Politics & Power Quote by Mark Millar

American pop culture has a blunt threshold: you can pile up bodies, but don’t make the harm feel intimate. Mark Millar’s line isn’t pearl-clutching; it’s a diagnosis of what U.S. mainstream entertainment silently permits. Explosions, gunfights, and superhero carnage read as spectacle, almost abstracted into physics and choreography. Sexual violence, by contrast, drags the audience out of genre comfort and into the messy, recognizably real terrain of power, shame, and bodily autonomy. It punctures the fantasy.

Millar is also pointing at an industry double standard that masquerades as morality. America’s rating systems, broadcasters, and studio risk departments often treat sex (and especially sexual harm) as uniquely “adult,” while treating mass violence as a PG-13 thrill ride. That doesn’t mean audiences are ethically coherent; it means they’re culturally trained. The country is steeped in frontier myths, war movies, and the sanctification of “justified” violence. Sexual violence doesn’t slot neatly into those narratives because it’s harder to rationalize as heroic or cleansing. It reads as contamination rather than conflict.

The subtext is uncomfortable: our tolerance isn’t about empathy for victims so much as about what can be aestheticized. Violence can be stylized into cool; sexual violence resists cool. In comics and screen adaptations, where Millar has lived, that distinction becomes a market constraint and a creative dare: how far can you go before entertainment stops being entertainment and starts being an accusation?