WARNING: Links contain graphic descriptions of sexuality excerpted from Webb’s books. Post itself is safe for work.

After suffering weeks of racism accusations, Virginia Republican has struck back at his opponent. (I commented on the racism allegations, and on the AP’s running with them, here.) The Drudge Report has the campaign’s press release here.

Allen contends that Webb’s works of fiction shows “a continued pattern of demeaning women.” In a race this heated, and with thousands of pages widely available, Webb had to know it was coming.

I think it’s important to note that, in art, depicting something is not the same as endorsing it. Stephen King’s Misery is certainly not a case for locking someone up and torturing him.

So the passage displayed on Drudge’s home page, where a man molests a young boy, doesn’t say much about Webb himself. Scenes of inappropriate sexuality are sometimes the best way to show a character’s lifestyle and/or pathology.

But on the other hand, if Allen’s campaign is right and Webb portrayed, across several stories, a continued trend of “servile, subordinate, inept, incompetent, promiscuous, perverted” women, there might be something to the allegation. The press release printed on Drudge has a ridiculous number of examples, but I’ve never read Webb, so I can’t say whether female role models balance out the strippers, chocolate-binging Filipinas, son-seducers and easy nurses.

Individual characters will deviate from “normal” in a work of fiction, but if a whole group of people always deviates in the same direction — here, negatively — it’s arguable it says something about the author’s worldview. For example, a disproportionate number of V.C. Andrews’s characters (yes, I read some…) participated in incest, and that always raised red flags in my mind.

Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com.