If you're having sex, you'd better get ready to die.

That seems to be the rule in superhero comics, anyway, and it's a rule that should sound pretty familiar. Jamie Kennedy probably said it best in the movie SCREAM: "There are certain rules one must abide by in order to successfully survive a horror movie. You can never have sex. You can't drink or do drugs. Never say, 'I'll be right back' because you'll never come back." That convention seems to have made the leap from film to comics.

The sluts die/virgins live rule allows characters to act out a morality tale while still giving us readers the prurient action we love. Like the couple making out in the woods in a slasher flick, you can be pretty sure that any character showing an interest in non-monogamous sex is a goner. Without those characters, who usually show up as an enemy or an "evil" version of a regular player, comics would be a lot less interesting. We need the slutty characters to spice things up, but we don't want them to stick around long enough to become actual sympathetic people.

In THE PRO, Garth Ennis, Amanda Connor, Jimmy Palmiotti, and Paul Mounts simultaneously lampoon and examine this device, ultimately questioning what choices it leaves for superheroes straining to be human.

The book opens on our female lead character, unnamed throughout except as The Pro, finishing up a blowjob on a customer then getting cheated out of her fee. This scene lays out the core problem of the whole book: by fucking, she is allowing herself to get fucked.

Ennis doesn't pull any punches with her character, either: the Pro is a dirty, smoking, swearing, shitting, pissing, breast-feeding, whoring ball of pure id. When she is given superpowers by a curious alien and tapped to join the virtuous Saint, Knight, Lady, and others in the "League of Honor", it is unsurprising that conflict ensues.

The interesting part, though, is why. It isn't so much that the League finds her offensive - though, of course, they do - it's more that they don't know what to do with her. Typically, overtly sexual women are enemies, their horniness explained away by their evil.

'If you're having sex, you'd better get ready to die.' Take Batman's traditional female foes; Catwoman and Poison Ivy, for example. Their attempted seduction of the Caped Crusader is part and parcel of their attacks. Think also of the difference between the way Jean Gray and Emma Frost are portrayed in the recent Grant Morrison run of NEW X-MEN. Even when Frost joins up with the good guys, she still carries the threat or promise of moral ambiguity.

The Pro refuses to participate in the League's hilariously G-rated sublimated sexuality (the Knight has a boy wonder-type, the Squire, who can usually be found hovering around the Knight's crotch) but the League still have to count her as one of the "good guys". None of her colleagues can quite figure out how to interact with her.

Using the broadest stroke possible, Ennis takes pains to expose the hypocrisy at work in the League and in the expectations of the reader. The Pro ends up having sex with both the Knight and the Saint, and the Lady even tries to get in on the action, but because she is the only one willing to own up to her sexuality, the Pro is blamed for inciting all of their lust. She becomes their whipping boy.

During one of the arguments about her behavior, the Pro enumerates the things she's been paid by men to do. In the background of the four-panel series, we see the Speedo guiltily masturbating, then looking around to be sure he wasn't seen. Like Speedo, we too want to be able to gawk at the Lady's gravity-defying boobs without getting called on it. A character like the Pro will give us what we want, but she'll charge us for it. Ennis makes the reader own up to his or her sexual desires along with rest of the League.

But sex is dangerous. When the Pro gives the Saint a blowjob to thank him for saving her baby (which is really the only polite thing to do), his super-ejaculate bullets out the window and rips the wing of a passing plane. When the Saint has to execute a pants-less rescue, he finally gets a taste of what the Pro's been dealing with throughout the whole book. He literally could have killed people with his sexual release, and there we find the heart of the matter: if there's fucking, there must be death. Any place where humans are human enough to perform the sex act, they're human enough to die.

In horror films, sluts die because someone has to. In comics, sluts die because they are the bad guys, and that's what bad guys deserve. The Pro exists to show readers how unfair and unrealistic this is; that sluts can be good guys too. Unfortunately for her, Ennis does not let the Pro off the hook.

In the end, the Pro has to sacrifice her life to save the world. The League tries to stop a terrorist attack, and ends up just screwing everything up. Because the Pro is the only one with enough brains to figure out that there's a guy holding a nuclear bomb, she gets stuck flying the thing out into space to safely explode. Unlike her predecessors, though, the Pro has some agency, even in death. She chose to martyr herself for the rest of humanity, thereby proving the power-giving alien's theory that any human can be a hero.

Ultimately, Ennis gives us a superhero that's all too human. She's a messy, angry, funny, sexual being who will die if she mucks around with ticking nuclear bombs. And perhaps that's really what's at the core of the sluts die/virgins live convention: any being who can't be killed and can't get laid really isn't alive, after all.

Audrey Ference lives in Brooklyn and writes the Zeitgeist Jamboree column for the L Magazine.

This article is Ideological Freeware. The author grants permission for its reproduction and redistribution by private individuals on condition that the author and source of the article are clearly shown, no charge is made, and the whole article is reproduced intact, including this notice.