Anyone who's watched Kaley Cuoco's animated series Harley Quinn is no doubt aware of how gloriously raunchy and R-rated it can get, in terms of highly explicit language and hyper-violent and hyper-sexualized imagery. It's easy to imagine that co-creators and executive producers Justin Halpern and Patrick Schumacker have been given free rein to do whatever they want with DC's extensive character base. However, that is not exactly the case, at least when it comes to superheroes like Batman going down on somebody.
Yes, that awkwardly concluded sentence is indeed representative of the topic at hand, as Harley Quinn's Justin Halpern told Variety that while its titular villain and her cohorts are mostly free to do whatever, the most marketable heroes apparently aren't allowed to engage in oral sex.
It’s incredibly gratifying and free to be using characters that are considered villains because you just have so much more leeway. A perfect example of that is in this third season of Harley [when] we had a moment where Batman was going down on Catwoman. And DC was like, ‘You can’t do that. You absolutely cannot do that.’ They’re like, ‘Heroes don’t do that.’ So, we said, ‘Are you saying heroes are just selfish lovers?’ They were like, ‘No, it’s that we sell consumer toys for heroes. It’s hard to sell a toy if Batman is also going down on someone.'
That kind of admission is worthy of a variety of reactions. On the one hand, of course I don't expect DC to be cool-cool-cool with having Diedrich Bader's Batman engaging in any sexual acts, even though we all know Bruce Wayne has probably fucked most of Gotham City by this point. The Caped Crusader, despite leading a plethora of adult-geared comic book stories, is such a cash cow for merchandizing aimed at younger fans, so animated GIFs of him diving face-first into Selina Kyle's catnip probably wouldn't be ideal for those prepubescent kiddos to stumble upon in a Google search. Even though his cowl appears as if it was designed specifically with oral sex as the second motivation behind identity-cloaking.
On the other three paws, there's definitely still something arguably questionable about why consensual oral sex is considered non-heroic behavior by DC's execs. I guess we should just pretend that Batman giving Catwoman physical pleasure counts as him aiding and abetting a known criminal, or else this argument might take forever. Likely with Calendar Man marking the days, presumably while going down on whoever will have him, as a villain does.
Luckily, DC seems to be perfectly fine with letting Kaley Cuoco's Harley Quinn and Lake Bell's Poison Ivy and Alan Tudyk's Joker get away with murder, quite literally, multiple times an episode, sometimes with sex parts. And Catwoman can probably get in on that fun, too, since Batman's scratching post will never be up for grabs. To be fair - I guess? - there also wasn't a whole lot of oral sex shown on Harley Quinn's biggest TV influence, The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Harley Quinn Season 3 is currently in one form of production or another, and is set to hit HBO Max later in 2021. Keep up with all the 2021 Summer TV shows debuting soon as you wait to see more ribald animated action, as well as all the upcoming Batman movies and TV shows where he'll totally be a perfect gentleman in the lips and mouth area.
