As I'm re-reading the early post-COIE Superman comics, I was struck by a couple of incidents that happen close together - Amazing Grace seducing an amnesiac Superman
https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Adventure...rman_Vol_1_426
and fairly soon after that, Superman is under mind control to make porn movies with Barba. He's rescued by Mr Miracle before anything goes on between them, although she had been exploited for weeks before Superman was also captured. The story is left with Superman and Barda losing memory of the experience and they don't even know that nothing happened between them.
https://dc.fandom.com/wiki/Action_Comics_Vol_1_593
I know that the Barda story had a lot of ugliness of Byrne's feud with Kirby, and it feels like degrading Barda was the point, which gets pretty dark when you consider that Kirby's wife was the model for Barda. That is a really bad moment for the books (and I am generally a big fan of this era so I hate that it has to be tainted like this).
I've never heard any talk for what that means for Superman, how these experiences were traumatic, or how people perceive especially the Amazing Grace situation. Do people consider that this was sexual assault? With amnesia, him being mentally manipulated and lied to, I don't think he could have genuinely consented to the sex that they clearly had. It makes me wonder why Darkseid wasn't feeding her fertility drugs to get a Kryptonian/Apokalyptian hybrid.
This does bring up a question to me, has the post Crisis Superman been shown to have had a sexual relationship before Grace? He doesn't seem likely to have been sexually active in high school, he was sort of platonically dating Lana, but his feelings for her don't seem to be romantic. Her presence in his life would suggest that he wouldn't have been involved with anyone else. Then the next relationship I know of is Lori in his senior year in college, but that wouldn't have likely gone far since she was hiding that she was a mermaid.
I can't help but think of the Lois and Clark tv series, which was heavily inspired by the post Crisis Superman, where Clark talks about being a virgin and saving himself for marriage to Lois - while she is more worldly and experiences. That was a pretty unusual situation to discuss so frankly on 90s tv, and to subvert expectations, as an adult male virgin wasn't something you saw on tv, much less treated with dignity. I'm not sure if I think the comic version of Clark was as chaste or not. He did reject Cat's advances to rush into a sexual relationship and instead dated her slowly while pining for Lois.