Fuck Yeah, Black Widow

John August, Scriptnotes 182

Recently, August, Craig Mazin, and Dan Savage had a podcast discussion about sex and the big-screen superhero, finding, rather predictably, that there’s not enough of it. It is true that superhero sexuality has always had this muted quality to it. Action stars are framed so that we can see their bodies, and marvel over them, but this is about our assumed desire, not theirs. Since the genre (and most other things, besides) is generally framed for the male gaze, it is a desire of becoming: of having that power, posessing those muscles, that sexual prowess. Sometimes it is the desire of posessing: of touching those curves, having that woman. But these calls are coming from outside the house. They are not about what the narrative wants, but what we do.

When comic book sex scenes fail, it is usually because they put too much in the showing, and not the telling. They aren’t rooted in the characters themselves but the desire to see the characters naked— but you can’t see the characters naked because this is PG-13 and then I always run up against a suspension-of-disbelief problem right then, because it’s character and continuity that lets me think these are people and not just cartoon drawings. They become cartoon drawings when they are careened wildly out of what the narrative wants us to believe. This is a woman in pain drawn like a woman in orgasm, here is a practical-minded military woman fighting in a bikini and heels. Here is a cartoon drawing showing as much boob with as little nipple as possible.

When John August says that Ms. Johansson is a “sexual creature”, what he means is that she is desired, sexually, by forces outside herself, and not that she is a person with sexual desires. He doesn’t mention Chris Evans or Hemsworth or Downey Jr. as “ineherently sexual” and casually glosses over her personhood with that word, creature. In this version, Black Widow is something contained by Scarlett Johansson the body, not created by Scarlett Johansson the actor.

The thing is, Marvel does tell stories about Natasha Romanoff and desire. She knows men desire her, and smiles flirtatiously before beating the crap out of them. She plays matchmaker because she does not want to see Steve Rogers crushed by the loneliness she thinks she has made her friend. Natasha lives surrounded by predators and secrets and cannot afford intimacy. She will not easily surrender her armor. And this is presented as tragic, but tragic for her, not tragic for the movie goers who won’t see her strip off the catsuit.

Savage asks, “Spider-Man would be like the world’s greatest bondage top. Does he not have sex?” Mazin answers, but doesn’t, because these people have barely watched the films they’re discussing, that the character has “no balls.” Spider-Man is the rare male hero with slender shoulders. He is not, generally, about machismo. But his story is, often about desire, about the lesson that even when your body remakes itself overnight into the world’s greatest bondage top, you will not get everything that you want.

And what characters want is important, when we talk about sexiness in fiction, because sexiness is about wanting and being wanted and not just about film ratings. Marvel and co. actually have no trouble sexualizing toys, and sexuality is not the shape of a woman’s lips. “But we’re inherently sexual creatures” echoes in the anger men tell me when I do not want to sleep with them, talk to them, acknowlege them. As though I am a prude or repressed or even unnatural for not wanting to wear a low-cut dress, for not enjoying the power of their gaze.

Look: I wish superhero stories could be more honest about sex, the kind that happens in wedlock and the kind that happens between strangers. I wish I could read comics and comic book messageboards without seeing “Black Widow is such a slut~” jokes. But real sex positivity requires the space to refuse sex. And I think really sex positive fiction would give characters the space express their varied-and-fictive-but-believable desires, not just our own.