She-Hulk is hung up on Captain America’s sex life. In the first episode of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, the titular super-lawyer, aka Jennifer Walters (Tatiana Maslany), lays out the case for Steve Rogers’ virginity to her cousin Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) over the course of a car ride. “After he’s unfrozen, he goes from world-threatening disaster to world-threatening disaster, and that’s when he’s not a fugitive from the law, right? So it seems like he was pretty busy.” In the mid-credits scene, Jen feigns drunkenness to get Bruce to admit the truth about his (former) fellow Avenger: he did, in fact, lose his virginity to a woman on his USO tour in 1943. “Yes! I knew it!” A triumphant Jen throws her hands to the heavens. “Captain America fu–!” The scene cuts out mid-word, but the audience gets the gist.
It’s certainly a fun bit. She-Hulk sells itself as the MCU’s first sitcom – its first actual sitcom, not WandaVision’s surrealist take on the form – and Jen’s irreverent, fourth-wall-breaking attitude is central to the show’s humor. In some ways, she’s as much of a fan surrogate as Ms. Marvel’s Kamala Khan; she just represents a different kind of fan. Rather than the starry-eyed teenager who bursts into applause whenever the Marvel fanfare starts playing in the movie theater, Jen is the sort who runs a meme account on Twitter and has written at least one steamy fanfic. But while it’s a clever gag, it accidentally draws attention to an inconvenient truth for the MCU, an admittedly minor issue that belies a bigger problem. Despite Jen’s proclamation, Captain America may have had sex, but he does not fuck.
Let’s talk about that word for a moment because I’m not just using it for its own sake. Except for the Netflix shows that currently exist in a state of limbo, no Marvel movie or TV show has explicitly used the word “fuck.” When it shows up, it’s obscured in some way: bleeped (Iron Man 2), euphemized (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. II), or cut off (She-Hulk). Using the word, after all, would jeopardize a given film’s PG-13 rating, and therefore its box office potential: Marvel has become a juggernaut by appealing to the widest possible audience, and the last thing it wants is an age-restricted movie. But every word has its use, and “fuck” is no exception. Whether Captain America does it is ultimately a question of humanity.
As Raquel S. Benedict argued in “Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny” (a truly definitive essay on our current pop-cultural moment), “fucking” is not necessarily defined by beauty or sexuality, but by a more general sensuality. A character who “fucks” may be beautiful, and may have sex, but most importantly, they are flesh-and-blood humans who exist comfortably in their own bodies. This can manifest in their interactions with other characters (such as the sizzling chemistry between Batman and Catwoman in Batman Returns), or in how they move and interact with the world around them (such as John McClane’s rugged everyman intensity in Die Hard.) Above all, these characters feel real: every creak of Catwoman’s leather and every bead of John McClane’s sweat reinforces the fact that these are humans like you and me. They strain, struggle, and yes, fuck like the rest of us. That’s what makes them appealing, sexually or otherwise.
Captain America, as portrayed by Chris Evans, is one of the strongest, fastest, toughest superpowered humans on planet Earth. He wears a tight, form-fitting uniform, and is frequently shirtless. He has had a love interest in Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), as well as a number of close relationships with men and women who are as muscular and beautiful as himself. A prominent joke in Avengers: Endgame, which soon became a meme, refers to “America’s ass;” in that mid-credits scene in She-Hulk, Jen laments that a man with an ass like Captain America’s might have died a virgin.
Captain America, as portrayed by Chris Evans, is one of the strongest, fastest, toughest superpowered humans on planet Earth. He wears a tight, form-fitting uniform, and is frequently shirtless. He has had a love interest in Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), as well as a number of close relationships with men and women who are as muscular and beautiful as himself. A prominent joke in Avengers: Endgame, which soon became a meme, refers to “America’s ass;” in that mid-credits scene in She-Hulk, Jen laments that a man with an ass like Captain America’s might have died a virgin.
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