I wrote earlier in the day that, given James Gunn’s blog post in which he objectifies a ton of superheroines in rather crude terms, and makes homophobic remarks about the idea of people being sexually attracted to male superheroes, he owed the public an explanation of the post itself, and of how it differs from his vision for the team he’ll be presenting in Guardians of the Galaxy and female superheroines in general. He’s done half of that in gracious Facebook post tonight, in which he writes:

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog that was meant to be satirical and funny. In rereading it over the past day I don’t think it’s funny. The attempted humor in the blog does not represent my actual feelings. However, I can see where statements were poorly worded and offensive to many. I’m sorry and regret making them at all.

People who are familiar with me as evidenced by my Facebook page and other mediums know that I’m an outspoken proponent for the rights of the gay and lesbian community, women and anyone who feels disenfranchised, and it kills me that some other outsider like myself, despite his or her gender or sexuality, might feel hurt or attacked by something I said. We’re all in the same camp, and I want to do my best to make this world a better place for all of us. I’m learning all the time. I promise to be more careful with my words in the future. And I will do my best to be funnier as well. Much love to all – James

I’m particularly glad to see him acknowledge that, if the post was an attempt at satire, something a lot of his defenders claimed, that it was ineffective, and that calling it a satire didn’t deflect legitimate criticisms of the work. And I think this incident is an important reminder: if you’re actually an “an outspoken proponent for the rights of the gay and lesbian community, women and anyone who feels disenfranchised,” and you have a serious platform, then that’s something you have to keep in mind whenever you’re speaking publicly. That should be a spur for your humor and your satire to be smarter. If you’re called out for violating your own principles, your first reaction should be to listen, and to hold yourself to a high standard. It would be terrific for Gunn to use this incident to lay out those principles for his supporters, many of whom are using his apology as proof that people who were upset about the initial post are overreacting and should shut up.

And I’d still appreciate him laying out his vision for Guardians and how he’ll handle any female superheroes who are part of the movie, and delineate the differences between the attitudes in that post and his creative plans. If this is an opportunity to push Marvel to rectify some of its serious lack of diversity in the past, it’s a productive moment. I’m glad Gunn’s responded with some insight and class. I hope his script for and direction of Guardians of the Galaxy reflects that same statement of his values.

When word came down in August that Guardians of the Galaxy, the planned 2014 Marvel movie about an oddball group of superheroes including an interstellar raccoon and a talking tree, was actually a backdoor introduction of Carol Danvers, the badass Air Force pilot who is now Captain Marvel, I was ridiculously excited. It’s long past time that Marvel added a female superhero (as opposed to simply a well-trained human woman) to the on-screen Avengers lineup, Danvers’ military pedigree would lend her some interesting synergy with Captain America, and she’d be a fascinating way to get a well-credentialed action actress like Katee Sackhoff into the franchise. But since folks have uncovered an old blog post by James Gunn, who is both writing and directing the movie, I’ve gone from enthusiastic about the project to straight-up terrified about it.

The post is Gunn reporting the results of a poll he did with readers about which superheroes they’d like to have sex with. It was deleted—and you can see why—but it’s available in Google Cache. And while I don’t necessarily oppose the idea of this kind of poll—superheroes are designed to be fantasies—the way Gunn wrote up the results reveals some pretty horrifying ideas about superheroines, both inside the bedroom and outside of it.

On Emma Frost, described as the woman of choice for “those men who love rude bitches,” Gunn says “What I love about Emma is the practical attire she wears while adventuring. Certainly, if I were a woman fighting giant monsters I’d want to wear some awesome breast-mushing halter top, a pair of panties, and thigh highs.” On my beloved She-Hulk, “I ever were in the mood to be dominated and treated like a little bitch, by someone who is green, then She-Hulk would almost certainly be the way to go.” Then there’s this little bon mot “Disco Dazzler, Rave Dazzler, and Punk Rock Dazzler, they all have one thing in common – a friggin’ GREAT vagina.” On Kitty Pryde: “I wrote her back [on Twitter], but neglected to mention that I wanted to anally do her. I won’t even mind if Lockheed is in the room, staring at me with a creepy look the whole time.” There’s slut-shaming of Batgirl: “Being a teen mom and all, you know she’s easy. Go for it.” There are nasty objectification fantasies, like this one of Spider-Woman: “The whole time I’m fucking her I can’t get her face out of my mind as the Skrull leader who tried to conquer the world. I know it’s not her fault, but I just can’t help it. So I finish on her face to help block out the painful memories.” A lot of “this woman is messed-up so she’s sexy,” a la Cassandra Cain: “Cassandra’s father taught her how to kill people when she was eight. Which means she has the ultimate daddy issues. Which means she’s just my type.”

Then, there’s the charming homophobia! On Gambit: “My girlfriend voted for this Cajun fruit. I think she’s looking to have a devil’s three way with the two of us. The idea of my balls slapping against Gambit’s makes me sick to my stomach.” The charming observation of Batwoman that “This lesbian character was voted for almost exclusively by men. I don’t know exactly what that means. But I’m hoping for a Marvel-DC crossover so that Tony Stark can “turn” her. She could also have sex with Nightwing and probably still be technically considered a lesbian.”

Maybe it should be comfort to us that of his potential heroine, Carol Danvers, Gunn only says “Carol Danvers dropped 13 points from her position last year. It’s a surprise to me as she is, along with Emma Frost and the Black Cat, one of the most consistently sexualized characters in the Marvel Universe,” though if he thinks her sexualization is one of the more telling things about her character, the fact that he doesn’t have specific fantasies about her may not count for very much. One of the most telling remarks Gunn makes is about Starfire: “The picture above is why, by the age of nine or ten, comic books had ruined real women for me forever.” In this post, he repeatedly mentions his girlfriend, so that doesn’t seem entirely true. But I do think that he and Disney should have to explain why these kinds of attitudes haven’t ruined him from being the kind of person who’s actually suited to introduce the first Marvel superheroine to an audience that includes men who are capable of reading superwomen as more than templates for sexual fantasies, and women who are eager to see themselves reflected on screen.

As I was reading through the coverage of the announcement that Star Wars Episode VII will be arriving in movie theaters in 2015, I clicked on over to my friend Alex Knapp’s post on the subject on Forbes. And then I lowered my head slowly and repeatedly to my desk. It’s not that I think Alex’s ideas for storylines for a new trilogy are bad ones—they definitely aren’t. But it was that the post fell prey to a symptom I’m finding more and more deadly in criticism these days: the idea that we should just hand the keys to all pop culture over to Joss Whedon and sit back and enjoy the ride.

It’s not that I dislike Whedon, or many of the products he’s given us over the years. But I think there’s something disturbing about the idea that Joss Whedon is good at everything, or that the things that Joss Whedon is excellent at are necessarily the best things that our mass culture can do. It’s a homogenizing impulse—I shudder to think of a world with one dominant action movie sensibility, especially one that particular. And it ignores the fact that for all of Whedon’s strengths, he has weaknesses, a number of which would be particularly tricky for a revitalized Star Wars franchise.

It’s worth remembering, for example, that Whedon’s main accomplishment is revitalizing and critiquing the horror genre, and that he’s actually weak when it comes to one of the most important components of truly transcendent action filmmaking. He often seems relatively indifferent to actual action sequences. The fights in Buffy and Angel (which I’m working my way through now) are almost deliberately indifferent and schlocky in a way that robs tension from them. Matchups may be exciting because of their outcomes, like Buffy sending Angel to Hell, but not because of any clash of styles, or often, any real sense that the outcome itself is at stake. Dollhouse was more attuned to standard-issue training montages than any particular difference in style. Like Buffy, River Tam’s fight scenes in Firefly and Serenity are plausible because of things we’ve told that have been done to her, and she wins because that’s integral to the story’s needs. We don’t see the decisions or things other than the generic martial arts skills she has, that give her an advantage and let her think her way out of corners, because she’s never really in any. If anything, I’d say Whedon has an interest in the artificiality of action sequences, which lends itself to valid critiques of genre conventions, but not always to fight choreography that stands on its own.

The action sequences in The Avengers are somewhat more distinctive than his previous batting average, are mostly better because they involve the Hulk, a fighter who can be used with particular wit and violence, or amusing team-ups of fighters, rather than because Whedon got much better at choreographing actual duels. I shudder to think what Whedon would do with a lightsaber duel—why not at least call in a wuxia action choreographer, given the potential of the Force to shape duels, like Yuen Woo-ping, who did the amazing fights in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon?

Then, there’s Whedon’s witty banter addiction and his approach to sexuality, both of which I think are strengths for him almost all the time, in part because he has a smart sense of scenarios where they fit, among them group dynamics or emotional situations that need to be deescalated. Whedon’s characters often use references or wit to defuse situations or to distance themselves from difficult emotions. I love Buffy telling Angel “I’m cookie dough. I’m not done baking. I’m not finished becoming who ever the hell it is I’m gonna turn out to be. I make it through this, and the next thing, and the next thing, and maybe one day, I turn around and realize I’m ready. I’m cookies. And then, you know, if I want someone to eat m- or enjoy warm, delicious, cookie me, then that’s fine. That’ll be then. When I’m done.” But that’s not remotely the same thing as Han Solo leaning in to tell Princess Leia “I’m nice men.” The line is an abstraction, but to totally different effect. The menu of movies available to us needs both cuteness and sensuality, lines that deflect and others than pull characters closer to greater intimacy.
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As excited as I am about the prospect of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy movie actually being a way to introduce Carol Danvers to The Avengers franchise as Captain Marvel, I’m starting to have concerns about some of the casting rumors swirling the movie. None of this is for certain, of course, but the latest buzz has Emily Blunt in talks to play the fighter-jock-turned-superheroine. I dearly love Ms. Blunt, who can do everything from sexy to hilariously, neurotically competitive. But the fact that she’s in the conversation at all raises an issue that I’ve noticed in the conversation about a female version of The Expendables, too: even as we improve the action roles available for women, Hollywood stays rather inflexible when it comes to what kind of female bodies are desirable and viable.

When word came the ensemble project was in production, the director of The Expendables 2 came up with his dream cast list, which included only one woman who is primarily an action actress. I made the point at the time that it would be nice if the movie went after actresses who specialized in action films, and had the fighting styles and physiques to match. And that’s what’s happened, starting with the additions of Gina Carano and Katee Sackhoff.

I don’t want to say that there should be strict body-type requirements for certain kinds of roles. But it’s striking that the kinds of shoulders and muscle development that are a prerequisite for male action stars don’t help women land the same kinds of roles. Good fight choreography can help suspend disbelief, which is why it was exciting and upsetting to see Scarlett Johansson face off against a ripped and sleeveless Jeremy Renner in The Avengers. But if the casting in that franchise and Angelina Jolie’s career or any indication, the ability to look great in an evening gown and to miraculously avoid sweating off your lipstick even in tense circumstances is at least as important as the ability to look physically intimidating or land a plausible punch. Blunt can do both of those things. But I’d rather see Sackhoff, who has played a tough fighter pilot before, as Carol Danvers, and to see Hollywood value a woman’s physical strength as much as her face and dress size.

An agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. show may not have been what I would have chosen for Marvel’s foray into television in cooperation with Joss Whedon, but it is a logical move, a way to build out the Marvel universe with relatively low special effects requirements and in a procedural framework that will be familiar to audiences who aren’t used to watching superhero shows. But I’m optimistic about the character lineup that’s been announced for the show for a couple of reasons:

SKYE | This late-20s woman sounds like a dream: fun, smart, caring and confident – with an ability to get the upper hand by using her wit and charm.

AGENT GRANT WARD | Quite the physical specimen and “cool under fire,” he sometimes botches interpersonal relations. He’s a quiet one with a bit of a temper, but he’s the kind of guy that grows on you.

AGENT ALTHEA RICE | Also known as “The Calvary,” this hard-core soldier has crazy skills when it comes to weapons and being a pilot. But her experiences have left her very quiet and a little damaged.

AGENT LEO FITZ and AGENT JEMMA SIMMONS | These two came through training together and still choose to spend most of their time in each other’s company. Their sibling-like relationship is reinforced by their shared nerd tendencies – she deals with biology and chemistry, he’s a whiz at the technical side of weaponry.

First, given the huge imbalance in the Marvel universe, it’s really nice to have three female characters to two male ones. I like great male characters, and I’m always curious to see what Whedon does with men and masculinity, a rather under-discussed element of his work, but if we’re seeing this show as part of a larger whole, this is a welcome course correction.

And second, it’s nice to see that, at least from the initial descriptions, we’re going to have different kinds of women in the show, too, from a charismatic heroine, to an action hero, to a lab rat. Particularly in the high school years of Buffy, Whedon did a nice job of showing how women with different personalities and styles could click as friends, grate up against each other, hurt each other, and work together. It was fascinating to Buffy, not a day-to-day academic whiz (though a good test-taker), and Willow, who made up in smarts what she lacked in fashion sense, form an extremely effective and for the most part, emotionally balanced partnership. The “Lovers Walk” episode of Buffy‘s third season, where Cordelia catches Xander cheating on her with Willow was interesting in part because it upset Cordelia’s understanding of her appeal and social standing relative to Willow. And in later seasons, Tara’s gentleness was a strong counterpoint to Buffy and Willow’s personalities: whether in magical practice or in terms of her relationship with Buffy’s younger sister Dawn, kindness can be even more effective than authority or strength.

Whedon did this kind of conflict of styles and surprising complementarities extremely well in The Avengers. Steve Rogers’ everyman values and old-fashioned perspectives on duty and teamwork clashed with Tony Stark’s ego and individualism. Tony may have goaded Bruce Banner, but in his fellow scientist, he recognized a kindred tinkerer and a man with some of the control problems that have plagued Tony in the past, if with more significant consequences. Thor sees in Bruce a man who needs a rumble sometimes. The final action sequences in the movie, though they have flaws, wouldn’t have been nearly as satisfying without the friction that preceded it. These were men who could work together so effectively because they’d probed all of each other’s weak points and figured out all the places where their skills could complement each other. I’ll be excited to see Whedon use this part of his skill set again with a mixed group of men and women, and in an extended narrative on television.

io9 passes along an intriguing rumor that, in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, Superman gets defeated, but by a fellow Kryptonian, Faora, rather than by Michael Shannon’s General Zod:

At first they’re not as powerful but later on as she applies her fight training and adapts them to her powers, she gives Superman one of the worst beatings a hero has faced on camera… She “Doomsdays” him… literally pulverizing him with precision and lethal strength with hitting pressure-points, nerves and even just outclasses Supes in bare knuckle and gives Supes a severe beat down…he’s total agony this entire time, bloody and broken and barely gets away. My buddy doesn’t know at all how Superman defeats these guys eventually but he did say that Superman in this film gets hurt a lot more easily than Routh’s pre-crisis Superman…the military can hurt him too but Faora pretty much nearly kills him in hand to hand.

This wouldn’t particularly surprise me, given Snyder’s interest in fighting women. Who knows what the actual execution would be like (I should here cop to my standard weakness for Sucker-Punch, and acknowledge that everyone thinks I’m insane). And I do really hope that Snyder’s version of Faora isn’t the one from Action Comics, who survived the destruction of Krypton because she was serving an off-world sentence for setting up a concentration camp where she was murdering men. Because I’m not sure the nerd community could survive the conversations about misandry and misogyny that would be the result.

But I am so, so eager to see genuinely super-powered women who aren’t providing assistants and who don’t have to be someone’s girlfriend. It’s not that Joss Whedon didn’t revitalize Black Widow in The Avengers, or that I didn’t appreciate the tremendous sexual chemistry between Emma Stone and Andrew Garfield as Gwen Stacy and Peter Parker in The Amazing Spider-Man. I like romances. Watching The Thomas Crown Affair over the weekend, I realized how desperate I am for more love stories in which the participants and the obstacles to their union are both genuinely adult. Superhero movies, despite the criticism they get for playing to childish fantasies, are actually giving us some terrific portraits of women who get to be women, rather than girls, and their spiky romances with the men they love. But I would love to see a woman’s hyper-competence separated from her interest in the physical and mental health of the man she loved, to see a story where a woman like Selina Kyle save a man like Bruce Wayne’s armored ass because she can and she wants to, but for reasons other than that she’s fallen in love with him. I don’t want to cut down on the romances. I just want more, and more kinds of stories for women within this context. If the only way we can get to watch a woman grow into her power in a superhero movie right now is as a villain, I’ll take it. And hopefully Faora can knock out some of the pigeonholing of super-powered women while she’s at it. Not to mention that in between Faora and Selina Kyle, great female characters could be a dandy way for DC to put some real daylight in between their franchise and Marvel.

I’ve long suggested that a Doctor Strange movie would be a great way to introduce a new tone to the Marvel universe, a kind of movie that could rely less on big fights and more on magic and atmospherics. Now, it seems gossip suggests that Thor 2 might be planning to introduce Strange somewhere along the way, though as Topless Robot points out, it’s not entirely clear what he’d be doing hanging out in Asgard.

And while I love Mads Mikkelsen, the Danish actor who is reportedly in contention to play Doctor Strange, I’m coming towards the end of my patience with Marvel announcing spinoffs and new characters, who don’t feel all that new given that they’re all white dudes. If a man shows up, even in a peripheral way, in a Marvel movie, it feels like he has a chance of sticking around. Hawkeye backs up S.H.I.E.L.D. in Thor and gets to be sexy and brainwashed and tragic in The Avengers. Bucky hangs out with Steve Rogers in Captain America, and gets to be a focus of Captain America 2, which will follow the Winter Soldier arc, which involves Bucky’s resurrection, though Gabe Jones (Derek Luke), Jim Morita (Kenneth Choi) and Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) will stay safely in the past.

Women and people of color who aren’t Samuel L. Jackson haven’t been as lucky. Terrence Howard got replaced in the Iron Man franchise by Don Cheadle, a move that Marvel CEO Ike Perlmutter reportedly said he thought wouldn’t matter because people of color are indistinguishable. Pepper Potts, despite running Stark Industries while Tony goes off and does his superhero thing, will forever remain primarily Iron Man’s girlfriend. The same fate seems likely for Jane Foster, whose only appearance in The Avengers was as an image flickering on a computer screen. This may be more contractual than intentional, given that Cobie Smulders, who played Maria Hill in The Avengers, may end up having to do another season of How I Met Your Mother beyond this year, but Joss Whedon says that his S.H.I.E.L.D. show, rather than focusing on Maria, who could have been a hugely promising hook, will feature all new characters. If Guardians of the Galaxy is, in fact, going to be a Carol Danvers movie, it would be awfully nice for Marvel to let us know, and soon.

Ever since the news came down that Joss Whedon would direct The Avengers 2, work with Marvel on the overall direction of its franchise, and make a television show that would be part of the franchise, the last part of the equation has been the biggest question. Whedon began his career in movies, but he truly excelled on television, and a show from him would be a major event, even if it wasn’t the connective tissue in a multi-billion-dollar franchise, and even if, given his track record, his involvement could be a significant way to get more women involved in that franchise, which is currently dominated by men.

Now, it appears we know at least the basic subject of the show:

From ABC Studios, the project is based on the long-running comic created by Jack Kirby and revolves around the secret military law enforcement agency dubbed S.H.I.E.L.D., which stands for Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage Logistic Directorate. Whedon is on board to co-pen the pilot alongside his brother Jed Whedon, and his wife, Maurissa Tancharoen, who all previously teamed on the three-part web series Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. (The CW will air the Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion, Felicia Day starrer in October.) Avengers and Buffy the Vampire Slayer mastermind Whedon will direct the pilot, should his schedule permit.

That leaves a lot of unanswered questions: Cobie Smulders, who played S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Maria Hill and would be an obvious main character for this show, is committed to How I Met Your Mother, and I have no idea if her Marvel contract could compel her to do both, or if that would be logistically possible. The same uncertainty is the case for both Scarlett Johansson and Jeremy Renner (who was once under contract to ABC), who as S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives Black Widow and Hawkeye would also be logical significant characters.

But whatever the ultimate lineup, I think this is a logical choice. I wrote yesterday before the announcement came down that a S.H.I.E.L.D. show would make sense because “it could fill in all the spaces between the big battles with smaller bureaucratic fights and the consequences that follow a throwdown like the one between Loki and his forces and the men and woman at Fury’s command.” It’s also a somewhat safe one that brings elements of the films that are most like procedural cop dramas to television, preserving a familiar tone and structure.

I just hope that that safeness doesn’t mean that Whedon and company will pass up a chance with this safe concept to make the Avengers universe a little less monochromatic, and a little braver and more thoughtful about the use and abuse of power. In the current comics continuity, S.H.I.E.L.D.’s director is a woman, Daisy Johnson. Having a whole squad of agents would open up space for characters like Jimmy Woo. And if Samuel L. Jackson isn’t available to play Nick Fury, why not have his son, Nick Fury Jr. feature in whatever lineup gets pulled together? It’s excellent that the Whedonverse means that a woman, Tancharoen, is going to be working on this project at a high level. But it would be even better if that translated into a more diverse, more interesting character slate as well. I can forgive white dudes arguing with each other making up much of a one-off movie. But not a television show, and not for much longer in the franchise as a whole.

I also really dearly hope that Whedon builds on both the tensions between Nick Fury and the S.H.I.E.L.D. council, and on Maria Hill’s apparent doubts about Fury’s leadership, even if those characters can’t be in the show, in some form. As much as The Avengers are an awesome teamup, it’s relatively terrifying that Fury has essentially pulled them together as his personal army, their functionality dependent on his ability to manipulate them correctly. And it’s even scarier that a quasi-governmental body with nuclear weapons is out there calling shots beyond the scope of the U.S. government. We have a very romantic relationship with both vigilantism and decisive military action in our pop culture that The Avengers relied on to cast a warm glow over a lot of what went down in the movie, and as Whedon did with his exploration of the abuses of the Watchers’ Council in Buffy, or the bureaucrats in Cabin in the Woods, I hope he can be more nuanced about that concentration of power going forward. This is a fantastic opportunity. I hope Whedon makes it mean something.

I was happy to hear yesterday that Kat Dennings will be back in Thor 2, and that apparently, her role, as a research assistant to Jane Foster (Natalie Portman, absent from The Avengers) and Dr. Selvig (Stellan Skarsgard), will be expanded. While I’ll never give up on wanting female superheroines to get equal billing in the Marvel Universe, at their best, non-powered female characters have already contributed a great deal to the franchise, mostly by injecting a healthy dose of sarcasm into a genre that could easily collapse under its own weight.

I think it’s no mistake that Iron Man‘s been the most fun character in the core lineup so far: he’s skittery, grandiose, and a combination of sophisticated and enormously immature. Alone, he might be hugely irritating, a nerd-bro fantasy. But Pepper Potts’ presence means that Tony Stark’s most ridiculous behavior is constantly being called out as utterly ridiculous. He’s charming in spite of, not because, he is a rude, reckless womanizer. In The Avengers, Gwyneth Paltrow does Barbara Stanwyck proud when Agent Coulson comes to call, as Pepper points out that Tony’s immature attempts to avoid the man aren’t just childish—they act against the interest of Tony’s own curiosity. Part of Tony’s arc in the movie is to the recognition that Pepper saw Coulson’s worth more clearly than he did because she bothered to pay attention and get to know the man. He doesn’t just lose a colleague when Coulson dies—he loses a man who might have been in his friend.

Similarly, in Thor, Darcy was a fabulous reminder of how ridiculous it would actually be to end up babysitting an extremely handsome, exceedingly disconcerted man who wanders around trying to buy pets to ride, smashing coffee mugs, eating all the Pop Tarts, and talking like he stepped out of summer stock. When she zapped Thor with a taser or complained that she was being asked to do an awful lot for six college credits, Darcy punctured the occasionally stifling atmosphere Jane’s literal and metaphoric starry-eyed approach to Thor. Part of what’s fun about superheroes—and an appropriate thing to point out as a way to question their power—is their overwhelming incongruity. I don’t want to see Darcy as a buzz-kill if she and Jane take a jaunt to Asgard in Thor 2, but her sense of the absurd, deployed correctly, is another very funny way to express wonder.

Captain America was, tonally, a very different picture, but one of its most fun moments was Natalie Dormer’s brief turn as a gal in uniform who wants to get at Cap. The Marvel movies have essentially hewed to fairly traditional ideas about their heroes and true love—part of Tony’s hero’s journey is his move away from being a womanizing cad. Dormer’s minx was a reminder that you can tell stories about superheroes as catnip for the ladies, too, and the juxtaposition of her clear desire with Cap’s innocence was something that might be useful in a more extended exploration of Steve Rogers’ integration into modern life. Similarly, I think the two recent attempts at Hulk movies have suffered badly from the big-eyed dewiness of Jennifer Connolly and Liv Tyler’s performances as Betty Ross. If Hulk movies do go into production, it would be a lot of fun to see a Betty who can banter with Bruce, even needle him the way Tony did in The Avengers. It’s awfully dull to have a Hulk who’s simply afraid he’s going to hurt this delicate woman he loves, and it would be more fun to have a woman who’s a foil, whose very engagement with Bruce is a risk for him and an incentive to get himself in check.

I’m bored by movies where women reform men, or act as prizes for low-level good behavior. But at their best, Marvel’s managed to give us women around our heroes who at least nod in the direction of the screwball tradition. The men may have the superpowers, but the women are the ones who are grown all the way up, and seeing around corners without even the benefit of enhanced eyesight.

Hero Complex has a long interview with Kelly Sue DeConnick, who is writing Marvel’s new Captain Marvel book which has a woman, Carol Danvers, taking on that mantle. In a particularly interesting section towards the beginning of the conversation, DeConnick goes back and forth on the question of whether, though Danvers was conceived of as an explicitly feminist character, she is writing a feminist book:

I don’t think this is new to my interpretation of Carol. I think that she’s an incredibly driven individual. The single line that I use for her off the top of my head is: Crackerjack pilot races to prove dead daddy wrong. I think Carol’s wound comes from …. well, she comes from a family of three kids, two younger brothers. Her dad was an old-fashioned construction foreman who loved her very much. This book was conceived as an unapologetically feminist book. It happened in the ’70s during the feminist movement and that was very much what the book was about. We’re much more skittish about that today, interestingly. Well, her dad opted not to pay for her to go to school and thought it’d be better spent on her brothers. That’s why she enlisted — to get her education paid for. I think that hurt her, and she’s always been trying to prove to her dad that she’s worthy. But her dad’s gone now, so it’s not a thing that she’s ever going to be able to get closure on…I’m not trying to write a feminist agenda. This is part of who the character is. And I’ve heard people question the Absorbing Man thing, like ‘Since when is the Absorbing Man a misogynist?’ That wasn’t my intent. My intent with him was that he was pushing her buttons. It wasn’t that it was a particular thing with him. Although he is a very old-fashioned character, and I think it’s hilarious. It was trash talk in a fight.

I’d argue that given that the first lines that are spoken in DeConnick’s take on the character are Carl Creel’s snarl “Lucky me! If it ain’t Captain America’s secretary, Mrs. Marvel,” and that he goes on to clock Carol, declaring “I’ll show you smarts, lady!” and to tell to Cap, “You lettin’ the little missus give the orders now? Wouldn’t catch me getting bossed around by no broad,” she’s probably writing a feminist comic. When someone brings gender (or race or sexual orientation or religion) into trash talk, they’re not just joshing someone, they’re setting up a hierarchy where whatever characteristic they’ve singled out is disqualifying, and that someone allied with their target will suffer a worse loss because they’ve inverted the gender heirarchy, etc.—they won’t just be defeated, they’ll be degendered.

Feminism isn’t just about getting women into positions traditionally occupied by men. The second half of the DeConnick response I’ve quoted there is in response to the question from Hero Complex, “We’ve already seen some dismissive behavior from Absorbing Man in the first issue. Will her proving herself as a hero in a male-dominated super-landscape be an ongoing theme?” Feminism is also about what happens when women get there, about the fact that earning the job is often the first step in dismantling sexism, and sexists don’t exactly roll over and die when women obtain positions of power. And fighting sexism isn’t solely women, or superheroines’ purview. Part of what’s thrilling about reading DeConnick’s version of Captain Marvel is watching Captain America joke with Carol about Absorbing Man’s sexism mid-fight and afterwards to encourage her to take up the Captain Marvel mantle, saying “Bottom line is this: you have led the Avengers. You have saved the world. Quit being an adjunct.” Their conversation is just the superheroic version of a mentor encouraging a female mentee to give herself credit instead of deferring it, pitch more ambitious stories, or to ask for that raise.

In other words, just because we’ve moved from one phase of feminism into the next isn’t a reason to abandon that as a framework as a character (or for an actress like Melissa Leo, whose work is clearly feminist, to declaim the label). Sexism isn’t over, in the superhero world, in the real world, or in the places that they intersect. And that sexism’s become more diffuse and complicated just means there are more ways to use gender dynamics to tell fascinating, complex stories about how people, male and female alike, construct their identities and understand their relative positions in the world.