In a conversation with Entertainment Weekly about a sequel to The Avengers, Scarlett Johansson drops some knowledge about why superheroine movies have tended to fail so badly:

I’d have to wear pasties to greenlight any of these movies…They’re always fighting in a bra, so while it might be exciting for a still photo, it’s ridiculous. One of the most exciting thing about [The Avengers,] is that in my opening scene the first thing you see is my character getting punched in the face. Everybody’s like, ‘Damn, it’s nice to see a girl get the shit kicked out of her…Superheroine movies are normally really corny and bad. They’re always like, fighting in four inch heels with their [thrusting out her chest] like a two-gun salute.

If you want audiences to respond to superheroines like they respond to superheroes, you have to treat them the same way. Their bodies can be admirable, but they should be framed so we admire what these heroes are capable of accomplishing with those bodies, not solely as objects of consumption. In The Avengers, we’re introduced to Captain America through a shot that presents his body as a beautiful thing, but we immediately see him using it to wreck a sandbag, and later, to perform remarkable feats. Ditto for their romances: My Super Ex-Girlfriend may have been meant as comedy, but its depiction of an insecure superheroine whipping out her powers solely to take revenge on a man who made her feel awful was sour and disappointing. In the X-Men movies, Dark Phoenix kills one lover and overdoes it with another, Rogue’s in constant danger of killing off any man she wants to touch, while the X-Men: First Class incarnation of Mystique has an implied encounter with Magneto that’s more about solidarity than a real relationship. It’d be nice to see a superheroine have a relationship, whether it’s with a superhero or a normal person, that’s about providing her with affirmation, with a reason to fight, rather than that acting as an illustration of her weakness.

Now, superheroines don’t have to fight the same way as superheroes, or to have the same priorities and motivations. In fact, it would be interesting for them to be different. But whether it’s Black Widow circumventing the need to torture Loki by conducting a skilled interrogation that never gets physical or Mystique grappling with the fact that having a power sometimes makes people more frightened of you than admiring, that difference should be a means of articulating that there are multiple kinds of power that are equally effective, not that being a woman with powers means you can never be equal to a man.

The bridge is yours.

-I would have been fine with it if J.K. Rowling had killed Ron Weasley.

-Scarlett Johansson has the best reaction to a leaked nude photos scandal of all time.

-Ron Howard goes from the Dark Tower to NASCAR.

-Summer Glau has literally become Sarah Marshall.

-I may find Odd Future tiresome, but Syd the Kid’s video for her debut single “Cocaine” starts out undeniably adorable and then gets genuinely disconcerting:

From the manifesto of Anders Breivik, the right-winger who murdered 76 people in Norway on Friday:

It is obvious that Nordic entertainment super-stars like Scarlett Johansson (60-70% Nordic purity), Gwyneth Paltrow (70-80%)Pamela Anderson (90-95%), Paris Hilton (70-80%), Taylor Swift (80- 90%) would have never been where they are today hadn’t it been for their distinct Nordic physical characteristics. They would have never, in a million years, managed to reach their current status of fame had they belonged to another ethnic group. Same can be said about several other superstars with Nordic physical features such as individuals from Marilyn Monroe to Megan Fox. So why not embrace their Nordic gift by contributing to preserve Nordic culture instead of throwing it away and robbing their children of the same opportunities they once received?

Scarlett Johansson has a Jewish mother. Megan Fox is Irish, French, and Native American. Pamela Anderson and Paris Hilton have what enduring recognition they have less because they’re avatars of Nordic purity than because they made sex tapes and were canny enough to profit from them on their release rather than slinking away to die of shame. Marilyn Monroe was similarly willing to take her clothes off — and when she kept them on, could actually be fairly funny, a trait which has no distinguishable correlation with Scandanavian ancestry. Ditto with curviness — a quality that is purchasable as much as it is genetic — a propensity to get naked, or the ability to write universally appealing songs about being a teenager.

Breivik is a monster who deserves every moment of the time he’ll do, and more. But even if he’d never gone out and killed a bunch of innocent people, I can’t imagine what it would be like trying to sort your life into these sorts of categories, trying to twist the facts to allow yourself to like things that don’t fit into your worldview. It must be a constant struggle to be this virulent a racist, to perpetually exercise this kind of self-delusion.