hazellazer asked: I needed to come over here after this to read about how awesome Natasha is. I just had a "friend" try to tell me that Black Widow is a whore and a terrible person because of how she "uses people for sex"... (transcript is on my tumblr) and told me to go "read comics from the 70s and 80s" and I would "see that he's right". I sorta want to cry right now. I love Natasha.
Your friend has read some really strange (read: probably non-existant) 70s and 80s comics. I don’t understand how having sex without the “enjoyment” of an emotional connection is a bad thing, but Natasha’s Bronze Age character hook— “the Widow’s curse!”— was all about the danger of emotional connection, love, and not sex. It most memorably struck people she had no sexytimes contact with at all. (See: Amazing Adventures #5, 1971.) And, well, for all that Conway and Colan tried to channel the mystique of the Summer of Love by moving Matt and Natasha to San Francisco, we were repeatedly told that even though they lived together, they didn’t share a bedroom.
And so you don’t get the wrong idea… you and he will share the second floor, while I, dear friend, I’ll take the street-leve suite.
The codename “Black Widow” has been a deep irony since Roy Thomas, Stan Lee & co. revealed that she’d begun her espionage career to serve in the place of her beloved dead husband. In the 1980s Frank Miller chopped off her hair and stuck her back with SHIELD. She became cold and no-nonsense instead of glamorous and temperamental; it was the beginning of a decade-long dryspell when it came to Natasha and getting any. This came out in the 1980s, you can see how right he is.
Basically, I can’t fix your friend’s misogyny, but I can absolutely demolish his continuity.
