Poses: Spider-Man, Black Widow, CDC
Reads and Views 12 January 2022
Reads
1 . Remember last summer when everyone was complaining about how badwrongevil it was for Black Widow to fight like this?
Here is Eliana Dockterman in Time magazine saying, “It’s been around since the Iron Man era, a blatant male fantasy of how a woman would fight.” Everyone was jumping on the bandwagon: Black Widow is a sexist caricature, an example of toxic masculinity, this pose is literally violence against children, now my cat’s dead too thanks Stan Lee.
There were some problems with that argument, including that it was false and that it was easily proven false. For example, here is Iron Man himself doing the pose.
If a pose is a “blatant male fantasy of how a woman would fight,” why is Iron Man doing it? Note to Dockterman: you may not be familiar with comic books, but the ‘Man’ in Iron Man is neither ironic nor transphilic. Iron Man is, in fact, a man. Why would a man in the supposedly toxically masculine culture of Marvel be striking a pose meant to objectify and exploit women?
The answer, of course, is that the pose is no such thing. It’s just a cool pose. Here’s the most macho film character of the year striking the pose at the end of F9.
And here’s one of the year’s least macho but very much male film heroes striking the pose.
In fact, Tom Holland hits this pose so often in No Way Home that I’m almost convinced it had to be deliberate. The only cause for hesitation is that the pose is so ubiquitous in comic books that it’s entirely possible for Spidey to strike it multiple times per adventure without conscious intent.
So that’s it, that’s the item. When I covered Spider-Man: No Way Home in the podcast last week, I forgot to mention the pose and its disgraceful use by gender trolls as a weapon of attempted cancellation.
I do think there is a Black Widow fighting maneuver that Whedon and others used that is informed by her sex - namely the flying scissors kick crotch-to-the-face maneuver - but that’s a different post.
2 . Speaking of poses, how much posing has the CDC been doing over the past two years? They’ll take whatever posture the public demands. They quickly reversed their decades-old guidance on masks. They issue so many revised recommendations that “CDC recommends” memes are a thing now. They’re for re-opening, they’re not for re-opening, they’re for school closings, they’re not for school closings, they’re for quarantine, they’re not for quarantine, the list goes on. Their credibility is shot.
But is their data itself just a pose? Take this article, which buries the lede. Sure, it’s interesting that in the current covid surge, not a single patient has been intubated by this UCSF doctor working in four different hospitals. But the kicker is this: “After reviewing the charts of every COVID-positive patient at UCSF hospitals on Jan. 4, Dr Jeanne Noble determined that 70% of them were in the hospital for other reasons.” Would people be nearly as scared if the numbers throughout the pandemic were one-third smaller than what they have been? Maybe. Would experts have lost as much credibility as they have if they hadn’t tried to dress up the data in scary ways, and instead just presented it without pose or spin? No, certainly not.
3 . I remember when this book came out almost a decade ago claiming that until the 18th century, most people slept in two shifts during the night, with a wakeful “watch” from 12 to 2, say. He claims that like Tartaria, this record has been lost to history (although not deliberately like in Tartaria’s case, if you believe that sort of thing, which you shouldn’t). I’m a big believer in hypnograms and sleep cycles - waking at the end of a cycle really works for me. But how would they look for biphasic sleep?
Views
1. Rob Lee has posted many videos showing movement of Russian troops and materiel from East to West. Rob thinks this is no pose: the Russians are going in. I still think Vlad decides to do something much smaller than a full-scale invasion, but I’m inching closer to 50-50 territory.
2. US and Russia tensions the last few years have been at their worst since 1985 or so. Let’s hope the Winds of Change can blow us up a nice pleasant detente this spring. Wikipedia tells me it’s the best-selling German single of all time. Wikipedia also tells me that the band gave Mikhail Gorbachev a cool $70k from the sales, and now I really want to see Gorbachev and Klaus Meine together on stage rocking the heck out of this song. “Let your balalaika sing what my guitar wants to play!” That’s not a great line, but it’s an earnest one.