So I’ve been meaning to write about last week’s She Hulk comic, but got super busy putting together the next issue of other. And then I couldn’t find my copy to scan the relevant bits. Luckily Scans Daily came to the rescue.
OK, so I blogged recently about my fascination with the idea that She-Hulk is an object of sexual desire to men, but it’s an ambivalent desire. They want her large and powerful body, but they’re also embarrassed by it.  Or scared of it.

Now I’m worried that Dan Slott is steering She-Hulk in a very different direction… more specifically, toward the idea that She-Hulk is a slut who throws herself at men. Witness, in the latest issue, her interactions with Wolverine (who is a stand-in for the fanboy reader.) First she does the “fastball special” which he normally does with the macho Colossus:

And then she has the nerve to hit on the scratchy one:

I seem to remember a chick hitting on Wolverine in an issue of Morrison’s New X-Men, and he was pretty psyched. But here, he reacts by insulting poor She-Hulk:

Apparently She-Hulk and Juggernaut did have sex, but it doesn’t count because it was in a comic written by Chuck Austen.

OK, I know Jen is just a fictional character, but I’m still somewhat miffed on her behalf. I can see where Slott is going with this: he’s continuing to explore the idea that Jen, her “human” alter-ego, is smarter and more cautious than the brash She-Hulk. On the one hand, it’s bad that her fiance wanted her to be Jen all the time. On the other hand, she needs to learn to value her mousy smart persona more. (In this issue, she sees a vision of her Jen persona, who for some reason is dressed as an old lady librarian, while the real She-Hulk is wearing a bikini in the tundra. Hmmm.)

Why does this bug me? I’m not sure. Maybe it’s partly just because I identify with She-Hulk a bit, as I mentioned earlier. But also, I think the idea of men throwing themselves at her while feeling weird about it is sort of interesting territory. But also, I think we’re skating a bit too close to some slut-shaming and double-standard territory. As in, Wolverine is a stud but She-Hulk is “sloppy seconds.” (And Batman is a “hairy-chested love god.”)

There’s also this: the whole She-Hulk=slut thing comes on the heels of the botched mind-rape storyline involving Eros, which I blogged about a while back. There, she thought that Eros might have been using his powers to make her sleep with him, but it turned out that she was just a slut. (More or less.) The thing I like about Slott’s writing is that he gets that superhero comics are largely soap operas with a bit of action-adventure sprinkled in. There’s supposed to be lots of unrequited love, doomed engagements, weird entanglements, romantic tension, and salaciousness. It’s just that Slott doesn’t know how to handle these themes in a non-creepy way.

PS: Of course, now that I’ve written my rambly, incoherent post about the “sloppy seconds” thing, I found this post by Ragnell which quotes from Rhy’s post on the Comic Fangirls community and does a much, much better job of explaining what was wrong with this issue as well as the Eros plotline. Go read Rhy’s post and Ragnell’s brief comments on it.