What would surprise Captain America?
Jun. 13th, 2012 01:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lolaraincoatI've been reading a lot of Avengers fics - there's been a lot to read - and I've been liking many of these fics quite a lot. Except that there's this one thing that's driving me crazy, so crazy that I keep having to back-button out of perfectly good fics before Nick Fury and the Hulk can even begin to get their freak on, which is kind of tragic. So in case you were thinking of writing anything in the Marvel-verse ever, and you were hoping to avoid me making sad puppy-eyes face, please, please, please consider this question carefully:
What would surprise Captain America in 2012?
See, people keep writing (and reccing!) stories in which eternally-27-year-old Steve Rogers, who is thawed out in 2012 after having been frozen in Arctic ice since 1945, is shocked by this crazy modern world. It's kind of irresistible as a plot point, to be fair. I just wish people writing these fics did not show such a profound lack of imagination in picking which aspects of this crazy modern world would horrify him. So far what amazes and/or upsets Captain America in fics I've read has been:
* sexy dancing by scantily clad teenagers to unfamiliar loud music
* sex
* premarital sex
* homosexual sex
* marriage equality
* computers
Computers as consumer goods, I agree, are pretty new and different. But when thinking about what might shock Captain America, writers should remember that World War Two, like all the big wars since 1850 or so, gave a huge impetus to technology, and even an ordinary soldier would have seen rapid change in information technology over the course of the war. Presumably the guy who got shot up with the top-secret super-soldier serum would have been around a lot more rapid technological change: radar, early computing (Alan Turing, who invented the Turing test, spent World War Two pioneering decryption software, remember), the first glimmerings of television (though not broadcast), the first antibiotics ...
So it's not so much that computers would shock the defrosted Captain because of their newness, I think. They might shock him because they are the latest development of the flowering of consumer culture in the postwar decades. So I'm not sure they would shock him more than disposable plastic sporks or drive-through Starbucks. Bear in mind that he grew up in the Great Depression: throwing stuff out would be very hard for him; being surrounded by objects which were made in order to be thrown out might astonish him.
As to sex: every generation imagines that they invented it, and every generation is wrong. But if you're thinking of World War Two as part of the vast, undifferentiated Time Before Sex Was Invented, you are extra-wrong with wrong on top and a side order of really, really wrong.. World War Two was, besides everything else it was, an occasion for lots of young (mostly) healthy (mostly) people to get out into the world and meet a whole bunch of interesting strangers. They danced sexily to loud music (I know the Glenn Miller Orchestra doesn't sound that way to us, but imagine all those brass and wind and percussion instruments playing as loud as they could in a ballroom. It was loud.) So they danced in ways that revealed their underwear to the world, and then they had sex. That's why the military produced all those interesting vintage posters warning about the dangers of attractive spies and also VD. That's why the invention of penicillin mattered to the war effort. That's why the Baby Boom. During the war, Americans made funny movies about all the sex people were having - Miracle at Morgan's Creek for instance - and a decade later some of them told Alfred Kinsey all about it.
As Kinsey discovered, some of the sex people were having during the war was with people of the same sex. In fact, Alan Berube mades clear in Coming Out Under Fire that gay men and lesbians in the military faced very little official trouble until after the war was over - at which point they faced terrible discrimination indeed. But Captain America would have been under the ice by that point. The world he left was full of unmarried people having all kinds of sex with relatively few consequences except pregnancy (and yes, birth control existed before the Pill) and venereal disease. So to me, fics depicting Captain America as a prude or a homophobe need to explain how he came to be so out of step with his own time. Or writers who want a prudish Captain America could show him as having gone into the ice in the 1950s - a much more buttoned-down time.
Marriage equality is a new thing in the world, yes, but like all new things it has historical antecedents. Communities of men who prefer sex with other men can be found in the historical record pretty much in any city in the world across the past two centuries at least, and gay liberation was an idea if not a political movement as early as the 1880s in parts of Europe. For Steve Rogers' home town, Brooklyn, fic writers might want to consult George Chauncey's terrific book Gay New York, which includes a brief account of a marriage ceremony - not a legel one, to be sure - between two men in Brooklyn in the 1920s. So while Steve Rogers might find marriage equality surprising, I very much doubt it would be on the top of his list of astonishments.
So, not sex and not computers, then. What would surprise Captain America?
Nick Fury. Nick Fury as played by Samuel Jackson, anyway. Remember that the US military was racially segregated during World War Two (yes I know that Captain America supposedly fought in an integrated unit, but all that tells us is that the guys who wrote the script for that movie know just as much history as the average fangirl, or maybe a little less) and that the biggest argument for maintaining segregation was that white guys could not possibly be led into battle by non-white guys. So to wake up to find Nick Fury as his commanding officer - I'm not saying that Steve Rogers would be upset, necessarily, but he would be very, very surprised.
And, more broadly, racial integration generally would shock him. Steve Rogers did grow up in a place and time where marriage was very strictly regulated: marriage between people of two separate races was illegal almost everywhere in the United States until 1962. I don't know if he grew up with separate drinking fountains and segregated public transportation - but if I were writing fic about Captain America waking up in 2012, I would do some serious googling about segregation in New York City. Did he attend segregated schools? That seems likely.
Maria Hill would probably shock him, too. While women were part of the military during the Second World War, they served in separate, auxiliary branches - and similarly to the segregated units in which non-white Americans served, that was to prevent any woman ever from having military authority over any man. Again, thinking more generally, he would not be surprised at all to see women working, but to see women in professional positions would be something very new to him. Pepper Potts would make sense to him as a secretary, but not as a CEO. He would have seen lots of women nurses, but no women doctors. No women scientists, either, so he would be surprised to meet Jane Foster.
Two other big surprises:
Changes in social class in America. As I already said, the rise of the middle class and all the material cultural surrounding it - suburbs! dixie cups! - was pretty much a post-war phenomenon. So was the collapse of the labor movement. In the neighborhood where Steve Rogers grew up, nearly all employed adult men would have belonged to a union. He didn't have a union, because he was a soldier, but he will be surprised to find that most of the guys working on rebuilding New York after it got Loki'd are not union members. Oh, and before World War Two, very few Americans went to college - he'll be impressed to keep meeting all these educated people.
And finally, geopolitical change. Probably the biggest shock would be that Europe is now united (sort of) and that Germany and France are now closely allied. Slightly less shocking, because anyone who was paying attention could see this looming over the horizon throughout the war, would be the bitter division between the US and Russia (though he might need the whole Cold War explained to him, several times, with emphasis on the bomb. Or should I say, The Bomb.) But also he would be amazed by the end of British imperialism. And the Chinese Revolution! The Iranian revolution! African decolonization and the end of apartheid! The Cuban Revolution! India and Pakistan and
... yeah, anyway, there's a lot for him to catch up on.
But not sex. Really there's not too much new there at all.
ETA: Wow, that's ... a lot ... of comments. I'm glad you're here and will try to respond eventually, but no promises. In the meantime, if you are thinking about commenting here, please read this first. Thank you!
*****
What would surprise Captain America in 2012?
See, people keep writing (and reccing!) stories in which eternally-27-year-old Steve Rogers, who is thawed out in 2012 after having been frozen in Arctic ice since 1945, is shocked by this crazy modern world. It's kind of irresistible as a plot point, to be fair. I just wish people writing these fics did not show such a profound lack of imagination in picking which aspects of this crazy modern world would horrify him. So far what amazes and/or upsets Captain America in fics I've read has been:
* sexy dancing by scantily clad teenagers to unfamiliar loud music
* sex
* premarital sex
* homosexual sex
* marriage equality
* computers
Computers as consumer goods, I agree, are pretty new and different. But when thinking about what might shock Captain America, writers should remember that World War Two, like all the big wars since 1850 or so, gave a huge impetus to technology, and even an ordinary soldier would have seen rapid change in information technology over the course of the war. Presumably the guy who got shot up with the top-secret super-soldier serum would have been around a lot more rapid technological change: radar, early computing (Alan Turing, who invented the Turing test, spent World War Two pioneering decryption software, remember), the first glimmerings of television (though not broadcast), the first antibiotics ...
So it's not so much that computers would shock the defrosted Captain because of their newness, I think. They might shock him because they are the latest development of the flowering of consumer culture in the postwar decades. So I'm not sure they would shock him more than disposable plastic sporks or drive-through Starbucks. Bear in mind that he grew up in the Great Depression: throwing stuff out would be very hard for him; being surrounded by objects which were made in order to be thrown out might astonish him.
As to sex: every generation imagines that they invented it, and every generation is wrong. But if you're thinking of World War Two as part of the vast, undifferentiated Time Before Sex Was Invented, you are extra-wrong with wrong on top and a side order of really, really wrong.. World War Two was, besides everything else it was, an occasion for lots of young (mostly) healthy (mostly) people to get out into the world and meet a whole bunch of interesting strangers. They danced sexily to loud music (I know the Glenn Miller Orchestra doesn't sound that way to us, but imagine all those brass and wind and percussion instruments playing as loud as they could in a ballroom. It was loud.) So they danced in ways that revealed their underwear to the world, and then they had sex. That's why the military produced all those interesting vintage posters warning about the dangers of attractive spies and also VD. That's why the invention of penicillin mattered to the war effort. That's why the Baby Boom. During the war, Americans made funny movies about all the sex people were having - Miracle at Morgan's Creek for instance - and a decade later some of them told Alfred Kinsey all about it.
As Kinsey discovered, some of the sex people were having during the war was with people of the same sex. In fact, Alan Berube mades clear in Coming Out Under Fire that gay men and lesbians in the military faced very little official trouble until after the war was over - at which point they faced terrible discrimination indeed. But Captain America would have been under the ice by that point. The world he left was full of unmarried people having all kinds of sex with relatively few consequences except pregnancy (and yes, birth control existed before the Pill) and venereal disease. So to me, fics depicting Captain America as a prude or a homophobe need to explain how he came to be so out of step with his own time. Or writers who want a prudish Captain America could show him as having gone into the ice in the 1950s - a much more buttoned-down time.
Marriage equality is a new thing in the world, yes, but like all new things it has historical antecedents. Communities of men who prefer sex with other men can be found in the historical record pretty much in any city in the world across the past two centuries at least, and gay liberation was an idea if not a political movement as early as the 1880s in parts of Europe. For Steve Rogers' home town, Brooklyn, fic writers might want to consult George Chauncey's terrific book Gay New York, which includes a brief account of a marriage ceremony - not a legel one, to be sure - between two men in Brooklyn in the 1920s. So while Steve Rogers might find marriage equality surprising, I very much doubt it would be on the top of his list of astonishments.
So, not sex and not computers, then. What would surprise Captain America?
Nick Fury. Nick Fury as played by Samuel Jackson, anyway. Remember that the US military was racially segregated during World War Two (yes I know that Captain America supposedly fought in an integrated unit, but all that tells us is that the guys who wrote the script for that movie know just as much history as the average fangirl, or maybe a little less) and that the biggest argument for maintaining segregation was that white guys could not possibly be led into battle by non-white guys. So to wake up to find Nick Fury as his commanding officer - I'm not saying that Steve Rogers would be upset, necessarily, but he would be very, very surprised.
And, more broadly, racial integration generally would shock him. Steve Rogers did grow up in a place and time where marriage was very strictly regulated: marriage between people of two separate races was illegal almost everywhere in the United States until 1962. I don't know if he grew up with separate drinking fountains and segregated public transportation - but if I were writing fic about Captain America waking up in 2012, I would do some serious googling about segregation in New York City. Did he attend segregated schools? That seems likely.
Maria Hill would probably shock him, too. While women were part of the military during the Second World War, they served in separate, auxiliary branches - and similarly to the segregated units in which non-white Americans served, that was to prevent any woman ever from having military authority over any man. Again, thinking more generally, he would not be surprised at all to see women working, but to see women in professional positions would be something very new to him. Pepper Potts would make sense to him as a secretary, but not as a CEO. He would have seen lots of women nurses, but no women doctors. No women scientists, either, so he would be surprised to meet Jane Foster.
Two other big surprises:
Changes in social class in America. As I already said, the rise of the middle class and all the material cultural surrounding it - suburbs! dixie cups! - was pretty much a post-war phenomenon. So was the collapse of the labor movement. In the neighborhood where Steve Rogers grew up, nearly all employed adult men would have belonged to a union. He didn't have a union, because he was a soldier, but he will be surprised to find that most of the guys working on rebuilding New York after it got Loki'd are not union members. Oh, and before World War Two, very few Americans went to college - he'll be impressed to keep meeting all these educated people.
And finally, geopolitical change. Probably the biggest shock would be that Europe is now united (sort of) and that Germany and France are now closely allied. Slightly less shocking, because anyone who was paying attention could see this looming over the horizon throughout the war, would be the bitter division between the US and Russia (though he might need the whole Cold War explained to him, several times, with emphasis on the bomb. Or should I say, The Bomb.) But also he would be amazed by the end of British imperialism. And the Chinese Revolution! The Iranian revolution! African decolonization and the end of apartheid! The Cuban Revolution! India and Pakistan and
... yeah, anyway, there's a lot for him to catch up on.
But not sex. Really there's not too much new there at all.
ETA: Wow, that's ... a lot ... of comments. I'm glad you're here and will try to respond eventually, but no promises. In the meantime, if you are thinking about commenting here, please read this first. Thank you!
*****
no subject
Date: 2012-06-13 09:45 pm (UTC)On a more personal note, I often wonder about gay men and lesbians in my mother's generation and in her circle, and I wish she was still around and not in a shirty mood so I could grill her about it more. For example, her best friend growing up, who went both to high school and college with her, was a man who I suspected more and more as I got older was gay. He was married, with 3 kids, never stopped being married, was an English professor at a university in Indiana. He was an exaggerated stereotype - extremely effeminate manners, collected antiques, served in the Navy, opera, martinis, Melville scholar (Moby Dick! Very gay book!) It also seemed like there was something chronically wrong in the family. His wife drank very heavily and always seemed to be on tranqs. His older son and daughter had all kinds of terrible problems, and his son broke with the family completely under circumstances I never understood. What was going on there? How should I know? I have no idea. I actually think I did ask mom once, long ago, if AH was gay, and she said no - but... And it's not like she (and she was *exactly* that generation, b 1925) didn't recognize any of her friends as gay. She had at least male one friend who was living the lifestyle at least in the 50s, if not the 40s. He was in advertising and lived in one of the big coastal cities. Not sure "out" is the word, but out to himself and, in some kind of implicit way, to her, and his friends - not Sal Romano, in other words. So it was visible to him and visible to mom. But were there relationships and situations in which it was not visible to her?
Excuse the very free associations. I have not been reading any Avengers fic. I don't want anything to do with Capt America, and I was weirdly unmoved by Sam Jackson/Nick Fury, but I suppose I could nibble on some - is Banner the Hulk? I liked him. Though I get the complaint on racial grounds.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-13 11:53 pm (UTC)This is relevant to my interests! My mother-in-law's sister was gay; her partner had been married and divorced, and they got together in the early-mid 50s at a dude ranch in Colorado and subsequently bought a house together in Tucson in the late 50s. There was an active gay and artsy community there, and they were a big part of it. My MIL's sister died of breast cancer before I ever married B, but I did meet her partner (who was accepted as 'aunt' in the family) who still lived in their Tucson house.
B lived with them for a year while he went to community college, before he transferred to the state University, and he remembers it as just being, oh, they were Aunt June and Aunt Libby, no big deal. Yet within the family there is still a lot of homophobia (e.g. his redneck brother, sigh), and I think there are (were) a few of them who firmly believe(d) they were just 'very good friends', because - it wasn't something people TALKED about, and I think maybe it wasn't something that was even acknowledged to themselves.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-14 03:15 am (UTC)Wow, what a cool story. If there are any family documents regarding their lives together, it would be a really good idea to get them to the state historical society or to the University of Arizona's library. The U. of A. has a terrific women's studies/gender studies department - you might try contacting their department chair to see about this.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-14 04:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-14 04:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-18 03:49 am (UTC)(Sorry. I love her.)
no subject
Date: 2012-06-19 02:45 am (UTC)... Hey, maybe Isis's aunt was friends with Jane Rule, though? That seems plausible.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-14 03:05 am (UTC)And my other point is, it has never changed in a linear or predictable way. In the US, things got much worse for gay people after about 1949, as the Cold War ratcheted up. We think of the Victorian (and Edwardian) years as repressive ones for women, but in fact it was significantly easier to lead a lesbian life for working-class women in the 1850-1900 period than before or immediately after. Etc etc etc... I know you know I know this, it's just ... I keep writing super-long replies to people because I am so interested in the history of sexuality right now anyway, and I get excited. Forgive me!
That's fascinating about your mother and her social circle(s.) I was just the other trying, with some friends of mine here in Mexico, when the phrase "the closet" (usually used in English - you rarely hear anyone use "el armario" in that sense) and whether it ever made any sense at all in a Mexican context - they seem to agree it did not. It may not have made much sense in the US context either, most of the time, except as a deliberate political strategy. It's never been a binary, so the metaphor doesn't work well. Men who had sex with men, and women who had sex with women would always have had some people in their lives who knew perfectly well who they had sex with, and others who understood implicitly, and others who could have understood if they wanted to, and others from whom this knowledge was deliberately hidden. What "coming out of the closet" ended up meaning in the US was that people stopped shielding anyone in their lives from the fact of their sexual identity. But it never has meant that in Mexico - my friends who I'm staying with right now, for instance, know that their neighbors in their apartment building think that they're (straight) spinsters - and that seems to be not changing much.
What was I saying about extremely long and kind of off-target comments made by me?
no subject
Date: 2012-06-14 03:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-06-14 03:57 am (UTC)I know Sal Romano isn't a "real person," but he's real to me - just per "the closet" - isn't that also a real thing that exists and existed, people not actually having sex with anyone, and not out to those closest to him - his wife and childhood friend, or his mother? And when I remember AH, whom I always just loved, and so did mom, I just hope his life wasn't like that.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-14 04:58 am (UTC)I'm not saying that "the closet" wasn't a really important metaphor when it was first used, or that it's not an important metaphor now. It just - the metaphor might obscure as much as it reveals, especially when applied anachronistically, is what I think I might mean.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-14 03:58 pm (UTC)I haven't read any of the books on your list, only Epistemology of the Closet, and not all of that, so I should probably know better than to talk the way I'm talking - but it's more about keeping the awareness of pervasive terror alive.
One other thing I wanted to mention, and again I read some Marvel comics growing up, but don't really remember them - didn't really like them, but my brother had stacks and I would go on binges. And what's really critical, I haven't read any of the slash, so I'm not sure exactly what you're responding to. But that said, Captain America doesn't seem to me to be representing the 40s or WWII *in general* (as in, "he's from the 40s, therefore he would have...") but rather seems like a kind of back-formation, a later image formed out of a cultural ideal that became more dominant in the 50s, though I think it was an element earlier - Bing Crosby's America - shudder. In fact, maybe partly a sentimental ideal related to the extreme loss and displacement, the death on a massive scale - all the old "familiar" places - in the war. I think part of that is, as you say, like the unspoiled countryside in Raymond Williams - that purity that is always only just recently destroyed, and then becomes ossified and inaccessible. There's a thing in TJ Clark about this, how WWI is further away than the Renaissance (not that I actually believe this, and I think you're arguing against it and that's good). But I do think that's part of how the "magic" works in the case of Capt America, which is just reinforced but not invented by thawing him out in the 21st century. He always already belongs to an inaccessible, sentimentalized past. If that makes sense - an ill-informed impression.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-14 04:46 pm (UTC)You may be giving the fic too much credit, though - really, it seems more like just thoughtless writing based on the assumption that everything was always the same until the author was about 15, and then everything started changing very fast. Or else these writers are doing it because they want to write a romance in which the lovers have to overcome an obstacle, and having Steve Rogers come from The Past, When Nobody Ever Had Sex Because It Was Not Allowed, is a useful obstacle. I'm not going to give specific examples because I am not that mean, but let's just say ...OK, I'll say this: I'm not fishing around randomly in Avengers fics but reading only those fics which people on my friends lists recommend.
I have never gotten though more than, like, ten pages of Epistomology of the Closet. Maybe fifteen. But I highly, highly recommend Gay New York - really, I think you'd enjoy it! And one of Chauncey's points, with which I agree, is that there was not always a "pervasive terror" attached to being a person who desired someone of the same sex. (I am trying to avoid the historically specific term "gay" here, is why the clunky forumlations.) Sometimes there was. Often there was for some people but not for others, even within the same communities, depending on class, gender, ethnicity, religion and race. But that pervasiveness of terror which Sal suffered from, and which led to the flowering of gay and lesbian liberation movements from the late 1940s onward - that's an artifact of the Cold War. At least Chauncey persuaded me so.