As a society, we are fascinated by the spy story. It makes
sense. Spy stories are filled with tension and suspense like a horror film, but
it’s not the same kind of tension. However, when we looked at the spies we see
in film and television there is a clear double standard in how they are looked
at by the audience. For this blog, I want to compare how we look at Black Widow
and James Bond.
The origin Natasha Romanoff, better known as Black Widow, begins
in the former Soviet Union when she was Russian spy before defecting to the US
and ultimately working for SHIELD. Within the Marvel comic universe, she has
been romantically linked to Hawkeye, Matt Murdock and his alter ego Daredevil,
and Alexei Shostakov (a Soviet test pilot). Her role was the quintessential
femme fatale.
This carried over to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as well.
We are first introduced to Natasha in Iron
Man 2 when she begins to work undercover in Stark Industries to evaluate
Tony Stark’s suitability for the Avengers Initiative under the direction of
Nick Fury. In this capacity, Natasha uses her sex appeal to get close to Stark.
In this film, Black Widow is dressed in her signature cat suit during the
climatic fight sequences. When we see her in The Avengers, she is wearing a tiny black dress as being questioned
by some mobsters of some kind. Then Fury sends her to find Bruce Banner and
bring him in as part of the Avengers Initiative. Her first tact is to flirt
with Banner to try and bring him in peacefully. Then during the events of Captain America: Winter Soldier, there
is some flirtation between Cap and Natasha while they are on the run. Then we
get a further developed romance between Bruce and Natasha in The Avengers: Age of Ultron. This romance is probably the most developed
for Black Widow within the MCU.
Natasha’s romance became a subject of scrutiny during the
press for Age of Ultron. There was a
great bit of controversy when Jeremy Renner, who played Hawkeye, slut shamed
Black Widow for her different romantic entanglements throughout the films. What
makes this interesting is that we don’t look at male spies in the same way.
Let’s take the quintessential male spy, James Bond. Over the
decades, the various incarnations of Bond have one thing in common, his nearly
never ending trail of women. Bond is a notorious womanizer, so much so that we
have reduced his romantic partners to simply being known as Bond girls. They
are given names like Pussy Galore, Honey Ryder, and Dink. Each film has Bond
sleeping with another woman, yet we never slut shame James Bond. In fact, he is
seen as the height of masculinity. Sleeping with women for information or even
just because they are available and willing is just part of Bond’s job. It’s
the ultimate in “boys will be boys” mentality.
James Bond is the personification of toxic masculinity. For
those not in the know (although this is probably just my tendency to
over-explain), toxic masculinity is the critique of the cultural perspective in
which men are seen as dominant, aggressive, unemotional, and sexually
aggressive. This code of behavior plays into ideas such as rape culture and the
idea that men are supposed to be promiscuous in order to prove their manhood.
There is little to the character of James Bond beyond these stereotypes of
acceptable male behavior.
The way that culture looks at these two spy characters tells
us much about the double standards in regards to sexuality. Women who use their
sexuality as part of a spy narrative are reduced to objects and subject to
slut-shaming. Often in these narratives, the promiscuity on part of the female
spy can have catastrophic consequences. However, with male spies, using one’s
sexuality as a tool in the spy game is all in a day’s work.
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