Is the Anger at “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” Accurate?

Nope. Good read, very efficient.

If you’re wondering what I’m referring to, I mean the rising anger and review brigading orchestrated by men on popular sites’ user reviews. “She-Hulk” Attorney at Law saw more than 40% of its reviews on IMDB hit 1-out-of-10 before it even premiered. The bulk of reviews overall came from men, but those who were registered on IMDB as 30-or-over were particularly negative. Right now, the show holds just a 5.5 after a perfectly good first episode.

I went over negative user reviews on Metacritic on Friday. There, it holds a 4.4. I’ll feature some of the choice quotes here again. See if you can find a theme: “feminist crap”, “constant misandrist whining”, “hatred of men”, “push social agendas”, “activist BS”, “overly feministic”, “a window into the feminists narcissistic and ungrateful, petulant brain”, “feminazism trash for the M-She-U”.

What’s the anger about? After lawyer Jennifer Walters accidentally gets an infusion of cousin Bruce Banner’s Hulk blood, she turns into a hulk. The thing is, she’s good at it. “She-Hulk” makes a point of the fact that she can manage her anger better than Bruce because – as a woman – she has to live with anger and fear every day. Whereas Bruce has struggled for a decade to mesh the dual personality of Bruce and the Hulk, getting stuck as one or the other for long periods of time, Jennifer is immediately good at fusing the two. Why? Because Bruce has struggled to control his anger, and Jennifer has learned to live with hers.

“Activism! Feminist BS!” Allons, to the fainting couch! Yes, Mr. BranFlakes5000, tell me in as angry a tone as possible about how ungrateful and petulant women are. I can’t imagine where anyone could have possibly drawn the conclusion that men have problems controlling our anger. 1-star reviews before it even premieres? You certainly don’t lash out in any way.

How could Marvel change the comic where Jennifer maintains her personality, emotional control, and breaks the fourth wall for jokes into a series where Jennifer maintains her personality, emotional control, and breaks the fourth wall for jokes? If your argument is that the MCU is ruining Marvel Comics by being accurate to Marvel Comics, and they need to stop being accurate to Marvel Comics and start being accurate to Marvel Comics, then you’re not actually reading this, you’re in a Christopher Nolan movie where you’ve found the tangible representation of a Schrodinger’s emotional state. It’s nothing but your childhood bedroom and if you go through the door, you’ll only find yourself in your childhood bedroom again. You fall forever. Turn back to page 1.

One of the more insidious criticisms of “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” has to do with the treatment of Bruce Banner’s Hulk. You see, they’ve turned him into a beta male, because the alpha-beta relationship is a thing biologist L. David Mech theorized about wolves in the 1980s before realizing oh shit, whoops, that theory didn’t pan out. Now, men’s rights con artists and incel MLMs will tell you that alphas and betas are a thing because apparently we all live in movies about Wall Street bankers set in the 1980s.

To fast forward, Bruce Banner has been turned into a smug, narcissistic beta who’s just there for comic relief. To which I ask: have you seen any of the MCU films? That’s his secret. He’s always smug. The worst scene (by far) in “Avengers: Endgame” was about Hulk not listening to Ant-Man trying to save everybody because Hulk was too busy taking selfies with adoring fans. Before that, he stood in Tony Stark’s way as he tried to double down on a prior mistake that had created Ultron and put the world at risk, until Tony appealed to Bruce’s ego and they tried again. Because Bruce is smug. Sure, he’s empathetic and complex and has anger issues, but he also has a strong dash of smug narcissist that has been present throughout Ruffalo’s portrayal of him.

But Tatiana Maslany’s Jennifer is a Mary Sue, who’s good at everything immediately? I’m sorry, let me call up “genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist” Tony Stark, who says that about himself to Captain America, who was the goodiest two-shoes to ever good a shoe but just needed a dose of Mary Sue juice to go full Sky Captain. Or should GBPP and America’s Ass rope Thor in, whose major character flaw was being too smug and got an entire “Henry IV” adaptation about how if he faces his smugness, he’ll be rewarded with Natalie Portman. All the Avengers are is smug, except maybe Hawkeye, and that’s because Jeremy Renner is too busy chasing his dream role as Droopy Dog.

Someone’s lecturing someone else in an MCU property? Stop, don’t, come back. The movies would amount to one season of hourlongs if you cut out the lecturing. At least it’s about something now. It’s about how women control their anger better than men? They do. How is that even a conversation?

Every tupperware party of incels wants to sell that men are more aggressive, more violent, that other men need to fear their violence to know where they stand in the hierarchy, but also that men are super totes self-controlled and don’t act out their anger at all. Like, fucking choose one. Are you so uncontrollably violent other people need to fear you so much they “know their place” or can you control yourself like an adult? Which one is it? Insert Christopher Nolan’s Schrodinger’s Funhouse here, turn back to page 1.

Hell, look at this article. As a dude, I can use my anger to point out how ridiculous we as men are being about things like “She-Hulk” (and “Ms. Marvel” before it, “Captain Marvel” before that, the list outside the MCU is never-ending – see last week’s “A League of Their Own”.) There’s an entire language for male anger. I can write in it about others who have written in it. I can be condescending and snarky and make jokes and translate the ridiculousness of male anger by drawing on male anger itself, because so much of the language in which we write both fiction and criticism is based on dealing with male anger. This article is angry because male anger is so privileged that we can just write in it as the default. Male anger is how our culture is defined and described.

That’s why a portion of men get so angry about something like “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law”. The things that don’t just argue for women, but that sit entirely outside our description of the world through male anger? They threaten our worldview as men, don’t they? They threaten an entire universe of storytelling and writing that’s fundamentally based off of male anger: The Iliad, Beowulf, The Tain, the foundations of Western literature directly deal with the fallout of male anger and ego and have been translated over time to prize that anger, simplify their stories, and excise the criticisms that once existed as part of those tales. We’ve been trained in bastardized versions of our myths that champion anger. The Odyssey was once about PTSD, but read most translations today and it’s stripped down into a simple episodic adventure.

If superheroes are our modern mythology, they’re streamlined with the modern priorities we’ve used to overwrite that mythology. Some men feel threatened when they aren’t the only ones who get those worldviews confirmed by this modern foundation. Some men feel threatened when women or people of color assume any level of access to how that modern mythology is told. Incel Tupperware Party is out here upset that a woman briefly talks about having to control her anger when she’s sexually harassed or threatened, because her life often depends on her ability to remain calm throughout the situation. At the same time, Incel Tupperware Party wants to sell you on the idea that men somehow have a right to women and women just don’t know any better. They argue for a lack of self-control on men’s part that puts women at risk, and then get upset when women say they need to keep their heads to navigate the risk.

There is no greater critical achievement than to be brigaded with one-star reviews from incel movements. A lot of series are successful on-screen, but to be so successful on-screen that you can extend that success to pissing off the right people off-screen? Few things are that brave or that successful, and they deserve support and normalization. “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” says nothing untrue. My biggest problem with narrative consistency is that when Bruce hulks out, his wavy hair turns curly, yet when Jennifer hulks out, her curly hair straightens out. That’s the immersion breaker for me. First MCU plothole ever, I’m sure. Otherwise, “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” strikes every goal it aims for, both on- and off-screen.

You can watch “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law” on Disney+.

If you enjoy articles like this, subscribe to Gabriel Valdez’s Patreon. It helps with the time and resources to write more like it.

Wednesday Collective — Talking About Isla Vista

Ask me about dance or film or anything else, and I can go on for hours right now. Especially right now. Ask me about Isla Vista and…I’ve written pages of reaction and vetted them with a close friend, and they’re just not there yet. I will tell you a quick story about the Pick-Up Artist and Male Rights culture, however.

I lost an old friend in February last year to the Pick Up Artist culture. Let’s call him Bob, though that’s not his real name. I had visited Bob in New Jersey for a weekend, but one untested restaurant later and I was slammed with the worst case of food poisoning I’ve ever had. He was very helpful, even going with me to the hospital, but when he had to step out and I needed to ask his roommate for help, it became an issue. Let’s call her Alicia, though that’s not her real name either. You see, to put it in his words, Alicia was his. She had already informed him once that she was very much her own and no one else’s, but this didn’t stop him from exercising some territorial mark to everyone behind her back. As he described to me, one day she’d realize she owed him for his being such a good friend, and everything else would work itself out.

Bob had been spouting Pick Up Artist gibberish for years: “Have you heard about negging?” “What about getting a friend to talk you up?” “Do you have a backstory ready?”

For years, I had joined other friends in laughing off Bob’s PUA obsession as something harmless. We’d argue with him from a philosophical standpoint, but we’d invariably let it go as not something important enough to truly fight over. That was our mistake, because by the time that thinking had festered in him for years, by the time he found himself with his life truly backed up against the wall, women had turned into nothing more for him than a goal his suffering earned. Alicia was to be Bob’s reward for having a tough run of life, and he spouted off the PUA gibberish as if it were religious dogma.

I asked Alicia if she would still be around to let me back in after I hobbled down the street to get a prescription filled for my nausea. It was the end of a friendship. Now, I feared getting locked out for the day in a bad section of New Jersey while I could barely stand upright, but in Bob’s mind, other men in the apartment weren’t allowed to be alone with Alicia, because all men must think like he did. Suddenly, I became privy to the same kind of gender inequality we usually only attach to the most extreme religious fundamentalism. It didn’t matter that I was seeing someone. It didn’t matter that Bob and I had been friends for years. It didn’t matter that I must’ve looked real supersexy puking my guts out Exorcist-style. It certainly didn’t matter that Alicia was a person capable of her own free will. Bob could only understand the world through a reward-system of sex and male dominance. In his mind, every decision in his life had to be oriented around the acquisition and defense of sex.

I ended up driving home on massive medication, and not having eaten in two days, because it was too disturbing to stay in New Jersey. When I got home, there were e-mails from him. There were texts from him. I started getting calls at 2 a.m. just to inform me Alicia was his. I scuttled the friendship. Bob had, over several years, adopted himself into a cult. And make no mistake – PUA and the Male Rights Association are cults, developed with the same purpose in mind as any other cult – to indoctrinate and addict paying believers. Like many cults, they need an enemy who’s visually different from their membership – in this case, women. Like many cults, teachings become more and more aggressive to the point of violence and hatred – the one who offers the best opportunity to blame and hate the enemy makes the most money.

I talked with Alicia some weeks later. She was fine. She had found a way to largely extract herself from the situation. I haven’t talked to Bob since, and I’m thankful for that.

MRAs around the country are cults, pure and simple. They don’t always take the look of cults because they’re compound isn’t brick and mortar, but rather an online, anonymous one. They have extensive online outreach, messaging campaigns, newsletters, forums, advice columns, all driven toward the purpose of indoctrination. Some of the more complex ones have oriented themselves around hacking women’s phones and computers. There’s a cottage industry of revenge porn, often involving photoshopping the ex-girlfriends of members onto the bodies of nude models, and then forwarding the resulting fake to the ex-girlfriend’s employers, friends, and relatives in an effort to make her ostracized and get her fired. Other members may volunteer their time to stalk the ex. If they can’t have her, she doesn’t deserve to have a life – that’s what many of these men feel. That’s what the idiot in Isla Vista felt. These cults have members who form the same kind of cause-driven militias that other cults have, and though these associations may be socially networked, their guns are very real.

I also don’t want to relegate the issue to a couple of dangerous nuts. What makes so many men susceptible to PUA and MRA is a culture that values sex as a reward to be won in our films, our video games, our television, our books. We don’t just need better gender representation in our media, but a reassessment of the value systems that our media reinforces. We have a Star Wars film with one female lead to six male leads. How much do you want to bet she’s a love interest? We have 25 superhero films centered around a man for every one superhero film centered around a woman. That includes the most expensive cinematic franchise ever created, which boasts exactly one female superhero among eight males. That’s bullshit.

Look, I’m only qualified to talk about this from a media and art perspective, maybe something of a political one, though it’s been a few years since I was in that game. Every reader is going to be qualified to talk about this through their own specialties. Figure out what you have to say, make sure it’s something that adds to the conversation, and voice up. We may think our goal is to keep Isla Vista from happening again, but the truth is, Isla Vista happens in the form of assault and rape thousands of times every day because of the way men are raised to view themselves, sex, and their relationship to women in this country. The conservative estimate is that a sexual assault happens once every two minutes in the U.S., but this doesn’t take into account an estimate that 75 to 95% of assaults go unreported. That means that the real number may be as high as once every six seconds.

But I’m not an expert in this. There are people far better equipped than I to talk about what caused this and what might begin the process toward addressing it. Please read their words and consider what they have to say. I’ll post their articles below without the usual Wednesday Collective commentary because, frankly, what they have to say, they say far better than I can:

Stockton Man Reportedly Opens Fire on Women After They Refuse Sex
Isha Aran

Let’s call the Isla Vista killings what they were: misogynist extremism
Laurie Penny

On Elliot Rodger, Isla Vista, Patriarchy
Chris Braak

Elliot Rodger’s California shooting spree: further proof that misogyny kills
Jessica Valenti

Christopher Michael-Martinez’s Father Gets It Right
Adam Gopnik

Seth Rogen Is Not A Victim Of The Santa Barbara Killings
Jessica Goldstein

‘No Way To Prevent This’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
The Onion staff