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Posts tagged: Iron Man

The Sexualization of Tony Stark

sakuratsukikage:

starkreactors:

The Sexualization of Tony Stark 

If you’re at all familiar with me and my personal thoughts on comicverse Tony Stark, you probably already know that I believe Tony is at least semi-canonically bisexual. There are a lot of reasons for this, most of which I plan to address at some point in the future, but this post is only tangentially related to that viewpoint.
This post is mainly about how Tony Stark is sexualized/has his virility or manhood mocked or questioned by villains and antagonists in the comics. At the end, I vaguely describe why I feel this adds fuel to the fire of my theory about his sexual orientation, but in this context that’s more for my personal justification than anything else.
In the 1998 Iron Man and Captain America Annual, upon first meeting Tony psychically, Metallo immediately calls into question Tony’s playboy status. image

This innuendo, while obviously intended to be a throwaway insult to Tony, is interesting because it presents Tony’s sexual promiscuity as something which weakens Tony, thus questioning his power and subverting the typical societal view of a promiscuous male (one that equates male power with sexuality). According to Metallo, because he is suddenly able to resist Metallo psychologically (he intends to mentally stop him from using mind control), his sexual strength must be diminished through his own will, making power and sexuality mutually exclusive. This then calls into question to power of Iron Man, whose identity is still a secret to everyone at this point. Iron Man’s power is clearly non-sexual in nature, but Tony’s reputation has allowed for questioning of his agency and virility on the part of Metallo, subverting traditional views of male sexual prowess.

Keep reading

theatlantic:
“ Iron Man Saved My Life
“ My earliest memories are of comic books, and of my father. He’d bring me to this little bar called The Dead End in Fox River Grove, where I would sit quietly in the corner, going over the pages of the same few...

theatlantic:

Iron Man Saved My Life

My earliest memories are of comic books, and of my father. He’d bring me to this little bar called The Dead End in Fox River Grove, where I would sit quietly in the corner, going over the pages of the same few comics again and again, looking for new details in the stories and the art. On the drive home, I recall the car swerving. I also recall him hitting me, throwing me to the ground.

The first comic books I bought on my own were a stack of Iron Mans from a little shop not far from the one-bedroom apartment I shared with my mother. From time to time, I’d add to this collection, shepherding and obsessing over it like only a five-year-old could, spreading it out on the pullout sofa I slept on. I constantly pleaded with my mom to buy more comics. Sensibly, she usually said no. When she did say yes, I always picked Iron Man.

As with the Robert Downey Jr. film adaptations, the original Iron Man character is defined as much by his intellect or technology as by personal troubles. Starting in 1978, with issue No. 120, in a story arc known as “Demon in a Bottle,” David Michelinie, John Romita Jr., and Bob Layton took Tony Stark’s billionaire playboy attitude and added the specter of alcoholism. The story begins with Stark flying first-class, pondering his life as he asks the stewardess for a fourth martini. When questioned by her, he rationalizes that he’s is drinking for two men, his civilian persona and his costumed identity.

Read more. [Image: Bob Layton/Wikimedia Commons]

redcardforwolverine:
“ chujo-hime:
“ scratch-the-maven:
“ silvercenturion:
“ rdjinspiringlybeautiful:
“ Total unpopular opinion but:
Way to support your man, Pepper. Walk out on him when he’s in the middle of a ptsd attack. ……Yeah, that’ll show him...

redcardforwolverine:

chujo-hime:

scratch-the-maven:

silvercenturion:

rdjinspiringlybeautiful:

Total unpopular opinion but:

Way to support your man, Pepper. Walk out on him when he’s in the middle of a ptsd attack. ……Yeah, that’ll show him how much you love him.

**

The above statement is exactly what I thought. Really it started in the lab though when he was pouring his heart out to her and she was clearly not caring. To watch him suffer a bout then snark @ him and leave him alone was painful to watch. WTF. I’m still not over it. At least Rhodey showed he cared about how Tony was doing. 

Yes, because when she walked over to Tony and practically held him in her arms she was really uncaring wow so heartless.

and god forbid a woman choose her physical safety over taking care of her man’s emotional state, which you know, just put her physical safety at risk there

(and I’m sure accidentally hurting Pepper with the suit would do wonders for Tony’s ptsd attacks) >_>

I hate to butt in but I was really pleased with this scene because this is PTSD done right and reactions by someone who doesn’t have PTSD done right.

I have high-level PTSD and have had to deal with it for about eight and a half months now. I have night terrors worse than Tony’s. I thrash in my sleep, kick, fight, and scream. In the time that this has been going on, I’ve had two friends who have spent the night with me in an attempt to see if someone calming and strong sleeping next to me would ease the night terrors. Out of three collective nights that they stayed with me, it was successful only once. The final night, my second friend had to leave the bed and sleep on the couch because I was thrashing so much in my sleep. He’s 6’2” and a military officer who can definitely kick my ass in a fight if I were awake. I was hurting him so much in my sleep and scaring the daylights out of him that he had to leave. When someone with PTSD is in the grips of a really violent night terror, they fight tooth and nail more violently than if they were awake. Yes, it hurt me that he did that but I get why he did it. He was scared for his safety because I was fighting so hard in my sleep. My other friend that stayed with me watched me suffer through a night terror like Pepper did with Tony and tried to wake me up after a few minutes of me whimpering and kicking in my sleep. I nearly decked him coming out of it because I was still swamped in the dream and had idea what was going on.

Both men reacted similar to Pepper. They were scared, they were hurt, they were terrified for me, about what I was doing and going through, and had no idea how to handle it, save walking away to breathe. When you don’t have PTSD, but your partner does, it is incredibly difficult to understand what they are going through and how their mind operates, especially when asleep when the PTSD manifests in nightmares and night terrors.

So don’t you say that Pepper wasn’t supporting Tony by walking out. She was putting her physical safety first, which is a perfectly legitimate action to do in that situation. It hurts Tony obviously, but she still supports him and loves him and helps him through the PTSD in the morning. She listens to him when he rambles and tries to articulate what it’s like inside his head since New York as he’s trying to express why he’s acting the way he is. Listening and still loving them at the end of the day is the best thing you can do for someone with PTSD.

I was incredibly pleased with how they handled the rather touchy subject of PTSD in this film because I’ve had to live through that hell for eight and a half months now and know what it’s like day in and day out to struggle with your own brain, especially against nightmares, night terrors, and panic/anxiety attacks.

So to all the people hating on Pepper for her reaction in this scene: shut up. You have no room to talk. Had you been in her position, you would have left the room too. Don’t try to speak authoritatively about something you know nothing about. Thank you.

gearsinthephoenix:

No, but you don’t understand why I liked Iron Man 3 so much.

In all the other Avengers movies, we see characters going through pain and trauma and heartache.  We see Steve lose practically his whole world and still carry on.  We watch Bruce struggle with trying to figure out just how the Hulk fits into his life and his psyche; it is implied that he deals with depression and tries to end his life.  We hear Clint and Natasha and their angst about the “red in their ledgers”, the things they have done, and we watch as Thor essentially comes of age and deals with the pain of having his brother fall down deeper and deeper.  We KNOW the pain and the issues and the upset are there.

But Iron Man 3 is the first time we actually get to witness—REALLY witness—the aftermath of heroics.

In the first part of the movie we see Tony Stark dealing with real, honest-to-god PTSD.  He has panic attacks, he can’t sleep, he gets reckless and has a harder time taking care of himself, he obsessively spends hours working on suits so he can protect Pepper—even though in doing so he is unintentionally threatening their relationship. Rarely has such a thorough job been done in showing that all the flash-bang-let’s-save-the-world action would, in real life, have some serious psychological consequences.

Then, as the film progresses, we see him laid low.  REALLY low—we see him get taken apart piece by piece.  He loses his home, he loses contact with the people he cares about, he loses his suit—which means, in the context of the past few films, that he is in some ways dead.  “He is Iron Man”, after all, isn’t he?  The public sees him as one with the suit, and in a sense, so does he—a good deal of his self esteem, his sense of being able to defend people, is locked up in what he can do in the suit.  And now he’s stranded in the middle of nowhere—he can’t fly, he can’t fight much, he’s still suffering from PTSD, he’s being actively hunted by the few people who don’t think he’s dead.  All of his real ability is locked up in his brain, a place not everyone would think to look.  We see him almost completely broken down.

And then we watch him build himself back up again, but with one major difference: he does it without the suit.

In most of the second half of the film, in almost all of his major victories, Tony is not in the suit.  He breaks into Killian’s mansion essentially with odds and ends he’s cobbled together.  He saves the passengers from Air Force One with a suit he’s remotely controlling.  He wins the final battle with a whole bunch of suits that he is not in at all.  Rhodes saves the president, and Pepper kills the villain.  Not Tony.  And at the end of the day he blows up all the suits and tosses his mini arc reactor into the ocean.

Iron Man 3 is brilliant and underrated precisely because it lets the hero be a real man—a man, not a man in a suit.  A person who can still work wonders even when he’s at his very lowest, when he’s stranded and battling mental illness.  Someone who can’t operate completely alone, who lets other people have some victories as well—heck, who needs his friends and teammates to win.  And as he says at the end of the movie, while he may not always wear a suit, he will always be Iron Man. 

And personally, I think that is an A-freaking-plus storyline to bring into this franchise.