Today sees the release of Diana McCallum’s new book The Sex Lives of Superheroes, in which McCallum approaches the subject with her signature style and a solid foundation of science. Nerds on the Internet or at cons or trivia matches always share their bona fides. McCallum is nerd royalty with credits that include co-host of the Talk From Superheroes Podcast, co-writer of From The Superheroes, interviewed nerd celebrities two of whom are Stephen Amell and Kevin Conroy, the voice of Batman. Her writing credits include The Secret Loves of Geek Girls and its sequel, The Secret Loves of Geeks (both from Dark Horse) and assorted other pieces at Bleeding Cool as well as other sites including Cracked, TopTenz and Dork Shelf.

The following full excerpt featuring Captain America from McCallum’s book appears through the courtesy of BenBella Books. We hope you enjoy reading it! At the end of the excerpt you’ll find a list of retailers and ways to buy a copy. Maybe even as a present to yourself with the holidays close at hand.

THE MISEDUCATION OF CAPTAIN AMERICA

“I had a date.”
—Steve Rogers, Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)

Throughout this book we’ve discussed how different superpowers have
caused weird and unique sex lives for the superheroes that have them, from Reed Richards’s superlong penis to Mystique’s ability to shape-shift her way into the perfect orgasm. But Captain America stands alone among the pantheon of heroes as a man whose superpowers didn’t affect his sex life in any way. After all, you can’t affect something that doesn’t exist.

Steve Rogers is in the unique position of being a man who is sexualized but never sexed in his heroic outings, despite being portrayed by Sexiest Man Alive recipient Chris Evans in the Marvel films. There’s no good reason why modern-day Steve Rogers with his moral integrity and his
Dorito-shaped physique remained single, but it’s at least obvious why he wasn’t a heartthrob back in the 1940s. When we meet Steve Rogers in both the comics and movies, he is an unfathomably scrawny young man with no sexual prospects, which may have been for the best because he was so plagued with illnesses that the physical exertion of having sex might have actually killed him. According to his military application in Captain America: The First Avenger, Steve suffered from all of the following maladies before the ripe young age of twenty-five:

• asthma
• scarlet fever
• rheumatic fever
• sinusitus
• high blood pressure
• palpitations or pounding in heart
• chronic or frequent colds
• heart trouble
• a family history of diabetes, cancer, and tuberculosis

Honestly, it’s astonishing that Steve could leave the house, let alone apply multiple times to join the army. It’s no wonder the military told him to get some superpowers or get the hell out every time. After undergoing a government experiment to give him said superpowers, things admittedly started to pick up in the romance department for our now incredibly ripped and exceedingly handsome super soldier. Suddenly all kinds of women started to pay attention to Steve, including nurses, soldiers, and USO dancers. But even with his newfound attractiveness, Steve never appeared wildly comfortable in the dating world as he clumsily interacted with most women he met. He also doesn’t seem particularly well informed about anything regarding sex, going so far as to mistake “fondue” for a sex act instead of a delicious way to eat bread and cheese.

Steve does become briefly involved with Special Agent Peggy Carter, who would end up being Steve’s main love interest throughout the films, but their relationship consisted of only a single kiss in 1945 before Steve found himself abruptly frozen under several feet of ice in the Arctic Ocean, not to be thawed out until 2012. And if Steve thought dating in 1945 was hard, he discovered that dating in 2012 was near impossible, bordering on the criminal. In modern times, Steve’s main love interest is Agent Sharon Carter, a woman we find out later is the niece of Peggy Carter, his ex-girlfriend. Dating two women in the same family is kind of gross on its own, but it gets even worse when Steve later time travels back to the 1940s to marry Peggy, which means technically Sharon was also his niece when he made out with her, adding new levels of gross to Steve’s limited dating history. Honestly, it’s starting to make sense why Old-Steve refused to tell Sam about his marriage when he gets back to present day in Avengers: Endgame—who knows what other weird stuff this guy got up to during his second trip through time. He’s probably his own grandpa or something.

But why is Steve Rogers so terrible at dating? By his own admission, “it’s kind of hard to find someone with shared life experience” in the present day, as there aren’t a lot of people who are simultaneously ninety-five and twenty-seven years old, unless we count Steve’s childhood friend Bucky Barnes, aka the Winter Soldier. Despite their promises to be with each other “until the end of the line,” a romantic relationship between Steve and Bucky never developed, leaving Steve’s dating options in the modern day to be women who didn’t personally experience World War II, which can certainly be a relationship barrier. Dating culture also changes significantly over time, especially when that time is sixty-seven years. When Steve tried to enter the dating scene in 2012 he likely went through culture shocks so powerful even his shield couldn’t protect him. But what exactly are those differences? Let’s do what Steve did with a plane full of bombs
and dive straight into exactly what dating and sex culture were like when Steve went into the ice in 1945.

Steve’s Got a Lot to Learn

The first thing to consider about Steve’s dating life in the early twentieth century is the state of sex education at the time, or the lack thereof. Steve Rogers was born in 1918, meaning he went to school in the 1920s and ’30s, and during that time only about 20 to 40 percent of schools offered any type of sex education at all, and the other 60 to 80 percent of kids had to learn about sex from their parents (who also didn’t have sex education), from school-yard gossip, or just figure it out on their own. And even if you attended one of the few schools that taught sex education, it wasn’t exactly the treasure trove of useful information that most youth have access to today.

Back then sex education was presented as scientifically as possible so as not to titillate the young masses, with a focus on sex being a natural act primarily performed as a means of procreation. For this reason, there were no pictures of humans used in school sex education; children were instead shown animals in any depictions of intercourse. The idea was that by showing how the animal kingdom got its groove on, children could kind of get the gist of what sex was without being exposed to imagery that might make parents or teachers uncomfortable. This scientific approach wasn’t without its flaws, though, as it removed the uniquely human aspects from the act of sex. For example, no animals have sex in the missionary position and would look wildly strange depicted in that way, so there’s a chance this educational system led an entire generation (including Steve Rogers) into believing doggy style to be the default pose. Whether that’s a positive or negative of the system can be decided by the reader’s personal preferences.

But sex education wasn’t just delivered by teachers. Much like today, a lot of educational materials came in the form of short films, each of which had a unique and particular lesson they were trying to instill in youth. For example, the American Social Hygiene Association’s video The Gift of Life was an explicit warning against boys masturbating, calling it a “solitary vice” that “may seriously hinder a boy’s progress towards vigorous manhood” and “is a selfish, childish, stupid habit.” Teenage boys throughout history would likely disagree, but this anti-masturbation message was repeated through many educational materials nonetheless, which might explain why this time frame was known as the Depression era.

Of course, no sexual education is complete without learning about the dangers of sexually transmitted infections, and if you think adults sat children down and explained these risks in a scientific and informative way in the 1920s, you’d be wrong. They absolutely just showed them another movie. The most famous STI-related cinema experience was 1914’s Damaged Goods, a short film that follows a man who has unsafe sex with a prostitute the night before his wedding, contracts syphilis, passes the disease onto his newborn baby, and then kills himself. You know, standard kid stuff. Despite the dark subject material, the film was a hit with almost everyone who saw it, with one critic calling it a “masterpiece” and another saying that “every American boy . . . should be made to see it.” The film was so popular that new versions were released in 1914, 1919, and 1937, which means the Damaged Goods film franchise has more reboots than Captain America himself.

Though it was shown in some schools, Damaged Goods was actually made as a warning to soldiers against contracting syphilis from prostitutes while overseas in World War I and II. Statistically speaking, Steve Rogers was more likely to see the film while serving in the military than attending school, but this was the norm for a lot of soldiers. During World War II, more than half a million young men received sex education from the US military as the army was desperate to slow down the spread of venereal disease that was costing them valuable manpower. In World War II alone, almost 100,000 potential draftees were rejected from service for testing positive for syphilis (the one disease Steve didn’t have), representing a huge potential fighting force lost due to preventable venereal disease. In response to this epidemic, the military began releasing films, posters, and educational materials warning about the dangers of syphilis, how it’s contracted, and how using a condom can help prevent the spread of disease. The military even started coming up with catchy slogans, with one pro-condom film proclaiming, “Don’t forget—put it on before you put it in.”

Speaking of which, if you ever wondered what Steve Rogers carried around in all those pouches on his uniform, there’s a good chance at least one of them was full of army-issued condoms. In keeping with their ongoing mission to stop those pesky venereal diseases in their tracks, the US military issued condoms to soldiers during World War II, which means Steve would be used to having these pocket-sized sex shields around since they were likely included in every ration kit he ever received. Civilians also purchased them in droves back home, forcing production to ramp up to three million condoms a day at times, but you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone talking about them, as their uses were more implied than openly stated.

The word “condom” would never even appear on early product packaging; instead they were referred to by generic names like “hygienic rubber product” or “genuine latex sold for prevention of disease” until eventually “prophylactic” became the common name, a term that originally meant any benign item from the pharmacy, such as toothbrushes, that has since become interchangeable with the word condom. Though it was known that condoms could help prevent pregnancy, in the 1940s they were predominantly marketed as a measure to prevent venereal disease. In fact, sex education in schools and the military almost never included lessons on birth control despite the existence of condoms and basic IUDs at the time, most likely because getting a girl pregnant wouldn’t stop a soldier from fighting in the war like a disease would. So, you know, priorities.

Sex Myths of the 1940s

School and the military are what we might call the “official” sources from which Steve Rogers could have learned about sex in the 1940s, but we must also consider that a lot of sex information at the time was gleaned from myths and misinformation shared among friends as fact. Much like today, boys at the time liked to gossip about sex, but unlike today they were unable to fact-check the ridiculous claims that were spread around the schoolyard or trenches. For example, there’s the persisting myth that some believe to this day that a woman can’t get pregnant the first time she has sex. This, combined with a lack of education about birth control, led to many couples not using condoms the first time they slept together, resulting in unwanted pregnancies and some women being accused of cheating.

But this was not the only sexual misconception that floated around social circles of the time. Other more ridiculous myths that Steve may have heard included the belief that period blood contained poisonous toxins or that tampons removed a woman’s virginity. And then we have the most famous war-era sex myth of them all: that grafting monkey testicles onto a man’s scrotum could cure impotence and increase a man’s libido. That may sound bananas, but the craziest part about this myth was that it wasn’t just gossip—people were actually trying it.

Pioneered in 1920 by Dr. Serge Abrahamovitch Voronoff, monkey-testicle transplant surgery was “hugely popular,” and by the 1930s thousands of people had undergone this new “miracle” surgery, with almost all recipients being incredibly wealthy. The surgery involved grafting a thin
slice of a baboon’s or chimpanzee’s testicle onto a man’s scrotum, like a primate-powered booster pack for your penis. The reported side effects of the surgery ranged from increased memory to enhanced libido, and even claims of a longer and more youthful life. And people believed it. Demand for monkey testicles was so high that Dr. Voronoff had to open a “monkey farm” to maintain his supply of transplant materials. Though the common masses couldn’t afford to have their testicles rearranged with monkey parts, they certainly heard about the procedures, as jokes about monkey glands started appearing everywhere, including Marx Brothers movies,
novelty mugs, and newspaper cartoons.

By the 1940s, the surgeries were branded as bogus and fell out of favor, but there may be nothing funnier in history than the fact that thousands of rich old men were walking around with monkey testicles in their scrotums that didn’t even cure their impotence. Then again, it probably wasn’t just old men who gave the surgery a try. Steve didn’t become Captain America until 1943 and considering the long list of maladies he suffered from growing up, it’s not a stretch to think he may have looked into the monkey testicle transplants himself. After all, we know from his eagerness to take the super-soldier serum that he’s open to experimental procedures on his body. Honestly, if Steve could have afforded it there’s a good chance he would have ended up as Captain Monkey Balls instead of Captain America. (Sorry, language—he would have been “Captain Monkey Testicles,” obviously.) With all this in mind, it becomes easy to understand why Steve Rogers had trouble stepping out of the ice and into the dating pool in 2012. He was absolutely right; it’s hard to find “someone with shared life experience” when you’re a man whose sex education consisted only of sex images of animals, terrifying films about how syphilis kills babies, no information about birth control, and being told that monkey testicles are a sexual
cure-all. But these are just the things Steve would have believed from 1945 when he went into the ice; we also have to consider everything he missed while he was frozen.

Steve Missed the Entire Sexual Revolution

As previously mentioned, when Steve went into the ice, syphilis was running rampant, in America and the trenches, and would later be described by doctors as the “AIDS of the late 1930s and early 1940s.” But almost as soon as Steve went under, things began to change. The same year Steve went into the ice, the United States started mass-producing penicillin, which not only treats but cures almost all forms of syphilis. Penicillin was such an effective treatment that the syphilis death rate fell by 75 percent and the syphilis incidence rate fell by 95 percent between 1947 and 1957. And guess what happens when all the men come back from war just as a cure becomes available for the only major venereal disease at the time? People have a lot of sex. The availability of penicillin launched the modern sexual era, and it hit maximum throttle in the 1960s with the introduction of the birth control pill, which meant that it was now possible to have sex without getting sick or pregnant. You can almost hear Steve watching all this happen under the ice and screaming “Come on!”

Interestingly, though, a lot of the social staples of dating haven’t changed since Steve took his ice nap—at least in terms of what couples do on dates. In the 1930s, the most popular date activities were drive-in movies and going out dancing, which both remain very good options in today’s world, though you may have to settle for a sit-down theater and a very different dance experience than Steve lived through. In the modern day, going out dancing almost always involves a dark, crowded nightclub filled with sweaty club-goers packed together like sardines as they rock out to pounding music. In the 1930s, going dancing involved a live band and a lot more room on the dance floor, but also a lot more partners.

Between World War I and II, dating was more of a popularity contest than it was about going steady or being locked down in a relationship. Dance floors were an important part of this culture, and it was common for women to show up and leave with different men or dance with a different guy every time a song changed. This explains why we see Steve’s best friend Bucky Barnes take two women dancing in 1943 before he heads off to war, and also why Bucky asks Peggy Carter if she wants to dance despite her obvious interest in Steve. At the time, dancing with multiple people over the course of the night was the norm, and couples only exclusively danced together if they were already engaged. So Bucky may be a handsome flirt, but he’s not a jerk. At least he wasn’t before the Soviets put him into a brainwashing machine; that made him a little cranky.

Now that we’ve covered everything Steve Rogers does and doesn’t know about sex and dating, let’s imagine just how Steve would do on a hypothetical date after waking up in 2012 (with a woman who hopefully won’t turn out to be his niece).

We know Steve believes the internet is “so helpful” with adjusting to modern life, so he likely met his date on a dating app of some kind after sorting through what had to be hundreds if not thousands of responses, because really, who isn’t swiping right on Captain America? After taking his date to the movies, and trying not to have a heart attack about the fact that a tub of popcorn that cost a nickel in the 1940s is now upward of $8, he may suggest they go dancing where he will abandon his date for a new partner on every song change. If they somehow end up back together by the end of the night, Steve could very well be persuaded to come upstairs, but only if he’d gone to the pharmacy to pick up some “prophylactics” to avoid getting a venereal disease he may not know has been all but eliminated from the world thanks to penicillin. And the night wouldn’t be complete without Steve apologizing that he couldn’t afford the monkey testicle surgery, but he thinks he can manage without it. And then there is the sex itself. Well,

Steve’s body being in peak physical condition almost guarantees that intercourse would be exhilarating (though possibly only in doggy-style position). But if his sex education also included the belief that masturbation is evil, it’s possible he hasn’t had a proper orgasm for more than sixty years, so a person may be able to go for a ride with Captain America, but don’t expect it to be a long one, at least not at first.

Steve Rogers may not be great at dating modern women, but that doesn’t mean all old-fashioned men have the same problem. For example, do you know about . . .