So, wow. Yeah. Another one of those “I’ve been reading a lot of.. and.. (insert my opinion here).”
So, yes, I keep reading about Bucky as the ladies man: all sexed up and such. It’s a bit baffling to me, as this is a very modern way of thinking. Dating – or courtship – was very different in the 30’s and 40’s than it is today!
For example, take this excerpt from A Brief History of Courtship and Dating in America, (Part 2):
Beth Bailey and Ken Myers explain in the Mars Hill Audio Report, Wandering Toward the Altar: The Decline of American Courtship, before World War II, American youth prized what Bailey calls a promiscuous popularity, demonstrated through the number and variety of dates a young adult could command, sometimes even on the same night.
In the late 1940s, Margaret Mead, in describing this pre-war dating system, argued that dating was not about sex or marriage. Instead, it was a “competitive game,” a way for girls and boys to demonstrate their popularity.
This describes a situation in which dating was more about one’s reputation than any sort of romance. It was very important not only to be seen with many dates, but with the proper people. This explains why Steve would have had such a difficult time securing a partner: being seen with someone unpopular was worse than not being seen at all. However, this gives us a clue as to how popular Bucky must have been! If he was able to leverage himself in order to get Steve dates, Bucky must have been pretty high-ranking on the dating scale.
For men, desirable dating traits included a good personality and dance skills, as well as being “tactful, amusing, well dressed, prompt, and courteous” (Great Depression and the Middle Class…). Lasciviousness was not a good quality! Women communicated with one another concerning a man’s suitability, so for Bucky to have been popular he couldn’t have been the sex-centric playboy that fans like to imagine. It’s far more likely that he was well-spoken, funny, charming, and a great dancer. Remember, Bucky was from the lower classes, so he wouldn’t have had the money – despite the Depression, it was expected that men pay for the entire date (barring Sadie Hawkins themed events and once a couple started to go steady) – to impress women with a car and fancy clothes, nor would he have been able to take them out to dinner, so his dance skills would have been pretty important!
In fact, dancing was such a popular form of entertainment that, in one year, the University of Michigan fraternities held over 300 evening dances!
According to this web page “young people in the 1930s dated and double-dated by going to movies, getting something to eat, going for ice cream, driving around, spending time with friends, going to dances, and even ‘necking.’” That’s right folks, necking. Not fucking.
Women were expected to straddle a fine line between being too forward or too “frigid,” both of which could harm their reputations. Young people engaged in kissing, necking, and petting (meaning anything short of full intercourse). Petting was becoming more common – due, in part, to rising automobile-culture – as was sex itself; heavier petting typically came from going-steady, and engagement “came… to mean that partners would at some point ‘go all the way’” (Teen Culture in the 1930’s). Ladies who were known to be free with their sexuality prior to commitment were in danger of being known for exactly that, and could easily become popular merely as a means to an end (the wrong kind of popularity).
So, it likely wouldn’t have been hard for Bucky, as a popular young man, to find a willing partner (and I’m certainly not suggesting that he was virginal). However, if he were the sort of man to focus on easy women, it’s not likely that he would maintain his own high rating (which, again, we can guess at by the fact that he was able to not only secure himself dates, but Steve as well).
This is a really quick and dirty run-down of dating and sex during the 30’s into the early 40’s, but there is a lot of information available out there. Bucky is presented as a stand-up guy, so I don’t really understand why so many people seem to view him as some sort of a man whore. I sincerely doubt that he was entirely chaste (particularly once he went into the Army, a topic which I avoided on purpose), but I imagine that he was a desirable companion for his charm and dateability far more than for his sexual prowess.
Note also how these same qualities (“tactful, amusing, well dressed, prompt, and courteous”) are very attractive today, too, and regardless of how well the filmmakers did their research, that’s exactly how Bucky comes across at the start of the film. Depending on his background, he might or might not be a man you’d seriously consider marrying, but he would definitely be someone to recommend to a friend as good company for an evening. (This means that a writer can plausibly interpret Bucky as anything and everything between virginal to modern serial monogamist -level of sexual experience or even very experienced – consider, if you will, the attractions of a charming man with an absolute sense of discretion.)
And then contrast this with pre-serum!Steve, who comes to their double date dressed – the best you can say is that he tried (and remember, he’s literally coming there after a fight in a dirty alley), is nearly silent, awkward almost to the point of tactlessness, and generally projects an air of wanting to be anywhere else but there, up to and including the trenches getting shot at.
It’s no wonder that his date is so upset, because pre-serum!Steve might be a doll once you get to know him, but as a blind date, he is an utter and total tragedy.
It also underlines how far from OK Bucky is after his rescue – he’s scruffy, unkempt and his uniform is a mess, he’s drinking hard liquor alone, and his attempt to channel the old charming Bucky at Agent Carter falls flat. He does get somewhat better later, as we can tell from his improved appearance in the new blue uniform jacket, but there’s a sharp edge there that wasn’t before. On the other hand, this is no longer New York with is dates and dances; Bucky wouldn’t be the only man on leave who’d lost the bright easy shine.
War changed a lot of things, and that includes the attitudes of women. Before, Private Lorraine probably wouldn’t have dreamed of ambushing a man with a kiss in a public place, no matter how handsome or heroic, but in wartime, people occasionally reconsidered the rules. (I’m not sure what the rules were for dating in England, but I do wonder if a part of the confusion between Steve and Peggy might stem up from different cultural approaches to dating between Britain and USA, in addition to the difficulties that a romance with a fellow soldier could cause her professionally.)
But to get back to Steve – consciously or unconsciously, who do you think he’s trying to emulate in company now that his body, fame and military rank have suddenly bumped up his social rating, if not Bucky-from-before?
(Side note: of the rest of the Howlies, Monty probably did respectably well for himself in his elevated social circles, which IIRC worked a bit differently; as for Dum-Dum, I doubt he ever even tried to play the game Bucky used to excel at; Jim probably was okay, but he doesn’t strike me as a man with the patience for being a social butterfly. Gabe Jones? He must’ve gone to all of the dances. All of them. Remember that suit from the very end? Now, there is one dapper gentleman with savoir-faire.)
Thank you for all this awesome information! 😀 I already knew that, while post-WS Bucky can easily be portrayed as a bit of a “bad boy”, he definitely wasn’t BEFORE that, bit it’s cool to have some insight into what dating was like back then!
Polite, dapper, dashing gentleman Bucky Barnes and his questionable, fight-picking punk of a best friend Steve Rogers is my fave thing.
Tag: history
Hey, copperbadge, you know a lot about Clint Barton. I seem to recall that Clint made the claim at one point that the draw on his bow was, like, 200 pounds or something completely ridiculous like that. Is that true?
I think so. I haven’t read the book personally, at least I don’t think, but according to Wikipedia he had a 250-pound draw on his bow. The citation to go with this was typically, for comics, cryptic:
Gruenwald, Mark; Layton, Bob (1983). Till Death Do Us Part. Hawkeye 1 (4).
That ought to give you a start in looking. I’m no expert but as I understand it, 250lb draw on a bow is rifuckingdiculous.
A lot has been made of the fact that Clint, especially in the film, has really terrible form, but I think that’s pretty accurate — he learned from a carnie, for god’s sake. Imagine how good he’d be if he’d had proper training. 😀
Wasn’t it a plot point at one comic where some villain picked it up and was like ow ow ow fuck ow i can’t make this thing move ow
Yeah, it was the last bit in the last issue of the first Hawkeye four-part miniseries, the one where he meets Mockingbird. He’s used the sonic arrowhead to break them out of the villain’s deathtrap, and the villain is all like “never mind without your bow you’re still just a guy coz I am so villainous I shall kill you with your own weap-OW OW OW” – I think that’s also the bit wehre he mentions the poundage of the draw.
So I’m no expert (The draw on my bow is a pathetic 25lbs for the moment) but the experts at a panel I attended had a lot to say on the subject of draw strength. Apparently there were all of these historical references to English archers being able to fire longbows over a mile and the calculated draw strength necessary for that kind of distance was well over 100lbs, so most historians took it with a grain of salt and a health appreciation for the fact that the French had a reputation to uphold and it looked a lot better on them if they got their asses handed to them by guys who were just too damned far away to stick with a spear okay, geez!
It WAS, however, pretty well documented that it was required by law for all Englishmen to spend at least an hour a day practicing with their bow so you’ve got to imagine that there were some pretty epic arms on those dudes.
Well apparently they found a sunken English ship that just so happened to have a bunch of longbows packed into barrels so tightly that they were completely preserved from the salt water. A bunch of experts restrung a few with period accurate materials and tested the draw strength. I think the average was 130 something pounds (it’s been a year since I was at the panel) but the highest draw was over 200lbs and when they shot it, the arrow landed over a mile away. Thus it was proven that the English Longbowmen were badasses with biceps the size of watermelon and the French weren’t exaggerating for effect (This time at least, I can’t vouch for the rest of history.)
Anyway, bottom line is that a 200lb draw is WAY beyond the capabilities of the modern archer but not impossible, and given Clint’s dedication to his art and the fact that he’s been an archer since he was a child (About the age young English boys would start to learn, I imagine) and practiced religiously… He’d have to make his own bows, or have them specially made, but given his history as a fletcher it is hardly out of the realm of possibility that he would have such a high draw.
… And that is my two cents and half-assed history lesson for the day.
7.23.14
George Takei describes the moment when he and his family were sent to an internment camp.
i find it enormously funny how there’s an actual ao3 tag for Ceiling Vent Clint Barton
My question is, why are there only 37 works tagged with it? Come on, fandom!
I feel that this tag arose after I wrote this particular trope. However, I will retag immediately!
(A High Road Out From Here, in case you’re curious)
The tag was canonized in either August or September 2012, if my memory serves, so you are correct.
I’d really love it if someone could do an analysis of when and how this trope developed. It’s one of the more distinctive and pervasive character-specific tropes to have absolutely no basis in canon whatsoever. It might make a good example of how character traits are developed and codified within fandom.
I saw someone mention William Brandt but my mind keeps going to that story where Tony turned all the roombas sentient and they ended up in the ducts at SHIELD? Does anyone else remember this?
I know the fic you speak of that is quality. But what I recall is that was a thing before the Avengers movie, when it was actually canonized as “Barton likes high places.” Maybe it’s a sniper thing?
The roomba thing is scifigrl47, but I don’t think she was the originator? Anyone know the source of this trope? Because I pretty much love it. I think it happens so much because you say spy/sniper and people think of surveillance from a hidden vantage point, and who expects murder to come their way from a ceiling vent?
I originated the Roombas, but not Clint hiding in the vents. I don’t know where I picked it up. Pre-Avengers, I was super excited to find out that my childhood favorite Hawkeye was going to be in the movie. One of my first acts upon discovering AO3 was to read the Clint fics. All of them. Clint/Nat, Clint/Phil, Clint/Darcy, Clint/ANYBODYANDEVERYBODY. I did not care, if it was Clint, I read it.
The sniper thing did factor into it, and there’s a solid background of ‘sneaky Hawkeye sneaking’ in the comics, but for a guy with a bow and arrows in a purple suit, he spends a lot of time attacking head on. If I had to guess, I’d say I picked it up from a sequence of Clint/Coulson stories that have since been taken down by the author. I seem to recall it factoring in there, but they’re gone now so there’s no way to double check.
I was literally only having this discussion the other day with actuallyclintbarton and actuallykatebishop, and I theorised that two stories in particular were pivotal to the development of the trope. My pick for the actual origin is the Adaptations series by snack_size, which was written for a kink meme prompt, but clio_jih’s story predates that, unless there was a significant delay between meme posting and AO3 posting.
Let’s be real, in a time before the internet people didn’t have more adventures and make more meaningful connections. They watched TV and listened to CDs. Before that they listened to records and read magazines. Before that they listened to the radio and read bad dime novels. Before that they embroidered or some shit.
People have been staying inside and ignoring other people for as long as there have been buildings.
Seriously, this. I mean have you read Jane Austen? I mean, sure, there are dances and parties and all that shit, but in particular, in Pride and Prejudice, there’s at least one big scene at Mr Bingley’s house where Lizzie’s reading, Darcy’s writing a letter, and the others are all doing their own thing, too, with occasional bursts of conversation. They’re sharing a space, but they’re not constantly engaged with one another.
Chiune Sugihara. This man saved 6000 Jews. He was a Japanese diplomat in Lithuania. When the Nazis began rounding up Jews, Sugihara risked his life to start issuing unlawful travel visas to Jews. He hand-wrote them 18 hrs a day. The day his consulate closed and he had to evacuate, witnesses claim he was STILL writing visas and throwing from the train as he pulled away. He saved 6000 lives. The world didn’t know what he’d done until Israel honored him in 1985, the year before he died.
Why can’t we have a movie about him?
He was often called “Sempo”, an alternative reading of the characters of his first name, as that was easier for Westerners to pronounce.
His wife, Yukiko, was also a part of this; she is often credited with suggesting the plan. The Sugihara family was held in a Soviet POW camp for 18 months until the end of the war; within a year of returning home, Sugihara was asked to resign – officially due to downsizing, but most likely because the government disagreed with his actions.
He didn’t simply grant visas – he granted visas against direct orders, after attempting three times to receive permission from the Japanese Foreign Ministry and being turned down each time. He did not “misread” orders; he was in direct violation of them, with the encouragement and support of his wife.
He was honoured as Righteous Among the Nations in 1985, a year before he died in Kamakura; he and his descendants have also been granted permanent Israeli citizenship. He was also posthumously awarded the Life Saving Cross of Lithuania (1993); Commander’s Cross Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland (1996); and the Commander’s Cross with Star of the Order of Polonia Restituta (2007). Though not canonized, some Eastern Orthodox Christians recognize him as a saint.
Sugihara was born in Gifu on the first day of 1900, January 1. He achieved top marks in his schooling; his father wanted him to become a physician, but Sugihara wished to pursue learning English. He deliberately failed the exam by writing only his name and then entered Waseda, where he majored in English. He joined the Foreign Ministry after graduation and worked in the Manchurian Foreign Office in Harbin (where he learned Russian and German; he also converted to the Eastern Orthodox Church during this time). He resigned his post in protest over how the Japanese government treated the local Chinese citizens. He eventually married Yukiko Kikuchi, who would suggest and encourage his acts in Lithuania; they had four sons together. Chiune Sugihara passed away July 31, 1986, at the age of 86. Until her own passing in 2008, Yukiko continued as an ambassador of his legacy.
It is estimated that the Sugiharas saved between 6,000-10,000 Lithuanian and Polish Jewish people.
knitting in the dark 