catnip for telepaths

I probably would have been better able to articulate this after last night’s all-nighter when this first really sunk in and came to me.  But anyways, I think there’s something really troubling and... kinda chauvinist/misogynist about writers painting the ‘reason’ Scott Summers has been involved romantically/sexually with multiple telepathic women is only because his mind draws in people with that power set to dick around in. 

--Putting aside a conversation concerning Jack Winters’, Mr Sinister’s, Xavier’s, and Emma Frost’s abuse of him and the layering of their telepathy with real-world abuse tactics-- trying to reason out why so many women (most of whom are telepaths) keep falling for Scott implies that there’s nothing there otherwise any man-attracted person (specificaly men-attracted women) would be interested in. 

And like, what’s really problematic about this is the fact that Scott thematically is implicitly set up to be a foil to the various representations of traditional comicbook masculinity in x-men books.  Most pertinent to this argument, Scott is a foil to wolverine and wolverine’s representative type of masculinity: hyper-aggressive, traditional, conservative, comicbook masculinity.

So by trying to come up with an excuse for lady-characters finding Scott attractive, that line of thinking condemns the character for not adhering to the exaggerated traditional comicbook masculinity the media is oversaturated with.  Y’know, the comicbook masculinity that has twisted and warped inevitably into toxic masculinity?  

tl;dr: thinking lady telepaths are drawn to scott summers like a drug is really gross, diminishes the agency of and belittles women characters, diminishes any sense of exploring a pov that isn’t cishet white male (let alone exploring povs of dude-attracted people esp dude-attracted women), sets scott up as not a ‘real manly man because only alpha males get all the chicks’, and downplays the positive feminine/alternatively-masculine traits scott has been written with for like almost 70 yrs and which could easily be seen as ‘attractive’.