There are a lot of alien races in the Marvel Cinematic Universe but we know very little about most of them at this point. We do visit a few of their home worlds though, so I thought it would be fun to take a look at how they each treat gender and sex. Keep in mind, I will be going by movie canon, but with an eye on the comic canon if there’s anything in the movies to support it.
This race doesn’t exist in the comics. Adam and Ayesha were created by rogue human scientist so there’s no culture to speak of. The only thing that’s a little interesting about them with regards to gender is that Ayesha was originally a man. He broke out of his birthing pod too early and appeared as a silver man, then re-podded himself and reemerged many years later as Ayesha. That would imply that all people created this way spend a stage as silver men, then turn into golden men, and if left long enough in the pod becomes golden women.
The movie makes up a society from whole cloth. We often talk about how gender is a construct, and that seems doubly true for the Sovereign. They create all their members in birthing pods and consider sex dirty, so they have no reason to continue making men and women. They could make one perfect, sexless gender but for some reason they consider it important to keep up the appearances of gender, even though gender seem to play a very small part in most Sovereign’s lives.
But there is one small thing that hints to gender inequality. They say that fighting and physical conflict is degrading and below them, so it’s interesting that all their guards are male and at the top of their community sits a woman (we know she answers to someone but not who they are). On all other levels of society men and women seem equal, even dressing largely the same, but women won’t lower themselves to the level of physical fighting, only remote controlled space battles. Again, if it’s because men are stronger they could just make stronger women, but no. That implies men are considered to be slightly lower than women.
With regards to sex, it’s implied that they want to be asexual but for some reason haven’t been able to breed out sexual desire completely, so they probably have a very shame based culture where they shame each other into staying “pristine”.
This race is very human in both looks and culture and are what I’d call “soft fascists”. They are benevolent and love their interracial nuclear families but rule with an iron fist, politicians and soldiers wear the same outfits, and while everything appears good on the surface they also run a barbaric prison which they know is an overcrowded hellhole filled with rape and murder but continue to put people in it anyway (Btw, did anyone else notice that even though they lump men and women together in the prison, the men still direct their sexual violence at each other?). Their head of state is a woman so women can clearly make it to the top, but they are seemingly required to wear dresses and high heels, and we don’t see a single female guard, soldier or police officer.
Frost Giants and Dark Elves
A quick one. I lump them together because we never see any women from either race. We know there are female Frost Giants and Dark Elves in the comics but like I said earlier, the movies have their own canon, so that could mean any number of things. Maybe they don’t have women and are created some other way. Maybe women and men look exactly alike. Maybe women have no rights and are locked up somewhere. Maybe they are like the Sovereign and women stay far away from the battles. I’m sure you can think of even more possibilities.
In the comics the Kree as a race are queer. They are encouraged to explore their sexuality with as many men, women and all genders in-between as possible and doesn’t like categorising sexuality the way humans do. Interestingly, the few Kree from the comics who have decided to identify as anything all chose gay/lesbian/bisexual/pansexual and the common denominator for all of them is that they grew up with other races, outside of Kree culture.
Kree in the comics only care about biological sex in regards to breeding and it’s a crime punishable with prison to create offspring with other races. This is why pink Kree are all lower-class (they are the result of interbreeding in the distant past) with the purest blue Kree at the top of society.
They don’t often bond emotionally but when they do they bond hard, though they often continue having other sexual relationships on the side.
We see hints of this in the movies. Men and women largely dress the same, treat each other the same, flirt with each other regardless of gender, they have lots of female soldiers, and doesn’t know toxic masculinity the way we do because they don’t see women as lower. While living with them Carol was put though many things but sexism wasn’t one of them.
When it comes to emotionally bonding, the people behind the movie have said Yon-Rogg has genuent feelings for Carol which was why he just gave up instead of dying in battle against her like an honourable Kree should.
Also, this is how the two major Kree characters were introduced:
Ronan strolling around butt naked with zero shame, and Yon-Rogg who couldn’t even be bothered to properly close his kimono-thing when answering the door. I think it’s safe to say that Kree are pretty laid back when it comes to nudity.
(Side note, I hope they put the deleted scene of Ronan and Yon-Rogg talking on the DVD because their relationship seems to go deeper than just superior/subordinate. Yon-Rogg is super mouthy and talks back a lot and Ronan inexplicably allows it for a very long time. All other Kree are too scared of Ronan to talk to him like that, but Yon-Rogg gets special privileges for some reason)
The Skrulls are a bit harder to say anything about because they’re very different from the comics and we’ve been told Talos’ people aren’t even the standard for Skrulls in the MCU. Some groups rival Ronan in brutality, others are saints compared to Talos’ men.
But from what little we’re shown we know the men aren’t afraid to take on the appearance of women, and they form close emotional and physical relationships with each other no matter gender, and “kiss” by touching foreheads. But surprisingly, despite how many Skrull soldiers we see not a single one was female.
Gender clearly means a lot to Asgardians. Women are very revered and respected but also seen as distinctly separate from men. So much so that even though both men and women are capable warriors they are separated into different armies that have strict rules for which genders can join (Poor Thor had his childhood dream of becoming a Valkyrie destroyed). Men and women wear very different styles of clothes that put emphasis on their masculine or feminine features. The women especially like to show off their breasts.
The importance of gendered clothes is so strong that Loki, who is canonically non-binary in both comics and movies, stands out because his clothes very noticeably doesn’t show any gender and could easily be worn by either men or women. Even his most masculine outfit to date from Thor: Ragnarok isn’t gendered. Where other Asgardians have lines that follow their curves and muscles, Loki just have angular lines that tell us nothing about his gender (He loves shoulder padding almost as much as a 80’s business woman though)
There’s just one tiny detail that hints to Asgardian culture being patriarchal. Look at how the royal family is depicted in the first picture.
All the men look at the viewer, but Frigga is depicted as holding on to Odin with her gaze downcast, despite wearing her warrior outfit. This might suggest that young and unmarried women are free to live their lives but once they get married they should devote themselves to their husbands.
That’s all I got for now. Yeah I know the Marvel movies are just mindless entertainment and a lot of these could be answered with “Because the writers wrote it that way”, but if nerd boys can make hour long YouTube essays about the symbolism of Civil War let this nerd girl have her own fun.
