Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for She-Hulk: Attorney at LawShe-Hulk is hung up on Captain America’s sex life. In the first episode of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, the titular super-lawyer, aka Jennifer Walters (Tatiana Maslany), lays out the case for Steve Rogers’ virginity to her cousin Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) over the course of a car ride. “After he’s unfrozen, he goes from world-threatening disaster to world-threatening disaster, and that’s when he’s not a fugitive from the law, right? So it seems like he was pretty busy.” In the mid-credits scene, Jen feigns drunkenness to get Bruce to admit the truth about his (former) fellow Avenger: he did, in fact, lose his virginity to a woman on his USO tour in 1943. “Yes! I knew it!” A triumphant Jen throws her hands to the heavens. “Captain America fu–!” The scene cuts out mid-word, but the audience gets the gist.

It’s certainly a fun bit. She-Hulk sells itself as the MCU’s first sitcom - its first actual sitcom, not WandaVision’s surrealist take on the form - and Jen’s irreverent, fourth-wall-breaking attitude is central to the show’s humor. In some ways, she’s as much of a fan surrogate as Ms. Marvel’s Kamala Khan; she just represents a different kind of fan. Rather than the starry-eyed teenager who bursts into applause whenever the Marvel fanfare starts playing in the movie theater, Jen is the sort who runs a meme account on Twitter and has written at least one steamy fanfic. But while it’s a clever gag, it accidentally draws attention to an inconvenient truth for the MCU, an admittedly minor issue that belies a bigger problem. Despite Jen’s proclamation, Captain America may have had sex, but he does not fuck.

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Let’s talk about that word for a moment because I’m not just using it for its own sake. Except for the Netflix shows that currently exist in a state of limbo, no Marvel movie or TV show has explicitly used the word “fuck.” When it shows up, it’s obscured in some way: bleeped (Iron Man 2), euphemized (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. II), or cut off (She-Hulk). Using the word, after all, would jeopardize a given film’s PG-13 rating, and therefore its box office potential: Marvel has become a juggernaut by appealing to the widest possible audience, and the last thing it wants is an age-restricted movie. But every word has its use, and “fuck” is no exception. Whether Captain America does it is ultimately a question of humanity.

As Raquel S. Benedict argued in “Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny” (a truly definitive essay on our current pop-cultural moment), “fucking” is not necessarily defined by beauty or sexuality, but by a more general sensuality. A character who “fucks” may be beautiful, and may have sex, but most importantly, they are flesh-and-blood humans who exist comfortably in their own bodies. This can manifest in their interactions with other characters (such as the sizzling chemistry between Batman and Catwoman in Batman Returns), or in how they move and interact with the world around them (such as John McClane’s rugged everyman intensity in Die Hard.) Above all, these characters feel real: every creak of Catwoman’s leather and every bead of John McClane’s sweat reinforces the fact that these are humans like you and me. They strain, struggle, and yes, fuck like the rest of us. That’s what makes them appealing, sexually or otherwise.

Captain America, as portrayed by Chris Evans, is one of the strongest, fastest, toughest superpowered humans on planet Earth. He wears a tight, form-fitting uniform, and is frequently shirtless. He has had a love interest in Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), as well as a number of close relationships with men and women who are as muscular and beautiful as himself. A prominent joke in Avengers: Endgame, which soon became a meme, refers to “America’s ass;” in that mid-credits scene in She-Hulk, Jen laments that a man with an ass like Captain America’s might have died a virgin.

But in practice, Captain America is as chaste as a monk. Despite growing up as a gangly, sickly bullying victim, he seems largely indifferent to his godly physique, perhaps even alienated from it. When he becomes a super-soldier in The First Avenger, he doesn’t behave as though his body changed, but rather as though his mind had been transplanted into another, considerably more ripped person’s body. His relationship with Peggy is affectionate, yet completely devoid of romantic or sexual chemistry; when they kiss before the final confrontation in The First Avenger, they simply press their lips together, with none of the passion or intensity a “this could be our last” sort of kiss demands. In the traditional Marvel way, every reference to his sex appeal, from “America’s ass” to Loki commenting on his tight uniform in Thor: The Dark World, is played as a joke. Captain America is not a sexual being; in fact, he only occasionally feels like a human being. He is a blunt tool, an action figure, a mascot, a weapon. After all, no one should expect a wholesome symbol of World War II Americana to become a figure of sizzling eroticism.

And here we come to our problem. The issue isn’t that Captain America does or doesn't fuck; the problem is that no one in the MCU does. Not Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), the billionaire playboy; not Thor (Chris Hemsworth), the boisterous Norse god built like a beautiful blond tank; not Loki (Tom Hiddleston), his dashing bisexual brother; not Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), the acrobatic Russian assassin played by one of the world’s most famous sex symbols. Even Sersi and Ikaris (Gemma Chan and Richard Madden) - who are supposed to have a romance that spans eons, who made love on the bank of the Euphrates in ancient Babylonia - are shown in Marvel’s first (and, to date, only) sex scene.

Instead of engaging in that very human verb, these spandex-clad superhumans train. They fight the enemy, whoever the enemy may be on a given day. They bicker with each other. They quip, and quip, and quip some more. When they show love, it’s in the broadest, most generic way possible, all hushed voices and puppy-dog eyes; it’s hard enough to take seriously even before the moment is inevitably punctured by another wisecrack. They rarely sound more passionate than when they’re in the middle of battle - consider how, back in Iron Man 2, Tony Stark said "I want one" regarding Black Widow after she brutalized a couple dozen guards. In “No One Is Horny,” Benedict compared the MCU to the scene in Starship Troopers where beautiful naked people in a communal shower talk about nothing but war; and hey, sometimes the shoe fits.

I don’t mean to imply that Marvel should turn into its own porn parody. Sexual chemistry is just one part of the numbing disconnect between these characters and physical, and emotional truth. Perhaps the solution is relying less on green screens, so actors don’t have to emote opposite tennis balls; perhaps the solution is to beef up the fight scenes, so they feel more visceral and less like video game cutscenes. The end goal should be to create something fuller, more satisfying, more real - a world where, even offscreen and long in the past, Captain America could have conceivably... well, you know. Either way, the status quo, while entertaining on the surface, may feel increasingly hollow going forward. Everyone may be beautiful, but when no one is horny - when no one seems to feel much of anything below the glib, quippy surface - the whole enterprise starts to feel like a bunch of $200 million Saturday morning cartoons.