News that Walmart is peddling a “Training to be Batman’s Wife” T-shirt to juniors has raised ire for its retrograde bullshittery. Lost in the ruckus is the fact that it’s not just offensive for its sexism — it’s offensive because Batman is the type of douche that no woman would realistically go for. Surely there’s a better superhero to aspire to love? Nah, doubt it.
Here is the T-shirt.
Of course, any T-shirt suggesting a woman would rather be a wife-in-training instead of a superhero herself (or literally anything else) is patently stupid. But I prefer my sexist insults to have some basis in reality if at all possible. Seriously, what woman in her right mind would actually want to marry Batman? Sleep with him? Sure. Marry? Hahahahhahahhaa. Suckers.
Over at PJ Says, author PJ Curtis makes a good point:
Batman Doesn’t Have a Wife
Batman isn’t the marrying kind. He has too much baggage for a successful relationship. His life is too dangerous. So “training” for that position is just stupid.
Let’s be fair. He wouldn’t be worth training for even if he were willing to marry on account of his inability to form actual, emotional human attachments. But that’s a lot of words for a t-shirt.
Pros: Hot, rich, brooding
Cons: Cut-off freak who is INCAPABLE OF LOVE. And a real douche.
Matt Taibbi said it well in an old review of the The Dark Knight Rises:
Batman’s a brooding, self-serious douche who lives in a mansion, drives a Lamborghini, and acts like he can’t even imagine wanting to get laid unless it somehow helps him fulfill his mission of protecting Gotham from its lurking proletarian community.
But as far as I’m concerned, the most accurate portrayal of what it would be like to date actual Batman is in, of all places, The Lego Movie. Batman, voiced by Will Arnett, finally achieves his true self as a frat boy douche who likes to party, play pranks, and is a sulking teenager obsessed with his own pain, which he expresses musically in a terrible, lurching industrial metal song called “Untitled Self Portrait.”
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