Diana McCallum Breaks Down The Sex Lives of Superheroes

The "Texts From Superheroes" co-creator wants you to know EXACTLY how radioactive Spider-Man's sperm is.

If you have been anywhere on the geeky corners of the internet in the last decade or so, you’ve almost certainly seen the work of Diana McCallum. The writer and podcaster is likely best known for her viral Texts From Superheroes social media accounts, but even preceding those, she was a key voice at Cracked from 2010 until 2016. Now, McCallum has a new book – The Sex Lives of Superheroes – which hit stores on November 18th from Penguin Random House.

Drawing inspiration from sources as diverse as scientists, doctors, and Kevin Smith movies, The Sex Lives of Superheroes strives to answer all the questions you’ve always wanted to ask – and probably some you don’t really want to have answered – about how the theoretical science of superheroes would intersect with the real-world science of sex and sexuality.

McCallum joined me for a dive into the book, which tackles topics from Spider-Man: Reign to The Boys to Larry Niven’s classic essay Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex.

Russ Burlingame: You’re probably known most from the Texts From Superheroes accounts, or the podcasts. What made a superhero sex book come together?

Diana McCallum: I used to write for Cracked back in its heyday – mid 2000s, around then. I loved it. I wrote a lot for them when they were like, when they were big, and what I love about Cracked is, we're making fun of something, but it has to be based on facts. We're not just making shit up to make jokes. You had to have reliable sources, and that's really what the book is.

When I wrote for Cracked, a lot of my articles about weird sex things in comics did really well. I wrote about the Marvel Swimsuit Editions – just weird things that happened in comics, sex-wise. Spider-Man: Reign with the radioactive semen that killed Mary Jane, all those kinds of things.

So, more than Texts from Superheroes, and Talk From Superheroes, it's more of a continuation of my early Cracked writing, which I fell off once I started my own website.

Burlingame: In the book, you mention Mallrats, and the “superhero sex organs” scene is obviously something Kevin [Smith] has been asked about a lot. Did you try to talk to Kevin for this?

McCallum: I have not reached out to Kevin. But I have not. I hope he finds out about it, because I did answer every question in Mallrats. I answered not just can he, but how far can Reed Richards stretch his penis.

I touch upon the the Superman/Lois Lane sex, but I do it from a Supergirl angle, because there's a very famous essay Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex, that really covers a lot of the Superman topic. So, my essay is more about Supergirl, and if she could have sex with a human guy with her very steel-like vagina.

There's three big inspirations for this book. So it's Mallrats, it's my Cracked writing, and then it's Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex. If you’re looking for answers, I've got them, and even more questions that nobody asked.

Burlingame: How do you engage with these things in an academic and serious way, when you know that you’re answering an inherently silly question?

McCallum: I think you just have to really engage with it in a very serious way. There are a lot of jokes, but also pretty much every chapter, I used a scientific study, often more than that. I talked to three different doctors while I was writing this book.

So, I'm very silly, and then I have a doctor who says “No, I can actually tell you if that would work.” Would Wolverine's sperm actually be immortal and inherit his healing ability? I make jokes about it and then they're like, “Here's what would actually happen.”

I think you can look at things through a silly lens, as long as you take the science side seriously, because that’s where I’m going to get the facts.

Burlingame: Since everyone has “their” version of these characters, are you expecting a lot of arguments from people who are upset because you’re using modern comics as a baseline while they’re going “back in 1966…?”

McCallum: Yeah – I don't think a lot of people are going to deep-dive into the science aspects, but I definitely feel like I'm going to get a lot of “you forgot when The Flash vibrated eight times instead of six…”

The science side was actually really fun and really rewarding, because I'm not a scientist, but I am really good at research. I talked to doctors, and it was so exciting every time I actually found answers. I actually found a scientific study that was like, “We looked at how much radiation is in semen, compared to blood, compared to urine, compared to sweat, and we can tell you what the most radioactive bodily fluid is.” I couldn't believe someone studied this. It was like, thank you, I've got my answers. That happened in a lot of chapters.

Burlingame: I’ve done this! When I was a kid and I did my internship at Wizard, Garth Ennis was taking over The Punisher. I was assigned to read every appearance of the Punisher ever, and come up with a complete exhaustive list of his crimes for a wanted poster.

I had to call the New York State Troopers and say, “So, technically the bad guy shoots first, and he's a known felon, but also Frank's trespassing. So is this first or second degree murder?” The cops were just like, “Who are you again?”

McCallum: But that's the really fun stuff! Like, I have a chapter about how big Reed Richards can make his penis. You would assume that is probably going to be short, not much to it, but then you're like, “Wait a minute. Is it flaccid or is it erect?” Because even if it's stretchy, it can't fill with that much blood. So, that's two very different sizes. So you end up working out all this math, and all these biological functions. It’s fun.

Burlingame: I assume it’s a little more straightforward to just ask if the Thing’s thing is made of orange rock?

McCallum: A few things are that straightforward, but you just find more stuff to talk about.

In the Edward Norton Hulk movie, he can't have sex because his heart rate gets too high. So I wondered if there is any way he could have sex? Is he just worried he'll Hulk out, or would he actually Hulk out? I tried to figure it out.

The answer like came pretty quickly, but you just build around it. What else would this be? What's the real world equivalent of this, if anything, so it's there's always more to mine. Even in the like Spider-Man chapter about whether sex is dangerous for Mary Jane, you can segue into why Rogue and Gambit also have trouble having sex. And there was Ivy and Harley Quinn – Harley has to be inoculated against Ivy's poison. You just you flesh it out.

Burlingame: Obviously, some of these questions come from Mallrats and some come from the internet more broadly. Is there anything that you personally really wanted to know about when you started?

McCallum: The Captain America chapter was the stuff I wanted to know. I wanted to know what Steve's sex education in the 30s was like. He wakes up in 2012, and he doesn’t know how to date, but I'm just like, “I don't think you know anything, though.” There’s even this fondue joke in Captain America: The First Avenger, where he doesn't know that fondue is just cheese and it's not sex. So even in the 30s, Steve didn't seem to know anything.

I did this deep dive on what was sex education like in the 1920s and 30s, which is when he would have been a teen or in his early twenties. He probably would have gotten most of it in the military and not in school, because they were desperate for soldiers to stop getting venereal diseases, because that's how they lost more soldiers than getting shot with bullets. Things like that. He doesn't know what AIDS is! He doesn't know what birth control is. He missed the entire sexual revolution. That chapter was really fun for me, and helped me get a better feel of Steve Rogers as a man.

Burlingame: Obviously, there are a lot of different takes on many of these character. How did you decide which one you were going to dissect? Was that fun?

McCallum: I think most of the fun was picking which version to dissect! I think I really tried to go as universal as I could, as often as possible. Like, hopefully this fits the character whether it’s Matt Murdock from the comics or the Charlie Cox Matt Murdock.

Steve Rogers, he's always from the 30s, no matter what, so this fits comic book Steve or MCU Steve.

The ones that were very specific questions had to be like, “This has to be about MCU Hulk, because it's about a scene from the Incredible Hulk starring Edward Norton.” The Spider-Man: Reign chapter has to be about comic book Spider-Man because it's about a very specific comic.

Burlingame: For the Reign one, did you have to get into half-lives and whether or not he'd still be radioactive 20 years later?

McCallum: It wasn't so much the half lives because one of the studies I used was an actual study on soldiers who had radioactive shrapnel in their bodies. It's still wildly radioactive. Obviously it didn’t kill them, because they’re still alive, they’re being studied, but the half life isn’t really as important as how much stays in your body and which fluids. That was really the question being asked.

I'm definitely not a radiation expert yet. I'll study it more when Reign 2 comes out.

Burlingame: Are there any big surprises here, or is it mostly really mainstream characters from Marvel and DC?

McCallum: It’s mostly Marvel and DC. I've got one chapter about The Boys, just to diversify a little. Oh, and Ninja Turtles. Their penises are scary.