Title: That One Time When Someone Tried to Mansplain The Black Widow
Fandom: The Avengers
Pairing: Clint/Natasha
Rating: PG 13 for languageish
Warnings: none
Spoilers: none
Summary: Some SHIELD dudebro tries to explain to Natasha how she's hampered by being a woman and being obsessed with equality. It goes over...like a lead balloon.

Here on AO3 if you'd like, or under the cut!



It wasn’t their first SHIELD/Avengers joint mission, but Clint was pretty sure it was going to be their last. Sure, they had gotten to Bogota fine. They had secured the perimeter. They had found the drug money, the girls, and the chemical weapons all in the same compound, which was convenient, if not a little unexpectedly stupid. (The head of the crime organization, Michael Baas, would be so disappointed that the people under him hadn’t quite understood him when he said to keep things separate. That arrest warrant was really going to sting.) They had gotten out of there just as easily. Minimal shots fired, few casualties, no one hurt on their side.

Yet.

They were at a SHIELD intermediary base off the Atlantic coast of Panama, waiting for debriefings before they split up. Clint and Nat were heading straight off to Belarus to monitor some uprising activity there. The usual play the Russian tourist, see what they could find out type of scheme. He needed a long hot bath, Natasha and him sleeping in as much as she’d ever let him, and walking, not climbing, through a city. In other words, he couldn’t wait to get to Minsk and that was definitely not something he had ever said before in his life.

And right now?

He wasn’t sure they were going to make it to Minsk. Or off the base. In fact, he lay in the corner on the floor, pretending to sleep with an arm thrown over his eyes, contemplating if he knew enough about hacking to get Natasha out of one of SHIELD’s maximum security cells.

Because she was probably going to kill the noob and then it’d be up to him to save her ass. Just…no one ever tell Nat that he thought that particular line. It wasn’t just her ass he was saving. Really. It was the rest of her too. Her ass was particularly nice—and his thoughts were running away with him. Again.

“Communism works in thought,” Natasha was saying, quietly and carefully, which someone might mistake for being polite, or being unsure, but usually meant she was trying to figure out how to quell her rage. “But not in actuality.”

“It doesn’t even work in thought. Look, you’re a woman, so of course you want equality--,” said the newly promoted and soon to be corpse SHIELD Captain Thomas Malic.

“So because you’re a man, you don’t want it?” Natasha’s voice remained utterly calm.

Clint lifted one eyelid to scan the room. Steve’s eyes were darting between Natasha and Malic, though he remained slumped against the wall. Tony was recording it on his own version of the iPhone (to piss Tony off, ask him if he has the latest iPhone. Seriously. It’s the joke that NEVER gets old and it’s definitely Clint’s favorite.). Bruce hadn’t come on the mission and that was probably good right about now. Bruce and Nat had become freakishly good friends ever since he nearly killed her in New York. He’d probably match Nat’s level of rage and go green right now.

Natasha hadn’t been playing seductress on the mission, so her striking red hair was pulled back into a low ponytail, a few wisps escaping after running, leaping, and killing a few people. She pressed her mouth together as Malic explained all the ways in which he was able—because he was a man, you see—to see beyond equality issues and understand “the root causes” of different arguments because he wasn’t “hamstringed” by “one issue.”

Then Malic realized Tony was filming him. “Wait, what are you doing?”

“Recording your inevitable death for posterity and the military tribunal, so they know that Romanoff’s actions were understandable.”

Clint smiled and settled back down, closing his eyes again. Malic scowled and said, “What the fuck are you talking about, Stark. Look, if Romanoff wants to get all pissy—“

“Why do people only use the word pissy to describe a woman? Or to insult a man by using a word typically used for a woman?” Natasha’s voice, colder than dry ice. “It’s the same way that someone says, getting their panties in a bunch. It’s meant to be hurtful only because it’s gendered statements.”

“Okay, now you’re just being picky. It’s just a way to say something.”

“Rooted, deeply, in sexism. White straight men have written history, developed language, institutionalized education worldwide, even where they are the minority, and created a caste system so deeply entrenched in our psyches that we no longer recognize the violence in gendered language. And it adds up. Eventually, there will be a straw that breaks the camel’s back.”

Malic laughed. “What, you’re not going to defend the camel here? Isn’t that language harmful to camels?”

“Are you comparing the sexism and patriarchal language you’re using to me to treating me like an animal?”

There was a long pause and Malic hesitated just a second before saying, slowly, “No, I think you compared yourself to an animal. Maybe you think of yourself as lesser and you’re projecting this onto me and this conversation, Romanoff.”

At this, Clint propped himself up on his elbows to watch. Steve came off the wall slightly. Sure. Sometimes, Natasha did think of herself as lesser but it had less to do with her sex and gender than it did to her past and what she had done for the Red Room. That ledger wasn’t the straw on her back. But then, again, sexism and the patriarchy had a lot to do with why she was chosen for the Red Room and what they used her for, didn’t it? Maybe they were all connected. Clint’s head pounded as he watched Natasha closely.

Natasha said softly, “The things we women carry are things you will never have to carry. We carry them for you. We are responsible for your lust. We are responsible for your sexual prowess, and we are responsible for your impotency. We carry the burden of being two entirely different people within and without a home. We must be beautiful, but in a way that you, as a white, straight, male consider beautiful. We must be powerful, but not so powerful as to threaten you. We must be sexual, but in a way that makes you feel powerful in your sexuality. We must be smart, but understand that you are, solely because you were born white and straight and with a dick between your legs, smarter than us. Virginity is a social construct, by men. When we speak our minds, we’re called bossy and bitchy and we’re slandered. When we have sex, we’re sluts. When we don’t have sex, we’re prudes. We must be thin, but not bony because if we’re bony, we’re not attractive, like that is our own worth. We must not be fat, because the important thing is that we embrace our curves, because that’s sexual, and that’s what is important to you, white straight man with a dick between his legs. We must always think of you first. Being ambitious is fine, as long as it’s other women we tear down along the way. Being funny is fine, as long as we’re self deprecating in our humor. Make fun of society? How dare we.”

The room held its breath and she sank back against the wall. She said, “You are lucky, we are so strong to carry that all for you. You would break if you carried that. Your privilege has made you weak. You only believe you are strong. It’s because you’ve systematically repressed that belief worldwide that you remain as narcissistic and megalomaniac as you are. Imagine, imagine if we began to dismantle your privilege and give equal weight to all voices.”

Malic didn’t speak. Natasha’s eyes closed and she said, “I’ll let you live to see that day.”

Satisfied, and smiling, Clint leaned back to cover his eyes and then Malic maybe dug his own grave. “Christ, Barton. Is she like that all the time?”

Malic was really fucking lucky that Clint knew exactly how fast he needed to move to intercept Natasha. He caught her by her arms and felt the force of her exhale against his cheek.

“Don’t,” he said quietly. “It’s not your responsibility to beat the sense into him. You said your piece.”

Her blue eyes glowed, her pupils wide, dark, the abyss staring right back at him. She shook off his arms and sat back down on the bench in the room. Steve stood up soundlessly and crossed the room, his footsteps steady against the metal floor, and sank onto the bench next to her.

Malic said, shakily, “I heard she was unstable.”

Clint rubbed his forehead and went over to Nat, sinking onto the floor at her feet and leaning back against her legs. Her fingers slipped through his hair, skimming over his scalp. He closed his eyes and tried to decide if he was going to break down Malic’s own mental walls, the way he immediately assumed that a woman who was angry was mentally ill or unstable, the way those labels were used and assigned to people who thought outside of the social norms.

Then Tony said, “I’m uploading to YouTube. How do you spell “Fucktard” and “Pwned”? Do you want to be Romanoff or the Black Widow, Natasha?”

Natasha laughed softly and said, “Oh, that wasn’t the Widow. He wouldn’t be here if that was the Widow. You can put me up there as a woman who never attended high school or college breaking down a tiny section of the patriarchy and his privilege. Don’t use fucktard though. I don’t like that word’s relation to the R word.”

The door opened and Phil stood in the doorway, with the expression that told Clint he had heard every last word of what happened. He nodded to Clint and Natasha. “You two, come on. We’ll debrief in pairs.”

They were going to make it to Minsk after all.