As a novice comic book reader whose central takeaway from the first Fantastic Four films was “Chris Evans with a buzz cut, Chris Evans with a buzz cut, Chris Evans with a buzz cut,” I had some lingering questions following The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Like, why did they name the most powerful baby in the world, whom they will have to frequently reference as the sole successor of a devouring space god … Franklin? A name almost exclusively evocative of turtles? And another thing: Is the surfboard a part of Shalla-Bal’s body? I know that the movie is saying no, but it really seems like the surfboard is part of her whole metallic spectral polymer thing? Oh, and one last Q: Why’d they give the Thing that much drip if they weren’t going to let him throw that pebble around a little?
The “they” in question here obviously goes beyond the First Steps creative team, who have an entire 60-plus-year canon to abide by. And there’s simply no avoiding that it’s historically pretty fucked up that when the Fantastic Four went through that cosmic ray car wash, Reed Richards became stretchy but remained hot, Sue Storm became the Invisible Woman but remained hot, Johnny Storm became flammable and perhaps got even hotter—and Ben Grimm became rocks. And he did it through a painful transformation that kept all of his bone and muscle and sinew, except he’s rocks now, and everyone thinks it’s just totally cool to call him “the Thing”? He’s an astronaut, for crying out loud!
Clearly, the cosmic daddy in the sky has his favorites, which is why, historically, Ben Grimm has been portrayed as a tragic figure. He feels like a monster; he’s self-conscious about his newly minted resemblance to the Grand Canyon and thinks everyone on Earth-616 is scared of him. It’s always “Would you still love me if I were a worm,” but no one ever things to ask, “Would you still fuck me if I were a rock monster?” Take, for example, that scene from the 2005 Fantastic Four that should come with a Marley & Me–level warning for imminent sobs: Ben’s fiancée dumps him by placing her engagement ring on the ground, and he can’t even pick it up because his fingers are rock-hard Twinkies now, and he’s about to spark a flint fire trying to recoup this two-karat public humiliation off the asphalt after saving the world. (OK, so apparently my psyche was affected by more than just Evans’s budding-Marvel-star Dorito body in the 2000s Fantastic Four movies.)
But we are working with a very different Thing in The Fantastic Four: First Steps—a departure from that beloved but campy Michael Chiklis portrayal (so sad, so bald), but also from Jamie Bell’s brutish portrayal (so strange, so pantsless) in 2015’s Fantastic Four. Sure, some of that existential mourning for a former life with smooth skin and two separate eyebrows lingers in Ebon Moss-Bachrach’s performance (they didn’t cast the second-saddest set of peepers from The Bear for nothing), like when the Thing stares at footage of his former self through his rocky reflection in a store window. But mostly … this Thing? The First Steps Thing? He’s got that shit on.
This Thing couples his trench coat with a full business-casual fit and a jaunty (relatively) little fedora; he’s sporting a period-appropriate Brooklyn Dodgers ballcap downtown, visiting bakeries in broad daylight like the Park Slope zaddy he was always meant to be. This Thing exists on the retro-futuristic Earth-828, where he’s widely celebrated and accepted and no one seems to think he’s a monster. Kids cheer for him from the playground, Yancy Street baddies approach him outside the synagogue, and he’s on the cover of Men’s Health in a slutty little tank top. Sure, I think there’s probably still some boulder dysmorphia going on—but these are not the fits of a man (well, a craggy, cosmic, crystalline-silicate-mineraloid superhuman) who’s trying to hide in the shadows. First Steps suggests that all Thing narratives don’t have to be trauma narratives. That Ben Grimm can be going through it a little but can also have a lifestyle that’s not entirely defined by his physicality and is maybe even enhanced by it. This Thing likes to cook, he’s still a very smart space pilot, and he has the emotional intelligence to intuit when his friends are trying to keep it a secret that they're pregnant with a superhuman space mutant …
Yet the movie also seems hesitant to follow through on the clear implications of putting the Thing in a plaid shacket, boots, and raw denim. This Thing fucks! Or he could fuck … theoretically. My only critique of First Steps’ depiction of the Thing as a sexual being is that a lot of it was clearly more subtextual and reliant on Moss-Bachrach’s nuanced motion capture performance than literally on the screen itself. There is a very minor story line in which Natasha Lyonne—not exactly a minor actress!—plays Rachel Rozman, a schoolteacher who keeps crossing paths with Ben Grimm in all of his street wear. She’s brassy, she’s bold, and her blatant approach to flirting with him on the street in front of her elementary school class suggests that she contains within her the sultry battle cry of “hear me out” cakes everywhere: would.
In a movie in which an adult male blond learns an entire alien language because he recognizes the heart of gold nestled beneath a space surfer’s metallic polymer not-boobs, we might not be able to deem Ben Grimm the no. 1 loverboy currently residing at Baxter Building. But … could he be? Someday? If that avoidant rock man makes a mean pasta sauce, brings in a paycheck, and has a decent EQ, well then, that is something Rachel might work with.
And so the real question is, could she? Fantastic Four is a family-friendly franchise, yet people have been wondering this since the beginning of its existence. And by “people” I mean 1995’s Mallrats: “The Thing … is his dork made of orange rock like the rest of his body?”
In that movie, Stan Lee tells Brodie, “It's a superhero secret.” But there are no secrets here, and there will be people (me) who, in between First Steps’ powerful motherhood narratives and baby-themed trolley dilemmas, are left wondering: How would one summit that rocky top? I know that Marvel generally likes to keep itself niiiiice and sexless, but I’m so sorry—you can’t show the Thing and his big, giant boulder arms cradling that itty-bitty baby or hot Hulk wearing that shawl-neck collar in Avengers: Endgame and not anticipate a few complicated questions about big, giant guys that the internet is ready and willing to answer. Like, how would it work, anatomically speaking, to turn Rachel Rozman’s Thing “would” ... into a Thing “could”?
Does the Thing have a thing?
In Sex Lives of Superheroes: Wolverine's Immortal Sperm, Superman's Porn Career, the Thing's Thing, and Other Super-Sexual Matters Explained (perfect title), author Diana McCallum makes a simple argument: The Thing doesn't have a penis because we’ve never seen it. And there have been plenty of occasions when we could have. Specifically in the 2015 Fantastic Four film, in which the Thing walks around completely nude, rocks out for all to see, revealing nothing but a Ken-like mound down there. She also notes that most of the Thing’s appendages that aren’t made of bone disappeared or retracted when Ben got turned into rocks: His eyes sank into his head, his ears completely disappeared, and his nose turned into an itty-bitty button. It’s reasonable to believe, then, that non-facial appendages made entirely of muscle and soft tissue could have been, uh, absorbed as well …
But I ask you: Just because we don’t see it, does that mean it’s not there? The Thing’s rocky exterior is his armor, and Batman certainly wouldn’t suggest adding any unnecessary anatomy to your armor simply to prove you have it. Plenty of species have biologically evolved to protect their most vulnerable appendages. But whether it’s hidden away or some whole different thing, Stan Lee put the Mallrats question to bed once and for all in—get this—a Vanity Fair interview in 2011, confirming that the Thing does have a penis. But even Stan the Man could only hazard a guess at the specifics: "I guess common sense would say it was made of orange rock too.” What we know for sure is that neither penis nor penetration is necessary for sex. But if the Thing does have a thing, it could come in a number of different forms …
What is the Thing made of?
If you’re considering polishing any of his peaks, it’s important to understand that the Thing’s rock form is basically an armor-like cocoon for his human form. We know from run-ins with the Hulk that when cut all the way through, the Thing is still flesh and (sort of) bone on the inside. Which is to say that he’s a super-durable superhuman whose stone plates keep him flexible, and there’s a special lubricant inside his joints that gives him the agility of a much less rocky man. He’s strong enough to hold up a collapsing mountain, stop a runaway train that’s going 100 miles per hour, or—hypothetically—toss you around like pizza dough. Plus, I’ve heard that he has the stamina to perform at peak physical exertion without tiring for, ahem, 24 hours.
But what’s perhaps most special about the Thing’s combined mineral and biological makeup is that while being built like rock-hard Hamburger Helper gloves, his giant hands are still canonically capable of performing tasks with delicacy and precision. So if Rachel Rozman is willing to hold a little space for the lyrics of “Defying Gravity,” so to speak, there are certain parts of the Thing’s anatomy that aren’t like ours—they’re more.
OK, but can he just … turn the rocks off?
Well, yes, kind of. But where’s the fun in that?
If we’re going there, however: Canonically, Reed’s little group of geniuses, the Future Foundation, created a really specific serum allowing the Thing to turn back into Ben Grimm for one week a year. And theoretically, during that annual week of TTO, Ben can have as much human sex with his human penis as he wants. In Dan Slott’s Fantastic Four run, Ben wanted to start a family with his human partner, Alicia Masters, during one of these periods, although what happens at the, um, completion of such a mission is never quite covered—we don’t know exactly what kind of sand or cement he might be shooting in either human or rock form. Reed does spend most of the movie in crippling existential fear wondering whether their DNA was altered during the cosmic storm, so presumably, we could end up with another Franklin situation on our hands—whether it be a tiny godlike baby or a tiny turtle-like baby. Coincidentally, this one week a year is also the only time when Ben Grimm ages. As the Thing, he’s immortal, meaning he won’t rack up enough weeks to die of old age until AD 6012. That’s a lot of time to take a lot of open-minded lovers.
Who’s having sex with the Thing?
Oh, I don’t know. Is he not a curmudgeon with a heart of gold? A barrel-chested mostly man with a servant's spirit who we’ve just learned is capable of growing a rock beard to pair with his flannels? Is the Thing not, then, just an even more gravelly version of a manic grumpy dreamboy like Nick Miller or Sam Malone, whom so many have fallen in love—and into bed—with before? Presumably, if Rachel Rozman is flirting with a superhuman rock man on the street, it’s either because she’s got a fetish and she’s wondering whether the cliffs match the rock face or, ideally, because she has an innately progressive approach to romance and sexuality that keeps her peeking through the synagogue windows, trying to organize a meet-cute.
Although Ben gets the shorter end of the narrative stick in First Steps, it’s clear that there’s been some character growth in between franchises. The most appealing things about this iteration of the Thing—and presumably the characteristics that draw Rachel to him on Earth-828—aren’t his lubed-up joints, his superhuman stamina, or even his (fine, I’ll say it) phallic fingers. They’re the things that flesh him out beyond his rocky exterior: He’s friendly to the neighborhood kids, he’s nostalgic for home even when he’s near it, he likes to cook and keep a nice house, and he’s gracious to H.E.R.B.I.E. the robot when politely suggesting that a little extra garlic be added to his sauce. Why wouldn’t some nice lady from Earth-828 want the Thing to get her rocks off?
So … it’s clobbering time?
Whether the Thing has a thing down there or not, in answering the question of “How would it work?” I’m most inclined to cite the Broad City “Blake Griffin” corollary: Anything is sexual if you want it badly enough. Despite his extra-tough exterior, Ben can still experience … sensation, even if he has a higher resistance to it than most. In the end, this could really just be kind of a mortar and pestle situation. And that’s OK—we’re not here to judge. We’re here to encourage—because, as previously noted, the Thing is ready to love someone else. If he can just remember to love himself first. And in the galactic race to save Earth, that really feels like a mountain worth summiting.
