It hasn’t yet reached the notoriety and acclaim of Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’,” but few essays have captured the vibe of the last decade better than RS Benedict’s “Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny.”

Published in 2021 by the online sci-fi/horror magazine Blood Knife, the piece takes an unflinching look at the perfect on-screen bodies of the superhero era. Benedict dives into the normalization of comedic actors putting on 30 pounds of muscle to convincingly wear spandex and crack jokes at alien hordes. These movies fetishize bodies not as sex objects, but as ruthlessly efficient machines. Imagine the shower scenes in Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 film “Starship Troopers” with an extra layer of deadly seriousness, and you’re most of the way there.

Separated from the status plays and c

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