I imagine plenty of you are familiar with Larry Niven’s classic “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex” essay, which probably gets linked to in 2/3 of all Superman threads on the boards.
If not, the gist is Superman can’t have sex with a human woman, because sometimes supermuscles are a curse:
My question: has anyone ever gone over what would happen if the situation were reversed? What if Supergirl fancies a hunky human male, who, being human, fancies her in return?
In short, just how damaging would sex with Supergirl be?
Doesn’t the vagina contract during orgasm?* So if hunky human guy is able to satisfy her (another question in itself), it would be his last time doing so. With his penis, anyway.
There are lots of ways to make a woman orgasm without vaginal intercourse, so that’s not too much of a problem. And artificial insemination would take care of any planned pregnancies.
I think “Man of Steel” remains a much bigger problem than “Woman of Steel”.
I don’t know about Supergirl, but I do recall it being heavily hinted that Power Girl had slept with a superpowered stalker of hers, so that particular problem isn’t an issue with her anymore.
Pregnancy is another problem entirely. Let’s say that, by whatever mechanism, Supergirl gets inseminated by human sperm. What happens when millions of sperm reach the Woman of Steel’s egg?
It’s invulnerable, of course. Millions of sperm will converge on superegg, knocking on the door, as it were. But none will be able to unite with the invulnerable egg. Pregnacy will not take place.
No fertility clinic will be able to circumvent it. Exposing the egg to kryptonite will most likely either kill the egg or horribly mutate it.
The Woman of Steel will be the last of her kind, unless she mates with a fellow Kryptonian.
“Confidentially, he just didn’t do it for me. No matter how long we worked at it, I wasn’t feeling anything. I didn’t want to say anything and risk hurting his feelings though, you know? So finally I just faked it by screaming his name loud enough to explode his eardrums, crushing his pelvis between my thighs and clawing his shoulderblades off.”
Even without the contractions, the natural (superhuman) elasticity of the vagina would be too great to allow penetration by something as soft as an erect human penis.
If conception was achieved by some artificial method (such as carefully exposing a tiny section of the cell membrane of the ovum to kryptonite, so that the sperm can enter), if the unborn child was in any way weak like a human, the contractions of labour would crush it to death (if something else hadn’t gone wrong long before then)
Of course, we’re assuming DNA as the mating material, but even that may not be so. If mating were to occur at all, it would have to mean that Superbabe possessed normal DNA with sequences of ACGT. But this begs a question – where does super-hardness or whatever cut in? That is, Superwoman is proof against gunfire, explosions, temperatures hot enough to melt most metals, etc., probably up to and including being nuked. Well, what’s her body made of that makes it so invulnerable? Surely not the ordinary chemicals we mortals are made of. If she’s made of the same stuff as us, are the fanwankers or authors proposing some super-powerful molecular bond, or unheard-of molecular density or what? Because this woud have definite repercussions for this whole mating thing.
