I really don’t like that Jennifer Walter’s hair is straightened when she becomes She-Hulk

A new clip from Marvel’s She Hulk The Disney+ series came out a few days ago and showcases some of the new powers Jennifer Walters (Tatiana Maslany) gains when she takes off. The clip looks great! This show will be a lot of fun. However, there have been some criticisms of Jennifer’s Hulk form, mainly that she isn’t muscular enough. I’m afraid, after seeing two trailers and the new clip, I have to add something to the criticism: I wish Jennifer’s hair didn’t lose most of its curls when she becomes She-Hulk.

You will admit that the curly to wavy transformation is weird, right? There is no logical reason for this. When she’s in her normal form, Jennifer’s hair is curly (I’d say between a 3A and 3B texture, just like mine), but when she transforms, it suddenly lengthens and relaxes into a completely different texture. What on earth? Why? I know that’s what She-Hulk looks like in the comics, but if you’re going to let curly-haired Tatiana Maslany keep her natural texture in her human form, if she’s a Hulk, why change her?

The most likely answer is something that people with curly hair, especially women, are all too familiar with. By Western standards of beauty, straight hair (with maybe some gentle waves) is considered ideal. Take Rapunzel and Mother Gothel at Disney’s, for example Tangled: Rapunzel’s long blond hair makes her beautiful, while Gothel’s dark curly hair establishes her as the evil “other”. Straight hair – the hair of white people – is the standard by which all other hair types are measured.

Black people, especially black women, are very familiar with this type of racism. Marita Golden writes about this in her essay My Black Hair. She describes getting her hair straightened with a hot comb and trying to avoid “that horrible, horrible place where my hair was on my head in its natural state and it didn’t hurt me or anyone else, it was coarse, tightly curled.” and in the eyes of so many around me, unacceptable…. I wasn’t supposed to face the world until my hair looked as close as possible to ‘good hair’ aka ‘white girl hair’.”

The vast majority of our culture’s anti-curl venom is aimed at black women, but other people with curly hair are getting some of it too. I say this from experience as a Jew. When my hair first started to grow curly during puberty (it actually happens a lot — one of my stylists called it the “puberty perm”), the pressure to straighten it quickly reached a peak. Children scolded me and shunned me at school. I mean they have bizarre mad at my hair

Adults asked if I stuck a fork in a lamp socket. Women encouraged me to use chemical straighteners and sleep with my hair wrapped in tomato cans. Once I found a curly haircut in a magazine and my mother took me to a stylist to try to copy it. Instead, the stylist gave me a blowout and then bragged about how she just pulled it off. Adults claimed to love curly hair but talked out of both corners of their mouths. “Oh, you are blessed with natural curls!” they would coo. “Now change your hair completely!”

Part of the problem was that I didn’t know there were hair products for curly hair, so my hair was always dry, brittle and frizzy. Even now, when I want something as simple as cleansers, I have to go to specialty stores or the tiny drugstore section dedicated to textured hair. If I want to get a haircut from someone trained to cut curly hair, I have to pay twice as much. Curly hair is Not considered normal.

So to see Jennifer’s hair lose most of its curls and then watch her friends tell her how amazing she looks in the trailer? It’s disappointing and something I’ve seen way too many times.

Will She Hulk explain why Jennifer’s hair is changing so much? Will they at least hang a lampshade on it? Maybe. And look, I will still love this show. I still get “HULK SMASH!” GETTING A GIRL!” Every time Jennifer does something great. But I’ll quietly mourn the curly-haired She-Hulk that could have been.

At least I still have my beloved Layla El-Faouly, aka Scarlet Scarab, who has the best hair in the entire MCU.

(Selected image: Marvel)

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