So I haven’t seen any of the interviews on the subject, but apparently, Jeremy Renner said that the Black Widow is a slut, or kind of slutty, or whatever he actually said. I read that he said that she’d slept with four out of the six Avengers. I’ve put a lot of thought into that statement in the last few days, and I think I have more problems with it than most people. This is my own fault. I shouldn’t be trying to put logic into sexism.

To me, the most obvious problem—and the one no one is touching on, for whatever reason—is that there are only six Avengers if you count Black Widow. One woman and five guys—Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Hawkeye, and the Incredible Hulk. Unless we’re counting, I don’t know, Nick Fury. Which we shouldn’t, because he’s not an Avenger. There are additional people at the end, but I don’t think we should count them. So that’s the first way the math just fails.

The other, of course, is that, no, she didn’t. Some friends and I had an interesting discussion Friday night, after I’d finally seen the film, about whether or not she’d slept with Hawkeye. They said yes. I said no. But we agreed that, if she had, it was long ago, probably before his marriage, and they tried it once to see if it was a good idea. It wasn’t. They never did it again. That’s their head canon, of course, just as the idea that Captain America is a virgin is head canon to Chris Evans. I don’t disagree with him, but while Cap says Natasha flirted with him, it isn’t explicit that he did anything about it, and it’s implicit that, at minimum, it made him uncomfortable.

And that’s it. She didn’t have time to sleep with Bruce Banner over the course of the film, even leaving aside, well, his issues there. By the time she met Tony Stark, he was getting serious about Pepper Potts. Thor has a girlfriend, and anyway no. And assuming we’re counting Nick Fury, well, double no. Not a chance.

This is, I confess, the part I can’t stop thinking about. The math. Bad enough that his statement is sexist; worse, somehow, that it’s just so obviously wrong. How can we have a conversation about the double standard if we can’t even get the facts right?

Still, there’s that elephant. That double standard. We do know Natasha was intended by her programmers to use sex as a tool. It was part of her training, hence the infertility thing that’s giving the internet such fits at the moment. But we also know that Tony has had sex with a lot of women. Sure, he appears to be monogamous at the moment, but that’s relatively new. What’s more, his current girlfriend knows about it and deals with it. If it bothers her, she doesn’t say anything where we, the audience, hear it—though of course our perspective character is male, because our perspective character usually is. Anyway, the point is that it’s hers to be annoyed, and since we don’t see it, it might as well not be there.

The only person in the film thus far with the right to have an opinion on Natasha Romanov’s sex life other than Natasha herself never even brings up the past. He talks about their present and their potential future, but not the past. The past isn’t important.

A woman doesn’t even have to sleep around on camera to be judged. She just has to be confident, including confident in her own body, and express interest in more than one man. Not necessarily at the same time, either. A male friend and a prospective boyfriend and flirting with someone off-camera is enough. If we are to take a previous movie as still being canon, we know she cannot have slept with her boyfriend, because wow. Just because she can lure him back from wherever it is he goes, it doesn’t mean that’s a risk she’d take. I wouldn’t.

People have been gossiping about fictional characters’ lives for a very long time. Fan fiction is not new. So I’m not actually surprised that speculation by an actor about another character in his current movie has come up. That part doesn’t bother me, particularly, since it’s a movie I actually liked. What does bother me is that she’s been labeled for something mild compared to what someone male in the movie has done—and that it’s based on inaccurate information, at that.