Cameron Kunzelman has a longish post up in which he tries to figure out what’s special about Wonder Woman as a character. Among other things, he talks about this sequence from the mess that was Frank Miller’s DK2.
As this suggests — and as the rest of Kunzelman’s discussion shows — Miller’s WW is largely defined by her relationship with Superman. Sometimes she mocks him, sometimes she fights him, and ultimately (as we see here) she is conquered by him. The whole point of having the strong woman woman there, for Miller, is to make the strong man stronger through his domination of her. Shortly after this scene, Superman grabs her and fucks her and she declares that he’s made her pregnant (“Goodness Mr. Kent, you could populate a planet!”) If you’re feeling flaccid, dominate the castrating bitch and soon you’ll be uncastrated. Wonder Woman’s the phallus which means (a) she can’t have the phallus, and (b) owning her is to own the phallus.
That’s not exactly where Marston is coming from, obviously. For Marston, strong women aren’t there to highlight the dominance of strong men. On the contrary, it sometimes seems like just the opposite is true — strong men only exist to be dominated by strong women.
That’s from Sensation Comics #46. In this issue, like the text says, “An enemy’s subtle plot gives Steve Herculean strength!” A scheming female gangster figures that if Steve is stronger than Wonder Woman, he’ll get her to marry him, and then she’ll stay home and cook and clean rather than fighting bad guys. So she gives Steve an electrical (ahem) ball which makes him uberpowerful.
The plot works to some extent; as Wonder Woman says, Steve’s new strength is “thrilling.”
Ultimately, though, Wonder Woman decides that she doesn’t want a stronger man…
and so Steve does the right thing.
In some sense, this is, as I suggested, simply a reversal of Miller — in DK2, the strong woman submits; in Marston, the strong man does. Male/female is not a purely reversible binary, though; the two terms have long histories of meaning and inequity which aren’t simply substituted when you flip them. Men on top and women on top are different in more ways than just the positions of the bodies.
Specifically, Miller’s fantasy of men-on-top is about love as a seizing of power; love and force go together, so that when Superman fucks Wonder Woman, he literally sets off an earthquake. The power of the love is attested by its violence. Men on top express real love by seizing and destroying.
Marston disagreed. “Love is a giving and not a taking” he wrote in his psychological treatise. And so Steve expresses his love not by grabbing Wonder Woman and taking her as his prize, but rather by submitting. With women on top, love is giving up power, not seizing it; embracing weakness, not asserting strength. And where Miller’s version of love involves male dominance and excited female submission, Marston’s version of love-as-renunciation seems more reciprocal. Or, at least, Wonder Woman’s reaction to Steve’s weankness is not a swaggering assumption of mastery, but a blushing admission — “I do l-l-like you, just as you are — now.”
In this regard, I think this image is interesting:
That’s the sequence where Steve first gains his superstrength. The ball is given to him by a woman, obviously. In the first panel, she sits on the desk with her suggestive red dress, her legs spread — and Steve’s gaze seems directed at her crotch rather than at that glowing ball. At the same time, the women explains that the ball will do for Steve what Amazon training does for Wonder Woman. Thus, Steve’s strength is, both narratively and iconically, something taken from women — to be stronger is to be feminized. The point is further emphasized in the next panel, where Peter draws the usually chunky Steve with an almost bishonen grace — his blonde hair poofing out flirtatiously in front, his eyebrows curving eloquently, his lips unusually full.
In Miller, male strength emphatically enforces typical gender norms; Superman’s phallus turns Wonder Woman from battling Amazon to mother, and all is right with the world. In Marston, on the other hand, male strength feminizes…which doesn’t change the fact that when Steve submits out of love, he is also following a feminine ideal. Men on top reads gender straight; women on top, on the other hand, makes everything queer.
It’s probably needless to say that Miller’s version of the character seems to me in just about every way more conventional and less interesting than Marston’s. But more than that, I think Miller’s handling of Wonder Woman really suggests pretty strongly that Kunzelman is wrong when he says at the conclusion of his essay that “Wonder Woman is special.” After all, there’s nothing special about women-as-phallus; there’s nothing special about women as cog in male psychodrama. There’s nothing special (certainly not in Miller’s work) about fetishizing female strength in order to more fully fetishize the strong man who conquers it. Marston/Peter’s version of the character is touched by unique genius, of course. But that genius inheres in their writing and in their art, not in some random corporate property with a particular color scheme and appellation. If creators want Wonder Woman to be special, they need to make her special. Miller — and the vast majority of people who have worked on the character since Marston/Peter — haven’t bothered.
I am think you generally are making good points here, but I think you are poorly reading Kunzelman. Kunzelman ended with this: “Wonder Woman is complex. She makes sense as a being who has a moral obligation to be violent, angry, and compassionate. She carries many paradoxes of action and emotion inside of her, of which Frank Miller only teased out one possible alignment.” That is really, really far from saying that Miller makes wonder woman special. Rather, he is arguing that the specialness of her character even infects Frank Miller’s writing, even though he can only understand one part of that specialness.
That strikes me as right.
Also, “Men on top reads gender straight; women on top, on the other hand, makes everything queer.” I am all for an expansive use of the term queer, but should it at least, you know, hold within itself the perpetual possibility of non-male/female couplings? It just strikes me that women being on top (particularly as a projection of male fantasy) isn’t capable of making everything queer.
Hey Scu. Good points, both.
— Kunzelman’s post is arranged around his discussion of what he calls a grand unified theory of Wonder Woman. He’s quite focused on the character and her potential, in other words. I’m saying that the focus should be on the creators, for the most part. I don’t think Miller teases out anything particularly special in Wonder Woman — not in whole, not in part. He uses her for a very typical power fantasy, much the way he uses other women in his work.
Wonder Woman, the character, as she’s been used since Marston/Peter, is really distinguished from other female action heroes mostly by the fact that her costume looks more ridiculous. The idea that there’s something special in the character that is visible whatever creator uses her just doesn’t seem to me to be born out in practice.
— Marston/Peter’s WW definitely, even obsessively, played (and more than played) with the idea of lesbianism. I think Marston’s view of women on top essentially makes (or longs to make) men female. So it’s a male fantasy of transvestism and lesbianism…which I think it’s reasonable to label “queer.”
WW aside, doesn’t DK2 envision powerful women as more than just “there to be overpowered by men.” Isn’t Supes and WW’s female offspring the one who ends up kicking Braniac’s butt and saving the day? That is, isn’t it a/the powerful woman who proves even more powerful, kick-butt and “super” than Superman (who, btw, is typically not very tough in the DKR universe–He’s Batman’s punching bag).
I actually can’t remember the endgame of Lara’s (is that her name?) storyline (I think she frees the Kandorians too, right?), but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t ultimately to be overmastered by a “super” “man”–
In general, I wouldn’t say that Miller’s gender politics are anything to write home about…but this piece does kind of elide some of what goes on in DK2. I would say that Miller does like the idea of overpowering powerful women and this does tend to turn up alot in his repertoire…but he’s also pretty inconsistent in this, as in all things.
Good points, Noah, but I disagree. I think you leave out two important details:
1) The scene between Superman and Wonder Woman is a very typical masochistic fantasy in which SHE hits him. WW takes the role of dominatrix, and Superman only responds to the game. Like Casey from Ronin or Martha Washington. In “Martha Washington Saves the World”, Martha also beats his Indian lover. He cries and finally leaves.
2) The role of Superman and Wonder Woman’s daughter, Lara. In DK2, Lara is stronger than his father and tells him what to do — in the second half of DK2, Lara takes the initiative and Superman follows her. Yes, a bit like in the Marston/Peter’s WW.
Eric: at the end of DK2, Superman asks her meekly: “What exactly shall we do with our planet, Lara?”
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Ter9Z4iVfM8/T_WvkVfAH2I/AAAAAAAAUrw/dADLsH1N_es/s1600/DK2Lara.jpg
Regards,
Miller’s use of fetishized strong women varies somewhat, in DK2 and elsewhere. Re: Paul, I think that having WW hit him and then be overmastered by him is pretty much in line with what I’m saying; she’s strong so she can be worth dominating. It’s Pussy Galore, basically.
I think Lara’s a different issue that I didn’t get into largely because I refuse to read the entire series again. But Elektra is dominant (in her own series, anyway), for example. And Robin in DK is actually a Frank Miller woman who manages to escape his usual fetishization altogether (mostly by being very young, but still.)
So yeah, I’d say that Miller’s attitude towards women varies somewhat — but never his attitude towards power, nor really towards phallicism. To be sexy is to be strong, basically. There’s a masochism, too, but it’s a masochism of worshipping strength. Even his masochists are sadists, in other words, whereas in Marston, even the sadists are masochists.
(Giles Deleuze in his essay on Sacher-Masoch argues that the masochist of the sadist and the sadist of the masochist are different people; that is, that masochists and sadists aren’t a perfect pair, but are looking for fundamentally different things and can’t actually get along. I think that’s true at least for Miller and Marston.)
Indeed, so I said that Superman is looking for ‘something different’ in DK2. In my point of view, he is dominated by WW the dominatrix and his daughter Lara.
Unless one thinks that making love with a woman (with or without masochistic games) involves dominate her. Yes, we can think that sex/love is always about domination, but the question is not only who dominates, she or he (or she/she in a lesbian couple, BTW), but exactly when, how and why (sometimes there is changing roles, etc). I don’t think things are so clear, even appealing to the old Freud’s castration complex. In that scene, why we can not think that Superman does exactly what WW wanted, as her puppet?
Anyway, Superman is primarily masochistic in DK2. In fact, he is beaten up throughout DK2 (even has a moment in which he appears like a modern Christ —see his voluntary sacrifice to Brainiac/Luthor). In the first chapter Batman gives Supes a good beating, later WW gives him the second, Brainiac gives him the third. I don’t remember any story where Superman gets more hits than DK2.
Sex doesn’t have to involve domination of women. But when the woman in question defines the sex as meaning that she is being taken as a prize, I think it’s being defined as him dominating her, yeah.
I was just reading Judith Halberstam, who talks about how manliness is often defined through an ability to take punishment. Masochistic in some sense…but still about being hard and dominant (over one’s own body, over adversity), rather than about submission, I think. She referred specifically to Raging Bull, if I remember right, in which the ability to take punishment is linked to misogyny pretty directly….
Honestly, Noah, I don’t think Raging Bull has much to do with Superman in DK2. Unless you want to say that this Superman is misogynist. Or even the author. If that is the case, we assume that Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro are misogynists for wanting to tell the life of Jake LaMotta.
Remember, “What exactly shall we do with our planet, Lara?”, says Superman at the end.
About masochistic games between (real) men and women, Anita Phillips thinks otherwise in her Defence of Masochism.
“as meaning that she is being taken as a prize”
Mythical dialogue. They are not human and don’t speak like humans. Again, it’s a fantasy —masochism fantasy, as I said. Well, masochism superhero fantasy.
Masochism is complicated in terms of its relationship to feminism and to reality. Like I said, there are different kinds of masochism. But it can definitely be a part of a phallic economy; showing who’s the toughest, and using one’s own punishment as a lever to take the place of the punisher. That’s actually how Venus in Furs works, for example.
Raging Bull is about showing that a fascination with violence is a fascination with violence, whether that’s expressed through masochism or sadism. I think the film’s creators are quite aware of that…and I absolutely think it applies to Frank Miller’s investment in both masochism and sadism.
The point for me with Frank Miller is that it’s always very much about power. Which he likes a lot, and which he invariably associates with goodness or rightness.
I think too that Superman topping Wonder Woman is in part a way to just show how powerful Batman is for topping superman. It’s all a hierarchy of violence and who’s the supercoolest for being the supertoughest.
The idea that the dialogue is “mythical” and that therefore it can’t be related to humans seems to me like utter nonsense. It was written by a human, Frank Miller, who at this point in his career isn’t even an especially good writer. His characters talk like pompous second-drawer pulp, not like actual gods. And yes, it’s a fantasy. It’s a fantasy in which strong women yearn to be dominated, and adolescent power fantasies duke it out to see who can be the most powerful and adolescent. It doesn’t change that to point out that the power fantasies are supposed to be *so* powerful that we can’t even understand their awesomeness. On the contrary.
Yes, superheroes is all about power fantasy, of course.
“The idea that the dialogue is “mythical” and that therefore it can’t be related to humans seems to me like utter nonsense.”
I didn’t say that.
” It was written by a human, Frank Miller,”
And writers think like all their fictional characters, right?
“It’s a fantasy in which strong women yearn to be dominated”
Sorry, Noah, I can’t see that in DK2. Again, at the end of the book:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Ter9Z4iVfM8/T_WvkVfAH2I/AAAAAAAAUrw/dADLsH1N_es/s1600/DK2Lara.jpg
“And writers think like all their fictional characters, right? ”
They don’t necessarily…but Frank Miller’s not someone who seems especially hard to parse to me — at least not at this stage of his career. I mean, what are you seeing there? I feel like I’m not understanding you. You think it’s not about the excitement of superman dominating wonder woman? He’s not setting her up as this sexy warrior who is sexy because of her stength and because she can be flipped? What do you make of the hyperbolic dwelling on potency, then?
He gets off on power in various ways, I think. The new shiny woman dominating the world doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s not into the other woman being dominated. Nor does it mean that it ever stops being about Batman just being superawesome because he can control/beat up/keep up with all these superhumans.
You agree that Miller’s obsessed with power, right? You’re just arguing that the way the power is gendered is different than what I’m claiming?
Yes, Noah, that’s is. I sincerely believe that since Frank Miller wrote that about OccupyWall Street we tend to associate his work with all kinds of negative things. Including misogyny. I must say that I’ve never seen that in his work, and certainly not in DK2. All his work is full of strong women, who sometimes dominate (not always, but often) men. Elektra, Casey, Martha Washington, Lara, etc. That’s my point.
“Raging Bull is about showing that a fascination with violence is a fascination with violence”
or is about the cathartic function of violence in fiction, in tragedy. Aristotle’s Poetics on catharsis, etc.
Ah, okay, I see.
I think Miller’s obsessed with fetishized strong women. I think that’s really hard to separate from his worship of power, which also ends up almost inevitably as a worship of manliness. His women are exciting because they’re more manly than men, which can be fun because they get flipped by stronger men, or can function as a kind of excitement in itself — possibly because they’re ultimately controlled by the author himself, yes? If Superman doesn’t have Lara as phallus, then Miller himself does. (That works for Elektra too, I think, who’s barely a character in her own graphic novel; she functions more as a magic totem that turns the tough guy into an even bigger dick….)
I think there are exceptions; again, Robin in DK is really notable for not being misogynist, and for just generally being a great character.
Gordon’s replacement as Commissioner is also a pretty interesting female character in DKR.
Yes! And Gordon’s love interest in Year One is an actual person as well.
Miller’s comments on Occupy Wall Street fit in pretty well with all of his work, don’t they? He’s always been into making fun of hippy/liberal types as squishy, ineffectual clowns living in a make-believe world. And I guess that’s largely true, particularly with regard to Hollywood liberals. But his “gritty, realistic” take on the world is more ridiculous than anything floating around in the heads of Barbara Streisand and her friends. In the Electra book, he makes fun of Ken Wind’s sappy appeals to nostalgia for “John, Martin, and Bobby,” but it doesn’t occur to him that jerking off to fantasies about killer ninja women might be considered a tad silly as well. In The Dark Knight Returns, he scoffs at the idea that street criminals are victims, but when it comes to portraying street criminals himself, the best he can come up with is an interracial gang of science-fiction “mutants.” Nowadays, he’s attacking OWS’s hippie idealism while clinging to the absurd fantasy of Islam vs. The West as another WWII. There’s a saying, “A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged,” but Miller doesn’t seem like he’s been mugged so much as he’s read a bunch of Mike Hammer novels and seen a lot of Dirty Harry movies.
(On the other hand, I really like the way he draws. Also, I talked to him for several minutes about 10 years ago, and he was extremely nice to me.)
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Pepo Pérez says:
…I sincerely believe that since Frank Miller wrote that about OccupyWall Street we tend to associate his work with all kinds of negative things. Including misogyny. I must say that I’ve never seen that in his work, and certainly not in DK2. All his work is full of strong women, who sometimes dominate (not always, but often) men. Elektra, Casey, Martha Washington, Lara, etc. That’s my point.
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Well put!
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…I think Miller’s obsessed with fetishized strong women.
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Yeah, if a writer — in a field massively dominated by musclebound male hero-figures — regularly features strong, courageous heroines, then let’s poison this action by saying he’s “obsessed”; denigrate the characters by saying they’re “fetishized.”
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I think that’s really hard to separate from his worship of power…
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So Miller, by featuring stalwart, brave protagonists who may get beaten down but persevere against villains, is showing he “worships power.”
In what way is he then different from any other pulp-type writer like Lester Dent (creator of Doc Savage), Walter Gibson (“The Shadow”), Mickey Spillane (Mike Hammer)? Or whoever came up with Hercules, Gilgamesh?
Rather than the “worship of power” being a pathology that is pandemic among action-adventure fictioneers, is it not the nature of the genre that demands such protagonists?
Let us imagine the unthrilling adventures of the “Passive Resister,” not struggling against his bonds, as he watches the villain (though he would never characterize him in that fashion; it would be too “judgmental”) about to lower PR’s paramour into a vat of acid: “No matter what you do to us, you can’t make me…hate you!”
Or, “Gandhi versus the Nazis!”; advising Europe,
“I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions…
“If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourselves, man, woman and child to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them.”
And telling Germany’s Jews:
“…suffering voluntarily undergone will bring [Jews] an inner strength and joy….if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving..to the godfearing death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep.”
Or, as depicted by Tim Kreider: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/132/liberalsvstheempire2.jpg/sr=1
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…which also ends up almost inevitably as a worship of manliness. His women are exciting because they’re more manly than men…
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Because, to follow your argument, being physically strong and skilled at fighting is “manly”; exclusively the province of males.
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…I think there are exceptions; again, Robin in DK is really notable for not being misogynist…
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Because regularly featuring strong, courageous heroines shows that a creator hates women: “See, he’s obsessed with them! And, they’re fetishized! Case closed!”
Mike, the heroines are insistently sexualized and presented as dominatrixes. Elektra isn’t Buffy, much less Elizabeth Bennett. Wonder Woman talking about how she wants Superman to make her his prize is, again, James Bond territory.
He does have some interesting female characters. But his default setting is sexualized strong women who are there to dramatize the even-more-phallic machismo of the male hero.
Superman has essentially been castrated by Batman, and Wonder Woman heals him; their titanic bout of sex is hardly presented as unequal oppression.
She heals him by being the phallus, which he reattaches.
She’s there to be part of his psychodrama, not to be a character in her own right.
I forgot what an unapologetic Freudian you are!
” I sincerely believe that since Frank Miller wrote that about OccupyWall Street we tend to associate his work with all kinds of negative things.”
Peppo, Miller was being accused of misogyny long before Occupy Wallstreet. This webcomic for example from 2006:
http://www.shortpacked.com/2006/comic/book-2-pulls-the-drama-tag/06-the-drama-tag/whores/
Alex, that’s more feminist Lacanians I’m channeling there, I think.
Fortunately, Miller’s work is open enough to allow different readings.
“Elektra: Assassin provides an excellent illustration of how the combination of image and text provides for a deeply layered feminist reading of the metaphysics of sexual difference” (Renée Tobe)
http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v3_1/tobe/
Well, anything allows for different readings. That’s the way art works; it’s not a particular compliment to Miller (though I personally love the Elektra graphic novel).
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Noah Berlatsky says:
She heals [Superman] by being the phallus, which he reattaches.
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So (as per your earlier arguments) for a woman to be physically strong and skilled at fighting is “manly”; exclusively the province of males.
And now, if a woman is forcefully, emphatically sexual…she’s a phallus!
At least there’s some “real women” out there:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wu9pHcfyoBY/TWUs9n3f8vI/AAAAAAAAAho/WgeGfkEvvnA/s1600/housewife3.jpg
http://motifmagazine.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/retro-housewife.jpg
Nope. Didn’t say any of those things.
She’s a phallus because potency is defined as owning her, not necessarily because she’s sexualized.
And it’s perfectly powerful to depict a strong woman who isn’t masculinized. For an example,you might look at the Marston/Peter WW, which nobody seems to want to talk about, but which I included examples of in the damn post.
As I see it, is Wonder Woman who owns Superman in DK2, and not vice versa. She causes him to do exactly what she wants to do it. Superman is in fact a puppet throughout DK2, and someone who just change thanks to the women. Without WW Superman didn’t regain his strength and youth. You say the phallus, but that’s just one psychoanalytic reading —others are possible. I say that she brings back him to life: without her, he had continued as a pathetic (super)human ruin. And without Lara, he hadn’t done anything finally.
“Well, anything allows for different readings. That’s the way art works”
Really? Do you really may have different interpretations of the panels from Marston / Peter ‘s WW? Or rather it is unambiguous pedagogic discourse for young women, feminist cautionary tales in which “Steve does the right thing” at the end, as you observed well ? Important: I don’t say this as criticism, just as observation. I really like the Marston / Peter ‘s WW, but despite Marston was a sophisticated and advanced intellectual, here we talk about comic books for kids, with clear messages that don’t allow double readings. Marston used his comics confessedly as a teaching tool for his readers, that is, kids, girls. Maybe that can answer why we have here 28 comments (for now) discussing what it means Superman’s relationship with women in DK2, but no one has discussed what means the relation (of power, of course, as in 99% of comic book superhero, as I said) between Marston’s WW and his beloved Steve. There is nothing to discuss: the message was clear.
For me it’s pretty clear that you value as the upper the Marston / Peter ‘s WW, but that’s just my opinion. And I think also you appreciate as superior because Marston / Peter ‘s WW “says the right thing”, i.e., launches feminist messages clear enough to not mislead anyone. I think, without neglecting at all the Marston / Peter ‘s WW, as ‘art’ and not as a teaching tool for children, DK2 allows many more readings. What some call before “inconsistency” I call ambiguity and a work open to multiple readings. A work closer to what I consider art —at least as we understand modern art.
In short, not everything allows for different readings, quite the contrary. Marston / Peter ‘s WW expresses an educational message to kids (girls) loud and clear without ambiguity. “No man can boss an amazon”, Wonder Woman says in the panels you’ve chosen from Sensation Comics # 46. “But Steve’s new strength is thrilling!”, she thinks. “I don’t know —It’s sort of thrilling. But —Isn’t it more fun to make the man obey?”
Yes, indeed. It’s more fun. Girls of 1945, get the message.
I repeat, I like those old comics. But educating children through comic books is very different from what Miller is doing in 2001 with DK2.
(sorry for my mistakes in this text, I’m not native English speaker, as is clear)
This brings me to another question I want to mention. Sorry to quote you again, Noah:
“Well, anything allows for different readings. That’s the way art works; it’s not a particular compliment to Miller (though I personally love the Elektra graphic novel)”
But comic books, at least until quite recently, tended not to allow many different readings, with some exceptions (such as Miller and others). In, say, 1981-1983-1984 comic books were not yet exactly works of open meaning. I mean the comic book industry, the mainstream, of course —where Miller did his job. Not, say, alternative comics like Love & Rockets.
The same goes with strong female characters: in 1981 (Elektra appears), 1983 (Casey from Ronin) or 1986 (Elektra Assassin), they were still the exception in comic books. So yes, I think we should recognize some merit to Miller. However much you dislike DK2 (I like), however much we dislike Holy Terror (which actually I don’t like).
Yeah…I’ve recently written 60,000 words plus on Marston/Peter, including 20,000 words on a single comic. That includes considering multiple interpretations of their entire oeuvre, of individual issues, and of single panels. I would say that there is much, much, much more ambiguity and richness in those children’s comics than in the work of Frank Miller, who I quite like, but who is not actually much for subtlety.
Marston/Peter do have feminist messages, and I like them for it…but those feminist messages aren’t either schematic or simple. Among other things, the comics are really daringly, enthusiastically committed to the idea that little girls (and boys too) are sexual beings. In this comic,there’s the fact that WW is tempted by the thought of Steve topping her; there’s the hint that Steve is in fact a woman when he’s topping; there’s the sexual tension between Steve and the evil villain…which is presented as rivalry with WW, which suggests sexual tension between WW and the evil villainness. With its lesbianism, its transvestism, and its B&D, I’d say the kids comic is a lot more sexually adventurous than the supposedly more adult fare Miller’s putting out — which is pretty much just de rigeur hetero fetishism with lots of homosocial jockeying between men, just like you get in any pulp comic.
Basically throughout WW you can read the comics as whimsical kids tales or as sexual fever dreams. Those interpretations are both pretty clearly intentional, and they interact and bounce off each other in weird and intricate ways. Miller’s tone is a lot more stable — he’s writing hard-boiled and he always writes hard-boiled. There’s interesting issues within that — the political critique in DK is pretty interesting and can be taken various ways, for example — but it’s a lot more predictable than Marston/Peter. Which is why you’re able to see the ambiguity there and not in WW, I’d argue; not because WW is less ambiguous, but because the ambiguity is original enough and unexpected enough that you don’t know how to look for it.
The idea that didactic art is simpler or less rich is something that George Bernard Shaw would certainly argue with. And, you know, Frank Miller is really quite ideological. It’s one of the things I like about him; much more fun than most superhero comics which don’t have anything to say.
In terms of Miller…I think you’re getting hung up on/confused with the issue of intentionality. Yes, of course WW is going what she “wants.” But Miller decided what she wants, right? The issue is that what she wants is to be part of Superman’s psychodrama and to be taken and dominated. Not that B&D play is inherently unfeminist, because it isn’t, but Miller just doesn’t seem to give a poop about her except as a chit in the male story. The point is at least in part that what she is allowed to want, or how she’s allowed to want it, is really limited and stereotypical.
Similarly, in Elektra, Elektra “wants” to have sex with the narrator — but why? There isn’t an internal reason because she’s never really a character; she’s just a fantasy fetish object who takes part in Miller/the narrator’s sex play because sex play with tough women is hot. She comes across as a plot device, not a person…so talking about what she wants or doesn’t seems like it mostly misses the point.
Characters like Robin and the police commissioner in DK actually get to be real people and are much more interesting for it…
Oh, and speaking of children’s comics, the girls in Peanuts have infinitely more subtlety and nuance than anyone in Frank Miller’s work (or in Marston/Peter’s, for that matter.) FWIW.
…which was a syndicate strip that read the whole family, not comic books aimed specifically at children. Anyway, I never meant that works for children don’t allow double reading in general, and leave aside the issue of ‘art’, which is certainly complex and will take us to discuss other topics far removed from the post. I was referring specifically to this case, these panels from Sensation Comics, from a comic that was designed specifically as an educational tool. I will not discuss the qualities of Marston / Peter ‘s WW just because I think it has many and yes, you’re right, sometimes presents ambiguities (yes again, quite unusual for a comic book of its time). Just wanted to say that in terms of message, is closed and pedagogical in this case. “Oh, Steve! I do like you just as you are now!”, says WW at the end of the Marston story.
BTW,
“His women are exciting because they’re more manly than men, which can be fun because they get flipped by stronger men, or can function as a kind of excitement in itself — possibly because they’re ultimately controlled by the author himself, yes? If Superman doesn’t have Lara as phallus, then Miller himself does”
OK, if so —I accept your phallocratic hypothesis to see where it leads—, the same goes for Marston’s WW, written by a man who liked women. It seems that Marston’s WW act “on their own” as opposed to Miller’s WW, but both were written by a man, obviously.
Once again: “No man can boss an amazon”, Wonder Woman says in Sensation Comics # 46. “But Steve’s new strength is thrilling!”, she thinks. “I don’t know —It’s sort of thrilling. But —Isn’t it more fun to make the man obey?” (that is exactly what Lara does in DK2. Make the man obey, the Superman. Like in Marton’s WW, but without the explicit, educational messages. Instead, the man –Superman– asks the woman –Lara– at the end “what shall we do with our planet, Lara?”, and she –the woman, not man– has the last word on the page of DK2: she says nothing. The woman represents the reader vicariously, not the man).
Back to Marston’s WW: “No, I won’t, Steve! —I discovered that I can never love a dominant man who’s stronger than I am!” If Steve doesn’t have WW as phallus… then Marston himself does.
Just to add to the psychic briar patch…Lara isn’t just the name of Supes’ daughter, but of his MOTHER as well.
Yes…it’s possible to read Wonder Woman as fetish and as phallus, and people have certainly done that (because, like I said, multiple readings are always possible).
I’d argue that the difference, again, is that Marston specifically rejects a phallocentric economy. He does that in a lot of ways, most especially by insisting that giving up power is the truest power and the truest love. Wonder Woman simply isn’t a power fantasy the way that DK2 and all of Miller’s work is because it explicitly and repeatedly rejects power and the phallus.
I think it makes much more sense to see Wonder Woman as a *yannic* symbol. Marston actually talks about her in those terms; he refers to the lasso as a symbol of feminine power in some of his writing…and of course it’s an encircling space rather than a a rigid pole. In other words, Marston has Wonder Woman, which gives him the vagina — which makes him a woman or the mother, not a father with the phallus.
Ok, Noah, thanks for your patience. It has been a pleasure.
Well, thanks for commenting! I hope I haven’t been too cranky; I’m perhaps overly invested in the Marston/Peter run at the moment since I’m writing about it all the time….
Oh, and just wanted to say…I don’t actually dislike DK2. It’s a ridiculous mess, but it’s entertaining to see Miller descend so enthusiastically into self-parody.
I keep “coming to the party” too late here; even on weekends, too busy with helping around the house to finish and post the argument. Anyway, here goes:
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pallas says:
Peppo, Miller was being accused of misogyny long before Occupy Wallstreet. This webcomic for example from 2006:
http://www.shortpacked.com/2006/comic/book-2-pulls-the-drama-tag/06-the-drama-tag/whores/
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Who needs to bother with trials, weighing evidence? A lying, distorted accusation — “worthy” of Fox News — in a webcomic is all that’s needed to condemn. Because the accusation is the reality.
With the target naturally depicted as shamefaced with guilt; unable to come up with any of the many, many non-murdered-prostitute characters he’s created.
And no, I’m no particular fan of Miller; but if we’re going to accuse someone, how about making the charges more “reality-based,” instead of coming at them from an ideologically-slanted perspective?
I’d certainly go along with his depictions of women frequently being stereotypes, exploitative.
But that’s not outrageous enough for the type of feminists we keep hearing from, who bear the same relation to the sensible strivers for equal rights that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson do to mainstream Christians.
No, Miller must be said to be guilty of hating women.
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Mike Hunter says:
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Noah Berlatsky says:
She heals [Superman] by being the phallus, which he reattaches.
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So (as per your earlier arguments) for a woman to be physically strong and skilled at fighting is “manly”; exclusively the province of males.
And now, if a woman is forcefully, emphatically sexual…she’s a phallus!
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Nope. Didn’t say any of those things.
She’s a phallus because potency is defined as owning her, not necessarily because she’s sexualized.
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(????) So if Superman has sex with WW, that means he owns her? Guess this is where “feminist Lacanianism” and the attitudes regarding male/female relations of the Taliban meet.
And for a male to “possess” a strong, beautiful woman means that all “trophy wives” are really…dicks?
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And it’s perfectly powerful to depict a strong woman who isn’t masculinized. For an example,you might look at the Marston/Peter WW…
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So you think, because Miller’s heroines don’t have bee-stung lips, carefully coiffed hair, and graceful, sylphlike physiques (like the Marston/Peter WW), therefore they’re “masculinized”?
I’m reminded of back in the 60’s, people saying of some thoroughly masculine rock stars, simply because they had long hair, “I can’t tell if that’s a boy or a girl!”
Personally, I have a far more flexible idea of what constitutes womanliness.
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…which nobody seems to want to talk about, but which I included examples of in the damn post.
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I was ignoring the subject ’cause it was too amusing how you were going on and on condemning Miller as being “obsessed with fetishized strong women,” who are “presented as dominatrixes,” while giving a pass on all that in Marston’s “Wonder Woman.”
And sure, Marston’s a vastly more thoughtful writer, theorist, and thinker than Miller. (Which doesn’t take much doing.) But he’s also far more loony, too; his eccentric ideology leading him down ever more convoluted paths into la-la land.
To go back to this point:
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[Miller’s WW] heals [Superman] by being the phallus, which he reattaches.
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Well, let’s look at a similar situation, handled with telling differences.
In the Marston/Peter WW, Steve Trevor is wounded and, in her guise as a nurse — thoroughly within the gender roles of the time — Wonder Woman nurturingly tends to him. And, as those panels you helpfully provided show, she wants him to stay weaker than she is.
(Indeed, when it comes to childrearing, it turns out that being overly protective, doing everything for one’s children, is as psychologically damaging as abusiveness.)
While in the Miller WW sequence, Superman’s been badly beaten, dispirited. Thoroughly in character of Miller’s Wonder Woman as a serious warrior, rather than cooing “Poor baby! Let me kiss the boo-boo and make it better!”, she does the “tough love” approach, demanding he find the strength remaining within him. It sure wouldn’t work for everybody, but doesn’t this show — even if in a harsh fashion — more respect?
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She’s there to be part of his psychodrama, not to be a character in her own right.
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She sure came across as a powerful, vivid character in her own right to me and I suspect some others.
But, through the perception of “feminist Lacanianism,” she is merely a “phallus,” “masculinized,” “part of [Superman’s] psychodrama.” (With friends like these…)
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…the [Marston/Peter] comics are really daringly, enthusiastically committed to the idea that little girls (and boys too) are sexual beings.
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Oh? Where do the stories show children as being sexual?
That there are sexual undertones and themes to the stories doesn’t mean that the creators were deliberately aiming them to those masses of lustfulness, prepubescent kids.
There definitely where plenty of older, more sexually mature readers of the comic. With the sillier fantasy stuff to delight the youngsters, the sexual undertones and philosophic arguments aimed at older readers. (Just like Shakespeare inserted cornball puns in his plays to amuse the less-educated in the audience.)
Oy.
Mike, Pepo said accusations of misogyny post-date the occupy wall street nonsense. The reply was that they pre-date it. No one said he should be hanged for it; just that it’s a long standing point that isn’t based on Miller’s latter-day politics.
And he does write prostitutes an awful lot.
Superman doesn’t own WW because they have sex. He owns WW by having sex with her…because the comic says that that’s how sex is to be defined! WW defines her relationship with him as one in which she is the prize. In the comic book. It says that. I didn’t make it up.
Not reading the whole thing…but towards the bottom…there are several Marston/Peter comics where children are presented as taking part in bondage games. The most spectacular is Sensation Comics 31, where adults turn into children and children turn into adults and everybody is spanking and tying up and obeying everyone. But more broadly, the comics are in fact for kids and encourage everyone who reads them to identify with/take part in eroticized dominance/submission.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Mike, Pepo said accusations of misogyny post-date the occupy wall street nonsense. The reply was that they pre-date it. No one said he should be hanged for it; just that it’s a long standing point that isn’t based on Miller’s latter-day politics.
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And my point was, that the accusations themselves were utter nonsense. Not to mention that…
Calling “viciously racist” some comics artist in the 30s or 40s drawing blacks with blubber lips (the noxious practice at the time) thereby inflates the moral outrage and righteous pose of the accuser. Never mind that therefore “devalues the currency”; what are you going to call some KKK scum who castrate and lynch a hapless black man? In reality? “Very viciously racist”?
Likewise, to be calling “woman haters” any creator who uses exploitative stereotypes, whose heroes are handsomely hunky and heroines curvaceously beautiful, whose women characters are far more often prostitutes that are the statistical norm — which is the “default setting” of mass entertainment — is not only hysterically inaccurate, but likewise “devalues the currency” of this accusation.
So, whether you’re a frothing member of the Taliban who wants women to be forbidden education r any career other than tending to husband and children, should be beaten if dressed “immodestly” or daring to go around in public without some male keeping her in tow, should be stoned to death if she behaves “immorally”…
…or if you’re some schlockmeister whose women are frequently sex-object stereotypes, you’re ALL “mysogynists”. Like Joe McCarthy finding a Commie behind every bushel-basket, some “feminists” froth over 99% of the male gender supposedly being woman-haters.
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Superman doesn’t own WW because they have sex. He owns WW by having sex with her…because the comic says that that’s how sex is to be defined! WW defines her relationship with him as one in which she is the prize. In the comic book. It says that. I didn’t make it up.
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I dug up and read all of “The Dark Knight Strikes Again” last night (for which I deserve a medal; what an unholy mess, though brilliant in spots, and more politically-complex than would be expected of the “older Al Capp” Frank Miller).
And throughout, Wonder Woman and Superman are called “lovers,” and have been so for a long time.
Are you really, seriously arguing that any incarnation of Wonder Woman (much less this one) would allow herself to become, or be considered, a piece of property? Or, that any incarnation of Superman (and Miller’s treatment, as with WW, hardly strays from the DC “model”) would treat or consider a woman thus? From dictionary.com:
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prize
1. a reward for victory or superiority, as in a contest or competition.
2. something that is won in a lottery or the like.
3. anything striven for, worth striving for, or much valued.
4. something seized or captured, especially an enemy’s ship and cargo captured at sea in wartime.
5. the act of taking or capturing, especially a ship at sea.
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If not looking at that word through “wanting to condemn Frank Miller” eyes, and looking at the actual characters and their relationship in the book, clearly the love and physical affections of Wonder Woman are to Superman, something “striven for, worth striving for, or much valued.”
In the 1989 “Miracleman” #16 ( http://miraclemen.info/comics/miracleman/miracleman-16/ ; DK2 published November 2001 – July 2002), there is a “lovemaking between superheroes” sequence, all in flight. Miracleman moves to embrace Miraclewoman; she makes to accept, then pushes him away. He’s startled, and she flies off, clearly intending him to pursue her. He flies after her, the pursuit watched by fascinated humans below, ’til he catches up to her. Mid-air coupling ensues, climaxed by…fireworks!
Could this not be fairly described as MM “catching” MW, “claiming her as a prize”? Yet rather than the military conquest of a piece of property, be part of vigorous love-play, as animals will “play-fight” with each other?
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…there are several Marston/Peter comics where children are presented as taking part in bondage games.
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Yikes!
“Calling “viciously racist” some comics artist in the 30s or 40s drawing blacks with blubber lips (the noxious practice at the time) thereby inflates the moral outrage and righteous pose of the accuser. ”
I’m sorry, I don’t necessarily agree with that. The society of that time was in fact viciously racist. Folks who participated in racism at that time were in fact drawing viciously racist stereotypes (which is not necessarily the same thing as being viciously racist themselves.)
I don’t think it’s helpful to pretend that the KKK are the only ones who can be viciously racist.
Marston/Peter’s Wonder Woman #19, in which Africans are portrayed as Nazis, was, for example, viciously racist. As a result, I think it’s probably the absolute worst thing they did. It’s really vile.
So, if some schmucks think that women ought to stay at home and have babies, or just see them as sex objects to fulfill their needs rather than full-fledged human beings, they are just as “viciously sexist” as the Taliban “morality police,” who beat women for dressing “immodestly,” stone them to death for being “immoral”?
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…I don’t think it’s helpful to pretend that the KKK are the only ones who can be viciously racist.
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Did I say that? Nope; merely maintained that there are different degrees of racism; that some unenlightened person might not persecute or be violent towards blacks, yet still consider them “not quite capable” in some ways.
(Taking a plane in an African airline to the “Thrilla in Manila,” Muhammed Ali was surprised by the all-black flight crew. He looked for a door to the chamber where “they kept the white man for emergencies.”)
…And others think they’re brutal animals, who can’t be trusted around guns or white women.
So, whether it’s a buck-toothed cartoon Chinese in “Blackhawk”: http://images.wikia.com/marvel_dc/images/2/24/Chop_Chop_Earth-X.png …
…or the rape, torture, and mass murder by the Japanese military of hundreds of thousands of Chinese in the Nanking Massacre ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre , http://www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/genocide/nanking.htm )…
…they all show “vicious racism”?
Between the Antebellum South, with blacks as property, to be sold or killed at their masters’ pleasure, and the 50s South, where they had to sit on the back of the bus and drink from separate drinking fountains, there’s no difference?
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I wanted to call this list ‘Half A Dozen Racist Disney Songs’, but for numerous reasons I couldn’t. Firstly, I could only think of five examples of racism in Disney songs. Secondly, some of them are, for lack of better phrasing, merely ambiguously racist. That is to say that there’s obvious racism – the sort your bitter widower grandfather throws at the nurses in his old folk’s home, and then there’s ambiguous racism, which is more akin to locking your car door when a black man walks past. “What? This? I just… I just leaned on the button by accident…”
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http://www.wewritelists.com/?p=91
“Are there ‘degrees’ of racism??”: http://www.depravedmindset.com/2011/05/are-there-degrees-of-racism.html
There are degrees of racism. The Imp and Ebony White qualify as vicious, though.
Glad we agree there are “degrees of racism”!
However…
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/37/Tales_of_the_Jungle_Imps_-_october_4_1903_-_Cincinnati_Enquirer.jpg/250px-Tales_of_the_Jungle_Imps_-_october_4_1903_-_Cincinnati_Enquirer.jpg
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_FVXCQBs2iUU/S_lP_fkFMsI/AAAAAAAACog/rvOhTb4iOSA/s1600/ebony.jpg
https://hoodedutilitarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Ebony-White.jpg
I must be awfully insensitive. ‘Cause while the above are condescending, insultingly stereotypical, I only see those below as “vicious.” Because the former are sympathetic characters; while the latter are hate-filled, depict the stereotyped figure as malevolent:
http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/images/sturmer/sturm09.jpg
http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/files/2009/11/Nazi_poster_Jew_Der_Sturmer_antisemitism_juutalaisvainot-bloodlibel_Wandering_Jew_propaganda_61.jpg
http://brainz.org/10-most-xenophobic-pieces-anti-japanese-wartime-propaganda/
Believe it or not, here’s a real-life Ebony White: http://www.thenaturalmusclenetwork.com/ocb/Contests/2008/IndianapolisIN2/EbonyWhite.jpg .
As per an earlier argument; where I see a beautiful woman with muscles, others (*ahem!*) would see one that’s “masculinized, “more manly than men”…
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Noah Berlatsky says:
The point for me with Frank Miller is that it’s always very much about power. Which he likes a lot, and which he invariably associates with goodness or rightness.
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Oh? Aren’t his villains all pretty damn powerful?
And in these genre action-adventure pieces, you want that Miller’s heroes and heroines should be powerless, ineffective wimps?
Else someone will read all manner of ickiness into it: “with Frank Miller… it’s always very much about power.”
Is there a statement of sorts in the askew scans?
You want a powerful antagonist to show that the hero is more powerful. Saying that you’ve got two powerful beings clashing is not an effective rebuttal to the claim that he’s obsessed with power.
Nope. Just what I could find online.
“Obsessed with power” is a little too vague. You can just as well claim that Lillian Hellman or Ernest Hemingway were “obsessed with power”.
Haven’t read any Hellman, but I think the charge works fine for Hemingway. I don’t have any trouble imagining him writing crappy superhero comics instead of crappy prose.
“If creators want Wonder Woman to be special, they need to make her special. Miller — and the vast majority of people who have worked on the character since Marston/Peter — haven’t bothered.”
Most of the fans agree.
There’s a reason that a few of the writers who’ve worked on Wonder Woman are usually singled out as the “good ones”, and the rest range from politely ignored to openly insulted. It’s usually the same few writers, too: after Marston/Peter, the names mentioned are George Perez, sometimes John Byrne, sometimes George Rucka, usually the Simonsons (but everyone complains that they only got to do fill-ins), Gail Simone, and lately Azzarello.
And everyone likes the TV series with Lynda Carter. Probably because in some undefinable sense she “got the character right”.
I’ve spent a while working out why Wonder Woman is so frequently written *badly* (e.g. by Frank Miller). I don’t think it’s hard to write Wonder Woman well: she’s not a complicated concept. Another characters who fits the same trope is Ozma of Oz.
But to write such characters correctly you have to throw away a lot of the baggage (tropes, habits of thinking) which our culture carries, and a lot of writers lean on that baggage.
First you have to toss the male supremicism — female supremicism will work, and there *is* a set of tropes for it, but most people can’t write them right. Second, you have to stay away from the angst which has been popular since the 1960s, since WW is a more-perfect-than-life character. (This second problem afflicts Superman writers too). Apparently it’s extremely hard to find a writer who is not a male supremacist *AND* not angsty as all hell. I’m surprised at how hard it is to find such a writer.
I don’t quite agree with all of that…but I think your point about the angst is on the money. Ben Saunders in his book Do The Gods Wear Capes? points out that Wonder Woman is a pretty happy character, and that that contrasts sharply with most recent successful superheroines (like Buffy.)
Regarding my comment about Ozma of Oz:
It is worth noting that L. Frank Baum was espousing essentially the same sort of “women should run the world” ideas which Marston was.
This has been independently documented, and you can find the essays on it by Googling. All the men in the Oz books are incompetent to lead, and are best and happiest if they simply submit to the wise rule of wise women. The women aren’t all fit to lead either, but some of them are fit to lead, and they become Princesses and similar roles. They are fit to lead *because* they are kind and loving towards their subjects *and* wise and thoughtful — this sort of description of Ozma, Dorothy, and Glinda is repeated over and over and over again in Baum’s 14 books.
I suppose not that many people are fans of both Oz and Wonder Woman, because I’m not aware of the similarity being mentioned anywhere else.
Obviously this female supremicist idea that women are somehow inherently better at running things isn’t *true*, and that’s a good argument for not repeating this idea unmodified.
Here’s the problem: this idea is a major theme of Marston-era WW. In order to engage with this theme and alter it, respond to it, etc., you have to actually understand it first. I may be one of the few people to have read enough of the literature written by men who believed in female supremacy to know how the tropes for it *work*. Most of the WW writers clearly just didn’t get it. I think it’s hard to reimagine something if you don’t understand what it originally was.
Gail Simone did a pretty good job, IMNSHO, while removing the more ridiculous gender-essentialism: her Wonder Woman is still trying to present the way they did things on Paradise Island as generally a better societal role model than “Man’s World”, but is not claiming that women are *inherently* going to be better. Diana’s attempt to induct Tom Tresser as an Amazon was a very interesting writing move which I respected, one which is making a serious attempt to engage with the original themes of the source material while rejecting the gender essentialism in it.
Most WW writers just seem like they haven’t been paying attention at all; they simply aren’t engaging with the original themes. Frank Miller just writes whatever the hell he always writes, for example.
There are very few non-angsty, better-than-real heroes with *leadership* these days. Superman and Wonder Woman are two of them. But there are actually quite a lot of such *male* heroes in our culture. Wonder Woman has the added aspect of being female — and there’s a very long tradition in our culture of prohibiting women from being powerful, happy, better-than-realistic leaders. I can think of other examples from literature: but the first *three* I can think of are all from the Oz books!
At least until after 1975, it seems to have required a female supremicist attitude to counteract the prevailing “men are better leaders than women” idea which is buried somewhere in our societal subconscious.
There are very few women allowed to be unequivocally good (non-angsty) leaders in literature. (I can think of four or five more, all in books written after 1975.) There are even fewer in illustrated literature, and even fewer in long-running series. There are essentially none other than WW in comics (a few come close, but none are allowed to have the godlike perfection), and there are essentially none in movies. (Whereas there are still a fairly large number of male lead parts like this in movies.)
There are also very few such female characters on TV, and this has been true forever. To the credit of the writers of Star Trek: Voyager, they acted as if Janeway was this better-than-realistic female leader — to their discredit, the scripts were godawful, and so Janeway generally did awful, obviously wrong things and all the cast subsequently claimed that she’d made great decisions, which made that attempt really not work.
So there’s a sense in which Wonder Woman really is a special character — but she *shouldn’t be*. The concept is simple, and there *should* be a dozen characters like that. In addition to Superman, we have near-copies in the form of Captain Marvel (both of them!), the original Green Lantern, and a dozen more, all dating from the 30s and 40s. And for female characters exhibiting the same better-than-realistic leadership? We have Wonder Woman.
And when a comics writer tries to create a new female character who exhibits the same traits, some other jackass writer will go and “break them”, or will make them make big mistakes and have to be “educated” by a male character, or will decide that it’s “unrealistic” for a female character to be more powerful than a male character, or will just kill the character for a plot point, or some other sexist bullcrap! This has been going on for decades, though I think it’s gotten slightly better since 2000.
Of course, the jackass writers have done this to Wonder Woman too, but the original version is stamped indelibly in so many heads that they can’t make it stick with Wonder Woman, and the jackass writers usually *can* make their character-trashing stick with any new character.
There’s really a lobby trying to trash strong female characters, which is why Wonder Woman is the only survivor of her type in comics. You can tell that there’s a lobby doing this from the sheer number of idiots who desperately and publicly wanted “Amazons Attack” to remain part of canon. (But had no problem with the decanonization of all the other originally-canon stories which were declared “imaginary” over the last 80 years.)
So Wonder Woman is special. She shouldn’t be. But she is special, because of a culture which is preventing us from creating more characters who are similar to her, and which is trashing attempts to create such characters.
Like William Moulton Marston, I hope to see a day when she isn’t special.
(Whew. That ended up as a long essay.)
That’s interesting about Oz. The wizard seems like he sort of undermines it to some extent maybe, though. He’s revealed to not be a great wizard, but he does sort of solve everyone’s problems in a way that men don’t really in Marston/Peter comics.
There is the gender swap with Ozma, though, which is very Marston. Did Baum ever write positively about matriarchy outside the Oz books?
“Did Baum ever write positively about matriarchy outside the Oz books?”
Yes, he did. I assume you meant “outside his fiction”, and Baum said such things in some of his letters. I don’t have the references on me, but you can probably find them online.
The pro-matriarchy attitude is evident in all of Baum’s non-Oz fiction that I’ve read as well. The Wizard is probably the strongest male character in the stories, but remember that it’s very clear that he should *not* lead, even though he’s smart and helpful; the first book involves overthrowing him by revealing his fundamental phoniness! In the second book, he’s retconned as an actual villain! In the fourth book, he’s brought back as a good guy… and takes orders from Dorothy, who is much younger than him! Upon arriving in Oz again, he renounces all claims to power and swears loyalty to Ozma!
There are a few other similar male characters who are in some important ways competent and helpful (Cap’n Bill, the Shaggy Man), but they’re still explicitly disqualified from leadership. I guess there’s Baum’s version of Santa Claus, but even he seems to be someone you wouldn’t want to take instruction from. There’s clearly a valuable role for men in Baum’s utopia, it just isn’t a *leadership* role.
On the other extreme we have Button-Bright; I don’t think Marston ever wrote a man or boy who was that ineffectual! I’m not sure anyone ever did!
(There may be “it’s OK for men to run things” exceptions in some of the non-Oz books which I haven’t read, since I never did get to The Master Key, which apparently has an actual male protagonist.)
If you’re wondering where Baum got his ideas from — Baum’s mother was heavily involved in First Wave Women’s Liberation, and as you may know that had a significant branch which claimed “if women can run things, we will end war, end world hunger, etc.” The political statements advocating power for women from that period are fun to read, but they can also be heartbreakingly naive. Stuff like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother%27s_Day_Proclamation
The business with Ozma is quite spectacular in the open female supremacism. Not only is the competent, smart boy revealed to have been really a girl all along — but when he says he doesn’t want to be a girl, he’s told “You’ll get over that. Being a girl is inherently better, so of course you’ll prefer it.” !!!!
Ahhh…I did know Baum was involved in various progressive movements, and I did know about what I guess you might call women’s purity feminism, but I hadn’t put that together.
This is really fascinating. I hadn’t really put Marston in the context of other women’s purity feminism of the time, and I actually don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone else do that either. Marston’s obviously fairly idiosyncratic (I suspect most women’s purity feminists were not especially obsessed with bondage or sorority rituals). But still that’s a really interesting tack to think about.
Yeah, the bondage games stuff is very idiosyncratic to Marston.
A lot of the rest of Marston’s material really does fit neatly into the woman’s purity feminism tradition.
In fact, when I look at Marston’s take on bondage, I think he’s mentally trying to put it into that same tradition. It ends up being kind of funny, actually.
His version is, so often, “Oh, are we tying each other up? What jolly fun!” I think, though I may be remembering wrong, that there’s even one where someone — can’t remember whether it’s Diana or Etta or one of the Amazons — says “OK, you’ve tied me up, that was fun. Do you untie me and I tie you up now?” (And then the villain, of course, says no, and the plot continues.)
This is… not the way a lot of bondage enthusiasts mentally process bondage. It’s an unusual interpretation, though not unheard of. But it’s a way of understanding a taste for bondage which is highly compatible with the women’s purity feminism ideas.
A lot of feminists have had trouble reconciling a taste for bondage (or even the existence of other people’s taste for bondage) with their feminist philosophical beliefs, and I think we’re seeing Marston’s attempt to give a compatible interpretation.
I don’t think it’s true that WW is out of sync with the BDSM community. You should check out Lewis Call’s Bondage in Science Fiction (I think that’s the title) — he has a whole chapter on Marston/Peter and how they fit neatly into BDSM ideals.
I certainly wouldn’t claim that his views were out of sync with the BDSM community.
What I’m trying to say is, if you look at some of the details, Marston’s really going out of his way to make BDSM seem *positively wholesome*.
And this is a little out of sync with the emotional attitude towards BDSM which turns many (not all) BDSM practioners on. To put it most politely, a lot of people like to imagine that they’re doing something naughty. It is however *necessary* for Marston to view it as positively wholesome in order to square it with his women’s-purity feminism.
I think that’s right, about it being wholesome. I think there’s maybe more of that in the BDSM community currently than you’re maybe crediting though. A lot of BDSM centers consent, and there’s definitely a push to see it as normal/healthy/fun rather than dangerous or marginal. I’d say that Marston is out on one end of the BDSM community, rather than that he’s opposed to it.
Oh. I should make it clear that I actually don’t personally like all of the writers who I said are “usually singled out as the good ones”. That was an objective description of the opinions I’ve seen online.
Personally, I like Marston and I like Simone, and apart from that I can only tolerate the occasional “one-off” oddball short stories. (There are a suprising number of these which are good; several of the stories in #600, for example.) I can’t even get through Perez, though most fans seem to like his work. The deity politics had me yawning when I tried to read the Perez material, so I didn’t even try Azzarello’s run.
“I’d say that Marston is out on one end of the BDSM community, rather than that he’s opposed to it.”
Agree. That’s what I was trying to say myself.
“The business with Ozma is quite spectacular in the open female supremacism. Not only is the competent, smart boy revealed to have been really a girl all along — but when he says he doesn’t want to be a girl, he’s told “You’ll get over that. Being a girl is inherently better, so of course you’ll prefer it.”
Nathaniel, this is a fascinating take on Marvelous Land of Oz, but I just pulled up the Tip transformation scene and I disagree with your reading. The bit you are presumably referring to it this:
“”Never mind, old chap,” said the Tin Woodman, soothingly; “it don’t hurt to be a girl, I’m told; and we will all remain your faithful friends just the same. And, to be honest with you, I’ve always considered girls nicer than boys.”
“They’re just as nice, anyway,” added the Scarecrow, patting Tip affectionately upon the head.
“And they are equally good students,” proclaimed the Woggle-Bug. “I should like to become your tutor, when you are transformed into a girl again.””
If someone like Glinda, who can probably be taken as an authority figure, had made this comment about preferring girls, it would be one thing, but it seems to me Tin Woodsman’s preference for girls is hardly an authoritative one rather than the opinion of a particular character, and it’s not like everyone agrees with him.
Glinda only states that Tip is meant to be a girl, and that’s that. Tip must become a girl because he was born that way.
Glinda is actually rather cruel about the whole thing, not offering Tip a choice, but she’s vindicated when undoing the transformation is depicted as a positive thing.
Well, pallas, you’re right, it isn’t quite as aggressive as I remembered.
Glinda is pretty authoritarian about it, though, isn’t she?