Kelly Thompson had a piece a couple weeks back about Brian Azzarello’s decision to make Wonder Woman’s Amazons into lying child-murdering rapists. She points out that this is maybe possibly problematic.
Anyway, I haven’t read the issues in question, but I left a couple of comments about Marston/Peter because I can’t help myself. I thought I’d reprint them below, because, what the hell, it’s my blog. So here you go.
“The Amazons may not have been created originally to be such a thing,”
AAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!
Sorry. Deep breaths…..
William Marston, who created Wonder Woman, was a passionate, ideologically committed feminist. He believed women were better than men in just about every way — smarter, stronger, more compassionate, more fitted to rule.
The Amazons were absolutely, uncontestably, intentionally meant as feminist icons. They were meant to be feminist examples for girls and *for boys.* It is impossible to read Marston’s Wonder Woman stories and doubt this; it’s impossible to read what he wrote about the character and doubt it. There simply is no doubt. The Amazons are feminist icons now because they were meant to be feminist icons by their creator. From the very first Wonder Woman story, they were established as feminist icons.
You know how horrified you are by castrating, evil, violent Amazons preying on men? Double that. Then double it again. Then, what the hey, double it a third time. That’s how absolutely, down to his socks horrified Wiliam Marston would be to see his beloved creations used in this manner. It is a deliberate, misogynist, betrayal of his vision. Azzarello might as well dig up the man’s corpse and defecate on it.
The fact that no one — not even committed Wonder Woman fans — knows about Marston or what he wanted for his creation is yet another sign of DC’s contempt for creator’s rights. (Which is in addition to their contempt for women, of course.)
Okay…sorry. End of rant.
And a second comment.
Wow…just skimmed through this.
I think for me the point is that Wonder Woman was very consciously created as a feminist statement. You can argue about the parameters of that statement (the swimsuit? amazons on a pedestal?) and certainly it wasn’t perfect in every way (though Marston and Peter are actually pretty thoughtful and complicated — they’re take on issues of war and peace, for example, is a lot more subtle than some folks here seem to think.) But be that as it way, Wonder Woman is decidedly, definitively a feminist vision for girls *and* for boys.
That was, and remains, extremely unusual for pop culture — or, for that matter, for any culture. You just don’t see a whole lot of movies, or books, much less comics, in which (a) the woman is the hero, (b) female friendships are central to her heroism, (c) feminism is explicitly, repeatedly, and ideologically presented as the basis for her heroism.
Since Marston and Peter, there have been a lot of creators who have, in one way or another, decided that the thing to do with the character is jettison the feminism. It’s important to realize that when they do that, they betray the original vision of the character in a way which is really, to my mind, fairly despicable. If you care about creator’s rights at all, what Azzarello is doing is really problematic.
Beyond that, though, to take a character who is originally, definitively intended to be feminist, and make her ideologically anti-feminist, is a really aggressive ideological act. One of the things Marston was doing was taking a negative mythological portrayal (the Amazons) and turning it into a feminist vision. Azzarello is turning that around and changing it back into a misogynist vision. Marston did what he did because he was a committed feminist. Azzarello is doing what he is doing…because he’s a committed misogynist? Because he’s not really thinking that hard about what he’s doing? Because he’s just getting his kicks? Whatever the reason, it is, as I said, a very definite decision with very definite ideological ramifications, and he deserves to be called on them.
“He believed women were better than men in just about every way — smarter, stronger, more compassionate, more fitted to rule.”
This is without a doubt sexism. A utopia based on stereotypes of one gender is going to be sexist. (That doesn’t mean that the use of this utopia is sexist, though.) It sounds to me like Azzarello asked a few questions about why a gynocentric society is comprised solely of superpowered warrior women and came up with a solution. But I don’t see why this new direction isn’t feminist. At least, no one’s bothered to make that argument so far, just assumed that feminism precludes violence (odd, given that we’re talking about Amazons).
And your first link doesn’t work.
Charles, man, that’s just not the case. It’s simply not true that feminism has to mean gender equality. Lots of feminists argue for the superiority of women’s experience or lives. It’s an extreme position, and has certain problems, but it’s not unfeminist, and it’s not necessarily sexist, as long as it doesn’t require women to be or act a certain way, which Marston was really pretty good about not doing. (Unless you’re saying it’s sexist because it’s unfair to men, which is not an argument I think is very thoughtful or useful, myself.)
Anyway, we’ve had this argument before; and, yes, you’re still wrong.
Azzarello asked a few questions, and came up with the solution that a society of women living together must be perverted, violent, evil, and anti-men. He took an explicitly feminist vision, and said, the problem with this vision is that it’s feminist; let’s turn it into a misogynist horror movie powered by paranoid gender anxiety. So, yes, that’s not feminist, and it is misogynist. Pointing out that women are not necessarily nonviolent doesn’t change that…especially since Marston’s Amazons weren’t non-violent. They were perfectly willing to use violence; they just weren’t lying rapist murderers fulfilling male nightmare visions of gendered anxiety. I really don’t think it’s a difficult distinction to see.
Oh…and thanks for the link note; fixed it.
Just to maybe comment a little more…feminism has various strands. One is the argument for equality; that men and women should be equal. Another is an argument for the special virtues of women and women’s experience. Both are quite important, and central to feminist critiques and arguments. Marston and Peter very much emphasize the second, and it’s definitely true that this can create ideological problems — for example, it can be difficult to explain or analyze oppression when you’re committed to the idea that women are actually superior.
However, that doesn’t mean that what Marston and Peter are doing is sexist, or that it’s ideologically not feminist. It means that they’re not perfect, certainly — but what they’re doing is well within the borders of the feminist tradition — specifically in the tradition of validating women’s experiences and strength, and assuring women that their oppression does not mean that they are broken. The Amazons, specifically, also emphasize the importance of women’s relationships and of sisterhood, which are again central to feminism.
It would be possible to make a feminist critique of Marston and Peter and of the Amazons. Gale Simone made some steps in that direction I think. I don’t see Azzarello doing that. His take sounds like a pretty straightforward misogynist horror fever dream about fears of strong women and fears of women acting together. You want to explain how that’s not the case, I’d be interested to listen. But saying, “Marston and Peter are sexist too” or “women aren’t nonviolent” — that just doesn’t even begin to cut it, I’m afraid.
I’ve been considering whether or not to weigh in on this, and I suspect I’ll regret it. But here goes.
What you’ve just described as a “misogynist horror fever dream” is about two pages of the arc so far — two pages depicting the Amazons as the source of disappeared ships on the Bermuda Triangle. They have sex — depicted as primarily consensual — with men, then kill them. They sell any male children they bear (to Hesphaestus, who as it turns out is not cruel to them.)
I read it as part of Azzarello’s generally nasty outlook on life and specifically nasty outlook on Greek myths. Because it’s of a piece with reimagining Hades as a creepy child with melted candlewax for a head, and Poseidon as a hideous fish-beast, etc, and portraying every single god shown so far as a monster or a dick, I didn’t read it as specifically anti-woman. It’s just Azzarello’s cynicism.
That doesn’t in any way rebut the criticism that Azzarello is using the character in a way that would horrify Marston.
“Lots of feminists argue for the superiority of women’s experience or lives. It’s an extreme position, and has certain problems, but it’s not unfeminist”
Here, we’re in agreement. The difference is that I’m saying, yes, that’s sexist towards men. I’m not sure why that’s not useful to you when someone is actually holding a sexist-feminist view. Call a spade a spade.
Where we mostly disagree is that I think (with only having read a summary) Azzarello’s Amazonian culture is sexist and feminist, too. Yep, our different reactions to using alarmist/horrific portrayals of minority power as hegemonic power has come up fairly regularly. (1) I don’t see it as necessarily suggesting that’s the way things would be in reality (e.g., “a society of women living together must be perverted, violent, evil, and anti-men”), but as a possible way of getting to people to deal with fears that already exist. Such fiction doesn’t have to be Birth of a Nation. (2) It’s also a way of questioning whether the majority power is inherently wrapped up in the qualities of those holding the power, or if there’s something about hegemony that tends to erase the differences in groups once they’ve achieved that status. That is, are these women acting like men, or are they acting like a group with absolute power? I suspect that your reaction to White Man’s Burden would be that the film is a racist vision of blacks, rather than an attempt to get whites and blacks to see things from an inverted viewpoint (I’m not saying the movie is worth a shit, of course).
“Another is an argument for the special virtues of women and women’s experience.”
You can argue about the special virtues or capabilities of either gender without being sexist. When you start saying that those virtues make either absolutely superior to the other, you’re being sexist.
John, that’s interesting. I think cynicism can be sexist too, though.
Charles, I wrote about this more or less here. Basically, pop culture loves reversals such as you’re discussing, in which discrimination is portrayed as structural. The problem is that discrimination is importantly historical. So showing it as structural is, to my mine, generally a cop out; it’s a way to avoid most of the hard questions about how discrimination works in favor of simply arguing, well, everybody’s equal (or equally horrible, in this case.)
Sexism and racism aren’t reversible because of history. Imagining a world in which women rule and in which women are superior isn’t the same as imagining a world in which women are subjugated, because of history. Time matters; what’s happened matters. Ignoring that isn’t bold and truth-telling — it’s lazy, and ends you writing misogynist parables when you don’t necessarily mean to.
After making my post last night I read Kelly Thompson’s piece, which I should have read first.
Her piece is more focused on the net effect this decision has on the overall picture for women in the DC universe. This is a point I can agree with. It seems that with 52 titles DC could have a few featuring women that weren’t fraught with these issues; and it seems that the larger role of Themyscira/Paradise Island in the DC universe ought to have been considered.
To me that’s more of an editorial problem than a writing problem.
Noah, I’m not sure why separate structure from history in that essay or here. The structuralists had synchrony and diachrony. And why does an analysis of structural bigotry have to more simplistic than that of a personal form? I’d say that the easier has been the more obvious choice in pop culture, since it’s seen as easier to overcome.
And I’m even more baffled by this:
We’re talking about 2 imagined worlds here. One imagines a perfect race of warrior women who are presented as superior to all other groups, whereas the other has them acting much more like realworld civilizations and questions how the former fantasy is maintained. However, you prefer the former, despite your expressed concern for how historical reality matters to fiction.
Not enough coffee, so here’s a better version of that first paragraph:
I’m not sure why you separate structure from history in that essay or here. The structuralists had synchrony and diachrony. And why does an analysis of structural bigotry have to more simplistic than that of a personal form? I’d say that the latter has been the more obvious choice in pop culture, since it’s seen as easier to overcome in a story.
They’re both fictional and fantastic. In your defense of Azzarello, you claim that his version has nothing to do with misogyny; it’s just following through logically and realistically on how the Amazons would behave. Your defense, however, ignores the historical ways in which misogynist tropes have been used; it ignores the historical use of the Amazons as misogynist tropes; it ignores the fact that Marston deliberately changed the Amazons from a misogynist story to a feminist one, and that Azzarello has changed it back to a misogynist story — which is an act with serious ideological implications.
Marston specifically created the Amazons and Wonder Woman as a response to the history of oppression that women have experienced. It was an imaginative and utopian response to that…but that doesn’t mean it ignored history, or was insensitive to it.
Azzarello, on the other hand, has simply reproduced misogynist tropes in the name of “realism”, as if the history of misogyny has no bearing on how one uses those tropes or how they are received. You don’t get to start over from zero; you don’t get to define your “realistic” perspective as outside history.
And structural bigotry is more simplistic, and more popular in pop culture, because it makes it seem like the issue is simply one of people changing their hearts, or simply an issue of treating everyone the same. It makes it easy to place oneself in a position of moral superiority; to say, well, I know how this works, and I would never do that. Taking account of historical oppression is a much messier and more painful process; it suggests that even in fantasy, what has already happened matters, both for characters and for readers.
For instance. It simply isn’t more realistic to see women as violent oppressors and rapists. That’s not a structural insight; it’s a historical one. In the history of the world, men have done exponentially more raping than women; they’ve done exponentially more killing as well. You can say, well, there’s nothing innate to women that makes that have to be the case, and that may be true — but it doesn’t change the fact that, realistically, in the world as we know it, women are historically much, much less likely to be perpetrators of sexual violence and murder than men are. So Azzarello’s vision is *not* historically, more realistic. Similarly, seeing women as dangerous aggressors, and femininity as especially dangerous and deadly, participates in a history of misogynist discourse, in which, for example, women are blamed for the kind of violence that is actually typically perpetrated by men.
Similarly, historically, there just are not a ton of stories about strong, self-sufficient women who care for each other crafting an egalitarian society based on justice and peace. There are many, many more stories about the destructive power of femininity (it’s a horror staple.) Why, then, is it more realistic, or more thoughtful, or more truth-telling, to denigrate the first in favor of the second? Why are you so resistant to the first, but have no problem with the second? What is the history of that, and why does pop culture work that way? Could any of these issues have something to do with the history of sexism?
I’m a firm believer that actually reading the work one criticizes goes a long way.
BigAssVerbosityMike here…
Thompson read the whole comic; indeed, she’s been enjoying Azzarello’s “take” on the character so far. Is Noah’s reaction so different?
It might turn out that Azzarello will have Diana wake up on good ol’ Amazon Island and say, “What a creepy nightmare I just had!” But, considering the toss-the-comic-across-the-room behavior that’d surely elicit, I’d think not.
The pages excerpted come across as dead serious; and the point they make (Hey, Diana Prince, everything you ever knew was a LIE!), and way they grossly invert not only Marston’s view of the Amazons, but that of virtually every creator who continued the Wonder Woman story, doesn’t take checking out the whole story to figure out, or comment upon.
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John says:
…Kelly Thompson’s piece…is more focused on the net effect this decision has on the overall picture for women in the DC universe. This is a point I can agree with. It seems that with 52 titles DC could have a few featuring women that weren’t fraught with these issues; and it seems that the larger role of Themyscira/Paradise Island in the DC universe ought to have been considered.
To me that’s more of an editorial problem than a writing problem.
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Yes; and I thoroughly agree with her. (Not so much on the “if a bunch of gorgeous, nekkid women offer themselves to a shipload of horny sailors, and sex ensues, that’s rape” argument.)
Even on a purely commercial level, wouldn’t it make sense for DC corporate to have considered, as stewards of the Wonder Woman “property,” whether it might not be a good idea to let a writer — no manner how trendily “hot” he might be — trash the very foundation of one of their few major superheroines? One who is actually widely recognized in the big world beyond comics fandom?
Ah, but gawd forbid business shouldn’t go for the quick buck, and damn the long-term consequences.
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Charles Reece says:
“[Marston] believed women were better than men in just about every way — smarter, stronger, more compassionate, more fitted to rule.”
This is without a doubt sexism. A utopia based on stereotypes of one gender is going to be sexist…
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Certainly! Though what I’d criticize in a modern-day feminist (when, at least attitude-wise, things have changed a lot), I’d understand and sympathize with William Marston, in his era.
His attitude is like when, back in the 60’s, I first heard the slogan “Black is beautiful.” And thought, why should it have to be beautiful? Not necessarily ugly, sure, but why not simply neutral, unimportant to what a person is?
And then, after a bit of thought, realized “Black is beautiful” was simply a strong reaction against the total opposite which had been taken for granted for so long. Which would, once attitudes became more rational, no longer be considered necessary.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…feminism has various strands. One is the argument for equality; that men and women should be equal.
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I think I get what you’re aiming at; but that kind of generalized language makes problems. (With many saying, “But men and women aren’t the same! Why, men have bigger muscles, and can’t have babies…”) More precisely, how about “should have equal rights, privileges, and protection in society and under the law”?
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Another is an argument for the special virtues of women and women’s experience. Both are quite important, and central to feminist critiques and arguments.
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Same situation; while women as a group have certain generalized patterns of behavior (more caring, empathetic, cooperative rather than competitive, less aggressive and violent), which are indeed superior (why, they’re even substantially more likely to be Democrats than Republicans!) than males as a group, isn’t it a problem to even admit that these differences exist? Which would involve conceding that stereotypes can have a foundation in reality?
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…it can be difficult to explain or analyze oppression when you’re committed to the idea that women are actually superior.
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Why so difficult? Superior people get oppressed by thuggish morons all the time: Jews by brutal Brownshirts, Civil Rights activists by inbred goons, intellectuals are given “noogies” by fratboys, gays beaten by loutish jocks. Oppression is simply the result of an imbalance of sheer, brute power; which, God knows, hardly flows to the more virtuous, intelligent, evolved.
RegularSyzed…yeah; someday maybe I’ll read it. But, you know, you could also use the fact that you’ve read it to introduce new information, which I’d be interested in. Alternately, you can kvetch. Which is cool too.
Mike, I’d thought of the black is beautiful analogy also…and yes, as part of an ongoing dialog with oppressors, I find it hard to argue with.
On your other points…as I said, I think there is a tension between arguing that women’s experiences/outlook/etc. are superior, and trying to argue against stereotypes. I think in the U.S. and at the moment, there’s a very strong drive to privilege the second (equality) over the first (the idea that there’s something worthwhile in woman’s historic experiences.) So I’m inclined to cut Marston and Peter a fair amount of slack.
It’s worth pointing out too, maybe, that Marston and Peter really do feel women are superior essentially on the basis of women’s historical oppression. That is, the main reason Marston thinks women are superior is because he feels that the most virtuous/powerful way of being in the world is submission and love. Women have historically been associated with both, not just in terms of stereotypes but in terms of history (women have been associated with family; women have been forced into subordinate positions.) He argues that women are more fit to rule, and more fit to teach men how to submit lovingly, essentially because of their historical oppression. It’s definitely idiosyncratic, and certainly can be criticized from various perspectives, but it is undeniably an explicitly feminist response to the history of women’s oppression.
And if Azzarello’s story is that, then I’d be curious to have somebody who has read it explain how.