La Mujer Maravilla Bondage y Feminismo en Comics 1941/48

While growing up, I had the idea that Wonder Woman was created in the past as a perfect feminist icon, and that only later was she sexualized by other creators. In fact, Wonder Woman was always, always both a fetishist fantasy figure and a feminist role model to follow, patriotic symbol, or children's heroine. The seven-year duration of the original comics, written or co-written by William Moulton Marston and illustrated by William Peter, shows the type of rare psychosexual rarity usually only found in 19th-century children's books. Noah Berlatsky's book explores to what extent those stories were queer and feminist; as the author says, a flamboyantly genderless mess. The book by Berlatsky focuses almost exclusively on the original comic, written or co-written by Marston and illustrated by Harry G. Peter, who had worked on Gibson Girls, pin-up art girls of early 20th century usually portrayed as strong, educated and independent.

How can Marston/Peter, in their beginnings, be both feminists and lovers of bondage and other fetishes?

Berlatsky discusses this apparent paradox in great detail, reviewing the criticisms of feminist writers such as John Stoltenberg and Susan Brownmiller. Brownmiller in particular sees the master-slave relationship as the foundation of controlled sexuality by men. Berlatsky quotes her from Against Our Will:

From the harems of slaves of the potent oriental, celebrated in poetry and dance, to the intense descriptions of luxury women with fair skin, a particular genre of historical pulp fiction, the glorification of forced sex in slavery, institutionalized rape, has been part of our cultural heritage, nourishing men's egos and women's egos - and, in the process, irreparably damaging healthy sexuality.

Berlatsky notes that in condemning eroticized slavery, Brownmiller participates in it. ... There is no way to imagine freeing oneself from slavery without imagining slavery, with all its connotations.

The popularity of stories featuring victimized women, such as Twilight, 50 Shades of Grey and The Hunger Games, indicates that they have firmly connected with the lives of girls and women. They are ways of talking about feminine experiences.

Gothic romances show women in sexual danger not to enjoy the image of women in sexual danger, but rather because women often find themselves in sexual danger and want to be. read books that deal with their experiences. Similarly, Marston, [co-writer Joy] Murchison, and Peter do not show the rape of Perséphone, because the rape of Perséphone is something stimulating to see. They show it because girls (and boys too) face incest and rape, and stories that mention them must also cover them.

Or so I've been discussing. But the truth, maybe, is less clear. Marston, Murchison, and Peter write about incest and rape in Wonder Woman #16 from a consciously feminist perspective. But that doesn't mean they can't also enjoy fetishized servitude.

Marston, Murchison, and Peter present incest as trauma and tragedy. But they also present it, and use it, as a fetish.Marston arrived at writing comics with his own ideas developed regarding genres, sexuality, and politics.

His book Emotions of Normal People describes domination and submission as fundamental human emotions, based on his studies of initiation parties where first-year girls dressed like babies, confessed their mistakes, and pretended to be punished. Marston describes this as emotion of enchantment, which could exist both between genders and within the same gender. Any gender could occupy any position in the dominant/submissive couple.

In other words, for Marston, Murchison, and Peter, there is no necessary contradiction between confronting the reality of rape and abuse (for women and also for men) and enjoying a sexually loaded BDSM game (for everyone).

According to Berlatsky, people can have dominant/submissive sexuality and be worthy of protection.

Trauma repeats itself, and violence repeats itself, but that doesn't mean only the traumatized are allowed to be submissive victims - or empowered avenging angels. Rather, Marston seems to believe that once the power of rape has been broken, the world will be safe for fantasies of rape and domination and submission - normal emotions.The philosophy of Marston is that women should lead because they don't have the same type of ego as men, because they are capable of love and submission to a greater degree than men. Female masochism is at the center of everything, the foundation of a new matriarchal social order.

Finally, we have a definitive answer, therefore, to the question posed for the first time in chapter 1. The many, many, many, many images of Wonder Woman tied [...] do not exist (or are only there) so that Marston's public – men or women - can get excited about the disempowerment of women. Rather, they are there to teach men (and women too) how to enjoy restraint.

This is more directly appreciated in Marston's utopian vision of Paradise Island, which is basically just bondage all day long. In Wonder Woman #3, Wonder Woman happily volunteered to be disguised as a deer, captured, flayed and prepared for roasting, or tied and baked-in-lie- in a giant pie. All for fun.Lesbians D/s is the underlying dynamic of everything in Marston's world. Even in his pulp quasi-historical novel Venus with Us: A Tale of the Caesar, there are positive representations of f/f relationships. Remember, Marston lived a life half in denial, married to Elizabeth Holloway and living with a graduate student, Olive Byrne.

It is public knowledge among scholars and comic book enthusiasts that Marston was not the alpha male at home. Berlatsky notes that he named his sons after Holloway and Byrne, and they continued to live together for 40 years after Marston's death.

It is possible, even probable, that the affective and sexual bonds between the two women were as strong or stronger than their relationships with Marston. Therefore, Marston was the marginal man, a kind of accomplice to his lesbian relationship, welcome but not essential.