Monthly Archives: May 2012

A Fanboy Denied

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My introduction to Wonder Woman was not the original Marston/Peters comics. I’m not sure what my first exposure to Wonder Woman was, and it almost seems like I became aware of the character through cultural absorption. As a kid, I saw a few snippets of the TV series with Lynda Carter, I read a few DC comics featuring Wonder Woman (but not her own title), I watched the Justice League cartoon, and played a few superhero video games. I don’t remember which piece of entertainment came first. What I do remember is that my fanboy brain had already constructed the “ideal” Wonder Woman long before I ever picked up a Wonder Woman comic. In other words, I was a Wonder Woman fan but not a Wonder Woman fan.

And therein lay the roots for so much of my dissatisfaction with the character. It would be easy to say that I dislike Wonder Woman comics because they suck. Well … most of them do kinda suck (the less said about the current run, the better), but I’ve put up with sucky comics in other circumstances (X-Men, I’m looking in your direction). But Wonder Woman comics always provoked a hostile reaction from me. Even the runs that were supposed to be good (according to the Internet hive-mind) failed to measure up to my standards. George Perez? Meh. Greg Rucka? Terrible. Gail Simone? Tiresome. They were never going to be as good as “my” Wonder Woman, so why bother?

I first read a collection of Marston stories about four years ago, well after I had formed my views on Wonder Woman. Needless to say, it was like nothing I had ever read in superhero comics. Bondage, cross-dressing, and lesbian subtext in a comic marketed to children!  It was idiosyncratic, to put it mildly.

 

It was obsessive, fetishistic, and outright insane, to put it less mildly. And it was fantastic! Most superhero comics aspire to little more than genre hackery, and many fail to measure up to even that lowly bar. But Marston’s Wonder Woman was a personal and ideological work. Regardless of what one thinks of Marston’s values, his comic stands out as a rare artistic achievement in mainstream comics, a fusion of radical feminism, patriotism, BDSM, and commercialism.

Regardless of its strengths, I should have hated this comic, considering how different it  was from my vision of Wonder Woman. Why is she getting tied up all the time? Why does she say ridiculous things like “Suffering Sappho?” What’s with the giant kangaroos? Etta Candy … what the fuck?

But I couldn’t find fault with Marston, as much as my ego wanted to, because his Wonder Woman was far better than mine (or any other version of Wonder Woman I had encountered). My Wonder Woman was nothing more than a grab-bag of traits: She’s strong (but not mannish)! She’s fierce (but not in a mean way)! She’s smart (but not nerdy)! She’s sexy (but not trampy)! I hadn’t created the perfect version of Wonder Woman, instead I’d assembled a highlight reel from every comic, TV series, or game featuring the character. And when I pasted these traits together they amounted to nothing more than another bland, inoffensive superhero. Marston’s Wonder Woman was born out of actual ideas. Those ideas were crazy (and occasionally creepy), but there was genuine thought and creativity behind his stories. Nothing I dreamed up has ever come close.

When I was younger, I tended to judge the quality of a work by how thoroughly it pandered to my tastes. If something hit the correct fanboy buttons in my brain, it was deemed good. Marston’s Wonder Woman failed the “fanboy test” in almost every way, but I came around to appreciating the work. And the more I appreciated Wonder Woman, the more I came to realize that my particular vision of the character (and comics in general) was fandom at its most banal. I won’t go so far as to say that reading Wonder Woman triggered an epiphany. Around the same time I was reading Marston I was also reading Moore, Ware, and a dozen other great comic creators. But Wonder Woman was one of the first comics that stifled my inner fanboy and forced me to reevaluate my standards for comics and other media.

I’m still not entirely immune to the siren call of slick genre product, but I have an easier time distinguishing mindless fun from great art. And I understand now that “good” doesn’t mean “identical to the tastes I had as a teenager.” So thank you for that, William Marston.

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The entire roundtable on the Marston/Peter Wonder Woman is here.

Ben Saunders on William Marston and Sex

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Ben Saunders had a great comment which I wanted to highlight in a post for Marston’s birthday. So here ’tis.

Thanks for your comment, Mike. To elaborate on Noah’s response: part of the difficulty, I think, is that Marston was an extraordinary sexual optimist who believed in the liberatory potential of desire. Although it is Freud who is usually associated with the logic of repression (“your neurozis iz a funktion of your represt longink for your muzzer!”), he was in fact far less optimistic about the idea that facing and overcoming repressions might lead to “health” than Marston. There’s a dark side, an almost cthonic element, to Freudian libido. Marston, on the other hand, seems much more cheery; “free yourself from your repressions, give in to your (real) desire to be dominated, and you will be happy.” It’s really a kind of sex-faith – to the point that the possibility of acknowledging a sexual element in all the non-sexual scenarios you suggest (child-parent, student-teacher, good citizen before the law) would not be seen by Marston as a distortion or corruption of those scenarios. Marston would probably say that the very need to insist that those scenes are non-sexual is itself a sign of our tendency to view sexual energy (falsely) as inevitably corrupting.

Of course, that’s exactly how a puritan culture DOES see sex – as dangerous, forbidden, shameful, corrupt, and having NO PLACE in any of the social interactions you have described. In some ways, it’s that puritanism that Marston is responding to – but he really doesn’t think he’s being subversive by insisting that sexual energy does play a role in all those interactions, because sexual energy is an unqualified good, in his vision.

I don’t actually agree with that, and would be hard put to point to one place in his writings where he flat out says it – it’s more an implication of the larger theories. But I think it’s a fair characterization of his thought, and it helps to explain why his comics seem weirdly sexy and sexless at the same time (to our perhaps jaded, puritan-in-reverse, pornotopic culture). His vision of sex is simply too sunny for us. To that extent, the observation that Marston was less cynical than us is probably right on – although I wouldn’t attribute a lack of cynicism to his culture at large, for all that their standards for sexual display were very different from our own.

The entire roundtable on Marston/Peter’s Wonder Woman is here.

Learning to Care at the Feet of Maurice Sendak

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The deal went like this – Dad would read me a story, I would go to sleep. Nothing in that deal said I couldn’t be a little f$%*!er about which stories I wanted him to read. My favorite was Zorro, followed closely by Fury, the Wonder Horse, which I insisted on calling Furry, just to piss. him. off. I still laugh at that one.

I also really liked a book called Pierre. I called it “Pierre: the boy who said ‘I don’t care,'” but its real name is Pierre: A Cautionary Tale in Five Chapters and a Prologue.

For it me, it was one of the smallest books in my collection of Golden Readers and picture books, part of the Nutshell Library, along with One Was Johnny, Alligators All Around,  and Chicken Soup with Rice.

I’m old enough to have been too old to care when Really Rosie came out as an animation in 1975, with songs based on the above books. It was no more than amusing, really. I recalled the books of my youth, of course, but that was like a million years ago, when I was a baby!! No way I was getting excited about baby stuff. Chicken Soup With Rice was still pretty cool, though.

When Really Rosie went Off-Broadway musical, I was in college and still, honestly, didn’t care. I mean, sure, it was cool, and a whole new generation would learn to love Sendak, but I had no money, wasn’t ever going to see it and besides, musicals were so….

It’s only natural that when I became an adult that baby stuff became interesting again. And of course, by that time I had lost that little Nutshell Library collection of books. Amazingly, after looking around, I found the very same 1962 edition I originally owned. So, clearly Sendak hadn’t yet become the household name he is now. This was still in the pre – Where the Wild Things Are days.  But that’s not the moral – the moral is, like Pierre, I learned to care.

If you read the social feeds this week, you’d think that Where the Wild Things Are was Sendak’s greatest work. Maybe it is, I don’t know…and I don’t care. When I think of his work, I think of alligators, crocodiles and lions that may or may not eat children if they don’t care enough for their surroundings.

One of the things I genuinely enjoyed about Sendak’s books was the cheerfully typical selfishness of the children that populated them. Whether they were singing paeans of joy to chicken soup with rice as they did bizarre and dangerous things, or running off from their bedrooms to become monsters, there was shockingly little consequence to their actions. The children riding the crocodile were not eaten, Pierre, although eaten, was fine in the end. Real and fake monsters are not the enemy of children that adults seems to think. The lion doesn’t eat Pierre because he is inherently dangerous – after all, he gives the boy fair warning.  He does it because Pierre clearly needs an object lesson in manners and his parents aren’t holding up their end of the deal.

My Dad had bought that Nutshell Library because when he was young, Sendak lived in the basement of the building he lived in.  Years before Sendak came out in a New York Times interview, my Dad told me that everyone referred to him as the “fag in the basement.” It was a tale told to me many decades after the fact, with a nostalgic smile, as if that was a cute, harmless nickname.

I sometimes imagine Sendak huddling in the basement, sensing the disdain with which he was regarded by the other tenants. I have no doubt that the children – those very same children Sendak wrote for, and are now beloved by as adults – were warned away from him, as if he were diseased.

Or maybe, Sendak didn’t really care.

Pierre, by Maurice Sendak, narrated by Tammy Grimes

Loving Authority: Some Thoughts On Wonder Woman #28

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“There is no enemy so cruel or so ruthless as a once-defeated criminal who seeks revenge.” With this typically portentous opening sentence, William Moulton Marston lets us know that we can expect to see a few familiar villainous faces over the course of Wonder Woman #28. And sure enough, the story makes enjoyable use of a device that has since become a cliché of the genre: the super-villain team-up. But Marston’s resort to this now standard trick from the hack-writer’s grab bag was probably prompted by something more than the ordinary motivations of a professional comic-book scribe. Having recently received a fatal diagnosis of cancer, he knew he faced the ultimate deadline, and that this story would likely be his swan song. Whereas the standard comic book “blast from the past” is an opportunity to say hello, again, to members of the rogue’s gallery that we have come to know and love, Marston was saying goodbye. Wonder Woman #28 is his fond farewell, then, not only to the character that had finally brought him fortune and fame, after a long search for the spotlight, but also to her entire supporting cast.

Writers such as Ken Alder, Geoffrey Bunn, Les Daniels, and Gerard Jones, among others, have provided a wealth of information regarding Marston’s career prior to the creation of Wonder Woman. Consequently, we now know that Marston’s various previous attempts to convert his academic credentials into money and celebrity had met with a measure of success, but had not provided him with a platform on the scale of his dreams, let alone financial security. From his earliest correspondence with pioneer publisher M. C. Gaines, however, Marston seems to have grasped both the commercial and communicative potential of comic books — seeing possibilities for both profit and proselytizing in a new medium that most members of his generation and class could only dismiss with disdain. His faith proved well placed. He scored big on his first try-out, creating one of the most immediately recognizable and indelible images of female empowerment to emerge from the mass-cultural milieu of 20th century America. But Wonder Woman was no mere lucky strike, or the product of a sudden epiphany. On the contrary, she was in many ways the culmination of more than twenty years of sustained intellectual work on Marston’s part — the comic book incarnation of half a lifetime’s meditation on the subjects of human psychology and sexuality.

Inspired by and at some level perhaps even a partial composite of Elizabeth Marston and Olive Byrne, the two real women with whom Marston lived in a polyamorous relationship, Wonder Woman was without doubt conceived as part of a sincerely feminist vision (which is one reason why she can claim such prominent figures as Gloria Steinem among her fans). But Wonder Woman was also a complex fantasy object for her creator, a projection of and vehicle for the transmission of his erotic and political desires — two categories that were equally inextricably linked in many of the publications he produced throughout his academic and journalistic careers. I’ve written about Marston’s intellectual and emotional investment in Diana at considerable length elsewhere, so I won’t belabor the point here; but suffice it to say that at times Marston seems to have imagined (perhaps only half-seriously, but nevertheless with all the creative energy at his command) that he could change the world through his Wonder Woman comics. Working through her, he believed he could contribute to the reformation of the basic structure of sexuality itself, at least as manifest in 1940s American society.

As Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt hopefully opined from his own deathbed: “He that no more must say is listened more/ Than they whom youth and ease have taught to glose.” Marston surely felt a similar hope when he sat down at his typewriter to enter Diana’s world for the last time; for in Wonder Woman #28 his idiosyncratic liberationist project resurfaces with a fresh urgency and insistence. The resulting three-part tale — “Villainy Incorporated,” “Trap of the Crimson Flame,” and “In the Hands of the Merciless” — is therefore more than just an affectionate backward looking glance at some of the weird and wonderful antagonists from Wonder Woman’s past (though it is clearly that, too). It is also a restatement of many of Marston’s key themes, as they had been sounded throughout his entire tenure on the title. More poignantly, it is his last attempt to lay out a set of principles that he seems to have honestly believed might mitigate some perennial aspects of human suffering.

The story begins in media res, reminding readers of Wonder Woman’s recent defeat of an invasion from Saturn. The first illustrated panel (the second on the page, the first being taken up entirely with text) shows Diana having captured a large group of Saturnites in her golden lasso — which seemingly could expand or contract in length as needed, and here must be a few hundred yards long. Interestingly, artist H. G. Peter initially depicts a mixed group of Saturnite invaders, of both male and female genders.

But in what I would regard as a telling slip, by just the second illustrated panel, the men in this group have mysteriously vanished; Diana (and Marston) is apparently only interested in the disposition of the female captive Saturnites, while the fate of the males is simply passed over. Attractively coiffed, and garbed in skintight costumes of bright scarlet, these “evil” young women are bound together in single file with their hands behind their backs, and transported by Diana in her invisible plane to the ominously named “Transformation Island” — the Amazon correctional facility. There, we are told, all prisoners are required to wear Venus girdles, a garment made from a “magic metal” that “compels complete obedience to loving authority.” This last phrase is spoken by the chief Amazonian prison officer in the final panel of the first page of the story; but it is repeated almost verbatim in the final panel of the very last page, by Diana’s mother Hippolyta: “The only real happiness for anybody,” we are assured there, “is to be found in obedience to loving authority.”
 

 
“Obedience to a loving authority.” Even for a reader unfamiliar with Marston’s psychological theories about the “primary emotions” of dominance and submission, the bookend status of this recurrent phrase signals the thematic significance of such concepts for the story at hand. And, indeed, the adventures that take place in between this repeated assertion depict several dizzying and occasionally hilarious oscillations between expressions of the impulse towards dominant assertion, on the one hand, and expressions of longing for a life of service, on the other. Thus, over the course of the first few pages, Eviless, a villainous (if rather unimaginatively named) Saturnite, turns the tables on her Amazon captors by forcing them to wear the Venus Girdles they have imposed on their prisoners, and thereby inverting the hierarchical structure of dominance and submission that characterizes the healthy “norm” of Transformation Island. However, while briefly wearing a Venus Girdle herself, even Eviless is momentarily tempted to surrender to the joy of captivity: “Now to remove this girdle … But I want to wear it — I feel so peaceful and happy!” As if to confirm the validity of those swiftly denied feelings with regard to the pleasure of obedience, several of the prisoners that Eviless subsequently attempts to release proclaim that they do not actually wish to be liberated at all. (“No, No! We don’t want our girdles removed!”). Eviless dismisses their desire to remain captive, of course — “You’ve let these Amazons break your spirit,” she declares — but later in the story, when some of these same happy prisoners have their girdles removed anyway, against their will-to-submit, we discover that a more profound change has actually taken place. “Without the girdle I feel dominant — invincible!” a girl named Irene discovers, “But I don’t feel cruel and wicked as I used to — the Amazons have transformed me! I love Wonder Woman and Queen Hippolyte … I must save them!”
 

 
At this moment, the regime of Transformation Island would seem to have produced the paradoxical ideal female of Marston’s psychological theories. Irene is “dominant” rather than submissive, but ruled by “love” rather than selfish “appetites.” (Marston’s preferred word in his academic writings for selfish-dominants is “appetitive”; he contrasts the appetitive type with unselfish-dominants, who he thinks can save the world by taking up the role of “Love Leaders.” Seriously. Read the last five or six pages of The Emotions of Normal People if you don’t believe me.)

In other words, the newly liberated Irene is just like Wonder Woman herself. She is an ideal personality type (in Marston’s preferred psychological terms), with a strong will to dominate that is nevertheless somehow conjoined with an equally strong will to love and serve others. We are encouraged to draw this parallel between Irene’s “new” post-Venus-girdle personality and that of Wonder Woman’s when she subsequently (and suddenly) develops Wonder-Woman-like powers: breaking free of her bonds, bending the bars of her cage, and freeing the other “good” prisoners. Irene goes on to lead a second rebellion of submissive-dominant prisoners against the prior rebellion led by Eviless and her dominant-dominant prisoners (the redundancy seems necessary if we are to keep track of who gets to “top” whom in this curious world of dominant and submissive flip-floppers). Irene then frees Wonder Woman (who had also been captured by Eviless), and together they restore order to Transformation Island; by which I mean that aggressively dominant types such as Eviless are once again placed in Venus Girdles, which cause them to happily accept roles of submission and service, while their mistresses (now including the formerly submissive prisoners who had earlier refused liberation at Eviless’s hands) once again dominate over them — lovingly, of course.

The inversions and reversal of the categories of top and bottom that produce this strange and paradoxical notion of order — in which loving-submissives-who-have-learned-to-dominate rule over recalcitrant dominant personalities that have been magically converted into submissives — are head-spinning. But they are also an inevitable consequence of Marston’s attempt to fuse his psychological theories, which assume the fundamental importance of the oppositions of dominance and submission in all human relations, with a liberationist-feminist philosophy of loving kindness.

This fusion should render certain arguments about Marston’s comics moot. For example, Trina Robbins has stated, on this website and elsewhere, that it is male readers (or “boys” as she sometimes calls them) that like to worry the issue of bondage in these comics, while female readers prefer to focus on the message of empowerment. Robbins is a creator and comics historian whose work I respect, but I’m strongly disinclined to accept this dubious gendering of our interpretive responses. (In fact, I can only wonder what Robbins would say to a woman who is interested in the depiction of bondage in these comics; would she accuse her of having more in common with “the boys” than with a woman such as herself, on the basis of such an interest?) But even if I were willing to reduce individual interpretive responses according to such gendered and heterosexist lights, the specific example of Wonder Woman #28 finally suggests to me that the very concepts that Robbins wants to separate — bondage and empowerment — actually cannot be disentangled in Marston’s imagination. As strange as many of Marston’s ideas undoubtedly seem, surely one of the single most frequently reiterated messages of his Wonder Woman stories is that there is no necessary contradiction between taking pleasure in bondage games (which, after all, form part of the regular recreational life of Paradise Island) and a commitment to female empowerment. On the contrary, for Marston, submission — of a very particular kind — turns out to be the best route to liberation. He said as much, prominently, twice, in this last story, so we wouldn’t miss it: “The only real happiness for anybody is to be found in obedience to loving authority.” The bondage sequences of his comics only make sense in the context of that curious philosophy.

Sharon Marcus describes the resultant imagery as “maternalist bondage.” This is a superb locution, in part because it acknowledges the fetishistic dimension of Marston’s scenarios while at the same time providing a strong indication as to the degree to which those scenarios depart from the typically polarized power structures of “traditional” BDSM, as superficially understood. (And yes, it is I think part of Marston’s achievement that a serious discussion of his work will lead one to posit a kind of BDSM that is “traditional,” simply in order to understand what the hell he is doing that is different.) But at the same time, and as Marcus has also clearly recognized, the phrase “maternalist bondage” also suggests some of the limits or problems inherent in Marston’s vision. At bottom (so to speak) the idea of submitting to your loving Mom is probably more disturbing or even icky than it is sexy for most of us. Of course, the reasons why that may be so are the basic stuff of psychoanalysis, and (as Marcus’s hints in her brief expositions of Jessica Benjamin’s work) these questions may even bring us closer to some of the (repressed) origins of the erotic charge present in what I am again forced (with delighted irony) to call more “normal” bondage. In other words, what we have here might have considerable potential as a psychoanalytic allegory — even if it probably isn’t going to bring about Marston’s larger project, which, as I’ve already said, was nothing less than the attainment of world peace through the reformation of sexuality. If we understand Marston’s logic, then, we can perhaps avoid getting caught up in a few older arguments about the politics of bondage — and even generate some newer and more productive ones.
 

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The index to the entire roundtable on Wonder Woman #28 is here.

Wonder Woman vs. Wonder Woman

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Sometimes a character feels at odds with the fictional world that houses her. I wish I liked Wonder Woman as much as I like Wonder Woman. I’d like to enjoy the super-heroine’s pluck and good cheer as much as I do her robust curves and lustrous black hair. Does this make me a bad feminist? Maybe. But it’s not that Wonder Woman’s athletic feats leave me cold. It’s her virtue that gets me down, just as her good deeds land her in aircrafts that plummet and boats that sink. Of course, she always pops back up, but it’s precisely that bounciness that feels so leaden.

Wonder Woman’s look promises a touch of evil glamor, but her dialogue is all perky efficiency. Judging solely by the character’s appearance, I’d expect a cross between Emma Peel and Bettie Page, but once Wonder Woman springs into action, she behaves more like Snow White’s love child with Nancy Drew. Unlike Batman, Spiderman, or Superman, Wonder Woman has no secret desires, no ulterior motives, no glint of malice or hint of weakness. Amazon Diana and Nurse Diana are equally cheerful, brisk, and sane. Wonder Woman’s superpowers don’t warp her; they don’t compensate for shameful deficiencies, nor are they shamefully hidden. They just turn her into a Girl Scout on steroids.

Despite her dark hair, Wonder Woman has no dark side. But why read comics if not to get in touch with the dark side? I, at least, have always preferred watching the bad guys and gals in comics and Disney films. Catwoman and Cruella have the best clothes. So in the panel below, though I admire Wonder Woman’s propulsive arms and extended legs, it’s her compressed, distorted shadow that draws my eye, not least because of the care Peter took in drawing it:

Notice that Wonder Woman is literally not in touch with her shadow in this image, just as throughout #28, “Villainy, Incorporated,” the evil she battles never taints her. Wonder Woman rarely gloats over her defeated antagonists, nor gets carried away subduing them. At one point, Giganta almost makes Wonder Woman lose her temper, but it’s far more typical for our heroine to dash off to get a purple ray machine that will keep villainous ringleader Eviless alive, or to express joy at having saved her from drowning.

If this were Mystery Men, Wonder Woman’s superpower would be agreeableness: by dint of being really, really nice, and kicking some ass, she’s going to make everyone else really nice too.

So it’s no wonder, ha ha, that my eyes keep straying to the less wholesome pleasures Peter has stuffed into almost every panel, such as the colors — especially vivid in the less authentic reprint of #28 in Wonder Woman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told.

The split between Wonder Woman and Wonder Woman manifests itself as a clash of palettes. Wonder Woman (the character) is red, blue and yellow, black and white; the one jarring note is her flesh, a rich coral beige, but we are encouraged to process that as neutral filler, not a color in its own right. Wonder Woman (the comic) is chartreuse and mauve, turquoise and forest green, and uses primary colors only as jarring accents. Sometimes the villains wear red and the Amazon guards don purple and green, but for the most part, to the villains go the subtler, less wholesome color schemes:

Mauve, turquoise, brown, and a muddy greenish-yellow dominate this panel, overtaking even Wonder Woman herself; her signature red and blue are relegated to the title letters. Only the Cheetah gets to be polychromatic. The color contrast provided by the yellow and brown portion of Cheetah’s arm, seen protruding above the water, gives the panel its depth of field, as do her mauve body parts, especially the sole of her foot, which invades both the print box and the reader’s space.

The battle between Wonder Woman and Villainy, Incorporated is a style war: patriotic primary colors versus a decadent, cosmopolitan spectrum; Roy Lichtenstein versus Picasso; Lego pieces versus burnt umber, melon, and periwinkle crayons. The more complex colors are often relegated to secondary characters and panel backgrounds, but precisely because of their outlandishness, they often end up coming to the fore. In this panel, for example, I find myself looking past Wonder Woman, at the bricks tinted pink and purple, at the gratuitously yellow-green strip on the window blinds, at the dab of purple on the spindle of the chair:

Wonder Woman’s costumes similarly pit the fascinations of villainy against the bland simplicity of the good guys. To be sure, Wonder Woman’s signature outfit is burlesque fetish wear — bustier, micro-mini, stiletto boots — but its eagle breastplate and white stars on blue background give an overall impression of wholesome Americana. Stripes are the only thing missing from this flag-like get-up, and are provided by the uniforms that the Amazons impose on their Saturnian prisoners, along with pacifying Venus girdles:

The prisoners on the right, who resist Eviless’s exhortation to resistance, speak as a united collective whose homogeneity echoes the striped pattern of their uniform; the whole ensemble embodies constricting, standardized repetition. Only a handful of prisoners, on the left above, resist the girdles. Once they’ve shed their prison garb, they pull sartorial focus:

Exchanging conformity for individuality, with stripes now removed from their persons and confined to the prison bars behind them, these figures, who make up Villainy, Incorporated, become a carnival of stripes and swirls, dots and spots, human and animal, butch and femme, West and East, pants and skirts, unitard and hoodie.

Why is Giganta in a wildcat pattern if she used to be a gorilla? Why is Cheetah sporting leopard spots? Why do those spots glow inexplicably green in the negative space between Eviless’s arm and breast? And look at the accessories — the bird headpiece, the sinister goggles, the orange scarf segmenting a red top and yellow pants, the elaborate cat ears, the fedora, the hood, the jewelry. At last, the circus has come to town. I could look at this panel for hours.

Losing oneself in one panel of a strip, or in the details of a single panel, especially in details of costume, is associated with fetishism, the fixation on a part detached from a whole. One way of describing my experience of “Villainy, Incorporated” is that I find it much easier to focus on individual panels and on details of individual panels than to follow the sequence of events, which feels more cyclical than progressive. If I force myself to focus, I see that we have eight villains, and that Wonder Woman first defeats four, then another two, and then the final duo. But tracking this is a chore, because in each of those mini-episodes, protagonist and antagonist keep switching roles: first the villains are bound to submit, then Wonder Woman, then the villains, then Wonder Woman. Often Wonder Woman finds herself having to obey the commands of an opponent who has snagged the heroine’s golden lasso, which allows anyone wielding it to compel obedience:

In this panel, I’m more interested in Cheetah’s feet than in what’s going to happen next. It’s hard to care about which particular character is wearing the Venus girdle or bound by the golden lasso at any given moment, because it’s clear that soon she will wriggle free and place it on someone else, who will in turn wriggle free and place it on her erstwhile captor.

Another way of putting this is that throughout “Villainy, Incorporated,” it’s hard to distinguish the tops from the bottoms, and sometimes even the good girls from the bad. Take Mala and Eviless, whose hairdos, like their names, are basically reflections of one another.

It’s as if the scene of sadism were more important to #28 than the story — as if sadism had itself become subject to the loopy visual tempo of the fetish. What matters most is not generating anxious suspense about what will happen next, but a feeling of secure suspension in a continuous series of images of women tying up women.

Wonder Woman thus seems to challenge the contrast between fetishism and sadism posited by Laura Mulvey in her classic essay on “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Mulvey sees Hollywood cinema as appealing to two types of pleasure that are of course related but look very different and appeal to different elements of our psyches. The first type is a fetishistic pleasure in isolated moments of female display that have no relation to linear plot progression. The second is a sadistic pleasure in narratives of pursuit, punishment, forgiveness, and control, in which men usually drive the action and women receive it. Mulvey sees both forms of visual pleasure as attempts to control castration anxiety, and people have been arguing productively with her schema for decades, which attests to both its insights and to its limitations. As Noah Berlatsky has pointed out in his readings of earlier numbers, the all-female universe of Wonder Woman undoes the identification of men with action and women with passivity and turns both the superheroine and the passive male into feminist fetishes.

Mulvey assumes a specific kind of heterosexual framework that seems less than relevant to the lesbian kitsch world of “Villainy, Incorporated.” This is a universe of female prisons, Amazons swearing by “Suffering Sappho,”and boarding school crushes (“Oh what strength — Princess, you are wonderful!”). Is #28 just a variation on a girlie show, designed by men for men, an appropriation of lesbian pulp? Or does it allow both male and female readers to identify with powerful femininity and vulnerable masculinity? I’d incline to the latter, given how #28 pumps up female agency and bonds between women while downplaying male power. Steve is as apt to be tied up as any of the female characters, and in his last appearance in this episode, though he comes to Wonder Woman’s rescue, he’s rendered as a barely discernible stick figure.

Questions like the ones posed above are fun because they’re impossible to answer. I’ll end with another imponderable. Why don’t I find this egalitarian story line sexy, much as I enjoy the individual panels? Mulvey describes the “destruction of pleasure as a radical weapon,” and for me, #28 has indeed destroyed what Mulvey deems the sadistic pleasures of control and dominance associated with conventional linear narrative. To some, it may seem nonsensical of me to say that #28’s destroys sadistic narrative pleasure. The characters address one another as “slave” and “mistress” and there’s an image of a woman engaged in some kind of bondage on almost every page:

The BDSM imagery isn’t just an effect of the action-adventure plot; the Amazons speak frequently of their desire to compel “complete obedience to loving authority.”

Yet “Villainy, Incorporated” feels to me like it gently thwarts sadism, because while reading it, I find it difficult to sort out who is active and who is passive, who is subject and who is object. You’re dominant if you hold the lasso, submissive if it holds you. Even when captive, Wonder Woman performs feats of strength, like towing a submarine. The most obedient prisoners have also become so strong that by virtue of submitting to their captors they have acquired the power to rescue them:

Throughout #28, the captive guards and rebel prisoners trade places, producing the confusion of agent and object, person and thing, masculine and feminine, that Anne Cheng identifies with fetishism in her book Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface.

“Villainy, Incorporated” is obsessed with bondage scenes, but its version of BDSM is a reparative, maternalist one in which difference is dissolved, polarities blur, and rectilinear structure collapses. This relaxation of the more punitive energies that Mulvey links to classically constructed plots seems related to the shift in scene from the heterosexual one typical of Hollywood cinema to the female world of love and ritual that is Wonder Woman. It’s also related to the difference between feature films and comics; it’s as though episode #28 has internalized the seriality of the genre as a whole.

Perhaps “Villainy, Incorporated” frustrates my narrative pleasure because it often feels like it’s trying to reconcile sadism with moralism. In the name of Aphrodite, Wonder Woman practices a kind of radical Christian ethics:

The Amazons claim to be enforcing complete obedience for the good of their captives, with the aim of removing “all desire to do evil” from them. Like the nineteenth-century proponents of criminal rehabilitation analyzed by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish, Wonder Woman prefers conversion to physical force, disciplining her enemies’ bodies in order to reform their souls. “‘I don’t feel cruel and wicked as I used to,'” exults Irene after doing time in a Venus girdle. But isn’t moral reform the ultimate invasion? What’s left of a person if she lacks even the desire to do evil? Is the problem with Wonder Woman that she is too sadistic, rather than not sadistic enough?

Or perhaps I have a lukewarm response to Wonder Woman because she dares to expose the soft underbelly that sadistic scenarios aim to protect. Explaining this requires a long detour through feminist psychoanalytic theory. Practitioners of BDSM often describe the core of their sexuality as an ethic of radical care that undoes any strict separation of omnipotence from helplessness. But many people see BDSM scenarios as appealing precisely because they revolve around polarized roles.

Jessica Benjamin has written brilliantly about sadistic fantasies and representations in The Bonds of Love and an essay in Like Subjects, Love Objects. I can’t do justice to her subtle argument here, but here’s the comic-book version of the points I find most relevant to Wonder Woman and its variations on the theme of bondage and submission between women.

For Benjamin, fantasies of erotic domination revolve around splitting. As infants, we feel omnipotent and helpless, destructive and vulnerable. Indeed, our very feelings of omnipotence make us feel helpless, anxious that our own aggression might destroy the external world on which we depend for survival. We find it almost impossible to discern the difference between what is inside us and what is outside us. We also find it almost impossible to discern the difference between the external world in general and our parents in particular, and like most psychoanalysts, Benjamin sees mothers as the prime embodiments of both the external world and parental care.

Engaging with various thinkers, including Donald Winnicott (a key figure in Alison Bechdel’s new graphic memoir, Are You My Mother?), Benjamin sees fantasies of power and submission as resisting erotic intersubjectivity, in which each recognizes the other as “a being outside omnipotent control” (186). Sadistic fantasies manage the universal infantile experience of feeling overwhelmed by both one’s own omnipotence and one’s mothers. They appease “the conflict between recognition and destruction of the other” (183) by creating a strict demarcation between fixed poles of power and submission. Benjamin writes that these are usually “organized by gender,” with men dominating and women submitting. This suggests lack of familiarity with the diverse range of BDSM scenarios in circulation for at least the last two hundred years, but gender is not really the point of her argument.

Benjamin’s key point is that s-m scenarios and erotic intersubjectivity alike are grappling with the same psychic challenge: how to reconcile tensions between sameness and difference, merger and separation, closeness and distance, acceptance and rejection, idealization and recognition. Sadistic fantasies may seem like expressions of cruelty, but in her view they are also working out the fear that the maternal object could not survive one’s aggression (196). In sadistic and masochistic fantasies, “each can play only one side at a time.” Benjamin contrasts this to erotic experiences in which those involved are neither perfectly strong nor perfectly weak. Those experiences emerge most readily when one has been able to recognize the mother as an independent subject, which helps one develop an erotic self that can play with destruction without being extinguished by it (206). Benjamin clearly prefers Eros to sadistic fantasy, but she’s not censorious of fantasy; she sees pornography as a sign of suffering mainly insofar as many people report feeling bad about their responses to it.

Where does this leave Wonder Woman? Benjamin describes sadistic fantasies as a way to cope with the sensation of “encapsulation in omnipotence,” which is an interesting gloss on being bound by a golden lasso and a Venus girdle that compel complete obedience.

I don’t think we need Jessica Benjamin to tell us that Wonder Woman #28 is obsessed with bondage. What Benjamin’s framework helps us see is that Wonder Woman revolves around what we might call maternalist bondage. Certainly, in this comic, you’re either tied up or doing the tying, and each can only play one side at a time. But characters switch from one side to another with such frequency and rapidity that they’re almost occupying both sides at once, yielding oxymoronic beings such as “captive guards” and Amazons bound by their own lassos.

The tender solicitousness Wonder Woman so often expresses for those she’s restraining (“What’s the matter, Eviless?”) makes Amazonian domination a relatively explicit expression of the need to give and receive comfort and recognition (“I hate to pull Eviless under water”). For Benjamin, sadistic fantasies exist to neutralize, even repress, such needs at their most intense and naked. Wonder Woman dares to go where most s-m fantasies don’t — into the turbulent emotional core of neediness and reparation that most sadistic scenarios tie up into neat, well-defined packages. And the vertiginous switch-hitting that results disrupts the controlled progression of plot along with the polarized distribution of power.

Wonder Woman #28 doesn’t give us perfect reciprocity; this is a classic comic, after all, and it’s inconceivable that its blissfully one-dimensional characters would lend themselves to the intersubjective encounters with difference to which erotic reciprocity gives rise.

What Wonder Woman #28 does give us is an obsessive depiction of the reversibility and replication of power between women. That reversible reciprocity is embodied in Wonder Woman’s name. WW: these initials constitute a double mirror image, since the first letter is the same as the second, and each letter consists of twin V’s. The two V’s that make up each W recur in the peaks of Wonder Woman’s boots. We have regular V’s in the back:

and inverted ones at the front:

WW is also MM upside down — just as adoration is the flip side of rage, omnipotence is the flip side of helplessness, and Wonder Woman is the flip side of Mom. But then, what isn’t?

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This is part of a roundtable on the last Marston/Peter Wonder Woman. The roundtable index is here.

William Marston on Sorority Baby Parties

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I was just reading this passage from William Marston’s psychological treatise, Emotions of Normal People, in which he describes his scientific observations of sorority initiation rites. And…well, I couldn’t resist sharing. Enjoy!

In the spring of the freshmen year, the sophomore girls held what was called “The Baby Party”, which all freshmen girls were compelled to attend. At this affair, the freshmen girls were questioned as to their misdemeanors and punished for their disobediences and rebellions. The baby party was so named because the freshmen girls were required to dress like babies.

At the party, the freshmen girls were put through various stunts under command of the sophomores. Upon one occasion, for instance, the freshman girls were led into a dark corridor where their eyes were blindfolded, and their arms were bound behind them. Only one freshman at a time was taken through this corridor along which sophomore guards were stationed at intervals. This arrangement was designed to impress the girls punished with the impossibility of escape from their captresses. After a series of harmless punishments, each girl was led into a large room where all the Junior and Senior girls were assembled. There she was sentenced to go through various exhibitions, supposed to be especially suitable to punish each particular girl’s failure to submit to discipline imposed by the upper class girls. The sophomore girls carried long sticks with which to enforce, if necessary, the stunts which the freshman were required to perform. While the programmed did not call for a series of pre-arranged physical struggles between individual girls…frequent rebellion of the freshman against the commands of their captresses and guards furnished the most exciting portion of the entertainment according to the report of a majority of the class girls.

Nearly all the sophomores reported excited pleasantness of captivation emotion throughout the party. The pleasantness of their captivation responses appeared to increase when they were obliged to overcome rebellious freshman physically, or to induce them by repeated commands and added punishments to perform the actions from which the captive girls strove to escape….

Female behaviour also contains still more evidence than male behaviour that captivation emotion is not limited to inter-sex relationships. [Marston’s emphasis] The person of another girl seems to evoke from female subjects, under appropriate circumstances, fully as strong captivation response as does that of a male.

Dr. Psycho, a psychologist like Marston, is forced to participate in sorority hazing rituals, from Marston/Peter’s Wonder Woman #5.

The index for our ongoing roundtable on Marston’s Wonder Woman is here.