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Wonder Woman Gets a Woman's Point-of-View
theodp writes "Traditionally, comics have been by, for and about men. But more and more women are breaking into the traditional boys' club. Beginning with Wonder Woman #14, the superhero's tale is being told by Gail Simone. It's a break from nearly 66 years of being written for the most part by men. '[Her work as a blogger] led to a writing job for the all-female comic 'Birds of Prey' for DC--which became a short-lived, live-action TV series--and in turn won her the "Wonder Woman" job. Simone says she sees a change since she wrote her refrigerator rant 10 years ago. 'At that time, the trend was towards grim stories where female characters were killed,' she says. 'We only had a handful of female characters to look up to. Today we're not seeing those stories so much.'"
Is this really such a big break when novelist Jodi Picoult wrote Wonder Woman last year, and is a woman herself?
William Marsden created Wonder Woman as a role model of what he considered feminine strengths. These are very much the traditional 'yin' feminine values and focused less on female empowerment and much more on beauty, demure behavior, and obedience. Women can be strong, Marsden reasoned, by focusing on their womanhood and need not waste time trying to fit into male roles.
Marsden was also a bit of a pervert. His wife and their live-in slave... er... maid, lived in more-or-less open polygamy. They were his bondage slaves, and were apparently quite happy to be so. This theme, of feminine happiness through obedience and subservience, is repeated frequently through Wonder Woman. Not only did Wonder Woman frequently get tied up with her own magic lasso, but pretty much all the Amazon girls loved being bound, spanked, or otherwise disciplined by their superiors.
While you may disagree with Marsden's symbolism, any retelling of Wonder Woman that leaves out the bondage isn't really doing the subject very much justice. Wonderwoman need not end up stuffed in a refrigerator, but she does need to be frequently paddled to keep the story moving.
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Her work as a blogger? Simone has been working in the comics industry for almost a decade now and got the job of writing Wonder Woman due to a solid history of writing well crafted, memorable, stories. She has worked for both the major comic companies and a few of the minor ones writing everything from established superhero books to quirky creator-owned stuff. To suggest that she got a high profile job because of her BLOG is kind of insulting to the hard work she has put in over the years.
Oh, I guarantee that women like that exist. There is simply too much diversity in the world for them not to. It's the principle of "If you can think of something, it already exists on the Internet, and there's probably already fetish porn about it."
But while I wouldn't call you a "Nazi Socialist PC ball buster", look what you did here: "men who are insecure about their own masculinity."
I don't disagree that it's possible to be feminist without being a feminazi, and you may even be right that the feminazi is a myth. But I've seen women propagate and participate in that myth.
When attacking others for their intolerance or prejudice, it helps to not be showing your own prejudice in the same breath. (Not even going to start with the "crawl out of your parent's basement" comment.)
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I think context is the perfect explanation for both of these people. Women do live in a different larger context than men, and aren't as free to have the context redefined from moment to moment. I guess that's the line of thinking anyway. Your friend from 1993 should have reacted to the context of "it would have been difficult to get through this door with a double armload of books," but instead reacted to "men treat women like they're helpless." Domineering though? I'm gonna go with no. Like with most jerk behavior, it comes from insecurity. The women's studies professor has spent too much time in her head meditating on this to realize that it's not a valid way to assign blame. You personally aren't responsible for any of the way 1993 was treated in her past. She had no call to treat you that way, but women in the abstract do have some claims against men in the abstract. The freedom from a larger context in which people make assumptions about you is surely a characteristic of a (social) majority. I can relate to this because may parents are from India and I'm nonwhite. It used to be that in every group of people I was the standin for all Indians. Meaning when I met someone new they asked me if I knew their doctor or if I worshipped a cow. They weren't talking to me, they were talking to the generic case of "Indian person." Being forced to always be the ambassador from India and explain Hinduism and caste gets old very fast. It still happens now, and with people I've known for years. They see me and immediately start talking about their new Indian neighbor or colleague or brother-in-law. Or they hear that I'm vegetarian and start talking at length about their favorite meat foods from India. Whoops I'm venting sorry. I don't go off on these people but I sure feel like it sometimes, as you can see. Does that make me a jerk? I don't know.
Once when I was in high school I was working at a mall store and someone came in and angrily demanded to know whether I spoke English. I had read about discrimination before but never had it applied directly to my face. Until then I had never thought about it happening to me. Since then it's been very hard for me not to consider whether I'm being treated differently because of race. For white people I'm sure this almost never enters their thinking because by and large there are no assumptions about behaviors and competencies (and deficiencies more to the point) based on whiteness. I couldn't say for sure since I've never been white. For white people I think it most often comes from having an ethnic name, but really I don't know.
So I think that's what women's studies professor 1 meant by context, but she should have known that you can't dismiss people's experiences when trying to make them see other people's experiences. College professors aren't always teachers inside.
Maybe next time check and see what the books are first :)
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."