Wonder Woman, Suicide Bombers & Gliberal Feminists

Second World War is generally understood as the most liberating and empowering period for western women. While men were away war fighting, women were fighting a different kind of war at home. Rosie the Riveter, Wendy the Welder and Josephine the Plumber became the new faces of a working class previously dominated by men. It was here, amidst women who were popping rivets on the West Coast, making bombers and fighters for aeronautical companies like Boeing, that Wonder Woman was born. Her creator William Moulton Marston, a psychologist by profession and the inventor of the polygraph, designed her to represent a particular form of feminism that believed women had the potential to be superior to men.

“Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don’t want to be tender, submissive, peace-loving as good women are. Women’s strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.”

Essentially, what he succeeded in creating was exactly the inverse of an empowered woman. The comic’s relentless message was appallingly male-centered: an overtly sensual Amazonian warrior who was as “beautiful as Aphrodite, wise as Athena, swifter than Hermes, and stronger than Hercules” sent as an ambassador to “Man’s World” or “Patriarch’s World” ( i.e. America, described as “the last citadel of democracy” and thus “America, liberty and freedom must be preserved!”). Aphrodite, in Greek history, is the goddess of love, lust, beauty, prostitution and sexual reproduction. Athena is exactly the opposite, her austere observance of sexual modesty gaining her the name “Athena Parthenos” (Virgin Athena). Isn’t this Athenian (her civilian identity as Diana Prince the secretary) yet Amazonian (Wonder Woman) portrayal precisely the stuff of male fantasy, a prelude to sex? Does it not act as a fantasmatic supplement feeding the predominantly male audience’s sexuality- nay, pornosexuality? I say pornosexuality because in reality men would prefer an Athenian woman – in this case a quiet, diligent secretary – for marriage and bearing children. A brazen Amazonian hussy would strictly be confined to fantasies, most of them ending with the man, the true alpha, successfully taming the wild vixen. Testament to this are the numerous scenes where Wonder Woman is tied up and drawn in provocative positions. In one issue when her wrist bracelets (symbol of bondage?) get broken, she loses total control and shatters into absolute madness. “Power without self-control tears a girl to pieces,” she sighs.

So the comic’s supposed ‘feminism’ was of course anything but. Curiously this doesn’t seem to upset western feminists. In fact, they embrace Wonder Woman as a super-hero and are proud of the fact she kicks ass better than a man does. And even more curiously, while heroes like Wonder Woman, Sheena, She-Ra and Elektra are widely praised as strong, beautiful, competent and altruistic, veiled Muslim women with guns blazing, bombs in hands, ready to take on any villain in order to save their families and people are usually described in terms of “economical necessity”, “jilted love”, “failed marriages”, “personal despair” and “moral transgressions needing redemption through a martyr’s death”. It never occurs to the gliberal feminists that these women could actually be politically driven and that politics alone can sufficiently describe their actions. The idea that a Muslim woman would be interested in preserving her country, liberty and freedom is utterly unconceivable. That she doesn’t need to be saved from the libidinal economics of uncivilized, gynophobic Muslim men is met with absolute disbelief.

Perhaps this is because western feminists are increasingly realizing that they are the ones in need of rescuing. “The sexuality that has been freed is male (porno)sexuality,” Germaine Greer bravely acknowledges. Gender revolution and sexual liberation has actually harmed women more than the vast majority of feminists care to acknowledge. The female sexuality has been stringently neutralized- what Irigaray calls “a genocide more radical than any form of destruction there has ever been in History”. She believes men and women cannot be equal and any attempts to do so would be futile. She gives an example from the workplace: “I fail to see how a woman can pass for a man at work. She can, of course, dress like a man, stop making love or doing the housework, no longer have children, change her voice, etc. Something of this sort occurs from time to time as a symptom of the neutralization of the sexes in modern times. What should be asked is whether this is due to the choice of particular women or to the necessities of a world men construct, a world women do not choose but tolerate. They do not become women; they become men. This is what the male world demands of them by failing to recognize female identity.”

And so Wonder Woman is not really a woman. In fact, the veiled suicide bomber is more woman precisely because she denies the hetero-normative gender in its usual construction. This probably scares the hell out of feminists.

-F