Wonder Woman Unbound

by Hanley, Tim

  Batman had a fondness for Catwoman, and she gladly used that attraction to her advantage. Although Catwoman occasionally seemed to take on the role of the damsel in distress, she did so only to manipulate Batman and achieve her own ends. She knew Batman would rescue her if she were truly in a dangerous situation, and she knew she could easily escape him afterward.

  During their first encounter, the Dynamic Duo escorted Cat-woman back to shore after foiling her attempted robbery of a cruise ship, and she suddenly jumped overboard. As Robin prepared to jump after her, Batman bumped into him, impeding his pursuit and allowing Catwoman to escape. Robin proclaimed, “I’ll bet you bumped into me on purpose! That’s why you took her along with us … so she might try a break!” Batman flatly denied this before spending the next panel rhapsodizing about Catwoman’s lovely eyes.

  Two issues later, Batman was about to arrest Catwoman, but she kissed him and, taking advantage of his distracted state, pushed him away so she could escape. Robin was about to give chase, but Batman called him off and then said, “What a night! A night for romance, eh, Robin?” Similarly, in Batman #10 Catwoman’s kiss left Batman in such a state that Robin had to yell at him to snap out of his preoccupied bliss long after Catwoman had left the premises. In most of these stories, Catwoman not only escaped, she also got away with jewels she’d stolen. Batman, the consummate crime fighter, was completely powerless in her presence.

  Catwoman was similar to the femme fatales of crime novels or film noir. The complete opposite of the typical good girl, she was assertive instead of passive, ambitious instead of subordinate, and entirely self-defined. Her sexuality wasn’t something to be chastely protected, but rather was a tool to be used for her own enjoyment or advancement. However, femme fatales regularly ended up dead by the end of the novel or film. Because of this, many scholars view the femme fatale as a tragic figure and see her inevitable demise as a punishment for betraying the sexual codes of patriarchal society.

  However, the serialized nature of comic books made death rare for major characters. New stories had to be written every month, and repopulating them would’ve been a laborious task. Any well-received heroes or villains were kept alive and became recurring characters. Catwoman may have stayed alive, but like the femme fatale had to die as condemnation for her independence, so too was Catwoman presented in a negative, villainous light. While Batman was attracted to Catwoman, he ultimately lamented, “It’s too bad she has to be a crook!”

  In the end it was Catwoman who most resembled the Golden Age Wonder Woman. They both used men and eschewed romantic entanglement, working to accomplish their own goals regardless of societal expectations. But while they shared similar traits, they had completely different roles. Catwoman embodied these traits in a framework meant to reinforce typical gender roles, and so she had to be shown in a bad light. Wonder Woman was focused on inverting typical gender roles, and so she took those traits that were so often negatively portrayed and embodied them in a positive and heroic light. Catwoman had transgressed the patriarchal social order, and because of it had to be a crook, but Wonder Woman was establishing a new matriarchal social order and she was its heroic model.

  The Inverted World of Wonder Woman

  Discussing the creation of Wonder Woman in a 1943 article in the American Scholar, William Moulton Marston wrote that “not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, power.” Marston suggested that most comic book readers had disdain for female characters because they showed only the “weak” qualities of women, and he argued that “the obvious remedy [was] to create a feminine character with all the strength of a Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman.”

  In Wonder Woman, Marston presented a brand-new kind of character. While his ideas about female superiority never really caught on, the long-term impact of the first powerful, independent female superhero cannot be understated. In a genre that so rigidly enforced typical gender roles and relied on a very narrow view of femininity, Wonder Woman shattered these expectations for millions of young readers each month. It’s sometimes hard to see the ingrained societal structures that dictate daily life, but by inverting these structures Wonder Woman comics shed a light on the tenets of these systems, along with a sharp critique.

  Marston intended to prepare boys for matriarchy, but it seems that girls got the most out of the comics. It can’t just be a coincidence that the first generation of girls raised on empowering female characters like Wonder Woman and Rosie the Riveter became the generation of the women’s liberation movement. Marston’s Wonder Woman was a wholly unique character in the Golden Age of comics, and while his theories may have been problematic, the legacy of his creation lives on still.

  *Robbins is the foremost expert on women in comics; her book The Great Women Superheroes recounts the stories of Golden Age heroines who have been long forgotten.

  †Miss Fury is particularly noteworthy because she was written and illustrated by June Tarpé Mills, one of the few women making comics in the Golden Age. She created the strip under the pseudonym Tarpé Mills, dropping her first name to hide her gender. Miss Fury strips were collected in comic book form in several issues from 1942 to 1946.

  *In fact, “Diana Prince” was literally someone else entirely. In Sensation Comics #1, soon after Wonder Woman arrived in America she met a nurse who was crying because her husband had found a job in South America and she couldn’t afford to go be with him. The two women looked exactly alike, so Wonder Woman gave her money to go join her husband in exchange for taking over her identity.

  *Lois ignored this demand and was at her editor’s desk the next morning trying to get the story published, but her editor didn’t believe her. Every man in Lois’s life actively kept her down.

  *This slowly changed over time, and Lois got a cover story here and there, though it was often only because Superman felt bad and let her have one. Years into the series, Clark was still out-scooping Lois at almost every turn. Lois is fascinating in that she so well embodies the progress and limitations of working American women in the late 1930s. That Lois even had a job was impressive considering that only a quarter of American women worked outside the home at the time, but being relegated to a position with very little room for advancement in a hostile work environment was the unfortunate plight of many working women.

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  Amazon Princess, Bondage Queen

  While the Golden Age Wonder Woman was impressive, there was more to her than just fighting crime. Her adventures, from helping a bullied child to saving the world from alien invaders, gave her a range Superman and Batman didn’t have. Wonder Woman was a superior superhero, and intentionally so. William Moulton Marston believed that every woman could be a metaphorical Wonder Woman and that women would soon take over the world. His worldview was unique, remarkably progressive, and all of his theories were channeled into his creation. Many of Wonder Woman’s early stories still stand up as strikingly feminist seventy years later, even compared to modern comic books and female characters in today’s books, TV shows, and movies.*

  All of Marston’s work preached a strong message about female power, and while his vision of a female-ruled society hasn’t panned out yet, it was nonetheless a rather forward-thinking idea. However, the more we dig into the subtext and metaphors of his work, the more another side of Marston emerges. His comics were rife with bondage imagery, adding a sexual component to the books that reflected his own fetishism and the troubling places it could lead.

  The rampant fetishism in Wonder Woman comics complicates their feminist message, but it doesn’t undermine it. In fact, the feminism and fetishism were inextricably linked, both of them deriving from Marston’s psychological work. You can’t have one without the other.

  A Staggering Amount of Bondage

  The idea of Wonder Woman as a bondage queen may seem farfetched. Getting captured and tied up by bad guys is an occupational hazard when you’re a superhero, so some argue that w
hile Wonder Woman got tied up sometimes, so too did everyone else. In The Great Women Superheroes, Trina Robbins makes an interesting Golden Age-specific argument about Captain Marvel. Robbins points out that because Billy Batson had to say “Shazam!” to turn into Captain Marvel, he often ended up bound and gagged by fiendish villains so he couldn’t transform into a superhero and thwart their plans. Similarly, Wonder Woman’s main weapon was a lasso, which she used to tie up a lot of people in her comics. Both characters had reasons to have an abnormal amount of bondage in their stories.

  A comparative analysis of the first ten issues of Captain Marvel Adventures with the first ten issues of Batman confirms Robbins’s initial point. Be it ropes or chains or gags, anytime someone was bound and restrained in a way that encumbered or incapacitated him or her, that panel was noted. Batman was chosen for two reasons: the book was never really associated with bondage, and Robin was always tagging along so there were two heroes to be captured and tied up.

  The overall percentage of bondage in both series was the same with each coming in at about 3 percent, but in terms of personal bondage there was a clear winner. On average, Batman and Robin combined were tied up in only 1 percent of the panels in Batman, while Captain Marvel was bound in Captain Marvel Adventures’ panels twice as often. This is a sizeable difference, particularly since it was one hero’s total against two.

  Captain Marvel was definitely tied up more than the average superhero, but his numbers get dwarfed by Wonder Woman.

  The chart below shows how often Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman were bound in the first ten issues of their own series, debunking the “all superheroes get tied up” argument. Wonder Woman’s lowest percentage of personal bondage in Wonder Woman was the same as Captain Marvel’s highest percentage of personal bondage in Captain Marvel Adventures. When your worst is the same as the other guy’s best, that’s a substantial amount. The averages show the same divide: Captain Marvel was tied up about 2 percent of the time in his books, and Wonder Woman was tied up 11 percent of the time in hers. Captain Marvel doubling Batman and Robin’s personal total was fairly impressive, but Wonder Woman trumps Captain Marvel more than five times over.

  In Wonder Woman #10, one out of every five panels in the issue showed Wonder Woman tied up in some fashion. The series was drawn on a six-panel-per-page grid, so on average Wonder Woman was tied up at least once a page in that issue. That’s excessive on its own, but other people were tied up in Wonder Woman as well.

  The following chart shows the total amount of bondage in Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel Adventures, including the heroes plus everybody else who happened to be tied up. If Captain Marvel Adventures #1, the issue with the highest amount of bondage, doubled its total, it still wouldn’t reach Wonder Woman’s lowest total. On average, Captain Marvel Adventures contained 3 percent total bondage, while Wonder Woman had 27 percent. That’s more than a quarter of the book and amounts to nine times as much bondage as Captain Marvel Adventures, our paradigm of an above-average bondage comic book.

  These numbers are colossal, and they get even more curious when comparing personal and overall bondage. Captain Marvel accounted for most of his book’s bondage. His personal total was 2 percent and the overall total was 3 percent, so Captain Marvel comprised two-thirds of the book’s bondage, a clear majority at nearly 70 percent. Wonder Woman was tied up 11 percent of the time, while her book’s overall total was a massive 27 percent; at 40 percent of the total bondage, this is a minority. Sixty percent of the bondage imagery in Wonder Woman didn’t actually feature Wonder Woman at all. Marston spread the bondage around to other characters.

  The bondage panels in Wonder Woman were both numerous and widespread. Going far beyond the occupational hazards of being a superhero, bondage in Wonder Woman comic books was a vast and all-encompassing phenomenon, and it was there for a reason.

  Bondage and the Coming Matriarchy

  Contemporary thought on bondage is much different than Marston’s approach. When we think of bondage these days, it’s usually in terms of the bondage/discipline, dominance/submission, and sadism/masochism subculture, conveniently amalgamated into the far easier to remember acronym of BDSM. This type of bondage has very specific associations with things like leather and whips and is usually tied to role-playing and escapism. For example, the businessman who runs a company all day and gets to boss people around goes home, puts on a leather unitard, gets chained to the wall, and lets someone with a riding crop be in charge for a while. It’s escapist and focuses on one party dominating the other.

  For Marston, bondage was about submission, not just sexually but in every aspect of life. It was a lifestyle, not an activity, and he used bondage imagery as a metaphor for this style of submission. In 1942, Marston conducted a fake interview with his domestic partner, Olive Byrne, for Family Circle magazine. Byrne used the pseudonym “Olive Richard” and pretended to be a casual friend of Marston interested in Wonder Woman and his ideas behind her.* The article was called “Our Women Are Our Future” and it allowed Marston to spell out his theories on the coming matriarchy. Byrne, still upset over Pearl Harbor, asked Marston, “Will war ever end in this world; will men ever stop fighting?” He replied, “Oh, yes. But not until women control men.”

  Patriarchy amounted to a lot of war, greed, and general strife and was motivated by aggression. It was a forced system where those in power weren’t looking out for everyone’s best interests. Marston told Byrne that he saw women taking over society “as the greatest—no, even more—as the only hope for permanent peace.” Men had to choose to surrender to the “loving authority” of women if things were going to get better.

  Men choosing to give up power to women en masse seems as unlikely today as it did in 1942, and Byrne pretended to be incredulous about the idea. Marston replied that men actually wanted to submit to women, because women were “nature-endowed soldiers of Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty, and theirs is the only conquering army to which men will permanently submit—not only without resentment or resistance or secret desires for revenge, but also with positive willingness and joy!” To Marston, this is what every man wanted deep down, and once women realized their power and took over, men would quickly fall in line.

  Marston always described patriarchy in active terms; it was aggressive and forceful and selfish, a whirlwind of men taking what they wanted and leaving destruction in their wake. Marston told Byrne that the success of Wonder Woman was a sign that this process of submission, of taming the whirlwind, had already started. He said that “boys, young and old, satisfy their wish thoughts by reading comics. If they go crazy over Wonder Woman, it means they’re longing for a beautiful, exciting girl who’s stronger than they are.” Wonder Woman tapped into “the subconscious, elaborately disguised desire of males to be mastered by a woman who loves them,” and intentionally so.

  In a letter to his publisher, Max Gaines, Marston echoed his comments in Family Circle and wrote, “The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound.” This bondage meant giving up selfish, dominant aims in favor of deference. If boys were taught the values of submission instead of the forceful, patriarchal values of other superhero comics, then matriarchy would come about more quickly and smoothly.

  The bondage imagery that made up more than a quarter of Wonder Woman was actually an elaborate series of metaphors about submission. Different forms of bondage had different meanings, but they all revolved around this theme. Nearly every Amazon activity on Paradise Island involved some form of bondage, even their holiday festivities. At Christmastime, the Amazons celebrated Diana’s Day, a moon goddess festival. Part of the celebration involved chasing down Amazons dressed as deer, hog-tying the ones who were caught, and then pretending to bake the bound Amazons in a massive pie. Once an Amazon was “sliced” out of the pie, Wonder Woman called out a zany task for her to perform and earn her freedom.

  Bondage was especially important for women who were new to t
he island and learning the Amazon lifestyle. In one issue, Wonder Woman brought a group of female athletes to Paradise Island for a competition, and the athletes were surprised to see so many women walking around with their hands and feet chained together. One athlete asked an Amazon initiate if all Amazons had to wear chains, and she enthusiastically replied, “Oh yes, we love it!” Whenever Wonder Woman returned home, the backgrounds of panels regularly featured characters walking around with chains of some sort, usually without comment. It was just an everyday part of life for all Amazons, even Wonder Woman.

  Wonder Woman not only directed bondage activity, she accepted it as well. In Wonder Woman #13, seven Amazons wrapped all manner of chains and ropes around her, lashing her to a wooden post. Wonder Woman was having a great time and called out, “Bind me as tight as you can, girls, with the biggest ropes and chains you can find!” One of the laughing Amazons replied, “We are, Princess—even you can’t escape these bonds!” Wonder Woman did escape, of course, snapping her bonds with ease.

  Bondage was a game to the Amazons, a sport they all played and enjoyed. When Wonder Woman was subduing female guards in Atlantis in Sensation Comics #35, she mentioned a few of the Amazon bondage moves by name, like “the kitten hold.” As she quickly bound a guard in her lasso, Wonder Woman said, “On Paradise Island where we play many binding games this is considered the safest method of tying a girl’s arms!” The intent of bondage was never to hurt, ridicule, or shame someone, and there were rules of safety and care.

  The Amazons incorporated bondage into their society as an expression of trust to emphasize that their utopia was based on kinship with a hierarchy of submission. All of the Amazons were committed to their patron goddess, Aphrodite; love was their very foundation. Queen Hippolyte would consult Aphrodite directly and ruled the island with the help of her love-based wisdom. They also submitted to Diana, their princess, but through bondage she regularly surrendered to them in return, promoting mutual respect and love.