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Had a thought a couple of days ago that I haven't actually typed out and published. Oh, yeah, I have a dreamwidth!
I used to think that the violent or dismissive ways writers (specifically male writers) treated the Amazons in Wonder Woman was a kind of male horror at strong independent women who were completely independent of men. I can understand that. But what I'm seeing from Tom King now made something click for me.
Years ago, I remember reading someone, maybe on the DC message boards, maybe in an email group, saying that Wondy creator William Moulton Marston "wasn't a feminist, but a female supremacist." And that seemed strange to me. Of course there are different kinds of feminism, but surely female supremacism counts as one of them?
What clicked for me two days ago is this: Some people genuinely think feminism isn't about female strength, but about female weakness and especially victimhood. They frame it as part of the "woke victimhood complex" or somesuch. So if they try to inject what they think "feminism" means into Wonder Woman, it means showing women being abused and degraded. Just showing a female empowerment fantasy wouldn't be "feminist" enough for them. So of course (they think) the Amazons have to be generally weak, hunted, abused, mostly dead, under threat, or the like. And this trope shows up a lot in Wondy stories over the last few decades!
You know whom this resembles? J. K. Rowling. Not that Jo Rowling is a feminist by her own lights nor by most definitions; but she now claims to speak for women while framing that entirely in fear of men--and fear of women who used to be men.
For women like JoRo, to be a woman is to be mostly ugly & undesirable, never as good as a man; this is entirely opposite the thematic space Marston set up for Wonder Woman, where women can be fat, thin, serious, comical, heroic, villainous, but always centered & always awesome. It seems in some ways a difference between an extreme form of female heterosexuality & an extreme form of male heterosexuality; but it's more precisely a difference between seeing womanhood as hateful, & seeing it as beautiful (to the point of idealization & romanticization).
Anyway, I'm basically on Dr. Marston's side here. The point of characters like Wonder Woman, She-Hulk, Vampirella, and so on is a kind of power fantasy. The fantastic elements can be toned down, as in the mod early-1970's Wonder Woman, or taken to absurd heights, as in the earlier Wondy stories. But the point isn't to make young female readers feel bad & weak; it's to imagine having fantastical power, the same as characters like Spider-Man & Superman allow for young boys. Is that healthy, for either sex? Not entirely. It's literary junk food. But it's wildly irresponsible to replace it with messaging that even a 3000-year-old sorceress queen is nothing compared to the male scions of the present patriarchy--which feels like what some DC writers think.
I used to think that the violent or dismissive ways writers (specifically male writers) treated the Amazons in Wonder Woman was a kind of male horror at strong independent women who were completely independent of men. I can understand that. But what I'm seeing from Tom King now made something click for me.
Years ago, I remember reading someone, maybe on the DC message boards, maybe in an email group, saying that Wondy creator William Moulton Marston "wasn't a feminist, but a female supremacist." And that seemed strange to me. Of course there are different kinds of feminism, but surely female supremacism counts as one of them?
What clicked for me two days ago is this: Some people genuinely think feminism isn't about female strength, but about female weakness and especially victimhood. They frame it as part of the "woke victimhood complex" or somesuch. So if they try to inject what they think "feminism" means into Wonder Woman, it means showing women being abused and degraded. Just showing a female empowerment fantasy wouldn't be "feminist" enough for them. So of course (they think) the Amazons have to be generally weak, hunted, abused, mostly dead, under threat, or the like. And this trope shows up a lot in Wondy stories over the last few decades!
You know whom this resembles? J. K. Rowling. Not that Jo Rowling is a feminist by her own lights nor by most definitions; but she now claims to speak for women while framing that entirely in fear of men--and fear of women who used to be men.
For women like JoRo, to be a woman is to be mostly ugly & undesirable, never as good as a man; this is entirely opposite the thematic space Marston set up for Wonder Woman, where women can be fat, thin, serious, comical, heroic, villainous, but always centered & always awesome. It seems in some ways a difference between an extreme form of female heterosexuality & an extreme form of male heterosexuality; but it's more precisely a difference between seeing womanhood as hateful, & seeing it as beautiful (to the point of idealization & romanticization).
Anyway, I'm basically on Dr. Marston's side here. The point of characters like Wonder Woman, She-Hulk, Vampirella, and so on is a kind of power fantasy. The fantastic elements can be toned down, as in the mod early-1970's Wonder Woman, or taken to absurd heights, as in the earlier Wondy stories. But the point isn't to make young female readers feel bad & weak; it's to imagine having fantastical power, the same as characters like Spider-Man & Superman allow for young boys. Is that healthy, for either sex? Not entirely. It's literary junk food. But it's wildly irresponsible to replace it with messaging that even a 3000-year-old sorceress queen is nothing compared to the male scions of the present patriarchy--which feels like what some DC writers think.
