   I've been into comics for as long as I can remember, but to be honest, I've never been into Wonder Woman. I rarely caught the old TV show with Lynda Carter (although the theme song is all kinds of awesome). In fact, the only time I really found her interesting is her animated appearances on Justice League Unlimited. It's not that I hated her, I never followed her as closely as I did Superman and Batman. And then, I went on to reading Marvel Comics, which is an entirely different story altogether. I've been told that she can be really awesome, depending on who's writing her, but then again, can’t that be said for any character? I read a lot of comics scans later on, and a lot of them featured her tied up, caged, and bound in various different ways. Hell, the one way she could lose her powers is if a man locked her bracelets together. Then again, she herself did her share of tying people up. There is her golden lasso, forcing anyone who is snared by it to only speak the truth. Well, a little past that… it’s best to show you, than tell you.     "Brings your ropes and paddles, it's gonna be a fun time tonight!" I sometimes wonder if Etta Candy made it to modern continuity.        G likes finding slashy subtext in a lot of her fandoms (though Superman/Batman does seem to fall within her limits), but even she admits in classic WW, there isn’t a lot of subtext, there’s just text.Looking at all that, I just can't help but to wonder if Wonder Woman is the patron saint of bondage. She might as well be. After all, like the saying goes, she’s not bad, she’s just drawn that way.Wonder Woman's creator, William Moulton Marsten, who used “Charles Moulton” as a pen-name, was an Ivy-League scholar and practicing psychiatrist. In addition to being Harvard-educated, and a comic creator, he also invented the lie detector. He believed that the path to world peace was for men to be subservient to women. "Wonder Woman satisfies the subconscious, elaborately disguised desire of males to be mastered by a woman who loves them." That’s a direct quote, by the way. It seems that Wonder Woman was more or less an outlet for Martsen’s bondage fantasies. From what I’ve read he was a big practitioner of BDSM. Polyamorous, too. He and his wife had a mutual girlfriend, both of whom had children by him, and continued to live together after Marsten’s death in 1948.All the bondage aside, it was mainly Marsten’s intent to create a strong female character that girls (and boys) could look up to. During the time when all the boys have gone to war, he saw the strength that women displayed after they took up the slack. Considering the fact that it’s taken a couple of decades for women equality to reach the forefront, an act like that is commendable. He just created a character that people with kinks can look up to as well.You’re a wonder, Wonder Woman.  |
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