Wonder Woman Unbound (20 page)

Nothing in the story matched the homosexual model Wertham outlined in his discussion of Batman and Robin. Jan wasn’t Wonder Woman’s protégé in some pederastic relationship, nor were they overly affectionate. Also unlike in his Batman section, Wertham didn’t mention any of his patients seeing lesbian overtones in this story. This interpretation was purely Wertham’s, and frankly, if he was looking for a Wonder Woman story with a lesbian subtext, there were far better ones to choose from. What this adoption story did offer was a female superhero in a maternal role and that, for Wertham, was an inherently impossible situation.

Discussing female superheroes, Wertham wrote: “They do not work. They are not homemakers. They do not bring up a family. Mother-love is entirely absent.” He added that “in no other literature for children has the image of womanhood been so degraded.” This was partly inaccurate; the alter egos of many female superheroes had jobs, including Wonder Woman. Wertham restricted the notion of proper womanhood to homemaking and child-rearing, which explains his assumption of lesbianism for Wonder Woman and other female superheroes.

To Wertham, a woman was supposed to be a wife and mother and take care of the home. Running off to fight crime was the opposite of being a homemaker and, following his logic, the opposite of being a wife and mother was being a lesbian. Wertham believed that if a woman wasn’t actively engaging in or pursuing a domestic, maternal lifestyle, then she just didn’t like men or children, and thus she was a homosexual. Wonder Woman’s adoption of Jan had lesbian overtones because it was impossible for Wonder Woman to be maternal; because she was a superhero, she was automatically a lesbian and lost any sort of maternal, nurturing potential.

Furthermore, Wertham decried the fact that “Wonder Woman is not the natural daughter of a natural mother, nor was she born like Athena from the head of Zeus.” In 1954, the Golden Age Wonder Woman origin story still stood, and she was made of clay and brought to life by the gods. Her lack of a “natural” mother or father placed her further outside of maternal, familial norms than her fellow female heroes and made her the archetype for Wertham’s narrow-minded lesbian deduction.

It sounds ridiculous, but this assumption of lesbianism is the only way to understand Wertham’s discussion of Wonder Woman. While he provided extensive evidence and clinical research for his discussion of a homosexual reading of Batman, he seemed to feel that a lesbian reading of Wonder Woman was as plain as the nose on his face. He even wrote that “if it were possible to translate a cardboard figure like Wonder Woman into real life, every normal-minded young man would know there is something wrong with her.” This was Wertham at his worst, and it takes away from his interesting arguments and progressive stances on other issues.

Amusingly, while Wertham’s baseless suppositions and sexist assumptions about Wonder Woman were terrible, shoddy work, his conclusion inadvertently stumbled onto a fascinating aspect of the character. A close look at Marston and Kanigher’s work on
Wonder Woman
shows that a reading of Wonder Woman as a lesbian isn’t off base at all.

Suffering Sappho!! Was Wonder Woman a Lesbian?

Marston’s key psychological work,
Emotions of Normal People,
didn’t mention lesbians, lesbianism, or any derivation of the term, but this was solely an issue of terminology. “Lesbian” suggests exclusivity in sexual preference, namely that you are a female who is attracted
only
to women. The terms “lesbianism” and “lesbian” were well established in psychological parlance by the time
Emotions of Normal People
was written, but Marston, as he was wont to do, used his own terminology.

Marston spent a lot of time discussing sexual relations between women as a part of “female love relationships.” He noted that women tended to form very close bonds and care for each other deeply, but he also found “that nearly half of the female love relationships concerning which significant data could be obtained, were accompanied by bodily love stimulation.” By “bodily love stimulation,” Marston meant sexual acts. He called this a physical love relationship, but was quick to explain that this was in addition to physical relationships with men.

Marston wrote that “in several cases, well-adapted love relationships with husband and children were not felt to be sufficient, without supplementary love affairs with other women.” This wasn’t lesbianism, but instead a type of bisexuality where heterosexuality was the default and sexual relations with other women were additional. Marston explained these relationships by referencing his earlier claim that women had twice as many love organs as men. With twice as much love to go around, he suggested, it was only logical that women would engage in sexual relationships with each other.

In the 1920s, sex and attraction outside of heterosexuality was seen as a perversion of the norm, and as a medical and psychological problem. Havelock Ellis argued that lesbians were women with aberrant masculine tendencies and described them as “the pick of the women who the average man would pass by.” The notion that nonheterosexual relationships were problematic was widespread and, as evidenced by Wertham in 1954, continued for some time.

Even Marston wasn’t immune to these theories; he argued that male homosexuality was a purely dominant relationship and not at all healthy for the participants. But while Marston avoided the term “lesbian,” his analysis of the effects of sexual relationships between women bucked the trend of his peers’ condemnation. He stated that:

With regard to the possibly deleterious effect upon women’s physical health of this type of love relationship with other women, I have been unable to verify […] that such love affairs between girls were always injurious to their physical health.
*

From a psychological perspective, Marston found that “girls and women who indulge in this form of love expression appear to feel no abnormality or unnaturalness about it.” While not an endorsement of lesbianism, this was certainly an endorsement of sexual relations between women.

Marston’s examination of female love relationships may have been reflected in his personal life as well. His polyamorous relationship with his wife, Elizabeth Holloway Marston, and their lover, Olive Byrne, sounds similar to the sort of relationship Marston described in
Emotions of Normal People.
He even opened his discussion of “Woman’s Passion” with a preamble about his naïveté when it came to female love relationships, and how he learned much more about them “with the invaluable aid of my collaborators,” meaning Elizabeth and Olive. The fact that Elizabeth and Olive stayed together for nearly forty years afer Marston’s passing, until Olive’s death, suggests that there may have been more to their association than a mutual love of Marston. Marston may have lived in the middle of a female love relationship, and this could have influenced his work.

This, however, brings up a chicken/egg question for Marston. Much like it was difficult to determine whether his enjoyment of bondage led to DISC theory or if his discovery of DISC theory led to his prominent use of bondage, so too is it tricky to determine which came first: Marston’s advocacy of female love relationships or his enjoyment thereof. With bondage, we found that the fixation extended past metaphor into fetishism, and the same appears to be true here.

Emotions of Normal People
contained many anecdotes about patients Marston had treated and stories he’d heard that illustrated his arguments concerning dominance and submission. These usually took the form of a paragraph that simply laid out the story, but there was one illustration that went above and beyond the rest. It included pages of tables and surveys, as well as pages and pages more of extensive examination of the data. It was one of the most, if not
the
most, detailed portions of the entire book and, perhaps not surprisingly, it involved both bondage and pleasure between women.

This extensive study concerned a “baby party,” a sorority initiation where freshmen were dressed as babies, blindfolded and bound, and then given various punishments, including paddling and performing stunts. Olive Byrne and Marston attended such a party at Jackson College in 1925, and Marston found it absolutely fascinating. Marston reported that the event was fun for nearly everybody involved; the initiators experienced the “excited pleasantness of captivation emotion” while for the initiates “about three-fourths of the girls physically made captive to other girls at the Baby Party experienced pure, pleasant passion emotion.” Marston ultimately came to the conclusion that:

it seems undoubtedly to be the fact that girls, acting as inducers, can evoke intense and very pleasant passion emotion from all normal and well-balanced girls […] without administering genital organ stimulation directly or indirectly.

This meant that women didn’t need to engage in direct sexual activities with other women in order to evoke a sexually pleasurable response. This pleasure could come from simply submitting to another woman and being made helpless to their power, like in a bondage situation. The great detail of this section of
Emotions of Normal People
is noteworthy, and Marston continued this sorority theme, with the accompanying theme of sexual pleasure between women, in his other work.

In
Venus with Us,
Marston’s sex romp novel about the life of Julius Caesar, women engaged in bondage with each other and willingly became each other’s slaves. While this is certainly interesting in terms of Marston’s inter-female sexual pleasure fixation, an entire chapter of the book, entitled “Ladies’ Night in the High Priest’s Palace,” dealt with initiations remarkably similar to the baby party in
Emotions of Normal People.

These initiations involved a mystery cult instead of a sorority, but the basic scenario remained the same: a group of women initiated a younger group of stripped down, blindfolded, and bound women into the ways of their secret society. Their cult worshipped a goddess named Bona Dea, and when Caesar asked if he could attend their initiations, Servilia told him, “Bona Dea is a woman’s goddess exclusively. The sacred rites practiced by us initiates would certainly interest you—intensely—if you could only know them. But you can’t.” The new initiates at the ceremony were “very young girls, some of them still in their early teens, with a few young married women recently converted to the service of the Good Goddess,” which was reminiscent of older classmates initiating freshmen.

Although the rituals of the ceremony weren’t detailed specifically, it was strongly hinted that they were of an erotic nature. Servilia’s teasing of Caesar suggested that something salacious was going on, and the action cut away from a neophyte beginning her initiation with the words “Cassandra felt the hands of several women busy themselves with her garments …” That seems to be a rather telling ellipsis.

Marston’s continuing fixation inevitably brings us to the Holliday Girls and their sorority, Beeta Lambda. A scene in
Sensation Comics
#3, the second appearance of the Holliday Girls, depicted Etta Candy and her fellow sorority sisters initiating Eve, a new member. The panel showed Etta swinging a piece of candy from a string in front of the blindfolded initiate, who was down on all fours and got paddled every time she missed when she tried to catch the candy in her mouth. Eve’s initiation continued in the next issue, where the kneeling initiate was paddled by a hooded girl and then chained to a radiator with a dog collar around her neck. When Eve escaped to attend a previous engagement, Etta and the girls gave chase with Etta calling out, “Woo-woo! Eve got away! Come on, girls! Bring your ropes and paddles.”

These initiation rituals were common for the Holliday Girls. In
Wonder Woman
#12, for example, Etta punished two initiates who were late for their duties by sentencing them to be bound, blindfolded, and left in the middle of the Holliday College campus, after which they had to find their way back to the sorority house in their impaired state. In another issue, an initiate called Etta the “grand mistress of spanks and slams.” Since we know that these initiations were always a source of sexual pleasure in Marston’s other work, we can conclude that inter-female sexual enjoyment was portrayed in Wonder Woman comics.

As for Wonder Woman herself, she too must have enjoyed female love relationships in a sexually pleasurable manner. Bondage was a regular game on Paradise Island, but we need to build on our previous conclusions. The “erotic element” Marston thought inherent in bondage wasn’t just a voyeuristic kink for readers; given Marston’s sexual interpretation of sorority initiations, the bondage was sexually pleasurable for the participants as well.

This raises an interesting point, because while female love relationships were always in addition to heterosexual relationships, there were no men on Paradise Island. If the only sexual activities the Amazons engaged in involved women via their bondage games, this would imply that they were, in fact, lesbians. Wonder Woman, on the other hand, was a citizen of both Paradise Island and the world of men. But the Golden Age Wonder Woman regularly rebuffed Steve Trevor’s advances and returned home to engage in bondage games, and with enthusiasm. She had a far better time with her Amazon sisters than she ever did with Steve. Marston might have been trying to tell us something.