Wonder Woman Unbound (9 page)

His reply to Gaines’s letter about the sergeant was astounding. He was completely indifferent to Gaines’s worries. Marston wrote back, “I have the good Sergeant’s letter in which he expresses his enthusiasm over chains for women—so what?” He then entirely embraced the sergeant’s reaction, writing that “you can’t have a real woman character in any form of fiction without touching off many readers’ erotic fantasies. Which is swell, I say—harmless erotic fantasies are now generally recognized as good for people.” He refused to change his series in any way.

Gaines remained concerned, but ultimately he did nothing about the book.
Wonder Woman
editor Sheldon Mayer later said, “The fact is, it was a runaway best-seller.” In early 1944, Josette Frank resigned from the advisory board for all three Wonder Woman titles, writing that “the strip is full of significant sex antagonisms and perversions” and “personally, I would consider an out-and-out strip tease less unwholesome than this kind of symbolism.”

Marston’s critics thought that he used bondage imagery in an intentionally erotic manner to lure in readers, and they weren’t entirely wrong. To Marston, there was a definite erotic component to submitting to women. In his fake interview with Olive Byrne, Marston argued that men’s desire to submit to women came from a combination of two feminine qualities. First, “normal men retain their childish longing for a woman to mother them,” so they want a caring, maternal figure. Second, “at adolescence a new desire is added. They want a girl to allure them.”

Mayer later said that Marston “was writing a feminist book, but not for women. He was dealing with a male audience.” It was a bait and switch, playing on male desires with the bondage to bring them in and then hitting them with his metaphors and messages about female superiority. In an article about movies he wrote in 1929, Marston argued that “the unique appeal of the erotic actress” was the key to the success of the film industry, and it seems that he was trying to do the same for comic books with the unique appeal of the erotic superheroine. According to Marston, any powerful female character could get a boy riled up, and
Wonder Woman
just happened to be full of those.

Sex with Marston

Not surprisingly, Marston wrote a lot about sex in his psychological work, and he had a different, more positive approach to women and sex than his contemporaries. In the 1920s, when Marston was developing DISC theory and all the ideas that would lead to Wonder Woman, the study of sexology had recently emerged as a new field in psychology. Researchers like Edward Carpenter, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Sigmund Freud all broke with the prudish and repressive Victorian approach to sexuality, but Havelock Ellis was probably the most famous early sexologist. He argued for the sexual rights of women and took men to task for their poor lovemaking skills, famously writing that “the husband is sometimes like an orang-outang with a violin.”

There was a sort of sexual renaissance in the 1930s when marriage manuals became popular. Based on the research of sexologists, these manuals espoused sexual harmony for married couples and the importance of sexual satisfaction for the husband
and
the wife.
*

Although the theories of sexologists were certainly better for women than anything that had come before, there were still a lot of repressive ideas about women and sex. Sexology was rooted in evolutionary theory, so researchers looked to the animal kingdom, where males often put on a display or some show of strength to capture the female. This propagated a framework where men were defined as active, aggressive captors while women were passive and wanted to be captured. Because women were meant to be captured, any resistance was deemed part of the mating ritual. If a woman refused a man, it was considered a feigned act. Some Freudians went so far as to argue that if a woman were forced to have sex against her will, her unconscious self had actually consented to the act, basically justifying the rape.

Similarly, since men were made to be aggressive captors, these theories resulted in a rationalization, and in some ways an endorsement, of brutality. Ellis wrote that sexual sadism was “in its origin an innocent and instinctive impulse” and “compatible with a high degree of general tender-heartedness.” If all sexual behavior was natural and instinctive, sexual sadism was therefore natural too.

For sexologists, the binary of active, aggressive men and passive women was like a law of nature, hardwired into the brains of humans. Marston disagreed entirely. To Marston, men’s aggressiveness and women’s passivity were things that could be changed with ease, because they were the product of society. Patriarchy encouraged men to be dominant and ruled by their egocentrism, forcing women into a subordinate role.

The only law of nature Marston ascribed to was the superiority of women. When Marston said that women should be in charge, he meant they should be in charge everywhere, especially in the bedroom. In
Emotions of Normal People,
he claimed that “however much dominant resistance the majority of males may feel, […] women’s bodies are designed for the capture of males and not for submission to them.”

Marston turned the sexologists’ framework around entirely, and described every step of a romantic relationship in his own terms. Women were never passive at any stage. In dating, for instance, “the male becomes a constant attendant upon his captivatress, obeying her spoken commands and seeking to submit to her inarticulate emotional nature in every way possible.” The woman was actually slyly capturing him.

Marston argued that during sex the woman’s body literally captured the man’s.
*
Once captured, the woman should initiate all of the movements and the man should respond to her actions, and only with her permission. This would be best for both parties, because women would get what they wanted and “normal males get the maximum of love happiness from being controlled, captured, or captivated by women.” This may be more about Marston and what he liked than an accurate theory of human behavior. Nonetheless, Marston’s ideas were a significant break from those of his contemporaries.

By denying that male sexual aggression was a law of nature, Marston also undercut the justification of sexual sadism. In fact, Marston spoke out quite strongly against sadism, calling it an “abnormal extreme” and arguing that sadism “imposes various tortures upon the body of the person subjected, revealing the fact that the subjected person is regarded, for the time, as an inanimate antagonistic object.”

Given his stance against sadism, it’s no surprise that Marston reacted strongly to his critics suggesting that the bondage in
Wonder Woman
was sadistic. He wrote massive letters defending the series against its advisory board critics, arguing that the bondage wasn’t sadistic because Wonder Woman always escaped. Marston stated that sadism was “the enjoyment of other people’s actual suffering” and claimed this could never happen in his comics because Wonder Woman wasn’t actually suffering; she was bound so she could demonstrate her strength and power when she broke free.

The Limits of Metaphor

Marston certainly had some eccentric ideas, but when he defended them he always said the right things. He was firmly against sadism, strongly advocated the strength of women, and while his bondage metaphors were elaborate, they in theory hold up. However, his intent didn’t match up with his execution, and there was a disconnect between his defense of the comic and the comic itself. If you were trying to teach boys the benefits of submitting to women, you’d expect that the comics would feature a lot of men bound by women. You’d expect them to be having fun, too, happily bound so as to demonstrate the positive qualities of letting a woman be in control. Instead, the vast majority of bondage imagery in
Wonder Woman
featured unhappily bound women. This raises some serious questions about the effectiveness of Marston’s metaphors.

Returning to the comparison series from the start of the chapter,
Wonder Woman
had far more bondage, but how often were men bound in
Batman
and
Captain Marvel Adventures?
All of the time. In
Batman,
panels featuring tied-up male characters made up 96 percent of the book’s total bondage imagery.
Captain Marvel Adventures
was a bit higher at 97 percent. That’s nearly all of the bondage; women only accounted for 8 percent and 6 percent of the series’ bondage imagery, respectively.
*
Of the twenty issues of both series that were tabulated, only five featured any bound women at all, so three-quarters of the issues featured only bound men.

Men accounted for only 20 percent of the bondage imagery in
Wonder Woman,
far less than the other two series. Women made up 84 percent of the book’s bondage, over four times as much as the men. We’re used to
Wonder Woman
being a different sort of book, but this is puzzling. It seems that Marston used his bondage metaphor rather sparingly on his male characters and focused all of his attention on having females tied up. There are several possible explanations for this, but none of them hold up.

Wonder Woman
had a female lead character, and lead characters always got into tight spots. Thus, there was higher male bondage in
Batman
and
Captain Marvel Adventures
with their male stars, and higher female bondage in
Wonder Woman
with its female star. However, Wonder Woman accounted for only 40 percent of her book’s total bondage. Women were tied up 84 percent of the time in
Wonder Woman,
which leaves 44 percent of female bondage unaccounted for. This 44 percent is still more than double the percentage of male bondage. Wonder Woman was tied up a lot, but didn’t even make up a majority of the female bondage. If a woman was tied up in
Wonder Woman,
more often than not it wasn’t even Wonder Woman.

It’s interesting to note that when the golden lasso was used in the examined issues, it involved Wonder Woman tying up someone else only 52 percent of the time. The other 48 percent of the time, Wonder Woman was tied up in her own lasso. So really, the golden lasso that symbolized women’s power was almost as much a hassle as it was a help.

Amazons played lots of bondage games on Paradise Island, which could explain all of this female bondage, but the numbers don’t back it up. Bound Amazons accounted for less than 10 percent of
Wonder Woman
’s total bondage. Paradise Island was an important metaphor for female rule, but it wasn’t in the book all that much.

While most of the bondage took place in the world of men, Wonder Woman always escaped and, according to Marston, was never actually suffering. One would assume that getting tied up in the world of men must have been a joke for Wonder Woman, since she could just snap her bonds and defeat the bad guys with ease. She wasn’t smiling much, though. Of the 341 panels where Wonder Woman was bound, she was smiling, laughing, or shown to be happy/amused through the art or text in only fourteen panels. Bondage was only demonstrably fun for Wonder Woman 4 percent of the time.

For the other 96 percent of her bondage panels, Wonder Woman was not at all pleased. She was frustrated because she couldn’t help her friends, crying because she was helpless, trying very hard not to die, or having her spirit ripped from her body. These unpleasant panels outnumbered the pleasant ones 24 to 1. Wonder Woman was Marston’s champion of female power and superiority, but in her bondage panels the pleasant, loving aspects of submission were completely overshadowed by cruel dominance.

If you look at the bondage imagery as elaborate metaphors for Marston’s theories, the metaphors do hold up. Paradise Island is a utopia, criminals get rehabilitated on Reform Island, and the world of men is a terrible, terrible place for everyone. Clearly,
Wonder Woman
shows that things are better with women in charge.

However, when we look closer we can see that there were fixations. Marston’s metaphors weren’t evenly presented. Instead, a lot of the book focused on one specific component: women bound in an unpleasant manner. These panels represented Marston’s critique of patriarchal society, but in the comics they were shown ridiculously disproportionately to the rest of his theories. All of the pleasant, positive aspects of submitting to women were shorted. Instead, readers were presented with a lot of very unhappy, very tied-up women.

Marston acknowledged that the book would inspire erotic fantasies, that it was “swell” readers got turned on by the bondage in
Wonder Woman.
But what was ultimately presented was a children’s comic book, full of images of unhappily bound women, meant to excite male readers. That suggests that there may have been some sadistic fetishism at play, where female characters were dominated for the reader’s erotic pleasure.

Taking a look at the series as a whole, though, while Marston illustrated his theories by having Wonder Woman tied up in all manner of painful, unpleasant, and arguably sadistic scenarios, the series was never overtly sexual. Marston acknowledged the erotic nature of bondage, but there was nothing in the comics themselves that directly tied bondage to sex or sadistic fetishism.
Wonder Woman
was fiction for children, and because of its G-rated content we can only take our sadistic fetishism concerns so far.