A first little bit of stuff about Wonder Woman and Sexuality

On the twitter, Gail Simone had a hashtag today which was "weirdthingsabouttherelaunch," and one of my responses (which Gail actually was kind enough to retweet) was 

which wasn't something I said without thinking about it. And substantially editing it for the character limit. Still, its something that, since the initial tag Gail put out, has been a germ in my mind. Why couldn't there be a sex positive comic based around Wonder Woman? 

Obviously, comic books have issues with diversity. In the whole relaunch, I could only find 7 books which are anchored to female characters, and of them 4 are Bat-related (girl, woman, Catwoman and Birds), then its Supergirl, Voodoo (which is a character I know nothing about but the cover of the book has me scared for the contents) and Wonder Woman herself. I don't include Hawk & Dove because its drawn by Rob Liefeld. Also, Hawk has first billing and Dove is defined in relation to Hawk, not autonomously. Bird gets to count because it is based upon being a female team. So, of the characters, only two aren't primarily the distaff counterparts to men, and while I am glad to see DC putting out a book, presumably as an on going, which stars a woman, again, the cover has issues to me.

That face doesn't say "I'm a superhero, I'll kick your ass" as much as "Oh, please, strong man, help me figure this out while I pout"

Add to this, we only can confirm one LGBT book (Batwoman), though hopefully Apollo and Midnighter will maintain their fantastic relationship, and we're not going to expect anything positive coming from DC in terms of sexuality and women. Plus, Wonder Woman's written by Brian Azzarello, who, while a great writer, is not known for his positive and enlightened portrayal of women. I don't mean to throw him under the bus as a sexist, but he's just not know for being like Greg Rucka, who does write positive female characters. I don't know enough about Azzarello to tar him before reading his Wonder Woman, but I'm just nervous for one of my favorite characters after the JMS relaunch, which was weird and now seemingly completely inconsequential so I stopped picking it up to make room for other books.  

Yet, that's the world that is, not the world that could be. To get to that, let's look at Wonder Woman's history. She was a sexual character from the start and her creator didn't really hide that. She was an exploration of kink and fetish on a grand scale. Her creator was known for being in a polyamorous relationship and William Moulton Marston, claimed she “satisfies the subconscious, elaborately disguised desire of males to be mastered by a woman who loves them.” I'd argue with him on that one in his book, but I do need to read more classic Wonder woman, so feel free to correct me if that's accurate.

Yeah...

Compounding the bondage issue, if we look at Diana's love interests, there has always been a push and pull, they have to prove their greatness as warriors and they're at least her equal in terms of strength in that way. Then, the DCnU rumor is that she'll be hookin' up with Superman, which is to say that, even though Superman is definitely not the most dominating guy in the League (Hi, Batman!), he's more powerful than her and thus the one who can win her physically. Or she'll be with Batman (Justice League was a great cartoon), who, again, while her physical inferior is ridiculously domineering and wouldn't work in a D/s relationship for the essential problem of the importance of consent in them.


Still, let's take Marston's spirit into the modern era and mix it with some feminist philosophy. Due to who she is as a character, Wonder Woman is uniquely placed as a possible ambassador, not just from the Amazon's to man's world, but from the world of fetish to the vanilla. She could still be a great superheroine, but in her personal life she could have a relationship with a queer male, and it would be able to make sense based upon her history. Wonder Woman would be able to be an exploration of a positive sexually dominant female role. I can't honestly see any other existing character able to do this in a positive way. 

I'll write more about this, this is a rough prologue to a larger idea. A prologomena, because I'm pretentious. Wonder Woman is one of the most complex and fascinating characters in comics. I want to write a series of posts exploring the issue. I also want to write more on this idea in particular, and why I think its important and why Wonder Woman would be perfect for it. I promise other posts will be more thought out than this one.