My response to "What am I seeing? Is she tied to a tree?" Part 1

Those of you who have stuck with this blog over the years (or who know me!) are fully aware of my interests or perhaps more accurately "obsessions": Jane Austen books, John Cusack movies,


and Wonder Woman.

Mostly through the generosity of friends, but with some of my own input, I have accumulated all 3 seasons of the TV series, a throw, the POP! figure, a flash drive, glasses, mugs, a watch, an action figure, Wonder Woman encyclopedias, and this handmade personalized paperweight. Without realizing it, I have become surrounded by Wonder Woman paraphernalia.


She's a feminist icon, gracing the cover of the very first issue of Ms. Magazine in 1972, and their 35th and 40th anniversary issues. She's strong and powerful, yet caring and a champion of the underdog: animals, children, women. Some women around the world may even have used her as a role model when they needed to be a little bit braver in their everyday lives.  And that's enough on that.

I recently wrote a series of posts on my first visits to comic shops.  Since then, I've located some characters that, although I don't know them well yet, I find interesting: Carol Danvers, Kate Kane, Sara Pezzini. I'm thinking I wouldn't mind spending time at a pub with them watching a rugby match.


But no Wonder Woman.


In a previous post I referenced a review  by Alicia Anderson (this), in which she discusses the issues with the current Wonder Woman series. Keeping that in mind, I initially chose to focus on learning about other comic book characters. But each month, on new Wonder Woman release day, I found myself looking through her book, hoping that I would find something to convince me to jump into the series. Each time, not without regret, I put it back on the shelf.


As Ms. Anderson recommended, the Amazons are back in the story. There also appears to be a focus in recent issues on a storyline in which Wonder Woman is attempting to force the Amazons to accept and help raise a male child. I can't fathom why there would be any need to construct a storyline which would require the Amazon warrior women to raise a male child. Are they so threatening as a community of confident, powerful women that adding a male presence is necessary? As Anderson states, "the Amazons were a magical, immortal race of women who didn’t need men to thrive," yet in this current version of the Wonder Woman story, "her [Amazonian] sisters are the fruit of reproduction with hapless, doomed sailors.  The Amazons as a race have been destroyed in this version of the mythology."


Of course, everyone knows that for a woman to be complete she should be a mother. Just look around: at the celebrity "news" about pregnancies, at celebrities chattering away about their children on Ellen, the lecture I received from a classmate about the joy of having children, and the reaction of a young woman I know after I told her I most likely won't get married and definitely won't be having children, which consisted of her telling me that the whole point of life was to get married and have babies. But the Amazons presumably helped raise Diana and other young Amazons, so they have already met this requirement to being fulfilled as women. So the point in this storyline must be that the child is male.


Everyone also knows that a woman isn't complete without a man, right? Most Disney movies start us out early in this regard. We need to find our hunky male princely soul mate, even if we have to turn into a vampire. The Amazons being the Amazons, however, a romantic male presence wouldn't be feasible, so therefore, this necessary-to-our-happiness male presence is in the form of a child. Even Bones, that logical, rational being who stated in the early seasons of the show that she wouldn't ever get married, eventually married Booth and had a child.  Get with the program, Amazon ladies.


A young man raised by a group of strong, powerful warriors could potentially grow up to embrace the concept of strong women and be a facilitator of change. However, these women don't want him (and if they don't, they shouldn't be forced to) and might tell him at some point that he needs to go back and live in the outside world, where he just as easily could end up as an UnSub on an episode of Criminal Minds, in which, unable to kill the Amazons who reluctantly raised him, he kills other strong women as substitutes- Olympic gold-medalists in weightlifting or judo, maybe.  The profilers on Criminal Minds talk about a "stressor", which in this case would be the rejection by this all-woman community, hypothetically speaking.

I think that DC should have a crossover issue, where Superman or Batman takes the baby and raises him as a single father.


This month, on my visit to the comic book store, I was browsing through the DC titles.  I looked over the Batgirl cover, where she is being physically overpowered by a male villain named Ragdoll (last month she was draped artistically over the bottom part of the cover, restrained by Poison Ivy's poison ivy), and then, again, checked out the new Wonder Woman issue.


Obviously, the first thing I saw was the cover.




to be continued...




Anderson, A. (2014). DC: Give Us Back Our Wonder Woman. Girls Like Comics. Retrieved from
http://girlslikecomics.com/dc-new-52-wonder-woman/#.U4DZOq3jjIV