Wonder Woman Unbound

by Hanley, Tim

  While Paradise Island was the end result of submission, the goal of Reform Island was to teach villains to give up their own egocentric desires and learn submission. Most of them were rather committed to their criminal lifestyles and incredulous that they would be in any way changed by Reform Island. Tigra Tropica, a felonious tiger trainer, was nabbed by Wonder Woman and told that on Reform Island she’d learn to “obey loving authority.” The infuriated Tigra replied with her exotic accent, “You weel regret zis! I weel get revenge!” But even a simpleton like Steve Trevor knew how effective Amazon rehabilitation was, and exclaimed, “Horsefeathers! You’ll end up loving Wonder Woman like all the rest of us!” And most of the inmates did. When Wonder Woman visited Reform Island in Sensation Comics #22, a reformed criminal ran up to her and proclaimed, “These bonds feel wonderful! Keep me here in Amazon prison and train me to control my evil self!”

  On the all-female Amazon islands, bondage was practiced in its purest forms. It was pleasant and instructive, and the result was a utopian society where even the most evil villain learned to love peace. Things were a lot more difficult out in the world of men, but Wonder Woman carried the power of submission with her in her golden lasso. The lasso was crafted from the girdle of Hippolyte, the symbol of the queen’s power and the Amazon matriarchy.

  While interrogating a suspected Nazi spy, Wonder Woman bound the woman in the lasso, saying, “I shall make you tell the truth—while bound with the golden rope you must obey me!” The lasso gave Wonder Woman complete control over whomever she tied up. A lot has been written about the links between the lasso and Marston’s work developing the lie detector test, but while there’s certainly some connection, the lasso was much more than just a magical polygraph. Marston told Byrne that he created Wonder Woman as a “dramatized symbol of her sex. She’s true to life—true to the universal characteristics of women everywhere. Her magic lasso is merely a symbol of feminine charm, allure, oomph, attraction every woman uses.” Every woman could be a Wonder Woman and every woman had her own lasso. It wasn’t a lie detector test; it was her sexuality.

  When Byrne again feigned doubt about the power of women, Marston replied that “woman’s charm is the one bond that can be made strong enough to hold a man against all logic, common sense, or counterattack.” Just like getting ensnared in an actual lasso, a woman could capture a man with her feminine wiles and get him to submit to her. And, because they were women and women were inherently loving, they used these powers for good.

  Wonder Woman could do anything she wanted with her lasso, and she chose to use it to fight crime and help others. While villains occasionally stole the lasso and used it for nefarious purposes, in the hands of Wonder Woman it was only used for good. Even in the world of men, with one lone lasso against all of the forces of patriarchy, the power of submission was extremely effective and beneficial.

  Although Marston depicted his theories in an unusual way, the underlying message of his bondage imagery was consistent and progressive. There weren’t many other people, much less men, advocating that women should be in charge in the 1940s. Paradise Island, Reform Island, and the golden lasso illustrated the strength and power of women.

  However, in the world of men Marston showed a different type of bondage, where women were kept down.

  While bondage among the Amazons was empowering, in the world of men, bondage had the opposite effect. Because men were cruel and dominant, being bound took what made women most powerful—the benefits of submission—and twisted it, leaving women literally, physically powerless.

  The first time Wonder Woman had her bracelets chained together by a man, her mother appeared to her and said, “Daughter, if any man welds chains on your bracelets, you will become weak as we Amazons were when we surrendered to Hercules.” All of Wonder Woman’s superpowers that came from her Amazon upbringing disappeared once a man had power over her. Wonder Woman was even reduced to tears in one instance as her captor taunted her, saying, “Aye weep, captive girl! Behold yourself helpless!” She sobbed as she gazed forlornly at her bonds.

  Marston took the metaphor even further in Wonder Woman #5. Not only did the fiendish Dr. Psycho capture Wonder Woman and lock her in a cage, he then used a special device to rip her spirit from her body. As Wonder Woman’s body slumped lifelessly in its cage, Dr. Psycho chained her spirit to the wall. Wonder Woman tried desperately to send out a mental distress call to the Holliday Girls, but it was no use; she couldn’t do anything without her body. It wasn’t a subtle message, but it was certainly evocative: don’t let men have control or they will steal your spirit and render you a powerless shell of your true self.

  The brutality of the bondage of women by men was meant to critique patriarchal society and illustrate the political and social oppression of women. When Byrne expressed concerns that patriarchy was too powerful for women to overcome, Marston offered a ray of hope, stating, “My Wonder Woman often lets herself be tied into a bundle with chains as big as your arm. But in the end she easily snaps the chains. Women can do lots of things by letting men think they’re fettered when they’re not.” Even with Dr. Psycho, eventually Wonder Woman’s spirit escaped its bonds, jumped back into her body, and defeated him. The dominant patriarchal society was strict, but in the end it could never keep a strong woman down.

  The Bondage Battle

  Soon after All-American Publications began publishing Wonder Woman, Sensation Comics, and Comic Cavalcade, Max Gaines received several concerned letters from the company’s editorial advisory board. Josette Frank, the staff advisor of the Children’s Book Committee at the Child Study Association of America, wrote to Gaines that “this feature does lay you open to considerable criticism from any such group as ours, partly on the basis of the woman’s costume (or lack of it), and partly on the basis of sadistic bits showing women chained, tortured, etc.” Frank advised Gaines to take her criticisms “very seriously” because she’d heard a lot of concerns about the bondage imagery.

  W. W. D. Sones, a professor of education and director of curriculum study at the University of Pittsburgh, agreed and wrote, “My impressions confirmed those of Miss Frank that there was a considerable amount of chains and bonds, so much so that the bondage idea seemed to dominate the story.” Responding to Marston’s claims about submission and metaphors, Sones was unconvinced and stated, “I could not help but feel that such subtle and almost mystic purposes were a business and social risk.”

  Assistant editor Dorothy Roubicek was given the job of sorting out these complaints. She sent Marston some sketches of less revealing costumes Wonder Woman could wear, and suggested that Wonder Woman avoid Paradise Island, which was obviously a hub for bondage imagery. Marston refused to make any changes; he replied to Gaines with lengthy letters arguing against Frank and Sones’s comments. After months of acting as a go-between for Marston and the advisory board’s letters, Gaines was weary of all the psychological mumbo jumbo and was about to drop the issue when he received another letter that he found very unsettling.

  It was a fan letter addressed to Marston that had arrived at the All-American offices, from an US Army sergeant who wrote, “I am one of those odd, perhaps unfortunate men who derive an extreme erotic pleasure from the mere thought of a beautiful girl, chained or bound, or masked, or wearing extreme high-heels or high-laced boots—in fact, any sort of constriction or strain whatsoever. […] Have you the same interest in bonds and fetters that I have?” The sergeant also said that he was a big fan of William Seabrook, the traveler and occultist, who wrote a lot about “chained women.”*

  This didn’t go over well with Gaines at all. Psychological squabbling was one thing, but a reader aroused by the bondage imagery was far more troubling. Gaines was the man behind Picture Stories from the Bible, after all. He wrote to Marston right away, stating that “this is one of the things I’ve been afraid of (without quite being able to put my finger on it).”

  Gaines was so concerned that he got Roubicek to quickly come up with some
alternatives to bondage, and included them in his letter to Marston. Gaines wrote, “Miss Roubicek hastily dashed off this morning the enclosed list of methods which can be used to keep women confined or enclosed without the use of chains. Each one of these can be varied in many ways—enabling us, as I told you in our conference last week, to cut down the use of chains by at least 50 to 75% without at all interfering with the excitement of the story or the sales of the books.”

  Marston, on the other hand, couldn’t have cared less.

  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 imag
ery 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.