It seems that Wonder Woman has been given a pair of trousers and new back-story for the twenty-first century. Should we be glad that she’s covered herself up?

Below is a sizeable chunk of a marvellous and thought-provoking article by Shelby Knox for womensmediacenter.com:

“…This isn’t the first time DC Comics has tried to “modernize” the Wonder Woman character, which debuted in 1930 as the creation of psychologist William Marston. Marston, with the encouragement of his wife Elizabeth, designed her as a “new kind of superhero, one who would triumph not with fists or firepower, but with love.” Wonder Woman, her creator said, was “psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world.”

As such, Wonder Woman, alias Diana Prince, was introduced as a protégé of the classical goddesses and, like her male crime fighting counterparts, possessed a variety of powers and tools, including superhuman strength, agility and cunning, the ability to fly, bracelets that made her invincible and a “Truth Lasso” that barred those bound by it from uttering lies. Unlike her male counterparts, however, she sought to rid the world of evil by first employing logic and mutual human understanding before breaking out the fire power.

A generation of role-model starved women, finally presented with a truly powerful heroine, proved themselves a reliable comic book fan base—at the height of her early popularity, Wonder Woman had a readership of ten million, appeared in four comic books, and a daily newspaper comic strip, reported Philip Charles Crawford in School Library Journal.

Yet, social progress for women wasn’t correlated with the evolution of their superhero. In 1968, DC Comics debuted a “modern” version of Diana Prince who’d lost her goddess heritage and all her superhuman powers, gained a male mentor and his martial arts skills, and developed a propensity for the domestic arts. She also came equipped with a new “mod” costume: a pantsuit with no “W” emblem, no flags, and no invincible bracelet cuffs.

Feminist outrage at the devolution of their heroine was quick. A group of activists, led by Gloria Steinem, leaned on DC Comics to scrap the “new” Wonder Woman in favor of the more powerful original—and they won, convincing the company to restore Wonder Woman’s powers and history during the next version of the series. They understood that along with equal pay and childcare and the right to hold credit in their own name, young women need to be able to see themselves in strong pop culture role models in order to fashion themselves into the real life versions.

Here we go again, it seems. Wonder Woman donning what looks like skinny jeans is being spun as a direct result of the successes of the Women’s Liberation movement, a reaction to requests that female superheroes do a little less baring of buns and a lot more kicking them. Yet in stripping Diana of her overt sexuality the new writers have missed the reason Wonder Woman was a feminist heroine in the first place. As originally portrayed, Diana Prince was sexy not because of her bare legs and cleavage but because her personhood wasn’t defined by them and her powers not derived from fashioning herself for the male gaze. She could work a 9 to 5 job, hold down a relationship, subvert international conspiracies and toss the villains in jail, and perhaps, as the first cover of Ms. magazine suggested in 1972, even be president—and the way she looked was, as it should be, simply an aside.

While it’s yet to be seen whether this costume change signals an intent to again strip Wonder Woman of her super powers, it’s disconcerting to learn that the writers are creating a new back story for the character that deprives her of her upbringing on Paradise Island with her mother, Queen Hippolyta, and her Amazon sisters in favor of being smuggled out of her homeland as a baby as it was destroyed. Wonder Woman’s original feminist creator’s intent in giving Diana the Paradise Island upbringing was to insinuate she knew gender equality existed because she’d lived it and that her powers were derived from living with and learning from her sisters. In effect, all women could become “Wonder Woman” if they tapped into the feminine power around them and strived for a gender just world that, we know from real live history, really did and can exist. Is this rewrite an attempt to impose the myth of “post-patriarchy” on the character, in which she no longer needs to dream of and fight for equality because she’s achieved it…?”

Full article here.

At the beginning of May, I posted an article about Roman Catholicism and the search for – and lack of – the divine female in mainstream modern religion. I had one rather intriguing response from a gent in the comments section:

“Whilst I appreciate scholarly findings about the greater role of women in antiquity in religion and society I don’t like this trawling for crumbs of comfort. I would not want to bother looking for evidence of black people in the Bible in order to justify my right to be equal. Finding snippets of info to make better the whole rotten construct of the patriarchal religion. Far better to find a religion where women are the centre and power of thing and then find snippets of where men fit in. Then again better still not to have a religion at all.”

Which is valid, of course, but I think that there are more than just crumbs to find. There’s a goddess-shaped gap in our society. The contemporary worship of (mortal) women at places like Club Pedestal is a shameful secret for many men. Any fetish for powerful women is dismissed as merely a sexual perversion that must be kept secret from friends, family and colleagues. I’m not a religious person, but I know how much influence patriarchal religion continues to have on every society in the modern world. No matter how much we collectively ignore it, we continue to be affected by its values, and I feel that we’re not being told the whole story.

You see, so much of what we’re taught about religion, politics and social history has been written, recorded or unearthed by men. Our perception of the past is tainted by the personal interpretations of its translators and editors. At best, historical texts and artwork are more ambiguous than we realise and the conclusions reached by our educators – whether religious or secular – aren’t always as objective as they claim to be. As a result, we can’t assume that we’ve been told all the information.

If many of my teachers were to be believed, the majority of women didn’t do much except tempt men, weave tapestries and plop out the occasional male heir until some time in the ‘seventies when we suddenly developed coherent thought and set fire to our bras. Even the scant information we’re given about the worship of female deities is treated as something fluffy and frivolous. Women who, in all likelihood, held positions of religious and social authority in the ancient world have been reduced to creatures as patchy and degraded as the relics they have left behind.

Many people see the ritual adoration of Dominatrices as a way of countering this imbalance, albeit in a small and sometimes misguided way – whether it’s through kneeling at her feet, giving pleasure, or offering up your own sweet agony or humiliation as a sacrifice. I’ve been trying to find a way to put this into words lately but the founders of fetish site “Woman Worship” have beat me to it. So, on that note, to find a far more succinct version of what I’ve been trying to express (and where I nicked the image below from) click this link.