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The beginning of an essay about Wonder Woman and bondage!
© 2009 G.N. Jacobs
The biggest golden Easter egg in my comic book experience had to be learning that Charles Moulton, creator of Wonder Woman, and William Moulton Marsden, inventor of the polygraph, were one and the same man. A quick skim of Golden Age covers shows an almost fetishist approach to the character, or as a friend put it, “if I had a dollar for every time there was a cover or interior art of Wonder Woman being tied up with her own lasso, I could clean up my student loans.”
Marsden, writing under the pseudonym Charles Moulton, always claimed in interviews that Wonder Woman exists as a counterpoint to the roided up male superheroes that are still with us. Certainly, there is some truth to this as Wonder Woman has always talked and shamed most of her bad guys into seeing the error of her ways while Superman and Batman posed with ripped abs under spandex and directly applied force to most problems. But, Wonder Woman as a symbol of the best aspects of feminine power only goes so far and the girl did start out as a bondage slut.
Wonder Woman’s primary weapon is a golden lasso, a compulsion device to which she is not immune alternately called the Lasso of Truth or the Lasso of Submission. Bad guys tell the truth about their misdeeds and promise to surrender to the authorities when tied up in the lasso. But, in the Golden Age Wonder Woman spends almost as much time in the clutches of her rope as do the bad guys. Gee, how kinky is that?
Obviously, the lie detector man will give Diana, aka Wonder Woman, a truth-telling device. But, considering how much time she spends in her own tool while wearing a star-spangled one-piece bathing suit, was Dr. Marsden working out personal fetish issues or collective ones? We can argue both points.
On the personal side, Marsden wrote the comic book for a couple years before leaving to maintain his academic career. True, he worked with editors who guessed that boys would flip for the imagery, but Marsden could have quit on principle and decried the smut that went out under his name. This did not happen, so the good doctor, at the very least, imagined tying women up as part of the sex ritual.
But, there is a really good for the argument for the fetish being collective in nature. That same editor and the artist involved knew that young boys seeking power imagine tying up the girl next door as they go through puberty. These boys were the primary market for Golden Age comic books and illicit sex sells. Even I admit to bondage fantasies, though I like to take turns in mine so that everybody has fun. Psychologically, I always figured the reason to tie a girl up is to get her to sit still and listen while the boy explains how much he’s in love. Adding the Lasso of Truth element really gets the party going, like Truth or Dare.
PART TWO – DUE 4/12/11
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