oh bondage, up yours! xo, wonder woman.

January 3, 2007 8:52 PM

"The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound... Only when the control of self by others is more pleasant than the unbound assertion of self in human relationships can we hope for stable, peaceful human society." William Moulton Marston, the quirky psychologist who created Wonder Woman, had a bondage thing. He also had a PhD from Harvard, lived in an openly polyamorous relationship -- with one wife, one mistress, and four kids -- and invented the precursor to the lie detector (more at /. and of course, youtube).
posted by jessamyn (13 comments total)

I had no idea! This is awesomely fascinating.

When I was a kid my best friend and I used to play Wonder Woman. Since Wonder Woman is really the only regular character in Wonder Woman's world, I played a character we made up: her little boy sidekick. The game had lots of kinky subtext and now I know why!
posted by serazin at 9:19 PM on January 3, 2007

Intriguing reading, thanks jessamyn. What an interesting character that William Moulton Marston was. And what an unexpected character he gave Wonder woman. Whoda thunk?

The document of the FBI's negative review of his book on The Lie Detector Test [pdf] and thoughts from the AntiPolygraph.org site.
posted by nickyskye at 9:40 PM on January 3, 2007

ps fun collection of tags.
posted by nickyskye at 9:41 PM on January 3, 2007

Caption writes itself.
posted by rob511 at 9:44 PM on January 3, 2007

KL Pereira wrote a great article about this in the Fall 2006 issue of bitch in case anyone is interested in some analysis of what's going on here and what happened to Wonder Woman as she was stripped of her lesbian undertones, toned-down, and was slowly stripped of her ideas of female independence.

Even when feminists tried to reclaim her (she was on the front cover of the first issue of Ms.) as a discarded icon of women's rights, they did by discarding the themes of homosexuality and bondage. Pereira pins some hopes on Josh Whedon's upcoming movie, but I doubt we'll see a resurgence of these themes.
posted by allen.spaulding at 10:04 PM on January 3, 2007

Wow, coincidence. Just watched an episode of QI with Jonathan Ross talking about this.
posted by Razzle Bathbone at 10:21 PM on January 3, 2007

Joss Whedon. And I think we will be seeing a resurgence of these themes. He did create Buffy after all and that had more than its fare share of homosexuality, bondage and feminism.
posted by liquorice at 11:19 PM on January 3, 2007

Wow, amazing information, great post. Some aspect or another of this fulfills the wet dreams of every guy I've ever known.
posted by tula at 11:25 PM on January 3, 2007

tula:Some aspect or another of this fulfills the wet dreams of every guy I've ever known.
Only guys? One of the the funny things about WW has been watching feminists claim she's a great archetype at the same time as they deny the bondage or the vaginal lasso that renders men helpless. Fantasy indeed!
posted by CCBC at 1:46 AM on January 4, 2007

See also.
posted by Faint of Butt at 3:31 AM on January 4, 2007

I snicker to recall that Wonder Woman's powers could be temporarily negated by crossing her wrists...maybe that's mentioned in the FPP link, which I'll wait to read at home.
posted by pax digita at 4:47 AM on January 4, 2007

Great stuff—thanks for the post!
posted by languagehat at 5:54 AM on January 4, 2007

How very funny. I just learned about this WW history over Christmas from my comics-geek brother and thought -- this has to be an FPP. Now that I've gotten 'round to it, I find I'm late to the party. The things you'd never have known...
posted by Miko at 9:48 PM on January 14, 2007