Free Wonder Woman Unbound by Tim Hanley Page A

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.