Free Wonder Woman Unbound by Tim Hanley Page B

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