How "Fascist" is WONDER WOMAN?

[Gothos]

Charles Reece advances an argument in two parts, here and here, , which indicts Marston's "loving authority" as just another 1984 brainwashing campaign.

I have made my counter-argument here,. My argument is linked to other essays as well so if you follow the link, don't expect a self-contained blogpost.

I made some attempts to argue with the author but my points were pretty much dismissed. But though I find Reece's reasoning fallacious, it seems a worthwhile topic to pursue here.

Is there fascism in WONDER WOMAN, or in superhero figures generally?

If so, how would one prove it?

[Don-Jack]

In Kingdom Come, yes. But given she was affected by the fact she was exiled from Themyscira, it's understandable. She was trying to do what she could not before, it was her flaw, and the whole book focus on superhero flaws.

Now, besides that time in that story, I don't think she's fascist. This guy seems to consider feminism a type of fascism (I didn't read much, it didn't interested me), which is not going to end well...

And if you think carefully, it seems the only way to not be "fascist" at all is to be anarchist, the complete opposite. I mean, there is always a little bit of submission in any type of government. In democracy, for instance, you have to submiss to the law (but you have the rights to question the law).

So, is submission to our own mother sort of fascism, for another instance? If you throw everything in the same package, you bet it is.

In short, it depends of which level of submission is considered fascism. But who is to determine that?

[pippl]

> Is there fascism in WONDER WOMAN, or in superhero figures generally?

The argument that superheroes are fascist has been around since the 1940s.
An example:

... the Superman formula is essentially lynching.

Instead of teaching obedience to law, Superman glorifies the "right" of the
individual to take that law into his own hands. Instead of being brave and
fearless, Superman lives in continuous guilty terror, projecting outward in
every direction his readers' inward aggression. In the ten-year effort to keep
supplying sinister victims for Superman and his imitators to lynch, comic
books have succeeded only in giving every American child a complete course in
paranoid megalomania such as no German child ever had, a total conviction of
the morality of force such as no Nazi could even aspire to.

Nor are the comic books lacking in any of the trappings of their Naziism.
There is the same appeal to pagan gods for totally unearned powers; there is
the same exploitation of magical insignia; there is the same anti-
intellectuality, not only in the worship of thick necks and ape-jaws, and in
the stock characters of the "mad" scientist, but in actual propaganda strips
showing whole hordes of sinister scientists about to enslave and destroy the
world. There is of course the same anti-Semitism -- the more sinister villains
have Jewish noses -- there is the same glorification of uniforms, riding-
boots, and crushed caps; and there is the same undercurrent of homosexuality
and sadomasochism. ...

Source: Gerson Legman, "The Psychopathology of Comic Books," American Journal of
Psychology, Vol. II, No. 3, 1948, pp. 472-490.

The whole "submission to loving authority" business in 1940s Wonder Woman comics
strikes me as being as much about religion as politics or feminism. Lots of religions
ask you to obey or submit to their deity. Submitting to the loving authority of Christ,
the Prince of Peace, is not very different from submitting to Marston's Aphrodite, the
Goddess of Love who's at odds with Mars, the God of War. In fact, Aphrodite and Mars
are pretty much the only major Greco-Roman deities who appear regularly in the stories
(others appear but are relatively unimportant to the mythos) -- where the two gods represent
good and evil, love and war, right and wrong. In other words, WW is as much old-fashioned
Judeo-Christian morality as it is Greek myth. Our heroine is a kind of Christ figure, sent
into the world from Paradise to lead by example, go through trials, triumph over evil,
et cetera -- and she regularly shows a Christ-like capacity for forgiveness in dealing with
her opponents.

Marston was some kind of warped genius at taking kinky fetishes like bondage and submission
and justifying them by having them stand in symbolically for political, social, religious and other
ideas -- or maybe it was vice versa. :)

[carabas]

No.

And anybody that thinks so really ought to look up what fascism actually is.

[Vaiyt]

As far as "1984 brainwashing" goes, Wonder Woman is a pretty inefficient attempt.

[MajorHoy]

But . . . didn't she beat up Fascists in World War II?

[Neutrino]

How can using great power to protect the rights and freedoms of all innocent people under the law and sound morality be facist?

Since when is facism about the individual? Facism has traditionally been about raising one group to oppress another. Nazi ubermensch BS aside, they were always much more about being a cohesive unit than glorifying individuals.

I don't know why this argument still gets kicked around today.

[Gothos]

> Is there fascism in WONDER WOMAN, or in superhero figures generally?

The argument that superheroes are fascist has been around since the 1940s.
An example:



Source: Gerson Legman, "The Psychopathology of Comic Books," American Journal of
Psychology, Vol. II, No. 3, 1948, pp. 472-490.

The whole "submission to loving authority" business in 1940s Wonder Woman comics
strikes me as being as much about religion as politics or feminism. Lots of religions
ask you to obey or submit to their deity. Submitting to the loving authority of Christ,
the Prince of Peace, is not very different from submitting to Marston's Aphrodite, the
Goddess of Love who's at odds with Mars, the God of War. In fact, Aphrodite and Mars
are pretty much the only major Greco-Roman deities who appear regularly in the stories
(others appear but are relatively unimportant to the mythos) -- where the two gods represent
good and evil, love and war, right and wrong. In other words, WW is as much old-fashioned
Judeo-Christian morality as it is Greek myth. Our heroine is a kind of Christ figure, sent
into the world from Paradise to lead by example, go through trials, triumph over evil,
et cetera -- and she regularly shows a Christ-like capacity for forgiveness in dealing with
her opponents.

Marston was some kind of warped genius at taking kinky fetishes like bondage and submission
and justifying them by having them stand in symbolically for political, social, religious and other
ideas -- or maybe it was vice versa. :)

I'm glad to see that someone like Gershon Legman, whose work comprised sort of a dry run (albeit not as popular) for Freddy Wertham, has not been forgotten. Though he's not the first person to condemn early comic books in print, he's the earliest known to me to make the explict "superheroes= fascism" argument.

He recapitulated the above article and others in a small self-published book, LOVE AND DEATH, and though most of it is nonsense it's a fascinating read. Neither he nor Wertham, incidentally, had any regard for Wonder Woman.

To a small extent I can understand why some people would get hinky about anything suggesting brainwashing, which is how some regard the "Venus girdles" stuff. But Amazonian programming is first and foremost a literary device, not a Skinner Box. I can think of just as many stories in which a protagonist trumpets his "free will" to anyone and everyone who will listen, but though that has its own appeal, it too just a literary device, not a "design for living."

I imagine my opponent would have no use for WW's "Christ-like forgiveness," and would see it as just another manipulating gambit. But as long as the forgiveness isn't being sold with the aid of racks and pincers, I tend to take its depiction in WW at face value.

[Gothos]

How can using great power to protect the rights and freedoms of all innocent people under the law and sound morality be facist?

Since when is facism about the individual? Facism has traditionally been about raising one group to oppress another. Nazi ubermensch BS aside, they were always much more about being a cohesive unit than glorifying individuals.

I don't know why this argument still gets kicked around today.

I think it keeps cropping up because it's an easy way of disparaging superhero features and their readers, but that's me.

It's usually done in a dishonest manner, where the critic insists on ignoring the real (within a story's confines) evil acts of the criminals, in order to make it seem as if the hero is the one applying the repressive jackboots of authority.

[Arvandor]

I think it keeps cropping up because it's an easy way of disparaging superhero features and their readers, but that's me.

It's usually done in a dishonest manner, where the critic insists on ignoring the real (within a story's confines) evil acts of the criminals, in order to make it seem as if the hero is the one applying the repressive jackboots of authority.

That may be. But it's hard to ignore that superheroes, by their very nature, violate and ignore all legal and civil rights. Criminals have rights. Rights that all superheroes, from Batman on down, routinely ignore. Even Wonder Woman violates those rights with that rope of hers.

The irony is seeing readers declare themselves as politically left-wing and openly defend criminal rights, while cheering on heroes like Batman and Wonder Woman, who violate those rights by their very nature.

[SteveGus]

The irony is seeing readers declare themselves as politically left-wing and openly defend criminal rights, while cheering on heroes like Batman and Wonder Woman, who violate those rights by their very nature.

It is well, then, that superheroes aren't real. All sorts of dissonance arises when you try to mix elements like this. Here's Felix Faust summoning demons in search of dangerous power. Heroes need to stop him, sure; but when they take him to the police station, what do you book him for? This one probably isn't covered in the law books. Are intergalactic conquerors subject to the Geneva conventions? What government has jurisdiction over the gods of Olympus?

It's trivial and trite to point out that the genre conventions don't mesh with the real world that well. So? Genre conventions exist to support stories, not to be the subject of stories themselves.

[Gothos]

It is well, then, that superheroes aren't real. All sorts of dissonance arises when you try to mix elements like this. Here's Felix Faust summoning demons in search of dangerous power. Heroes need to stop him, sure; but when they take him to the police station, what do you book him for? This one probably isn't covered in the law books. Are intergalactic conquerors subject to the Geneva conventions? What government has jurisdiction over the gods of Olympus?

It's trivial and trite to point out that the genre conventions don't mesh with the real world that well. So? Genre conventions exist to support stories, not to be the subject of stories themselves.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

I did make a similar point in saying that no matter how much Amazonian reconditioning may remind one of mind-control, it has to be judged as a literary construct first and foremost. Such a construct allowed Marston to play out his fantasy of a utopian society. One can't very well enjoy any utopia if one keeps bringing in the question of its resemblance to reality. The whole point of utopias are that they are "no place."

[dshipp17]

It is well, then, that superheroes aren't real. All sorts of dissonance arises when you try to mix elements like this. Here's Felix Faust summoning demons in search of dangerous power. Heroes need to stop him, sure; but when they take him to the police station, what do you book him for? This one probably isn't covered in the law books. Are intergalactic conquerors subject to the Geneva conventions? What government has jurisdiction over the gods of Olympus?

It's trivial and trite to point out that the genre conventions don't mesh with the real world that well. So? Genre conventions exist to support stories, not to be the subject of stories themselves.

I think you can handle this in the common sense department; or, weren't you that poster that implied the new Diana was portrayed as stupid and you can't come up with a common sense solution? Supernatural beings aside, this would kind of fit into the Good Samaritan department; in real life, if you saw a mother step into the grocery store and left her son in the car, what would the right thing be for you to do if you saw a stranger walk up from a bypass, tried to persuade the son to come with him, started trying to abduct the boy against his will, and started to slap the boy into submission until he was able to kidnap the boy? Would you walk up to scare the man off, getting physical with him if necessary, would you run into the store to get the mother, would you search for a security guard, or would you seek out a pay phone to call the police? Of course, the legal thing to do would be to alert a security guard or call the cops, but wouldn't this give the guy time to abduct the boy? That's the same thing with Batman preventing the Joker from shooting somebody or Wonder Woman getting involved to stop someone from being physically bullied; of course, the legal thing to do would be to call the police, but Batman just saved someone from dying of a bullet wound and Wonder Woman possibly just prevented an assault.

[Brave Sir Robbin]

In response to Wonder Woman fighting fascists in WWII, that in itself is not a strong point. After all, German and Russia fought the bloodiest campaign in history.

[Brave Sir Robbin]

No.

And anybody that thinks so really ought to look up what fascism actually is.

I agree, I know what fascism is, and Diane has taught me that anyone who disagrees with us HATES AMERICA! Do they wear our colors and fight evil? No, they work for its demise when they argue against her. Diane is forming the National Superheros and Patriots party. I am a local organizer. Join me in our march on Washington! I have been wrecking the store windows of people who don't agree with our need for Diane to lead us. We will have Victory. Victory! Victory!