The Wilderness of Mirrors

youngbadmanbrown:

is Wonder Woman.

Imagine you’re raised in this utopian, women only warrior society (this part isn’t fucked up) and you’re taught all about how outside of your society which is magically shielded by super-science/magic
there lies “man’s world.”

Man’s world is just horrible and fucked and violent place you hear stories about and the people who inhabit it and you reach a point growing up where you probably think “okay mom, it’s probably not that bad. Shit I bet men don’t even really exist you’re just fucking with me.”

And then a fucking man shows up on your island. He’s not at all like the ones that you’ve heard about. He’s not some violent monster who wants to ruin everything he touches. He’s a good dude. You decide you want to go see man’s world, you fight for the right to become your peoples champion and ambassador. It’s your job to share with man’s world the wonders of Amazonian society.

You get to man’s world and it’s fucking astounding. There are crazy tall buildings and cars and ice cream and all these different cultures  and music and it’s just fucking mind blowing.

And there are lots of men. They’re walking down the street side by side with women. They aren’t murdering them, they aren’t reducing things to cinders. Obviously all the stories your mother told you were horse shit.

But then you start to pull back the curtain. You hear and see men disrespect women on the street. You go to the mall and wonder why all the mannequins are the same size if all the women clearly aren’t. You see all these magazines telling women what’s wrong with them, what they have to do to please men. That’s when you start wondering what’s up with this world.

You find out women are paid less then men, that no woman has ever been the leader of the United States, you see crime statistics, and you find out that this Steve Trevor, who you really thought was a good person, is an agent of a government that has declared the assaults on female soldiers “occupational hazards.”

Then you realize it’s not just the United States, it’s all over “man’s world.”

It hits you that this place is even worse than all the stories you heard.

And the worst part about it is: the gods that you’ve been raised to worship and fear, the gods that you know fucking exist, don’t want to do shit about it.

Imagine what that would do to you?

I wanna read about that Wonder Woman, the Year One Wonder Woman who’s like jesus in the temple flipping shit over. I wanna read about the Wonder Woman who’s so appalled by the conditions of man’s world she marches into the UN and tells everyone off. The Wonder Woman who meets a crying girl on a street corner, finds out that her boyfriend just laid hands on her and then goes and cuts off his hands.

Writers too often fall back on all that mythology shit as if Medusa and hydras and gorgons are the worst monsters that Diana can fight.

The monsters Wonder Woman should be fighting are the ones her mother told her about as a kid

At one point, that bolded text was the entire reason why Wonder Woman was in Man’s World in the first place: as the agent of her gods sent to put the world to rights.

As a concept for a character, it was brilliant. Pretty much every other character in DC is about maintaining the status quo and the rule of law by beating up bad guys. You get a very few — a significant proportion of which are women — who take the responsibility of dealing with the threats society is clearly unable to deal with to its logical conclusion. But Diana and her cast stood alone in having as their goal the fundamental transformation of the world.

Naturally, she was never ever allowed to make any sort of head way at all.

Back in the day, the first post-Ellis arc of The Authority had the team intervening in the Indonesian slaughter of East Timorese by — instead of doing anything about the Generals and their militias actually responsible for the killings and kidnappings — seizing the Indonesian President and throwing him to his victims to be torn to pieces, an action which supposedly and quite improbably halted the hostilities but put the team on a collision course with the governments of the world (all of which was part of the point I believe the writers were trying to make about superheroes interfering in the ‘real world’ being a bad thing).

This has an echo in one of Diana’s most famous scenes — probably next to the image of her curb-stomping Bruce — in the out of continuity New Frontier where she literally shows the spaceman the door when he’s more aghast about her having allowed Viet Cong sex slaves to kill their abusers than about the original murder of the menfolk and their enslavement. As the OP indicates, the concept of the character carries with it the expectation that we should be seeing something like this on occasion, where she empowers victims to seek their own justice but there’s nothing close in the main DCU. Except maybe when she takes down the (standard) evil feminazi gynarchy of the Bana Amazons living as mercenaries in the Middle East but pretty much everyone dies at the end of that adventure, including the small population of male slaves.

The Middle East — well, more properly, what the general public would probably label fundamentalist Islam as practiced by the Taliban and Saudi Arabia — is probably why we’ll never see Wonder Woman make any sort of notable gain in changing the way the word works. With its many similarities to the way the ancient Greeks used to treat women, it’s the logical place for writers to begin a more ‘real world’ focus on her reformation attempts, and it’s full of the sort of minefields that give PR departments screaming nightmares. Even if Diana would have stormed into Afghanistan at the head of a platoon of Amazons and handed the Taliban their arse, their testicles and their heads in very short order, even if it meant a repeat performance of League of One

Frustrating, even on a more… ‘practical’ level, Diana is denied any sort of victory. As part of the whole misthought plot line where Hypolita is sentenced to being Wonder Woman during WWII — thus screwing Diana out of her due recognition again — there’s a sigle throw-away reference to the existence of the Wonder Scouts, an analogue to Girl Guides that is never mentioned again. Seriously, how significant — and gratifying — would it be for there to be such a civil organisation in existence in the DCU? I weep at the number of plots and stories that will never be.

Even if we move past that to a more “insertable” presence int the social topography, the first we hear about the existence of Amazon-run shelters addressing domestic violence they turn out to be fronts for Granny Goodness recruiting for Darkseid as part of the lead up to Morrison’s Final Crisis where Diana is turned into a mindless slave thanks to the Anti-Life equation when as the embodiment of Truth she should have been leading the fight against him. I’ve said it before that Batman Inc should have been Wonder Woman Inc; what makes that comic’s use of the wrong member of the Trinity even more galling is that it’s written by that tosser Morrison who has famously claimed — and repeatedly proved — that he’s clueless about Diana when ironically it was the perfect idea for her,

(Source: satanic2chainz, via bluejaybirdie)