Wonder Woman provides an (imperfect) road map for a new way of looking at BDSM in fiction.
The record breaking success of Wonder Woman has all but assured the superheroine a privileged place at the uppermost echelons of popular media for the foreseeable future. It’s drawn a lot of attention to the character and, for my part at least, brought the previously uninitiated into the fold of her fandom. But long before I’d even picked up a Wonder Woman comic I was familiar with one of the more unusual features of her origins: Her creator was rather into the whole bondage thing.
Wonder Woman’s creator was rather into the whole bondage thing. Click To TweetWilliam Moulton Marston was Wonder Woman’s creator: a trained psychologist, one of the inventors of the polygraph, and a kinky, polyamorous, feminist-minded man whose wife and girlfriend connected him to such luminaries as Margaret Sanger (the lauded, but highly controversial Planned Parenthood founder).
His brand of feminism was a chimerical and eclectic thing, a variant on the old maternalist idea that women were less inherently warlike than men. It was further modified by his psychiatric theories, where he identified key drives he thought motivated human beings — particularly dominance (which men were reared into) and submission (which women were raised to embody).
Though this neatly fit sexist stereotypes, the difference for Marston was that he believed that these dispositions were the result of socialization; thus, they could be altered, producing a more balanced, equal world.
One way to do this, he thought, was with a healthy appreciation of bondage.
Jill Lepore’s excellent The Secret History of Wonder Woman touches on this, and is certainly worth reading for the expansive treatment Lepore gives to the women who inspired and helped create the character — but for a full, unblinking (and more sympathetic) treatment of the BDSM business, I can’t recommend Noah Berlatsky’s Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941–1948 strongly enough.
To be sure, women tied up in comics and genre fiction is nothing new, nor is the sexualization of such a predicament. There has always been a strong sexual charge to damsel-in-distress stories; the helpless woman is a site for manly virtues to be proven and for the indulgence of fantasy. Marston took things a step further, however; he wasn’t merely presenting us with sexualized images of bondage (of both men and women), but the full range of the BDSM acronym — bondage, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism. Further, he used each of these things to express political ideas.
There is no summary that does justice to the full scope of the, frankly, weird, quasi-spiritualist theory that Marston had in mind, but this must suffice: Men’s thirst for dominance has led the world to ruin, and only by learning submission to loving authority can the world be made peaceful and egalitarian.
Women, who have mastered the art of submission, can learn to dominate men, forcing them to submit and quell their bestial impulses. Wonder Woman is just this sort of archetypal new woman: strong, powerful, independent, yet unafraid to give up her power temporarily; able to dominate and submit at will, she has mastered both sides of human nature.
With this theory underlying the whole original comic, virtually every scene involving bondage and D/s was heavily freighted with a specific, somewhat eccentric feminist message. It’s also one that—Marston’s belief in socialization notwithstanding—chafes against feminist theory in its essentialism, and it still sets off alarm bells that Wonder Woman was just one elaborate fantasy for the spank bank of its male authors.
Wonder Woman is able to dominate and submit at will, she has mastered both sides of human nature. Click To TweetYet Berlatsky makes a convincing case that Marston went further than his patriarchal contemporaries. Where the classic male fantasy of masochism is locked in the realm of fantasy — you submit to a woman, get off, then escape the fantasy to redouble your aggressive manhood — Marston advocated something more universal. Submission as a way of life, whose principles would inform and temper everything you did. Instead of the assertion of dominance and mastery being equated with success, one would leaven that through giving up power on occasion (usually to a woman), in an act of love and trust that also blew off steam.
Whatever one thinks of the theory itself — and I’m certainly no adherent — what I find fascinating is the attempt to spell out a political manifesto through BDSM (also known as “kink”), where it’s portrayed as the basis of an egalitarian society. The Amazons, in Marston’s rendition, are powerful warriors and people who tie each other up in elaborate rituals for fun.
This remains exceedingly rare in art. Most popular portrayals of BDSM fetishism don’t even get the fetish right, after all — Fifty Shades of Grey does quite a lot to promote abuse rather than the actual, negotiated consensuality of real kink. BDSM remains relegated to the realm of individualist fantasy; even when portrayed well, it is merely what it appears to be: sex.
What if it could be shown as something with greater meaning, and without all the baggage that Marston brought with him? Goodness knows, I’d certainly love to see what a kinky feminist woman could do with this material. Colorful metaphors and allegories populate our fiction — why can’t BDSM be among them as something other than a marker of evil? Think of how often a villainous woman is portrayed as a “dominatrix” type, all black leather and curves. Why is she so often synonymous with evil or tarnished virtue? Take the Drow in older versions of Dungeons and Dragons, say, and their patron deity Llolth. Nothing says “evil” like making it obvious that you like sex, after all.
Or even consider the sultriness endemic to Disney villainesses, like Ursula, Cruella de Vil, or Maleficent (who at least had a wonderful live-action film that undid some of the stigma and made her far more human). There’s a reason these villains beguile us and command a rather vocal fandom in feminist and queer communities. We love them for the reasons we’re told they’re “bad”: their confident swagger, their “vanity,” their power.
It’s certainly no coincidence that for many years, the rare portrait of female power we got in society was a darkly sexual one that neatly slots into popular portrayals of kink culture.
There was one thing Marston’s comics had going for them, though: Women in bondage were never “fallen” or “dirty.” Love was always in the equation for him.
In popular culture, what BDSM performs and parodies is often taken literally, undermining the transformative power of fantasy and consensual violence; the “sadist” becomes an actual sadist, the dominatrix becomes an actual torturer, and so on. What if their accoutrements, mannerisms, and tropes came to stand for something else?
Marston’s women in bondage were never ‘fallen’ or ‘dirty.’ Love was always in the equation for him. Click To TweetThe actual experience of BDSM is replete with inspiration for what such art might look like. Truly being involved in a scene where you’ve negotiated its parameters is an immersive experience that is among the most profound acts of empathy I’ve ever known.
Pleasuring someone in this way gives me pleasure in turn, creating a rapidly spinning cycle of both physical and emotional sensations that far exceeds the stimulations of genital pleasure. There’s a transcendental mutuality to it; you know another person and their limits with such intimacy that you can artfully dance along those edges. The sensation my partner feels when I crop them, say, is instantly translated back into a parallel form of stimulation for me. I don’t feel the pleasurable pain my partner experiences, but something equally forceful fills me in turn, setting my nervous system alight.
This is the crucial part: There is no physical pleasure to be gained but through producing pleasure for your partner. It cannot be one sided. If I want to feel good, I have to make them feel good.
I’m sure there’s at least a few parables about socialist feminism in there.
This sort of thing matters for a number of reasons. Kink is often equated with abuse, in ways that both stigmatize its practitioners and endanger women who are into kink, in particular, as many presume that we somehow get off on being assaulted by men. The sharing of one’s body is always a delicate affair, bound up in trust; kink merely takes that sharing to a particular extreme, exploring limits with a partner while using a wider palette of sensation. What is masochism if not the enjoyment of an especially wide range of touch, after all?
How might a feminist woman use the visual language of BDSM to explore these themes and more? We do have an intriguing example in the form of Gail Simone’s take on the Wonder Woman character.
In Vol. III, no. 41, “Throwdown,” Wonder Woman asks fellow superheroine Power Girl to tie her up with her own golden lasso. The lasso, famously, compels anyone in its grip to tell the truth. Coiled in its length, Wonder Woman confronts the wicked Crows, sons of the God of War, who use a form of mind-control to turn people against their better natures. Bound in the lasso, however, Wonder Woman can only think and speak the truth.
So bound, she cannot be taken in by the Crows’ seductions — all while calling herself, pointedly, Mistress of the Hunt. And thus she finally ends their reign of terror. By spanking them.
Marston would’ve been proud, I daresay. But Simone manages to use her trademark sense of whimsy to be quite a ways more subversive with this episode. Bondage is equated here not with weakness or submission, but its opposite. Something that looks just a tad like the kind of rope bondage one might wear surreptitiously under their clothes becomes an armor of truth.
The Biblical verse from Romans, “let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light” is actually stunningly apposite here. But unlike the Biblical version (which precedes an injunction against “sexual immorality and debauchery”), what some might consider debauchery is Simone’s armor of light — in the form of the illuminated lasso — which casts off Ares’ darkness.
It’s a thin filament, hardly a whole philosophy, but it gives some insight into what themes more positive portrayals might evoke. Submission becoming a form of strength that, in turn, dominates masculinity, for instance.
The symbolism of bondage needn’t always be negative, shameful, or purely fetishistic. Whatever his faults, that was a lesson Marston imparted to us.
The videogame Bayonetta furnishes us with a (not uncontroversial) take on the idea as well, with a dominatrix in the role of hero, spanking and whipping her way to saving the world.
But that extra, long step toward something bigger than titillation or an expression of merely individual sexual agency, is yet to be taken in mainstream fiction, so far as I can see. Bayonetta, for instance, is a fantastic first step in many ways, yet still very much about an individualistic portrayal of BDSM that also, in many scenes, serves a rather boring idea of male heterosexuality.
There remains that strain of feminist thought that can only understand BDSM as an artefact of patriarchy, a means by which we fetishise our own oppression and literalize male domination to an absurd degree. But this should not be the only story feminism tells about our way of life; kink can mean so much more.
And just maybe there’s a way to use such a story to cast off the shackles this society places on the free expression of our sexuality, for in all the counter-narratives essayed against BDSM as both practice and symbol lies the notion of shame, and the specter of the perverted man and fallen woman.
Perhaps William Marston’s take on it was a bit strange and sexist in its own right, but it was a worthy attempt at using sexuality as a visual language for an empowering story — where weakness could be a strength and strength could be a weakness.
And now more than ever, we need women to tell such stories without apology.
