Throughout our classroom discussions of Wonder Woman, there’s one thing that continues to bother me: the irony of her skimpy, sexualized costume.

While Wonder Woman is a model for feminism, I can’t get past the icky feeling of knowing the male gaze was upon her before she even hit the page. Her creator, William Moulton Marston, and her original illustrator, Harry G. Peter, were both male.

“The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of a Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman,” Marston wrote in “Why 100,000,000 Americans Read Comics.” It’s as if Marston couldn’t think of a way to show Wonder Woman was, well, a woman without baring her thighs and giving her an ample bosom. This quote from Marston also worries me, because it suggests that a woman must be beautiful in order to be good and liked by readers.

Even in modern depictions of Wonder Woman, her breasts seem to be the most prevalent thing about her. In this collection of Wonder Woman art, a few (like the image I’ve embedded from the collection) even feel a bit pornographic to me. While it’s not fair to judge the original based on later depictions of her, these sexualized images show how these artists think of Wonder Woman today. Those meanings are attached to her status as an American Icon.

 

There’s a clear double standard when it comes to the worth of a superhero and his or her body. Spiderman seems kind of scrawny to me, and Superman gets to enjoy the modesty of his muscles being covered up. The only instance I can recall of male superheroes’ body parts being hyper sexualized, the characters were “ambiguously gay.”

An article published on pop culture news site “AV Club” suggests Wonder Woman’s costume was inspired by pin-up girls in the 1940s (the time of Wonder Woman’s creation), and that any oddly kinky comic strip scenes of her being tied up and escaping them was a metaphor for women escaping social injustices. That’s all fine and good, by why do I have to see the top of her breasts for that metaphor to work? The answer is: I don’t. I’m more likely to believe a second explanation offered by the same article: by making her sexual and attractive, male readers will feel positively toward a female superhero. Gag.

While it’s not hard to argue the stupidity of wearing a skimpy costume as temperatures begin to drop in late October, our discussion of Wonder Woman will surely have new meaning when I see women dressed up in less-than-modest costumes depicting her on Halloween. While becoming a recognizable Halloween costume is one of my personal benchmarks of what makes something an American icon, it’s hard to ignore the irony of women dressing in skimpier versions of an already scantily clad female superhero who was meant to represent feminism.