![]() ![]() So, Marston (and his wonderful artist Harry G. Instead, they usually involved a kind of bondage role play, in which Wonder Woman would tie up her enemies and force them to do her bidding, then they would tie her up with her own rope and force her to do their bidding, and back and forth, until finally Wonder Woman regained her hold on the end of the rope, and (like a true love leader) led the villain to happiness via loving submission. His plots weren’t organized around competitive fights leading to the protagonist’s victory. The lasso also gave Marston’s stories a unique narrative dynamic. (Marston, who lived in a polyamorous relationship with two bisexual women, was always very aware of the possibility of lesbian attraction.) Her ability to persuade and transform through love is embodied in her lasso, which Marston himself described as “a symbol of female charm, allure, oomph, attraction.” He added that “every woman has that power over people of both sexes whom she wishes to influence or control in any way.” The lasso is therefore a kind of ennobling sex appeal, which leads men and women to good. In his 1928 academic treatise Emotions of Normal People, Marston argued that patriarchal, male-led society is too competitive, or as he says “appetitive.” Men and women must be reeducated by female “love leaders,” whose erotic persuasion can bind everyone in loving submission, creating a matriarchal utopia.Ī decade or so after writing Emotions of Normal People, Marston created Wonder Woman, the prototypical love leader. It was tightly tied (as it were) to Marston’s particular theories about gender, feminism, and matriarchal utopia. The first time Wonder Woman got the lasso, she made an Amazonian doctor stand on her head, because if you had a lasso which could compel people to do anything, why wouldn’t you make a doctor stand on her head? The lasso of obedience wasn’t just a nifty magical toy, though. But it wasn’t - because again, the lasso Marston gave Wonder Woman didn’t compel truth, but obedience. Marston’s lie detector work is sometimes credited as the inspiration for the Lasso of Truth. Wonder Woman was invented by William Moulton Marston, a psychologist, sexologist, and crank who hyped himself as the inventor of the (ineffective) lie detector test. It was changed over time to make her less kinky and more mainstream - which is to say, truth pushed the Amazonian princess into the closet. Wonder Woman’s lasso wasn’t originally a Lasso of Truth it was a much more versatile lasso of control. ![]() But the famous “Lasso of Truth” is something of a falsehood - or at least, a garbled half fact. If there’s one thing that you probably know about Wonder Woman’s lasso, it’s that it can force people to tell the truth. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |