Saturday, January 19, 2008
PLAYBOY responds to the funny book feminist Wonder Woman uproar
I didn’t know that Playboy has a blog, but there are a lot of things I don’t know. This is just one of them. On their blog, Josh Robertson responds to some of the hullabaloo raised in some quarters over the fact that Tiffany Fallon was bodypainted to make it appear she was dressed in a Wonder Woman’s costume.
Josh Robertson writes:
It’s our cover, and while we don’t feel the need to explain in detail our thought process, perhaps a step back is warranted. The story is called “Sex in America.” Wonder Woman is sexy. Her costume is red, white and blue, and she has stars on her hot pants – it suggests the American flag almost as much as Captain America’s does. But we like to put women on our covers, so Steve Rogers is SOL in this case.
He’s exactly right. They don’t need to explain their thought process, but they did anyway. I’m certainly glad they did because it makes most of the criticism over the magazine cover look even more silly then it did because. I didn’t even know that was possible. For instance, comic book writer Greg Rucka theorizing that running a cover photo of Tiffany Fallon painted up to look like Wonder Woman was done to torpedo Hillary Clinton’s run for president.
I don’t know what more embarrassing: That he would come up with that goofy leap of logic that or that a lot of people actually agreed with him. Luckily it’s not my job to figure that out.
Josh Robertson continues:
Is Wonder Woman a feminist icon? If you say so. Is she a sex symbol? Without a doubt. Are the two mutually exclusive? Creator William Moulton Marston would have found the question laughable. The false dichotomy that separates female sex appeal from female intellect and strength of character hobbles feminism, and that’s been Playboy’s view for over 50 years.
It seems some people want to argue that sex appeal and intellect are an either-or type of thing. That a woman can be either physically attractive or she can be smart. She can’t be both. Why do some people think this? Is it because over the years woman have been portrayed this way in works of fiction? It’s as though we are supposed to actually believe a woman can only either be the ditzey bombshell or the homely nerd-girl.
Woman can be smart and sexy. The two are not mutually exclusive. People need to stop pretending that they are.
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Yeah, let’s not forget that Moulton had a wife and a freaky, live-in sex doll that was much younger than the two of them. I doubt he’d be offended that his Amazonian goddess was being all sexed up.