Oh, no, wait, I'm sorry. What I meant to say was, "That thing that means the exact opposite of 'shock.'"

You’re Not a Wonder, Wonder Woman

You’re a naked, painted Playboy cover now.



From the inside cover of Playboy’s February 2008 issue…



Truth, justice and American sensuality? Yeah, because sensuality can stop a bullet cold, make the Axis fall, change their minds and change the world.

So, Wonder Woman finally gets a female writer after sixty years in existence (and manages to get some favorable real-world press as well) and Playboy follows up on that meme by painting a naked chick who couldn’t survive more than a week on The Celebrity Apprentice. Wonder how Gail Simone feels about that. And I wonder where DC/Warner stands on the issue, or are we to expect a naked, body-painted Batman on Playgirl in the months leading up to this Summer’s Dark Knight?

Yeah, see, usually, I'm totally with the feminist movement's criticisms of the exploitation of female characters in superhero comics, but ... this?

I'm sorry, but in the words of Dustin Hoffman in Wag the Dog, "This? This is nothing."

I mean, I'm sorry, but all I can assume is that whoever wrote this article has obviously not seen any pornography that's been produced in the past two decades, because if they had, they'd know that Playboy is quite possibly the last adult magazine in existence to finally feature a model undressed as Wonder Woman.

No, really; go ahead and check. Penthouse, Hustler, Club, Score, Swank, Genesis, High Society ... literally every single one of them has already used this idea (many of them more than once), and I can guaran-goddamn-tee that every single one of them was far fucking filthier than Playboy's layout has any hope of being.

Now, if you object to seeing an icon of female independence being reduced to a male fantasy, fair enough, but at this point, "Wonder Woman as a porn character" has become such an overused trope, even within the relatively repetitive genre of pornography, that it's long since become cliche.

By all means, object to what it represents, but please recognize that what you're objecting to is not a new thing, and indeed, considering that this latest iteration of it is coming from Playboy, I'd wager that it actually stands a decent chance of treating the character more chastely and respectfully than the actual comics themselves.

At this point, taking offense at anything done by Playboy is like thinking that the worst problem facing public schools is kids who wear their baseball caps backwards, because even within the realm of degrading portrayals of female comic book characters, this doesn't even rate. I'd still consider Identity Crisis and "One More Day" way more offensive, from a feminist standpoint.zhinxy raised the following point, in response to Lisa Fortuner's post on Blog@Newsarama about this same issue, that I felt was valid enough that it deserved my response:

K-box, insofar as anybody is complaining about the pictures - which are cute, and really quite tame as these things go, and insofar as - as you pointed out - anybody is acting as though this isn’t a cliche, I agree completely.

But the bulk of the eyerolling hasn’t been at porn-WW qua porn-WW from what I can tell, but the write-up accompanying it.

Which I do find vexing, for much the same reasons ragnell/Ms. Fortuner does. (Although, to be honest, only mildly vexing.)

Wonder Woman porn is fine in my book. Maybe even more than fine, from time to time. But that write-up feels a bit like… taking pictures in the “naughty nun” vein and then claiming you’re celebrating virtue?

This assumes that the sort of people who would a) seriously be influenced by the text in a Playboy pictorial would also b) be at all inclined to read the text in a Playboy pictorial.

And again, I’m sorry, but wasn’t one of the original feminist objections to magazines like Playboy that such critics were calling bullshit on those magazines’ claims that anybody “reads them for the articles”?

Can’t have it both ways.