https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/matr ... -woman-999I think I wanna party with the [male] creator of Wonder Woman:
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But Marston has a real feminist agenda, I think, not just in the sense that he wants to put women in power, but in the sense that he wants to overturn the patriarchal idea that power should rule, or that the strongest should rule. Marston sees erotic submission as important not because it puts men down but because submission is actually for him a virtue. Erotic submission is about releasing control to the one you love, for him. So, yes, I think that is opposed to the values patriarchy tells us are important, and I think it has feminist implications, or can have feminist implications when coupled to a belief in women's power, and women's right to power, as in Marston's worldview.
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It's awkward to mix the kinky propaganda and the serious propaganda against child abuse, but that was one of Marston's gifts. And that mixture was reflected in his life as a therapist and a sex radical polyamorous kinkster...
He didn't actually work as a therapist,which may well have been for the best! He was a psychological researcher—and yes, his theories about how dominance and submission were "normal emotions" were definitely reflected in the comics. He was also a huckster; he worked on inventing the lie detector (which never actually worked, of course) and he'd then use the lie detector in ads for Gillette, I think. And he did stage performances with the lie detector. He was a big old kinky carny.
As you say, he was polyamorous. He lived with his wife Elizabeth and Olive Byrne, who was his lover and almost certainly Elizabeth's as well. Living with two bisexual women definitely seems like it was important to his theories and his comics. In his psychological work he wrote about how lesbianism made women better mothers, better sexual partners, and just better all around; basically he thought that lesbianism made the world a better place for everyone, of every gender and age range. And his comics are filled with lesbian bondage play, often modeled on his (idiosyncratic) academic work on sorority initiation rituals.
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