Wonder Woman's new Amazons

As a comic-addicted kid in the Fifties, I have to admit that Wonder Woman was not on my required reading list. Theoretically she ought to have at least appealed to the nascent leering adolescent that lurked within me, but as a superhero she just didn't make the grade. I was of the Superman persuasion myself, with a nod in the direction of the Flash and Green Lantern and the like. I preferred male superheroes because I wanted to be one myself. I could easily imagine myself flying around saving the world a la Clark Kent, but couldn't quite work in Diana of Themyscira. Overcoming villains with a lasso and a pair of bracelets? Gimme a break! That is not pre-adolescent boy material, not no how, at least for this particular pre-adolescent boy.

I'm not sure if Wonder Woman was intended as a superhero for girls or not, but there was no question that she was something of a feminist, given the definition of feminism at the time. And she was part of the all-female Amazon world of Paradise Island, where the women were head and shoulders above any men one might dig up on other parts of the world. Part of my pre-adolescence elided the problem of where all these women came from in the first place, but one lets that sort of thing ride in aid of a better narrative, I guess.

Things are not the same in the Wonder Woman universe these days. Writing for Tor.com, Shoshana Kessock reports on some seriously disturbing new origins:

In the original DC history, Wonder Woman is raised by the immortal Amazon women as the only child on Paradise Island, daughter of their Queen Hippolytta. Her sister Amazons live isolated from men pursuing perfection of their culture without having children, focused on their own interests and largely happy. This history has largely stood untouched until the drastic recent rewrite. In Wonder Woman #7, Wonder Woman is still reeling from the discovery that she is in fact the daughter of Zeus from an extra-marital affair with the queen of the Amazons when she is forced to plan an invasion of the underworld to rescue a woman also bearing Zeus’s child. When she goes to the god Hephaestus for help, he reveals that all the men working in his forge are in fact the offspring of Amazons, sold as unwanted male children for weapons.

Yikes! The Amazons sell of their used men as slaves to Hephaestus? That, in a word, is pretty cold.

What to make of all of this? Decide for yourself. Read Wonder Woman Comics and the Violation of the Amazons.