Superwoman (Wonder Woman) is always a horror type. She
is physically very powerful, tortures men, has her own female
following, is the cruel, “phallic” woman. While she is a frighten¬
ing figure for boys, she is an undesirable ideal for girls, being
the exact opposite of what girls are supposed to want to be

To advise a child not to read a comic book works only if you
can explain to him your reasons. For example, a ten-year-old
girl from a cultivated and literate home asked me why I thought
it was harmful to read Wonder Woman (a crime comic which
we have found to be one of the most harmful). She saw in
her home many good books and I took that as a starting point,
explaining to her what good stories and novels are. “Suppos¬
ing,” I told her, “you get used to eating sandwiches made with
very strong seasonings, with onions and peppers and highly spiced mustard. You will lose your taste for simple bread and
butter and for finer food. The same is true of reading strong
comic books. If later on you want to read a good novel it may
describe how a young boy and girl sit together and watch the
rain falling. They talk about themselves and the pages of the
book describe what their innermost little thoughts are. This is
what is called literature. But you will never be able to appreci¬
ate that if in comic-book fashion you expect that at any minute
someone will appear and pitch both of them out of the win¬
dow.” In this case the girl understood, and the advice worked

Edith was a delinquent girl of fourteen. Over the years the
family had had contact with some twenty-five social agencies.
It was a history of illness, vocational dislocation, disruption
and financial difficulties. The girl, good-looking and anxious to
get help, had serious aspirations to make something of her life.
Surely in such a case one cannot disregard the social condi-
166tions, nor can one ascribe delinquency directly to them. One
must seareh for the particular in the general, the individual in
the social, and vice versa. There is no such thing as abstract
frustration leading to abstract aggression.
Wliat goes on in the mind of such a girl? Where does the
rationalization come from that permits her to act against her
better impulses? Her ideal was Wonder Woman. Here was a
morbid model in action. For years her reading had consisted
of comic books. There was no question but that this girl lived
under diflBcult social circumstances. But she was prevented
from rising above them by the specific corruption of her char¬
acter development by comic-book seduction. The woman in
her had succimibed to Wonder Woman. By reading many
comic books the decent but tempted child has the moral props
taken from under him. The antisocial suggestions from comic
books reach children in their leisure time, when they are alone,
when their defenses are down

The Lesbian counterpart of Batman may be found in the
stories of Wonder Woman and Black Cat. The homosexual con¬
notation of the Wonder Woman type of story is psychologically
unmistakable. The Psychiatric Quarterly deplored in an edi¬
torial the “appearance of an eminent child therapist as the im-
192plied endorser of a series . . . which portrays extremely sadistic
hatred of all males in a framework which is plainly Lesbian.”
For boys, Wonder Woman is a frightening image. For girls
she is a morbid ideal. Where Batman is anti-feminine, the at¬
tractive Wonder Woman and her coimterparts are definitely
anti-masculine. Wonder Woman has her own female following.
They are all continuously being threatened, captured, almost
put to death. There is a great deal of mutual rescuing, the same
type of rescue fantasies as in Batman. Her followers are the
“Holliday girls,” i.e. the holiday girls, the gay party girls, the
gay girls. Wonder Woman refers to them as “my girls.” Their
attitude about death and murder is a mixture of the callousness
of crime comics with the coyness of sweet little girls. When one
of the Holhday girls is thought to have drowned through the
machinations of male enemies, one of them says: “Honest, I’d
give the last piece of candy in the world to bring her back!” In
a typical story, Wonder Woman is involved in adventures with
another girl, a princess, who talks repeatedly about “those
wicked men.”

As to the “advanced femininity,” what are the activities in
comic books which women “indulge in on an equal footing with
men”? They do not work. They are not homemakers. They do
not bring up a family. Mother-love is entirely absent. Even
when Wonder Woman adopts a girl there are Lesbian overtones.
They are either superwomen flying through the air, scantily
dressed or uniformed, outsmarting hostile natives, animals or
wicked men, functioning like Wonder Woman in a fascisticfuturist setting, or they are molls or prizes to be pushed around
and sadistically abused. In no other literature for children has
the image of womanhood been so degraded. Where in any other
childhood literature except children’s comics do you find a
woman called (and treated as) a “fat slut”? The activities which
women share with men are mostly related to force and violence.
I admit they often use language—“advanced,” I suppose—which
is not usually associated with women. Dr. Richmond Barbour
mentions an example: “ ‘Try this in ya belly, ya louse’ the young
lady says as she shoots the uniformed policeman in his midsec¬
tion. Scantily dressed, thighs and breasts exposed, she is leading
three similar gun-girls. One has been shot, and she is falling.
Another girl shoots at the police with a revolver and mutters,
‘Here’s one fer luck!’ ”
The prototype of the super-she with “advanced femininity” is
Wonder Woman, also endorsed by this same expert. Wonder
Woman is not the natural daughter of a natural mother, nor
was she bom like Athena from the head of Zeus. She was con¬
cocted on a sales formula. Her originator, a psychologist re¬
tained by the industry, has described it: “Who wants to be a
girl? And that’s the point. Not even girls want to be girls. . . .
The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all
the strength of Superman. . . . Give (men) an alluring woman
stronger than themselves to submit to and they’ll be proud to
234become her willing slaves.” Neither folklore nor normal sexu¬
ality, nor books for children, come about this way. If it were
possible to translate a cardboard figure like Wonder Woman
into life, every normal-minded young man would know there
is something wrong with her.