Happy to Be Sad

WONDER WEDNESDAY

On Wednesdays I look at various chapters in Wonder Woman’s history. Click here for previous installments.

Ralph, dude, you’re creeping me out.

Wonder Woman #219, DC Comics, September 1975.

This was the only chapter in The Twelve Labors that I had when I was a kid, so I had no idea why the heck Elongated Man was perving on watching Wonder Woman tie herself up on the cover. Even if that weren’t freaking creepy to begin with, he’s a married man! I didn’t have the background to know that during this arc, each member of the Justice League of America was taking a turn spying on Wonder Woman at her own request, to judge her worthy of rejoining the JLA after a long absence. But I’m not sure how much it would have helped, because Ralph seems way too enthusiastic about videotaping all the action. Then again, being overenthusiastic is kind of his shtick.

“World of Enslaved Women” is by writer Martin Pasko and artist Curt Swan, inked by Vince Colletta. It starts with Wonder Woman saving a woman from being run over by a truck, only to find the woman was happy to be about to die and furious about being saved.  Hey, what gives, lady?

Then her boss at the United Nations Crisis Bureau, Morgan Tracy, tells her that prominent feminists around the world are suddenly vanishing into thin air—right before the UN hosts the World Conference of Feminist Women. Otherwise I guess the UN wouldn’t care.

Weirdly, Tracy now looks completely different than he used to, and not just because he’s grown a mustache. His face is completely different than the last time Swan drew him, and Swan tends to draw him black-haired instead of the brown-haired guy other artists show him as. I guess he’s an international man of mystery!

Gotta love those fan signs. And Tracy’s kind of a pig, too.

These prominent feminists, by the way, are thinly-veiled versions of actual prominent women of the time. I don’t know my history well enough to say who “Irish nationalist Bonita Doolin” is meant to be, but Israeli diplomat Minna Golden is clearly Golda Meir, and tennis star Betty Jo Kane would be Billie Jean King.

After Kane disappears in the middle of a match with a notorious chauvinist tennis pro (if that was even considered a negative thing at the time), Diana does some detective work that leads her to…a beauty salon? But…but feminists don’t go to beauty salons! That’s just crazy talk! I love how everybody makes a big deal about this, that feminists wouldn’t be caught dead in a beauty salon. I know there have been several waves of feminism since then, but was it ever that cut and dried? But it’s OK, see, because this salon is for women to like the way they look whether men like it or not! The place is really over the top, too, with beauticians preaching, “It’s not important what your husband wants—only what you want!” while they’re shampooing women’s hair.

Crush the patriarchy and pass the conditioner!

But the shampoo is a lie! It transports women to a whole ’nother world in another dimension, one where they feel the opposite of what they’d feel on their own world. So ardent feminists from Earth are equally insistent on submitting to men once they land on this world—and that’s exactly the plan.

“Feminist sow,” eh? Boy, that act was dropped pretty quick!

Apparently this planet’s women were getting too uppity. Originally all the women of Xro were slaves, stronger but supposedly mentally inferior to men. (This inferior intelligence is never exactly debunked in the story, but we only have the chauvinist male leader’s word for it.) But they got big ideas from observing Earth women, at first through a TV-like “dimensiomonitor” and then by visiting themselves. (We’ve seen this trope before in past stories, and pretty recently too.) There they discovered the disturbing emotion-reversal effect that on Earth they felt the opposite of what they’d feel at home. Now they were in open revolt, with borrowed slogans like, “Off the male chauvinist pigs.” So the male chauvinist pigs, not wanting to be offed, are importing Earth feminists, made docile by the emotion-reversal effect, to teach Xro women to simmer down and get back to work.

This just gets more and more messed up.

And Wonder Woman, transported to Xro accidentally through the shampoo, thinks this is a wonderful plan! (Elongated Man was right behind her, moving through dimensions with his video camera, and she still doesn’t notice him.)

Slavery is freedom!

But because Wonder Woman is awesome, her will is just too strong for the emotion-reversal to work on her for long, and of course she fights back and trounces the oppressors, getting all the Earth feminists out (despite their resistance because of course they want to stay) before Xro leader Mchsm destroys the whole palace to keep his planet’s women from taking it over. You gotta figure the Xro women laying siege to the building were hit by the bomb too, but I guess we’re no longer concerned with what goes on there.

He died as he lived—a total jerk.

Of course the twist is that Ralph’s emotions weren’t affected at all by his trip to Xro, because the reversal effect only works on women. “Imagine that,” he tells the JLA boys’ club while recounting the tale, “a dimension where nature is sexist!” Yeah, Ralph, hilarious. I sure hope things turned out all right for somebody back there.

So that’s the ninth trial of twelve. Only the Atom, Hawkman and Batman are left to do monitoring duty, and next issue it’s the tiny titan’s turn! Not that it ever matters too much who’s watching because they don’t really get involved, but we gotta stay in the spirit of the thing.