SADISM OF THE CASUAL KIND

One disadvantage of going the historical route in refuting the charges of syndromic sadism made by Wertham and Legman is that both authors are dead and cannot respond to my refutations. There are modern critics who object to violent entertainment on aesthetic grounds, and occasionally one of them will toss out the "sadism" accusation as a passing brickbat, sometimes even with a light-hearted manner (see below). I'm not aware of any who have attempted to make the accusation via a psychological schema, such as the one used by Legman and Wertham, though.

Thus I have to anticipate how these two deceased intellectuals might have found fault with my assertion that the paradigm of the adventure-genre (hero fights villain with both having the ability to defend themselves) does not match the paradigm of classical sadism (victimizer tortures victim, who has no ability to defend him/herself). Based on their writings, I think I can assume that both of them would use some variant of an "inconstant reader" argument. Assuming that both of them granted the difference in paradigms, they would leap to say that even though the hero of a given superhero comic generally faces the villain mano-a-mano (or even womano-a-womano, etc.), the budding young proto-sadist ignores the ethical ideals put forth in the text (much as they thought he did with the phony "you can't beat the law" preachments in the crime comics). From there (they might say) the budding young proto-sadist would go on to become obsessed with characters beating other characters without the benefit of self-defense, and of course, violent comics would be to blame for this development.

While I would not agree with the "blame" part of this imagined argument, I would certainly agree that any individual who did so transform the dominant "hero vs. villain" battles into one-sided beatings for his/her personal fantasies would indeed be a syndromic sadist. (For convenience here I will use "sadist" after Freud's somewhat-indiscriminate formulation; that is, including the phenomenon of "masochism" within the "sadism" rubric.) That such individuals do exist is testifies by a number of sites on the Internet, one of which is touched on by BEAT reporter Heidi McDonald in this post from 1/31/08, "The One With a Lot of Comments."

Now, McDonald does not call for a ban (direct or indirect) of violent comics as did Wertham and Legman. However, she does stray somewhat into their territory when she lumps together syndromic sadism with what might called "casual sadism."

"Casual sadism" as I conceive it is not a syndromic phenomenon. It is just one of many affects communicated by many forms of fiction generally and the adventure-genre specifically, and it refers here to the pleasure one takes in seeing a "villain" violently beaten by the hero. For that matter it can occur in any number of non-literary contexts, particularly those of adversarial sports. Legman and Wertham assumed, perhaps both of them were so phobic to any kind of fictional violence, that "casual sadism" could develop into the syndromic kind. I take the position of Plato's PHILEBUS, which asserted that the "soul" could experience many affects in the course of its "owner's" life, and that some would have transitory effects while others would permanently "make their mark," so to speak. In my opinion, most audiences who temporarily take pleasure in seeing hero beat villain are experiencing a transitory effect that does not noticeably warp their lives. If the effect were more than transitory on a wide scale, one might expected by now to see civilization reduced to the fascist state that both of the anti-comics critics feared.

It's unclear to me as to whether McDonald really believes that most superhero readers are potential syndromic sadists, as her comment toward the end of the post is made with a somewhat flippant tone. However, it would be a mistake, due to that slight humorous tone, to believe that she doesn't hold strong views on the subject of women being beaten. even within the bounds of fiction. In part I'll be examining some of the philosophical aspects of McDonald's expressed views in my next post.

BETTELHEIM, BETTELHEIM, BETTLEHEIM!!

In my last essay, I wrote:

"But what Wertham and Legman failed to take seriously was that all people capable of at least elementary cognition-- whether children or adults-- know that there is always some possibility that they could be victims of violent crime, particularly (but not exclusively) when they reside in urban centers."

It later struck me that this sounded similar to the views expressed by Bruno Bettelheim in his most famed work, THE USES OF ENCHANTMENT, which concerned the way children read fairy-tales as a way of coping with the anxities of surviving in a world of (sometimes violent) adults. However, I'm not precisely on the same page as the late psychologist.

I read USES many years ago and thought it was a fair premise, albeit marked by a certain utilitarianism. While I would never deny that readers may internalize the subject matter of fiction so as to give the subject some personally-proactive theme, it's certainly not the principal quality of fiction, nor do I think most readers, children or adults, are thinking to themselves, even unconsciously, "How can I 'use' this?" Much of the charm of fiction, be it 'fantastic' or 'realistic,' resides in the way those elements most similar to everyday experience can be inverted, transvalued, or reinterpreted in assorted ways.

Apparently Bettleheim was strongly influenced by the late works of Sigmund Freud, in contrast to earlier-mentioned Legman and Wertham, who take what Freudian influences they possess from Psychology-Dad's early works. Thus the latter two see things largely in terms of a given reader's gratification (what Freud would later call the "pleasure principle"), while Bettelheim reconfigures the reader's needs in terms of Freud's corresponding "reality principle."

That fiction of all modes and genres can lend itself to both of these principles should go without saying. Therefore, I do conjure three times the name of Bettelheim so that that when he does come forth from the vasty deep, I can promptly send him right back.

A SIEGEL SEGUE

This is another segue from my ongoing posts re: a theoretical judgment of "sadism in the comics."

I've coined the term "dynamization" for the purposes of a study that discusses sex and violence in art, but I've done so in order to come up with a term that describes a subjective experience of ego-satisfaction that doesn't call up associations of fictive sex and violence, as I've argued that "gratification" does. The problem of word associations is not a new one: after Freud started using "libido" to mean predominantly-sexual energies, Jung tried to correct that use by asserting that since "libido" meant life, any human activity connected to life (which meant, in effect, every activity) would be "libidinal." But though Jung's logic was impeccable, the Freudian association became dominant. So had I used a term like "libidinization," that too would have suggested naught but sex-thrills.

Dynamization, as I conceive it, is certainly not confined to art. If Person One wants to build a birdhouse, that individual is in a static state with respect to his non-knowledge about birdhouse-building, and he reaches a dynamic state once he has learned the method of crafting birdhouses and does successfully build one. In comics this would comparable to the position of a reader who becomes proficient in understanding the basic rudiments of a given genre; his understanding of that genre dynamizes him and gives Person One (generally speaking) some degree of self-satisfaction. Of course Person Two may come along and tell Person One that what the latter thinks is a dynamic genre is in fact static in comparison to some other genre which Person Two favors. Person Two may even convert Person One to this very belief, but I would argue that the initial dynamization of Person One's learning the genre is a fact within his subjectivity that is not altered by his later change in priorities.

Just as the principle of subjective dynamization can apply to any activity that gives ego-satisfaction, it also has many manifestations even within what may appear a simple fictive experience. The aforementioned comics-critics Legman and Wertham chose to read nearly all comics that contained violence as "crime comics" and charged them with having the potential to infuse their readers with the seeds of sadism and fascism. Given the multifaceted nature of human beings, it's impossible to say with certainty that NO ONE ever had sadistic or fascist impulses "touched off" by reading a comic book, but one can certainly discern other sources of dynamization than that of sadism.


I've asserted that most of the violence in works belonging to the adventure-genre centers upon a fight between a hero (or heroes) and a villain (or villains). Legman and Wertham take pains to claim that comic-book villains are symbolic substitutes for the forces of organized society-- parents, policemen, other ethnic groups-- in order to make the medium's aggression seem hostile to a civilized society. And yet, the two critics never consider that the readers might, at least in part, actually read the castigations of villains as applying to actual criminals-- such as the unknown burglar who caused the death of Jerry Siegel's father.

As Gerald Jones' MEN OF TOMORROW notes, Siegel never publicly commented on the fact that, long before he was writing fast-paced crimefighting tales, his father was shot to death, presumably by a thief, in a scenario that resembles the origin of Batman more than that of Siegel's most famous creation. Since Siegel did not comment upon his early personal encounter with crime, we cannot presume that he took any especial satisfaction in punishing fictional gangsters with his heroes. On the other hand, had either Wertham or Legman known of Siegel's experience, I like to think that they would have at least conceded that his hypothetical motives for enjoying the spectacle of crime-beatings could have more to do with his personal loss than with any buried urge toward sadism.

Of course, they could also rejoin that few comics-readers personally lost loved ones to the depradations of criminals. But what Wertham and Legman failed to take seriously was that all people capable of at least elementary cognition-- whether children or adults-- know that there is always some possibility that they could be victims of violent crime, particularly (but not exclusively) when they reside in urban centers. Many people, knowing this, still do not love adventure-stories; some people may even be phobic toward scenes of violence, as indeed Legman and Wertham seemed to be. But some readers will feel a sense of dynamization at observing scenes in which a hero, with whom they identify, overcomes a real menace. Some may, as Wertham and Legman argued, disregard the "moral" of a given story, and focus only upon the violence. But it's clearly ridiculous to think that all readers of Jerry Siegel's SUPERMAN were so distanced; that the appeal of the Man of Steel was based in sadism alone.

In one of Alan Moore's JOURNAL interviews Moore took the non-elitist position that there was nothing inherently wrong with the ideals of the Superman comics as pertaining to young readers. He elaborated that as they grew older such readers would surely need to deepen and refine those early, elementary ideals in order to participate in the adult world, which is true enough, so far as it goes. I would add a caveat that the adult world, too, is governed by premises about the way culture and society work, and that many of these too have their roots in garnering a self-dynamizing satisfaction for this or that party. I've objected before to the fallacies of unilaterally preferring the sophisticated to the crude:

'The high/low prejudices can be much more virulent when dealing with works in differing modes that do not have humor as their aim, leading to (for instance) the tendency to reject modes dealing with adventure or melodrama in favor of those dealing with “serious drama"'

I take an even more pluralist view than Moore: the type of subjective dynamizations offered by "sophisticated entertainment" are in no way innately superior to those of "simple entertainment;" they can only be *conditionally* superior in certain particular aspects, and the reverse is also true. There will always be some individuals who like only one of those two broad idioms, but as society we need both-- and not just for the children.

We need both because the world in which we live is a "blooming, buzzing confusion" of conflicting energies, and anything that gives us clarity is essential.

NOTE: Some time after I wrote this, I learned that Siegel's father died of heart failure brought on by a holdup, not because of being shot.  My error.

GRATIFICATION= DYNAMIZATION?

This essay is a segue from the theme pursued last in "Pop Goes the Psychology." Since my current theme involves in part those narrative elements called "sex and violence," I find myself searching around in the corpus of literary terms in order to express what I want to say, and not finding what I want.

In other words, I feel a neologism coming on.

The closest extant term to what I want is "gratification." The word comes from a Latin root meaning to "oblige" or "please," and in litcrit is usually coupled with the word "instant" as a derogatory comment of commenting upon simple entertainments that offer only quick but short-lived pleasures. In WHAT WAS LITERATURE Leslie Fiedler contrasted "unearned instant gratification" with the kind that the schools teach one to appreciate-- i.e., the "earned" kind, the type that takes some cognitive or affective noodling to assimilate. He did not, like many critics, make this contrast as a means of privileging the latter over the former, and seemed to regard both as significant to the criticism of literature, even if the two modes (my term) were not covalent.

I do believe that no one reads/views any work of art without some notion of a rewarding experience down the road, even if that experience is one as arid and rigorous as the "alienation" preferred by Theodor Adorno (whose aesthetics I hope to touch upon in a future essay). Yet the word "gratification" does have strong associations with the sex-negative attitudes of Judeo-Christian ethics. The word also carries the association of "deferred gratification," the notion that if one puts off immediate satisfaction of desires, there will be some more fulfilling or at least more prudent outcome as a result. In this essay I've rejected the notion that those forms of literature deemed to represent "unearned gratification" should be curtailed to make way for more prudent or even more mature forms of literature, so for all of these reasons "gratification" does not quite work.

"Dynamization," however, does work as a term for what the reader of a given work perceives to be happening within him, whether he seeks for unearned or earned gratification. The word, not to my knowledge used in literary studies as yet, describes an intensification of potential, as seen by the Wikipedia definition of the term in the realm of computer science:

"In computer science, Dynamization is the process of transforming a static data structure into a dynamic one"

To relate this somewhat indirectly to my essays on sadism, for the reader who wants thrills out of a superhero comic-- whether those thrills can be deemed sadistic or not by an outsider-- he searches not just for gratification but dynamization. The fact that not all gratificatory fictions suit all readers, even among those commonly thought to be undiscriminating, should be easy to demonstrate from a casual perusal of any comic-book messageboard. The same is true for readers seeking sexual thrills through a fictional medium; one size does not fit all, and the reader will obviously seek out the experience that most gives him the thrill of arousal, not just anything that is meant to gratify.

Similarly, artcomics readers, though tending to view what the mainstream-reader likes as uniformly static, seek their own dynamization through whatever experiences they find intriguing or engrossing. A given reader of this type may find a given artcomic to be basically static in its structure-- say, a bad imitation of a Harvey Pekar "confessional" comic-- and therefore his lack of dynamization would be covalent with that of the disappointed thrillseeker.

"Dynamization," by the way, comes from a Greek word for "energy," and thus seems appropriate for talking both about the *energia* through which authors create their works and with which readers come to appreciate those works.

POP GOES THE PSYCHOLOGY

"Increasingly, in the last century, sadism has been supplied to the American public in massive doses in all its popular arts until, now [1949], one out of every three trees cut down in Canada for paper-pulp has murder printed on it... Whole industries have sprung up based ultimately on the exchanging of printed death for pictorial... The kiddies' korner in this new national welter of blood is the comic-book."-- Gershon Legman, LOVE AND DEATH, p. 27.

When the average pundit claims that this or that popular-media artifact will make its audience more sadistic, that pundit is not concerned with sadism as a syndrome. For instance, when in the 1980s Siskel and Ebert inveighed against slasher movies, their preachments against slashers had less to do with the concept of sadism than against a kind of "monkey-see monkey-do" level of violence. And from reading David Hadju's account of the anti-comics movement in the America of the 40s and 50s, I've the impression that most concerned parents and authorities were also worried mostly about kids learning from comics to be bullies or rapists or thieves, not sadists as such.

Gershon Legman and his fellow traveler Fredric Wertham, however, were not average pundits. Though they tossed around the word "sadism" with as much carelessness as any common commentator, one was a self-educated independent scholar and the other an accredited psychiatrist, and between them they put forth the first intellectual critique of the comic-book medium, almost entirely in terms of its ability to evoke the syndrome of sadism in American culture. There isn't much need to refute them point-by-point: Legman is largely forgotten by comics-scholars and Wertham remains known but in disrepute, despite a recent attempt by Bart Beaty to reform his reputation, examined here. But for better or worse the two of them were historically the first to raise the spectre of culture-wide sadism based on intellectual concepts, and in order to arrive at a more meaningful concept of sadism-- the better to combat current Legmanite/Werthamite uses of the term-- their concepts must be dealt with.

Though the two writers' concerns were not in all ways identical-- Legman was more the fiery Marxist radical who wanted to completely remake society, while Wertham was the liberal who wanted to remold it from within--both chose to identify every instance of fictional violence in every comic-book genre as potentially capable of engendering the syndrome of sadism. Legman's concern for "murder" in all American media is at least not exclusive to comic books, and indeed LOVE AND DEATH only has one section devoted to comic books, which is the inverse of the procedure in Wertham's SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT, where comic books are the focus and other media are condemned almost as an afterthought. But clearly from the above quote alone Legman sees violence pervading every genre and medium, "printed" and "pictorial," while Wertham takes the rhetorical stance that all comics that depict "crime" are "crime comics," whether they take place in settings germane to Westerns, jungle-adventure, horror or "the realm of the supermen" (p. 20). Even girls' romance, considered by fans to be one of the least violent genres, comes under attack by both writers, whose main concern is not generic distinctions but the prevalence of "crime."

Of course most current analysts of genre would tend to see "crime" as a distinct genre, almost entirely focused on the depradations of 20th or 21st-century gangsters, usually in an urban environment. Wertham and Legman have a good rhetorical reason to emphasize "crime" as applying across the board, for the specific crime genre usually does emphasize the criminal rather than his law-abiding opponents, and could be, with some small fairness, accused of lining up with the paradigm of the Marquis deSade. Admittedly, Sade's stories are usually about victimizers who capture and then torture victims for pleasure, rather than gunning down little old ladies in the street as did the comic-book gangsters during the heyday of crime comics. Still, one may grant that the essential Freudian paradigm seems common to both: the aggressor vents his aggression on the helpless, and in theory the reader of crime comics enjoys and internalizes the spectacle, "unless he is a complete masochist," as Legman helplfully tells us.

However, as others before me have noted, both writers had to do some quick stepping to include adventure-comics under this sadistic syndrome, inasmuch as most adventure-comics concern a protagonist whose purpose is to prevent or avenge the crimes perpetrated by criminals upon the helpless. Both men chose to read the adventure-genre in terms of a "hermeneutics of deceit," in which every hero was merely a criminal in crusader's clothing, whose exploits against crooks Legman chose to read as "lynching."

Now, while the jury may remain out on the question as to whether the adventure-genre can inspire any sort of sadistic vibe in their audiences-- a question I'll address more fully in a future piece-- it seems obvious to me that when heroes fight villains in adventure-tales, the narrative action could not be less like a lynching, much less a Sadean sadist torturing helpless victims or a gangster shooting down old ladies in the street. Wertham and Legman dance around the difference by trying to make it sound as if the villains are merely stand-ins for despised minorities and the like, which argument remains a linchpin of Marxist oppositional thought, both in modern comics-criticism and elsewhere. But neither author can totally expunge this difference of narrative action: in the adventure-genre, *the villain can defend himself.* He may be fated to lose the struggle-- indeed, until recently he always did-- but the struggle itself is essential to the adventure-genre, as it manifestly is not with the crime genre. As Wertham and Legman both point out, the crime-genre books usually ended with a last-minute destruction of the rampaging crook as a "sop" to morality. But the struggles of hero and villain in the adventure-genres-- best represented in comic books by the superhero-- are not thrown in at the last minute. Narratively, structurally, such physical struggles are the selling-points of the genres, and so cannot be conflated with either the crime genre or the Sadean paradigm by any truly rational approach.

In making this crucial distinction about the differing narrative structures of crime and adventure, I'm making an argument similar to the argument of Gilles Deleuze. Just as Deleuze pronounces the syndromes of sadism and masochism to be distinct by virtue of his "literary approach" to the works of Sade and Sacher-Masoch, I am claiming that if there is any "sadistic vibe" to the adventure-genre, it must be radically distinct from not only the crime genre (which no longer exists in modern comics these days), but from the Sadean paradigm of victimizer-torturing-helpless-victims.

This leads to the inescapeable conclusion that every modern pundit who makes a blanket condemnation of the antics of adventure-characters generally, and superheroes specifically, as "sadistic" is as outrageously wrong as both Legman and Wertham. The word "sadistic" cannot help but invoke the paradigm of Sade, and the adventure-genre simply does not conform to that paradigm, any more than the pheomenon of masochism was (as Freud claimed) etiologically identical with the phenomenon of sadism.

Whether or not there is an analogue of paradigmatic sadism present in adventure-comics is, of course, a separate question, which I'll address with reference to my earlier-cited concept of "sthenolagnia." But as to all the modern pundits who toss around the word "sadistic" as flagrantly as did Wertham and Legman, I can only quote to them Andre the Giant's famous phrase:

"I do not think this word means what you think it means"

THEORY OF SADISM

Before exploring any questions as to how the phenomenon of sadism might apply to fiction generally or the comic-book medium specifically (see here), it's necessary to establish a theoretical judgment of the phenomenon's nature (as opposed to a judgment on what if anything could/should be done about it).

Most educated persons know that for however long the actual phenomenon has been around (I hold with those that think it goes back to prehistory), the origin of the word "sadism" was coined by sexologist Kraft-Ebing in his 1890 work PSYCHOPATHIA SEXUALIS. In this book Kraft-Ebing derived his term for a subject's taking pleasure in others' pain or discomfort from the name of the Marquise de Sade: thus"sadism." Kraft-Ebing also took a similar literary model for the phenomenon of taking pleasure in one's own pain: "masochism," named after Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. I'll be touching on both phenomena here though I'll focus on the former since I don't believe any significant voice since the days of Frederic Wertham has suggested that popular fiction might turn readers masochistic.

Sade's books, starting with JUSTINE in 1791 and published to increasing scandal until (and after) Sade's death in 1814, had only one purpose: to lovingly describe harrowly-explicit scenarios of murder and torture visited upon innocent victims (mostly young women) by ruthless aristocratic voyeurs. According to critic Mario Praz, the "Divine Marquise" had a titanic effect on the development of European literature from then on, to say nothing of creating an entire erotic subgenre that developed in Victorian pornography. Not unlike a lot of literature deemed too "popular" in nature, Sade's works possess an ambivalent status in literary studies, at the very least maintaining a certain cachet for historical reasons.

Naturally "father of psychology" Sigmund Freud had his say on the sexological terms introduced by Kraft-Ebing, and he attempted to define sadism in a causative continuum with masochism. Though many of his precise theories changed during his career, his basic assertion was that sadism was the more primary phenomenon. It arose from a subject's aggressive, even "phallic" desire to inflict pain on others for his own pleasure. Given Freud's general emphasis on guilt and repression, it's not surprising that he defined masochism as pleasure arising from a subject who feels the need to inflict pain but who disavows the impulse and turns it upon himself-- sort of a "self-castration" complex.

Philosopher Gilles Deleuze overturned Freud's formula, using what he called a "literary approach" to disassociate masochism from sadism. He did so by examining in depth the concepts behind the respective syndromes as put forth by the fictional works of Sade and Sacher-Masoch. In addition to finding that the two syndromes had radically-opposed etiologies than those asserted by Freud, Deleuze found that masochism seemed to be the more primary phenomenon, arising during the subject's pre-phallic phase. As Gaylyn Studlar put it, "Deleuze considers masochism to be a phenomenology of experience that reaches far beyond the limited definition of a perverse sexuality" (IN THE REALM OF PLEASURE, p. 14). However, Deleuze agreed with Freud that, even if the etiology of the masochist was not covalent with that of the sadist, the masochist disavowed "phallic power" by suspending his own egoistic desires, thus making it possible to interpret his pains/discomforts as pleasures. The masochist wants to feel overwhelmed by a dominating force-- although he always contracts in advance with the "force-giver" as to what type of force it will be-- while the sadist wants to be that force toward others who categorically do NOT interpret pain as any kind of pleasure.

Though I agree with Deleuze in his distinctions between sadism and masochism, I think that both Freud and Deleuze are guilty of over-intellectualizing the somatic aspects of these sexual syndromes. "Disavowal" is just another intellectual construct devised to emphasize "absence" rather than "presence," thus putting both thinkers in line with similar types like Sartre and Lacan. I would emphasize more the aspect of bodies clashing against bodies, which IMO is the main reason that either activity summons up associations of sexual excitement. With this caveat in mind one can schematize the respective attitudes so: the pure sadist wants to actively inflict his power/strength upon others without opposition; the pure masochist wants to have the power/strength of others inflicted upon him, albeit under controlled conditions. I prefer the term "strength" to the now-dated term "phallic power" employed by Freud and Deleuze, since the former term does not limit itself to the phallically-endowed gender.

And this leads me to consider sthenolagnia.

Many sexual syndromes concerns activities not common to what we consider "normative" (in terms of statistical concentration) sexual stimulations-- crushing bugs, odors, or numerous other triggers. The sthenolagnia syndrome, however, bears some marked resemblance to normative stimulations, for this syndrome deals with stimulation by strength or musculature. Obviously, as per my earlier example of women's romance covers, at least one gender is stimulated enough by male musculature that such books sell in dependably-high numbers. In contrast, normative male stimulation doesn't focus upon strength in the female gender, and if anything femininity is defined in some minds as the absence of pronounced strength and/or musculature. However, even within normative, non-fetishistic sexuality, men have been known to fancy women with strong legs that suggest superior lovemaking skills (Crumb again!) and women have been known to seek out less imposing men, possibly in part to satisfy a nurturing instinct. Or perhaps both of these are pat explanations, much like those of Freud and Deleuze, and it comes down to the possibility that humans just like more variety than other animals.

I should note also that Freud's emphasis upon pain as the constant element to both sadism and masochism has less application to bondage that my theory of strength (stheno= forceful) as the common element, for as Marston pointed out, in bondage the captive is subjected to force but not necessarily to pain. I have no idea whether or not tenured sexologists could ever find a definite link (insofar as any of these heuristic speculations can be definite) between sadism/masochism and sthenolagnia in their researches. But like Deleuze, my main concern is the apperance of these syndromes/fetishes in literature, to which I'll be turning next.

SUFFERIN' SAPPHOTASH

Though I don't have any particular threads to hand, it seems to me that whenever I've gone to webforums and posted aboutthe William Moulton Marston WONDER WOMAN as an example of a progressive comics-feature, fans' attitudes break down into three types. First is dismissive disinterest, for any number of reasons (the stylized art of HG Peter being a frequent stopper for some fans). The second reaction ranks with the tittering of ten-year-olds: "Ooh, whips and chains! And paddles!" And the third is priggish harumphing against Marston's morality in that he introduced scenes of potential sexual nature into what was then deemed children's entertainment.

The question as to whether sexual elements should ever be introduced in children's entertainment is for me a moot one: they do enter, no matter what the author's intention, as an inevitable result of depicting more than one gender in a story (and sometimes even when the story confines itself to one gender; a homoerotic reading of TREASURE ISLAND is certainly not beyond thought). One might cavil that Marston was guilty of over-emphasizing his particular fetish in the world of 1940s comic books, and certainly critics like Frederic Wertham and Gershom Legman jumped on him for it, though their accusations that WW inculcated homosexuality and sadism in young readers have not stood the test of time. But I found it interesting that according to this article, Wertham himself considered that his heavy usage of bondage was a means of imperilling his protagonists in a less sadistic manner, according to a 1943 letter Wertham wrote to his publisher M.C. Gaines:

"Sadism consists in [sic] the enjoyment of other people’s actual suffering…. Since binding and chaining are the one harmless, painless way of subjecting the heroine to menace and making drama of it, I have developed elaborate ways of having Wonder Woman and other characters confined."

Now, one may fairly argue that Marston is papering over the apparent fact that he had a personal liking for bondage, but it does emerge as more than just that, insofar as Marston weaves his personal kink into a Empedoclean philosophy of Love and War as it pertained to the cultural events he saw around him. That philosophy had its flaws, but no more than that of Robert Crumb IMO. So Marston does deserve some credit for being one of the first raconteurs in comic books (and strips, for that matter) to articulate any sort of philosophical stance.

WONDER WOMAN's lesbian element has been attacked less frequently in recent years than its quasi-sadistic elements, and the homosexuality arguments of Wertham, Legman, and a few later writers (Jim Harmon, for one) have been adroitly refuted by Trina Robbins here. However, the question of sadism requires more in-depth study, since it is also a frequent objection made against not just WONDER WOMAN but superhero comics in general, and so will be the subject of my next essay.