Not to open this normally deft diversion with a rough reality, but if I’m reading the stars and my ACLU newsletter correctly, this country is dangerously close to setting back the reproductive rights of women some fifty years. While I’ve always wanted a time machine (“Sure, coach…I’ll be happy to stay late after gym to help you clean up the locker room!”), the idea of living in the 1950s just doesn’t appeal. The repression, the prejudices, and oh those poodle skirts. Ick.
It’s with the venerable Virginia Slims slogan “You’ve come a long way baby” in mind that I present a look back into the early days of the women’s rights movement, via the pages of Wonder Woman #219. To be sure, this is the women’s rights movement as seen through the eyes of a white male writer, so you know you’re in for a bra-burning good time right away.
First of all, take note that this story takes place during the period where our Amazing Amazon was undergoing twelve “trials” as observed and/or arranged by the Justice League members. Ralph “Elongated Man” Dibny films all the events in this issue with a camera the size of a Volkswagen, and screens his little snuff film 22,300 miles above sea-level for the other Leaguers’ edification. All this in order to see if Wonder Woman “deserved” to get back into the JLA once she gave up her white bell-bottomed pantsuit and mad kung-fu skill. Consider that the chauvinistic wallpaper to this issue’s girl-power diorama.
We first see Diana rescue a lady pedestrian from an on-coming car with a quick rope trick. When the gal sees what has happened, she goes berserk, angry with Wonder Woman for saving her life. Could this have been the earliest known appearance of PMS in a comic? We’ll never know since WW orders the cheeky chick to go peacefully home. Why? She’s late for work!
Cut to Di in her day job as a bespectacled workaday grunt in the Orwellian-named “U N Crisis Bureau.” Flash! Important feminists from across the globe have been de-materializing in front of crowds of people, among them Israeli diplomat Minna Golden and tennis great Betty Jo Kane, who vanishes right in the middle of a match with, and I quote, “a chauvinist hustler named Willy Wrigley.” If you are at all amused by these thinly-veiled versions of Golda Meir, Billy Jean King and Bobby Riggs, then keep your side-stitching kit at the ready, because the best names are yet to come.
It’s then that Wonder Woman turns sleuth by investigating tennis great BJ Kane’s untimely evanescence. I’ll give her props for rifling for dyke porn in Mz. Kane’s locker, but she’s can’t be that observant since she constantly fails to notice the hugely distorted Elongated Man stretching over every other panel with his brobdingnagian video camera.
Still, the locker investigation does turn up a real find: a “shampoo and set” receipt from a beauty salon, known unexplainably as “Consciousness III: Beauty Salons for the Liberated Woman.” “What would liberated Betty Jo want with a sexist establishment like a beauty parlor?” the Princess ponders. Apparently writer Martin Pasko missed the part of the jingle where she sings that, in addition to bringing home the bacon and frying it up in the pan, she will also “never let you forget you’re a man.” That, I think, is where the shampoo and set part comes in. Just guessing, though.
Diana (with Ralph and his wife Sue trailing apparently juuuuuust far enough behind) goes to the salon to have a look-see and maybe a mani-pedi. One of the all-male staff addresses her as “Mizz” [sic], but she doesn’t decide to kick his ass until another famous feminist in the salon gets upset at how her hair is now green and—poof!—she’s gone. Di catches her stylist reporting “mission accomplished” into his electric clippers (and no, I didn’t make that up), and she borrows a page from the white-suit I-Ching training she’d recently abandoned and karate chops the crap out of him. Hi-ya! Take that, you chauvinist pig! ::insert GONG sound here::
He retaliates by breaking a bottle of the green shampoo over her head, and in the resulting melee, the shampoo is scattered over the whole place. After executing a perfect judo throw, Diana herself vanishes from the scene. Ralph, himself covered in verdant suds, figures he really messed up by not intervening and starts to panic like a little girl. Ironic, no? Then he vanishes!
Soon we see Ralph’s footage following Diana through your standard Ditko-esque inter-dimensional void, while Di swings her lasso to change duds. And just when you think the story will be totally free of awkward non sequiturs, the script points up a bizarre sound effect accompanying her change: “Wree-eek-ekk-onk-ook-bink-bink!” This seems a little too early for a reference to the TV show (didn’t it start the following year?), so I can only assume that this bit was included on a bet.
Our dimension-hopping daredevils come out into a dimension called Xro, where men rule and women are subjugated—happily! Even Wonder Woman responds to being a prisoner with sheer delight. Something about the nature of Xro seems to make Xroian women, though physically stronger than the men, obedient enough to be willing slaves. Get the subtle message?
We soon discover that two slave-girls in kicky go-go outfits, namely Frdn and Stnm (told you it’d be good), found some kind of TV tuned to the Earth Channel, and saw that women were free there, and vowed to go to investigate for themselves. Upon teleporting there (I guess the F Train was on a Sunday schedule or something), their minds “underwent a strange transformation.” A bit of building fell (like they so often do) on Stnm, who was simply enchanted to be thusly crushed. Frdn laughed and laughed—the dimensional transfer had reversed their emotional responses. “Me am always not reading ideas like that in comi… uh, me mean tragics!”
Frdn eventually returned to Xro bringing with her all the “Down with Male Chauvinist Pigs” posters she could stuff in her trench coat, and a gorgeous, well-groomed slave revolt was the result. The skinny-ass Xroian men figured out it was Earth where all this bad influence was coming from, and cleverly deduced that if they brought Earth feminists to Xro, the same reversal would happen to them (but in reverse, if you follow me), and the girls’ idols could talk the women out of kicking their asses so much. If you think about it, this is a perfect representation of a male-dominated society: they can create an interdimensional TV set, but haven’t invented a diet and workout regime that’ll allow them to beat up on the women. What do you want to bet they had mandatory blowjob contracts with every slave they owned?
To accomplish their cowardly kidnapping plot, the Xroian men invented the shampoo; actually, it was a chemical which would transport folks to Xro when they were under stress. I figure one of their fags thought of that one—maybe Vdl Sssn. Oh…kay. Guys, just because you’re 98-pound weaklings doesn’t mean you can’t just do a little smash and grab. Chloroform and a rope. I’m just saying.
So, once Wonder Woman has been filled in on this whole deal by the commanding and expository Xroian leader, Mchsm (snicker), he simply orders her to surrender her magic lasso and come along quietly to be fitted for her custom slave outfit (no doubt designed by Hlstn). Naturally, our battlin’ buxom beauty resists, and they are forced to tie her up in her own lasso. Not again!
But our warrior princess, upon being ordered to be docile, finds the reversal effect allowing her to gain extra strength to fight back even harder! No, I don’t actually follow the logic of that either, but let’s go with it anyway. I’m about three paragraphs from the end of this diatribe anyway.
Mchsm decides he’d rather destroy their whole stronghold than be dominated by women (typical), and so he hits the requisite self-destruct button. Wonder Woman quickly frees all the Xroian lady prisoners who break into an elaborate dance number (I wish), but when freeing the Earth-chicks, they resist and want to stay! Damn reversal effect. So, she just wraps them all in the lasso and drags their asses into the teleporter. They were definitely out of shampoo. I guess.
Anyhow, the Consciousness III salon is destroyed along with the Xroian palace and all is right with the world, after Wonder Woman uses her lasso to erase the memory of her secret ID from the Earth-women’s minds. I guess she hadn’t read Identity Crisis yet.
Elongated Man (having again gone impossibly unnoticed on Xro) makes it back through the teleporter as well after helping to save… no wait. He actually didn’t do anything but tape the proceedings. What a dick. Nice job he did setting up that “trial” for Wonder Woman, dontcha think? He had nothing to do with it—and she still had to endure three more trials before her “friends” would let her back in their club again.
Hmm—looks like this issue had something real to say about women’s equality after all! 
