wonder woman in: erotic transference

Illustrated by Josephine Hirsh 

Co-Written by Calvin Mustokoff

Wonder Woman, armed with her golden lasso, would be the ideal therapist because she has instant access to the truth. The golden lasso captures the paradox of therapy: Wonder Wonder’s victims are restrained by the whip and freed from their lies. The patient, interrogated by the doctor, is trapped in the room and freed from their conscious defenses.  

William Martson, who created Wonder Woman, was a Harvard psychology professor credited with the invention of the first lie-detector. Thus, the heroine is emblematic of the institutional quest to delineate fallacy from truth. There is, however, a perverted underside to the history of Wonder Woman. Martson had a known academic interest in kink, as Call (2013) writes, his “psychological model advocated dramatic forms of BDSM, especially DS [Dominance and Submission]” (p. 28). Martson and Wonder Woman alike cast a sexual perspective on our collective search for truth.

Considering Wonder Woman, upholding omnipotent womanhood and psychotherapy alike, it is tempting to locate undertones of the American-Jewish perspective.  The practice of talk therapy has been historically spearheaded by Jewish academics, being the original brainchild of Sigmund Freud. Accordingly, the cultural conception of the American Jewish man makes for the ideal target of talk therapy. He, the Jew, is “anxious and neurotic; victimized and humiliated.” Judd Apetow’s ‘Jew Tang’ clan, consisting of Seth Rogan, Jason Segal, Micheal Cera, Jonah Hill, Paul Rudd, and Jason Shwarstzman parade their arrested development, their status as “boy/man” in the service of the audience (Abrams, 2012). Moreover, the Jewish patient is feminized, resembling the oxymoronic image of a male hysteric (Boyrain, 2012). Abrams (2012) observes the ways in which the archetypal Jewish man’s legs reflect his incapacity for war-making and athleticism. He is devoid of the phallic pride championed by his goyim counterpart–the ideal candidate for penis envy.  

In his emasculation, the neurotic TV Jewish mensch displays hetero-sexist behaviors under the framework of reluctant, frustrated submission. In Seinfeld’s 127th episode, The Doll (1996), George Castanza finds himself in bed with his fiance, accompanied by the near perfect image of his mother in the form of a doll. The doll/mother polices Goerge into chastity, standing in for maternal authority. Similarly, mother-obsessed Portnoy continually conflates the presence of women and gentile authority. “No women–and no goyim. Can it be?,” Portnoy asks, “There is nothing to worry about” (Roth, 1969, p. 31). Larry David, in Curb Your Enthusiam’s pilot episode, is caught with a “pants's tent,” an illusory boner, to his utter humiliation in the face of raging, prideful, Nancy. The construction of the neurotic Jewish man is complementary to the gentile wicked queen–the wicked queen herself being Woody Allen’s preference over Snow White, as narrated in Annie Hall (1977).

The comic strip above is meant to characterize the interplay between the construction of the neurotic Jewish male, the psycho-sexual history of Wonder Woman, and the absurd performance of psychoanalysis.

CALVIN MUSTOKOFF

References 

Abrams, N. (2012). The Jew. In The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema (pp. 19–42). Rutgers University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bj4q14.6 

Allen, W. (1977). Annie Hall

Boyarin, D. (1997). Unheroic conduct: The rise of heterosexuality and the invention of the Jewish man (Vol. 8). Univ of California Press.

Call, L. (2013). Submitting to a Loving Mistress: BDSM in William Moulton Marston’s Wonder Woman Comics. In: BDSM in American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137283474_2 

David, L. & Seinfeld, J. (1996) Seinfeld

David, L. (1999) Curb Your Enthusiasm 

Roth, P. (1969) Portnoy’s Complaint. Random House, New York.