My Golden Age Wonder Woman posts are finished!

[mosellegreen.insanejournal.com]

That's right, yesterday's was the last of 'em. Now, for other GA WW enthusiasts, I posted scans from every issue in the first four volumes of the Archive Editions, plus from the 70's collection with the intro by Gloria Steinem. So if anyone wants to pick up where I left off by buying volume five or later, feel free because I'm done.

For legality, here's something I found on the web last weekend. If it's been posted here before, I wasn't able to find it. There's been discussion here lately about whether the Amazons were lesbians, so when I found this I had to share it.

Comments

[psychop_rex.insanejournal.com]

Well, to be fair, he DID have a wife and child back on Mars, which makes him the Martian version of straight, but he's a MARTIAN - no one on Earth is even his species. (Well, there's Miss Martian, of course, but I somehow don't think that'd work, given that she's the Martian version of a girl scout.) And even if he IS strictly a straight male in human as well as Martian terms - well, so he can appreciate her as a woman in manly a manly fashion, and receive pleasure from her in a womanly fashion. (I will confess that I don't know what the hell I'm talking about, being, y'know, a straight male myself, but really, you'd think that J'onn could be a bit more fluid about this.)

[bluefall.insanejournal.com]

Well, sure, his attraction seems limited to women, and between his behavior (averaged over all authors from his inception till his current zombification) and what we've been shown about his culture over the years, martians certainly seem to have some form of relatively fixed gender identity. But there's really no reason to think that corresponds to a fixed body identity in his species. When they're in their normal conehead forms there's no visible sexual dimorphism, and J'onn seems equally likely to dress up as a female human as he does a male one, even in those decade-long take-a-dead-person's-life research stints of his. If his sense of himself as male carried over into his human physical traits you'd expect him to avoid long-term female masquerades... Plus we know nothing about martian sex, which if it's anything other than Tab A Slot B style, means J'onn's already doing weird abnormal-for-him shit with his tackle to suit his mate when he dates someone like Scorch.

Though, yes, in fairness, a lot of that hadn't been written yet - this stuff was written a little prior Ostrander's MANHUNTER series, so there wasn't much to contradict the default "he's a straight cis white Christian human male with a thin green veneer" take he'd inherited from the Silver Age.

I'm not sure anything excuses this (http://i29.tinypic.com/15y6gx1.jpg) scene (http://i30.tinypic.com/1213dol.jpg), though.

(Oh, and on re-reading, the queen is actually a hermaphrodite, hence her queenly status - J'onn freaks out and bails on the consummation ceremony at the sight of teal peen. Which brings all those questions even more starkly into the light - not just the "how similar is martian sex" question, but the much more direct real-world issue of "what constitutes gender;" obviously the queen is female if she thinks of herself as female, but what does that mean for a potential mate whose gender attraction is more rigid, et cetera. Which is a huge issue in queer culture in my experience and frankly it's just as well PAD left it alone, given his handling of Andy over in SUPERGIRL.)

[psychop_rex.insanejournal.com]

Well, that does make things a bit different - hermaphrodites are pretty unusual in any species, and I can imagine someone getting a bit weirded out - you may be prepared for A or B, but not AB.
And really, the Martian reproduction process is complicated considerably by the fact that the Martians THEMSELVES are so damn complicated - I mean, there are Green Martians and White Martians and who knows what other kinds that I haven't heard of, who look nothing whatsoever alike, and then we find out that Martians as a whole USED to be 'Burning Martians', who reproduced asexually when exposed to a great enough concentration of flame and the pain and terror such a conflagration would cause. This was all changed due to the meddling of the Guardians, but who the hell knows what it means for the gender politics of the species as a whole. Do they still retain traces of that asexual nature? Obviously they do have 'male' and 'female' genders, but just how far does that carry? Can they still reproduce asexually if they want to - as a Martian, could you be a single parent AND a virgin both at the same time? And the White Martians were exiled for being warlike, but while they were still around, were there sexual relation between the different groups? Were 'Green' and 'White' just like racial terms, like we would call someone black or white on earth? Did Green girls date White boys? Oh, it's just a headache waiting to happen...