"Spider-Man." "Superman." "Batman, all the classics." "Batman?" "You know what I'm saying?" "Batman's dope!" "Can't stand Batman." "Spider-Man." "Superman!" "Clark Kent." "The heroic myth is an ideal." "It suggests that there are depths in all of us." "But almost at no point do you hear anything about heroic women." "There's not very many." "There's not very many female superheroes." "Catwoman?" "Is that... is she a superhero?" "I think so, yeah." "I think she, like, turns into a superhero." "Wonder Woman." "Wonder Woman, yeah, for sure." "Wonder Woman, is there Wonder Woman?" "¶" "What are the consequences for women when they are strong, and when they are the central actors of their own lives?" "¶" "¶" "The superhero was the thing that kind of put the comic book on the map." "The character Superman specifically, and the figure of the superhero, it somehow hit a chord with kids, with adults, with just the popular culture and it made comics into this, uh, medium that suddenly took a quantum leap in popularity." "¶" "When superheroes first developed in the late 30s, it was something that was really appealing to people coming out of the Great Depression." "This idea that someone would sort of come down literally from the sky, and help, uh, help the needy." "I came across comics in the same way that every child did in those days, anyway, which was on a newsstand." "I think when you're little, and you're looking at people's knees, you're so powerless and so unequal, that it's really helpful to be able to think yourself into someone who is powerful," "and even more powerful than grown-ups." "As a little girl," "Wonder Woman was the only female superhero, so she was irresistible." "She was literally the only game in town." "I mean, she was the only hero that made you feel good about yourself." "There were other women featured in comics." "There were some female superheroes, but it wasn't until Wonder Woman that there was a really iconic character to capture people's imaginations, and she's one of the few to survive for almost 70 years now." "Wonder Woman came about when a very interesting man named William Moulton Marston, who was a psychologist and the inventor of the systolic blood-pressure test, which was a precursor to the lie detector, managed to get himself hired at a comic book company," "and suggested that they have a woman hero." "She debuted in December of 1941." ""At least, in a world torn by the hatreds and wars of men," ""appears a woman to whom the problems and feats of men are mere child's play."" "She is known as Wonder Woman!" "Three things... three things, you say this to any girl, and her eyes light up." "Amazon, princess, goddess." "And those three items are in the early Wonder Woman comics." "Marston really believed the future of the world was tied up with women being in charge." "¶ Whoo ¶" "He believed that Wonder Woman was basically a psychological propaganda for the type of woman who would soon rule the world, and predicted that within 100 years, we would be living in a matriarchy." "They live on Paradise Island, which is based on real mythology." "They're Amazons." "In Greek myths, the Amazons are women who do not need men." "They are equivalent of men, and they show up very briefly in the very early sources as fighting in battles against men." "In some of the most striking stories and images that you have of the Amazon women, they are warriors." "They are ruthlessly violent." "In the comic book version, they were female warriors, but they were dedicated to peace and love because they worshipped Aphrodite, the goddess of love." "Princess Diana grows up in a world where there are only women, no men, and there's an American pilot who crashes near the island." ""Come on, let's see if anyone's hurt!"" ""A man!"" ""A man on Paradise Island!"" "And he tells them what's going on in the real world, about the war, the war against the fascists." "She decides to go and fight for the good cause." "She gets the call to go somewhere else." "That's what the hero always does." "They have to go somewhere else, to a blighted land, to make it better." "¶" "Wonder Woman, because it was an era of World War II, had to be patriotic." "She was clearly supporting the war." "All over the United States, women are called upon to leave their homes and take jobs." "They discover that factory work is usually no more difficult than housework." "When Wonder Woman emerged, women had to step out of the private sphere into the public sphere and enter the workforce, because we were at war." "Women came into a real prominence in wartime, because the guys were all fighting." "Women did things they had never done before." "They made planes, and they flew the planes, and they became super-heroines." "When some people are going to shoot her, sometimes she has the shield in the hands, and then she blocks it away!" "She's super-strong, and she can fly." "She has the invisible jet." "One of my favourite T-shirts was my Wonder Woman shirt." "It was hard for my mom to even wash it because I was always wearing it." "It was probably pretty smelly." "How can you not love her?" "And she helps teenage boys through puberty." "She came out to the world to fight for the rights of women, and teach man the merits of peace and love." "She believed that you didn't need a man to take care of you." "We all know she had her crush on Steve Trevor, but she didn't need him." "He actually needed her." ""Got him!" "Now to carry him back to my plane."" "That was always the really cool thing, was that any woman in theory could become Wonder Woman, if she had the training and persistence." ""Welcome home again, my child, to Paradise Island!"" "Paradise Island said that somewhere there was a society where women were equal, and even in power." "It was fictional;" "It was an island." "I didn't know where, but it existed." "Marston had originally found superhero comics overly masculine and anti-feminine and violent, and then he creates this character who is, on the one hand, a symbol of female empowerment, and on the other hand, is a series that's filled to the brim" "with, like, fetish and bondage imagery." "Then, there's the fact, of course, that he invented the lie-detector, and he was obviously fascinated by the truth because Wonder Woman has this Golden Lasso, and if she binds you with the Golden Lasso," "you have to tell the truth." "It's her lie detector." "Wonder Woman loses all of her powers whenever a man forges chains onto her bracelets." "Someone steals her lasso, and they tie her up in that." "Wonder Woman oftentimes talks about this idea of loving submission." "We have the strength of the female character presented, but also controlled." "It's always this big deal about the bondage in Wonder Woman, and she is indeed often chained up, but she's chained up so that you can see her breaking her chains." ""Why did they bind me with such small chains?" "It's an insult!"" "If you look at the comics of the 40s, women are always tied up and chained." "That's so that the hero can rescue them, but she rescues herself." "¶" "Wonder Woman Day is a celebration of the character of Wonder Woman, and what she stands for, what she means, but it's a benefit for domestic violence shelters." "When I first conceptualized Wonder Woman Day, the immediate thing that I felt was to do something that helped women." "As an openly gay man, the ideals that Wonder Woman represents are the ideals that I try and live in my life." "There was something about her in every story that was different than just, "I'm going to put the bad guy away."" "There was always an element of compassion, elements of politics, equality." "All those things were wrapped up in this character in ways that other superheroes and other comic book characters just didn't have." "We've raised over $89,000 for domestic violence shelters." "This is what Wonder Woman would do if she were around." "Girls actually need superheroes much more than boys when you come right down to it, because 90% of the violence in the world is against females." "Certainly, women need protectors even more, and what's revolutionary, of course, is to have a female protector, not a male protector." "William Moulton Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman, died in 1947." "At the same time, men were returning home from the war, and reclaiming their positions in American society, and women were told to go home." "As soon as the war was over, women were supposed to go back to the home, the suburbs, give up their jobs to returning veterans." "In popular culture in general, you started to see more women in the homemaker role versus being out in the world." "With Wonder Woman, you begin to see her adventures turn more to romance." "You go from seeing Wonder Woman, you know, saving a woman and carrying her in her arms, to Wonder Woman, dainty little Wonder Woman, being carried across a stream by Steve Trevor." "She spent many, many, many years not being a feminist character at all." "A man with a bloody axe, holding a woman's head." "You think that's in good taste?" "In the 1950s, Dr. Fredric Wertham came out with a book called Seduction of the Innocent that talked about comic books and how they were a bad influence on children." "It was part of a whole look at comics in the mid-50s as being a possible cause of juvenile delinquency." "Fredric Wertham testified at the senate sub-committee on juvenile delinquency about comics being evil." "Wertham had very specific charges against many heroes," "Wonder Woman was one of them." "The pro-female message and the large female cast led Wertham to declare that Wonder Woman was a lesbian, that she was promoting lesbianism." "Wertham pulled out the most violent of comic books, and it shocked and terrified parents." "This led to the comics industry adopting a voluntary code of ethics, um, which is part of what led to comics being kind of vanilla in the 50s." "One of the guidelines was that women should be downplayed completely, or even eliminated entirely." "Catwoman, who had been Batman's major adversary in the 1940s, was reformed." "She had amnesia, and she was cleaned up and sent off to the sidelines." "Lois Lane's career ambitions cooled, and she's less interested in becoming an ace reporter, and more interested in becoming Mrs. Superman." "Batwoman carried a little handbag, in which she had her weapons for fighting crime." "So, things like a compact with face powder that she would blow in the eyes of bank robbers, and a hairnet." "Ugh!" "Batman's constantly telling Batwoman how incompetent she is, and incapable of fighting crime the way a man would." "It was a very limited, traditional role for a heroine." "As a psychologist, the question that I was asking myself was how to create conditions where more girls would grow up to be strong women, and that's what brought me into the work in female heroism." "Growing up in the 50s and 60s," "I was always looking for models of strong girls, and I didn't see them anywhere." "Just a lot of housewives who were staying home, taking care of their kids." "Everyone who was having fun was male." "I remember a time," "I think I must have been about 10 years old." "I don't remember where I saw, but it always stayed with me." "It was a comic about what happened to Cinderella after she married the prince." "It was shocking!" "She stayed home and she cleaned the castle, while the prince went out and had adventures, and then she was always waiting for him." "And I remember thinking, "What a rip-off!" "What a horrible life." "I don't want to live that way."" "But I don't remember any other models." "Fortunately, the feminist movement came along when I was in my teens." "All of a sudden, there were, if not models, there were at least lots of women and lots of girls who were strong." "They're the central actors of their own lives." "The press is always talking about working women." ""Well, the movement is only for working women."" "When, in fact, housewives work harder than anyone." "She should be paid between $8000 and $9000 a year, because that's how much it would cost her husband to pay for her services, not including off-and-on prostitution." "In the very beginning, the women's movement was ridiculed." "We hadn't moved forward to serious opposition yet." "We were... we were really getting ridiculed." "Many knowledgeable sources in media circles have predicted Ms. won't last six issues." "But others point out, it's mostly men making those predictions." "The first regular cover of Ms. Magazine, we wanted to have something that was, um, big and said that you can't have democracy without feminism, so we thought what bigger image than a superhero?" "The idea of Wonder Woman striding through the world as a colossus, stopping war with one hand, distributing food with the other hand." "What could be better than that?" "Then, we discovered that she had fallen on very hard times." "She gave up her Amazonian powers, opened up a clothing boutique, and she gets this mentor named I Ching, who is this blind martial-arts expert, and she goes on these crazy spy-fi-type adventures, doesn't have any superpowers." "Seems to cry a lot;" "She has some temper tantrums." "And it's all very, very fun but it's not Wonder Woman." "We had to persuade, not to say lobby and... and practically march in the street to get her magical powers back." "But also, we wanted all women to be represented, and I remember the person in charge of Wonder Woman calling me up from DC Comics." "He was so annoyed, and he said," ""Okay, she has her magical powers back," ""her lasso, her bracelet." ""She has Paradise Island back," ""and she has a black African Amazon sister named Nubia." "Now, will you leave me alone?"" "When Wonder Woman was repowered and went back to being the Amazon princess," "I don't think that her stories really captured anything feminist." "But because of all this," "Wonder Woman became associated with feminism, and has been this recognizable icon of female power, um, for decades after." "¶" "Regardless of what's happened with her character, regardless of what stories were told about her, she is a symbol of female power." "¶" "Well, I'm dressed as Wonder Woman, and she's strong and brave, and she was trained by warriors!" "She's a superhero." "She saves a lot of lives." "She shows that these girls can be daring and brave." "They can stand up for us." "They can stand up for their selves." "¶" "I read the comics of years ago, when my dad started telling me about them," "I just thought they were really cool." "Like, the idea of people having superpowers, or just regular... regular humans rising up to be like a symbol or something." "They don't give up, like, they just keep fighting." "Like... just keep going." "No matter how much traffic there is on that highway, they keep going!" "That also proves how superheroes have powers." "Like, most of them are just regular people." "So, but they became something more, and that's how... and that's how they inspire me." "Some... well, sometimes, I get picked on at school, but I just tell myself, "Keep going, keep going!"" "It doesn't..." ""Keep going, keep going." "You could be more."" "They're... 'cause someday they're going to be wishing that they treated me better." "Because like, while they're... while they're struggling to figure something out," "I'm doing pretty good." "I'm, mmm..." "They could be like, "Ah, why didn't I become her friend?" "She's like a multimillionaire!"" "Oh, yes!" "To be able to become the real-life version of a superhero, to be able to become president, to be able to become the big scientist, the engineers, you need to see it in something." "You need to be able to imagine it, and so therefore, girls need imaginary superheroes, because they need to know that they're strong." "They need to know that they can go out and tackle villains and take on the world, and that their gender is not an obstacle." "¶ Wonder Woman ¶" "In the 70s, with second-wave feminism, women were strong again." "It was like the perfect time for Wonder Woman to come back, and of course, she came back in the new media, the media of the 70s, which was TV." "Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman was a revelation." "I think she really solidified our vision of who Wonder Woman is." "In the comic book, she just went away and came back as Wonder Woman." "There was no phone booth." "There was no transformation." "I remember I said, "Well, why don't I just, like, spin?"" "My sister and I would watch her whenever she was on, and spin along with her, hoping that we would turn into Wonder Woman ourselves." "I loved Wonder Woman growing up." "I watched that television series." "We twirled around, and we thought that we might become Wonder Woman." "Wonder Woman?" "Yes." "There was a comment made to me before I was cast." ""Well, if you get this, you know, you're going to have a lot of women hating you."" "And I went, "Huh?" "What?"" "You know, that's not Wonder Woman." "So, I went about really deciding how I wanted her to be." "I'm not afraid of you!" "Do you understand that?" "I've never wanted you to be afraid of me." "She would be interested in the community of women, certainly not against men, but for the community of women." "I thought it was my job to show women that this guy's knocking you around?" "Well..." "You know, knock him back." "The writing wasn't, you know, fantastic." "It was the 70s, right?" "You're not gonna believe this, but there's a broad on a skateboard coming after us." "But she brought this presence to it." "They did not think that a woman could carry a show, and uh, and well, we proved them wrong, and made a lot of money for the network." "A lot of money." "And because she was successful, other shows came along to sort of capitalize on her popularity, like Charlie's Angels." "Here again, you have not just one, but three lead females, who are also pretty much running their own missions." "Charlie is just this disembodied voice, and The Bionic Woman, with Lindsay Wagner as Jaime Summers." "When Jaime Summers was created, this whole cultural revolution was going on." "Women were going where they hadn't been allowed to go before." "Hey, lady, stand back!" "Let me through!" "Assert themselves." "He just won't quit!" "Okay, okay, maybe you're right." "So, it was not surprising in retrospect that the show was an absolute hit, just off the charts." "This character was going into a man's world, into a man's job." "But I used to say I didn't want to be a man running around in a skirt." "I wanted, if we're going to do a woman in this type of a role," "I wanted to bring up the feminine principles in our stories, inclusiveness, conflict resolution, as opposed to just settling it with physical prowess." "The goal was to create something that was really meaningful for kids." "Even my father, he cannot break six boards!" "Shall we start with geography?" "When the women entered their 20s and 30s," "I started getting feedback." "Now, they were saying, "You know, I work at NASA." ""My dad wanted me to go to beauty school," ""but I work at NASA now." ""I'm an engineer at NASA, or I'm a whatever," ""because your character showed me that I could be something far beyond whatever we ordinarily were on track to be."" "Looking back on it, it doesn't seem very feminist, or empowering, but it certainly had that effect on us." "These images are very multi-veiling." "You're getting some feminism." "You're getting feminism wrapped up in a really sexy package." "Is sexy all bad?" "Are these women objects?" "Are they inspirational?" "Well, they're all of these things." "I feel very much like Wonder Woman now." "I have a daughter, I have two jobs," "I study, I have to take care of the house, and try to live." "You know, so I feel like I have to be a Wonder Woman." "I'm proud of my daughter." "She's four years old, and she's already a little Wonder Woman." "A little Wonder Girl!" "I want my daughter to be always strong in life, and never give up, like I never did." "Like I never did." "It took me a long time to realize that my grandmother was my idol, and my mother, as well." "They were the real heroes." "They were the real Wonder Womans." "I was 23 years old when I came to this country, and I came because life was very tough." "The poverty in Brazil was a very, very difficult life." "I want my daughter to always know where we came from." "But I want to give her the opportunity that I did not have, or that my mother did not have, or my grandmother did not have." "The women in my family did not have." "I'm the only women... woman in my family that went so far, that actually went to school, that went to college, and I speak another language." "I am in another country." "Nobody ever done that." "This is a new thing." "I'm proud for that, but I want my daughter to have even better." "It just represents a lot to me." "Yeah, I got it really for Wonder Woman." "It's beautiful." "I love it." "And people said that she looks a little bit like me, too." "The first Wonder Woman comics that I actually read were the ones from the 40s." "I thought she was incredible." "She is super-powerful." "She has a great sense of humour." "She's got the lasso that makes men tell the truth, which has to be the scariest weapon that any man would ever have to face." "By the time the 1980s arrived," "Wonder Woman's been sort of left by the wayside." "We see some new heroines introduced who embodied more that idea of the independent feminist heroine." "Wonder Woman, she hasn't been on the scene in 30 years." "The character has obviously continued on in the comic books, but there's a small portion of the public that really has followed that." "In the 1980s, a new sort of action hero emerges." "The muscular star." "I'm coming to get you!" "Ugh!" "Argh!" "The 80s... the 80s were sad." "You see all that hyper-masculinity in action movies is sort of a backlash to the feminist movement in the 1970s." "You get this muscular manhood, this very armoured masculinity that's going to go out there in the world and also be the world's policemen." "Government is not the solution to our problem." "Government is the problem." "In the 80s, in particular, in Reagan's America, this is about shrinking government and government responsibility and really enhancing the image of the individual, and you can't do that through men alone." "Evacuate immediately." "You now have 15 minutes." "It wasn't until Ellen Ripley in the second Alien movie, Aliens, that we have this very svelte, very athletic, very powerful woman leading a team of Marines away from danger and kicking alien ass." "Medical, get to medical!" "She's the one that drives the story." "She's strong, she barks orders." "She's in power." "That's how you really want to measure an action heroine." "Can that role be replaced by a male?" "When we think of an American hero, we think cowboy." "We think gun-slinging." "We may think kind of military figures." "Masculine female characters really work this very question about can a woman take the role that a man traditionally takes?" "Sarah Connor was just absolutely radical." "Morning, Sarah." "We'd never seen a woman leading a movie with a body like that before." "I mean, she had this really radical, muscular figure, and she was carrying these huge machine guns." "I was in high school and we had a party, and my girlfriends were..." "You know?" "That girls had never had a character like that to mimic." "And of course, you culminate the end of the decade with Thelma and Louise." "I think Thelma and Louise was a really, really big deal because it did register a change." "You say you're sorry, or I'm going to make you fucking sorry." "These two women had guns and shot them, and that was shocking." "Oh, God!" "A line was being crossed." "That is, women really literally fighting back." "I don't think he's gonna apologize." "Nah, I don't think so." "Ah!" "Oh!" "We begin the 90s with Thelma and Louise taking the law into their own hands." "That opening that they leave behind them for female action, female heroes, female leads who are not predetermined by their relationship to men, that that closes down so quickly is kind of remarkable." "¶" "This is for the rights of the Riot Grrrls!" "Starting with the Riot Grrrl movement, girls who grew up with Wonder Woman and Charlie's Angels, through punk rock music and handmade zines are taking the images that we grew up with, and dissecting how they've influenced us as women," "making that a politically feminist act." "Girls took back the word "girl" by putting three R's in it." "¶ That girl, she holds her head up so high ¶" "¶ I think I want to be her best friend, yeah ¶" "¶ Rebel girl, rebel girl ¶" "In the 90s, there was a huge backlash going on, and you know, we were being told that feminism didn't exist right as we found it." "The United States Supreme Court handed down a decision today that has the anti-abortion forces cheering." "I have nothing to gain." "No one has promised me anything." "I was like, "If Coke has a great slogan, so should feminism."" "¶ When she talks, I hear the revolution ¶" "¶ In her hips... ¶" "Our fan zines were a way that we communicated with our audience." "Our first fan zine, on the cover had an image from a She-Ra, He-Man comic." "That was really a wonderful thing about the 90s was we felt that power for the first time." "We felt like we could take our image of Wonder Woman and claim it as our own, and turn it into something else." "It's about making your own media." "We're Bikini Kill, and we want revolution!" "Girls gone mad!" "In the 90s, women are trying to enter politics more vigorously than before." "Count them, six women will serve in the new U.S. senate." "We have this resurgence of really powerful female heroes, women who fight bad guys and are captains of starships." "Warrior women, like Xena." "A mighty princess, forged in the heat of battle." "People like Buffy, the Slayer, the chosen one, who fights the vampires and saves the world." "Argh!" "Nobody ever questioned Buffy's abilities." "Nobody ever said," ""You shouldn't be the leader 'cause you're a girl."" "Everybody, keep back." "Damage control only." "She is heroic." "But she also is a teenage girl, who wears flower barrettes and mini-skirts." "Oh, sorry!" "She was a girl becoming a woman, and female viewers got to go with her through that." "The Buffy fans, we would get letters, and I still get people coming up to me at conventions and stuff, saying, "I only got through high school 'cause Buffy got through high school." "Like, I wouldn't have made it if it wasn't for Buffy."" "It's okay, it's over." "You're going to be okay." "In spring of 2001, suddenly all of these women die." "Within a few days, suddenly boom, boom, boom, boom." "It was this carnage on television." "Buffy, no!" "Dawnie, I have to." "Heroes are the models for the ideal of the community." "To die is to take yourself out of it, to say that the community's best served by my non-existence." "Buffy goes through this." "You'd have to send powerful women off the cliff." "It goes through the Thelma and Louise, you know, off into the abyss." "But we're going to give it an ending that's different, and that's because Buffy came back." "In every generation, one slayer is born because a bunch of men who died thousands of years ago made up that rule." "So, I say we change the rule." "I say my power should be our power." "The end of the series suggests that she should not be trying to squelch that power within her by killing herself, but it needs to be extended to a larger community of women." "One could argue that in some ways." "Buffy is a way to update a female superhero." "You've got this quite brief window where female characters are quite strong, but for whatever reason, that image seems to fade, and what takes its place is a much more sexualized version of the female action heroine." "Particularly for young women, sexiness becomes the way of signalling empowerment." "Well, you know, you joke about the fact that they're usually big-breasted, and they're this crazy interpretation of, like, some sort of male fantasy, but so are the men." "¶" "Men may be drawn as muscular and handsome, but they're also shown being active." "They're shown saving the day." "Women are shown in very little clothing and tortured, raped, murdered." "So, to say that men are just as hyper-sexualized really isn't true, because they're not subjected to those same sorts of treatments of their bodies." "¶" "There's like so few images of powerful women that women get desperate, and they're like, "Okay, that's powerful."" "And we'll just take any kind of garbage or crumb off the table that we can find, and claim that as something that's powerful even when it's kind of not." "¶ Slam your body down, zig-a zig-ah ¶" "See you later, girl power!" "We wrote a fan zine in 1991." "Girl Power." "It said "Girl Power" on the cover." "It was the first time anybody supposedly had ever said that, and then three years later, Spice Girls." "This is about girl power!" "So, come on!" "And they were like, "Girl power, girl power!" "Wear high heels, girl power!"" "And then, it just became a part of the wallpaper." "It said, "Girls rule."" "You know what I mean?" "It's like, really?" "Do they really rule?" "Actually, they don't." "Actually, we still don't make the same amount of money that men do, and we still don't feel safe in our own homes, and you know what I mean?" "It's like... it's like the kind of veneer of change without the actual change underneath it." "My studies on violent women in film and action heroines, from a feminist standpoint," "I was looking at how gender norms may or may not be changed." "Mommy, I'm home!" "Hey, baby." "How was school?" "I picked action films because they're the most popular genre in cinema." "The biggest money-makers, the most popular of popular culture." "Even though we tend to think there's action heroines," "I came to find that there were relatively few." "Of the 157 characters that my research studied, nearly half of those were evil characters." "Argh!" "And of course, they die off and that's a given." "But what I also found was nearly 30% of the characters that I coded were killed off in the movies, and they weren't all bad girls." "What was really disturbing was the way in which they were killed off, in this self-sacrificing way." "Oh, no!" "It's all right." "It's time." "I've done all that I can do." "Now, you have to do the rest." "These women begged to be killed off." "They couldn't handle their power." "They didn't want to be part of the world, and they asked the male hero..." "Kill me!" "What?" "Kill me before I kill someone else." "You would think that that is something of the past, but we still see this resonating." "The woman gives up the most she can give up, her life, to this dominant male hero." "¶" "The box office is driving the representations that we see." "Mainstream audiences want to see a woman that's sexy, good-looking, that helps the guy and doesn't drive the storyline and usually is a romantic character." "There's a way in American film tradition that cinematic pleasure is derived from that gaze upon a female body." "And so, we have a visual tradition that depicts women in a particular way." "Pay attention to me." "Some of the most popular female heroes, so Wonder Woman or Buffy Summers, were created by men and it's not that women aren't capable of creating these heroes, it's that the people who have the means to production" "have traditionally been men." "Three percent of the decision-making positions in media are held by women." "That means that 97% of the decisions about how women are going to be portrayed," "97% of those decisions are being made by men." "The question is where does the vision come from?" "Will it come from pre-existing sources and symbols, and beloved characters?" "Or will it come from kind of the production process?" "See, it looks like it's white-balanced, so we can zoom it out and see if it looks normal to us." "So, that slows down." "So, there's a little wheel right here, this thing." "Do I push the wheel first?" "Yeah, you push the wheel in." "Oh, my gosh." "It's a little fast." "Reel Grrls is a program for teenage girls." "Young women come here to learn how to tell their own stories through video." ""Freaks and Geeks..."" "Teenagers act way old..." "older than they actually are." "The girls stab each other in the back." "There's always, like, a character who's a teenager who's like really stupid." "They're overly sexualized." "What I challenge you to do as you guys start thinking about your projects is how can you come up with characters that are outside of those stereotypical roles that we always see." "Like, what do you not see?" "You know, what are you not seeing out there that you would like to see, because you have the chance this week to create your own media." "That's going to be an opportunity for you to create what you want to see." "I'm writing about superheroes." "Mine's is about teens who feel insecure about their differences." "The stories that Wonder Woman, since she's such a stereotype-defying character, she decides to open up a counselling centre for television tropes who want to have more depth." "The basic story is about teenagers, teenage girls specifically, fitting into mainstream ways of thinking and living out of insecurity." "We're going to have her raised on the table, and we're going to have her illuminated by light." "But slowly, we're going to have a newspaper wrapped around her until she's cocooned." "She's going to wake up from her slumber." "She's going to break through it." "¶" "What?" "Your voice isn't being heard in the media?" "Our girls are on their way." "¶" "The question is, do you want to continue this as a career?" "So, here we are at the Wonder Woman Day, year 5." "It's been interesting watching the metamorphosis of how people view the character over the years." "There's the people who always interpret it through the filter of the television show." "And then, there are a lot of images that are just cute." "They express kind of a joy behind the character, and that goes back to the original 1940s comics." "The messages that William Moulton Marston was putting out there, it's kind of funny to see that reinterpreted through the eyes of new artists." "¶" "When I first came to the Wonder Woman series," "I thought a lot about the tone of the book, and thought a lot about her history, a lot about what people were telling me she meant to them." "I wanted to keep that original spirit of being an adventurer." "But Wonder Woman deals with things that are global, that are relevant to our world today, problems that we have with politics, with inequality, with humanitarian abuses and things like that." "She is much more about hope and tolerance than a lot of other superheroes." "She has grown beyond DC Comics, beyond any writer or creator." "Reading about heroes or watching heroes, no matter what age you are, or in what medium you consume them from, be it Uhura, a Starfleet officer," "Alice leading an army, or Hermione's bravery..." "Now!" "They teach us to be better people." "They teach us that we can aspire to do great things." "Wonder Woman's legacy is what we make it, you know." "She gave us an idea of, um, justice and compassion and friendship among women." "Uh, it now depends what we do with it." "I don't know why people aren't asking," ""Where did Wonder Woman go?"" "Not everybody knows who she is." "Like, nowadays, because they don't show her very much anymore." "I think the story needs to go on." "Most of the blockbusters are still films about males." "It's a big cop-out for media executives to say that they're unable to bring in the dollars if a woman is in the lead." "We'd love to have a feature, live-action Wonder Woman movie." "It's time." "¶" "If I was a superhero, my power would be, um..." "I could shoot with my own hand." "Eye lasers that you can make trash go into little shreds." "Recycle Girl!" "Actually, anyone could be a superhero." "Your mom could be a superhero." "Your dad could be a superhero." "Um, my real-life heroes, I'd have to say my parents." "It's... my dad's like my best friend." "My mom's a paramedic." "She saves lives, like, almost every night." "In my childhood, besides Wonder Woman," "Louisa May Alcott was my hero." "Cyd Charisse, because I wanted to be a dancer." "Eleanor Roosevelt." "I loved Dinah Shore." "Ann Richards really spoke to me." "Bella Abzug, you know, she said stuff that rang true in my life as a 9-year-old!" "When I would watch M A S H when I was a kid, there were women writers' names on it, and I'd see those names every week, and those were the names that made me say," ""Women can do this job."" "Strong women leave legacies, and their legacy is simply," ""If she could do it, I could do it."" "¶" "When I did my last book on super-heroines," "I was going to go to the Cartoon Art Museum and deliver my talk." "I decided that I needed to wear an outfit." "I found a skirt, red with white stars." "I found a silver jacket." "I found red boots, and I had my super-heroine outfit." "And there I was in my outfit for the first time, taking the subway!" "Suddenly, suddenly, I thought, "Oh, my God, you're an idiot." ""Everyone's staring at you." "You are a fool!" ""Look at you in this dopey outfit." "Oh, no, what have you done?"" "And it was too late, of course." "I was on the subway, so I got off, and as I was walking up the steps, actually going up the escalator, I heard a voice on ground level, a woman's voice saying," ""Will someone help me, please?" "Help me!"" "And I went upstairs and there was a blind woman standing there, and everyone was passing her by and no one was paying attention to her." "And she was saying, "Someone, please help me!"" "So, I trotted over to her in my little red boots, and I said, "Can I help?"" "It turned out all she needed was a telephone." "I took her to the phone booth." "She didn't even need a quarter." "She had a quarter, and that was all I had to do." "All I had to do was help her, and suddenly, I had become a heroine." "¶ There was no justice ¶" "¶ Until you came to our Earth ¶" "¶ We owe it all to you ¶" "¶ To protect and to serve ¶" "¶ You're my hero, my superhero ¶" "¶ Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah ¶" "¶ You're my hero, my superhero ¶" "¶ Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah ¶" "¶ You're my hero, my superhero ¶" "¶ Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah ¶" "¶ You're my hero, my superhero ¶" "¶ Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah ¶" "¶" "¶ You're my Amazon princess ¶" "¶ You can see through the lies ¶" "¶ Heavyweight champion ¶" "¶ Knock 'em out, make them cry ¶" "¶ You're my hero, my superhero ¶" "¶ Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah ¶" "¶ You're my hero, my superhero ¶" "¶ Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah ¶" "¶ You're my hero, my superhero ¶" "¶ Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah ¶" "¶ You're my hero, my superhero ¶" "¶ Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah ¶" "¶" "¶ There was no justice ¶" "¶ Until you came to our Earth ¶" "¶ We owe it all to you ¶" "¶ To protect and to serve ¶"