This Wonder Woman custom comic for designer Diane Von Furstenberg features three women (Diva, Viva, and Fifa) who have Wonder Woman come into their lives and tell them "you go girl" -- thus rendering them fully actualized (and well-dressed in ultra-expensive clothing) human beings.
In one sequence, housewife Fifa has been invited to the local Gourmet cookoff but three villains stand in her way: her annoying brats, who barrage her with such unreasonable requests as giving them a snack for school.
What is poor Fifa to do? Well, Wonder Woman saves the day, telling her to look beyond her present condition and "Be The Wonder Woman You Can Be." The image of Wonder Woman is of course conflated with that of Diane Von Furstenberg's floating head, as some sort of Blessed Virgin Mary apparition in the middle of thin air.
Stick-thin model shows off Von Furstenberg dress So Fifa immediately calls the babysitter, and turns down her children's request for pancakes. The babysitter can make the damn pancakes. "I need to see what else I can do!", Mom explains in a narrative caption as she wins first prize in the cookoff. Now Fifa is a fully-actualized woman who Wonder Woman can be proud of.
Because being a mom of three children wasn't enough for Wonder Woman to make an appearance and approve. Because when you are a housewife and mother, you are a failure -- you're not a Wonder Woman, you're a slave to a patriarchal system, a joke, an underachiever. Oh, and a Stepford Wife Soccer Mom.
Official Diane Von Furstenberg Barbie doll.That this "liberated woman" pitch is made by a member of a business sector that does so much to convince women to buy expensive shit in order to be pretty, liked, and sexy is quite ironic.
"Be The Wonder Woman You Can Be."
Buy expensive shit. Wear jewels. Promote poor body image by feeding into a system of advertisements and fashion modeling that favors the freakishly thin.
You know what would be really liberating for some women? Some sort of encouragement to just stay home for a few years with their small children. Give them a stipend so they don't have to put their kid in child care when they are only six months old.
Hopefully, this soccer mom will have Wonder Woman visit her and make her realize what a mistake it was to birth those
two parasites who ruined all her accolades and fun.
Then she can go use the money she would have used to raise
these drains on her resources and buy a Diane Von Furstenberg dress.
I know someone who has her three-month-old child cradled in one arm and her laptop balanced on her knee so she can work from home. She doesn't have the money right now to take time off from her job to raise her infant child, nor does she want to immediately get him a nanny. She wants to bond with him. So she works her ass off to do so. Will I see a Wonder Woman comic praising her decision to keep her baby and make personal sacrifices to raise him properly?
This Wonder Woman comic is so out of touch with reality, so airy-fairy in its view of feminism and the appropriation of Wonder Woman as feminist icon, that it blows my mind. I don't need lectures about feminism from fashion designers. Sorry.
It's important to note that I am not saying that the views in this comic represent that of DC Comics. This is a custom comic -- a vanity comic, really -- written by the fashion designer herself. I suppose we won't be seeing any WW graphic novels from her any time soon.
Uh, right, DC?
Are you sure that thing wasn't just the next issue of Dave Sim's glamourpuss?
ReplyDeletePoor woman. She's married after a soccer league.
ReplyDeleteUgh. That is some big, FAT bullshit right there.
ReplyDeleteMy wife and I both worked from the time our son was 3 months old to the time he was 16 months old. Over that time period, he was constantly sick from interacting with all of the other children at day care.
My wife quit her job and works from home, trying desperately to follow her dream of being a writer while caring for him.
Our child almost immediately showed an improvement in his learning, his health and his outlook. He is an entirely different little boy from the one we used to drop off every morning and pick up every afternoon.
It's been a sorry trend to look down on those who choose to spend time with their children over other pursuits (and...a cookoff? Really?). Why is that bad?
While I believe that the martyr complex of those who have completely repressed their own desires is unhealthy, I also know that there is something to be said for the fulfillment found in spending time with your kids. It's out of favor to admit it, but why is it a bad thing to enjoy that?
Sacrifice is sacrifice, but how many people do you know who have it all?
My wife is a homemaker. She literally makes our house our home. She generally does the duties of an accountant, a child care specialist (well, our children are grown, but she stayed at home with them), a nutritionist, a cook, a seamstress, a gardner, and lots of other stuff I can't think of right now.
ReplyDeleteWe made a trade-off when we decided to have children, and though the extra income would have been nice (and I'm not a person with a "career", I just work a 40-hr/week warehouse job), we think we did the right thing. Our children are both well-adjusted adults who weren't raised on Ridilin and daycare.
The problem now is people are like, "So, are you going to get a job now?"
Hell, she's had a job for the past twenty-five years -- and she's still doing it!
I believe in people living up to their potential. I believe in equal opportunity for all people. I believe that all of us have the right to pursue happiness. But I also believe in doing the right thing. For us, the right thing was living on a single income and raising our own children. That's not anti-feminism. That's just the choice we made together.
I'd like to be a stay at home dad. Man, I'd be a sweeeeet househusband.
ReplyDeleteLynda Carter said, in the WW DVDs that she thought Wonder Woman needed to have a child at some point, because to her that was the capstone of womanhood.
ReplyDeleteI clicked on "next blog", and found this:
ReplyDeletehttp://blog.iamchic.com/
coincidence?
I completely agree with everything you said... except the knee-jerk reaction to the "sanctity of motherhood."
ReplyDeleteIn an already overpopulated world with swiftly exhausting resources, how does birthing a child (or two or three) make the world a better place and qualify a woman for sainthood? Having a child is (supposed to be a) choice, and that choice comes with a wealth of additional choices that must be made. It's a package. I'm not saying that juggling work/school/children successfully doesn't make you a Wonder Woman any more than idiot materialism qualifies one as such, but it's significantly less heroic when you make that choice and then cry about consequences you should have accepted from go.
Also, there are lots of motherless children in this world that could stand to be adopted, where all these "Wonder Women" can't stand to allow their functional reproductive organs go to waste. How is giving in to biological compulsion at their expense any more heroic than being some "Sex & the City" shopoholic? Because you have to have one that's truly "yours?" Isn't that just another form of personal gratification through an object of desire, regardless of the expense to society and self in the long term?
Why does Viva have to be the singer? That's the most cliched, stereotypical "girl" position in any band. Why can't she be the lead guitarist? Or the drummer?
ReplyDeleteYou know, something that defies the standard "woman in music" gender definitions. That would TRULY be a wonder.
And anyway, why does she have to impress a group of guys to join their band? Why couldn't she have a band of her own?
Oh, I know. Because girls are only singers in bands. Guys have to play the instruments.
And now that Viva's signed by a real record company, she can submit to Spearsification and sing marketable but safe anthems about being in "control" and make 50 million dollars while thousands of hard-working female musicians find themselves unable to get airplay or relegated to novelty status.
You go, Viva! That's TRUE self-actualization! That's being the Wonder Woman you can be!
PS- Notice how, oddly enough, Viva has not one single line of dialogue in her own little story. Even when she sings, she's silenced. Some gruesome mixed signals coming off that one. The message is haywire!
Not if Gail Simone has anything to say about it!
ReplyDeleteHer most recent comic depicted a woman who was a former alcoholic who felt crappy about Wonder Woman since her kids seemed to idolize her but not the fact that she goes through a lot of stress and crap to make sure they've got a roof over their heads. However, she becomes the bestest mom ever when Wonder Woman does appear. ^_~
Plus it features Wonder Woman smacking around the Queen of Fables, so if you haven't picked it up already, Val, I highly recommend it. =3
"You know what would be really liberating for some women? Some sort of encouragement to just stay home for a few years with their small children. Give them a stipend so they don't have to put their kid in child care when they are only six months old."
ReplyDeleteTHANK YOU.
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ReplyDeleteHere's a question, has a feminism in the latter half of the century ever really been about anything else other than having your own consumer identity? There's something to be said for the consequences of modern industrial process removing all economic activity from the home, but feminism doesn't really seem to push back against that at all and instead focuses on employment outside the home and consumer gratification as the best goals. I find it curious that so much attention is paid to the movement in the 60s and 70s and so much less is paid to the arguably much more important sufragettes. There's a reason feminism is pretty much regarded as a movement for well off white women, poor and minority women have never had these concerns at all, they've always had jobs and rarely had the money for the kind of consumer gratification that is supposed to equate to self-actualization.
ReplyDeleteI was all ready to hate the Fifa mom as a slacker, but in her defense, she did make her kid French Toast instead.
ReplyDeleteYeah Gail Simone's current arc rocks on (french) toast!
ReplyDeletePlaying devil's advocate...
ReplyDeleteIt's ridiculous to think that any man ever "had it all." Up through and beyond my father's generation, most men sacrificed their relationships with their wife and children (and, often, their very health) to have a job, let alone a "career." Yet, somehow, it's wrong for a woman to have to make those sacrifices. Women, apparently, can and should have it all--career, marriage and family--AND it shouldn't be so gosh-darned hard. Why, just think how much more a woman could get done during the day if her irritating man earned the lion's share of the family income AND did more of the housework?!
Maybe the reality of contemporary culture--especially in these harsh economic times--is that you have to choose: family or career. Even now, according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, the concept of work/family-life balance is starting to collapse as economic pressure forces husbands AND wives into the workplace to maintain lifestyles. Wouldn't it be smarter to reassess the lifestyle? How much money could be saved if a family avoids paying someone else to nurture and raise its children? And since we persist in the cultural myth that men aren't good at raising children, doesn't it fall once again onto women to take care of their offspring?
Consider: Joseph Campbell said that having a child is a woman's "heroic journey," because it's a woman's unique, physiologically enabled birthright. What's tragic is how that "option" has been demonized and its importance diminished--and by women, no less. Men, by their comparatively sterile nature, are driven to somehow define their life or find fulfillment or meaning in some other way, but (and I know this is an overgeneralization) they usually wind up living lives of quiet desperation.
So, I keep asking myself: If a man's life is a contrivance by which he struggles to find purpose in a patriarchal system designed to keep him a subservient, tax-paying consumer, dependent upon someone else's productivity, why would a woman envy--let alone embark upon---such a hollow, often fruitless quest, when she is empowered by her gender to do something miraculous?
It comes across to me that you're interpreting this from an angle that you haven't explained. The woman is being barraged with requests from her children who are clearly being inconsiderate of her time and disrespecting her. (All three stories begin with an element of disrespect). She hires a baby sitter so she can receive acknowledgment of her skills from an outside source. There is nothing that implies that she thinks less of her role as mother or abandoning them in theslightest. The babysitter is very specifically a temporary outlet that will allow her to return to her regular role, instead of a permanent change like the other two stories. The emphasis isn't leaving her former role, but to expand it in a temporary and fulfilling way. Each story is very clearly about participating in a role that they enjoy and in which they excel despite the roles others think they should play. DvF/Wonder Woman are praising her for putting herself first instead of the typical housewife role of sublimating her desires and putting her children's needs first at all times. It's a horrible stereotype that many women perpetuate that only bad mothers work, hire babysitters or do anything outside of their roles as mothers. As a feminist, I would think you would support housewives and mothers being praised for breaking out of the stereotype of a Soccer Mom and maintaining their own interests.
ReplyDeleteRailing against Diane Von Furstenberg by saying that her designs are expensive or that you need to be stick thin is confusing - Diane single-handedly popularized the wrap dress, bringing lower-end designer fashion to women of all body shapes. Her dresses are often available for $150-$400 dollars and are made of 100% silk or other luxury fabric with unique prints. In the world of designer fashion, that is very affordable. You may not agree with people with high paying/high status jobs having to dress nicely, but in the corporate world Diane Von Furstenberg's wrap dresses are popular for a reason. They're affordable but are still exquisitely tailored, easy to clean and most importantly in my personal experience -- still fit if you gain 15 or 20 lbs! The wrap dress is versatile and her patterns are flattering to a variety of sizes. The design has been made so popular by her that it's now knocked off & consistently available at low cost stores like Old Navy so that all women of all economic levels and sizes can enjoy the influence she's had on the fashion world. Overall she's had a positive influence on the fashion & textile industry.
I'd love to see a graphic novel from Diane. Despite being a fashion designer (which I didn't realize was mutually exclusive to being a feminist) she's led an amazing life and inspired a lot of people. She raised by a strong woman who was an amazing role model and in her adulthood she made a name for herself doing what she loved instead of being a "proper" wife to royalty. Before you judge people based on their profession or looks you should research them just in case they turn out to be really interesting (or even inspiring) instead of a straw man.