Raising Wonder Woman in Man's World, Redux

Wonder Woman opens in theaters this weekend and I'm excited for a number of reasons: Gal Gadot was the best part about Batman v. Superman, so an entire movie devoted to her sounds fantastic; early reviews suggest that the DC Cinematic Universe finally got one right on their fourth try; and this film leads us toward this fall's Justice League, which I've been waiting for since I was twelve. Above all, however, I'm excited for Wonder Woman because, nearly forty years after Richard Donner's Superman and nearly thirty years after Tim Burton's Batman, it's about damn time the boys stepped aside to let their female counterpart shine.

I haven't always called myself a feminist, mostly because I wasn't sure I had a right to the title. I read Xavière Gauthier in college and applied her theories to feminist critiques of Batgirl comics and E.M. Forster novels, but in my mind I was an outsider borrowing ideas from someone else. When a feminist critic publicly attacked me for perceived misogyny in essays I published in 2005, I was flabbergasted because gender equality is a concept so deeply ingrained in my value system, but still in defending myself I didn't dare to call myself a feminist, for fear of being called out on my ignorance of the full body of feminist literature. I didn't understand at the time how diverse feminism is, or that not even the most educated feminists have read all the literature. 

I don't remember how or when, but eventually I came to realize that, despite the fact that I'm a man and despite the fact that I don't know everything that every feminist theorist has ever said, I can still be a feminist. To me, being a feminist means that I believe men and women should be treated equally, and that I recognize the many ways we are not treated equally. It means when I see injustice I speak out and do what I can to change it, even especially when that injustice favors me. It means I question the assumptions we as a society and I as an individual make about gender. 

At some point in my process of coming to identify as a feminist, I published an essay that I'm still quite proud of, "Raising Wonder Woman in Man's World." At the time I was in a mixed-orientation marriage and, ever since that feminist critic had attacked me five years earlier, questioning how my decision to marry heterosexually would be perceived by others, particularly my daughters. I was worried about inadvertently sending a pro-patriarchy message when that was the opposite of my intent, and concerned that my life was too enmeshed in patriarchy to successfully teach my daughters anything but. In the comics, Wonder Woman was raised on Paradise Island among the Amazons; how could I raise girls to be strong like her in my world of men? 

THIS is not the version of Wonder Woman I wanted to raise.

Seven years later, I can't say that my home, headed by my husband and myself, is any less of a Man's World. We do our best to teach gender equality and oppose patriarchy, but at the end of the day it's two men calling the shots. Nonetheless, our daughters and our son seem to be doing pretty well when it comes to understanding the wide range of options available to them. The conclusion I came to in my essay still holds true: I do what I can, and where I fall short others step in. My children have a number of great female role models, between my ex-wife, my husband's ex-wife, aunts, grandmothers, school teachers, music teachers, dance teachers, church leaders, and friends. And now they have a kickass live-action Wonder Woman to look up to as well. We still have a long way to go, but today is a good day to be a feminist.