Wonder Woman's Greatest Strength is Her Humanity. -Julie Zeilinger for MTV
Posted on 06 July 2017
Wonder Woman's Greatest Strength is Her Humanity. -Julie Zeilinger for MTV
There’s a reason Gloria Steinem chose Wonder Woman for the first cover of her groundbreaking feminist publication, Ms. Magazine. The first female superhero called into question gender constructs that had long been considered fact: That men are stronger than women. That strength is purely physical, violent, dominating. That women can’t do the jobs historically assigned to men.
Forty-five years later, on the heels of a potential first female president’s loss and in the early days of an administration that looks at women as little more than fetus incubators, Americans still want to overthrow these gender norms — and they’re hungry to, judging by the more than $100 million dollars that the female-directed film adaptation earned in its opening weekend. But while women expected to (and certainly did) cathartically engage in the historical experience of watching a woman display superhuman strength to physically save not only her love interest (for goddamn once) but the whole world, it was perhaps not the most resonant aspect of this film’s treatment of Wonder Woman. The most profound takeaway for many was, somewhat ironically, not the display of female superhuman power itself so much as the way that power allowed Wonder Woman to express the humanity women are rarely permitted.
Julie Zeilinger for MTV
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