The “it”, in this case, being “making videos”.

I started again on Saturday, and I am going to keep on making one a day for the foreseeable future. Here’s the three I have done so far, starting with Saturday’s.

Yup, I’m back. Note the casual, handheld style. Totally an artistic decision, and not just because it’s easier to record videos lying down in bed.

Next, I use Netflix as my inspiration and do a review of above-average action film Solomon Kane from back in 2012.

I was really surprised when this turned out to be over seven minutes long. time flies when I am enjoying the sound of my own voice, I guess.

And finally, today’s vid, in which I talk about Wonder Woman.

You know…. like I do.

And that is where I will begin today’s actual blogging because I have finished the Wonder Woman documentary and I have more thoughts on it.

It was a great documentary. But a few things in it disturbed me.

One was that, despite being launched by psychologist and weirdo way ahead of his time William Moulton Marston as a very firmly feminist (and feminine) heroine who showed the world that women could be strong and brave and such, after the boys came home from World War II and all the ladies who had been working in factories and doing all the jobs of men were told to go be housewives ^[1] now, the same fate befell Wonder Woman.

Suddenly she was way less interested in fighting evildoers and showing men the power of peaceful conflict resolution and way more interested in trying to marry Superman. Her previously action packed comic turned, seemingly overnight, into a romance comic, and at one point they even stripped her of her powers and all her cool accoutrements and turned her into a spy-action hero.

It makes total sense that this happened, but I still find it incredibly depressing. Where are Gloria Steinam and Betty Friedan when you need them? Wonder Woman is not supposed to be domesticated. She is supposed to be a free, strong, brave, loyal, and steadfastly idealistic fighter against the forces of evil.

In other words, like I said in the video, she is supposed to be the female equal of Superman. Notice Supes doesn’t get married either?

I can only imagine how crushed little girls (and certain little boys) who were Wonder Woman fans precisely because she was such an awesome figure of heroism felt when their favorite heroine suddenly stopped kicking ass on villains and started kissing ass on Superman.

I will give you a moment to get over that image in your head.

It must have been a very confusing time for women and girls in general. It wasn’t simply the men that told them they had to go back to the home when the war was over. They had told themselves that all through the war. I am sure most of the woman who had husbands overseas kept themselves going through the war with a rose-colored vision of how wonderful life was going to be when her husband came home, swept her off her feet, and took her away from the grimy grunting disgusting world of the factory and put her back where she could be dainty and feminine and yes, even subservient again.

The problem was, this Other Thing had happened. They had experienced the same burdens and freedoms of men, they had proved to themselves and the world that woman could live independent of men and do the same work as men, and despite their rosy dreams of domesticity, they could not just forget that and go back to what they had been before the war, no matter how hard they tried.

Back to WW. Luckily, eventually Steinem and Ms. magazine did come around and start hounding DC to restore Wonder Woman to her previous glory, and while, according to the documentary, Wonder Woman didn’t quite become the feminist icon she was before, she at least got her powers and her accessories back, plus a black sidekick.

The other thing that bothered me in the documentary came from something I had sort of known about but never really thought about, namely 90’s feminism.

I only saw the ugly side of it at the time (political correctness, anti-male hostility, and so on) but the truth of the matter is that the 1990’s contained the third wave ^[2] of feminism in North American culture.

Women and girls were publishing zines, joining punk rock bands, and there was a rise of powerful female heroes like Xena, Buffy, and my fave Scully in the media.

Far fuckin’ out, man. The disturbing bit is that, in 2001, all of them died.

Buffy came back, Xena died heroically, and I don’t remember Scully dying, but apparently a whole slew of others also got killed off that year, and that bugs the hell out of me.

Worse, it lead to a whole era of women being allowed to be only one of two things in the media : power-bitch sex fantasy ass kicking chicks, or totally passive vengeance objects who get killed in awful ways with a sickening regularity.

That bothers me even more. I consider myself a feminist (in that I am a humanist, and women are people) and it infuriates me to imagine this terrible ebbing of the positive political tide in a realm which I hold near and dear, namely genre media.

And that leads me to this very era, where women get sick bastard nerds posting the vilest and more hurting things their piggy little brains can think of on public forums, attacking any woman who dares to have an opinion on anything fannish.

It all leads me to the conclusion that despite all the progress made by women in the last 100 years, the struggle continues, and it is the duty of all decent people, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, to roll up their metaphorical shirt sleeves and get in there and push.

It’s not over yet, folks, but the end is in sight. Women are breaking through the last level of the glass ceiling and soon, we may even have parity in the highest levels of political power.

And then we will REALLY see some changes.

That’s it from me. I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.