What should happen to men on Themyscira?

[Jim Kelly]

I think in the WONDER WOMAN movie we're meant to believe that the protective barrier around the island opens up to let Steve in, because divine providence has brought him there. Just at that moment of weakness in the barrier, the Germans also break through and their pilot boat manages to make landfall. But we see in the distance that their mother ship is pulled down into the sea, so the protective barrier must doom any ship. The men in the boat escaped that fate but they were all killed by the Amazons.

When Diana and Steve leave, they must be allowed through the barrier again, by whatever will protects the island, but Diana has no hope of ever returning once she leaves.

[Gaelforce]

I think in the WONDER WOMAN movie we're meant to believe that the protective barrier around the island opens up to let Steve in, because divine providence has brought him there. Just at that moment of weakness in the barrier, the Germans also break through and their pilot boat manages to make landfall. But we see in the distance that their mother ship is pulled down into the sea, so the protective barrier must doom any ship. The men in the boat escaped that fate but they were all killed by the Amazons.

When Diana and Steve leave, they must be allowed through the barrier again, by whatever will protects the island, but Diana has no hope of ever returning once she leaves.

I don't think that the barrier dooms ships.

One minute they were in deep ocean water, the next shallow water off of an island. It looked to me more like it hit a reef or rocks due to the sudden change in depth.

[Jim Kelly]

I don't think that the barrier dooms ships.

One minute they were in deep ocean water, the next shallow water off of an island. It looked to me more like it hit a reef or rocks due to the sudden change in depth.

Maybe. But I imagined that there was some gravitational or magnetic force that pulled ships down, and pulled aircraft out of the air, as well.

[brettc1]

It is largely irrelevant. No Amazon revolted against the segregationism; even the Bana Migdhall didn't, they only rejected the idea that they had to be secluded in an island outside of the world and resented the Greek Gods for trying to impose it on them. But the Themyscyra Amazons supported this isolationism and the segregation it was founded upon.

And that's what matters : the Amazon never rebelled against those edicts; they then promoted a culture which villify an essentialized Other, in this case Man. And in case you didn't know it, under Tokugawa's rule, foreigner stranding ashore in Japan were killed. They were only allowed in minuscule enclaves and forbidden to set foot in the main islands. It was the rule, because the society had chosen to seclude itself from the outside world.

And when I say "the society had chosen", I mean that its rulers chose to promote isolatinism, enforced it and after the first hundred years, it became ingrained into the population, to the point that the Shogun lost his powers because he couldn't uphold the isolationist policy and thus lot all credibility. And, for all intent and purpose, the Imperial Family was considered god-like and supported the absolute isolationism.

In fact, Tokugawa's Japan bears a lot of ressemblance with the Amazon's civilization, in that warriors forged a peaceful society, albeit at the cost of unchanging social order, rejection of the outside world and exaltation of what made Japanese uniques. They also closed the borders of the country to Japanese living abroad, not unlike Amazons closed their borders to all the women outside their island who would have sorely needed champions to protect themselves and confront the rise of the monotheism (far more nefarious for woman's rights and standing in society that any polytheism, including the Greek Pantheon).

The Amazons DIDN'T close their own borders - you said so above.

Oh, and not ONE Amazon advocated going into the outside world? Really?

Huh. I wonder whose book I've been reading for the last thirty years...

Your argument mentions the Perez Bana while breezing past the historical fact that they became the murdering nut jobs they were because they rejected the gods call to withdraw and chose vengeance instead. Had the Themy's followed suit they would have ended up in the same state. Not exactly the preferred outcome.

[AmiMizuno]

I don't think the Amazons themselves should all be isolationist rather because they care about their duties they focus more on protecting the doom gate or any other god they have. So that's why some amazons should be pro isolationist. Because one many other side people might want the power or will be killed easily.

I think that the amazons before coming on the Island should have been in relationships with men. That they cared about their uncles, brothers, fathers and grandfathers. That many amazons should hold memorials and celebrations for people who were in their group in the outside world.I think they should have been coed. There were male amazons but Ares or Hercules or whoever you want caused all the men to dead.

[Korath]

The Amazons DIDN'T close their own borders - you said so above.

Oh, and not ONE Amazon advocated going into the outside world? Really?

Huh. I wonder whose book I've been reading for the last thirty years...

Your argument mentions the Perez Bana while breezing past the historical fact that they became the murdering nut jobs they were because they rejected the gods call to withdraw and chose vengeance instead. Had the Themy's followed suit they would have ended up in the same state. Not exactly the preferred outcome.

Yes. One Amazon, who has always been depicted as fundamentally different from the rest (clay birth or demi-goddess) has asked for the Amazons opening their borders. She has hardly succeeded.

And again, you fail to notice that nothing keeps the Amazons tied to Themiscyra but their will. They want to be secluded, they want to have nothing to do with the outside world. Diana is the outlier, not the basic mold for her sisters. The Bana alone are proof enough that the Gods couldn't force the Amazons to remains here, if they wished to move beyond their borders.

And talking about the Bana, yes, chose revenge, but they also chose segregationist policies, and that's why they ended like what we see today. But distant and aloof disdain from the Other isn't better than blatant sexist and racism. It's just a more insidious, and even more poisonous form of toxic behavior and ideas, because it is not as in your face as some crazy dude screaming abuse at the Other.

And the WW mythos has several of such toxic ideas.

Yes, women deserve and need placed where no man will enter, because it's a basic necessity to be with peoples who can truly understand your hardship (think, Anonymous Alcoholic). No, creating a whole society around it isn't healthy, because it promotes segregationism, especially if it is a willing choice and not some sort of heroic self-imposed sacrifice (in the confine of comic books).

No, bravery, determination and strength aren't masculine qualities and empathy, compassion and care feminine ones. They are basic emotions and it's by ascribing some to one gender and pretending that the other has to seek out the missing half, we aren't helping peoples become more balanced and thus happier. We just reinforce the stereotypes that an empathetic man is very feminine and its often correlated with the idea that women are weak, ergo empathetic men are weak and that they have to toughen up or break if they can't fit in the mold society expect of us.

In the end, I'll quote an article from the Guardian :

Two women a week in England and Wales are killed by a current or former partner. World Economic Forum statistics suggest gender equality in the UK has not improved in the past 10 years. If you are like me, those facts probably make you feel sad and angry. But I’m just as sad and just as angry that in the UK men are three times more likely to take their own lives than women

All of those facts are unacceptable. But by shirking from depicting a segregationist and isolationist society in non-romanticized way, WW isn't helping as much as it could to deal with all those problems. And that's a shame, and the reason why I'll always love Azzarello's Amazons over whatever they are in Rebirth, or even under Perez (whom I simply can't stand the writing off, but that's another story) and most other writers who tackled them. At least Azz didn't sugarcoat all the toxic foundations of their society by seeing "look, they are an all-female, all-lesbian society! How progressive of us!"

I don't think the Amazons themselves should all be isolationist rather because they care about their duties they focus more on protecting the doom gate or any other god they have. So that's why some amazons should be pro isolationist. Because one many other side people might want the power or will be killed easily.

I think that the amazons before coming on the Island should have been in relationships with men. That they cared about their uncles, brothers, fathers and grandfathers. That many amazons should hold memorials and celebrations for people who were in their group in the outside world.I think they should have been coed. There were male amazons but Ares or Hercules or whoever you want caused all the men to dead.

The Amazons should run the gamut from women hurt so bad by men that even thousands of years haven't healed all their scars and that genuinely feel that their island being an all-woman society helps them, to stoic (or not so stoic) warriors keeping the horrors of Tartarus at bay will mourning the fact that they had to leave the peoples they loved (including men) behind, to girls who simply never interacted much with men, for whatever reasons and are simply proud that the freaking Gods chose them to hold unspeakable horrors at bay for all Eternity !

Then, the Amazon's society would make sense, and depicting it in the way it's usually done would be far better. But writers almost never does that, or at least not for long.

[Agent Z]

Yes. One Amazon, who has always been depicted as fundamentally different from the rest (clay birth or demi-goddess) has asked for the Amazons opening their borders. She has hardly succeeded.

Yeah because she can’t find it. In the previous timeline that DC wiped out she did succeed.

And again, you fail to notice that nothing keeps the Amazons tied to Themiscyra but their will. They want to be secluded, they want to have nothing to do with the outside world.Diana is the outlier, not the basic mold for her sisters. The Bana alone are proof enough that the Gods couldn't force the Amazons to remains here, if they wished to move beyond their borders.

When the borders were dropped, the Amazons held a vote to either stay in isolation or rejoin the rest of the world. The majority voted in favor of rejoining.
And the Bana weren’t segregationist either. You’ve stated before that you haven’t read most of Perez or pre-Flashpoint WW and it kind of shows.

Yes, women deserve and need placed where no man will enter, because it's a basic necessity to be with peoples who can truly understand your hardship (think, Anonymous Alcoholic). No, creating a whole society around it isn't healthy, because it promotes segregationism, especially if it is a willing choice and not some sort of heroic self-imposed sacrifice (in the confine of comic books).

Again, it wasn’t a choice.


In the end, I'll quote an article from the Guardian :

The Amazons should run the gamut from women hurt so bad by men that even thousands of years haven't healed all their scars and that genuinely feel that their island being an all-woman society helps them, to stoic (or not so stoic) warriors keeping the horrors of Tartarus at bay will mourning the fact that they had to leave the peoples they loved (including men) behind, to girls who simply never interacted much with men, for whatever reasons and are simply proud that the freaking Gods chose them to hold unspeakable horrors at bay for all Eternity !

Then, the Amazon's society would make sense, and depicting it in the way it's usually done would be far better. But writers almost never does that, or at least not for long.

You just described how the Amazons were depicted in every version that isn’t written by Azzarello, who let me remind you doesn’t even mention the Amazons being victims of abuse by men.

[WonderScott]

They become more enlightened and a helluva lot less overtly and "everyday-ly" sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, etc. from their experiences and time spent with the Amazons.

[Geraldofrivia]

Yes. One Amazon, who has always been depicted as fundamentally different from the rest (clay birth or demi-goddess) has asked for the Amazons opening their borders. She has hardly succeeded.

And again, you fail to notice that nothing keeps the Amazons tied to Themiscyra but their will. They want to be secluded, they want to have nothing to do with the outside world. Diana is the outlier, not the basic mold for her sisters. The Bana alone are proof enough that the Gods couldn't force the Amazons to remains here, if they wished to move beyond their borders.

And talking about the Bana, yes, chose revenge, but they also chose segregationist policies, and that's why they ended like what we see today. But distant and aloof disdain from the Other isn't better than blatant sexist and racism. It's just a more insidious, and even more poisonous form of toxic behavior and ideas, because it is not as in your face as some crazy dude screaming abuse at the Other.

And the WW mythos has several of such toxic ideas.

Yes, women deserve and need placed where no man will enter, because it's a basic necessity to be with peoples who can truly understand your hardship (think, Anonymous Alcoholic). No, creating a whole society around it isn't healthy, because it promotes segregationism, especially if it is a willing choice and not some sort of heroic self-imposed sacrifice (in the confine of comic books).

No, bravery, determination and strength aren't masculine qualities and empathy, compassion and care feminine ones. They are basic emotions and it's by ascribing some to one gender and pretending that the other has to seek out the missing half, we aren't helping peoples become more balanced and thus happier. We just reinforce the stereotypes that an empathetic man is very feminine and its often correlated with the idea that women are weak, ergo empathetic men are weak and that they have to toughen up or break if they can't fit in the mold society expect of us.

In the end, I'll quote an article from the Guardian :



All of those facts are unacceptable. But by shirking from depicting a segregationist and isolationist society in non-romanticized way, WW isn't helping as much as it could to deal with all those problems. And that's a shame and the reason why I'll always love Azzarello's Amazons over whatever they are in Rebirth, or even under Perez (whom I simply can't stand the writing off, but that's another story) and most other writers who tackled them. At least Azz didn't sugarcoat all the toxic foundations of their society by seeing "look, they are an all-female, all-lesbian society! How progressive of us!"



The Amazons should run the gamut from women hurt so bad by men that even thousands of years haven't healed all their scars and that genuinely feel that their island being an all-woman society helps them, to stoic (or not so stoic) warriors keeping the horrors of Tartarus at bay will mourning the fact that they had to leave the peoples they loved (including men) behind, to girls who simply never interacted much with men, for whatever reasons and are simply proud that the freaking Gods chose them to hold unspeakable horrors at bay for all Eternity !

Then, Amazon's society would make sense, and depicting it in the way it's usually done would be far better. But writers almost never do that, or at least not for long.

When did Amazon have men? Amazons are either made from Clay or Woman resurrected from dead which means their men are dead too.

[Vanguard-01]

I still say the best way to avoid the misandrist label for the Amazons is to establish that their society was never meant to exclude men in the first place.

To this end, I continue to maintain that Gail Simone's take on the Amazons in the animated movie is still the best. We don't learn the specifics, but the story does make it clear that the Amazons had men within their ranks and lost them when Ares killed them. The Amazons were not without men by choice. They simply took up their duties on Paradise Island before they had any chance to replace their losses.

[brettc1]

Yes. One Amazon, who has always been depicted as fundamentally different from the rest (clay birth or demi-goddess) has asked for the Amazons opening their borders. She has hardly succeeded.

And again, you fail to notice that nothing keeps the Amazons tied to Themiscyra but their will.

Yes, nothing but their will.

Oh, and that pesky God-imposed impenetrable force field you seen strangely determined to ignore...

[kjn]

I think the thread has been rather thoroughly derailed, but I think there are a couple of rather bad framings and assumptions that go around here that I want to discuss. I first was leery of doing so, because there is a lot of theory and a lot to unpack, and I was hoping someone else, better qualified, would step into the breach, but here goes.

First, there is a difference between in-universe justifications or reasons for something in a text, and their meaning for the reader. The former is sometimes openly stated by the writer, but can also sometimes be inherited from earlier versions or assumed by the reader. The meaning for the reader is however always a thing that is a matter of individual interpretation by the reader.

We know that Marston created Diana and Themyscira based on his own brand of gender essentialism, where he posited that women were more capable as leaders, and thus that an all-female society could create an utopia advanced in science, technology, organisation, and morals. I believe most of us here don't agree with Marston's gender essentialism, but there is something powerful in the idea that an oppressed group—freed from the shackles of their oppressors—can achieve great things and be morally superior. Superman can be viewed as such a fantasy on an individual level: he can not only fly and be super strong; he is nice and has superior ethics than the people around him as well. From this level, there is little to distinguish Wakanda from Themyscira: both are fantasies of freedom from oppressors.

That is different from the fantasy of counter-oppression, where the formerly oppressed group now is on top and lords over their oppressors. This is also a powerful fantasy (and common in many labour protest songs), but it is perhaps most common as a dystopia. The workers, black people, women, or other group, are now lording over white dudes and destroying our society! Viewed in that light, the demand from white dudes that they should be able to be part of Wakanda or Themyscira isn't so much a demand for inclusion as a demand that a positive utopia for an oppressed group should be turned into a dystopia for white dudes, that they can thus attack for being a dystopia.

The demand for the inclusion of white dudes in Wakanda or Themyscira also ignores the power dynamics of our culture. We live in a society ruled by white dudes. There is a very real difference between a demand that women should be allowed into the war room that from their position of safety sends millions of men to death and injury, and the demand that men should be included in a completely fictional entity that doesn't even try to run things around them. Because there is a difference between isolationism and segregationism here: segregationism enforces the will of an exclusive group onto the groups around them, while isolationism does not.

Another concept to address here is the one of safe space, which is frequently misunderstood. Here I'm understanding it as the place where people from a marginalised group can go, talk about their experiences, and never have to justify or defend those experiences. It achieves that by being a space which is free of the oppressors. It recognises that cultural socialisation can be so bad that the mere inclusion of men (or whites, or straight people, and so on) into such a space can distort the atmosphere in such a space. Sometimes such a space needs to be challenged, like Diana did with the war room in London in the movie, but those spaces are much more likely to be those held by the white dudes in power. To take an extreme example, the slave owner takes his right for granted that he can always intrude into the home of the slave, but would react violently if one of his slave labourers would even show themselves in his dinner room. The demand from white dudes to be part of Themyscira and Wakanda can be viewed as a demand of the right to intrude into the homes of other people.

For those reasons, I think there are very strong out-of-text reasons for why Themyscira should be depicted as a space for women only. I also believe that the Amazons would recognise the value in Themyscira being a safe space for women, and thus keep the island closed for men, no matter if there is any reason imposed from outside like magical barriers, curses, or something else.

However, the actual implemenation and presentation does matter. Marston created Themyscira from a position of gender essentialism and from something many of us don't approve of created a powerful and positive fantasy. But Azzarello turned that utopia into a dystopia, which murders and rejects men. More insidiously, Morrison's Earth One undermines the idea that Themyscira is a safe space for women, because the women of Themyscira belittle and shame the women from Man's World. The Amazons are presented not as creating a safe space and an example for women, but as lording over everyone—men and women—in Man's World.

[Korath]

Yes, nothing but their will.

Oh, and that pesky God-imposed impenetrable force field you seen strangely determined to ignore...

A force field that anyone can cross to get out of the island whenever they want.

The Amazons are segregationist and sexists because they have the means to stop being so but refuses to take the steps necessary to do it. Nothing is preventing them to pack up. The Olympians Gods are mostly absent since Rebirth started for instance. No one is preventing the Amazons from leaving but the Amazons.

[Geraldofrivia]

A force field that anyone can cross to get out of the island whenever they want.

The Amazons are segregationist and sexists because they have the means to stop being so but refuses to take the steps necessary to do it. Nothing is preventing them to pack up. The Olympians Gods are mostly absent since Rebirth started for instance. No one is preventing the Amazons from leaving but the Amazons.

Once again you conveniently forget that they are guarding Ares and Grail who his sons and Darkseid want.

[Korath]

Once again you conveniently forget that they are guarding Ares and Grail who his sons and Darkseid want.

Well, Ares is out, and possibly Grail. Will the Amazons will use this opportunity to return to the world, or will they cling to their isolationism because "Man's world" is impure ?