And then Wonder Woman was taken from a comic book into a real live TV venture.
Lynda Carter appeared and kept Wonder Woman alive.
The show had a huge impact on my generation.
We all were Wonder Woman on the playground.
We all wanted to look like Wonder Woman,
and be Wonder Woman, and be as strong as Wonder Woman.
So l know what Wonder Woman can mean to a little girl.
Everything about her. Her femininity, her beauty,
her strength, her power.
You know, I grew up in such desperate situations,
I just imagined if I ran around a building
when someone was chasing me, calling me names,
that l could spin and turn into Wonder Woman and that would be it.
It's a female fantasy to be all of that, that beauty and strength.
What Wonder Woman brought
to my memory of things, she was about justice in a feminine way,
which is very powerful.
Women are the wave of the future,
and sisterhood is stronger than anything.
For me, you wanted to be her, you wanted to do those things
as a little girl, but it's really tough,
the kind of perception of women, and the male-gaze part of this,
because Lynda Carter was not eхactly averagely built.
She's in, really, what you could consider
a strapless bathing suit, essentially.
And l do think that her body type
and her body size, all of that,
was to uphold a certain media standard of beauty.
Вut at the same time, she wasn't necessarily sexualized in that outfit.
I argue that one of the reasons that she was so successful in that role
is because as hot as the costume is,
she walks around like it's no big deal.
This is who she is, this is the world she came from,
this is what they wear in that world.
And she owned it.
And that's what I think is great about the message of Wonder Woman,
is that it's how you want to project yourself
and not how others see you.
In her characteristics,
she's a person who is compassionate.
She's standing there on her own,
and she turns to herself to make those decisions.
Wonder Woman was always identified from the start
as a superhero whose whole mission was fighting for women's rights,
for equality for women.
The current opposition to fascism was the opposition of a feminist.
But it's not like there's one big consensus
about "what feminism is"
and what an ideal woman who's really, totally enlightened
and truly empowered would look like.
And this is where Wonder Woman can come in beautifully,
because it's like, of course you're gonna have your feminists
who're gonna be angry at this one specific feminist ideal.
And of course it's not perfect.
But what is perfect?
GANNIS: There's a lot that's still not resolved about, you know,
feminine identity,
what power means, what power means in terms of,
"Is your power through your beauty,
"or is your power through your force of will?
"Your sense of righteousness, your sense of empathy?"
Or all these other things we discuss that define who Wonder Woman is.
And you can look to Wonder Woman
at different time periods and kind of pluck her out
and say, "Look, she represents our movement,
"because she's fierce and she's strong,
"and she just kind of embodies the ethos of the movement,"
rather than saying,
"Everything she was depicting in this comic series
"is exactly what our movement stands for."
KRISTEN TАYLOR: But I think, especially with Wonder Woman,
even if you don't know the history,
you can say, "Oh, I like that character. I like what she stands for."
And I think, for me, I like the idea of an Amazonian character
as someone l'm like,
"Yeah, that's my choice. That's what l want to be like."
A lot of readers, they're looking for something in comics.
They're looking,
in many ways, for a moral compass,
especially when you're younger and reading comics,
and it's important when you have younger readers to make sure
that you represent everybody equally,
which makes Wonder Woman really extra important because of that.
And l think, a lot of times,
she bears the burden of having to represent all women,
which is kind of unfair and difficult to write.
And the way I would look at it
is if this icon shifts anything in a good direction...
If there's one little boy or girl out there who is like,
"l'm gonna dress up like Wonder Woman, and feel empowered,"
then it doesn't matter what it looks like.
lt doesn't matter why it manifests, as long as it does.
I hope that when young men see a powerful woman character
that they can kind of eхtrapolate that out to the women around them,
to see those women as stronger beings with agency.
l mean, it's the main thing you hope for in a situation like that,