As this trailer for a Wonder Woman movie, made by Jesse V. Johnson, a stuntman who is trying to transition to directing, has circulated over the past couple of days, much of the focus has been on how awesome it is to see Diana laying some serious smackdown on Nazis:

My reaction to it was somewhat different. What struck me as the most interesting part of the trailer was the way said Nazis treated their captive, and the things they assumed about her because she was a woman. There was the implication of sexual torture, the idea that one of her captors and Diana would have “fun.” There was the treatment of her ambitions to protect innocent people as if they were delusional or pathetic. And then there was the assumption that she was physically vulnerable, which is part of what makes watching her turn the tables so entertaining.

But it also suggested a direction that a Wonder Woman could take that might both allow her character to fit into the established superhero arc while also allowing her to be distinct. In Iron Man, Tony Stark’s narcissism and self-regard are his greatest weakness: he keeps having to acknowledge that he both needs and is attached to other people in order to defeat his enemies. In The Avengers, he has to face up to the possibility that destroying himself might be the best thing to do for everybody else. The Hulk has to learn that anger can’t be permanently contained, it can only be managed and channeled. So why not make Wonder Woman’s big struggle against the expectations that come along with being a female superhero? Just as Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s opponents kept coming at her even as her Big Bad count piled up, you could get some comedy and irritation out of the constant underestimation of Wonder Woman, especially in comparison to other members of the Justice League. Leavening villains’ threats with a tinge of sexual nastiness could be a creative way of commenting on the double standards for superheroes and superheroines—James Bond may be sexually threatened, but not so much Batman or Superman, and nipples on the Batsuit or a bulge on the Man of Steel’s suit aside, neither of DC’s other franchise players would ever end up in hotpants and a strapless top.

In other words, why not make the point that superwomen, just like high-achieving women in the real world, have to work through obstacles that their male counterparts couldn’t imagine. And just because Diana can do everything Batman can do backwards and in heeled boots doesn’t mean that it’s fun that she has to. This would be a lot less depressing than David E. Kelley’s attempt to recast Wonder Woman as a stressed-out single gal in the city, which thankfully never made it onto the air. And it doesn’t mean you have to get rid of the Nazi-punching, but it’s always nice when badassery actually conveys something other than the fact that the Amazons apparently offer rigorous machine-gun marksmanship training.

My pals at the Mary Sue posted Ms. Magazine’s inaugural 1972 cover next to the one the magazine is running for its fortieth anniversary this month. And as much as the comics-lovin’ gal in me is excited to see Wonder Woman back in her role as cover woman, I couldn’t help noticing some of the differences between the covers, which in subtle ways have a lot to say about where feminism was forty years ago and where it is now. Take the 1972 cover:

The billboard calls for “Peace & Justice In ’72,” rather than making specific feminist demands. She’s in a landscape where the war in Vietnam and the blasted landscape it’s produced are in danger of intruding on the American main street, and Wonder Woman rushes to catch a war plane before it crashes, perhaps into that schoolbus. In this reading, feminism is part of a much larger left movement, but the implication is also that it has a larger role to play. The cover lines may be about paid housework and body hair, but Wonder Woman, as the personification of feminism, is solving not just any problems she might have as a super-powered lady, but the problems of everyone else. This was a time when people still talked about misogyny as a root cause of war, something that seems awfully distant from our mainstream political discourse now.

Flash-forward forty years:

Wonder Woman’s striding through the streets of Washington, the capitol in the background. Unlike the cover forty years ago, when the women on the street were dwarfed by the Amazon striding above them, Wonder Woman appears to be following a group of multi-racial young feminists carrying signs about the War on Women and voting in 2012. The movement’s survived into the next generation, and its constituency is broader than it was back then. But its theater of operations has gotten smaller: institutional feminism is part of the patchwork of the left, but nobody’s claiming that feminism will get us out of Afghanistan. Part of it, I think, is that in those forty years, feminists have had to spend a lot of time consolidating and defending our early gains, instead of pursuing new goals. It’s hard to to move into new arenas when we’re still trying to hold on, for example, the right to choose.

In the course of an interview with Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang, who are writing and drawing DC’s rebooted Wonder Woman, Geoff Boucher raises an interesting question. What does it mean to change Wonder Woman’s origin story, turning her from a statue brought to life by Aphrodite for Queen Hippolyta to Zeus’s daughter:

CC: If you went to the average person on the street and showed them a picture of Wonder Woman they would recognize her immediately. Ask those people her origin story and some of them might know the clay story but many, many others would not know that at all. That’s not a problem you have with Superman or Batman; everyone knows their origin. By making her the daughter of Zeus, we’ve gotten a big driving force behind our story. It gives her a motivation and it’s a key to character that we now feel is very important. She’s a child of the gods who defends us from them, in the same way that Superman is from another planet trying to save humanity and Batman is the orphan who is protecting us from the criminals who killed his parents.

BA: It’s going to be key to a lot of things. We can’t just make this change and leave it hanging. It’s going to inform the first year of stories. She’s got a whole family she’s got to meet. Some are looking forward to meeting her and others aren’t. We’re heading toward the family reunion. Ever been to one of those? At the same time she is protecting this young woman Zola, who happens to be carrying a baby — we don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl yet — who is another one of the children of Zeus. So she’s protecting her half-brother or half-sister who is on the way.

That’s a sort of Buffy-ization of the Wonder Woman mythos that accords with a lot of recent stories that explore scenarios where there are a lot of people with varying degrees of power in the world. The idea that we’ve all got a little Wonder Woman in us has been part of the feminist mythos since the founding of Ms., which put her on the cover of its inaugural issue trying to halt the advance of the Vietnam War, striding past a billboard with the slogan “Peace and Justice in ’72.” A mythology that makes that possibility explicit raises the possibility of a pantheon of new superheroes. But it also risks reducing Wonder Woman to a permanent and perpetual mother-protector role, constantly rushing around defending her divinely-inspired relatives.

Similarly, in their quest for specificity, I wonder if Azzarello and Chiang are reducing Wonder Woman a bit. Her original story may not be plausible, or gritty, but it is about an expression of female will and independence. Not everything needs to be grounded in social realism. Some things can just be mysterious and strange. It’s yet another reason we’re far too consumed with origin stories. Trying to come up with a psychologically plausible explanation for the divine, or near-so, is a bit of a contradiction in terms.

After consumer finance advocate and Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren joked that she didn’t take her clothes off to pay for college, Scott Brown decided that an appropriate rejoinder would be to call up talk radio and tell listeners how relieved he is that he doesn’t have to see his opponent naked:

Warren probably shouldn’t have made the original comment, but Brown’s sin here is vastly worse. Warren’s comments about Brown’s posing for Cosmopolitan were a judgement of Brown’s behavior, Brown’s comments were a superficial, inappropriate, and degrading judgment on Warren’s appearance, on who he thinks she is. This is an ancient script, and a sadly typical way to try to take the focus away from the relevant qualities of smart, strong women, like when Don Imus calls Hillary Clinton “that buck-toothed witch, Satan.” And men aren’t entirely immune either: Brown’s comments come after several weeks of fierce national debates over whether New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s weight disqualified him from the presidency. But as ugly as the conversation about Christie has been, I can’t even imagine the vitriol that would be aimed at a woman of Christie’s age and equivalent body weight if she were poised to be a national political figure.

Of course, this is probably where Brown would like the debate to be. Last time out, he won his Senate seat on the strength of a barnyard coat, a pickup truck, and an opponent who didn’t know her Red Sox trivia as well as she should have. At the time, one of his campaign consultants said that the jacket proved that “Scott is the Rocky Balboa of Massachusetts politics.” But this time, Rocky from Wrentham’s going up against Warren, who may name-check Wonder Woman in debates, but she doesn’t need a Lasso of Truth—she has actual ideas and credibility. If I were Brown, I’d be worried. But bodysnarking Elizabeth Warren isn’t going to make Brown’s status as Wall Street’s favorite Senator go away.

There’s been a lot of discussion of a series of illustrations, some of which are reproduced here, that show what male superheroes would look like if they were posed like Wonder Woman is on the cover of the latest Justice League. I was particularly interested to see those images in conjunction with a new study that looks at 1,000 Rolling Stone covers and determines that the images of both men and women have become more sexual more frequently over the 43 years the magazine’s been published, but that over time, the number of sexualized and hypersexualized images of women has increased faster than the number of comparable images of men. I mention this because while I think reducing women to their sexuality is a problem, we’ve also got something of an equal opportunity problem here.

The reason those images of superheroes posed like Wonder Woman are resonating is in part because they’re funny, they’re superheroes in drag. They help make clear why it’s ridiculous to have Wonder Woman running around fighting evil in a swimsuit — it can be hard to see things as ridiculous when they’re all you’ve ever seen, but when you see a reversal, like a pantsless Batman, it’s usefully jarring. But these images don’t accomplish their full purpose because they aren’t actually meant to be sexy. They don’t communicate to men what it’s like to see another man held up as an object of pure sexual desire for women’s consumption.

That’s one of the reasons I cracked up in the 2 Broke Girls extended trailer when Kat Dennings explains that she can’t resist her cheating newly-ex boyfriend because of “he had these muscle thingies [adjacent to his abs]…I don’t know what they’re called but they make smart girls stupid.” Or why Crazy Stupid Love is selling the joke where Emma Stone tells Ryan Gosling, “It’s like you’re Photoshopped!” when he takes off his shirt. There’s this idea that female desire doesn’t exist, or if it does, that it’s sort of laughable, which both of those examples thankfully reject, but as a result, we have fewer images of men that are just purely about being beautiful and covetable. Patrick Swayze’s incredibly desirable in Dirty Dancing, but the fact that there are so few images of men that are just available for the female gaze like that hugely magnifies the significance of his performance and his self-presentation in the movie.

I don’t want to live in a world where we remove all images of women that are desirable. I just want more of other kinds of images, and equal opportunity for women who like to sigh over dudes to have images to sigh over.