Binary relationships

Saunders addresses the nature of Marston's "Wonder Woman" in Do the Gods Wear Capes? as a narrative that functions socially as a deconstruction of binary oppositions. The broadest polar relationship is manifested in the opposition between man and woman, which accumulated tension up to the 1940s as the notion of feminism gained momentum starting in 1913 through campaigns for women suffrage. Saunders postulates that Marston diagnoses the controversy behind major social and global issues contemporary to the WWII era by exploring psychological tendencies of men and women. As a scholar of psychology abandoned by the academic community for overtly radical experimentation, Marston undoubtedly maintained his theories of sexual psychology throughout his career as an author of superhero comics. This implies that the characterization of his theories on psychology may have permeated into the text of Wonder Woman, branching into a wholesome account of such theory through the superhero genre in comics.

The content of his sexual theories revolved around the binary relationship between submission and domination. As something that was repeatedly depicted in the text of Wonder Woman, this relationship develops into a social criticism, as Saunders continues to argue. The belief of Marston suggests that the basic sexual desire of men and women to engage in domination/submission relationships is converted into the foundation of social structure. Such a social structure is characterized by a dominance of men, plagued with violence and corruption due to man's nature. Marston believes in a feminist utopia, implying that a reversal of domination to a feminine regime would occupy love instead of violence as a means of domination. Wonder Woman is a dominating female figure who demands obedience to love. According to Marston, then, men cannot continue to dominate over the opposite gender without being violent and destructive to mankind. All in all, the feminist agenda is best applied to society in relating to sexual relationships of domination and submission. This is the way that Wonder Woman works.