Despite glowing reviews and an extremely low bar set by Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, the here-at-last Wonder Woman movie is embroiled in controversies that have nothing to do with the actual quality or content of the film.
Without the movie even being out yet, here are five outbursts of outrage it has already caused.
1. Wonder Woman banned from theaters in Lebanon because Gal Gadot is Israeli.
Lebanese authorities banned the movie from screening in theaters because the film's star, Gal Gadot, is Israeli. Sadly, for Lebanon, a similar boycott campaign did not spare them the Star Wars prequels starring Natalie Portman.
Because Gadot was born and raised in Israel, she participated in the country's mandatory military service, serving as a combat trainer from 2005 to 2007. USA Today reports that "the ban is in accordance with a decades-old law that boycotts Israeli products and bars Lebanese citizens from traveling to Israel or having contacts with Israelis."
Congratulations to sellers of bootleg DVDs in Beirut—you can make good money on a copy of this one.
2. All-woman screenings prompted man rage.
Wonder Woman/Diana Prince was raised on the all-female island of Themiscyra, and to replicate the magic and celebrate girl power, Alamo Drafthouse cinemas were offering all-female screenings.
Many males, the more emotional and reactive of the sexes, took to their keyboards and shouted "THAT'S NOT FAIR!"
As the rage spread among beleaguered men throughout the USA, Alamo Drafthouse responded by adding even more ladies' night screenings in even more cities.
One alt-right troll, Jack Posobiec, got so mad, he filed a civil rights complaint with the New York City Human Rights Commission against the Alamo Drafthouse and Carson Daly for promoting the screenings on The Today Show.
3. Gadot's boobs criticized for not being big enough.
When she was first cast as Diana for Batman v Superman, fans went nuts saying that her breasts and butt were insufficiently large to play Wonder Woman.
To many, Wonder Woman is embodied by the very, very curvy proportions of a drawing or Lynda Carter's 1970s figure, insisting that Gadot was too thin and flat.
Gadot had a perfect response in an interview with Robot Underdog:
They said that I was too skinny and my boobs were too small... When I was younger I would take criticism really hard. But now it mostly amused me. The true amazons had one boob so it won’t bother them in their archery. So it’s not going to be like real amazons. We always try to make everyone happy but we can’t.
That's right, nerds. If you're such a purist, be happy that she has any boobs at all.
4. Wonder Woman stripped of her UN honor for being too stripped down.
To celebrate the character's 75th birthday, Wonder Woman was unveiled as an honorary United Nations ambassador to promote women's rights, but her tenure quickly came to an end after an online petition criticized her as "an overtly sexualized image," and "a large breasted, white woman of impossible proportions."
Just last week on the press tour, the film's director Patty Jenkins weighed in on the criticisms on CBS, calling them sexist:
I think that that's sexist. I think it's sexist to say you can't have both. I have to ask myself what I would apply to any other superhero. This is fantasy and it's not for anyone other than the person having the fantasy.
Gadot, too, defended Wonder Woman's sexiness, telling TIME magazine:
There are so many horrible things that are going on in the world, and this is what you’re protesting, seriously? When people argue that Wonder Woman should ‘cover up,’ I don’t quite get it. They say, ‘If she’s smart and strong, she can’t also be sexy.’ That’s not fair. Why can’t she be all of the above?
5. Gadot's armpits slammed for being too bare.
Keeping with the theme of zeroing in on Gadot's body, people were pissed when a trailer dropped in March that when Wonder Woman throws a car across the street, her bare pits were just too unrealistic.
Celebrity armpits have long been a fascination of the public, with a whole Reddit forum dedicated to the crease (ew). The color of Gadot's armpit skin is unusually bright, suggesting that they were digitally remastered in post-production as to spare the world a real view at the follicles and folds.
Despite all the dissection, Wonder Woman's been taking all these mini-controversies and repelling them off like bullets.
Like all women, Wonder Woman is subject to a hell of a lot of scrutiny, making her truly representative of womankind.
