A young girl named Laura is no longer allowed to bring her Wonder Woman-adorned lunchbox to school because it violates the school’s dress code. No, little Laura didn’t use the food delivery contraption’s hardened features as a weapon. Nor did she attempt to convert her leftover sandwich wraps into a homemade Lasso of Truth. She was simply bringing her lunch to school in it.
As Twitter user @auntiesiannan — who first brought the lunch box incident to the attention of the Mary Sue on Wednesday — points out, “Wonder Woman lunchboxes violate dress codes? I didn’t know lunchboxes wore clothes.” In the same tweet, she posted a link to an Imgur gallery featuring two images of said lunchbox and a third of the letter sent home to Laura’s parents, Daniel and Sarah.
According to the letter, the school dress code “requests that the children not bring violent images into the building in any fashion — on their clothing (including shoes and socks), backpacks and lunchboxes.” This makes sense, of course, but how does Wonder Woman fit into the picture?
“We have defined ‘violent characters’ as those who solves problems using violence,” the letter continues. “Superheroes certainly fall into that category.”
Granted, superheroes can often be quite violent — depending on the context of any given story, character arc or publishing house. But Wonder Woman? A violent character? Sure, as @auntiesiannan later notes, the warrior princess of the Amazons has had to get her hands dirty, but not to the degree or frequency that warrants being deemed too violent for school lunches.
There’s also the matter of conflating so many terms — superheros, violent characters, violent images — into one amorphous whole, a point the Mary Sue addresses in great detail. Just because a few characters identified as “superheroes” commit violent acts depicted in violent images doesn’t mean that all superheroes do so.
Then again, neither of the two images of Wonder Woman featured on the lunch box include any kind of violence whatsoever. The first is a closeup, and the second is a shot of her running with the lasso — a means of preventing, and not causing, violence — at the ready.
(Via the Mary Sue)
