SHE may be a feminist icon in a world of male superheroes – but there's a very kinky reason why Wonder Woman is always being tied up or whipped.

The DC Comics hero comes from imagination of bondage-obsessed psychologist William Moulton Marston, who formed a ritualistic sex cult around “love binding” with his wife and their two lovers.

By creating a character who is constantly shackled by men, he was able to hide his unusual sexual appetites in plain sight.

His heroine finds herself tied to railway lines, winched into a straitjacket and repeatedly whipped, fettered and manacled. In one comic strip she cries: “Great girdle of Aphrodite! Am I tired of being tied up!”

As Marston himself once said: “The secret allure of women is that they enjoy submission — being bound.”

Tonight's episode of The Secret History of Comics examines the bizarre sex life of Marston, his wife and lovers, who lived together even beyond his death in 1947.

After blazing a trail through the world of comics, Wonder Woman transferred to TV in the 1970s, played by Lynda Carter.

In 2017, the character was given a modern spin in a blockbuster movie,starring Gal Gadot, which raked in over £820million worldwide. She reprised the role in the 2020 sequel, Wonder Woman 1984.

Lie detector used to measure erotic arousal

Wonder Woman’s eccentric creator was born near Boston, Massachusetts, in 1893 and was brought up by his mother Annie and her sisters. The matriarchal influence rubbed off and Marston became an early supporter of women’s rights.

He was fiercely intelligent and went on to study law and then psychology at Harvard, where in 1915 he married his childhood sweetheart Sadie Elizabeth Holloway, who he called Betty.

A lawyer and psychologist, she had observed that her blood pressure rose whenever she was angry or excited, and carried out some ground- breaking research — which Marston later passed off as his own, and which led to the development of the lie detector machine.

But being the sex obsessive that he was, he found the gadget was useful for more than just finding fibbers. It could also be used to ­measure women’s erotic arousal when they were watching raunchy films — and he concluded that brunettes were friskier than blondes.

Threesome, young lover and kinky 'baby' parties

When America entered World War One he offered his research on blood pressure to the government, and though there was little appetite for his invention, he was assigned to the US Army School of Military Psychology.

There he met librarian Marjorie W Huntley, a women’s rights campaigner, who set his own pulse racing. A believer in the psychic power of the orgasm, she became his lover and introduced him to bondage.

After the war, Marston took her back to his marital home in Massachusetts, where she and the couple became what Marjorie later described as “a threesome”.

She lived with the couple on and off for years, and in the 1940s, when Marston devised the Wonder Woman comic strip, she helped out with the inking and lettering.

In 1926 Marston had been teaching at Tufts University in Massachusetts, where he grew infatuated with one of his students, 22-year-old Olive Byrne.

She invited him to an extraordinary party, where girls dressed as babies were tied up and blindfolded.

Fellow students told them to carry out tasks — and those who didn’t do as they were told were hit with sticks.

'Love sphere' and dominatrix 'punishment'

Olive quickly joined Marston’s bohemian household and the foursome developed a free-love cult called the Love Unit. Harvard historian Jill Lepore’s 2014 book The Secret History Of Wonder Woman contains notes from the group, which instruct women to “expose their bodies and use various legitimate methods of the Love Sphere to create, in males, submission to them”.

Marston described Love Unit rituals in an “academic” report, noting in detail the “excited pleasantness of captivation emotion” when dominant women would punish submissive women — while he looked on.

The domestic arrangement led to four children — two were Betty’s and two Olive’s. Betty had agreed to the strange set-up but insisted Olive should bring up the children, leaving her to pursue her career as an editor of academic publications.

After the extended family moved to a rambling farmhouse in Rye, New York, they struggled financially and Olive boosted their income by writing occasional articles for supermarket magazine Family Circle.

She regularly quoted Marston, whose own career had faltered, as an expert on child psychology. In one piece he celebrated the effect of comic books on American children.

It was spotted by All-American Publications — later part of superhero publisher DC Comics, which quickly recruited Marston as a consultant.

He soon pitched his creation “Suprema, the Wonder Woman” who, he said, was “psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who, I believe, should rule the world”.

Despite the suggestive storylines, Wonder Woman was a sensation from her first appearance in All Star Comics No8 in autumn 1941. In July 1942 she got her own comic, and by issue three it was selling more than half a million copies.

But there were certainly traces of Marston’s fondness for “love binding” and the heroine frequently lost all her powers after being tied up by a man.

Jill Lepore says: “In episode after episode Wonder Woman is chained, bound, gagged, lassoed, tied, fettered and manacled. She is locked in an electric cage. She is winched into a straitjacket, from head to toe.

“Her eyes and mouth are taped shut. She is locked in a bank vault. She’s tied to railroad tracks. She’s pinned to a wall.”

In episode after episode Wonder Woman is chained, bound, gagged, lassoed, tied, fettered and manacled.

While her creator still saw himself as an ardent feminist, his boss at All Star Comics, Sheldon Mayer, said: “Marston’s idea of feminine supremacy was the ability to submit to male domination. William had a rather strange appreciation of women. One was never enough.”

But Marston saw it differently, saying: “The next 100 years will see the beginning of an American matriarchy, a nation of Amazons in the psychological, rather than the physical sense.

“In 500 years there will be a serious sex battle and in 1,000 years women will rule the country.”

Marston died of cancer in 1947, but the devoted women in his life helped him to write his beloved Wonder Woman right until the end.

Her success in the flagging superhero movie market shows what Marston knew all along — it takes a woman to whip things into shape.

The Secret History of Comics airs tonight at 9pm, on Sky

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