Marie Goetz as quoted on Wonder Woman

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The idea was to make the character of Wonder Woman the face of a U.N. social media campaign to promote women's rights via tweets and facebook callouts. Women's rights advocates exploded in outrage, and nearly 45,000 people signed a petition against the decision. "It's an insult, frankly," said Anne Marie Goetz at the time. Goetz, a professor of global affairs at New York University and a former adviser on peace and security issues to the United Nations agency, U.N. Women, said a big issue was the timing.
"It's frivolous, it's fatuous and it reduces an extremely serious human rights problem experienced by half of the world to a cartoon," she said. And not just any cartoon, added Goetz. Wonder Woman in her view was tantamount to a Barbie/Playboy pinup. Like most female comic action figures, she has big breasts bursting out of a skimpy outfit and an impossibly tiny waist. "The message to girls is that you are expected to meet a male standard in which your significance is reduced to your role as a sexual object," said Goetz.