The UN Made Wonder Woman An Honorary Ambassador (Then Immediately Walked It Back)

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In 2016, the United Nations named Wonder Woman as an "Honorary Ambassador for the Empowerment of Women and Girls." This wasn't a very meaningful move because, you see, Wonder Woman is a fictional character.

Sure, people can be inspired by works of fiction, and it looks the "Wonder Woman campaign" consisted mostly of asking followers to tweet the names of actual heroes, with the hashtag #RealLifeWonderWoman. But the move did rub some people the wrong way.

For starters, it came with a ceremony in which the UN gave a speaking spot to the president of Warner Bros. rather than to any of those real-life heroes. With a Wonder Woman movie coming out the following year, it felt less an "international policy initiative" and more like a Fornite cross-promotion.

A few months later, the UN bowed to pressure and pulled the plug on the campaign. But the reasons for killing it were so bad that suddenly, we feel like defending Wonder Woman after all.

A petition had complained about Wonder Woman, calling her "a large breasted, white woman of impossible proportions, scantily clad in a shimmery, thigh-baring body suit with an American flag motif and knee high boots—the epitome of a pin-up girl." None of that means she'd make for a bad ambassador, and many actual models have been ambassadors. Plus, with the most famous depiction of Wonder Woman at the time being Gal Gadot from the upcoming film, very little of that description was even accurate (just the part about the boots and bare thighs, maybe).

To really judge Wonder Woman, we'd have to stack her against all the other fictional characters the UN had ever made ambassadors. But it turns out there haven't been a great many of those. We could only find two. One was Tinkerbell, an ambassador for the environment because she dresses in green. The other, also for the environment, doesn't quite qualify as an iconic character: It was "Red," from Angry Birds.

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