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Annoying sexism and Joss Whedon

Reading through the latest Feminist sf carnival I hit some links which made me go "yes! That! Grr!". So I thought I would share the joy :)

Joss Whedon and feminist cookies Makes the point that one can (and should) acknowledge the effort of feminist writers like Joss Whedon..while still calling them on their mistakes. And oh, does he make some mistakes. Also, this comment captures some of the dodginess of the "Women corrupted by power" archetype.

On a similar subject Firefly: The Trouble With Saffron, on the fact that having a sweet innocent female victim of abuse who has pity taken on her turn out to be an evil sexy seductress is, uh, kind of creepy, especially given that it's done so often. I think there's a subtext to the "Turn a victimised group who 'everyone cares about' into the villain" thing which plays on the fact that deep down people don't want to sympathise with victims, and get annoyed at having to care about them, so get a real sense of catharsis from having them turn out to have been evil all along.

It got me thinking about the sheer absurd fetishisation of the "Woman who becomes evil automatically starts dressing an acting more sexily" thing. I'm not saying that women can't use sexuality to gain power, or that being sexy is inherently bad (or good) But it's just one way to be powerful, and it plays both into the "woman + sex=evil" trope and the "Women exist to serve men" trope (since she is titillating the male viewers rather than doing what makes sense for the character) It's way overdone in Supernatural, I'd love to see an evil female character who is genuinely gross (like, a zombie or something(*)) do the whole "creepy touching" thing (in order to deliberately creep the guy out, not in a failed attempt to be sexy), then it would be actually creepy rather than a thinly veiled excuse for men to despise the women they're attracted to. And why can't a woman be aggressively sexy and dressed in leather and not evil? Actually, I guess that was Xena. Yay Xena :) EDIT: Yeah, ok, so there's MANY counterexamples to this :)

EDIT: Oh hey, metafandom :) Man, I really didn't put much thought into this post, and now I have to justify my dodgy arguments with a fuzzy brain...All disclaimers are in operation!

(*)Except I hate zombies. Hmm.

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What I find interesting is that aggressive female sexuality is 'acceptable', but aggressive male sexuality is not. Or, to put it another way: it's possible for a female hero to 'go bad', seduce or rape male characters, then 'snap out of it' and return to being a hero; a male character who 'goes bad' and rapes a female character generally becomes a villain forever.

There's a lot of weird double-standards when it comes to sexuality, of which the costume thing is an obvious one. They do swing both ways, though: While the overt sexualisation of female characters reduces them to sex objects and two-dimensional femme fatales, they're very rarely presented as genuinely 'evil'... their promiscuity makes them 'bad girls', but that 'badness' is presented as erotic and alluring. Male characters, by comparison, are almost never permitted to be overtly sexual, and when their sexuality does manifest, it is usually portrayed as threatening and aggressive. Both sexes lose out: Women get the message that they must be sexually aggressive to gain power, but that female sexual power is something that should be rightfully 'tamed' by a man, and men get the message that their sexuality is horrifying and evil. Win-win!

Conclusion: genre fiction tends to treat human sexuality in a very shallow, repetitive and negative manner? The real WTF is that people are still surprised by this. :P

This sounds a lot like my comic book rants, but with big words. Also without any Nightwing. :P

Also examples of aggressively sexy women, dressed in leather, I don't know if she actually wore leather but Aeryn Sun in Farscape springs to mind. And whatever her character was in Starscape/Fargate.

You can't have ugly women in television (except for maybe comedies or comedic characters, like the black lawyer women in Bones).

The Bat family provides several great examples of male characters with extremely repressed sexuality, as well as numerous femme fatales who are constantly forgiven for no particular reason other than they are women.

You can't have ugly women in television (except for maybe comedies or comedic characters, like the black lawyer women in Bones).

Ellenor Frutt (Camryn Manheim) from The Practice is basically the only 'unattractive' female character I've seen who is given serious treatment in a TV show. She had genuine issues which included, but were not limited to, the fact that she had body-image issues. The Practice's characters were actually really well written most of the time.

*nods* Ah Batfamily. That's because if they don't get forgiven, they get tortured with a powerdrill. (Okay so she wasn't a femme fatales, but she certainly only seemed there as an interest for Robin). Nightwing doesn't seem too repressed by his sexuality though...

Nightwing is interesting, because he's supposedly the most sexualised of any male in DC, yet only ever seems to just go along with the girls that hit on him, he never actually does anything himself. I think Talia has been the only major character so far that's rocked up and _not_ made out with him (this is a very good thing).

I also keep trying to figure out where Grace Choi (from The Outsiders fits into this. She's on the 'good' side, and is seen as pretty sexual, despite a history of abuse, but doesn't seem to be particularly attractive in any sort of traditional sense. Still I suppose that's why they made her gay.

I haven't seen The Practice so I can't say anything there really.

In the stories we had in that English unit, you could basically tell who the bad guys were because they were ugly. Beautiful people usually were right. Which lead to complete confusion when covering Chaucer, who made all his characters pretty, THEREFORE THERE WAS NO BAD GUY. :P

Before I forget, there's 3 GN's on your bed and two rum balls in the fridge for you. Well, the GN's are mine, but you can read them, dunno how much you want to actually read Nightwing though.

That's basically what I mean about Nightwing: he isn't 'repressed' in the sense that he avoids sex, but his sexuality is completely passive and reactionary to the 'assertive' sexuality of all the female characters (usually villains?) that cross his path. He's 'repressed' in the sense that he seems to have no sexual agenda of his own... perhaps 'suppressed' would be a better term.

...And we have yet another internet conversation continued and finished when we both get home from work.

:(

Ellenor Frutt was a wonderful character. David E. Kelley actually writes some awesome emale characters, when he isn't trying to hard. Kind of by accident. As evidenced by the fact that every female character on Ally McBeal (a show overtly about modern women) sucked, whole right now Shirley Schmidt on Boston Legal (who is once again only the sidekick to two male lawyers) is the only real woman over 50 on TV that's allowed to have a carreer, a political stance, a sex life and still care about people.

Sorry, not leather-related tangent here, but damn do I love Ellenor Frutt.

Aeryn sun! Yes, indeed. *edits*

I have somewhat come to terms with the "no ugly women" thing(*), but there's pretty and then there's LOOK AT HOW SEXY I AM

(*)Ok, no I haven't :)

I agree: sexual violence from women just isn't taken seriously, and it's gross and bad all round. Apparently there's a comics character (I'm sure

greteldragon could tell you who :)) who was mind controlled into sleeping with another woman, and despite knowing the circumstances everyone sees it as him cheating on his wife!

This is bugging the crap out of me because I don't actually know this.

However I'm fairly sure there should be a list of men that were mind controlled or drugged into sleeping with women in DC :P

(If it turns out that this is from a 'bat' story line, I'm going to be horribly embarrassed).

I THINK it was Green Arrow. But it's disturbing that there's so many you can't figure out who I mean :)

Hm... I was thinking of the Green Arrow, but from what I've read, he didn't get married to Black Canary until long after, Shado raped him. Amusingly a similar thing happened to Batman, Talia drugged and slept with him and (also) got a son out of the deal.

Neither really gets acknowledged as rape though, which is disturbing.

(The other disturbing thing is that the younger Green Arrow, Connor, loses his virginity to a ghost purely because Chuck Dixon decided he wasn't allowed to be gay.* Apparently having a member of the Justice League being gay would be all bad).

* I may not have this entirely right, I'm paraphrasing an article I read awhile back.

the younger Green Arrow, Connor, loses his virginity to a ghost purely because Chuck Dixon decided he wasn't allowed to be gay

Nice. This sort of thing is why I am always very trepidatious when I get a yen to read superhero comics.

*laughs*

The thing that annoys me about that, is that he has ranted many times about how he's just been waiting for the 'right' woman. And mostly running away from Mia (16/17 year old ex-prostitute, who seems to have become his father's ward) when she hits on him.

Heh. I forgot to add my last line there:

And then someone decides to go and wreck that, because they're upset about fans deciding the character is ambiguous about his sexuality. I don't care if he's straight or gay, but it was nice having a character being able to keep it in his pants (particularly one related to Oliver Queen, it made a cute contrast).

I think fans can get a bit paranoid about Executive Meddling to "prove" characters are straight, but there is the odd really obnoxious example and that sounds like one of them. Ew.

There's a lot of that sort of thing in comics. The Green Arrow storyline you may be thinking of: Ollie (Green Arrow) was feverish and delusional and slept with a Dragon Lady type name of Shado, thinking she was his live-in girlfriend Dinah. This was considered "cheating" by the author and all characters involved for years, and is still thought of as such by most of the fandom.

Then there was the Nightwing storyline, where an alien shapeshifter took the form of his girlfriend Starfire, and they had sex, and Starfire broke up with him for cheating on her.

Then there was the Superman Porno Tape thing, which has pretty much the same connotations....

Really, there's a lot of that sort of thing going around in comics.

And also the time Catalina had sex with him, even though he was saying “no” which seemed kind of skeevy, but it was treated like she was just sort of… bold.

My favorite part is how Devin Grayson flat-out called it rape - or, actually, I think it was something weird like "no, it definitely wasn't consensual but I wouldn't call it rape" or something bizarre like that - and like, nobody cares. She's an important piece of the Batfamily battle during War Games right after. Dick never comments on it.

And just to make it all that much muddier, Gail Simone's currently using her as a significant character in Secret Six, and this was her comment on what happened on the roof:

As for the 'rape' scene, I have some feelings about that. I don't think Nightwing could be completely forced even under the weird circumstances. I think that makes him a participant, even if he is somewhat diminished--but 'diminished' for Nightwing is different than getting a co-ed drunk at a party. I still don't think he'd be involved if he didn't want to be on some level. He might've felt it was a huge mistake ten seconds later, but he'd hardly be the first person male or female to feel that way. I'm not avoiding it because it's 'dangerous,' or anything. It just hasn't come up yet.

Which... actually makes me much *more* inclined to consider it rape than I did before.

OMG, Simone, *facepalm*

I don't think that co-ed drunk comparison was helpful. Or…. good.

"He must have consented, because he would have stopped her if he didn't want it" is a totally okay thing to say, right? Not skeevy at all?

Although TBH, I'll totally admit to a double-standard on Catalina myself. She really intrigues me, and I sympathize with her the same way I do Catman or Deadshot, these people who are bad and do evil things but are complicated and sometimes seem just a step away from redemption. I want to see her get the chance to shine and get better treatment as a character. On the other hand, flip Nightwing for Black Canary and Tarantula for Bane in that rooftop scene, and Bane would be absolutely dead to me. I'd want him gone, and anything that tried to treat him as a protagonist would creep me out and piss me off.

It's a weird thing to realize about myself and I'm still trying to unpack it.

Haha, oh Nightwing is terrible. I didn't know about the Kory storyline, only the Catalina one. They do seem to treat him like a target for this kind of thing.

Wasn't there dodgy stuff as well where Raven was trying to manipulate him into a relationship?

Yeah, the fact that gretel_dragon was like "Uh, you have to be more specific, there's lots of plots like that" was pretty telling :)

I think the scene in Buffy where Riley sleeps with Faith-as-Buffy was ok-ish, in that Buffy was annoyed that Riley didn't notice the difference but didn't see it as cheating per se. I think, it's been a while.

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