Annoying sexism and Joss Whedon

[sqbr]

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.

Comments

[grahame.livejournal.com]

At some point you've just got to say that people like looking at pretty people. No television show is going to get very far having ugly women (or men) in great numbers just to be PC. I guess you do have a point with the whole she-gets-hotter-as-she-gets-evil thing, but she-gets-uglier-as-she-gets-evil wouldn't really have worked!

You do have the whole GELF pus-monster in Red Dwarf thing though!

[alias_sqbr]

Oh, yeah, I'm not railing against the fact all women on tv are generally pretty(*), but there's pretty and then there's being explicitly sexualised into a particular cliche. I mean as with any cliche there are some evil women who, while still tv-pretty, aren't bad-girl sexualized: Lilah from Angel (mostly), Evil!Wendy from the Middleman, um...Anyway, that's not the same as putting on a leather corset and seducing the hero, you know?

(*)Though I think there could be more unpretty ones, there's plenty of unpretty men, even if the average is still pretty far above normal

[minim_calibre]

Lilah was pretty specifically bad-girl sexualized, just using older tropes. As they moved her into a more central role, and introduced the relationship with Wesley, they upped the noir/femme fatale aspect of her look until she could have come straight out of a remake of Double Indemnity.

[alias_sqbr]

Hmm, that's a good point. She wasn't in a corset, but she was pretty sexualised in her way, certainly more than Lindsey.

[greteldragon.livejournal.com]

Lindsey was hot.

I can't remember how much of that was delibrate sexualisation, but he did seem to be delibrate contrasting Angels repression, with regards to the sexy. But yeah not in the same way or amount that Lilah was hot, I suppose.

[alias_sqbr]

Mmm.