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

[greteldragon.livejournal.com]

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).

[kadeton.livejournal.com]

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.

Talking about comics, because I know nothing about TV

[greteldragon.livejournal.com]

*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.

[kadeton.livejournal.com]

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.

[greteldragon.livejournal.com]

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

:(

[dryope.livejournal.com]

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.

[alias_sqbr]

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 :)