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

[blackjackrocket.livejournal.com]

Well you know that and I know that, but as you're well aware, there's people out there who'll look at someone and say "she slept with multiple guys and she wears revealing clothes--she MUST be a slut!" without looking at the specifics. (actually, I know a fandom where they talk about a guy for being a slut and he doesn't wear revealing clothes...and also he sleeps with like three women over the course of the series, spanning about twenty years)

[alias_sqbr]

Yeah, those sorts of people are annoying. * is reminded of this recent post off metafandom* But past a certain point you have to just accept that some people will take entirely the wrong message away from your story and move on :)

[blackjackrocket.livejournal.com]

I also have this feeling they're going to take the male and female leads (a couple) both having affairs after being seperated for a long time as drastically different as well even though they're meant to be mirrors of each other.