Lmao!
Sadly, the way this came to me, I don’t have the original poster’s link. If I find it, I’ll edit in the content source.
Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters.
Brilliant work from Mike Grell, basically a tv show in comic book format. Extraordinary, and not to be missed.
There’s just this gross continuity in Joss Whedon’s work of women who have been sexually assaulted - and, more than that, a large majority of them are changed or motivated by this abuse into becoming the empowered “feminist” characters he so often lampoons. It’s just… really…
OK, as a Whedon fan and a feminist, I feel the need to offer a rebuttal. I see this post as a big example of people being able to see whatever the hell they want to see. There was a rape scene in Buffy (arguably one of the show’s worst moments, I admit) and as soon as people watch it, they start to see rape everywhere in his work.
When Buffy shares her power with her fellow slayers in the finale, she’s actually subjecting all of them to rape? Really? The shows Buffy and its spinoff Angel both tell the same story in different ways: the main character has an epic destiny that comes with superpowers and a lot of responsibility. The main character doesn’t really want this destiny, but eventually accepts it as a part of who they are. In both cases, this character is the title character. One is a woman and one is a man. Buffy’s power came from men forcing it on her. Angel’s came from a woman forcing it on him. But nobody talks about Angel getting raped because that doesn’t fit with the sexist idea for Whedon they’ve built up in their heads. I didn’t see rape in the flashback where we learned about the slayers’ power origins. I saw a group of stupid men seeing something that they didn’t want to do and deciding to make the women do it again. That’s it. We don’t call “rape!” every time a show has a woman rebelling against men forcing her to be a housewife or generally do something he didn’t want to do…because that’s fucking ridiculous. The men who created the slayers eventually become the watchers, the men who try to control Buffy and take credit for her work…so she kicks their asses. And that’s the point. Buffy and all the other slayers refuse to be controlled by the patriarchy.
Angel takes place in a world of demons and demonic possession…so obviously there’s going to be a running theme of people losing control of their bodies as they are taken over by evil people. But nobody complains when Angel is forced to switch bodies with an old man who wants to live forever, or when Spike is controlled by the First and loses all control of his actions, his body used as a killing machine. Could possession be a metaphor for rape? Sure, if you intend it to be. Joss uses it as a vehicle for including characters without bodies. Where’s the rape outcry about Castiel using Jimmy Novak’s body on Supernatural? Or, for that matter, every demon on Supernatural and every bodyswap that has happened on every scifi show ever?
Getting into Dollhouse gets a little more complicated because it’s essentially a show about high-tech prostitution. It’s important to point out that prostitution =/= rape and, while this show does occasionally mess up (and I think we can forgive it because it’s taking on a lot of difficult issues and manages to always come out on top anyway) it is mainly about a group of people who, because they are basically sex workers, are considered less than human, not whole people (and how the people for whom they work feel that it is necessary to physically remove as much of their humanity as they can) and how these people basically say “fuck that” and take back their identities. It’s also sort of about how the apocalypse that comes as a result of stripping people of their identities and that plotline probably could’ve been integrated a lot better if Fox hadn’t cut the show short.
And now let’s look at the Trio’s rape scene in season 6. Because I don’t see any evidence of rape culture or rape fetishism there. It isn’t necessarily bad for rape to be included in a plot if it’s done well and for a certain purpose. The worst villains in Whedon shows are always the misogynistic ones and this scene is a perfect example of that - because Buffy is good and therefore cannot cause much harm to humans without guilt. The trio are all human and previously were joke villains, robbing banks and causing general mayhem, but not worthy of slayer justice. After this scene, we stop seeing Warren as human because he has done the worst thing possible and can never be forgiven. For those who haven’t seen this scene, Warren drugs his ex-girlfriend with some magical substance to make her submit to him. It wears off (before he actually manages to do anything) and she runs, telling him and his two friends who helped that they’re rapists. They are all shocked for a moment, having clearly not thought about it like that and I really liked that Joss did that because he pointed out something that society loves to ignore - consent doesn’t count if someone isn’t clear-headed and rape with this kind of “consent” is still rape. In a world that still doesn’t want to count it as “rape” unless the victim kicked and screamed “NO,” this is a good message to get out to the general public and I think Whedon did it well.
Rape culture pisses me off, too, but you don’t help anyone by seeing rape in every instance of men hurting women or by calling every instance of rape in TV “fetishism.” Because so many of the problems of rape culture come from people refusing to really think about it and when TV discusses rape, this can be a good thing even if it makes people uncomfortable. Joss Whedon’s shows are some of the few where you see female characters have conversations with each other about anything other than men. He’s the man who pioneered the idea that a woman can be strong while still maintaining her femininity. He’s the guy who fought tooth and nail to have the first legitimate lesbian couple on prominent TV because he hated how so many shows used girl-on-girl action to bring in viewers while only letting girls have actual relationships with boys. He’s one of the few writers who writes sex scenes that actually focus on the pleasure of the woman at least as much as that of the man. He allows prostitute characters to be empowered in their professions instead of shaming them. He made it cool for nerdy guys to call themselves feminists. He’s raised shit tons of money for Equality Now. You’d be hard-pressed to find such positive treatment of women in other TV shows, but no one is willing to accept him at face value. The internet is full of people yelling that Joss Whedon isn’t actually a feminist because…he killed off some female characters. His female characters are too feminine. His female characters are too masculine. He dares to have female characters cry. You can find rape everywhere in his stuff if you look hard enough for it. Because you can find rape anywhere if you look hard for it. But it pisses me off to no end when I see people saying “that’s exactly why I refuse to watch Whedon stuff! I don’t understand why people love him so much.” Because you need a magnifying glass to find these problems and nobody who hadn’t actually seen any of his work could possibly actually see it. They just read about it online somewhere, so it must be true.
