Tag: joss whedon

thevipsupersecretsupperclub:

kaylapocalypse:

me-see-world:

What really sucks about the way Joss Whedon writes is that he sort of has this idea that if he writes about women being strong and confident, that is all it takes for women to appreciate his work. Like, even if the villain constantly belittles a woman for being a woman and people are constantly harassing her and sexualizing her, it’s okay because she’s strong and she can take it.

The biggest difference between Whedon’s version of Wonder Woman and Jenkins is that in Whedon’s version Wonder Woman is A Woman. She (and the audience) must be constantly aware that she is a Woman, that she is Sexy, that she is overcoming incredible odds because she has the terrible disadvantage of Being Born A Woman.

Whereas in Jenkins’ film Diana simply exists. There are some points made by other characters about her being a woman, like when Steve won’t sleep with her because he feels it’s improper, or when his secretary says, “Oh yes, put specs on her, like after that she won’t be the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen”, but Diana is almost completely unaware of her status as a Dreaded Woman. Her excitement over a baby? She’s literally never seen one before. Her little makeover seen? Spends the whole thing looking for something comfortable she can fight in. She basically never mentions the difference between men and women, never even says that women are better or whatever because she was raised by them. 

Joss Whedon would have never let Wonder Woman forget she was a Woman. She would have constantly been making comments about it, wether positive or negative, as would everyone around her. In Whedon’s heyday that might have flown a lot better, but now women seem to be a little sick of grrrrl power. They just want power. They just want to exist, both on screen and in life, without constant reminders that they are Women and that they must pay for that at every turn.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^


now women seem to be a little sick of grrrrl power. They just want
power. They just want to exist, both on screen and in life, without
constant reminders that they are Women and that they must pay for that
at

every turn

somekindamermaid:

laureljupiter:

laureljupiter:

I’m looking at screenshots of this horde of furious girls and women destroying Joss Whedon on twitter and it’s so great

Motherfucker you knew you were a misogynist and a fraud in 2002 when you wrote the autobiographical Buffy episode about Andrew the filmmaker fetishizing the pain and hero stories of the house full of women who despise him, and now it’s finally coming crashing down on you and happening in real life.

I sincerely hope some of those girls calling him a piece of shit and a trash can and demanding, “fight me” shook him; this has been his deepest fear about his behavior towards women for over a decade now, but he hasn’t made a change, and he’s always known on some level that he deserves to be hated for it.

BUFFY: Are you still filming me? Stop.
ANDREW: But it’s a valuable record. A-an important document for the ages. ‘A Slayer in Action.’
BUFFY: ‘A Nerd in Pain.’ Would they like that? Cause we could do that.

BUFFY: When your blood pours out it might save the world. What do you think about that? Does it buy it all back? Are you redeemed?
ANDREW: No.

Ugh ok ok I actually have a ridiculous amount of words about this (hi ocelot, can I post those emails from 2012??)  But I wanted to say that this… idk.  This has been a long time coming for Joss and it’s absolutely a bed he made for himself, and it makes me gratified on a brutal visceral level to see it coming back to bite him, but a lot of that anger is watching an artist I loved curdle into his own self-hate and turn into the kind of awful man he used to write about.  Joss…Joss has had a recurrent fantasy of self-loathing and shame about his treatment of female characters and actresses that started, afaik, in season 6 of Buffy, with the introduction of the three nerd villains Warren, Jonathan, and Andrew.

The initial patriarchal villains of the Buffyverse were men who abused women using either brute strength or political power: Angelus, the Watchers, the Mayor. The three nerds introduced another kind of misogynistic male antagonist that grew to dominate and completely consume Joss’s work in the 00s: the nerdy, story-obsessed guy who used his intelligence and mastery of technology to abuse and control strong, heroic women.  Nerdy men who, like Joss, either created or tampered with the women they wanted total control over, either by building androids or altering existing women, usually via invasive medical torture.  Joss the writer invents the character of Buffy while having workplace clashes with her actress Sarah Michelle Gellar;  Andrew, Warren, and Jonathan drug their girlfriends into compliance and create the BuffyBot to obey their will.  This villain character would show up again and again in Joss’ later works: the scientist who had, thanks to his technical and storytelling skills, been given custody by higher powers over women who would normally be far out of their range of influence. And, uncomfortably, all of the actors cast for these roles bore a striking physical resemblance to Joss.

When Joss aired “Storyteller”, I was surprised and impressed.  It was penned by Jane Espenson, Buffy’s strongest staff writer, and was a story about Andrew the Joss doppelganger filming the house of potential Slayers for a series he called “Buffy, Slayer of the Vampyres.”  A major theme of “Storyteller” was Andrew’s intrusive use of the Buffy cast’s personal lives and pain to make a good story, his refusal to acknowledge their privacy, and possibly, as Anya kept insisting, to use his videos as masturbation material.  It seemed like a huge moment of self- awareness and self-reflection about the relationship Joss had to the real and fictional women who worked for him, especially given the conflicts he had at the time with actresses like Charisma Carpenter over her character Cordelia and personal bodily autonomy (pregnancy).   It was self-critical and raw and I was incredibly proud of Joss for being willing to go there in such a public way.

Buffy ended, and Andrew redeemed himself, but the misogynist-nerd-self-loathing metastory intensified. One of the aspects of the Three Nerds villain arc that had always made me profoundly uncomfortable was the way Joss positioned the boys’ nerdy pursuits and lack of traditional masculinity– not just their treatment of women– as something inherently repulsive. 
Viewers were supposed to be disgusted by the sight of three dorky boys nerding out over Star Wars figurines.  Buffy and the house full of potential slayers call Andrew vile names for being a nerd, not in response to his behavior; by the end of his run, I felt the urge to protect Andrew, not from the girls, but from Joss, who was clearly using him as a punching bag onto which he was projecting his own self-loathing.  (Eventually Joss was quoted saying that Andrew was, as had been hinted, gay, but would remain in the closet indefinitely “because it’s funny,” something that horrified and enraged fans, but which Joss seemed to view, appallingly, as as an ultimate emasculation.)   

The next major Joss project was Dollhouse, with evil scientist and Joss lookalike Topher Brink programming, manipulating, and violating various women into playacting roles he’d scripted for them.  It was such a blatant story about Joss and his actresses it was difficult to watch.  Like, My Feminism Is Just An Excuse To Exploit Hot Actresses, I Am Such A Disgusting Creature!!!  Coming soon to the CW!   His next project, the webseries I Am So Horrible And My Feminism Is A Sham, featuring NPH as the Joss stand-in, was similarly cringeworthy. 

A big outlier here is Wash, from Firefly and Serenity, who almost fit the pattern, but not quite, and that “not quite” was enough of a problem that, like the similar character Oz, he had to be written out of the story.  Alan Tudyk had the same general physical resemblance to Joss and the same dress sense as Andrew, Topher, and Billy Horrible.  His dinosaur theater sessions looked and sounded like the action figure games the Trio played, and the blurb for Joss’s media company, Mutant Enemy.   But unlike all the other nerdy blond men of the Whedonverse, Wash was in a equal and loving relationship with the strong soldier woman he adored.  Other characters in the series were preoccupied with the traditional gender role imbalance in Wash and Zoe’s marriage and questioned whether Wash felt emasculated by his wife being stronger than he was, but both Wash and Zoe were completely above and untouched by it.  She was a warrior woman and she was married to a dorky guy who told stories and who wasn’t the most physically powerful man on her crew.  She could have broken him in half with her pinky and they loved and respected each other and had a happy, healthy marriage. This was, somehow, too much for Joss to handle, and so Wash had to die. 

When venting about Joss I want to say that the problem isn’t that Joss was always terrible, or that all of his work was tainted or had a poisonous message from the beginning.  It wasn’t; Buffy was and still is incredibly important; it had the kind of powerful emotional intelligence that burrows into your heart and stays there and I think it still stands by itself, years later.  Buffy still stands.  Charles Gunn still stands.  Anya still stands.  When my mother passed away last year, I watched “The Body” like a ritual, and I know I’m not the only person to have done something similar.  That canon isn’t going anywhere.

The problem is that at some point in his career, Joss became so intent on the masochistic fantasy of being hated by strong women for being a nerd that he spent a decade writing stories about violating those women to ensure they would hate him.   I wish Joss had ended that obsession with “Storyteller.”  I wish he had talked about the feelings that made him want to make “Dollhouse” with his therapist and tried to make things right with Charisma Carpenter instead of turning those particular personal demons into a bad TV show.  I wish the ideas of intimacy and equality weren’t so threatening to him that he had to write men like Oz and Wash out of existence instead of trying to evolve into them.  I wish he hadn’t let himself fall into that pit of destructive self-loathing back in 2002, and I wish he hadn’t stayed there so long that he started to turn that hate outward onto the women he perceived as loathing and rejecting him.  I wish he hadn’t turned, in twenty years, from the man who wanted to see the blonde girl in the horror movie survive and thrive into the rich bastard who thought it was funny to call Natasha Romanoff a cunt on IMAX and who called her a monster for being the victim of medical abuse.   I’m still laughing angrily at Joss being driven off twitter by a mob of angry, betrayed female fans, because wow does he ever deserve it, but man, Joss.  It didn’t have to be that way.

also let’s not forget Xander Harris who was a horrible misogynist from the very first episode of Buffy and very much a Joss Whedon self-insert

Xander who was never once called out for his bs and continued to behave horribly and treat the women in his life like property, who went on to have fantasies about the Potentials most of whom were minors… Xander who left Anya at the alter and then acted as though he had any right to be angry with her for sleeping with Spike…

honestly I could go on but this is already a long post and I’m tired

septembriseur:

Wow, OK, I had kind of conceptualized that Joss Whedon post along the lines of “here are some random thoughts that I’m gonna store behind a cut in case a few people are interested,” not expecting so many people to reblog it. But since there was so much interest, I ended up thinking about it more. And the direction my thinking took me in was this: what is it that women find attractive in male and female characters, and to what extent does this match up with what men assume that women find attractive in these characters?

Here’s the thing: I honestly do not believe that Joss Whedon understands himself as writing for an exclusively male audience. I believe that he thinks to himself: “Wow! This is so great! I’m writing for girls, I’m writing to empower girls, I’m writing the characters that women want!” (For one thing, this is the line that has been fed to him by the media as a positive and important aspect of his work.) There are tons of male writers/directors who are very open about the fact that they are not interested in the female audience. (David Goyer comes to mind.) But Joss Whedon is not one of them. So what is going on with the disconnect between what he understands himself to be doing and what we see him doing?

This disconnect doesn’t just have to do with female characters, either. I’m reminded of that Tumblr post that compares two magazine covers featuring Hugh Jackman: a men’s magazine on which he appears bulging-veined, huge-muscled, and sort of terrifying and weird, and a women’s magazine on which he appears as a slim, athletic guy smiling and wearing a sweater. Anyone who reads comics is familiar with this weirdness: comics heroes are often depicted as nightmarishly hyper-muscled, enormous man-mountains. (Interestingly, this trend grew more and more exaggerated as women became more and more nominally liberated— that is, as they should have been more and more able to communicate what they wanted, including what they wanted from men.) Hyper-masculinity is almost always framed in terms of being attractive— to women or, for gay men, to other men— and sometimes even talked about in the same breath as “the female gaze.” Yet, as that Tumblr post points out, while “the female gaze” is attracted by things like a naked, sweaty Chris Evans or Idris Elba, it’s also attracted by things like: men smiling in sweaters, men crying (DON’T LIE TUMBLR), barefoot fragile Sebastian Stan in the rain on Political Animals, men holding babies, men speaking foreign languages, Mark Ruffalo, and a whole bunch of weird stuff on Ao3 that I don’t even wanna get into. And that’s just “the female gaze as it pertains to men.” 

But think about whether men would agree that this is what women find attractive in men. Imagine a men’s magazine that offers tips on being attractive to women that include: looking fragile, being a bumbling scientist, acting like a helpless meatball, expressing affection to tiny children, blushing, being intensely interested in gorgeous clothes, etc, etc. This is hard to imagine. In fact, these are characteristics that are typically characterized as not ideal for men, because they are coded as feminine. Yet they’re also not only traits that are commonly attractive to women, but are generally accepted as commonly attractive to women, if one looks at “women’s” entertainment (romantic comedies, chick lit, anything in which Hugh Grant appears). 

What I’m getting at is that there is a division between what attracts women and what men accept/permit as attracting women. Men are engaged in a constant enforcement of heteronormativity, a policing of women’s desire and their own accession to it. What women want is subordinate to what men decide that women want, and the latter is then culturally broadcast as the ideological “what women want” that becomes accepted.

This is true also in the case of female characters. What do women want in female characters? Well, I mean, a lot of us just want female characters for the love of God. But specifically: some of the most popular current female characters in comics/MCU fandom are: Natasha Romanoff, in a movie (Cap 2) where she only briefly appeared in a sexy bodysuit and instead spent most of her time wearing jeans and a hoodie, wisecracking, having a complex narrative about salvation, and hacking computers, not to mention the down-to-earth Phil Noto comics depiction, who even (GASP) sometimes wears a ponytail; Peggy Carter, a 1940s secret agent with little patience for men; Kamala Khan, a teenage Pakistani-American girl who writes fan fiction and wears a modest homemade costume; Darcy Lewis, who’s full-figured, socially awkward, and not a superhero; the lady scientists of the MCU (Jane Foster, Maya Hansen, Betty Ross)… I could go on.

But what do men apparently believe that women want in female characters? Well, going by Joss Whedon: superheroines who wear catsuits, beat up men, are secretly very vulnerable, and are sexually threatened, fragile and unstable girl-women with superpowers beyond their control… oh, wait. That’s it. Expanding beyond Whedon, the most common characteristics tend to be: aggressively sexy, sexually threatened, beats up bad men but is secretly vulnerable. I discussed already one potential reason this is attractive to men (see my previous post); my issue here is: this is not what women want, but it is what men believe that women want, because it is what they have been told by other men that women want. 

Once again, what women want is ignored (or, more accurately, invisibilized— in that men deny or are oblivious to its existence) in favor of the ideological construct of “what women want,” which is determined and enforced by men. Men genuinely believe that they know what women want, and are earnest in their attempts to explain “what women want” to women. They are deeply confused, because of course they know what women want! Right? They are unable to see that they are selling a version of “what women want” is essentially “what it would be attractive to men for women to want.” 

That is the center of this thing: everything revolves around what men want. What type of female heroine would be most attractive to men? If she has to be strong, what type of strength would men find attractive? How can she be “feminist” but still attractive to men? This seems obvious, yet men seem to find it invisible.

One of the most interesting angles from which to consider this is that of the queer/lesbian woman. That is the viewpoint that is most invisibilized in this discussion, because it simply has no relevance or importance to men’s desires. The woman who is not sexually available to men does not exist within a system that assesses women’s value based on sexual availability to men. The gay male gaze is comprehensible, because it can conform to existing ideas about the male body’s desirability (though it does not always). Indeed, the gay male gaze is often preferable to the female gaze, because it sidesteps the problematic female perspective. The lesbian gaze, however, is fundamentally incomprehensible. It is the divide-by-zero point of the system. What does a woman want if she doesn’t want men and doesn’t want what-men-want-from-women? This is the perspective from which it’s easiest to see the bizarreness of what’s going on, the degree to which it is all centrally tied up with men.

This is, not incidentally, the reason that it’s so important for women to have creative control over projects. For women to write, produce, direct. As long as men dominate these positions, representations of what women want will be filtered through them. It’s not accidental that two of the most popular female comics characters among women (Kamala Khan and Captain Marvel) are being written by women. We need female creators; we need female voices. It’s the only way to end the invisibilization of women’s desires.