Halli's Story

Being a later Millennial is fascinating. We're both too old (brightly colored hair) and too young (retirement accounts, owning a home) for many things. We came of age when desktop PCs were a strange kind of DIY kit where you had to learn file systems and CSS and HTML to do pretty much anything cool online (and let's not forget dial-up internet), when now everything is touchscreens and pretty self-explanatory.

We might be going the way of Generation Jones, but there's many more of us and we're tired all the damn time.

But we also grew up in a very strange time for media. The late 1990s and early 2000s was very give and take: new music, movies, TV shows, competed with print media for our attention. Celebrity gossip was a huge obsession. MTV and TRL and premiering music videos. A strange, hedonistic wasteland filled with the reputations and careers of women who dared to stand up and speak out. No one was safe - not Britney, Paris, Lindsay, Christina, any of them. And these were pretty, thin, pampered white women. Heaven forbid you be gay or bi or trans or a women or person of color.

So the cultural touchstones of those years are remembered for what they did right, and for the many things they did wrong. Women were often the victims. The first real fandom I remember being a part of was for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And remember, this is in the nascent era of fandom being online, in chat forums and on sites like LiveJournal. There has been a resurgence of nostalgia for the time, but the critical lens of those of us looking back doesn't miss on what was truly fucked up.

Buffy was the Chosen One. Powerful. Smart. Pretty. Thin. White. Blonde. But she was aspirational in a way that the women on my mom's soap operas weren't - she kicked bad guy ass, and did it with snark and sarcasm, and yet gave us intense moments of empathy. And it seemed to a young me that her star-crossed and forbidden love story with Angel, a two-century old vampire cursed with a soul, was the epitome of romance.

And that's as much as I can say that even bordering on good about that whole scenario. First of all, the age gap is more like an age canyon. Angel loses his soul when he has sex with a 16 year old Buffy. The metaphor alone is bad enough, but then comes all the trauma of Buffy being stalked and terrorized by her former (adult, vampire) lover and clearly the point is that she had sex and should be shamed, stalked, and terrorized.

I have no idea why we thought this was feminist.

There's so much we could look at - Xander's character, the treatment of Willow's gay awakening, the weird thing between Cordelia and Wesley, Spike's entire character and backstory, and on and on. (We'll talk about THAT SCENE in a moment.)

And behind all of this and so much more (the mostly white cast, the treatment of characters of color when they did appear, the literal TAKING OF VOICES, the constant sex jokes, shaming Buffy as a slut and a dumb blonde, that Slayers get their powers bestowed upon them by a group of men who torture her…) was Joss Whedon.

"..Joss Whedon's influence on the show is undeniable. As the creator and showrunner, he set the tone for Buffy. The quippy dialogue, the fun action scenes, and yes, the underlying cruelty and abuse that ran unmistakably through the show's seven seasons."

"Buffy hasn't been praised as a "bad but lovable show." People will die on the altar of Buffy, hold it up as a beacon of feminism, and I think it's important that we examine exactly why we have all been so easily fooled by a show, and a creator, riddled with such blatant misogyny."

Even Buffy herself isn't often more than an ideal - if she was a regular teenager, she'd be vampire-bait. But Slayer powers are given to the Chosen One, and Buffy was just a regular girl before that happened. One of the moments I remember the most is her not wanting the power, and telling Giles that she never wanted it and just wanted to be that regular girl. And it's probably a jump to say this, but I always thought that to be a metaphor for the things forced on women and the deeply skewed way society views them. They have to be polite and sweet and pretty but if they can't defend themselves, then they had it coming. Or maybe they always had it coming, and are always being thrust into roles they didn't ask for and that someone else, usually a man, defined for them.

"I think it was necessary for Buffy, a show that was, at its core, about the pressure and fear of being a teenage girl, to address the violence that we face. It would have been weird to ignore it. But the way that it was addressed always felt off to me. There were throwaway lines from B-characters and obvious villains about how girls can't fight, set-ups so that Buffy could have some cool girl power quip before kicking their asses, but the real insidious misogyny always came from more familiar characters."

Something else that struck me not long after the show wrapped up its seventh and final season was how Buffy was always with men older than her. Angel, Riley, Spike - older, wrapped in violent pasts and/or presents, always trying to protect her and not understanding why she hated that. And given what we know about Whedon now, it's not surprising.

"In a ruthless takedown published in 2017, his ex-wife Kai Cole claimed that Whedon was a "hypocrite" who used this persona as a shield so that no one "would question his relationships with other women or scrutinize his writing as anything other than feminist." Then there was Whedon's treatment of Charisma Carpenter, who played Cordelia; "[h]e spent years traumatizing her, causing anxiety, a 'chronic physical condition,' and he eventually fired her over her decision to have a baby." He's been accused of gross, abusive conduct on many sets, from Buffy to the Justice League, and has kind of faded into the background of Hollywood.

There are predators everywhere, and sometimes they call themselves feminists.

So now let's talk about a certain scene from season 6, and fair warning, this is the scene that actor James Marsters, who played Spike, has called out again and again as being awful to film.

"In season 6, Buffy is raped by her on-again/off-again love interest, Spike. The scene is brutal, but the rape itself is depicted as the actions of a desperate man to win over the woman he loves. This 'low point' inspires Spike to redeem himself, and Buffy eventually takes him back, because, in Whedon's world, a woman should always forgive her rapist once he proves that he's really sorry about it."

"Buffy sent me into therapy, actually," Marsters said. "Buffy crushed me... There was a scene where I was paired with Buffy and she breaks up with me, and then I go and I force myself on her and then she kicks me through a wall. It's a problematic scene for a lot of people who like the show. And it's the darkest professional day of my life."

The whole EW article linked here is worth the read, since Marsters has been speaking about this scene and other issues on the set for years now.

"But despite his personal feelings on the matter, he still had to show up to work and film the scene as scripted. "I was contracted to do this. I couldn't say no," he said. However, he ended up in physical and mental pain while shooting that scene."

I'm the same as James - I can't watch anything with sexual assault in it, and can barely handle reading it. He mentions in the EW article that he can't, either, and I get it. Honestly, unless a piece of media is dealing with sexual assault in a very certain way, or is a victim's story told by them or someone they trust, I don't think it's necessary at all. Ever. Even today, sexual assault is used by so many people as a way to advance the plot/story of another character, typically a man. And that's not even including fridging women (using their trauma as plot advancement). And Buffy does A LOT of fridging.

But here's the kicker - without Buffy, I probably wouldn't have a vampire infatuation. I probably wouldn't have written my debut book, Wilderwood. And while it is possible to look at the art separate from the artist, I think those instances are really rare. If we're smart about it, we can use what we learn from art we love and loved and take a critical mallet to it while reflecting on how it changed us.

Full Source List

• https://www.vox.com/culture/22350286/2000s-pop-culture-misogyny-britney-spears-janet-jackson-whitney-houston-monica-lewinsky 

• https://sammmauchward.medium.com/buffy-was-the-first-piece-of-evidence-that-joss-whedon-is-an-abusive-misogynist-cd33705e0838 

• https://www.blossommag.com/post/real-monsters-reckoning-with-the-inherent-misogyny-of-buffy-the-vampire-slayer 

• https://thenewfeminist.co.uk/2022/04/why-the-2000s-was-a-sexist-wasteland/ 

• https://www.thewrap.com/joss-whedon-feminist-hypocrite-infidelity-affairs-ex-wife-kai-cole-says/ 

• https://ew.com/james-marsters-reflects-on-fighting-against-controversial-buffy-the-vampire-slayer-assault-scene-8706632