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Jan. 13th, 2012 07:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatAw..nobody responded to my movie trailer post. (pouts) Not that I really expected anyone too. But...one squee over the Spiderman Trailer would have been fun. Apparently I'm the only one who thinks the Avengers trailer is lame?
Work has put me in a pissy mood. For lack of a better term. I am tempted to hibernate tomorrow and not deal with people. I had a headache by the end of the day...from email. Sigh. Project Managers and Engineers. Sigh. Actually - the men at work drove me nuts. Patronizing bastards. Who were completely clueless. One guy insisted on talking to another guy, and refused to listen to me, because I was female. I told him I was managing the project and had only pulled the other guy in for a bit of help. He was "assisting" me NOT the other way around. I know, shocking, but there it is.
After much thought and analysis, I've decided that Buffy the Vampire Slayer the Television series, in spite of Whedon or because of him (on the fence) was feminist. It unlike all his other stories did not fall into the victimized little girl trope popularized by Luc Besson and later by Stieg Larrson. I'm sorry, the victimized little girl trope is not what I'd consider feminist. How is showing a girl repeatedly at the mercy of men, until she finally gets fed up and kicks them in the balls feminist? It feels more like male guilt or a way of handling that guilt (much like the magical black man helped and aided by the nice white couple in The Blind Side is about white liberal guilt not the black experience and is insidiously racist), and in a way - female revenge fantasy, which is okay, I guess, but not what I'd define as feminist or even misogynist for that matter. Just female revenge fantasy.
What I liked about Buffy the TV Series is two things: 1) Buffy was not and never was a victim. She wasn't raped. She didn't let it happen. 2) She took the reins. She was a hero like guys are heroes. She didn't have to become a victim first. She was like Peter Parker in Spiderman.
My main problem with the victimized little girl trope is the girl can only become physically powerful and a hero after she is raped and tortured by men, not before. She can't be a hero just because she is - like men can. Buffy prior to the episode "Get it Done" was not about the victimized little girl. And in many ways subverted the stereotype portraying traditional male roles throughout much of the series (with the possible exception of the first two seasons). That is however the only thing that I've seen or read that Whedon has written that I can say that about. I don't know why or when he decided women can only be powerful after they've been brutally tortured by men or at the mercy of men. Nor do I know why everything else he created is scarily and disappointingly sexist in places, not completely, just in places. I suspect somewhere along the line Whedon fell into the same fantasy as Luc Besson and Stieg Larrson? Where he assauges his own guilt by creating a fantastical heroine who kills her rapist over and over again. She does what he'd do if he were female - as a friend of mine neatly put it. Forgetting the power women have which is uniquely our own. We don't have to kill the rapist to survive. We can forget he exists. Excise him from our memory. Or in some cases transform the experience into one that is not painful and lacks power. There are ways to handle things that do not require fists or guns. We can rise above. Our lives are not about our gender. Most of the time, we don't think about being women. We are just ourselves.
Sorry I keep editing this. I think one of the things I love most about lj and the internet social mediums...particularly the fanboards, is you can't always tell who is male or female, black or white, rich or poor, old or young, queer or straight...these things fall away. What we see is the essence of the individual, not the constructs or short-hand categories that we use to define one another. Race, gender, class, all of these things...fall away. You can fall in love with a person, not what they look like, not their physical essence. We live in such a material world, so physical, the internet..often strips that physical materiality away...and we are left with each others words and our perceptions of them. I love that. I can be male on the internet (people on a fanboard actually thought I was for a bit) and I can be black, I can be
short, I can be young, I can be ancient. I can be whatever I want. Rich, poor. It's freeing. Until people find out...and then that's lost.
Work has put me in a pissy mood. For lack of a better term. I am tempted to hibernate tomorrow and not deal with people. I had a headache by the end of the day...from email. Sigh. Project Managers and Engineers. Sigh. Actually - the men at work drove me nuts. Patronizing bastards. Who were completely clueless. One guy insisted on talking to another guy, and refused to listen to me, because I was female. I told him I was managing the project and had only pulled the other guy in for a bit of help. He was "assisting" me NOT the other way around. I know, shocking, but there it is.
After much thought and analysis, I've decided that Buffy the Vampire Slayer the Television series, in spite of Whedon or because of him (on the fence) was feminist. It unlike all his other stories did not fall into the victimized little girl trope popularized by Luc Besson and later by Stieg Larrson. I'm sorry, the victimized little girl trope is not what I'd consider feminist. How is showing a girl repeatedly at the mercy of men, until she finally gets fed up and kicks them in the balls feminist? It feels more like male guilt or a way of handling that guilt (much like the magical black man helped and aided by the nice white couple in The Blind Side is about white liberal guilt not the black experience and is insidiously racist), and in a way - female revenge fantasy, which is okay, I guess, but not what I'd define as feminist or even misogynist for that matter. Just female revenge fantasy.
What I liked about Buffy the TV Series is two things: 1) Buffy was not and never was a victim. She wasn't raped. She didn't let it happen. 2) She took the reins. She was a hero like guys are heroes. She didn't have to become a victim first. She was like Peter Parker in Spiderman.
My main problem with the victimized little girl trope is the girl can only become physically powerful and a hero after she is raped and tortured by men, not before. She can't be a hero just because she is - like men can. Buffy prior to the episode "Get it Done" was not about the victimized little girl. And in many ways subverted the stereotype portraying traditional male roles throughout much of the series (with the possible exception of the first two seasons). That is however the only thing that I've seen or read that Whedon has written that I can say that about. I don't know why or when he decided women can only be powerful after they've been brutally tortured by men or at the mercy of men. Nor do I know why everything else he created is scarily and disappointingly sexist in places, not completely, just in places. I suspect somewhere along the line Whedon fell into the same fantasy as Luc Besson and Stieg Larrson? Where he assauges his own guilt by creating a fantastical heroine who kills her rapist over and over again. She does what he'd do if he were female - as a friend of mine neatly put it. Forgetting the power women have which is uniquely our own. We don't have to kill the rapist to survive. We can forget he exists. Excise him from our memory. Or in some cases transform the experience into one that is not painful and lacks power. There are ways to handle things that do not require fists or guns. We can rise above. Our lives are not about our gender. Most of the time, we don't think about being women. We are just ourselves.
Sorry I keep editing this. I think one of the things I love most about lj and the internet social mediums...particularly the fanboards, is you can't always tell who is male or female, black or white, rich or poor, old or young, queer or straight...these things fall away. What we see is the essence of the individual, not the constructs or short-hand categories that we use to define one another. Race, gender, class, all of these things...fall away. You can fall in love with a person, not what they look like, not their physical essence. We live in such a material world, so physical, the internet..often strips that physical materiality away...and we are left with each others words and our perceptions of them. I love that. I can be male on the internet (people on a fanboard actually thought I was for a bit) and I can be black, I can be
short, I can be young, I can be ancient. I can be whatever I want. Rich, poor. It's freeing. Until people find out...and then that's lost.
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no subject
Date: 2012-01-14 04:52 am (UTC)I think that's the big problem with for a lot of mainstream creators, they just can't the idea that gender or race or sexual orientation isn't front and centre in the minds of people who fall outside of their own white male default setting. Thus we end up with "edgy" jokes about race or endless movies with women "owning their sexuality" by dressing in fetish wear and manipulating men. Funny, the women I've known who were the most comfortable with sex didn't give a shit about how they looked and were incredibly straightforward about their expectations.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-14 03:58 pm (UTC)