dramaturgy (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dramaturgy) wrote2008-03-28 05:59 pm
dramaturgy) wrote2008-03-28 05:59 pm
Joss Whedon is a Rapist!!1! (Except for the part where he's not.)
I'm not sure why I'm trying to formulate a logical response to this, but it is some LOL inundated with "Bzuh? o_O" and frankly, it offends me. (Basically the teal deer here is that Joss Whedon is anti-feminist, even misogynistic, and shown by how his female characters are treated and characterized in Firefly, he obviously rapes his wife.) All quotes I use are from this rant (I can't really call it an essay, because there is nothing resembling objectivity here) are by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
_allecto_ for the purposes of refuting her argument (I can only presume it's a her, but on the internet you never know). I'm not seeking to change her mind because honestly, it looks like hers is pretty well made up to hate Joss Whedon and his creative works, but maybe a few more reasonable people can be convinced that maybe Buffy and Firefly are not the Devil's work. Though I am a fan (Firefly moreso than Buffy or Angel - although I would really like to get into the last two more) I will attempt to be objective and let his work speak for itself. The rant is mostly based on the pilot episode of Firefly, and she promises more to come. Oh goody. I will try to control snark since I am making an attempt at being pseudoacademic here, but I have the feeling it's not going to work.
Before we start with my own tl;dr... I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that accusing someone of a crime that there is no evidence they have committed, since it is used in a way that is meant to subvert the good that he has done and damage his credibility as a feminist, is considered libel. (So Can't Stop the Serenity has just ceased to exist? I should alertphiremangston, who spends her considerable energies arranging the Des Moines screening.) Especially when the only evidence in question is a person's creative works. Creative works are not in themselves a crime. I have a feeling that I've seen a Law and Order: SVU episode like this, but there are so many episodes of that show I haven't seen (I manage to keep seeing the same twenty or so over and over again) that it would not surprise me. Back to the topic at hand, it's one thing to dislike a man's work and say it is anti-feminist but it's completely another to accuse someone of rape. I mean. Jeez.
I find much of Joss Whedon’s work to be heavily influenced by pornography, and pornographic humour. While I would argue that there are some aspects of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer that are feminist and progressive, there is much that isn’t and I find it highly problematic that there are many very woman-hating messages contained within a show that purports itself as feminism.
What I find terrifying about this passage is the lack of examples.And the masquerade of a noun as an adjective in the last sentence. Since the rant itself is not about Buffy but Firefly, I guess it's not that big of a deal. Given that I don't know as much about Buffy as I do about Firefly, I don't really know what she is talking about because no images leap to mind or anything, but hey. I suppose it could be worse.
They [Mal and Zoe] bought a Firefly, an old space ship, and Mal calls it Serenity, after the last battle they fought for the Independence. The pilot of the ship, Wash, is Zoe’s husband. Kaylee is the ship’s mechanic and Jayne, the final member of the crew, is the brainless brawn. This bunch of criminals go around stealing things and generally doing lots of violence.
It's a genre - we're a spaghetti western set in outer space, here. In Wash's words, "Sweetie, we're crooks. If everything were right, we'd be in jail."
There is Inara, a Companion (Joss Whedon’s euphemism for women in prostitution).
Not not not true. In Heart of Gold, Inara herself calls her friend Nandi and her girls "whores":
Though we are not told a lot about the Guild and the laws that govern a Companion of the Firefly 'verse, and this is probably due to the fact that we have fourteen episodes and a movie and not much else, there are a few things that are clear. But we can talk about those when we really start going on Inara.
Zoe says, “This ship's been derelict for months. Why would they –”
Mal replies, (in Chinese) “Shut up.”
So in the very second scene of the very first episode, an episode written and directed by the great feminist Joss, a white man tells a black woman to ‘shut up’ for no apparent reason.
1. Mal is not going to say "Be quiet, please." Mal is not a character who says "Be quiet, please" when he needs someone to be quiet. He is a character who says "Shut up." If you think he wouldn't say it if it were Jayne making a protest (which , you are simply kidding yourself. (Also interrupts Wash later in the cargo hold. "Jayne, your mouth is talking, you might want to look to that." [Serenity] "Jayne, you will keep a civil tongue in that mouth or I will sew it shut." [Serenity] "
2. Since_allecto_ seems to be working off shooting scripts, let me say that Jayne DOES add his protests..
The context, I remind you, is that the crew is salvaging goods from a derelict transport and they are being approached by an Alliance Cruiser - which is, by the way, a Very Big Ship with A Lot of People while Serenity is not. So if Serenity and her crew are caught they are, as Jayne and Zoe put it, humped. Urgency is an issue and given that Mal isn't really the type to ask for silence nicely, I think "shut up" is hardly the worst trangression. (And as_allecto_ reminds us, it is not.)
The next scene we meet Kaylee, the ship’s mechanic. <- Lookee, lookee, feminist empowerment. In this scene Mal and Jayne are stowing away the cargo they just stole. Kaylee is chatting to them, happily. Jayne asks Mal to get Kaylee to stop being so cheerful. Mal replies, “Sometimes you just wanna duct tape her mouth and dump her in the hold for a month.” Yes, that is an exact quote, “Sometimes you just wanna DUCT TAPE HER MOUTH and DUMP HER IN THE HOLD FOR A MONTH.” Kaylee responds by grinning and giving Mal a kiss on the cheek and saying, “I love my Captain.”
1. First of all, the line is actually:
Okay. What part of that line is not screaming "teasing"? Kaylee is a ten on the goodness and light meter, she is sweet and more often than not the first to try and make peace. She is so high on the goodness and light meter that when it comes time for her to wield a weapon ("War Stories"), she can't do it. She is so goodness and light, Jayne watches her surgery to remove the bullet through the window. Gruff, unintelligent Jayne who earlier in the episode asks Mal to stop her from being cheerful. Could they have been... kidding?
Also please consider Mal and Kaylee's relationship. While there are those out there in the fandom who write Mal/Kaylee as a romantic relationship (and props to them, I've read a few pieces that I've enjoyed even though it is not my ship of choice), Mal and Kaylee show to me a brother/sister relationship. I'm not going to go into it in depth here. But needless to say in my experience of being a sister (albeit an older sister), I think a fair amount of teasing goes into your average siblingly relationship. There is also a strong instinct and desire to protect, shown in the other brother/sister relationship on board Serenity - Simon and River. And that sort of proection is not just physical protection:
I said I wouldn't go in depth, but I think if this is not exactly an example of protecting her physically, it's certainly a desire to protect her psychologically - her innocence, if you will.
They go to an Academy, to train in the arts of being a ‘Companion’. They belong to a Guild which regulates prostitution, forces women to endure yearly health tests and comes up with rules to make prostitution sound empowering for women. For example, one Guild rule is that the ‘Companion’ chooses her rapist, not the other way around.
Okay. This is kind of where we get into the "Bzuh? o_O" that makes my eyes cross.
Yes. The Guild does train them. Once again, we're not clear about the rules that govern the Guild but there are some things that are clear to us:
1. Companions DO choose their own clients. ("Companions choose the people they're to be with very carefully. For example, if your father had asked me to come here for him, I wouldn't have." [Jaynestown], also addressed in War Stories.)
2. Companions CAN blackball registered clients (which I would guess is a prerequisite for engaging a Companion) for mistreating them or others (and I certainly think Atherton Wing's treatment of Inara constitutes as verbal abuse, or at least threatening - and had she agreed to stay with him as a "personal companion," may have continued and worsened. Can't wait for_allecto_ to get ahold of this one!):
3. A Companion can... retire from the active life, shall we say. (Inara seems to have done so in Serenity [the movie], living at a training house and teaching them.)
4. A Companion can leave training. (Nandi does so, mentioned several times in Heart of Gold, and after her interactions in Our Mrs. Reynolds, Inara guesses that YoSafBridge has some sort of Companion training.)
5. Companions must be physically examined yearly. (Ariel)
6. I don't recall any canon evidence to the contrary, but it doesn't seem like Companions could not leave the Guild to pursue a different kind of life if she chose.
The last supposition is circumstantial, as there is no canon evidence to support it, but I think it's somewhat reasonable. The kink in this is the idea that Companions are partly Japanese Geisha and part courtesan, who are involved with their okiya their whole lives. This idea is often exploited in fic (I have seen it in a couple Mal/Inara, which is admittedly my poison of choice [I'M SUCH A DIRTY, PATRIARCHY LOVING PIECE OF CHICKMEAT] and it's even been done well once or twice), and while not wholly impossible, I think it's important to note that the idea of sex didn't even come from the "Geisha" part of the equation, and courtesans were not just prostitutes in fancier dresses. Courtesans often had careers outside of being courtesans, primarily as performers or artists, and were sometimes married, often to men lower on the social ladder than themselves, sometimes to their gain (ooh, fic bunny - STOP LIZ, STOP IT).
I can't even wade through the rest of the argument because we stop giving examples and go straight into What The Fuck. (Book wants forgiveness and assurance at the end of the pilot. It's the priest going to the harlot [and I'm spreaking strictly in terms of archtype here] for absolution. In art we call it subversion.)
I counted the amount of times women talk in the episode Serenity compared to the amount of times men talk. The result was unsurprising. Men: 458 Women: 175. So throughout the first episode men talk more than two and a half times as much as women do. And women talk mainly in questions whereas men talk in statements. Basically, this means that men direct the action and are active participants whereas women are merely observers and facilitators.
There are also four women total (really three, because River is crazy as a bug and doesn't even appear until the end of the first half of the episode, and I'm not counting Patience, either), as opposed to the six men (including the Alliance mole they kill). There are MORE men. I don't know, it might be VERY WELL that this is the case but I think this quite simply falls into the category of Thinking Too Much About It. Sometimes cigars are just cigars.
Zoe, the token black woman, acts as a legitimiser. Her role is to support Mal’s manly obsession with himself by encouraging him, calling him ‘sir’, and even starting the fights for him. Zoe is treated as a piece of meat by both her husband (Wash, another white male) and the Captain.
1. Zoe is a soldier, period. I think the fact that she is not only black but a woman and is able to be second in command on a private transport ship but in an armed forces unit renders the argument null and void. 'Sir' is how you answer.
Also, I need an icon that says Wash: The Other White Male now.
Wash and Mal fight each other for Zoe’s attention and admiration, both relying on her submission to them to get them hard and manly. In fact there is a whole episode, War Stories, devoted to Wash and Mal’s ‘rivalry’. By the word rivalry, I mean violent, homoerotic male/male courtship conducted over the body of a woman.
Hee. (So what does this make Niska? A sexual sadist?)
She [Zoe] has no female friends, in fact she tends to dislike women. For example, she is the first one to insult Saffron in the episode Our Mrs. Reynolds, calling her ‘trouble’.
Well. Isn't she trouble?
So you will forgive me for believing that the character, Wash, is a rapist and an abuser, particularly considering that he treats Zoe like an object and possession.
No. I won't. I'm sorry the women in the family have been under such dehumanizing treatment, but Your Experience Is Not Every Experience. Also, Wash, rapist and abuser? Wash is one notch below Kaylee on the goodness and light meter, and that is only because Kaylee has a teddy bear patch on her coveralls. Wash is... he's... "Can I make a suggestion that doesn't involve violence, or is this the wrong crowd for that?" (Serenity movie)
Also:
Yes. The the face and conduct of an evil rapist and abuser.
So of all the things she picks up on... she does not pick up on Jayne (who "will be in his bunk" [War Stories], "will start a fair fight ... if there's a woman" [Serenity movie], and "could stand to hear a little more of that" [Serenity movie]).
There is just a lot that is being missed in this argument. Like characterization, context, andsanity... no, those are all pretty much it. >_> It's probably also not a good thing that she's commenting on the commentary for the episode. ("I don't think I was more hated for anything on set than the Chinese." "Other than the constant sexual harrassment." ... OR, "If I was that beautiful, I would just be a bitch.")
There. I feel a little better.
_allecto_ for the purposes of refuting her argument (I can only presume it's a her, but on the internet you never know). I'm not seeking to change her mind because honestly, it looks like hers is pretty well made up to hate Joss Whedon and his creative works, but maybe a few more reasonable people can be convinced that maybe Buffy and Firefly are not the Devil's work. Though I am a fan (Firefly moreso than Buffy or Angel - although I would really like to get into the last two more) I will attempt to be objective and let his work speak for itself. The rant is mostly based on the pilot episode of Firefly, and she promises more to come. Oh goody. I will try to control snark since I am making an attempt at being pseudoacademic here, but I have the feeling it's not going to work. Before we start with my own tl;dr... I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that accusing someone of a crime that there is no evidence they have committed, since it is used in a way that is meant to subvert the good that he has done and damage his credibility as a feminist, is considered libel. (So Can't Stop the Serenity has just ceased to exist? I should alert
phiremangston, who spends her considerable energies arranging the Des Moines screening.) Especially when the only evidence in question is a person's creative works. Creative works are not in themselves a crime. I have a feeling that I've seen a Law and Order: SVU episode like this, but there are so many episodes of that show I haven't seen (I manage to keep seeing the same twenty or so over and over again) that it would not surprise me. Back to the topic at hand, it's one thing to dislike a man's work and say it is anti-feminist but it's completely another to accuse someone of rape. I mean. Jeez. I find much of Joss Whedon’s work to be heavily influenced by pornography, and pornographic humour. While I would argue that there are some aspects of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer that are feminist and progressive, there is much that isn’t and I find it highly problematic that there are many very woman-hating messages contained within a show that purports itself as feminism.
What I find terrifying about this passage is the lack of examples.
They [Mal and Zoe] bought a Firefly, an old space ship, and Mal calls it Serenity, after the last battle they fought for the Independence. The pilot of the ship, Wash, is Zoe’s husband. Kaylee is the ship’s mechanic and Jayne, the final member of the crew, is the brainless brawn. This bunch of criminals go around stealing things and generally doing lots of violence.
It's a genre - we're a spaghetti western set in outer space, here. In Wash's words, "Sweetie, we're crooks. If everything were right, we'd be in jail."
There is Inara, a Companion (Joss Whedon’s euphemism for women in prostitution).
Not not not true. In Heart of Gold, Inara herself calls her friend Nandi and her girls "whores":
MAL: A whole house full of companions... How they fixed for payment?
INARA: They're not companions. [pause] They're whores.
MAL: Thought you didn't much care for the word?
INARA: It applies. They're not registered with the Guild. They're...
MAL: Independent?
INARA: Yes. [Script]
Though we are not told a lot about the Guild and the laws that govern a Companion of the Firefly 'verse, and this is probably due to the fact that we have fourteen episodes and a movie and not much else, there are a few things that are clear. But we can talk about those when we really start going on Inara.
Zoe says, “This ship's been derelict for months. Why would they –”
Mal replies, (in Chinese) “Shut up.”
So in the very second scene of the very first episode, an episode written and directed by the great feminist Joss, a white man tells a black woman to ‘shut up’ for no apparent reason.
1. Mal is not going to say "Be quiet, please." Mal is not a character who says "Be quiet, please" when he needs someone to be quiet. He is a character who says "Shut up." If you think he wouldn't say it if it were Jayne making a protest (which , you are simply kidding yourself. (Also interrupts Wash later in the cargo hold. "Jayne, your mouth is talking, you might want to look to that." [Serenity] "Jayne, you will keep a civil tongue in that mouth or I will sew it shut." [Serenity] "
2. Since
_allecto_ seems to be working off shooting scripts, let me say that Jayne DOES add his protests.. JAYNE: If they're here for the salvage, we're humped
ZOE: If they find us at all, we're humped. Thievin' ain't exactly -
JAYNE: I don't like this -
MAL: [In Chinese] Shut up.
The context, I remind you, is that the crew is salvaging goods from a derelict transport and they are being approached by an Alliance Cruiser - which is, by the way, a Very Big Ship with A Lot of People while Serenity is not. So if Serenity and her crew are caught they are, as Jayne and Zoe put it, humped. Urgency is an issue and given that Mal isn't really the type to ask for silence nicely, I think "shut up" is hardly the worst trangression. (And as
_allecto_ reminds us, it is not.)The next scene we meet Kaylee, the ship’s mechanic. <- Lookee, lookee, feminist empowerment. In this scene Mal and Jayne are stowing away the cargo they just stole. Kaylee is chatting to them, happily. Jayne asks Mal to get Kaylee to stop being so cheerful. Mal replies, “Sometimes you just wanna duct tape her mouth and dump her in the hold for a month.” Yes, that is an exact quote, “Sometimes you just wanna DUCT TAPE HER MOUTH and DUMP HER IN THE HOLD FOR A MONTH.” Kaylee responds by grinning and giving Mal a kiss on the cheek and saying, “I love my Captain.”
1. First of all, the line is actually:
JAYNE: Captain, could you stop her from being cheerful?
MAL: I don't believe there is a power in the 'verse that can stop Kaylee from being cheerful. Sometimes you just wanna duct tape her mouth and dump her in the hold for a month.
KAYLEE: [grins, kisses his cheek] I love my captain.
Okay. What part of that line is not screaming "teasing"? Kaylee is a ten on the goodness and light meter, she is sweet and more often than not the first to try and make peace. She is so high on the goodness and light meter that when it comes time for her to wield a weapon ("War Stories"), she can't do it. She is so goodness and light, Jayne watches her surgery to remove the bullet through the window. Gruff, unintelligent Jayne who earlier in the episode asks Mal to stop her from being cheerful. Could they have been... kidding?
Also please consider Mal and Kaylee's relationship. While there are those out there in the fandom who write Mal/Kaylee as a romantic relationship (and props to them, I've read a few pieces that I've enjoyed even though it is not my ship of choice), Mal and Kaylee show to me a brother/sister relationship. I'm not going to go into it in depth here. But needless to say in my experience of being a sister (albeit an older sister), I think a fair amount of teasing goes into your average siblingly relationship. There is also a strong instinct and desire to protect, shown in the other brother/sister relationship on board Serenity - Simon and River. And that sort of proection is not just physical protection:
[Speaking of the experience in "War Stories"]
KAYLEE: Well, we all went in. Me, too... I didn't make much account of myself, I'm afraid.
MAL: I got no problem with the notion of you not killing nobody, Kaylee.
I said I wouldn't go in depth, but I think if this is not exactly an example of protecting her physically, it's certainly a desire to protect her psychologically - her innocence, if you will.
They go to an Academy, to train in the arts of being a ‘Companion’. They belong to a Guild which regulates prostitution, forces women to endure yearly health tests and comes up with rules to make prostitution sound empowering for women. For example, one Guild rule is that the ‘Companion’ chooses her rapist, not the other way around.
Okay. This is kind of where we get into the "Bzuh? o_O" that makes my eyes cross.
Yes. The Guild does train them. Once again, we're not clear about the rules that govern the Guild but there are some things that are clear to us:
1. Companions DO choose their own clients. ("Companions choose the people they're to be with very carefully. For example, if your father had asked me to come here for him, I wouldn't have." [Jaynestown], also addressed in War Stories.)
2. Companions CAN blackball registered clients (which I would guess is a prerequisite for engaging a Companion) for mistreating them or others (and I certainly think Atherton Wing's treatment of Inara constitutes as verbal abuse, or at least threatening - and had she agreed to stay with him as a "personal companion," may have continued and worsened. Can't wait for
_allecto_ to get ahold of this one!):ATHERTON: You set this up, whore! After I bought and paid for you. I should have uglied you up so much no one else'd want you.
MAL: (to Inara) See how I'm not punching him? I think I've grown.
ATHERTON: (to Inara) Well, get ready to starve. I'll see that you never work again.
INARA: (to Atherton) Actually, that's not how it works. You see, you've earned yourself a black mark in the client registry. No Companion is ever going to contract with you ever again.
3. A Companion can... retire from the active life, shall we say. (Inara seems to have done so in Serenity [the movie], living at a training house and teaching them.)
4. A Companion can leave training. (Nandi does so, mentioned several times in Heart of Gold, and after her interactions in Our Mrs. Reynolds, Inara guesses that YoSafBridge has some sort of Companion training.)
5. Companions must be physically examined yearly. (Ariel)
6. I don't recall any canon evidence to the contrary, but it doesn't seem like Companions could not leave the Guild to pursue a different kind of life if she chose.
The last supposition is circumstantial, as there is no canon evidence to support it, but I think it's somewhat reasonable. The kink in this is the idea that Companions are partly Japanese Geisha and part courtesan, who are involved with their okiya their whole lives. This idea is often exploited in fic (I have seen it in a couple Mal/Inara, which is admittedly my poison of choice [I'M SUCH A DIRTY, PATRIARCHY LOVING PIECE OF CHICKMEAT] and it's even been done well once or twice), and while not wholly impossible, I think it's important to note that the idea of sex didn't even come from the "Geisha" part of the equation, and courtesans were not just prostitutes in fancier dresses. Courtesans often had careers outside of being courtesans, primarily as performers or artists, and were sometimes married, often to men lower on the social ladder than themselves, sometimes to their gain (ooh, fic bunny - STOP LIZ, STOP IT).
I can't even wade through the rest of the argument because we stop giving examples and go straight into What The Fuck. (Book wants forgiveness and assurance at the end of the pilot. It's the priest going to the harlot [and I'm spreaking strictly in terms of archtype here] for absolution. In art we call it subversion.)
I counted the amount of times women talk in the episode Serenity compared to the amount of times men talk. The result was unsurprising. Men: 458 Women: 175. So throughout the first episode men talk more than two and a half times as much as women do. And women talk mainly in questions whereas men talk in statements. Basically, this means that men direct the action and are active participants whereas women are merely observers and facilitators.
There are also four women total (really three, because River is crazy as a bug and doesn't even appear until the end of the first half of the episode, and I'm not counting Patience, either), as opposed to the six men (including the Alliance mole they kill). There are MORE men. I don't know, it might be VERY WELL that this is the case but I think this quite simply falls into the category of Thinking Too Much About It. Sometimes cigars are just cigars.
Zoe, the token black woman, acts as a legitimiser. Her role is to support Mal’s manly obsession with himself by encouraging him, calling him ‘sir’, and even starting the fights for him. Zoe is treated as a piece of meat by both her husband (Wash, another white male) and the Captain.
1. Zoe is a soldier, period. I think the fact that she is not only black but a woman and is able to be second in command on a private transport ship but in an armed forces unit renders the argument null and void. 'Sir' is how you answer.
Also, I need an icon that says Wash: The Other White Male now.
Wash and Mal fight each other for Zoe’s attention and admiration, both relying on her submission to them to get them hard and manly. In fact there is a whole episode, War Stories, devoted to Wash and Mal’s ‘rivalry’. By the word rivalry, I mean violent, homoerotic male/male courtship conducted over the body of a woman.
Hee. (So what does this make Niska? A sexual sadist?)
She [Zoe] has no female friends, in fact she tends to dislike women. For example, she is the first one to insult Saffron in the episode Our Mrs. Reynolds, calling her ‘trouble’.
Well. Isn't she trouble?
So you will forgive me for believing that the character, Wash, is a rapist and an abuser, particularly considering that he treats Zoe like an object and possession.
No. I won't. I'm sorry the women in the family have been under such dehumanizing treatment, but Your Experience Is Not Every Experience. Also, Wash, rapist and abuser? Wash is one notch below Kaylee on the goodness and light meter, and that is only because Kaylee has a teddy bear patch on her coveralls. Wash is... he's... "Can I make a suggestion that doesn't involve violence, or is this the wrong crowd for that?" (Serenity movie)
Also:
Yes. The the face and conduct of an evil rapist and abuser.
So of all the things she picks up on... she does not pick up on Jayne (who "will be in his bunk" [War Stories], "will start a fair fight ... if there's a woman" [Serenity movie], and "could stand to hear a little more of that" [Serenity movie]).
There is just a lot that is being missed in this argument. Like characterization, context, and
There. I feel a little better.