I recently found this one a different forum I frequent and while I strongly disagree with the opinion of the writer I thought that some of you may have an opinion worth sharing.
I was unable to find any rules for this forum on post length, so I would like to warn everyone that this may be fairly long. I am including the link to the original site, as well as the website that the woman currently posts from.
A Rapist's View of the World: Joss Whedon and Firefly This is a really long rant about Joss Whedon's
Firefly.
Why? Because I'm angry and I think it is really important that
feminists don't leave popular culture out of the equation. Especially
considering that popular culture is increasingly being influenced by
pornography.
***
I have become increasingly interested in
examining Joss Whedon’s work from a feminist perspective since I had a
conversation with another lesbian feminist sister at the International
Feminist Summit about whether Joss was a feminist. I am really quite
shocked by how readily Joss is accepted as a feminist, and that his
works are widely considered to be feminist. I decided to start
re-watching Buffy: The Vampire Slayer and also to watch Firefly and the movie Serenity.
I have to say that now that I have subjected myself to the horror that is Firefly, I really am beyond worried about how much men hate us, given that this was written by a man who calls himself a feminist.
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. But Firefly takes misogyny to a new level of terrifying. I am really, really
worried that women can call the man who made this show a feminist.
For
myself, I’m not sure that I will recover from the shock of watching the
malicious way in which Joss stripped his female characters of their
integrity, the pleasure he seemed to take from showing potentially
powerful women bashed, the way he gleefully demonized female power and
selfhood and smashed women into little bits, male fists in women’s
faces, male voices drowning out our words.
There is so much
hatred towards women contained within the scripts and action of the
series that I doubt very much that this post will even begin to cover
it. I am going to try to focus on the episodes that were written by
Joss Whedon but I will also refer to the series as a whole. As Joss
Whedon was responsible for the concept development and was a producer,
ultimately I hold him accountable for the depiction of women in the
entire season. Only one episode was written by a woman. It was no
better or worse in its depiction of women than the ones written by men.
The pilot episode, Serenity, was written and directed by
Joss Whedon. The basic plot of the series is Malcolm Reynolds and his
second in command Zoe, have made a new life for themselves after
fighting a war against the Alliance, which they lost. They 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.
They
also take on board passengers. There is Inara, a Companion (Joss
Whedon’s euphemism for women in prostitution). She rents one of the
ship’s shuttles. Simon, a doctor and his sister River. And a Shepherd
(which means preacher), a black male character.
The first
scene opens in a war with Mal and Zoe. Zoe runs around calling Mal
‘sir’ and taking orders off him. I roll my eyes. Not a good start.
The
next scene is set in the present. Mal, Jayne, and Zoe are floating
about in space. They come into some danger. Mal gets all panicky.
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. And she does shut up. And
she continues to call him sir. And takes his orders, even when they are
dumb orders, for the rest of the series.
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.”
What
the fuck is this feminist man trying to say about women here? A black
woman calling a white man ‘sir’. A white male captain who abuses and
silences his female crew, with no consequences. The women are HAPPY to
be abused. They enjoy it. What does this say about women, Joss? What
does this say about you? Do you tell your wife to shut up? Do you
threaten to duct tape her mouth? Lock her in the bedroom? Is this funny
to you, Joss? Because it sure as fuck ain’t funny to me.
Our
first introduction to Inara the ‘Companion’, Joss Whedon’s euphemism
for prostituted women, is when she is being raped/fucked/used by a
prostitutor. I find it really interesting to read the scripted
directions for this particular scene:
We are close on INARA's
face. She is being made love to by an eager, inexperienced but quite
pleasingly shaped young man. She is beneath him, drawing him to his
climax with languorous intensity. His face buried in her neck.
He
tightens, relaxes, becomes still. She runs her hand through is hair and
he pulls from her neck, looks at her with sweaty insecurity. She
smiles, a worldly, almost motherly sweetness in her expression. He
rests his head on her breast, still breathing hard.
So,
Joss Whedon refers to rapist/fuckers who buy women as sex, as ‘eager,
inexperienced but pleasingly shaped’ who ‘make love’ to women in
prostitution. Obviously, ‘love’ to men like Joss Whedon, requires
female powerlessness, force and coercion. Women in prostitution enjoy
the experience of being bought for sex. They feel ‘motherly’ towards
the men who have just treated them as property and bought them as sex.
In
Joss Whedon’s future world prostituted women are powerful and
respectable. 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.
But there is one really big question that does not get
answered. The women who ‘choose’ to be ‘Companions’ are shown as being
intelligent, accomplished, educated, well-respected and presumably from
good families. If a woman had all of these qualities and opportunities
then why the fuck would she ‘choose’ to be a man’s fuck toy? Would
being a fuck toy for hundreds of men give a woman like Inara personal
fulfillment? Job satisfaction? A sense of purpose? Fulfill her dreams?
Ambitions?
Money doesn’t seem to be the motivation behind
Inara’s ‘choice’ to be a ‘Companion’, presumably she just ‘enjoys’
swanning around in ridiculous outfits. And being used as a fuck toy by
men is seemingly a small price to pay for the pleasure.
At any
rate, Inara’s apparent ‘power’ is merely a figment of Joss Whedon’s
very sick imagination. In a later episode, Inara is shown to have set
down three very specific rules in relation to her arrangement to hiring
one of Mal’s shuttles as her base of operations. 1) No crew member,
including the Captain would be allowed entrance to the shuttle without
Inara’s express invitation. 2) Inara refuses to service the Captain nor
anyone under his employ. And 3) the Captain cannot refer to Inara as a
whore.
Mal agrees to all of these rules but he breaks every single
one of them. Blatantly and deliberately. The third thing that Mal says
in the first interaction between Inara and Mal is, “She’s a whore…”
Does Inara stop him from calling her a whore? Nope. She just goes on
smiling and being gracious. So he calls her a whore again. Lovely man
this Mal is, dontcha think?
And in regards to her first rule,
Mal takes every opportunity he can to break it. In the first episode
Mal barges into Inara’s shuttle. The interchange goes like this:
Inara: What are you doing on my shuttle?
Mal: It's my shuttle. You rent it.
Inara: Then when I'm behind on the rent, you can enter unasked.
Scenes
like this continue to occur for the rest of the series. Mal never
apologises for breaking the terms of his agreement with Inara. And
although Inara gets a little annoyed, she does not get really angry at
the Captain for consistently undermining her power and invading her
space. She tells the Captain to get out but he rarely complies. The
point is that a man should never invade a woman’s personal space to
begin with. Especially when he has been told expressly that he is not
invited. But Mal delights in pointing out Inara’s powerlessness, it
makes him feel all manly.
In regards to her servicing the crew,
she begins to service the Captain and the male passengers of the ship
from day one. The following is an excerpt from the script of Serenity.
Book is a black male character. He is a Preacher and disapproves of
Inara’s ‘profession’.
BOOK Is this what life is, out here?
INARA Sometimes.
BOOK
I've been out of the abbey two days, I've beaten a Lawman senseless,
I've fallen in with criminals… I watched the captain shoot a man I
swore to protect. And I'm not even sure if I think he was wrong.
INARA Shepherd…
He is shaking a bit, tearing up.
BOOK I believe I just… (a pained smile) I think I'm on the wrong ship.
INARA Maybe. Or maybe you're exactly where you ought to be.
He lowers his head. She puts her hand on it, a kind of benediction. We hold on them a second.
It
is clear from the outset that a large part of Inara’s service involves
addressing issues of male inadequacy and fulfilling many other
emotional needs of her clients. The ability to do this IS a resource
and it is therefore a service that Inara must perform. BUT Inara
services all of the male passengers and the Captain in this way. She
also services Kaylee but the relationship between them is a little more
reciprocal. In any case, Mal makes it pretty obvious that he expects
his emotional needs to be serviced by Inara and she willingly obliges.
Mal also allows the male passengers to demand her emotional services
and does not tell them to stop, despite the terms of his agreement with
Inara. Inara is not paid by any of these men for her time, energy and
emotional support.
Beyond a shadow of a doubt, Joss uses his
own wife in this way. Expects her to clean up his emotional messes.
Expects her to be there, eternally supportive, eternally subservient
and grateful to him in all his manly glory. I hope the money is worth
it, Mrs. Whedon. But somehow I doubt that it is. No amount of money can
buy back wasted emotional resources.
Aside from women being fuck
toys, property and punching bags for the men, the women have very
little importance in the series. 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.
Given
the fact that women are largely absent from the action and the dialogue
of the majority of scenes it is unsurprising that the action onscreen
is highly homoerotic. Men jostle with each other for power. Pushing
each others buttons, and getting into scuffles. This intense
homoeroticism is present from the outset as Mal asserts his rights as
alpha male on the ship.
Completely unnecessary and unprovoked violence is a spontaneous result of this hypermasculinised male character. In Serenity,
Mal enjoys using a character called Simon as his personal punching bag.
In one scene he walks up to him and smashes him in the face, without
any provocation or logical reason. In another scene Simon asks Mal a
question and Mal smashes him the face again. No reason, no explanation,
just violence. Violence is a part of the landscape throughout the whole
series and Mal is often the instigator. He is constantly rubbing
himself up against other men, and punishing wayward women, proving and
solidifying his manliness through bashing the shit out of anyone and
everyone.
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. 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.
Zoe
is not shown to have a personality of her own. She has no outside
interests, no ideas or beliefs, no conversation with anyone other than
Wash or Mal. She 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’.
Zoe,
of course, is meant to be our empowered, ass-kicking sidechick. Like
all sidechicks she is objectified from the get go. Her husband, Wash,
talking about how he likes to watch her bathe. Let me just say now that
I have never personally known of a healthy relationship between a white
man and a woman of colour. I have known a black woman whose white
husband would strangle and bash her while her young children watched.
My white grandfather liked black women because they were ‘exotic’, and
he did not, could not treat women, especially women of colour, like
human beings. I grew up watching my great aunts, my aunty and my mother
all treated like shit by their white husbands, the men they loved. 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.
Joss Whedon does not share my view, of
course, and he paints the relationship between Zoe and Wash as a
perfectly happy, healthy union. If anyone is interested in portrayals
of relationships between white men and black women written from black
women’s point of view, I would suggest watching Radiance
, Rabbit-Proof Fence and Serenades, skip Joss Whedon’s shit.
Also
if you are interested in the reality of women in
prostitution/prostituted women rather than the candy floss version that
Joss Whedon has produced, I highly recommend Rebecca’s story Lie Dead. Skip Joss Whedon’s women-hating bile.
I can assure you that this is just the beginning of my rant on Firefly. There is so much more disturbing stuff later in the series. In particular, an episode called Our Mrs. Reynolds, another episode written by Joss, which completely demonises women as well as pornifying male violence against us.
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