Joss Whedon is God

[viscousmemories]

:cerseiShameWalk:

[BrotherMan]

Joss' own work had already tainted itself according to some. (There are many critiques on how not-feminist his work is, long before this came out.) This was just a nail in that coffin as proof that SEE, HE'S NOT AS FEMINIST AS YOU THOUGHT. For me, it puts more of a skeeve on Dollhouse than I already had. The inroads that Buffy made though are undeniable.

If it was just infidelity I'd be okay just calling him a bad person and leaving it at that. It's his description of the women that digs at me now. It makes me think that he used his position as a coercive force. It's that power imbalance that gives me that cause to see him as less of a feminist. But most of that label is still rooted in "not a good person."

If he were any other writer/director/producer it would have stopped at "man uses position to sleep with young women, just like a lot of them do." It was his own crowing about how good he was for the movement that trips him up now.

[Ari]

Whedon has shown us just how sad the representation of women in the media has been, in part by being labeled the huge feminist he is. Disclaimer I haven't read all of his works or seen all of his stuff but from my understanding his 90s version of Kitty Pryde was a proto version of Buffy before he got his break. Then buffy hit and he got to flesh out this one character he had in mind, who is a strong female lead. Which was great, Buffy was and still is excellent in many ways including its girl power feminism but it's really just one story universe with a handful of iconic feminist characters. A jumping off point which hit a slip with Angel, as two characters that had abusive relationships with our feminist hero are redeemed and a woman is fired for being pregnant and then a fall with Dollhouse which while an interesting idea certainly wasn't feminist. His cred for mainstream pop culture feminism is quite lite, and only seems strong because we have so little that's well done, but that's changing, you gotta do better now. Following up with things such as Firefly gave us great characters but nothing heavily feminist. Which would all be fine and good if he didn't then promote himself as a feminist writer, and talk about basic feminist ideals, setting assumptions even higher and building a specific image for himself, one that with past work like that leaked Wonder Woman script seems to be the imagined ideal image of himself that he would like to be, but isn't.

Now we come to the cheating. Basic cheating itself isn't anti-feminist, but there are multiple types of cheating and what they mean are different, like A 20 year affair can mean quite different things than say serial cheating, which is what Whedon has done. Now you might think, well maybe he needs a polyamorous or otherwise non monogamous relationship. Well, funny thing, because I haven't been paying attention and the world's a tiny place I discovered I follow someone who dated him after the divorce, offering a kinky and non-monogamous relationship if that was his need. I know nothing more than it didn't go well and she stands with Kai Cole. Which leaves me to think the power dynamic is a possible reason for his serial cheating, and that starts to get into feminist territories. Not only abusing his power imbalance over women that he worked with but seemingly enjoying that he was getting away with it and few were the wiser, playing out many of the patriarchal power differences he publicly claimed to hate.

As with many things the response is important and so far it's been lack luster but it's the actions taken, or not, that will solidify people's minds. If after being angry, depressed or whatever at his name tanking he then says "I'll do better" and then tutors under feminist women authors on multiple projects or blatantly putting women authors, producers, directors first, with none of this feminism means equality bullshit, he fucked that up, equality is now him listening and speaking only when spoken to until he digs out of this hole. Or if he completely ignores it and tries to flounder on. He is a good writer and hollywood doesn't give a shit, so I doubt it will end his career, but we'll know where he stands if he acts as if there's no real problem.

[BrotherMan]

Thanks largely to his Avengers the first work, he's already done something with Justice League and may still have the Batgirl thing "some people" were talking about. We'll have to wait and see how that comes out, I suppose. Folks in our circles will probably be looking at both of those p hard.

[erimir]

Still gotta say, it'll be hard for Justice League to be worse off with Whedon than Zack Snyder. Including the fact that Snyder has some sex and gender issues of his own in his works.