Joss Whedon

For those of you who have completely been out of touch with SF/fantasy fandom in the last few days, Joss Whedon's, it turns out, ex-wife Kai Cole has announced that they have been secretly divorced for several years, and accused him of repeatedly engaging in exploitative sexual relationships with actresses on his shows, and using his "feminist cred" both to get into such relationships and to deceive her about them.

I must admit, I'm upset but not shocked. I've distrusted Whedon in terms of his personal sex life for years. Firstly because of both his highly unprofessional and creepy remarks about women he's worked with on DVD commentaries (constantly "negging" Morena Baccarin, gushing over Summer Glau and two specific parts of her anatomy). Secondly because of the increasingly visible and embarrassing way that he writes at least one female character on each of his shows as an expression of personal fetishes which, while I don't judge anyone's private sexual fantasies, you would have thought that a pro-feminist man would be more self-critical about and less unembarrassed about putting on the screen (Drusilla, Fred, River, the entire concept of Dollhouse). I was far more shocked a few years ago at the allegations of ugly sexual misconduct on the part of the comics writer Brian Wood, whose work showed far less in the way of questionable sexualised content.

And I've become steadily more negative about the politics of Whedon's artistic work over the years, as you can probably see if you go through my "buffy", "angel", and "firefly" tags. It's not worth going into details here, but it boils down to a feeling, that a lot of people seem to share, that since the end of the Buffy TV show he's been capitalising on his self-created image as "Hollywood's most feminist man" while failing to keep up with further developments in political ideology, and producing work which at best has been nowhere near as good on gender as Buffy was, and at worst has been out-and-out sexist.

And the other reason, of course, has been my opinion that Russell T Davies's hero-worship of Whedon was behind an awful lot of the things I most dislike about his work on Doctor Who and spin-offs. Davies has even fallen into some of Whedon's off-screen tendencies, most notably when, at precisely the time that LJ fans started to seriously criticise his writing of Martha Jones on race and gender grounds, he did an interview for a newspaper in which he bluntly alleged that the only people who disliked his Doctor Who work were privileged right-wing bigots.

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From:

cjlasky7

I've already thrown in my two cents on Joss in my farewell post to whedonesque. (I brought up Roald Dahl, Orson Scott Card, and Bill Cosby, and I think I made the mods uncomfortable. Maybe I'll lay low for a day or so before I post about Joss on my own blog.)

But I wanted to talk to you about Martha. I LOVED Martha. A genuine physician, a young black woman with a complicated family life, and Freema had her own particular dynamic with Tennant--different, but just as effective as Piper and Tate.

That said ...

After all that beautiful setup in "Smith and Jones", Davies never fully developed the character. She turned into the Rebound Companion, mooning over the Doctor while he still held a torch for Rose. The only thing keeping "Family of Blood/Human Nature" from perfection was Martha grumbling that "John" didn't fall in love with her. The character deserved so much better.

So when Martha rallied humanity in "Last of the Time Lords" and gave the "this is me, getting out" speech, I nearly stood up and cheered. In a sense, she was giving it to Davies. (Not even the relative lameness of her S4 appearances could diminish that speech.)

I never felt that Davies' characterization of Martha was racist or sexist. Lazy as hell?
No argument there ...

From:

jesuswasbatman

This will be long, please skip if you aren't interested.

Well, initially the major critique over Martha centred on "Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood", simply because of how explosive and charged the image of the African-American maid figure is in US culture. (It really doesn't have the same existence in Britain, because of the much smaller proportion of black people in Britain during the heyday of domestic service.) But even given the transatlantic cultural divisions people were still unhappy about the Doctor and/or the TARDIS putting Martha in that situation when they had the whole of space and time to lie low in. (In the 1990s novel Human Nature, the companion was a white woman who was acting as "Dr. Smith"'s poor cousin rather than his servant.)

And when Martha's arc fully ended, a lot of people including me were angry that RTD had made the show's first black primary companion (on TV) the first one to be intentionally conceived and written as "the one the Doctor didn't like as much as the previous one". I felt that Martha's ending scene was a bit too far towards "apologising to Ten for the fact that he didn't fancy her". (I liked the first half of the scene, really hated her coming back in and what she said then.) Especially because the new generation of Who fandom at the time was dominated by hardcore Ten/Rose shippers who were convinced, encouraged by some of RTD's glorification of Rose in comparison to old-school companions in interviews, that RTD's Who was essentially a paranormal romance story, that Martha was the essentially unsympathetic "rebound", and that the RTD show was going to end, probably as the final end of the franchise, with a Ten/Rose "endgame" happy ending. I remember defriending someone on LJ because they'd gone hardcore into Ten/Rose and wrote a whole essay about how Martha's arc was all about recognising that she wasn't as good as Rose and didn't deserve the Doctor because she was a "Sam" while Rose was a "Frodo".

And also there was the fact that RTD seemed to have a recurring tic of writing a non-white character in love with a white character who didn't return their affections at all or only saw it as a casual thing - as well as Ten and Martha there were Rose and Mickey and Owen and Tosh, and some fans also thought that there was a friendship rather than romance version between Sarah and Clyde in the first season of Sarah Jane Adventures (which was corrected later, it was mostly because all the stories in that season seemed to have a sex-segregated plot approach with Sarah and Maria on one track and Clyde and Luke on the other).

From:

legionseagle

And also there was the fact that RTD seemed to have a recurring tic of writing a non-white character in love with a white character who didn't return their affections at all or only saw it as a casual thing

As reinforced by pairing Mickey off with Martha in Journey's End rather than her canonical white love interest, the one who got killed saving her in the year that never was, and whom she found again. That really was a "You what?" moment among a mass of them.

From:

cjlasky7

That wasn't long at all.

I never saw Martha's big speech as an apology for her supposed inferiority to Rose. She'd spent the majority of that episode fomenting a worldwide psychic rebellion right under the Master's nose. She executed the plan flawlessly. She saved her loved ones and she rescued the Doctor from a lifetime of Dobby-ness. She was coming in from a position of strength.

"This is me, getting out" was Martha telling Ten that she's strong enough to leave the most exciting, thrilling adventure of her life because it would wreck her emotionally if she stayed. She left on her own terms, instead of the Doctor dumping her by the side of the road.

Look at Tennant's reaction--the Doctor knows she's right. She got him through his post-Tyler blues and he'd love it if she stayed, but he absolutely respects her decision and is PROUD of her decision. She has a calling as a doctor and a family who needs her, and she'll carry on with the Mission in her own way. She doesn't need to apologize to anyone.

As for her humiliating stint as a chambermaid in Cornell's two-parter, it stings because it's supposed to sting. Maybe we're not supposed to look back at 1912 with a warm, amber-tinged nostalgia. Maybe we should take a hard look at an era where the idea of a woman doctor is mocked like a child's idle notion, and where a generation of young men is lined up as cannon fodder. The episode is better, not worse, for meeting the racism of the era head on.

From:

jesuswasbatman

As for her humiliating stint as a chambermaid in Cornell's two-parter, it stings because it's supposed to sting.

The point is that the Doctor and/or the TARDIS *chose* to go there and put her in that situation, which puts an unnecessary bad light on them.

From:

cjlasky7

True. And "John"'s lady love lays the whole bloody mess at the Doctor's feet at the end. Again, Tennant's reaction tells you the Doctor knows she's right.

From:

nostalgia

Oh god I'm pretty sure I remember that exact "martha and the audience had to realise how shit she was in comparison to rose" essay. Urgh.

From:

ironed_orchid

I am so unsurprised by Kai Cole's story.

A few months ago, when people were tweeting about Whedon's Wonder Woman script, I read this post by LaurelJupiter on Tumblr which articulated a lot of my discomfort with Whedon's post BTVS/Angel work. Excerpt:

The problem is that at some point in his career, Joss became so intent on the masochistic fantasy of being hated by strong women for being a nerd that he spent a decade writing stories about violating those women to ensure they would hate him. I wish Joss had ended that obsession with “Storyteller.” I wish he had talked about the feelings that made him want to make “Dollhouse” with his therapist and tried to make things right with Charisma Carpenter instead of turning those particular personal demons into a bad TV show.

From:

jesuswasbatman

Yes, I read that and found it interesting. You can also see "Mr. Universe" in Serenity the feature film as a more idealised version of that type.

From:

jesuswasbatman

Although as a nerdy man myself I think that the Trio arc was one of the most genuinely courageous things that Whedon ever did from a feminist perspective, as nerd misogyny was simply not being confronted in any particularly visible way in culture at the time. I still remember how several intelligent people on ATPO complained that the Trio arc was Joss betraying the nerds who'd made him a star and siding with the evil popular kids.

From:

ironed_orchid

Yeah. I think it's very important to address the misogyny in our own subcultures. And Gamergate and other events have shown that nerd resentment of women can be both truly toxic and a mass movement.

From:

momentsmusicaux

Ah yes, I was wondering about the OP's list of characters that are the 'expression of personal fetishes', and at first not managing to see the common element.

And then it struck me: they all start off meek, shy, timid, even a bit wimpy, and then something happens and makes them powerful:

- Drusilla: goes from injured to restored to full power in Buffy S2. (And then in flashbacks, goes from devout catholic to vampire.)
- Fred: goes from normal Fred to Illyria.
- River: goes from normal to super-powered, prior to the events on-screen.
- Dollhouse: as the OP says, whole concept...

And usually there's a man who's rejected by her in her powerful form, who in some of the cases was her partner in her meek form:

- Spike both times with Dru, poor thing: disregarded for Angel in S2, and the hapless poet in the flashbacks
- Wesley with Fred
- the doctor guy with River, I suppose.
- I don't remember enough about Dollhouse...

Do we definitely know that it's Joss's fantasy to be hated by strong women, or is it speculation that he's projecting himself into the Spike/Wesley/etc character at that point?

From:

jesuswasbatman

Those comparisons work, but I was actually thinking of a rather darker set of fetishes - all are incredibly skinny (although stronger than they look) women who are mentally unstable and vulnerable due to unspeakable torture, but also depicted in a quite sexualised way, partly because of how their questionable sanity makes them fascinatingly unconventional. (Drusilla was driven insane by Angelus, Fred was always a little odd mentally but at her first introduction was completely nuts due to her suffering as a slave and later fugitive in Pylea, River was vivisected by Alliance black-ops scientists, and all the characters in Dollhouse were constantly brainwashed and rebrainwashed by Rossum.) Also note the fetishistic treatment of feet with all of them - River and to a lesser extent Drusilla were depicted as barefoot waifs, and you only have to listen to Whedon's commentaries on Firefly and Serenity to know how much he enjoyed that; all the Dollhouse Actives, from what I've read, are constantly barefoot when not on "assignment"; and while Fred usually did wear shoes, they were very frequently flimsy thong sandals that gave a lot of foot visibility.

From:

ironed_orchid

I agree more with this reading.

From:

jesuswasbatman

I would add that this pattern is the big reason why I have always been strongly opposed to the idea of Whedon having any involvement in a hypothetical Black Widow solo Marvel Cinematic Universe film, as her origin as depicted in the comics and less-explicitly in the movieverse would blatantly appeal to it. (Although I was pleasantly surprised that Scarlet Witch in Age of Ultron was not actually an example of that character type, especially since her introduction in the post-credits scene of Winter Soldier seemed to suggest that she would be.) On the subject of Black Widow, I think that the controversial attitude to infertility in Age of Ultron is something of a surface effect caused by the deeper problem, which is that Whedon's first thought on the film was to have the most important female "regular character" be the character whose personal arc in the film was an entirely romance-based one.

From:

ironed_orchid

The post I linked to does not identify Joss with any of the male characters you mention, it's more the outright nerds like Andrew, Topher, and Doctor Horrible who experience women hating them for being a nerd, but who then act in ways that actively harm women, often using technology. I would also include Xander.

So... after all this came out, I did see some confirmation shared on facebook by someone who dated Whedon after he moved out of his home with Kai Cole but before the divorce was finalized and public. Both the person who posted and the person who dated Whedon are okay with this being shared, but please read carefully and be respectful before deciding to leave any comments on the post. (The original post was edited to include the statement from the person who dated Whedon, and the first few comments are in response to the original version.)

From:

momentsmusicaux

I'm not massively surprised to read in that post that when he was offered an open poly relationship, he declined and then cheated.

I've heard poly people say that polyamory isn't cheating, but I've sometimes felt that they perhaps aren't aware of the reverse, which is that cheating isn't polyamory. If you like cheating, then in some cases it's actually some elements of actual cheating you like: the taboo, the risk, and so on.

From:

sajia_kabir

Smug Muslimah feminist is smug at the fall of yet another Heroic White Male Atheist. If you aren't actively fighting gentrification and the accompanying oppression of drug addicts and sex workers in your own major cities, shut the fuck up. I lived in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside in supportive housing for nearly two years, so I know of what I speak.

From:

dlgood

To the extent that my impression was worth anything, I felt like Joss' description of what he thought feminism was ... not entirely reflective of what I was experiencing as an twentysomething when his shows were airing.

In his cultural heyday, Whedon was very effortful at promoting himself in ways that rang to me as a pose.

From:

purplecat

This encapsulates a lot of what I feel about it. Buffy was incredible in lots of ways, but Whedon has given the impression ever since of feeling that producing one show that was good on gender (and was ground-breaking on gender for its decade) means not that he happened to get lucky, but that his views on gender and how he expresses them are automatically good.

From:

rogin

Yeah, your post is pretty much spot on. I guess I would have been really shcked if I learned about this at the height of Buffy, but my love for his writing has been pretty much over after Firefly. I really tried with Dollhouse, but ugh...and Shield was just outright boring me to pieces.

I'm not really surprized and to be honest it doesn't change much for me. I can like parts of his work and dislike him. I hope the whole male feminist hero whorship gets tuned down, though. There are writers with way more interesting ideas in that area these days.

From:

tree_and_leaf

wrote a whole essay about how Martha's arc was all about recognising that she wasn't as good as Rose and didn't deserve the Doctor because she was a "Sam" while Rose was a "Frodo".

Crikey. That's a pretty egregious misreading of Lord of the Rings, too.

From:

arcanetrivia

That... wow. Yeah.

(For one thing, on one level wouldn't comparing them the other way around be more apt? Not that they have the relationship that Sam and Frodo do.)

From:

legionseagle

Would "private sexual fantasies" include his "manic pixie dream ninja" obsession?

From:

jesuswasbatman

Yes, plus the whole "manic because she's been tortured to the breaking point but her psychosis is sexy" thing.

From:

legionseagle

Yes, if you look at River, for example, you've got someone presented with a lot of "child" markers coupled with serious communication issues.

From:

jesuswasbatman

Yeah, I am really yukked by a lot of fic that has River in a sexual context.

From:

legionseagle

I'm reminded that there's a certain "male feminist" in fandom whose fic I find has very questionable (and similar) preoccupations who decorates his DW with a picture of Dawn posed in a very male-gaze, "barely-legal" sort of way (dressed, but it's the way the shot's set up that yukks me.)

From:

conuly

Well, his explanation for why he cheated on his wife - repeatedly - was that it's not his fault, it's a combination of the patriarchy and being surrounded by "needy, aggressive young women".

Gross, gross, gross, and not very full of self-insight either.

From:

ruuger

Firstly because of both his highly unprofessional and creepy remarks about women he's worked with on DVD commentaries (constantly "negging" Morena Baccarin, gushing over Summer Glau and two specific parts of her anatomy)

Eugh, seriously? I never listened to any of his commentaries so I had no idea.

it boils down to a feeling, that a lot of people seem to share, that since the end of the Buffy TV show he's been capitalising on his self-created image as "Hollywood's most feminist man" while failing to keep up with further developments in political ideology

Yeah, this has been one of my main criticisms of his work after Buffy as well. One of the least suprising elements in Kai Cole's blog was the whole "I'm a feminist, so I can't be bad" aspect. Many of the creators whose work I've followed have said or done problematic things, but none of them have seemed so unwilling to learn and change as Whedon.

From:

nostalgia

I'm very unclear on what happened re: Charisma Carpenter (I've looked it up a few times and been left none the wiser somehow - maybe I just suck at Google?) but I always felt a bit weird about Whedon's thing for "waify little girl but she has super powers so she's a feminist icon even as I clearly want to shag her."

From:

jesuswasbatman

The most damning allegation is that she agreed to come back to do her single episode in season 5 on the basis that Cordelia would absolutely not be killed off, whereupon Whedon waited until she had left the set before filming the episode's brief final scene that revealed she'd been a ghost.

From:

nostalgia

D: D: D:

From:

conuly

And she was fired because of her pregnancy which... well, that's not very feminist, is it? There are ways to work around an actress's unexpected pregnancy.

http://josswhedonisnotafeminist.tumblr.com/post/114093159176/charisma-was-not-fired-for-being-pregnant-true

Edited Date: 2017-08-25 11:02 pm (UTC)

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