I think AtS shows some of the same ideas - VAW is a serious issue, men and women should be equal - but it's very frustrating, because Angel as a character never learns. He never stops making decisions for people or recognizes on any level that empowerment is better than protection. And he's supposed to be the hero - even when we don't particularly like him, we do at the end of the day have to root for him because of the whole end-of-the-world thing.

Outside of the character, the show uses misogynist tropes over and over. ("Hey, we haven't had a mystical pregnancy for a whole season! THAT'LL BE AWESOME." "Okay. But this time she'll die because she had rough sex/wasn't faithful to one dude/ate from the tree of knowledge showed some intellectual curiosity! FEMINISM!") Female characters are expendable, and in fact there are none left by the end of the series (Amy Acker is beautiful as Illyria and all, but Illyria is an "it" beyond gender) but male characters get brought back from a firey death in the bowels of hell, for chrissake.

It's disappointing because Joss has produced so much good feminist stuff, and I'll argue with anyone who says otherwise, but this....is the same trash as any other drama. I watch his stuff because I don't want that.

I don't see punishment, I see the random chaos that is the world we inhabit.

Except, when the same story is told three times in a row, it stops being random, you know? What's the Bond quote, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action? Eventually, it gets tough to assume such similar events are unrelated. And when it is something so explicitly gendered as pregnancy, which plays out in ways that are decidedly disempowering, it looks even less random, because it fits into broader cultural tropes about gender roles. (If you'll forgive the self-promo, I've actually discussed this particular recurring storyline at length in my own journal.)

I see it as "characters are expendable", just as they always have been in Joss' works

But when important female characters are 100% dead and gone by the finale, and four male characters and Illyria are around, some characters (female ones) become clearly more expendable than others.

These things get weighted because they happen in a context. Whedon shows, with the exception of AtS, are a break from the hundreds of other shows out there where controlling male behavior is played as romantic; where the most important arcs of female characters revolve around relationships and motherhood; and where female characters get less screen time, are less important than male ones, and who are frequently killed off for emotional manipulation. People who want to see a more realistic world - ie one with many well-rounded female characters - deliberately look for shows with that quality because they're rare, and when we're let down, of course the general anti-feminism is thrown into sharper relief.

Is there a slightly lower classification than "enemy action"?

Not according to Goldfinger! (I think that's why the quote sticks, it is so perfectly 'stache-twirling villain. :)) But the general principal, that when you see a pattern emerge, you don't keep presuming it's random, stands even if you're not planning on World Domination. (Muahahaha!)

I hope this doesn't come across as attacking, because I know you are arguing in good faith, and I just want to try to explain why I think we're missing each other. When we're talking anti-feminism, it's important to remember that intent is not magic. I do not think for a second that Joss & co. sat down and said "we're going to undo all that good work we did for woman-power in pop culture on Buffy by writing a regressive series for our boy Angel." I do NOT think they set out to do such a thing.

But what they did, I am guessing, was that they stopped paying attention. Someone at the network probably pointed out that this was a good show wherein they could hook in more of the male demographic, and so they set out putting their skills towards a "guy show" in the Buffyverse. And those were the goals - that was the still-feminist intent right there in the beginning of the project. And then I think they got lazy.

Sometimes being knowledgeable helped them to reach for issues Angel should deal with - a lesser show would have assumed there was no such thing as VAW (in POY, for example, Our Heroes don't just fight an abusive baddie, Angel pretty clearly explains the power dynamics of stalking and emotional abuse), wouldn't have gone to an FGC metaphor, and especially wouldn't have shown FGC victims being rescued by their own leader. I know why people think She wasn't a great episode or wasn't particularly feminist, but it did go farther than just about any show. And it helped them create some wonderful characters, male and female, because they didn't reach unthinkingly into male and female characteristics and play mix and match.

But they collapsed into mainstream (and, thus, inherently not neutral but anti-feminist) ideas and didn't stop to check them, the way I think they usually did on BtVS. And then they started to rely on those tropes. Tropes like: a person who we should be able to morally relate to deciding that women can't fight, or make important decisions on their own. Pregnant women should be treated like incubators for a golden egg, and then killed off to emotionally manipulate the audience. Women should kill women, preferably due to their Crazy Evil Pregnant Hormones (Lilah and Cordy,
S4); men should kill men for the greater good, and significantly later in the plot (Lorne and Lindsey, late S5). When the Grand Finale comes, the only people who need to be around to Fight The Good Fight (which is one of the Things That Matters in the 'verse) are the dudes.

Those things determine who is important in a story, and who can be discarded, and how the audience should react when that happens. None of them happens in isolation, and a person could not mind one storyline but still be ooged out at the overall impact of the series. But, in often turning out just like every other mainstream drama where the dudes do the fighting and the chicks do the pregnancy and dying, AtS became - even with good intentions on the part of its writers - anti-feminist.

Sexism is not a matter of opinion. If AtS makes you think about feminist issues and feel more committed to them, I'd argue that says good things about you, not necessarily about the show.

I just can't see it as deliberate anti-feminism.

No one's saying it's deliberate. (In fact, I desperately, desperately hope it's not deliberate, because that would be horrifying.) That doesn't mean it's not THERE.

ETA: Haha, or what pocochina said, because she's kind of awesome and I'm fangirling right now.

Edited at 2010-07-30 01:12 pm (UTC)

It is a strong phrase. When I say "anti-feminist," I generally mean "explicitly damaging to or derogatory toward the pursuit of women's equality." I don't know what definition you're using, but AtS' treatment of its female characters fits that description to me.

Totally with you. I've seen the whole series; parts of it are among my favorite TV rewatches. (Not, for example, A Hole in the World, because of the hulk rage, but, you know.)

PRobably because he'd gone through a couple of seasons as designated 'damsel in distress' :)

Good point about Illyria.

That kid of makes me eyeroll that Marsters said that. Even if it was All Ladies All The Time on the screen, which it wasn't, I would have a hard time believing that the backstage crew was, like, oozing estrogen all over him. AtS is way past male dominated, it's a series about male dominance.