Buffy: Gingerbread Redux

So I forgot to to mention it at the time, and if I go back and put it in a comment it will just get buried under all the Google tomfoolery, so I will just take a moment to note here that my favorite part of Gingerbread was that our first mention -- as far as I can tell -- of the Patriarchy in the Very Feminist Show Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a comment about Mr. Rodgers from an ivory-tower, abusively-disconnected, psychologist mother who is ignoring her daughter. (Right before stringing her up and setting her on fire.)

Willow: Mom, how would you know what I can do? I mean, the last time we had a conversation over three minutes, it was about the patriarchal bias of the Mr. Rogers Show.

Sheila: Well, (makes finger quotes) with King Friday lording it over all the lesser puppets...

Haha, that is really awesome! People have been telling me for years that Joss Whedon television franchises speak the feminist lingo, and they were totally right! And it was very clever and subversive and original to put that lingo (or "lingo", with the finger quotes, as you kids like to call it) in the mouth of an obviously villainous mother who has utterly failed to have any kind of connection with her children! Great! Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

As an open thread prompt: What shows can you think of where feminist language has been used by unsympathetic characters and/or sympathetic characters have explicitly disavowed being feminists?

22 comments:

Elodieunderglass said...

In my former US state, while voting was secret, your party affiliation and portions of your voting record were public (in open books in the Town Hall and in the post office). There were a few married couples registered with different parties, and this was always the subject of fevered speculation. My father, for example, was Democrat, but my mother was registered Independent. This was regularly brought up as gossip when I was growing up, because even .

The big book also showed everyone's address with their voter registration, so that unpopular people could be purged from the roll if complained about, and everyone could know everyone's business in a proper fashion. Domestic violence victims could readily be found by abusive spouses casually consulting the voting registry.

(Tax records were also public, so anyone capable of finishing the equation "$X taxes at a rate of 10% indicates a house value of Y" could casually flip through the Big Book O'Town while getting their stamps and determine what everyone's house was worth. )

This fuelled All the Gossip. Two-party marriages! THREE-PARTY FAMILIES! People whose houses, when scoped carefully on a drive through the town, were CLEARLY worth more than they were being taxed for! Republicans dodging taxes! All the Democrats living in poor housing! The flip-flopping habits of the Libertarian who owned the gas station! GASP - all of the police always vote the same way - SCANDALS!

Silver Adept said...

@Elodieunderglass-

Brrr. That particular place seems very unwelcome. I'm in favor of public information being available, but it seems like a mistake to offer the data in such a way that it becomes very easy to connect dots that should not be connected. My state offers a service for domestic abuse victims to receive a valid voting address that will be on the record to try and prevent that, but I don't know if that address or protection extends to things like owning property parcels - my county has a searchable database online of who owns what and pays property taxes on those things. How frustrating it would be to basically not be able to own a house because your abuser could look you up through the tax records. I can hope municipal governments will understand the need to anonymize their data sets before putting them out...

Scribblegoat said...

I took the feminist stance of the P.E. coach in Glee (I stopped watching and can't remember her name and am too lazy to look up) as eyeroll satire at first. What made me actually stop watching was when they had her step out of character to condemn gay-bashing. Is that weird? It just felt so ... backpedalish ... like "We can't talk about the gay experience in any serious manner, so have a Very Special Episode where either we massively change a character or the character who's most upset is the one created to be awful, take your pick of narrative bullshittery or seriously uncomfortable implications, those are your options."

welltemperedwriter said...

This is Buffy again, but I remember it because it was my first clue that the show wasn't as feminist as it was presented/perceived to be...Maggie Walsh says a few things in season 4 that made my brain go clunk.

The show really doesn't have any sympathetic adult women characters, does it. (Well, Jenny Calendar, and we all know what happened to her...)

Beguine said...

More broadly, she's Progressive Values are idiotic, though feminism is one of the one's that gets singled out.

Elodieunderglass said...

Whoop, "This was regularly brought up as gossip when I was growing up, because even the slightest deviation in married voting - especially among such LIBERAL VOTERS OMG - was regarded as a sure sign of impending divorce."

People would ask me about it as a child. "Your father voted FOR the school expansion but your mother voted AGAINST it! Is everything okay at home?"

or "Haha, when is your mother going to use her vote properly? She should listen to your dad."

Ana Mardoll said...

Did not know that, thank you. And....wow. O.o

The states I've lived in don't have party registration (at least since I came of age); one registers to vote, one goes to the booth, one is assigned an "anonymous" number, one votes. No public records, that I know of, at least that match Voter 52169 to Suzy Haberdasher.

You CAN go online and see peoples' property taxes here. But it's also an article of faith here that what the government SAYS your house is worth is ALWAYS wrong. Best you can hope for is that it's either not too wrong our at least wrong in the "right" direction.

That's really dreadful that people would gossip about stuff like that, and to children...

Ana Mardoll said...

Was voting in Bronte's time and place a public thing where people saw your vote?

Nathaniel said...

I believe the secret ballot wasn't a thing until somewhere late in the 19th century.

Jane Carnall said...

Later when Laura says she won't promise to obey Almanzo in the wedding ceremony, he asks her in surprise if she's "for women's rights, like Eliza?" Laura denies it and says she doesn't want to vote.

Charlotte Bronte, when asked to support women's suffrage, said no, because while women were economically dependent on men (I am paraphrasing, obviously, from memory) they would vote as they were directed to by their husbands/fathers. Admit women to equality in education and the professions first, she said.

(I also think that where and how Laura Ingalls was growing up, "the right to vote" must have been to a certain extent rather academic.)

Marcus said...

@ Dav:

"I can't think of a single parent-child relationship in BtVS that isn't totally fucked up, to greater or lesser degrees. Xander, Buffy, Angel the human, pretty much every vampire-"sire" relationship, Cordelia (although a lot of that is extrapolation), and pretty much every other character I can think of has a strained relationship, or no relationship at all."

What about Spike-the-human and his mother Anne? It gets characterised by [spoiler]inzcver Naar[/spoiler] as unhealthy, but what we see is sweet and loving, and Spike (after 120 years of angst) ends up realising that it really was. There's also [spoiler]Serq naq ure cneragf[/spoiler], although that's initially set up to LOOK abusive for the sake of drama.

Another interesting point on this parental-relations tangent: this is the only appearance of Willow's mother, and her father is never seen. Buffy is the only teenage character whose parents are ever around. (Apart from [spoiler]Pbaabe[/spoiler], obviously, but that's a whole 'nother story.) Xander's parents don't show up till S6. The characters whose relationships with their parents do get talked about are already adults, some of them centuries old. Throughout both series, with Joyce as the big exception, parents of teenagers are largely invisible - while the grown-up characters have a ton of parental issues. Outside of Buffy, whose parents are mentioned most often? Angel's. Wesley's. Meanwhile, Willow's vanish when they really would be useful to have around, and ascended-from-background characters like Harmony and the Trio never seem to have any.

I think this is a deliberate decision. With teenage leads, visible parents are a hindrance to the drama, because they would tend to try to keep their children out of dangerous situations; but for adults, bad parental relationships are just an extra layer of angst.

Sorry, I realise this was all massively OT to the original post.

Aspermoth said...

The only examples I can think of off the top of my head at ten to midnight are that episode of the Powerpuff Girls with that Strawman Feminist supervillain chick who was persuaded that sexism no longer exists by Sacagawea dollars or something like that, and that little bit of "Matilda" where the Trunchbull gets angry about the women in the "Difficulty" song all being married.

Isator Levi said...

I wonder about that one... I don't know about them saying that sexism didn't exist, but rather that the villain was wrong to focus everything in terms of the evils of men, and hypocritical for using Susan B. Anthony as a symbol of her demands for privilige.

I'd suppose that still falls under the standards of "feminism portrayed through unsympathetic characters" when put in the mouth of a character who is explicitly insincere and hypocritical.

I know the Girls were finally brought around by a pep talk from some of the series' other women characters, but actual feminist issues weren't addressed, from what I recall, so it probably doesn't quite balance out.

Silver Adept said...

@storiteller -

Yeah, I've stopped watching it, because the strawpeople were too painful to be considered funny satire. I couldn't get any enjoyment out of it. And I couldn't really articulate it well enough when pressed on it at the time. But I just don't want to watch that show.

storiteller said...

The New Normal seems like one giant mess of caricature strawpeople to me. I have never had any desire to watch that show and all of the advertisements make me wince.

Silver Adept said...

Matter of typography: The Presbyterian minister in question does not have a D in his last name.

Matter of substance: The New Normal and Glee both have caricature strawpersons when it comes to both Progressive Values and Evil Conservatism. To the point that I have to mentally screen out those characters.

Dav said...

Wodehouse has some of this, but I generally feel like it's a case of double undermining, or legitimate fun-poking. YMMV, though.

I can't think of a single parent-child relationship in BtVS that isn't totally fucked up, to greater or lesser degrees. Xander, Buffy, Angel the human, pretty much every vampire-"sire" relationship, Cordelia (although a lot of that is extrapolation), and pretty much every other character I can think of has a strained relationship, or no relationship at all.

jill heather said...

S05E1 of House, Dying Changes Everything. Took me a while to google for it effectively.

Aspermoth said...

Ah, that explains why I didn't remember it – I'd stopped watching by that point. Thank you :)

jill heather said...

There was that episode of House, there was that every episode of everything Aaron Sorkin's ever written, and I don't care how much people including me enjoy Community, Britta is Feminism Is Idiotic (not evil).

Aspermoth said...

Which episode of House was it, if you don't mind me asking?

jill heather said...

VERONICA MARS AND THE THIRD SEASON OF DISAPPOINTMENT. Sigh.

(But season 1 is great!)

Post a Comment