librarians do it in the stacks

jwsjumpers:

cabell:

ktempest:

cabell:

karnythia:

logicnothormones:

“When I created Buffy, I wanted to create a female icon, but I also wanted to be very careful to surround her with men that not only have no problem with the idea of a female leader, but were in fact engaged and even attracted to the idea.”

- Joss Whedon

Twilight can suck it. Suck it hard. You can have your domestic-violence begging leading lady. I’ll keep my feminist icon of Buffy.

Joss pays such lip service to this idea, but he spent the entire show punishing Buffy for having feelings along with that strength.

My bold for emphasis.

I have this friend who constantly argues with me about this man, claiming that he never said he work is feminist and that’s something other people push on it, blah blah. But as the bolded above expertly points out, even if he never uses the term “feminist”, he’s definitely trading on those ideas, and then falling down in actual execution.

Anyway, who said that we can only be mad at self-identified feminists for fucking up representations of women?  Also, he was apparently a Women’s/Gender Studies major, so he really has NO excuse.

People love to tell me how feminist Joss Whedon’s shows are. All the damn time. While maybe he does better then some he is still a far cry from perfect….

Ummm… Joss Whedon (or, more accurately, the people who actually wrote the episodes, which was not Joss for the most part) spent all of Buffy and all of Angel punishing every character who had feelings for having them. He had Angel be intentionally emotionally manipulated into losing his soul on Angel, for fuck’s sake.

Buffy? Yes, absolutely. But also Angel, Spike, Xander, Willow, Cordelia, Giles, Anya, Dawn, Oz, Riley, Drusilla, Ben… If they loved someone? It got fucked up and they got hurt. If they acted impulsively? They dealt with the consequences. And not always well.

I love Joss Whedon for creating so many strong female characters. Are they the perfect, shining beacons of feminism that I’d love for them to be? No. They’re uniformly tiny and gorgeous. They’re uniformly unrealistically badass. And that sucks. But they actually have emotions and flaws and they fuck up and sometimes they learn from it and sometimes they don’t, and that is what makes them awesome. And what makes him awesome, to me? Is that the same holds true for the male characters and for the female characters other than the heroine.

(via iamgwenslongroadhome)

Source: logicnothormones