{"id":3142,"date":"2008-09-06T17:37:29","date_gmt":"2008-09-06T21:37:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=3142"},"modified":"2008-09-06T17:37:29","modified_gmt":"2008-09-06T21:37:29","slug":"warning-may-contain-profound-misogyny","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/?p=3142","title":{"rendered":"Warning: may contain profound misogyny"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ever feel like someone else watched a completely<\/i> different show<\/a> than you did? <\/p>\n

First Cracked<\/i> listed Firefly<\/i>‘s River Tam in its rundown of the “saddest attempts at feminism<\/a>” — nobody tell Randall Munroe<\/a> — which I thought was sort of ridiculous, partly because I don’t agree with it, and partly because I don’t think River was<\/i> an attempt at feminism. I’m not convinced that every female character has to be.<\/p>\n

And then they linked to that LJ post as some kind of proof or approbation of their theory… <\/p>\n

When I read that “beyond a shadow of a doubt” Joss Whedon obviously abuses his own wife, the essay went from being just an extremely flawed reading of Firefly<\/i> to being downright insulting. I waded through just enough of her current blog<\/a> to see that she considers Whedon “a profound misogynist,” and men in general to be, at best,”superfluous creatures.” (At worst, we’re violent misogynist bastards not to be trusted around anyone else.)<\/p>\n

That’s when I realized that we had, in fact, seen two very different shows, and we were never going to agree on something like this.<\/p>\n

A couple of weeks ago, Mary Ann<\/a> took some of the Firefly<\/i> (and Torchwood<\/i>) characters to task for being racial stereotypes. And while I didn’t really agree with her on that, I could definitely see her point. As a middle-class American white guy, I’ll admit my persepctive may be different, and I may not be as sensitive to these things as I could be.<\/p>\n

I don’t think Joss Whedon, Russell T. Davies, or anyone else should get a free pass. When they do wrong — or could do better — they should be called on it. But, at the same time, I don’t think every time<\/i> a person of color displays a character flaw that that’s racism, or that every time<\/i> a female character shows some sign of weakness it’s because the writer is a profound misogynist. Sometimes it’s actually just good writing. People are often flawed; people are sometimes weak. If all<\/i> we have are predictably flawed and weak characters, then we have a problem. And if all of those characters are women and\/or non-white, then the root of that problem could very well be racism and\/or misogyny, and that needs to be fixed.<\/p>\n

I don’t think Whedon is a perfect feminist, by any means, but I do think he’s more a part of the solution than the problem.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ever feel like someone else watched a completely different show than you did? First Cracked listed Firefly‘s River Tam in its rundown of the “<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[238],"class_list":["post-3142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3142"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3142\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unreality.net\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}