Joss Loss
A wife accusing her hot-shot Hollywood husband of adultery sounds like old news, but in the case of Joss Whedon, it's become a major story.
Which is why his ex-wife recently wrote that he's a "hypocrite preaching feminist ideals." The two have been separated for a while, and divorced last year. She now says he lied to her about many affairs he had.
He once wrote to her:
When I was running Buffy, I was surrounded by beautiful, needy aggressive young women. It felt like I had a disease, like something from a Greek myth. Suddenly I am a powerful producer and the world is laid out at my feet and I can't touch it.
She says he never really was a feminist to begin with. Part of her argument:
I've been critical, but not nearly as critical as others, like the women of color who have repeatedly pointed out that in Buffy, the first slayer is a black woman depicted as a savage, and her powers are forced upon her by a group of white men against her consent...
His work has plenty of male gaze and women in refrigerators and some narratively pointless rape scenes--it's all right there, in hundreds of hours of television and film--but boy, it sure is a lot more comfortable to listen to a guy tell you he's a feminist than listen to a lot of women telling you he's not. Women are trained to prioritize men; men expect to be trusted....
Whedon doesn't get that feminism isn't an award you earn by writing "strong female characters." And he can write those characters even as he acts contrary to them--that just means that he's is [sic] a good writer, not a good feminist....
I think Browning misses the boat. What she's got is a writer who wants to tell good stories, not chain them to any ideology so strongly that it gets in the way. And she's also got a human being who isn't perfect, but that doesn't mean he doesn't believe in anything. (As for his descripton of needy, aggressive women, that sounds like a description of the world of almost any Hollywood producer.)
I never particularly cared about Whedon's politics--in fact, when I've heard him spouting off about this or that, it hasn't been too impressive, since it's pretty much boilerplate leftism. But that's no reason to doubt he believes what he says. Maybe he's a hypocrite, but I don't know what's in his heart. I do know that up close, very few people live up to their ideals.
posted by LAGuy @ 11:00 AM
3 Comments:
Wow. I was a hardcore follower of Whedon's shows from the time I got into Buffy (when its run was almost over), through Angel (three of its five years were genius), Firefly (astounding; always raises the question of What Would Have Happened? -- not in terms of plot, but whether the quality could have been maintained for many years), Dollhouse (mostly disappointing), and the first Avengers movie. Since then I've been too busy, and following the Marvel Universe in movies and TV is a full-time job I don't have time for.
But one of the things that struck me is how much Whedon has always been a family business. Not merely because he's the first third-generation television writer in history, but because his co-writers and co-producers include his two half-brothers Jed Whedon and Zack Whedon, Jed's wife Melissa Tancharoen, and yes, Joss' then-wife Kai Cole.
Wikipedia even has a table showing how frequently Whedon has used the same actors in multiple projects.
I actually put this cartoon on my office door years ago, but it was as much about my feelings towards Lucas as towards Whedon. The many fans who just took the "Master" line by itself, without the context seemed a bit creepy to me. But perhaps every fanatic gets creeped out by those 50% more fanatical than him?
It often strikes me how self-proclaimed feminists don't see how odd it is that being "pro-choice" is a non-negotiable part of "feminism".
Whedon's ex-wife, in her essay, complains that his affairs make him a hypocrite, given that he seemed so "committed to fighting for women’s rights".
But is it really hypocritical when a man (1) has many secret sexual affairs, and (2) wants abortion to be available and affordable for all women? Seems to me that those two things fit together quite logically.
LAGuy wrote:
I think Browning misses the boat. What she's got is a writer who wants to tell good stories, not chain them to any ideology so strongly that it gets in the way.
Yes, because your words "chain", "ideology", "strongly", and "gets in the way" are quite loaded. Nonetheless, Whedon's writing has often been affected by his political views. He tended to avoid preachiness (like Ayn Rand and the later Heinlein), but it's still quite easy to see Whedon's own political views by watching his fiction (unlike, say, Shakespeare).
Through most of Buffy this wasn't a problem, but the very end of the final season became a caricature, with a cruel, misogynist villain versus the all-female army which becomes empowered once they cast off their male leadership (Giles, who had never shown any signs of sexism) and the male aspects of their legacy (the male magicians in ancient times who created the all-female Slayers).
I agree with your main point, that generally speaking one should enjoy art independent of the artist's political views. That's also how I enjoy food (I don't ask the chef who he voted for) and the roads I drive on.
Browning goes too far in other ways as well. Whedon avoided the "male gaze" far more than almost any comparable work starring women (no "let's put our actresses in bikinis" episodes or anything of that ilk), unless "the male gaze" now means any video of females shot by a male director.
And there weren't any "women in refrigerators" scenes that I can think of offhand. He did kill two important female characters for which many fans (including me) are still bitter, but their deaths were central to the story, which is the very opposite of the refrigerator situation. But perhaps "women in refrigerators" has become a phrase that pundits now use without understanding it, like "jumping the shark".
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