Previously, we examined the self-proclaimed “feminist man” and the ulterior motives that often accompany him. In today’s chapter, we visit another such man recently fallen from grace. Joss Whedon, once a media darling and creative, is getting dragged mercilessly by his feminist chariot.
After decades of fawning attention for his screenwriting that featured strong female leads, Whedon is on trial in the court of public opinion for being a jerk. In largely non-specific allegations, Whedon is accused of being hard to work with, yelling at actors, dismissing their ideas (the horror!), and being really darn unpleasant to an actress while she was pregnant. The most substantive accusation it seems is that he spitefully wrote the pregnant lady out of the script with a clumsy plot line in which she became impregnated by a demon and went into a coma never to return. Whedon, clearly, is a monster.
The strange parallels between post-modern woke purists and fervent Evangelicals again present themselves. Like the Protestant who believes that proclaiming Jesus one’s Lord and Savior puts one under the mantel of all that is good and holy precluding any possibility of sin, the woke adherents seem to believe that once proclaiming oneself a feminist, you’re one of the good guys. In this rigid paradigm devoid of nuance, if the self-proclaimed Christian falls from grace, an explanation must be found. Perhaps the proclamation of being “saved” wasn’t really sincere. There must have been some deficit or duplicity. The same, it seems, is true of the self-proclaimed feminist. If he winds up being a jerk, he must not be a real feminist.
Whedon’s commitment to the cause seemed so sincere. He said without a trace of a smirk that, ‘’A lot of writers are just terrible when it comes to writing female characters. They forget that they are people.’’ This deeply insightful perspective was gained, it seems, thanks to his “hardcore feminist” mother. Like every good feminist, Whedon wanted to “help the ladies” and envisioned charming feminist take-homes from his work, telling Time, “If I can make teenage boys comfortable with a girl who takes charge of a situation without their knowing that’s what’s happening, it’s better than sitting down and selling them on feminism.”
Ignoring obvious physical realities, Whedon said inane things that appealed directly to the feminist illusions like, “I would love to see a movie in which a blond wanders into a dark alley, takes care of herself and deploys her powers.” From this bold vision came Whedon’s first magnum opus.
Cultural commentators spent the past decades extolling the deep commentary of the teen television phenomenon Buffy the Vampire Slayer (yes, in all seriousness, that is the illustrious beginning of Whedon the erstwhile feminist icon). It wasn’t just TV gossip rags talking about Buffy. Apparently, the spiffy fun of an “empowered” woman spawned a wide range of “academic” papers on the portrayal of women in art. This was super serious.
Whedon gave the appearance of believing it all. He told one outlet that “the very first mission statement of the show” was “the joy of female power: having it, using it, sharing it.” Marti Noxon, a writer and executive producer for Buffy vouched for Whedon’s feminism, saying, “There are very few times when Joss isn’t more of a girl than I am” (evidently intended as a compliment).
When discussing the future ahead of the expected end of Buffy, Noxon said, apparently without irony, “It’s funny, because just yesterday I was talking to Joss, and he was pitching me stuff that he wants to do at the end of this season. And I said, ‘How the hell is it that you are more of a feminist than I am?'” Noxon has a very different view of Whedon these days, it seems, but let’s take her seriously for the moment.
Whedon even had the good taste to warn against bad self-proclaimed feminist men trying to take advantage of women. He said sagely, “A guy who goes around saying ‘I’m a feminist’ usually has an agenda that is not feminist.A guy who behaves like one, who actually becomes involved in the movement, generally speaking, you can trust that. And it doesn’t just apply to the action that is activist. It applies to the way they treat the women they work with and they live with and they see on the street.” But what is the cause and how does it help women?
Gradually, Whedon has found himself sliding from critical acclaim to the wrong side of history and it seems his greatest crime was taking feminists at their word. Things really went south for Whedon with his show The Dollhouse. The show follows super attractive women as they get hired out for various jobs and have their memories wiped after the fact. Audiences recognized the premise as reminiscent of prostitution and vaguely unpleasant. Whedon maintained that the show was“the most pure feminist and empowering statement I’d ever made—somebody building themselves from nothing.”
It seems this is the fundamental disconnect between passionately feminist Whedon and his passionately feminist audience: Whedon took it all much too seriously. Women said they wanted equal treatment; gone are the privileges given to women. According to, Vox: “Dollhouse recast Whedon’s relationship with the actresses who worked for him as an icky, sexualized act of exploitation. It made every gratuitous shot of Buffy in a miniskirt or Firefly’s courtesan Inara in bed with a customer feel just a little bit gross.” The feminists braying for free unions and equal treatment suddenly realize getting treated like a piece of meat leaves something to be desired.
Two generations of women have been convinced to rap lyrics and perform plays about their pudenda (e.g. the works of Cardi B and The Vagina Monologues) and they’re only now considering that this may be to the voyeuristic benefit of men who aren’t very nice.
After a recent spat of accusations of not-niceness, Whedon is being skewered by a poor taste expose article penned by his ex-wife, Kai Cole. In the article, Cole alleges that Whedon used “feminism” as an alibi for extramarital affairs. She wrote, “I believed, everyone believed, that he was one of the good guys, committed to fighting for women’s rights, committed to our marriage, and to the women he worked with. But I now see how he used his relationship with me as a shield, both during and after our marriage, so no one would question his relationships with other women or scrutinize his writing as anything other than feminist.”
What was not feminist about Whedon’s free love conduct? Cole alleges, “There were times in our relationship that I was uncomfortable with the attention Joss paid other women. He always had a lot of female friends, but he told me it was because his mother raised him as a feminist, so he just liked women better.” This is proof positive that feminism does not seek equality but the superiority of women. Also, it is obvious how unhelpful an inane ideology that ignores reality is. Men don’t hang around beautiful women because of feminism.
When Cole took the family dirty laundry and dumped it from the third-story window in 2017, it didn’t make much of a splash. As the folks at Jezebel put it, “Many minimized the essay on the basis that adultery doesn’t necessarily make you a bad feminist or erase a legacy.” Indeed, there is little in the common ethos of feminism to preclude premarital sex, affairs, and other paths to human misery.
Now that Whedon has been exposed as an unpleasant and domineering individual, the feminists are cutting ties. In concert with the two-decades-old accusations of aging starlets from the Buffy era, Cole’s fury as a woman wronged suddenly seems like a meaningful denunciation of an “ally” the movement would like to shed. Whedon may have been a lousy boss, an unfaithful and deceitful husband, and an unpleasant person in other respects. He has always been a committed feminist; his only mistake was taking the feminist argument to its logical end.
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