Anonymous Rex’s Weblog

Joss Whedon has presented himself as a feminist and his characters are quite popular with women. I once heard a woman opine, “Buffy is totally female power.” I don’t know what “female power” means. I also don’t know what Joss Whedon means when he calls himself a feminist. What I do know is that I am highly suspicious of other men who claim the title of feminist. I think it is very odd that “female power” could be located within a long train of beautiful female warriors all of whom were invented and promoted by men.

I think I speak for most men of my generation when I confess that I find feminism a little bit frightening. In middle school I heard Rush Limbaugh declare that feminists were ruining the economy by getting jobs and devaluing labor. I knew immediately that this was insane: That it wasn’t true and that even if it was, it didn’t matter because working is a human right. What is frightening to men about feminism is the endless clashes between second-wave feminists, third wave feminists, and post-feminists: Camille Paglia compared Gloria Steinem to Joseph Stalin. Molly Ivans simply called Paglia, “an asshole.” As men, all we can do is throw up our hands and apologize for whatever it is that we did or neglected to do. I had a friend in high school who was taught to open doors for women. So, at age seven he opened the door for a woman at the mall. She slapped him and called him an oppressor. I think he cried. Feminism can be some scary shit.

I claim for myself the negative title of “not sexist” but I am sure some feminists would dispute this––particularly my views on the sex trade (see previous blogs.)  Furthermore, most wife beaters and rapists also think of themselves as “not sexist.” This brings me to men who describe themselves as “feminist.” Most men I have met who declare themselves as “feminists” seem to be blissfully ignorant of the debate over what this term means. I strongly suspect that when men claim this title, they assume that this will make them more appealing to women. However, I have also noticed that these male feminists seem to have a preoccupation with beautiful warrior women portrayed by Angelina Jolie, Mila Jovovich, and Sarah Michelle Gellar. I think there is an idea among men of the sci-fi/geek persuasion that if you can somehow look past Buffy’s kick-boxing skills and medieval weaponry to her blonde hair and nubile body––that this makes you a feminist. That’s fucked up.

THE WARRIOR BABE TRADITION

Buffy is clearly indebted to a tradition of female super-heroes, and is referred to as a “super-hero” on the show. Wonder Woman, created in 1941, is the matriarch from which all female super-heroes are descended. Wonder Woman is an amazon, which dates the warrior babe tradition back the ancient Greece. (In Buffy, Willow and Tara refer to themselves as Amazons.) Now there may have once been a culture––or more likely a military unit––on which the legend of the Amazons is based. But this is irrelevant. What matters is that the Greeks embraced this legend whole-heartedly. Achilles, Hercules, and Belleraphon all killed their share of Amazons. Greek art has numerous depictions of Amazonmachies––or battles against the Amazons. Notice in this picture how the Amazon’s mini-skirt highlights her pelvis gyrating against her steed.

 Why were the Greeks so interested in Amazons? No one can be certain, but it should be remembered that Ancient Greece was one of the most misogynistic cultures in the world. Robert Meagher has suggested that the legend of the Amazons was not meant to empower women but to buttress a culture of misogyny.  (One mural depicts Greek warriors dragging captured Amazons by their hair.) The defeat of Amazons seems strangely related to the suggestions of rape that appear throughout Buffy.

Now let’s look at Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman was created by William Moulton Marston, a psychologist at Tufts. Marston believed in the educational power of comic books and described Wonder Woman as “psychological propaganda” promoting the new type of empowered woman–that Marston thought ought to rule the world.  So Wonder Woman was, in a very literal way, a man’s prescription for how women ought to be. Can that be feminist? I’ll return to this question later. 

The comic has been credited with bringing bondage into American popular culture. Wonder Woman, originally called Suprema, was clearly the product of Marston’s masochistic––arguably Oedipal––fantasies. Wonder Woman was a sort of maternal dominatrix causing the world to submit to world peace under the yoke of her golden lasso. Marston is quoted: “The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound … Only when the control of self by others is more pleasant than the unbound assertion of self in human relationships can we hope for a stable, peaceful human society. … Giving to others, being controlled by them, submitting to other people cannot possibly be enjoyable without a strong erotic element.” And elsewhere “Give them an alluring woman stronger than themselves to submit to, and they’ll be proud to become her willing slaves!” Although the themes of bondage and domination have been toned down in Wonder Woman, I think male fans of the warrior babe tradition still harbor Marston’s fantasy of a dominatrix world order. What they call “feminism” seems to include an idealized concept of women as wiser and more moral than men. It also very telling that the Whedonverse is rife with bondage. The pilot of Dollhouse showed us glimpse of a naked Eliza Dushku lashing a man to bed. A detective mentions that the Dollhouse can produce, among other things, the perfect dominatrix. Why were these details included? What is the connection to Wonder Woman?

This brings us to the modern era of bad-ass beautiful women. I am thinking here specifically of Angelina Jolie in films like Tomb Raider and Mr. And Mrs. Smith and Mila Jovovich in The Fifth Element, Resident Evil, and Ultraviolet. It is odd that so many of these films are based on video games. This also seems to suggest that these warrior babes are being marketed to the geek feminist males. What is interesting about this new crop of warrior babes is that, unlike Amazons, they need the support of men. The traditional strengths of men and women have essentially been reversed: the women are the superior fighters and the men heal their wounds, encourage them when they’re down, and check their hubris. This dynamic is particularly strong in The Fifth Element where Bruce Willis is physically weaker but more mature emotionally than the film’s heroine.  The modern warrior babes are strong and weak at the same time.

This brings me to Dollhouse, which seems to be the ultimate manifestation of the dependent warrior babe.  The show is structured so that in each episode the heroine is given incredible skills and powers. (These powers are bestowed by a male technician, at the request of men.) Then, at the end of the episode, she is once again reduced to a helpless, mindless commodity. Dollhouse will either become the starkest expression of the warrior babe myth as something created by and for men––or it will evolve into a brilliant critique of this dynamic. In a final installment, I will attempt to look at how women have appropriated these warrior babes and try to figure out what it means for Buffy to personify “female power.”