Ugh ok ok I actually have a ridiculous amount of words about this (hi ocelot, can I post those emails from 2012??) But I wanted to say that this… idk. This has been a long time coming for Joss and it’s absolutely a bed he made for himself, and it makes me gratified on a brutal visceral level to see it coming back to bite him, but a lot of that anger is watching an artist I loved curdle into his own self-hate and turn into the kind of awful man he used to write about. Joss…Joss has had a recurrent fantasy of self-loathing and shame about his treatment of female characters and actresses that started, afaik, in season 6 of Buffy, with the introduction of the three nerd villains Warren, Jonathan, and Andrew.
The initial patriarchal villains of the Buffyverse were men who abused women using either brute strength or political power: Angelus, the Watchers, the Mayor. The three nerds introduced another kind of misogynistic male antagonist that grew to dominate and completely consume Joss’s work in the 00s: the nerdy, story-obsessed guy who used his intelligence and mastery of technology to abuse and control strong, heroic women. Nerdy men who, like Joss, either created or tampered with the women they wanted total control over, either by building androids or altering existing women, usually via invasive medical torture. Joss the writer invents the character of Buffy while having workplace clashes with her actress Sarah Michelle Gellar; Andrew, Warren, and Jonathan drug their girlfriends into compliance and create the BuffyBot to obey their will. This villain character would show up again and again in Joss’ later works: the scientist who had, thanks to his technical and storytelling skills, been given custody by higher powers over women who would normally be far out of their range of influence. And, uncomfortably, all of the actors cast for these roles bore a striking physical resemblance to Joss.
When Joss aired “Storyteller”, I was surprised and impressed. It was penned by Jane Espenson, Buffy’s strongest staff writer, and was a story about Andrew the Joss doppelganger filming the house of potential Slayers for a series he called “Buffy, Slayer of the Vampyres.” A major theme of “Storyteller” was Andrew’s intrusive use of the Buffy cast’s personal lives and pain to make a good story, his refusal to acknowledge their privacy, and possibly, as Anya kept insisting, to use his videos as masturbation material. It seemed like a huge moment of self- awareness and self-reflection about the relationship Joss had to the real and fictional women who worked for him, especially given the conflicts he had at the time with actresses like Charisma Carpenter over her character Cordelia and personal bodily autonomy (pregnancy). It was self-critical and raw and I was incredibly proud of Joss for being willing to go there in such a public way.
Buffy ended, and Andrew redeemed himself, but the misogynist-nerd-self-loathing metastory intensified. One of the aspects of the Three Nerds villain arc that had always made me profoundly uncomfortable was the way Joss positioned the boys’ nerdy pursuits and lack of traditional masculinity– not just their treatment of women– as something inherently repulsive.
Viewers were supposed to be disgusted by the sight of three dorky boys nerding out over Star Wars figurines. Buffy and the house full of potential slayers call Andrew vile names for being a nerd, not in response to his behavior; by the end of his run, I felt the urge to protect Andrew, not from the girls, but from Joss, who was clearly using him as a punching bag onto which he was projecting his own self-loathing. (Eventually Joss was quoted saying that Andrew was, as had been hinted, gay, but would remain in the closet indefinitely “because it’s funny,” something that horrified and enraged fans, but which Joss seemed to view, appallingly, as as an ultimate emasculation.)
The next major Joss project was Dollhouse, with evil scientist and Joss lookalike Topher Brink programming, manipulating, and violating various women into playacting roles he’d scripted for them. It was such a blatant story about Joss and his actresses it was difficult to watch. Like, My Feminism Is Just An Excuse To Exploit Hot Actresses, I Am Such A Disgusting Creature!!! Coming soon to the CW! His next project, the webseries I Am So Horrible And My Feminism Is A Sham, featuring NPH as the Joss stand-in, was similarly cringeworthy.
A big outlier here is Wash, from Firefly and Serenity, who almost fit the pattern, but not quite, and that “not quite” was enough of a problem that, like the similar character Oz, he had to be written out of the story. Alan Tudyk had the same general physical resemblance to Joss and the same dress sense as Andrew, Topher, and Billy Horrible. His dinosaur theater sessions looked and sounded like the action figure games the Trio played, and the blurb for Joss’s media company, Mutant Enemy. But unlike all the other nerdy blond men of the Whedonverse, Wash was in a equal and loving relationship with the strong soldier woman he adored. Other characters in the series were preoccupied with the traditional gender role imbalance in Wash and Zoe’s marriage and questioned whether Wash felt emasculated by his wife being stronger than he was, but both Wash and Zoe were completely above and untouched by it. She was a warrior woman and she was married to a dorky guy who told stories and who wasn’t the most physically powerful man on her crew. She could have broken him in half with her pinky and they loved and respected each other and had a happy, healthy marriage. This was, somehow, too much for Joss to handle, and so Wash had to die.
When venting about Joss I want to say that the problem isn’t that Joss was always terrible, or that all of his work was tainted or had a poisonous message from the beginning. It wasn’t; Buffy was and still is incredibly important; it had the kind of powerful emotional intelligence that burrows into your heart and stays there and I think it still stands by itself, years later. Buffy still stands. Charles Gunn still stands. Anya still stands. When my mother passed away last year, I watched “The Body” like a ritual, and I know I’m not the only person to have done something similar. That canon isn’t going anywhere.
The problem is that at some point in his career, Joss became so intent on the masochistic fantasy of being hated by strong women for being a nerd that he spent a decade writing stories about violating those women to ensure they would hate him. I wish Joss had ended that obsession with “Storyteller.” I wish he had talked about the feelings that made him want to make “Dollhouse” with his therapist and tried to make things right with Charisma Carpenter instead of turning those particular personal demons into a bad TV show. I wish the ideas of intimacy and equality weren’t so threatening to him that he had to write men like Oz and Wash out of existence instead of trying to evolve into them. I wish he hadn’t let himself fall into that pit of destructive self-loathing back in 2002, and I wish he hadn’t stayed there so long that he started to turn that hate outward onto the women he perceived as loathing and rejecting him. I wish he hadn’t turned, in twenty years, from the man who wanted to see the blonde girl in the horror movie survive and thrive into the rich bastard who thought it was funny to call Natasha Romanoff a cunt on IMAX and who called her a monster for being the victim of medical abuse. I’m still laughing angrily at Joss being driven off twitter by a mob of angry, betrayed female fans, because wow does he ever deserve it, but man, Joss. It didn’t have to be that way.
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