It's bait. Bait for publicity.

Who wants to bet that Disney paid people to post all the actually racist comments and Facebook groups to get people talking about it and ensuring they blame racism.

Last week, Kai Cole shocked the internet when she came clean about her ex-husband, the screenwriter and director Joss Whedon, who is best known as the creator of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In a scathing essay for the Wrap, Cole describes Whedon’s repeated violation of their relationship boundaries, his lying and gaslighting, and the ways that his neglect led her to compromise her integrity as she struggled to keep their 16-year marriage together:

“Joss admitted that for the next decade and a half, he hid multiple affairs and a number of inappropriate emotional ones that he had with his actresses, co-workers, fans and friends, while he stayed married to me,” Cole writes. “Despite understanding, on some level, that what he was doing was wrong, he never conceded the hypocrisy of being out in the world preaching feminist ideals, while at the same time taking away my right to make choices for my life and my body based on the truth. He said, after he left, he understood: ‘It’s not just like I killed you, but that I’d done it subtly, over years. That I’d been poisoning you. Chipping away at you.’ He made me doubt my own instincts and watched me move further away from my personal values and social mores, trying to connect with him, never telling me it was impossible."

Cheating is often perceived as a problem in a marriage rather than one of boundaries and consent. Marriage, after all, is easy to categorize as part of patriarchy’s structural constraints on women, a dated mechanism that cannot be expected to “work.” Looked at it a different way, however -- as an agreement made by people about their needs and limits -- it becomes much easier to understand how repeatedly stepping out without any effort to renegotiate the existing relationship agreement is, in essence, a denial of a partner’s right to exercise agency. “It’s not just like I killed you,” Whedon told her, referencing the ultimate denial of agency. But it’s worse than that: it’s that he acted like she didn’t have a right to agency.

A recurring pattern of cheating is emotionally destabilizing -- in order to keep the relationship going, a partner must be lied to and sometimes gaslit. As instances of emotional neglect, disconnection and misattunement pile up, the partner being lied to begins to exercise betrayal blindness to cope with the mounting cognitive dissonance. This process is largely not conscious. As the betrayal scholar Dr. Jennifer Freyd writes, “unawareness helps the victim survive. [Betrayal theory] draws on two facts about our nature as social beings and our dependence and reliance on others. First, we are extremely vulnerable in infancy, which gives rise to a powerful attachment system [that views maintaining the bonds we form with others as a biological imperative]. Second, we have a constant need to make ‘social contracts’ with other people in order to get needs met. This has led to the development of a powerful cheater-detector system. These two aspects of our humanity serve us well, but when the person we are dependent on is also the person betraying us, our two standard responses to trouble conflict with each other. [ ... ] The standard response to betrayal -- confrontation or withdrawal -- may only make the situation worse for the person who depends on the [person doing the betraying], because confrontation and withdrawal are generally not good for inspiring attachment and caregiving.” Freyd’s research and that of others in the past 30 years indicate that terror and violence are not the only things capable of traumatizing someone: betrayal does as well.  

Cole’s account illustrates why Lundy Bancroft recognizes “the Player” as one of the archetypal patterns of abuse in his seminal work on relational harm Why Does He Do That? Abuse is defined by entitlement (or to use Whedon’s own words: “When I was running Buffy, I was surrounded by beautiful, needy, aggressive young women [ ... ] I am a powerful producer and the world is laid out at my feet and I can’t touch it.” Except he did touch it and he felt justified in touching it (“In many ways I was the height of normal, in this culture. We’re taught to be providers and companions and at the same time, to conquer and acquire -- specifically sexually -- and I was pulling off both!”). Even as he admits that he had affairs that violated his wife’s consent and created literal hostile workplace environments on his sets, Whedon frames it not as deeply troubling pattern he needs to address but as a banquet laid out for him. The women with whom he had affairs aren’t agents any more than Cole is -- they are food items laid out for him. Like his then-wife, Whedon’s sexual partners are not humans with a right to self-determine. The world laid out a table and cruelly told him not to eat -- there are no other humans in this picture. “He is incapable of taking women seriously as human beings rather than playthings,” to quote Bancroft.

Whedon has suggested over the years that cheating on Cole was a personal problem specific to the tragedy of their growing apart over the course of nearly two decades together. However, his troubled history of relationships with other women -- from actresses and crew working on his shows, to other romantic partners -- and his work loudly contradict this assertion. In a 2015 analysis of his work, Laurel Jupiter spoke to the core of Whedon’s pattern:

The initial patriarchal villains of the Buffyverse were men who abused women using either brute strength or political power, but the three nerds [introduced later on in Buffy] are 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; [the three nerd villains in Buffy] 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 his range of influence. And, uncomfortably, all of the actors cast for these roles bore a striking physical resemblance to Joss.

[The episode “Storyteller” in Buffy] was a story about Andrew the Joss-doppelgänger 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) [He reportedly fired Carpenter for getting pregnant as well as other abuses]. It was self-critical and raw and I was 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 [toward them]; 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. 

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!  

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. 

This pattern shows through in Cole’s essay. She, a strong and self-possessed woman, supported and buttressed Whedon’s dreams and pushed him to develop these into a career. She cofounded Bellwether Pictures with him. She kept their life together as he worked on numerous projects. She adored him, and he ensured her destruction and through it, that of their marriage. 

It’s tempting to imagine that marriage is complicated, that the fault hides in the love and attention Whedon was not receiving from his wife. But then why would he destroy the next relationship he had in which a new partner offered to explore a non-exclusive relationship together? 

After his separation from Cole, Whedon had the opportunity to have a nonmonogamous relationship in which he could explore his interest in power-exchange (that is, erotic play involving power and control, or BDSM). He chose instead to slowly poison this partner too, to use his own words, but in a different way. Arden Leigh, singer songwriter of Arden and the Wolves, writes:

In the wake of his separation I offered him a consensual non-monogamous BDSM relationship so he could have his fantasies responsibly, and he STILL chose monogamy and lying.

I figured hey, marriages are messy, and while there was no question he made mistakes (which he admitted), I chalked it up to societal default monogamy and sexual repression being the problem. I thought he deserved a chance at having what he wanted in an honest way, and I offered him that. And in return he took everything I offered and then piled so much shame on me for it that I spent a good year of my life thinking I was completely unworthy of love, that I'd always fall on the wrong side of someone's Madonna/whore complex. The effort I've undertaken since the start of 2016 to undo this fuckery has been monumental.

Monogamy is not the problem. One troublesome marriage is not the problem. When you hate yourself so much that you only get off when the women you desire hate you too, then you will continue to hurt people so that you can revel in the guilt over what a piece of shit you are. And when you are a rich white man who has every resource to heal and instead you consciously choose not to so that you can stay in the comfort of your patterns of hurting both others and yourself, that's no different from abuse. And I'm glad to see it made public.

Looking over the archetypes of abuse that Bancroft describes in Why Does He Do That? we begin to recognize that the infidelity described by both of Whedon’s former partners is actually a symptom, rather than the problem itself. In many ways, Whedon’s use of his position as a feminist ally bears more resemblance to Bancroft’s “Mr. Sensitive” than “the Player”: 

He loves the language of feelings, openly sharing his insecurities, his fears, and his emotional injuries. [ ... ] Often he has participated extensively in therapy or twelve-step programs, or reads all the big self-help books, so he speaks the language of popular psychology and introspection. His vocabulary is sprinkled with jargon like developing closeness, working out our issues, and facing up to hard things about myself. He presents himself to women as an ally in the struggle against sex-role limitations. 

Mr. Sensitive wraps himself in one of the most persuasive covers a man can have. If you start to feel chronically mistreated by him, you are likely to assume that something is wrong with you, and if you complain about him to other people, they may think you must be spoiled: ‘You have the New Age man, what more do you want?’