like the misogyny in supernatural is honestly rather bog-standard male prioritization and female exclusion. it's a female cast of madonnas or whores and nothing in between and for all intents and purposes women are props which only exist for titillation or to care for sam and dean.
what makes the misogyny interesting ultimately is the circumstances of the show, and i doubt mr kripke could ever have conceptualized this himself which only makes it more interesting to me. sam and dean exist in a hypermasculine world, isolated from society and, as a necessary extension, women as a demographic. they have no mother and no consistent feminine presence in their lives. john's hunting buddies, at least who sam and dean are shown to have interacted with growing up, are entirely male (john DOES know female hunters, but these are always "secret" relations that sam and dean don't know aboutâunless i'm forgetting one. the general principle still stands though). they're kept locked in cars and then in motel rooms; i would reckon they had almost no contact with women for a majority of their young childhood, what with how protective and isolating john is toward them.
and isolation and lack of contact disallows the opportunity for people to naturally come to empathize with others, especially those outside of their demographic. without conscious effort to seek humanity in others, there exists a disconnect so long as contact remains minimal. and sam and dean absolutely have minimal contact with not only women but society at large. you can see, implicitly, the way they fall back on the instinct to objectify the people they interact with; unless they see themselves in the victims they help, they expend very little emotional investment in them and are more prone to seeing other people as distinctly outside of them. they are not part of this world, and that world's affairs are of little or even no concern to them.
and this dehumanization is amplified with women: dean, specifically, treats women as prizes to be won and rewards for doing his job. it's something that keeps him hunting, and he is a character that indulges in hedonism and aesthetic pleasure for want of a community. he can continue hunting because he has extrinsic motivators pulling him forwardâsex with women is one of those, and it is not necessarily more prized than other rewards he may get for his efforts.
sam too falls into this habit, albeit in a much different way from dean. sam is awkward around women in ways he is not with men (to the extent that he sees interviewing Hot Girls as "dean's job"); he is also concerned with their respectability where that should be none of his business, frankly (that one line where dean says sam tried to convince a hooker to go to nursing school???). at the same time, women are a reward for him, but in a much more sexless way (which coincides with his concern for female respectability) to contrast dean's promiscuity. at the same time, he still receives women as rewards for his efforts; if he wants the sex, he takes it and he enjoys it. he is the one who has the elaborate wet dream about bela, not dean, even when he shows contempt and disdain toward her whenever they meet. his objectification of women is much more understated but still present; it's a necessary component of kripke's world, after all, and sam cannot escape the misogyny baked into his writing.
but what i mean by all this is that we see the show from sam and dean's perspective. we don't get an objective look at the world as it is. and even though i am so, so sure this was never intended to be subtext, what we receive from the rampant misogyny of supernatural is a strong support for their biased narration. women in supernatural are objects because sam and dean see them as objects, and we see the show through their eyes. we see the masculine fantasy of the hunter because they are the ideal sam and dean are striving for, and we see the madonnas and the whores because that is who women are to them. it elevates the experience from other shows with the same brand of misogyny and allows for a depth of interpretation that other shows can't (or rather, shouldn't) get away with. we already know the narration of supernatural is unreliable; the misogyny is just another layer of that. it strengthens the argument and adds to the atmosphere of the show instead of detracting from it and making it annoying to watch. oh yes another hot girl is flirting with deanâbut of course she is, because this is dean's world and in dean's world the women who aren't sexually available aren't worth paying attention to. so we see the hot girls and we don't see anyone else. oh my another hot girls needs sam to save her from herselfâof course she does, because this is sam's world and sam is concerned with people insofar as they reflect his internal struggles back at him, and if he can save this girl then he can save himself too (and of course she's hot, because she must remain sexually available for him if he decides he wants sex).
basically kripke created a deeply misogynistic show where women are cardboard cutouts with no interiority, and for once this approach works because sam and dean have such unique life experiences that this has become the world that they live in. they don't see the interiority of other people unless they see themselves, and they're unconcerned with agency and autonomy, like, period. there's no malice in the misogyny but it is present, and it makes sense for who they are and where they've come from. and that is why i think it's interesting and why i prefer Hot Bimbo #487 over any humanized alternative. once you start making sam and dean recognize the interiority of people outside themselves, you start reversing their gothic isolation and bring them closer to society, with which they are fundamentally incompatible.
jbbartram-illu
gummygunk
yousharknotpass
turnnoffyourmind
vaporwave
annaxmalina
kaledo-art
germansingergirl
