What’s that you say Cliffy? Only jerks quote long posts they wrote on other message boards?
Yes, Other Cliffy, but this is right on point and I’m much too lazy to try rephrasing it (from a discussion of the terrible things that befall women on Joss Whedon TV shows, but you can ignore the particular context]:
I’m not a big fan of the whole Women in Refrigerators thing. I get it, but it’s the side-effect of a larger problem, which is that women are accessories in stories to male heroes. The women aren’t tortured because authors love torturing women (or audiences love seeing it); they’re tortured because “person important to hero is in jeopardy” is a powerful story, and it’s frequently a woman that fits that bill.
That’s not a positive status quo; female characters do have a disturbing lack of agency, but decrying Women in Refrigerators is saying the symptom is the disease. It’s dumb because there’s no way to treat that symptom without attacking the root cause, and those who claim otherwise make it really easy to dismiss the problem, because that is so clearly not it.
But even if you’re a devotee of the WiR line of reasoning, the reason Joss Whedon in particular writes a lot of stories in which terrible things happen to women is that he writes a lot of stories in which terrible things happen to people, and he includes a lot of women characters that do have agency and aren’t simply accoutrements to protagonists. I doubt very much that the solution to that problem would be to rewrite Buffy, one of the most explicitly feminist shows ever created, with an all-male cast.
I don’t mean to be a complete Whedon apologist here, as some of his stuff is less easily swallowed. But if we list every terrible thing that’s happened to a woman in fiction and say it’s part of the problem regardless of circumstance, then the only solution is to not include female characters, period.
I note in passing that Gail Simone, who coined the term Women in Refrigerators, recently wrote a comic (quite a good one) in which, when the female protagonist told her boyfriend she was pregnant, he beat her and held her head underwater until she lost consciousness and would have drowned if his parents hadn’t intervened. Also, a couple issues earlier, said protagonist’s sister was stabbed in the neck with a fork. Both of those incidents would have been decried as exactly what needs to be fought against if the author had a Y chromosome instead of being originator of the movemynt. (Oh yeah, the boyfriend also planned to rape them both to death.)
–Cliffy
