Badoom-tish! 
Yes - they were selling their skills as well as their bodies. But their skills were related to dating and sex. They’re not street hookers - they’re high class escorts. It’s still them selling their bodies for sex, just with other attributes as well.
I hardly defend Whedon blindly. I think Dollhouse is a piece of crap, personally. But your characterization of Companions as “sex slaves” is way off the mark. Especially since their status in the 'Verse is very high. Just because there is sex involved in some (most) of their business doesn’t make them “slaves” by any definition of the word. Especially since Companions are very picky about their clientele. As for the sex part of the job…so what? We all have a skill set we’ve mastered that enables us to make a living. Just because that skill set is looked down upon in contemporary Western culture doesn’t mean it will be in the future, in a different start system. Obviously. 
We are watching it from a culture in which selling your body for sex (yesyesyes, that’s only part of the job, but it is an integral part of it) isn’t high status. It doesn’t really matter how often in the show they claim that being a companion is high status in this invented world - in the real world, it isn’t, so the character is still, from a 2010 perspective, a willing sex slave.
FWIW, if you haven’t seen Epitaph One of Dollhouse or ep3 of season 2 onwards, then I’d recommend giving that a go any time you fancy some TV and you’ve run out of other things you actually want to watch.
Whedon makes an art out of making the snorting, breathlessly clipped dialogue that most nerds (especially female ones) engage in sound and look cool instead of embarrassing, like it does in real life. This is the major component of his appeal, especially to a dorky female audience.
I think we’re talking past each other and getting hung up on some minutia, when we really pretty much agree with each other on the big things.
We have Season 1 of Dollhouse on DVD. When they release season 2, I’ll probably sit down and watch them all in a row. But I really don’t think Dushku is that great an actress, even though I like her as a person.
While just about anything that has fans has its share of obnoxious fans, 1) these other fandoms are not the subject of this thread and 2) in my experience the Whedon cult is the absolute worst. I’ve never had a Trekkie tell me I need to watch EVERY EPISODE, IN ORDER of any of the Star Trek shows. I’ve never encountered a Tolkien lover who said that I had to read all of the books before I was allowed to decide they weren’t for me. Members of other fandoms may feel pity or contempt for those who don’t share their interests, but I’m unfamiliar with any other fandom that suffers from so many proselytizers. Heck, I’ve known Jehovah’s Witnesses who were less into converting others.
*It’s the insistence upon talking about it to people who’ve made it clear that they aren’t interested, and worse still insisting that these people WOULD be interested if only they’d watch EVERY EPISODE, IN ORDER, that bothers me. I’m allowed to not like Buffy, and I’m tired of hearing about how I need to “cure” this problem by subjecting myself to 100+ episodes of a show I don’t ever want to watch again. If the Whedon cult could keep it amongst themselves then I’d have no problem with them. I don’t have a problem with the sane Whedon fans who are capable of accepting the fact that not everyone either is or wants to be a member of their fandom.
She gets better in season 2, but so do all the other actors - she’s definitely the weak point of the show. The bloke who plays Victor turns out to be one of the best actors I’ve seen on TV for a very long time. And um, yeah, those legal DVDs are what you should wait for, ahem. (We didn’t, but have actually bought season 1 now. It cost hardly anything).
I’m trying to extend the benefit of the doubt here. Don’t make it harder than it already is!
Though I think the series improved greatly as it progressed ( i came close to abandoning it early as well ), frankly as the focal point she remains just about the weakest link even to the very end. She’s hotter than a hot tamale and is adequate within her range, but said range really isn’t broad enough to work for this sort of show.
Thankfully an at least slighty more ensemble style developed over time.
Heh. I like Whedon, but after some moderate involvement in the early Buffy community I became disenchanted with a sizeable chunk of the more rabid fans. I’m not sure they are all that much more obnoxious than other “cultists”, but they were annoying enough I wanted to distance myself. Plus I grew tired of a steady stream of Whedon’s authorial “voice”. He does have a distinctive style and on heavy exposure it can get a bit too precious for my taste. For a little while ( especially from the last season of Buffy on ) I was somewhat tired of him.
Then the Firefly DVDs drew me right back in ( the series on TV failed to snag me - I blame Fox for that one ). When he’s on, he definitely works for me and IMO he’s more often on than he’s off.
But yeah, different strokes for different folks. I can certainly see his characteristic stylistic flourishes or preferred subject matters just not being to someone’s taste.
I’m sorry, I’ll have to take your word for it, but I’ve never seen anything like that.
I’d probably start by pointing out that you don’t seem to understand the definition of “sex slave.” They have sex for money, yes. But they get to choose when they have sex, and who they have sex with, and the money they get for it is theirs. They don’t have an owner, and they occupy a high social position in their society. They fail to meet the definition of “slave” (sex or otherwise) on every point.
I don’t think you’ve really shown a basis for it. All we’ve really got is two examples of a sex-bot from one show, both from late in the series where it’s debatable how much creative input Whedon even had on the show any more. And in both shows featuring the sex-bot, the person using the sex-bot was presented as a pathetic loser, and the actual portrayal of the robot was not particularly titillating. Your other examples are either wildly off-base (the Companions) or simply referenced and never directly shown, as in the Angel episode that featured escaped slaves fighting against a tyrannical off-world (and off-screen) society.
A lot? Excluding Firefly, you’ve got a total of three episodes out of twelve years worth of TV shows. That’s pretty far below the threshold of “lots.”
In fact, there is one episode where a person tries to treat her explicitly like a slave (“She’s mine,” “I bought and paid for you,” “I should have uglied you up,” etc.) and he’s thoroughly humiliated legally and socially.
I get the impression that scifisam2009 just assumes that if your profession is sexual, you’re a de facto slave. Which…doesn’t really follow. If someone commissions an artist to make them a painting, is that person an art slave? Obviously not. It’s just the current taboos about sex that give it this special status.
You don’t think that’s a lot? Fine. But when you’re trying to argue against people who claim that Joss is unhealthily obsessed with sexbot type characters, they’re simply not going to listen to you if you pretend that
[ul]
[li]The characters in ‘She’ (I’m not sure that it matters that we never see them having sex)[/li]
[li]The sexbot made by Warren, then the Buffybot[/li]
[li]The companions, no matter how ‘high status’ they’re supposed to be[/li]
[li]All the women in the Dollhouse (plus the men presumably - we only saw one being used for sex but I’m sure the others are too) - why are you not counting them?[/li]
[li]Plus probably few other examples that I can’t be arsed thinking about. You could probably include the women going mad for Xander when he does that magic spell to try to get Cordelia to love him, and the women going mad for the boy with the lettered jacket (in Buffy), and Cordelia’s zombie ex BF trying to create a version of her made from bits of other women, Darla’s human past as a prostitute, Cordelia being possessed by a demon and her body used to have sex with Connor so that she can get pregnant, etc etc … [/li][/ul]
Does not amount to a lot of sexbot type characters. ‘12 years’ is a bit disingenous - the amount of time isn’t important. Hell, you claimed that there weren’t any. We can argue about how they’re presented (note that I agree with you about that) but we can’t deny they exist.
Yes. Do you live in a world where those taboos don’t exist? I don’t, and Mal doesn’t either, apparently. The world we’re watching the show from counts as much as the world they’re trying to present on screen.
Hell, in a way you could say that the companions’ profession involves giving over even more of themselves than current prostitutes, because they have to act like the person their client needs them to be and perform the non-sexual tasks the client wants, rather than just having sex; the client rents their personality as well as their body. Taken in isolation it wouldn’t mean anything much, but it’s not exactly unique in Whedon’s shows.
You can either argue against it, with episodes like the one you cite above or by pointing out that these women are always battling against being used as sex toys against their will (like Inara’s friends in the companion training place), or you can argue against its importance by pointing out how strong the female characters tend to be, but you can’t pretend that it doesn’t happen.
This is just…so very incorrect, and a very weird argument to make. When in Firefly have you seen anyone hire Inara and say, “Okay, I want you to be hot-tempered,” or, “I need a sub, can you be it?” People hire Inara because they want her (and on at least two occasions, they find that getting her is more than they thought they were getting). You’re only seeing what you want to see, here.
As for taboos, they’re cultural and they’re mutable. The very point of Inara is that she is a free woman with wealth and significant social status. She’s intelligent and educated; if she desired, she could take up any number of professions. But she chooses the one that gives comfort and companionship to others, which includes but isn’t limited to sexual companionship. There is no slavery involved, and there is less sex involved than you think (of course, you’re not alone, given that there are several piggish characters in Firefly who vacuously assume Companion = sex = whore).
Women who cannot find any job but prostitution, who are not well educated, who work for a domineering pimp or mistress, you could argue that they’re slaves, because they have very little choice and freedom in what they do. Inara has nothing but freedom. She is not a slave, pure and simple.
scifisam2009 needs to revisit the definition of the word “slave.”
Ditto. Lamia, cite please, regarding these supposed rabid Whedonites who demand that you watch every episode of Buffy before you’re qualified to judge it? Preferably within this thread, since it seems to be enraging you so?
Hm. Space cowboy skiffy versus dark mindrape neuroSF. Yeah, I can see how that would happen. I love the stuffing out of Priya & Tony (aka S & V), but I don’t talk about it because I don’t know who to talk about it with.