Extremely Lame

Do you ever get the feeling that some people choose to get pissed at something popular just for the sake of being different?

I had the displeasure of reading a review on the series Firefly and the film Serenity as, and I quote: “A Rapist’s View of the World.”You will have to forgive me for choosing not to link it to this blog. Sure, it could be argued that I’m only doing it so that no one here can hear her side of the story. Of course, that would be wrong. I just don’t want there to be a spidersilk thread directly linking me to that crap. Go find it on Google.

The rather substantive essay (at least for LiveJournal) just reeks of the kind of nonsense people write when trying for tenure at a university. Fame=infamy=$$$ to the university=tenure. You can’t write a paper that says academia has pretty much gotten something right after centuries of study. If you want to be noticed, you have to say that “Everyone in the history of the discipline to this point is completely wrong, and only I can understand it as it was meant to be understood!”

The essay in question is pretty definitively written by a neo-Dworkinite feminist. Andrea Dworkin is known as a radical anti-pornography feminist, but she’s mostly infamous for stating that all heterosexual sex is rape.  Just to be fair, Dworkin said that virtually all incidents of heterosexual sex in media were akin to rape because they focus on conquest and subjugation of a female by a male and that this behavior is likely to get perpetuated in real life. While it’s pretty close to saying “all heterosexual intercourse is rape,” it isn’t actually saying that. Unfortunately, such subtleties have been lost on a number of her disciples

First off, the author rants and raves about how everyone refers to Joss Whedon as a feminist and the series of Firefly as feminist work. Maybe I am hanging out in the wrong circles, but I’ve never heard to either as such. Firefly is a cleverly scripted sci-fi western that got the axe from Fox prematurely in my opinion, but that’s about it. It’s a fun popcorn kind of show, and if you go into it looking for something deeper, you’re likely to come out with so-called evidence to verify anything you already believed.

Some of the incidents of allegèd male bourgeois oppression seem to be pretty silly points to anyone not already looking to be pissed. For example, during flashbacks during the War of Unification, she refers to her superior, Malcolm Reynolds as “sir.” Later, when he is captain of the ship Serenity and she is second in command, she still addresses him as sir. Oh, the scandal! It’s even worse for the author because it’s a racist thing too because Zoe is black and Mal is white. The fact that there’s a military aspect to the relationship seemingly has nothing to do with it.

If it wasn’t bad enough, Zoe also gets “raped” by her white husband, Wash. The character of Wash is goofy, a pushover, and admits himself that his wife could “kill [him] with her pinky.” Apparently, grabbing your husband and dragging him to their room saying, “I need this man to tear all my clothes off” is what makes Wash a rapist.

The eternally peppy ship’s mechanic, Kaylee, isn’t freed of this bondage either. When big buff Jayne asks the captain if he can’t stop her from being cheerful, Malcolm jokingly replies, “I don’t believe there’s a power in the ‘verse that can stop Kaylee from being cheerful. Sometimes you just wanna duct tape her mouth and dump her in the hold for a month.” Oh my God, he’s talking about tying someone up and dropping her in a hole! Of course, the fact that the character is obviously joking, and more importantly, the fact that Kaylee knows he’s obviously joking is what makes this scene particularly heinous. After all, it shows her complicity in being abused.

The most hate, and the crux of the article, however, comes when we get to Inara, the Companion. Companions in the series are less like prostitutes and more like courtesans. Instead of having a pimp managing their money and clients, Companions are part of a guild and choose their own clients and are largely independent. Or, as the author refers to it, “[she] gets to choose her rapist, not the other way around.” Of course, her ability to choose to not take any clients at all seems to be kind of lost on the author.

It’s pretty obvious from the article that the author has a bone to pick with prostitution. In the comments, she asserts that all prostitution is rape, without exception. The author gets particularly personal when talking about how Inara is forced to be an unpaid and often unwilling counselor for the entire crew (emotional rape). She then accuses the creator of doing the same to his wife, having her listen to his worries and problems, and surmises elsewhere that it’s likely physical rape as well. The author implies that his wife puts up with it solely for the money. Interestingly enough, I can’t help but draw her statement on prostitution out to imply that any woman who chooses a mate based in whole or in part on that person’s financial status would be equally victimized. This is exactly what she is accusing Joss Whedon’s wife and yet she chooses to attack her. Seems as if she’s attacking a rape victim, at least according to her words.

Something interesting I noticed. All of the females that this author focused on could easily be seen as sex-positive role models and it is this that I think rankles her sensibilities. Dworkinites are notorious for seeing nothing good or rewarding from sex. It’s always seen as evil and dirty–a point often shared by the religious right. All three females seem to take charge of their sex lives, certainly moreso than their partners—Inara and her clients, Zoe and Wash, Kaylee and Simon.

Thankfully, there are comments to this essay that partially restore my faith in humanity.

There’s the rape survivor who was thoroughly disgusted at the author’s trivialization of actual rape by saying that nearly all instances of hetero sex is identical in its violation. If that’s rape, then what do you call non-consensual sex?

Then there was the person asking the author the legitimate question of whether there could any similar plots that she wouldn’t view as being anti-feminist. For example, if you have pretty girls saving the day, then heroines are nothing but eye candy. If you have ugly butch girls saving the day, then it’s just the patriarchy showing their fear of strong women. And if the women are neutral looking and saving the day, then they’re stripped of what makes them women and it’s as if it were a cast of male characters. Unfortunately, the author skirted the question.

Edit: I guess I have been under a rock with regards to Joss Whedon being beatified as a paragon of feminism. It’s easy to see how sneaky he is when you see him speaking at an Equality Now conference knowing all the while that he’s continually raping his wife. Pfft.