Is Joss Whedon feminist enough?

Hopefully-provocative title aside, my GF puts a question in response to the heartbreaking Angel episode 'A Hole in the World': Does Joss Whedon kill his major male characters anywhere near as often as he offs his central females? The answer is obviously NO, he doesn't. So the real question is: why not? From which we get to a whole host of other more specific questions, but let's approach through that one. Why not?

[Note: This is just about as close as this blog comes to full-on lit-crit. It also assumes familiarity with Joss Whedon's work, though I hope to surprise even fans dropping some references to his writing beyond Buffy. Still, this is more highfalutin' than is traditional around these parts. Forewarned is forearmed.]

[Note 2: New readers (if there are any), find some other writing on Joss/Buffy/etc. here, here, here, here (a long post about fandom and subjective combat(!)), here (on the different ways The Sopranos and Buffy treat dreams), and here (spoilery for Angel's final story arc, so my housemates, don't read!).]

[Note 3: Whedonesque types, to clarify, while I may have buried the lede here, the implied answer to this deliberately silly, improperly framed titular question is 'Yes, but Angel is problematic.' Welcome again - please leave a comment if you'd like.]

The first and least satisfying answer is nothing more than: 'Numbers.' Most of the main characters on Buffy are women, and they're often in combat and conflict, so it makes sense that they'd be killed off (cf. Buffy, Anya, Kendra, Jenny Calendar, etc.). Angel was never positioned as that kind of explicitly feminist statement, and its recovery-from-checkered-and-brutal-past themes (Angel is a private detective with a drinking problem, remember) are much harder to rework in primarily-female stories, so its cast is largely male; as Fred puts it in 'A Hole in the World,' she 'walks with heroes,' '[her] boys,' even if Whedon regularly undercuts standard masculine/feminine expectations - as when Gunn is caught singing 'Three Little Maids' and tries to cover by turning it into a rap, but can't remember any rap lyrics. Firefly centered on Captain Malcolm Reynolds and his role on the outskirsts of (traditionally male-dominated) society, but as Whedon has pointed out, he can't help turning it into a show about a 'teen girl with superpowers,' namely River Tam. Whedon's inversions of standard sex-role formulae - the whore is the most powerful public figure on the ship, the formidable second-in-command on the ship is a married woman whose husband feels a combination of inferiority complex, willful submissiveness, and fear of cuckoldry, while the greasy ship's mechanic is a cute little girl - work as statements about culture on that show, and complicate the group dynamic. But when the time comes to start killing regulars on Firefly (or rather, in its film sequel, Serenity), he offs the husband and the priest. Whoever's more numerous does the dying on Firefly and Buffy.

But again, there's Angel, on which the following women die suffering horribly (we haven't watched up to the finale yet, and I won't talk about it though it plays into this argument): Fred, Cordelia, Darla, Lilah. The little girl in the White Room is brutally killed (though admittedly she's only a physical manifestation of all-powerful evil), and the particular way in which both Cordy, Fred, and Darla die is uniquely female: they die (or are rendered comatose) in childbirth.* Angel is a show largely about men in which the genre formulae seem to dictate that women bite the dust. And if you've just seen Angel's fourth season, in which a goddess bursts forth from Cordy to terrorize the world, you can be forgiven for raising an eyebrow when, a year later, a goddess bursts forth from Fred to (etc.).

But I credit Whedon with almost superhuman craftsmanship and commitment to egalitarian principles; if he's killing girls off left and right in his stories I imagine his reasons aren't the usual ones. He's got his fetishes like everyone else - notice how often shirtless males are made to endure torture on all three of his shows, particularly in the third season of Buffy, with Angel in the role of victim/convalescent much of the time, down to the finale - but I think the mortality rates on his shows tend to reflect the unique and progressive reordering of power that is a major theme in all his work. Think too of Alien: Resurrection, a middling film at the center of which are a mother-clone and daughter-robot, along with a dumb ox of a guy for ineffectual company. And of the sacrifice of the buddy-cop in Speed. And of the percentage of Angel and Buffy's adventures in which females end up aggressors (from praying mantis teacher lady to the demon of the Doublemeat to Glory to Illyria to the Amazons in 'She' to Willow's S6 rampage to the astonishing richness of Faith, Buffy's alter-ego, and on to the Primitive, the central figure in Buffy's evocative mythology). Among Whedon's work, Angel trades in the most problematic (from a feminist-evaluative standpoint) gender relations of all his shows, but it follows the general lines of his work, which is pointedly and consistently progressive.

Lilah, for instance, is killed only after being emotionally and physically weakened: The Beast has given her a wound that won't close (with a molten finger to the midsection),** and she's staying with her ex-boyfriend Wesley while they work to stop the Apocalypse (only sort-of-)together. Lilah was the gloriously sexual castrating legal-eagle bitch-goddess of Angel, but by her death midway through Season Four she'd been pummeled by an abusive coworker, let down none-too-gently by her XBF Wesley, and lived in a constant state of barely-concealed terror that Angel would harm her. Angel endured his share of torture on that show - far beyond it, actually - but Lilah's treatment at his hands was sometimes downright cruel. He'd have killed her (as Angelus), given the chance - but then Cordelia, or rather whatever demon was inhabiting Cordy's body, took care of that for him. Lilah was laid low before dying, running scared (like Jenny Calendar - no slouch herself). And even as villainess, Cordy was a victim; same for Lilah; same for Darla, whom Angel fucked 'til they were both blue in the face in Season Two and who came back huge with devil-child in S3 so she could kill herself in an alleyway. Did she find redemption? Why yes she did. Right before buying it while having a kid.

But then you might point out that pregnant Darla was also the most powerful being on the show in Season Three - able to toss Angel all over the place, empowered by the living thing inside her. She was Angel's craftiest foe, to whom he had the closest and most twisted relationship, and she came nearest to destroying him utterly - and far from being simply victimized by pregnancy, she was humanized by it, attaining in her final weeks an admirable complexity and humanness of character. By taking her own life, she embodied a feminist-poetic principle ill-suited to plain ol' structural analysis: there are costs that only women can bear, and in paying them strong women can acquire unique vision. Remember, Darla gets to come back briefly in Season Four to play the wise mother from beyond the grave, setting Connor against his then-lover, Cordelia. The kid doesn't stand a chance against one woman stewarding the next generation of Joss's creations; against two he's hopeless, a pinball. That scene - in which Darla fails to prevent Connor from completing a dark ritual that requires the blood of a virgin - sets the sacrifice up as women's work, in which loverboy is just a pawn. A fighter so strong he can beat Angel and his pals in a brawl, but unlike Darla and Cordy he's slave to his adolescent impulses. Two of the three will end up dead, but they die as full-on combatants, agents, not just shells. From a narrative standpoint, Lilah is brought to the Hyperion Hotel just to die - she might easily have slunk off on her own. But the proximate function of her death is to force Wesley to decapitate her dead body - to make sure she doesn't come back a vampire - which is the respect accorded a warrior, not just a protective gesture by the sensitive ex-boyfriend.***

So what about Fred? She's struck down and never even gets a chance to fight (though look too at her 'I'm not the damsel in distress, Wesley' speech). Why? For one, because that's what Joss's L.A. does to women in particular. (Remember the foolish, sympathetic actress in Angel's first season, who seeks eternal youth because she's been eaten up by Hollywood's ludicrous expectations for starlets? But then remember also Anne, who fights and survives and is last seen running a successful homeless shelter she once might have inhabited.) The opening of 'A Hole in the World' illustrates that standard trope: the nervous parents, promises that Fred'll be careful in L.A. Cut suddenly to an homage to Aliens: Fred with a flamethrower, destroying a nest full of demon eggs. And then she heads home to study them: science geek, badass, adorable Southern girl, and head of a freaky sci-fi laboratory. So why is she punished? (She asks this question herself, on her deathbed.) In part, to symbolically echo the circumstances under which was found (hiding in a cave, waiting for a knight in shining armour to save her - who turns out to be a vicious demon who can't love her). Fred makes reference in that final episode to those days in the cave, and that episode's ending hinges on the fact that Angel can't save Fred - or rather, by doing so, he'd kill hundreds of thousands of people, and he won't do that. (He thinks he can make that decision, but can't - a major character moment, handled beautifully by Whedon and Boreanaz.) They boys gallop off to do good, they inflict some violence, but the die was cast 'millions of years ago' - and so Wesley does literally the only helpful thing he can do in that situation, namely to make Fred comfortable in her last moments. Her final words: 'Why can't I stay?' And the answer the show seems to offer, in my reading, is: because she's the one everyone tried to protect. Deals have been struck, a System has been erected and perpetuated, and the casualty in such a situation is always the person everyone makes it their first priority to keep safe.

Fred's not the damsel in distress, but the guys of Angel seem at some level to want her to be just that. (The love of Angel's life certainly worked that way!)

It's all there in the very first season of Buffy - a distilled and (in retrospect) surprisingly powerful articulation of Whedon's pet notions. In the finale of Buffy's first season, 'Prophecy Girl', Buffy finds out that she's fated to fight the Master and die. She has two conversations with Giles about her fate. In the first she cries and is heartbroken: 'I'm sixteen years old. I don't want to die.' And in the second she clocks him and marches off to war - after (to his credit) Giles tries to take up the burden himself, knowing it's suicide. In her ball gown ('By the way...love the dress') Buffy fights, and dies, and comes back, and though she dresses the part of damsel in distress, it's her refusal to lie down and be endangered that grants her victory. The finale of the show's seventh season works the same way - Buffy leads her troops into battle, and loses lots of them, and though she initially retreats, she explicitly refuses to let the Potential Slayers be 'scared little girls,' instead leading them down into Hell itself. Again, the various men in traditional seats of power (priests, Watchers, CEO's, principals, even the largely male army of vampires who 'make it their world') want to cast women as trophies in need of saving (or succubi in need of slaying, of course). And while Whedon sometimes seems to make a now-too-common extension of that schema by linking pregnancy and forcible imposition and invasion (an association of greater historical than contemporary-critical value, I would venture), his work generally gives its females plenty of chances to throw off the yoke of expectations and assume roles outside of standard gender-political orientations. Some fail. Oh well.****

The Illyria arc complicates the Fred-as-helpless-damsel vibe of the proceedings somewhat, though I don't want to discuss that here (since the GF does deign to read this bullshit once in a while and I don't want to spoil the surprises in store in Angel's final nine episodes). And since Cordelia's pregnancy was written into the existing Season Four Angel story arc around Charisma Carpenter's real-life pregnancy,***** it'd be necessary for a fuller consideration of the show to delve into the exigencies of production. Let's skip those considerations here, and say simply that Fred's death is as much a transition as a termination, and that Amy Acker's performance as Illyria was no small factor in the strength of late Season Five Angel. (Not to mention that it brought out some of Alexis Denisof's finest work as Wesley.) It was something Joss and Co. inflicted upon the character, of course, but it also preserves the position of an interesting, rich female in the group dynamic - just a different one.

Angel has always played on the macho-martyr vibe of its title character, never questioning the validity of his desire for redemption but periodically pointing up its pathetic or escapist sides. I believe the character reaches transformation and transcendence by the end of the Fifth Season, but I also think Carpenter's beautiful performance in the show's 100th episode (Cordelia's return) shows that Cordelia had achieved the same transformation. Why is it that Angel's cock-waving heroes end up costing the women around them their lives?

Maybe because, were the situations reversed, such losses might not be countenanced, such missteps made, such torture deserved and sustained. Angel doesn't get to go back to the earth from whence he came. Buffy does. (Someday Malcolm Reynolds will.) That fact says something about Joss, yes, but within his world it serves too as a song of Earth. What is lost and gained in death has nothing to do with body count.******

-----

* Fred's 'pregnancy' is an infection, a transformation of her body, and the episode in which she dies is closer to Outbreak than Rosemary's Baby in plot and temperament. But the tale's body-angst and the helplessness of the men around her (who acquit themselves magnificently trying to save her) as she suffers alone with her beloved are linked, I think, to a generalized association of pregnancy (and the deadly, grotesque miracle of birth) with monstrosity in Whedon's work. Remember Ripley's gleeful words in Alien: Resurrection - 'There's a monster in your stomach. [...] In a few hours it will punch its way through your chest and you'll die. Any questions?' Stricken, the villain asks: 'Who are you?' 'I'm the monster's mother.' Not for nothing is the pregnancy that kills Cordelia her second such affliction.

** No symbolism there, of course.

*** Note that Holtz gets the same treatment from his adoptive son Connor. Watching characters bury a 'loved one' (as Wesley calls Lilah in a slip of the tongue) puts the audience in the position of grieving not for the departed but for the survivors; when Doyle died he got the last word (on video), and viewers mourned him, but Lilah was a peripheral character, as was Joyce Summers. The goal of fictional death is to render the aftermath, in Joss's world - one of the unique strengths of his TV work is the accretive melancholy of his fictional worlds, showing the way the constant presence of death weighs on the surviving characters.

**** Joss's more-or-less proxy, Xander Harris, is an extraordinary creation, not least because he comes to embody, organically, a healthily imperfect masculinity that's tied to an appreciation of both the unique strengths of the superpowered women around him and a willingness to accept traditional masculine responsibility - at least until his massive, character-altering fuckup at the altar in Season Six of Buffy ('Hell's Bells'). By leaving his bride at the altar Xander took, in that episode, a position more critical of than continuous with his previous identity. But without talking about the show's authorship - who was running things - it's hard to discuss the shifts in Season Six. And that's well beyond this post's ambit.

***** Apparently on-set relations were imperfect at the time, not least because of this sudden change. Remember that she didn't come back for the fifth season. How could they? But then again, how could they not?

****** For ANS, who wouldn't have put it in such simplistic terms as those but rather pointed up my own tendency to do so. Reading alongside her is one unprecedented pleasure; writing for her is another.

Comments

[Sherv]

David Lynch's feminist credentials are significantly more dubious... :)

[Wax]

Along with his sanity and narrative good sense, I should think.

I still count Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive among the filmgoing hours I would like to get back.

[agi]

The question was not meant to be looking for sneaky but intentional misogyny, or even misogyny at all, exactly. I was just curious whether a guy who names "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit" as one of his favorite current t.v. shows might have gotten a bit influenced by the culture of the damsel in distress. (When I first saw that in an interview I thought it was a sarcastic joke, like "ha ha yeah I just love the antithesis of my old show!" but it was confirmed in a later interview.)

Wally, you said something to me about "yeah, maybe he does get more sympathy if he kills off a woman instead of a man" - your (oh so slightly antagonistic) tone indicated that you thought you had caught me in a bind, but I never thought he was doing it cause he hates women or thinks they're expendable, and I happen to agree with you. Sympathy is key, and coupled with that sympathy is relief.

I mean, why do so many of the crime shows kill off women disproportionately? Because that way men can feel safe. (I think that's also why women will be as harsh as anyone about finding fault with a rape victim's behavior: "if she brought it on herself, then I am safe.")

Now one interesting thing you mentioned is that torture is relegated (almost?) exclusively to the men in the Buffyverse. But what real-life man actually fears getting randomly tortured? At best (er, worst) he may fear a mugging. Whereas women are trained and constantly reminded to be wary of rape (which is why the pregnancy as forced invasion strikes me as an interesting and relevant observation): don't go there, don't wear this, etc etc.

Now obviously the Buffyverse is not a place where women are taught to unduly restrict their actions by a culture of fear (even though there's actually stuff to like, be afraid of!). I just wonder if some of the "classic" reasons for killing women characters were seeping into Angel, a show that is way more "damselly" than BtVS in the first place.

[Wax]

OK, I'll bite. [Though I feel the need to apologise here that I'm arguing more forcefully than is called for by the points you're actually making, Agi. I mean you're obviously right that a certain very different gendered structure is present in Angel. But I'm reading it as generously as I can out of faith in Joss's sense of the world. Now that faith says something about me, and whether that's good or bad, sensible or unjustified, is subject for another conversation entirely.]

re: SVU, Jane Espenson also cites the Law and Order franchise as a favourite (though not that show in particular). I suspect a number of old TV hands are drawn to its nostalgic procedural vibe more than any depth of character - it's a structural thrill primarily. I've never seen one of the Law and Order spinoffs, only the original, but I understand the appeal in spite of it having nothing whatsoever to relate to emotionally or personally.

And not being able to relate to art politically is a separate question from approving of its aesthetics - I argued with Farhad two or three days ago about Cerebus and whether it's possible to take guiltless pleasure in art the politics of which you find reprehensible. I said yes, he said (roughly) no. That perspective surely informs this somewhat.

But look:

I mean, why do so many of the crime shows kill off women disproportionately? Because that way men can feel safe. (I think that's also why women will be as harsh as anyone about finding fault with a rape victim's behavior: "if she brought it on herself, then I am safe.")

I don't know how that second sentence follows. When I hear about gangs of black kids shooting each other in L.A. am I assumed to think, 'Thank God I'm white and I don't have to fear gangs of black kids?' Not so much! I think some variation on, 'Stupid fucking kids with guns will get everybody killed.' And: 'One more neighbourhood I'd be scared to walk through at night.' All are welcome to criticize those reactions but I hope I'm illustrating my point - that the 'culture of rape' (such as it is) isn't meant to be comforting to men. Quite the contrary, no? Rape as manifestation of power/sex anxieties widely understood not to assuage them?

Now at one level I think I understand what you're saying: once we narrow the scope of a crime to victim and perpetrator, excising societal connections, we dodge our own complicity or culpability. OK - but you seem to be implying up above that a man viewing the victimization of a woman sees only that A Thing Not Like Me is hurt - another tally mark in the 'I'm not a victim today' column. But does that extend to, say, a relative? Or the portrayal (on a TV show, say) of a crime against someone whom the police offhandedly mention is from our hometown? Or in our profession, or a member of our race? Antagonism isn't the only possible tension between boys and girls, even in something as stupidly retrograde as network TV.

I'm inclined to answer your question much more blandly: women are victims all the time in crime shows because men tend not to view women as competition in the same way and therefore can feel unsullied anguish at their victimization; because physical crimes against less physically-strong people garner sympathy; because the cops and doctors and whatnot on these shows then get to play hero, propping up the fantasy of the male (sub)urban professional as modern-day white knight; because that's how the numbers actually look. In the first season of NYPD Blue the badass female cop loses her husband and ends up leaving frontline duty; he gets shot, as I recall, because he rushes into a gun battle during a quiet lunch with his wife. He died because he was a civil servant, but also because he was drawn to that kind of role in the first place. The depiction of such an outcome isn't necessarily noncritical just because it's uncommented.

I would say that Angel - a hardboiled detective story after all - plays on the generic tropes of a certain kind of procedural drama, but situates them within a more complicated field than usual.

Now one interesting thing you mentioned is that torture is relegated (almost?) exclusively to the men in the Buffyverse. But what real-life man actually fears getting randomly tortured? At best (er, worst) he may fear a mugging. Whereas women are trained and constantly reminded to be wary of rape (which is why the pregnancy as forced invasion strikes me as an interesting and relevant observation): don't go there, don't wear this, etc etc.

But pregnancy isn't invasion or punishment the big majority of the time. Cordy and Fred aren't punished for their actions - they do all the right things and die undeserved deaths. They're in the wrong place at the wrong time. And why? In large part because of Angel himself. Which is the larger moral point of the show (just wait for the finale!!) and which, far from uncritically pilfering 'agency' for Angel from everyone else, calls that traditional power-configuration into question.

I'm inclined to say that if you're going to watch for 'classic reasons' for killing off the girls, it's important to keep in mind just how many millennia-old narrative formulae are played for all kinds of reactions on Joss's shows, subversive comedy and loving emotional drama alike. From the train heist on Firefly (they give it back) to the little-blonde-goes-down-alley-with-scary-guy schtick on Buffy (she eats him!) to the detective with a heart of gold on Angel (ultimately it's his demonic nature that enables him to strike back at evil in the world - no small comment there, I'd think). The classics are classics because they win the sympathies of good and bad audience members alike.

You're right that Angel is more 'damselly' than Buffy. But by no means unreflectively so. And I'm guessing that when you tally up the whimpers, tears, endangerments, victimizations, violations, and (ig)noble deaths, the boys of the Jossverse have it pretty goddamn hard. Joss casts women as caretakers from a position of strength (cf. Buffy tending to drug-withdrawal Riley, or badass Wicca Willow tending to brain-sucked Tara) and wisdom (Cordy draining Connor's anger, Inara giving lessons in love and empathy), which humanizes them far beyond the formulae on which he trades. Can't live without genre - and Joss would be wasted making just-plain soap opera, absolutely wasted.

More sympathy from endangering a female character, certainly. (Even on a show overwhelmingly female in fanbase, we might point out. A reader-response view would complicate this but ha ha it's only a blog comment. ;v) But the men left behind, in a position to grieve and revenge and persist, reveal vulnerability and humanity. Perhaps the most feminist thing about Joss Whedon is that in fictional worlds overrun by world-shaking women, he credits his male characters' ability to deal with them as something other than damsels. When they fail, they're called out. That's responsible storytelling - at the levels of both craft and culture.

[saurabh]

Hmm. I was hoping for more incisive critiques, here - for example, women on Angel are not just killed in unusual circumstances, they're almost always victimized/forced to rely on the aid of men to save them. When Angel "helps the helpless", it's most often a woman, and very rarely does that woman step forward to take an active part in her rescue ("She" being a rare exception). When men are involved, they're often called on to throw at least a punch or two in their defense.

Also, for the leads - Buffy was never afraid of emasculating its male leads; Angel almost never does. Quite explicitly in the third-eyeball-implantation-demons episode, where Cordelia is essentially raped and forcibly impregnated (again), humiliatingly and on camera; Gunn and Wesley arrive to rescue her, but though they are threatened with a similar rape/impregnation, they're never actually forced to suffer such a fate.

Wesley's another interesting character. He rather rapidly progresses from bumbling idiot to complete and total badass, probably the most hard-edged character on the show. He's quite traditionally masculine - dominating, if chivalrous. Even his intelligence and knowledge of the occult, which on Giles is mostly geeky, becomes practically phallic by the end of the show.

Let's also not forget that there's a number of non-super-powered fighting men in both Buffy and Angel, while no women are given that opportunity on either show. As someone who regularly gets my ass kicked by women, I'm not sure from whence this lack originates - certainly not in any reflection of physical possibility.

In short: yes, Joss's work has real failings in terms of its presentation of male and female characters, and I don't think these can entirely be attributed to the exigencies of the story.

[agi]

Ooh, more buffy talk!

Saurabh: I definitely noticed that Gunn and Wes were not metaphor-raped as Cordelia was, and it pissed me off at the time - good call.

As for normal human women fighting on either show, I think Cordelia counts, in the season where she begins to train with Angel specifically because she wants to hold her own. Fred only throws a few punches, but barring significant weight training, I don't think she'd be believable as a strong fighter with her slight frame. And in BtVS, do the potentials have any increased strength before they become slayers or not? Certainly they engage in fights before having superhuman (or at least ultra-superhuman) powers. And I could swear that Dawn does decent battle once or twice, in the last episode of S6 with Buffy, and even a bit with that vamp (mostly through smarts) in S7, although she turns out not to be a potential in the end. Am I misremembering?

Finally, there's a difference between physical possibility and typical reality. Women are on average smaller, and on average have less muscle mass than men - the latter they can at least work on. But if the women and men on Joss's shows were evenly matched by default, it wouldn't be very, if you'll please forgive the irony of this word, realistic. And isn't "use your brain when you can't use your body" a better lesson to teach than that one must develop physical brawn, which many women don't have time for and will find merely escapist?

[agi]

Wally - I'm not sure I have the time or inclination to respond to your comment in super-depth here, but a couple of things:

Yes, you're right that there's an attraction to a couple of procedural shows that Joss has mentioned (he's even been asked if he plans to do one). I was still surprised that he singled out SVU in particular, since I think sex crimes are always complicated from the position of the voyeur. It's a crime! but there's sex! and oh isn't this titillating yet disgusting! I think this has been written about much better by many other people, but I hope you get my general point. Here's one slightly elliptical piece of writing on the topic.

As for "rape culture" being comforting or not to men, I think you are comparing apples and oranges, or claiming mutual exclusivity of two valid points. Rapists have power anxieties, sure. However, if women are widely understood to be the targets of violence, then your average man can feel more safe, yes. I sort of want to make multiple points here at once, about stranger versus acquaintence violence and male versus female victims of violence as portrayed on tv versus as borne out by statistics, and so I'm having trouble writing this. Instead I'll say that BitchPhD makes a good case that reinforcing the feeling of street safety is bad advice to men, just as reinforcing a 'culture of fear (of rape)' for women is bad.

Which brings me to: no, I don't think the actual numbers bear out that women are the main victims of violent crime. Isn't it mostly committed against men by other men? Or were you talking about sexual violence in particular? Google gives me this, for example.

Anyway, I don't want to derail a buffy thread by talking about some of this stuff at length, but I hope the main points are more clear now.

[saurabh]

Frankly I find it unrealistic that Fred, Cordy, etc., regularly went into great physical danger for years without picking up serious fighting skills. A punch here and there is fine, but a few months of that stuff and they'd almost have to learn to fight, or else they'd end up dead. Cordy starts to learn, much later - but she's been fighting as long or longer than Wesley by that point, and he picks up fighting almost magically, whereas she develops almost not at all. Even her lessons at the end had a sort of "aww, how cute, she's learning how to fight!" vibe to them - complete with Wesley telling her how he's "proud of her" for making the effort.

I had the whole "women can't fight as well as men" thing out with Wally earlier (offline), not reaching any satisfactory conclusion. Personally I don't believe that muscle mass has a whole lot to do with fighting ability - speed and flexibility are just as crucial, if not more so, and women can do as well or better in those areas. Observe Summer Glau, weighing maybe ninety pounds, who can kick someone who is standing right behind her in the head. Plus, they're all regularly fighting demons way, way out of their weight class. Fighting smart is what's in order, anyway.

Perhaps it's not "believable" or "realistic" to have females as fighters, but I don't think this has anything to do with reality. I know plenty of girls who are serious ass-kickers, and I have to imagine professional demon-hunters could quickly develop that kind of juice. Plus, Joss (in addition to the rest of the writers) HAS to be aware of this, having surrounded himself with badass stunt women for years. A minor crime, maybe, but I still attribute this to a gender bias - girls can't fight unless they have superpowers.

[Wax]

saurabh, what's behind your nauseating implication that emasculation is a virtue, aesthetic or otherwise? To put it bluntly, the men of Angel suffer in all kinds of ways (of course - like everyone else on all Joss's shows) and are often put into the position of caretakers, which they take up with relish. And not just in a 'Go and fight for the girl' way (though since this is a hardboiled detective story, which is to say in Raymond Chandler's terms a knight-errant story, that's obviously a big part of it), but also in a 'sit by the bed and tell stories' way. cf. Fred's final day (and Wesley's!), but cf. also the way that abandonment of Cordelia (in her coma) is made into a major moral decision for Angel et al. Joss is among other things illustrating the requirements and machinations of power of a particular earthly kind. Wielded by men usually.

It seems to me that the underlying principle of your critique is that Joss shouldn't show a non-ideal (real) world - or let's phrase that more generously. He shouldn't unreflectively show and thereby tacitly endorse a certain presumably oppressive order of things. And I'd say: fucking duh, man, he doesn't. As tiresome as I find the word 'gendered' let's toss it: all the gendered narrative decisions on Angel are made for particular reasons, always thoughtfully. We can make that good faith assumption because Joss has more than proven he's earned it. (And the staff of Angel, though more heavily male than Buffy's, has more than the usual share of sharp feminists, from Joss on down.)

OK we did talk about the following but you're still wrong about this:

Personally I don't believe that muscle mass has a whole lot to do with fighting ability - speed and flexibility are just as crucial, if not more so, and women can do as well or better in those areas. Observe Summer Glau, weighing maybe ninety pounds, who can kick someone who is standing right behind her in the head. Plus, they're all regularly fighting demons way, way out of their weight class. Fighting smart is what's in order, anyway.

Perhaps it's not "believable" or "realistic" to have females as fighters, but I don't think this has anything to do with reality. I know plenty of girls who are serious ass-kickers [...] Plus, Joss (in addition to the rest of the writers) HAS to be aware of this, having surrounded himself with badass stunt women for years.

Summer Glau can kick someone beside her right in the head from a standing start. But with force? Watch that stunt (the head-through-glass kick in the bar in Serenity) again: she's dancing, and that's a slo-mo stunt. She's not a stuntwoman, and her strength is in her legs, but I'm disinclined to take that as an example of how good them girls can fight if they get all riled up. All that girl-power fighting ability is largely metaphor, man - the 'plenty' of girls you know who are 'serious ass-kickers'? I hate these coarse terms, but take out the girls you go to martial-arts classes with, and you're back to typical human beings. The average American guy has wrestled and punched a lot more in life than the average American girl - hell, if you want to be Zen about it, my brother and I used to have fights in which one of us was blindfolded, as some kind of ninja training.

As for the actual logistics of fighting demons, let's not waste our time there. The question is twofold: what are the rules of Joss's narrative universe? And what do they speak to the real world? In Joss's world, women can be badasses much more readily (and terrifyingly) than here on earth. That fact is meant to inspire, not reflect the percentage of women actually capable of taking Joe Sixpack in a fight. Angel is a show centrally concerned with the responsibility of self-appointed heroes and the costs of their work (yet another Whedon meditation on what it's like to be lonely and supremely powerful - The Unbearable Cost of Being Exceptional, as Marti Noxon has suggested). That's a story that, as demographics (if I recall correctly) suggest, speaks primarily to women, but concerns men. And maybe I should've said this from the outset: basing 'feminist' credentials on questions of numbers and representation only cheapens art and its readers and the meaning of their relationships.

Angel is an L.A. show. It portrays a certain world of men and women. It has no responsibility to portray the world people want to see - and that's its mission statement anyhow, right? 'Nothing in this world is as it should be. It's harsh, and cruel, &c.' By its end Angel was almost entirely about the lives of men. I don't need to remind anyone, I hope, how deeply and meaningfully feminist such a focus can be, done with openness and feeling.

[agi]

Wally -

I think you can feel free to replace "emasculating" with "deconstructing masculinity"; still as nauseating?

As for "take away X and you're left with typical human beings," well that argument can be made about any supposed female 'deficiency' and strikes me as incomplete at best. No, Saurabh has convinced me that the girls in his martial arts classes are quite important indeed. Are they exceptional because they're exceptional, or are they exceptional just for trying? We may be answering this why question with a just-so story (cf. Larry Summers et al. on the women in science question), when really I don't have much perspective on what makes a good fighter, while Saurabh might.

You mention that guys typically have more experience fighting, which is true. But doesn't that mean that we don't know shit about women's typical fighting ability, in some sense? If girls are scolded for fighting, while boys are given somewhat more allowance for rough play, then of course they won't develop as much talent or even interest for the thing. I'm not saying we'd all be superheroes, but clearly experience - and attitude (confidence, motivation, etc) - make a difference. So perhaps "you need superpowers if you want to be able to fight at all" is setting the bar too high.

I don't think this makes or breaks Angel as a show, and I absolutely agree with you that feminism is meant to humanize everybody, and portrayals of men that are rich and against stereotype (emotionally) are certainly welcome.

Finally, a healthy dose of good faith should not shut down discussion. No one should get a pass from interrogation just because they've 'proved' their feminist cred. As others have pointed out, often they may be interrogated because they are an unabashed feminist, and thus presumed to be willing to listen. Feminism (not that this is the only thing that should inform the art, but this is what we're talking about, so...) is not some plateau that you reach and then you quit trying or paying attention. And nobody - as a feminist, as a storyteller - is perfect. Exceptional people are still human.

[saurabh]

saurabh, what's behind your nauseating implication that emasculation is a virtue, aesthetic or otherwise?

Quite the contrary - my implication is that "masculinity" is not some adamantine construct, and in real life it is frequently punctured. The fact that characters on Angel suffer does not mean their masculinity suffers. Torture, for example, is a perfectly masculine way to suffer, and as you've noted, there are almost no instances of females being tortured. There are also, as far as I can remember, no instances of men breaking under torture (could be wrong here). Masculinity is a myth, or a mythic ideal for men to aspire to, anyway, and maintaining its sanctity is not, to me, either reflective of real life or laudably feminist.

[L33tminion]

Does Joss Whedon kill his major male characters anywhere near as often as he offs his central females? The answer is obviously NO, he doesn't.

That surprises me, but I've only seen Firefly and Serenity. Maybe Joss was correcting for that earlier trend...

[Spike]

Who are you? I jokingly said to someone I could do a master's thesis on Buffy. I agree with almost everything you said. But there is one thing most don't think is valid. I think it is valid, and it is a problem, that everyone Angel comes in contact either dies or are worse off than they were before. Not everyone, 99 percent.
Gunn, ends up trading his soul to WR&H
Wesley, ends up dead
Fred is dead
Cordelia dies
The woman who he was supposed to help in S1 dead
Doyle dead
Darla dead twice
well, this list can get lengthy.
I left out two. Connor And Kate
Connor survives, because Angel made a deal with WR&H. Kate survived, don't know what became of her.
I just think that "Gypsy curse" was quite brilliant. I think it was meant to cause him pain, even if it meant innocents would suffer.
Oh, yeah, didn't Mention Jenny Calendar, becuase that was Angelus, not Angel.
anyway, thought your analysis was rather brilliant.

[DrusillaRox]

What about Buffy? Who went on to give hundrds of girls power? the final feminist message

[Eva]

Taking Buffy as a reference point I would say that the killing of female characters is tied to the "big twist" - Slayer chained to the earth by evil men etc. It's all part of the struggle against the establishment of jerkoffs. Similar themes in Dollhouse. (I realize I'm 3 years late to the party)