Joss Whedon’s Abuse and How We Got Here
When addressing the problem of abusive creators like Joss Whedon being allowed to “walk away with no consequences” for their actions, we as a society need to do more than hear out the victims of such behavior ( a supremely important step sadly not ubiquitously taken). If we are going to ever get to the point of doing right not just by the future generation of actors and actresses but by victims of abuse on the whole we need to examine the factors at play that brought us to this point.
Jessie Gender’s February 2021 video “Joss Whedon: Why Harmful Creators Are Allowed to Thrive” illustrates the reasons that explain just how Joss Whedon, feminist writer extraordinaire was able to get away with such abusive conduct for so long. The fact that he could ever have been considered a feminist writer extraordinaire plays a significant part in this equation. According to Jessie Gender, Whedon “had cultivated this air of being a feminist and being someone who was progressing science fiction and nerdum in a way that had never been done before.”
Indeed, Whedon’s flagship series Buffy the Vampire Slayer is credited with inspiring a generation of female action heroes, from Lost Girl to Wynonna Earp to Jessica Jones to Supergirl, among others. British science fiction series Doctor Who and the fantasy RPG video game Dragon Age series both drew clear inspiration from Buffy, and the trope encyclopedia TvTropes.org originally started as a Buffy trope list.
Whedon’s rise as a powerful abuser didn’t happen within a bubble, society has proven over and over again that it is willing to allow talented men to get away with just about anything. This happens, unsurprisingly, most prominently among cisgender white men. In her analysis, Jessie Gender also highlights the importance of the fact “the that the people who face these problems most directly are women and people of color over and over and over again.”
It is true that it is often men who get off scot-free for problematic behavior. This applies even more so to men regarded as talented and influential. We see it with Woody Allen and Louise C.K. We even see it with H.P. Lovecraft, whose putrid racism fans regard as “irrelevant in the face of his overall contributions.”
And how exactly did a straight white man garner such influence? This question seems laughable in how easily it answers itself; he is heterosexual, cisgender, white, and male, his power came by way of his privilege. Yet it is worth noting that Whedon was not just considered important the way Lovecraft was, as a creative genius, but rather he has developed a substantial fandom among those he abused: women.
Why? Why was a male creator considered such a pioneer for feminist fantasy and science fiction works, apparently more so than any women creators? Perhaps because society was only receptive to feminist messages when they came from men. Such is the value of allyship after all. Actress and activist Jameela Jamil has noted that “as we look back through history, the oppressed have always, always relied upon the oppressor’s mercy.”
Feminists could have thought of Whedon as the trojan horse they needed to infiltrate an industry and a genre dominated by men to introduce the concepts of feminism in a way deemed palatable to a wider audience. Would Buffy have been as successful if it was created by a woman? When we examine the initial reaction to a similarly campy fantasy horror work, Diablo Cody’s Jennifer’s Body, the answer is: probably not. Jennifer’s Body was a story not just about women, but for women and by women. Yet it was marketed to men by capitalizing on the sex appeal of Megan Fox and as a result, it was critically panned.
Whedon’s work on Buffy wasn’t just important for feminism, it also proved to be significant to the LGBTQ community as its portrayal of the relationship between the two witches Tara and Willow was one of the first major gay relationships to be featured on network television. But perhaps we need to analyze how this relationship was allowed to become so influential. YouTube creator Jade Fox points out in her video “Why LGBT Movies Are Bad + The Problem w/ Representation”, that “we are in a place now where we can just create movies that are very queer that are not in any way aligning with a heteronormative lifestyle.”
Now, Willow and Tara do not necessarily have what could be considered a homonormative relationship, or, a “conception of LGBT+ representation that emphasizes assimilation and conformity,” according to Florian Vanlee in her article Acknowledging/Denying LGBT+ Difference: Understanding Homonormativity and LGBT+ Homogeneity in Flemish TV Fiction through Production Research. However, they are both slender, attractive white women, and again, their relationship was created by a straight white man.
Buffy as a whole was allowed to succeed because it was feminist in a way that aligned with a patriarchal society’s values. Natasha Simons’ 2011 essay Reconsidering the Feminism of Joss Whedon explores this, noting that the character Buffy Summers, “as a Slayer, descends from a line that was literally created by men — a formation that stems directly from the male anxiety over an inability to create life the way that women do.”
Joss Whedon’s rise in power and influence and the way he has gotten away with abuse is not a linear process, it is a cycle: feminists needed positive representation of women in an industry and genre dominated by men, so a man created a feminist work and garnered the admiration of feminists, giving him more power as a man in a place full of powerful men, further perpetuating the issue of men dominating in Hollywood and in science fiction and fantasy, creating a need for better representation of women.
The point is this: while people of privilege should use their power to support marginalized peoples, we as a society need to stop placing allies on pedestals for their work in progressivism. Instead, we should be directly supporting creators actually within those communities. We do not need a trojan horse to tell our stories, and lifting that horse up so high only enables it in its abuse of such power.
