On Firefly and Intellectual Reductionism

The intellectual bankruptcy of current feminism has become almost a cliche.  While academic feminists rail about the patriarchy of George W. Bush and conflate white male and oppressor, they ignore truly egregious treatment of women throughout large swaths of the third world.  They have become disoriented by their success (few young women complain of the patriarchal nature of America these days; they are too busy getting into law school, medical school, business suites, etc) and as happens to so many movements which become animated by ideology rather than reality, have become more and more extreme in their world view as a result.

Yesterday Dr. Sanity, who has written extensively on the failures of the modern feminists, sent me a link to an article which offered a fascinating glimpse into the angry, unhappy mind of a modern (or is it post-modern?) feminist. 

I have long been a fan of Firefly, a wonderfully complex, character driven science fiction western that emerged from the fertile mind of Joss Whedon.  What elevates the series is the humor, warmth, and depth of the characters.  However, Firefly is not for everyone (though almost everyone who I have introduced to the show has instantly become a fan.)  allecto (who does not capitalize her name, perhps in order to avoid having one letter seem bigger than another) has been able to resist Firefly's charms:

A Rapist's View of the World: Joss Whedon and Firefly

This is a really long rant about Joss Whedon's Firefly. Why? Because I'm angry and I think it is really important that feminists don't leave popular culture out of the equation. Especially considering that popular culture is increasingly being influenced by pornography.

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I have become increasingly interested in examining Joss Whedon’s work from a feminist perspective since I had a conversation with another lesbian feminist sister at the International Feminist Summit about whether Joss was a feminist. I am really quite shocked by how readily Joss is accepted as a feminist, and that his works are widely considered to be feminist. I decided to start re-watching Buffy: The Vampire Slayer and also to watch Firefly and the movie Serenity.

I have to say that now that I have subjected myself to the horror that is Firefly, I really am beyond worried about how much men hate us, given that this was written by a man who calls himself a feminist.

I find much of Joss Whedon’s work to be heavily influenced by pornography, and pornographic humour. While I would argue that there are some aspects of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer that are feminist and progressive, there is much that isn’t and I find it highly problematic that there are many very woman-hating messages contained within a show that purports itself as feminism. But Firefly takes misogyny to a new level of terrifying. I am really, really worried that women can call the man who made this show a feminist.

While it might be easy to ridicule the piece, in fact, the writer actually does a decent job of supporting her thesis.  Unfortunately, her thesis rests upon a set of assumptions that are at best questionable, and performs a distillation of complexity into simplicity that is truly saddening.

Here is a small part of allecto's argument:

The pilot episode, Serenity, was written and directed by Joss Whedon. The basic plot of the series is Malcolm Reynolds and his second in command Zoe, have made a new life for themselves after fighting a war against the Alliance, which they lost. They bought a Firefly, an old space ship, and Mal calls it Serenity, after the last battle they fought for the Independence. The pilot of the ship, Wash, is Zoe’s husband. Kaylee is the ship’s mechanic and Jayne, the final member of the crew, is the brainless brawn. This bunch of criminals go around stealing things and generally doing lots of violence.

They also take on board passengers. There is Inara, a Companion (Joss Whedon’s euphemism for women in prostitution). She rents one of the ship’s shuttles. Simon, a doctor and his sister River. And a Shepherd (which means preacher), a black male character.

The first scene opens in a war with Mal and Zoe. Zoe runs around calling Mal ‘sir’ and taking orders off him. I roll my eyes. Not a good start.

The next scene is set in the present. Mal, Jayne, and Zoe are floating about in space. They come into some danger. Mal gets all panicky.

Zoe says, “This ship's been derelict for months. Why would they –”

Mal replies, (in Chinese) “Shut up.”

So in the very second scene of the very first episode, an episode written and directed by the great feminist Joss, a white man tells a black woman to ‘shut up’ for no apparent reason. And she does shut up. And she continues to call him sir. And takes his orders, even when they are dumb orders, for the rest of the series.

The next scene we meet Kaylee, the ship’s mechanic. <- Lookee, lookee, feminist empowerment. In this scene Mal and Jayne are stowing away the cargo they just stole. Kaylee is chatting to them, happily. Jayne asks Mal to get Kaylee to stop being so cheerful. Mal replies, “Sometimes you just wanna duct tape her mouth and dump her in the hold for a month.” Yes, that is an exact quote, “Sometimes you just wanna DUCT TAPE HER MOUTH and DUMP HER IN THE HOLD FOR A MONTH.” Kaylee responds by grinning and giving Mal a kiss on the cheek and saying, “I love my Captain.”

What the fuck is this feminist man trying to say about women here? A black woman calling a white man ‘sir’. A white male captain who abuses and silences his female crew, with no consequences. The women are HAPPY to be abused. They enjoy it. What does this say about women, Joss? What does this say about you? Do you tell your wife to shut up? Do you threaten to duct tape her mouth? Lock her in the bedroom? Is this funny to you, Joss? Because it sure as fuck ain’t funny to me.

Our first introduction to Inara the ‘Companion’, Joss Whedon’s euphemism for prostituted women, is when she is being raped/fucked/used by a prostitutor. I find it really interesting to read the scripted directions for this particular scene:

We are close on INARA's face. She is being made love to by an eager, inexperienced but quite pleasingly shaped young man. She is beneath him, drawing him to his climax with languorous intensity. His face buried in her neck.

He tightens, relaxes, becomes still. She runs her hand through is hair and he pulls from her neck, looks at her with sweaty insecurity. She smiles, a worldly, almost motherly sweetness in her expression. He rests his head on her breast, still breathing hard.

So, Joss Whedon refers to rapist/fuckers who buy women as sex, as ‘eager, inexperienced but pleasingly shaped’ who ‘make love’ to women in prostitution. Obviously, ‘love’ to men like Joss Whedon, requires female powerlessness, force and coercion. Women in prostitution enjoy the experience of being bought for sex. They feel ‘motherly’ towards the men who have just treated them as property and bought them as sex.

If I am reading allecto correctly, her critique rests on one basic assumption.  To allecto, all relationships are first and foremost about power.  Under such a rubric, sex becomes rape, 'yes, sir' becomes slavery, and sardonic humor becomes assault.   This is typical of current feminist/leftist "scholarship" and relatively unremarkable.  It is certainly possible to understand power relationships and inequalities as comprising one aspect of human relations.  However, the writer apparently watches Firefly (and note that she had to re-watch several of Whedon's other shows in order to fully grasp his abusive and hate-filled approach to women; apparently on her first pass she missed the hate and perhaps, might I consider, she enjoyed the shows) through a lens that not only highlights every possible instance that supports her thesis but the same lens also obliterates all other aspects of the human experience.

Zoe and Mal have a complex relationship born out of combat and the shared experience of death, danger, failure, loss, and recovery.  They are deeply devoted to each other and love each other as comrades, even as the hint of sexual-tension-denied suffuses their relationship.  They trust each other implicitly in the most dangerous situations and would risk their lives for each other and for their ship.  Despite her combat experience and facility with weapons, Zoe is a fully functioning woman who is quite capable of loving a man and enjoying her femininity.  All of this is washed away by the solvent of angry feminist ideology.

Leonard Shengold, in his seminal book on Soul Murder, described defensive anality as a characterological defense, often seen in survivors of abuse, which drains all affective charge out of conflictual reality by homogenizing reality.  The physiological model of the psychological process is the workings of the alimentary canal which takes the wonderful complexity and melange of sensations of food and homogenizes it into a brown, lifeless mass by the time it reaches the terminus of the GI tract.  In much the same way allecto takes the richness of Firefly, and indeed the richness of real life relationships, and homogenizes them down to their lowest common denominator, in this case, a lifeless, humorless, intensely angry power chart.   

[As an aside, intellectualization often includes a component of defensive anality, since the affective charge attendant to events is dissolved by the solvent of the intellect, and such reductionism is rampant in the academy where single ideological explanations for complex events abounds.]

allecto's world is a world filled with abusive men and abused women.  She sees most women as one-dimensional objects devoid of power and most men as one-dimensional objects suffused with power.  (Presumably the men and women she surrounds herself with have managed to transcend such typicality.)  In her need to support her world view she reduces everything to black and white, (and the red of rage) losing all the beauty and complexity that makes life the marvelous experiment that it can be.  Her world is a poor and humorless place; it is a great tragedy that someone chooses to live there.