Tag: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Week: Xander Harris Has Masculinity Issues

Xander Harris (Nicholas Brendon), cavalry guy with a rock (not pictured: rock)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer has a great cast of characters that includes many flawed, admirable, psychologically complex (white) women. Two of them (Buffy and Cordelia) are some of my most beloved television characters ever. Another (Willow) fascinates me and infuriates me in equal measure. The rest of the female cast resonate more with other people than they do with me, giving a variety of watchers (as in television watchers, not the Council of Watchers, hey-o!) a large selection of women to relate to and find inspiring.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer also has Xander Harris, a character who is, perhaps, not as inspiring for a feminist viewer of the show. After all, he’s a bit of a Nice Guy. He’s slut-shamed his romantic partners and female friends. He’s been a judgmental jerk about his friends’ lives. He’s my favorite character on the show.
*record scratch* Wait, what?
Seriously? This guy?
Yes, it’s true. Despite Xander’s many flaws, despite the fact that he’s said and done a few things that have made me want to reach into the television screen and shake him a little, I still count him as my favorite of the many characters on Buffy that I love.
Some of the reasons I love Xander are obvious to anyone who knows me or has read my writing: he’s funny and a loyal friend, and I tend to be attracted to that particular character archetype (see Weasley, Ron and Gamgee, Samwise). I also love him for his bravery and the fact that he always fights the good fight despite not having any superpowers. Other reasons are less obvious, because I’m a feminist and Xander has, let’s say, issues with women – but if anything, my feminism has made me appreciate him as a character even more than when I first started watching the show.
When I look at Xander through a feminist lens, I find him fascinating because he’s a mass of contradictions. He’s a would-be “man’s man” – obsessed with being manly – whose only close friends are women. He’s both a perpetrator and victim of sexual assault and/or violation of consent. He’s both attracted to and intimidated by strong women. He jokes about objectifying women and viewing sex as some sort of game, but in more intimate moments, seems to value romance and real connection. He’s a willing participant in the patriarchy and also a victim of it.
The last point is the main one I’m going to address in this post. I hesitate to wring my hands and go “what about teh menz?!” but I think deconstructing traditional masculinity is an important part of feminism, and while Buffy has excellent commentary on the way gender roles have negatively affected women, it also shows us, through Xander, how these gender roles are no picnic for men, either. 
Xander and a phallic symbol. He has a complicated relationship with these things.
Xander is a boy who struggles with his relationship with masculinity, and the source of much of this struggle can be traced back to his childhood. In the first few seasons, we’re given brief glimpses into Xander’s home life, and even though we never see his parents onscreen, what we dosee isn’t pretty. His mother doesn’t recognize his voice when he calls her at home. During the holidays, he spends his nights on the lawn in a sleeping bag to avoid his family’s drunken Christmas fights. He watches movies with Anya, Buffy, and Riley in his family’s basement as his parents fight loudly above them. When Buffy expresses shock that a villain of the week turned out to be a cruel children’s baseball coach, Xander replies, “Well, you obviously haven’t played Kiddie League. I’m surprised it wasn’t one of the parents,” showing a disturbing familiarity with the way adults can be harmful to children.
The show leaves little hints about Xander’s upbringing throughout the first four seasons, but the first time we see one of his family members is in “Restless.” During Xander’s dream sequence, he constantly finds himself returning to his parents’ basement, and we’re left with the impression that his biggest fear is to be stuck aimless, drifting from job to job, and being a loser.
Then the basement door opens, and we see the shrouded, partially obscured vision of Xander’s father. A physically imposing man, he walks down the stairs and berates Xander for being ashamed of his family. And Xander, who has fought vampires, who stared down a vicious bully with a quiet smile on his face, who has saved the lives of each one of his friends at one point or another, can’t look his father in the eye. He’s at a loss for words, offering only a weak “You don’t understand” before hearing the rest of his father’s tirade: “The line ends here with us, and you’re not gonna change that. You don’t have the heart.”
And his father reaches into Xander’s chest and pulls out his heart.
Xander and his father (Michael Harney)
Yes, the person who really ripped out Xander’s heart was the spirit of the First Slayer, but the point is clear: his father is the scariest, most threatening figure in Xander’s life. He is literally the source of Xander’s nightmares, and his speech speaks to Xander’s biggest fear: that he will never escape the cycle of abuse from his family, and that he might someday become just like his father.
Presented with an unhealthy example of abusive, aggressive male behavior throughout his life, Xander struggles with his masculinity as a teen and a young man. He doesn’t have a healthy relationship with his father, the only male authority figure he admires (Giles) mostly views him as an annoyance, and after Jesse dies in the second episode, he has no male friends.
Xander is essentially left to his own devices to construct his version of masculinity, and seems to have pieced lessons about “what it means to be a man” from his father, the media, and pornography. However, Xander’s ideas about how to be manly often run counter to Xander’s actual desires and needs, and he’s in constant conflict between what he, as a young man, is supposed to want, and what he actually wants. 
Xander is confused. He gets that way a lot.
Real men get into fights. One of Xander’s many admirable traits is his willingness to fight the good fight no matter what. He’ll pull Cordelia out of a raging fire. He’ll shove Willow to safety as he takes on a vampire without the aid of any weapons. This is a good quality of his, but sometimes he gets into physical altercations when he doesn’t have to and has a negative opinion of himself when he fails to be macho “enough.”
Case in point: the episode “Halloween.” Xander stands up for Buffy when Larry calls her “fast,” and then grabs him by the shirt with a vow to do something “manly.” Larry is quickly about to get the upper hand in the fight, but Buffy twists Larry’s arm behind his back and sends him limping away. Xander is furious – at Buffy, for humiliating him in front of their classmates. He’s convinced that everyone will make fun of him for being rescued by a girl, even though the person made to look most ridiculous in that situation is Larry. He’s terrified of being seen as weak and cowardly and would rather lose in a fight than be rescued by a girl.
And this is hardly the only incident where Xander shows insecurity over his lack of physical strength and fighting power. He hero-worships Riley for possessing the fighting skills he lacks, even though Xander has probably fought and killed more vampires and demons while fighting next to Buffy than Riley did during his time in the Initiative. He comes down hard on himself for not having superpowers and not being able to “contribute” to the group the way Giles, Buffy, and Willow can, even though he’s saved all of their lives on several different occasions. He doesn’t fit his own ideal image of a macho man. 
Who says his Snoopy Dance isn’t manly?
Real men want swooning, submissive ladies.The audience has been witness to some of Xander’s sexist fantasies regarding women. We’ve seen him fantasize about rescuing a trembling, victimized Buffy from a vampire and then leaping onstage for a guitar solo that makes her eyes flutter and her panties wet. We’ve seen him fantasize about two younger, submissive potential Slayers coming into his room to have a threesome with him while other potential Slayers have a Sapphic pillow fight in the background. We’ve seen him wax rhapsodic about the idea of a submissive sexbot, and when his girlfriend and friends look at him with disgust, he says, “No guys, huh? I miss Oz. He would’ve gotten it. He wouldn’t have said anything, but he would have gotten it.”
Xander is wrong, of course – Oz never took the bait when another man invited him to sexually objectify a girl. But he’s also wrong about himself. Xander may talk a good game about wanting a submissive woman to serve him, but his dating history points to an opposite trend of being attracted to assertive – sometimes even aggressive – women. His first girlfriend is Cordelia, the former queen bee of the high school, a girl who defeated a vampire simply by threatening him. His second girlfriend is Anya, a former vengeance demon who spent one thousand years eviscerating men, a woman who never shied away from expressing an opinion even if others found it rude. He’s attracted to both Buffy and Faith, Slayers with physical strength who also know how to fight with their words, but any attraction he had to Kendra died when she couldn’t look him in the eye while speaking to him.
Xander and Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter), his original acid-tongued sweetheart
There’s a part of Xander that wants the stereotypical male fantasy of a girl who will serve at his whim, but the larger part of him seems to crave a woman who will speak her mind and banter with him. If he ever did find a girlfriend who only wanted to serve and please, he’d be bored within a few hours, though I’m not sure he has the self-awareness to realize that yet.
Real men always want sex. Xander can be gross when it comes to women. He makes sexually objectifying comments about his female friends. He thinks about sex all the time, as confirmed when Buffy gains the ability to read minds and gets wind of his inner monologue. He sees nothing wrong with making comments about women’s bodies in front of his female friends, and fantasizing about Willow and Tara’s sex life in front of Buffy and Dawn.
Yet there’s another side of Xander when it comes to sex, one that doesn’t come out as often: he values and craves intimacy. When he dreams about Joyce Summers in “Restless,” he confirms that he’s more interested in comfort than in conquest: “I’m a comfortador.” After he has sex with Faith, he doesn’t brag to his friends the way we’d expect him to, but tries to prevent Buffy from finding out and only spills the beans when he thinks the information might help – and he’s crushed when Faith dismisses their one-night stand as meaningless to her: “I thought we had a connection.”
It’s clear that intimacy is more important to Xander than merely getting his rocks off, but the side of him he chooses to show with his friends is the side that’s gross and reducing women to sex objects – even though his friends like the sweet side of Xander a lot more than the pig he often lets out.
Real men get into fights. Real men want submissive women. Real men want sex. These are the lessons that Xander internalizes, and where does that leave him? It leaves him feeling inadequate. It leaves him feeling unloved. It leaves him angry, and when he’s angry, he uses his words as weapons and cruelly lashes out at the people he loves the most – in short, repeating some of the behavior he learned from his father.
The worst part is that Xander often isn’t self-aware enough to see what he’s doing, even as he can recognize this detrimental behavior in other men. He criticizes his friend Riley for acting too macho and blowing up a crypt without waiting for backup. He’s disgusted with Spike for creating the Buffybot. He thinks Warren, Jonathan, and Andrew are creepy and gross. He’s right about all of these things, but if someone were to point out the similarities between his behavior and theirs, he’d be in deep denial to hear it – because as much as Xander wants to be like other men, he wants even more to not be like those men, those jerks who take advantage of women and try too hard to wow people with their macho behavior.
Xander has many wonderful qualities. He can be very brave, loyal, selfless, and loving, and the boy knows how to turn a phrase. He can also be insecure, angry, sexist, cruel, and judgmental. Close to the end of the series, he becomes more at peace with himself and lets go of much of his anger and judgment, but if we didn’t live in a culture that fetishizes and celebrates the most aggressive and disgustingly macho versions of masculine behavior, maybe he would have reached that point much earlier in his life. 
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Xander becomes more at peace with himself – and becomes a better friend – when he gets over the need to be our culture’s definition of a man and instead does what he does best: take on the more traditionally feminine role of comforter and emotional support for the people he loves. 
Xander embraces his comfortador role, helps Willow (Alyson Hannigan), and saves the world with a hug.

Lady T is a writer and comedian with two novels, a play, and a collection of comedy sketches in progress. She hopes to one day be published and finish one of her projects (not in that order). You can find more of her writing at www.theresabasile.com.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Week: Xander Harris Has Masculinity Issues

Xander Harris (Nicholas Brendon), cavalry guy with a rock (not pictured: rock)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer has a great cast of characters that includes many flawed, admirable, psychologically complex (white) women. Two of them (Buffy and Cordelia) are some of my most beloved television characters ever. Another (Willow) fascinates me and infuriates me in equal measure. The rest of the female cast resonate more with other people than they do with me, giving a variety of watchers (as in television watchers, not the Council of Watchers, hey-o!) a large selection of women to relate to and find inspiring.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer also has Xander Harris, a character who is, perhaps, not as inspiring for a feminist viewer of the show. After all, he’s a bit of a Nice Guy. He’s slut-shamed his romantic partners and female friends. He’s been a judgmental jerk about his friends’ lives. He’s my favorite character on the show.
*record scratch* Wait, what?
Seriously? This guy?
Yes, it’s true. Despite Xander’s many flaws, despite the fact that he’s said and done a few things that have made me want to reach into the television screen and shake him a little, I still count him as my favorite of the many characters on Buffy that I love.
Some of the reasons I love Xander are obvious to anyone who knows me or has read my writing: he’s funny and a loyal friend, and I tend to be attracted to that particular character archetype (see Weasley, Ron and Gamgee, Samwise). I also love him for his bravery and the fact that he always fights the good fight despite not having any superpowers. Other reasons are less obvious, because I’m a feminist and Xander has, let’s say, issues with women – but if anything, my feminism has made me appreciate him as a character even more than when I first started watching the show.
When I look at Xander through a feminist lens, I find him fascinating because he’s a mass of contradictions. He’s a would-be “man’s man” – obsessed with being manly – whose only close friends are women. He’s both a perpetrator and victim of sexual assault and/or violation of consent. He’s both attracted to and intimidated by strong women. He jokes about objectifying women and viewing sex as some sort of game, but in more intimate moments, seems to value romance and real connection. He’s a willing participant in the patriarchy and also a victim of it.
The last point is the main one I’m going to address in this post. I hesitate to wring my hands and go “what about teh menz?!” but I think deconstructing traditional masculinity is an important part of feminism, and while Buffy has excellent commentary on the way gender roles have negatively affected women, it also shows us, through Xander, how these gender roles are no picnic for men, either. 
Xander and a phallic symbol. He has a complicated relationship with these things.
Xander is a boy who struggles with his relationship with masculinity, and the source of much of this struggle can be traced back to his childhood. In the first few seasons, we’re given brief glimpses into Xander’s home life, and even though we never see his parents onscreen, what we dosee isn’t pretty. His mother doesn’t recognize his voice when he calls her at home. During the holidays, he spends his nights on the lawn in a sleeping bag to avoid his family’s drunken Christmas fights. He watches movies with Anya, Buffy, and Riley in his family’s basement as his parents fight loudly above them. When Buffy expresses shock that a villain of the week turned out to be a cruel children’s baseball coach, Xander replies, “Well, you obviously haven’t played Kiddie League. I’m surprised it wasn’t one of the parents,” showing a disturbing familiarity with the way adults can be harmful to children.
The show leaves little hints about Xander’s upbringing throughout the first four seasons, but the first time we see one of his family members is in “Restless.” During Xander’s dream sequence, he constantly finds himself returning to his parents’ basement, and we’re left with the impression that his biggest fear is to be stuck aimless, drifting from job to job, and being a loser.
Then the basement door opens, and we see the shrouded, partially obscured vision of Xander’s father. A physically imposing man, he walks down the stairs and berates Xander for being ashamed of his family. And Xander, who has fought vampires, who stared down a vicious bully with a quiet smile on his face, who has saved the lives of each one of his friends at one point or another, can’t look his father in the eye. He’s at a loss for words, offering only a weak “You don’t understand” before hearing the rest of his father’s tirade: “The line ends here with us, and you’re not gonna change that. You don’t have the heart.”
And his father reaches into Xander’s chest and pulls out his heart.
Xander and his father (Michael Harney)
Yes, the person who really ripped out Xander’s heart was the spirit of the First Slayer, but the point is clear: his father is the scariest, most threatening figure in Xander’s life. He is literally the source of Xander’s nightmares, and his speech speaks to Xander’s biggest fear: that he will never escape the cycle of abuse from his family, and that he might someday become just like his father.
Presented with an unhealthy example of abusive, aggressive male behavior throughout his life, Xander struggles with his masculinity as a teen and a young man. He doesn’t have a healthy relationship with his father, the only male authority figure he admires (Giles) mostly views him as an annoyance, and after Jesse dies in the second episode, he has no male friends.
Xander is essentially left to his own devices to construct his version of masculinity, and seems to have pieced lessons about “what it means to be a man” from his father, the media, and pornography. However, Xander’s ideas about how to be manly often run counter to Xander’s actual desires and needs, and he’s in constant conflict between what he, as a young man, is supposed to want, and what he actually wants. 
Xander is confused. He gets that way a lot.
Real men get into fights. One of Xander’s many admirable traits is his willingness to fight the good fight no matter what. He’ll pull Cordelia out of a raging fire. He’ll shove Willow to safety as he takes on a vampire without the aid of any weapons. This is a good quality of his, but sometimes he gets into physical altercations when he doesn’t have to and has a negative opinion of himself when he fails to be macho “enough.”
Case in point: the episode “Halloween.” Xander stands up for Buffy when Larry calls her “fast,” and then grabs him by the shirt with a vow to do something “manly.” Larry is quickly about to get the upper hand in the fight, but Buffy twists Larry’s arm behind his back and sends him limping away. Xander is furious – at Buffy, for humiliating him in front of their classmates. He’s convinced that everyone will make fun of him for being rescued by a girl, even though the person made to look most ridiculous in that situation is Larry. He’s terrified of being seen as weak and cowardly and would rather lose in a fight than be rescued by a girl.
And this is hardly the only incident where Xander shows insecurity over his lack of physical strength and fighting power. He hero-worships Riley for possessing the fighting skills he lacks, even though Xander has probably fought and killed more vampires and demons while fighting next to Buffy than Riley did during his time in the Initiative. He comes down hard on himself for not having superpowers and not being able to “contribute” to the group the way Giles, Buffy, and Willow can, even though he’s saved all of their lives on several different occasions. He doesn’t fit his own ideal image of a macho man. 
Who says his Snoopy Dance isn’t manly?
Real men want swooning, submissive ladies.The audience has been witness to some of Xander’s sexist fantasies regarding women. We’ve seen him fantasize about rescuing a trembling, victimized Buffy from a vampire and then leaping onstage for a guitar solo that makes her eyes flutter and her panties wet. We’ve seen him fantasize about two younger, submissive potential Slayers coming into his room to have a threesome with him while other potential Slayers have a Sapphic pillow fight in the background. We’ve seen him wax rhapsodic about the idea of a submissive sexbot, and when his girlfriend and friends look at him with disgust, he says, “No guys, huh? I miss Oz. He would’ve gotten it. He wouldn’t have said anything, but he would have gotten it.”
Xander is wrong, of course – Oz never took the bait when another man invited him to sexually objectify a girl. But he’s also wrong about himself. Xander may talk a good game about wanting a submissive woman to serve him, but his dating history points to an opposite trend of being attracted to assertive – sometimes even aggressive – women. His first girlfriend is Cordelia, the former queen bee of the high school, a girl who defeated a vampire simply by threatening him. His second girlfriend is Anya, a former vengeance demon who spent one thousand years eviscerating men, a woman who never shied away from expressing an opinion even if others found it rude. He’s attracted to both Buffy and Faith, Slayers with physical strength who also know how to fight with their words, but any attraction he had to Kendra died when she couldn’t look him in the eye while speaking to him.
Xander and Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter), his original acid-tongued sweetheart
There’s a part of Xander that wants the stereotypical male fantasy of a girl who will serve at his whim, but the larger part of him seems to crave a woman who will speak her mind and banter with him. If he ever did find a girlfriend who only wanted to serve and please, he’d be bored within a few hours, though I’m not sure he has the self-awareness to realize that yet.
Real men always want sex. Xander can be gross when it comes to women. He makes sexually objectifying comments about his female friends. He thinks about sex all the time, as confirmed when Buffy gains the ability to read minds and gets wind of his inner monologue. He sees nothing wrong with making comments about women’s bodies in front of his female friends, and fantasizing about Willow and Tara’s sex life in front of Buffy and Dawn.
Yet there’s another side of Xander when it comes to sex, one that doesn’t come out as often: he values and craves intimacy. When he dreams about Joyce Summers in “Restless,” he confirms that he’s more interested in comfort than in conquest: “I’m a comfortador.” After he has sex with Faith, he doesn’t brag to his friends the way we’d expect him to, but tries to prevent Buffy from finding out and only spills the beans when he thinks the information might help – and he’s crushed when Faith dismisses their one-night stand as meaningless to her: “I thought we had a connection.”
It’s clear that intimacy is more important to Xander than merely getting his rocks off, but the side of him he chooses to show with his friends is the side that’s gross and reducing women to sex objects – even though his friends like the sweet side of Xander a lot more than the pig he often lets out.
Real men get into fights. Real men want submissive women. Real men want sex. These are the lessons that Xander internalizes, and where does that leave him? It leaves him feeling inadequate. It leaves him feeling unloved. It leaves him angry, and when he’s angry, he uses his words as weapons and cruelly lashes out at the people he loves the most – in short, repeating some of the behavior he learned from his father.
The worst part is that Xander often isn’t self-aware enough to see what he’s doing, even as he can recognize this detrimental behavior in other men. He criticizes his friend Riley for acting too macho and blowing up a crypt without waiting for backup. He’s disgusted with Spike for creating the Buffybot. He thinks Warren, Jonathan, and Andrew are creepy and gross. He’s right about all of these things, but if someone were to point out the similarities between his behavior and theirs, he’d be in deep denial to hear it – because as much as Xander wants to be like other men, he wants even more to not be like those men, those jerks who take advantage of women and try too hard to wow people with their macho behavior.
Xander has many wonderful qualities. He can be very brave, loyal, selfless, and loving, and the boy knows how to turn a phrase. He can also be insecure, angry, sexist, cruel, and judgmental. Close to the end of the series, he becomes more at peace with himself and lets go of much of his anger and judgment, but if we didn’t live in a culture that fetishizes and celebrates the most aggressive and disgustingly macho versions of masculine behavior, maybe he would have reached that point much earlier in his life. 
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Xander becomes more at peace with himself – and becomes a better friend – when he gets over the need to be our culture’s definition of a man and instead does what he does best: take on the more traditionally feminine role of comforter and emotional support for the people he loves. 
Xander embraces his comfortador role, helps Willow (Alyson Hannigan), and saves the world with a hug.

Lady T is an aspiring writer and comedian with two novels, a play, and a collection of comedy sketches in progress. She hopes to one day be published and finish one of her projects (not in that order). You can find more of her writing at The Funny Feminist, where she picks apart entertainment and reviews movies she hasn’t seen.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Week: Equality Now: Joss Whedon’s Acceptance Speech

This post previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on December 12, 2010.
In 2007, the Warner Brothers production president, Jeff Robinov, announced that Warner Brothers would no longer make films with female leads.

A year before that announcement, Joss Whedon, the creator of such women-centric television shows as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, and Dollhouse, accepted an award from Equality Now at the event, “On the Road to Equality: Honoring Men on the Front Lines.”

Watch as he answers the question, “Why do you always write such strong women characters?”

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Week: Femininity and Conflict in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

This piece by Lindsey Keesling previously appeared at her Web site *! [emphatic asterisk] and is cross-posted with permission.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 7
Femininity and Conflict in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

When the popular movie Twilight first appeared in theaters, it did not take long for fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS) to shame Twilight’s Edward with a fan video smackdown (“Buffy Vs. Edward”). The video shows Edward stalking Buffy and professing his undying love, with Buffy responding in sarcastic incredulity and staking Edward. While it may appear that this “remix” of the two characters was about Buffy slaying a juvenile upstart and reinforcing her status as the queen of the genre, there was more at stake, so to speak. Buffy slaying Edward says more about the perceived masculinity and virility of the vampire in question than about Buffy herself as an independent woman. Buffy was never given that much agency in her own show. Buffy’s lovers stalked her, lied to her, and often ignored her own wishes about their relationships all in the name of “protecting” her. Many of these things are what fans of BtVS pointed out as anti-woman flaws in the narrative of Twilight, yet Buffy did not stake the vampires who denied her agency in her own relationships; instead, she pined for them! This is only one area in which BtVS as a vehicle fails to respect the ideals of a generation of young girls who crave a positive female icon. In family life, romance, and success outside of her primary role as Slayer, the show revolves around not Buffy’s strength and independence but the struggle she finds herself in because of it. The constant conflict Buffy suffers sends a mixed message to viewers; women can be granted strength but will be punished for it.

Dressing to Kill

One cannot watch BtVS without noticing the sometimes outlandishly girly way that Buffy is costumed, as well as the berating she often faces as a result. It isn’t uncommon for Buffy to climb into the sewers to head off an impending apocalypse wearing a pink sequined halter top. It is also likely that Buffy will face criticism from her watcher, mother, friends, or teachers the more girlish her garb becomes. While Buffy’s wardrobe may seem to contradict her warrior role, in actuality her feminine appearance helps to “normalize” her in the eyes of the viewer by reassuring them that she retains her female self despite her masculine strength (Jowett 23). When asked to patrol with the military Initiative, Buffy rejects their offer of camouflage garb, stating, “I’ve patrolled in this halter top before” (“The I in Team”). This rejection of the male warrior’s need to wear protective clothing in battle does not weaken Buffy, it instead positions her as a transgressive icon of female strength (Early). Buffy wields her girlish appearance like a weapon, using it to disarm and distract her opponents. Buffy’s unique approach to her role is also evidenced in the way that she and her friends often “resolve conflict nonviolently, through rationality, tactfulness, compassion and empathy” (Early, 20).
Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy, looking pouty in a halter top

Deborah Tannen explains the way in which women are denied a “default” state in the way they dress and portray themselves, stating that “if a woman’s clothing is tight or revealing (in other words, sexy), it sends a message… …If her clothes are not sexy, that too sends a message, lent meaning by the knowledge that they could have been” (622). If Buffy were portrayed as butch, she would just be a girl pretending to be a man. If she were portrayed as too vanilla in the way she dressed, spoke, and acted she would be less interesting; her plainness would also send a message to the viewer by making her more androgynous. Buffy may be saucy and sexy and contrived in the way she dresses, but that is part of what makes her character complex. She is a warrior but also, undeniably, a woman.

Thus it is interesting that the plot and dialogue of the show often does not reinforce Buffy’s feminine dress as a positive thing, but instead condemns her for it. In the episode “Bad Eggs” Buffy and her mother are shopping and Buffy wants a new outfit. Joyce says no, “it makes you look like a streetwalker”. Buffy pouts and replies, “but a thin streetwalker, right?” This scenario is sadly common. Buffy’s peers, her mentors, and authority figures criticize her appearance as if it were offensive, and Buffy deflects such comments with sarcasm instead of defending her right to determine her own physical appearance.

Life Outside of Slaying

The punishment Buffy receives for her appearance is the least troubling aspect of the way in which Buffy is treated. From the first episode, Buffy is perceived of as a delinquent by those who do not know her dual identity as student and slayer. Buffy burnt down the gym of her old school, forcing her mother to quit her job and move to Sunnydale. Despite the fact that telling her mother the truth would assuage some of the resentment Buffy faced at home, Buffy chooses to lie to her mother to “protect” her. This pattern, in which Buffy stoically faces the judgment of others without defending herself repeats with her principal, teachers, and peers; in this way, Buffy accepts punishment that could have been avoided while reinforcing the idea that her treatment, while not deserved, is just.
Buffy working at Double Meat Palace

As the show progresses and Buffy moves out of high school and into college and pursuing a career, she continues to encounter difficulty in her everyday life because of the dual identity slaying forces her to concoct. When her mother dies Buffy takes on the role of provider for her household. Buffy works a minimum wage job at Double Meat Palace to make ends meet as she is incapable of securing better employment. Buffy is eventually offered a position as a school counselor by the new principal in town, Robin Wood. In the episode “First Date” Principal Wood reveals that he knows that Buffy is the Slayer, and this is why he offered her a job. Buffy says, “so you didn’t hire me for my counseling skills?” and Principal Wood responds with a chuckle. Buffy may be powerful as the Slayer, but as a provider for her family and as an employee, her skills are portrayed as laughable.

Buffy’s necessary efforts to cloak some of her actions and engage in subterfuge to protect those unaware of vampires also constantly weaken her standing in society. Dramatic irony is often engaged as a plot device in BtVS, wherein Buffy is posed almost clownishly trying to hide the truth from an ignorant and often judgmental public. It is humorous as well as endearing to see how poorly Buffy lies, and Buffy’s lack of finesse outside of slaying does lend her character a great deal of humanity. Yet one must question why dramatic irony so often has Buffy playing the part of the bozo. Buffy is too often percieved of as flaky, inconsistent, or downright delusional. As one character says, a lot of people think Buffy “is some kind of high-functioning schizophrenic” (“Potential”). While Buffy may be possessing of super-human strength and a higher calling, it greatly impedes her ability to function as a normal member of society. She faces humiliation, prejudice, and conflict on a daily basis.


They Say Not to Take Work Home

As JP Williams writes in Choosing Your Own Mother (Mother-daughter Conflicts in Buffy), Buffy is “over-fathered and under-mothered” (61). She is reliant on the men around her for her survival, but denied an adequate female role model. For the first two seasons of BtVS, Buffy hides her true identity from her mother, Joyce. When Joyce does find out the truth about Buffy’s powers, they fight bitterly. Joyce tells Buffy, “if you walk out of this house don’t even think about coming back” (“Becoming”). Buffy has to leave or risk the world ending; so she walks out of her home and does not return to it until the third season. Buffy’s powers in this case strip Joyce of the ability to mother because Buffy’s calling must take precedence over her family obligations. Yet Buffy’s relationship with her mother suffers from far more than just the tension created by slaying. Joyce doesn’t seem to know how to properly communicate and often offers meaningless anecdotes, with Buffy reassuring her mother in an apparent role reversal. In “The Witch,” Joyce is attempting to encourage Buffy to follow through on trying out for cheer squad. Buffy says, “what was I trying out for?” and Joyce fumbles for words, having already forgotten. Buffy says, “that’s okay, your platitudes are good for all occasions.”
Buffy and her mother Joyce

As the series progresses Joyce becomes portrayed as less neglectful, but in the first few seasons especially there are serious questions to be asked about her role as a mother. She has a teenage daughter who sneaks out nightly, lies to her, skips classes and bucks authority and Joyce is largely incapable of informing her daughter’s actions. Much of the early dynamic between mother and daughter comes down to the fact that Joyce does not realize the reality of Buffy’s “dual identity as Slayer and Student… a greater failing than Lois Lane’s traditional inability to envision Clark Kent without his glasses” (Williams, 64). The fact that Joyce is kept ignorant and Buffy routinely shuns her mothering is not entirely Joyce’s fault. The Slayer cannot respect her mother’s authority because the Slayer’s role is more important than mother-daughter relations.

Buffy the Relationship Slayer

Buffy’s relationship with her mother is not the only one which is strained. If her relationship with her mother is tense, then her romances are strenuous. Her first romantic pairing is with Angel, a vampire who is cursed with a soul. Unbeknownst to Angel, he will lose his soul if he experiences even a single moment of pure happiness. He finds this happiness when he and Buffy consummate their relationship in Season 2. When Angel then transforms into the demon Angelus, Mary Magoulick writes, it “culminates in a graphic, brutal, and bitter fight scene” (738). This is “particularly disturbing” as it comes in the second part of the episode in which Buffy makes love to Angel for the first time, giving the viewer the message that “being in love is more torment than pleasure” for Buffy (Magoulick 738).
Buffy and Angel

Buffy’s later relationships may not be equally as tormented in terms of scale, but they do continue to revolve around themes of pain and conflict. This conflict is evident not only in romantic relationships, but in all her close relationships with men. Buffy even comes to blows with her mentor, Giles. While often their fighting is only in words, twice she resorts to hitting him. The first time occurs in the final episode of season one, “Prophecy Girl.” When Buffy realizes that Giles is going to sacrifice himself to save her life, she knocks him out in order to protect him. This action does lead to Buffy’s death by drowning, but she is resuscitated by her close friend Xander. The second time Buffy punches Giles echoes the first. In “Passion,” Giles is inflamed with rage after Angelus kills the woman Giles loves. Giles pursues Angelus in a suicidal rage. Again, Buffy resorts to blows in order to get through to Giles where words failed, to save his life. No matter how close the relationship, how deep the trust between two people, Buffy always seems to have to resort to her role as Slayer and her superhuman powers in order to make herself heard. This repeated theme has a serious connotation; Buffy as a girl is powerless. Her authority is intrinsically tied to her physical strength, which comes from her role as Slayer.


The Troubling Issue of Being Female On TV

One might ask how much any of this matters. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a television show, and much of the drama it depends on for ratings necessarily comes from conflict. No one watching the show should be surprised that Buffy’s interpersonal relationships are constantly disrupted, that she wears revealing clothes, or that she has to struggle in some areas of her life. The only problem with such thinking is that it assumes that such tensions could not have been written in a way that strengthened Buffy’s character rather than weakened her. It was not necessary to deprive Joyce and Buffy of a healthy mother-daughter relationship. A strong mother who supported her daughter’s calling would not necessarily have been less interesting to viewers than a mother who fumbled for words and appeared helpless. Nor was it necessary for Buffy to date men who stalked her, lied to her, and deprived her of agency in her relationships. While there is inevitably a price to pay for living a double life, the way in which Buffy is punished for her duplicity speaks volumes when viewed as analogous to the feminist struggle.
From the episode “Hush”

Often Buffy resorts to saying “I’m the Chosen One” when her authority is questioned; she is the Slayer, and that truth defines the way in which she acts and relates. Because of her power Buffy is forced to struggle in every area of her life. What message does this send to a young girl watching the program who is imagining being as powerful as Buffy? Rather than being an encouragement for girls to picture themselves as superheroes as boys so often do, BtVS sends the opposite message. Don’t pursue power, because that power will define your circumstances and those circumstances will define you. You will be forced to lie, to cheat, to sacrifice healthy relationships and to face constant conflict as a result of your independence.

It is unfortunately true that many shows that feature women as primary characters employ the same kind of storytelling. Xena: Warrior Princess, La Femme Nikita, The Closer, Alias, In Plain Sight, Saving Grace, Weeds and Battlestar Galactica all feature women as primary characters. All of the women in these shows have just a few things in common aside from their beauty: their intelligence and capability is challenged regularly; they face conflict in their private lives and homes; and they are punished for their physical and emotional strength. It is almost inevitable that any strong woman on TV would face the same treatment, especially those who play a traditionally masculine role. Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica, Xena, Nikita, Sidney Bristow of Alias, Mary Shannon of In Plain Sight and The Closer’s Brenda Lee Johnson all play traditionally masculine roles. All of those women face conflict and physical violence in almost every episode. Not only do they have to fight for respect, but their good works are seldom rewarded. Appreciation, respect, achievement, and victory are few and far between and must be won at high cost; home is not often a safe haven and interpersonal relationships are constantly disrupted. What is true for all of these female characters is especially true in the case of Buffy; she is a singular icon for female strength as well as for the punishment of feminine power.

Buffy and Faith

Male Superheroes do not receive the same treatment. Spiderman, Batman, and Superman may engage in conflict in their everyday lives as a result of their necessary deceptions, but it is certainly not to the measure which Buffy does; their familial ties are free from extreme stress. They all have close relationships with older figures who mentor them and preserve their familial ties (Aunt Mae, Alfred, and the Kents respectively). They have places they can go home to which are a respite from the pressures their dual identities create. Each of the male superheroes mentioned also receives a certain measure of success both in their chosen careers outside of crime fighting and their romantic lives. While Batman does not have any long term romantic relationships, he is a millionaire and dates often; he is rewarded for his power. Buffy is not afforded the kind of pleasures these male superheroes enjoy. It is because of that truth that Buffy’s story is far from empowering. Rather than showcasing a character who has achieved full agency as a woman and been rewarded for it, Buffy the Vampire Slayer instead chronicles one girl’s fight to be respected; a fight it sometimes seems she will never win.

The fact that women receive unequal treatment in today’s society is made wholly apparent in the fact that feminine strength is not showcased or rewarded in television media as masculine strength always has been. Until women are allowed to be feminine and strong without fear of their homes and lives being disrupted, or facing constant judgment and critical backlash, women will remain less than men. While Buffy the Vampire Slayer may have gone further than any show before it in creating a female character who was independent and powerful, the fact that her strength could not go unpunished leaves a gaping hole. Young women are still hungry for a role model who can navigate all of the complexities of modern womanhood successfully. Buffy’s final fight, the fight for respect, must not be left unwon. It’s time for a female superhero to get equal treatment: strength, intelligence, achievement, and reward.

Works Cited
“Buffy Vs. Edward”. Jonathon McIntosh, ed.

http://www.rebelliouspixels.com/2009/buffy-vs-edward-twilight-remixed viewed 10/28/11

Early, Francis. “Staking Her Claim: Buffy the Vampire Slayer as Transgressive Woman Warrior.” Journal of Popular Culture 35.3 (2001): 11-17.

Jewett, Lorna. Sex and the Slayer: A Gender Studies Primer for the Buffy Fan. Middletown: Wesleyan, 2005. Print.

Magoulik, Mary. “Frustrating Female Heroism: Mixed Messages in Xena, Nikita, and Buffy.” Journal of Popular Culture 39.5 (2006): 729-55.

Tannen, Deborah. “There is No Unmarked Woman.” Signs of Life in the USA: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers. Ed. Sonia Maasik and Jack Solomon. 6th ed. Boston: Bedford St. Martins, 2009. 620-24. Print.

Whedon, Joss. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Seasons 1-7. Television Program.

Williams, JP. Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Ed. Wilcox, Rhonda, and David Lavery. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. 61-68. Print.

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Lindsey Keesling is a geeky English major who sets herself apart from the crowd with her pop culture and religious criticism writing for Harlot’s Sauce E-magazine and *! [emphatic asterisk] as well as a venture into re-imagining the female superhero mythos in a serial novel online.

Quote of the Day from "When TV Became Art: What We Owe to Buffy" by Robert Moore

Buffy on the verge of killing a vampire

In an article published way back in 2009, Robert Moore made the case in PopMatters for why Buffy the Vampire Slayer is such an important television show:

Without any question, Buffy revolutionized the role of women on television, more even than Mary Tyler Moore or Cagney and Lacey or Murphy Brown or Ally McBeal. If you look at female heroes (as opposed to hapless heroines–I have always thought that the definition of heroine should be “endangered female in need of rescue by male hero”) in the history of TV, you will be astonished at how few there are prior to the nineties. You have Annie Oakley in the fifties and Emma Peel on The Avengers in the sixties, and to a degree Wonder Woman (who spent a great deal of her time worrying about impressing her boss Col. Steve Trevor) and The Bionic Woman (the weaker spin off to The Six Million Dollar Man). This all changed in the nineties, first with Dana Scully on The X-Files and then with Xena. But the former, as competent as she was as an FBI professional, was not sufficiently iconic to change TV, while the latter, sufficiently iconic, was too cartoonish to inspire future female heroes. Buffy was the turning point. You can write the history of female heroes on TV as Before Buffy and After Buffy. It is not a coincidence that most of the female heroes on TV arose in the wake of the little blonde vampire slayer. Look at the roster: Aeryn Sun (Farscape), Max (Dark Angel), Sydney Bristow (Alias), Kate Austin (Lost), Kara “Starbuck” Thrace (along with a plethora of other strong women on Battlestar Galactica), Olivia Dunham (Fringe), Sarah Connor and Cameron (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles), Veronica Mars, and an almost uncountable number of lesser characters. Buffy made TV safe for strong women. This isn’t art, but it is the content of art. Buffy guaranteed that TV as art would make a place for heroic women.
While I recognize that we can go back and forth for the end of time about whether Buffy (the show and the character) is feminist or antifeminist, I think we can at least agree that the simple statement “Buffy made TV safe from strong women” is pretty compelling and hard to entirely disagree with. 
My seven-year-old niece Sophia visited me recently in New York. When it was bedtime, and we were browsing through Netflix to find something to watch before we went to sleep, she wanted Buffy. The next day when we woke up, she immediately asked if we could watch Buffy while we ate breakfast. When we got home from New York sightseeing, she wanted Buffy. We skipped many of the violent, scarier episodes (“Hush,” anyone?), but she loved watching Buffy save her friends and fellow high school students by destroying monsters with her bare hands. 
Now Sophia takes Taekwondo. She showed me some of her moves the last time I saw her, and said, “I bet I’ll be able to kick as much butt as Buffy soon, maybe more!” 
I don’t want to get bogged down about how it sucks in a way that Buffy’s ability comes exclusively from superpowers. I get that, and I could write about it endlessly, but in this moment, I don’t care because Sophia doesn’t care. She watches Buffy and sees a woman who kicks ass, and she wants to emulate that. It’s tough to over-analyze and intellectualize a TV show when you’re watching a young girl practice roundhouse kicks because she wants to be a strong badass like Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And I have to say, it’s much more heartwarming to see her excited about becoming a strong woman with martial arts skills than it was to watch her pretend she couldn’t speak–because she wanted to be Ariel from The Little Mermaid. 

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Week: Death Is Your Gift–In Praise of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Fifth Season

This piece by Adam Howard previously appeared at his Web site The Blank Projector and is cross-posted with permission. 
Buffy, jumping off the ledge in Season Five
I don’t intend to write about TV too often here, as the volume of serious television criticism on the internet is close to saturation point and I’m not sure what I could bring to the table. However, I’ve decided to to briefly diverge from my usual film-talk to champion a TV series that ended nine years ago and has such a huge cult following that no one really needs to talk about it anymore. When people talk about great seasons of US drama you tend to get the usual suspects time and time again: season one of The Sopranos, season two of Deadwood, season three of Breaking Bad, season four of The Wire, etc. One television season that I rarely see standing alongside those giants, though, season five of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

There are plenty of reasons why Buffy doesn’t often get recognised as the masterpiece of a show that it was. All the really great television series of the last fifteen years or so have been serious, downright worthy affairs and critics have taken them very seriously in turn. Buffy took itself very seriously indeed too, but there was always a deliberate, inherent silliness in its central premise that turns many people off before they even give it a chance. Furthermore, my belief that it’s one of the greatest shows of all time doesn’t mean I’m not fully aware that it has its fair share of dud episodes – such is the curse of the 22 episode season and the way the show figured itself out as it went along.

But its strengths are strengths that none of the other big US dramas have. For one, the flexibility of its form meant that it could be any kind of show it wanted: one week it’s a goofy comedy, the next it’s a frightening fairy tale, the week after it’s an all-singing all-dancing musical. It was clearly the work of a team of writers, too, and when I was young and watching it for the first time it was the first time I really started to learn how TV was constructed – I got a thrill from seeing who had written each episode and guessing at what kind of episode it was going to be by who wrote it. Above all, though, the thing that Buffy has in spades that most shows lack, and the aspect of the show that season five best showcases, is emotion. Even at its most laid back, Buffy is a show spilling over with emotion, and it’s this that gives the potentially goofy premise of show its weight. Whedon et. al. were absolute masters at making us really care about their characters, and every audacious plot contrivance was easily swallowed when viewed through the lens of the real, human emotion that they would imbue it with.

Take, for example, season five’s biggest plot contrivance – Dawn’s sudden appearance as Buffy’s sister. She’s never been mentioned or seen before, everyone’s acting as if he’s been there all along, and aside from one crazy tramp seething at her that she doesn’t belong here, we the audience aren’t given many clues as to who or what she is for six entire episodes. When we do find out what she is – a mystical key sent to Buffy and her friends to protect, complete with fabricated memories so she’d love her deeply like a sister – it doesn’t come easy, and doesn’t make things any less complicated. Many people call Dawn the albatross of the season, but while her character becomes much more problematic later on the series’ run, I think she works beautifully in this season. Moments like the one where Joyce realises what Dawn is and loves her anyway, or when Buffy talks to her about how they share the same blood, are some of the most beautifully drawn and tender moments the series ever produced, and if she hadn’t been there the show would have been drained of all its agency.

If I was going to pin the blame on any character for dragging down the season in its early episodes, it would be Riley. From the outset of the season it’s clear that the writers don’t really know what to do with him now that the Initiative business from Season Four is done and dusted, but they take an awfully long time to get rid of him. I’m sure that the plotline in which his insecurities at no longer being a superman lead to him going to some kind of vampire sucking den for cheap thrills looked good on paper, but it sticks out like a sore thumb in a season that’s otherwise thematically harmonious. In a season that’s more about confronting the hard-edged reality that our heroes ignore by fighting monsters, this slightly hysterical flight-of-fancy just doesn’t work.

That’s a small quibble, though, when you’re faced with a season of television that’s otherwise so thematically rich and intricate. All the themes and motifs of the series – family, power, blood, death, the toll being a slayer takes on Buffy’s loved ones – all bounce off one another in constantly fascinating ways.

Take, for example, the season opener, “Buffy vs. Dracula.” At first glance it’s a fun, punchy, exciting opening to the season, but in retrospect it kicks into gear a lot of what season five is trying to do. To begin with, there’s a renewed focus on Buffy’s blood as something powerful and life-giving, an idea that is teased throughout the season but doesn’t come to fruition till its final moments. Most importantly though, it ups the stakes and deepens the mythology significantly. Season Four’s closer “Restless” did a great job of connecting the slayer to a deep and ancient power, but it’s in “Buffy vs. Dracula” that she sets out to learn what that means, tasting the darker side of her power and asking Giles to help her harness it.

Perhaps that’s why this season feels so different to what came before it. Everything feels grander, more important, like the writers are making the show they’ve been preparing for all this time. They have more confidence than ever in the story they want to tell – early on in the season they drop the college as the show’s hub, instead centering on Buffy’s two families: her mother and sister at home, and her friends at the Magic Shop. It results in the season being far more streamlined and the overarching plot having far more prominence – there are few episodes that have no connection to what’s going on with Glory and Dawn, and even the most inconsequential-seeming episodes – “Triangle” and “I Was Made to Love You” – have things in them that become important later. Many people miss the one-off, monster-of-the-week aspect of the show from season five onwards, but I always found that Buffy worked best when it was dealing with more long-form, character-based storytelling, and season five’s arc has to be its strongest.

Willow and Tara sharing their first kiss in Season Five
Not that some of the individual episodes aren’t fantastic in their own right. An early standout is the Joss Whedon penned and directed “Family,” that is in some ways the whole season in microcosm. Tara’s family (including a young Amy Adams!) comes looking for her, insisting that once she turns eighteen she’ll turn into a demon and only they can look after her. Not only does Tara’s using magic turn into a graceful metaphor for her lesbianism, it also lays out the main theme of the season – hell, it’s right there in the title. Early in the episode, Buffy and Xander talk about how they don’t know what to get Tara for her birthday, how they like her, but don’t know her that well or really ‘get’ her. But at the end of the episode, when her father says to Buffy, “We are her blood kin. Who the hell are you?” she replies “We’re family.” It’s not the people who you share a surname with or even the people you love deeply that are your family, but the people who you choose to care about and embrace as part of your life. All Joss Whedon shows and films are about people forming ad-hoc families to overcome obstacles in one way or another, but never is it clearer, or more affecting than here.

And then there’s “The Body.” To say that “The Body” is a great episode of television would be an understatement. It’s one of the most ambitious, devastating, daring and powerful things ever committed to the small screen, saying more about death and grief in one episode than Six Feet Under managed in its entire run and looking and feeling unlike anything I’ve ever seen before or since – including any other episode of Buffy. Using no non-diagetic music and limiting each act to just one scene, Whedon tracks Buffy’s loss of her mother with stark, hyper-realist immediacy. People are quick to criticise Sarah Michelle Gellar’s acting ability, but she does great work here, and her journey from blind panic and fear to numb, empty grief is devastating to watch. So many tiny moments stand out from the episode’s first act alone – Buffy rearranging her mother’s skirt before the paramedics enter; the strange, unclear way she says “She’s at the house” to Giles on the phone; the moment when she opens her backdoor and peers out into bright sunlight and the world still going on outside – but the episode’s best moment is the scene where Buffy’s friends each go through their own grief. Willow frets about what clothes she should wear while Tara comforts her (with what was their first on-screen kiss despite them having been a couple for over a year), Xander punches a hole through the wall, and Anya asks a lot of questions. Anya’s recently-mortal status has been a bottomless well of comedy since she became a regular cast member, but here she surprises everyone and gives a speech that’s unbearably sad: “She’ll never have eggs, or yawn or brush her hair, not ever, and no one will explain to me why.” The gang have faced all kinds of insurmountable odds, but when faced with the cold hard reality of death, none of them has the answers.

Anya in tears after the death of Joyce
The best thing about “The Body,” and the thing that shows how far Buffy had come by this point, is how it trusts its characters and its writing enough to abandon its central premise. There is a vampire in “The Body,” but only one, and while it’s a dirty, naked struggle of a fight, he’s not a real threat. By now, the characters are so strong that they can stand on their own, and that’s what makes this season so powerful. Whedon’s character writing has never been particularly psychologically complex, but he’s a genius when it comes to writing broad, instantly recognisable characters that are easy to understand and easy to care about, that grow and develop and feel like real humans. That’s why season five works so well – it makes you care. The final four or five episodes are some of the most emotionally involving television ever made, from Tara’s brain being sucked out, to Spike telling Buffy she makes him feel like a man, to Xander proposing to Anya, to Buffy’s quiet, resigned talk with Giles where she confesses how much she misses her mum. The season’s climax is also the the series’ climax – Whedon et. al. had intended to finish the series here, and regardless of whether you feel they should have continued or not (I for one think there’s enough interesting stuff going on in Seasons 6 and 7 to justify their existence), it’s hard to argue against Buffy’s sacrifice being the defining moment of the series.

So, while conventional wisdom will cast season 3 as Buffy’s finest year, and many will cite Season 2’s Angel-turns-evil plotline as the show’s most operatic, emotional arc, I respectfully disagree. Season 3 is terrific fun, and Angel’s transformation is as sensational and rewarding a plot twist as they come, but Season 5 has both four years of history behind it and a committed drive to produce something more daring and ambitious than ever before. Its influence is still being felt now: without Buffy, there’d be no Lost, no 24, no new Doctor Who, and yet none of its many protégées has ever come close to the emotional gut-punch of Buffy jumping off that ledge. If you’re ever left wondering why Buffy the Vampire Slayer has such a huge cult following a decade later; if you’re baffled by why someone would bother to write 2,000 words about it in 2012; mark my words: you are missing out.

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Adam Howard is a 25-year-old Londoner who writes about movies at The Blank Projector. You can follow him on twitter @afahoward.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Week: Willow Rosenberg: Geek, Interrupted

This piece by Lady T previously appeared at Bitch Flicks on July 24, 2012 as part of our Women in Science Fiction Theme Week. 

Willow Rosenberg (Alyson Hannigan) on Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Joss Whedon is known for creating and writing about strong female characters in his science fiction shows. One of the most popular and complex of these characters is Willow Rosenberg from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Willow speaks to many people and quite a few have named her their favorite character on the show, from Mark at Mark Watches to Joss Whedon himself, who put the most Willow-centric episode of the series (“Doppelgangland”) on his list of favorite episodes.

Another thing that makes Willow so appealing is the fact that her character arc over seven seasons can’t be described in only one way. Some see Willow’s story as a shy, brainy computer geek embracing her supernatural power in becoming a witch.Others relate to her arc as one of a repressed wallflower who explores her sexuality and finds more confidence in coming out as a lesbian. Still others are fascinated with the different ways she handles magic, and her recovery after drifting too far to the dark side.

What story is told when those three arcs are put together? For me, the story of Willow Rosenberg is the story of a woman who spends years defining and re-defining herself, rejecting roles that other people have chosen for her – for better and for worse.

From the very first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Willow has been presented as a shy, sweet, helpful friend to the titular heroine– and from the very second episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Willow has shown herself not to be as sweet or innocent as everyone thinks she is. When she meets Buffy for the first time, she’s eager and friendly, bubbling over with information, in awe that this mysterious, cool new girl is talking to her, but also wanting to help in any way she can.

Willow (Alyson Hannigan) talks to Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar)

This eager beaver persona is the one that Willow adopts for most of seasons one and two.She becomes the Hermione to Buffy’s Harry, using her computer hacking skills to assist whenever Buffy needs more research for demon-fighting and she can’t find the answers in one of Giles’s books. And for these two years, Willow is notonly content in this role, but she thrives in it. Like her best friend Xander (my favorite character on Buffy), she’s found a place where she belongs. She’s found a purpose in fighting the good fight against the forces of evil, and she doesn’t seem to mind that she’s a second banana to Buffy. As long as she can put her skills to use and she’s fighting the bad guys, she’s happy.

This changes when Willow discovers magic.

Near the end of season two, Willow begins exploring supernatural arts. She doesn’t do much beyond research and reading, but despite her lack of practice, she thinks that she has what it takes to perform a spell that will restore Angel’s soul.

Watching the season two finale with the perspective of hindsight is more than a little uncomfortable, because we know how much Giles turns out to be right when he tells Willow, “Challenging such potent magics through yourself…it could open a door that you might not be able to close.” It’s also uncomfortable because we can see that Willow is more interested in proving her skills in magic than doing the right thing. She wants to help Buffy, obviously, but she also wants to prove to everyone – and to herself – that she can do the spell.

And she does.

Willow possessed as she performs the spell

Angel’s spell is restored several minutes too late, and Buffy has to kill him anyway. But Willow doesn’t think about this potential consequence. She excitedly tells her friends, “I think the spell worked. I felt something go through me.”

After that,Willow becomes less meek, less shy, and more risky with her use of magic. She tries to use magic to make her and Xander fall out of lust with each other (in a plotline that I hate and always will hate, by the way), and is angry with him when he confronts her for resorting to spells. She becomes even angrier in season four when she, Oz,Buffy, and Xander are trapped in a haunted house and Buffy criticizes her aptitude in magic, saying that Willow’s spells have a 50% success rate. Willow responds with a flustered, “Oh yeah? Well – so’s your face!” but then follows up with a bitter, “I’m not your sidekick!”

Shortly afterwards, Willow tries to perform a spell that winds up failing. This is in an episode entitled “Fear, Itself,” where each major character confronts his/her major fear. Oz is afraid of the werewolf inside him, Xander is afraid of being invisible to his friends, Buffy is afraid of abandonment, and Willow…seems to be afraid of her spell going wrong?

Willow’s spell goes wrong

Compared to her friends’ worries, Willow’s fear seems a little superficial. At the end of the season, though, we learn that Willow’s fears are about much more than simple experiments going wrong.

By the end of season four, Willow has gone through a few pretty significant changes. She’s become more focused on magic and less focused on her scientific, “nerdy”pursuits. She’s farther apart from Buffy and Xander than ever, despite loving both of them. She’s entered a romantic relationship with a woman. Most significantly of all, Willow is confident. She has a life that is fully her own, where she has two things (Tara and magic) that are hers. She’s entered a new phase in her life.

Or has she? After watching Willow’s dream in “Restless,” we can’t say that this new Willow is any more confident or self-assured than the old one who couldn’t stand up for herself when Cordelia Chase insulted her by the water fountain.

Joss Whedon’s writing for Willow’s dream is clever and filled with misdirection. Characters talk about Willow and her “secret,” a secret that she only seems comfortable discussing with Tara. Dream-Buffy constantly comments on Willow’s “costume,”telling her to change out of it because “everyone already knows.” We’re led to believe that Willow is afraid that her friends will judge her for being gay and being a relationship with another woman…but this isn’t the case at all.

Instead, when Dream-Buffy rips off Willow’s costume, we see a version of Willow that is eerily reminiscent of season one Willow: a geek with pretensions of being cool.

Dream-Willow delivering a book report
In her dream,Willow is dressed in schoolgirl clothes, delivering a book report on The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.Anya and Harmony are snarking at her from the audience, Buffy is bored, Xander is shouting, “Who cares?!” and Tara and Oz are mocking her and flirting wit heach other.

This sequence is haunting, heartbreaking, and foreboding. Those of us who watched Buffy for the first four years know that Willow’s perceptions are far from accurate. Buffy was supportive of Willow far more often than not and Xander defended Willow against anyone who threatened her. As for her love interests, well, Tara practically worshiped the ground Willow walked on, and Oz admitted that Willow was the only thing in his life that he ever loved.

But none of that changes the way Willow feels. Despite the friends she’s made, despite thechanges she’s had, she still thinks that everyone will eventually discover her secret: that she’s an uncool, childish, awkward geek.

I think that this fear, more than anything else, is what motivates Willow’s actions over the second half of the series. The show talks about magic addiction and getting high off of power, but ultimately, Willow wants to change who she is. She doesn’t want to be the nerdy, lonely bookworm that defined so much of her childhood and adolescence. She jokes to Tara, “Hard to believe such a hot mama-yama came from humble, geek-infested roots?” and she might as well be pleading, “I’m not that geek anymore, am I? Tell me I’m not.” She says to Buffy, “If you could be, you know, plain old Willow or super Willow, who would you be?…Buffy, who was I? Just some girl. Tara didn’t even know that girl.” 

Willow talks to Buffy after coming down from a high

Eventually, Willow confronts her addiction and power issues with magic. Her arc in the last season of the show is largely about the way she learns to be more careful with magic, her steps forward and her steps back, until she handles her power more responsibly. But one thing she never does is confront her deepest issue: her fear of being an unlovable geek.

I could write for another two thousand words about how Willow’s insecurities made her dangerous to people around her, and how her arc paralleled the arc of the three misogynistic sci-fi geeks who provoked terror all throughout season six, and how her fear of abandonment turned her into the abuser in a controlling relationship, but that’s an essay for another day. I will probably write that essay in the future, but for now, I want to talk about how Willow’s insecurities affected Willow.

A part of me feels truly sad that Willow could never find it in her to reclaim the geek label. I look back at the cute, eager computer nerd from the first two seasons and feel nostalgic for her Hermione Granger-like enthusiasm. I wish she had felt comfortable enough in her own skin to realize that being smart and knowing a lot about computers is a good thing, dammit!

At the same time, I wonder if there’s another lesson in Willow’s story. Audience members like me might yearn for the days when Willow was more interested in computers than she was in magic, but who’s to say that hacking and breaking into government files was the best way for Willow to spend her life? Sure, she was good with computers, but did she had to let that skill define the rest of her life? Isn’t it positive for her to branch out and explore that she has talent in other things in more than one area? After all, even if we’re nostalgic for Willow’s nerdier days, doesn’t she have the right to explore other sides of herself, even if she makes mistakes along the way?

To this day, I still don’t know how I feel about Willow’s arc. I’m glad she discovered another side to her personality, but I’m disappointed that she couldn’t reclaim her geeky days and make it a source of power instead of embarrassment and loneliness. Ultimately, I would have liked to see the show address Willow’s “geek-infested roots” in the last season of Buffy,so we could have seen her make a choice about that part of her life and her identity, instead of seeing that part of her character fall to the wayside. 


Lady T is an aspiring writer and comedian with two novels, a play, and a collection of comedy sketches in progress. She hopes to one day be published and finish one of her projects (not in that order). You can find more of her writing at The Funny Feminist, where she picks apart entertainment and reviews movies she hasn’t seen.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Week: Xander Harris: Hyena Boy

Xander Harris (Nicholas Brendon) in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Guest post written by Monika Bartyzel originally published at The Hooded Utilitarian. Cross-posted with permission.

As soon as Buffy hit television on March 10, 1997, Joss Whedon became the poster boy for geek feminism. Raised by a radical feminist, he always merged his creativity with gender studies which he called his “unofficial minor.” Buffy was created to defy stereotypical expectations, a blonde superhero whose adolescent growing pains were the blueprint for the supernatural evil she vanquished. This balance struck a chord in viewers, inspiring theoretical interpretations running as rampant as fanfic. But it was never the feminist dream that we thought it was. It couldn’t be, as long as Buffy was friends with Xander Harris, the thorn destroying any so-called feminism in Sunnydale.
Ironically, Alexander LaVelle Harris is based on Joss himself. As he told NPR in 2000, “Xander is obviously based on me, the sort of guy that all the girls want to be best friends with in high school, and who’s, you know, kind of a loser, but is more or less articulate and someone you can trust.” But instead of the radical feminist upbringing, Xander is the product of a highly dysfunctional family. He has no healthy male role models or friendships. (His only male friend, Jesse, is turned into a vampire he accidentally kills, and the act barely fazes him.) Xander only has Willow, the awkward girl who is in love with him, who he romantically ignores. 
When Buffy Summers arrives, Xander immediately wants her. His first words to her: “Can I have you?” He lusts over her power, sexiness, and defiance of school politics and adult authority. His willingness to accept her position of power has often been seen as an example of his feminism; moreover, it’s been used to frame him as a “subversive image of masculinity,” because “confronted with the feminist reality that women are at least equal to him … he doesn’t try to dominate it, he doesn’t try to deny it, and he doesn’t try to ignore it.” But that is precisely what he does. 
Xander sexualizes power, instead of maintaining a respectful attitude towards strong women. He lusts for most of the powerful women he meets, good or bad – Buffy, preying mantis lady, Incan mummy, Willow (as she begins to mature), Cordelia, Faith, and Anya. At the same time, he finds himself at odds with this attraction, which manifests into this strange almost self-loathing that drives him to assert dominance. Since he’s a rather awkward boy without strength, he uses his tongue, throwing insults and off-the-mark opinions as “Xander, the Chronicler of Buffy’s Failures.”
It begins rather benignly. Xander complains about Owen’s “shifty” eyes and rants that Angel is a “girly name.” But it becomes a real problem after “The Pack.” When Xander is possessed by a hyena, he becomes the misogynist alpha male. Though he acts like an animal, he also reveals observations he wouldn’t dare to as human. He acknowledges that Willow likes him, and he challenges Buffy: “We both know what you want… You like your men dangerous.” Hyena juju might make him sniff things and eat piglets, but hyenas aren’t cognizant of high school politics. Possession merely removes Xander’s filter.

Xander possessed by a hyena spirit
Though he is quickly freed of hyena (which he never apologizes for, claiming amnesia), the possession seems to spark an egocentric attitude deep within – Xander’s questionable moments increase in a flurry of sexism and hypocritical commentary that sometimes wanes, but never disappears. In “Angel,” he begins calling Cordelia a hooker. There is no provocation for the term, he’s merely trying to neutralize Cordelia’s power by slut-shaming her, and sadly, the show backs these opinions by drawing a line between acceptable and over-the-top Cordelia-centric insults in “When She Was Bad.” “Hooker” is okay, but Buffy calling Cordelia a “moron” is framed as highly questionable.
“Angel” also marks the beginning of Xander’s war against the souled vampire. When Buffy learns that Angel isn’t human, Xander fails to think of anyone but himself. Though it isn’t wrong for him to note that Buffy should slay Angel (they don’t yet know about his soul), it is not for her benefit or Sunnydale’s. Xander wants Buffy to remove his competition, and urges her to kill him without thinking of her feelings.
Even Willow suffers Xander’s egocentrism. As she develops feelings for someone else (“I Robot, You Jane”), he is immediately critical: “I don’t like it; it’s not healthy.” For these women to be his friend, each must tolerate jealousy and/or insults. Xander is loyal and will help in any deadly fight, but if there is even the slightest question or challenge to his “territory” or masculinity, Xander’s sexual interests and ego come first. He even makes boundaries for Buffy’s strength – it’s okay for her to be an unstoppable Slayer, but she should not protect him from the class bully. Female strength is okay in their private, vampire night, not in the public halls of high school.
Sadly, Xander is continually rewarded for his worst moments. Increasing, sexualized insults towards the most popular girl in school lead Xander to win over Cordelia, creating one of his two highly problematic relationships. When Cordelia momentarily dumps Xander because of her waning popularity, he wants to control her by blackmailing Amy into performing a love spell. He yearns to remove Cordelia’s free will and gain the power, and he’s rewarded for the action. Though Giles chastises him, Buffy praises him for being a gentleman when the spell goes wrong and she hits on him. Likewise, Cordelia is charmed by what Xander has done, and is willing to lose her friends and social standing to be with him.
Dating Cordelia, however, doesn’t stop Xander’s Angel hatred. Yes, Angel killed Ms. Calendar and Xander has a right to be mad. But while the rest of the team hope for the best outcome in “Becoming,” and are concerned for Buffy’s feelings, he just wants Angel dead and couldn’t care less about its effect on Buffy. “The way I see it, you want to forget all about Ms. Calendar’s murder so you can get your boyfriend back.” One might forgive his reductive anger in this particular situation, but it’s not a one-time event. Xander again refuses to acknowledge Buffy’s feelings, or provide comfort that could possibly make her job easier. Instead, he lies, giving her a false message from Willow to “kick his ass.”
Buffy kills a freshly re-souled Angel and runs away. When she returns, Xander quickly condemns her in “Dead Man’s Party” as “incredibly selfish and stupid.” As he sees it: “I’m sorry your honey was a demon, but most girls don’t hop a Greyhound over boy troubles.” Xander is so wrapped up in his own ego-driven world that Buffy’s wildly complicated and emotionally scarring situation is framed as “boy troubles.” Again, no one questions him for his actions. Zombies descend, fighting begins, and everyone forgives each other. Xander begins to be framed as the voice of reason who tells her how it is. 
Cordelia, meanwhile, is treated terribly. Xander, with his overt weakness for Slayers, openly gushes over a newly arrived Faith in “Faith, Hope, and Trick,” until Cordelia tersely asks him to “find a new theme.” He’s in love with Buffy, lusting for Faith, and dating Cordy. Two episodes later, he’s cheating on her with Willow, having become increasingly attracted to his rapidly maturing friend. And this fictional incarnation of Joss isn’t done. When Cordelia discovers the affair and nearly dies, Xander can only feel anger over his loss. He repeatedly gripes about his own unhappiness, blaming his actions on other people, and is desperate to make Cordelia feel even worse. He is completely unable to atone for his actions: “You want to do a guilt-a-palooza? Fine. But I’m done with that.” As Xander later states about his incessant, mean-spirited ranting: “I can’t help it; it’s my nature.”
Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Xander (Nicholas Brendon)

If the show ever decided to question Xander for his sexist, problematic nature, these moments would serve a purpose and help the character evolve into a more worthwhile person and true “heart” of the group. Instead, the Powers That Be continue to reward him for his bad behavior: he loses his virginity to Faith. She’s not Buffy, but she is a powerful Slayer.
When the girls head off to college and Xander becomes the townie, the series gets a break from the sexism. This does not mean Xander is silent; he’s just the marginalized menace. He continues to joke about his lust for Buffy; he never lets her forget that he wants her, marking her as his ideal prey. He might stubbornly accept that they won’t be together, but he lets it fuel his every action as a friend, and the show never questions it or lets him evolve beyond it. 
Meanwhile, Xander begins a rather combative relationship with Anya, chastising her every comment and story – whether they’re demon memories or normal interpersonal communications. When she tells him he isn’t showing an interest in her life in “Hush,” he retorts: “You really did turn into a real girl, didn’t ya?” No man comfortable with female equality equates real concern with nagging, though we can’t be surprised that Xander does – not only because of his many previous and problematic actions, but also because of his attitude towards Anya. He clearly believes he is the better person, the moral center who will teach Anya to be human. Luckily, as he grows into his relationship with Anya, he seems to mellow, becoming a regular Scooby member and friend until Buffy’s relationship implodes in “Into the Woods.” 
Riley and Buffy are a good-on-paper couple. He’s the strong and heroic human offering the security Angel never could. But he’s also a deeply flawed man who cannot stomach Buffy’s strength, especially when she’s in crisis. When Joyce becomes ill and Buffy refuses to fall apart and cry on his shoulder, Riley’s inferiority complex leads him into the arms of blood-hungry vampires he willingly feeds. When she discovers his infidelity, he issues an ultimatum: immediately give him a reason to stay, or he’s going to run off with the Army and leave her forever.
It’s a ridiculous, callous ultimatum, and Xander supports it. Once again, instead of comforting her, he ridicules her. He chastises her for wanting to hide, though she’s barely had a second to process what’s happened. (Riley, meanwhile, had tons of time to process the back story Xander told him about Angel and Buffy.) Xander castigates her for not seeing the problems earlier, though she’s been dealing with her mother’s very serious illness and the arrival of a sister-shaped key. Buffy asks: “What am I supposed to do? Beg him to stay?” Xander looks downright shocked at her hesitation and asks: “Why wouldn’t you?” He continues: “you’ve been treating Riley like the rebound guy, when he’s the one that comes around once in a lifetime. He’s never held back with you. He’s risked everything, and you’re about to let him fly because you don’t like ultimatums? … Think what you’re about to lose.” It’s not much of a jump to wonder if Xander is pro-Riley not because Finn is perfect for Buffy, but because he’s the safe, human choice – the almost-Xander. He continues to be the voice of faulty reason, setting the stage for his utter hypocrisy in season 6 and 7.
Xander is relatively normal for the next year, until his wedding to Anya. He disappears when he’s presented with an obviously fake ‘50s version of his so-called marital future; he flees just like Buffy did, but for much less. (And of course, Buffy and Willow don’t ever condemn him for fleeing, they only support him.) Xander leaves Anya at the altar, telling her “I don’t want to hurt you. Not that way. I’m so sorry.” He lets fear guide him to publically humiliate her and break her heart as if it’s some sort of moral, heroic choice. 
Astonishingly, he destroys her, yet still expects to be with her. Everything surrounding Xander’s cancelled wedding speaks to his egocentrism and hypocrisy. He’s so used to Anya being head over heels in love with him that he expects their relationship to go back to normal. And though he finds it simple to ignore Riley’s infidelity, he prepares to kill when he discovers that his ex is having sex with Spike. Xander questions Anya’s maturity and insults her: “I’m not joking now. You let that evil, soul-less thing touch you. You wanted me to feel something? Congratulations, it worked. I look at you, and I feel sick, cuz you had sex with that.” Though he left her at the altar, he still believes he is the moral center with a right to judge her choices.

Xander and Buffy
Yet it’s Buffy’s sex with Spike that really breaks him. Again, it’s up to Buffy to explain herself in “Seeing Red,” as if she needs to apologize for her own personal life. Ever the egomaniac, when Buffy says: “You don’t know how hard it’s been,” he thinks she’s talking about lying to him about Spike, not about struggling with her newly revived life. Xander even stretches to condemn her choice based on Spike’s previous violence: “I didn’t say I haven’t made mistakes, but last I checked, slaughtering half of Europe wasn’t one of them. He doesn’t have a soul, Buffy.” Though he’s never believed that having a soul makes a vampire an okay bedfellow, he uses that qualifier to denounce Buffy and absolve his own choice of Anya — who was was much more dangerous than Spike, and killed and tortured men for over a thousand years.
Anya rightly tries to temper Xander’s egocentrism in “Two to Go,” but it doesn’t work. She explains that sex with Spike “wasn’t vengeance. It was solace,” and she refuses to let him “play the martyr,” but Xander is still too wrapped up in his own ego. In the next episode he carelessly removes Buffy’s agency and tells Dawn about Spike’s attempted rape. Not only that, but he continually and persistently brings it up through the rest of the series. He takes that power and repeatedly uses it against her.
Xander’s hypocrisy is finally center-stage in “Selfless,” yet he still manages a hypocritical attack. Though he fiercely fought for Angel’s death, he now insists that “when our friends go all crazy and start killing people, we help them.” When his feelings aren’t enough to change Buffy’s mind, he chooses to once again attack her sexual choices: “You know, if there’s a mass-murdering demon that you’re oh, say boning, then it’s all grey area.” He refuses to acknowledge that Anya consciously chose to become a demon both times, and tries to frame Buffy’s responsibility as another example of her capriciousness: “You think we haven’t all seen this before? The part where you just cut us all out? Just step away from everything human and act like you’re the law?”
But it’s the next words that really sum up his complete and utter refusal to acknowledge or consider Buffy’s feelings and power: “If you knew what I felt,” Xander says. He can’t see the similarities between killing Anya and killing Angel, or notice what Buffy went through when she sent Angel to hell. This is our moment to finally call Xander out for his hypocrisy and chastise him for lying about Willow’s message those years ago, and his attitude since. Yet only one line is tossed in, and Willow’s reaction to the “kick his ass” quote is buried in the heated argument. As much as Xander’s hypocrisy is displayed for those eager to see it acknowledged, it’s all words of anger – Xander never learns a damn thing from the exchange; he never gets punished, or feels remorse for his actions. 
The series continually, passively, upholds Xander’s skewed viewpoint, never forcing him to repent and never allowing him to change. Instead, they give him the ultimate gift – Buffy’s strength. In the series’ penultimate episode “End of Days,” Buffy says: “You’re my strength, Xander. You’re the reason I made it this far.” By this point, the idea of the Slayer is already problematic – she’s the result of a vicious supernatural rape on the first Slayer, a lineage controlled by a white, patriarchal council. And now she attributes her strength and survival to the man who constantly sexualized her, belittled her, and condemned her. Not only that, but he’s given more power in the comics, having dominion over all the slayers as the “unofficial Watcher.” 
Upon reflection, it’s hard to link Buffy the Vampire Slayer to feminism because Xander, the self-proclaimed “perspective guy,” continually nullifies the agency of the women around him. His respect for powerful women is qualified. No woman enjoys her power without Xander trying to exert some form of control (judgment) over it. As one fan once described it, “he hurts people with an uncanny casualness of a true bully.” Through casual banter, his egocentric power struggle is framed as comedy. We’re supposed to laugh at this superficially witty and charismatic everyman, and ultimately listen to him as the group’s moral compass, which undermines the show’s push for female empowerment.
This isn’t mere oversight or writer missteps, these moments come again and again and they cannot be excused. The minute Joss and his team embraced the feminist label and strove to create a feminist heroine, they accepted the responsibility of upholding those ideals, or at the very least, not continually undermining them. Buffy cannot be a feminist heroine if her strength comes from a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do man, especially one happy to remove her agency and morally judge her.
Monika Bartyzel is a freelance writer and creator of Girls on Film, a weekly look at femme-centric film news and concerns, currently residing at Movies.com. Her work has appeared in the likes of The Atlantic, Moviefone, Collider, Splice Today, Hooded Utilitarian, Toronto Screenshots, and the now-defunct Cinematical, where she was a lead writer and assignment editor. You can follow Monika on Twitter at @mbartyzel.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Week: Are You Ready to Be Strong? Power and Sisterhood in ‘Buffy’

Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) in Buffy the Vampire Slayer
 
Guest post written by Amanda Rodriguez.

No one will argue that the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer isn’t populated with strong female characters. Buffy’s best friend, Willow, is a computer-hacking lesbian witch with the magical prowess to end the world. Her sister, Dawn, is a mythic Key who can open gateways between dimensions. Faith, Buffy’s sometime friend and ally, is a sexually and physically empowered slayer who revels in her body’s physical gifts. The female villains are also intensely powerful and iconic, ranging from ancient vampires, werewolves, and vengeance demons to genius scientists and even the ultimate foe, The First (though technically genderless, this force often takes the form of Buffy herself). Season 5’s villainess, Glory, is even a goddess whose power is only diminished when she is forced to inhabit the body of a human male, and if that ain’t feminist commentary, I don’t know what is.
Though the show suffers from no shortage of powerful women, the ways in which they relate to one another throughout the series is a constant struggle. This is because the dominant patriarchal paradigm within which the show is operating insists that one powerful woman is a delightful anomaly, but multiple powerful women are a threat to hegemony. By these standards, Buffy, by herself, is set up as a superior paragon of womanhood: strong, independent, sassy, beautiful, smart,courageous, and compassionate. If all women, however, were empowered like Buffy, or even a small group, it would be a subversive threat to male dominance,which is why Buffy and her power are exceptional and solitary. This, in effect,handicaps her, limiting her power.
“Into every generation, a slayer is born. One girl in all the world, a chosen one. She alone will wield the strength and skill to fight the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness.” | Image of Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar)
Within this context, each woman’s power in the Buffyverse sets her apart from others and often puts her at odds with other powerful women. Buffy laments the isolation that her power causes, feeling as if no one can relate to the magnitude of the unending burden that she must bear alone. On multiple occasions, her power also puts her into a position where she feels she must destroy other women who are abusing their power.
Though Buffy has no qualms destroying evildoing villainesses, her decision-making becomes more complicated when it is a female friend/loved one/ally using her power in ways that go against Buffy’s code. Inevitably in these instances, Buffy struggles with her duties as a slayer but always comes back around to what the dominant patriarchal paradigm expects of her. Buffy begrudgingly conforms to patriarchy’s prescribed dichotomy that polarizes powerful women, steeling herself to kill the love of Xander’s life, her sister-slayer, and even her own blood sister.
Anya, Xander’s ex-fiancee and Buffy’s friend, returns to her vengeance demon ways in Season 6 after Xander jilts her at the altar. In the Season 7 episode Selfless, Anya kills an entire fraternity as part of her vengeance demon work, punishing men who wrong women. Buffy says of her responsibility to kill the rampaging Anya, “It’s always complicated. And at some point, someone has to draw a line in the sand, and that is always going to be me…I am the law.” Here again the series insists that two mighty female forces cannot coexist. Their power will be constantly at odds, and a balance must be struck by either the neutralization or the destruction of one of the women’s powers. Though Buffy stabs Anya in the chest, Anya lives and chooses to “take back” her murder of the fraternity and relinquish her vengeance demon powers, becoming human again. There is a price, though, for this transformation, and another powerful woman pays it. In a cruel twist, Anya’s friend and fellow vengeance demon, Halfrek, is obliterated in order to restore balance. This implies that women are to be punished for their powers and nonconformist desires and, most importantly, that all powerful women are interchangeable.
“The proverbial scales must balance. In order to restore the lives of the victims, the fates require a sacrifice: the life and soul of a vengeance demon.” – D’Hoffryn | Image of Anya
The polarization of powerful women in the series is most exemplified by the relationship between Buffy and Faith. The nature of slayer power allows only one slayer at a time. She possesses all the power until death. Buffy is drowned and dies briefly in Season 1, disrupting the slayer line, causing another slayer to be “called.” The relationship between Buffy and Faith (commonly known as “the dark slayer”) is contentious from the beginning. There is resentment and jealousy between them. Faith is set up as the outsider little sister who has no friends, no home, no family, causing a deep resentment toward the stability of Buffy’s life. This reveals the unspoken power of Buffy’s privilege, calling attention to the economic and educational disparities between the two slayers. On the other hand, Buffy is simultaneously judgmental toward (in a classic big sister way) and intoxicated by Faith’s free sexuality and her love of slaying (fans and academics alike have cited the two as metaphors for each other).
In Season 3, Faith betrays her sacred duty as a slayer, killing humans and aligning herself with the evil Mayor. Buffy decides to kill Faith, but because the two women share the same abilities, this task is easier said than done. The two go round and round before Buffy finally stabs Faith in the stomach with her own knife, putting her in a coma. In Season 4, Faith wakes up, and after more discord, Faith leaves town and turns herself in, choosing prison as a method of atonement. Faith’s threatening power is effectively neutralized behind bars.
 “There’s only supposed to be one. Maybe that’s why you and I can never get along. We’re not supposed to exist together.”- Faith | Image of Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Faith (Eliza Dushku)
The only time Buffy refuses to do her duty and kill someone she loves is in Season 5 when her sister, Dawn (the mystical Key), must be killed to stop her from unwillingly opening a gateway to a demon dimension that will send the world into chaos. Throughout the season, the sisters often have an uneasy relationship due to typical sibling rivalry and the fact that Dawn isn’t truly Buffy’s sister. Monks harness the awesome power of the Key and shape it into human form, using Buffy’s blood and altering her memories so that she will be compelled to protect it. In spite of all this, when Dawn must die to save the world, Buffy chooses to sacrifice herself and dies instead. This is meant to be a beautiful,selfless act of love, and, though it is, Buffy’s death simply reinforces the idea that only so much female power can safely exist in the world.
“This is the work that I have to do.” – Buffy | Illustration by boo21190 via deviantart.com
All these “sister” relationships are deeply dysfunctional and problematic from a feminist perspective. The show itself sits uneasily within the patriarchal paradigm that it is constantly reinforcing. Though the series complies in a circuitous way by systematically disempowering powerful women by divesting them of their abilities (in the case of Anya) or forcing them to reign in their strengths (in the case of Willow), the show refuses throughout to actually kill these women(permanently anyway). To stop another apocalyptic menace in the final season, Buffy,Anya, Faith, and Dawn all work together alongside a host of “potential slayers.”The “potentials” are women who are not actually powerful but could become powerful should a slayer die, further underscoring the notion that female power must be balanced and finite.
This is when it gets really good. The ending of this series gives me goosebumps every time I watch it. It’s a feminist dream come true. They are facing The First, a truly invincible foe who is only able to rear its ugly head when the cosmic balance is upset because of Buffy’s mystical resurrection, allowing two slayers to exist in the worlds simultaneously. One could even posit that The First is symbolic of patriarchal and misogynistic oppression of women, especially since Its right-hand man is a woman-hating religious fanatic. Not only that, but The First appears often as Buffy, herself, implying, perhaps, that female complicity or conformity to an oppressive standard is a major obstacle to equality. That’s a whole other paper, though.
To muster enough force to beat back The First, Buffy creates a new paradigm. She enlists the help of another powerful woman (Willow) to subvert the paradigm that requires only one woman/one slayer to exist at any given time. In a speech that moves me almost to tears every time I watch it, Buffy explains that Willow will use an ancient slayer artifact to release its power to all potential slayers around the world.
“So here’s the part where you make a choice. What if you could have that power, now? In every generation, one slayer is born, because a bunch of men who died thousands of years ago made up that rule. They were powerful men. This woman is more powerful than all of them combined. So I say we change the rule. I say my power, should be our power. Tomorrow, Willow will use the essence of this scythe to change our destiny. From now on, every girl in the world who might be a slayer, will be a slayer. Every girl who could have the power, will have the power. Can stand up, will stand up. Slayers, every one of us. Make your choice. Are you ready to be strong?” — Buffy

The series finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer tells us that women must band together to defeat patriarchal oppression. Here Buffy chooses to share her power with other women,creating a community of slayers. Buffy has evolved into a powerful woman who refuses to see other women as a threat. She is now a strong woman embracing and empowering other strong women. Together they create a unified force that changes the world forever.
Amanda Rodriguez is an environmental activist living in Asheville, North Carolina. She holds a BA from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio and an MFA in fiction writing from Queens University in Charlotte, NC. She writes about food and drinking games on her blog Booze and Baking. Fun fact: while living in Kyoto, Japan, her house was attacked by monkeys. 

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Week: Buffy Kicks Ass

Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) in Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Guest post written by Erin K. O’Neill originally published at FemThreads. Cross-posted with permission.
“We saved the world, I say we party. I mean, I got all pretty.” ~ Buffy Summers

“Yes, date. And shop and hang out and go to school and save the world from unspeakable demons. You know, I wanna do girlie stuff.” ~ Buffy Summers

Let us now discuss the epic feminist awesomeness that is Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is exactly what it sounds like: A girl, named Buffy Summers, slays vampires and demons and wages war against evil supernatural forces. The major complicating factor? She’s a blonde, fashion-and-boy-obsessed California high school student who becomes a social outcast because of her secret identity and nighttime activities.

But first, a short personal history lesson:

One fall night in sixth grade, my B.F.F. Marcella came over after swim practice. She made a big stink about watching Buffy that night, since it was the second season premiere. I was reluctant to watch, as up to that point fantasy/horror hybrids were really not my thing (I was still in a lengthy L.M. Montgomery phase). However, Marcella sat my ass down and made me watch it. It was love at first (I’m so sorry) … bite.

In middle school Marcella and I used Buffy to cement our friendship. It held through attending separate high schools and my yearlong absence while I was an exchange student in Australia. We religiously analyzed last night’s Buffy episode every Wednesday at lunch. I had a buff-colored kitten named Buffy, and Marcella had a black kitten named Angel (after Buffy’s vampire-with-a-soul boyfriend). Marcella got all the DVDs as soon as they came out, and we would often soothe our teenage angst (break-ups, placing badly in the state water polo tournament, rejection by our first-choice colleges, etc.) with mochas and Buffy marathons. It became a common language of cultural and fashion references that were always fodder for conversation (and often girlish shrieking). When our other commonalities fell away as we grew up and away from each other,
Buffy kept us together.

But I digress.

Buffy created by Joss Whedon

The coolest thing about Buffy is that creator Joss Whedon conceptualized the show as a deliberate inversion of horror movie clichés. In traditional horror, when the girl wanders into a dark ally the audience expects her to meet a horrible fate. On Buffy, the girl hunts the monster in that ally, and then fights and defeats it. Whedon purposely created the show as a way to subvert and redefine the audience’s expectations about women.

The show layered this feminist perspective upon a strong tradition of high school and coming-of-age-stories in American pop culture. “In Buffy‘s world, by contrast, the problems teenagers face become literal monsters,” Rhonda Wilcox wrote in an essay in the Journal of Popular Film and Television. “Internet  predators are demons; drink-doctoring frat boys have sold their souls for success in the business world; a girl who has sex with even the nicest-seeming male discovers that he afterwards becomes a monster.”

There is a lot of scholarly research and criticism of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There’s a Wikipedia page dedicated to “Buffy Studies.” There’s even an academic journal called Slayage: The Journal of the Whedon Studies Association. No, I’m not kidding. The show has become a bit of a zeitgeist for feminist criticism, in particular for scholars interested in Third Wave Feminism.

And then, of course, Buffy kicked a lot of ass. A very serious amount of ass. Over the course of the show’s seven television seasons, she averted multiple apocalypses. She punned and killed all very large monsters and vampires that she came across. She added clever insult to injury. She never apologized for not being a dumb, weak girl. And it was very physical — in the canon of the show, a Slayer is given extra-human powers of strength, speed and agility. She was a fashionable girl’s girl, and she slayed creatures that go bump in the night. It was Girl Power at its late-1990s peak and taken to an excellent extreme.

Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar)

Buffy deals with homework, dating and a single mother who’s just a bit clueless. Despite being labeled a loser, she navigates the social hierarchy of high school with her friends who assist in her fight against the undead. She goes through the many painful stages of sexual initiation and maturity. She fights the good fight of college admission, and later the decision to drop out of school when her mother dies and she must take care of a younger sister. She makes mistakes, and fails sometimes. While Buffy’s circumstances were different, they embodied situations and emotions I often felt as an adolescent trying to make my own way.

Buffy was not just a warrior, but a leader. Less than half way through the series, she quit taking orders from the Watcher’s Council, an ancient group of British people who identify and train the Slayer, and decides to go it alone with her friends. While Buffy defers research to her Watcher (who was fired from the Council) and friends Willow and Xander, she is the member of the darkness-battling team that makes, coordinates and executes the final plan. She essentially becomes the general of a guerrilla army, which becomes a more and more literal role as the series progresses.

Buffy is a hero. She has a destiny. She fought and died (twice). She saved the world a lot. And yet, the show wasn’t really about Buffy’s sacred duty to fight things that go bump in the night. It was, at it’s core, about how to deal with and survive the pressures of being a young woman in American society.

Buffy

And, hot damn, the girl looked good doing it. In the tradition of WB teen show characters dressing like they had unlimited budgets and stylists, Buffy had the BEST clothes. Well, for 1997-1999, she had the BEST clothes. If there was ever a fashion icon Marcella and I strove to emulate, it was Buffy. Her very short skirts, leather pants, spaghetti strap tank tops and platform boots were the holy grail of sartorial achievement in middle school (mostly because we had to fight our mothers to be allowed to leave the house dressed in them). Buffy rocked super-feminine styles tempered by leather, denim and practical pieces. While most of her wardrobe is horrifying in retrospect, there are still a few items I’d wear and rock the shit out of today.

In the first season finale, Buffy accessorizes a white satin and chiffon prom dress with a black leather jacket and a crossbow. Fashion doesn’t get more bad-ass than that.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a concept that could and did go terribly wrong. Its first incarnation, a 1992 movie of the same name, is awful. Yet the film showed signs of brilliance nonetheless. The TV show rectified all the problems of the movie, by making the fictional universe and characters deeper, wider, darker and much more interesting. The show wouldn’t have been such a phenomenon if it were crap. It really is excellent television on all levels. The writing was clever and intelligent without being preachy, the characters were real, and the action was fantastic. It is really fun to watch. Joss Whedon is a singular talent—he really can do no wrong. He loves super-powered women, and that shows in all aspects of his storytelling.

Looking back, I honestly believe that Buffy had a profound effect on my own development as a feminist thinker. At the time, I was just watching a cool show with fun dialogue, tragic romance and drool-worthy shoes. But I internalized a lot of the subtext and it helped shaped how I view modern womanhood: A girl can kick ass, and look pretty doing it.

Erin K. O’Neill is an award-winning writer, photographer, visual editor, and digital marketing professional currently located in her hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan. A devotee of literature, photography, existentialism, and all things Australian, Erin also watches too much television on DVD and Netflix. Follow her on Twitter, @ekoneill.