Entertainment
Why Attempts To Tear Down Buffy The Vampire Slayer As Problematic Are Wrong
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an insanely popular television show for many reasons, including its stellar writing and top-notch performances from some of Hollywood’s best actors. Beyond all this, though, the show is celebrated for being a feminist masterpiece that centers on a powerful young woman fighting against powerful men who try to keep her down. In this way, Buffy succeeds as both an entertaining urban fantasy series and a provocative exploration of sex, power, and gender roles in modern society.
However, many modern critics and fans have been re-evaluating Buffy and have come to a wild conclusion: that this girl-power cornerstone may actually be a shockingly bad portrayal of women. These arguments typically claim that the show is secretly misogynistic despite its surface-level message about fighting the patriarchy. While this has changed how some fans view their favorite show, defenders of Buffy maintain that the more problematic plotlines and portrayals in the series are just a side effect of having flawed and complex characters.
The Fall Of A Feminist Icon
It’s almost impossible to discuss a critical reframing of Buffy the Vampire Slayer without discussing franchise creator Joss Whedon; after this show’s success, he became a major comic book movie director, helming two Avengers movies as well as the lackluster Justice League film. However, his career came to a screeching halt after his ex-wife Kai Cole published a letter alleging that he had cheated on her numerous times, including with unnamed actresses on Buffy. In her brutal missive, she also called Whedon out for the “hypocrisy” of his “preaching feminist ideals” while allegedly lying to his wife for a decade and a half.
Towards the end of that letter, she said that she wants “the people who worship [Whedon] to know he is human, and the organizations giving him awards for his feminist work, to think twice in the future about honoring a man who does not practice what he preaches.” Obviously, Buffy the Vampire Slayer remains Whedon’s greatest work, a work designed to be the greatest feminist show ever made. Now that its creator has seemingly been revealed as a hypocrite (one who also faced allegations of abuse on the set of Justice League), many have been re-evaluating Buffy and how its characters and plotlines may be surprisingly harmful to women.
Critics Claim Buffy Secretly Reinforces A Status Quo
On paper, a big part of Buffy’s charm is that the titular character is a rebel: she is constantly defying Giles, her stodgy watcher, with the same sass that she tosses at various evil demons. Buffy is a troublemaker who clashes with corrupt cops and an evil mayor, and she never really respects authority. This is especially true when she puts the Council of Watchers (basically, her boss’s boss) in their place, reminding them that without the Slayer, their job literally has no meaning.
However, some critics believe that Buffy actually exemplifies a status quo established largely by and for men. After all, as a sexy, thin, heterosexual blonde, the Slayer is an exemplar of what most men consider conventionally attractive. To impressionable young girls watching the show in the ‘90s, Buffy the Vampire Slayer ironically reinforced some of the lopsided beauty standards expected of women, arguably continuing a very problematic tradition perpetuated by the patriarchy this show was designed to skewer.
Does This Show Secretly Hate Powerful Women?
Additionally, beyond her surface-level rebellion, Buffy’s character is presented as the safe and palatable alternative to other women who are presented as dangerously transgressive. For example, Faith is a fellow Slayer who loves sex and partying, and the show inevitably transforms her into a murderous enemy. Willow comes out as both gay and a witch, and when she really delves into her powers, she suddenly becomes a skin-flying Big Bad that can only be talked down from mass murder by a fairly useless man (sorry, Xander fans, you know it to be true).
What these other cases have in common is simple: women begin by embracing a hidden power that men disapprove of. They then act in selfish ways before they are vilified and then humbled: Faith serves prison time and then comes back to follow Buffy’s orders, whereas Willow rejects dark magic and becomes a loyal little Scoobie again. Each of these women is deliberately contrasted with Buffy, who constantly puts her own needs to the side for the sake of others.
Fans typically view this as a noble attribute, the same one that causes the X-Men to fight for a world that hates and fears them. But Buffy arguably spends most of the TV show named after her as a doormat for the Watchers, a group of men who essentially force her to do what they want until she finally stands up to them. In this sense, the majority of the show presents Buffy as a feminine ideal for being subservient to men and preserving their preferred status quo; Faith and Willow must eventually be fought by Buffy, someone whose line of work conveniently has her keep other women from ever getting too powerful.
Long story short? The claim is that Buffy is a show where rebellious women are tamed: Buffy by the Council, Faith by prison, and Willow by Xander. Heck, even vengeance demon Anya is tamed by her obsession with a man, ultimately trading all of her considerable mystical abilities for a life of domestic submission.
The Argument Against Buffy’s Men
One of the things Buffy the Vampire Slayer is very good at is creating villains that fans love to hate. These foes were almost always men, which helps reinforce the feminist theme of the show: the fellows would mouth off and insult the female protagonist before she killed them. This is all part of why the show feels so empowering: what woman watching wouldn’t enjoy having the power to fight off the toxic men who are always making her uncomfortable?
The essential problem with Buffy as a character, though, is that she keeps falling in love with the most messed-up men of all. The vampiric Angel is already a redeemed mass murderer when Buffy begins dating him, and she takes him back even after he temporarily loses his soul and tries to destroy the entire world. The same goes for Spike, a notorious serial killer whom she begins secretly shagging; he goes to get his own soul back after intimately assaulting Buffy, and she proceeds to welcome him back just as she did with Angel.
There’s a rather ugly subtext here that Buffy is uncontrollably attracted to notorious murderers just because they are hot, and she takes them back after these characters commit the worst atrocities against her and her friends. Rather than painting our titular protagonist as a hero, Buffy is presented as a doormat who doesn’t hesitate to take her abusers back. This arguably sends the worst possible message to abused women who are watching the show, hoping to gain the strength to escape the people who are hurting them.
Why They’re All Wrong: It’s Complicated
Those are just a few of the reasons why many modern critics are reevaluating Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Heck, we barely touched on Xander, the problematic proto-incel that Joss Whedon wrote to be his class clown self-insert character. However, there is one ironclad defense of the show and its characters that fans continue to embrace: namely, that Buffy is stronger for having flawed and complex characters.
Most of the complex aspects of Buffy herself are arguably part of the character’s evolution. Sure, she falls in love with a couple of hot murderers, but she eventually breaks up with both of them. The Slayer works for a patriarchal group of old farts, but after a few years, she makes it clear that they now have to work for her. Heck, she even bounces back from the worst self-destructive streak in human history to save the entire world from the first evil it had ever known.
If Buffy didn’t start out as such a flawed character, such evolution would have been impossible; plus, it’s worth noting that we shouldn’t hold the Slayer to higher standards than we do popular male characters. Does anyone think Walter White or Don Draper are bad characters because they are selfish and self-destructive? No, we understand that these flaws simply make them human, and that humanity makes the characters all the more compelling.
In this sense, Buffy’s flaws make her show that much more relevant: Buffy the Vampire Slayer may be a silly comedy show from the ‘90s, but it has the epic stakes and realistically damaged characters of modern prestige TV. It’s a wild combo that has helped the Slayer’s show remain a fan-favorite for decades. Now that a Buffy revival is around the corner, we can only hope the new show retains the complex characters and murky morality that made the original series such a groundbreaking pop culture phenomenon.