I agree about the huge double standard when it comes to Anya's past, I think that it's partly about her gender, but also partly about the writers always portraying her as a comedic character which encouraged them to never take her seriously. Faith for example was a female character who certainly didn't have her crimes brushed off (other than perhaps the attempted rape of Xander), and the scoobies always acted wary of her in a way that they didn't with Anya. Anya's primary purpose always seemed to be as the clueless human who was humorously confused by modern life, and so I suppose that it just didn't occur to the writers to build up her crimes and give her a redemption arc in the same way. Plus her stories were always more of the "back in the day" jokes, she was never seen as an active threat as a human. I think that does make a difference if you compare it to how Spike was introduced as being on a mission to kill Buffy, whereas none of the characters remember the events of The Wish, and even in Doopelgangland they were more rolling her eyes at her desperate attempts to talk about how you will all tremble before me when I get my powers back. They (and we the audience) were always conditioned to treat her as a joke because she was so impotent as a human, and it felt like the writers assumed that her past crimes could immediately be written off simply because she was human now
It was disturbing though how even the show seemed to find humour in her tales of her past ~glory days~ and never seemed interested in exploring the moral implications of what she had done, I agree that it definitely wouldn't have been seen as a joke if it was male character punishing unfaithful women. It's why I always blink a bit at how self-righteous Xander gets about Buffy's choice of partners and how they've slaughtered half of Europe, even though it's never once brought up as reflecting badly on Xander when Anya is proudly reminiscing on how much pain and death she once brought to unfaithful men
And I agree on the gender double standards being overblown when it comes to Buffy and Spike, honestly it always felt to me like fans were seizing on the Gone blowjob and making a bigger deal of it because they wanted to make the Seeing Red incident more equal somehow in their minds, even though as you say there was never the same focus given to similar moments of dubious consent towards Buffy in Wrecked or Dead Things. But Gone became something convienient to point to in the argument that Buffy and Spike were mutually abusive, and Spike had no choice but to misunderstand the boundries that Buffy had failed to set
And yet when Angel hit Darla through glass doors in Reprise while initiating sex with her, I don't remember hearing a peep
From what I remember the writers said that the network had some concerns with a moment where Angel slaps Darla, they insisted that that be cut out because for fears that it made the scene look sexually dubious, and the writers were marvelling at the fact that the network had no issue with Darla being thrown through a glass door though and were completely fine with the scene after the slap was cut out. And I don't remember that particular scene being discussed or debated much by fandom either, it seemed like more of an issue with the writers room worrying about the implications of it and being surprised that the glass door part wasn't a bigger deal to anyone else. Maybe that was partly a case of the network being concerned because of the real world implications of a man slapping a woman, whereas the rest of that scene was more acceptable because it could be viewed through a strictly fantasy lens when it came to two vampires capable of throwing one another around? (Just as Seeing Red caused such a reaction in fandom partly because of the way that the director chose to film it as equivalent to an attempted rape between two humans in the real world, and so it hit much closer to home)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2016-03-08 02:26 pm (UTC)It was disturbing though how even the show seemed to find humour in her tales of her past ~glory days~ and never seemed interested in exploring the moral implications of what she had done, I agree that it definitely wouldn't have been seen as a joke if it was male character punishing unfaithful women. It's why I always blink a bit at how self-righteous Xander gets about Buffy's choice of partners and how they've slaughtered half of Europe, even though it's never once brought up as reflecting badly on Xander when Anya is proudly reminiscing on how much pain and death she once brought to unfaithful men
And I agree on the gender double standards being overblown when it comes to Buffy and Spike, honestly it always felt to me like fans were seizing on the Gone blowjob and making a bigger deal of it because they wanted to make the Seeing Red incident more equal somehow in their minds, even though as you say there was never the same focus given to similar moments of dubious consent towards Buffy in Wrecked or Dead Things. But Gone became something convienient to point to in the argument that Buffy and Spike were mutually abusive, and Spike had no choice but to misunderstand the boundries that Buffy had failed to set
And yet when Angel hit Darla through glass doors in Reprise while initiating sex with her, I don't remember hearing a peep
From what I remember the writers said that the network had some concerns with a moment where Angel slaps Darla, they insisted that that be cut out because for fears that it made the scene look sexually dubious, and the writers were marvelling at the fact that the network had no issue with Darla being thrown through a glass door though and were completely fine with the scene after the slap was cut out. And I don't remember that particular scene being discussed or debated much by fandom either, it seemed like more of an issue with the writers room worrying about the implications of it and being surprised that the glass door part wasn't a bigger deal to anyone else. Maybe that was partly a case of the network being concerned because of the real world implications of a man slapping a woman, whereas the rest of that scene was more acceptable because it could be viewed through a strictly fantasy lens when it came to two vampires capable of throwing one another around? (Just as Seeing Red caused such a reaction in fandom partly because of the way that the director chose to film it as equivalent to an attempted rape between two humans in the real world, and so it hit much closer to home)