Some Thoughts on Gender Double Standards and Violence (BtVS)

[itsnotmymind]

I've seen many Spike fans argue over the years that there are gender double standards in how Buffy treats Spike in S6.

For example, that the writers and fans would have handled it differently if a male character shoved a female character into a wall and started having sex with her, or if a male character beat his lover as badly as Buffy beat Spike in Dead Things.

I agree with some of these arguments, and not with others. Here are my current thoughts about gender double standards and violence on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A lot of this is about Buffy/Spike, but also some other characters and situations. Sometimes Spike fan criticisms are on the nose. But sometimes, as I'll show you below, the gender double standard actually seems to be the opposite of the one that the Spike fan is arguing. And even when they are accurate, when there is an undeniable gender double standard where female violence against men is more acceptable, I can't help but notice that these criticisms seem to only come up when the victim is Spike. When a less sympathetic character is the victim of gender double standards about violence, you can dance in the silence.

My first exposure to fannish criticism of gender double standards about violence in Buffy was before I saw a single episode of the show. A feminist comic blogger I used to read argued that Mutant Enemy had double standards because Buffy giving Spike a blow job over his objections was treated humorously, while his attempt to rape her in Seeing Red was portrayed as horrible. Having not seen the show, I had no opinion at the time.

However, I somehow managed to stumble upon some Spike fans who had linked to the post and were engaging in the nastiest commentary on Buffy, bile to such a level that I decided that even if Buffy were the most horrible person on earth, she couldn't possibly deserve that. It didn't help that it was coupled with comments praising Spike and his virtues to the sky. After all, the blog post I had just read told me he was also an attempted rapist.

Having watched Buffy season 6, I strongly disagree with the idea that the blow job in Gone was a sign of gender double-standards. Yes, Buffy jumps on Spike mid-fight in Smashed and initiates sex with him. Yes, Buffy takes him unawares while invisible in Gone and initiates sex with him. Yes Buffy starts a blow job later the same episode in hopes of appeasing Spike into not kicking out, after he has told her to leave. But from the other side, Spike pulls Buffy into his lap and fondles her in Wrecked, even though she initially verbally and physically resists. Spike initiates sex with Buffy in Dead Things against her objections, and despite her obvious unhappiness and discomfort.

None of these examples are exactly the same as the others. You could compare and argue for months, and maybe reach the ultimate conclusion that Buffy is worse than Spike, or Spike is worse Buffy. But it's hard for me to look at the relationship over all and think that the way sexual consent is handled in Buffy and Spike's relationship demonstrates gender double standards on ME's part.

(If you care, this post about consent in S6 Buffy/Spike has been very influential to my thoughts on that matter.)

When it comes to fandom's reaction to these sort of scenes, the gender double standard seems to be the reverse of what these Spike fans argue. As I said, I saw complaints about Buffy's behavior in Gone being raped before I saw a single episode of the show. Since watching the show and delving into the fandom, I have seen the balcony scene in Dead Things characterized as rape on one or two occasions. But in addition to the many complaints about Gone, I've heard many complaints about how the fannish reaction to Buffy violently initiating sex with Spike in Smashed would be viewed very differently if the genders were reversed.

And yet when Angel hit Darla through glass doors in Reprise while initiating sex with her, I don't remember hearing a peep. Admittedly, I never delved as deeply into AtS fandom as BtVS fandom, but I've still had many encounters with it. I heard many peeps about Gone when I wasn't following Buffyverse fandom, or any other Whedon show fandom for that matter. Yet nothing about Angel/Darla?

I was actually a bit bothered about consent issues myself while first watching the Angel/Darla sex scene in Reprise. However, I concluded from Darla's eventual reaction that it was fine. Yet it seems that the overall fannish reaction signifies a double standard on the part of fandom--a double standard that favors sexually aggressive men, while a sexually aggressive woman in a similar situation is violating her partner's consent.

There is another major criticism about Buffy/Spike and violence against men being treated less seriously than violence against women, and this is a criticism I have to agree with. Specifically, the alley beating scene in Dead Things that leaves Spike with bruises the next episode. On his commentary for Smashed, during the scene where Buffy and Spike were hitting each other, Drew Greenberg comments that it's okay to hit Buffy because she's not like other girls. As far as I can tell, the folks at ME did not seriously ask themselves whether it was okay for Buffy to hit Spike. I cannot imagine they would have written a male protagonist beating his female lover that badly, much less never mention the incident again. And while many fans were completely pissed off about the lack of follow-up to the alley beating scene, I imagine if a male protagonist had done that to a female character, the fall-out among fans would have been even more intense.

That said, it's pretty telling how some examples of gender double standards about violence get outrage, while others are ignored. The first time I watched Beer Bad, I thought the scene where cave Buffy knocks Parker unconscious to be highly unfunny. I had no idea then how fandom had reacted, because I wasn't doing much exploring in Buffy fandom at that time. All I knew is that if a male super-powered character had knocked out a female civilian, it would never have been played for laughs.

Now that I am more familiar with BtVS fandom, I have heard no peeps. None. Zero. Parker's an asshole, I guess, and Buffy wasn't fully herself, so since it's not relevant to any argument over the morality of our favorite characters, we can move on.

Faith and Xander is something that does get talked about. Faith tried to rape Xander. It's never mentioned again. When Spike, a male character, tries to rape Buffy, he has to go on a quest to fundamentally change himself in a way no real person can. Only then does he get his redemption. And even then, the would-be rape remains a huge issue. Faith gets to have a redemption arc and crack jokes about having had sex with Xander before Anya did and the attempted rape is never addressed.

My last example of gender double standards and violence is Anya. Anya is a very gendered character. She grants the--usually vengeful--wishes of scorned women (a pretty gendered descriptor). The men she goes after can be anything from teenage boys who are too immature to be monogamous to abusive adult men. The metaphorical nature of the show makes her power, granting wishes, seem less harmful than that of a vampire who kills people directly. Even still, I have a hard time ignoring the strong contrast between her and Spike. From S4-S6, they are both mostly unrepentant murderers restrained by some force that renders them powerless. Spike tries to rape Buffy after they break up--but an episode earlier, Anya tried to trick Xander's friends, one of whom is underage, into helping her torture Xander to death. One of these crimes is treated much more seriously than the other, and of course it is Spike's. In Never Leave Me, Spike and Buffy are in the basement talking seriously about the horrible things he's done to teenage girls. Xander and Andrew are upstairs discussing Anya's past. Despite the references to torture and death, the tone is light and humorous. Xander's example of Anya's bad deeds is to describe the way she broke his heart.

The Scoobies have a very different attitude towards Anya than towards Spike. During the period when Anya is dating Xander, they don't seem to be particularly concerned about her past and whether she's trustworthy. Her death count is treated as a joke. Even in episodes like Triangle, where Willow does express concerns, it's not treated with the seriousness you would expect. Compare that to their attitude towards Spike.

It's part of why I've always had a hard time liking Anya--she's funny, sure, but I have trouble taking her seriously as a character when the show itself doesn't seem to take her seriously.

In terms of how fandom views her: Well, is there a way to measure how much louder and more intense the reaction I've seen to Xander's verbal abuse of Anya in Entropy is than the reaction I've seen to Anya's attempt to torture Xander to death that very same episode? It's not pretty, that much I can say.

Here's a thought game: What would Anya be like gender swapped? A male demon who grants vengeance for men scorned by women? What would be the implications of that? How would male Anya be different?

Comments

[local-max.livejournal.com]

These are generally pretty frustrating in different ways. I don't actually have trouble liking Anya, for a few reasons, the biggest one being...she's not the main character, which is a weird thing to say, but I think that her story makes sense in the context of Xander's; Xander fears that he (and perhaps all men) is horrible (like his father) and thus perhaps deserves the worst. This is especially true by the time Anya comes into the show. People don't take Xander's self-hatred seriously or his need to be loved seriously, so the neediness, intense love, moral confusion and outright murderous misandry of the person who comes into Xander's life remain mostly not taken seriously, including by Xander, until it's (nearly) too late. I do think there is something good-hearted about the way Xander comes to take Anya's love for him seriously before he takes her *hate* (for all men, eventually for him) seriously, and also something sad and of the victim mentality that Xander doesn't spend a lot of time seriously thinking about how he *or anyone remotely like him* (flawed men) particularly deserves not to be murdered.

[lusciousxander.livejournal.com]

Interesting thoughts. I have to rush off to work, but I'll have more to say when I get back. :)

[rebcake.livejournal.com]

I think that you are giving equal weight to intention and action in the Anya vs. Xander in "Entropy" argument. It is absolutely true that Anya's intentions were malevolent in the extreme, but nothing came of her machinations, so it is easily shrugged off. Xander attempted to murder a guy for sleeping with his ex — and verbally attacked her — which isn't so easy to dismiss.

Whether intention weighs more or less heavily than action is often at the heart of these kinds of discussions. The attempted rape in "Seeing Red", for instance, was probably not intended as an attack, but that's what it was in the end. Does the intention mitigate the action? Not for many (most?) people, but perhaps for some. Faith clearly intended to rape Xander — and kill him, let's not forget — so I can never figure out how it's dismissed, except for gender reasons. (There's a fic over at EF, Thursday's Child, that examines Xander reaction to this incident a couple of years later, FYI. Yay, fic!)

[frelling-tralk.livejournal.com]

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)