Buffy The Vampire Slayer was on our television screens from 1997 to 2003. If you’ve never watched it, you are missing out on a show that combined supernatural creatures, with a good sense of humour, heavy doses of irony and clever lines. Most importantly, it had Buffy Summers, the heroine of the show. It’s been 10 years without her, and a decade after she left us, there have been very few Buffys out there. The line: “To each generation a Slayer is born, one girl in all the world, a Chosen One” leaves me asking, where is she now?
I switch on the television and it’s either female characters going through an “emotional breakdown”, or being portrayed like “superbitches” fighting against other women in some sort of man-run popularity competition, equalling the idea of being powerful with wearing impossible high heels and sexy clothing.
Buffy killed the baddies, repeatedly saved the world from its doom, and even better, she had her own flaws. This meant she struggled with her responsibilities as a slayer, got her heart broken more than twice, had no money and ended up working in a fast-food joint, lost loved ones, she died, came back and fought on. Joss Whedon, the show’s creator, chose to portray a woman that relied on her inner strength and the power of her mind to battle with everything life threw at her. She didn’t care about being covered in blood, mud or having to rip a tight pencil skirt to be able to kick ass.
Joss Whedon is always asked about why his female characters are strong, powerful beings. He responded to this best when he said: “Because you’re still asking me that question”.
It’s no surprise I loved Buffy so much. It’s no coincidence most of the women you ask about the show will tell you they adored almost every episode. Joss Whedon created a character that inspired a generation. And he did it in the realm of adventure fiction, characterised for its deep masculinity and heavy dosages of sexism.
The issue is that no one else seems to want to do like Whedon.
Last year we had the people behind the Tomb Raider franchise, explaining how Lara Croft seemed to have suffered sexual abuse of some kind. It was all pretty simple for them: men can be born powerful and strong. A woman needs to be broken dow and abused, to be a survivor, to be able to fight.
Female characters in comics are portrayed with huge breasts and unnatural Barbie proportions. The toy-models that are highly sought after and sold amongst collectors, are dressed in clothing so tight you see their nipples, with, you guessed it, breasts bigger than their heads.
In the latest Star Trek movie, a female character had to strip to her underwear and we are still wondering what the point of that scene was and how it affected the narrative.
In the realm of music, teenagers had best-selling pop artist Rihanna premiering her Pour It Up video (for a taste, see video below). It was not shocking, it was not even mildly amusing. It was sad. I’m not going to bore you with the whole Cyrus/Thicke twerking extravaganza.
Oh for Fuck’s sake. via @upperdog: Vogue UK’s idea of women in tech: pic.twitter.com/R1RDivQpQH
— Dara Ó Briain (@daraobriain) December 6, 2013
The thing is, Buffy never left us. There are real women behaving like that every day. Malala Yousafzai, Hilary Clinton, Caroline Criado-Perez, Nigella Lawson, that girl that gets wolf-whistled every time she passes the building site, the female MP David Cameron told to “calm down”, the former prime minister in Australia, the lady that was told to stop being emotional, Caitlin Moran, the pop star someone convinced to strip to give her new video some “edge”. Women are powerful, women are strong, naturally.
Buffy is not a fantasy, nor an idealisation of women done by a brilliant mind. She is out there. But we need to celebrate her more, make more movies about her, write about her, without excuses, without reducing her to a male-centered, narrow-minded view. Half of the world still seems to think women are highly emotional, fragile beings that need to be protected. I know this by experience, members of my own family have told me how they don’t worry about me, because I have a male partner that can take care of me.
Truth is… no one takes care of me better than myself. A man doesn’t make me feel whole, it doesn’t give me security. I don’t have breasts the size of pugs and wearing miniskirts or a tight lycra bodice is not what I aspire to when I wake up every day. I’m not sometimes hysterical, I don’t even know what that means.
Women deserve to be represented differently. We don’t need journalists asking Joss Whedon why he creates strong female characters, we need to ask movie directors why they continue to insert a “sexy female interest” in every action film that is made. We need to educate our children to realise that a mutilated female torso covered in blood in a video game is NOT acceptable. We need to teach younger generations that being sexy is nothing compared to the amazing achievements girls the age of Malala can aspire to.
We need to bring Buffy back.
Picture: 20th Century Fox Television. All rights reserved
fashionlimbo 