labellementeuse | (no subject)

So, someone just posted the usual rant about how SPN isn't sexist, even if it is it's just a tee vee show, it's a show about BROTHERS not about WOMEN, what does it matter if Dean is disrespectful to women, it's totally in character, blah blah. Anyway, I saw RED (but I'm not defriending, person who wrote this post, if you're reading) and worked this up as a comment to that post, but thought better of it. I am going to replicate it here, though, because it's kind of like SPN Feminism 101. (ETA: I wanted to add some clarification just in case. Although the original post did make me angry, nothing in it was material that was new to me, and I intended that this post be read more broadly than as a specific response to that post - more as a specific response to these criticisms, which I have heard over and over and over.)

The show is about brothers, not women!

Uh-huh. So, how come Bobby is alive (I assume: I did indeed stop watching the show after it pissed me off so much.) and recurringly present, while Ellen (&Jo) vanished into the ether, Bela was killed, and - OK, I still don't know Ruby's fate so I can't go for a trifecta. It's pointless to say that Bobby is a "good" character and Bela is "pointless and annoying" because these things are subjective - Bobby drives me crazy with his fake dadliness. How come in the witch episode, the only surviving guest character was the asshole cheater who started the whole thing? How come 9 times out of 10, the vic of the week is a woman, a hot woman, whose violent death is then portrayed in as sexy a manner possible? Don't say to get male viewers. You, me, and everyone in the world know Supernatural's main audience is women and that's probably not going to change - if dead women was really going to bring them in it would have brought them in after the second season.

In other words: if you want to defend the viewpoint that the show's just about Sam & Dean, you also have to defend the contradictions between the way the show treats guest and recurring characters of either gender.

Why does it matter if Dean's disrespectful to women? Mostly they're demons anyway. And anyway, Dean's like the lowest common denominator, he's not going to be all polite. Plus, bitch isn't offensive, lots of women I know use it all the time.

When most people use the word bitch that's true. When Dean uses the word (especially when he talks to Sam) he means bitch like "my bitch": someone submissive & sexually available to him. It's sexually degrading. Pretending that it's just like calling someone a dick when Dean says it is, well, pretending: there are no words like this for a woman to use to describe a man. (There is an increasing gender neutrality of the use of bitch in this context, but chiefly to describe feminised men like Sam.)

Frankly, as tired as you are of reading feminist posts, I'm three times that tired of reading about, hearing about, and experiencing anti-feminism - not only in posts like the one I'm writing about, but when women insist to me that they aren't feminists because feminists are all dykes and "feminism isn't important anymore"; when men tell me all feminists hate men; when my boss tells me I should shave my legs "so I can get a man" and when I say that that's sexual harassment and I really don't like it, as well as pointing out that he wouldn't shave his legs for his girlfriend, he tells me "not to get my knickers in a knot." It's shows like this - shows with ordinary guys saying rude and disrespectful things to and about women, actively and consciouly objectifying them, and perpetuating through itss portrayal of almost every woman that women are useless objects - that made this guy so surprised when he was a dick to me and I bit back. It's seeing guys talk to this like women all over the goddamn television: he thinks it's OK, and why wouldn't he? But it's not OK. It's not OK IRL and it's not OK on the show - not because it isn't appropriate for Dean's character to say these things, but it is inappropriate for the show to commend Dean (or at the very worst, not condemn him) for them.