Lady Business: Buffy & Britney & Justin & Joss

Hello, and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 122nd issue, published February 14, 2021.
 

Into Every Generation…

I was going to take this long weekend off from Lady Business. Then the foundational pop culture of my teenage years finally exploded, scattering more 1990s misogyny everywhere.
 
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a formative TV series for me and so many other feminists of the old-Millennial persuasion, was always built on a shaky foundation. It was genuinely groundbreaking, and it cleared a path for many more TV shows by and about women. It was also created by a man with Some Major Issues that were never very well hidden—even before his employees started carefully voicing complaints in the 2000s, his ex-wife laid some of them bare in 2017, or one of his few Black actors publicly accused him of “gross, abusive” behavior last summer.
 
None of it has stuck—or stalled that man, Joss Whedon, on his rapid ascent from beloved nerd-niche auteur to blockbuster filmmaker employed by Marvel, Warner Bros., and HBO. But then, this week, former Buffy actor Charisma Carpenter published a damning account of working for Whedon. He bullied her, she claimed; he got angry at her for getting pregnant, after she had worked for him for several years on Buffy and its spin-off, Angel; he asked her if she would have an abortion; and, when she continued the pregnancy, he retaliated by firing her. (Whedon has not responded to these or subsequent allegations made this week.)
 
Most of this wasn’t new—Carpenter made some of this public way back in 2009—but this week’s fallout was. Buffy star Sarah Michelle Gellar publicly distanced herself from Whedon, while other actors and writers who worked for him posted about Buffy’s “toxic environment” and Whedon’s “casual cruelty” towards female writers. Most disturbingly, Michelle Trachtenberg—who was 14 when she was cast as Buffy’s younger sister—implied that she had experienced something seriously creepy from Whedon, when she wrote that there was a Buffy production rule barring him from being alone with her “again.”
 
Cue a lot of online agonizing about Buffy’s legacy, and whether it’s been irredeemably tarnished. I think that’s inevitable—but did it ever deserve the uncritical adulation we gave it in the first place?
 
I say this as a fervent early Buffy fan who made all of my high-school friends watch the show, who definitely spent at least one Halloween as Buffy, and who still dabbles in writing about its legacy. The show’s willingness to take a teenage girl seriously meant a lot to me when I was one, and I’m not dismissing the pain of anyone who still loves it fiercely.
 
But I also wonder how much we’ve all been paying attention. As someone who’s had reservations about Whedon for decades, I’ve seen how willfully some of his fans—and the powerful companies that kept on hiring him—have ignored or shouted down any critiques. You didn’t even have to be following Hollywood gossip; under his “feminist” self-adulation, Whedon has always gotten away with a shocking amount of blatant racism and misogyny in plain sight.
 
There was the TV series that fetishized rape; the one that fetishized the Confederacy and also Asians, without including any Asian characters; the gleeful have-your-slutshaming-cake-and-ironically-critique-it-too nihilism of Cabin in the Woods; the modern Shakespeare adaptation that made a joke out of Black women, without allowing any to speak. And the less said about incel manifesto Dr. Horrible, the better.
 
If and when Whedon breaks his silence, I’m expecting a wordier version of Justin Timberlake’s new “apology” to Britney Spears and Janet Jackson—a vague acknowledgement that “the industry” did things to these women and their careers, rather than a specific reckoning with the active role he took in causing that damage. Oh, and he’d very much like it if you’d stop tagging his Insta with your #FreeBritney complaints, okay?
 
Timberlake’s apology was extracted in the wake of the new Britney Spears documentary, which made bigger headlines than the Whedon meltdown but tells some of the same story. Britney, like Buffy, was a pop-culture icon of my teenage years, another blonde white girl who was supposed to represent some part of my identity. Like most of the other young women who became celebrities in the late 1990s and early 2000s—the Olsen twins, and Paris Hilton, and Jessica Simpson, and Lindsay Lohan—she had to be young and white and thin and hot to even get the chance to succeed. But this success lasted only as long as these women could navigate a brutal media era—and navigate the sexual fantasies of the men around them.
 
Lindsay “Lohan fields queries about her breasts in most interviews, which is probably why she decided to pre-empt the issue,” reads the third sentence, and only the third most-horrifying sentence so far, of a 2004 Rolling Stone profile of an 18-year-old woman. (The author, a dude who’s still writing for prestigious magazines, has already assured us that he “fact-checked” her breasts’ veracity by staring at them, and by groping her.) There are a million more examples currently recirculating of the blatant cruelty that these successful young women endured 10 or 15 years ago—from prestigious journalists as well as relentless paparazzi, from late-night hosts with millions of viewers, from famous ex-boyfriends who bragged about sleeping with them while accusing them of cheating.
 
So I’m glad that we’ve progressed to a point where Charisma Carpenter can repeat her allegations and be heard, and where those who publicly say or write hateful things are more likely to face immediate scrutiny. It’s hardly a perfect media climate by any means, and there’s still plenty of racism and misogyny allowed to flourish in plain sight—but at least we’re all paying a little bit more attention.
 
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