Thursday, November 17, 2011

My Thoughts on Supernatural 7x08 "Season Seven, Time for a Wedding!"

Considering all the hits I've been getting from Supernatural fans looking at my post on the Wedding Crashers male rape scene to compare it to the latest Supernatural episode "Season Seven, Time for a Wedding!" (thanks to whoever started sending that link around, by the way), I thought I'd write a post sharing my feelings on the episode. This is that post. "Season Seven, Time for a Wedding!" is a problematic episode involving obsessed Supernatural fan Becky giving Sam a love potion, and they become a cutesy couple until the potion wears off in the third act... and it's still too cutesy.

A lot of feminists think Supernatural is misogynistic, but I generally don't see it. The main complaint is that female characters are often killed in a way where the camera lingers over their pain and/or to hurt Sam and/or Dean in a women in refrigerators situation. Well, it's a horror story featuring gruesome deaths all around. The focus is on two male characters and everyone keeps dying around them, anyway. They even liquified Castiel (though possibly not for good). That said, there are a few things here and there that annoy me as a feminist, like practically the entire episode of "Season Seven, Time for a Wedding!".

Thursday, November 10, 2011

The Dollhouse Rape Issue

A lot of feminists complain about Dollhouse being a big display of rape without anyone ever acknowledging it. I think it is acknowledged through the shorthand of "prostitution" and "human-trafficking", but I can understand people not recognizing it. I think rape does happen in the normal operation of the Dollhouse, but it's hard to say how this rape exactly occurs given the weird science-fiction element of the show. The problem is that we are just not used to conceptualizing of this kind of thing because it never happens in the real world, and we want to think about this kind of fantasy scenario in the way normal life operates where a person is both mind and body simultaneously and indistinguishably, but that's not accurate to these scenarios. I have some thoughts on how to conceptualize identity in these scenarios, breaking it down to three distinct parts.