Dollhouse Is Feminist (Part 11: 1x09)

(Written for the video version)

The ninth Dollhouse episode “A Spy in the House of Love” is a partially nonlinear story following the four main Actives in separate storylines that intersect with each other. The first part is a set up that doesn’t follow anyone specifically.

It starts out with Echo as a dominatrix talking to Boyd about her job. I have issues with the portrayal of BDSM here, but I’ll leave that to the previous post “S&M Barbie”. I’ll just point out that Echo’s outfit is incredibly revealing and even though she’s supposed to be dominant, she comes off as just a sex object for the male gaze. Anyway, she talks to Boyd about the importance of trust and how it’s beautiful when a submissive trusts a dominant enough to submit to her. Boyd talks about how it’s dangerous to trust people, and it has the implication that the Dollhouse can’t be trusted and he feels bad for lying to her. Trust and specifically misguided trust is the theme of the episode.

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.