I was thinking today about how in roughly 10 years Joss Whedon has gone from being seen as a fairly feminist person who was at the forefront of representing fleshed-out women characters on screen to a patriarchal evil mansplainer who wants to tell stories about women so he can somehow exploit them.
I don’t intend to make this about Joss Whedon and his flaws or even his successes, but rather to explore what caused this severe transition.
The central cause is not that Joss Whedon suddenly started hating women, but rather that we changed so much since the late 90s and early 2000s (Whedon’s TV heyday) that the shows made then feel completely foreign to our sensibilities — especially when you consider that Whedon’s formative years and thus TV shows were really originating socioculturally in the late 80s/early 90s period when more open personalities were prevalent.
So, watching a show of his from the late 90s is a completely different world, before identity politics had taken over the discourse and when there was nothing morally wrong about a man being interested in how girls or women live their lives. And when I say a “completely different world,” we no longer live there any longer so it’s very hard to understand. The Tumblrites who weren’t even born then simply can’t comprehend it at all.
Now, under current mores, a magic-adept librarian who mentors a 16-year-old girl would automatically be seen as an abuser (just as a man who writes a TV show about teenage girls is seen as the same). These days, even a woman might be under suspicion in the same position. It is getting worse, in other words. There is no space for nuance, for people to be their full human selves — only authoritarianism and suspicion.
I am not sure how this benefits, anyone, exactly. But it seems to make a lot of people happy.