Maybe the reason Joss Whedon ever seemed “feminist,”
the reason he was writing “feminist” stories that seemed visionary, is because his worst impulses sounded a lot better when Sarah Michelle Gellar said them.

— H Kapp-Klote (@pizza4justice) February 11, 2021

This is just a completetely ahistorical and ignorant take. The main difference is just cultural change. I’m no huge fan of Whedon, but what made Whedon seem feminist in the late 1990s and early 2000s is that he was completely channeling mainstream feminism at the time, and the method of storytelling that was prevalent then. He was more creative than most and a bettter dialog writer, but that’s essentially true.

Now that culture has shifted significantly, he has become some demonic figure who secretly hated women (despite having more of them in his shows than any person before him), and uniquely deserving of ridicule.

This more deeply is about who gets to control the narrative and if characters are allowed to be complex. These days, characters must parrot woke slogans like some robot, and if you’re a man who writes any young female character or anyone who is not exactly like you, it’s considered abuse. Whedon’s characters had convoluted motiviations, didn’t always do what was best for themselves or others, and didn’t necessarily hold all the latest (especially for now) bien-pensant opinions. And when they got power, they abused it, as people do, even if they were young and female.

Unlike now, all that was not a huge offense during the late 90s and early 2000s. Now that we’ve launched into re-segregation, except from the left direction, these are huge blunders to most. I do truly miss when characters could be complex and not woke-bots, though. Most art is now is dreadfully boring since the woke pseudo-revolution.