In eighth grade, my teachers banned me from bringing up Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Or at least they tried. I was obsessed. The previous summer my mom purchased the first season on DVD so we could watch as a family, but once I met Buffy Summers there would be no waiting around for my parents to watch with me. I watched the whole show on Netflix five times in a row, absorbing every moment of every episode. I wrote down every line that made me laugh or cry in a Notes file. I memorized all 144 episode titles using a quiz website designed to make 13 year-olds super popular with their peers. I semi-consciously developed a propensity for Buffyspeak, the show’s iconic speech pattern that still comes in handy when I can’t figure out how to express myself without using the word “thingy.” I was not an uncritical fan. I had major hang-ups with the show: I hated Buffy’s boyfriend Riley, and while I found most of them endearing individually, I thought Buffy’s friends were not so good with the friend being. I also thought some character deaths or traumas were excessive, and handled too flippantly. But I loved certain characters and their stories so much I was willing to undergo whatever frustration or heartbreak creator and showrunner Joss Whedon threw at them and me. I thought all the tragedy and misfortunes were in service of a better show. Besides, some of my gripes felt unimportant and vague. I couldn’t quite articulate what it was that bothered me so much about Xander Harris, or why I really resented that Cordelia Chase was written off Buffy to star in the spinoff Angel. I figured I ought to trust Whedon. After all, he was the genius and I was just a fan. What did I know?
In ninth grade I was thrilled to take a month-long Buffy the Vampire Slayer class taught by a popular English teacher at my high school. I was one of the younger students, and one of the only ones to have seen the show in its entirety, so the class would ask me to describe the larger events of the show as we skipped the majority of episodes. The teacher often tried to correct my recaps, not because I had gotten any facts wrong, but because I interpreted them differently than he did. He was openly dismissive of opinions that varied from his own. After screening an episode in which Buffy has a one night stand with a classmate in college he started a class discussion with the question, “Is Buffy a slut?” I was appalled in so many different ways I could barely respond. What’s wrong with being a slut and also she isn’t one and what do you mean by slut and how would one decide that and so what if she was one and why would you ask that when there are a million other things you could ask about Buffy? He egged the class on, goading us to say yes. “Come on, she slept with a guy she barely knew. You don’t think that’s slutty?” He was eager to see us debate not Buffy’s character, but her humanity, her value. Did she have any? He thought it was debatable. I had completed my seventh rewatch by that point, but I didn’t feel as motivated to watch again.
I spent the next decade watching more TV than any person I knew, every kind of show, but always Buffy was a touchstone, Buffy was the standard of great TV. The longer I went without rewatching the more details I forgot, but I still remembered my allegiances; the characters I fiercely adored and the ones who made me furious. Whedon made headlines for other projects, and I paid attention. When he equated infertility with being monstrous in Age of Ultron. When his ex-wife wrote about his constant cheating and his use of feminism to disguise his behavior. And when Ray Fisher and Jason Momoa spoke out about Whedon’s abusive and unprofessional behavior on the Justice League set. I don’t remember feeling shock or even betrayal at any of these stories. I felt more like my suspicions were confirmed, suspicions I didn’t even realize I had formed.
Last summer I realized that without paying attention, I had grown older than Buffy is at the end of the show. To me, this was a greater and more unnerving milestone than my recent college graduation. Despite my feelings about Whedon and the stains on his work, I missed Buffy Summers. So I enlisted two friends, one a Buffy fanatic and the other a Buffy virgin, and we began the journey together. So much of the show was just as I remembered. I still idolized my favorite characters, especially Buffy and Cordelia. But I felt a heightened protectiveness of them too. I knew how to better identify just how they were mistreated, and the kind of perspective that would deem that mistreatment as unimportant, or even justified. Whereas before I understood so well what made the show great, I could now understand what held the show back. I no longer believed in Whedon’s ultimate authority over the stories of Buffy.
My two favorite characters on Buffy have always been Buffy herself, played by the brilliant Sarah Michelle Gellar, and the ultimate HBIC, Cordelia Chase, played by the incomparable and very aptly named Charisma Carpenter. Both Buffy and Cordelia are beautiful, witty, charming, and capable of achieving that holy grail of high school popularity, although both often choose their friends over status. The character of Buffy was famously conceptualized by Whedon as an upending of the trope of the helpless blonde in horror movies who always dies, often in a sexualized way. Buffy may occasionally lean into the ditz and the blonde, but she’s incredibly perceptive, strategic, and funny. Her defining characteristic is her well-honed ability to pun in the face of evil, of both the hell and high school varieties. She occasionally yearns for her pre-Slayer days when she didn’t have such a heavy burden to bear, although she admits she was also shallower back then. Cordelia is Sunnydale High’s Queen Bee. She initially welcomes Buffy to her new school, but changes her mind after Buffy elects to hang out with friendly losers Willow Rosenberg and Xander Harris (and also after Buffy pins her to a wall and nearly stakes her). Cordelia does her best to avoid the trio, but she can’t seem to stop getting kidnapped/stalked/attacked/knocked out by demons and evildoers. She often fills the damsel-in-distress role Buffy was written to reject, but she does so with style and spirit, thanks to Carpenter’s consistently flawless performance. My favorite Cordelia line is from season two, just after she’s been drugged and chained up by a bunch of frat boys so they can sacrifice her to an evil snake demon that lives in their basement (has there ever been a more heavy handed date rape analogy on TV?). Once again, she has to be rescued by Buffy and the Scoobies, and she is sick of it:
“You did it! You saved us! I’ve never been so happy to see anyone in my whole — you guys. I just...hate you guys. The weirdest things always happen when you’re around. And you! You’re going to jail for fifteen thousand years!”
Carpenter’s smooth transitions from relieved elation to tearful frustration to fierce anger—Buffy has plenty of great lines, but it’s acting like Carpenter’s that make those lines so extraordinarily riveting and memorable.
When Lindsay King Miller first wrote in 2019 about the women of Angel and Charisma Carpenter’s exit from the show following her pregnancy, it solved one piece of the puzzle of what rankled me about the Buffyverse. I enjoyed a lot of the Buffy spinoff, but I could never bring myself to rewatch and witness Cordelia Chase’s decline a second time. Cordelia’s arc ended hastily, thoughtlessly, vindictively. The storyline wasn’t simply sloppy; it was designed with an agenda that valued punishing Carpenter over successful storytelling. Carpenter confirmed this explicitly in her recent statement about Whedon’s abusive behavior. Almost immediately after I first read her statement, I saw Kevin T. Porter retweet his very funny impression of the kind of guy who wants you to know that he never liked X male celebrity who abused his power, and he wasn’t surprised, which makes him better than everyone else. I love this video, and I recognize exactly the self-serving, faux-sympathetic attitude that Porter skewers. I also think we need to have a conversation about how people who are not cishet white men actually do tend to dislike or suspect these celebrities of abuse before the stories go public, simply out of an instinct towards self preservation. In fact, sometimes the stories have already gone public, they just haven’t gotten enough attention from the media or public to motivate any action. Olivia Munn spoke about Brett Ratner exposing himself to her and lying about sleeping with her for years, and the press characterized her allegations and his blatant misogyny as “gossip.” (He has since admitted he lied). Tig Notaro wrote a scene for her TV show One Mississippi based on Louis CK’s abusive behavior and asked him to confront the allegations, just a few months before he would admit the rumors were true. And Charisma Carpenter described Whedon’s anger and retaliation in the face of her pregnancy at Dragon*Con in 2009. Not every story is regularly given enough traction to generate consequences for an abuser.
Even if you aren’t tuned in to smaller stories or rumors about abusive behavior in Hollywood, the evidence is often right in the text, begging to be seen. One of the criticisms of Whedon is that he used his feminist credentials onscreen to hide his misogyny offscreen. But misogyny is embedded in the very fabric of his work. I happen to think, overall, Cordelia Chase really is a well written character, and at least during her tenure on Buffy, her characterization is thoughtful and compelling. Whedon did occasionally write great women. But he also wrote people around these women who would tear them down. Xander Harris is perhaps the most egregious example. Whedon has acknowledged that Xander is based in part on himself, particularly in the way others overlook him as a “loser.” Xander is the everyman of the show; no special powers, unpopular, frequently feeling left behind or undervalued by his friends and peers. He also has a disturbing penchant for belittling and scolding others, particularly women to whom he is attracted. Nearly every line he speaks to or about Cordelia is a putdown, even while they’re dating. Cordelia’s no wallflower, and she can hold her own in a war of words. But while Cordy struggles with tact, Xander’s insults feel so hostile and personal, taking constant shots at her intellect and sex life. He doesn’t care if they’re true—he never acknowledges that she’s generally smarter and more insightful than him—it’s like he has a handbook of every misogynist insult known to man, compiled over the years by incels and so-called “nice guys.” It’s hard not to read Xander’s disdain as Whedon’s own, especially as Whedon himself affirms the connection.
The most consistent victim of Xander’s contempt is Buffy herself. From the moment he meets her, Xander is attracted to Buffy, and early on in the show he tries to ask her out. Buffy turns him down, explaining she doesn’t want to risk their friendship, and she never wavers on that point. But Xander never lets his crush go, and his resentment of this rejection often manifests in behavior as cruel to Buffy as that of any of the show’s villains. He purposefully sabotages her relationship with Angel at every chance. He convinces her that Riley cheated on her with a vampire because she wasn’t sensitive enough to his masculinity. After accidentally activating a Sunnydale-wide love spell, he admits that he considered sleeping with Buffy anyway, even knowing she wasn’t in control of her body. And time after time, in When She Was Bad, Dead Man’s Party, and ultimately in Empty Places, he takes her lowest moments as opportunities to cruelly excoriate her, often publicly. He mocks her pain and condemns her for her mistakes, never ever admitting any wrongdoing of his own. And Buffy always apologizes! No matter the extenuating circumstances or misplaced blame, if something goes wrong, Buffy must face consequences. She has to be taken down a notch, because she has the audacity to be powerful. Not that she asked for this power -- she’s the only human character who truly had no choice in her destiny. She had this power thrust upon her. But still, she must be punished because she doesn’t deserve it.
What makes the misogyny in Buffy so painful is that it doesn’t just come from the bad guys. It comes from the people you trust, the people who are positioned as voices of reason. We’re supposed to like Xander, to root for him. The other characters often agree with him. Rarely does anybody ever interrupt his vicious speeches to defend his chosen victim, no matter who she is. His misogyny is written as reasonable, justified. The show addresses other forms of misogyny too, like the stuffy, patriarchal Watcher’s Council, and Warren Mears, a technological genius so obsessed with dominating women he accidentally kills his girlfriend when she resists his mind control device. Warren is a guy many of us recognize, someone who feels entitled to women and rages when they don’t do as he wants. But what makes Warren different from Xander? Xander didn’t kill or assault anyone, nor did he build a subservient sex robot to satisfy his every need. But he openly sympathizes with Warren, and even sees the appeal of the robot, a detail played for laughs. Unlike Warren, Xander’s funny, and he has friends who put up with his sexist cracks and unwanted overtures. Xander’s behavior doesn’t really escalate throughout the show because he’s comfortable right where he is. He employs just the right kind of misogyny to avoid consequences and berate others. The kind of misogyny Whedon wields.
My least favorite type of Buffy scene is the public scolding of Buffy by her “friends.” I really truly despise these scenes, and find them unbelievably painful. When I was 13, I thought that despite my personal taste, this pain was necessary, that it made the show better. I remembered a quote from Whedon, “Buffy in pain, story more interesting, Buffy not in pain, story not interesting.” He was being facetious, but his work as a whole is a product of this ethos: the more suffering you inflict on your characters the better your art. Now I see the greater context around that kind of mentality, the way that that pain isn’t inflicted just on the characters, but the actors and the audience as well. I thought pain was necessary, not just in art but in life, that to reject potentially transformative suffering was a sign of weakness. But there will always be suffering we can’t reject, pain we can’t fight. You don’t need to offer yourself up for even more. You don’t owe the world a debt of pain in order to be worthy or interesting. There was no need to manufacture pain for Buffy either; the premise of the show sets her up for a life of pain, or at least seven seasons’ worth. But the hits just kept coming. I’d be lying if I said many of these arcs weren’t great storytelling, in large part due to Sarah Michelle Gellar’s incredibly devastating performance. But Buffy’s joy was just as worthwhile and compelling. Her wit, her love, her spirit. So why did Whedon focus so much on her pain?
Ultimately, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is about pain. It’s about persevering in the face of grief, heartbreak, despair, and fear. The hardest thing in this world is to live in it. The exploration of pain is part of what makes the show so great, so enduring. But Buffy is also about justice. About taking a tired cliché and giving her power and integrity in a world that doesn’t recognize her as deserving of either. About witnessing pain and fighting to lessen it. It’s remarkable that the cast was able to give such stellar performances in such a hostile environment, but outrageous that the hostility was allowed to exist in the first place. Carpenter and every other actor who suffered on set deserved more. Every person who found strength in Buffy deserved more. Buffy can never be separated from Joss Whedon, but he doesn’t have total ownership over the show either. Carpenter, Gellar, Michelle Trachtenberg, Amber Benson—their contributions to the show defy quantification.
The difficulties Carpenter and Fisher have faced in seeking justice attests to how the problem is bigger than Whedon himself; the system is designed to protect him from consequences. So rarely is abuse of power really punished that it’s hard for me to imagine what justice would even look like. Hard to imagine we could ever get so far that we’d even have the chance to figure that out.
I don’t know where this leaves the rest of us, those who loved this show and the characters and the performances. Anyone who debates separating the art from the artist wrestles with finding a balance between the two, appreciating the art for what it is while considering the ramifications of the artist’s external life. But I don’t think we should separate the art from the artist at all, and that seeing the true connection between art and artist is perhaps the best way you can honor what the cost of that art truly was. If you are not cognizant of the misogyny in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you aren’t seeing that show for all that it is. Whedon didn’t lock away all his contempt for women and abusive behavior in a safe and throw away the key while he made Buffy. He let it inform every facet of that show’s perspective. So watch Buffy. For the first time or the tenth, with others or alone. But see it for what it is. Understand where a show gets its point of view, its conscience. Skip the parts that feel exploitative or degrading. Don’t give your attention or energy to Whedon’s attempts to defame others or preserve a fraudulent reputation. Don’t let those who spoke up about Whedon become footnotes in his story, shelved under “Controversies” on his Wikipedia page. Their experiences and achievements are the story. Listen to them.