Joss Whedon at Whedonesque, making the connection between an "honor killing" of a seventeen-year old girl that was caught on camera-phones and the trailer for the Elisha Cuthbert movie Captivity, asks this question:"How did more than half the people in the world come out incorrectly? I have spent a good part of my life trying to do that math, and I’m no closer to a viable equation. And I have yet to find a culture that doesn’t buy into it. Women’s inferiority – in fact, their malevolence -- is as ingrained in American popular culture as it is anywhere they’re sporting burkhas. I find it in movies, I hear it in the jokes of colleagues, I see it plastered on billboards, and not just the ones for horror movies. Women are weak. Women are manipulative. Women are somehow morally unfinished. (Objectification: another tangential rant avoided.) And the logical extension of this line of thinking is that women are, at the very least, expendable."
He goes on to, of course and rightfully so, having spent the bulk of his creative-life creating female characters who refute all of these things, challenge such assumptions. Check it out.
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I LOVES me the Whedon and I do give him so much love for the strong women he's given us (and for giving Collosus back to Kitty, if only for a while), but he's been prety free with the weak, manipulative, morally low and/or expendable woman:
Slayers, by their nature and mythology are expendable and to bash it home he kills them pretty often (Buffy, Kendra, Buffy, loads and loads of S7 slayerettes).
Angel's entire premise was helping the helpless--who more often than not happened to be female.
Buffy, Faith, Drusilla, Harmony, Lila, Cordelia. . .all more than full of their fair share of manipulation (and how about River in the last episode of Firefly?).
Amy's moral journey was toward villainy instead of redemption.
Cordelia eliminated for absolutely no good reason. . .
What Joss wins is the fact that while he still fills his females with many of the same faults he sees in other media portrayals, he does rise above them in a much greater capacity as well.
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