Buffyversemeta entry

[aycheb]

This is what I wrote for the buffyversemeta metathon

Title: Reader, I destroyed him.

Summary: The special treatment of girl’s stories in BtVS

Source texts: All of BtVS including the S8 comic issues 1-4. AtS S1 The Prodigal, S3 Lullaby, S4 Inside Out and S5 Damage

Word count: 2642

Notes: The original prompt was azdak’s "People are gonna die. Girls are gonna

Comments

[peasant_]

Great stuff.

I have never considered Willow's arc in Season 6 as being related to her fear of being in charge. I always saw it as a study of what happens when someone intelligent is not exposed to sufficient peers so they get an over-inflated idea of their own importance. Your take is a very interesting angle.

The trouble with subverting storylines, is that sooner or later it becomes so expected that the trick no longer works. Maybe I'm naturally suspicious but the very first time I watched I expected Darla to be the one doing the biting, from the moment they climbed in through that window it was obvious it was going to be a subversion. And I think we were supposed to guess. (Rather similar to the first appearance of Aeryn Sun in Farscape - any fool knew it was going to be a woman under that helmet.) As such I think maybe these situations are not just being played to subvert the expected, but to flatter the viewer into thinking they guessed the trick just ahead of the reveal - much as a good detective story will let the reader work out who the murderer is just a shade ahead of the detective, so the reader gets the thrill of having got there first. So I think subversion only really works as just subversion if your audience somehow believes the subversion isn't possible for some reason.

And on a tangential thought, why is female curiosity so often portrayed as the origin of sin in folklore? Their own sin as an individual, sure, I can understand that might be something you wanted to teach your daughters, but why should curiosity cause all sin generally? That seems to be over-egging the pudding.

[stormwreath]

why is female curiosity so often portrayed as the origin of sin in folklore? Their own sin as an individual, sure, I can understand that might be something you wanted to teach your daughters, but why should curiosity cause all sin generally?

The feminist answer: because in a social system set up to favour men, it's much more dangerous to let girls grow up to question things and wonder "why?" than it is if boys do the same thing.

More generally: if you're living in a dangerous, subsistence-level economy without much scientific knowledge of the world or advanced medical resources, curiosity can get you killed. Worse, it could get your entire community killed. "What does this taste like?" "What happens if we plant these seeds instead of the ones we normally use?" "Will this branch hold my weight?" "I wonder if those strangers would be friendly if I went to talk to them?" "Is that snake poisonous?" "Will the gods really punish us if we stop sacrificing to them?" "Will brandishing a Star of David at a vampire scare it off, or just get me eaten?" . Because we've seen so many scientific advances in the last 300 years, we tend to forget the stability of the previous 300,000. Our ancestors surely weren't stupid, so small-'c' conservatism must have had survival value for them.

[azdak]

The problem with this explanation is that if curiosity were such a disadvantage to the community, it would be reviled in men as well as women. And since the survival of our in-built curiosity suggests that it's adaptive, there must surely have been more instances where everyone benefitted from curiosity ("I wonder what happens if I put these inedible olives in brine for a year? Oh!") than suffered from it.

I am reminded irresistibly of a chapter on ethics in sociolinguistics, where the author referred to a case where an anthropologist published a picture of an Australian aboriginal tribe's sacred objects. It was forbidden for women to see these, and when a copy of the book ended up in the hands of an aboriginal schoolgirl, the men demanded she be killed. This in turn reminds me of the chapter in The Bullerby Children, where the boys keep some sacred and powerful magical artefacts in a cigar case and won't let the girls see them, on the grounds that they're inferior. The girls naturally aren't having any of this and eventually find a way to sneak a peek, only to discover that the awesome artefacts are merely a couple of the boys' milk teeth. Their laughter completely spoils the magic, as far as the boys are concerned. I can't help thinking that herein lies the answer - men are afraid that if the women are curious enough to sneak a peek behind the curtain of authority and superiority, they will laugh at them, and all their power will be gone. Hence much social instruction is aimed at curtailing this dangerous trait.

That's my explanation, anyway ;-)

[peasant_]

I'm with Azdak in agreeing that curiosity is generally a useful human trait in a hunter-gatherer society. And indeed in almost any society. Conservatism does have big social advantages, that is why it is so innate, but so does innovation and risk-taking.

I am not a feminist (in the normal sense), and I view hunter-gatherer societies as not favouring men so much as recognising the value of men as regards their greater body strength and social adaptation to be a fighting and hunting force. But in terms of questioning and risk taking, it is hard to see why there should be a gender bias. Indeed since split-second obedience is generally more vital in men's roles than women's (bickering on the hunt means the animal gets away, bickering over if this is the right tuber to harvest can be imortant in reaching consensus and avoiding mistakes) I would have expected the bias to be the other way round.

However, this is to confuse the issue since both the examples of 'curiosity is bad for women' myths that Azdak cites come from much more recent civilisations. They might be pre-agricultural but they could just as easily be much later. So we would be talking about complex civilizations with a completely different set of social structures and needs than hunter-gatherer society.

[stormwreath]

The problem with saying that curiosity is an advantage for early communities is how then to explain why, for example, it took 1,200 years - 48 generations - for the idea of growing wheat and barley to spread from southern Italy (6200 BC) to the south of France (5000 BC). And it's not because there was no contact between the people either - seashells from Greek beaches have been found in Dutch archeological sites, so there was definitely extensive long-distance trade in Europe at this time. The only explanation I can see is a massive conservatism that's almost inconceivable to modern eyes... because when you're living on the edge of survival, it only takes a couple of adults dying before their time - or wandering off - to threaten the entire clan.

That said, both the Eve and the Pandora myths come from settled agricultural or pastoral societies, not hunter-gatherers. Curiosity is even less valuable to people whose life consists of growing the same crop year in, year out... and while it might be less dangerous in an absolute sense, structured societies have religious, political and social heirarchies which can feel threatened by talk of change. That could explain why the elites of such cultures developed formal myths to explain to people why curiosity was a bad thing.

As for the gender difference, perhaps it's something like this. Curiosity in a [male] leader is good: it's a sign of boldness, risk-taking, innovation, strength of character. Men who aspire to leadership would want to emulate such characteristics; but for the rest, obedience and honour (where 'honour' = always doing what's expected of someone in your social position) are stressed. Since women weren't supposed to aspire to leadership - and from a male perspective, had a dangerous tendency to cluster in little groups talking about who-knows-what - curiosity was always dangerous for them.

[aycheb]

Thank you. Re: Willow I think yes, Buffy's not the only one with both a superiority and an inferiority complex although with Willow I suspect she has an superiority complex about feeling inferior rather than the other way round.

The trouble with subverting storylines, is that sooner or later it becomes so expected that the trick no longer works.
Subversion isn't just about suprising the audience though (speaking as a complete sucker for every trick in the book). In BtVS it's more about commenting on previous stories, criticising the underlying assumptions by showing it doesn't have to be that way.

Why should curiosity cause all sin generally?
I wonder how culture specific that is. The folk tales, Bluebeard etc, are more about the risks for the girl herself and then you have Pandora and Eve but I don't know if there are equivalents to those women in non-Western mythologies (I tried googling but to no avail). Curiosity is about challenging authority both Eve and Pandora aren't just curious but curious about something they've been expressly forbidden to do yet Pandora is written very differently from Prometheus who broke the original injunction. I keep thinking that curiosity being a childish trait has something to do with it too.

It depends as well on who's telling the story and interpreting it. Marina Warner is very strong on the idea of folk tales as stories told by women, old wives, mother goose. The really virulent versions of Bluebeard etc are adaptations by aristocrats like Perrault and contempory critics were adamant that the moral was very much that wives should obey their husbands. It wouldn't take much though to put a pro-curiosity spin on the story, her curiosity is what saves the last bride from the fate of her predecessors.

[peasant_]

I suspect she has an superiority complex about feeling inferior rather than the other way round.

What, a sort of ultra-geekish pride, you mean?

Subversion isn't just about suprising the audience though (speaking as a complete sucker for every trick in the book). In BtVS it's more about commenting on previous stories, criticising the underlying assumptions by showing it doesn't have to be that way.

Yes, I think Joss tries to do both. But the problem as I see it is that if one half of teh equation fails to work (the surprise) it weakens the message of teh other half, because it looks like it was just a bungles surprise rather than something clever. I think Spike's soul-quest is probably the best example of that. if it had been played carefully as a subversion of Angel's story (and the whole idea of the soul, and Spike's relationship with the chip, and the idea of 'rapists' as the ultimate evil, and hundreds of other ideas) then it would have been a very powerful storyline. As it was, they bunged teh surprise and we can only lok for those other ideas in retrospect and rather badly because at the time we didn't get any shock from the subversion itself, just a rather tedious mess.

I don't know if there are equivalents to those women in non-Western mythologies

Can't help you, I'm afraid. I have pretty much zero knowledge of non-Western mythology.

I keep thinking that curiosity being a childish trait has something to do with it too.

Or is it simply that curiosity is branded as childish in order to stigmatise it?

Of course, one outcome of stories that caricature people is that they are more likely to behave that way. If women are being told that they are naturally curious and disobedient they are more likely to be so, so maybe it was a way for mothers to put a bit of spine in their daughters. After all, the power to cause misery is still power, and desirable as such.