Meta: Masculinities in "Firefly"

[catwalksalone]

Panel Author: executrix

MY FAVORITE CITY,
(WHERE THE WOMEN ARE STRONG
AND THE MEN ARE PRETTY)
Firefly Masculinities
--Executrix

Comments

[inalasahl]

Very good essay, by the way! I very much enjoyed reading it.

The psychoanalytic critic’s answer might be that he and Inara fetishize one another precisely because they prevent one another from having a real relationship with each other, and this therefore defends them against having another, potentially workable but also potentially risky, with anybody else.
I tend toward this explanation myself, or at least, tend toward the idea that a lot of Mal and Inara's attraction to each other is that they both know nothing will ever really happen. But I think that Mal's hang-ups about companions (and whores) are way out of proportion to what's reasonable given what we know of his background. The fact that Inara chooses to work on the Rim is repeatedly mentioned as unusual. Therefore, I assume that Mal has never before encountered a companion in real life. So what's the source of his disgust? If it was just Companion=Alliance hatred, I would expect to see him be equally as awful to Simon, which he isn't (certainly not to the level of deliberately trying to provoke a scene between Book and Inara in StE). Which leads me to believe that his problem with Companions is the sex.

We have an adequate backstory reason as to why: we know Mal is a Christian pre-Serenity Valley, and apparently, a devoted one. The ways that the Firefly verse map to Civil War-era USA, further suggest that he's also a conservative Protestant: fundamentalist or evangelical. No sex outside of marriage, for either men or women.

It's significant to me that the one time Mal doesn't tune out Book's religious babble is the "special hell" conversation regarding sex with Saffron. For once, Mal seems intent on assuring Book that he would never have sex with Saffron, not with challenging Book's right to make a moral judgement in this case.

All of which leads me to suspect that prior to Mal's loss of faith, he was a virgin. While he may have conciously decided that sex between consenting adults is okay, I think he still has a lot of subconcious prejudices that might explain the lack of lady (or gentlemen) friends on other planets.