Tag: this fucking hellsite

tuvok77 mentioned you in a post

@philosopherking1887 Considering he’s a fake feminist who gave us the Flash/ Wonderwoman boo joke in JL cheated on his wife and gave us the most sexist and mignoginistic Wonder Woman scripts ever. What’s not to hate.

@tuvok77, clearly you did not read the tags on my post, which said “Joss Whedon is not a bad writer, whatever you want to say about his feminism.” The point being: what on earth does any of that have to do with his characterization of Loki in The Avengers? I am not interested in defending the quality of Joss Whedon’s feminism (though if you wanted to take a consequentialist tack, you could say that Buffy actually did a lot of good for the feminist cause, regardless of the impurity of his outlook or motives in creating it). I want to make the point that people with imperfect social justice credentials can still make good art in other respects. What I object to is not criticisms of his depiction of female characters, if the criticisms are well-defended, but “arguments” that his writing is bad in respects unrelated to his depiction of women. These arguments tend to be poorly defended – which is unsurprising, considering that they are motivated entirely by a moral objection to his “fake feminism,” and not by considerations that actually bear on the interpretive issue at hand (in this case, the characterization of Loki; I have seen similarly flimsy arguments regarding his characterizations of Tony Stark and Steve Rogers).

The assumption here seems to be that if someone has imperfect social justice credentials – if someone is morally flawed – nothing they do can have any merit, including aesthetic merit. They must be a bad artist because they are a bad person. This strikes me as appallingly bad reasoning. I came to like Joss Whedon’s work, including Firefly, Dollhouse, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, The Cabin in the Woods, and the two Avengers movies as well as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, not in the first instance because I thought they were works of revolutionary feminist propaganda but because I found the stories and characters compelling, the dialogue clever and well-paced, the premises innovative and philosophically interesting. None of that is obviated by the fact that Whedon cheated on his wife, or by anything in the Justice League movie or his unproduced Wonder Woman script (neither of which I have seen).

If the only reason you like works of art is because they take a moral stance of which you approve, or (even worse) because you approve of the moral character of the artist, I think you’re making incredibly impoverished aesthetic judgments that have only a marginal claim to be aesthetic judgments, i.e., judgments of taste, at all; they are actually moral judgments that happen to be directed at works of art. It seems like a lot of people on Tumblr are like some weird kind of moral hipsters who, when an artist they liked “sells out” (which is to say, proves to be morally flawed, by their lights), claim that nothing they made was ever good in the first place – even the things that they used to like (such as Buffy). The hipsters’ judgments are not aesthetic judgments, either – at least not about the music; they are judgments about the social cachet to be gained from liking something obscure. If you’re content to base your judgments about works of art on their obscurity, their moral qualities, or the moral qualities of their creators, fine, knock yourself out; but don’t go around pretending to be making a good-faith effort to interpret their content or evaluate their aesthetic quality. Just be up front about it; go ahead and say, “Joss Whedon is a bad feminist/person, therefore none of his work has any artistic merit.” Don’t make bullshit claims about unrelated points of dialogue, plotting, or characterization so you can feel morally superior, hipster-style, about how you always knew his work was crap.