Et tu, Buffy?

On Joss Whedon and celebrity betrayal

I was a very lonely teenager. While I had friends and theater and supportive parents — all the trappings of a happy adolescence — I was also navigating an undiagnosed social anxiety disorder and depression. On my best days, it felt like my peers were effortlessly dancing along to a song that I could never quite get the rhythm of, and on my worst, I felt universally despised and completely alone.

These struggles will probably be with me forever, but I’ve gotten much better at managing them through therapy, medication, and gaining perspective. But as a 14-year-old, those healthy coping mechanisms were beyond me. And so I turned to the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer instead.

Buffy Summers, the titular slayer played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, was nothing like me. She was athletic and pretty, a quintessential valley girl with all the trappings of popularity, at least until she became the “chosen one,” she alone standing “against the vampires the demons and the forces of darkness.” Turns out, as Buffy learns, killing vampires in secret and by night will put a real damper on a teen’s social life.

But despite our differences — her being a hot superhero and me existing in reality as an awkward, lumpy kid with an overactive imagination — I felt a deep kinship with her as a fellow outsider. Sure, her reasons for being unable to connect to her classmates came down to repeatedly saving the world (“I suddenly find myself needing to know the plural of apocalypse,” Buffy quips in her college years), but I recognized her sadness and resentment. Depression can make you self-obsessed and self-pitying to the point of alienation. Being the slayer, turns out, works similarly. We both were growing uncomfortably into roles that we hadn’t imagined for ourselves and we couldn’t help be a little bitter about it.

Buffy and its spin-off Angel, two silly fantasy shows, were ultimately a life raft for me during a time where I constantly felt like I was drowning. The episodes made me laugh, and cry, and practice high kicks in my bedroom during the many long hours I spent alone after school. Some people are saved by an album or a book. I was saved, at least in part, by a show that luckily ran in syndication for two hours every single day.

Unfortunately, while remaining a fan for years, I eventually came to understand that Joss Whedon, the mind behind Buffy and a one-time creative hero, ain’t shit. His seemingly feminist rhetoric coupled with his creation of what feels like an inherently feminist TV show distracted me for a long time, but eventually Joss would impersonally teach me a frustrating lesson that I keep having to re-learn: Never trust someone who wants congratulations for simply recognizing the world’s social imbalances. Believing in equality should be the baseline for human decency rather than an exemplary and celebrated personality trait. In the seven years I worked in women’s media, I was certainly guilty of mistaking people speaking loudly about their respect for women for, you know, the action of actually respecting them. Enough of the men I once wrote celebratory “[NAME HERE] IS THE FEMINIST ZADDY OF OUR DREAMS” blogs about have since been outed as creeps or abusers, so now I avoid publicly celebrating men — and most people, actually — who I haven’t vetted personally.

But with Joss, I have to admit that everything that comes out about him being a shitty person still hurts. It hurt when his ex wife Kai Cole exposed him as a master manipulator and emotional abuser, writing, “[Joss] never conceded the hypocrisy of being out in the world preaching feminist ideals, while at the same time, taking away my right to make choices for my life and my body based on the truth” about his many deceptions during their marriage. Today, when Charisma Carpenter, who played the beloved and hilarious character Cordelia Chase on both Buffy and Angel, released a statement detailing the many abuses she faced on set at the hands of Joss Whedon, my heart sank again — a reaction I didn’t expect Joss to still elicit.

charisma carpenter @AllCharisma

My truth. #IStandWithRayFisher

Carpenter says she was motivated to speak out publicly after she participated in another investigation into Joss’s misbehavior, this time directed at actor Ray Fisher on the set of Justice League. According to Fisher, Joss was was “gross, abusive, unprofessional, and completely unacceptable" as a director. That this latest target happens to be a Black actor is unsurprising. Weak, shitty people typically only lash out at those they think no one else will care about, which usually means people of color and women bearing the brunt of harassment. Sadly for Joss, though, everyone, including Sarah Michelle Gellar, is now speaking out against him. Even Amber Benson is saying that the Buffy set was a toxic environment and she was one of the only women in the Pussy Posse!!!! She would know! That Fisher and Carpenter, two underdogs, could be the ones to finally knock him on his ass is something out of, well… Buffy.

Discussing this over text with my fellow Buffy-obsessed friend Katherine, she recalled a quote from producer David Greenwalt, shared via Amy Pascale (different from the racist movie executive Amy Pascal, who does not spell her last name with an “E”), the writer of Joss Whedon: The Biography:

“Joss was lonely kid who thought that if he could just crack the code, people would understand what an awesome person he was and love him for it. As Buffy executive producer and Angel cocreator David Greenwalt said, 'If JossWhedon had had one good day in high school, we wouldn't be here'.”

It’s tacky to equate the trauma experienced by those directly in Joss’s orbit to my experience as a betrayed fan, and I certainly don’t mean to. But reading this excerpt filled me with resentment: Buffy was so formative for me is because Whedon — having had a similar high school experience, down to waiting for everyone to realize how spectacular we are — designed it that way. This would be an empathetic, creative triumph coming from someone who wasn’t a cruel narcissist, but sadly that’s not what we’re working with here. Instead, Buffy — my precious, beloved Buffy — feels like yet another way that Whedon tricked his audience, which is filled with sensitive misunderstood-yet-kind-hearted dorks, into thinking he was one of us.