#or wants to Fix Them by painting one of the trio as the pure villain and it's like

[midnightwind]

I have to like, avoid any Crow posting that opens with someone griping about the abuse, for my own sanity

[ettadunham]

A Buffy rewatch 7x18 Dirty Girls

aka gotta have faith

We did it, guys! We made it to the last season! Also, hello if you’re new, and stumbled upon this without context. As usual, these impromptu text posts are the product of my fevered mind as I rant about the episode I just watched for an hour (okay, sometimes perhaps two). Anything goes!

And in today’s episode, our secondary villain is finally revealed made of pure misogyny, and Faith is here to make everything better.

So... Dirty Girls. We really are in the finish line of the season now.

This episode opens with two scenes that I’m not sure were intended to have the connection I made, but let’s do it anyway. In the first, we’re introduced to Caleb, a priest with extremely misogynistic views of women, who is revealed to be an agent of the First. And one who’s been pulling a lot of its strings in our world at that, like blowing up the council, or organizing the Bringers.

I guess Caleb hates humanity as a whole - he is aligning himself with the First after all -, but he directs pretty much all of that hatred onto women. He calls the Potential he picks up with his truck a ‘whore’ and ‘dirty’, and from his fantasies of his past, you get the idea that he specifically targeted young women using his authority, seduced them, and then turned it around and punished them for it.

Misogyny as a theme happens a lot on the show of course, Buffy fights the patriarchy after all. But when it comes to overt depictions of it, it’s often a bit… well, overt. You want to cheer Buffy for punching the douchebag in the face, but you’re also aware of how it’s an exaggeration of reality, made to get that fistbump reaction out of you.

And actually, that’s something that I think is worth re-examining too. A few years back, when the Supergirl TV show was about to premiere, there were a lot of discussions around this type of overt feminism. When I watched the pilot, I experienced some of these cringe moments myself. But, despite some of the many actual problems of the show and its feminism at the time, it also got me thinking.

Why? Why do I actually feel cringey about this?

And the answer that I found was that I was imagining watching the show from a perspective other than my own. Kind of like watching the 1992 Buffy movie back in the 90s with my brother made me hyperaware of its many faults, instead of giving me a chance to enjoy its culty ridiculousness.

So, while considering other perspectives can be essential in forming critical thought of your media, there’s a difference in trying to understand a minority perspective for instance, and feeling the need to put yourself in the shoes of the dominant culture, and base your opinions with that in mind.

But that’s a tangent inside a tangent.

Disregarding all that, imo the show’s most successful and impactful depictions of misogyny arguably come from characters who don’t always act like monsters. I actually like the bad guy from Reptile Boy for instance. He acts charming and nice to lure Buffy in, and only reveals his true nature, once he holds all the power.

Caleb in that sense then, is the show’s best and most horrifying example of that type of misogynistic evil.

(And yes, we could also talk about the Trio here, but trying to fold them in would be yet another tangent, and it’s time to talk about the actual episode at this point.)

Caleb says to the First that he doesn’t lie... but that’s a lie. He does lie. By wearing the symbol of authority, of someone you can confide in, he tells you that he can be trusted. And yes, there is very much a commentary here about the evil of religion and Catholicism, but the point being is that for someone in that community, Caleb’s appearance signals no threat. And Caleb uses that assumption to his advantage.

He only gradually reveals his true nature to Shannon at the beginning. First by calling her a whore. Because hat that point, he knows that he holds the power in their interaction and that he doesn’t need to pretend to be anything but the monster he is in order to lure her in. Shannon’s guard is down, and he knows that she can’t escape.

Caleb’s misogyny is disturbing because it’s still believable in all of its overtness. He does what he does because he knows that he can. He has the power, and that power reveals all of his deepest darkest thoughts with nothing to keep him in check.

And right after this scene, you get Xander’s dream. Where he dreams about two Potentials coming onto him in a threesome situation (and specifically with the two women also getting it on with each other in front of him, because I guess fetishizing lesbians is still a thing that Xander hasn’t internalized despite his best friend being one), while the rest of the girls are having some sexy pillow-fight in the other room.

So… I guess we’re pairing up scary misogyny with “”fun”” misogyny?

Of course, since this is a dream, we can argue that Xander can’t really be held responsible for it. We don’t have power over our dreams after all. It’s where our subconscious works through stuff, and that doesn’t reflect our persona wholly.

Except then the question still remains – why is this scene here? Why would someone write this scene in, especially in an episode full of these themes? When Xander wakes up, he’s immediately faced with the reality, where his role is to fix the toilets. It’s supposed to be funny. Look how powerless he actually is, compared to the girls.

But then he also gets the big speech moment in the very same episode, supporting Buffy, and then loses an eye to Caleb. How are these things connected? And if they’re not… why is that scene at the beginning there?

I mean, you could interpret Caleb removing one of Xander’s eyes as a punishment for Xander having these ‘urges’… Except Caleb’s comment before doing that doesn’t reference that. It references Xander’s speech from Potential, where he’s telling Dawn that he sees a lot by being underappreciated.

So, that’s probably not what they were going for. And it’s a stretch of an interpretation. In the end, there’s little to no reason for that scene to be there, and therefore I’m left with the impression, that the writers weren’t even aware of the misogynistic angle of Xander fetishizing all these young women in his dream. They just thought it was funny.

God, I wrote 1k workds already, and I haven’t even got to Buffy’s storyline in this.

This episode is setting up the pre-finale twist of everyone turning against Buffy, which I kinda hate. And that bleeds into my thoughts of Dirty Girls, unfortunately.

Like, I get it. Everyone kept telling Buffy that this was a trap, that it was a bad idea to bring the Potentials to confront Caleb without knowing more, and she ignored them. And that got a whole lot of them injured. At least two of them dead. It was a bad call.

On the other hand, didn’t Giles keep telling her in the last episode that she needed to make these hard decisions? That she needed to think big picture, and accept that there would be losses? And now, when he advises her against action, and she makes the damn ‘hard choice’ and ‘acts like a general’ I guess it’s still her fault, huh.

I swear, nothing Buffy ever does is good for these people. And maybe that’s the point we’re making, that leadership is lonely and hard and whatever the fuck, but I’m tired and I kinda hate it.

Buffy fucked up, yes. Okay. But instead of dealing with that, instead of having an honest conversation where we can explore these things, we just vaguely hint at how this is driving a wedge between her and the rest of the group.

Thanks, I hate it.

But hey, at least Faith’s here! The way Eliza Dushku delivers this line in particular is an absolute highlight:

SPIKE:  “Not all that tension was about you. Giles was a part of a plan to kill me. For Buffy's own good.” FAITH:  “Well, that makes me feel better about me… worse about Giles...kinda shaky about you.”

The show also addresses the fact that no one told Faith about what the fuck was going on. Which… is a bit of a problem, and paints each and every character on Buffy in a pretty bad light? Willow’s whole explanation about how, well, Faith was in prison and they thought she was safe there falls pretty flat (especially since Faith was in fact attacked in prison due to this), and the characters know it. More than anything, it just feels like they all forgot about Faith, and how this whole plan of the First to murder the Slayer line affects her.

And yet, to be honest, I couldn’t help but feel like it was the writers that actually forgot? Or at the very least, thought that it was inconvenient to share this information with Faith, before both shows came to a point where they could integrate her character into the story again?

Anyway, whoever you blame this on, it’s kinda bad.

Overall, Dirty Girls is still chilling and effective, and Faith is a breath of fresh air in this final stretch of the season. I’m just not a big fan of where we’re taking Buffy’s arc here before the big finale, and that shows.

Next up: Wine mom and vodka aunt fight over the kids’ love.