meganbmoore | (no subject)

(no subject)

So, in True Blood, I understand there's a teenaged vampire who was a virgin when she was turned, and now her hymen regrows itself anytime she has sex, so she can never have sex without that pain?

If everything else I've heard about the show hadn't already convinced me I'd hate it, that would manage to turn me off it for life.

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Oh. Ew.

Dollhouse writers were jealous when they heard about it, I bet.

I will admit to loving the show, yes, but nothing can redeem that plot point for me and I was ready to throw things when it came up.

Defenses I've seen make it sound even worse.

It's worse because it flips around almost everything about her portrayal, before or since. And also because it's more than just the run-of-the-mill virginity fetishism (like you have with the protagonist), it ties up all sorts of ugly narratives and feeds off the idea that eternal youth means eternal power and virility for men, but eternal frailty and inexperience for women.

I mean sure, there are a lot of characters that I love on this show, and a lot of them exercise power and autonomy casually, as a matter of course. But this dynamic where a girl's two father figures both control her without even trying is so ugly. Especially when compared to the lead's story, it looks like she's getting punished for being a slut and "letting" herself get turned.

And I don't care if it "just makes good sense" because it doesn't. Not biologically, not story-wise and not in every other sense. It's just skeevy and foolish and wrong. There's really no defense of it.

Most defenses i've seen of it sound like trying to justify-to-self still liking something that had something bad added to it that's of the sort that fandom tells them they have to either walk away from, or justify it as being somehow ok. Which is mostly unfortunate because fandom has convinced people that they can't just say "this aspect is bad and stupid and XXX-ist but I still enjoy canon for yyy other reason" unless there's heated words of defense first.

Yup. And it's just as awful as it sounds. What makes it especially horrific is that before that point, she was one of the kindest portrayals of female sexuality that I'd ever seen on TV; she was delighted with her newfound discovery, eager to explore and completely unabashed. So, of course, she had to be punished for it.

Just to top off the queasy sundae, in the most recent episode someone calls her a 'fucking whore' and she sobs, "I know I am." When last season, she playfully told her boyfriend if she could have been a 'slut', she probably would have been.

Based on LJ comments, it's awesome because "women's sexuality used against her = awesome metaphor," and it makes dudes look good.

I wanted to 'what?' to pretty much all of those comments.

True Blood is pretty much 'queasy gender issues' Central, and that's not even touching on the race stuff. It just stung so much because I had to face that fact that, once again, what they intended when they wrote her happy sexuality was not what I got from it.

And this is just another reason why despite me liking the books for their half romance/half murder mystery plots, I'm not touching the TV series with a 10-foot pole.

Edited 2010-06-24 06:22 (UTC)

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