just saying what everyone else is

[vaznetti]

It's nice not to feel completely out of step with the fandom re: Dean and his misogynist language; as everyone has pointed out, trollprincess did the math and there's a distinct upswing in the number of times Dean and Sam use pejoratives when addressing women -- from 3 times over 22 episodes to 18 times over 16. So it's not surprising that by the time I got to the end of the season I was more or less unmoved by Dean's suffering.

What I like best, though, are the excuses for it -- which range from "blame CW!" to "that's not sexist!" to "they deserve it!" to "it's because of the fangirls!" But my absolute favorite, so far, has to be "It's all John's fault!" (cereta's whole post there is worth reading, as are the comments). Because although indeed it is theoretically possible that John was a sexist asshole, the textual evidence we have does not support it. I am so tempted to go all teal deery about this! Because sure, Missouri and Ellen (and probably Mary) would totally have put up with that.

Unless calling Kate-the-vampire "sweetheart" counts in this context, of course.

Comments

[vaznetti]

Sorry for the delay answering this comment!

If you look over the posts in trollprincess's LJ before the one I linked to, you'll see that she does include statistics for "son of a bitch," which IIRC is only used toward men or male-type monsters -- very common in S1 and S2, but seems to fall out of use in S3.

but I do believe that some of what prompted these discussions has to do with having a female Big Bad and another female character as an antagonist to the boys instead of male antagonists.

Well, I think that this is actually part of the problem. I mean, if you're going to make Lilith your Big Adversary, I think you should probably think carefully about what else you're saying about women, especially women with their own agendas, and about female sexuality. (I am presuming here that you know the story; not all viewers will, but the show's writers have in the past been pretty good about getting the occult research right, so I have to assume that they know it too.) I don't get a positive message from the combination of Ruby, Bela and Lilith here -- what I get is the message that good women know their place, and know that their place is subordinate to the men in their lives. So I don't think that the overall structure of the season can be used to excuse the languague -- I think they are both facets of the same larger problem.

[subtly-modded.livejournal.com]

Thanks for responding - I'm interested in this topic, just don't want to cause/further any wankage, so I appreciate the answer and the explanation.

I did check the post that you mentioned. I didn't see the bit about Sam and Dean being called "those assholes from Texas" in Ghostfacers, but other than that, it's an interesting distillation.

Regarding Lilith... Honestly, I don't think that she is "the" Lilith, which might color my viewpoint on the whole matter. I didn't get the same message that you did from the Ruby/Bela/Lilith thing, but I respect your views on it. In my opinion, the writing this season has been inconsistent at best, and I think that the adversaries and their actions were inconsistent and somtimes downright confusing because of it.