imagine you write a story where Tara meets Spike, and they banter with each other and compare notes on Willow and Buffy, and it's a nice fluffy friendship fic.
Of course you would pick the combo I loathe with the burning passion of a thousand white-hot suns, sweetie. NEVER would I write those two together. EVER. But I do get your point in general, and of course I'm all about interpretation of the text within reason.
it doesn't really fit with a modern sex-positive ideology.
Right, it does fit with the theme of "Buffy's bad sex life" - which also demonstrates that Joss is thoroughly of his own time and a product of his upbringing, and not necessarily as "subversive" as he likes to think or as his fans claim he is (which came first, the chicken or the egg?) Is making Faith "go bad" right at the same time as the subtext comes very close to text accidental? Probably. Was it necessary? Maybe not. But it's there nonetheless, and I'd be untrue to myself and everyone if I pretended I don't notice this stuff. I also noticed what a great job he did with complex characters, etc.
whereas most people in fandom are probably cheering her on!
To do what? Get down with Faith or with Angel? I know I found her jumping on Angel like that like a little girl kind of gross, but Angel's reaction is genuinely funny and actually appropriate to the situation. She's almost behaving like someone who's slightly high or inebriated and her self-censoring mechanism is lowered.
To me, the Kinsey Scale is just a convenient shorthand. There's no reason it can't represent a continuum, with Buffy being a 0.9, Faith being a 3.4 and Willow being a 4.9 on the scale! :)
*giggles*
:) srlsly, that sounds a bit like the butch-femme scale - I was in a lesbian group in the '90's and it was a 1-10 thing, 1 being very femme, 5 being perfectly androgynous, and EVERYBODY wanted to be as close to that as possible like it was some holdover of the perfect lesbian-feminist ideal of gender erasure; I was a little disappointed that I was rated a 2 or 3 - and I knew damn well I'm quite femme. I wore skirts and long hair! (Adding combat boots did not make me more "butch". It's something you are or are not.)
no subject
Of course you would pick the combo I loathe with the burning passion of a thousand white-hot suns, sweetie. NEVER would I write those two together. EVER. But I do get your point in general, and of course I'm all about interpretation of the text within reason.
it doesn't really fit with a modern sex-positive ideology.
Right, it does fit with the theme of "Buffy's bad sex life" - which also demonstrates that Joss is thoroughly of his own time and a product of his upbringing, and not necessarily as "subversive" as he likes to think or as his fans claim he is (which came first, the chicken or the egg?) Is making Faith "go bad" right at the same time as the subtext comes very close to text accidental? Probably. Was it necessary? Maybe not. But it's there nonetheless, and I'd be untrue to myself and everyone if I pretended I don't notice this stuff. I also noticed what a great job he did with complex characters, etc.
whereas most people in fandom are probably cheering her on!
To do what? Get down with Faith or with Angel? I know I found her jumping on Angel like that like a little girl kind of gross, but Angel's reaction is genuinely funny and actually appropriate to the situation. She's almost behaving like someone who's slightly high or inebriated and her self-censoring mechanism is lowered.
To me, the Kinsey Scale is just a convenient shorthand. There's no reason it can't represent a continuum, with Buffy being a 0.9, Faith being a 3.4 and Willow being a 4.9 on the scale! :)
*giggles*
:) srlsly, that sounds a bit like the butch-femme scale - I was in a lesbian group in the '90's and it was a 1-10 thing, 1 being very femme, 5 being perfectly androgynous, and EVERYBODY wanted to be as close to that as possible like it was some holdover of the perfect lesbian-feminist ideal of gender erasure; I was a little disappointed that I was rated a 2 or 3 - and I knew damn well I'm quite femme. I wore skirts and long hair! (Adding combat boots did not make me more "butch". It's something you are or are not.)