[1] Buffy the
Vampire Slayer and Angel have done a great deal to promote tolerance
of alternative sexualities. The two programs are especially well known for
their positive depictions of gay and lesbian sexuality. However, Buffy
and Angel have also brought about another intriguing revolution in the
representation of unorthodox sexual practices. Throughout the twelve seasons
which comprise the Buffyverse narrative, Buffy and Angel have
consistently provided positive portrayals of sadomasochism (S/M) and erotic
power exchange. In the early seasons these representations were, of necessity,
largely subtextual. As the two shows progressed, however, they began to provide
bolder, more explicit depictions of S/M. Thus the Buffyverse's discourse of
erotic power gradually moved out of the subtextual and into the realm of the
textual. As representations of erotic power exchange became more open and explicit
at the textual level, these representations became increasingly available to
the Buffyverse's audience. In the later seasons of Buffy and Angel,
the two programs did not merely depict S/M, but actually presented it as an
ethical, egalitarian way in which participants might negotiate the power
relations which are an inevitable part of their lives. Buffy and Angel
brought S/M out of the closet and normalized it. The two programs thus offered
their audiences a positive and practical model of erotic power exchange. The
Buffyverse has already secured for itself a prominent place in the history of
narrative television. By endorsing the ethical exchange of erotic power, Buffy
and Angel may earn an important place in the history of sexuality as
well.
[2]
Few television shows are as fascinated with their own subtexts as Buffy and
Angel. Both shows feature a frequently flagrant disregard for their own
master narratives. "Storyteller" (B7016), for example, emphasizes the
perspective of a character who would be considered minor on most programs,
geeky reformed "super villain" Andrew. "The Girl in
Question" (A5020) sends Angel and Spike to Italy, ostensibly on a quest
for Buffy, but quite obviously for the real purpose of permitting the
homoerotic relationship between the two male vampires to eclipse their mutual
obsession with Buffy (who, like a proper fetish object, is much discussed but
does not appear in the episode). Both shows also have a deep and abiding
interest in saying those things which cannot be said with words. Thus in
"Hush" (B4010), the characters must find ways to express themselves
in the absence of spoken language, while in "Once More, with Feeling"
(B6007), they can express their deepest feelings—but only in song. Series
creator Joss Whedon seems determined to make use of every possible form of
non-linguistic communication including, remarkably, ballet (see "Waiting
in the Wings," A3013). Since spoken dialogue is the main form of
textuality in narrative television, the effect of these experiments is to
foreground such normally subtextual elements as gesture, facial expression,
color, editing cuts and (of course!) music and choreography. (But then, Giles
warned us way back in Season Two that the subtext is rapidly becoming the text,
“Ted,” B2011.)
[3]
As several critics have noted, Buffy and Angel consistently use
their subtexts to speak about marginalized sexualities—a strategy which would
certainly seem to make sense, given the censorship regime which dominates
Anglo-American network television. Subtextual representations of erotic power
exchange appear with particular frequency on both programs. Justine
Larbalestier has recently observed that "for obvious (American prime-time
TV) reasons," Buffy stays away from explicit depictions of S/M, and
"instead there are gestures of deviance, props (chains, leather etc.) and
behaviours that suggest these activities" (211). A receptive audience can
use these gestures to create erotically radical readings of the program which
would dismay television censors (and perhaps even the show's creators). Esther
Saxey has argued persuasively that "the moments of kink in Buffy
function for a gleeful audience in similar ways to the queer recognition
moments" (203). Here we should understand "kink" to mean those
theories and practices which sanction the consensual exchange of erotic power. This
would include the practices of dominance and submission (D/S), bondage and
discipline (B/D), and sadomasochism (S/M). For Saxey, Buffy's
"moments of kink" permit an audience of viewers who might be
sympathetic to kink to ratify the existence of that powerful alternative
sexuality. Saxey is right to emphasize the importance of Buffy's kinky
moments, and she is also right to compare these to "queer recognition
moments." In general terms, "queer" refers to those readings and
representations which challenge our culture's dominant heteronormative logic. When
discussing early season Buffy's subtextual kink in particular, it
becomes necessary to use "queer" as a verb. As Wendy Pearson has observed,
when we queer certain texts, we "recognize within the texts the traces of
an alternative or dissident sexual subjectivity that may be revealed through
close and careful reading" (10). Particularly in Buffy's early
seasons, the signifiers of kink were frequently present but rarely discussed. A
kinky interpretation of Buffy was therefore available mainly to those
who were familiar with such readings in advance. In order to access that
interpretation, it was necessary to queer the text; i.e., bring out the
primarily subtextual elements of kink which were implicit in it.
[4]
This strategy—making kink available to those "in the know" by
creating moments when the kinky reading becomes possible—is also evident in
early seasons of Angel. Rhonda Wilcox and David Lavery have recently
noted that Angel "often uses the queer text method of frequent
textual games with the characters' sexual and gender roles—especially for Angel
himself" (228). The program plays similar games with other characters as
well. Stan Beeler observes that the figure of Lorne, Angel's flamboyant
anagogic demon, "is a strategy for allowing the representation of the
marginal to appear in mainstream forms of discourse; forms which would not
normally tolerate the representation of gay men without recourse to camp
humour" (89). (As Lorne said to the Groosalug,
"Well, aren't you just sneaky with the subtext?" “Benediction,”
A3021). Similarly, in both Buffy and Angel, a consistent
commitment to erotic subtext in general and kinky subtext in particular permits
the expression of ideas about erotic power which would be difficult to express
explicitly on network television. In her excellent essay, "A Vampire is
Being Beaten: DeSade Through the Looking Glass in Buffy and Angel,"
Jenny Alexander describes what she calls the "canonical subtext" of
the Buffyverse:
In the kinky register
of the Buffyverse canon the show's queer and feminist sensibilities stage and
eroticise the bodies of the tortured and dominated as almost exclusively male,
whilst positioning participating women almost exclusively on top. . . . This
canonical subtext, which plays with the eroticism of the dominatrix and her
male submissive at the juncture of a shifting late twentieth century gender,
sex and sexuality matrix, provides the psycho-geographical ground on which the
edifice of Buffyverse kink-fic is erected. ( 9)
[5]
I want to endorse, challenge and build upon Alexander's argument in several
ways. First, I wish to argue that kink is present in the Buffyverse not only at
the subtextual level (the level at which, as Alexander and Saxey have
convincingly shown, the slash fan fic community has clearly gained access to
that universe), but also at the level of the text itself. Second, I argue that
as the two series progress, subtextual kinky gestures are increasingly
supplemented, and eventually replaced, by explicit textual statements and
discussions about kink. There is an increasing normalization of kink as the
Buffyverse develops, particularly on Angel. By the final season of that
series, kink was out of the closet, and could joke about itself as such. "So
tell me. . .why do they call you Spanky?" Angel asks a mystic as he
surveys the man's rather extensive collection of paddles and slappers
(“Conviction,” A5001). (Although Angel's back is to the camera in this shot,
one assumes that he says this with a queer, rather than straight, face,
particularly in light of the fact that Angel concludes the scene by announcing
proudly that he has "no problem spanking men.") The history of kink
in the Buffyverse thus recapitulates the history of queer. Initially only
cautious subtextual readings were possible. Over time, however, the
subterranean discourse has become increasingly normalized and has even become
incorporated into the dominant discourse, to a certain extent. (In the case of
the queer discourse, this is illustrated by the popularity of programs such as Queer
as Folk, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and The L-Word.) This
historical process eventually leads to the creation of a limited but definite
space in which alternatives to the heteronormative may be discussed openly. In Buffy
and Angel, the critique of heteronormativity takes the form of an
especially effective two-pronged attack. The Buffyverse's queer discourse
undermines the hetero, while that universe's kinky discourse subverts
the normative.
[6]
So, what historical moment do Buffy and Angel occupy? Clearly,
this is a matter of some importance to queer theory. It is also a crucial
question for what I call kink theory (i.e., the theoretical discourse
surrounding the consensual exchange of erotic power). Jenny Alexander offers us
an intriguing historical reading. She argues compellingly for a historical narrative
which positions Angelus as a creation of Sade's eighteenth century, and Spike
as a creation of Masoch's nineteenth. In Alexander's "shifting late
twentieth century gender, sex and sexuality matrix" (9), it is important
that the "Sadeian patriarchal past," in which male characters
dominate women, appears only in flashbacks (18). Within such a matrix—at the
historical moment when it became possible, finally, to develop an effective
critique of patriarchy--the figure of the male masochist was clearly crucial. However,
both Buffy and Angel extend into the early twenty-first century. In
the rapidly shifting world of contemporary erotic politics, these few years
make a crucial difference. Laura Diehl hits the mark when she observes that:
queer and feminist sex
radicalism emphasizes roles in sexuality that are infinitely exchangeable and
never align statically with gender (i.e. male sadism and female masochism). These
erotics are embraced by the figure of the vampire, whose desire is ungendered
and free-floating, a force that has no sense of man/woman, in/out, top/bottom
binarisms." (47)
What Buffy and
Angel occupy, then, is a very postmodern, early twenty-first century
moment, in which there is no dominant gender identity and no privileged
position within the structure of erotic power. Within this moment, males and
females can experience sadism and masochism, as well as dominance and
submission, and the positions are always reversible. Perhaps we can call it the
Age of the Switch. And while Diehl is right to say that the vampire embraces
this remarkably free-form eroticism, vampires aren't privileged either. In the
Buffyverse, erotic power is equally available to humans.
[7]
Indeed, the Buffyverse promotes a philosophy which understands power to be an
inevitable part of all erotic relationships. Certainly every major relationship
on Buffy and Angel partakes of such power: Buffy/Spike,
Spike/Angel, Xander/Anya, Wes/Lilah. What's more, both programs sanction, at
the subtextual and textual levels, those relationships which acknowledge the
inevitability of power and strive to negotiate its expression in ethical ways. Power,
in these relationships, is understood in Foucaultian terms: it is everywhere,
which creates a paradoxical condition of perfect freedom, since power flows
through the hands of the dominated as well as through those of the dominatrix,
and since the relations of power are reversible at any time. The Buffyverse is
truly subversive, because it articulates a philosophy of kink which holds that
categories of dominance and submission, sadism and masochism exist as
possibilities within any relationship[1], and because it encourages the exploration of those
categories through the consensual, negotiated exchange of erotic power. There
is thus an ethics of kink in the Buffyverse, and it is not one which pleases
the guardians of mainstream "vanilla" culture, for it rejects the
non-consensual power exchange which is such a common feature of patriarchal
society's vanilla relationships, and advocates kink as an alternative. Small
wonder, then, that the BBC decided to "vanillafy" Buffy for
its British audience.[2] And yet by doing so, Britain's
television censors denied Buffy's British audience the ethical option of
kink. It is clear that this is a political problem. Vivien Burr is right to
protest that the BBC's editing has robbed British viewers of an opportunity for
moral education ("Buffy vs the
BBC" 12). Such editing, of course, cannot remove all kink from Buffy,
but it can drive kink back down into the subtext. Here it is more dangerous,
for the late season Buffyverse's frank and open discussions of power allow the
clear articulation of ethical principles, but the ethical status of subtextual
gestures is often unclear. Jenny Alexander finds the subtextual canon of the
Buffyverse to be kinked in ethically specific ways, away from the Sadeian
patriarchal past and towards female dominance in particular (18). Yet Buffy
is so subversive that it even kinks its own feminism. After the first few
seasons of Buffy, Joss Whedon's "take back the night" vision
(monster follows girl into dark alley, girl kicks monster's butt) was so well
established that he could begin to play with it in increasingly radical ways. "I
know you've got this whole Female Power, Take Back the Night thing, and I think
that's cute," Halfrek tells Anya late in Buffy Season Six (“Entropy,”
B6018). Sure, Halfrek's a vengeance demon, but she's a sympathetic one, and she
understands something important: the Buffyverse authorizes male power, too. Spike
has it. Even Wesley has it. So yes, the Buffyverse offers us radical images of
dominant women and submissive men. But it also gives us revolutionary
images of people whose positions within the framework of erotic power are
subject to constant change.
[8]
It would be easy to assume that these fluid, flexible, reversible power
relations are to be found only in the world of the vampire. Vivien Burr, for
example, has argued that "erotic power resides primarily in the
human/vampire relationships," and that the eroticism of these
relationships lies in their ambiguity. "Does he really love her or hate
her? Desire her or want to kill her?" ("Ambiguity and Sexuality"
353). The answer to these provocative questions is "yes." "No,
I'll save her, then I'll kill her," sings Spike (“Once More, With
Feeling,” B6007). Buffy provides us with complex, intricate
vampire-human relations whose major symbolic significance lies in the fact that
these relations model the exchange of erotic power. These relationships are
erotic precisely to the extent that they remain consensual; consent, in the
Buffyverse as in our world, is a crucial precondition for the erotic exchange
of power, and a vital boundary which separates erotic power from power's
unethical forms. Because vampire-human relations make explicit the power
dynamics which Burr (following Sartre) finds to be inherent in all erotic
relations, Burr is also able to argue that these relations "offer a more
recognizable experience of sexual relationships as they are actually lived, and
that this is an important factor in their obvious appeal to the audience"
("Ambiguity and Sexuality" 344).
[9]
So Buffy does not offer an escapist fantasy of imaginary power
relations. Instead, it provides a very real and meaningful account of the ways
in which power must inevitably flow through erotic relationships. What is more,
it offers us clear strategies by which we may confront that inevitability, deal
with it, and lead ethical lives in a world where power is omnipresent. I must
therefore challenge one of Burr's conclusions. She finds that "SM is
regularly portrayed and therefore available as a sexual story for audiences to
engage with, but it is associated only with vampire (and therefore perverted)
sexuality. It has been hived off into a vampire ghetto" ("Ambiguity
and Sexuality" 357). In the later seasons of Buffy and throughout Angel,
S/M and erotic power exchange escape from their vampire ghetto. On both
programs, kink is increasingly portrayed as a viable ethical and erotic option.
And it isn't just for vampires (and guilt-ridden Slayers) any more. By the end
of the series, even the human-human relationships—Xander and Anya, or Wesley
and Lilah—have become thoroughly kinked. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to
find a purely vanilla relationship in the Buffyverse. Buffy predicted as early
as Season One that neither she nor her friends would ever have a normal
relationship (“I Robot—You Jane,” B1008). But it is only in the later seasons
that we realize this may be a good thing. The Buffyverse systematically
obliterates the very concept of a "normal" sexuality. It provides us
with a revolutionary model of sexuality in which the explicit recognition and
ethical negotiation of power relations is the norm. Such negotiation is
presented as a precondition for the erotic. The presence of kink in the
Buffyverse's loving human-human relationships permits this model to escape the
realm of fantasy and allows kink to become an option for the audience as well. By
the end of Angel, these two series had achieved something which would
have been unthinkable in any previous historical moment. They had presented an
audience composed mainly of young people with a consistent philosophy of erotic
power. This philosophy included a sophisticated system of ethics and an
ethically informed sexual practice which corresponded quite closely to that of
the real world BDSM community.[3] Buffy
and Angel were able to bring kink out of the closet, normalize it,
demystify it, and present it as a potentially positive element of human erotic
relations. The two programs have thus made a major contribution to the theory
and practice of erotic power exchange.
I. "I Believe the Subtext Here is Rapidly Becoming Text": The
Shift from Subtextual to Textual Representations of Erotic Power
"Did We Not Put
the 'Grr' in 'Grrl'?": Will to Power
[10] Everyone in the
Buffyverse follows the path of power in one way or another, but nobody travels
further on that path than Willow. Willow's story shows us how representations
of erotic power eventually escape from the Buffyverse's subtext and enter the
realm of the textual. Buffy's best friend comes from humble beginnings. She
starts the series as a shy, fashion-challenged computer nerd. "I don't get
wild," she declares in the first Halloween episode (“Halloween,” B2006). It's
entertaining to re-read this early self-diagnosis in light of Willow's eventual
destiny ("I flayed a guy alive and tried to destroy the world,"
“Orpheus,” A4015). Clearly, Willow does get wild, and not always in a
good way. So the crucial questions are, when and how does Wild Willow emerge? We
get intimations of the erotic nature of Will's wildness when she reluctantly
dons a halter top and leather miniskirt for Halloween. "But this just
isn't me," she protests. "And that's the point," Buffy replies. Desire
is still scary in Season Two, but even so, Buffy is able to introduce her
introverted friend to the important concept of identity hacking. On Halloween
night, she can be Wild Willow (at least in theory: in practice, she
chickens out and puts a ghost costume on over the sexy outfit).
[11]
Early seasons of Buffy offer Willow
plenty
of safe opportunities for closeted S/M experimentation. When you live on a
Hellmouth, after all, you can almost always claim that you've been under the influence
of some spell or mystical possession. When Xander's love spell backfires,
Willow and every other woman in Sunnydale falls madly in lust with him
(“Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered," B2016). The problem lies in the
form of Willow's desire. When Xander is overwhelmed by his friend's unwanted
attentions, he threatens to restrain her by force if necessary. Willow informs
him that "force is OK!" The spell creates desire in all women (except
Cordy!), yet only Willow gives that desire a specifically sadomasochistic form.
This suggests that Willow is inherently kinky and that the spell has simply
brought that kink to the surface. The spell provides Buffy with a
relatively safe way to address Willow's kink. The kink is made briefly
explicit, but the device of the spell ensures that this kink is bracketed off
from the canonical text (since these acts were not performed by the "real
Willow "). When the spell is broken, Willow's kink retreats into the
subtext.
[12]
It doesn't stay there, however. Buffy's early season strategy of
allowing kink briefly out of the closet via a spell reaches its highest
expression in "The Wish" (B3009) and its sequel
"Doppelgängland" (B3016). The first of these episodes, a
multi-signifying masterpiece by Marti Noxon, concerns the fulfillment of
wishes: textually, Cordelia's wish that Buffy had never come to Sunnydale;
subtextually, Willow 's wish "to be strong Willow ." She is speaking
in the context of her recent breakup with Oz, but the fulfillment of her wish
takes an unexpected form. Cordy's wish initiates an alternate reality (the
"Wishverse") in which vamps rule Sunnydale. In a beautiful symmetry,
this world creates the conditions in which Willow may learn how to fulfill her
wish. Specifically, the Wishverse creates Vamp Willow, the polymorphously
perverse, sadomasochistic version of Willow whose explicit textual kink is
sanctioned by her status as an alternate Willow . Vamp Willow is
everything that Vanilla Willow aspires to be. She is honest about her desire.
She knows what she wants, and she initiates negotiation with Vamp Xander to get
it: "Play now?" The scene in which the two vampires drink Cordelia
together is clearly filmed as a sex scene; the vampires are making love to each
other through Cordelia's body and blood.
[13]
Vamp Willow is generally sadistic; she watches as the Master's
blood-harvesting deathtrap drains a girl, and the lust in her eyes is
positively palpable. However, her sexuality exceeds simple sadism. She shows
clear affection—even love—for Vamp Xander. Vamp Willow is also very switchy.
She ruthlessly dominates the Wishverse Angel (Vamp Xander likes to watch her
play with her "puppy"), but she submits to the Master. When Vanilla
Willow meets her vampire double in "Doppelgängland" (B3016), she
finds the experience very educational. Lorna Jowett has pointed out that
"pleasure can certainly be gained from her alternate version of Willow,
her acting out as 'bad' and as more sexy or sexual than regular Willow"
(81). However, Willow is not simply "acting out"; she is also trying
to come out. She is sexual (and kinky!); she's just having
trouble admitting it to herself. She may try to dismiss her vampire self as
"evil and. . .skanky" (B3016), but since Vamp Willow represents a
repressed desire, Vanilla Willow's revulsion confirms that desire rather than
eliminating it. Willow tries to deny kink any place in her "normal"
life: "Oh, right. Me and Oz play 'Mistress of Pain' every night"
(B3016). But this statement only encourages Buffy's friends (and the audience)
to ask "well, why not?" Oz is a werewolf, after all, which means that
vanilla relations are out of the question for at least three nights a month in
any case. Willow's friends react to the thought of Kinky Willow with disgust. Reading
this scene with later developments in mind, however, it is easy to see that
both Buffy and Xander protest far too much. As for the audience, they respond
by generating gigabytes of erotic fan fic about the "Mistress of
Pain."
[14]
So Willow witnesses the erotic power of the Wishverse. In fact, she
participates in that power. In "Doppelgängland" (B3016), Joss Whedon
directs Alyson Hannigan in an amazing performance of Vanilla Willow performing
Vampire Willow. This play—textually sanctioned as a ruse to fool Vamp Willow's
gang—continues to haunt Vanilla Will. She becomes increasingly frustrated by
the lack of kink in her life. She is genuinely upset when Spike is unable to
bite her (“The Initiative,” B4007), and she complains that "everyone's
getting spanked but me" (“The I in Team,” B4013). Willow wants out of the
closet, but it takes the tragedy and trauma of Season Five to get her there. After
Joyce's death, Tara tells Willow that the two of them can be strong. Weeping
Willow reaches for this hope: "Strong like an Amazon?" (“The Body,”
B5016). Tara replies, "Strong like an Amazon, right." Season Five
also acknowledges the exceptional nature of Willow 's strength. When Glory
sucks the sanity out of Tara , we get our first glimpse of Dark Willow. "I
owe you pain!" she cries, and makes with the bag of knives (“Tough Love,”
B5019). In the season finale, Buffy calls Willow "the strongest person
here," and points out that Willow is the only one who has ever even hurt
Glory (“The Gift,” B5022). Of course, what is remarkable about Willow 's power
is the fact that it is purely hers. She has no Slayer or vampire strength—just
a connection, as Giles later tells her, to a great power (“Lessons,” B7001).
[15]
Willow begins Season Seven terrified of that power, convinced that she cannot
use it without reverting to the Dark Willow who killed Warren and nearly
destroyed the world in the previous season. Season Seven is the moment when
Willow finally learns how to eroticize her power and how to use it safely,
sanely and consensually. As Willow learns these crucial lessons, Buffy
provides increasingly textual representations of her erotic power. "I am
the power," Willow realizes in "Conversations With Dead People"
(B7007). Willow has learned that the distinctions she was so desperately trying
to maintain between her "self" and her power are illusory. She
understands herself now as a human node within an ancient power matrix—a rather
Foucaultian perspective. Her next move is erotic, kinky and queer (again with
the Foucault!). Willow develops a relationship with Kennedy, one of the
potential Slayers. Lorna Jowett is quite right to suggest that this
relationship is eroticized by the tension which Willow 's power creates (59). Kennedy
immediately starts to eroticize Willow 's dark side: "Big, scary Willow ? That's
something I'd almost like to see" (“Showtime,” B7011). At this point,
Willow is right on the cusp. She's come out of plenty of closets in her day:
first about the witchcraft, and then "Hello? Gay now!" (“Triangle,”
B5011). She's almost ready to come out about kink. To bring Buffy back from the
dreamtime after her encounter with the Shadow Men, Willow must draw upon
Kennedy's strength. Kennedy is clearly attracted to Willow 's kinky side, and
she has consented to exchange erotic power with Willow . As a potential Slayer,
Kennedy knows something about power's erotic nature herself. And yet she is
still scared when Willow introduces pain and power into their relationship by
draining Kennedy's strength so that she can bring Buffy back. "I thought
it would be. . .I don't know, cool somehow. It just hurt," Kennedy says
(“Get it Done,” B7015).
[16]
Frightened by this glimpse of Willow 's true power, Kennedy backs off. This
gives Willow an opportunity to experiment outside of her relationship with
Kennedy. Willow takes a brief trip to L.A. , where she and Fred cast a spell
whose rituals require Fred to perform what can only be called "pony
play" (“Orpheus,” A4015). Fred trots around the lobby of Angel's hotel
ringing a small bell, while Willow gently corrects her posture and assures her
that she's making "good bells." At the end of her visit, Willow
nervously informs Fred that she's seeing someone. Clearly there is an erotic
connection between Willow and Fred. Under the ethical rules of the Buffyverse
(which correspond to those of many real world BDSM relationships), Willow may play
with Fred, while remaining sexually monogamous with Kennedy.
[17]
Her positive experience with Fred gives Willow the confidence she needs to
confront her fear (and Kennedy's). She may now continue building her erotic
relationship with the potential Slayer. By the end of the series, Willow is
able to embrace and revel in the loss of control that comes with erotic power
exchange "in a nice, wholesome, 'my girlfriend has a pierced tongue' kind
of way" (“ Chosen ,” B7022). What Willow is really experiencing here is
the loss of repression. At the conclusion of the series, Willow 's desire
is finally liberated. Confident at last that her power is erotic and beautiful,
Willow works the spell that activates the Potentials. It is Will's will which
creates the new community of Slayers. And she works that will through an act of
love. Her spell gives her an erotic connection with all of the (no
longer just potential) Slayers. The textual requirements of Buffy are
such that the program must conclude with a massive vampire-Slayer fight scene. But
we must not let this fight scene distract us from the more radical love scene
which unfolds as Willow casts her spell. This scene depicts the redemption of Willow
's power. As she casts the most powerful spell she has ever attempted, Willow
is transformed once more—but this time into White Willow. "You're a
goddess!" cries Kennedy as her lover changes before her eyes. Yet it is
clear that Willow is no more or less a goddess than any other woman who has
found the courage to embrace the erotic power which flows through her. It is
equally clear that by the end of the series, Buffy is able to provide
open, honest, textual representations of Willow 's erotic power.
"Give Me
Something to Sing About": Buffy and Spike
[18] No relationship
in the Buffyverse has generated more controversy than Buffy's kinky affair with
Spike. Thomas Hibbs has called it "the most demoralizing subplot in the
sixth season" (57). Carla Montgomery asserts that "there is
absolutely nothing healthy in this relationship other than their mutual
libidos" (154). Interestingly, however, Buffy's audience responded
very differently to Buffy's sadomasochistic interactions with Spike. The Buffy
fan community read the Buffy/Spike relationship in a far more positive light. Indeed,
Buffy's audience became so infatuated with Buffy and Spike that the
show's producers felt it necessary to write a scene in which Spike attempts to
rape Buffy, in order to dampen fan enthusiasm for this relationship (Heinecken 38). The crucial question, then, is this: why were the
show's producers so terrified by the positive fan reaction to Buffy and Spike's
sadomasochistic play? What was it about that play which was so dangerous that
the show's writers felt compelled to alter the storyline in a fairly unnatural
direction, in the hopes that viewers would not continue to endorse it? Jennifer
Crusie has argued compellingly that "the continued insistence throughout
season six that this relationship is wrong, unhealthy, symbolic of something
evil and immoral is not only inexplicable but annoying, which is probably why
so many viewers are unhappy with the direction the series takes in the sixth
season: they were reading a different metaphor than the writers intended"
("Dating Death" 94). What, then, is this metaphor, and what is its
significance to the operation of erotic power in the Buffyverse?
[19]
In her excellent queer reading of Spike, Dee Amy-Chinn argues that
"Spike's queerness becomes the source of his power, particularly of his
erotic power" (314). Her convincing analysis explains why Buffy's
producers began to fear their own creation. For Amy-Chinn, "Spike
exemplifies the breakdown of gendered binaries that underpin the heteronormative
matrix, and by his actions seeks to legitimate some of those minority sexual
practices which generate anxiety" (326). This reading suggests that the
creators of Buffy—who, despite their obvious sympathy towards kink, are
still constrained by the heteronormative cultural logic of network
television—felt they could not risk unleashing an explicit, positive portrayal
of sadomasochism upon an unsuspecting television audience. They thus found it
necessary to undermine the kink-positive reading of Buffy/Spike. But by making
this choice, the writers of Buffy (much like the BBC executives who
attempted to vanillafy the British version) were depriving their audience of a
valuable opportunity. Buffy's kink-friendly audience recognized what the
program's writers perhaps could not: kink offers its practitioners a number of
vital benefits and advantages, many of which Buffy and Spike enjoy in the
course of their relationship.
[20]
The relationship between Buffy and Spike is profoundly erotic, and this is true
from the beginning. Naturally, representations of the erotic power which flows
between the two characters are initially found at the subtextual level. Spike
initiates the relationship by bragging about the Slayers he has killed (“School
Hard,” B2003). At first, this seems like typical "Big Bad" posturing;
however, if we read this violent bravado with Buffy/Spike's subsequent S/M
relationship in mind, it starts to look more like foreplay. Of course, this
reading is available only in retrospect. If we were dealing with an ordinary
television program, it would perhaps be problematic to read the early behavior
of the characters in terms of motivations which emerged only later in the
narrative. But Buffy is no ordinary program. The show's writers have
acknowledged what Roz Kaveney calls "inadvertent foreshadowing"
("Writing the Vampire Slayer" 107). Buffy's characters are so
coherent and so realistic that they often appear to be speaking through
the writers, and this frequently occurs at an unconscious level. For example, Buffy
writer Jane Espenson has noted that Willow 's lesbianism was foreshadowed in
"Doppelgängland" (B3016). "When we started plotting the Tara arc
in Season Four," she remarks, "Joss [Whedon] said, 'Were we planning
this back then?' And even he didn't know for sure" (qtd. in Kaveney,
"Writing the Vampire Slayer" 107-8). Given Buffy's unique
scripting process, then, it may be reasonable for us to read a character's
actions in light of later developments. Certainly Buffy's critics have
been willing to read sadomasochistic motivations into Buffy's early
interactions with Spike. Thus Terry L. Spaise has identified elements of S/M in
"the physical and verbal sparring that Buffy and Spike have indulged in
over the years" (750). It's also clear that Buffy and Spike both
participate in this "sparring." In their first encounter, Buffy
promises Spike that "it's gonna hurt a lot" (“School Hard,” B2003). Buffy
has no idea, at this point, just how true that is.
[21]
Buffy/Spike follows the typical pattern of power-exchange relationships on Buffy
(i.e., it becomes increasingly explicit and textual in later seasons). Early in
Season Five, Spike has a sexual dream in which Buffy stakes him (“Out of My
Mind,” B5004). As a polymorphously perverse vampire, Spike has an easier time
incorporating unconscious desires into his conscious life than does Buffy;
thus, he is able to have sex with Harmony while fantasizing about fighting the
Slayer (“Family,” B5006). Spike and Harmony even engage in kinky vampire-Slayer
role playing, with Harmony taking on the role of Buffy in an attempt to satisfy
Spike's erotic desires (“Crush,” B5014). Here as elsewhere, the vampire
community shows a close kinship with the real world BDSM community: in both
communities, fantasy role playing is used as a safe way to fulfill desires
whose literal expression is either physically dangerous or unacceptable to the
community. (By vampire standards, the desire to get staked by a Slayer is
certainly both.) As Spike's desire becomes more explicit, Buffy becomes
increasingly aware of the nature of that desire: "I do beat him up a lot. For
Spike that's like third base" (B5014).
[22]
At this point in the narrative, it is not yet possible for Buffy to embrace openly
the erotic possibilities which Spike offers her. However, Buffy is
determined to play with those possibilities nonetheless. Warren 's
"Buffybot"—a nearly perfect robot replica of Buffy—permits this. Initially
commissioned by Spike to serve as a sex toy, the Buffybot enables some
fascinating meditations on the ethics of consent. Spike's behavioral control
chip prevents him from using violence against humans. He suspects that the chip
will not allow him to attack the extremely lifelike Buffybot: "You know I
can't bite you.” The Bot's reply is most instructive: "I think you can. I
think you can if I let you. And I want to let you" (“Intervention,”
B5018). This raises some intriguing questions. How, exactly, does Spike's chip
define "violence?" If Spike's "victim" consents to his
"attack," the chip might not activate. In short, Spike's chip may be
capable of drawing ethical distinctions between erotic power exchange and
sexual violence, based upon the principle of consent.
[23]
The Buffybot also promotes interesting interactions between the textual and the
subtextual. After Spike is nearly killed by Glory, Buffy visits him in the
guise of the Bot. "Spike!" gushes Buffy-as-Bot. "You're covered
in sexy wounds!" (“Intervention,” B5018) Textually, Buffy is trying to
ascertain if Spike has told Glory about Dawn. But because she is playing the
role of the Bot, Buffy is able to eroticize Spike's wounds. This brings her
subtextual kinky desire for Spike a bit closer to the surface, and provides
important foreshadowing for Season Six.
[24]
In the pivotal sixth season, the sadomasochism which had been implicit in the
Buffy/Spike relationship from the beginning—and which had become increasingly
explicit in Season Five—finally becomes overt. This represents a real turning
point for the series. By Season Six, subtextual representations of kink had
been fading for some time, in favor of increasingly open, honest, textual
discussions of erotic power. The time had now come for the textual to eclipse
the subtextual completely. But before the show could explicitly embrace erotic
power, it would have to complete and transcend the subtextual representation of
that power. This would clear the way for the explicit textual discussions of
erotic power which form the thematic core of Season Six.
[25]
The astonishing shift from the subtextual to the textual occurs in the
groundbreaking musical episode, "Once More, With Feeling" (B6007). Written
and directed by series creator Joss Whedon, this episode (like so many others)
is concerned with expressing those thoughts and feelings which cannot be
articulated in spoken language. In the musical episode, the characters must
express their darkest truths, including their most sincere desires—and they
must do so in song. When they sing, what had always been implicit suddenly
becomes explicit. The effect is only momentary, but the consequences are long
lasting. Once a desire is sung, it becomes available for later use at the
textual level. The songs of "Once More, With Feeling" thus permit
kink to come out of the closet in subsequent Season Six episodes.
[26]
"You know," Spike sings, "You've got a willing slave"
(“Once More, With Feeling,” B6007). Here he falls to his knees, confirming in
gesture what he has just expressed in song: that his desire for Buffy has taken
the form of a powerful submissive masochism. Perhaps Spike is so determined to
position himself on the bottom of this power relationship because he
understands how hard it is for Buffy to come out about the reciprocal
sadomasochistic desire which she certainly feels. If he makes himself into the
slave, then Buffy will become the Mistress, and power will reside (for the
moment) with her. But Spike's opening position is more complex than that, for
these are serious negotiations. He also challenges Buffy's unwillingness to
come out of the closet about her kink. "And you just love to play the
thought/That you might misbehave./But till you do I'm telling you,/Stop
visiting my grave!/And let me rest in peace!" Spike's song sends a very
clear message: Buffy has had plenty of time to consider vanilla, to experiment,
to play at kink. But it's time to grow up. If she is serious in her desire to
know the erotic side of power—as Spike suspects she is—she needs to consummate
the relationship. If not, she needs to stop teasing him. As a submissive who is
being courted by a reluctant, inexperienced dominant, Spike has every right to
present these terms.
[27]The
decision to place himself in the submissive posture shows us something
important about Spike: consent matters to him. Indeed, as Amy-Chinn points out,
"consent is critical to Spike in terms of his sexual relationships"
(323). Recognizing that Buffy has come as far as she can without actually
having kinky sex with him, Spike has created a situation in which Buffy may
either see her desire through or turn her back on it. It might appear that
Spike's decision to force Buffy's hand is coercive, but in fact he is only
revealing to her the choice which her own desire has already forced upon her:
"kinks or vanilla" (as Faith said way back in “Consequences,” B3015),
but for real this time, as a life choice. Spike's lyrics are also (not
surprisingly) performative. He is not simply presenting Buffy with a choice
between two erotic systems and two different communities. By requiring her
consent before he proceeds, he is also modeling one of those systems and one of
those communities for her.
[28]
It would be cliché (but not wrong) to identify Buffy's song as the climax of
the episode. Plucked from a peaceful death by her well-meaning but clueless
friends, Buffy can finally sing what she has so far only been able to say to
Spike: "I live in Hell/'Cause I've been expelled/From Heaven/I think I was
in Heaven/So give me something to sing about!" Buffy begins to shake her
hips seductively. As with Spike, her erotic gesture matches her song. Here
Buffy becomes uncharacteristically vulnerable, even desperate. "Please/Give
me something. . ." she begs.
[29]
At this point Buffy, under the spell of the demon Sweet, begins dancing herself
to death. Spike intervenes to save her. He sings: "Life's not a song/Life
isn't bliss/Life is just this/It's living/You'll get along/The pain that you
feel/You only can heal/By living." The negotiations are complete. Spike
has offered to teach Buffy about erotic power. She has accepted, largely out of
therapeutic need, though that will change. Spike confirms her acceptance while
simultaneously taking kink into the textual ("Life's not a song") and
out of the closet. The show concludes with one final subtextual confirmation of
Buffy and Spike's negotiations ("The curtains close on a kiss, God
knows.") Buffy then moves bravely into the textual.
[30]Only
an outbreak of magical amnesia ("Tabula Rasa," B6008) can keep Buffy
and Spike from consummating their erotic power relationship immediately; they
do so in the following episode, "Smashed" (B6009). Rhonda Wilcox has
noted that Buffy and Spike do not actually have sex until they know that he can
hurt her ("Every Night I Save You" 17). Terry Spaise has identified
this moment as marking a "shift in the power paradigm" of the
Buffy/Spike relationship, since Buffy held the dominant position in the
relationship prior to "Smashed" (B6009) (752). However, it is
important to be clear about the nature of this shift. Some critics have
mistakenly read this change as a return to politically problematic power
relations. Dawn Heinecken takes it as evidence that "men need to be
violent and able to dominate their women" (22). "When did it become
okay to hit a woman and then have sex?" demands Rachel Thompson. The
answer, of course, is: when she consents. In fact, Buffy initiates violent sex
with Spike, and participates enthusiastically.
[31]
What has really happened in "Smashed" (B6009) is that Buffy and Spike
have moved from a situation in which Buffy had all the power into a situation
of equality. The problem lay not with Buffy's vulnerability but with
Spike's. By giving Buffy all the power, he had placed himself in a very
delicate situation. He could only feel secure enough to pursue a serious S/M
relationship if the power between them were equalized. It is important to
remember here that Spike is a switch—and an accomplished one, as Amy-Chinn has
observed (316). Spike thus reflects the basic erotic orientation of the Buffyverse.
He represents a profoundly egalitarian sexuality in which dominant and
submissive relations are always reversible.
[32]
In "Smashed" (B6009), Buffy embraces this sexuality, and her
desperate gamble pays off handsomely. Buffy's affair with Spike represents her
attempt to seize control of the pain, to mold it, to find a positive way in
which she might express it. Her ultimate goal is to find her way back into the
world. Terry Spaise has pointed out that the S/M games Buffy plays with Spike
are a kind of "therapeutic exercise" which "constituted a
necessary element of Buffy's emotional restoration and ability to re-embrace
life" (761). Like many real world kinksters who have suffered abuse or
other trauma, Buffy uses kink as a way to heal. For Buffy, whose second death
was heroic and beautiful, the trauma lies not in dying but in coming back.
Kink gives her a way to return to heaven for a night, while still remaining in
this world. As such, it clearly serves a vital psychological role for Buffy. But
Spaise's analysis, while convincing, relies upon a medicalized concept of S/M.
As such, this analysis does not account for the possibility that Buffy and
Spike practice S/M not only for therapeutic purposes but also because they
enjoy it and find it satisfying.
[33]
Spike revels in his newfound knowledge of Buffy. "I know where you live
now, Slayer. I've tasted it" (“Wrecked,” B6010). Buffy has a harder time
dealing with her new kinky self. She finds it easier to have sex with Spike if
she's invisible (“Gone,” B6011), and she can't bring herself to tell her
friends about her newfound sexual identity. But Buffy soon becomes more
comfortable with Spike. "You were amazing," whispers Spike, after a
scene which "hurt in all the wrong places" and left bite marks. "You
got the job done yourself," Buffy says softly (“Dead Things,” B6013). Still,
Buffy can't accept who and what she has become. Fearing that she returned from
the grave "wrong," she has Tara check the resurrection spell which
brought her back. When Tara assures her that nothing's wrong with her, Buffy
cries "there has to be! This just can't be me, it isn't me" (B6013).
Here Buffy finally confronts the painful fact that her sexuality is radically
Other—or, in the heteronormative language of the dominant culture, that there
is something wrong with her. In this context it is perhaps significant that
Buffy first comes out to Tara, one of the program's explicitly queer
characters. Buffy is able to come out to Tara because she knows that Tara is
likely to sympathize with her predicament.
[34]
The Buffy/Spike relationship continues to grow more intense. "He's not
getting any gentler," Buffy observes (“As You Were,” B6015). Buffy tries
to end the relationship (B6015), but Spike has a hard time accepting that
decision. He becomes increasingly unstable and obsessive. In the highly
disturbing episode "Seeing Red" (B6019), Spike expresses his
obsession: "Great love is wild and passionate and dangerous. It burns and
consumes." Indeed it does, for this episode culminates in Spike's attempt
to rape Buffy. What is most striking about this scene is how profoundly
different it is from Buffy and Spike's initial sex scene in "Smashed"
(B6009), and from all their subsequent consensual scenes. Those scenes were
filmed erotically, with appropriate music and low lighting. By way of contrast,
the rape scene in "Seeing Red" is lit with painful brilliance
(Wilcox, Why Buffy Matters 35), and
executive producer Marti Noxon decided to use no music in it at all because, as
scriptwriter Steven S. De Knight says, "we wanted it not to have any
fantasy element, to be nasty and violent" (qtd. in Kaveney, "Writing
the Vampire Slayer" 127). Certainly the result is very unsettling. Spike's
attempted rape is an egregious violation of Buffy, and the decision by the
show's producers to include it might appear to be an equally egregious
violation of the caring and consensual S/M relationship which Buffy and Spike
had been on the verge of developing. But a more charitable reading is possible:
frightened by the deafening cheers of the fan community as Buffy and Spike came
out of the closet in the course of Season Six, Buffy's writers retreated once
more to the subtextual. Spike's attempted rape is one of the most clearly wrong
things that happens on the entire program. By filming it in such a uniquely
disconcerting way, Buffy's creators were able to show, discreetly, that what
Buffy and Spike had done before was not wrong. Furthermore, the heavy
subtextual distinction between this rape and the previous scenes of erotic
power exchange draws attention to the major difference between the two:
consent. When Spike ignores Buffy's "safe word," play becomes rape.
By highlighting the vital distinction between the two, "Seeing Red's"
subtextual cues actually endorse the ethical values of the BDSM community.
[35]
It is also vital to remember that although "Seeing Red" (B6019) marks
the end of Spike and Buffy's sexual relationship, it is by no means the
end of their erotic relationship. The rape was empty of ethics and erotics,
and Spike knows it. He is so dismayed by what he has done that he goes to
Africa and tortures a soul into himself. He returns in Season Seven a new man,
but some things haven’t changed. Spike's still all about the pain. He has a
soul again, and "all it does is burn" (“Beneath You,” B7002). And of
course, he still likes to see Buffy on top. "Make it tighter," he
says when Buffy, who fears he might be killing again, binds him to a chair
(“Never Leave Me,” B7009). But what's really interesting is the way that Buffy
treats Spike when she has him chained up in her basement. Buffy cares for
Spike, gently washing the blood from his wounded face. Buffy is very much the
loving Mistress here. Spike's attempted rape was profoundly wrong, but he has
done everything in his power to make amends, and Buffy has begun to forgive
him. She knows that he is not responsible for his current violence, since he's
being controlled by the First. And so she can be tender with him, even
intimate.
[36]
This new intimacy culminates in the remarkable love scene in
"Touched" (B7020). The night before an apocalypse is traditionally a
very erotic time in the Buffyverse, but this beautiful montage of intercut sex
scenes takes that tradition to new heights. Faith and Robin Wood have steamy
interracial sex, while Willow and Kennedy have pierced-tongue lesbian sex: the
scene is relentlessly queer. And what are Buffy and Spike doing while all this
is going on? She is sleeping peacefully, fully clothed, in his arms. The
Buffy/Spike scene is not at all sexual, but it is stunningly erotic. Indeed, it
has the feeling of the time beyond the scene, the "after care" time. Buffy
feels safe with Spike once again. Just as she cared for him in the basement, he
spends the night looking after her. The next day, Spike calls this the best
night of his life, and when he asks Buffy if she was there with him, she
assures him that she was, and speaks of the strength he gave her (“End of
Days,” B7021). Their encounters throughout the brief remainder of the series remain
tender and respectful. I must therefore challenge Justine Larbalestier's claim
that Buffy and Spike's relationship "can't work," and that Buffy's
night of having Spike hold her is simply "masochistic" (in, one
presumes, a bad way) (216-17). The relationship does work. It gives them both
what they need. What Buffy needed before going off to save the world was a
night when she could be vulnerable, submissive, and safe. Spike needed to be
caring, protective, gently dominant. So they did what they've always done. They
switched into the necessary configurations and satisfied their mutual erotic
needs. The fact that there is no sex here is irrelevant. There is power and
there is love.
II. "It.
. .Turns the TV into a Two-way Conduit with Direct Access to the Viewer!":
Representations of Erotic Power become Increasingly Available to the Audience
"That's Why Our
Kind Make Such Good Dollies": Vampire Kink in the
Buffyverse
[37] Vivien Burr has
argued that:
vampire relationships
are sadistic and explicitly SM, with violence as a sexual appetizer. But this
sexuality is not really being offered to us as a viable choice; it is something
only (bad) vampires do. The portrayal of vampire sexuality is therefore a covert
confirmation of traditional sexual ideals and mores. ("Ambiguity and
Sexuality" 351)
But this reading is
mistaken, in much the same way that Buffy is mistaken when she assumes one
cannot love without a soul. "Oh, we can, you know," Drusilla assures
her. "We can love quite well. If not wisely" (“Crush,” B5014). Dru
may be crazy, but she also happens to be quite honest about matters of love and
power. Jennifer Stoy correctly describes Darla, Angelus, Spike and Drusilla as
"a compelling vision of just how perverse a loving family can be"
(226). I would only add that these vampires also show us how loving a perverse
family can be. In the Buffyverse, vampire play is highly erotic, and frequently
occurs within the framework of compassionate, caring power relations, some of
which last for centuries.
[38]
Darla and Angelus, for example, played mind games for over a century (“The
Trial,” A2009). Sure, he killed her, but she's over that (“First Impressions,”
A2003). In the Buffyverse, death is forgivable and frequently erotic; thus, the
resurrected human Darla begs Angel for the bite (“Darla,” A2007, “The Trial,”
A2009). At the textual level, Darla does this because she is dying of syphilis,
but Darla desires more than mere eternal life. Why else would she tie Angel
down and make him watch while she nurses blood from Drusilla (A2009)? Apparently
this has the desired effect on Angel, who beats Darla senseless before having
sex with her in "Reprise" (A2015). The immediate text calls this
Angel's moral low point, but the long-term text says otherwise. Yes, their sex
was violent, but they both wanted it, and this act initiates Darla's miraculous
pregnancy. Darla stakes herself so that her child can be born (“Lullaby,”
A3009). Angel names the boy Connor and loves him through the remainder of the
series. Darla and Angel share a perverse love, to be sure, but it is a kind of
love nonetheless.
[39]
Darla and Angel play hard. In general, vampires play much harder than humans. Since
they're practically indestructible, play which would be edgy or impossible for
humans is standard for vampires. Vampires like to drink each other's blood
(“Untouched,” A2004). The more exotic (and exciting) forms of vampire play
involve those few things which can kill vampires. Vampires are fond of holy
water play, for example (“ Reunion ,” B2010): in small doses, holy water is
extremely painful without being lethal. They also enjoy sunlight play
(“Destiny,” A5008; an elegant but non-consensual example can be seen in “In the
Dark,” A1003). You can even stake a vampire, as long as she's wearing the Gem
of Amarra when you do it (“The Harsh Light of Day,” B4003). But the most potent
form of vampire play involves that thing which is most deadly to vampires: a
Slayer. Spike and Drusilla show us that "the blood of a Slayer is a
powerful aphrodisiac" (“Fool for Love,” B5007). Surely Slayer blood is so
exciting because getting it is so dangerous. As with human kink, vampire kink
derives much of its excitement from the element of risk. Since vampires in the
Buffyverse have been known to come back to life after being staked or immolated
in a pillar of fire, the level of acceptable risk is remarkably high.
[40]
But vamps aren't just about the play. The erotic exchange of power is equally
important to them. After Dru dumps Spike, he returns to Sunnydale, where he has
a bit of an epiphany and decides to "find her, wherever she is, tie her
up, torture her until she likes me again. Love's a funny thing" (“Lovers
Walk,” B3008). Here's the really funny part: this is a perfectly sensible way
to negotiate with a crazy sadomasochistic vampire. When Drusilla returns in
"Crush" (B5014), she once again acts as Spike's Mistress. She tells
him he can overcome his chip. When he complains about the searing pain, she
tells him it's all in his head: "It tells you you're not a bad dog, but
you are." Spike can take the pain for Mistress. The only problem is, he's
taking pain for a new Mistress now: Buffy.
[41]
All of the Buffyverse's vampire relationships emphasize power, but none do so
more effectively than Spike/Angel. Roz Kaveney has correctly noted that
"the homoeroticism that many fans have always seen in the relationship…is
at the very least closely related to…[the] power dynamic between them"
("A Sense of the Ending" 63). And Spike asks, "how’s that for a
perversion?" (“In the Dark,” A1003. In the text, Spike is speaking about
Angel's love for Buffy; in the subtext, Spike and another male vampire are
preparing to torture Angel's bound body.) Season Five of Angel reveals
to us the deep history of Spike/Angel, and thus makes textual the longstanding
subtextual power dynamic between them. They began as William/Angelus. Upon
meeting William (freshly sired by Drusilla), Angelus immediately thrusts
William's arm into the sunlight (“Destiny,” A5008). As he holds his own arm
into the searing sunlight, Angelus admits that lately he has begun to wonder
what it would be like "to share the slaughter of innocents with another
man. Don't think that makes me some kind of a deviant, hmm? Do you?" Clearly
William does not, for he thrusts his own arm into the agonizing light once
more, in proper masochistic fashion. These direct, physical negotiations
establish this relationship as one of consensual power exchange from the
beginning. How intimate is that relationship? Well, there was that
one. . . (“Power Play,” A5021). But again, it's not about sex, it's
about power. Today Spike and Angel are both nominally straight (in a queer,
identical all-black wardrobe kind of way). And yet they fall all over themselves
to see who gets to drink from the cup of perpetual torment (“Destiny,” A5008). Sure,
they say it's all about the prophecy, but that's just a lot of Shanshu: it's
clearly a form of play. "Here we are, then," Spike says with
masochistic glee. "Two vampire heroes, competing to wet our whistle with a
drink of light, refreshing torment." And even if Spike and Angel don't
play like they used to, they can still keep each other company as they dash off
to Italy in pursuit of their mutual Slayer fetish (“The Girl in Question,”
A5020). By the end of Angel, Spike and Angel can almost be honest about
what they are: two longstanding members of a kinky vampire community who have
always shared power and pain and who, despite their constant textual sniping,
clearly need each other and clearly satisfy one another's mutual erotic needs.
"Pervert!/Other
Pervert!": Human Kink in the Buffyverse
[42] The explicit
kinkiness of the Buffyverse's vampire community should not distract us from the
fact that everyone in the Buffyverse is kinky. Kink cannot remain safely
contained within the "vampire ghetto." Nor is it the sole province of
Slayers, who at least have the excuse that they must develop intimate relations
with death if they are to do their job properly. In the Buffyverse,
"normal" humans are every bit as kinky as vampires and demonically
powered Slayers. Since their power relations are constrained by their relative
physical fragility, human expressions of kink are often less dramatic than
those of vampires or Slayers. Yet all of these power relations have one crucial
thing in common: in the Buffyverse, human relations of erotic power, like their
vampire and Slayer counterparts, are consistently portrayed as consensual,
caring and compassionate. The Buffyverse thus presents erotic power exchange
not simply as an interesting illicit perversion of the inhuman and the
superhuman, but as a realistic ethical and erotic option for actual human
beings. Since these are precisely the sorts of people who make up the
kink-friendly audience of Buffy and Angel, this may turn out to
be the Buffyverse's most radical move.
[43]
"Why couldn't Giles have shackles like any self respecting bachelor?"
wonders Xander (“Living Conditions,” B4002). Giles may not have shackles, but
he and Joyce don't hesitate to use handcuffs on top of a cop car (twice!)—and
it's not just the band candy, because the band candy doesn't make anybody do
anything that they weren't already thinking about doing. "Never
tell me," Buffy tells Joyce—the one thing harder than coming out to your
parents is facing the possibility that your parents might come out to you
(“Band Candy,” B3006).
[44]
Besides, Xander's a fine one to talk. His casual dating partners include a
giant praying mantis, an Inca mummy girl, Faith (!), and an evil sorceress who
tries to sacrifice him to open the seal of Danthazar. The erotic interests of
these girls can hardly be called vanilla; in fact, the full consummation of any
of these liaisons would have resulted in Xander's untimely death. Xander's serious
dating choices are only slightly more safe and sane; they differ from his
casual dates mainly in that they are consensual. There's Cordelia. Her erotic
relationship with Xander is based initially upon their mutual dislike. Plus, as
Cordelia notes, "we kept being put in these life or death situations, and
that's always all sexy and stuff" (“Doppelgängland,” B3016). It turns out
that ordinary humans find death erotically exciting too. Small wonder that
Cordelia considers dressing up like a Slayer and putting a stake to Xander's
throat (“Faith, Hope, and Trick,” B3003). (Xander: "Please, God, don't let
that be sarcasm.")
[45]
And then there's Anya. Anya is the love of Xander's life; his erotic
relationship with her is by far his most serious. Anya also happens to be
openly, outrageously, unapologetically kinky. Esther Saxey is quite right to
argue that "the only couple to engage in kink unproblematically are Xander
and Anya, and significantly this is in the most entirely committed couple
relationship the show offers" (206). We know that Xander and Anya have
enjoyed spanking (“The I in Team,” B4013), and she's been known to bite his ass
(“Sleeper,” B7008). We assume that he knows about "tying someone up for
sexy, funky fun" (“First Date,” B7014) from his time with Anya, and when
he and Anya have their "last" sex, they both think "it's too bad
Buffy took Spike's chains down" (“Storyteller,” B7016). But that's all
just play. Xander and Anya are serious. After Joyce's death—a very serious,
very real death, not the temporary kind you usually find in the Buffyverse—Anya
gets philosophical about death and sex. "She got me thinking, about how
people die all the time and how they get born too and how you kinda need one so
that you can have the other. And when I think about it that way it makes death
a little less sad, sex a little more exciting" (“Forever,” B5017). Cordelia
may have found the threat of death titillating, but Anya really gets the
sex/death connection.
[46]
Anya is one of the program's most reliably honest characters. Her relationship
with Xander features an astonishing amount of open, direct negotiation. This is
partly due to the fact that Anya is "newly human and strangely
literal" (“Into the Woods, B5010). As a result, she says what she wants,
in no uncertain terms, from the beginning: "Sexual intercourse. I've said
it like a dozen times" (“The Harsh Light of Day,” B4003). Xander, who has
been badly used by women (and demons) who do not acknowledge the importance of
negotiation, finds this oddly refreshing. "And the amazing thing. . .still
more romantic than Faith" (B4003). Yes, she's romantic, and resourceful,
too. When the Gentlemen render Sunnydale speechless in "Hush"
(B4010), Anya and Xander communicate more effectively than most of the
Scoobies. When Xander thinks Spike has attacked Anya, he beats the vampire
silly. Xander discovers that his lover is OK, and the two kiss passionately. Delighted
to see how much he cares about her, Anya makes a circle with her thumb and
forefinger and thrusts the index finger of her opposite hand in and out of the
circle repeatedly. Her lack of subtlety disgusts the other Scoobies, but it's
the right move for the circumstances. Their negotiations complete, Anya and
Xander move to off-screen bliss, and their relationship advances. Though it may
be taboo in vanilla circles, Anya's blunt honesty teaches Xander how to
negotiate. The two may bring each other plenty of pain, but they do it
consensually. And even though Xander eventually leaves her at the altar, he
loves her to the end of her life and beyond. Like Buffy/Spike, the Xander/Anya
relationship "ends" in a formal textual sense in Season Six, but
remains erotic, and specifically kinky, through Season Seven. Xander and Anya
play "good cop/bad cop" when they interrogate Andrew (“Never Leave
Me,” B7009)—a scene of potentially sterile "political" torture,
except for the fact that Andrew is in many ways a willing participant (Andrew
later calls Anya "the perfect woman," “End of Days,” B7021). Anya
develops a taste for multi-partner scenes; shortly after the original
interrogation, she and Dawn (!) co-top Andrew (“Bring on the Night,” B7010). Xander
and Anya may have "broken up" in vanilla terms, but their Season
Seven relationship has the structure of many committed kink relationships:
sexually, they are basically monogamous, though they do play with others.
[47]
Meanwhile on Angel, Wesley Wyndam-Pryce is showing us that erotic power
isn't just for Xander. On Buffy he was insufferably effete, but on Angel
he's a whole new Wesley. We've known since “Over the Rainbow” (A2020) that
Wesley has handcuffs he doesn't want to tell anyone about. But it's Dark Wesley
who comes out of the closet. At the end of Season Three, Dark Wes takes up with
Lilah Morgan, the seductive evil attorney. Lilah is unsurprisingly kinky. Like
many professionals, she switches her toppy professional persona for a
submissive one in the bedroom. She seduces Wes by asking him what it was like
when Justine cut his throat. By way of reply, Wes grabs Lilah's throat.
"You terribly anxious to find out?" (“Tomorrow,” A3022). The
punchline is that yes, she is anxious to find out. These intense
negotiations land Wes and Lilah immediately in bed; she brags that she has
experienced several "little deaths." Season Four opens with a bang.
Wes and Lilah are shown in bed again, but what is much more urgent is the
revelation which viewers receive after Lilah leaves: Dark Wes has a girl in a
cage, and her name is Justine. Season Four of Angel (which corresponds
to Season Seven of Buffy) represents a late Buffyverse narrative moment.
The kink is textual; the Sadeian system is expressed in its own terms and with
its own name intact. Dark Wes has no concern whatsoever for Justine; she is, at
most, an animal to him. (He also claims, at this point, to have no feelings for
Lilah, though this is belied by affectionate subtextual gestures and his later
textual affection for her.) Dark Wes experiments with the Sadeian system of
ethics and finds that this system, with its utter lack of interest in consent,
lacks eros. He releases Justine. His experimentation immediately resumes (this
time with Lilah) in a consensual, erotic mode. Lilah positions herself on the
bottom: "Shut up, Lilah./Make me!" (“Ground State,” A4002) She thus
offers him a consensual alternative to his ethically problematic use of
Justine. In fact, Lilah turns out to be remarkably service-oriented. She has
phone sex with Wes, and he is firmly in dominant mode: he orders her to take
her panties off while she's in a meeting (“The House Always Wins,” A4003). She
even impersonates Fred to give Wes his ultimate Texas schoolgirl
fantasy (“Apocalypse, Nowish,” A4007). She teaches Wes how to play safely,
sanely and consensually—for somebody who's "evil," she actually gives
him a tremendous boon. Does he understand this? He is the first to refer to
their "relationship," thus losing his one dollar bet with Lilah
(“Slouching toward Bethlehem ,” A4004). When evil Cordy kills Lilah, Angelus
drinks from the corpse. Thinking that Angelus killed her, Wes must decapitate
Lilah, lest she rise as a vampire. As he prepares to sever her head, she (or
her ghost) begins to speak in his mind. She reminds him about the dollar bet
and says "you knew how I felt" (“Salvage,” A4013). If this ghost is
more than a figment of Wes's grief-stricken imagination, then the relationship
was as important to her as it was to him. When Wes tells her he's sorry, she
tries to lift that burden from him: "Oh, Wes, we don't have that word in
our vocabulary. Not people like you and—" But there is no longer a
"me" to complete that sentence, and so Wes's axe comes down. Of
course, no one is ever really dead in the Buffyverse. Lilah's still around
("standard perpetuity clause," “Home,” A4022), and even though she
doesn't appear after Season Four, she has made her mark. Wes has learned
something about power; thanks to Lilah, he has completely redefined his concept
of the erotic. "It's not always about holding hands," he tells Fred
(“Players,” A4016), in a futile attempt to explain what he and Lilah had
shared. Poor little Fred will have to become an ancient blue goddess before she
really understands what he's talking about.
[48]
Wes/Lilah is part of Angel's ambitious, ongoing project to normalize
kink. Because the first three seasons of Buffy were already complete
when Angel first aired, the latter program was able to move towards much
more explicit textual depictions of erotic power. From the beginning, Angel
conveys the feeling that the Buffyverse has done about as much as it can do
with subtextual representations of kink. On Angel, kink grows up, comes
out of the closet, and begins to celebrate itself as a valid and viable erotic
system. The dualistic nature of Angel's protagonist makes it very easy
to place moments of kink in the program as a matter of course. The basic
structure of these moments is established in Season One: whenever Angel's
associates suspect that he may have reverted to Angelus, they must bind him. For
some mysterious reason, the job of chaining up Angel generally falls to
Cordelia; for some even more mysterious reason, she likes to wear leather pants
while she's doing it (“Eternity,” A1017). Tying up Angel becomes such a routine
part of life at Angel Investigations that it starts to seem tedious. Cordelia
actually complains that putting the boss into bondage has become part of her
workload: "I get to make the coffee and chain the boss to the bed. I’ve
gotta join a union" (“Expecting,” A1011). We sure aren't in Sunnydale any
more. It took Buffy and her friends seven years to come to terms with erotic
power; when they finally did, the town was destroyed. Things are different in
the City of Angel(s) . In L.A. , kink is a normal part of both home and
workplace. When Knox gives Fred a tour of the facilities at Wolfram and Hart,
the first thing he offers to show her is the dungeon (“Home,” A4022).
[49]The
introduction of kink into business life is a sure sign of its normalization. Angel
also presents erotic power exchange as a strategy by which overworked
professionals may relieve the stress and tension of their working lives. When
Angel and Groo visit a demon brothel, they find a well-dressed man shackled to
a wall. The well-meaning but clueless Groo tries to "rescue" the man.
"Groo, I think he's happy there," says the slightly less clueless
Angel. "As a slave?" replies Groo, shocked (“Couplet,” A3014). Of
course, on Groo's homeworld, the major form of slavery was always the
non-consensual, economic sort (recently abolished by Princess Cordy, “There’s
No Place Like Plrtz Glrb,” A2022). He finds it hard to understand that someone
might deliberately embrace slavery's erotic form. Yet he must face this
difficult fact. "Don't judge me," says the willing slave. In L.A. (if
not in Pylea), erotic slavery does exist, slaves may insist upon their right to
be enslaved, and high-powered professionals may turn to dominatrices as they
seek to invert the power relations which obtain in their work environments
(just as toppy attorney Lilah Morgan chose to submit to Dark Wes).
[50]
Although kink is accepted and tolerated throughout Angel's narrative,
the normalization of kink reaches its highest expression in Season Five. Here
the representations of erotic power become remarkably creative, fanciful and
elaborate. There is the demon Archduke Sebassis, who keeps a slaveboy on a
leash. This demon slave is fitted with a cork in his wrist, so that he may
bleed into a glass on command, to satisfy his master's darkest thirst (“Life of
the Party,” A5005). Blood remains a major fetish throughout Season Five, and
the show maintains a clear space for ethical blood play. As far as we can tell,
the relationship between Sebassis and his slave is consensual. (The slaveboy is
allowed to "safeword" by unhooking his chain and running away when
the Halloween party gets too heavy for him, A5005.) Angel does impose a
"no human blood" policy on Wolfram and Hart's vampire employees, but
like all moral prohibitions in the Buffyverse, this one is not absolute. When
Harmony tests positive for human blood, Fred tries to console her: "You
slipped, had some human blood. Maybe it was consensual" (“Harm’s Way,”
A5009). By this point, the idea that humans might consent to have vampires
drink their blood is a well-established concept in the Buffyverse, and it's clear
that the ethical status of such consensual blood play is very different from
that of the old-fashioned, predatory vampirism. The moral message is clear: if
Harmony or another vampire drank from a willing "victim," Angel and
company would not regard that as a major crime. (Angel himself drank
reluctantly from the willing Buffy, “Graduation Day,” B3022; Angelus drank
eagerly from the secretly willing, drugged Faith, “Release,” A4014.)
[51]
In order to get a complete sense of Angel's attitudes regarding erotic
power, however, we need to consider not just the elements of demon and vampire
kink which are clearly present in Season Five, but also the aspects of human
kink. What meaning does erotic power hold for the ordinary humans who inhabit Angel's
Los Angeles ? Angel's fifth season answers this question in no uncertain
terms, through the remarkable device of the Wolfram and Hart "holding
dimension." Season Five "Little Bad" Lindsey MacDonald spends
some time in this extra-dimensional prison; so does conflicted champion Charles
Gunn. The structure of the prison is remarkably explicit. On the surface, it is
a reductionist stereotype of suburbia, featuring rows and rows of identical
houses with identical manicured lawns. Each morning, long lines of identical
suburban husbands march out their front doors with clockwork precision,
retrieve their identical newspapers, and wave to their identical neighbors. But
in this dimension (as in real world suburbia), things are not quite as they
seem. Each day the prisoner (first Lindsey, then Gunn) is subjected to a
recurring torment. Every day his pleasant, attractive, vanilla wife sends him
into the basement on a routine chore. But the basement turns out to be a fully
equipped medieval dungeon. Here the victim has his heart ripped out of his
chest, each and every day, by what the ever-textual Spike refers to as a
"juiced-up S and M demon" (“Underneath,” A5017). The victim then
forgets this horror and returns upstairs, to live out another identical day.
[52]
The "S and M demon" is relentlessly precise and mechanical. It exists
only to torture; it is the pure essence of sadism. When Gunn begs to know why
he is being tortured ("Listen, please. . . .What did I do?" “Time
Bomb,” A5019), the demon silences him with a gesture. Here there is no why;
there is only suffering. There is thus a certain purity to this dungeon, and
that fact is not lost on its victims. After his comrades rescue him, Gunn
meditates on the nature of this strange hell: "Do you know what the worst
part of that place was? Wasn't the basement. At least there, you knew where you
stood. Demon was gonna cut your heart out and show it to you. Nah. It was the
fake life they gave you upstairs. The wife, kids, all the icing on the family
cake" (A5019). This speech is likely to produce a remarkable sense of
vertigo in the vanilla viewer (if, indeed, any such viewers remained by the end
of Angel Season Five). We must not underestimate the radically
transgressive nature of Gunn's comments. Gunn has just returned from a world whose
tidy, repressed vanilla exterior hides a profoundly kinky interior. In this
way, Wolfram and Hart's extra-dimensional suburbia resembles our own: the kink
is there, but it is deeply closeted. Because this dimension was created by an
evil law firm, the kink is non-consensual and ethically irredeemable. And yet
when Gunn returns from this hell, he does not criticize the S/M demon or its
actions. Gunn's experience has taught him something profound: the basement
is not the problem. The basement is honest. In the basement, the S/M demon
does what it was made to do, and so does the victim. The problem is the
closet, represented in this case by the fictitious vanilla life upstairs. This
life is terrifying precisely because when one is in it, one cannot identify,
articulate or discuss the elements of power which exist in every erotic
relationship. Negotiations are one-sided and purely implicit. Consent is
neither sought nor granted. "Trish," the vanilla housewife, sends
Lindsey to his fate each day by asking him to go downstairs and get a light
bulb. When he hesitates, she walks over to him, places her hand on his shoulder
significantly, and says "I kinda need it now" (“Underneath,” A5017). This
is the very model of vanilla power relations. In this scenario, Trish has all
the power; Lindsey has none. There is no open negotiation. Lindsey's consent is
assumed; there is no way for him to refuse his "wife's" command. Perhaps
worst of all, Trish sends Lindsey downstairs so that the S/M demon can provide
what she herself cannot: a frank and open scenario in which the roles are clear
and the power relations are explicit. The structure of the S/M dimension thus
mirrors that of some vanilla marriages, in which the husband turns to a
professional dominatrix or the wife retreats into online kink, since the
vanilla spouse is unable to fulfill the erotic needs of his or her partner. What
is scandalous about Angel Season Five—in a good way, from the viewpoint
of the fan and Buffy Studies communities—is precisely its critique of the power
dynamics which obtain in typical vanilla relationships.
III.
"It's About Power. Who's Got It. Who Knows How to Use It.": Kink and
the Ethical Negotiation of Power within the Slayer Community
[53] As we have seen,
early season Buffy's conversations on and around the problem of power
remained largely subtextual. Explicit statements about power in general and
erotic power in particular were relatively infrequent, and were typically made
not by Buffy but by Faith. Faith thus played a vital role in the Buffyverse's
early narrative of power. Because she was the "bad" Slayer, she was
authorized to say things which early season Buffy could not say. Faith is the
Slayer who is always honest about the erotic nature of her power. Faith thus
seizes control of the erotic potential which the Slayer's power clearly
contains. "Isn't it crazy how slaying just always makes you hungry and
horny?" Faith asks during her first appearance (“Faith, Hope, and Trick,”
B3003). Here she shows a remarkable degree of openness and honesty, considering
she has known the Scooby gang for about ten minutes at this point. Faith also
practices what she preaches. After a particularly exciting fight, Faith takes
Xander back to her motel room. She tells him that the demon "got me really
wound up. A fight like that and...no kill...I'm about ready to pop" (“The
Zeppo,” B3013). She then takes his virginity. Faith also begins to educate
Buffy about the erotic nature of Slaying: "slaying's what we were built
for. If you're not enjoying it, you're doing something wrong" (“Bad
Girls,” B3014). At this point (mid Season Three), Buffy resists Faith's
arguments; early season Buffy doesn't "get it" yet. But Faith has
planted the seeds.
[54]
This is also the moment when the ethical risks inherent in Faith's concept of
power become evident. Faith begins to view herself and Buffy as superhuman
beings, unencumbered by inconvenient systems of human ethics. She accidentally
kills a man and refuses to accept responsibility for her action. She rejects
the concept of community, and she refuses to abide by any ethical standards
other than her own, which are increasingly minimalist. Faith has another
encounter with Xander. She pretends to honor his desire and respect his limits:
"Lights on or off? Kinks or vanilla?" Xander, however, is not
interested in negotiating another scene, regardless of the level of kink
involved. He tries to continue their conversation, hoping that he can help
Faith: "I thought we had a connection." Faith insists on proceeding
with erotic power play, even though Xander has most certainly not consented to
it. "I could do anything to you right now, and you want me to. I can make
you scream. I could make you die." Faith turns to breath play—the edgiest
of the edge games—and chokes Xander into unconsciousness. Only the timely
arrival of Angel saves Xander from serious injury or death (“Consequences,”
B3015).
[55]
It is at this point that Faith abandons both the ethical and the erotic. It is
easy to assume that Faith's break with ethics occurs when she kills the deputy
mayor. However, Buffy consistently argues that acts of lethal violence
such as this are not irredeemable. (By Season Seven, Andrew could point out
that "confidentially, a lot of [Buffy's] people are murderers. Anya and
Willow and Spike" “First Date,” B7014.) The real problem here is that
Faith has turned her back on her community and its standards. In the Buffyverse
as in real world BDSM communities, the exchange of erotic power between humans
is held to be ethical if and only if it is safe, sane and consensual. The
killing of the deputy mayor was accidental; had she sought help within her
community, Faith could have recovered from that. Her assault on Xander,
however, was quite deliberate. Faith tries to justify this attack to Angel:
"The thing with Xander; I know what it looked like, but we were just
playing." Angel responds by explicitly invoking the major mechanism of
consent for sadomasochistic scenes: "And he forgot the safety word. Is
that it?" Faith's reply constitutes a seriously disturbing renunciation of
the basic standards of erotic power exchange: "Safety words are for
wusses" (“Consequences,” B3015). Here
Faith positions herself at the very margin of the margin. Her open advocacy of
erotic power has already located Faith on the fringe of erotic behavior. She is
now identifying herself as an "edge" player who need not follow the
"safe, sane and consensual" standard. The problem, however, lies in
the fact that even edge play has its own accepted standards and practices. It
is possible to play without safe words, but such edge play requires a very high
level of negotiation and informed consent. Such play typically occurs only
within the framework of well-established erotic relationships. Xander and Faith
had no such relationship. In any case, Xander lacks experience in erotic power
exchange. For Faith to take advantage of a "newbie" in
this way is entirely unacceptable, even by the standards of the "edge
play" subculture. Her non-consensual "play" is, fundamentally,
an act of rape.
[56]A full season later, Faith still
doesn't understand the ethics of kink.
In "Who Are You?" (B4016), Faith has taken possession of
Buffy's body, thanks to a magical device bequeathed to her by the late Mayor.
Faith tries to negotiate with Buffy's boyfriend, Riley: "What do you wanna
do with this body? What nasty little desire have you been itching to try out?
Am I a bad girl? Do you wanna hurt me?" Although she is wearing Buffy's
body, Faith's explicit invocation of kink convinces Riley that this is not the
Buffy he knows and loves. "What are we playing at here?" Riley
demands. "I'm Buffy," Faith insists.
"Okay. Then I'll be
Riley," he decides. Faith's reply illustrates her disturbing inability to
take no for an answer. "Well, if you don't wanna play. . ." she
huffs. "Right. I don't wanna play," Riley agrees, and gives her a
gentle kiss. When Faith initiated this scene, she made a number of unfounded
assumptions about the form of Riley's desire. It never even occurred to her
that he might not consent to her play agenda. Faith does have sex with Riley,
but it's doubtful that this (presumably vanilla) sexual encounter satisfies her
erotic needs; it seems likely that she does it mainly to hurt Buffy. As bad as
all of this is, however, it is only on Angel that we see the full
consequences of Faith's departure from the community of Slayers and its system
of ethical kink. Faith arrives in Los Angeles and falls in with Wolfram and
Hart. She captures and tortures Wesley, her former Watcher (“Five by Five,”
A1018). This represents the culmination of the trend which began with her
attempted rape of Xander. What she had proposed to do to Xander—torture him
non-consensually, for her own pleasure, and without regard to his desire or
consent—she actually does to Wesley. Here Faith enacts the ethically
irredeemable Sadeian system, in which the pleasure of the torturer is always
paramount, and the concerns of the victim irrelevant. The ethics of the
Buffyverse, however, are sadomasochistic rather than sadistic. Like real
world BDSM communities, the Slayer community incorporates the standard of
submissive consent developed by Masoch to produce ethical S/M. Of course the
non-consensual torture represents a trauma for Wesley, but what is really
interesting about this scene is the devastating impact it has on Faith. Her
complete abandonment of ethics breaks through her last psychological defenses.
By the end of "Five by Five," she is begging Angel to kill her
(A1018).
[57] Following "Restless" (Buffy's
Season Four finale, B4022), the Buffyverse's meditations about power become
increasingly explicit and textual. In "Restless," Buffy encounters
the Primal Slayer, ancient mother of the Slayer line. Buffy then wakes up—from
the dream in which the Primal Slayer appeared, and also from that dream of an
innocent world, in which representations of power remain beneath the textual
threshold. This is the moment when Buffy and Buffy get serious about
power. In the very next episode, the legendary Dracula tells Buffy that her
"power is rooted in darkness" (“Buffy vs. Dracula,” B5001). Dracula
may be evil, but he's not wrong. At the end of the episode, Buffy tells Giles
that Dracula understood her power better than she does. But her understanding
soon improves. In "Checkpoint" (B5012), Buffy confronts the Watcher's
Council, that eminently dislikeable collection of tweedy patriarchs who
controlled the Slayer line until Buffy quit working for them. The Council once
again tries to assert its authority over Buffy. The conclusion of the episode
represents a breakthrough for Buffy (and is also deeply satisfying to the
audience). Having realized that without a Slayer the Watchers are "pretty
much just watchin' Masterpiece Theater," Buffy begins to speak about power
differently. "Power. I have it. They don't. This bothers them."
[58] Having passed through the
"Checkpoint," Buffy and Buffy are in a new ethical universe.
Buffy understands that the power is hers. She is now free, in a way which she
was not before. Similarly, Buffy understands itself to be in a
discursive position from which open textual discussions of power are now
possible. In the remarkable "Get It Done" (B7015), Buffy encounters
patriarchal power once again. This time it happens through a re-enactment of
the event which created the Slayer line. Buffy returns to the dreamtime, where
she meets the ancient patriarchs who made the first Slayer. They chain her to a
rock and release tentacular demons, which quickly descend on her. The shadow
patriarchs tell her that this demon energy is her "truest strength."
To her horror, Buffy suddenly realizes that this is her origin. Her heritage
began here, with an unspeakable act of demon rape. But Buffy has already shown
that she is a different kind of Slayer from her primal ancestor, and this time
the origin story has a very different ending. Buffy says "no" to the
demon rape. "You violated that girl, made her kill for you because you're
weak, you're pathetic," she declares. She breaks her chains, and turns
those chains into a weapon which she can use against the shadow men. She
defeats them and breaks their staff. ("It's always the staff," she
points out, and the critique of phallocratic power isn't getting any less
explicit.)
[59] Buffy will not endorse the
ancient rape which made the Slayers, nor will she submit to such a violation
herself, even if it might give her more power. Jennifer Crusie is right to say
that "the creation of the Slayer was a violent sexual sacrifice to death.
. . . But the myth of Buffy the Vampire Slayer has never been the myth
of the Slayer; it's the myth of Buffy Summers, the Slayer who is
different" ("Dating Death" 95). Buffy will not participate in a
patriarchal power system; she rejects patriarchy's ancient tribal form (Shadow
Men) as well as its modern bureaucratic form (Watcher's Council). But this does
raise an important question. If Buffy rejects this coercive type of power, then
what is the source of her power? We get a hint of the answer at the end
of "Same Time, Same Place" (B7003), when Buffy shares her strength
with Willow to help Willow heal from her injuries. Buffy's power is the kind
which can (and perhaps should) be shared. This turns out to be a major theme of
Season Seven.
[60] By the late seasons of Buffy
and Angel, explicit textual discussions about power were becoming so
common that it was even possible to recuperate Faith as a positive symbol of
power's erotic potential. Faith spends some time in prison, pursuing a
redemption which mainly occurs off-screen. By the time we see her again (in Angel
Season Four), a remarkable reversal has occurred. She has returned to ethics
once again. In fact, she is now able to claim the moral high ground over Dark
Wes, whose own system of ethics has undergone considerable revision. "You
crossed it back there, Wes," she says after Wes tortures a female
informant. Wes reminds her of her own ethically problematic past: "Oh, you
have a problem with torture now? I seem to recall a time when you rather
enjoyed it" (“Release,” A4014). But Faith has confidence in her own transformation:
"Yeah, well, it's not me anymore."
[61] This remarkable transformation
eventually permits Faith to rejoin the community of Slayers. In Buffy
Season Seven, Faith joins Buffy and the potential Slayers in their fight
against the First. From the moment Faith returns to Sunnydale, she finds that
the moral categories which seemed so clear to everyone before have become
confused. "Are you the bad slayer now?" she asks Buffy. "Am I
the good slayer now?" (“Dirty Girls,” B7018). It would be more accurate to
say that Buffy has become the Slayer who is consciously aware of the operations
of power, much as Faith always was before her "fall." As for Faith,
she has returned to her community and embraced its ethics. Because she now
respects the community and its values, Faith is again permitted to play erotic
games and push erotic boundaries. In short, her kink is now authorized. And it
is authorized precisely because Faith is now articulating her views on erotic
power within the ethical framework provided to her by the Slayer community. In
a playful scene with Spike, Faith mentions that "this one guy I ran with,
he liked me to dress up like a school girl and take this friggin' bull-whip,
and I'd be like. . .?" (B7018). Faith considers "looking up" the
guy with the bullwhip. We know she won't do it, but the message is clear. She
has forsaken the non-consensual, unethical use of her power. She has returned
to the fold of ethics. She has always known that her power contains profound
erotic potential; now she understands, at last, that this potential can only be
realized if she employs it according to the ethical standards of her community.
[62] The season (and Buffy)
conclude when Buffy decides to share her power with all of the Potentials,
making every Potential into a full-fledged Slayer ("Chosen," B7022).
Here Buffy subverts its own foundational myth. "In every generation
one Slayer is born because a bunch of men who died thousands of years ago made
up that rule," Buffy declares. "They were powerful men. This woman [
Willow ] is more powerful than all of them combined. So I say we change the
rule. I say my power should be our power." Having renounced patriarchy,
Buffy is free to experiment with a new form of power, one which is based upon
community and consent. "Make your choice," she tells the Potentials.
"Are you ready to be strong?" At the end of her journey, Buffy comes
down in favor of a form of power which is consensual rather than coercive, a
type of power which is negotiated and shared. By doing so, she initiates a new
community and possibly a new race of women, much to patriarchy's dismay.
[63] Jennifer Crusie has recently
wondered why "the Good Girls Gone Bad of the Whedon Universe—the Bad
Willow, Buffy from Cleveland, Cordelia the Beastmaster and Blue Fred—always
wear too much eyeliner and dress like dominatrixes? Where's the subtext, the
humor, the subtlety?" ("Assassination of Cordelia Chase" 193).
Since Crusie draws most of her examples from the late season Buffyverse, the
answers are clear. The subtext is where it belongs, in early season Buffy,
where it retains great historical importance. The humor is still there; if
anything, it is more thoroughly present than ever. (Angel Season Five
may well be the most hilarious of the Buffyverse's twelve seasons.) The
subtlety is gone, a necessary casualty of the maturation process. After twelve
remarkable seasons, the Buffyverse has reached adulthood. Its kink is out of
the closet, and that kink has become a normal, healthy part of life. Erotic
power no longer needs to hide in the subtext. This form of power has been
emancipated at last. To be sure, this liberation represents a great boon for
those who inhabit the Buffyverse. More importantly, it represents a remarkable
historical opportunity for those who watch that universe. Buffy and Angel
have presented their audience with a practical, ethical model of erotic power
exchange. By doing so, they have authorized that audience to deploy this model
in the real world. Human erotic relations can only benefit from this
much-needed dose of honesty, openness and ethics.
A
Note About Dialogue Quotations
All dialogue quotations are taken from the excellent
Buffyverse Dialogue DataBase at http://vrya.net/bdb/index.php.
For a complete listing of all Buffy and Angel episodes, see http://vrya.net/bdb/ep.php.
The dialogue quotations which form the titles of this
essay, its sections and sub-sections are taken from the following episodes:
Anya says "Sounds like kinky business to me" in
"Storyteller" (B7016). Giles says "I believe the subtext here is
rapidly becoming text" in "Ted" (B2011). Willow says "Did
we not put the 'grr' in 'grrl'?" in "Living Conditions" (B4002).
Buffy sings "Give Me Something to Sing About" in "Once More,
With Feeling" (B6007). Fred says "It. . .turns the TV into a two-way
conduit with direct access to the viewer!" in "Smile Time"
(A5014). The First as Drusilla says "That's why our kind make such good
dollies" in "Bring On the Night" (B7010). Anya says
"Pervert!" and Xander replies "Other Pervert!" in "The
Gift" (B5022). Buffy says "It's about power. Who's got it. Who knows
how to use it" at the beginning of "Lessons" (B7001).
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[1] See Vivien Burr's Sartrean interpretation of Buffy (Burr,
"Ambiguity and Sexuality").
[2]
As Kevin Andrew Murphy has noted, the BBC considers science fiction and fantasy
to be children's viewing; as such, they are typically scheduled for the
"teatime" slot and rigorously censored (142).
[3] In the
Buffyverse as in real world kink communities, erotic activity is typically
considered ethical only if it is "safe, sane and consensual." For
more on this, see the discussion of Faith in section III below.
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