In keeping with some of the things that I and Linda Holmes have been writing about an obsession with darkness and grit that’s become more for its own sake than it is for a larger narrative purpose, Stephen Lloyd Wilson has a good piece at Pajiba about the difference between plot complexity and moral complexity:

And even in this hair-splitting description, the language doesn’t quite work right, because complexity also has implications of plots that resemble spaghetti, which isn’t exactly right either. What we’re really trying to get at is moral complexity, not plot complexity. Difficult questions are not the same as complex ones.

In the second season of “24”, the last one I bothered watching, there’s a wonderful illustrative example. There’s the conspiracy to blow up a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles, thwarted by bravery and pluck, and for a several episode sequence all evidence points to the plot being a joint effort by several Middle Eastern governments. Planes are in the air, ambassadors are recalled, the world is on the brink. And of course Jack Bauer discovers the key evidence that reveals that the cabal was actually within the American government itself. Complex? Well that isn’t a simple plot. Dark? Well there were nukes and people dying. But morally complex?

All the air went out of the show at the exact moment of that reveal because it turned a terrible moral question of how to respond to a horrific act of war (do you drop the bomb even though the plot failed? Invade three other countries?) into a simple question. Find the bad guys. Shoot them.

I’ve been thinking of Buffy the Vampire Slayer a lot in this conversation, because it’s a show that largely eschewed physical disgustingness—the Gentlemen and their jars of hearts were about as gross as the show ever got—but had plenty of moral complexity. The fifth season of the show feels to me like a perfect example of a way to pose a range of morally complex questions that aren’t limited in stakes to avoiding violent death, and to do so without communicating those stakes through grotesquerie. Among the issues at stake: what does Buffy owe Dawn, the girl she is brainwashed to think is her sister, but who is actually a construction of ancient monks? Who is Buffy without her mother? What does it mean to parent someone? How do we handle death? How do we—or in this case, Xander and Anya—know when we’re ready to get married? When is self-sacrifice selfish, and when is it necessary? How do we handle people who are, in themselves, innocent, but who can’t help committing unspeakable evil? In the case of Spike, how do we know when someone evil has truly reformed?

There are a lot of plots in play in Buffy, but as a network show, it had a longer season to let them all flesh out—and one downside to the shorter seasons of prestige cable is that sometimes showrunners try to stick too much plot spaghetti into their fewer episodes, rather than limiting the amount of story they try to tell. And the basics of the season were fairly simple: Glory, the main Big Bad of the season, sometimes was stuck in the body of a doctor named Ben, who also happened to be treating Buffy and Dawn’s mother for cancer. The dynamic animating those elements was fairly simple: Glory looked for Dawn, the gang tried to keep her from figuring out what Dawn was, once Glory knew Dawn was the key, the gang tried to keep Glory away from her. There were variations, but the core structure was strong. Sometimes, it seems, moral complexity is actually served by plot simplicity. And as the end of the fifth season of Buffy should serve to remind us, sometimes death is most effective when it comes imbued with deep love, rather than simple brutality.

Via The Mary Sue comes the news that Buffy the Vampire Slayer (as well as Mad Men and Glee) veteran Marti Noxon has been hired by Pixar:

Joss Whedon isn’t the only Buffy alum with big things going on. Writer Marti Noxon, who’s worked on Mad Men, Grey’s Anatomy, Glee, and last year’s underrated Fright Night remake since leaving Sunnydale behind, has just been hired by Pixar to work on one of their upcoming films.

It’s unclear exactly what Noxon will be working on; Pixar currently has several films in pre-production, including a Dia de los Muertos-inspired flick and the latest from director Pete Docter (Up, Monsters, Inc.), listed on IMDB as “The Untitled Pixar Movie That Takes You Inside the Mind.” (I’m envisioning Monsters, Inc. meets Inception—I can hope, can’t I?)

Many of Pixar’s best movies have been about adult men who are unmoored from the sources of their identities, or have them challenged. In The Incredibles, Bob Parr’s been stripped of his right to work as a superhero. In Finding Nemo, Marlin feels that he’s failed to protect his family when his son Nemo is scooped up in a net, and as he journeys to find him, has to explore what and who he is without Nemo around to occupy all his attention and interest. Much of what made the introduction to Up so shattering was its demonstration of how much Carl Fredricksen built his sense of self around his wife Ellie, and how that idea deepened through disappointments like the failure of their travel plans or their inability to get pregnant, an event that would have expanded Carl’s understanding of his role. Wall-E’s encounter with Eve puts his work processing trash in a new context and gives him new things to yearn for.

The company’s made strides with young female characters, both in Brave, which did a lovely job of exploring the complicated relationship between a teenaged girl and her mother, and in the Pete Doctor movie mentioned in the article I quoted, the brain the film explores is supposed to be a girl’s. But it’s notable that both of those projects are about girls rather than adult women, who have never been so fully realized and sympathetic in a Pixar movie since we saw Elastigirl reckon with her husband’s secret-keeping and temper, and then kick into superheroine high gear to protect her family. I’ve always thought that the sixth season of Buffy, which Noxon executive produced, never quite got enough credit for its depiction of women who were in similar senses of crises about their identities. Whether Buffy was reckoning with her lack of job credentials in “Doublemeat Palace,” her lack of prestige relative to her ex-boyfriend Riley in “As You Were,” exploring a new kind of sexual relationship with Spike, or dealing with a dramatic realignment of her sense of her friendships and her sister Dawn after she was forcibly recalled from heaven, Noxon helped craft a portrait of what it means to be reconsidering every element of your identity in your twenties.

If she can identify these kinds of crises and find stories that make them universal (rather than aimed just at ladies) in the same way Pixar’s done for men who are widowed, separated from their children, or fired from their jobs, she’ll bring something special and important to the company—and to our standards for popular, high-quality entertainment. And if she can’t, that’s still something Pixar should pursue as a goal. If the company can sell audiences on the identity anxieties of a middle-aged man gone to fat, a cranky retiree, a voiceless robot, or a fish, it ought to be able to turn them out for stories about a woman.

On Friday afternoon, Gawker published a long profile of a Reddit moderator who went by Violentacrez. A Texas programmer in real life, Violentacrez has helped shape Reddit’s norms, mentoring and writing documentation for moderators, scrubbing the site for patently illegal content, but also helping establish some of its most distasteful subsections, some openly racist, and others devoted to posting and discussion of sexualized images of very young women taken or republished without their consent. It’s very, very ugly behavior, and Violentacrez, who became a Reddit star, represents the outer limit of speech Reddit will defend. Reddit subsections have responded to the profile by collectively banning links from Gawker sites. But whatever your opinion of publishing Violentacrez’s real identity, the profile and the conversation around it have furthered discussions about a range of misogynistic behaviors, from the belief that men are entitled to images of women, even those obtained invasively, to the idea that men have a more valid right to protection of their identities or to sexual gratification than women have to be free of harassment or to name harassing behavior for what it is.

In the midst of the discussion of the Gawker piece, New Yorker television critic and friend of this blog Emily Nussbaum tweeted “The whole Gawker/Reddit expose is reminding me how thoughtful & prescient Buffy Season 6 was about exactly this type of geek misogyny.” It’s a brilliant observation, and I’d take it a step further. The sixth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which the titular demon hunter and her friends find themselves harassed by three young men, Jonathan Levinson, Andrew Wells, and Warren Mears, who call themselves The Trio. These characters are each an important example of three different and damaging kinds of views men can have of women, and what toxic and tragic things can come to pass when those different worldviews are conflated and intermingled.

When we meet Jonathan Levinson, the member of the Trio who has the longest history with Buffy and her friends, he seems awfully like some of the men on Reddit and elsewhere who express profound yearning for emotional and sexual connection with women (in particular), but are afraid such connections are permanently beyond their grasp. His failed high school relationships, which take place on the periphery of Buffy’s adventures, read like a litany of stereotypical complaints about the true motivations of women. There’s the reincarnated Inca princess who wants him for his life-force rather than his person. Cordelia Chase, a popular and beautiful girl, uses him to get over her own feelings of rejection with little regard for Jonathan’s emotions. Later, he has a date to prom who apparently doesn’t last. Jonathan struggles with suicidal impulses that Buffy initially mistakes for murderousness, an indicator of his profound self-hatred. And while Jonathan recovers enough to want to live, to honor Buffy for protecting him and other students at prom, he remains profoundly alienated and insecure.
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I’ll admit that when I heard that Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics were adding a gay male slayer to the lineup, I was skeptical. I’ve always been invested in Buffy as a story specifically about what it means to be a girl and then a woman, what it means to have your strength devalued and underestimated because you’re female, and what it means to create an identity of your own within a larger cultural context that imposes its own requirements and expectations. And I worry that, rather than creating new tools that can both explore those questions, franchises tend to sequester their efforts to represent women, gay people, and people of color in narrow tranches, like DC Comics has done with the Green Lantern corps.

But as soon as Jane Espenson and Drew Greenberg, the authors of the book, explained what they were doing in an interview with Out, I started to feel a lot better. Jane put the comic on the context of her work on Husbands, particularly her co-writer, Brad Bell:

I already knew Cheeks, and he has a line in Season 1 of Husbands, that Brad [Bell] wrote, that really struck me about how Cheeks has an “exotic femininity” that’s equated with weakness. I thought, Gee, all the work we’ve done with Buffy is about being female, and how that doesn’t mean that you are lesser. It suddenly struck me: If being feminine doesn’t mean that your’e lesser, then liking guys also doesn’t mean you’re lesser. For very good reason, we’ve focused on the female empowerment part of Buffy, but I wondered, Did we leave something out? What if someone in high school is looking up to Buffy as a role model, and we’re saying: You can’t be a Slayer.

And Drew puts the comics in the context of a larger conversation about misogyny and femininity that stretches across the gay and straight communities:

I have no problem telling a story about a boy who’s always felt more comfortable identifying with what society tells him is more of a feminine role. So much crap gets heaped upon us as gay men — crap from straight people and, frankly, crap from other gay people — about how it’s important to be masculine in this world, how your value is determined by your ability to fit into masculine norms prescribed by heterosexual society and, sadly, co-opted by gay society as a way to further disenfranchise and bully those who don’t meet those norms…And those attitudes are a reflection of not just our own internalized homophobia, but of our misogyny, too, and that’s something I’ve never understood. So if this is a story that causes people to examine traditional gender roles and think of them as something more fluid, I’m thrilled.

This is a critically important point, and not just for these conversations. Sexism and calcified gender roles hurt men as much as they hurt women. Having people believe you’re strong because of your gender presentation can be empowering, but it can also deny you the opportunity to express certain emotions or have certain reactions because that would make you weak, strip you of your social capital and authority. If your gender performance and your physical sex don’t match, people will try to reconcile them. Buffy‘s core mission, it seems, is still in place. This is just a reminder of how widely it’s needed.

Jeff Parker, who writes Hulk for Marvel, reports that the book will switch focus and tell the story of Red She-Hulk, the super-powered version of Betty Ross-Banner, Bruce’s love interest. And his take on it, and on the book as an opportunity to bring in new female audiences for comics, sounds phenomenal:

I thought why not dive in with a woman lead, AND tap the very roots of Hulk? Originally he always walked the line between menace and hero. Even if Hulk liked you, that still didn’t guarantee you were safe around him once he started raging, it was like being friends with a category 4 hurricane. As the newest of the Hulks, Betty is still formative and unknown- in a perfect position to be that kind of Hulk to the world.

Though you may only know my superhero stories, I am far from someone who thinks that genre IS comics, and I know that others may fit female readers more naturally. But I don’t think we should abandon trying, because despite conventional wisdom, many do want stories about powerful women in big action- did Buffy the Vampire Slayer teach us nothing? This gender does have daydreams about throwing cars around and flattening fools with a backhand swat. The superhero model appeals to something fundamental in us- that we feel, despite appearances, we have untapped power that could break out in the right circumstances.

The HULK myth goes further- and somewhat scarier- because it acknowledges our rage. The feeling that deep inside, whether from personal history or even wilder remnants still left from our ancestors, we harbor something devastating. Feelings we have to work at constantly because in the real world, letting that out doesn’t end well. But to be Hulk is to let that wave roll right out and wash away everything in your way. If you don’t think the ladies can relate to that, you haven’t talked to any lately.

Y’all know that I absolutely adore Jennifer Walters, and have long banged the drum for a She-Hulk television show as a companion to the Marvel movies. But if I can’t have that, a feminist take on Red She-Hulk—perhaps in less fetish-wear-y costumes than in the past, folks?—makes me very, very happy indeed.

It seems obvious to me that fantasies about physical power, and fear about our rage and anger (I mean, seriously, have folks read Little Women) are not exclusive to men. But we don’t get a lot of mass culture that addresses that. Characters like Black Widow and Catwoman are often confronted with the limitations of their physical power, rather than the idea that we could go too far and do damage verbal or physical damage to both someone else and ourselves. As I wrote last week, I absolutely adore the feminism of early She-Hulk comics, and the way they demolished the idea that anger about gender discrimination makes people incoherent or overly personal, putting She-Hulk up against institutions and even powerful superheroes like Tony Stark who fundamentally misjudged her. Parker’s said on Twitter that “I think of it as a Clint Eastwood western starring her. It’s one woman against the world.” A Red She-Hulk With No Name is a pretty amazing place to start from.

Once upon a time, rumor had it we were going to get a show called Ripper that spun off Anthony Stewart Head’s character from Buffy the Vampire Slayer that would follow the former Watcher back home to England where he’d get up to a variety of supernatural skulduggery. The Buffy Season Eight and Nine comic books have seemed to have foreclosed that possibility—Angel, Buffy’s vampire-with-a-soul sometime lover did kill Giles by snapping his neck. But the Mary Sue makes it sound like a Ripper show, or even just a show with Anthony Stewart Head and magic, from Whedon might be a possibility again, this time on the BBC. The project, if it ever were to happen, actually sounds like the kind of thing that Netflix ought to be all over.

Currently, Netflix has been all over continuation of cancelled series like Arrested Development, remakes of well-regarded programs with high-priced talent attached like House of Lies, and deeply random original series like Lillyhammer, which just got renewed for a second season. It’s a combination of daring shots in the dark and utterly conservative programming. Something like a Whedon-Head reteam would let Netflix walk a middle path. The show would attract a dedicated fan base, but it would also be an original project, one that wouldn’t absolutely require hardcore membership in the Buffy or Angel fandom. It’s the kind of project that might work well with a shorter order than a network season, something that Netflix seems to be focusing on. And unlike Netflix’s other original projects, this would be one that critics actually created a buzz around. The whole project may be a pipe dream. But it would be less silly than Netflix spending even 30 seconds considering keeping Terra Nova alive.

Normally I wouldn’t do this, but Cabin in the Woods relies so much on the element of surprise, that you should not read this post if you haven’t seen it and care about being spoiled on it.

As I wrote after seeing the movie at SXSW, Cabin in the Woods, I wrote that the movie is a fantastic extension of Joss Whedon’s long-running interests in the bureaucracy of evil and the beauty of the monstrous. The work that Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford are given to do as the control room operators of the Apocalypse, the torture pornographers who happen to be humanity’s saviors, is just a delightful, funny, sensitive use of both men. And the gorgeousness of Whedon and Goddard’s monsters is something to behold—I found myself unexpectedly moved by the man with the gears embedded in his skull and the ballerina dentata that Dana and Marty encounter in the elevator.

But I was disappointed by one element of the movie, which felt to me like a bit of a regression from Buffy the Vampire Slayer: the treatment of Jules, the blonde sexpot who is the first of the characters to get killed by the murderous hillbillies the friends unwittingly unleashed in the basement. Whedon told Vulture that he sees Jules’ character as an attempt to answer some of the same questions as Buffy was:

Cabin isn’t overtly a feminist work necessarily, but it is built on the same question that built Buffy the Vampire Slayer: If you have a blonde who is perfectly nice and funny, why are you intent on her coming to a bad end? What is the purpose of the final girl, as she’s called? All these people, all the characters behave a certain way, and there is a progression of what they have to do, to allow themselves to be written off as sex fiends or druggies or bullies or complete idiots in the face of true danger, and you just don’t get in the way of that. It’s about being stereotypes versus fleshed-out people. There was never a question — the nudity had to happen, because the movie is about objectification and identification and that’s what horror is about. Drew and I were not unhappy if the hot blonde took off her shirt — hey, we thought it was a good decision! — but mixing titillation and mutilation started to become a very weird confluence. It’s not the same kind of pleasure for us. Those are two separate things. But that’s the foundation of what we knew was part of the film, and we were the most timid filmmakers ever about it.

But Jules’ character is the one that’s least-played with, the least-subverted, and the one we see suffer the longest. We learn that Dana isn’t really a virgin—she’s just the best the people orchestrating the sacrifice have to work with. Curt, the giant jock, turns out to be a pre-med smarty. Stoner Marty’s protected from the malign influences of the people manipulating them because the pot he’s smoking ends up inoculating him to the pheromones they’re pumping into the cabin, and he’s the one who figures out how to get them into the complex. (Holden doesn’t get much of a fair shake either, and it’s too bad that both of the characters of color in the movie are somewhat quiet and detached). But we don’t get a clear debunking of whatever stereotypes we’re supposed to have about Jules. Clearly, she’s being influenced by the chemicals, the heightened moonlight. But we don’t know what her base behavior is like, whether she and Curt were already sleeping together (though I assumed so) before the trip, why her actions here are surprising—when we meet her, after all, she’s bugging Dana to be less of a prude.

I asked Whedon about this at South By Southwest, where he seemed kind of irritated by the question, telling me that “I don’t think Jules comes off as dumb…We did want to be making that movie at the same time that we were talking about that movie and making images that were sexual and sometimes exploitive.” (After that line drew a lot of applause, he noted “I don’t think I’ve ever been applauded for exploitation before.”) I agree with Whedon that those things aren’t incompatible. And a movie is always going to offer less time to develop its characters and debunk simple tropes than a television show us. But I was sorry there wasn’t a little more detail in there, something that would have heightened the sense that even if, in the balance, the world isn’t worth saving, there’s some real pain in the loss. If anything, Cabin in the Woods feels like it’s coming from Willow before Xander talks her down at the end of Buffy season six, rather than Buffy herself.

Lost Girl, the Canadian fantasy series about Bo, a succubus, and the rest of the faerie world she operates in, which is headed into production on its third season and finished airing its first season on SyFy last night, has attracted comparisons to Buffy the Vampire Slayer for its progressive attitude towards sexuality and sexual orientation and its detailed magical world. It’s not quite Buffy—a story about a hot bisexual succubus who seduces people for good will never be as subversive, or as funny as a high school built over a portal to Hell and a cheerleader who battles the forces of evil. But the differences between the two shows aren’t entirely a bad thing: Buffy laid a foundation on which Lost Girl‘s building a somewhat more sexually progressive and more diverse universe.

Lost Girl represents, in television terms, a generation of forward progress from Buffy when it comes to sex. Sex is literally life-giving to Bo, rather than conflicted in the many ways it is in Buffy. While initially she operates a lot like X-Men‘s Rogue, sucking her victims dry of chi to the point of their deaths, as she becomes more confident in and knowledgeable about her status as a succubus, Bo stops draining her partners while still drawing sustenance—and joy—from sex.

Unlike Buffy, whose on-screen partners have, alternately, lost their souls, ignored her afterwards (college boys can be jerks, too), turned to vampire hookers out of a sense of inadequacy, and tried to rape her, Bo doesn’t get punished for sleeping around. When she sleeps with Dyson (Kristen Holden-Ried), the wolf-shifting fae and cop who’s her entree into the faerie world, the scenes are choreographed to be enticing, rather than a form of self-punishment, like Buffy’s first house-destroying night with Spike, her second vampire lover. Dyson may be convenient to Bo, the same thing Buffy accuses Spike of being to her, but their encounters don’t make anyone involved hate each other.

And unlike how Buffy handled Willow’s coming-out as bisexual, having her transition from attractions only to men to (on-screen, at least) attractions only to women, Lost Girl is confident enough to have Bo’s sex life reflect her stated sexual orientation. She’s capable of loving and desiring both Dyson and Lauren, the human doctor in service to the fae who Bo falls for—and of being hurt by both of them. The heterosexual and same-gender sex scenes are filmed differently, to be sure—when Bo sleeps with Dyson, it’s all dramatic lighting and multiple sexual positions, while the night she spends with Lauren is silk sheets and sweet nothings. But even if the show doesn’t quite have the courage to treat the scenes as if they’re similar, it’s progress to have a bisexual character dating people of multiple genders calmly and without comment, instead of functionally confining them to heterosexuality or homosexuality.

It’s not the only way Lost Girl is more representative than Buffy. Bo and her roommate Kenzi (a human con artist played with delightful spunk by Ksenia Solo) hang out a bar owned by “Trick” McCorrigan, a powerful fae who also happens to be played by Rick Howland, an actor with dwarfism, in what may be the only performance featuring a person of short stature on television where their dwarfism isn’t a regular and explicit plot point. The most powerful official in the fae universe, the Ash, is played by Clé Bennett, a Canadian actor of Jamaican descent. And Dyson’s partner in his day job as a cop, Hale, is also black, a nice improvement on the all-white Scooby Gang.

It’s too bad Lost Girl doesn’t quite have a mythology or psychology is rich as Buffy, but then, almost nothing on television these days does. But it’s laying down a marker for fantasy, reminding us in a world where we have diversity in our monsters and myths, it’s not so strange to have a true diversity of people.

It’s difficult to talk about The Cabin in the Woods, Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard’s much-delayed, highly mysterious horror without spoiling it altogether. And while I’m not the world’s most spoiler-averse person, I am going to hold off on discussing the film in any specific detail, though this post will affirm that certain elements are present in the movie, until it’s in theaters, and I’ll revisit it once folks have had a chance to see it. This post is spoiler-safe if you are only concerned about specific plot points. But if you don’t want to know anything about the movie whatsoever, hold off.

In very general terms, it turns out I was right that the movie is about the bureaucracy of evil. And in a lesser way, it’s a sustained exploration of another major theme in Whedon’s work: the beauty in evil.

Over the course of Whedon’s career, he’s shifted from writing purely about the people who escape from bureaucracies and started to spend more time on the people who participate in running organizations, some of whom commit significant evil in the course of their work. We see the Watchers largely from Buffy’s perspective, and the ones who are allowed to have stand-alone stories, and whose perspectives and growth we have access to, are apostates. Wesley Wyndam-Pryce is fired for incomepetence, and Rupert Giles defies the council before he is dismissed. Maggie Walsh is murdered as a direct result of her manipulation of the Initiative beyond its original parameters. Riley’s struggles against the Initiative, first as a reformer and then a flawed revolutionary, are as important an aspect of his character arc as his relationship with Buffy. He finds peace when he finds a role that suits him within the government, and that new organization becomes not just the source of his job, and his family. In Firefly and Serenity, we see the same pattern again: we see the agents of the Alliance through River Tam’s memories, or through their encounters with the crew of the ship. And the Operative is redeemed when he accepts the truth about the creation of the Reavers and calls off the agents of the Alliance.

Dollhouse, however, spends substantially more time with the agents of both the U.S. government and the Rossum Corporation, tracing the damage that they do to other people and that participation in the system does to them as well. Corporations, it seems, are self-replicating machines. And fully half of The Cabin in the Woods is spent with and told from the perspective of the movie’s bureaucrats. They get to be just as quippy as the average teenage Whedon hero or heroine, and they get to be tragic in a way that’s compromised and adult.

That’s not the only way the movie feels like it’s different in degree, if not in kind, from Whedon’s past work. It’s also got some of the best monster design in his ouvre. Whedon’s always been very good at creating novel monsters—the Mayor’s demonic form, the gods breaking through from Glory’s ritual. But often, he creates unease by implanting monstrous behavior and worldviews in extremely beautiful human forms. We’re disturbed by seeing David Boreanaz, James Marsters, or Clare Kramer behave in ways that are horrifying particularly because we’re taught to equate physical beauty with goodness. The monsters in Cabin in the Woods can, at times, be much more foreign than that. The loveliness in some of that moster design is impressive, an inverse aesthetic subversion. I found some of the monsters genuinely moving. And for someone who suffers from unusually bad nightmares and has low tolerance for horror, that’s saying something.

By now, most of you have probably heard the news: after she got black-out drunk at a party and found herself pregnant and unsure of who the father of her baby is, Buffy Summers is getting an abortion in the franchise’s Season 9 comic book extensions of the television show. I’m profoundly relieved that, in keeping with his courage about social issues in general, Buffy The Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon has been firm that Buffy will definitely go through with the procedure, rather than following the lead of so many other pop culture artifacts, which generally have a character consider abortion before deciding to keep the baby. But even more than the fact that Buffy is doing this storyline, I think these comments from Whedon in Entertainment Weekly are important:

I think strongly that teen pregnancy and young people having babies when they are not emotionally, financially, or otherwise equipped to take care of them, is kind of glorified in our media right now. You know, things like Secret Life [of an American Teenager] and Juno and Knocked Up – even if they pretend to deal with abortion, the movies don’t even say the word “abortion.” It’s something that over a third of American women are going to decide to have to do in their lives. But people are so terrified that no one will discuss the reality of it — not no one, but very few popular entertainments, even when they say they’re dealing with this issue, they don’t, and won’t. It’s frustrating to me.

I don’t think Buffy should have a baby. I don’t think Buffy can take care of a baby. I agree with Buffy. It’s a very difficult decision for her, but she made a decision that so many people make and it’s such a hot button issue with Planned Parenthood under constant threat and attack right now. A woman’s right to choose is under attack as much as it’s ever been, and that’s a terrible and dangerous thing for this country. I don’t usually get soap box-y with this, but the thing about Buffy is all she’s going through is what women go through, and what nobody making a speech, holding up a placard, or making a movie is willing to say.

This is honestly one of the messaging issues I struggle most with. I defy anyone to read Adrian Nicole Leblanc’s Random Family and think that we shouldn’t provide more support for teenaged mothers. I may find it inexplicable that a 14-year-old would want to get pregnant or that a 16- or 17-year-old would want to derail their education by having a child and raising it herself, but for the sake of that teenager’s kids, I want her to have access to plenty of WIC, subsidized daycare, and health insurance. And I think it’s repulsive that anyone thinks we should start the process of trying to prevent teenagers from getting pregnant by making it harder for their children to grow up with adequate access to food, clothing, medical care and safe child care.

But that does leave a messaging window that requires a greater precision: it’s not easy to glamorize abstinence for a mass audience, but it is possible to talk up good grades and the opportunities that college, travel, and career bring along with them. We need pop culture to stand up not just for the right to choose, but to emphasize all the adventures you can have if you finish your education and find a fulfilling job. And those adventures don’t only have to include killing vampires.