This seems to be the general Joss Whedon thread. I don’t want to clutter up any of the specific movie or show threads with this, so I guess it’s going here.
Kai Cole, Joss Whedon’s ex-wife breaks her silence.
There were times in our relationship that I was uncomfortable with the attention Joss paid other women. He always had a lot of female friends, but he told me it was because his mother raised him as a feminist, so he just liked women better. He said he admired and respected females, he didn’t lust after them. I believed him and trusted him. On the set of “Buffy,” Joss decided to have his first secret affair.
Fifteen years later, when he was done with our marriage and finally ready to tell the truth, he wrote me, “When I was running ‘Buffy,’ I was surrounded by beautiful, needy, aggressive young women. It felt like I had a disease, like something from a Greek myth. Suddenly I am a powerful producer and the world is laid out at my feet and I can’t touch it.” But he did touch it. He said he understood, “I would have to lie — or conceal some part of the truth — for the rest of my life,” but he did it anyway, hoping that first affair, “would be ENOUGH, that THEN we could move on and outlast it.”
Joss admitted that for the next decade and a half, he hid multiple affairs and a number of inappropriate emotional ones that he had with his actresses, co-workers, fans and friends, while he stayed married to me.
Until recently, Joss was still letting the illusion of our marriage stay intact. Now that it is finally public, I want to let women know that he is not who he pretends to be. I want the people who worship him to know he is human, and the organizations giving him awards for his feminist work, to think twice in the future about honoring a man who does not practice what he preaches. But no matter what happens, or how people interpret this statement, I no longer have to carry the burden of Joss’ long-term deceit and confessions. I am free.
Editor’s Note: A spokesperson for Joss Whedon provided the following response, “While this account includes inaccuracies and misrepresentations which can be harmful to their family, Joss is not commenting, out of concern for his children and out of respect for his ex-wife.”
That’s touchy. I’d say in general, it’s not incompatible with being a feminist. That said, Joss Whedon, as showrunner of Buffy and other projects, had a lot of power and having multiple affairs using that power dynamic with young hungry (as Joss says “aggressive”) women is less compatible with feminism.
On the one hand, this is a post written by an ex-wife whose divorce was the result of years of infidelity. I would expect it to be highly skewed in her favor. On the other hand, just the fact that Whedon had years of affair beginning during Buffy is going to punch a few holes in some people’s impression of him.
I’ve seen this stuff popping up in my news feed and I don’t fully understand either. If she is claiming with all that Buffy stuff and all the starlets that he used his power to manipulate them to have sex with him, that would probably fit the bill. But I can’t tell that she’s making that accusation. This stuff reads like he’s a jerk and bad husband (assuming it’s true, and I have no idea) in which case take it to divorce court I guess?
I guess you can be a feminist and treat women in your life like crap, but it’s a bit missing the point?
I don’t know if he’s a feminist or not, but what I do know is that he shouldn’t be put on a pedestal.
Indeed, I just found the “he can’t be a feminist” thing weird. Affairs are very common and I can’t really see what marriage fidelity has to do with feminism either way! Or marriage in general has to do with feminism (beyond ensuring equal rights for women in marriages).
Some men may only perceive feminism as applying negative prejudice toward them, so they might relish someone falling off his high horse. Shrug.
For me I’m more of a bottom-up change type of person, so I have to wonder if we’d have much need for an abstract -ism if men simply focused on respecting the women in their lives.
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Was watching one of my favorite movies over the weekend - the Philadelphia Story
While a roughly 70 year old line, I was reminded of it by this thread bump:
Seth Lord: What most wives fail to realize is that their husbands philandering has nothing whatever to do with them.
Tracy Lord: Then what has it to do with?
Seth Lord: A reluctance to grow old, I think. I suppose the best mainstay a man can have as he gets along in years is a daughter. The right kind of daughter.
Or women respected the women in the lives of the people they are having an affair with? Again, I simply don’t understand how cheating can be a gendered issue particularly when the rates between genders can be similar (depending on the polling e,g, yougov). Can men who have affairs with men still be feminists, since they aren’t ‘disrespecting women’?
I know it’s kind of getting away from the topic a bit, but it seems to be his ex-wife’s main angle of attack and I simply don’t understand it.
She pretty much lays out that he confessed to her that he was using his supposed feminism as a cover.
Then later, after he confessed everything, he told me, “I let myself love you. I stopped worrying about the contradiction. As a guilty man I knew the only way to hide was to act as though I were righteous. And as a husband, I wanted to be with you like we had been. I lived two lives.” When he walked out of our marriage, and was trying to make “things seem less bewildering” to help me understand how he could have lied to me for so long, he said, “In many ways I was the HEIGHT of normal, in this culture. We’re taught to be providers and companions and at the same time, to conquer and acquire — specifically sexually — and I was pulling off both!”
Despite understanding, on some level, that what he was doing was wrong, he never conceded the hypocrisy of being out in the world preaching feminist ideals, while at the same time, taking away my right to make choices for my life and my body based on the truth. He deceived me for 15 years, so he could have everything he wanted. I believed, everyone believed, that he was one of the good guys, committed to fighting for women’s rights, committed to our marriage, and to the women he worked with. But I now see how he used his relationship with me as a shield, both during and after our marriage, so no one would question his relationships with other women or scrutinize his writing as anything other than feminist.
If Kole’s account is true, then Whedon was purposefully leaning into feminism as a cover for his behavior. That’s fairly damning.
But again, it’s her blog post, so who really knows what happened?
Her argument is that because he was cheating, he can’t have meant any of the feminist things he said. That makes the assumption that anyone who cheats can’t be a feminist.
To me, the ‘righteous’ part is about hiding his infidelity from her by acting like the perfect husband, not about faking feminism. Nowhere in her writings does she actually lay out that he confessed to faking feminism as a shield, she just seems to have jumped from assumption/inference to judgement.
Anyway, I’m not sure how pretending to be feminist was meant to stop him being caught. “You’re cheating on your wife with another woman, but you’ve professed to be a feminist before so I won’t tell anyone?”. It’s just absurd, particularly if he was cheating on-set where it would be be an open secret at best.
This illustrates something I came to grips with a long time ago: to enjoy someone’s art I don’t have to enjoy how they live their life. And be careful who you put on pedestals.
We both agree on this. I don’t think having an affair means it’s impossible to honestly be a feminist.
I think her interpretation is that the close relationships he had on set (conferring with female writers, producers, actors, and mentoring them) was explained by his supposed strong feminism which acted as a cover for his affairs. To be fair to her, there have been rumors for years out there, but they were always dismissed because no one came forward to corroborate the accounts, and Joss Whedon had that reputation as a stand-up guy with strong feminist leanings. I don’t think that’s absurd at all. Society routinely dismisses rumors of infidelity based on the reputations of the people involved.
Plus, I would imagine that in her mind she was caught in a situation like politicians’ wives get snagged. His rep is being a good dude and he’s a feminist. If you’re married to him, do you publicly contradict that by telling everyone about the affairs, or do you just let it go?
And those reputations almost never include being a strong feminist! I can’t think of a single example of a public figure being a faux-feminist to cover up infidelity
His first affair was sometime around 1997 and I doubt he had any kind of a reputation for anything back then or in the following years, given tabloids had zero interest in a showrunner and the internet didn’t penetrate mainstream society.
Her letter just reads like that 5 years after the event, she is perhaps less hurt but certainly even angrier by his infidelity.
It probably doesn’t help that she’s been misdiagnosed by her psychologist.
Whoa dude! Maybe not 1997, but Whedonesque (see my post above) started in 2002 and it was the fan site for Buffy discussion. His reputation as a feminist writer/director was absolutely flowering back then.
Among who? The internet was comparatively a wasteland back then and cult status online absolutely did not penetrate into wider society. Did he hand business cards around everywhere he went, pointing out that he had a busy fansite and was a recognised feminist because he had made Buffy and written the screenplay for Titan A.E. and Toy Story? Other than that, how were all the people who saw him being close to women meant to have known he was a renowned feminist so there was nothing to question?
I giggled. I think she has a rather higher opinion of her ex husband’s importance than the rest of the world. Some B Celebrity gets a divorce after fucking around on his wife is about as far as it goes.
I know we’re never going to agree on this since you’re couching it in pretty vague terms, but there was definitely recognition that Joss Whedon was, if not an actual feminist, a pretty openly pro-female writer even by the premiere of Buffy.
Mr. Whedon’s talent for creating strong female characters was a crucial factor in having the show accepted by the WB network, which was looking to attract young viewers. After the modest success of the ‘‘Buffy’’ film, Mr. Whedon was hired to rewrite the scripts for ‘‘Speed,’’ ‘‘Twister,’’ and the forthcoming ‘‘Alien 4: Resurrection,’’ all big-budget action films with self-reliant female leads.
‘‘Buffy may grouse about it, but she has heroic instincts. I seem to be the guy for strong action women,’’ he says. ‘‘A lot of writers are just terrible when it comes to writing female characters. They forget that they are people.’’
