Once again I draw inspiration from you—yes you sociopaths, autists, and people that are otherwise an asshole in some way.

The illustrious Count Potato reminded me of a really stupid article I read…

*checks date*

…12 years ago. Whoa.

This is my review of Dogfish Head Slightly Mighty Low Cal IPA.

This is a long winded feminist rant which I will link here but I will only quote bits and pieces of it because most of the arguments are ridiculous, and nobody here has that kind of time.

So in the very second scene of the very first episode, an episode written and directed by the great feminist Joss, a white man tells a black woman to ‘shut up’ for no apparent reason. And she does shut up. And she continues to call him sir. And takes his orders, even when they are dumb orders, for the rest of the series.

The next scene we meet Kaylee, the ship’s mechanic. <- Lookee, lookee, feminist empowerment. In this scene Mal and Jayne are stowing away the cargo they just stole. Kaylee is chatting to them, happily. Jayne asks Mal to get Kaylee to stop being so cheerful. Mal replies, “Sometimes you just wanna duct tape her mouth and dump her in the hold for a month.” Yes, that is an exact quote, “Sometimes you just wanna DUCT TAPE HER MOUTH and DUMP HER IN THE HOLD FOR A MONTH.” Kaylee responds by grinning and giving Mal a kiss on the cheek and saying, “I love my Captain.”

Mal has a different relationship with each character on the ship.  Zoe and Mal go back a long time when they were fighting in a war.  He was her superior officer then and her military professionalism is a dominant part of Zoe’s character.  You might notice she was also the toughest character in the show if you weren’t so concerned about being offended.

Mal and Jayne is a different animal.  Jayne is enough of a dick that Mal’s only option in maintaining order is to be a bigger dick to Jayne.  If you ever been around a pack of dogs, it is sort of like that.

I never got how Kaylee wound up on that ship. I thought it was a running joke I missed.

So, Joss Whedon refers to rapist/fuckers who buy women as sex, as ‘eager, inexperienced but pleasingly shaped’ who ‘make love’ to women in prostitution. Obviously, ‘love’ to men like Joss Whedon, requires female powerlessness, force and coercion. Women in prostitution enjoy the experience of being bought for sex. They feel ‘motherly’ towards the men who have just treated them as property and bought them as sex.

In Joss Whedon’s future world prostituted women are powerful and respectable. They go to an Academy, to train in the arts of being a ‘Companion’. They belong to a Guild which regulates prostitution, forces women to endure yearly health tests and comes up with rules to make prostitution sound empowering for women. For example, one Guild rule is that the ‘Companion’ chooses her rapist, not the other way around.

If both parties consent, by definition it isn’t rape.  The fact she was paid further enforces consent because it implies a contract was involved.

At any rate, Inara’s apparent ‘power’ is merely a figment of Joss Whedon’s very sick imagination. In a later episode, Inara is shown to have set down three very specific rules in relation to her arrangement to hiring one of Mal’s shuttles as her base of operations. 1) No crew member, including the Captain would be allowed entrance to the shuttle without Inara’s express invitation. 2) Inara refuses to service the Captain nor anyone under his employ. And 3) the Captain cannot refer to Inara as a whore.
Mal agrees to all of these rules but he breaks every single one of them. Blatantly and deliberately. The third thing that Mal says in the first interaction between Inara and Mal is, “She’s a whore…” Does Inara stop him from calling her a whore? Nope. She just goes on smiling and being gracious. So he calls her a whore again. Lovely man this Mal is, dontcha think?

Given humans are an multi-planetary species at this point, I could argue Mal might have a strict definition for “whore” as “one who has sex in exchange for money”.  I instead will point out the obvious sexual tension between the two characters and if Inara were truly offended by that she can very well take care of herself.

There is also an entire episode where the crew of the Serenity actually defend a brothel from from by most people define as a Warlord.  He fathered a child with one of the girls there and the Madame asked Inara for help.  If Mal looked down on whores he has an odd way of showing it.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, Joss uses his own wife in this way. Expects her to clean up his emotional messes. Expects her to be there, eternally supportive, eternally subservient and grateful to him in all his manly glory. I hope the money is worth it, Mrs. Whedon. But somehow I doubt that it is. No amount of money can buy back wasted emotional resources.

[…]
Zoe, of course, is meant to be our empowered, ass-kicking sidechick. Like all sidechicks she is objectified from the get go. Her husband, Wash, talking about how he likes to watch her bathe. Let me just say now that I have never personally known of a healthy relationship between a white man and a woman of colour. I have known a black woman whose white husband would strangle and bash her while her young children watched. My white grandfather liked black women because they were ‘exotic’, and he did not, could not treat women, especially women of colour, like human beings. I grew up watching my great aunts, my aunty and my mother all treated like shit by their white husbands, the men theyloved. So you will forgive me for believing that the character, Wash, is a rapist and an abuser, particularly considering that he treats Zoe like an object and possession.

No, Wash is clearly a leaf in the wind.  I’m sorry these things happened to people close to you, the tangential experience suggests you may need to seek the assistance of a mental health professional.

 

This is an appropriate beer for discussion of an intellectual lightweight because by any measure it is a lightweight.  People like light beer for some reason but a light IPA?  It wasn’t watered down or anything but something about this didn’t feel right to me.  I don’t think it will feel right to anyone else here.  Dogfish Head Slightly Mighty Low Cal IPA:  1.5/5