Buffy The Vampire Slayer

This week

Lucy Mangan

Saturday March 13, 2004

The Guardian

It’s always fun to watch a member of officialdom dipping a tentative toe into the shallows of popular culture, particularly as no one ever sees fit to warn them of the quicksands beneath before they roll up their trousers and start splashing about. This week it was the turn of Ofsted’s head David Bell who, in a speech to mark International Women’s Day on Monday, recommended Buffy the vampire slayer as a valuable role model for girls. Let’s be clear about this. Buffy is a great TV show. It may even be one that lasts down the ages, and not just because an age is now defined by the MTV generation in terms of picoseconds. It’s fast, it’s funny, it brought Wicca lesbians into homes from Poughkeepsie to Peoria, and it gave gainful employment to David Boreanaz, despite the fact that at some point in the late 90s his neck became disconcertingly thicker than his head.

But Buffy herself as a role model is a tricky proposition. She may be an action heroine and odds-on favourite for the Dana Scully award for her ability to pursue supernatural beasts through chiaroscuro sewers in three-inch heels and still change outfits 18 times an hour, but she is also an academically underachieving, chronically underweight popsy whose preferred ambition of high-school popularity has only been thwarted by the unwanted advent of her special slayer powers. If she’s the designated aspirational figure for young women, we’re just going to end up with an awful lot of broken ankles and disillusioned schoolgirls.

Others will argue for a totally different interpretation of Buffy, of course, and that’s the trouble with your post-modern icons; they tend to carry a multiplicity of meanings, and trying to insist on one is like nailing jelly to a wall. With a rubber nail. And a tapioca hammer. A Gallic peasant woman probably knew where she stood with Joan of Arc, and Marilyn Monroe fans were pretty happy with their lot too for a while. Then Monroe got reinvented and all hell broke loose.

It makes you wonder whether the time has come to abandon the search for famous role models altogether. Frankly, if the scarcity of plausible candidates is such that the best the government’s education inspectorate can come up with to inspire the nation’s youth is a fictional, immortal denizen of SoCal, and we’re living at a time where Jordan can be lauded as a feminist triumph, it’s hard to feel that the deprivation would be unbearable.

The temptation to append a famous name to a speech, a report or a campaign is strong; celebrities are an easy shorthand and the merest mention is good for a few column inches. But proffering them as paradigms of female behaviour to girls is a dangerous business. Not because girls are girls, but because they are children, and children are impressionable beings who rarely filter the desirable elements in what is presented to them from the undesirable. Whatever the "good" parts of Buffy and her ilk, they are always obscured by the common surface message - be pretty, be thin, be shiny: be happy.

What about a less glittery alternative? We could encourage girls to focus on real-life role models; on the women succeeding all around them. Of course, they’d have to be able to see some first, which might involve a few minor societal shifts so that women could make up more than 4% of directorships, 6% of high court judges and 7% of chief constables. Closer to home, their teachers, nurses and social workers would have to be accorded some respect and remunerated accordingly, and their mothers less resoundingly traduced for every non-tabloid-approved choice they make.

And then we can enjoy Buffy for what she really is - ass-kicking entertainment.