Joss Whedon

Click on the link :

http://www.whedon.info/article.php3?id_article=22187

The blog entry is titled: "Let’s watch a girl get beaten to death."

It was posted on Whedonesque.com by Joss Whedon, the TV/movie creator whose accomplishments the blog celebrates.

The creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Serenity occasionally posts on the site, as he has no blog himself, but mostly what he writes are entries and updates on his work. This time it’s something else entirely. Noting that he "snapped," he has posted an angry essay that deals with his visceral reaction to two separate, yet connected, pieces of video.

One is the cellphone-recorded "honour" killing of 17-year-old Dua Khalil in Iraq a couple of months back; the other is the trailer for Captivity, a movie starring Canadian actor Elisha Cuthbert that’s due out June 22.

Of the killing of Dua Khalil he writes: "As the girl was on the ground trying to get up, her face nothing but red, the few in the group of more than twenty men who were not busy kicking her and hurling stones at her were filming the event with their camera-phones. There were security officers standing outside the area doing nothing, but the footage of the murder was taken - by more than one phone - from the front row. Which means whoever shot it did so not to record the horror of the event, but to commemorate it. To share it. Because it was cool."

He goes on to talk about his reaction to seeing the trailer for Captivity.

"The trailer resembles nothing so much as the CNN story on Dua Khalil. Pretty much all you learn is that Elisha Cuthbert is beautiful, then kidnapped, inventively, repeatedly and horrifically tortured, and that the first thing she screams is: `I’m sorry.’"

Whedon, whose strong, capable female characters have fought vampires, Reavers (homicidal entities in Whedon’s Firefly) and negative stereotypes for years, is a long-time women’s rights activist who has been honoured for his work by the international human rights organization Equality Now. His essay has been posted and linked to on a variety of fan sites and discussion forums, eliciting responses ranging from, "I love you, Joss" to who cares what he has to say?

It is an interesting read, as he admits he’s never had any faith in humanity, grapples with misogyny and admits to a bit of complicity himself.

"I don’t pretend to be a great guy; I know really, really well about objectification, trust me. And I’m not for a second going down the `women are saints’ route - that just leads to more stone-throwing (and occasional Joan-burning)."

Wavering between being resigned and looking for some way of making sure there will not be another Dua Khalil, he ends on a positive note, urging his readers to do something, anything in the way of activism, but not before asking: "How ... to explain the fact that cultures who would die to eradicate each other have always agreed on one issue? That every popular religion puts restrictions on women’s behavior (sic) that are practically untenable? That the act of being a free, attractive, self-assertive woman is punishable by torture and death?

"In the case of this upcoming torture-porn, fictional. In the case of Dua Khalil, mundanely, unthinkably real. And both available for your viewing pleasure."