In the beginning....

...there was a fantastic dinner conversation...

So tonight, my husband I were enjoying a relaxing dinner out and as often happens, the talk turned to one of our favorite TV shows, Supernatural. Now I am a shameless groupie of this show. In my extremely humble opinion, it is one of the best shows on television at the moment. It's got some fantastic, interesting characters, its writers clearly care about their product (which is not something every television show out there can boast of, at least as far as I can tell), and it manages to balance the precarious line between horror, comedy and drama extremely well (in fact, some of the most serious episodes also contain some of the best moments of levity in the series). I also love that it has taken up issues like God and religion in interesting ways in the last few seasons.

In any case, as we were talking, I got to thinking about female characters in this particular show...the few there are anyway. This is a definitely a homosocial show. The two main characters (Sam and Dean Winchester) are brothers (and demon hunters...whoo hoo!) and with the exception of Castiel and Bobby, there are very few recurring characters beyond the Winchester brothers.

No real problems there. It's a show about brothers. I get that.

But then I realized something. The majority of the recurring female characters on the show are "evil" in some way or another. Ruby, Meg, and Lillith are legit demons. Spawns of Hell even. Lillith is, of course, one of the oldest female demons (at least according to the apocryphal book of the Bible). She haunts the Winchester brothers for the better part of two seasons and is instrumental in the onset of the apocalypse (in fact, her death is necessary to resurrect Lucifer). In Season 3, she likes to take the form of a little girl, which proves particularly creepy. But more than that, it highlights the fact that this show seems invested in marking little girls as monstrous. Lillith maims and massacres in the form of an angelic child. Many of the menacing spirits that Sam and Dean meet are also little girls (the girl in the portrait, the dead sister in the hotel, etc.).

The 'adult' demons are no better. Meg is calculating and vicious. Ruby plays the reformed, 'good' demon only long enough to jump start the apocalypse. Her particular brand of manipulative evil leaves the Winchesters (particularly Sam) forever changed.

And...as my husband pointed out to me....a good percentage of the 'monsters of the week' in Supernatural turn out to be female. The werewolf, the vengeful spirits, many of the crossroad demons...all women.

Bela (not the obnoxious twit from Twilight), who showed up frequently during Season 2, may not have been an actual demon, but her actions were no less questionable. A dealer of occult objects, she would hock all sorts of dangerous crap to the highest bidder without so much as a thought to what they might be capable of or who may get hurt in the process. (The rabbit's foot episode comes to mind...) Her character becomes much more sympathetic towards the end of the season, when you discover that she made a deal with a demon to gain vengeance on an abusive father. But she's not exactly a shining picture of femininity.

I was definitely excited to find out that the Winchesters' mother (this show definitely has it out for mother figures as well..but that's a story for another time..) was once a demon hunter herself. This show is screaming for a Buffy Summers-like, kick-ass strong female figure. But don't look to Mary Winchester. Her death, rather than her life, haunts the series. The one time we see her in flashback as a teenage demon hunter, she is complaining about how she wants 'out of the business' and how her boyfriend John is going to take her away from all this. By the end of that episode, she has shrugged off this original role for one of domestic bliss with her boyfriend. For the rest of the episodes, she is merely Sam and Dean's dead mom.

Anna also gave me some hope for female empowerment. The rebel angel, who chose to disobey her orders and fall to earth in order to find her own way. She proves a polarizing force among the ranks of the angels for the second half of Season 4, but she is quickly 'dealt with' (i.e. divinely disappeared) before the season concludes, never to be heard from again.

There may be hope for Ellen and Jo, since episode 2 of this current season plucked them from the domestic sanctuary of the roadhouse and deposited them in the middle of a hunting ground....but for most of season 2, they were shackled to the roadhouse, which the Winchester boys frequented throughout the season. It's the closest thing these nomadic demon-hunting brothers have to a home (except maybe the Impala) and you never see Ellen outside of it. Jo leaves to hunt with Sam and Dean, but it quickly deteriorates in an "OMG we have to save Jo!" episode. Blond and petite, she's your textbook damsel in distress, no matter how tough a persona she tries to project.

And finally, you have your plethora of sexual objects that sprinkle throughout the landscape...romantic opportunities for the brothers (mostly Dean the man whore) who disappear into oblivion once the credits roll...

This show has a lot of interesting insight into some heavy topics...religion, God, family, loyalty, etc....but it has really dropped the ball in its treatment of women. All these revelations certainly won't deter my enthusiasm for the show...but I find it extremely fascinating that even hundreds of years and feminist movements later....we haven't moved all that far away from the medieval romances I am reading for my dissertation....apparently to talk about men and masculinity it is necessary to degrade, dismiss, or completely elide femininity....

*steps down off the soapbox*