Via the Supergeek comes this PopPolitics “roundtable” discussion of the current (and final) season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. All the participants are enjoying season seven (although one of them is, like myself, profoundly bored with the Spike/Buffy relationship), so those of you in the “Buffy sucks why don’t they do the good season three stuff anymore?” crowd might not enjoy it. But I really enjoyed it - one of the most intelligent discussions of the current season I’ve seen, but not so rigorous that I can’t enjoy it when I’m half-asleep (like right now). :-)

Anyway, here’s round one; here’s round two; and here’s round three, which came out shortly after it was announced that this is the final season of Buffy.

Having said that, I’m going to ignore the substance of their discussion, instead going off on my own tangent. In round two, one of the participants says “Riley was a nice jock who never had a hope in hell of really understanding Buffy.”

Riley? A nice jock?

Really?

I disagree. By the time the character left the show, Riley had become a misogynistic jerk (not that I’m complaining; Riley’s misogyny and general creepiness was the most interesting thing about his character). In a way, season-five Riley was where Buffy writers began seriously examining misogyny among ordinary men, a theme that continued with the character of Warren in season six.

Consider how Riley starts his vampire habit; not with prostitutes, but by picking up attractive female vampires at bars. With at least one female vampire, Sandy (and maybe more we didn’t see), he flirted with her at a bar, went someplace private, and then…

If his victims were human, we’d call Riley a serial killer.

Of course, she’s not human; she’s a vampire, demon, evil evil evil. But so what? Buffy’s behavior towards Spike in season six was wrong because cruelty, malice, and using other people without regard for what it does to them is inherently bad; and it is bad despite the fact that Spike the mass-murderer surely deserved all that suffering and worse.

Riley then switched over to prostitution, and the set design made it clear: Riley was not using happy, well-off callgirls a la Sam’s girlfriend in the first season of West Wing. He was exploiting what looked like the poorest, most miserable vampires imaginable; finding a “relationship” where he could pay a powerless woman to give him what he wanted, and all the while blaming it on his girlfriend for not opening up enough to him. To be attracted to that situation at all requires, I think, a fairly significant level of woman-hating.

I actually enjoyed this plotline - every character should have a dark side, and making the nice jock also a creepy misogynist certainly made the character more interesting. It was also compatable with what we had already seen of Riley’s character. Riley, after all, appears to be one of those guys who has no female friendships at all other than 1) his mother-figure and 2) his girlfriend. In general, guys who actually like women have some women friends who aren’t moms or lovers.

What bothered me is that some of season five’s writers - and in particular, Marti Noxon - seemed to take Riley’s side in the dispute: Buffy was in effect blamed for the end of the relationship and for Riley’s disgusting behavior. Remember, for instance, Xander’s speech to Buffy towards the end of “Into the Woods?“

But Riley has been holding back, in huge and significant ways (for instance, by not mentioning his habit of being sucked by vampires for pleasure). And insofar as Buffy has been unable to trust Riley entirely, that may simply show how sharp her instincts are.

Fortunately, Buffy also had some fairly impressive anti-misogynist episodes, such as “I Was Made to Love You” - a Jane Espenson scripted episode that, by ripping apart the “live for your boyfriend” ideology, played like a rebuttal to “Into the Woods.” (Unfortuately for my theory, Espenson seems to endorse the it’s-all-Buffy’s-fault interpretation in “Intervention,” but oh well.)

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