apocalypsos | Bitchwatch, part three

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Bitchwatch, part three

Okay, here's season three.

I don't know, I feel like I should add somewhere in here that most of the reason I'm doing this is because I'm putting my own curiosity to rest. It's one thing to hear both sides of an argument, it's another thing to look at the facts and judge accordingly, I guess. Most of the time that this wank's been going on, I keep sitting here thinking, "Well, maybe I'm just looking back at things through rose- colored glasses," and, "Maybe Dean's just always been a dick."

Here's the thing. After looking at season three, even if Dean's always been a dick, he's gotten WAY worse this season.

SEASON THREE

Bitch

Magnificent Seven ("Evil sons of bitches," 1) *
The Kids Are Alright **
Sin City (Casey, 1; Ruby, from Sam, 1 ***) ****
Fresh Blood (Bela, 1)
A Very Supernatural Christmas (Madge Carrigan, 1)
Malleus Maleficarum ("Craggy Old Blair Bitch," 1; Ruby, 2) Ruby does respond to one of these times by telling Dean to stop calling her "bitch." You might notice from the fact that the list doesn't end here that he doesn't.
Dream A Little Dream Of Me (Bela, 1)
Jus In Bello (Bela, 1; "You kinky son of a bitch," 1)
Long-Distance Call (Ruby, 1) *****
Time Is On My Side ("This immortality thing's a bitch", 1; "The bitch of the bunch", 1) ******
No Rest For The Wicked (Bela, 1; Ruby, from Sam, 1; Lilith, 1) *******

Slut

No Rest For The Wicked (Ruby, 1)

Skank

Sin City (Casey, 1)
Malleus Maleficarum (Ruby, 1)
No Rest For The Wicked (Ruby, 1)

Whore

Fresh Blood ********
Malleus Maleficarum *********

Broad

Red Sky At Morning (Gert, 1)
Time Is On My Side **********
No Rest For The Wicked (Ruby, 1)

* Tamara calls Isaac (or more aptly the thing IN Isaac) a "son of a bitch."
** Ben says, "Only bitches send a grown-up." Dean responds that he's not wrong, to which Ben says, "And I'm not a bitch."
*** Ruby responds to Sam calling her a cold bitch by saying, "And this cold bitch saved your life."
**** When Dean says to Casey, "What are you laughing at, bitch? You're still trapped," Casey responds with, "So are you, bitch."
***** The father of the dead girl who attacks Dean calls him a "son of a bitch."
****** Bela calls Lilith a bitch.
******* Bobby tells Dean, "You're almost Hell's bitch, so you can see Hell's other bitches." Also, Ruby calls Dean a "son of a bitch."
******** When a vampire refers to his daughters, Gordon corrects him with "fang whores."
********* Ruby calls witches "whores." Also, just to save myself from a longer list of footnotes, "Tammy" tells Ruby that it was a "bitch of a fight." Oh, and she calls Ruby a "lying whore."
********** The spa workers in the first scene refer to one of their clients as a "crabby old broad."

IN SUMMATION

*sigh* Okay, let's start simple.

Dean calls a grand total of six women by misogynistic pejoratives. And no, I don't discount the phrase because the character in question is a demon, or as it seems to be implying, "because she deserved it."

Demon and human, good and bad -- he covers his bases this season. Keep in mind, that's twice as many women as he insulted in the previous two seasons COMBINED. And he didn't even offset it by calling any men bitches, not even Sam. The only time he comes close is during the discussion with Ben in "The Kids Are Alright," and Ben's the only one who actually says the word.

"Slut" makes its first and so far only appearance in "No Rest For The Wicked," when Dean calls Ruby -- a character who has been, and continues to be until her bodily expulsion by Lilith, practically sexless -- a "slutty little Yoda."

"Skank" is another word used only once before on the show, not by Dean and not in regards to a female character but in regards to a "skank-filled" jar containing some really gross stuff. This season, Dean calls Casey a skank once and Ruby a skank twice. Ruby's special like that, as you can see from the episode tallies.

I include "broad" this season because -- and this might be wrong, so if I am feel free to correct me, I wasn't paying as much attention for this as I was for the others in the previous seasons but I don't recall any -- this season it suddenly pops up a couple of times. Dean calls Ruby "one ugly broad" and refers to Gert -- a good woman, and a human -- as a broad when talking to Sam.

Here's a good question -- where did "son of a bitch" go? In season one, there are eighteen instances of the phrase. In season two, there are a whopping twenty-six instances. In season three, there are only five. When Dean did use it in reference to another character it was almost exclusively male, and almost exclusively their MOTW antagonist. If you consider their antagonist as a creature or person who is intentionally causing others harm (I didn't count Madison, for example, and nameless demons were also not counted), the numbers of major male and female antagonists during each of the three seasons is about the same. There are about fifteen male antagonists a season and about six female antagonists. Season three only weighs slightly heavier than normal on the female side, but not by much.

The difference is pretty easy to tell from the tallies above -- the Big Bads this season are female.

Okay, so maybe not Big BADS, per se. Lilith is obviously the Big Bad, but she only gets one instance where she is referred to as "Queen Bitch." Bela, as sort of a secondary Big Bad, gets called a bitch four times, and none of those are to her face. The final instance is even after she's dead.

Ruby gets the brunt of it at NINE separate occasions. You know, their ally.

I know, I know. She's a demon, and as she says at the end of "Malleus Maleficarum," the Winchesters are a wee bit bigoted towards demons. But after a season of saving their lives, giving them information, and backing them up -- selfish reasons or not -- they continually falling back on calling her a bitch, a slut, a skank. Even Sam starts up. Two of those instances are from Sam, a character who up until this season has only called one female a bitch -- a character on a soap opera.

On the good side, in many of the cases where a female character is called a bitch, she turns right around and gives as good as she gets. Ruby in particular does this a few times, which seems fair because by the end of the season Dean almost has forgotten her name and just resorted to whatever pejorative pops into his head. Look at the finale -- Dean calls her a bitch and a slut, she calls him a dick and beats the crap out of him. There's also the case of "Sin City," where both of the Winchester brothers call a female character a bitch only to have her throw it back at them with a snap in the next line of dialogue. So, there's that.

But basically here's what it looks like:

Season one -- Dean or Sam refer to a woman by a pejorative three times in twenty-two episodes.
Season two -- Dean or Sam refer to a woman by a pejorative three times in twenty-two episodes.
Season three -- Dean or Sam refer to a woman by a pejorative eighteen times in sixteen episodes.

Maybe they were making up for the shortened season?

**

Okay, done. Now where the hell is that happy squishy porn I was writing? AND WHERE THE HELL IS MY BOOZE?

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Thank you for doing this, it's really interesting. Reading through comments, I'm struck by how people seem willing to write off SOB as being more or less "okay," or not as bad as directly calling a female character of whatever sort a denigrating name. To me, the casual use of SOB, where the entire insult towards the target is based in their descent from a bitch, whether intending to say their mother was a dog, or that she was a woman of low moral character/whatever "bitch" connotes, still shows a certain level of misogynistic attitude, whether intentional, or culturally assimilated.

Exactly. That's part of why I made a point of documenting every time someone was called an SOB -- because it's insulting a man by insulting a woman.

Well, "pussy" also suggests "kitten" or "cat"- so, scaredy-cat. Also, Bela was non-American, but look how that turned out.

Thanks for putting this together. This season of SPN has made me wince so many times and it's nice to have proof that there is a quantifiable increase in sexist language.

See, I'm wondering if the problem is one more broadly of language that is available and the gender of the primary antagonists.

You can say skank, whore, slut, and bitch (and son of a bitch) on network television. I don't know if you can say dick in a context where you call someone one (like, I'm pretty sure Steve Martin in Roxanne gets away with in the scene where he comes up with 20 insults for the nose, and clearly there it means, you know, dick, but it's not directed at anyone), and course, there are no good terms for skank/whore that are masculine, and so on.

Son of a bitch is of course problematic on its own, as it implies that this person's bad character is all about his mother.

My point: the change in language may be less about Dean himself changing than about the primary antagonists changing, and there being more and shorter likely bad words for women available to the character. Obviously the writer could choose not to use those words, but it probably changes the character to purposefully avoid a set of words that are commonly in use amongst young American men, particularly when one whole subset (fucker, dickhead, etc) are off the table.

Again, not arguing your premise that a bunch of words that are derogatory about women come out his mouth, nor that it's worth paying attention to. Only wondering more broadly (not for the first time) what it says that the FCC is okay with these words, but not the others, you know?

Ruby got to call Dean a spineless dick in the finale, so he probably could have been using it, too.

Ah, okay, good. Er, I mean, good to have evidence it's an available word.

...*waits for FCC to complain about that word because we cannot be going around calling people THAT!*

Heh.

He does use it in Tall Tales, about the people - all men, iirc - the Trickster tricked. "They have one thing in common - they're all dicks."

I don't know if you can say dick in a context where you call someone one

Ruby calls Dean a dick in the season finale right before she beats him up. So ... yes. :)

The thing is, most of those occasions when a women was called one of those names were unnecessary. And it's obvious from the first two seasons that they've never avoided the words before -- Dean and Sam have both called women pejoratives before but never to this extreme. They've both gone up against female protagonists before and restrained themselves from using those words -- the amount of female antagonists per season hasn't really changed, but the numbers of times they've been insulted based on their gender has.

Even when Meg was around causing just as much damage as, say, Bela, she didn't get called a bitch as often as Bela has this season, and let's not even get started on how much more often Ruby was called a derogatory name.

i find it a damn shame that supernatural's writers seemed to feel that 'targeting the male demographic' as ordered meant writing the entire show down to a lower level, its not just dean's words, its all the characters actions, being coarsened and made more crude and less thoughtful, dumbed down, in general.

I think you hit it on the head right here. It's really the CW that's behind this, just like they were behind Kripke's putting 2 female characters on the show rather than the one he'd planned on. Which just makes me kinda sad because that was the one thing I liked about Dean's character; that underneath all the sleaze he put on for show, he was really pretty equal opportunity.

Ugh. Thank you for the confirmation of what I had sensed.

Yeah. Ironic part is, if Kripke is doing this in response to the more vocal fans, he's only serving to do his show a disservice. I know in my case, when I've had opportunity to spend money (and thus support) on show-related material, I've opted not to. Purely because of the way season three seems to have gone out of its way to alienate me as a woman. If, because of my gender, I'm not good enough for Supernatural, then clearly my money isn't either.

And this would be why the CW is one season away from oblivion.

Okay, this is the thing: yes, there's a lot of misogyny in fandom. (There's a lot of feminism, too, but I don't get the sense that Kripke et. al. see it.) But I am really uncomfortable about complaints about the writing of the show getting turned around from the (mostly male) writers to the (mostly female) fan base. Because whatever the motivation for the writing, ultimately the writers are the ones responsible for it -- and the writers have given us a shitload of misogyny this season.

Thanks for the tallies,

trollprincess.

I'm almost glad I haven't watched the third season yet, if this is what I have to look forward to. I love this show and these characters, but, christ! When I first started watching during season one, i would find myself yelling at the screen over gender issues and misogyny and that it's gotten worse, just. Fail, guys.

Thanks for putting this together, though, it's really informative.

Because whatever the motivation for the writing, ultimately the writers are the ones responsible for it

See, I disagree with you there. The producers and the network have a huge say in what gets written and (if I'm not mistaken) they have to sign off on scripts.

Which means that if the producers/network execs/etc are feeling pressure from the fan base (who provide the ratings to keep their show in business and them employed), then they could be influencing the writers.

It's not like the writers have the final say in anything.

Okay, I'll adjust it: it's not the writers alone, but it is the production group, or the show. Even if they're responding to fan complaints about female characters--which is a big "if"--they do choose *how* to respond, and responding by increasing the level of misogyny and gendered insult isn't the only option available.

Thanks for all the labor that went into this. It's very depressing.

(And the secret inside part of me is also going, Dudes, get a thesaurus! I can think of some awesome, censor-approved name-calling you could do, that doesn't have any gender application in the slightest! And now that I'm thinking about it, I bet douchebag is even censor-approved!)

I don't think it's that big of an if. Jo was written off because of negative fan reaction.

If the networks are putting pressure on the production group to make it obvious that the main characters dislike the female characters because of negative fan reaction, it puts the writers/production folks in a bind.

I do agree with you that they didn't necessarily have to go the route they chose, but I wouldn't be surprised if fan reaction was part of the reason for the change.

I think "bastard" is airable. It would seem to fit the bill.

(However, in my head and when I'm cursing, "bastard" and "bitch" apply to either gender; it's what's being done that determines which I pick. As near as I can figure out, I use "bastard" as a derogatory for disagreeable things done from a place of power and "bitch" for disagreeable things done from powerlessness -- and "bastard" as a compliment for somewhat unsavory or otherwise devious but nevertheless still complimentable things done from a place of existing power, and "bitch" as a compliment for unsavory &c and highly complimentable things done by someone coming up from under the power structure, especially someone who is not expected to be able to obtain power or a place in the power structure through normal channels. So to me they're highly gender-roled curses, and it's a side effect of society's power imbalance that fewer women have the opportunity to be proper bastards. I suspect reading the "Bastard Operator from Hell" chronicles has an influence on my definitions.)

This *is* like the dark side of the Dudemeter. I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.

I was going to do this myself after arguing that the insults were much thicker on the ground this season, but you've taken that bullet for all of us.

Thanks.

Hey, thanks for putting up this tally, though it's sad to see. I mean, you could just tell from watching this whole season that Dean's language in particular had changed, I think I commented on it once after one of his encounters with Ruby.

Like someone above said, I think it's to appease the networks and try and get that male fanbase. People keep saying that Dean's a sexist asshole and, while he does have his moments, SPN also took great pains with his treatment of Jo to show us that when it comes to business, the sexism drops away and you're either a good hunter or a bad hunter, a good guy or a bad guy. And the fact that female pejoratives were used against men so often in the past sort of signified that, I think. I could always deal with the way he treated Jo in BUaBS because I knew he was treating her like an inferior hunter who'd get in the way, not a silly woman who'd get in the way. If the same thing had happened this season...I probably wouldn't have been so sure (probably because he'd have said something like, 'and don't try and follow me you stupid skankwhorebitch!')

Edited 2008-05-19 18:22 (UTC)

Douchebag gets used on How I Met Your Mother, so it must be censor-approved.

Exactly! For me the show has become almost cartoonish this season, an exaggeration of itself as seen through the coarsening you've mentioned above. I've found the brightening of the show's typically dark and washed out palette, and the introduction of Bela (not on basis of her sex, but the stereotypical nature of her character as a well put-together, upper-class professional thief) also compounds this.

I think the show has suffered in many respects because of this coarsening, but the misogyny, which was always to be found in the first 2 seasons and is now even more noticeable, has been particularly hard to stomach.

It may be censor-approved, but it TOTALLY has gender application.

(Gimme the non-gendered ones! List 'em! I need to upgrade my own vocabulary!)

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Bitchwatch, part three

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