into the new thing

Girls need Buffy to win gender battle
Response from Guardian Readers & Writers

Letters, March 9th 2004
Sentence passed on Sunnydale slayer

When the chief inspector of schools recommended Buffy as a female role model (Send in Buffy to save lost girls, March 6), he presumably did not have her scholastic record in mind. Expelled from her high school in LA for burning down the gym, at her Sunnydale school she was at best an indifferent student, putting homework the bottom of her to-do list. She was disrespectful of authority and frequently skipped class. On her graduation day, she blew up the school.
At university, she showed limited interest in her studies, had an affair with her supervisor and dropped out. At the end of the series, she was involved in the total destruction of her town with the concomitant loss of the brand new high school. Exactly which aspect of it does the chief inspector want our girls to emulate?
Philip Horowitz
San Leandro, California

The Vampire Slayer's record includes cheating in tests, lying to teachers, fighting in school, running away, and having a boyfriend who kills teachers. And her sister Dawn wasn't much better.
Tessa Kendall
London

I am much in sympathy with David Bell's opinion of Buffy. But I remain concerned about the portrayal of Willow. She is shown as possessed of a formidable academic intellect, but this image is made ambivalent. She is also shown, variously, as: unpopular; a nerd; a witch who becomes excessively addicted to the use of magic; a lesbian whose great love affair ends in tragedy; and someone who nearly destroys the world. This is not exactly a ringing endorsement of intellectual women. Activity and assertiveness are not enough - let's have some positive models for cleverness.
Jane Card
Harwell, Oxon

So, the film Kill Bill - in which Uma Thurman gains revenge over those who tried to kill her - should be condemned as propagating violence towards women; whereas we should regard Buffy the Vampire Slayer (in which Buffy and other female leads are attacked continually) as being important in building positive role models? Beam me up, Captain Picard.
Daniel Godfrey
Leeds
Letters, March 11th 2004

I think Buffy's critics are being a little harsh on her (Letters, March 9). My daughters are doing fine at school, but if either of them manage to repeatedly save the world, I'm sure I'll cut them a little slack over any exam results that go awry.
David May
London

This week , March 13th 2004
Lucy Mangan

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.

Letters, 13th March 2004
Saving the world is not an easy job

Have those who condemned Buffy the Vampire Slayer's suitability as a female role (Letters, March 9) model watched the programme? It's all about how a spoilt, not so academically able teenage girl has the responsibility of saving the world thrust upon her untrained shoulders and how she learns to deal with it.

Buffy ultimately always does the right thing - including dying a couple of times in the course of duty - even when she doesn't want to, because she knows it's her job; and the fact that she makes mistakes along the way only goes to highlight how tremendous a burden such responsibility can be. She's a young woman trying to juggle study, unsuitable partners and a difficult family life (who can't relate to that?), all while holding down a demanding and dangerous job which she can't reveal to anyone because they'll think she's crazy. She does it with courage, style, determination, resourcefulness and humour. Of course she's a good female role model.
Julia Hartley
Brighton

Before you close the file on Buffy, could we first consider the case of MASH? Like Buffy, it was a TV spin-off from a critically lauded movie which didn't let the original down. It was witty, intelligent and funny - until it became popular. Then it seemed everybody owned it. Doctors were upset at surgeons knocking back cocktails while in theatre. Cue an episode about the dangers of alcohol. Hot Lips became Margaret. When actors left, their characters were replaced by more "human" ones - and it became more responsible and conscious of its duty to present positive role models. It became "Good TV". Thankfully, the Buffster never did.
Patrick Rowley
London

Perhaps just as vital as advocating Buffy as a role model for girls is also recognising the importance as a female role model for men. The original point of the series was to overturn the largely pathetic roles that blonde women tend to play in horror movies, and it's just as important for boys and men to see modern women confronted with issues and dilemmas that had not been dealt with on TV. I couldn't care less if they were unpopular or should've been doing their homework - after all, they were saving the world ...
Gustav Ando
London

Letters, 16th March 2004
There seems to be some debate about Buffy's merits as a role model for girls (Letters, passim). All I can say is that she does a much better job of saving the world than Tony Blair and with much more wit too.
Malcolm Hunter
Leicester

The speech in full
Guardian report