“I May Be Dead, But I’m Still Pretty.”
Science fiction and fantasy TV can be traced back to a time when Television did not exist—Ancient Greece. Its origin is Greek mythology, full of gods, monsters, and monster hunters. This was also a time when men and women were given entirely different rights—or, in the case of women, sometimes no rights at all. As with ancient mythology, the mainstream opinion of women during a specific decade could be discerned by the feminism of sci-fi and fantasy TV shows. In the 1960s, Star Trek tried to make a future in which women and men were equal, but fell short. Though it was progressive for its time, women were still objectified, treated as “Love Interest of the Week,” and given short, rather revealing costumes. After the wave of feminism in the ‘80s, Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, a 1996 fantasy show took leaps in the way women were
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Buffy, though a female-centric show, did not seek to make women better than men, nor did it seek to make them lesser than men. It sought to portray women as equal to men—equally capable, equally funny, equally smart. Women wore what they wanted to wear, and that wasn’t some comment on their personality. However, in the CW’s Supernatural, a male-centric show that really had its male-centricity on display, women were assets, “Love Interest of the Week,” demons, or mindless, obsessive fan-girls. The 2005-2015 decade was a time in which women’s rights were in constant question and discussion, and so it’s no surprise that Supernatural falls prey to questionable views. Mainstream culture’s view of women can be discerned from fantasy and sci-fi TV shows of the time by the way male characters talk about female characters, the roles women play, the way women are dressed, and the