At 18, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Is Still Revolutionary
No show since has empowered its teenage heroine in such a subversive, engaging way.
SOPHIE GILBERT MAR 10 2015, 3:27 PM ET
The
WB/Netflix
Eighteen years ago, Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired for the first time on The WB in a two-part debut.
“Welcome to the Hellmouth” introduced viewers to Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar), a likable, popular 16-year-old who just happened to have a destiny that included saving the world from the undead; while also introducing Buffy to Sunnydale, a small, run-of-the-mill California town that just happened to sit on a Hellmouth—a portal of mystical energy that attracts demons, vampires, and other boogeymen.
In many ways, Buffy was a conventional television heroine, in that she was pretty and blonde and perky, and she talked a mile a minute about clothes and homework like a normal teenage girl (as opposed to the theatrical soliloquies delivered by characters in The WB’s next teen drama, Dawson’s Creek). But the show’s subversiveness was spelled out by creator Joss Whedon in the opening scene, as a nervous blonde girl and a cocky, older-looking guy in a leather jacket break into Sunnydale High School late at night. The girl seems scared and keeps hearing noises. “We’re just going to get in trouble,” she tells him.
“You can count on it,” he replies, licking his lips. Finally, once she’s certain there’s no one else around, she reveals her distorted vampire features and sinks her teeth into his neck.

In its first two minutes, “Welcome to the Hellmouth” establishes a universe, as the camera creeps slowly through a high school in the dark, lingering on skeletons in a classroom and shadows behind a door. But it also establishes a premise—that this is a show about female power. The pretty blonde, a vampire named Darla, isn’t a victim but a predator, just as Buffy has strength and acuity that belie her looks. At the end of “The Harvest,” the second part of the two-episode debut, Giles (Anthony Stewart Head) watches Buffy and her friends walk away, cheerily discussing the ways in which she stands between the world and its total destruction. “The earth is doomed,” he says, wearily. It's this kind of assumption— that being young and frivolous and having profound influence are mutually exclusive—that Whedon would go on to dispel throughout Buffy’s seven seasons.
Buffy is also unique in that, as much as Sunnydale is a Hellmouth, high school is hell. The monsters in the first season are literal manifestations of the demons that plague teenagers—a controlling mother who's so intent on living through her daughter that she switches bodies with her, a pack of teenage boys who become uncontrollably feral, an Internet boyfriend who pretends to be a normal kid but whose real identity is much more complex (in this case, he's a demon called Moloch who got accidentally uploaded onto the Internet). In the episode “Out of Mind, Out of Sight,” one of Buffy’s classmates is ignored to the extent that she physically becomes invisible. In transmogrifying common teenage issues into actual, tangible villains, Buffy makes them seem important, and worth agonizing over. It also makes them seem conquerable.
The monsters in the first season are literal manifestations of the demons that plague teenagers.
This sense of empathy for the complexity and horror of the high-school experience comes through as
Buffy’s characters defy their stereotypes to become fully realized people, with help from the Slayer.
Willow, pigeonholed as a nerd, becomes confident and powerful (too powerful) throughout the course of the show, while Cordelia, the shallow and cruel Queen Bee, becomes much more sympathetic. But
Buffy herself arrives in the pilot fully-formed—smart, kind, sensitive, and aware of what she wants in life, which is mostly not to have to kill vampires every night and to just be a normal teenager. What she realizes along with the audience during the first season is that there’s no such thing. Every kid has her own demons to slay—some just have pointier teeth than others.
Television has had lots of complex, admirable teenage heroines since Buffy, but it's hard to think of one so consistently empowered to take control of the circumstances around her, whether in the middle of a graveyard, surrounded by vampires, or in her bedroom, grounded. Buffy’s super-strength is a physical attribute endowed by the forces of destiny, but it's also a state of confidence and competence that carries her through the varying traumas of having the fate of the world always on her shoulders.
Joss Whedon’s 2006 speech after being honored by the group Equality Now describes his frustration at consistently being asked why he writes strong female heroines. The real reason, he finally states, is because people are "still asking me the question.” In a perfect world,Buffy at 18 wouldn't still seem so revolutionary, but if nothing else, it's another reason to appreciate it.
Study: We Benefit From Seeing Strong Women on TV
LINDSAY ABRAMS AUG 31 2012, 8:06 AM ET
The "Buffy effect" posits that strong characters can combat the negative effects of sexual violence in
media.

NBC, WB
PROBLEM: What's the difference between a typical scene from The Tudors, in which nubile courtesans allowed themselves to be conquered and dehumanized by King Henry VIII, and an episode of Law and
Order: SVU where the no-nonsense detective Olivia Benson comes perilously close to being raped? The latter depiction of sexual violence is portrayed as more disturbing, yes, but there's also a significant discrepancy as well in the way the women are characterized: as passive and submissive, as opposed to strong and independent. In the much-discussed issues of sexual violence in the media and its effects on attitudes toward women, this study focuses in on the interplay between content and character.
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METHODOLOGY: One hundred fifty male and female students at a university in the southern United
States attended screenings of one of six television shows that included both sexuality and violent content within the same scenes. The Tudors and slasher-esque Masters of Horror were selected as exemplars of sexually violent shows with negative depictions of female characters; SVU and Buffy the
Vampire Slayer depicted sexual violence but featured positive female "role models"; and7th Heaven and Gilmore Girls were used as the family-friendly controls.
After the screenings, participants were surveyed on their attitudes towards women and were evaluated for symptoms of depression and anxiety.
RESULTS: Males who watched sexually violent shows with submissive female characters reported more negative attitudes about women than the control group. This effect did not occur for men who watched shows with powerful women. Women actually reported more negative attitudes after watching the Grated shows, but how female characters were portrayed did not affect their beliefs.
Women who watched weak characters in sexually violent situations became twice as anxious as women who watched SVU or Buffy, who in turn actually reported less anxiety than the control group. The inverse occurred for men, who felt least anxious after watching The Tudors or Masters of Horror.
The subjects reported more or less similar levels of enjoyment for all of the shows.

CONCLUSION: It was the depiction of female characters, and not sexual violence per se, that appeared to influence audiences' emotional reactions and attitudes toward women. Positive female characters were in some ways able to negate the effects of degrading content.
IMPLICATIONS: The researchers found strongest evidence of women responding positively to strong female characters, while instances of men responding negatively to such characters were much lower.
They admit, "it is possible that some males find the presentation of strong females to be threatening to traditional gender-role stereotypes," and speculate that machismo culture may have contributed to this effect.
But in general, men responded more positively to shows with powerful women. The researchers suggest this may be because "depictions of women reawaken negative stereotypes that some men hold about women, whereas positive depictions challenge these stereotypes." Further research is certainly needed, but this study at least points to a new, potentially significant factor in the effects of sex and violence in the media.
The full study, " Positive Female Role-Models Eliminate Negative Effects of Sexually Violent Media ," will be published in the Journal of Communication .