This is a really powerful and interesting video! While I can see where you are coming from, I never perceived it as a gender problem in the show itself. It's more a part of the horror genre for me and in the context of the show I mostly perceive how the absence/death of women (esp. Mary, Jess & Madison) serve as a symbol for loss and dysfunction for Sam, Dean & John, which also forces the male survivors to take over roles that are typically associated with females.

There are also a lot of victimized males (and children) in the show; Max, Andy, Scott or Jake try to fight back and don't succeed either and I am quite certain that you could make a just as violent and brutal video, only using footage with the male victims of the show. I guess, I just tend to see a character instead of a certain gender, ethnicity, religion or sexual orientation.

Exactly! It is by far not just Supernatural (if you are familiar at all with comic book fandoms then you have heard about Women in Refridgerators) that the death/maiming/assault of women is done to provide the male leads with man-pain. This happens a lot and after a while, once you start recognizing it, it becomes kind of impossible to ignore.

I am not familiar with comic book fandoms, so I lack a good comparison. The way, the loss of female influences so clearly defines the dysfunction of the males that survive them, I encountered that in Supernatural for the first time (at least in that intensity) and I love that aspect of the show. I try to think of an example where the loss of fathers/boyfriends influenced the female members of a family in a similar crushing fashion, but I draw a blank at the moment, which kind of makes me sad, as if the loss of fathers can be negated more easily than the loss of mothers.

What you say is intriguing because I was discussing the possibility of exploring just what you describe with a vidder friend last night and I think it would be an interesting study merely because once you really get into these scenes as part of vidding? You'll see there are some really extreme differences with how the victimization of women is lit and filmed and the victimization of men is lit and filmed. Also, there is a completely different wardrobe.

I would really love to see a video like that, because I think it's probably more an aesthetic problem than anything else. Because honestly, the main problem with this kind of video for me is, that in order to bring your point across you are very selective in what you show and what you leave away, which achieves a distorted perspective in my opinion. Just some examples:

a) You show Kat (Asylum) cowering in fear as the spirit approaches her, but not that she faces her fear and comes out of that experience strong, while her boyfriend comes off as a pathetic loser.
b) You show Max killing his stepmother, but not the gruesome murder of his father and uncle before.
c) You show Ava stringing up Lily but not shredding Andy to pieces.
d) You show the death of Billy Carltons daughter, but not the one of his son (or himself for that matter).
e) You show 'victimised monsters' like Ava or Madison, but not Max or Jake.
f) You show Meg's body abused and possessed but not Sam or John.
g) You show the female vampire getting beheaded by Gordon, but not the male being beheaded by Dean.

I could go on with this in many instances and I just think that taking all these selective scenes out of context doesn't do Supernatural justice, since there are many layers in how women are approached in this show. I was also curious and took my time to go through all SN episodes today and run a quick (and probably by no means completely acurate) statistic and came up with the following gender-focused body/evil count in SN

35 dead Females
72 dead Males
21 rescued Females
8 rescued Males
5 rescued Families
3 rescued Kids (not counting the comatose ones in SW)
14 Female Evils
24 Male Evils

For the evils I only counted monsters (and of course humans) that took a definite gender in the show and stuck with it, I took out Sam and Dean (when they were victimized) and made some adjustments where needed, but I was kind of astonished at the numbers myself. So I came to the conclusion that my feeling about males being just as victimized in the show as females isn't really wrong.

If the aesthetics suggests a different approach, I would really love to see that comparison. God, sorry for rambling like that LOL but this was stuck in my head all day. ROFL

Or as if mothers get killed more often than fathers. Or as if we use the death of mothers to tell the story of men more often than we use the death of fathers to tell the story of men or women.

I remembered that we do have the death of Bill Harvelle as an example as to how the loss of fathers can influence the remaining females. So it is there, just not explored in such a detail, understandably.

Why are you taking out Sam and Dean? They appear in every episode. They are not genderless. They make up a large portion of the show's representation of gender.

I took out Sam and Dean since I knew that if I take them in, the numbers would come out clearly on the male side, after all, the show only has those 2 male leads and they are endangered nearly every week LOL, and I was more interested in the victims of the week, the creeps, the more general gender numbers.

But men do something on the show besides die; they fight, they take an active stand, when they are victims, the victimizations are not sexualized. The percentage of men who are something more than victims or monsters on the show is greater than the percentage of women who are, they appear more often, and they have more repeated appearances, which makes them more distinct in the viewers' minds. When Dean and Sam are victimized, their victimization is not sexualized in the same way women's is, and they are wearing hell of a lot more clothes.

I am not sure about this. If the fact that more men appear on the show is responsible for the fact that there are more dead males in the show than females, then we can also transfer that argumentation to the fact that the percentage of men who are actively fighting when they are victimized is higher due to that higher numbers. There's just a huge number of males that end up as helpless demon fodder, just like females. And as a quick example where Sam & Dean's victimisation is sexualized is the sexually agressive way Meg deals with them after she captured them in Shadow.

Take a look at destina's vid "Want," which is terrific, and which is all about Winchester pain as the focus of desire--and yet which comes across completely differently from "Women's Work," because the Winchesters have subjectivities and identities and actions, they're fully clothed, they're active instead of simply responding to victimization.

I love destinas video and just recced it at my journal. I just think that given the fact that the show is shown completely from Sam and Dean's perspective it's natural that they are the best defined characters on the show, you can't just hold that against the show itself. That's another reason why I didn't count them in my body count.

Look at the difference between the "Crossroad Blues" deaths of Robert Johnson (clothed, struggling, choking), the male architect (offstage), and the female doctor (half-naked, her clothes getting stripped off, scratches torn down her legs, rape imagery). Look at the difference between John and Mary.

I am thinking at the beginning from Provenance, the guy is murdered just wearing his boxers, half naked. Btw the doctor in CRB wasn't half naked, she was fully clothed, just the leg of her pants were ripped off. The difference between John and Mary .. well, I always figured the 'angelic' symbolism was intended with Mary's white dress, given how much she is worshipped by the Winchester and she is bound to the place of her tragedy just like any other spirit.

I am not saying that there aren't any differences in the aesthetics of how male and female victims are treated in the show, that's why I am actually interested in a counter-vid. :)

Okay, fair enough points.

Though I also do remember the guy in Provenance who was killed only in his boxers and the half-naked corpse of the male victim of the shapeshifter in Nightshifter or the macabre pan over the dead and mutilated body of Ava's fiance and Madison's boss or the camera focused on the death struggles and dead stares of Pastor Jim and Caleb.

Well, the couple in Provenance was about to have sex, so her sexual pose was perfectly in context with the scene, but you're right about the exposition of the corpse.

I don't quite get the comparison between Jessica and Ava's fiance though. *confused*

Sam was also threatened in a sexual manner by the Woman in White (not tied up though), also the Crossroad demon usually clearly has a sexual innuendo when dealing with Dean, though not threatening, so I guess that doesn't count. ;)

i watched this vid not knowing anything about spn. (and i still "got it," but that's thanks to a handful of film theory and coming into it with a vague notion of the concept.) i'm looking forward to watching it again and really seeing all of this. so thank you for taking the time to go through these points, even if they weren't intended as a primer.

Name an 80's/90's sitcom about a single parent - now quick - is the parent a widowed father, a divorced father, a widowed mother or a divorced mother? All of the ones I thought of involved a widowed dad. Which SUCKS.

Kate and Allie.

Not that I've spent any time at all seeking femslash for it...

But, yeah, that's the only one that really comes to mind. (Leaving out things where widowhood occured during the course of the show, such as Roseanne [which I'm sketchy on, as that was after I'd stopped watching the show, but I *think* that happened] or as a result of actor death [8 Simple Rules, which is from this decade, and outside the scope of the exercise].)

I'm about 80% vidblind, so, I'm much more a fan of the concept of the vid in question than I can possibly be fan of the vid itself. That said, I'm a fan.

My blindness given, I wonder if a primer in the politics of visuals would be useful? I've run across a bunch of discussions where "I don't see that" is the argument I'm trying to counter. Not "I don't want to see that" or "I don't know how to think about that," but an inability to parse the subjectivity of the camera's gaze. I don't speak the language of film well enough to articulate the visual cues that tell us whether a character is being shown as a subject or an object, whether the camera observes or participates in or flees from what's happening; I just sort of know and can articulate my reaction. If you wanted to do a big whole lecture explaining how that works, with slides and laser pointers, I think that would be awesome.

Because I would like to have such a primer handy, for whenever arguments of this type pop up, and I do not feel competent to develop it myself.

I... wouldn't recommend that essay to fandom. Probably the reason I know much at all about film is that I read it back in college, and it's as dense and indigestible as bad fruitcake. I think it requires a considerable grounding in how to read academic criticism, which is a skill I know most of fandom lacks. Also, it has no pictures.

(Also, it was published the year I was born, and I think such a primer would have more impact if it could say, "Yes, in some wise, things have changed.")

See - I HATE this aspect of the show. It just says to me that the only reason women *exist* in this universe is so we can see what kind of effect they (or their absence) has on men. And you are right - you don't often see the reversal because... well, the loss of fathers is not a dominant trope.

I LOVE this aspect of the show since it serves as a point where the males become nurturers and caretakers (Dean) and shows this as an acceptable male role identification. Not only women are used as plotpoints here, but also children or other pairs of siblings, in a universe that is solely based on the perspective of 2 (male) leads basically every other character is reduced to a means to show a certain effect on the protagonists, no matter the gender or ethnicity.

Name an 80's/90's sitcom about a single parent - now quick - is the parent a widowed father, a divorced father, a widowed mother or a divorced mother? All of the ones I thought of involved a widowed dad. Which SUCKS.

Well, it just shows to me that the single dad/widowed father is perceived as the more difficult (and therefore more interesting/conflicting to explore) type of story, since the "houseman and father" is still perceived as opposed to the typical male role identification. Therefore you can surely name more tv shows that show females needing to fight their way in a typical male business world. It's the attempt to go against the stereotypical gender role identifications and I tend to think that shows about successful business women or successful single parenting fathers served to loosen the gender roles.

Aren't men reduced to plotpoints in shows that are delivered from a solely female perspective as well? Couldn't that just be an effect of this kind of storytelling (non ensemble shows), 'cause as I said before, in my opinion nearly every character in the show is reduced to being a plotpoint, maybe with the exception of Bobby&Ellen. The biggest 'hero pain' aside from Mary&Jess is provided by the loss of 2 other males, John& Sam, though I understand you make the distinction here because it is not their sole purpose in the show, it still ties into the 'loosing family' theme for me.

Maybe I make more concessions as usual because I am so deeply in love with the characters, I just never perceived the show as more anti-feminist than any other horror themed show/movie.

Yeah, I see the point the vidders make with the representation and I am not completely arguing against it, I just tend to see it in the context of horror movie aesthetics, exploiting every shot for a maximum of gore or shocking visuals, maybe I am just too used to it to question it, I don't comepletely rule that out. :) Although, as I said in an above comment, I do also remember gruesome shots of male victims.