ameliasscanwells:

out of all the stuff in Kai Cole’s article, this one bit is what jumped out at me:

“When I was running ‘Buffy,’ I was surrounded by beautiful, needy, aggressive young women. It felt like I had a disease, like something from a Greek myth. Suddenly I am a powerful producer and the world is laid out at my feet and I can’t touch it.”

-because to me, it speaks volumes about Whedon’s opinion of women. These “beautiful, needy, aggressive young women” are his employees. He is, functionally, their manager. There is nothing sexual about the employee/manager relationship, nor should there be. The fact that he looked at them and thought “the world is laid out at my feet and I can’t touch it” instead of “I have hired these women to do a job, and it is my responsibility to ensure that they do the job well and in a safe working environment” tells me that he has never in his life looked at women as his equals. He looks at them as potential fucktoys. And while there will unfortunately never be real consequences for directors who treat their actors like this, there should be.