Niccolo Makes Me a Misogynist: A Look at Dean Winchester's Violent Tendencies

[chasingtides]

I am going to open this meta with the statement that I am, probably, likely to be considered a violent person. I hit things. And people. Usually with my cane, Niccolo Machiavelli. I also throw things. And like shooting my compound bow. And hitting things.

I like Dean a lot. Probably, partially, because he also hits things.

Now, I've seen around the internet that it seems that a lot of people don't like Dean hitting things. They say that he likes to pick on women. That's he's mean to women. That he's written as a misogynist.

Well, thinks I, I am not so sure about that. I hit women, but I don't think of myself as a misogynist for a variety of reasons, but partially because I also hit men.

So, I decided to analyze exactly who Dean hits in Lazarus Rising.

If we set aside the opening montage of season three as irrelevant to this meta and focus upon Dean's acts of personal violence against others, we can look at four separate incidents of such personal violence in Lazarus Rising. The first is Dean's fist/knife fight with Bobby; the second, his fist/knife fight with Sam; the third, his slapping of the possessed waitress; and the fourth, his attack upon the angel Castiel.

Bobby, as Dean expresses in this self-same episode, is the closest thing Dean has to a father. Presumably, this works the other way (and I am taking a cue from Bobby's new drinking habit as well) and Bobby feels that Sam and Dean are the closest things he has to sons. As he said so eloquently in the finale of the third season, "Family don't end with blood, boy." And yet despite this - or perhaps because of it, for who would not be startled and afraid to see a loved one arise from the grave - the first thing he does when he sees Dean is attack him with a knife. Dean responds in kind, returning the fight with his fists. This continues until Dean has wrested the knife from Bobby and purposefully cuts himself.

This same scene magically repeats itself when Dean sees Sam for the first time. Sam, too, does not know what to do upon seeing Dean alive and thus attacks him with a knife. This time Bobby helps Dean with the fisticuffs, but it is still an act of personal violence upon the person whom, I can say with little reservation, Dean loves most in the world. In fact, Dean is not rejoicing at being out of hell because he is fearing for the state of his brother's soul. And the first thing they do when they see one another is get into a fist/knife fight.

Then comes the fight with the demonically possessed waitress. However, Dean does not slap her because she gave him bad service. In fact, before he visits personal violence upon her person she says, "I'll drag you back to Hell myself," and, "I'm going to reach down your throat and rip out your lungs." And then Dean slaps her twice.

Lastly, Dean does personal violence upon the angel Castiel. He and Bobby both shoot him, but it has been suggested to me that this is not personal violence and shouldn't be dissected here. But he also stabs Castiel with Ruby's demon killing knife. Dean doesn't just want to kill Castiel's body or insult him or bruise him; Dean wants to kill Castiel's soul. Even in the Supernatural world, that's big. Dean's not playing with Castiel. He wants him dead and forgotten.

Now I've written before that I don't like treating demons (or, now, angels) as though they are gendered by their meatsuits/vessels. The demon possessing that waitress could well be male gendered even though his body is currently female sexed. But as most of the people who inspired this meta are treating it one way, I am willing to treat this situation as one of Dean doing personal violence upon male and female bodies.

In this episode, 25% of the personal violence Dean does is upon female bodies and 75% of the violence Dean does is upon male bodies. 50% of the personal violence Dean does is upon loved ones. 25% is done upon angels, 25% is done upon demons, and 50% is done upon humans (for the purposes of my current knowledge, both Sam and Bobby are human). The only unprovoked personal violence Dean does is upon the angel Castiel who is currently inhabited a meatsuit/vessel which appears to be male sexed. Castiel, from what research I have been able to do, is also male gendered. The most frantic of the personal violence which Dean does is upon Castiel who is, to my knowledge, both male sexed and gendered.

Now I will examine the situation with the possessed waitress, which has distressed many. The waitress threatens Dean with two very real threats, "I'll drag you back to Hell myself," and, "I'm going to reach down your throat and rip out your lungs." Dean has just now returned from Hell, a place where, presumably, no one goes willingly. Even Sam, who is sociopathically calm in a later scene with the same demon, is ready to attack the waitress when she threatens to return Dean to hell.

Wondering if perhaps I was reacting violently myself to these threats, which are both gruesome and no doubt frightening to Dean, I consulted an outside source. Our conversation went as follows:

chasingtides: "If you were threatened with actually being dragged to hell and then having your lungs pulled out of your mouth, is hitting the person threatening you reasonable?"

una__sola: "No.

It's not nearly extreme enough."

To be quite frank, I realised I agreed with this. Really, the demon wearing this women isn't just threatening Dean's life, though she is with the second threat; she is threatening his soul. By returning to life, Dean has received a second chance. He doesn't have to go to hell and he doesn't have to become a demon. He no longer has to become what he hates and pray that someone kills him quickly. Well. Damn. That's a good deal. But this demon is threatening to take all of that away. That warrants more than a few slaps.

Also, I have slapped people (okay one guy) like that in a fight. It is one of the most ineffective maneuvers out there. This is why I only used it once. It is very wimpy and pointless. Mostly, your hand stings and maybe their cheek turns pink. This is not a drastic level of violence.

Finally, I will close with a few thoughts on violence against female bodies in media. If I am going to an action movie where the hero has a big ole machine gun and is shooting everyone, I expect women to be shot. If the hero - or villain - purposefully only kills men, then that is sexism in media. If the hero - or villain - only kills women, this too is sexism in media. If the hero - or villain - kills both men and women, that is equality.

There is real violence against women in the world. I do not doubt this. I know and love women who have survived it. I myself have survived it. But when someone hates or hurts or hits people of any and all gender, class, race, or other subdivision of humanity, it doesn't mean that they are being sexist, classist, racist, or subscribing to any other "ism" of the world. It means that they are hateful or hurtful or violent. Period. End of story.

Now, if you don't want to watch a show about a violent person, I'm not sure why you're watching TV. But that's an issue for another day.

Comments

[samidha.livejournal.com]

I love you, and I love you for this meta. :D

I am going to say it right here as the first commenter (I think) to this post: DEAN SHOULD HAVE DONE MORE. And he was fucking scared out of his gourd. Because he knew exactly how fucking terrible what she was saying was. (See also breakdown outside the diner for actual proof beyond samidha said so.)

Sam thanks you for defending his brother, even if Sam is, well, in a dubious condition right now.

[faunaana.livejournal.com]

I really like this. I definitely want to come back and re-read it when its not 1 am.

[chasingtides.livejournal.com]

I look forward to your thought after you've slept.

[una--sola.livejournal.com]

You already know most of my thoughts on this, and in TL;DR it goes as follows: QFT.

This especially is something people forget: "... when someone hates or hurts or hits people of any and all gender, class, race, or other subdivision of humanity, it doesn't mean that they are being sexist, classist, racist, or subscribing to any other "ism" of the world. It means that they are hateful or hurtful or violent. Period. End of story."

Just because your subdivision was part of it, that doesn't mean that someone is after just your subdivision.

[colourmod.livejournal.com]

I always found the whole misogyny thing stupid and quite frankly a load of bullshit.

He's not a misogynist, the so called "women" he hits and refers to as skanks and bitches are fucking demons, and it also makes me laugh when the very same people who call him that do the same damn thing all the time: "she's such a dumb bitch" or "i hate that fucking slut".

Basically I agree with this post.

[jameserin.livejournal.com]

i think that dean should've done more(in fact i was expecting him to lean over and open his mouth and say 'go for it' before killing her), but i honestly think he was in a hurry to get out of there.

the thing that people seem to forget is that all the 'girls' or 'people' dean gets violent with are demons(not talking about fighting with sam at the moment), things that took his mother, his father(and turned his father into a drill sargent earlier on and made his father stop being his father), things that he was raised to hate, whether they are girls or not. i think people think that gender factors into this show more than it does. i honestly don't think that dean gives a flying fuck about what demon is in a girl's body or not. if you're a demon/murderer/some baddie, he's going to kill you/fuck your shit up. the end. he didn't seem to have issues with casey, but she wasn't really a threat to him either, and she was a girl. he doesn't have a problem with women to me, he has a problem with demons/things that take his family away from him and it makes him violent. understandable, it'd make me violent too. if someone tried to hurt/kill my brother, i'd react violently, too. and, okay, dean has some anger issues, but who wouldn't given everything that has happened to the winchesters? dean could be a lot worse than he is.

that was a really long winded way of me saying i agree with this post. :)

[red-handed.livejournal.com]

As usual, I am jealous of your eloquence and whole heatedly agree with your views.

OH DEEM, HOW I LOVE YOU AND YOUR FONDNESS FOR HITTING ALL THINGS.

[pinkphoenix1985.livejournal.com]

I agree

[shorofsky.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, while I am not a big fan of misogynist!Dean, he does have a lot of the usual traits of the misogynist. However, slapping the demon waitress, does not seem to me to have anything to do with misogyny as much as with showing her that he is not afraid of her threats. He's been there, he's done that and now it'll take more to rattle his cage. I think the slapping is a kind of demonstration of either extreme powerlessness or probably even more so, of showing that Dean's place in the world has changed since he came back from Hell.
I think the demon's trying to rattle his cage, but that it also knows it can't possibly because this is Dean Winchester and he's the one that got away.
I,too, was waiting for Dean to lean over and say 'go for it' to Sam, but I was actually relieved when he didn't and I think it shows us how the dynamic's going to play out between the boys from now on. Whether my hunch is right or not, remains to be seen, but so far, OMG this was an amazing ep:-D

[almostinstinct.livejournal.com]

Good points all, but it still squicks me, personally. I don't think Dean is sexist, I think the show is sexist. Someone writing, or someone in the casting office, or just on a general unconscious level. I've only thought this since mid-season three, when stuff started happening that made me cringe and then go "hmmm".

[mresundance.livejournal.com]

I don't know that Dean's misogynist; he is a raging sexist, and the show is sexist.

But this is an interesting critique and made me re-think some of my own reactions. Even though we know that a demon could be male gendered and in a female sexed body/vessel, there is still that deeply ingrained cultural recoil to violence against women of any form. I think the producers and the writers (if they are at all decent writers, and they demonstrate they are on a regular basis) KNOW this, and know how the audience may respond. Knowing this, I wish they would be more . . . eh . . . equitable in the way they write violence sometimes.

On the surface it often appears equitable; I mean, there is violence committed against men in the show, frequently, and it is as frequent as the women. It is not the number of acts of violence on the basis of "assumed gender" which bother me; it's the way in which acts of violence against the women have been scripted and filmed in the past. The men are not so often conventionally attractive. Bald dudes, kinda pudgy dudes, whatever. And they are rarely even REMOTELY sexualized in their death throes. By contrast the women, however, are often young, conventionally attractive. There is a lot of eroticizing the women and their bodies even during acts of violence. THIS is why the violence against women in the show bothers me. Because it is NOT equitable, and it IS blazingly, almost unapologetically sexist.

[almostinstinct.livejournal.com]

Hey, thanks for saying what I was trying to say. :)

[riveryklown.livejournal.com]

Guh, thank you so much for saying this!
Although, I personally think he hit her mostly to see if she would actually do something, to make sure she really is afraid to make a move against him.
But I hate the "Dean is a misogynist" fans so this post made my day :)

but this is a show about two men who fight evil

[threecatmama.livejournal.com]

Hi! I'm sure my ideas are not popular, but I don't think the violence on the show is inequitable. This is about good vs. evil and it depends on who is wearing the meatsuit. Plenty of female demons have tossed and damaged Dean and Sam over the years. And though the women are always thin, they are fully clothed (I've never seen so many layers on a TV show)! I can't see how the deaths are erotisized (sorry spelling)???? And I'm picturing quite a few of them as I write this.

Sam and Dean are warriors. They have been at war their entire lives (including their childhoods). They do not live in the normal world. They encounter evil and beings that are trying to kill them. They either have to fight or they will die. That is what this show is about.

The above meta was eloquently written (wish I could be that clear in my ideas) and I like the points the author makes.

[chasingtides.livejournal.com]

I would agree to a certain level with the fact that the Winchester's violence against other male bodies is not eroticised. However, I think that often violence against the Winchester's male bodies is more eroticised than their violence against attractive female bodies.

Take Mystery Spot as a viable example. I admit that I fall into the category of fans who went, "Oh wow, that's hot... wait, what?" when Sam was stitching himself up/removing the bullet from his abdomen after the Wednesday Dean died. Dean's writhing around when the hell hounds were attacking him in No Rest for the Wicked was also fairly erotic, underscored by Lilith sexual attitude toward Sam in the same scene. If you watch the community spnstoryfinders at all, you would see that there are an untold number of fans who want to read fanfiction where one or both of the Winchesters are hurt and many want to see them having sex while hurt.

[paper-cranes.livejournal.com]

I don't label Dean a misogynist because of who he hits, in fact most of the time he's hitting male "bad guys" and saving female "victims" which... looking at Dean's character, gives him more brownie points. [examining the production and creators though, not so good, the victimization of mostly women is just perpetuating stereotypes, etc. etc. etc.]

But, I digress. The reason I call Dean a misogynist is because of his use of language. Almost every insult or intergection of anger is derogatory. "Son of a bitch," "bitch," "whore," "black eyed skank," and now a new one, "douche up." There's more, but it's all linguistically anti-woman.

So, I think it's interesting that you've picked this all apart, and I'd even add the fact that when he was attacking Castiel he thought Castiel was going to SERIOUSLY hurt him. [I mean, until we knew he was an angel, imagine how scary the idea of an unknown SOMETHING that even demons are afraid of would be] I agree that Dean tends to be an equal opportunity hitter [he'll hit a woman if necessary, although he hesitated more way back when Meg was the first woman we saw him hit] but not an equal opportunity speaker.

[ckll.livejournal.com]

The guys don't hit women out of reason. They hit women demons.
How Dean uses women? Like every man in this planet.

[chasingtides.livejournal.com]

What male-oriented derogatory language would he be allowed to use? Words like "jackass" and "asshole" and "fucker" - which are, actually gender neutral - are restricted on television. I'm having trouble thinking of language he could use, but I freely admit that my brain is clogged from the cold/fever from Hell, so if you could point me in the direction of derogatory language that isn't female oriented or restricted on cable television, I would be appreciative.

[mresundance.livejournal.com]

more eroticized than their violence against attractive female bodies.

I don't disagree with the No Rest for the Wicked example. I wouldn't regard the fanfic as an example though, merely because that is not canon, and it is, to my mind fans projecting their own desires onto the hurt/comfort thing. It is not direct evidence provided by the writers and film-makers of the show itself.

I also think the scene in Mystery Spot you are citing is not a good example, when taken in context. Sam had an injury he was taking care of where parts of his very attractive physique were on display. But, I took it as more "Sammy is badass and dangerous". It additionally could have erotic subtext. But I don't think it is an example of violence, or the threat of violence being committed against a person being erotic.

It isn't simply Winchester violence towards women which is eroticized, I think. I think it's the whole damn show's framework of reference. Violence is a threat against women explicitly and it is sexualized.
The eroticized violence against women is everywhere, from Tricia Helfer's character in Roadkill (strung up, with the other ghost slicing at her exposed, stomach and well nigh groping her) to the dead black girl with her guts gore and body on display in Hookman, to the overly eroticized choice of footage of the female swimmer in the early minutes of "Dead in the Water" (compare it to similar footage in "Jaws" - where the female swimmer is naked, but the body is blurred/darkened to the point that it "clouds her") to the witch in "Malleus Maleficarum" biting it on her pretty, slightly slinky nightgown . . . gore and sexuality on display everywhere there . . . There was also the scene in "Nightshifter" with the blonde woman, gagged, bond, and bloody, her cleavage bloody and heaving . . . practically on display. It was massively creepy for a number of reasons, but the sexualization was there, particularly since the Skinwalker had just made really creepy passes at her minutes before. And besides. If it was just down to the cleavage, wardrobe could've given her a different shirt. But they didn't. And they chose the clips and the angles the chose for a reason.

Those are a few examples I can think off just off the top of my head. But there are plenty more. And that's not even touching on the sticky wicket of the "evil" women and their "dangerous and foreboding" sexuality. Nor the portrayal of women in the show in general.

Now, I can excuse some of this in light of the fact that it is a horror show, and it's within genre conventions. Horror - and urban myths and legends in the first couple seasons - often play upon the things people fear most. And one thing which is a definite reality and fear for many women is the threat of violence. I could excuse it if it was used in a fashion to make the horror/suspense more horrible. But often it's not. Often it just seems like cheap titillation rather than smart discourse on violence against women.

I think it's massively sexist and the writers don't even seem to have spent a minute dwelling on it, either. I think saying the show is otherwise is ignoring reams of footage and evidence on how women in general are treated by the show. That doesn't also mean the show doesn't have a lot of really awesome things about it and I don't love it in spite of it's faults. And I think being sexist is different from being misogynistic. Most people are sexist to an extent, or have had sexist thoughts towards women (this goes for women and men), I think, just because it's so culturally ingrained it's hard not to be. But misogynistic? That's a whole other ballgame, methinks, though related. Just because women are getting smacked around in SPN frequently doesn't make it misogynistic. Or that much different from so much other TV and movies out there.

Jo! God. I loved Jo. I wish they hadn't written her out like they did, nor Ellen, but that's a whole other ball of thread, I suppose.

[paper-cranes.livejournal.com]

I'm going to be honest, I'm not familiar enough with all the words restricted on television to come up with more neutral options. I'm not saying that this isn't indicative of the more troubling fact that female oriented insults are considered "okay" on tv when the neutral insults aren't. The larger problem than Dean's sexism is the willingness of tv corporations and ratings boards to let things like this go.

Really, I liked your meta, and I wasn't trying to start anything.

[talullahred.livejournal.com]

To add to your argument, in other episodes, while speaking or or talking to Meg and Ruby, Dean has left it clear that he doesn't think demons in girls bodies are girls.

Also, the only derogatory terms he ever uses to speak of women are reserved for those possessed by demons - e.g., skank for Ruby.

I don't think this makes him sexist - it sure makes him discriminatory against demons, but not sexist.

Nice analysis there.

[mresundance.livejournal.com]

Additionally . . . I don't think the boys tend to demonstrate violence - or eroticized violence - towards women per se. I am simply saying: it's written into the show. I don't find the boys misogynistic, but yeah, they have their moments of sexism, which is sometimes character development (I'm thinking Dean here), but it's also just part and parcel of the show to an extent.

[mresundance.livejournal.com]

How Dean uses women? Like every man in this planet

I could come up with a number of responses to that, but think the most direct and succinct one would be: no. Not every man on the planet.

[ckll.livejournal.com]

Ok, i correct it, not every man but many guys.
Besides that, we have seen in the last season that Dean would like to have a family and not just one night stands

[fangirlsays.livejournal.com]

IAWTC.