snick_backup | Sex Leads to Badness, and other tropes

In comments to

penny_lane_42's recent post, Sexuality, Consent, and the Buffyverse, I wrote, "I don't really have anything to say about the Sex Leads to Badness trope."

On further thought, I find that this is not true.

Joss's repeated use of Sex Leads to Badness (see Lauren's post for a handy enumerated list of evidence) is frequently viewed as Joss punishing the characters for having sex. I gather that this is a common horror trope as well, one that Joss has clearly overlooked in his attempt to deconstruct the genre. I've read a number of reasons for why people dislike this trope; leading the list are the related ideas that Sex=Good and that by using the trope Joss is promoting a twisted, unhealthy view of sexuality.

By themselves, I've never found either objection very compelling, largely, I suspect, because I have a more conservative view of healthy and appropriate sexual behavior than many folks. I view sex as an intimacy best experienced inside a deeply committed relationship. As with other intimate acts, it involves a great deal of vulnerability, at the very least physical but in most cases emotional as well. It also comes with baggage and expectations, many of them cultural but some, I believe, hard-wired. Sex is powerful stuff and not to be taken lightly. There are in fact very few examples of sex in the Buffyverse that I can believe were actually good decisions on the parts of both parties involved. (This is one major reason why I tend to write gen.)

(Also, because I know this often becomes an issue: I feel exactly the same way about this for both men and women. To my mind, casual sex is equally unhealthy and inappropriate for either gender.)

Given that, I’m actually all for the idea that sex has consequences, both good and bad, and am not opposed to seeing these consequences played out on screen. When Buffy makes what I consider the monumentally stupid decision to sleep with Parker, whom she’d known for a couple of weeks, I’m not in the least surprised that she gets burned. When Spike and Anya get it on, is it any wonder they hurt a whole lot of people’s feelings in the process, whether those hurt feelings are justified or not? And Lauren and I were talking just the other day about how one of the reasons the Spike/Buffy relationship in S6 works for us is because it goes against the “start having sex and everything’s fixed!” trope that’s so popular, especially in fandom.

OTOH, I find I have increasingly little patience with badness that directly follows sex and yet isn’t causally related to it, or at least wouldn’t be in our universe. “Sleep with your boyfriend and he’ll lose his soul” is of course the prototypical example, and it works because it’s Joss’s first big venture into such waters, because its metaphor is intentional, and because the arc is written so very well. But then there are such gems as “Sleep with your girlfriend again and some guy’ll shoot you” and our latest winner, “Sleep with your ex-boyfriend and current mortal enemy, and you’ll destroy the world! Literally!” That’s badness by authorial fiat, and after a while it starts to feel like plain bad storytelling.

However, if you toss in all the instances that are less about sex than about relationships in general, whether begun, renewed, or ongoing, things get much worse: Jenny dying just as she and Giles are reconciling, the meltdown of the Willow/Oz breakup, the heartbreak and stupidity of the Xander-Anya wedding-that-wasn’t, Anya dying shortly after she and Xander get together again, Renee dying after she and Xander kiss. And then there’s that one thing in Dr. Horrible, and that other kiss-followed-by-gunshot-death in Dollhouse (which I am still quite bitter about). In fact, I care much less about Joss’s apparent vendetta against sex than I do about his vendetta against relationships in general. Joss forbid that any couple ever get a happy ending, or even just a stable, long-term relationship. I adore Wash and Zoe in Firefly - a happily married couple! in space! – and we all know how that turned out.

All of which is to say: I’m a fan of Sex Leads to Consequences. I’m skeptical of Sex Leads to Badness; it depends very much on how it’s handled and what we’re talking about. And I’m profoundly irritated with All Relationships are Doomed.