On Joss Whedon, Male Feminist

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How I wish I’d remembered to link to this when I wrote earlier this week about the misogyny of the Horton Hears A Who movie.

It’s Joss Whedon, the man who gave us Buffy the Vampire Slayer (go ahead and laugh—LOVED it), Angel, Firefly, and much more. Here’s a guy who builds killer vehicles around strong, female protagonists and gets rich.

It’s his acceptance speech for an award from Equality Now and is one of the best indictments I’ve encountered of media pack mentality, intellectual laziness, and the near impossibility of having a national conversation around sexism.

Problem is: people think merely asking a seemingly feminist question, while tuning out on the answer, will suffice. Also, the speech is hilarious. Whedon is riffing about all the poseur ‘journalists’ who interview him and ask the same question, one to which they clearly never do more than type up the answer: How come you write about such strong women?

Enjoy, with my compliments.

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We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

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