Lessons in Funny Feminism from my Littlest, Tallest Little Brother

I was away on vacation when my youngest brother turned sixteen, so this post is a little late, but I wanted to talk about the youngest and tallest member of my family.

My youngest brother is growing up to be a pretty cool kid. He’s active in several different activities, a creative soul, and a funny person who enjoys making people laugh. One of my favorite aspects of watching him grow up is noticing how he obviously and openly respects women, women’s experiences, and women’s opinions.

This respect manifests in a few ways. Despite being a rather stubborn person who doesn’t always take criticism well (sorry, kid- it’s the truth!), he listens to me and my mother if we attempt to offer him advice. I also notice with pleasure that he seems to make female friends pretty easily. I don’t recall him ever having a “girls are icky” phase, or not wanting to play with girls or be friends with girls. He seemed to be happy whenever he made a new friend, and whether the new friend was a girl or a boy was irrelevant to him.

I can’t speak too much about his personal life, though – he wouldn’t want me to, for one thing, and I also don’t know too much about his friendships. I will, however, make some observations about his viewing patterns and his choices of entertainment.

A few summers ago, I watched some of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with my brother. I was in the middle of re-watching the whole series and was caught in the middle of season four. I say “caught” because season four is by far my least favorite season of the series – way too much Riley Finn and the Initiative and ugly, ugly sets and costumes and lighting – but watching it with a new viewer made the season more palatable to me.

Now, I had recently watched a few episodes with my then-boyfriend, and while he enjoyed the show to a point, he would occasionally make the observation that the male characters on Buffy were only there to serve the female characters and didn’t get many storylines of their own. I humored that observation at the time, even though I was thinking, “First of all, that’s just plain inaccurate, and second of all, welcome to how women feel in just about every male-centric story ever written.”

I did notice, though, that a lot of the male fans of Buffy I knew cited Spike, or Angel, or Giles, as their favorite characters in the show. They liked Spike and Angel because they kicked ass, or Giles because he was the wittiest character on the show. (Interestingly, none of them liked Xander nearly as much as I did.) I understood where they were coming from, because I was also a big fan of Spike and Giles, and grew to like Angel once he got his own show.

My brother, however, was the first male viewer I knew who was all about Buffy.

He didn’t even comment that much on Buffy’s hotness or sexiness or the things that guys are “supposed” to talk about, either. He just thought Buffy was cool. He sat forward in his seat and cheered her on whenever a fight scene came on. I heard enthusiastic cries of “Go, Buffy!” several times an episode. He didn’t think Buffy was cool “for a girl character.” He thought Buffy was cool, period. (Willow and Spike were close second favorite.)

But his respect for Buffy extended beyond an appreciation of her ass-kicking abilities. When we watched one of my least favorite episodes of all time, “Doomed,” we sat through several excruciating scenes where Riley lectures Buffy about why she’s stupid for not wanting to go out with him, despite knowing very little about her history or her responsibilities. (Disclaimer: I am the opposite of a Riley fan.) During these interminably long scenes, my brother, with no prompting from me, said, “He’s disrespecting her. He doesn’t even know what she does or what being the Slayer means.”

I cannot tell you how proud I was to see him come up with that observation all by himself. It seems like such a little thing – Buffy’s just a television show, right? But it was a little thing that spoke to something bigger. My brother recognized that Riley was lecturing Buffy about Buffy’s experiences, that a character was ‘splaining the other character’s life instead of listening and asking questions, and he recognized that this was the wrong thing to do.

I’ve also enjoyed watching his reactions to horror movies. We watched the original Scream trilogy together and he had an interesting take on all of the murder scenes. I noticed that murder scenes involving male characters were often quick and relatively bloodless, while murder scenes involving female characters were drawn out, probably because the audience gets off on watching a woman run for her life. My brother had a different perspective on those scenes. He commented, “The guys don’t even try to fight back. The killer gets them so easily. At least the girls try to put up a fight. They’re stronger.” And while I don’t think that was the intent of the filmmakers, I still thought it was neat that he took that message away from the movies.

My brother is a pretty neat kid because he’s quite a well-rounded person. He enjoys playing sports and playing music to an equal degree, and he’s just as likely to pick up a video game as he is to make a cheesecake. He doesn’t limit himself to either stereotypically masculine or stereotypically feminine activities, and he’s not likely to turn down a movie or book because it has a female protagonist. If anything, the presence of a strong female character is likely to appeal to him. He’s growing up quite nicely and I’m very proud of him – though that won’t stop me from stealing his dessert.