Tiger Beatdown: Dollhouse, Joss Whedon, and the Strange and Difficult Path of Feminist Dudes: Some Thoughts -by Sady:
I did not like Buffy. I, unlike a lot of feminist ladies, get annoyed with Strong Female Characters Who Kick Ass, because it seems to me that making your heroine actually magical and skilled in various made-up martial arts is a really silly way to go about delivering Female Empowerment to your viewers. Yeah, yeah: it's a metaphor. It just wasn't a metaphor that worked for me. The strength was always just a little too superhuman, the magic too magical, the villains too obviously and literally demonic, and Buffy -most crucially- way too adorable yes for me to buy in.

The new show Dollhouse has drawn critique from other feminists: because it depicts rape of a very "gray" variety, because it doesn't condemn the forced prostitution and human trafficking it conveys strongly enough, because its characters aren't Strong or lovable in the way they have been in past Whedon shows. Fair points. Also: points with which I disagree.
Dollhouse is, pretty much specifically and entirely, a show about consent.
Whedon, unlike most folks & many feminist or progressive-identified dudes, seems to listen when he is called out then improve his work accordingly. With Dollhouse, I think he is doing smarter work than he ever was.
Getting smarter about oppression, I submit to you, requires making the visible manifestations of it or metaphors for it much, much uglier.
The answer to whether Joss Whedon & his showrunners know how rape-culturey the Dollhouse concept is seems to be Yes: it's a metaphor not only for rape culture but for patriarchy & oppression at large. When they have sex, they aren't consenting: they've been made to think that they are consenting, by being made to think that they are ppl who wld consent. They exist either in non-personhood or implanted w false consciousness. I mean, false consciousness: Whedon's metaphors, they are rarely subtle. Their reactions to learning this, when they "wake up" (which Whedon has shown them doing, albeit briefly) are horror, disgust, and rage at how deeply they've been violated.
Resistance, this time, isn't about throwing punches. It's about reclaiming your right to be a person.

One of Whedon's perennial concerns is masculinity in a feminist era: if women are so powerful now, how are guys supposed to relate to them? It's a good question, and one of the better themes a male writer can explore, if he's willing to do it honestly. Whedon has offered solutions before but they've always been imperfect, because they haven't addressed how pervasive gender inequality is. In Dollhouse, he's giving it deeper and more sustained focus than ever, and is more willing than ever to implicate masculinity: in parallel to the story of how the dolls work to reclaim their personhood, there's the story of the people who take it away from them on a day-to-day basis, and how they justify their actions.
They tell themselves they're protecting the dolls. They tell themselves that they're doing the dolls a favor, by taking away the responsibilities of personhood. They tell themselves they're doing society a favor by keeping the dolls' services available. They tell themselves that the best way to fix the system is to work within the system. They tell themselves that the dolls aren't really people, so none of it matters.
Whedon has done a lot of shows about magically powerful women and the men who protect them (Buffy had Giles, River had Simon and Mal), which is sweet - hey, at least they aren't actively seeking to take power away from those women - but also paternalistic and troubling, and in Dollhouse he seems to know and specifically address just how creepy it is. Lots of parallels have been drawn between the "handler," Boyd, who is a protective father figure to Echo, and Giles, who is a protective father figure to Buffy, and those parallels are correct. However, this time around, Boyd is the guy in the creepy van, who takes her back to the Dollhouse to have her self taken away once she's served her purpose, and if she were a whole person, she might not need him at all. The question of whether he loves her enough to help her free herself is continually raised. Paul Ballard, the FBI agent who wants to "save" Echo, is also implicated: a hero, sure, but also weirdly and sexually preoccupied with "saving" a girl he doesn't know so that she will love him, a person just as involved in projecting his desires onto a blank slate as any Dollhouse client. The show doesn't steer around that fact. You don't hate these men -you love them, in fact- but Whedon is far more willing than ever before to implicate them in the oppression that he condemns. He's toyed with ambiguity and complicity before, but this time around, ambiguity and complicity are what the show is about.

Because Topher, the programmer, who is responsible for constructing the artificial personalities & implanting them in the dolls, is a dorky blonde guy just like Whedon and who speaks in distinctly Whedonian cadences & lines, and we are encouraged to dislike him more than almost anyone else in the series. What you hear, when you hear Topher speaking about how difficult it is to construct a believable personality, how all of his creations have to be full & nuanced & have reasons for how they behave, how achievement is fueled by lack and he gave her asthma because that made her a more complete person and blah blah blah, is noted feminist auteur Joss Whedon reflecting, very consciously and very obviously, on his life's work -hiring gorgeous women & making them into who he wants them to be. It's a beautiful thing: brave, and self-questioning, and radical in a way that entertainment by dudes -even entertainment by dudes who identify as feminist- very rarely is.