oranges8hands:

oranges8hands:

*pinches bridge of nose*

The reason I shook my head when I
realized Jenna was played by the same actress as Emily (7.22) was
because the Winchesters deliberately left a kidnapped victim with her
(sexually abusive, emotionally manipulative) “father” and I knew  –
having paid, yanno, an iota of attention to the way this show does girls
– that something similar was going to happen to Amara. Crowley
“stranger in a white van” grabbed her and was literally trying to train
her (gotta make her loyal, like a dog); cupcake, sweetie, good girl, let’s take a step back and look at the big picture of this storyline: a being older than God, older than Death,
has to Emma-grow her way into being, underneath Crowley’s command,
locked away and rewarded with a pink dress (Emily and her pink room,
sexual abuse victims and their pink clothing) and controlled (how much
food does she get, what does she watch, what can she read) and her anger
is only seen in privacy, a reflection of her older self she needs to wait to reach. She’s powerful, technically, but mostly she’s a baby little girl, she’s listening to Crowley, she’s shunted off to a side room, she’s a rotating cast of growing bodies and she – locked away longer than Lucifer was even alive – has to wait before she can act. (Because first we need to see Crowley try to shape her, control her; and whether he’s able to or not at the end of the day, the narrative will always make sure its a possibility for the female character.) 

An additional summary of the women in this episode:

Women (witches) are a joke. Half the time they can’t even
finish the spell before a man is grabbing them (which somehow stops them), can’t defend themselves
and – besides Rowena – can’t save themselves. Dean winks and sticks his
feet up and talks to them like they’re stupid and beneath his notice;
Rowena is a joke to other witches and witches are a joke to the
Winchesters. Ruby used a map and fire to scry out Dean’s location in S4
and here we have make-up (mirror and foundation) to find Rowena. ”I’m a
nobody, I’m worse than nobody, I’m nobody’s third cousin who doesn’t
even get invited to dinner.”

Women are victims. We watch Cas stalk
and choke a woman,
Cas was on our screen trying to choke a woman to death, and Dean was watching
(how long would he have stood there and let it happen?) and we were
watching and our hero (not his fault, of course, can’t control his
actions and those Winchesters have inconsistent skills with handcuffs)
tries to choke a woman to death, he stalks and chokes her, we literally watched Cas
try to choke a woman to death, not his fault Dean tells him when he
apologizes for hitting Dean and there is a woman out there who was
recently almost choked to death, who ran (slowly) for her life and was
scared and hurt and as soon as she left the screen (left where she was
victimized) she was removed from our consciousness. Women get boiled
alive, they have their throats cut and then stabbed for emphasis, they
have violence visited upon them, over and over and over
again, they are dead and expendable.

Women are sexualized and
racialized and mothered. East Asian women are fetishized porn stars,
they are PR footage and silent voices and moans and available 24 hours a
day. Blonde women “have more fun” (she is about to be chained against
her will) and there to fulfill all those no homo needs (Dean was
definitely flirting with her, body close to her, in the dark, in an
isolated area, he is a big guy and he scoffs when she doesn’t want to
hear it.) They are pure evil but still somehow know how to be nannies
(and when they can’t, MOC can be feminized into their role.) They are
private jokes (MrsTran, “tiger mom,” was another woman Crowley locked
away) and dismissible.

This is how Buckner & Ross-Leming write women in this episode and this is how they write them in all of their episodes.