Whedon's Brown Coat Is, Um, Something Else Brown

   On the day I first conceived of this column, what should I see on the rear window of a pickup truck but a big decal of the Spaceship Serenity from the cult-favorite series "Firefly," which was the brainchild of Joss Whedon. All right, it's time. They can't stop  THIS  signal.

If a director of television and cinema has gone to great effort to convince his audience that prostitution is glamorous fun, and that prostitutes JUST LOVE being prostitutes...he has thoroughly disqualified himself to be taken seriously on any subject pertaining to oppression and enslavement.

Here on Earth, I have in my time been approached by prostitutes in the United States and Portugal. There was NOT A THING GLAMOROUS OR SOPHISTICATED about their exhausted faces, or their bleak resignation (when they weren't drunk) to their lot in life. They certainly didn't have the self-confidence of a vampire-slayer. They were turning tricks either because of desperate poverty, or because a pimp had them enslaved, or both. (Good grief, you just need to watch Les Miz to understand!)

Right at this point, the defenders both of prostitution and of smug Hollywood celebrities will try hard to believe that my distaste for prostitution must be motivated by the same hypocritical self-righteousness, the same haughty contempt for women, which "Firefly" depicted as being THE motivation for anyone who was so bigoted as to disapprove of the flesh trade. But I don't hate prostitutes; I grieve for them as Dostoevsky did. I don't wish to "punish" them, I wish I could liberate them from their servitude. Of  course, Joss Whedon's enablers will have a scripted comeback for this also: "You just have a savior complex!  You don't feel compassion for hookers, only sexist condescension!" Yeah, right; I'm sure that it's a great comfort to any prostitute to know that the pimp who beats her up and humiliates her DOESN'T have  a savior complex.

Here, then, we have storyteller Joss Whedon, who for his own part would probably argue that we just need to get rid of prudish puritanism and legalize prostitution everywere, then all would be well. But if he were to say this, he would be overlooking a fact of the real universe: the fact that, even where prostitution IS legal, women STILL need to be tricked or kidnaped into it, because (golly, what a surprise) most women don't relish having their abdomens treated like an airport terminal.

Here, I say, we have Joss Whedon, who has positively helped to desensitize his viewers to the realities of human trafficking; who has given a free pass to one of the most persistent forms of oppression ever to exist. This man has just had the chutzpah to declare, with fake solemnity, that confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the United  States Supreme Court would "cement" a dictatorship! Talk about straining out gnats and swallowing camels!

Dennis Prager, who has more intellect in his dandruff than Joss Whedon has inside his air-filled head, has transmitted his own signal to Joss Whedon. It's a question worthy to be remembered over the coming months. Mister Whedon: when Brett Kavanaugh joins the Supreme Court, and the United States DOESN'T suddenly turn into the standard-model racist neo-Nazi theocracy that Hollywood loves to depict, will you apologize for slandering the new Justice Kavanaugh?

Of course Whedon won't apologize. He'll cover his tracks by pretending that any slightest thing Kavanaugh does which ISN'T in favor of Marxism and sexual anarchy, IS the dictatorship.

Meanwhile, prostitutes in the real world will continue NOT being happy, sophisticated love-goddesses who delight in being  used.