I Finally Figured Out the Problem: <i>Angel</i> Hates Sex

I am a recovering TV hater. When I was a kid, my parents allowed us very little TV, so I made a snooty virtue of necessity and proclaimed that TV rots your brain and I didn’t want any anyway. This was a lie easily disprovable by the ferocity of my commitment to the soap opera Guiding Light, but I clung to it until college, when the show Firefly (I know, I know) slammed into me like a Mack truck. My older sister found out about this, graciously did not say “I told you so,” and shepherded me into the world of Buffy and, in due time, its companion show, Angel.

I love this TV show. I love it. Angel remains practically unmatched in its success at creating a found family of its characters. Writing this essay made me want to rewatch it, which I am doing right now. I refused to send this piece to my usual beta reader, because they haven’t seen Angel yet and I want neither to spoil it for them nor to give them any reason not to watch it. I watched Angel on the evening of November 6th because it powerfully reminds me that you don’t get a hall pass from the fight just because it’s unwinnable. As you are reading, please hold in your heart the knowledge that this show is, and will probably always be, one of my most beloved pieces of media, ever.

Perhaps inevitably for a long-running show from the early aughts, there’s a lot of fights to be picked with Angel. Some of its problems I’ve only noticed on a rewatch, like the casual violence committed against suspects by a cop character we’re supposed to like. Others were articulable to me even on a first viewing, like that nobody writing for this show had ever met a Black person; Gunn deserved better, and any episode that tried to talk about race should be swiftly yeeted into the sea.

I could never articulate one of my biggest problems with the show—at least not as a college student pulling all-nighters to watch Angel DVDs in my dorm room. I knew it had to do with sex, and I felt like misogyny was mixed in there too some kind of way, but I could never quite put my finger on what was making me feel so icky. Sure, the show punished its characters for having sex, but the show punished its characters for everything they did, not to mention everything they failed to do. And the show condemned misogyny explicitly as well as thematically. What, actually, was my problem?

A quarter-century on from Angel’s inception, I can see that my feeling of ickiness arose from the show’s insistence that sex can’t be meaningful or important unless it’s also hurting people. This is a weirdly consistent theme throughout the show’s run, with very few exceptions. Several of the primary (male) characters have sex (once each) with women who won’t have any lasting impact on plotlines or character development. Fred and Gunn have a sweet, warm relationship that lasts across two seasons, but we virtually never see the sexual side of their relationship. Angel and Cordelia have sex once, but it (a) is a dream and (b) turns Angel evil (“Awakening”). In the landscape of this show, sex is disappointing at best, predatory almost always, and at worst it’s going to kill someone or kickstart the apocalypse.

The show’s original sexual sin—which sets the template for how plot-significant sex will be treated over the course of the series—takes place in the second season, at the end of the so-called “gray Angel” arc. After many ups and downs and magically induced sex dreams and killing a roomful of lawyers, Angel has sex with his vampire ex-girlfriend, Darla. He does this knowing that Darla has been on a thrilling rollercoaster ride through the range of human and vampire morality before landing firmly in “pure evil” territory. He’s also fully cognizant that sex with Darla might turn him evil: the curse that granted him a soul can be reversed, and he can be returned to the nefarious killing machine he used to be, if he experiences a single moment of perfect happiness (glossed in the show as an orgasm during sex with someone he loves).

Instead, the hook-up turns out to be Angel’s personal rock bottom—he describes it as an act of “perfect despair.” Scared straight by the emptiness of his sexual dalliance with mindless evil, he rejects Darla and returns to his friends. Good outcome, right? Except this sets the stage for every other bad thing that happens for the next three seasons. Darla becomes mystically pregnant with a baby whose future—as foretold by prophecy—is shrouded in destruction and misery. Briefly re-ensouled via pregnancy, Darla realizes that the soulless version of her is too evil to be a mother. She stakes herself, in a sacrifice that will allow the baby to be born.

The baby, Connor, comes back later in season three having grown up in a hell dimension, therefore now old enough to have his own perfect despair sexual encounter. He has sex with Cordelia, a person who changed his diapers when he was a baby, because he’s convinced that he’s to blame for the sudden apocalypse Los Angeles is experiencing (“Apocalypse Nowish”). They bone while the city burns, and Angel watches them from a nearby building for some goddamn reason. “But Jenny,” you say, “at least the person he was having sex with wasn’t evil this time!”

GUESS AGAIN, BITCH. We find out that Cordelia is possessed by a demon when this occurs, and she’s only sleeping with Connor to bring on a much bigger apocalypse. Cordelia falls demonically pregnant for a second time (!) and eventually gives birth to villain-goddess Jasmine. Like Darla, Cordelia will not survive childbirth: she lapses into a coma and dies off-screen in the fifth season. Charisma Carpenter has said that her character was written off the show in retaliation for her having had the temerity to get pregnant in real life, which puts an even ickier spin on this sexual encounter and its aftermath.

And then there’s Wesley.

And Fred.

Winifred “Fred” Burkle is a character type that Joss Whedon was never able to stop writing, the big-eyed, vulnerable girl who will inevitably be sexually menaced in a way that’s definitely not voyeuristic or prurient, no sir, it’s happening to teach us an important lesson about Primal Male Urges and The Evils of Misogyny. We can only ever learn this lesson by depicting said misogyny in loving detail and with very broad strokes. This is Angelus with Willow, Caleb/the First Evil with various Potential slayers, Jubal Early with Kaylee, that one… fuckin… client in Dollhouse with Dichen Lachman’s character (God I’m mad that I remember that), and of course, a demon-possessed Wesley with Fred in season three’s “Billy.”

In this godforsaken episode, we meet a character called Billy whose touch “brings out a primordial misogyny in [men], turns them into killers.” Basically, if Billy touches a man, that man turns into a violent incel. The episode depicts and implies a lot of violence against women, and it’s unusually graphic for a show that rarely shows a named character taking any damage that lasts more than about an hour. Here, Wesley gets infected by touching Billy’s blood, which leads to a lengthy sequence in which he threatens Fred, hits her, then stalks her through the hotel as he issues a series of upsettingly sexual threats. A brief sample of what he says:

It is actually really unpleasant! Putting the episode on for long enough to copy down that dialogue sent my heart rate through the roof. Once Billy’s influence wears off, Fred is quick to reassure Wesley that what happened isn’t his fault and that he’s a good man. Fine, okay! I’m not here to argue that the misogyny really is primordial, when bigotry of all kinds are so clearly learned behaviors. Still, it’s striking that the episode closes on how Wesley feels about committing sexualized violence, rather than how Fred feels about having it committed against her by a trusted friend. It’s Fred, rather than Wesley, who takes initiative in repairing the damage to their relationship; and it’s Wesley, rather than Fred, who experiences lasting effects from the violation he suffered in this episode. The episode becomes a pivot point for Wesley’s character journey across the remainder of this season and the next.

As the object of protection, Fred exists at a level of moral purity in her that isn’t present in any of the other (sex-having) ladies of Angel. Sex with Fred can’t be a moral rock bottom—she’s too good and perfect for that!—so it’s taken off the table almost entirely. Indeed, when Fred and Wesley do get together in season five, she dies before they do more than kiss. Fred can be desired, but that desire can’t be consummated, because the vocabulary of the show requires that the act of sex is ethically contaminating. The one and only Fred sex scene we ever see occurs in the episode where she makes the most morally compromising choices we’ll ever see from her (“Supersymmetry”).

The nadirs of “Billy,” which occur without Fred’s participation or consent, set the stage for Wesley’s moral downturn. Later in the season, Wesley finds himself outcast and alone after betraying Angel and his friends, for, let’s say, moderately sympathetic reasons. The evil lawyer Lilah Morgan, an Angel antagonist from early on, tries to tempt Wesley into taking a job with her law firm, Wolfram and Hart. Although he refuses, he starts sleeping with Lilah in the finale of season three. Here again, his sexual choices are meant to illustrate how far he has strayed from the path. “Your former boss has a soul,” Lilah says to Wesley the first time they have sex, “and you’re losing yours.” It’s his own moral rock bottom, as it was for Angel when he had sex with Darla.

Wesley and Lilah keep sleeping together through the first half of season four, and Wesley breaks it off around the same time he’s becoming more fully integrated back into the team at Angel Investigations. Shortly thereafter, Lilah’s killed by the season’s Big Bad, and Wesley has to mutilate her corpse to make sure she doesn’t come back as a vampire. He is sad about this. We dwell quite a lot on how sad it makes him.

Meanwhile, throughout this arc, virtually every character on the show finds time to remark on how much sexier Wesley is, now that he’s sort of awful. Here and always, sex in Angel reaches us via the perspective of the male characters. The show condemns their sexual choices, while simultaneously casting them as victims of magic and manipulation. They are making wicked choices that they will and should regret; but isn’t it kind of sexy and alluring of them, actually? When you think about it? Bad, though. Definitely bad.

It’s this kind of fakey self-flagellation that I find unbearable. I’m all for exploring the complexities of sexual power dynamics, but Angel doesn’t have the range to do that. Instead, it serves up the same tired patterns over and over again, calls it feminism, and expects viewers to eat it up with a spoon and say thank you. Over and over again, sex is the outward sign that the (male) characters have done wrong, and it’s also the punishment they deserve.

Except—it never is the men who end up punished. As much as the show belabors the perspective of the guilt-ridden men, it’s the women who pay, and pay, and pay. Darla sacrifices herself so her despair sex pregnancy son can be born. Lilah gets killed by the Beast’s master, right after Fred (pure, good) finds out that Wesley’s been boning Lilah (seedy, bad). Fred dies because one of her exes loves her so much that he chooses her as the vessel for the second coming of his god. Cordelia dies because—look, I’m trying not to talk that much about Joss Whedon, I am trying so hard to stay in the text, but truly men would rather write five seasons of a television show, get way too obsessed with their own psychosexual narrative, and be a real asshole to Charisma Carpenter, than go to therapy.

Darla dies. Lilah dies. Cordelia dies. Fred dies.

You’re welcome.