I'm not trying to disparage anyone by saying that a person who is so socially isolated that they don't have any friends can't make social change. You've got a hermit, he lives in the woods, he never talks to a soul in his life. He wants to change society. I don't think this is very smart, or a very good way to be a hermit. One shouldn't try to repair social relations if they don't have any. It's like campaigning to stop deforestation when you live on a desert island. The theory of change here is basically "prayer".
Only if you're genuinely of the belief that "understanding theory" is akin to worship or self-purification can it even make sense to think that the man who knows nothing of feminism but is kind and understanding to his friends is worthy of denigration, or that our friendless hermit is doing literally anything of value whatsoever.
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I'll defend Clay quite quickly—the point of Clay was the controversy, the tension between what was acceptable and what wasn't. The "downfall" he had was a symbolic one; it's kayfabe. You won't see people defend him because it sends the wrong message, you know, but by putting it out there, making it contestable, he was doing a great service to the cause. Even if that service was having his character getting symbolically annihilated out of the public sphere. That's how comedy works, it's a kind of accelerationism, without him you'd be stuck contesting it for another decade or two. The joke isn't about what he's saying, it's about what he's allowed to say, and then what he's not allowed to say. That's why Andrew Dice Clay's content isn't Andrew Tate's content. His earliest fans were women, and it's clear why—the joke is about the mortifying ordeal of being female, of having someone say outrageous things to you, of the attitudes he's surfacing and making contestable.
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And then Whedon, as we discussed, is not making feminist content, he's making this sort of mockery of women. Do you not remember Dollhouse, his mind-control BDSM rape fantasy TV show, featuring crowds of reprogrammable women, all controlled by an amoral and geeky self-insert? The meta-text is of course that this is what he's always been doing, taking beautiful women and putting them in sleazy situations and reveling in their humiliation. The subtext is the same as it's always been in Joss Whedon's work, which is that the personalities of the women he writes don't belong to themselves, they belong to him; he's the one writing the clever quips, remember? They're not smart—he is.
