I was a very religious teenager. Consequently, I spent a lot of time thinking about good and evil, and a lot of time trying not to think about sex. Christianity is partially to blame for this, but so is literature: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Christina Rossetti’s sororal allegory of forbidden sexuality Goblin Market (1862), for example, make for heady companions to the kind of evangelical-lite youth groups that sprung up across the home counties in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Around the time I was spending my Sunday evenings at the Alpha Youth course and my long weekday nights reading Wordsworth Classics, I was also spending a lot of time secretly watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I wasn’t allowed to watch the show, which originally aired between 1997 and 2003, and so from the very start the VHS tapes I furtively collected took on a certain power: they promised the possibility of a newer, more potent form of the corruption I had already found in the 19th century. Buffy appealed precisely because it was so clearly about the things that I was preoccupied by: the unholy cast of vampires, demons, witches and monsters, and the gang of high school friends working to defeat them felt familiar to me, relatable. But its real gift was its escalation of the everyday: high school is hell and the show made good on that promise, locating within the tawdry horrors of adolescence a battle against various embodiments of a force the final season reveals to have been “the first evil”. It didn’t require much Sunday School knowledge to interpret that as original sin.

Reading, praying, and watching forbidden television all required the same thing: time alone in my room. The literary scholar Patricia Meyer Spacks writes in her book Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self (2003) of the widespread, diffuse anxiety that appeared in 18th-century England as reading became something that people, especially young women, did alone. The fear was that “the solitary experience of others’ fantasies would perhaps encourage their own, and perhaps those fantasies would result in dangerous action (meaning, in most cases, sexual action.)” Reading – imaginative solitary time – was a threat to virtue. My own reading practices, tending as they did toward material from the subsequent century, confronted this assault on purity head-on: the authors I read, Rossetti and Stoker chief among them, were obsessed with contagion, with the commingling of bodily fluids, of the violation of the chastity and privacy of the female body. Sexuality, then – Spacks’s “dangerous action” – was a central preoccupation, particularly for someone inhabiting the freighted body of a young woman in the new millennium. The question of whether my own burgeoning sexuality was a natural or a moral evil – a choice or a burden – was something I obsessed over: was I a victim or a villain? Could I be both? In the Goblin Market paradigm, which sister was I?

Buffy certainly didn’t give me any clear answers. On the one hand, Buffy herself was clearly on the side of good in her professional life (if slaying is a profession); on the other, in her personal life she herself was clearly a desiring subject, and she gave into precisely the kinds of sinful urges I was so troubled by. By the time it becomes clear in the middle of the first season that she is attracted to the vampire-with-a-soul Angel, the pleasingly clear parameters of the series’ morality start to get muddied; by the time she’s literally fucking the house down with the soulless, peroxided, BDSM-coded, bad-boy vampire Spike, it became clear that I was in way over my head. But I couldn’t stop watching: mesmerised, I even started rooting for them. Evil, I realised, was something that I wanted to see, and to experience, even if I had to watch it with the bedroom light on, peeping through my fingers.

Vampirism, historically, is a useful bellwether for the culture more generally. Nina Auerbach writes in her book Our Vampires, Ourselves (1995) of the vampire as a figure which shapes itself to “personal and national moods”: every generation, she believes, constructs the specific version it requires to give form to its most pressing anxieties. In the 19th century, this was to do with sex but also with human vulnerability, the transgression of bodily borders: Jules Law, in The Social Life of Fluids (2010), writes of the ways in which the figure of the vampire in particular haunts all exchanges of fluid in the period, from breast milk to the newly embanked waters of the Thames. Central to this was the difficulty of controlling unruly bodies, both those that threatened to violate and those that needed to be protected from such violation (especially if they seemed like they might be seeking it). A century later, amidst the wreckage of second-wave feminism and the incipient celebrity culture that fetishised the teenage girl, the ambivalent, subculturally-coded vampires of Buffy the Vampire Slayer were, while certainly symbols of sexual power and old-school historical evil, not always the primary antagonists.

Instead, the show makes the norm the villain. Evil is made manifest in the governing structures of society itself, and society being, specifically, suburban California at the turn of the 21st century, this means the patriarchy. In Buffy, dads are bad. Katherine Angel, writing in 2019 of the “troubling power” still wielded by father figures, puts forward that “discontent with fathers has increasingly been privatised within feminist discourse; Daddy Issues have been relegated to the realm of personal problems.” Buffy might have been post-feminist in its high-femme aesthetic, but its approach to the concept of the patriarchy is an old-school one. I’m not advancing any grand declarations about the “radical” subversiveness of Buffy, wary as I am of the mishandling and dilution of the concept of patriarchy by the dreary girlboss feminism that has dominated the last few decades and also of Joss Whedon himself, a self-declared feminist who has been accused of abuse and misconduct by multiple people. I’m trying, rather, to analyse the show on its own terms. These are, of course, my terms, too: certainly, the forms of religious influence I was under at the time I was watching the show were explicitly patriarchal. (The softened evangelism of the Church of England in relation to its American counterpart often underplays its sinister dynamics. In 2023 the founder of Soul Survivor, the charismatic evangelical Christian movement based in Watford which ran annual youth music festivals, Reverend Mike Pilavachi, stepped down after historic allegations of inappropriate intimate relationships with young people in his care).

Daddy Issues – the title of Katherine Angel’s book as well as its subject – could be Buffy’s alternative title. It was certainly a perfect cultural object for students of paternal hostility like myself, beginning with the archetypal absent father Hank Summers – may God curse his name – whose only appearances in all seven seasons were classical failures: he didn’t show up to take Buffy to see the Ice Capades, he didn’t even show up after her mother, the long-suffering gallerist Joyce, died suddenly of a cerebral aneurysm in season five. Male authority figures throughout the series are almost universally evil: the school principal, the town mayor, the frat boys at the local university, the coach of the high school swim team. Often, the level of avuncular paternity performed by each of them directly correlates with how evil they are. The mayor, the antagonist or “big bad” of the third season, is an immortal demon and self-described family man who manipulates the abandonment issues of rogue slayer Faith, cultivating a daddy-daughter dynamic in order to turn her against Buffy and the gang. In Buffy, one evil unique to the father figure is his ability to come between the fertile forms of alternative familial solidarity that constitute the rest of the series’ primary relationships.

This dynamic is mapped out in one memorable episode from the second season when Buffy faces paternal intrusion into her own home. Joyce begins to date Ted, who, with his baking, his mini golf, his obsession with rules and his repeated, threatening refrain “little lady”, begins to exert the kind of control over Buffy’s life that is explicitly and prohibitively paternal: the episode is a claustrophobic viewing experience, as we see the parameters of possibility we need her to exist within – as Slayer, but also as series protagonist – becoming narrowed. In the end, it’s revealed that Ted is actually a femicidal robot bent on seeking out and killing women who look like his original wife, but the closure feels unnecessary: the behaviours that scared us were those of a deliberately normal man.

The exception to this rule is Giles, the school librarian and Buffy’s “Watcher”, who knows her secret identity and performs the role of the good dad to her and her friends. If the protective father of a daughter is, generally, an expression of anxiety about female sexuality – he is her guarantor precisely because he was formerly a threat; he can counsel her against the dangers of masculinity because he himself knows its full horrors – Giles functions as a kind of transitional figure as Buffy moves into adulthood. When she loses her virginity and in the process accidentally turns her boyfriend Angel back into Angelus, the most evil vampire of all time (oops), Giles doesn’t judge or harangue her: instead, he gives her a hug, legitimising her move away from childhood and allowing her to understand herself as remaining lovable, despite her “mistake”. (This is why the episode in which Giles betrays Buffy, injecting her with a chemical that saps her of her strength, is so horrifying. He does so, however at the behest of the Watchers’ Council, the uber-paternalistic organisation he later makes a total break with. Patriarchy, we’re allowed to think, made him do it).

“Ted” includes a scene in which Buffy’s friends Willow and Xander joke in explicitly psychoanalytic terms about her antipathy towards Joyce’s partner: Willow diagnoses Buffy with “separation anxiety” at “the mother figure being taken away”, before declaring them to be in “Sigmund Freud territory.” Yet, from a psychoanalytic perspective, Buffy inverts the Oedipus complex: she, with her phallic stake, has not been symbolically castrated, and so we witness her not turning away from the mother in horror but instead taking on a feminised urge toward patricide. (And as for a sublimated desire to bear the father a child: her major romances, if we discount her sublimely boring college boyfriend, Riley, are with vampires. It’s unclear whether vampires can get someone pregnant. Despite their blood flow issues, they can get erections – but can they impregnate? Probably not). With these Oedipal inversions in mind, we can see the show, at least in its first few seasons, as an allegory for the unconscious motivations of a specifically patriarchal misogyny: a broadly object-relations approach best summarised by Adam Phillips in a 2019 essay as a “story” about dependence and its horrors.

“The male child, in this story, had to turn the trauma of having been mothered into the triumphalism of male potency. In this set-up vulnerability is masculinity’s dirty secret, leaving men with a haunting and haunted sense of impotence that only becoming a bully can assuage. Looked at this way, development would be about getting even. Boys who have grown up experiencing their mothers’ care as a regime become men who are intent on turning the tables, on revenge. (Not surprisingly it is problematic for adolescent girls that boys treat them as both alluring and frightening.) And psychoanalysis was left trying to address everyone’s terror of their own misogyny. It wasn’t just that everyone wanted to kill the thing they loved, but that they mostly wanted to keep it alive in order to torture it, unable to forgive their own need for someone they could not be everything to.”

But if Buffy is a show about growing pains, they’re not just masculine ones. When I was a teenager, because I thought sex was evil, I thought I was evil. Even when I was that most vulnerable sexual category, a teenage girl, I always felt powerful in a bad way, capable of doing harm – this is perhaps to do with my own experiences of dependence, as a, in common parlance, “parentified child” in a violent household – and I knew, just as I knew I was probably going to hell, that the way I felt about other bodies was bad and violent. This was not as much to do with what I wanted to do to them as what I might want them to do to me. Meyer Spacks, in Privacy, writes that reading “provides special stimulation for unshared individual fantasy. The fantasies encouraged by fiction may speak to the self’s deepest longings and can separate their possessors from the actualities of their outer experience.” Buffy leaves her bedroom window open because she wants, in some way, the vampires to climb in. I watched, again and again and again, literally until the tape wore out, the most unsettling scenes from later in the series – the scene, for example, in the episode “Seeing Red”, where Spike tries to rape Buffy, and the scenes, later on, where they reunite – because I was constructing a space in which I could test out my fears and my own longings in the realm of someone else’s fantasy (fantasy doubled: Buffy, after all, is a television series that fits into that genre).

Jacqueline Rose, in her book States of Fantasy (1994), offers a corrective to the common notion that fantasy is “supremely asocial”; that it is “what you get up to when the surveying mind and surveying society are both looking the other way”. (Like when you’re alone in your room, reading, praying, or watching TV). Psychoanalysis, for Rose, begins with the observation that fantasy, unlike dreaming, is always progressive, foundational to “public, social being”, and “always heading for the world it only appears to have left behind”. Fantasy, for the fantasising subject, allows us to simultaneously distance ourselves from our repressed wish and experience it: we get to have our psychic cake and eat it. In this way, the obsessive attachment I formed to Buffy performed, in some way, a similar role to the unconscious. Engaging with the evils of the world via the evils of the Hellmouth, I could begin to restage my own understanding of both violence and desire.

The most interesting work the series does with these complicated forms of transgression comes when Marti Noxon takes over from Whedon as the showrunner, in season six. This shift was much maligned at the time: for many fans, she “ruined” Buffy. Referring to this in a 2018 interview, she elaborated on her choice to move the show to darker narrative arcs (particularly Buffy’s relationship with Spike): “When we become young women, especially if we’re troubled or haunted by something, that can lead us to make some bad choices, especially in the area of romance”. Haunting is an interesting choice of word, here. At the beginning of the sixth season, Buffy is brought back from the dead by her friends, the beginning of a trajectory for Willow that unleashes a powerful capacity for harm within her and changes something fundamental inside Buffy herself: she comes back, in Spike’s words, “wrong”. Part of the work Buffy does with patriarchal evil is to identify and begin to cope with her own relationship to violence, something present from the very beginning of the series.

Let’s return, briefly, to “Ted”: before we find out that he’s a robot, she knocks him down the stairs during an argument, killing him. Until the episode’s denouement, when it’s revealed that he wasn’t, in fact, a human, and therefore his murder is fully within her purview as the Slayer, an anxiety is unleashed in both the show’s characters and in its viewers about her strength, about her temper, about the question of whether she might be capable of performing evil acts as well as fighting them. During her interrogation by a cop, he looks pointedly at her perfect, unblemished skin when she says that Ted hit her first; “I don’t bruise easily,” she says. Despite the hasty closure of the final act of “Ted”, these anxieties are never quite dispelled; as Buffy grows up, the ghosts which populate her psyche are embodiments of responsibility, violence and desire.

In the final season of the show, the “First Evil” – a shapeshifting force – appears several times in the guise of Buffy herself. After two seasons in which we’ve seen her grappling with her own powers in tandem with a masochistic, highly erotic relationship with Spike – their sex scenes the mirror image of their fight scenes earlier in the series – it’s impossible to see this as anything other than a question about the character of Buffy herself. No longer an adolescent, no longer one half of a doomed romance of chastely star-crossed lovers (after their first time, Buffy and Angel can’t have sex in case he loses his soul – another inversion of pregnancy), we see her as she fully is, or might be. A desiring subject, a violent woman, someone who has seen enough evil in enough forms to distrust the benign performances of legitimised power, and who has experienced enough of her own troubling fantasy to understand that the choice between natural and moral evil is a false one. In the final scene of the series, she stands on a cliff above the smoking crater that contains Sunnydale, the burial sites of its bad dads obliterated along with her old high school, her college, and the house she shared with her mum. The body of Spike, too, who has sacrificed himself, allowing his body to be incinerated in the service of apocalypse prevention. “What are we gonna do now?” asks Dawn, her little sister, to no reply. As viewers, our answer to this depends, in large part, on the understanding of evil we’ve taken away from the series. The first time I watched it, I preferred to believe in the possibility of this ending as a definitive one: the obliteration of all the sinful temptations that beset Buffy’s path as an adolescent and young adult. Now, I realise that would function as a form of self-obliteration, too. .