Treatment of Women

There's something admirable about a series where seven of the nine leads are women, but Coven was not nearly as feminist as it appeared to be on the surface. The themes of female power were explored on occasion, but the writers didn't delve much deeper than the Spice Girls did in the '90s. The season began with a retread of the rape-revenge convention, as young witch Madison (Emma Roberts) was drugged and gang raped by a group of frat boys, whom she then murdered with the power of magic. Beyond that, however, the women of Coven mostly fought each other — note how much precious screen time was devoted to the "catfight" between Madison and Misty (Lily Rabe) in the season's penultimate episode.

And while the women did have moments of triumph over their male oppressors, they were far more successful fighting each other than the men in their lives. In the finale, Madison, who proved to be a seriously powerful witch, was strangled to death by Kyle (Evan Peters), and later, Fiona (Jessica Lange) was doomed to an eternity of being smacked around by the Axeman (Danny Huston) in the afterlife. Earlier in the season, Marie Laveau (Angela Bassett) stood helpless in the face of witch-hunter Hank (Josh Hamilton). It's not only that these women's powers were inconsistent — and more on that in a bit — but they seemed thoroughly ineffective in the face of male violence.

Though violence against women is a common trope in horror, it's not inherently misogynistic. But there is something unsettling about a series that prides itself on complex female characters concluding its season with two of the strongest female characters left as playthings for men. (Fiona essentially became the Axeman's prisoner, and Madison's corpse ended up in the arms of Denis O'Hare's Spalding, who treats her as a doll.) Beyond that, the speech Cordelia (Sarah Paulson) gave about witches being "born this way" and subject to ignorance and hate crimes was an obvious allegory for LGBT identity — a sloppy way of addressing the real-life misogyny women endure. Without discounting what either group faces, the "witches are gay people" coda reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the specific concerns of feminism versus those of the LGBT community.