butchcommunist:

For all its self-awareness, Bojack Horseman as a show really cannot get around the fact that its assertions about behavior/trauma/redemption and its continued attempts to get us to pity Bojack are not only irresponsible in this cultural moment but actively antifeminist. Men who abuse women in real life don’t do it because they are just too high to know they are doing it. Men who abuse women in real life usually don’t become better people. It is irresponsible of the show writers, who’ve said his arc is “inching toward redemption,” to feed us this idea that there can be any level of trauma or any level of emotional turmoil that makes physically abusing women less bad than it would be otherwise. And worse I think the writers are vaguely aware of all this as voiced by Diane in the most recent season- they know it but they believe, as many men have believed about their own stories, that this time it is different. Men like Bojack are a dime a dozen and they leave trails of emotionally and physically scarred women and those women’s current lives are more valuable than the resolution of Bojack’s self-resentment and that’s just that.