All Men Are Beasts (The Pack)

The Pack starts off as a simple episode about bullying and social cliques. It shows us a group of bullies (never seen before and never to be seen again), and another newbie that they pick on – the nerdy and shy Lance. They get infected with a hyena spirit (as you do), and Xander joins in on their animal possession/bully clique. The eponymous Pack is a metaphor for social in-groups, the infection is a metaphor for how people can easily slip into bullying behaviour. It’s a pretty standard High School Buffy monster-as-metaphor episode. But behind that, this is also a story about gender, and a battle for dominance between three predators – Xander, the Hyena, and Buffy.

The connection between the predatory nature of the hyenas and masculinity is made explicit by Giles half-way through the episode.

“It’s devastating. He’s turned into a sixteen-year-old boy. Course, you’ll have to kill him.”

“Testosterone is a great equalizer. It turns all men into morons.”

“Buffy, boys can be cruel. They tease, they prey on the weak. It’s a natural teen behavior pattern.”

Giles supposes an equivalence between the predatory nature of bullies, who isolate and target the weak and vulnerable, and a predatory nature of men. This is not an angle of this episode that had registered for me before – though if I’m honest, I’m not sure I’ve seen this episode more than once. It does seem to be a recurring feature though. This scene is the main point of evidence, but also throughout the episode Hyena!Xander is shown to partake in behaviours traditionally associated with masculinity (a stated need to eat meat over “bird food”, sexually aggressiveness, sporting dominance). Being possessed by an animal spirit means performing toxic masculinity.

The supposed relationship between men and beasts is a repeated theme throughout the show. You could see this as the first installment in the Men Are Beasts Trilogy, along with Phases and Beauty and the Beasts. Both heavily feature Oz and his lycanthropy as an animalistic trait that takes possession of him, which he must control – of course by locking himself in the book cage in the school library. Xander is actually the first to be locked inside that cage, as a means to control the animalistic power that has taken control of him. (Of course, it gets destroyed quickly and Xander escapes. This is the Chekhov’s Gun of lycanthropy: you don’t show the werewolf’s cage unless you’re going to have the werewolf break out of it.)

“You see, the werewolf is such a potent, extreme representation of our inborn animalistic traits […] It acts on-on pure instinct. No conscience, predatory, and aggressive.”
“In other words, your typical male.”

– Rupert Giles and Buffy Summers, 2×15 Phases

“All men are beasts, Buffy. […] It’s not cynical. I mean, it’s realistic. Every guy from… Manimal down to Mr. I-Love-The-English-Patient has beast in him. And I don’t care how sensitive they act. They’re all still just in it for the chase.”

Faith Lehane, 3×04 Beauty and the Beasts

These other episodes lean a little harder into the theme of choice, and conclude that though Men may have some Beast in them, they can choose to indulge that Beast or to control it. Oz chooses to lock himself up monthly; Angel fights through his hell-dimension-induced insanity to save Buffy. This episode has none of that though. None of the Bully Gang or Xander are shown to be making an active choice at any point – they all get infected with the Hyena Spirit by accident, and from them on are treated as having no agency. Sticking to the Masculinity metaphor, you could say that this means that toxic masculinity is shown to be something externally imposed rather than natural, akin to society “infecting” men with unhealthy attitudes. Still though, it does not account for choice. None of them manage to resist or overcome the infection – Buffy just has to knock them out.

It’s problematic, to say the least, to suggest that toxic masculinity is something that is biologically innate to men, or otherwise inevitable. At best, that is a dull approach to feminism. At worst, it’s straight-up TERF rhetoric. A good rule of thumb is to be deeply suspicious of any theory that attributes certain qualities to biology alone. It’s insulting, it’s demeaning, and it’s directly harmful to all men, and AMAB trans people to boot. It’s disappointing to see the show so often return to this idea and only somewhat refute it.

It’s more interesting to look at the events in relation to what it means in the Great Ongoing Soul Debate, because the Hyena Spirit infection is presented as more or less equivalent to vampirism. The Hyena-Bullies are animalistic predators, beings of id who seek out and consume their prey. They infect others through a “predatory act”, just as vampires propagate through preying on humanity. Giles states that the animal worshipers who practice this animal possession “believe that humanity, consciousness, the soul, is a perversion.”. Who does that sound like more than vampires, who are repulsed by the one vampire (at this point) who has been “perverted” by a soul? If animal possession is something intended to remove the “perversion” of the soul, then we can see the possessed students as lacking a soul, with everything that entails. The Xander we see in this episode is really the first glimpse we get of Vampire Xander.

We saw in The Harvest how Vampire Jesse, functionally a mini-Xander himself, immediately and aggressively pursued the target of his affections – Buffy’s shadow herself, Cordelia. That was almost a dress rehearsal for the behaviour we see from Xander in this episode. Vampires are twisted mirrors of their human selves, an imprint on a shroud, and Hyena!Xander is clearly dictated by the desires of Human!Xander. 

The episode is quite eager to excuse Xander of any wrongdoing by the end. As Buffy says, Hyena!Xander “wasn’t really Xander”. This is clearly not entirely true though. The Hyena didn’t care about going after Buffy – that was Xander. Clearly, the possession was enough of a controlling influence that we can’t actually hold Xander morally responsible for anything he does here. He does not have free will. But we can say that Hyena!Xander’s actions are a result of Human!Xander. A glimmer of the full self exists inside the id. 

(Content warning for sexual assault starts here.)

I noted in the Teacher’s Pet essay that the climactic scene formed an unfortunate parallel to Dead Things, and I’m sad to say that there’s another parallel to a traumatic sexual assault from season six here. In Seeing Red, Spike insists that he knows what Buffy wants. That she craves darkness, danger, a love that burns. That she wants “a little demon in her men”, and that demon is him. His presumption of Buffy’s desires lead directly to his ignoring her consent. In The Pack, when Xander attacks Buffy, he tells her he “know[s] what she really wants”, that she “like[s] her men dangerous”. It’s the exact same language that Spike uses, and they both use it to justify this vile act.

This scene is difficult to watch. I’m not sure the show ever had a fantastic grip on the topic of sexual assault. It’s an improvement on Teacher’s Pet in that it is cognizant of what it is depicting, but it does seem unnecessarily exploitative, to put the hero in such a vulnerable position and have her take so long to overpower her attacker, seemingly just for the shock value of seeing Buffy suffer an attempted rape. And after this episode the emotional repercussions for Buffy are never adequately dealt with. What is significant for the philosophy of the show is that the perpetrator is more or less let off scot free for this, because the state that they are in robs them of the ability to make meaningful choices. They are controlled entirely by the id, the animal, and they do not have the necessary component – the soul – to not indulge their selfish desires, to decide not to hurt Buffy. There’s so much in the show that will complicate this matter that we’ll talk about eventually, but here, that is the perspective the show is taking.

(Oh, I’ll let you decide whether I’m talking about The Pack or Seeing Red in that paragraph.)

(Content warning ends.)                                                                                     

This is not the only similarity this episode has with Teacher’s Pet. We get another animal-themed monster, and an educator that is obviously signposted as the villain early on when they rhapsodise far too passionately about the qualities of said animal. Both are episodes intensely interested in peer pressure and the performance of masculinity, and the dangers that that can entail. Both are nominally Xander-focused episodes, though in this one Xander is shifted to being the villain very early on, so while it is Xander-heavy, he’s not the protagonist – this is not a character spotlight episode for him. Both touch on Buffy’s blossoming attraction to Angel. We even see a school faculty member straight-up eaten in both episodes.

What does it mean that by its sixth episode, the show is already kind of remaking previous episodes? I think it indicates that this is a show deeply concerned with the position of masculinity, and Xander represents that. Buffy is built on the very basic subversion of the horror premise, and is explicitly intended to flip gender roles, with Buffy taking the role of the dashing hero, and therefore putting Xander, who in a different story could be the Everyman hero, in the sidekick/damsel role. Many of Xander’s spotlight episodes focus on the insecurity that stems from being put in this role. The anxiousness of masculinity with the oncoming rush of equality is a massive issue, which let’s face it is a shaping force in modern society. I think the role of masculinity within feminism is a valuable and interesting topic. The show is aware of this, but it seems slightly uncomfortable with exactly what it wants to say about it.

If Men are the predators in this framework, as Giles puts forward, then Buffy represents an existential threat to that framework. The Slayer is the ultimate predator, a cat that hunts her undead prey with expert precision. She is also innately feminine, a power possessed only by women. The Slayer is the Alpha Female. We see that in this episode. Hyena!Xander bows down in the presence of Buffy. The predators only target the weak, and Buffy is not weak. In the dodgeball scene, the titular Pack are all faced off against Buffy, but instead of trying to beat her, they turn and target their own, weaker teammate. They will destroy their own side rather than take on a fight they aren’t assured to win.

The climactic scene is focused around a “predatory act”, a ritual that is apparently required in order to complete an animal possession. We have the Hyena Bullies, Hyena!Xander, and the Zookeeper Furry, all attempting to complete this act, and metaphorically you’ve got vampires and masculinity in that melting pot, all battling it out to be the ultimate predator. But who completes the “predatory act” in the end? It’s Buffy, when she throws the Zookeeper Furry into the hyena cage. This is one of the very few moments in the series where you can argue that Buffy takes the life of a human being. It’s indirect, and it’s a life-or-death situation, but I’d say yeah, she does kill him. The alpha predator is Buffy, is the Slayer. And by achieving victory, she destroys the animal possession. Xander isn’t strong enough to overcome the Hyena, but Buffy is. The symbol of the feminine destroying the symbol of the masculine. 

Of course, this isn’t real feminism. Feminism is not about women taking the place of men within patriarchy, or about destroying masculinity. This is just where the show is, trying to reconcile the biologically super-powered female Hero with a framework that supposes some biological basis to toxic masculinity. It’s messy, and doesn’t entirely work, but there’s fragments there that reflect something empowering, a foggy vision of feminine power rising up and breaking the established order. At the very least, we get to enjoy the fact that Buffy gets to hit her attacker with a desk. And that’ll have to do.

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