Buffy effect: violence against strong women more acceptable to TV viewers Dr Ferguson asked 150 students to watch scenes from television programmes that either contained no violent content or which featured aggression against women in a sexual scenario. In some of the scenes containing violence women were portrayed as passive and powerless, such as an episode of The Tudors in which female characters were roughly handled or insulted during or after sex scenes. In others women were more assertive, including an episode of Buffy in which a female character is enslaved by a vampire but is then made to torture a man while wearing fetish attire. The study found that men who watched sexually violent shows featuring passive female characters displayed a more sexist attitude towards women in questionnaires taken afterwards, while programmes featuring strong women had no effect. Women's attitudes towards their own sex showed little change but female viewers were more anxious after watching scenes featuring a submissive victim rather than a strong one. Prof Malcolm Parks, editor of the Journal of Communication in which the paper was published, said: "Positive depictions of women challenge negative stereotypes even when the content includes sexuality and violence. While it is commonly assumed that viewing sexually violent TV involving women causes men to think negatively of women, the results of this carefully designed study demonstrate that they do so only when women are portrayed as weak or submissive.