I recall some of our long-ago discussions about how Buffy, whose mission in life is to hunt down the Children of the Night and penetrate them with a big woody phallus, could be seen as a masculinized agent of the patriarchy. (An Auntie Tom, if you will.) So her secondary role in "keeping the Hellmouth closed," i.e. preventing the womb of the demonic Earth Mother from spewing forth legions of demons, seems perfectly compatible with that.

In both cases, she's upholding the supremacy of male symbols (the sun, pointy sticks, axes with pointy stick attachments) over female ones (night, the moon, Earth, caves, magic manhole covers) to keep the world safe for Old White Men In Suits. I guess there was always a limit to how much "subversion" you could read into that, especially after the last couple of seasons did away with all the touchy-feely, consensus-building, empathetic aspects of Buffy's character.

So does that mean Buffy's newfound role as a harbinger of apocalypse, making love not war and opening dimensional portals willy-nilly, actually strikes a blow against the patriarchy? I dunno if I can stretch my formidable powers of rationalization quite that far. :-)