I wasn’t initially hooked by Katy Perry’s “Part of Me,” the angry breakup anthem to mark the end of her marriage to comedian Russell Brand that she debuted at the Grammys. But it’s grown on me. And I really love her video for it, which takes the idea that women can be tough in the wake of a breakup to a whole new level—all the way to the front lines of combat:

Some people in the audience may be more queasy than I am about the military’s influence on our popular culture. And I harbor precisely no illusions about the idea that the military is some sort of slumber party for women: The Invisible War, a powerful documentary about the epidemic of rape in the armed forces, or Doonesbury’s Melissa arc will disabuse anyone of that notion. But I really appreciate any piece of pop culture that expresses the notion that a fulfilling career is better than a rotten relationship, and that the company of women who bring out the best and most powerful in you is more worthy than the presence of just any man. Our romance-obsessed culture really distorts our sense of our options, of different potential lives.

Seriously, dude?

Be wary of reviews by female critics, as they’re probably more susceptible to the lore of this young-female-adult-propelled franchise than most. I don’t even know what to make of this declaration by Movieline’s Stephanie Zacharek: “The surprise of The Hunger Games isn’t that it lives up to its hype — it’s that it plays as if that hype never even existed, which may be the trickiest achievement a big movie can pull off these days.” If there’s one thing that defines Gary Ross’s film, it’s a feeling that he and his Hunger Games producers were acutely aware they were adapting a wildly popular literary property, and that they’d best serve the fantasies and sensibilities of its young female readers.

Because if you’re a female critic, and you happen to find art that’s about people of your gender, and about people of your gender being strong, and emotions women sometimes have about choosing romantic partners and being providers, you are just heeding the siren song of your easily-duped ladybits. But if you’re a dude who appreciates stories about, oh, I don’t know, chauvinist advertising executives, or violent automobile drivers, or self-absorbed Hawaiian landowners who happen to have your particular variety of sexual equipment, you’ve got discerning taste.

Six months ago, it seemed like we were at the verge of a promising new age in female comedy (at least, if you’re a white lady). Bridesmaids was a big, and unexpected, hit. And it was the beginning of a television season in which the hottest trend was sitcoms created by women. As much as I would have wished for a string of hits, the results have been more predictable. The shows have ranged from the toxic Are You There, Chelsea? and 2 Broke Girls, to the increasingly-tolerable New Girl, to the outright winning Up All Night. And despite the boom in shows created by women, the episodes of these programs have been overwhelmingly directed by men. And men have written slightly more than half the episodes in six shows I examined. If a revolution for women in entertainment is under way, this fall may have been the vanguard, but in both employment of women and depictions of them on television, we’re a long way from victory.

Of Whitney‘s 20 episodes, just 7 were written by women, and of those seven, only three were written by women other than show creator Whitney Cummings. The other show Cummings created, 2 Broke Girls, has been influenced much more by showrunner Michael Patrick King than by Cummings (she wrote just one episode of the show), though it’s actually doing better than Whitney at getting episodes written by women on the air: women have written 9 of the show’s 20 episodes, while men have written 11. On New Girl, almost twice as many episodes were written by men (11) as by women (6). Liz Merriweather, the show’s creator, wrote two out of those 17 episodes. It might be hard to imagine, given how much the show seems like a Female Chauvinist Pig archetype, but a majority of Are You There, Chelsea? episodes are written by women—6 out of 10. And it’s the only show on this list where every episode is directed by a woman, Gail Mancuso, who’s also directed an episode of Suburgatory, and is reteaming with Roseanne Barr on her new NBC sitcom Downwardly Mobile. Suburgatory also has a narrow majority of its episodes scripted by women, including series creator Emily Kapnek, 10 out of 19. And Up All Night is the undisputed champion—in a world where having 13 of a show’s 20 episodes written by women counts as an overwhelming victory.

These numbers are a striking reminder that we can’t count on female showrunners and show creators to do all the work of getting more women working on television programs. And we shouldn’t ask them to. Being a woman doesn’t mean you don’t enjoy working with men, or that you can’t learn from men’s perspectives. And we shouldn’t ask women to deny themselves those pleasures and those insights just to make up the gaps created by men who aren’t curious enough to want to work with women, and as a result are missing out on fresh and exciting perspectives, as well as potential friendships and working partnerships. If women creators or showrunners are solely responsible for getting more women writing for television, then the cancellation of a single show or a mass decision by studios that lady-run or lady-created shows are no longer a trend they want to ride could create a massive dropoff in the number of women writers. Until men and women are equally invested in getting more women’s voices in writers’ rooms, those numbers won’t improve in a permanent way.
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The bridge is yours.

-The Ender’s Game teacher in South Carolina will, thankfully, not face criminal charges.

-Moscow Mules for Mad Men‘s return.

-Sharpening his credentials as a Romney surrogate, Jeff Foxworthy will host The American Bible Challenge.

-Reflections of a cord cutter.

-The science of creativity.

-Don’t want it, didn’t need it, but it’s here anyway:

In our conversation yesterday about whether the rise of fan-funded projects mean that, if fans are putting up the money companies would normally provide to get projects into production, they should be rewarded like investors, a number of people wrote in with the same objection. If fans replace studios not just as a source of cash, but as a source of creative input, everything will be ruined forever.

Foster Kamer pinged me in response to the question “should we treat fans like investors,” to say “Hell no. See: The ‘Mass Effect 3 Ending’ debate. The moment art responds to audience demands it loses integrity of vision.” And Arturo Garcia wrote that we’re already seeing similar problems now: “But haven’t we ::always:: been investors? Once we start spending money on the comic, or the game, we become invested in the story. I’m not saying everything deserves a Mass Effect 3-like protest, but when companies and creators sell themselves as doing things “for the fans” and then pull the Entitlement card when somebody calls them out, that’s a problem our geek media isn’t willing to confront.”

This gets at a larger, and more uncomfortable question: are fans a deleterious influence on the artists they love? Joss Whedon has walked a line between embracing his extremely strong fan community and making decisions that ruffle their feathers, most notably killing off characters no matter how much pain it causes the folks watching at home. When he first made Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-Long Blog, he self-financed the project and distributed it online and through iTunes, a combination of methods that made fans feel like they were participating in the project to support it by stepping up after the fact, but that didn’t involve them in the production process. It remains to be seen if he’ll go the same route or stop by Kickstarter to fund the sequel, due out this summer. Dan Harmon, for whom fan service has become a matter of life or death for Community, may feed the gif machine, but it’s not particularly clear that he makes story decisions or selects pop culture to reference purely based on what makes the audience go squee!

In any case, while it’s true that trying to be responsive to every bit of shippery and every fan desire would break just about any piece of entertainment, it’s also true that there are costs to be paid when commercial artists—and that’s what most folks who make mainstream television shows, video games, and movies are—submit to edits from the businesses that finance them, too. While fans may want to see a pairing happen, a studio may want a character to be thinner, or blonder, or for a show or movie to kill off a black character first. Ultimately, corporate expectations probably have a more deleterious effect on our entertainment as a whole, while answering to legions of fans would take its toll in terms of the integrity and coherent of individual stories. It’s a neat corporate trick to make the latter more visible, and to suggest it’s worse.

Novelist Teju Cole* has a fantastic piece up about the Kony2012 campaign, of which he’s been a prominent critic, and what he refers to as the white savior industrial complex, up at The Atlantic. While much of it is about activism and journalism, I also think it’s a critically important piece for anyone thinking about telling stories that are set in regions like Africa, Asia, and South America that were once colonized, or that continue to receive substantial aid and intervention from Western governments and individuals. Specifically, Cole (in this case, talking about news coverage) takes aim at the idea of a “bridge character,” a white person who gives white readers access to a story about non-white readers:

Earlier this year, hundreds of thousands of Nigerians took to their country’s streets to protest the government’s decision to remove a subsidy on petrol. This subsidy was widely seen as one of the few blessings of the country’s otherwise catastrophic oil wealth. But what made these protests so heartening is that they were about more than the subsidy removal. Nigeria has one of the most corrupt governments in the world and protesters clearly demanded that something be done about this. The protests went on for days, at considerable personal risk to the protesters. Several young people were shot dead, and the movement was eventually doused when union leaders capitulated and the army deployed on the streets. The movement did not “succeed” in conventional terms. But something important had changed in the political consciousness of the Nigerian populace. For me and for a number of people I know, the protests gave us an opportunity to be proud of Nigeria, many of us for the first time in our lives.

This is not the sort of story that is easy to summarize in an article, much less make a viral video about. After all, there is no simple demand to be made and — since corruption is endemic — no single villain to topple. There is certainly no “bridge character,” Kristof’s euphemism for white saviors in Third World narratives who make the story more palatable to American viewers. And yet, the story of Nigeria’s protest movement is one of the most important from sub-Saharan Africa so far this year. Men and women, of all classes and ages, stood up for what they felt was right; they marched peacefully; they defended each other, and gave each other food and drink; Christians stood guard while Muslims prayed and vice-versa; and they spoke without fear to their leaders about the kind of country they wanted to see. All of it happened with no cool American 20-something heroes in sight.

I’m as guilty of this as anybody. I loved the movie adaptation of The Constant Gardener. I think Lord of War is a hugely underrated movie. And I was quite pleased to see the Bond franchise turn its attention to Africa, however fleetingly, and even if only for the novelty of the action sequences. Aid workers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, gun runners, and spies all do play a role in African life, and are changed by their time in African countries. And their stories are worth telling.

But they aren’t the only stories worth telling. And it’s a mistake to assume that the only way to get a story to a western audience is to slap a white person on it as a delivery mechanisms. Some of it is simply a failure to promote promising movies about African characters. One of the movies I most would have liked to see last year, Viva Riva, about a gasoline smuggler in Kinshasa, played in a grand total of five theaters, none near me, which is not a recipe for building buzz. I’ve got it in my Netflix queue now that it’s available, but how many people will have the knowledge or motivation to go look for it?

And some of it is just going to be a matter of trying to get folks to write what they don’t know personally, or even harder, to cede ground to let folks who do know what they’re talking about write African, and Asian, and South American stories. I know I’d watch a web series based on Cole’s tweets, which regularly read like lyrical one-line short fiction.

*Open City is very, very good. You should read it.

I find Brit Marling, who broke out in dreamy science fiction movie Another Earth and is the best part of financial crimes thriller Arbitrage, which should be out later this year, utterly fascinating. So I’m intrigued by Sound of My Voice, in which she plays the leader of a cult who claims to be a time traveler from the year 2054:

I don’t know if the movie will explore this, but I think it would be fascinating if it at least interrogated the idea that people think Marling’s character is a cult leader because it’s easier to believe that than to accept that a woman might be capable of the miraculous, might be a savior. We get lots of pop culture depictions of cult leaders as men who are using their power, and the fact that people are willing to invest authority in them, as a way to enhance their sense of their own masculinity, whether by gaining sexual partners, amassing wealth, or creating opportunities for them to prove themselves in violent confrontations with outsiders. But we see women far less frequently, and I wonder if that’s a result of male creators not being able to identify with the idea that a woman could be a messianic leader.