There are a lot of things that look terrible about the trailer for Dustin Lance Black’s new movie, Virginia:

But I think I’m most irritated by the whole pious-Mormon-sheriff-who’s-cheating-on-his-wife-so-he-can-be-a-submissive schtick. It’s amazing how often pop culture goes to the adultery well, whether it’s to demonstrate that a social conservative is a hypocrite; to show that an upstanding man has a dark side as was the case in Ides of March; or to reinforce the idea that an already venal person is even more evil than we already knew.

I’ve been watching Damages as part of work on a larger piece, and it’s very interesting in the first season how the show decides to reinforce that Arthur Frobisher, a billionaire who trashed his company’s stock value to make a profit and raided his employees’ pension fund, is a bad guy by having him sleep with hookers while he’s married and do some cocaine after his wife decides to divorce him. There was something just incredibly generic about the sequences (though it is particularly poignant to me to see Ted Danson have sad desperate car hooker sex) and the way they were meant to indicate to us that he was a Bad, Bad Man. Especially because there are much more powerful ways to impart the same lesson. His casual manipulation of his mole among the client advocates, and the way he treats his wife, particularly the scene where he swings the good-luck putter she made sure he had as his good luck charm into her windshield in a futile, scary attempt to prevent her from leaving him, are much more directly relevant to explaining Frobisher’s hunger for control.

I get that choreographing morally-dubious-looking sex scenes, or talking about adultery, is a really easy thing to do cinematically. But it’s really boring, and it often doesn’t get at what actually is important about these figures. Being personally irresponsible and selfish isn’t actually always the same impulse as reshaping the world to suit your needs. And what’s important about philandering politicians or corporate tycoons is less their personal behavior and the way it impacts their families than the policies they implement and the decisions that they make that affect the rest of us.

Via Melissa Silverstein at Women and Hollywood, this is profoundly depressing:

But this year we are back to two years ago when no women were included. NO WOMEN DIRECTED FILMS WILL BE IN THE MAIN COMPETITION AT CANNES. That is ZERO out of 21. Two women directed films out of 17 films — Trois Mondes (dir. Catherine Corsini) and Confession of a Child of the Century (dir. Sylvie Verheyde) — are in Un Certain Regard.

Cannes is the most prestigious world competition and to have no female directors is just a slap in the face. I cannot believe there were no films worthy of inclusion. I just don’t believe it. The whole process is fucked up that women can’t even get into the conversations about films that people are even thinking about will be included in lineups. For an industry that professes to examine questions about life, that challenges conventions, that pushes the envelope, the total neanderthal approach to women is breathtaking. How can this industry say it is progressive or forward thinking in any way when it constantly shunts aside the perspectives of half of the world.

The outlook is somewhat better for non-white directors, who directed five of the 21 films in competition. Lee Daniels, Sangsoo Hong, Sangsoo Im, Abbas Kiarostami, and Yousry Nasrallah will all be in the mix. She’d like to see a quota for movies directed by women. I’m not sure I’m ready to go there, both because such a quota is an incomplete way to address much broader-based discrimination in the industry, and because I worry that movies directed by women who got into the pool would then be viewed with suspicion, whether they needed the quota to get in or no. I’d hate to think that a move to make sure more women got considered ended up making it harder for women to win.

Yesterday, I was wrapping things up at the office when one of my best friends gchatted me to say “This Is What A General Interest Magazine Looks Like,” and included a link to this picture:

Now, Sofia Vergara is an estimable, talented, and very funny woman. But it’s not just her presence on this cover in lingerie that suggests that this magazine isn’t for women. The facts in text around her are all about men: “10% of men don’t believe that oral sex counts as ‘sex’,” “52% of men have sex less than once a week,’ ’80% of men have never used Viagra,” “34% of men in a committed relationship have cheated,” “14% of married men say they have had sex with a guy,” and so on. All of them appear under the headline “What’s Normal Now”—the issue’s meant to be a kind of measuring stick against which men can metaphorically whip it out and measure it. But perhaps in a general interest sense, ladies, who, judging by the magazines aimed at us, are meant to be constantly boning up on our Sex Knowledge, are meant to swing by as well to have this arsenal of information at our disposal to go along with our Cosmopolitan-provided “50 Things Guys Wish You Knew” or “1000 True Sex Confessions.”

When I talked to Sid Holt, who runs the National Magazine Awards, a couple of weeks ago, I asked him about why there’s a women’s magazine category while men’s magazine are judged as general interest. He explained that “There clearly are men’s magazines, but the number of men’s magazine doesn’t justify having a separate category for men’s magazines…There was a perception, and it was a reality, that women’s magazines weren’t recognized. So we specifically created a category for women’s magazines to recognize women’s magazines…It was a specific problem, and there are women editors who liked it the other way. We were trying to address an issue in which magazines that competed for readers and for advertisers were competing against one another. It was a system that made sense from a magazine perspective and wasn’t entirely arbitrary.” That may be true, but it doesn’t prevent things like this from being funny and sad, and making the category breakdown look silly.

Meanwhile, people like the estimable Kevin Fallon have been pushed to write pieces with titles like “Can Guys Watch ‘Girls’?” A commenter on that piece huffed “Many would be insulted if women were told they can enjoy male comedies,” but it’s a question I got from readers who I think are entirely people of good will*. We live in a world that constantly reinforces that looking at Sofia Vergara’s breasts is a broadly engaging pastime but that men have nothing to learn from the women of Sex and the City‘s conversations about what men do to their bodies and how it feels. It’s not irrational, given that environment, to ask if shows or movies with female leads and about female problems is the exception to the rule that women are niche and men are general interest.

*More to come on this, but Girls is definitely not for everyone even though I love it, and I have thoughts on how it can be a lever for things that speak to other audiences.

By Alli Thrasher

Yesterday The Oatmeal ran a comic about the differences between online gameplay experiences between the genders. In it, Oatmeal creator Matthew Inman, depicts his own experience playing a few rounds of Left 4 Dead online. In the panel below, he showcases the ease with which a clueless girl gamer accidentally trashes her teammates and receives pleasantries and accolades for her faults:

Naturally the comic sparked outrage across the interwebs. The piece drew ire from gamers across the board, largely for its totally flawed portrayal of the realities of online gaming. At first, Inman seemed to miss the point, responding with a pseudo apology post in which he wrote, “a terrible female gamer gets away with more than a terrible male gamer.”

Cuppycake, Lead editor of The Borderhouse Blog, summed up, perfectly, why the above statements are not only erroneous, but also evidence of the privileged perspectives that make gaming often unwelcome for women: “You know what actually sucks about being a woman who games? Being harassed because of my gender…When I make a mistake in games, it’s because I’m a woman trying to play games. When you make a mistake, you just suck at the game and made a mistake.”

After receiving, and obviously digesting, further messages and tweets about the comic and the follow up post, Inman made a huge step in rectifying the situation by not only making a large donation to The Women Against Abuse Foundation, but also noting that he really and truly effed up: “I’m a guy and I barely talk into my mic, so I’ll concede that my view of things is probably very skewed.”

I commend Inman for skewing away from the typical mansplaining of “stop being so sensitive” that often accompanies the response to pieces like his comic. That he recognized his position as privileged and went even further to show that he came around to understanding what the problem with the post was is HUGE. The entire situation, however, brings to light, again, the true realities of online harrassment in the video games community.

As part of his apology post, Inman asks readers, “Outside of steam, it sounds like it’s still pretty horrible for women to play games. Is this true?” Yes, Mr. Inman, it is.

Need proof? Check out http://fatuglyorslutty.com/ or http://www.notinthekitchenanymore.com/ And guess what? The above include posts from all over the sphere of gaming – Steam, XBLA, and beyond. While I’m very aware that trashtalking is the nature of friendly competition, for women gamers (or gay or lesbian gamers, or gay gamers, or well basically anyone who doesn’t immediately present as a white straight male), our mere presence online opens us up to language that goes well beyond trashtalking. I’ve gotten cursed out playing Uno. And it’s not just “idiotic 13 year olds” doing the harassing. Research proves that the average gamer is 37 years old and that eighty-two percent of gamers are 18 years of age or older. Speaking from personal experience, the worst harassment I ever received as a gamer or community manager came from a man in his early 30s who had a job, a long time girlfriend, and most definitely did not live in his basement.

Truth be told, I’m thankful that the whole debacle occurred for a number of reasons. First, and foremost, it’s HUGE that a very public, internet celebrity, like the Oatmeal creator, can have his eyes opened to the experiences and realities of other gamers. Second, the reaction, to Inman’s original post, highlights again, that a sizeable portion of the gamer community is very aware of, and not cool with, the unfriendly nature of online gameplay. Finally, it provides an opportunity for all gamers to proactively look at how they address harassment when they witness it.

I think all gamers are invested in their play experiences being fun, productive, and straight up awesome. Moreover I think we all want the spheres we play in and the communities we participate in to be welcome places. So what do we do about all of this? Simple, report, call people out, and refuse to accept that violent sexist language is part of our culture or experience. If you’re a guy playing online and you hear someone trash talking, call them out. Feel free to say, “hey, that’s not cool.” Better yet, feel free to report and block them. Refuse to play with them. If you’re a moderator for an online community, enforce guidelines regarding hate speech. Educate members of your community about how their language can alienate other players. Don’t be afraid to use the banhammer.

And finally, if you’re a woman playing online, don’t stay silent on your end of the headset. I know this is tougher—who likes opening themselves up for abuse? But it’s high time that we stop hiding. Women make up over 40% of the gaming population – we’re a huge part of this community and we should not let ourselves be made invisible. So turn on your voice chat, ladies, and let the folks on the other end know that you’re there, you’re playing, and you’re not going away.

Every summer, Fandango polls consumers about the blockbusters they’re most excited for. And it turns out that the movie women reported being most excited to see is Snow White and the Huntsman, followed by The Avengers, Men in Black III, The Dark Knight, and Dark Shadows. Now, there are a lot of dedicated female fantasy and science fiction fans out there—I should know because I talk to all of you on a constant basis. But I don’t know that we represent 22 percent of the female moviegoing population, the percentage of women who named Snow White and the Huntsmen as their top ticket-buying priority.

And I think that gets at an important point: women, even outside the core fan community, will be interested in fantasy and science fiction if work in those genres have anything to say to them. Snow White and the Huntsman is being explicitly sold not just as a story with two female leads—Charlize Theron and Kristen Stewart—but as a story about the connection between beauty and power, about competition between women, and about styles of rule and command. From the outside, the women in the movie don’t look like women acting like men. They appear to be women acting like women but with the force of armies and heroes available to play out the issues that they’re grappling with personally.

Women watch Game of Thrones not for the incest and other sexual skulduggery, as the New York Times suggested in its utterly bizarre review when the show premiered, but for the variety of women we see on-screen the way they exercise power. We watch to see Cersei Lannister wonder what it’s like to be a man, and to struggle between the imperatives of command and family. We watch for that moment when Brienne of Tarth beats the Knight of Flowers, and reveals herself for what she is (and I watch The Return of the King for the moment when Eowyn spits out the declaration of her gender at the Witch-King of Angmar). We watch for Sansa’s bitter, brittle bravery, and Arya’s nourishing hatred.

The dudes who make much of our science fiction and fantasy are rightly confident that they’ll get my, and other women’s money, even if they don’t speak to us. We’re going to Men in Black III and The Dark Knight, after all, and we’ll turn out for The Avengers even if we’re supposed to accept Black Widow and Maria Hill as our representatives. But from a purely mercenary perspective, you could always get more of our money once in a while by catering to us as women first, and counting on dudes to come along for the swords and dragons as a secondary market.

Via Entertainment Weekly:

If FX was mildly nervous that Charlie Sheen’s public persona may affect his chances for a comeback, this information should come as a huge relief: EW has learned that test audiences who saw the pilot of his new comedy Anger Management recently were both pleased with his new half-hour comedy and eager to see the 46-year-old actor succeed in a new series.

The majority of men and women who attended a screening of the half-hour comedy in California’s San Fernando Valley last week rated the multi-camera pilot favorably, while over 80 percent gave Sheen an enthusiastic thumbs-up for his performance as an unorthodox therapist, according to one well-placed source. The pilot that also features the comeback of Brett Butler as a bartender played even better among women in the 18-34 and 18-49 demographic.

Overall, testing groups indicated that while they were well aware of Sheen’s fall from grace at CBS, they were still excited about his comeback and actually rooting for him to succeed, the source said. Some respondents even went so far as to say they were happy to see the actor in good health.

I’m open to, though skeptical of, the idea that I’ll like Anger Management. But I’m genuinely curious: does anyone have a theory about why people feel so charitably towards Charlie Sheen in particular? I know people like redemption narratives in general, but we also sure seem to relish kicking certain people when they’re down. I’d love a Sheen-specific explanation, especially since there’s no performance that makes me desperately long for him to return to former glory.

As Current TV heads into what is likely to be protracted litigation with Keith Olbermann, who it hired away from MSNBC to be its star anchor and News Director, the network needs some good news. But I’m not sure that the announcement that Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom will be doing a weekly interview show on Current is exactly the proof the network needs to regain its momentum and to rebuke Olbermann’s charges that Current is a tin pot imitation of a serious news channel.

There’s nothing objectionable about Newsom in theory. But he’s hardly a national political figure, and he has no experience whatsoever as a journalist. Current has tried to sell former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm to viewers in part by suggesting that her political experience means she can call out talking points and hypocrisy when she sees them. But Newsom’s job at Current will involve doing interviews rather than delivering opinion pieces, which makes his credentials seem even slimmer.

Beyond that, Newsom is a sitting public official in California. The two tranches of people Current’s release said he’d be interviewing are from Silicon Valley and Hollywood, key constituencies for the administration Newsom is a part of. It’s highly unlikely that Newsom will ask anything close to a tough question of someone who is a potential donor, or who makes a substantial contribution to California’s tax base. Current officials spend a lot of time arguing that their network, unlike MSNBC, will speak truth to power. But hiring Newsom feels a lot more like Current becoming an adjunct of an administration, providing a politician who’d awfully like to have a national profile with a platform where he can burnish his media credentials and make nice with the people whose money could launch him on to greater stardom.

What does Current get out of this? If they’ve tired of the combative model that Olbermann and Cenk Uygur represent, he could be a transition towards something gentler, and more Hollywood oriented. If they’re trying to assemble assets to make the network more attractive to someone in a sale, Newsom seems more like the contents of a junk drawer than a major asset. And it doesn’t precisely make Current look committed to the principles it’s articulated as the network’s main selling point to viewers.