50 Cent, in an interview in which he endorsed marriage equality on the grounds that “If everyone else is for it, then hey, to each his own. I don’t have personal feelings towards it because I’m not involved in that lifestyle,” also decided it made sense to tell the world that:

So in process, we need organizations for straight men. We do. We need organizations for straight men in the case you’ve been on the elevator and somebody decides they want to grab your little buns. Times are changing. Those organizations are set up for at one point they were being attacked for those choices. Now its completely different. Obviously [homosexuality] is more socially accepted.

One of the hardest things about getting people to surrender their privilege is helping them to understand that giving some of it up isn’t going to materially change their living conditions. Asking that women be treated equally isn’t to ask that women have the right to sexually harass men or to invert the pay gap so women make more than men. Advocating for gay rights is in part about communicating that 50 Cent’s arrogant fear that gay men want to grab his ass is unfounded. Liberation, done right, can make things better for both people who have privilege and people who don’t. The people who are disadvantaged get access to the rights they see denied them. And then people who have privilege end up freed from their fears of what might happen if things change, benefitting from their contact with people they were previously separated from.

In this specific case, the wave of endorsements for marriage equality shouldn’t be mistaken for comfort with gay people. We normally talk about how contact with specific gay people makes straight people more receptive to gay rights: when you care for someone, it becomes emotionally difficult to support their continued legal subordination. But President Obama’s use of the bully pulpit reverses that process, and it means we’re seeing a lot of people coming out for substantive gay rights who don’t seem to have fully dealt with their homophobia. That doesn’t necessarily lessen the impact of their endorsements—indifference is better than aggression or loathing—but it is a reminder that progress doesn’t advance in tandem on all fronts.

Conservatives are apparently very upset that the Obama administration talked to Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal for their upcoming movie about the campaign to hunt down Osama bin Laden—despite the fact that Bigelow and Boal have been clear that the movie will cover the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations:

Complaining about the White House’s efforts to stall the organization’s requests for death photos of the Al-Qaeda leader, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said, “These documents, which took nine months and a federal lawsuit to disgorge from the Obama administration, show that politically-connected filmmakers were giving extraordinary and secret access to bin Laden raid information, including the identity of a Seal Team Six leader.

“It is both ironic and hypocritical that the Obama administration stonewalled Judicial Watch’s pursuit of the bin Laden death photos, citing national security concerns, yet seemed willing to share intimate details regarding the raid to help Hollywood filmmakers release a movie ‘perfectly timed to give a home-stretch boost’ to the Obama campaign.”

This is a silly complaint. First, the movie, Zero Dark Thirty, is coming out more than a month after the election precisely to avoid any suggestion that it’s an attempt to influence the campaign. Second, collaborating with a fictional movie project is as much of a risk for the Obama administration as it is a guarantee of an election slam dunk. Kathryn Bigelow is the inverse of a director like Michael Bay who’s willing to rent his opinions to the government in exchange for lots and lots of military hardware. She’s got a very specific vision, one that isn’t particularly triumphalist and is based more on the front lines than in the halls of power.

And finally, what this kind of objection really reveals is an attempt by conservatives to preserve the idea that only they can authentically represent the troops. When Act of Valor casts real Marines for parts in a silly, overdramatized movie, that’s supposed to be a move so dedicated to honoring members of the military that there’s no valid way to critique it. But when Bigelow and Boal do research to try to give their movie verisimilitude, they’re dupes who couldn’t possibly care about the truth of the story they’re trying to tell.

The bridge is yours.

-I hope Elton John is okay.

-Here are all of your summer TV premieres.

-Someone’s going to try to turn Shadow of the Colossus into a movie.

-Hipster X-Men.

-I am so excited to hear about this Christopher Guest series even if I’m not sure it’ll actually happen.

Won’t Back Down is careful not to speak the words in the trailer, but it’s clear from the decisions the characters make and the protest signs they’re waving that these moms are setting up a charter school:

This is the kind of movie that always give me pause about how well popular entertainment, particularly popular entertainment that’ll clock in at under two hours, can lay out policy solutions instead of articulating policy problems. Narrative fiction can be very, very good at the former. The Wire handled Baltimore public schools well over the course of a season. Brooklyn Castle, my favorite documentary from SXSW uses the jeweler’s lens of a competitive middle school chess team to examine New York City public school budget cuts and the city’s high school exam system. But the solutions it presents are all temporary, individual fixes rather than system-wide reforms. One student wins a scholarship through a chess competition, but that means of achieving escape velocity isn’t available to all students. The school manages to do some stop-gap fundraising, but not everyone has the extremely dedicated parent base and an extracurricular program that can be a massive rallying point.

I’ll be curious how much Won’t Back Down presents setting up a charter school as a difficult endeavor, and if and how meaningfully it acknowledges charter schools’ closure rates. Triumphal narratives feel good, and I’m all for movies that push back against stereotypes of poor parents as uninvested in their childrens’ education. But if you actually want to mobilize people, you have to valorize the effort, not just the end result. And promising outcomes that are far from guaranteed is a recipe for disappointment.

Dan Solomon follows up my post on D’Angelo and what happens to men when they find themselves treated like women with an important reminder that men talk about wanting to be objectified in a way that isn’t really supported by their behavior:

If they don’t put on a lot of weight, they do other things to mess with the way they look. They take on roles that reward them for looking unattractive, maybe, or they grow stupid beards, like Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp, if they’re able to let these things roll off their backs a bit. But it happens a lot, in any case, to men who are treated the way that women are — as objects, whose sexuality and appearance are public property…So much of the rhetoric from dudes who talk about the way women are objectified is that they’d love it if they were sexualized in the same way. And it sounds like a dumb hypothetical, something that has no real connection to reality, because there’s no real equivalence between the way society does (or even can) treat men and the way it treats women. Except, kinda, there is — and the way the men who do get treated that way tend to do whatever it takes to get out from under it. That’s probably worth considering, fellas, the next time you try to make that argument.

I don’t write about the way men’s bodies are portrayed in the media as much as I write about women, if only because women are treated so much worse. Women’s bodies are dressed up for others’ use, whether it’s to bring visual pleasure or physical pleasure to the people who see them or touch them. Men’s bodies are presented as being for their own use, as sources of strength they can use to save the world, to fight injustice, to perform feats that are impressive and valuable in their own right. Now, of course, there are all sorts of culturally conditioned ideal bodies: a skinny Jewish nerd’s dreaming his way into Superman’s body and Superman’s tights is having a different experience from a black man raised in the Pentecostal church who is grappling with the connection between body and soul. But I’m intrigued by those self-perceptions, varied though they may be. I’m used to the constant struggle to think of my body as something that belongs to me, but I’m not personally familiar with my body not performing up to an arbitrary set of standards set for it. I can imagine there are difficulties I simply can’t fathom.

Ah, the joys of someone with power who just encountered their first bonkers comments section. Via Wired:

Did you hear the one about the New York state lawmakers who forgot about the First Amendment in the name of combating cyberbullying and “baseless political attacks”? Proposed legislation in both chambers would require New York-based websites, such as blogs and newspapers, to “remove any comments posted on his or her website by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post.” No votes on the measures have been taken. But unless the First Amendment is repealed, they stand no chance of surviving any constitutional scrutiny even if they were approved. Republican Assemblyman Jim Conte said the legislation would cut down on “mean-spirited and baseless political attacks” and “turns the spotlight on cyberbullies by forcing them to reveal their identity.”

It’s easy to make fun of the late Sen. Ted Stevens’ for his description of the internet as “a series of tubes,” or to get irritated with legislators who aren’t particularly tech-savvy. But this kind of inexperience has consequences: as ludicrous as this legislation is, and even if it would be struck down immediately, a bill like this eats up the energy of people who have to explain that it’s a bad idea, unimplementable, and ultimately unconstitutional.

But even beyond the bill itself, this is an interesting illustration of how inexplicable internet culture is to people who don’t actively participate it. I imagine it’s hard for Assemblyman Conte to imagine the incredibly dreadful things people are willing to say under their real names, and in forms that show up on their social networks. Maybe he doesn’t have things that he urgently needs to tell someone but that he can’t risk saying under his own name. And perhaps he’s never encountered a forum that he urgently feels the need to participate in, but doesn’t feel that he can join the conversation as himself, and by participating learned how self-policing works. There’s no lost age of internet civility that can be restored with legally unenforceable accountability requirements. There are just different kinds of intimacy that, if you haven’t experienced them, are hard to fathom and embrace.