I leave tomorrow morning for Netroots Nation in Providence, RI, so pending internet on the train up, blogging may be a tad slower than usual. But my being in Providence means two things.

1) I am doing a panel at 1:30 on Saturday afternoon, in Ballroom D at the convention center, in which Jezebel founder Anna Holmes, all-around comics guru Elana Levin, and video game designer and guest in these parts Alli Thresher and I will talk about the representation of women behind the scenes in media. I think it will be a lot of fun, and you should come. If you’re interested, but not registered for the conference, please let me know in comments or via email, and I’ll see if we can work something out.

2) Netroots drinking. Will enough people be there / in Providence in general / willing to come down from Boston for the afternoon to do a happy hour? Let me know in comments here, and if folks want to do something on Saturday afternoon or evening, we’ll make it happen.

There are lots of interesting tidbits in Google’s new efforts to report the takedown notices it receives and to explain how it complies. NBCUniversal is, by a wide margin, the content company that’s most aggressive about issuing takedown notices, asking that 1,073,536 URLs be yanked since Google began collecting data, trailing Microsoft, with 2,717,163, and leading the RIAA member organizations with 445,189. HBO, despite having one of the most-pirated shows in the world in Game of Thrones, comes in only at 55th, with takedown notices filed against 17,303 URLs, representing 1,136 domains. There’s been a general upward trend in the number of takedown notices Google’s received since it began aggregating this data in 2011, with a particularly sharp recent spike, which could be due to an attempt to lock down leaks from May sweeps, or a recognition that with SOPA or a similar bill not forthcoming, the studios will have to beef up their reporting efforts.

But perhaps the most interesting bit of data in the report comes in the form of two accidental blind items in the section of the report where Google explains some of the illegitimate requests it’s fielded and turned down. Among them: “A U.S. reporting organization working on behalf of a major movie studio requested removal of a movie review on a major newspaper website twice” and “A major U.S. motion picture studio requested removal of the IMDb page for a movie released by the studio, as well as the official trailer posted on a major authorized online media service.”

I would be endlessly curious to know which movie studios, or people working on their behalf thought it would be a smart move to treat critics and news organizations—some of the last people defending the idea that it’s hard and expensive to create excellent content and it requires a carefully-calibrated business environment to make it work—like they were pirates. And I’d love to know why they thought they’d have a chance of getting away with it.

Over the weekend, Audrey Bolt, Miss Ohio caused a bit of kerfuffle during the Miss USA pageant when, asked to name a movie she thought portrayed women positively, named Pretty Woman and gave this explanation:

I think it depends on the movie. I think there are some movies that depict women in a very positive role, and then some movies that put them in a little bit more of negative role. But by the end of the movie, they show that woman power that I know we all have. Such as movie Pretty Woman. We had a wonderful, beautiful woman, Julia Roberts, and she was having a rough time, but, you know what, she came out on top and she didn’t let anybody stand in her path.

Mediate and company have juiced the story by saying she thinks that a prostitute is a positive role model. That kind of misses what is wrong with Pretty Woman. It’s not that being a sex worker inherently shuts you out of inspiring stories. I’m finding Connie Riesler’s efforts to get clean on The Shield compelling. One of the most fun side characters in Hysteria is a former prostitute. I could go on.

The problem with Pretty Woman as a positive portrayal of women is that the “woman power” it shows is limited to being vivacious and sexually attractive. Vivian (Julia Roberts) does demand that she be treated with basic decency, whether she’s trying to convince Kit to stop using and to get away from her pimp, or refuses to submit to the advances of Philip Stuckey (Jason Alexander). Those are good things to demand and to aspire to, and I appreciate that the movie insists that being a sex worker doesn’t mean surrendering your right to consent.

But the movie is relatively lazy about a fundamental point: Edward Lewis (Richard Gere) essentially purchases a new life for Vivian, starting with a dress, scaling up to a new wardrobe, and finally an amount of cash that is meant to function as Vivian’s escape velocity from her life. It’s a nice fantasy of salvation if you can get it, and perhaps if you’re competing in pageants, you can (Pretty Woman‘s fantasy of a man picking a woman out from a crowd has much more in common with beauty pageants than with actual sex work). But it’s more a portrait of a man seeing something in a woman that she doesn’t see in herself than it is of empowered womanhood.

The bridge is yours.

-Andy Samberg’s best digital shorts.

-The Dark Knight Rises is going to be 2 hours and 45 minutes long.

-Star Wars as telenovela.

-Because everything is silly we’re going to have a movie about gladiators fighting zombies.

-I like this almost as much as the video for Kelis and Andre 3000′s “Millionaire”:

This is just absolutely brutal and hilarious as a parody of not just Broadway, but of everything mainstream popular culture would have done to the raw material of The Wire had they gotten their hands on it:

More Stringer Bell with interpretive dance, please.

This season of Game of Thrones is over, and with it, our annual discussion of whether the use of the nudity in the show is gratuitous or not. As I wrote early in this season, I think the use of nudity was in service of a larger point, and I think the rise of Ros as a significant character tends to bear out my argument. But it does seem like there’s an emerging consensus that cable television shows are having characters strip down simply because they can get away with it, that we’re approaching some kind of flesh fatigue. So as a pushback against burnout, and in defense of something better, here are five cable sex scenes that worked because they advanced plots or characterization, were visually or politically daring, or were hot beyond a “Durr, here’s a naked lady” level:

1. The Wire, Pearlman and Daniels and Greggs and an unknown woman, Season 3: I’ve always thought there was something radical about the framing of a single night in Baltimore, when ADA Rhonda Pearlman and Lt. Cedric Daniels sleep together for the first time, and Det. Kima Greggs finally steps over the line and cheats on her partner, Cheryl. These two sex scenes are intercut, showing us not just an interracial couple but a gay one. The only thing missing? A straight white man as either giver or receiver of pleasure. A little showy? Sure. Character-advancing and genuinely alluring? Absolutely.

2. Sons of Anarchy, Jax and Tara, Season 2: There’s no show-runner in television who like offering up his leading man’s body for consumption than Kurt Sutter, the creator of FX’s motorcycle gang melodrama Sons of Anarchy. “Fix” is no exception: after Jax Teller (Charlie Hunnam) sleeps with a porn actress, his girlfriend Tara (Maggie Siff) is understandably upset. They talk through the terms of their relationship, but just to make things clear to anyone who thinks she can make inroads on her man, Tara seduces Jax in a public bathroom. When the porn star walks in, Tara’s smile over Jax’s shoulder—we see none of her naked body and much more of his—is wickedly triumphant.

3. Breaking Bad, Walter and Skyler, Season 1: There’s nothing sexy about watching Walter White, cancer victim and high school chemistry teacher turned meth dealer, try to bring…something back to his marriage by forcefully attempting to initiate sex with his wife Skyler. But it’s a fantastic, upsetting manifestation of what will become Walter’s core character arc: a fetishization of control, even at the expense of, and maybe for the express purpose of dominating others.

4. Deadwood, Sol Star and Trixie, Season 1: “Mister Star.” “Miss Trixie.” “Would you want a free fuck?” Why would you say that?” “To know the answer.”… “Seth, you remember Trixie?”… “Kiss my neck or tits if you have to kiss something.” “Let me kiss you.” “Well, you’re a goddamn Jew fool.” The formality of the negotiation between Jewish shop owner Sol Star and prostitute Trixie, giving way to first names, then Trixie’s granting permission to Sol to kiss her is a microcosm of a relationship in a single scene. Never has a a bare knee in a torn high sock, the unchoreographed awkwardness of two people’s bodies figuring out how to fit together, been so alluring.

5. Damages, Arthur Frobisher and unknown prostitutes, multiple seasons: There is something profoundly weird about seeing Sam Malone high on cocaine having spastic, unpleasant sex with a prostitute in the backseat of an SVU. But that’s what Ted Danson did, repeatedly, as billionaire Arthur Frobisher during his run on Damages. Frobisher could be self-righteous in his defense against Patty Hewes, a charmer cracking jokes with his children, desperate and controlling smashing in his soon-to-be ex-wife’s windshield with his golf clubs. But in those sex scenes, he looked as lost as he ever did. And the scenes were a reminder that sometimes sex is just about friction and tension, and that it can be a windup more than a release.

Maxim’s oral history (I know, I’m groaning myself) of The Wire is a lot of fun, in part for stories about actual addicts trying to buy drugs from the cast or kids skipping school to be extras in the public school plot in season four, in part for the image of Idris Elba tooling around Baltimore strip clubs before he was famous in the states. But reading through it, I think I was most interested in the little anecdotes about the show and race. First, there’s the assumption by some of the black actors that they were being abandoned in favor of white storylines in season two:

Seth Gilliam: Me and Domenick got frustrated because we were doing a lot of sitting around. We went to David Simon one day and said, “What’s the deal here?” He said, “There’s a long-term plan for your characters, and we’re not phasing you out.”

Michael K. Williams: Season 1 I was just happy to have a gig. I was frivolous with the money. It was all about party time. Season 2 I got real antsy. I thought David Simon bamboozled the black cast when he brought all the white actors in to tell the docks story line. I was like, “This is some bullshit!” But midway through Season 3 I saw that this was bigger than me.

Now, obviously Simon proved those fears wrong, but it’s a sign of what people are conditioned to expect by their experiences in Hollywood, and from watching other shows play out. And then there’s the reaction even within the show to its failure to achieve awards recognition:

Amy Ryan: We would shake our heads, going, “Why are we being overlooked?” It was maddening, but it also didn’t matter, because we knew.

Wendell Pierce: That’s politics. That’s the politics of outside New York and L.A. That’s the politics of race. We had a running joke where after every nomination, this one woman in the hair department would be so hurt, you know, “You guys were so good!” I was like “Janet, sorry, but you’re on a black show!”

There’s something kind of depressing—and clarifying—about the inability of one of the best shows ever to air on television to dispel that pessimism because, in spite of everything else it was, it was still a black show. The rules change. The game remains the same.

We’ve had some, if not enough, discussion on this site about the people rendered most aggressively invisible by Hollywood norms: people with disabilities. Which is part of the reason I wanted to call everyone’s attention to Push Girls, Sundance’s new show (it premieres last night at 10, episodes are available on Hulu) about a group of four friends who also use wheelchairs as they navigate their lives in Los Angeles. The program’s a sly double whammy: it’s an effective execution of a standard reality show format, complete with sexual adventurism, marriage and pregnancy challenges, and some impressively, er, forward styling. But it’s also secretly a show about the narrowness of Hollywood. As I wrote for The Atlantic in reviewing the show:

Push Girls is most dramatic when it’s exploring the characters’ attempts to make careers in Los Angeles, the most appearance-obsessed place on the planet. Where Bravo reality shows treat the Hollywood ambitions of their stars as ridiculous even while urging them into the recording studio or on stage, Push Girls takes its characters’ aspirations seriously. Angela Rockwood and Auti Angel both had entertainment careers before their injuries, Angela as a model and Auti as a backup dancer on hip-hop tours. The show portrays their desires to get back into the game not as a function of boredom, greed, or self-aggrandizement. This is a career, not a dalliance, and one that’s driven by financial as well as creative needs. Angela is separated from her husband, and explains that Social Security doesn’t pay for the nursing care she needs. And the challenges they face are not a result of their own deluded lack of talent, but a manifestation of Hollywood’s narrowness and lack of creativity.

When Angela, who was breaking into movie and television roles when she became a quadriplegic in a car accident, decides to start looking for a new agent, she’s treated as if she’s some sort of bizarre anomaly. “To my knowledge, I can’t think of much advertising featuring people in wheelchairs,” a woman at an agency tells her. Later in the conversation, she insists, “We’re wheelchair accessible, but there’s a staircase.”

Anthony, the photographer Angela hires to take her new headshots, initially acts the same way. “Angela has a lot of work,” to do, he says. “It’s like the guy who didn’t have any arms who wanted to pitch in baseball.” And he wants to lean the seat back so he can take shots that will conceal that she uses a wheelchair. But she insists that “I have to show a part of the wheelchair to show that I am in a wheelchair,” recognizing it doesn’t make sense to take shots that might get her in the door only to encounter a shocked reaction and an instant rejection. As Angela talks Anthony through what’s happening to her body when she has a leg spasm, he begins to relax, and the photos he takes of her are beautiful. It’s a perfect encapsulation of what the show hopes to accomplish, as familiarity overcomes fear and an able-bodied person and a disabled one work together on a project that’s a credit to them both.

In a way, Push Girls is an interesting counterpart to The L.A. Complex. The latter is a show about how the decisions you make can make it harder for you to work, and to work on your terms in entertainment. Only one of the characters in that show, Tariq, bumps up against professional limits created by how other people perceive his identity (Raquel, to a certain extent, is limited by her age, but also her own personal rigidity). Push Girls is about what it means to have talent an industry doesn’t know how to accomodate. In between the pressure to be a certain kind of thing and to behave a certain kind of way, I don’t know how anyone makes a career in Hollywood and stays mentally healthy.