An annual survey of Americans on the civility of our national life is out, and once again, the media’s high up on the list of folks people apparently blame.

55 percent of the 1,000 people surveyed said they thought that the country was getting less civilized. And of those people, 50 percent said the media was a contributor, just behind Kids These Days at 55 percent, and above celebrities at 42 percent. (Only 29 percent of respondents said they thought sports figures were helping make America less civil.) 65 percent of overall respondents said that the tone of American popular culture was generally uncivil, while 62 percent said that the tone of the media was generally uncivil. Fox News was perceived to be less civil than MSNBC by a narrow margin: 35 percent of respondents said the former was generally uncivil in tone, while 31 percent said the same about the latter.

There’s no question that people perceive some level of incivility to be a negative: in the 2012 study, 81 percent of respondents told the folks who conducted the survey said they thought incivility in government was a danger to the country’s future, and 72 percent said incivility was turning potential public servants away from government. And they self-report tuning out political advertising at a rate of 66 percent, election coverage at a rate of 54 percent, and opinion journalism at a rate or 49 percent and reported news at a rate of 45 percent, though that doesn’t mean those numbers are an accurate depiction of their actual behavior.

But when it comes to media and popular culture, I tend to think that we find incivility exciting. Conflict is a great driver of narrative, whether it’s the kind of nastiness that leads people on the same side of a war to try to off each other in the midst of a battle in Game of Thrones or high school meanness to be overcome through song in Glee. Tyrion Lannister and Coach Sylvester are fan favorites (or were, prior to their gross overuse) in part because they’re good with zingers. In Tyrion’s case, his verbal slaps are generally aimed at worthy targets, but that doesn’t make him a paragon of sweetness and light. We love mean people on reality television as long as they seem smart rather than delusional. And when it comes to celebrity gossip, our consumptive habits suggest we’re giant hypocrites: we adore nothing more than to destroy someone and then cheer their rise so we can do it all over again. It’s fun to condemn incivility in principal, but everything about our choices suggests that a lot of the time, we have an enormous amount of fun with it.

One of the things I hear whenever I write about misogyny in video games is that there’s a silent majority of male gamers who are uncomfortable with the vicious sexism some of their counterparts deploy against women (and frankly, against men, too). Women aren’t alone in feeling hopeless, or like there’s no effective way to change either the behavior of individuals or the culture that leaves space for the harassment of women. So I hopped on Twitter yesterday and asked men who play video games, and who push back against sexist behavior when they see it, what kinds of arguments they’ve found to be effective. Dozens of you responded, with a lot of terrific advice. So if you’ve ever wanted to call out sexism in video games but weren’t sure how to start the conversation or how to make sure it would be productive, here’s the collective wisdom of the internet.

-Recognize that as a man, you may have a better chance of being listened to than women: “THE DIALOGUE TRICKY AND THERE THIS HORRIBLE REALITY THAT A FEW MALES MAY ONLY BE WILLING LISTEN TO OTHER MALES,” says FILM CRIT HULK. Women who write about sexism in gaming—and sexism in entertainment in general—often find themselves discredited on the grounds that they’re acting in their own self-interest (which is strange, when you think about it). When men speak up against sexism, it gives validity to the idea that sexism is a problem that affects everyone, not just something that only women see or experience.

-Have the conversation one-on-one, if possible: “As a rule I think direct 1 on 1 conversation is more valuable than a public setting (Internet included) w/ groupthink,” writes Reuben Poling. If you think someone is reachable in private, but likely to get their hackles up in public, start the conversation there before shaming or banning them more aggressively.

-Take the high ground—but don’t sound superior: “SOMETIMES IT ABOUT STARTING FROM PLACE GIVING RESPECT EVEN IF RESPECT UNDESERVED?” asks FILM CRIT HULK. And Byron Hauck suggests avoiding prissiness: “‘Don’t talk like that with me.’ Pepper in swearing or ‘bro’ as you feel appropriate. Works on homophobia & antisemitism too.”

-Stay as calm as possible. If you need to blow off steam, don’t do it in conversation with the person your’e trying to change: “Speak calmly and then back off,” says Ian Dickerson. “Avoid messy argument. Hope silent majority feel more able next time as a result.”

-Use humor: Lots of recommendations for this. Humor and sarcasm change the perception of who’s in violation of norms, and shows that feminism is cleverer than sexism.

-Be clear, from the beginning, the conditions under which you’re willing to play with someone, and stick to them: “We simply did not tolerate any sort of sexism, racism, ableism, homophobia, or other bigotry, even jokingly,” Grayson Davis of Beeps & Boops wrote in an email. “We had a zero-tolerance approach, with exceptions only made for long-standing players who seemed genuinely sorry, and even then we handed out long bans—several weeks or months, which is a very long time in multiplayer gaming.”
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The bridge is yours.

-Sansa Stark and Sally Draper: period buddies.

-Portia di Rossi will be in the Munsters reboot, and my world gets a little brighter.

-Shonda Rhimes is less than delighted with the lack of diversity in Bunheads.

-Is this the last season of Bones?

-Carly Rae Jepsen and Annie Lennox. You’re welcome;

Alan Sepinwall has done my favorite post-game interview with Mad Men‘s Matthew Weiner about this season of Mad Men, and I wanted to pull out this part of it, in which Alan asks Weiner about what it means for the show to be entering the second half of the decade, because I think it gets at something critically important:

I’ve always been telling a story, from the beginning of season 2, when the youth culture starts to be the focus of the advertising industry and commerce in general, and then the society. And you see Clearasil and talk about Pepsi, but there’s the scene in the elevator with the guys talking and they won’t take their hats off. And the crudening of our culture, it’s a big part of the story. There becomes less irony, and as the manners disappear, there’s less hiding. That’s something that I’ve really tried to tell. That’s why Ginsberg will swear out of the middle of nowhere, that’s why more of the language becomes more on the nose. Witticisms start dropping off. It hasn’t changed for Don and Roger, but I’m trying to tell a story about how we’ve become the way we are now. And I think that being inundated with nihilism, random violence, the rise of subversion in the marketplace — which Ginsberg represents — multi-culturalism, this is not a good or bad judgment. It’s just part of how we became more modern, and what people perceive. One of my things is that human behavior doesn’t change, but certainly the manners change, and what you’re watching is the manners changing.

In a way, this clarifies for me why I’ve never felt as attached to Mad Men as some of the folks who love it do — I’m somewhat interested in the reactions of folks on the wrong side of history, but I’m more excited to spend time with folks who will be liberated by the crudening of that culture. Because while politeness can be a spur to style, and wit, and class, it can also be a powerful means of enforcing privilege and preserving the comfort of people who benefit from it.

Politeness is staying quiet while your fiance rapes you so you don’t disturb anyone else in the office — and so their sense of you isn’t disrupted. Politeness isn’t interfering in the early days of the marriage of the colleague who got you pregnant. Politeness is wondering if you should have slept with Lane Pryce to keep his spirits up. Politeness is letting Don Draper appropriate or undermine your ideas. Politeness is not speaking up when your colleagues keep you at the office so late that you can’t get home safely to the neighborhood where you live because that’s all your salary allows.

And that’s why I found the rudeness of certain characters on Mad Men this season so refreshing. When Peggy calls out Don in a test kitchen with other people around, she’s being rude, but she’s also entirely justified. I love Michael Ginsberg in his awkward, profane, emotional nakeness. There isn’t a polite way to talk about being born in a concentration camp, to call out your boss for undermining your work. The fact that he’s a raw nerve end is a kind of courage, particularly in a season where Lane Pryce’s inability to talk about his problems or to ask for help lead him to commit what he hoped was a quiet transgression, and ultimately to his death.

Mad Men is, to me, the beginning of a conversation that our culture is still very much struggling to have, about the fact that style and privilege don’t have to be connected. It’s why Ron Swanson is such a transformative figure in his suggestion that performative hypermasculinity is in no way dependent on the oppression of women. And it’s why, in a way, it’s nice to see vintage cocktails and sixties styles come back. Feminism doesn’t mean that Peggy Olson and I are here to take away your old fashioned.

The video game industry is not exactly having a banner week. First, some passionate players decided to reaffirm the stereotype of gamer trogolodytes by viciously going after a feminist video blogger for daring to crowdfund a project about female character tropes. Then, a bunch of folks at E3 decided to treat actress Aisha Tyler like should couldn’t possibly be a serious gamer. Now, Tomb Raider executive producer Ron Rosenberg (no relation, or he’d be getting an earful from me in person) has announced that, in a redesign that makes the character less obviously a sex object, the big development for her character is that she’ll be a potential victim of rape.

As reported by Kotaku, Rosenberg said that there will be a scenario where “island scavengers” attempt to rape her, and that this is a great thing because “She is literally turned into a cornered animal. It’s a huge step in her evolution: she’s forced to either fight back or die.” Generally, character evolution involves how people respond to situations, not what other people do to them. And as actress Brit Marling pointed out in April, sexual assault is one of the most common dramatic wells Hollywood likes to go to as an attempt to force a female character to go through something difficult. It’s narratively lazy, and speaks more to what men like Rosenberg imagine about rape and strength than to any particular woman’s lived experience.

And beyond raping strong female characters as miserable cliche, as a lot of writers have pointed out, the game is a profound failure of empathy. Kat Howard points out how disturbing it is to have whether a character is raped be entirely dependent on the actions of the player: “Here is what we get asked: What were you wearing? Did you know him? Did you scream? Was your skirt too short? Were you in a bad part of town? Did he spend a lot of money on dinner? Were you wearing a bra with that dress? Did you let him touch you? Did you hit him? Did you fight back? Did you fight back enough?” The fantasy of being powerful enough to repulse any attack is a compelling one, but it stops short of placing responsibility where it actually belongs: with rapists. And it’s much more compelling—and less exhausting— to dream of living in a world where you are never threatened than it is to dream of constantly fending off attackers.

Given that Rosenberg also said that he expected men playing the new Tomb Raider will feel like they’re protecting Croft rather than embodying her experience, Kellie Foxx-Gonzalez at The Mary Sue points out that his assumption is rooted in the idea that “Men cannot ever relate to women (or women characters) in a meaningful way because we are fundamentally different and share no overlapping interests or experiences.” By Rosenberg’s reasoning, women can be objects of desire or protective impulses, but not of identification, a formulation that makes no sense given how many men play as female characters. In this specific case, the assumption is that men couldn’t possibly empathize with a character who is at risk of being raped, but that they can protect her. I’d be curious to see how men reacted to playing a character who was sexually assaulted no matter what they did, and no matter how powerful their character was. I imagine most of them wouldn’t like it very much. And I imagine people would have less fun playing a game where being strong kicks in after an assault, where you have to figure out how to make someone feel safe and confident again. Internal battles are more complicated than first-person shooters, but they’re a lot closer to the actual experience of surviving sexual assault.

Apparently, the Game of Thrones set has some pretty weird stuff kicking around, because someone has noticed that George W. Bush’s head is among those impaled on spikes on the Red Keep, and David Benioff and Dan Weiss said on the DVD commentary that “we just used whatever heads we had around.” I’m with SEK in finding that somewhat surprising. And actually, I think it would have been a better easter egg if it had turned out there were a bunch of recognizable figures dipped in tar so they’d be less recognizable, mounted on that wall for people to puzzle out obsessively. It’s the kind of thing that would have immunized the show against the inevitable accusation that suggestions of violence against conservatives are treated less seriously than suggestions of violence against liberals. And it would have made the same point more directly: be you George W. Bush or Stringer Bell, Bill Clinton or Al Swearengen, Joffrey Baratheon will make sure you get got if you displease him.