I wrote a bunch yesterday about the advice I’d gotten from guys about how to push back against misogyny in gaming. Now, Jay Smooth makes the definitive case for why it’s worth putting those tips into action, so both men and women can live in the kind of world we all want to share:

Also points for “try to make Fetch happen with that misandry thing.”

I’ve been watching screeners of Louie‘s absolutely terrific third season over the past few days—y’all have a real treat coming in your direction at the end of the month—and it got me thinking. Television often revels in the father as a clueless or disconnected figure, whether it’s the cheerful bigotry of Peter Griffin on Family Guy or the raft of shows that treat the very prospect of men raising children as if it’s inherently comedic. In this environment, Louis C.K. has to be the best father on television. That doesn’t mean he’s the most competent father in pop culture, or the best provider—among his bits are his discomfort over the fact that he doesn’t own a home. But his mix of honesty, tenderness, and attempt to pass something like wisdom and honesty along to his daughters, on television and off, make him remarkable. Here are five of the best reasons to hold up Louis C.K. as a role model on Father’s Day.

1. He thinks hard about how to teach his kids about prejudice, America, and the virtue of living life to its fullest: In “Country Drive,” Louie takes his daughters to see an aged female relative—who turns out to be a virulent racist. The lessons he gives in the episodes about how to love your country, respect even your most difficult relatives, and take responsibility for your privilege should be a textbook for all parents who want to raise their kids with awareness of American racism.

2. He’s willing to bury his bitterness about his divorce for his children’s sake: Watching Louie bite his lip as his youngest daughter explained in the first episode of the last season of Louie that she likes her mother’s—Louie’s ex-wife—house better than Louie’s was an exemplar of staying civil, if not together, for the kids. The show is a constant reminder that children have the power to wound as well as to delight. Being a good parent means working through the pain.

3. He’ll protect his daughter’s duckling on a USO trip through Afghanistan: In “Duckling,” one of the best episodes of television of 2011, Louie got saddled with his daughter’s elementary school class ducklings the night before a USO trip—and touched down in a war zone to find he had a baby duck on board. Rather than trying to pass off the responsibility on someone else, Louie nurtured it through Afghanistan. That’s devotion to the family pet, and your child’s happiness.

4. He’ll reconcile with Dane Cook to get his fictional daughters concert tickets: In “Oh Louie / Tickets,” Louie sat down to work out his character’s (and real life) beef with frat comedian Dane Cook to get his daughter concert tickets. Given Cook’s general wretchedness, and the widespread assumption that he stole jokes from C.K., that’s a pretty awesome sacrifice to make for your kids.

5. He’s teaching his daughters that his love for them isn’t linked to their looks: When I interviewed C.K. at the Television Critics Association press tour in January, he told me that he tries never to tell his daughters that he loves them because they’re pretty. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t tell them that they look nice, but he’s trying not to make his love for them feel conditioned on their appearance. It’s an awesome example of thoughtful, feminist parenting.

No links since I’m off at a screening. But let’s experiment—I declare this an open thread to discuss anything and everything.

And a reminder: we start our rewatch of The Wire on Monday with the first three episodes of season 1. I have some SERIOUS THOUGHTS on street gambling to share.

It goes without saying that Rock of Ages is a profoundly silly movie, lacking even the veneer of social concern that marked director Adam Shankman’s previous movie musical adaptation of John Waters’ original Hairspray. It is, after all, a movie about eighties rock that repurposes “We Built This City” as a protest anthem and where one character lures another into stripping with a spirited rendition of Journey’s “Any Way You Want It.” But even though the overlong movie spends far too much time on its drippy leads, Sherrie (Julianne Hough), an Oklahoma girl drawn to the bright lights of Los Angeles, and Drew (an uttelry inert Diego Boneta) a barback with metal dreams, it’s full of hilarious, loose turns by veteran actors. I don’t really believe that singoffs will beat Family Research Council-style cultural conservatives, but it’s awfully fun to pretend for two hours that what the revolution really needs is Russell Brand on the barricades with a microphone.

Catherine Zeta-Jones is loonily committed as Patricia Whitmore, a cynical decency crusader. She’s married to Mike Whitmore (Bryan Cranston, in a role that will make it hard for Breaking Bad fans to look at Walter White the same way again), a candidate for the Mayor of Los Angeles who’s locked in his biggest financial backer by agreeing to shut down rock clubs and record stores on the Sunset Strip and turn the real estate over to a developer. Patricia is his main weapon in this fight, and her plan is to start by killing a club called the Bourbon Room, which employees Sherrie and Drew, just as it’s hosting the final show of a major band called Arsenal, whose lead singer, Stacee Jaxx, is having a meltdown. Her main tactic is rallying church groups—one woman complains that “my son ate my neighbor’s horse’s head because of Stacee Jaxx”— with a hilariously well-choreographed and -costumed rendition of “Hit Me With Your Best Shot.” But she’s not a moralist at heart, just an opportunist. It’s the rare portrayal of a decency advocate that acknowledges that there are motives at work other than fear and delusion.

That’s about as serious as the movie gets, though. Most of the fun is in watching the rest of the adults camp it up and do karaoke while the youngsters take themselves seriously. Tom Cruise divse into his performance as sex-drugs-and-managerial-indulgence-addled rock star Stacee Jaxx with a weirdly compelling ferocity: he can actually sing without embarrassing himself, and he moves around the stage with a sexy confidence. It’s the first time in years I’ve been able to think of him as anything other than a manic couch-jumper. Malin Ackerman is the best she’s ever been as a Rolling Stone reporter whose questions to Jaxx are surprisingly hard-hitting, even if her stripping down to her skivvies and dueting with Jaxx are not precisely what this fellow curly-haired, bespectacled entertainment reporter would recommend as the pinnacle of professionalism. Alec Baldwin tried to get out of his contract with the movie at the last minute, which is too bad. As club manager Dennis Dupree, he’s a Bizarro Jack Donaghy, and the movie would have done well to devote more time to his love story than to to the drippy romance between Sherrie and Drew. It’s similarly too bad that Mary J. Blige, filling the unfortunately common slot in musicals for black women who have little to do but whose voices put their non-singing actor colleagues to shame, is saddled with the aforementioned role of an inconsistently-motivationed strip club manager who goes by the name of Justice.

Ultimately, Rock of Ages likes the idea of having something to say about the corny manufacturedness of the music industry more than it actually has something to say, or any self-awareness that it’s the product of the same processes it critiques. “I’m a stripper,” Sherrie confesses to Drew at one point. “I’m in a boy band,” he responds. “You win,” Sherrie tells him, ceding pride of place in humiliation to him. But in Rock of Ages, as in the real world, processed boy bands have outlasted debauched rock.

I’ve been writing on and off for months about where women fit into the current Golden Age of television (or are we in the Silver Age at some point? Someone who knows more than I do about mythology, help!), particularly into the ranks of masculinized anti-heroes. So I just loved Todd VanDerWeff’s brilliant piece on how the current standards for television excellence are defined by masculinity, and how shows like Girls and Enlightened are powerful—and uncomfortably received—challenges to those norms:

We have a very particular idea about what makes “good” TV in this age of episodic online reviews. “Good” TV is either a single-camera sitcom filled with pop-culture references or moments of pathos (ideally both), or a serialized drama—often on cable—that probes the darkest limits of the human experience and has a bad-boy protagonist. In essence, we’ve created a world where the only two shows that can be copied to make good TV are Arrested Development and The Sopranos.

There’s nothing wrong with this, actually. Copying those two shows has resulted in a lot of great series, including some terrific, distinctly feminist TV, be it the female heroes of Parks & Recreation or Mad Men’s multi-faceted portrayal of what it meant to be a woman in the ’60s. But copying those two shows has also resulted in a narrow TV palette, a limited series of colors to draw from when constructing the next “great” TV show. These series tend to have sensibilities that are very white and masculine, largely because they’re all created by white males, and, hey, write what you know. (It’s not like my reviews aren’t informed by this same perspective.) Even the shows created in this mold that have female characters at their centers—Damages, say—tend to define that female character by how well she fits into a traditionally masculine world.

I’ve long thought that Sex and the City, which I love, has been weirdly excluded from the narrative of the rise of great television even though it premiered before The Sopranos did and had as much to do with the rebranding of HBO as an adult, smart, frank network as The Sopranos did. I wonder if that is in part a response to fact that the default perspective in popular culture is male, so shows aimed at women are based in the assumption that men will never come along, or that women will find some sort of refuge from male-dominated culture hugely refreshing. And to a certain extent that’s true—shows that speak to my experience in any way that’s close to emotionally precise are so rare they feel miraculous. But I wonder if their particularity becomes a hindrance when it comes to acting as a model. It shouldn’t be that hard to extract from Sex and the City that frank, aspirational shows about female friendships and female sexuality are a draw. But somehow, that show becomes particular time, place, and set of actresses, exceptional in its depictions of anti-heroines, its excellence, AND its privileging of women’s experience, while The Sopranos is conventional in its focus on men and unconventional only in its focus on an anti-hero and the quality of its execution.

I hate that we still haven’t found the show with a female lead, about specifically female issues, and from a specifically feminine-coded perspective that’s such a smash and so well-executed that everyone wants to try to be as smart and as ground-breaking and as buzzed-about as it. I hate that quality shows about women remain exceptions rather than anything close to a norm. As much as I love Girls and Enlightened, they’re too low-rated to qualify. But they’re sparking hugely difficult and important conversations, and perhaps they’re turning over fertile soil for someone who will follow them, and strike gold in the same fields..

My friend Tim Molloy has a great interview with Giancarlo Esposito, who plays Gus Fring on Breaking Bad and Sidney Glass on Once Upon a Time in which he reveals, among other things, that Esposito was recently stopped and frisked in New York:

Which is a testament to Esposito’s empathy as well as his acting. One reason he appreciates playing ruthless characters is the chance to find the humanity within them.

Days before the interview, Esposito was stopped and frisked by New York police while walking out of a theater where he was rehearsing a play. After several frantic minutes – with him and officers screaming, and their guns drawn – they realized they had the wrong guy. Their suspect had a hoodie, and Esposito was wearing a suit. When it was over, one of the officers recognized him, from his recent turn on ABC’s “Once Upon a Time.”

It would be really easy to make jokes about Fring’s toughness. But it’s an illustration of how fast these things can go down, and how confused they can be, that a cop who recognized Esposito once things were calmer didn’t know who he was while the incident was happening. If you can’t tell that, what other things are subject to misinterpretation and overreaction? Stop and frisk laws are frightening not just because they’re indiscriminate, but because they create huge numbers of incidents where things can go very, very wrong.