Right?

I also think it’s fascinating that we just can’t get over Bill Clinton’s affair. There were, after all, other things that happened during his presidency that resonate today much more than his extramarital dalliances and the resulting impeachment trial, including an attempt to reform the health care system, the patchy bridge of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, or the attempts to take out Osama bin Laden. But no, what we’re fascinated by is the affair.

In last week’s conversation about the fact that Lara Croft will be threatened with sexual assault in the latest release of Tomb Raider, commenter Yitzhak Ben-Moshe wondered “One wonders how many sick puppies will let it go and watch the rape happen. Disgusting.” No sooner had he said that than two people showed up in the feed to validate his fears. “As long as you get to watch Lara Croft get raped uncensored, I’ll pre-order the special edition right now,” wrote Jordan Cunningham. “I been wanting to see that foe nearly a decade.” And Eric Ericsson chimed in “Rape in my tomb raider? Oh boy, I cannot wait to raid her tomb.” This letter is to them.

Dear Jordan and Eric,

I have a lot of questions for both of you, but let’s start with this one: why do you want to see Lara Croft get raped?

I ask because I’d be willing to bet it’s something you hadn’t considered much before Ron Rosenberg and company laid out the scenario (one they’re now walking back) for the new Tomb Raider game that will give Lara Croft a backstory. And once you heard that Lara Croft was going to be at risk of rape in the new game, you jumped on the idea. But I still want to know why. It’d be one thing if you wanted to see the character have fairly explicit consensual sex—Lara Croft has been marketed to us as a hot, adventurous woman for years, and all manner of non-exploitative fantasies can come out of the way she’s been sold in-game and on-screen. But no, what Jordan wants is to see her get “raped uncensored,” and Eric wants the chance to do it himself.

So, in all seriousness, why do you want to see Lara Croft get raped?

Do you think she has an obligation to be sexually available, if not to you in real life, to someone else in-game, and if she violates that obligation, that it should be enforced upon her? One of the hard, immutable truths of adulthood is that no one owes you, and there is no mechanism to guarantee that everyone gets some mysteriously-allotted fair share of happiness and sexual satisfaction. I get that there’s this fantasy of a time before feminism when women were more broadly sexually available to men, when some men think they would have experienced less of that pain of loneliness and that fear of rejection that is baked into modern life. But I’d bet if you think about it carefully, you’ll acknowledge to yourself that it’s not really true, that participation in that fantasy was limited to certain very powerful and wealthy men, that it probably wouldn’t have served you as well as you think it would, that then, as now, you would have been required to exercise persuasion and charm and negotiation to get what you wanted. This fantasy of yours, it’s a fantasy. And nothing, not pretending you’re owed something, not seeing a video game character get raped, is ever going to bring it back.

So if it’s not that, is it entertaining to you to see this powerful woman reduced in some way, made vulnerable to something whether you’re the person enforcing her powerlessness or not? Because if that’s the case, really, what are you so frightened of? Lara Croft is not some sort of proof that men have been replaced as adventurers, or that men are unnecessary. To paraphrase Orson Scott Card’s Piggies talking about their desire to participate in the full life of the universe alongside humanity, feminism is not about being there first, about rendering men irrelevant. It’s about being there, too. I’d think that needing to see Lara Croft, or any other strong woman, made vulnerable isn’t pushback against misandry, the unicorn of oppressions. It’s evidence of fear, proof of John Scalzi’s theory that relying on patriarchy is really playing the game of life on the easiest setting rather than being willing to collaborate, and in some cases compete. If that’s what you really want, to be spared the presence of women in your lives because you find us threatening and upsetting, you may be able to find a way to do that, for a little while longer. But I don’t think it’s going to last. You can’t put all of us in whatever it is you perceive to be our places. There are too many of us. And whether you want to acknowledge it or not, there are a lot of men who will tell you that having women is a value add to their lives, not a painful surrendering of territory. You can fight for whatever barren rock you want to make your last stand on. But why not check out what men and women are building together? If you like what you see, then welcome.
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Deadline’s roundtable on female-driven comedy has some interesting stuff in it, particularly these observations from House of Lies co-executive producer Jessika Borsiczky on the state of women’s employment behind the camera in television, which mostly serves to illustrate that things are good relative only to the movies:

We are sort of hitting a place where there’s some real seniority to women in television. When I started at HBO (in the movie division) in 1992 I certainly wasn’t running television shows, it took a long time…We have two women on the staff and three men. I ran an action movie company, and in 90 percent of the meetings I’d be the only woman in the room. When I shifted to television, it was a much more balanced environment. There are more women in comedy – the last show I ran was Flash Forward, and there are a lot more men in science fiction. I think it’s really important to be expressive and not self-conscious in a writers’ room when you’re going for comedy. On our show it’s not only women’s issues, but also race. We devoted an entire episode of House of Lies to anal sex, you have to know going in that when you are breaking that story there are going to be some very raw moments in the room. I have to say nobody felt uncomfortable, and we were laughing our heads off. That being said, there are limits, I know stories of women who were discriminated against for taking maternity leave, or sexually discriminated against by their bosses, I think that still exists.

An industry where you face the prospect of discrimination for taking maternity leave you’re allowed by your contract is probably not one that’s going to be exceptionally thoughtful and sensitive in its explorations of the issues faced by women in their real lives.

I’m also really interested in the arguments Borsiczky and other women in the roundtable make in favor of a boundary-pushing environment in the writers’ room that seems to imply that women have to be sure they want to be in that sort of environment before they proceed. From what I’ve seen of folks writing television dialogue in the moment, it absolutely is a tough editing process: every line is diamond-cut, and that requires a particular kind of ego to hold up under. But in terms of busting boundaries, you can get there both by creating safe spaces and by making your willingness to go to difficult places a mark of toughness. The ability to tackle impolite topics is not gendered, and just as women can thrive in filthy, frattish writers’ rooms, I’m sure there are a lot of men who would do just fine in the kind of bonded environment Lena Dunham, for example, talks about trying to create on Girls.

The bridge is yours.

-I will totally go see this Spice Girls documentary.

-Call of Duty and how war changed America.

-Anger Management is being advertised with conceptual trailers because the clips are awful.

-Avengers-inspired red carpet gowns (I ADORE the Thor one).

-More Louis C.K. on Father’s Day:

It is truly bizarre to me that television networks, in trying to capture viewers’ energy and engagement as they talk about shows after they air, would try to supplant existing tools like Twitter:

A recent study by the public relations firm Edelman found that the majority of users comment on shows and share content after they air.

Yet both that study and a Nielsen study found that some viewers do engage with related content while viewing. How to capitalize on that is the challenge. “It’s not like Instagram,” Miso CEO Somrat Niyogi said, referencing the massively successful photo-sharing app. “We’re still trying to crack the code of how do you add value to the TV-watching experience that supersedes what’s happening with Twitter and Google. I don’t think anyone has done it yet.”…IntoNow founder Adam Cahan argues that networks are starting to understand that they should not build their own apps because there is not a great return on investment. But tell that to the networks, who see themselves as having the upper hand because they control the content and have the access to the stars.

I understand that networks like the idea of monetizing branded apps, but given the costs and irritations of development and maintenance, I’m hard-pressed to see why they wouldn’t decide that governing the after-show conversation through existing tools makes more sense. If you’re the social media director at a premium cable network, why wouldn’t you just insist that an actor is available to do a Reddit chat after every single episode? HBO’s hashtags for Game of Thrones episodes are similarly a good idea—it’s an example of a network recognizing where the content lives and giving people a tool they need anyway but that also lets the network effectively tag everyone participating in it and track the conversation.

The larger problem is also just that, whether the conversation is taking place in a medium they control or not, television network social efforts often come across as hopelessly square, controlled to the point of utter dehydration. I can see why FX might be anxious about hosting Kurt Sutter’s blog, in which he goes off on critics who he thinks are insufficiently deferential to his vision for Sons of Anarchy, or his production diaries for GQ—they can be…a little rough. But hosting something like that, and giving creators who want that outlet free reign, would make networks’ sites actual magnets and real sites of engagement. In a way, the best effort I’ve seen by a network to co-opt fan social engagement is Bravo’s Watch What Happens Live, Andy Cohen’s late-night talk show. Half new interviews and drinking games with guests, and half a rehash of recently broadcast Bravo programming, the show uses social media as a bridge connecting Cohen and Bravo fans: they can Tweet in questions for the guests, and use Twitter to discuss the talk show as it’s under way. It’s programming that meets fans where they’re at and has been hugely successful as a result—at this point, Andy Cohen is a more-watched late-night host than Conan O’Brien—rather than treating fans as purely monetizable nuggets.

There are a lot of reasons I am not the target audience for a movie about college a capella, but you know what’s an awesomely quick way to ensure I will never, ever see Pitch Perfect? Make fun of people who are trying to prevent rape on college campuses both by suggesting that they’re over-earnest and that there are a lot of fake allegations:

Try harder.

A note on this series of posts: Some of you are watching The Wire for the first time. Some of you are scholars of the show. I’m doing my best to respond to the episodes as they’re presented me, both so these pieces will be accessible to anyone who is watching the show for the first time, and so I can concentrate really hard on seeing what I hadn’t seen before. That said, I hope this discussion will branch in many directions, so if you want to talk about foreshadowing, or watching the show after having seen it, talk away, just please label your posts as spoilery or for veterans. And I’ll be hanging out in comments, so if you’ve got questions, ask away.

As is the case in the famous opening scene of the series, in which McNulty struggles to understand the series of events that lead to Snot’s murder, much of the first three episodes of The Wire are devoted to translation between the argots and customs of a Baltimore rendered multicultural by bureaucracy and the drug trade. McNulty’s informant’s explanation that they had to give Snot admission to a game that was rigged against because, “Got to. It’s America, man,” explains why the men tolerated Snot, but not the rules of the dice game itself. No matter how much the characters learn by study or in conversation with each other, their excavations keep uncovering huge new structures to be mapped and navigated, much less understood.

We see Bubbles teaching Johnny that running a scam requires a little cash investment, lowering the price of heroin rather than eliminating it completely because: “We not burning no eleventh street chumps, here.” When they’ve obtained the drugs, the lessons aren’t over. “You got to pace that shit,” Bubbles tells his fragile protege, who rushes cons and hits. “I’m trying to give you a little game, man. You want to pretend like you know something.” When Johnny ends up in intensive care, Bubbles, an inveterate teacher, takes his skills to the detail, naming Barksdale crew members for Kima, and lecturing Leander Sydnor on the importance of losing his wedding ring and dancing on dead soldiers before he poses as an addict.

D’Angelo Barksdale and the crew he leads in the Pit are constantly bickering over the meaning of the world around them. Johnny’s attempt to scam them becomes the occasion for a debate about prestige and elevation. “Hamilton. He ain’t no president,” insists Wallace. “No ugly-ass white man get his face on no legal fucking tender less he president,” D’Angelo counters grumpily. It isn’t the first time they’ll disagree on how the world works. “The nigger who invented those things still working in the basement for regular wage,” D’Angelo will tell him as they discuss the wonders of chicken nuggets, insisting as he always does on the essential calcification of the social hierarchy. “He still have the idea, though,” Wallace says, seeing the gleam of satisfaction where D’Angelo only sees drudgery. D’Angelo’s lecture to the Pit crew about how chess works is a dual act of translation, an attempt to explain the game that also tells the audience why he’s so eager to convince the boys working under him that they should foreswear ambition. “It ain’t like that,” he explains to Bodie, who is convinced that if he gets to the other side of the board, he can win. “See, the king stay the king. Everything stay who he is…The pawns in the game, they get capped quick. They out of the game early.” He doesn’t get through: “Unless they some smart-ass pawns,” Bodie immediately insists.

Daniels is meeting with similar frustration in his attempt to educate Herc, Carver, and Pryzbylewski in the art of being decent police, something that appears worryingly inconsistent with being decent human beings. After they drunkenly (revealed in a pullback that reveals how many beer cans they’ve crushed and scattered on the ground) attempted to exert their authority in the Towers, sparking a riot and in the course of which Prez strikes a teenaged boy and blinds him, Daniels delivers a withering lecture to them about how to keep their jobs. He’s disgusted by the harm they’ve wrought, of course, the fact that they’ve put him in a position where he has to tell his wife “You don’t give your people up to IAD. You don’t do that.” But he’s also angry that they have no sense of how to protect themselves, an extension of knowing how the system works and is set up to protect even men as foolish and as violent as them.
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