I’m quite looking forward to Robot & Frank, a story about an aging jewel thief and the robot he’s given to keep him company, not just because of the absurdly terrific cast, or the fact that it’s near-future science fiction, which tends to employ small changes rather than broad metaphors, to sharp effect:

Robot & Frank is a case where the scenario in which the technology’s being employed—to resume Frank’s heist career, and get revenge on the tech nerds who are taking over the local library—is actually more baroque than the technology itself. Japanese companies have long been at work developing robots to assist in many aspects of elder care. Technology companies depend on our ability to develop low-level emotional bonds with technology ranging from Roombas, which act as surrogate pets, to Apple’s Siri voice technology. And the continued work and social lives of aging people, as well as elder care, are major issues that Hollywood almost never has the courage to touch, much less approach from the perspective of people who are aging rather than the younger people who will take lessons from them. I’m almost as excited for a thoughtful, funny, fully human story about retirees as I am to see a movie about robots.

I’ve been watching this season of True Blood, not out of any particular affection for the show, but because I need something to do on Mondays when I’m cleaning out my Google Reader. And while I think overall the show remains not very good (though it is marginally less racist than last season), I found myself unexpectedly struck by two stories in this most recent episode: Salome’s remembrance of being pimped out by her family as a young girl, and Pam’s reflections on how she came to know Eric while working as a prostitute shortly after the turn of the century. True Blood‘s always been a show deeply concerned with sex, but this episode was one of the first times it’s considered the issues that were threaded into Game of Thrones all season, and that reoccured in Deadwood: what happens when women either don’t have control of their own sexuality, and what risks do they face when they turn their sexuality into a commodity.

“We die alone, in the dark,” Pam, still human, told Eric. The pair met after Pam, the mistress of an upscale brothel, discovered that one of the women who worked for her had been murdered by a serial killer. Eric saved her from the same man, and intervened again when he found Bill Compton and his maker Loretta glamoring another woman who works for Pam so she’ll give them consent to drain her dry. Eric’s protective, but even as he develops a tentative relationship with Pam, who, though human is surprisingly accepting of Eric’s unusual abilities, he still holds her at a distance. When she asks him to turn her into a vampire to save her from the fate that awaits both working prostitutes and the women who have ascended to supervise them, Eric tells her that the bonds between maker and made vampire are too sacred to be entered into lightly. Pam remains a disposable to him. Eric may respect her and enjoy her company, but he’s still treating her like a prostitute, a woman who falls into a separate category from women he might actually consider forging a long-term relationship with. Pam forces his hand by slashing her wrists, forcing Eric to turn her if he wants to spend more time with her.

Joanie Stubbs, the prostitute who plays a similar role first in the Bella Union and then in her own establishment in Deadwood, has no such promise of a magical escape, and fewer emotional resources than Pam. When Joanie considers suicide by gunshot, crying out “What am I Lord, that I’m so helpless,” she means it. She’s alone in the room with that pistol. There’s no one to persuade, or frighten into transporting her into a new life. Pam, when she turns into a vampire, is able to reclaim her sexuality for herself, and ends up working with Eric to run a bar where people can meet on equal terms, rather than as client and prostitute, with all the inequalities and vulnerabilities that implies. It may take a while for Joanie to make good on what she tells Cy Tolliver, the owner of the Bella Union, and her former boss, that “I don’t want to run women no more,” but she eventually does. But she doesn’t have the luxury of living from one era into the next, from sexual constraint into sexual liberation.
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Over at the Mary Sue, Aja Romano has a terrific piece about the redoubtable culture site TV Tropes’ decision to delete all of its content related to rape and sexual assault on the grounds that it was making it more difficult for the site to retain advertisers. She writes:

Today when you access any of these pages, you’re informed, “We do not want a page on this topic. It does not meet our content policy.”…This problem wasn’t a new one; in January, the Rape Trope index was locked due to Google threatening to block the site’s ad revenue for explicit content. This led to complaints about vanishing hentai tropes, with some users commenting that “creepy content and creepy examples” needed to go, and others questioning whether “creepy content” applied to rape tropes. At that point a user-led effort was made to rename all of the Rape Tropes so that they sounded less rapey (seriously), which rapidly turned into an admin mandate to go through all the renamed tropes and excise all creepiness.

But despite this frantic renaming/excision, either Google brought down the content policy hammer or the admins simply decided it wasn’t a battle worth fighting. When Fast Eddie noted the deletion of the trope page, he added, “There is no explanation needed beyond the fact that the topic is a pain in the ass to keep clean and it endangers the wiki’s revenues. We just won’t have articles about rape. Super easy. No big loss.”

Aja’s gone deep on the grostequeries of suggesting that eliminating conversations about rape are “no big loss.” Amy Davidson’s written powerfully in the New Yorker about the extent to which social media helped former Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky’s victims see that they weren’t alone in their experiences. And as long as TV Tropes remains the predominant site for discussion of common story elements in the medium, removing discussions of rape and sexual assault means that when victims or viewers go to the site, they’ll be denied a chance to see the traditions and frameworks that shape their experiences and the stories that touch them.

Now, this is a problem for which Google is more to blame than TV Tropes. TV Tropes is hardly the only site to be affected by Google’s classification of discussions of rape and sexual assault as explicit or obscene, though it’s deeply unfortunate that they decided it was just too much effort to keep an important and powerful part of its site alive.

Rape is obscene. But that’s not because it’s dirty, or sexually alluring, something that needs to—or could be—confined to people at a certain age or a certain stage of life. Rape is obscene because it’s a violation of community norms and standards, not in some settings, but in all settings. It’s a gross, violent attack on the humanity of the victims. I would say rape is an adult topic, but children are victims, too. Part of what’s obscene about rape and sexual assault is that their existence eliminates our ability to let children live in a world that they assume is safe.

Talking about rape may involve talking about sex, but it’s not primarily about sex. A depiction and discussion of a naked woman having consensual sex, and a depiction and discussion of a woman being raped are fundamentally different things, and it’s disturbing that we’d allow algorithms that can’t tell the difference to elide sex and rape. It’s one thing to talk about tailoring content, in news or non-fiction, for ratings or traffic. It’s another to see the structures that governs profit-making online silence a discussion altogether. Ad servers who are literally providing a financial disincentive to discuss rape and sexual assault should be ashamed.

The bridge is yours.

-Do gamers need a bill of rights?

-”Vagina”: apparently, still shocking.

-Well, Dan Rather liked The Newsroom.

-Gallup is starting to examine the relationship between the arts and well-being.

-Yay, new Diamond Rings:

I have a lot of friends who work at The American Prospect, the venerable progressive policy and politics magazine based in Washington, and who until recently, worked at GOOD, the progressively-oriented general interest magazine that laid them off recently. As the Prospect went through a major round of fundraising to pay off its debt and secure financing for another year of operations, and the former GOOD staffers have started a round of Kickstarter fundraising for a project called Tomorrow Magazine, I’ve been gratified to see people come through for both publications. And I’ve been struck by both endeavors as illustrations of the cost of doing quality journalism.

It’s not that I don’t think people know that doing reporting, publishing print magazines, paying reporters’ salaries, and maintaining websites costs money. It’s more that I think these projects have put a precise price tag on that rather nebulous “costs money” assumption. There are twenty two staffers at the Prospect, not all of whom are full time. To pay them, and to keep publishing for another year, the magazine raised $700,000 to cover operating expenses for the first quarter. That is, frankly, not a lot of money: it’s a figure that also presumably needs to cover production of the magazine, freelancers, IT, rent on offices, etc. $700,000 is a large number. But it is not a very large budget for a magazine.

Similarly, the folks behind Tomorrow asked for $15,000 to put out a single issue of the magazine. I assume they’re going to raise a great deal more than that—as I wrote this, the Kickstarter was at $11,174, mere hours after it was posted, and growing fast. But that was an amount of money that didn’t involve compensation for anyone working on the project. It was a figure solely devoted to “production, web design and hosting, tech needs, postage, and one amazing launch party.” Even though the Tomorrow staffers are aiming to make their dream magazine, these are still pretty low-budget dreams.

Not every publication has staffers who readers have a passionate emotional investment in and are willing to support financially. And not every publication needs to get crowd-funded or supported through a combination of foundation and private giving. But I do think that in our conversations about media consumption and supportable business models, it’s really useful to know what the minimum costs of putting out a magazine like the Prospect or Tomorrow, or a television show like Louie, or a great-sounding album are. The more targets we have, the more we can think creatively about sustainable business models that will help us consistently reach them. It’s one thing to want media to be cheaper. It’s another to suss out how cheap it can actually get, and to make peace with that.

In a recent column for the Huffington Post, Richard Stearns wrote about a kind of diversity pop culture hasn’t integrated particularly well into its characters and storylines. “The vast majority of television and film characters seem to have no faith,” he explained. “People rarely attend church, pray, or make decisions based on religious beliefs. It is hard to find any Christians on popular television shows who are not belittled. There are virtually no television characters who I can fully identify with.” But one of the things that’s been striking this summer at the movie is how many characters have faith, and how often it’s implied to be Judeo-Christian.

In The Avengers, when Black Widow explains to Captain America that Thor and Loki are basically God, Cap’s response is a nod to his religious belief as part of what makes him an avatar of a certain kind of American traditionalism. “There’s only one God, m’am,” he tells her. “And I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.” The movie doesn’t spell out whether he’s a professing Christian, in part because there isn’t another really opportune moment to discuss theology, but the trail is there for people who want to follow it. In Snow White and the Huntsman, Kristen Stewart’s Snow White says the Lord’s Prayer in captivity. When she lies in a near-death state, the Huntsman’s (Chris Hemsworth) response is prayer, an attempt to speed her into heaven and to find solace for himself. And Elizabeth Shaw, the hero of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, is a Christian whose scientific exploration is directly motivated by her faith. The symbol of her Christianity, the cross she wears around her neck, becomes something that’s traded back and forth, a totem of trust between characters who have little other reason to see each other as sympathetic.

Whatever the virtues and failings of the first two movie, the careful integration of the characters’ beliefs into moments of emotional strain or the world opening up, is very smart. This is the way that a lot of people live their faith: it informs their decision-making as they make their way in the secular world. These aren’t niche movies, meant only to speak to a very faithful minority who view themselves as embattled by the secular world. They’re meant for hugely mass audiences, and their characters’ Christianity is self-confident, both in that they don’t have crises of faith, and that it doesn’t have to be the only element that defines the characters’ personalities. It stands on its own. This strikes me as a smart way forward for people outside of Hollywood who’d like to see more Christian characters in mass entertainment, and for people in Hollywood who’d like to give their characters religion without writing solely religious stories.

Part of the reason Prometheus doesn’t work as well is that Shaw’s religion is the only thing we know is her motivation, but the movie doesn’t flesh out the relationship between her belief and her work as a scientist, and doesn’t bother to establish any consistency in her worldview. If a character’s going to be faithful, what we see of that faith should be consistent in and of itself, and consistent with the other things a character uses to make decisions and to evaluate the world. People of all religions should want to see smart depictions of faith, whether it’s a minor part of a character or their main motivation. And folks who want to create good religious characters need to spend time thinking through theology. Belief is a complicated thing, and getting it right is an essential part of worldbuilding.

Novelist Chuck Wendig wrote a post on the difference between being offensive and being mean last week that I think is worth reading in its entirety, but I wanted to pull out this section of it:

I don’t want to hurt anybody. That’s the thing. Offending people? Happy to do it…But I don’t want to be mean. Or cruel. Or conjure up words that ding a person’s armor. I care little about minimizing offense, but I care quite a lot about minimizing people.

That’s why I don’t think the Tomb Raider thing is about political correctness — because I think it’s about minimizing women and, in a way, minimizing the men who play those games. That’s also why I don’t think that profane “in-your-face” blog posts that use words like the ones I noted are in what you might call “terribleminds-style” — sure, I’ll mock things within the industry or the bad habits of writers, but I won’t call those “retarded.” First, because it’s lazy. Second, because while that word may not seem to mean what it says, it still says what it means — and it’s short-code for being mentally handicapped no matter how you slice it. Third, and most importantly, because I don’t want to hurt people.

I think that one of the common defenses whipped out by people who make art—or hell, say things in any forum—that’s sexist or racist or transphobic is to say that they’re brave, speaking truths others dare not utter. The thing this, these people rarely speak these so-called truths to unfriendly audiences. And the easiest thing you can do with any audience is to confirm the beliefs they already hold. Sometimes, that can be a useful thing to do. Confirming that people aren’t alone in their beliefs or reactions to things can be a powerful way to bring marginalized people together. And telling people that their beliefs matter and are actionable in the world is a major mobilizing tool. But there’s a difference between those kinds of conversations and affirming people’s fears, prejudices, and need to be superior to someone. If you view giving offense as a sign of courage, it’s much more courageous to poke at your allies rather than the people weaker that you’ve determined to keep that way, to take a broad view, really see what the conventional wisdom is, and then challenge that. There are pieties in every movement, be it left, right, or center. But if you want to skewer them, you have to do better than “bitches be crazy” or “trans people are gross.” Smashing things and causing pain are not the same things as making a point.