I loved The Sessions (then titled The Surrogate) when I saw it at Sundance, and I wish the trailer captured a little bit more of the movie’s tart humor. What’s unusual about The Sessions, which is based on an article by the late Mark O’Brien, isn’t just that it deals with the sexual lives of disabled people, an almost untouchable subject in modern popular culture, but that it’s a movie that is directly about the disparate experiences of people with disabilities without encouraging the audience to pity the main character:

Mark is funny, in the movie. He’s smart. He’s eloquent. He faces something he’s anxious about—losing his virginity—directly and with a lot of self-awareness. He’s not a saint, which is a relief. Mark gets to make mistakes and cross boundaries, but he also takes responsibility for those errors and grows from them. In other words, he’s a specific person, rather than a stand-in for a set of traits or the means by which able-bodied people learn tolerance and get to be awed by Mark’s perseverance and hope.

I think we need a lot more of this in pop culture. People with disabilities have different experiences of the world than able-bodied people do, in a whole range of areas. Folks with disabilities have higher unemployment rates than able-bodied people, and a lack of adaptive technologies can make it harder for them to access educational opportunities and appropriate housing. But the fact that our society and political system have been slow to accomodate disabled people, and that disabled people live involve different challenges and frustrations, doesn’t mean that people with disabilities are pitiable or saintly, or that their experiences are wholly different from able-bodied people’s. Mark’s intimacy issues and fear that he’s unlovable may spring from different wells than your standard romantic comedy heroine’s, for example, but the movie is a variation on a conventional romantic comedy structure. He is definitely not your Judd Apatow-style schlub—he’s an accomplished poet, as O’Brien was in real life—but his conversations with his priest (a very funny William H. Macy) and his caregiver (Moon Bloodgood) are funny in some of the same frank ways. It’s depressing to watch pop culture, and people more broadly, get caught up in disabilities such that they fail to see the people, and the characters, who have disabilities but are hardly the sum of them.

I can’t even bring myself to embed it here: some trogolodytes have created a game that lets players beat up Anita Sarkeesian, the feminist video blogger who’s been subject to an unremitting campaign of harassment since she created a Kickstarter to support a project to explore tropes of female characters in video games. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: anyone who thinks that feminists who push back hard against online harassment are being oversensitive needs to understand that we’re all trying to keep ourselves from becoming Anita Sarkeesians. No matter how strong you are, and no matter how much support you have, this kind of concentrated campaign of harassment affects the targets of it. And the goal of these campaigns is to terrorize people into silence. It’s not disagreement. It’s not creative trolling. It’s deployment of a weapon.

And even though it’s frightening, ugly stuff, the campaign waged against Sarkeesian illustrates the fundamental cowardice and weakness of the people attacking her. If you so lack confidence in your ideas, if you’re so uncomfortable defending your appreciation for problematic things (which, by the way, is tricky but not that tricky) that you can’t even put your hands over your ears and sing loudly and ignore them, that you have to actually go out and try to prevent anyone from from saying anything that could make you remotely uneasy, you are a coward. That’s cold comfort to folks like Sarkeesian who have to go through this now. But it’s why, long-term, angry, petty sexists are going to lose, and why it’s important to throw up bulwarks against trolls who try to venture out of their holes and take over mainstream conversations. These ideas don’t stand-up to discussion and debate. And sexist trolls can’t shut down all of those debates, no matter how hard they try.

I loved last night’s episode of Louie, starring Melissa Leo as a woman Louie is set up with on a blind date and ends up having a hilarious, insane, uncomfortable discussion about sexual reciprocity with, which I thought did something brilliant: gave an uncomfortable but important idea the least effective spokesman of all time for it, and validated it anyway. As I wrote about the episode at Slate:

Louie claims that Laurie has suckered him into an unfair bargain. “If you doing that for me hinged on me doing that for you, you should have said something,” he grouses, inadvertently proving her point. Louie’s default assumption is that he can get something he wants without having to give anything up or think about the other person’s needs in return. There’s something refreshing about the blast of rage Laurie sends back to him. “You know how many dicks I sucked that I didn’t want to suck, because I’m a good kid?” she asks, her voice echoing with years of pent-up indignation. Laurie may be a scary, irritating pain. But Louie doesn’t have an answer to her question, or a defense against the accusation that he’s let a lot of women go unsatisfied even as he’s judged them for being attentive to his desires. Once they’re over the shock of Laurie, I doubt anyone in the audience has a good justification for that double standard either.

To other people, though, what was powerful—and in some cases overwhelming and uncomfortable—about the episode was its depiction of a man getting coerced into sex. As Zach Dionne wrote at Vulture in a piece I read after writing my own:

Laurie sears through a handful of stages — anger, Obama-blaming, bargaining, accusing Louie of homosexuality — before finally arriving at the logical endpoint, which is rape. Argue this if you want, but a woman smashing a man’s head into a car window, climbing upon his stunned head and growling “lick it or I’ll break your finger!” with a bloodthirsty war face … is female-on-male rape, making a rare televised appearance. The shock is so strong it raises the question of why Louie is cool with going out again.

I pinged a bunch of my TV critics buddies to talk it over, and I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about this scene. One of them raised the question of whether Louie, in the context of the show, thinks he’s been assaulted, and whether that’s different from the show’s perspective. Is he afraid to get out of Laurie’s car? It sure seems like she’d be willing to run him over on that motorcycle. Or is he staying because he wants to prove her right even though he knows the entitlement he’s displayed is fundamentally untenable?

I think the ultimate point of this episode of Louie though, is that Louie’s feelings and motivations, and our reactions to them are confusing. The show is a sharp rebuke to the idea that all sexual encounters are marked by clarity, that not knowing what you want to do in a fraught moment and feeling guilty and ambiguous about it later are the products of women’s weak wills or ill intent towards men they later resent. Laurie’s behavior is frightening and coercive and violent and inherently ridiculous, and confusing in part because one of the arguments she’s making is appealing to Louie, that if he gives her what he wants, he’d be doing the equality-oriented, fair thing, and make her happy. And at the end of the day, that’s what date rape often looks like: it’s violent, and scary, and coercive, and upsetting, and the rapist in question holds out something the victim wants, the ability to validate the victim’s behavior and whole person. Laurie may be a wild character, but her behavior is not actually more ridiculous, illogical, or effectively coercive than the way male date rapists behave towards women. Her actions recast a common event and make it freshly upsetting. Louie is upset and confused because anyone would be confused in that situation.

I can’t think of another show that could do what Louie did last night, demolishing two double standards at once by giving credence to both a victim and an attacker. Laurie has a right to be angry, in both a specific and a global sense, about the fact that she’s both expected to and shamed for pleasing the men she’s with. And Louie has a right to be angry, confused and frightened about what Laurie is doing to him. Unlike most conversations about sex and fairness and consent, the episode doesn’t force you to side solely with one of them. Both of these points are correct, and both of them are vitally important.

The bridge is yours.

-Are we going to get a District 9 sequel?

-Batman’s finances v. Spider-Man’s finances.

-These Homeland memes are pretty sick and funny.

-Chris Nolan’s Gotham City.

-The rise of the mandatory standing ovation.

My favorite novel of the summer is G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen, which follows the adventures of adventures of Alif, a young hacktivist in a repressive Emirate, who finds himself in trouble after the state censor, known as the Hand of God, appropriates a computer program he wrote and starts tracking down dissidents, and with a broken heart after the upper-class girl he’s in love with becomes betrothed to someone else. Alif flees his home one step ahead of the state security forces, with Dina, his neighbor, only to find that he’s stumbled into a version of his city where djinns exist, and where computer code and Arabic text have taken on unprecedented power. I spoke with Wilson, herself a convert to Islam, about the power of text, writing Arabic characters as a white author, and imagining the Arab Spring before it even took place. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

One of the things I really enjoyed about Alif was the novel’s sense of the power of language, whether to summon, reinvent, conceal or wound. Do you think there’s something particularly powerful or incantatory about Arabic? About computer code?

Those things have always been very present in my mind, particularly since moving to Egypt right out of college and having to wrestle with this language, which was so, so, so different from English. I’d studied French for about six years, and even though they’re two different languages, there are enough similarities that there are very few things you can say in French that are impossible to say in English. In Arabic, you’d need a bunch of different words to translate a single word. Some languages expand not only your ability to speak to different people, but what you’re able to think. That was a very interesting idea for me, and it certainly carried over to Alif in a big way. The way computer code carried over was from a conversation with a friend who writes computer code by day and comic books, mostly for the Indian market, by night. He was trying to explain to me in layman’s terms quantuum computers and how it’s different from computing we have today. He began to make allusions to monotheism and polytheism and our computers and quantuum computers, and I just said that’s really cool. I’m not a programmer myself, but I am a very, very picky end user of technology. I like my machines to work they way they’re supposed to, all the time. It made me really interested to learn more about how these machiens work, and how they talk.

Well and of course technology and social media are changing the way we speak in the real world, too. You’ve got all these abbreviations from texting that have crept into everyday language.

There’s a whole parallel universe of Arabic text-speak, which uses English letters but substitutes in numbers.

As someone who writes about the power of culture and stories to determine our worldview, I was really tickled by Alif’s conversation with Vikram the Vampire, a djinn, about how censors forget to crack down on fairy tales. Was that a detail that was drawn from your experiences?

It is absolutely drawn from truth. In many countries in the Middle East, and this is changing in the wake of the Arab Spring, but for a long time censorship of books and film was a very big deal. There were books you couldn’t buy, things with political content would be censored, but there were some genres of books and film that the censors just didn’t understand. They didn’t understand that below these fantasy themes which they thought to be very childish were these popwerful political messages. There were these English news journals and things you couldn’t get. Anything critical of religion, whether Islam or Christianity, you couldn’t find. No Christopher Hitchens. And yet you could walk into an english-language bookstore and find America Gods or the The Chronicles of Narnia. All they see is the surface metaphor. They don’t really get what these books are saying.
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The Olympics are normally an opportunity for us to marvel at the things the human body can do if it’s conditioned to its peak. Watching people break world records is thrilling in its revelation of the possibility of human improvement—with continued improvements in science, and in health and training, what can’t we do? We may no longer be walking on the moon, but we fly higher and run faster on our own planet with every passing year. But part of what’s particularly exciting for me about the summer Olympics this year is the kinds of conversations competitors are sparking about the capacities of bodies we often see as less capable or less normatively desirable.

First, there’s Sarah Robles, the weightlifter who is literally the strongest person one of the strongest people in the United States, but is barely getting by because, unlike some of her fellow competitors who are the best in their fields, she doesn’t have the backing of or an endorsement with a major company. As Maya writes at Feministing:

There’s no doubt that some sports–both men’s and women’s–are considered sexier than others when it comes to sponsorships and media attention. And certainly only the most famous Olympic athletes are able to bring in the big bucks through six-figure endorsements. But for women like Robles, who don’t fit the thin ideal of women’s athleticism, it’s particularly difficult. As she notes, “You can get that sponsorship if you’re a super-built guy or a girl who looks good in a bikini. But not if you’re a girl who’s built like a guy.”

I think of all of that is true. And I’d add that while we have archetypes of women who are less strong than men, but manage to hold their own through cleverness, and of bigger women who are funny or cheery (or even occasionally intimidating, as with Melissa McCarthy’s pep talk in Bridesmaids), we don’t have a positive established archetype of women who are as big and as strong as men, whether as heroes, or rescuers, or funny action stars. Advertisers may not be interested in Robles, but they, and their marketing agencies, may simply not be creative enough to figure out the many engaging things they could do with her. If she medals in London, one would hope that someone, somewhere, gets their creative juices flowing and figures that out.

Then there’s Oscar Pistorius, the South African double-amputee who just qualified to represent his country in the 400 meters and the 4-by-400 in London. Pistorius is a reminder that astonishing physical accomplishment isn’t merely something that’s available to able-bodied people. Whether or not his prosthetics constitute an unfair advantage—the consensus seems to be that they may make him slower to start than able-bodied runners, canceling out any boost—the point remains that being able to run on them, much less run as fast as Pistorius does, is a major achievement. If he shows well on this enormous international stage, his presence could have a major impact on the way people with disabilities are perceived around the world.

This is the reason that stories like Bleacher Report’s idiotic ranking of hot female athletes are so infuriating, and why the counterexamples of people like Robles and Pistorius are so important. Pursuing your Olympic dreams doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll end up an avatar of normative physical beauty, nor should it. And you don’t need a normatively attractive body in order to be physically extraordinary.

This last season of Mad Men heightened the debate about the show’s approach to race and the 1960s, bringing Dawn, a young secretary, into the office as Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce’s first African-American employee. Would these exceedingly exceedingly privileged white people have much contact with black people who weren’t their domestic help or much awareness of the civil rights movement? Did the show tokenize Dawn by bringing her into the office but building no significant storyline around her presence there? I expect all of those debates to continue next season, particularly as we see whether Matthew Weiner has long-term plans for Dawn, or for how his white folks will bend or break under the winds of change.

But in the meantime, Santigold’s new video for her song “The Keepers” may be my favorite critique of the obliviousness of people like the Drapers:

It’s a house where impeccably coifed, white-blonde people eat food that glows with poison. When shooters in a car shred the walls, they momentarily startle, then check their hair and make sure their clothes are in place, and sit back down to dinner. And when their milkman’s caught in the crossfire, they make a spectacle of his death without considering the risk outside. The house build by racism is burning down around them and they don’t even notice.Mad Men did horror stories last season, but to slightly cartoonish effect. Don Draper still had to be the person we rooted for, even as he courted rot in his jaw, even as he was haunted by his dead brother. It seems it takes someone like Santigold to do the job properly, to reveal the obscenity of moving through your swish, stylish life ignorant of the fundamental inequalities you benefit from, and unprepared to adapt to a world without them.