Louis C.K. apparently decided that, after Daniel Tosh has been the subject of harsh criticism for saying it would be funny if a feminist heckler got gang raped at his show, Tosh is in need of his support. “Your show makes me laugh every time I watch it,” he tweeted. “And you have pretty eyes.” Given C.K.’s long record of comedy that’s self-reflective about privilege and smart about gender—though I do think he’s fallen down both comedically and politically in his attacks on Sarah Palin, and his episode of Louie where he goes after a heckler played by Megan Hilty can be jarring—this is particularly disappointing. Given the reaction I, and other folks, have gotten from comedians today, and a rash of unfortunate attempts at humor that have devolved into bashing women, I kind of think women who care about comedy need C.K.’s championing them more than Daniel Tosh does. And I’m feeling less disappointed by not pulling the trigger on tickets to see him live on this tour.
Read more

It says a lot about the military that it apparently didn’t occur to anyone that men’s body armor, which female soldiers wear too (they can choose from a range of sizes), might not actually be optimized for women’s bodies or the way women move in combat. The Christian Science Monitor reports that military chemists are trying to solve a basic problem of armor design—that apparently adding curves makes armor heavier—and using Lucy Lawless’s Xena: Warrior Princess costumes as inspiration:

“It rubbed on the hips, and the vests were too long in the front, so that when you had female soldiers climbing stairs or climbing up a hill or a tree, or sitting for a long time in a vehicle, that would create pressure points that in some instances could impact blood flow and cause some discomfort,” Lt. Col. Frank Lozan, who is helping design the body armor, told the Monitor. A subsequent study by the U.S. Army found that the ill-fitting gear actually interfered with how the women were able to perform during combat, making “it difficult for them to properly aim their weapons and enter or exit vehicles.”

Now obviously, that’s an inspiration that should only be taken so literally. The ladies of the U.S. military can probably skip the leather skirts. But the point is that when you start thinking about people in roles or situations that haven’t been open to them previously, you start thinking creatively about what they’d need to succeed in those circumstances. And there’s nothing wrong with scientists looking for inspiration even in unexpected places, when linear thinking hasn’t met the needs of people they’re trying to serve.

I’m not sure I expect better from comedian Daniel Tosh, but this story of a woman who saw him on a bill at the Laugh Factory (where, it should be noted, she got through a Dane Cook set just fine, lest anyone want to accuse her of oversensitivity) and ended up having to hear him talk about how hilarious it would be if she got gang-raped is…dispiriting:

So Tosh then starts making some very generalizing, declarative statements about rape jokes always being funny, how can a rape joke not be funny, rape is hilarious, etc. I don’t know why he was so repetitive about it but I felt provoked because I, for one, DON’T find them funny and never have. So I didnt appreciate Daniel Tosh (or anyone!) telling me I should find them funny. So I yelled out, “Actually, rape jokes are never funny!”

I did it because, even though being “disruptive” is against my nature, I felt that sitting there and saying nothing, or leaving quietly, would have been against my values as a person and as a woman. I don’t sit there while someone tells me how I should feel about something as profound and damaging as rape.

After I called out to him, Tosh paused for a moment. Then, he says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, 5 guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her…”

Now, I don’t know what jokes Tosh was telling specifically, but judging by, say, this routine, where the joke is that his sister gets raped after he replaces her pepper spray with silly string and her reaction is that he pulled a good one, I’d imagine it wasn’t particularly thoughtful or analytical:

Ditto with this “Acme Rape Trap” routine:

Heckling is, of course, a legitimate part of something that does happen during* comedy performances (though more so in clubs like the Laugh Factory than in a major auditorium), and heckling someone on the substance of their jokes is obviously a notch politer than simply telling someone that they’re terrible, or unfunny, or unattractive, or to get lost. A good comedian is an alchemist who can turn heckling into a transformative extended riff. Here it sounds like Tosh just doubled down on the same points he was making rather than actually responding, or providing an example of a rape joke that his heckler might find funny, undermining her objection. As I’ve written before, I think there is a case to be made that rape jokes that make fun of perpetrators can be very funny. Tosh didn’t go there, though. He just took the quickest route to run his heckler out of the club, and in using an image of her getting raped to mock and intimidate her, kind of made her point instead of his own. If rape was just hilarious and uproarious and trivial, it wouldn’t be a very effective rhetorical or literal weapon. Tosh isn’t just failing at civility here. He’s being a bad comedian.

*Thanks to the comedians who pointed out that heckling is less common than it’s sometimes portrayed to be. I regret the mischaracterization. The point I wanted to make is that is that the writers’ remarks weren’t entirely bizarre and a professional should have been prepared to respond to them.

I know I’ve been writing a lot about Anita Sarkeesian, the Feminist Frequency video blogger whose attempts to raise money to fund a series examining the portrayal of women in video games resulted in vicious, sexist attacks on her—and much higher levels of contributions to her project than she initially anticipated. But I really am struck by these unfolding events as representatives of larger trends and ideas. Most recently, as the attacks have expanded from Sarkeesian herself to Stephanie Guthrie, an organizer who decided to shame the creator of a game that allowed players to beat up a picture of Sarkeesian, I’ve been left wondering what the people who are trolling Sarkeesian and Guthrie are hoping to accomplish here if it’s something other than shutting both women up.

First, I should acknowledge that Guthrie’s language in calling out Bendilin Spurr—the initial tweet was “So I found the Twitter account of that fuck listed as creator of the ‘punch a woman in the face’ game. Should I sic the internet on him?”—was harsher than I would have used, though I’m not really opposed to publicly shaming people who do gross things or threaten people online, particularly if they do so under their real names or Facebook accounts, or leave a clear trail back to such things. People aren’t entitled to greater deference than they give other people. But I think if you’re going to shame someone, it’s probably better to take the moral high ground. That is not always an easy thing to define. Personally, I’m comfortable calling people by name and explaining why what they did was dangerous, offensive, or uncool, though I would never tell folks to respond with retaliatory harassment, or affirmatively contact employers or universities to suggest that they not hire or admit someone (not, for the record, things Guthrie did). If we want to keep the institutions of the internet and the real world troll-free spaces, we have to avoid adopting certain tactics ourselves.

That said, the response to Guthrie was of an entirely different proportion. On Twitter, a user told her that he’d be “The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You’re fucking dead, bitch,” promising “I will wip you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before, mark my fucking works.” Guthrie, justifiably, called the cops.

The thing is, given that trolls have failed to scare Sarkeesian into silence, and they now appear to be failing to shut Guthrie up, what do they think they’re achieving? Screaming violent, sexist trash at women doesn’t dispel the idea that gamers are sexist, or insensitive to women’s concerns, or afraid of people who challenge their ideas. It’s not as if this is an example of classical trolling, which is meant to reveal something about the target’s naivete or hypocrisy. Calling a woman a cunt reveals vastly more about what the speaker thinks is acceptable than it does about the woman who’s on the receiving end of his name-calling. Everything about this kind of trolling is oriented towards short-term efforts to get individual women to stop saying things that make the trolls uncomfortable. And if those efforts fail, the trolls have left behind huge amounts of evidence that reinforce the perceptions of people who think they’re a bunch of troglodytes, making it more likely that feminists of all genders will say more things in the future that make the trolls uncomfortable. In addition to being ugly harassment, it’s bad, stupid strategy. At some point, you’d think that dudes who don’t want to be called out as sexists would try something else.

The bridge is yours.

-I would agree Aaron Sorkin should go back to writing rom-coms if I didn’t live in terror of what he’d do to his female protagonist.

-ABC Family invests big in lesbian characters.

-Badass female action movie partners.

-Yay new Mountain Goats album!

-Cannot wait for MOAR GEMMA:

As much as I’m not enjoying The Newsroom, recapping it for Press Play has actually helped me clarify some things that I care about in progressive television. I don’t just want to see progressives or progressive-coded characters win because they’re factually or morally correct, or because they do the right thing against the odds. I want to see clear explanations of systems, and to see the characters work through them. As I explained in this week’s recap, that’s part of why Don is becoming my favorite character on the show, because he’s all muddled up in the gears:

After Will’s epic on-air apology for falling down on the job, Don sits down to have a heart-to-heart with Jim, who has effectively replaced him. “I would have loved to be part of that. I could have done the show you guys want to do. I’m equipped for that,” he confesses. “You’ve got a mandate. Bring viewers to ten o’clock. I don’t . . . I have to cover Natalee Holloway. And you guys set me up to look like an asshole before I even got started.” Don is like Will, to a certain extent, a talented man who succumbed to the pressure to put on a show that was likable rather than substantive. But unlike Will, he’s relatively anonymous. He could be fired and Elliot’s show would keep ticking on without him. If Don is going to live in hopes of being able to make the kind of show that Jim and MacKenzie are making for Will, he has to keep his job. And that means kowtowing to a lot of unattractive people’s unattractive senses of what counts as news…

And I’m not even sure Jim gets the message later when Maggie, in one of the few moments in The Newsroom where a woman gets to explain something to a man, tells Jim that Don’s failure has more complex roots than Jim acknowledges. “Don’s hands are tied,” Maggie says. “He got marching orders to get the ratings up at ten. And he’s driving a different car than McAvoy. Elliot’s smart, but he can’t do what McAvoy does. Plus, his salary’s tied to ratings.” That, not a studied, cowardly commitment to blandness for its own sake, is the reality of cable news—and the actual source of journalism’s problems.

The show just seems to me like it’s giving up an enormous amount of dramatic potential in having characters spend most of the show making speeches, on air or to each other, dealing with their personal lives, and then, throwing us five minutes of people pulling together the guests who will appear on air or Charlie negotiating with Leona and Reese. Sorkin wants us to think his characters are Interesting Hero Journalists but we essentially never see them doing actual journalism, so we don’t get a sense that Maggie is great at weeding out idiots, or that Jim is terrific at developing relationships with sources, or that Neal is unbelievably good at sorting through documents, something that would have been particularly useful in this last week’s episode in documenting the Koch brothers’ funding of Tea Party operations.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: the most important thing in news, cable or otherwise, is not what Will McAvoy says on air. It’s what his staff has the resources to dig up. It’s what kinds of pressures producers like Don are under, and what they can negotiate to broadcast. State of Play did a particularly nice job of this in the scene where Bill Nighy’s editor went to meet with a suit who laid out the specific issues at stake in their negotiations with the government over broadcast licenses, and then capped the budget for a big scandal story the reporters were working on. The miniseries spent serious time negotiating with editors over content, whether they’d proved a story well enough, whether they were at risk of getting sued. By the time something gets to someone like Will McAvoy, or to the front page of the paper, most of the pressure’s already been exerted on the information. We get flashes of that with Don. But The Newsroom can only get better the more it focuses on actual process and on actual journalism, not on telling Will, or anyone in the audience, that we’re good people because we have certain facts at our disposal and hold certain opinions.

I felt a real pang yesterday hearing the news that Chumbawamba, the left British band best known for its 1997 single “Tubthumping,” had decided to disband. “Chumbawamba was our vehicle for pointing at the naked Emperors, for telling our version of the truth; it gave us more than the joy and love of playing live, writing songs and singing together – it gave us a chance to be part of a broad coalition of activists and hectors, optimists and questioners,” the members wrote on their website, explaining that the felt they were no longer living up to the ideals they’d set out for themselves to be not just musically excellent but politically relevant and responsive. That’s as good a reason to go out as any, but I’m still going to miss them.

I was 12 when Tubthumper, dropped, and bought the album through one of those twelve-cassettes-for-a-penny scams on the strength of the lead single. I had no idea, as I assume most people who listened to the song didn’t, that the introductory lines to “Tubthumping” were from Brassed Off, the very funny British movie about coal miners fighting the Thatcher administration’s closing of the mine that provided their livelihood. The album I bought was more than a raucous set of football anthems. It was about New Labour, and welfare, and gender, and religion, and solidarity. I may have come for the catchy tunes, but I stayed for the rare fusion of politics and music that wasn’t swamped in sentimentality. “Outsider” has always been, and will remain, one of the best pre-Internet age expressions of what it means to recognize that there are people who share your beliefs, and to force other people to recognize that you aren’t marginal, or crazy, or isolated:

Chumbawamba’s music was one of the first things that really suggested to me that your politics weren’t something that only mattered when you voted, that they shaped your entire life, and that they could grow out of love. “Home With Me” is an amazing expression of that, and certainly the best love song to namedrop the Kronstadt rebellion.

I’ll miss them.

Over at TV By the Numbers, Robert Seidman argues that even if Nielsen collected more comprehensive ratings data on viewers, even those who aren’t in the sample pool, or who don’t have set-top televisions at all, viewers will still be unhappy when their favorite shows are cancelled. And he says a more comprehensive system would be prohibitively expensive and painfully slow:

Would a complete census be more accurate than Nielsen? If you could get it, it would, without a doubt, be more accurate. But TV ratings measurement exists for the purpose of buying/selling TV advertising. The networks and advertisers aren’t going to be willing to pay for it and as expensive as Nielsen is (and it’s very expensive) the census style system would be multiple orders of magnitude more expensive to maintain and manage. The networks and advertisers aren’t going to pay for something like that for a system that might only be a little more accurate.

On top of that you’d still probably need Nielsen or something like it because the census system would have so much data to crunch it wouldn’t likely be able to produce fast national ratings the next morning and final ratings the next afternoon. The networks need the information fast so they can react and make scheduling decisions.

I think the larger problem is less developing a new system, and more reporting of data in ways that would help viewers understand the true audiences for their favorite shows. Some of this is a problem of overlapping systems, all of which report data differently or fail to report at all. Community fans, for example, see the low Nielsen ratings for the show, but have a sense that their numbers are larger due to time-shifting beyond the seven-day period, or to viewers without televisions who are watching the show on Hulu, which doesn’t report streaming data publicly, especially because social-media chatter around the show makes it seem like the Nielsen numbers couldn’t possibly be representative. If all those numbers were available, we’d have a better idea of the total fanbase for individual shows, even if the data had to be pieced together from multiple sources.

The other thing that might help in the current system is changing the way ratings data is presented. As things work presently, data’s released sporadically, sometimes through press releases from Nielsen or the networks. There aren’t tools available to the public, or even to journalists, that make it easy to pull data, graph trend lines, or compare shows. To a certain extent, that’s understandable: gathering ratings data is an expensive, time-consuming process, and Nielsen’s business model seems to work fairly well for it. But in January, FX President John Landgraf suggested his network might build a portal to provide more fine-grained data than normally gets reported to journalists, in part as a tool to help the network get public credit for its full viewership, rather than the viewers the current system credits it for. His isn’t the only network—or the only fan base—who could benefit from that kind of information.