“Every woman adores a fascist.” -Sylvia Plath

“We drove past the hatchery, / the hut that sells bait, / past Pigeon Cove, past the Yacht Club, past Squall’s Hill, / to the house that waits still, / on the top of the sea, / and two portraits hung on the opposite walls.” -Anne Sexton

I’m not going to Comic-Con this year, but I have been reading a lot of comics lately, plowing through 2000 AD’s editions of Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files and Savage She-Hulk #1-25. They’re wildly different comics projects—Judge Joseph Dredd is the main character in a long-running futuristic comics saga that doesn’t reboot, letting a year pass in his life for every one of ours, while She-Hulk is a mid-level character in the complex Marvel Comics universe. And even more important, they explore wildly different values. And over the past couple of weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why, as a feminist and a civil libertarian, I like both a fascist cop who originated as a British satire of American authoritarian tendencies and a green feminist defense lawyer who was created to preempt a television rip-off of both the Hulk and the Bionic Woman so much.

In coming to terms with the cop, it help that Dredd is a satire of the yearning towards authoritarianism, and that the writing is often very funny. In a confrontation with the Dark Judges, undead villains dedicated to eradicating all life, Judge Fear attempts to drive Judge Dredd mad by telling him, “Gaze into the face of fear!” “For a moment the icy chill of terror courses down Dredd’s spine,” the comic tells us. “The shock of this gaze can kill an ordinary man. But Dredd is a judge—and Judges are not ordinary men!” His response? A solid punch, delivered with the retort: “Gaze into the fist of Dredd!” In another story arc, called Block Mania, Mega-City One’s inhabitants, cramped into massive apartment buildings with strong internal identities, are drugged with a chemical that leads to city-wide riots. Dredd leads the response, but ultimately gets hit with a heavy dose of the substance himself. It’s hilarious watching this highly controlled man go as bonkers as his neighbors, hollering at the Judges under his command, “Now there’s just one thing I gotta know. I’m with Rowdy Yates Block! Who you fighting with?”

The comic also regularly punctures Dredd’s stoicism, particularly with regard to Walter, his lisping, worshipful robot butler who is an obvious stand in for stereotypically gay functionaries. Walter adores Dredd, and embraces subservience and slavery (something that causes him real psychological struggle down the line). But even though Dredd finds Walter irritating, Walter often inadvertently saves him. When Dredd is infiltrating the inner circle of a corrupt Chief Judge, the leader of the Department of Justice, which lead a coup and now rules Mega-City one in a dictatorship, Walter helps him sneak through a secret passageway in the Hall of Justice. During the Apocalypse War arc, Walter, who is trying to help Judge Dredd’s landlord Maria get cured of her Block Mania, finds out that invaders from East-Meg One, the nation that’s replaced the Soviet Union, are flanking Dredd’s forces and about to destroy them. Walter’s decency ends up being more crucial to Dredd’s survival in that moment than Dredd’s competence or authority.
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The recent decision by college football’s biggest schools to institute an end-of-season playoff to determine its champion will no doubt generate millions of dollars in additional revenue for the sport and its participating schools, and it has added fuel to a growing debate about whether the people who make it all possible — the thousands of players at colleges and universities across the country — should get a piece of the pie.

For a brief moment, the NCAA thought they should. Last year, the organization that oversees college sports initially gave conferences and schools the right to give a $2,000-a-year stipend but delayed the proposal shortly thereafter due to concerns about its implementation. Recently, college football’s most prominent coaches, including the University of Texas’ Mack Brown and all 14 coaches in the Southeastern Conference, have revived the idea, backing the idea that if a playoff is going to help make bowl executives, coaches, athletics directors, and even the NCAA president rich, the players ought to get a cut too.

To traditionalists who value “amateurism,” the idea of paying college football players is absurd. To author and civil rights historian Taylor Branch, though, it is a matter of human rights.

“My concern is not ensuring that the athletes get paid, but ensuring that they get their rights,” Branch told me in an interview. The fight to reform the NCAA and make it more equitable for athletes, he says, isn’t just about compensation, but about giving the players bargaining rights and making them consenting participants in the system. “If you are a grad student at the University of Texas,” Branch added, “you can bargain for how much you get paid as a teaching assistant.” If you’re a college athlete, no such rights exist.

The stipend, as proposed, is a complicated issue, Branch said, since it doesn’t appear to change that. “They’re still within the framework of the old system,” Branch said. “The coaches and athletics directors decide (how much they get paid). This is like a tip a waiter gets. You can’t get market values, and you can’t object to it without being called unethical.”

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The bridge is yours.

-James Poniewozik in defense of binge-watching television.

-The Mary Sue is hiring. I’m not applying because I have the best job in the world, but some of you should.

-Ta-Nehisi is back guesting at the Times and being characteristically astonishing.

-The folks making the next Wolverine set in Japan have decided it might be smart to give work to actual Asian actors.

-Kal Penn’s address at Friend of the Blog Gabriel Rossman’s department commencement:

The premise of Hit & Miss, which begins airing on DirecTV tonight, is that Chloe Sevigny is playing an assassin, and not just a assassin, but a transgender assassin, and not just a transgender assassin but one who’s suddenly inherited her ex-girlfriend’s children, including the son she was never told she fathered. It’s too bad that the show has the assassination plot. As Mia, Sevigny makes the kills look dandy, and she’s shot well. But it’s an emotional distraction from the show’s exceptionally fine depiction of a woman learning how to be a parent in fraught circumstances, and to be a woman after having had the privilege and freedom from sexual violence afforded to a man.

One of the most refreshing things about Hit & Miss is how it presents Mia’s body—she’s begun, but not completed her transition—in a matter-of-fact light. Within the first five minutes of the premiere, we see her undressing for a shower after an assignment. That she has both breasts and a penis is information for what follows, but not shot as if it’s shocking or freakish. After that shower we see Mia working out in the largely empty mansion where she spends time in between missions, perfecting her body because it’s the tool of her trade, not because she feels alienation from or hatred for it. The show regularly presents Mia as if she’s attractive and stylish: she wears terrific, seventies-inflected outfits in wonderful colors, beautiful makeup, and regularly receives complements both from men who are interested in her and the children she comes to take care of.

That latter respect is hard-won, though. Hit & Miss is striking in its presentation of a transgender person confident in her body and identity, while it’s the people around her who grow by getting to know her. When Mia arrives to meet her son Ryan, and her late girlfriend’s other children, Riley, Levi, and Leonie, they work through stereotypes with a minimum of fuss. “So you were a man, but now you’re a woman,” Levi asks. “So you’re gay.” “No,” Mia explains. “Straight. But I’m a woman trapped inside a man’s body…We loved each other, your mum and me. We were happy. If I wasn’t a transsexual, I’m sure we’d still be together.” The children accept her explanation, but as they adjust to her as their caretaker, Riley and Levi use Mia’s body as a weapon against her. “I don’t know about the dick in your pants, but you definitely have a dick in your brain,” Riley spits at her. “You’re fucked in the head.” And when Mia finds Levi showing Ryan pornography, he tells her “Someone’s got to show him. It’s not like he’s got a proper dad.” In the second episode, when Mia bumps into Riley, breaking a dish, Riley asks “Does everything you touch turn to shit? Typical man,” denying Mia her gender and heaping stereotypes of men on her, a double insult. Early in their relationship, Riley even steals Mia’s hormone tablets as a small act of meanness.

But in contrast to the older children’s hostility, Ryan and Leonie immediately embrace Mia, who is able to translate some of the stranger manifestations of their grief, making them feel understood. Ryan, alone among the children, asks Mia about her life before her transition. When he finds out that Mia, too, was named Ryan, he asks “Someone named me after you?” “Maybe,” Mia tells him. “I hope so.” She teaches Ryan to throw a punch, helping him stand up to the neighborhood bully, the son of the man who owns the land and home the family lives on. It’s fascinating to watch a little boy go through the process of equating strength and defense of his family with someone who is extremely feminine, who delivers a precise, vicious beating to the man who is threatening her family while wearing prettily-tooled cowboy boots and a flowered blouse. In a touching second-episode moment, Ryan tells Mia, “I just want to be more like you.” There’s something radical about the uncomplicated nature of Ryan’s tenderness for Mia. It doesn’t matter what her body is or who she was. He’s found her now, and he loves her.

After Daniel Tosh responded to a heckler at a recent show who told him rape jokes weren’t funny by laying out a scenario that involved her getting gang raped, he tweeted an attempt at an apology. “All the out of context misquotes aside, i’d like to sincerely apologize,” he wrote. “The point i was making before i was heckled is there are awful things in the world but you can still make jokes about them. ‪#deadbabies‬.”

There are two issues here. First, is that the main thing Tosh needs to apologize for is what he put the audience member through. She felt threatened and humiliated, and he targeted her in front of an audience. It’s be nice to see him use that power to impress an audience to explain why what he did wasn’t funny or insightful. I’d even be interested to hear him explain his thought process in formulating his response or his emotional reaction to the audience member’s comments, like Jason Alexander did when he apologized for his comments about cricket being a “gay sport” earlier this year. The best apologies involve conversation rather than deflection.

Which is the second problem with this response. Tosh restates the point that he was trying to make, which is that it’s possible to make jokes about rape. Again, that’s a subject that needs parsing. Jokes about sexual assault seem, to me, to fall into a category that requires heightened scrutiny. Reveling in someone else’s vulnerability or humiliation is not an inherently funny thing, and it’s upsetting to a lot of people. If you’re going to upset a lot of people, and defend upsetting a lot of people, you have to have more than a pedestrian joke to offer up. You have to have a point, and you have to execute it with a high degree of precision. That doesn’t appear to be something that Tosh understands in a lot of his schtick. But it’s particularly obvious here that he doesn’t seem to understand either his heckler’s original criticism, or why what he did to her subsequently was so upsetting, or feel the need to offer a specific elaboration of his point or exploration of his thinking. There is a genuine and interesting conversation to be had about how comedy works in this space. But it doesn’t seem like we’re in a place where we’re close to having it.

I’ve been following Bunheads, Amy Sherman-Palladino’s kind of delightfully weird ABC Family show about a showgirl who impulsively marries a guy, moves to California with him, discovers his eccentric mother runs a ballet studio, decides to stay in California after her new husband is killed in a car accident, and starts spending time with her mother-in-law’s students. It’s a weird, fun, female-centric little show. And it got me thinking about an interesting question. We have a lot of shows and movies about people who defy the odds and make rigid, exclusionary institutions realize their potential. But are there situations where it’s unproductive or unrealistic to encourage a character to dash themselves against a norm or organization that’s unlikely to yield?

The character who occasioned those thoughts is Boo, a student who’s heavier than some of the other girls. She’s not fat by any means, but she doesn’t have a naturally willowy figure, and we see her improving as a dancer through the episodes that have aired so far, as she prepares to audition for a prestigious summer program run by the Joffrey Ballet Company (which is real, not merely an invention of the show). Boo’s nervous about her chances, but hopeful. “I’m a better dancer, I’m in better shape,” she tells her mother as they shop at a farmer’s market, only to be crushed when she finds her mother’s already ordered a cake with “Better Luck Next Year” iced across it. When she’s cut in the first round, rather than consoling her, Fanny whips out a wig and outfitting Boo as another girl, declaring “You were not cut. No one cuts one of my girls that fast. Now, you’re Trina from Simi Valley if anyone asks.” Boo gets cut that time, and another time after, telling Fanny that the judges have offered praise for her other identities, but not for her original self. She’s buoyed, even though she doesn’t get in.

I hadn’t really considered this until I talked to a friend who danced for a long time about the show, and she mentioned that she thought there was something cruel about suggesting that Boo could get in to Joffrey’s program. All the talent in the world, she suggested, would never overcome Boo’s body type. So is it misleading to tell a story in which she’s encouraged to keep trying, that suggests Joffrey might divert from the deeply established priorities of the ballet world? I don’t think there’s anything wrong with stories that encourage people to pursue their dreams and changes to established structures that would keep them out. But there’s good drama, and perhaps fair warning, in stories that illustrate how difficult it is to make those boundaries fall, and that sometimes they stay standing.