It’s been a draining week, but I was heartened to see three items come over the wires today. First, James Fudge at GamePolitics, calls out the campaign against Anita Sarkeesian:

Admittedly we missed this story last week, but it’s important to highlight the ridiculous antics of some Neanderthals in the community that are so bent out of shape over a video series that they want to create a digital effigy of someone to abuse. The last time I checked, Canada and the United States were situated in a part of the world where women are equal to men and ideas can be explored without engaging in violence. The part of the gaming community that loathes Anita Sarkeesian needs to call off the Internet holy war it has declared on her for exploring ideas they seem to think are tantamount to blasphemy.

At Forbes, Erik Kain writes about overcoming how flabbergasted he’s been by some of the sexism he’s seen to speak out, and explain why sexism hurts male gamers as well as female ones:

Maybe it’s not my business to comment on what to do about it – girl gamers don’t need White Knights, after all – but I do think men can be useful, and probably necessary, allies. Men and women talking about sexism in gaming culture is an important way to make matters better for everyone involved. I’m including men in this statement because ending sexism in gaming culture is good for men, too. As with any other social setting, things get dreary quickly when it’s all boys. Life is more fun because there are two sexes, and treating people decently opens doors and reduces barriers to entry for everyone. More girl gamers means better, more varied games, and better online social interaction. Not objectifying and vilifying women means you have more actual human beings with whom you can interact, vastly enriching your social experience – and theirs.

And Sam Killermann, founder of Gamers Against Bigotry, an initiative that lets gamers pledge to avoid using slurs in trash talk, tells the Mary Sue about the attitudes he’s changed since he started the campaign:

About a dozen of the pledgees have contacted me saying things like “I never realized doing this actually hurt people,” or “I just thought it was part of the culture, so I played along” and ended their messages with “but I’m going to try to stop now.” And those are just the gamers in those situations who have gone out of their way to get in touch with me. We can safely assume more signed with those sentiments and didn’t let me know (see what I did there?).

I don’t know that sexism in gaming will disappear tomorrow, or within a year—there are powerful economic incentives for it. But over the last couple of months, it’s seemed like we’ve reached an action point, where men who were previously silent or neutral are no longer content to be so, and are working to marginalize the trolls amongst them. The moment when eradicating sexism becomes not a special interest but a shared interest is a powerful one.

Oscar Pistorius, a South African quarter-miler who became the first athlete with a disability to qualify for the Olympic Games this year, was born with a rare condition that caused the amputation of both legs below the knee. Pistorius runs on “blades,” and though there is no evidence that the blades provide Pistorius with any competitive advantage over his fellow runners, his participation has sparked a needless controversy from writers and analysts like CBS Sports’ Gregg Doyel, who thinks the precedent set by Pistorius’ participation could “ruin the Olympics.”

The nut of Doyel’s argument is that while Pistorius’ story is “a great one,” it isn’t fair for him to run against “able-bodied” athletes because at some hypothetical point in the future, a disabled runner using prosthetic blades will have an unfair advantage over athletes with legs. That, Doyel says, is a dangerous precedent:

But Pistorius represents so much more than one man, one country, even one Olympiad. He represents every amputee from this day forward, and once he runs in the 2012 Games, the precedent will have been set. And it’s not a good one.

The small problem with Doyel’s argument is that it depends solely on a hypothetical, one the International Olympic Committee is capable of dealing with. If technology becomes an artificial advantage, it is an easy problem to address, the same way the IOC bans performance-enhancing drugs and dealt with the swimming suit controversy from the 2008 Beijing Games. And Doyel either isn’t aware of or doesn’t mention the story of George Eyser, a gymnast whose six medals at the 1904 Olympics remain the only ever won by an athlete with an artificial leg. Far from being ruined, the Olympics continued to grow and prosper for the next 108 years.

The larger problem, though, is that Doyel and others that share his view have seemingly lost a perspective of what the Olympic Games are for, something that is easy to do in a country that regularly finishes at the top of the medal count and where sports, for better or worse, are played solely to win. But here, lest Doyel or anyone else forget, is the Olympic mission:

The purpose of the Olympic Movement is to:
– link sport with culture and education;
– promote the practice of sport and the joy found in effort;
– help to build a better world through sport practised in a spirit of peace, excellence, friendship and respect.

This mission is what led the IOC to negotiate the addition of first Saudi Arabian women in Olympic history to the kingdom’s team even though they didn’t qualify. It is what leads athletes across the globe to chase the Olympic dream even if they have no chance of challenging better athletes for a gold medal. It is what brought Jesse Owens to the Third Reich, Pyambu Tuul to Barcelona, a united Korea to Sydney, and a man with no legs to London.

The Olympics are as much about the stories of overcoming adversity and challenging global and personal barriers as they are about champions and their medals. Oscar Pistorius won’t ruin that. Attitudes like Doyel’s will.

Much of the last season of Breaking Bad involved a growing rift between Walter White (Bryan Cranston), the show’s high school teacher-turned drug kingpin, and Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), his stoner partner in their meth business. It was a divide that almost ended in murder before Walt closed it in a terrifying act of deception, poisoning the son of Jesse’s girlfriend, and successfully blaming Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) for that monstrous act. In the fifth and final season of the show, which will air in two parts beginning on Sunday at 10 PM, it was inevitable that the two men would have a conversation about Gus’s death and their reunion. But I didn’t expect it to be so horrifyingly clarifying.

“I almost shot you. I almost killed you, all because…No, no, no. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know how I could be so stupid,” Jesse breaks down in an upcoming episode. “I’m so sorry.” Walter comforts Jesse, rubbing his shoulders, telling the younger man soothingly: “You and I working together, having each other’s back, it’s what saved our lives. I want you to think about that as we go forward.” There’s something repulsive about that gesture of physical tenderness, of Walt forgiving Jesse even as he reels him in, yet again.

Walter White sells drugs. He’s committed murder. But underlying his crimes is a common dynamic. Walter White is an abuser. With his wife, Skyler, he is manipulative, physically cruel, and threatening. Last season, when he told Skyler that “A guy opens his door and gets shot, and you think that of me? No. I am the one who knocks,” he had no real interest in reassuring her that he was safe, but in asserting that he could, and would, do great violence to anyone who stood in his way. This season, he’s setting himself up as the tin god of the White household, a man with the power to dispense forgiveness for the manifest wrongs he believes have been done to him, even as he becomes less and less able to see his own monstrosity.

With Jesse, his behavior is more like an adult abusing a child, which was one of the reasons watching him touch Jesse was so clammy. One of the show’s first iconic lines was Jesse’s delight at discovering that Walt had discovered a way to circumvent the central problem of meth production, obtaining pseudoephedrine. But it’s what comes after “Yeah, Mr. White! Yeah, science!” that matters. Jesse demurs, saying he’ll leave the state and start over. And Walter reels him back in, neatly undercutting Jesse’s self-esteem, but promising that Walt can be the one to make Jesse a real boy:

This is the pattern of their interactions, whether with Jane, Jesse’s addict girlfriend, whose death Walt caused by negligence and callousness, or Brock, who Walt poisoned. Walter does dreadful things to Jesse, allows Jesse to shoulder responsibility and crippling guilt for them, and feeds on Jesse’s vulnerability by convincing the younger man that only Walt can restore him to wholeness, whether by sending Jesse to rehab or reenlisting him in an expanded drug production scheme. Jesse has sought out other mentors, most notably in the last season, Mike. But one of the great tragedies of the show is its illustration of how the claws Walt’s sunk into Jesse’s brain exert a more powerful pull than Mike and Gus’s treatment of Jesse as someone with potential. Walt has groomed Jesse to respond to his own guilt and shame more strongly than to straightforward affirmation, perverted his job as a teacher so they only thing Jesse is supposed to learn is Walt’s authority.

“You are trouble. I’m sorry the kid here doesn’t see it, but I sure as hell do,” Mike tells Walt at one point. James Poniewozik asked today in Time what a fitting outcome for Walt would be at the end of Breaking Bad, whether death might be an escape compared to the torture of shame and exposure. But I wonder if focusing on retribution for Walt might distract us from a more powerful and important outcome: freedom and wholeness for his victims.

The bridge is yours.

-15 of 27 Sundance Institute grants go to women.

-Reasons I’m sorry I’m not at Comic-Con this year: missing the Racebending panel.

-More Sandman next year!

-Should DC Comics stick to the small screen?

-James Franco is the Wizard:

Comedian Lizz Winstead has opened for Roseanne Barr, co-created both Air America Radio and The Daily Show, and in May, she published her first book, the essay collection Lizz Free or Die. I loved her tour of Minnesota comedy clubs and behind-the-scenes look at standing up one of the defining progressive cultural institutions of the last decade, and when Daniel Tosh became the center of a wide-ranging conversation about comedy, gender and etiquette this week, she was the first person I wanted to talk to. We talked about the social contract between comedians and their audiences, owning—and executing—material on the highest level, and what she learned from Roseanne. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

One of the things you talk about in Lizz Free or Die was how, when your friend Christine suggested you try stand-up, you realized it hadn’t occurred to you that your life could be material because so many of the stand-ups you saw were men.

They weren’t necessarily the comics I love. I wasn’t necessarily an aficionado, but they were the guys I saw doing comedy. I would be watching Carson with my family and there would be a bunch of guys in ties. I think it’s changed dramatically because of everything and the internet. Late night is still notoriously male, the women comics featured to the men comics featured are notoriously low. But women have said “If you’re not going to book us, we’re going to start our own web pages…[When people talk about new female comics they like] I ask, did you find them on late night? And the answer is no, I saw them on Funny or Die, or these cool pop-up shows. Women are forging their own paths. They get to hone their own voices and present what they want outside the limits of a ten-minute routine.

Carlin still throws a long shadow over the industry. Because he could pull off things like rape jokes with a high level of precision, a lot of people seem to miss the point that the key to doing that kind of material is doing it well.

Where I agree with Daniel Tosh is that everything can be funny…people have made all of these things funny. The movie The Aristocrats was hilarious, trying to one-up the most horrible joke ever. Every joke would put the most vulgar, horrible things within the confines of that joke. If there’s funny, there’s no controversy. And if there’s not, there is. I don’t defend anyone who apologizes [for their material], because if they apologize, they didn’t believe it when they said it. Louis [C.K.] and Patton [Oswalt] can be edgy, and Sarah Silverman can be edgy, but they’ve crafted these jokes and they believe in them. If you don’t believe in it, I don’t find it very interesting. Every time, and I can only speak for myself, the question I ask myself is “Do I believe it? And can I defend it?” When you’re a political comic, you’re immediately going to piss off half the people because America is divided. I get death threats from telling my abortion story once a month. Someone wants to rape me or wishes I was dead.

Well and that raises a central question here. How do you think comics should deal with hecklers without getting into ugly territory?

One is how was the audience reacting to the whole thing. Daniel Tosh hasn’t responded and neither has the woman, so we don’t know how this horrible thing was received. That would add a layer, this horrible thing was acceptable to this audience. If Daniel Tosh thinks anything is fair game, just tell those jokes, then. If he’s going on and on, there’s a constrast for a comic and a comedian.

If it’s a comedy club, the contract is the person’s going to get on stage and explore comedy however they see that comedy is. And the contract for the audience member is to come and see that, and you don’t get a guarantee it’s going to make you laugh, but the comedian is going to attempt to make you laugh. But if they’re not attempting to do material, and the article made [it seem like Tosh was discussing concepts rather than telling jokes]…

A comic should have the freedom to go on stage and say whatever they want. The only control you have is what passes your lips. After, you’re saying “I’ve passed this up to be judged.” Everyone else gets to decide whether it’s funny…all the comics say don’t laugh or leave. Those are your options as an audience member. The bigger discussion for me, is if someone walks into a comedy club and gets a lecture about what’s funny or not funny, has that comedian broken the social contract? That’s the question that I would ask because I don’t have any information about the context he was talking about it. It’s all very confusing. The whole thing, we’re talking about so many issues of what people get away with and what they don’t, and at the end of the day, if you’re going to do material that pushes boundaries, you better be fucking funny and know the purpose of why you’re saying those things.
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Scott Mendelson, writing at Women and Hollywood, spots an entirely fascinating trend: the tendency of movies to treat the death of characters’ fathers as much, much more significant than the death of movie mothers, even if both of a character’s parents are dead:

When Mufasa falls off a cliff at the halfway point of The Lion King, it’s a devastating moment for both Simba and the audience, since Mufasa is a full-blown supporting character who is basically the second-lead for the first third of the picture. Yet the countless dead mothers in prior and future Disney animated films (The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Finding Nemo, etc.) merit at best a cameo in the prologue before being bumped off before the title card comes up (Bambi is the rare exception, where the doomed mother sticks around long enough to be mourned). Even The Princess and the Frog, another rare animated feature to spotlight a dead father and a living mother, makes a point to keep the deceased dad in the audience’s minds throughout the narrative, including a climactic flashback that concludes Tiana’s character arc.

The recently deceased mother of Super 8 merits a photo and a name, while the dad in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is played by a major star (Tom Hanks) who has a supporting role throughout the drama despite dying on 9/11 in the opening moments. Bruce Wayne loses both of his parents in Batman Begins, yet it is only his father (Linus Roache) who gets a real character to play and more than one or two lines. It is his father whom Bruce Wayne holds as a role model and his father who Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes) and Alfred Pennyworth (Michael Caine) constantly refer to when discussing Bruce’s actions and his moral worldview. Martha Wayne is played by Sara Stewart, but that’s all I could tell you about her.

I think that’s one of the reasons Brave feels so striking, something Lili Loofbourow lays out in a terrific essay about Brave and the need for a Disney princess who thoroughly vanquishes the ghosts and tropes of her predecessors:

I wonder, though, whether any of the foregoing critics who’ve tolerantly yawned at Pixar’s latest effort could name a Disney princess besides Mulan whose mother is alive, let alone named. And yet, in Brave, there is a live mother, named and all. And then a remarkably boring thing happens: this interloping mother who has no place in this ordinary, predictable princess story suddenly becomes central to it. She gets turned into something that keeps on getting misread as a monster, something her loving and well-meaning husband has dedicated his life to tracking down and killing for the sake of his own story, which is built around victory and revenge…for our hero, Merida, courage doesn’t achieve the victories we expect fictional bravery to produce. She doesn’t slay Mor-du. She’s no Mulan; her archery, despite her skill, is unhelpful. All this, in a story featuring a warrior princess, should make the mind boggle: Why would a studio create such a character in order to make her real crisis be her relationship with her mother?

The corollary to Disney’s—and animated movies more generally—dead mothers are the fathers and father figures who fill in for them. Rather than female mentors, or aunts, or grandmothers, or older cousins, women with dead mothers in animated movies often are often coached in strength and femininity by men. In Beauty and the Beast, Belle’s father fills the place of her absent mother as best he can, and when he is unable to protect her, her allies and companions in the Beast’s castle include a male clock, candlestick and teacup, matched by a motherly teacup and a feminine wardrobe who doesn’t speak. Cinderella treats male mice tenderly, and they are more personified, even if female mice help make her ballgown. In Anastasia, after Ana loses her family and her memory, it’s men who teach her how to be both an elite woman in general and a specific woman in particular. Animated orphans don’t lack for surrogate parents, but there’s a strain running through them that suggests men can teach women both how to be strong, and do just as good a job handling femininity as their absent mothers. Learning courage and the skills to implement it are hard, the kind of things that can only be imparted by a male master. But learning to dress well, be confident, present yourself like a lady, these are all apparently things that men can pick up on the side and pass along to a woman.

It’s one of the reasons I love Mulan so much—it’s one of the only movies where a heroine, after learning from a bunch of men in her military camp, gets to teach them something in return. Specifically, she gets to teach them that femininity, subtlety, and social blending, feminine values that are placed in contrast to brute force and direct confrontation, are enormously valuable, something Mulan has been able to repurpose from her training in how to be an acceptable bride, and something the men around her wouldn’t have just picked up intuitively thanks to their smart maleness:

It’s awesome to see women get molded into action stars and superheroes and unconventional Disney princesses. But once we’ve got a cadre trained up, once we’re used to the sight of action princesses, once Chloe Grace Moretz and Saoirse Ronan and Hailee Steinfeld are all grown up and acknowledged both as beautiful women and hugely credentialed action stars, can’t we let some of them live to pass their wisdom down to their daughters—and to their sons?

The British Board of Film Classification has decided, in the wake of the release of some extremely sexually violent movies, that it wants a better sense of where the British public’s thinking is on violent and sexual acts and images. In its annual report, the Board explained:

In 2011 the BBFC considered The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) (in which a man achieves sexual gratification from the stapling together of victims to form a human centipede and which culminates in him raping a woman with barbed wire) and The Bunny Game (in which a truck driver abducts, strips and sexually abuses and tortures a prostitute).

The BBFC intervened with both of these works on account of their depictions of extreme violence against women. It made significant cuts to The Human Centipede 2 and refused to certify The Bunny Game because of the harm risk both works posed.

Partly as a result of these and other films, the BBFC is commissioning a major new piece of original research into depictions of sadistic, sexual and sexualised violence, mainly against women, to determine what the British public today believes is potentially harmful and therefore unacceptable for classification. The research will be completed in 2012 and the BBFC will publish it in the usual way, not least because it might be helpful to other regulators.

I have mixed feelings about refusing to certify films at all, of course. But I cannot wait to see the results of this study. When we talk about sex and sexual violence, a lot of our conversations are dominated, I think, by surprise and shock that some people think certain behaviors, or ways of discussing issues are normal or acceptable. As much as I think I might be dismayed by the results, an attempt to document in a reliable way people’s attitudes about what shocks them, what counts as normal, what counts as consensual, what counts as shocking or upsetting in culture would be a fascinating baseline to have as a basis for future discussions.