io9 has the story of Weird Tales, the venerable science fiction magazine that committed to run an excerpt of a novel called Saving the Pearls, in which people of color tyrannically oppress white people, who are considered ugly and genetically disadvantaged because ozone layer damage makes them much more susceptible to UV rays, apparently in part because the author, Victoria Foyt, told the editors the people who were criticizing her were just haters. In the statement from the Weird Tales publisher, he says:

Marvin was approached by Victoria Foyt, and was asked to review her novel. He was told that she was being slammed online by people who had not read it. I have not read the novel, but have gone over its online presence today. I have no need to read it. I saw the blackface video and read the excerpts the author and publisher chose to make available. I must conclude that the use of the powerful symbols of white people forced to wear blackface to escape the sun, white women lusting after black “beast men,” the “pearls” and “coals,” etc., is goddamned ridiculous and offensive. It seems like the work of someone who does not understand the power of what she is playing with.

In a way, this reminds me of the controversy over TLC’s great reality show All-American Muslim, when advertisers including Lowe’s and Kayak pulled out of the show after a fringe Florida group that purports to represent many more people than it actually does, told them that the show in some way was a contravention of their values. Both cases are a reminder that when someone is really eager to discredit a controversy, or to tell you that something that seems utterly anodyne is secretly nefarious, it’s probably worth going to the source material, or whatever of the source material is available, and making your own independent judgement.

When Mike Huckabee’s radio show debuted in April, one of the ways Cumulus Media positioned his entry into the market was as a classier alternative to Rush Limbaugh. At the time, Limbaugh was in the midst of a controversy over his nasty attacks on then-Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke, who he’d attacked for her testimony on coverage of contraception, and he looked like a viable target. As I noted at the time, “Cumulus Media’s seized that opportunity, telling stations that don’t have Limbaugh now and that might choose not to reup their contracts to carry him in the future, that in Huckabee, they’ve got a better alternative. The company’s distributed a list of 31 advertisers who have asked that their spots not be affiliated with any Limbaugh-related programming. And they’re pitching Huckabee’s show by telling stations it’ll offer ‘more conversation, less confrontation.’”

So there’s something rather astonishing about watching Limbaugh be more reasonable on a women’s health issue than Huckabee, as has been the case as both men have covered Rep. Todd Akin’s deplorable remarks about whether women can get pregnant as the result of rape. In the midst of peddling conspiracy theories about poll sampling and nailing down his pro-life bona fides, Limbaugh made a fairly good point on his show today: that comments like Akin’s are the result of a closed community reaching for any arguments they can make, no matter how specious, to convince listeners to of their position. He said:

So they sit around amongst themselves — I’m not being critical of ‘em; don’t misunderstand my choice of words or tone, and they try to think of ways to persuade other people who agree with them. So Akin goes on TV with Charles Jaco, which is mistake number one, but he goes on with Charles Jaco on local St. Louis TV. And this whole business of a woman’s body shuts down in rape, there’s no evidence for that. But this is the kind of thing that people who do nothing but talk amongst themselves will conjure up, a belief system like that, and they’ll grab on to anything they can to support what their empirical belief is because their ultimate aim is to save life.

Their ultimate aim is to protect the baby no matter what circumstance the conception occurs in. And I think that’s just who the guy is, but he doesn’t know how to explain it. He has no clue how to make his case for it. And so he hangs around people who are like-minded and they’ve devised this belief. He’s not the first guy to say this. I’ve had people tell me that a woman’s body shuts down in rape. There’s no evidence for this. I mean it’s absolutely absurd. This leads to the second problem. This is absurd. That belief that a woman’s body shuts down and the whole notion of “legitimate” “illegitimate” rape, that’s the thing that bothers me about it. That’s just absurd. It’s not intelligent.

Huckabee, by contrast, has doubled down in support of Akin. He’s given him space on his show for Akin to explain that he didn’t mean to promote ideas with precisely no scientific basis—he just mean to communicate that sometimes women lie about being sexually assaulted. Huckabee’s continued to flog the junk scientific claims of Dr. John Willke, the physician who’s backed up Akin’s claims, and whose fitness to handle women’s health issues I dearly hope is under investigation by the relevant credentialing organizations. And most horrifyingly, on Monday, he got on the air to guilt women who have become pregnant as the result of rape about carrying those pregnancies to term:

“Ethel Waters, for example, was the result of a forcible rape,” Huckabee said of the late American gospel singer. One-time presidential candidate Huckabee added: “I used to work for James Robison back in the 1970s, he leads a large Christian organization. He, himself, was the result of a forcible rape. And so I know it happens, and yet even from those horrible, horrible tragedies of rape, which are inexcusable and indefensible, life has come and sometimes, you know, those people are able to do extraordinary things.”

There’s no question that for some women, choosing to keep a child in the aftermath of a sexual assault can be a powerfully affirming decision, as it was for Shauna Prewitt, who writes about her daughter in a powerful rebuttal to Akin posted on XOJane today. But just like abortion, that’s a profoundly personal decision for a woman to make that should be influenced solely by her beliefs about what would be best for her physically and mentally, rather than by the suggestion that if she chooses to terminate a pregnancy that’s the result of rape, she’s doing a wrong to society at large. Not to mention the fact Prewitt points out, that rapists retain parental and visitation rights in many states, and giving birth to a child conceived in an assault could force a woman to have ongoing contact with her attacker. It would be interesting to see what both Akin and Huckabee, both vigorous advocates of two-parent, heterosexual-led households have to say about that element of raising children who are the product of rape.

Conversation, Huckabee-style, it turns out, can be a way to mask in niceness ideas that are even nastier than those revealed by Limbaugh-style confrontation.

I have to admit that, in a week full of absolute ridiculousness in politics, I’m feeling refreshed by the return of my favorite political joke of the cycle, Key & Peele‘s skits about Luther, President Obama’s anger translator:

It’s wonderfully cathartic to hear Luther spit “I did not realize that was an option,” about Romney’s refusal to release his tax returns in contrast to the mountain of disclosure President Obama’s been required to do in response to deeply specious claims about his citizenship. I don’t want to see Obama lose his cool during the election, even as I’m angry at the double standard that would condemn him as an angry black man. But Luther is my favorite fictional surrogate for the President, and Obama himself is a fan as well. That transmutation of the double standard into comedy gold is a powerful thing, claiming the limitations our politics put on Obama and turning them into a call for a more honest politics that also acknowledges the limitations of anger.

The bridge is yours.

-12 questions writers should ask themselves about their magical systems.

-If being number one doesn’t mean what it used to, then that’s not really a reason you wouldn’t lay people off from Jay Leno’s show.

-Chris Orr on True Romance.

-Pretty sure Hulu is not this badly in trouble.

-This picture of Willow and her vampire stand-ins from Buffy is pretty much my new favorite thing ever.

Hero Complex has a long interview with Kelly Sue DeConnick, who is writing Marvel’s new Captain Marvel book which has a woman, Carol Danvers, taking on that mantle. In a particularly interesting section towards the beginning of the conversation, DeConnick goes back and forth on the question of whether, though Danvers was conceived of as an explicitly feminist character, she is writing a feminist book:

I don’t think this is new to my interpretation of Carol. I think that she’s an incredibly driven individual. The single line that I use for her off the top of my head is: Crackerjack pilot races to prove dead daddy wrong. I think Carol’s wound comes from …. well, she comes from a family of three kids, two younger brothers. Her dad was an old-fashioned construction foreman who loved her very much. This book was conceived as an unapologetically feminist book. It happened in the ’70s during the feminist movement and that was very much what the book was about. We’re much more skittish about that today, interestingly. Well, her dad opted not to pay for her to go to school and thought it’d be better spent on her brothers. That’s why she enlisted — to get her education paid for. I think that hurt her, and she’s always been trying to prove to her dad that she’s worthy. But her dad’s gone now, so it’s not a thing that she’s ever going to be able to get closure on…I’m not trying to write a feminist agenda. This is part of who the character is. And I’ve heard people question the Absorbing Man thing, like ‘Since when is the Absorbing Man a misogynist?’ That wasn’t my intent. My intent with him was that he was pushing her buttons. It wasn’t that it was a particular thing with him. Although he is a very old-fashioned character, and I think it’s hilarious. It was trash talk in a fight.

I’d argue that given that the first lines that are spoken in DeConnick’s take on the character are Carl Creel’s snarl “Lucky me! If it ain’t Captain America’s secretary, Mrs. Marvel,” and that he goes on to clock Carol, declaring “I’ll show you smarts, lady!” and to tell to Cap, “You lettin’ the little missus give the orders now? Wouldn’t catch me getting bossed around by no broad,” she’s probably writing a feminist comic. When someone brings gender (or race or sexual orientation or religion) into trash talk, they’re not just joshing someone, they’re setting up a hierarchy where whatever characteristic they’ve singled out is disqualifying, and that someone allied with their target will suffer a worse loss because they’ve inverted the gender heirarchy, etc.—they won’t just be defeated, they’ll be degendered.

Feminism isn’t just about getting women into positions traditionally occupied by men. The second half of the DeConnick response I’ve quoted there is in response to the question from Hero Complex, “We’ve already seen some dismissive behavior from Absorbing Man in the first issue. Will her proving herself as a hero in a male-dominated super-landscape be an ongoing theme?” Feminism is also about what happens when women get there, about the fact that earning the job is often the first step in dismantling sexism, and sexists don’t exactly roll over and die when women obtain positions of power. And fighting sexism isn’t solely women, or superheroines’ purview. Part of what’s thrilling about reading DeConnick’s version of Captain Marvel is watching Captain America joke with Carol about Absorbing Man’s sexism mid-fight and afterwards to encourage her to take up the Captain Marvel mantle, saying “Bottom line is this: you have led the Avengers. You have saved the world. Quit being an adjunct.” Their conversation is just the superheroic version of a mentor encouraging a female mentee to give herself credit instead of deferring it, pitch more ambitious stories, or to ask for that raise.

In other words, just because we’ve moved from one phase of feminism into the next isn’t a reason to abandon that as a framework as a character (or for an actress like Melissa Leo, whose work is clearly feminist, to declaim the label). Sexism isn’t over, in the superhero world, in the real world, or in the places that they intersect. And that sexism’s become more diffuse and complicated just means there are more ways to use gender dynamics to tell fascinating, complex stories about how people, male and female alike, construct their identities and understand their relative positions in the world.

Jonathan Chait has a long, and important, essay in New York about the extent to which our popular culture is liberal. But while I think the piece is required reading, and that Chait is largely correct about the extent to which Hollywood values are essentially if not particularly articulately liberal values, I want to quibble with him on a few issues. I don’t really think the culture war is over, it’s just in a new phase. And it’s important to acknowledge that for all the liberal values it espouses, Hollywood employment can be astonishingly, shockingly illiberal in a way that impacts and diminishes the breadth and depth of the liberalism that’s reflected in the content the industry produces.

It’s true, as he writes, that “Americans for Responsible Television and Christian Leaders for Responsible Television would be flipping out over the modern family in Modern Family, not to mention the girls of Girls and the gays of Glee, except that those groups went defunct long ago.” But it’s not as if other groups haven’t risen up to replace them. Retailers may have become comfortable rebuffing organizations like the Million Moms when they complain about something as anodyne as Archie Comics that portray gay people getting married and serving in the armed forces. But as the reaction to TLC’s All-American Muslim, a reality show that explored the lives of an interconnected group of Muslim families in Michigan, shows, conservative groups can be shockingly effective when their target is a minority with less social capital than the gay community. Home-supply giant Lowe’s and travel booker Kayak both pulled their ads from the program in response to a boycott organized by a front organization, the Florida Family Association. Just because conservative agitation campaigns have moved from condemning gay characters to treating the portrayal of Muslim families as normal Americans as a suspect practice doesn’t mean they’re not still active, and that they can’t still be effective.

Chait also suggests that the very fact that The Dark Knight Rises was hailed as a conservative movie suggests that conservatives have largely ceded the debate. That’s a debate that depends in part on how conservative you believe The Dark Knight Rises is. But it also doesn’t really take into account the effort to build a parallel structure to Hollywood to create and release deeply conservative movies like the anti-abortion film October Baby, which made $5,355,847 at the box office, or Act of Valor the rah-rah Marine movie that took in $70,012,847 domestically and another $10 million overseas. If liberals are able to use mainstream Hollywood to, as Chait puts it, use “their platform to raise their audience’s consciousness about racial tolerance or the environment or distrusting government officials,” on a broad but not particularly deep level, conservatives are using their cultural products to rally people who are already deeply invested in a shared set of ideas, whether that abortion is wrong, or that unquestioning praise of the troops is critically important.

And while Chait points out that Hollywood is an industry that makes liberals and conservatives talk somewhat differently about the market than they do in other spheres—”One oddity of the Hollywood-liberalism debate is that it makes liberals posit the existence of a perfect, frictionless market, while conservatives find themselves explaining why a free market is failing to function as it ought to,” he writes—he ignores one of the strangest disjuncts between Hollywood’s stated and practiced values, and one the deepest drivers of the shallowness of Hollywood liberalism: the striking illiberalism of the industry’s hiring practices. The Hollywood liberals who shape the worldviews Chait discusses are largely white men, and the actual patterns of employment in the industry are the kind of nightmare stories liberals like to tell about what American life would look like under conservative rule. I’ve repeated these statistics to many times that I’m exhausted by them, but no discussion of how liberal Hollywood is can really be an honest one unless it’s acknowledged that in the 2010-2011 television season, women were just 15 percent of writers and that women of color directed just one percent of episodes, or that in 2009, the pay gap between white men and minority writers of both genders in television was $23,325. These are maddening numbers that represent a fundamental and powerful contradiction between the ideals of Hollywood and its practices, and that shouldn’t be ignored just because the ideas in a lot of films and television shows are fundamentally if not exceptionally liberal. Powerful Hollywood liberals should not be allowed to walk on hiring practices because their work reaps results a decade and a half down the line, and we should not assume that the liberalism espoused by Hollywood content is truly representative of the spectrum or priorities of liberalism, particularly given the portrayal of women and people of color, when they actually get roles in front of the camera.
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It won’t be on television for a year, but NBC just won a competitive auction for a sitcom that would bring Michael J. Fox back to television. Dan Fienberg has the details over at HitFix:

NBC was able to seal the deal by making a full 22-episode series commitment to the Fox project, based only on the script by Will Gluck (“Easy A”) and Sam Laybourne (“Cougar Town”). Gluck will also direct the single-camera series, which will begin filming later this year and will premiere in Fall 2013. The project is loosely based on Fox’s real life and will feature the “Back to the Future” and “Frighteners” star as the father of three living in New York City and dealing with life’s various challenges. Fox’s Parkinson’s will be a part of the show.

That last line, I think, is crucial to whether the show is a warmhearted but bland family comedy or something more unique. If this is a Hollywood version of chronic illness where it’s played for laughs, and no one every exceeds the amount of treatment covered by their insurance, and everyone’s employer is beautifully accommodating all the time, that may be a vision of a world I’d like to live in, but it’ll be a quick way to flatten a lot of the chances for humor and drama out of the show. Legit, FX’s upcoming show about a comedian and his friend, who uses a motorized wheelchair, is funny and emotionally affecting precisely because it doesn’t try to make everything seem nice or easy. It’d be revelatory to have some of that attitude on network television.