I don’t normally pass along public service announcements, but I was really struck by this spot Amy Poehler cut for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which represents nannies, housekeepers, and caregivers, and aims to win them the recognition the same recognition available to employees who work outside household settings:

There’s something exceedingly refreshing about seeing the kind of woman who’s held up as a model mother state frankly and without pretense that there’s no way to work the way fully employed actresses do and also keep house to a high standard without paid help. And this ad, and the campaign it’s in support of, are a reminder of a bizarre double standard that treats work done in the home as if it’s not work at all, whether it’s performed by the women who occupy those homes, or the women who are paid for the duties they perform in the homes they visit.

With the National Football League season just a couple weeks away, the league’s officials still haven’t returned to work. Fans have undoubtedly noticed the low-quality officiating that has filled the preseason, but they haven’t noticed the plight of the every day officials who have been locked out by a league that wants to strong-arm them back into work before the season begins.

ESPN’s Jeff MacGregor took fans to task in a tremendous column yesterday. You should read the entire piece, but I wanted to highlight MacGregor’s main point here:

But where’s the pushback? Where’s the solidarity? When did we stop calling replacement workers scabs?…And where, Mr. and Mrs. America, are you? Maybe we could get your attention if commissioner Goodell threatened to outsource the work to Guangzhou or Matamoros or Bangalore. [...]

You know that your leisure to watch an NFL game on Sunday was argued and bargained and fought for by unions, right? That the wages you spent on that game-day flatscreen were argued and bargained and fought for by unions, right? That your standing as a member of the American middle class was argued and bargained and fought for by 200 years of collective effort and sacrifice and blood on the part of folks just like you, right?

And then comes MacGregor’s pitch-perfect walk-off:

Next kickoff, maybe think of it this way: That referee, that back judge, that stranger down there on the field running as hard as he can to keep up with the millionaires but falling farther behind with every step? Maybe that’s us.

I’d go a step farther than MacGregor — it’s not just disheartening that fans don’t care about the officials, but also that fans rarely, if ever, take an interest in sports’ labor fights in general. Sports are, for better or worse, one of the only industries now where such fights are front-page news, and where the existence and outcome of those fights both matters to and affects the average American in a way he or she notices and cares about. And yet, we still forget to care, even as we sit at home watching games on weeknights because of the eight-hour workday or on weekends because of the 40-hour work week that unions made possible.

Dismissing labor fights in sports as disputes between millionaires and billionaires misses the point that those fights, fundamentally, are no different than any other labor dispute: these are workers, albeit highly paid ones, fighting for their rights against a corporate class of owners that wants to take them away. These fights matter, not just for the athlete or official, but for the fan who will return to a business on Monday that, at some point, will come asking for extra hours without overtime pay, a bigger contribution to a health care package, or the elimination of a pension or retirement program. It should matter to the worker who will go to work next week at a factory that doesn’t care about safety, doesn’t allow a lunch break, that pays its executive an exorbitant salary while denying yearly raises to its employees.

These fights, whether they involve well-paid football players, part-time referees, or workers at Con Ed or Caterpillar, are our fights. They are fights that are still necessary today, in an America where stagnant wages created the “worst decade in modern history” for the middle class even as corporate profits soared through the roof. These are the fights that built our middle class, that made the American Dream something more than a faraway myth. They matter because when one group of workers wins a labor fight, it is good for all workers.

In America right now, workers are losing far too many of these battles. The biggest loss, though, is that too many people who have a stake in the outcome don’t even notice that the fight is taking place.

It’s depressing and profoundly revealing that Mitt Romney thinks that insinuations about President Obama’s citizenship pass for aww-shucks campaign trail humor, which certainly seemed to be the subtext of his remarks in Michigan today, when he noted “Nobody has ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place that I was born and raised.”

The existence and persistence of birtherism is the terrible, ugly joke here, not the substance of that conspiracy theory. As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in a long essay for The Atlantic this month, “The goal of all this is to delegitimize Obama’s presidency. If Obama is not truly American, then America has still never had a black president.” The lengths people will go to delude themselves in service of that backwards wish have a horrible humor to them, magnified by the actual drain on public resources and the president’s time they’ve occasioned. If Leonard Wibberley, author of Cold War satire The Mouse That Roared about a small country that goes to war with the United States in hopes of being badly defeated and then given the kind of development aid that Japan and Germany received after World War II, only to accidentally win, was writing for the age of Obama, he might have come up with a variation of birtherism.

That Romney thinks it’s funny to play into this mass delusion speaks either to his discomfort with humor, or a conviction that nasty pandering is the clearest road to a November victory. Either way, it reflects poorly on his character. And a man whose deepest liabilities concern his foreignness from the experiences of the people who he would like to have as his constituents, from his offshore bank accounts to his wealth to the unfortunate treatment of his faith as a cult, might want to think carefully before entering into a contest with Barack Obama about whose life is more deeply rooted in the American tradition.

By Tony Palumbi

Every so often I get a twitching in the long finger of my right hand. It’s happened enough that I know the reason and the cure: Bayonetta, released in 2010 by the wild-and-wacky Platinum Games. Fast-paced Japanese action games have always been a personal favorite dating back to Devil May Cry on the PlayStation 2, and Platinum, helmed by DMC creator Hideki Kamiya, has built a reputation for action titles with personality. Bayonetta was successful on release—reviews praised its kinetic combat system, its visual design, and mind-blowing boss battles. At the same time, they scratched their heads at the confusing plot and uneven dialogue. Many frowned at the hyper-sexualized protagonist: Bayonetta has two pistols strapped to her stiletto heels and carries another pair, contorting into sexually gymnastic poses or finding conveniently phallic objects to pole-dance around while she deals hot death to her foes.

Lead designer Kamiya didn’t help matters, admiring Bayonetta’s sex appeal and declaring “women are scary” with a mix of misogyny and adolescent confusion that’s not uncommon in Japanese gaming culture. Bloggers pounced, taking strident issue with the poses, the orgasm sounds released by certain female enemies, and the lollipops that grant temporary power-ups. They really hated the lollipops. What’s the difference, the critics asked, between this and a thousand other sexpot gaming characters? Mocking condescension of the hapless male lead and relentless violence does not a feminist make. Lara Croft was always more than the guns (I refer to her pistols, but take “guns” in that sentence however you like). Given the flimsy story and dialogue, isn’t Bayonetta just a brunette Barbie with leaner proportions? Opinions differed, but from my perusal of the debate a solid consensus emerged: Bayonetta is a really excellent video game, but it’s too exploitative for the feminist label.

I knew all this going into my most recent binge. But it didn’t ring true to me. Maybe it’s my good fortune to grow up surrounded by amazing women, but I just couldn’t see Bayonetta as a victim. The critics, I felt, were wrapped up in a confining vision of the liberated female: one where sex needn’t define any part of a woman, and flaunted sexuality is inherently a concession to the male gaze. Which, it seems to me, still appropriates sex as something controlled by men. As somebody whose fiercely independent sister takes the stage in rock bands dressed like (I mean this in the best way) a tart, I felt this was wrong. But I needed to play the game again to figure out why it was wrong.

Writers suffer from a very particular arrogance: we believe we control the world. Not the world of reality and cold sores, but the worlds we build ourselves. Wielding the power of creation, we can make something amazing or something terrible and own it completely. It’s tempting to apply this to fictional forms like games; Tom Bissell has written extensively about his frustrations in the industry. Writers hear the cringe-inducing dialogue in video games and question the missing links in their plots. We could do better, they always think. But video games crush this special writerly arrogance more than any other fictional form. Games succeed when they cede control back to the player. Tiny details of design, hammered out through relentless testing, have powerful impacts on the audience without words and within moments—achieving subtle narrative feats in spaces so small even Kafka would have thrown down his pen.

Which is to say that for the purposes of my critique, the plot isn’t terribly important. Sun-themed male Lumen Sages oppose the Moon-themed female Umbra Witches, a child is conceived in forbidden love, and Bayonetta is the product. She plows through the patriarchy like a wrecking ball, teaming up at the end with a fellow witch to summon a demon that punches God into the Sun. These things are feminist in the same way that pole-dancing animations are misogynist: superficially.

I posit that Bayonetta is an unsurpassed experiment in radical empathy, the ultimate act of putting yourself in another’s shoes—absorbing their feelings, experiences and desires. You become another person, if only for understanding’s sake. It seems to be what most feminists really want from men: to think for a moment about the female experience as lived by women. Bayonetta achieves this kind of radical empathy in a way nobody could expect and I’ve never seen articulated. Through colorful moments and flawless mechanics, it locates the player inside Bayonetta’s physical person and unlocks her weird, wonderful personality. There are no moral lessons here, just good fun—.
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I know. There aren’t a lot of competitors for the mantle. But I’ve been catching up on SyFy’s Alphas, a show about people with remarkable abilities, the people who want to exploit them, and those in their number who want to declare independence from humanity, and I’m increasingly impressed by its political savvy. While at first blush, Alphas might seem like a rip-off of X-Men, it’s turning into a deeply thoughtful meditation on extremism, equality, and the profound difficulty of achieving political consensus.

Many science fiction or fantasy franchises have a range of villains who stand in for a series of big ideas, like Magneto’s representation of mutant superiority in the X-Men, or the Lizard’s advocacy of evolution beyond humanity in Spider-Man. Alphas has one big question—how people with abilities can live in a world where they are a minority—and a lot of people who believe they have the correct answer to it.

Dr. Rosen believes that integration, including channeling his charges’ abilities in service of law enforcement and helping them manage the manifestation of their abilities so they don’t do damage or make other people uncomfortable, is the best way to go. Red Flag, the terrorist organization the advocates for Alpha dominance, isn’t a monolithic organization. The first member of it we meet, Anna, an autistic woman with the ability to translate languages and invent them, believes that Red Flag is necessary as a way to force a truce with normal humanity. If humans had their way, she believes, they’d prevent people like her from being born, both because they’d see her autism as a defect, and because they find her gifts threatening. Later, Brent Spiner played Dr. Kern, an Alpha who went a step further, sowing active DNA in prenatal vitamins in the hope his experiments on non-consenting women would result in the birth of more of the people he sees as a miraculous improvement on humanity’s base state. And lately, the show’s been spending time with Stanton Parish, an apparently unkillable Alpha who’s murdered more moderate members of Red Flag.

It’s a fascinating approach, turning a villain-of-the-week formula into a more deeply nuanced exploration of a question that deserves that kind of sustained interrogation. Gary, an autistic member of the core team, complained in an episode in the first season “Why do we always have to fight people with abilities? It’s annoying.” It’s a question that almost anyone who cares about politics has asked themselves at some point, wishing it was easier to get it together to win an election or a legislative vote. But the answer is that the big questions aren’t resolvable quickly or easily. It takes time to reach a consensus, and even then, there will likely remain people outside of it. Alphas is the rare science fiction program smart enough to understand that, and it’s making for fascinating television.