Zoë Heller is a total ninja of a critic, and I think everyone should read her review of Salman Rushdie’s new memoir of his fatwa years, Joseph Anton for its evisceration of Rushdie’s self-regard (the stuff on his marriages sounds like it may not even be believed if it is seen), and even more particularly, for her explanation of a contradiction that’s evolved in Rushdie’s work. While he initially argued that literature shouldn’t be exempt from political criticism, now, Heller writes, Rushdie’s falling back on arguments that fiction of sufficient quality to be considered literature ought to be somehow exempt from political criticism:

More troubling, however, than his exaggerated claim to naiveté is the case that Rushdie seems to be making for fiction’s immunity from political or religious anger. In a departure from the standard, liberal notion that literature must be free to offend, he proposes that literature, properly understood, cannot offend. Muslims who were insulted by The Satanic Verses were guilty of a category error: just like Anis Rushdie, in his “unsophisticated” reading of Midnight’s Children, they had confused fiction with other sorts of speech…

In his famous essay “Outside the Whale,” written five years before the fatwa, Rushdie attacked various books and films for propagating imperialist myths about the nature of Indo-British relations during the Raj. (He argued, for example, that the rape plot at the center of Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet endorsed a racist fantasy about the sexual threat posed to white colonial women by “lust-crazed wogs.”) Novels, he claimed, could not be excused from criticism of this sort on grounds that they were “just” fiction: all art, in as much as it ventured to assert “what is the case, what is truth and what untruth,” was inescapably political, and part of “the unceasing storm, the continual quarrel, the dialectic of history.”

It is not surprising that Rushdie should be a little warier of history’s storm these days, but his impulse to quarantine literature from “the cacophony of other discourses, religious, political, sociological, post-colonial” is an unhappy one, nevertheless. Certainly, not all opponents of The Satanic Verses were as alert to the ludic techniques of the modern novel as they might have been. But to claim that their wounded reactions were inconsistent with Rushdie’s artistic motives cannot be the end of the argument. Had Paul Scott been around to answer to Rushdie’s critique of The Raj Quartet, he might well have insisted that he had not meant to be racist. He might even have accused Rushdie of engaging in thin-skinned identity politics. But these rejoinders would hardly have embarrassed the legitimacy of Rushdie’s complaint.

I wish she’d made the point that quality conversations and political ones aren’t separate from each other. Falling into dreadful politics can also mean falling into cliche without transcending it. Ignoring the details and realities of life in your search for “what is the case, what is truth and untruth,” a failure to reckon with politics, can mean a failure to tell a truly engaging and revealing story. Good politics aren’t enough to make literature, of course—there’s a lot of awfully stiff execution of noble ideas. But an entirely careless approach to the politics of your subject is a danger, too.

My friends Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz have a long and marvelous (and I’m not just saying that because they are my friends) conversation about Alan’s new book, The Revolution Was Televised (about which more later) up at Press Play. And something Alan said helped a lot of my thinking about the era of anti-hero television over the last year or so snap into place. He told Matt:

When Carolyn Strauss told me that HBO’s decision of what to do as their first show after Oz came down to The Sopranos or something by Winnie Holzman, the creator of My So-Called Life, about a female business executive at a toy company, I immediately stopped paying attention to the interview for a good five minutes, because all I was thinking about was an alternate timeline where this Winnie Holzman show was the next big HBO show. I was asking myself, would the other show have spawned imitators? Or would it not have, because “Female business executive at a toy company” is not as inherently cool as “New Jersey wiseguy in therapy”?

It’s striking to me that while both of them talked about this alternate world, neither, at least in the edited version of the interview that appears online, mentioned Sex and the City. There’s no question that The Sopranos, which began airing seven months after the debut of Sex and the City in the summer of 1998, is the more formally ambitious show. But Sex and the City has never really gotten the credit it deserves for its deeply probing discussions of, among the factors my friend Emily Nussbuam at the New Yorker has identified, romanticism and cynicism, second- and third-wave feminism, and libertinism and prudishness, nor for its foundational role in the rise of HBO. Both in terms of acting as a destination show that brought viewers to the network while it elevated the traditional sitcom, and in the income it provided to HBO through syndication, Sex and the City deserves both critical and financial recognition for its role in elevating both the network and cable television in general.

And it, and the possibility of this long-lost Winne Holzman, raise the specter of an alternate universe of prestige television drama that’s dedicated to the rise and deconstruction of female fantasies in the way that shows like Breaking Bad or Mad Men paint glorious specters of masculine badassery that are the primary draw for some viewers, and then reveal the rot in them, a process that’s the primary draw for others. I can dream up a lot of the kinds of shows that we’d have in that bizarro world: in genre, the She-Hulk procedural I bring up so often I know it’s annoying, a functional version of Powers with Katee Sackhoff as Deena Pilgrim, in period shows, something about Helen Gurley Brown and the rise of women’s magazines, or a kicky vision of the seventies and eighties in Washington and New York through the eyes of a woman suspiciously like Nora Ephron, in crime, maybe a story about the DC Madam. I suspect the dynamics of this world would be similar: a period of establishing the competence and coolness of these women, followed by overreach, downfall, and accountability (arcs, by the way, that Sex and the City and Girls‘ most determined critics never give those shows enough credit for following). But the details would be different: we’d have to have audiences that accept private lives as important as power struggles, sex as something to be explored rather than simply had, frivolity as not more condemnable than violence or anger.

I wouldn’t want to have to choose between this fantasy world and the one we’ve got. I don’t want to give up Game of Thrones or The Wire for any of these other things. I just wish they could exist too, that Sex and the City wasn’t written out of history, and that Damages could have worked better on FX and on DirecTV, and that we weren’t still stuck on the idea that male fantasies are the stuff of literature, and female fantasies are treats.

The bridge is yours.

-Two perspectives on Liz Lemon’s wedding last night.

-CBS is adapting Under The Dome.

-A good point on medical marijuana and Parenthood.

-An app for my fellow Game of Thrones fans.

-We’re finally getting a Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell series.

I’m looking forward to heading back to Park City in January, but this news about the Sundance Film Festival’s lineup this year is making me particularly enthusiastic about getting back to the press tent:

In what festival programmers say is a Sundance first, fully half of the narrative features were made by women.

Culled from 1,227 submissions, the 16 dramas playing in the 2013 festival announced Wednesday cover a wide array of subjects and are populated by well-known actors (Casey Affleck, Daniel Radcliffe, Octavia Spencer, Jessica Biel) and complete unknowns. Many of the films, perhaps as a reflection of the gender of their directors, focus closely on personal, and often highly sexual, relationships.

“They are very much women’s stories,” said Trevor Groth, the festival’s programming director. In the 2012 festival, only three of the 16 dramatic competition films were made by women. According to San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, only 5% of the 250 highest-grossing films last year were directed by women.

It’s great that Sundance has hit this milestone, and hopefully now that they’ve gotten there, they’ll try to maintain the ratio. But it’s also an illustration of how easy it is to get these numbers right if you really want to. This isn’t even a matter of a couple hundred television writing jobs. It’s eight movies.

It’s the top-ten list time of year, and as I’m catching up on some shows and sifting through my list of favorites, I’ve been struck by how many fantastic performances we’ve seen in television this year. While some are obvious continuations of dominant streaks, like Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul’s turns on Breaking Bad, or Tina Fey’s embrace of happiness on 30 Rock, there are some truly astonishing turns going down on shows that almost no one is watching, or in shows that are so crowded with flashy performances that these are in danger of being overlooked. Here are five of the actors whose work hit me hardest this year:

1. Khandi Alexander, Treme: I ran a little behind Treme this season, but catching up on it this week, I regretted that. Much of that regret comes from how marvelous Alexander is as LaDonna Batiste-Williams. As a bar owner trying to keep her place alive, and determined to see through the prosecution of the men who robbed and sexually assaulted her, Alexander is by turns moody and joyful. Whether she’s feuding with her husband’s wealthy family, cooly cussing out a man demanding protection money from her, finally taking the stand in her much-delayed trial, or developing a tender friendship with Albert Lambreaux, Alexander’s been given the chance to be as complete a female character as I’ve seen on television in a long time. “Burnt me out for nothing,” she said in the season finale when her case ended in a heartbreaking mistrial. But it’s not nothing to those of us who have been watching at home.

2. Andra Fuller, The L.A. Complex: It is a source of considerable sadness to me that so few people found it in themselves to watch The L.A. Complex, an incredibly sharp ensemble show about what it actually takes to become successful in the entertainment industry. The cast is strong up and down the lineup, but if there was justice in the business, this should have been a breakout performance for Andra Fuller as closeted rapper Kaldrick King. King is one of the most sexual and emotional gay characters ever to appear on network television, and as he battered a young lover, made amends with him and reconnected with his father, and began a relationship with a handsome young lawyer who gave him the courage to come out, Fuller acted the hell out of every scene.

3. Eliza Coupe, Happy Endings: I spoke to Eliza Coupe earlier this season about her approach to physical comedy, playing uptight, and being half of one of only a few interracial couples on television. Since then, her performance as Jane Kerkovich-Williams has only gotten deeper and funnier. Whether she’s going overboard in enjoying being the breadwinner in her family, sneaking a perfectly-prepared turkey into her sister’s house to ensure that Thanksgiving isn’t a disaster, or revisiting the origin of her relationship with her husband Brad, Jane’s exploded the idea that being controlling means you have to be a humorless bitch, and I love her for it.

4. Charles Dance and Maisie Williams, Game of Thrones: Peter Dinklage probably has Game of Thrones‘ acting awards slot locked up as long as Tyrion Lannister lives. But that’s too bad, because Dance and Williams spent this year putting on the best cross-generational acting clinic on television as Tywin Lannister and Arya Stark. They’re people who should be mortal enemies, but, isolated from their families and in service to larger causes, find themselves understanding each other. I could watch the two of them dance around each other in Harrenhal’s great hall for ten hours a year.

5. Walton Goggins, Justified: Goggins, who’s been everywhere from Sons of Anarchy to Lincoln this year, probably has the best shot of anyone on this list of scoring an actual Emmy nomination. As Boyd Crowder, Goggins has taken an archetype, a racist redneck, and infused the role with an injection of coal-country rage, tenderness towards his surrogate father Arlo Givens, and a spiky relationship with Arlo’s son Raylan, who is his sometime-enemy, sometime-ally. I can’t wait to see where their rivalry heads next. Goggins was good on The Shield, but I think he’s even better on Justified.

This post discusses plot details from the November 29 episode of Parks and Recreation.

Even before Parks and Recreation fully hit its stride in its second season, I enjoyed the funny little town that it started to build in its uneven first year. Pawnee, with its cheerful cults, horrifying murals, vicious rivalry with Eagleton, and deadpan public radio station, has always been a perfectly surreal little riff on middle American small towns. But in this fifth season of the show, I’ve started wondering if we’ve reached Pawnee’s borders. Parks and Recreation has been acting as if it’s winding up its characters lives, pairing up its singletons, sending its young people on paths to stable adulthood, and leveling up Leslie, if not towards her dreams, at least towards higher tasks than fixing the pit behind Ann’s house.

This episode did precisely what a number of other episodes have done this season: it revisited an old storyline, namely, Leslie’s hatred of her true hometown, Eagleton, with the long-standing issue, Leslie’s desire to build a new park in the former pit. The show moved forward these stories a little bit, by having Leslie find and accept the decency of the only Eagletonian who doesn’t share the sentiments of the town’s “Now entering Pawnee. Good luck with that,” road signs. It’s nice to have her overcome that prejudice, but the story felt more like a tying up of loose ends than a genuinely funny riff. Neither the evil Eagletonians’ fake park, nor the return of Season 1 Leslie in the form of her attack on the urban planner, were innovations, or even welcome returns to truly hilarious jokes past.

Both the B and C subplots, with Tom getting Rent-A-Swag up and running, and April finding a way to help Andy realize his actual talents as a potential cop were stronger, particularly the latter. I’d been worried that Andy might get knocked off his ambitions to become a cop, turning it into just another dream like Mouserat as a stadium-filling band. “I did everything I was supposed to go and I walked around the building four times and only twenty minutes have gone buy,” he explained of the job that Chris got him working as a security guard to give him experience prior to taking his police academy exams. “I got so bored I started thinking about existence.” But April’s turn as Judy Hitler, however accidentally, exposed that Andy’s actually excellent with children: he may be bored a lot of the time, but when he’s activated, he’s perfect. And while April and Andy’s fantasies used to be an expression of a genuine yearning for an entirely different life, they seem to have settled in to the marriage and the jobs that they’ve got. Their fantasies are fun for them, and for us, but they’re no longer a means of escape.

And maybe that’s where we leave them. I’ve enjoyed the time I’ve spent in Pawnee tremendously over the past four and a half years—it’s been some of my all-time favorite television viewing. But I’m wondering if it might be time for this city mouse to leave the country. I just wish Parks and Recreation was going to leave me devastated that I have to go, rather than doing something I haven’t done since the show’s first season: checking my watch during episodes, waiting for my flight out of town and on to the next thing.

I wrote earlier in the day that, given James Gunn’s blog post in which he objectifies a ton of superheroines in rather crude terms, and makes homophobic remarks about the idea of people being sexually attracted to male superheroes, he owed the public an explanation of the post itself, and of how it differs from his vision for the team he’ll be presenting in Guardians of the Galaxy and female superheroines in general. He’s done half of that in gracious Facebook post tonight, in which he writes:

A couple of years ago I wrote a blog that was meant to be satirical and funny. In rereading it over the past day I don’t think it’s funny. The attempted humor in the blog does not represent my actual feelings. However, I can see where statements were poorly worded and offensive to many. I’m sorry and regret making them at all.

People who are familiar with me as evidenced by my Facebook page and other mediums know that I’m an outspoken proponent for the rights of the gay and lesbian community, women and anyone who feels disenfranchised, and it kills me that some other outsider like myself, despite his or her gender or sexuality, might feel hurt or attacked by something I said. We’re all in the same camp, and I want to do my best to make this world a better place for all of us. I’m learning all the time. I promise to be more careful with my words in the future. And I will do my best to be funnier as well. Much love to all – James

I’m particularly glad to see him acknowledge that, if the post was an attempt at satire, something a lot of his defenders claimed, that it was ineffective, and that calling it a satire didn’t deflect legitimate criticisms of the work. And I think this incident is an important reminder: if you’re actually an “an outspoken proponent for the rights of the gay and lesbian community, women and anyone who feels disenfranchised,” and you have a serious platform, then that’s something you have to keep in mind whenever you’re speaking publicly. That should be a spur for your humor and your satire to be smarter. If you’re called out for violating your own principles, your first reaction should be to listen, and to hold yourself to a high standard. It would be terrific for Gunn to use this incident to lay out those principles for his supporters, many of whom are using his apology as proof that people who were upset about the initial post are overreacting and should shut up.

And I’d still appreciate him laying out his vision for Guardians and how he’ll handle any female superheroes who are part of the movie, and delineate the differences between the attitudes in that post and his creative plans. If this is an opportunity to push Marvel to rectify some of its serious lack of diversity in the past, it’s a productive moment. I’m glad Gunn’s responded with some insight and class. I hope his script for and direction of Guardians of the Galaxy reflects that same statement of his values.

I wrote earlier this year that The Hour, the BBC’s period drama about the producers, reporters, and anchor on a show of the same title trying to break through the BBC’s strictures and the stifling social environment of the late 1950s, was the show that Aaron Sorkin wanted his HBO drama The Newsroom to be. It was attuned to the actual rhythms and difficulties of reporting, the stories are legitimately revealing rather than pontificating, and the characters face genuine obstacles to getting those stories on the air. And in the second season of the show, which began its run on BBC America last night, I think that’s become even more true, particularly in the way that The Hour is handling the rise of a phenomenon that The Newsroom tried to critique decades later: the rise of commercial television programming aimed at women.

I talked to Abi Morgan, The Hour‘s creator, about the show’s approach to gender in general, and about the kind of programming aimed at women like Marnie (Oona Chaplin), the upper-class wife of The Hour anchor Hector (Dominic West), who begins exploring a career as the host of a cooking show. She explained:

I think if you look at the women, the on-screen talent at that time, on the whole they were either singing along to a puppet, or they were presenting the kind of soft magazine programs that were just starting to come up through the ’50s. I liked the idea of Marnie almost becoming quite literally this professional housewife. She’s this Fanny Cradock-esque character. It also felt like a kind of brilliant, brittle metaphor for this kind of life Marnie finds herself encased in. You’ll see that marriage really is tested through the course of the series….

The mainstay of commercials of that time was the great British housewife. Marnie is very much the consumer of her time. On the wider level, the show is about the birth of capitalism in the ’50s and into the ’60s. The warmongers were finding a way of making money out of nuclear paranoia, [and there was a] global desire to be part of the arms and space race. This parallels what’s going on with Marnie. She’s someone who aspires to a bigger life. When you write a drama set in this era, you have a whole period where if your characters have any gumption or charisma, they have to break away from this suppressive ’50s world.

Where The Newsroom could be viciously dismissive of mass culture aimed at women—Will McAvoy ran himself into trouble in part by insulting a gossip columnist for covering the Real Housewives, and declaring that he’d fix another woman whose primary flaw included consuming that kind of show—The Hour doesn’t try to make judgements about whether it’s bad or not that programming aimed by women exists. Instead, it tries to reckon with what it means that this kind of programming speaks powerfully to the ennui of post-war women like Marnie, who aren’t working, and how their power as consumers affects the entire media landscape. When Bel debates whether or not to run a segment about Christian Dior, she’s also trying to figure out where fashion fits in the hierarchy of news and human interest.

And the show never presents Marnie as stupid for being entranced by a commercial, or seeking out a career using the skills that she has, even if they’re feminine ones. Of course she’s bored! She was bred for a specific role, to be a good wife to a man like Hector, who was expected to play a corresponding part, but instead cheats on her, pursues entertainment in nightclubs where she is not invited, and treats her as if she couldn’t possibly be interested in his career. Marnie is an intelligent, capable woman, but no one asks anything of her, not even that she be available for sex and housekeeping. Even if she’s only valuable to television as a consumer, at least it’s a form of being valued.

The thing that Will McAvoy, and that by extension The Newsroom, never seemed to get, is that consuming frivolous things doesn’t make you a frivolous person. Everyone I know who watches Real Housewives does so because they recognize the show as a social critique folded into a trainwreck like a pill into applesauce. It’s possible to even consume things that you know are bad for you, or that have no redeeming social value whatsoever, to recognize them as such, and to enjoy them anyway. The question is not whether or not someone is a good person for watching certain things. It’s what need they speak to, what itch they scratch.

Women’s professional soccer will return to the United States in 2013, as U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati announced last week the formation of a new league that will feature teams based in some of the nation’s biggest soccer hotbeds. The new league, the third attempt at forming a successful top-notch women’s soccer league in the U.S., will have eight teams based in Boston, Chicago, Kansas City, Western New York, New Jersey, Portland, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.

As I wrote in August, when the U.S. Women’s National Team was on its way to its second consecutive Olympic gold medal, making a women’s league successful won’t be easy. But the focus for U.S. Soccer president Sunil Gulati, who made a women’s league a priority when WPS folded, is now on sustainability, and that is already evident in the early formation of the new league.

U.S. Soccer has promised to pay the salaries of 24 players — three per team — who are on its full-time roster. The Canadian and Mexican soccer federations announced this week that they too will fund salaries of players who join the league from their national teams. The backing of those three foundations will give the new league a financial crutch WPS and WUSA never had, a significant break for a league that will need help attaining financial viability.

Regardless of the challenges the league faces, this is a positive step for the women’s game. The absence of a professional league made it impossible for the game to take advantage of the enthusiasm brought on by the 2011 World Cup and 2012 Olympics, particularly in the United States, where players like Abby Wambach, Hope Solo, and Alex Morgan blossomed into full-fledged stars outside the small world of women’s soccer fans. It also left those players with no top-level professional league to return to, making it harder both for the U.S. to sustain its dominance of the women’s game and harder for the game to grow.

That growth is important. There are now more than 337,000 girls playing soccer on 10,500 teams at the high school level, and another 700 teams play collegiate soccer. The growth of the women’s game internationally has followed the growth of the women’s game in the United States, one of the few countries where women enjoy equal access and funding to the world’s most popular game. But without a pro league, continued growth and the continued expansion of women’s access is no guarantee.

There are plenty of challenges facing the league, but there was once a mountain of challenges facing the now-thriving men’s league, Major League Soccer, and unlike an American women’s league, it can’t claim that it has the world’s best players or top competition. That doesn’t mean that the women’s league will become a similar success story. That Gulati and the league’s investors are committed to making a women’s league viable and sustainable, though, is a good sign for the future of the women’s game and it’s biggest stars.

I”m an admitted total and utter sucker for Guillermo del Toro’s monsters, so I’m intrigued by what little we see of the beast in Pacific Rim in this teaser:

The thing I’m hoping for the movie, though, is that it’s at least in part about how you go from having military jets shoot rockets at monsters to a point where a multi-national fighting force is going mano-a-mano with the damn things in battle robots. The viral content for the movie seems promising—it’s got things like emergency tests and troop transfer orders that demonstrate a society adapting itself to a new and unnerving reality. If I can have bureaucracy and monsters and Idris Elba, I will be a very happy woman.

The bridge is yours.

-If you can’t get enough of Downton Abbey, NBC has a Julian Fellowes show they’d like to try to sell you next fall.

-Oh, hey, a video game company that deliberately chose to have a mixed-race, female protagonist.

-The next Star Trek movie apparently involves a “one-man weapon of mass dstruction.”

-China will have a bigger box office than the U.S. by 2020, so get ready for more Asian movie stars, and more sequences shot in Shanghai.

-This looks like the perfect late-August movie it is set up to be:

When word came down in August that Guardians of the Galaxy, the planned 2014 Marvel movie about an oddball group of superheroes including an interstellar raccoon and a talking tree, was actually a backdoor introduction of Carol Danvers, the badass Air Force pilot who is now Captain Marvel, I was ridiculously excited. It’s long past time that Marvel added a female superhero (as opposed to simply a well-trained human woman) to the on-screen Avengers lineup, Danvers’ military pedigree would lend her some interesting synergy with Captain America, and she’d be a fascinating way to get a well-credentialed action actress like Katee Sackhoff into the franchise. But since folks have uncovered an old blog post by James Gunn, who is both writing and directing the movie, I’ve gone from enthusiastic about the project to straight-up terrified about it.

The post is Gunn reporting the results of a poll he did with readers about which superheroes they’d like to have sex with. It was deleted—and you can see why—but it’s available in Google Cache. And while I don’t necessarily oppose the idea of this kind of poll—superheroes are designed to be fantasies—the way Gunn wrote up the results reveals some pretty horrifying ideas about superheroines, both inside the bedroom and outside of it.

On Emma Frost, described as the woman of choice for “those men who love rude bitches,” Gunn says “What I love about Emma is the practical attire she wears while adventuring. Certainly, if I were a woman fighting giant monsters I’d want to wear some awesome breast-mushing halter top, a pair of panties, and thigh highs.” On my beloved She-Hulk, “I ever were in the mood to be dominated and treated like a little bitch, by someone who is green, then She-Hulk would almost certainly be the way to go.” Then there’s this little bon mot “Disco Dazzler, Rave Dazzler, and Punk Rock Dazzler, they all have one thing in common – a friggin’ GREAT vagina.” On Kitty Pryde: “I wrote her back [on Twitter], but neglected to mention that I wanted to anally do her. I won’t even mind if Lockheed is in the room, staring at me with a creepy look the whole time.” There’s slut-shaming of Batgirl: “Being a teen mom and all, you know she’s easy. Go for it.” There are nasty objectification fantasies, like this one of Spider-Woman: “The whole time I’m fucking her I can’t get her face out of my mind as the Skrull leader who tried to conquer the world. I know it’s not her fault, but I just can’t help it. So I finish on her face to help block out the painful memories.” A lot of “this woman is messed-up so she’s sexy,” a la Cassandra Cain: “Cassandra’s father taught her how to kill people when she was eight. Which means she has the ultimate daddy issues. Which means she’s just my type.”

Then, there’s the charming homophobia! On Gambit: “My girlfriend voted for this Cajun fruit. I think she’s looking to have a devil’s three way with the two of us. The idea of my balls slapping against Gambit’s makes me sick to my stomach.” The charming observation of Batwoman that “This lesbian character was voted for almost exclusively by men. I don’t know exactly what that means. But I’m hoping for a Marvel-DC crossover so that Tony Stark can “turn” her. She could also have sex with Nightwing and probably still be technically considered a lesbian.”

Maybe it should be comfort to us that of his potential heroine, Carol Danvers, Gunn only says “Carol Danvers dropped 13 points from her position last year. It’s a surprise to me as she is, along with Emma Frost and the Black Cat, one of the most consistently sexualized characters in the Marvel Universe,” though if he thinks her sexualization is one of the more telling things about her character, the fact that he doesn’t have specific fantasies about her may not count for very much. One of the most telling remarks Gunn makes is about Starfire: “The picture above is why, by the age of nine or ten, comic books had ruined real women for me forever.” In this post, he repeatedly mentions his girlfriend, so that doesn’t seem entirely true. But I do think that he and Disney should have to explain why these kinds of attitudes haven’t ruined him from being the kind of person who’s actually suited to introduce the first Marvel superheroine to an audience that includes men who are capable of reading superwomen as more than templates for sexual fantasies, and women who are eager to see themselves reflected on screen.

Well, this is a little intense:

When a Japanese couple decided to tie the knot recently, they wanted everyone who was important in their life to be on hand to share in their joyous day. One catch — for the groom, those important people included NeNe Anegasaki, his virtual girlfriend in the Nintendo DS dating sim Love Plus. The perfectly charming piece of software even had a place set for her at the wedding, so that everyone on hand could meet her…

The bride apparently didn’t find the situation exactly tenable either, and before the evening was out, the night had dissolved into predictable, if one-sided, violence. Once the wedding ceremony was concluded, the blushing bride determined that NeNe was one of the things the groom was going to have to give up with his bachelor lifestyle, going the way of the cool movie posters in his bedroom. Which we feel would be kind of unreasonable, if the groom wasn’t doing things like “inviting his virtual girlfriend to his real wedding.” At that point, man, you’ve got a problem.

It’s perhaps not as consequential as some of the questions we’ve been discussing here over the past couple of days about male body image and expressions of female sexual desire. But it’s definitely easier to solve: if you have an issue with your significant other’s emotional attachment to a piece of culture, figure it out before your wedding.

Ta-Nehisi is reading Raymond Chandler, and in exploring Philip Marlowe’s distaste for some of the women in his path, his observation that “It’s so hard for women—even nice women—to realize that their bodies are not irresistible,” turns to the question of visibile manifestation of male desire, and its relationship to shame:

Erection is not a choice. It happens to men whether they like it or not. It happens to young boys in the morning whether they have dreamed about sex or not. It happens to them in the movies, in gym class, at breakfast, during sixth period Algebra. It happens in the presence of humans who they find attractive, and it happens in the presence of humans whom they claim are not attractive at all. It is provoked by memory, by perfume, by song, by laughter and by absolutely nothing at all. Erection is not merely sexual desire, but the physical manifestation of that desire.

Masculinity’s central tenet is control—and perhaps most importantly, control of the body. Nothing contradicts that edict like erections. It unmans you, it compels you through sensations you scarcely understand. And it threatens to expose you, to humiliates you, in front of everyone. Laugh now at the boy at the middle school dance, who gets an erection on the slow number (God help him if he has orgasm.) But he does not forget that laughter, nor does he forget what prompted it. That boy is going to be a rapper. Or a painter. Or an author of fictions where men are men and somehow are invulnerable to the humiliating effects of the female form.

In the comments to that post, a number of people, rightly, bring up Prince as an example of someone who managed to decouple desire and shame, which I think is exactly right. When he sings in “When Doves Cry,” “Touch if you will my stomach / Feel how it trembles inside / You’ve got the butterflies all tied up / Don’t make me chase you / Even doves have pride,” Prince is offering up evidence of his arousal and embracing the power dynamic his desire occasions. The woman he’s speaking to has the initiative there. There is the possibility that he will be rejected or shamed. But he’s also gained power by being willing to run those risks, to speak honestly to her.

It’s also worth, as a counterpoint to Marlowe’s contempt, to consider Agent Cooper and Audrey Horne in Twin Peaks:

Her appearance in his bed is a repetition of Carmen Sternwood’s attempts to seduce Marlowe. But rather than reacting with disgust to his own attraction to her, or anger at her for arousing him, Cooper is kind, and self-denying. “What I want and what I need are two different things,” he tells her. His desire for her can exist within a web of his other values, including his devotion to the F.B.I. And perhaps most importantly, Cooper isn’t angry at Audrey for wanting him, an emotion that seems to underscore Marlowe’s repulsion to a number of the women that he encounters.

Because that’s the critical other half of this conversation, one that I discussed in part yesterday in exploring why James Bond and other sex objects designed for women’s consumption can be so threatening. If men can be shamed for visible and involuntary evidence of arousal, both because they’re deemed to have slipped in their control, and because they risk sexual rejection from the women who have prompted their reaction, women can be shamed for voluntarily expressing arousal and asking that their sexual needs be met. Such requests meet with such complicated reactions because they fracture sex, raising the possibility that for men and women, intercourse assumes varying levels of importance and delivers different levels of satisfaction. In other words, a positive reaction to evidence of male desire is the beginning of a negotiation, not the end of it. And that negotiation is a culturally fraught one.
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I loved the first season of HBO’s little-watched but truly remarkable comedy, Enlightened, about Amy Jellicoe (Laura Dern), a corporate drone who has a breakdown and returns to work determined to good in the world but resigned to the basement as punishment for her meltdown. It’s is one of the best depictions I’ve ever seen of how hard it is to try to live up to your values in corporate America, particularly when you have debt to pay off, because fulfilling work is so often dramatically underpaid, if it’s paid at all. So I’m particularly excited to see that in the second season, Amy’s leveling up—she fantasized about burning down the company she worked for last season, and this year, she’s found a way to do it, by becoming a corporate whistleblower:

“People are living under the illusion that the American dream is working for them,” Amy says in the trailer, in one of the baldest statements about inequality I can think of on scripted American television. And I hope Enlightened makes an important connection that’s implied in this clip. “I just don’t want to jeapordize everything because you’re pissed about your life,” Tyler (Mike White, also the show’s creator) tells Amy when she tries to enlist him in her whistleblowing scheme. But sometimes, you’re pissed about your life because of structural things that make it worse, that make things unjust, that prevent you from grabbing the resources and opportunities to fix your life by more gradual and reasonable means. Sometimes, you have to blow things up, and jeopardize everything, for a shot at something better. That’s one of the fundamental and scary truths of organizing, of the Walmart workers who walked out on Black Friday, of every whistleblower who ever lived. Last season, Amy wanted to change the world and be liked. Now, it seems, she’s truly reconciled herself to the fact that the first half of that equation may be more important.

This post discusses plot points from the November 20 and 27 episodes of Sons of Anarchy.

“You reach an age where you realize that being a man isn’t about respect or strength. It’s about being aware of all the things you touch,” Jax writes to his son in his journal in last night’s episode of Sons of Anarchy. It’s a fantastic mission statement for masculinity. And I think the test for Sons of Anarchy going forward is whether the show thinks Jax is living up to it, or if it’s aware that Jax has reached a point where he’s entirely self-deluding, where even his declaration that “You can’t sit in this chair without being a savage,” is a way of evading the person that he’s truly become. I’m at a point with Sons of Anarchy where I literally could not care less about any of the plot mechanisms, the Irish, the cartels, the CIA, etc., but I think the show’s doing some of the best work it’s ever put on screen with its characters’ emotions, and with the impact of their choices.

First, and most important, I think Sons of Anarchy‘s made important steps this season to make Tara a consistent character, and that means forcing her to reckon with the totality of her life with Jax. “I know why you couldn’t walk away a few months ago. The club’s been your whole life, you couldn’t let it die. i think I fell in love with you even more because of that. You’re a beautiful, loyal man Jax,” she told him in last week’s episode. “You’ve done everything you wanted to do, baby. It’s your turn now. we can move on. And after yesterday, I can’t help but feel like this is some kind of last chance for us.” His deflection is heartbreaking, because what it really means is that he wants Tara to turn the job down, that he may say that he’d be willing to consider a life where his wife is the primary breadwinner away from Charming, but that when that option is genuinely present, he’s not up to the task. But Charming isn’t really enough for Tara, even if it takes Unser to help her realize it. “I love Jax and my boys. I love being his wife…I’m okay with the life,” she tells the old man when she meets him at chemo, stepping back from the triumphant embrace of her role as queen that marked her last season. “Seems like you left yourself off that list,” Unser reminds her. “I used to love being a surgeon,” Tara admits.

When she accepts the job, telling the head of the practice, “It’s a perfect fit. I just want to keep it under wraps. Let Jax sit with it for a minute,” she’s acting in her own interests. But she isn’t ready, either, to face up to the fact that what’s a perfect fit for her and what’s a perfect fit for Jax may be fundamentally incompatible. Jax may promise Tara that “I’m going to give you a beautiful life.” But the two of them, at least in our viewing, have never been able to have an honest conversation about what beautiful means to either of them, to agree on a shared vision of their life. They’re good at impulse, at sex in that hotel room, at the shotgun wedding. But marriage means planning, means understanding how your touch affects things years down the road.

It’s Wendy who speaks that truth to Tara and Jax once she finds out about Abel’s accident, and his kidnapping. “You knock her up, spit out another kid, and throw your entire family against the chaos. And you, how can you live like this? What is wrong with you?” she tells them. And when they object, she doubles down, telling them “Bullshit, you know I’m right.” How Jax punishes her for telling the truth, that as a recovering addict with a partner who is out of the life, Wendy is actually better-equipped to raise Abel than Jax and Tara are, is, to me, one of the most repulsive things that’s happened in this show. Tara may have revitalized prospects of a career, and Jax may be a man. But Wendy loves her son enough not to put him in danger, not to use him as a pawn in manipulating her family. And Jax absolutely cannot handle that truth.

Instead, he decides he’s justified in attacking Wendy as a threat to her family, tells her she’ll use her genuine and legitimate fears for her child to make her seem insane rather than accepting responsibility for his own failures, and attacks her through her sobriety. Wendy is not a perfect person, of course. Her drug use endangered Abel and made his life more difficult. But as an addict, her drug use has a different moral quality than Jax’s sober bad acts. And just as Gemma took advantage of Wendy’s addiction to try to push her into suicide in the pilot, Jax has become someone who will threaten Wendy’s hard-won sobriety to avoid a reconciliation for the threat he himself poses to Abel’s safety. It’s a repulsive thing to do. And I don’t know how Jax can recover from the places he’s gone to. If he’s Hamlet, Jax’s fate may be to suffer a kind of living death, casting a cancerous shade across the people he believes he loves. Whether she knows it or not, Gemma may have seen her son’s future in Nero’s ravaged face.

Clay’s expulsion may offer some instruction. “I’m aware that we don’t just pick it up where we left off. But maybe this is a chance for us to do it different, Gem. No lies, no secrets,” he tells her. Their reconciliation may be false on Gemma’s end, and Clay may not have fully reckoned with his past willingness to commit violence against people he loved in the name of controlling them. But there seems to be some genuine shame and regret in his reactions to her return, to his expulsion from the club. “I’ll sleep at mine tonight. The ink’ll ruin your sheets,” Clay tells her as he heads off to have his tattoos covered up. He’s accepted his punishment from the club, and he’s aware of what he’s touching, even to the level of Gemma’s linens.

Marvin Miller, the labor leader who built the Major League Baseball Players Association into sports’ most powerful union, died today. He was 95.

You won’t find Miller in baseball’s Hall of Fame, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t among the game’s most important figures. The Babe Ruth of labor negotiations, Miller took over a weak union in 1966 and immediately turned it into a force that would be modeled in other sports thereafter.

Miller led the union through a total of five work stoppages and, as adviser to the MLBPA, worked alongside it during three more. His victories were numerous. He led baseball players into the first collectively bargained contract in professional sports history in 1968; in 1972, he led the first major players’ strike in the history of American professional sports. Later that year, he led former St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood’s unsuccessful challenge of the reserve clause, the rule that gave owners sole control over player contracts and movement. In 1975, baseball’s independent arbitrator — who existed because of a union victory — invalidated the reserve clause in response to another Miller-led challenge, paving the way for free agency that gave players labor rights they had never had before.

Free agency ensured that baseball’s players wouldn’t be excluded from the new-found prosperity that came from television contracts. When Miller took over the union in 1966, the average salary was just $14,000. By 1976, it had grown to $52,000 and the next year, star players like Reggie Jackson received multimillion-dollar contracts. The rise in salaries bolstered the players’ once-meager pension plan, making it the real retirement program they had long sought. By the time he retired in 1982, the average salary was up to $245,000; on the day of his death, it exceeded $2.3 million.

Critics of professional sports often point to the astronomical salaries players now receive. Those are, in part, Miller’s doing, but that is a point to praise, not to criticize. Miller recognized that the labor of the athletes he represented had substantial value, and a $6,000 minimum salary that hadn’t moved in nearly two decades wasn’t close to meeting it. It was Miller who convinced players to think like union workers (he came from the steelworkers union) who had extracted better salaries and benefits from corporate owners in other industries; it was Miller who got players to hold firm during fights for their rights. It was Miller who, when players were angry at Flood for disrupting the status quo, eventually coalesced them behind the idea that they weren’t just lucky to play a boy’s game for a living, but that they had worth and rights and that neither was being honored by baseball’s employment structure.

His victories resonated both inside and outside baseball, which today is home not just to the strongest union in sports but perhaps the strongest union in America. The 1981 strike he led and the 1994 World Series-cancelling strike that followed still stand as models of solidarity and determination; rather than break the union, the ’94 strike seemingly broke owners, who finally realized they would have to negotiate in good faith. After labor disputes ground baseball to a halt eight times between 1972 and 1995, the sport hasn’t had a work stoppage since. Miller is gone, but the union that has made baseball prosperous for both owners and players today is built on the foundations he put in place.

“All players – past, present and future – owe a debt of gratitude to Marvin, and his influence transcends baseball,” MLBPA director Michael Weiner said in a statement. “Marvin, without question, is largely responsible for ushering in the modern era of sports, which has resulted in tremendous benefits to players, owners and fans of all sports.”

Miller’s victories spurred labor movements in the other major American sports, leaving a legacy that today makes sports one of the labor movement’s strongest fronts. It isn’t implausible to think that without him, sports today would be union-free games where the labor didn’t share in the prosperity gained by the corporate class. Even if baseball owners never get over themselves and put Miller in baseball’s Hall of Fame, his legacy will stand among the giants of sports. Marvin Miller didn’t just change baseball. He made all of our sports better games.

At Gawker this morning, Max Read did a thorough job of explaining why Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who appears to have shown considerable disappointment in real life that he’s not attractive to some of his very young colleagues, is perhaps not the person best fit to decry Daniel Craig’s chiseled physique and to praise retro, older sex symbols like Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant as Cohen did his column yesterday. But reading through Cohen’s lament that ladies of roughly my age seem to dig Craig more than we do grizzled syndicated columnists, I think that Cohen, without intending to, is expressing an anxiety that’s worth examining. James Bond’s being treated like a Bond girl. The ascendance of young adult literature means that pop culture has more and more gorgeous young men who are offered up like a dessert tray for heroines’ pleasures. And as images of what makes a man attractive and successful as determined by female desires and standards proliferate in our culture, it makes sense that the guys watching at home would start to worry if they measure up, and to think about what would happen to them if they started facing ideals as rigid as those imposed on women.

That Cohen, whether he recognizes it or not, is not alone in his anxiety doesn’t exactly make his critique of James Bond in comparison to older, less athletic, but still super-rich and super-white guys thoughtful or incisive. Desirable masculinity, as Cohen outlines it, is a pretty great deal for men, or at least, men of a certain financial position and class upbringing. A world in which men can take the things they learned when they were young about how to “handle a maitre d’ as well as a commie assassin,” or about how to be the kind of man who “knows his martinis, but he also knows how to send out a suit for swift hotel cleaning,” buy some style along the way, and have beautiful women fall into their laps is one that doesn’t force those men to suffer much in the way of anxiety or upkeep. There’s no female gaze or female judgement here—nor any concern for female pleasure, the question of what those male bodies might be good for. Men present the standards for manhood, and women effortlessly—gratefully, really—accept them.

Cohen dismisses the current crop of sculpted hunks that Daniel Craig represents as “some marbleized man, an ersatz creation of some trainer,” but the standards for what makes a man sexy that he’s describing are no more natural or objective. And I’m curious if he’d identify the beauty of the women he cites in his column, like Ingrid Bergman and Mary Astor, as effortless and natural, rather than the product of beauty standards and the punishing regimes and restrictive clothes that helped women accomplish them. One of the earliest contradictions I understood as a young teenage girl reading fashion magazines was that I was supposed to look “natural” and “effortless,” but that it took an enormous amount of work and money to recreate the looks that I was told embodied those standards. I learned that my own lip color and texture was less natural than a glossy pink, that the blush of my unadorned cheek looked less vital than a layer of foundation, powder, and blush. I’m glad I had that education so I could see the distance and the contradiction, enjoy wearing bright red lipstick for its artificiality and sense of performance, not because I believed that my own hue was an error or imperfection. But it’s not an easy education to acquire, or to shake off in favor of truly discerning what I want to look like and feel, and I don’t envy someone like Cohen coming to his own version of it later in life, or reckoning with the work he’d have to do to meet the standards laid out for him. I feel a lot more concern, however, for teenage boys who are turning to steroids or working out more than is actually healthy to meet those standards

In a way, I think we’re at an interesting tipping point in our culture, but one that still involves men and women (when those are the parties to the conversation) talking past each other. What’s interesting to me about Daniel Craig’s body is less how it looks than in what he does with it as James Bond. The contrast between the force he’s able to exercise (as James Poulos put it on Twitter, “Soooo to be clear, CraigBond’s muscles are things you have to have if you are a blunt instrument. Get the causal arrows right.”) and the tenderness and sensuality Craig in particular shows women is what’s attractive about him. Watching him curl up under a running shower with Vesper or bowl her, laughing, over a hospital bed, the delicacy of the way he unbuttons Eve Moneypenny’s blouse, or the rough hurry with which he pushes his unnamed paramour up against a wall in their lean-to on the beach—these all speak to an attentiveness to and experience with women’s bodies that’s far more relevant to the question at hand than Bond’s ability to deal with a formally trained waiter, though in Casino Royale, he seems to navigate fancy restaurants just fine. While neither Edward Cullen nor Christian Grey does it for me, I can understand why those archetypes are so attractive to some of the women who consume them, and not just because they’re described as very handsome: these are men who are bringing considerable physical power or substantial sexual experience to bear in service of their partners’ pleasure*.

The question of how we want our bodies to look, and how we want other people to react to them, has long stood in for how we want them to feel, how we want them to be touched, and treated. This isn’t to say that looks don’t matter, but they’re intertwined with a set of issues we’re much less capable of having productive public conversations about. I’m glad, to a certain extent, that more men are coming to an understanding of how culture contributes to this nasty bit of sleight-of-hand for women, particularly after what’s felt like a particularly intense decade of Beauty And The Slob pairings. But this is a case when turnabout isn’t fair play for people on either end of the equation.

*More thoughts on this tomorrow.

Over at Penny Arcade Report, Ben Kuchera talked to analyst Geoffrey Zatkin about the market conditions for video games that have only female protagonists, as opposed to male protagonists, or the choice to play as a male or female main character. There are a lot of insights in there worth considering, but this one stood out to me:

We know from our previous article that marketing spend is one of the few, if not the only, things that can overcome negative reviews. Television commercials, ads in magazines, and even shelf space in stores are all for sale, and the more you have to spend the better your game will sell.

Games with only female heroes are given half the marketing budget as games with male heroes. That’s an enormous handicap that cripples their ability to sell well. “Games with a female only protagonist, got half the spending of female optional, and only 40 percent of the marketing budget of male-led games. Less than that, actually,” Zatkin said.

So is this a self-fulfilling prophecy? Do publishers send female-lead games out to die without proper support? “I think it might be, and I think in some cases, though this is a guess, that these games may be considered more niche, and you advertise niche games less,” Zatkin said.

It’s also hard to draw many broad conclusions from this data. There are so few games with exclusively female heroes, and those few games are given such a small marketing budget, do we even know how well a large-budget, marketed game with a female hero would perform?

And this is exactly a point. I don’t want to hear that video games starring women don’t sell as those starring men unless you can show me a persistent failure of video games starring women that have received the same quality and investment in their advertising campaigns and rollouts. Don’t tell me that African-American actors can’t conquer international box office until you make the same efforts to build more Will Smiths as you do to build Taylor Kitsches and Daniel Craigs. Our assumptions about what works and what doesn’t, what will sell, and what won’t, are not natural laws. They’re decisions we’ve made.

The bridge is yours.

-Girls on skateboards in Afghanistan.

-More details on the new Star Trek villain, maybe.

-I am totally buying Sarah Silverman’s babysitting app.

-I am not sure how I feel about Lenny Kravitz playing Marvin Gaye.

-I really hope this Rupert Murdoch miniseries makes it stateside.

-We may be losing Cousin Matthew from Downton Abbey.