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.