When the trailer for Surrender The Secret, a reality show about women who are doing bible studies based on the book of the same name, which presents abortion as a traumatic and sinful experience, came out, most of the mainstream attention given to it pointed out the kinds of misinformation and shaming the show seems likely to promote:

I don’t disagree with any of those sentiments. But this trailer, though it doesn’t follow the conventions of reality television so much as it advertises what sounds like a lecture, actually made me think something different: though Surrender The Secret will be inexplicable to mainstream audiences, I’d guess that it’ll be a relative success.

It actually makes an enormous amount of sense to me that conservative artists would be the ones to figure out how to make new models of distribution work for them. I may not think much of the artistic quality of either the anti-abortion film October Baby or the conspiracy-minded 2016: Obama’s America. But the former made $5,355,847 on a budget of $1 million, and the latter made $33,349,941 in theaters and $5,990,541 in DVD sales. These weren’t movies that came out through major studios, though Lionsgate and Fox handled video distribution for both films. But they found their audiences, through strong word of mouth, through church trips, and through established email lists. Existing affinity groups decided that these projects were something they should support. Neither movie made what would be considered serious box office. But they definitely reached the thresholds of success they’d defined for themselves.

Other projects need to build their own bases of support. The Whedonverse may turn out, in greater and lesser numbers, for projects involving anyone who’s ever worked on a Joss Whedon show or movie, but they’re an exception rather than a rule. Artists like Issa Rae, who have started out with web series and are now moving into network television, have to build their audiences through much, much slower word of mouth that can eventually snowball into media hits, and to an audience that grows somewhat faster. It’s hard to imagine, say, the Human Rights Campaign emailing their entire list and telling anyone who’s ever donated or had contact with the organization to go see the gay adoption period drama Any Day Now.

As someone who’s been shouting from the rooftop about all of the amazing female characters who already exist in the Star Wars Expanded Universe and really should be featured in the upcoming sequels to the films, I was excited to see Luke Plunkett report this bit of Star Wars trivia at Kotaku:

Turns out that there were four female pilots cast and filmed for Return of the Jedi‘s climatic Battle of Endor. Two of them were A-Wing pilots, the other two piloting an X-Wing, with one, played by Vivienne Chandler, having an entire page of dialogue.

Sadly, according to Star Wars Aficionado, they’ve remained mostly unknown and unseen until now. The two A-Wing pilots, one elderly, can at least be seen buried in the extras on the Star Wars blu-rays (I’ve never seen them), but the two X-Wing pilots went straight to the editing room floor. Bizarrely, one of the A-Wing pilots, pictured up top, had her lines dubbed over by a male voice actor in post-production (though people are telling me she’s still visible in the film).

Things like this really make me increasingly convinced that it would not just be nice, but important to see a Star Wars movie that’s centered around a woman who is on the same kind of hero’s journey Luke Skywalker took all those years ago. This is a moment when we have a generation of young actresses who are credentialing themselves primarily as action stars, from Jennifer Lawrence, to Chloe Grace Moretz, to Hailee Steinfeld, and to a lesser extent, Saorsie Ronan and Abigail Breslin. We have proof that female-centered action franchises, like The Hunger Games, can be global smash hits. But what we don’t have is women worked into major franchises like The Avengers as equals. Having the next trilogy of Star Wars films focus on a woman like Jaina Solo, Han and Leia’s daughter, would be a real passing of the torch, and passing it in a way that’s fully integrated into the franchise already.

Over the past year, one of the most popular ways to call out sexism in the depictions of female superheroines or women on the covers of fantasy and science fiction novels has been to illustrate what it would look like if men assumed similar poses. Illustrators have posed the other members of The Avengers like Black Widow. Others staged a wide range of superheroes like Wonder Woman, whips or other objects snaking through their legs. The Hawkeye Initiative subs in Hawkeye in any number of ludicrous positions and costumes superheroines are drawn in. And novelist Jim Hines, who’s posed in similar positions as women on fantasy novel covers, challenged his fellow writer John Scalzi to a pose-off for charity.

But something Hines said about the reaction to the pose-off resonated with me, and clarified a bit of concern I’ve had about this particular trope. In an update to the original post introducing their entries, he noted: “I’ve also seen a few areas where response has begun to shift from, ‘I say, those poses seem remarkably impractical, and how exactly does one do that without dislocating one’s ankle?’ to ‘Hey, guys dressing or posing like girls are both ugly and hilarious!’” And in a follow-up called “Wait, What Are We Laughing At?” he wrote:

But if you’re laughing because you’re a straight guy and therefore must declare all male bodies brain-searingly ugly? If you’re laughing because you think a man in a dress is funny and should be mocked? In other words, if you’re laughing because of various aspects of ingrained sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other discriminatory nonsense? Then you’ve missed the point so badly it’s not even funny…So please do me a favor. Step back and ask yourself what exactly you’re laughing at, and where that’s coming from. ‘Cause I’m starting to see some rather problematic reactions out there.

And this is what makes me nervous about this particular tactic for exposing sexism. What happens if people see these poses and think they’re ridiculous because it’s ridiculous to see a man pose like a woman, to see a man dressed like a woman, to see a man pretending he’s displaying sexual characteristics he doesn’t actually possess? And what if they walk away from these posts thinking that it’s silly for men to do these things, to dress this way, to pose like that—but that it’s perfectly natural for women to be presented this way.

I wonder if the solution is less to pose men like women, than to demonstrate what superheroes would look like in sexual situations, or if they were sexually aroused, and to place them in the context of doing their jobs. If we want to demonstrate that posing superheroines is ludicrous and sexist, we need to demonstrate that it’s because it undercuts their power, that it leaves them less prepared to respond to events taking place around them, that they have sources of power that aren’t sexual. And we need to demonstrate that the same thing is true for men, that their strength comes from muscles and brains rather than their genitalia, and that it would be odd to the point of utter illogic to suggest that it did.

The bridge is yours.

-The cutest baby monsters.

-I hope if Mark Wahlberg is going to make a movie about hackers and personal information, he’ll consider the role of gender in this kind of harassment.

-Lois McMaster Bujold, being awesome.

-Can it please be Pacific Rim o’clock immediately?

I like Sarah Silverman’s political videos as much as the next girl—the Great Schlep, in which she encouraged young Jews to turn out their Florida-retiree grandparents to vote for then-Sen. Barack Obama for president is inspired—but I actually think that, while the idea of enlisting men to support reproductive rights is a great impulse, this doesn’t quite hit the mark:

“Does your fight have to be yours to take it on?” she asks. But simple solidarity is actually aiming a little low in this case. Women may be the people who get pregnant, and who are subject to transvaginal ultrasounds, but men are affected by our access to contraception, too. Before Obamacare covered contraception fully, it was a household expense, and one that in some cases, could be a real strain. If neither half of a couple want to get pregnant, an unexpected pregnancy, it may be a woman who has to go through an abortion or pregnancy, but the decision-making process and resulting strain and expenses affect both parties, and it’s in both of their interests to avoid getting to that point.

There’s a balance, here, of course, between getting men invested in women’s reproductive rights and health issues, and making it clear that men and women are affected in profoundly different ways by access to medical contraceptives, prenatal care, abortion and adoption services, or by being subject to transvaginal ultrasounds or required viewings of ultrasounds. But being affected differently, and respecting women’s agency, isn’t the same thing as not being affected at all. That’s a difficult needle to thread, particularly in a political comedy video. But it’s a distinction that’s worth trying to make when we talk about men’s support for reproductive rights.

This post discusses plot points through the December 10 episode of Homeland.

Judging from some of the things that I’ve heard you say in comments and on Twitter, a lot of you are frustrated to the point of quitting with Homeland. I’m not sure I’m at that point yet—there are too many good performances, and too many strong emotional moments for me to walk away from yet. But increasingly, it seems like a show that’s sacrificing its best potential to plot mechanics that don’t necessarily even make much sense, to the sense that it needs to be exciting, rather than deeply felt, or tender, or psychologically astute. The name of the show should lend itself to the considerations of inner life, our sense of home and what makes it and the threats that come to it from ourselves as much as from our enemies, all things Homeland did beautifully last season. But instead, it’s turning outward in a way that feels less distinct than the show once did.

There are good moments in this episode, but often, they aren’t enough. Carrie’s suspicions of Galvez, telling Quinn “He is a Muslim,” only to find out that he’s forced himself back into the field too soon, would have been a nice character moment for the show, and a good repudiation of the correlation between Islam and terrorism that the show’s dispelled only fitfully. But we don’t know Galvez at all as a person, only as a functionary of Estes’. He’s barely a character. The mole storyline has been so dormant until this episode that I was choosing to believe that the show had wisely decided to abandon it. Instead, the whole moment is a perfunctory bump on Carrie’s path to finding Nazir still hidden in the plant where he held her captive.

The best sequence, by contrast, was one between characters we’ve come to know well. “I don’t want to fight anymore, even for something. I’m tired of fighting,” Jessica told Brody as they returned from confinement, musing on how well they’d done for so long. “Since we were sixteen, and all we wanted was to be together. We were all okay.” Even if Brody had never been turned, the dissolution of their marriage after his return from war would have been a worthy subject for a television show, and it’s the storyline that Homeland has respected most, trusting its initial elements—Jessica’s relationship with Mike, Brody’s sexual brokenness, his affair with Carrie, Brody’s relationship with Dana—to be genuinely moving without ornamentation.. Brody’s admission that “I tried, too, to deal with everything that happened. But that was beyond me. I was fucked the moment I left for Iraq. We all were,” would have worked in that context, which may be why it carried the weight that it did.

And even though we know that’s not the case, the simplicity of the means by which they admit their marriage was over was beautiful even in their pulp surroundings. Brody seems about to tell the full truth to Jessica when he begins, “The time that Carrie came over here to the house, on the day Elizabeth Gaines was shot and Tom Walker died, Carrie said some crazy things to Dana and to you. She said things about what I was going to do.” And there’s a particular sadness to Jessica stopping him, explaining, “Don’t. Not now. For the longest time all I wanted was for you to tell me the truth. I wanted to know it all. I don’t have to know anymore. I just don’t want to…Carrie knows, right? She knows everything about you. She accepts it. You must love her a lot.” Again, if Brody were only a wounded veteran, it still would have been haunting to hear Jessica admit that she can’t handle knowing the fullness of what her husband suffered and who he became, to surrender him to a woman with a greater capacity to absorb his pain.

In a way, this episode made me realize something about Homeland: the show would be more interesting if it were willing to invest as much in exploring the perspective of someone who hates the United States as it has in exploring Carrie’s zeal to defend it, or Brody’s broken embrace of his family even as he takes pleasure in killing the vice president. That’s a risky thing to do, going truly inside the head of a terrorist without endorsing his or her perspective, though Showtime managed to pull it off to a certain extent in Sleeper Cell, aided by a tremendous performance from Oded Fehr. But Homeland has never really seemed interested in doing that with either Abu Nazir or Roya. That’s lead to both machinery that never really made sense or was explained, like Nazir’s work with Hezbollah. And it’s left psychological blank space in the show, as when Nazir gets Carrie alone and chooses to rail against…argula?

Carrie’s confrontation with Roya in this episode carried the same promise and the same lack of fulfillment. Carrie mentions Roya’s family losing land, but we don’t know any of the details, nor how she came to know and be recruited by Nazir, and the scene never gets there. Instead, Roya rattles Carrie, asking her “Have you ever had someone who takes over your life, pulls you in, gets you to do things you would normally never do?…Do you have anyone like that?” knowing full well, of course, that she does, and his name is Nicholas Brody. When Carrie admits that she’s been so influenced, Roya turns the tables on her. “Well. I’ve never been that stupid,” Roya tells her, declaring her independence of choice. “You idiot whore. You think you understand me or what my family have lost and suffered? You think is just some fucking game?” When she switches into Arabic, the only thing we learn about what she’s saying is a clue that makes Carrie realize that Abu Nazir is still in hiding, the show sacrificing a chance at psychological insight for plot mechanics. Carrie may think that she fucked up the interrogation. But Homeland botched the sequence, too, choosing story over its characters.

As any reader of gossip sites knows by now, while exiting a limo on the way to a Les Miserables premiere, a paparazzo snapped a picture of Anne Hathaway’s genitalia and sold it. Hathaway’s always struck me as a classy and smart person. So when Matt Lauer, in an exceptionally gross moment, noted that we’ve “Seen a lot of you lately,” as if Hathaway had deliberately decided to go flashing her nether regions around New York for the laughs and to satisfy an exhibitionist streak, she responded by explaining where the blame for the incident should lie:

It was obviously an unfortunate incident. It kind of made me sad on two accounts. One was that I was very sad that we live in an age when someone takes a picture of another person in a vulnerable moment, and rather than delete it, and do the decent thing, sells it. And I’m sorry that we live in a culture that commodifies the sexuality of unwilling participants.

It’s refreshing to see Hathaway give no quarter to any potential criticism of her. When crotch shots seemed to be a regular occurrence, there was a lot of moralizing about whether starlets should simply adapt to the new, invasive media environment and permanently adopt underwear with a coverage area equivalent to that of tennis shorts. But while that may be wise, it’s depressing, and Hathaway was right to back up the conversation to a place that requires photographers and the people who consume them to consider accepting some responsibility.

Hathaway isn’t the only young actress to react to nude or exposed image of her gone public with aplomb, rather than acting ashamed or trying to reestablish a sense of her virtue. When The Newsroom actress Allison Pill accidentally tweeted a topless picture she intended to Direct Message to her fiance Jay Baruchel earlier this year, she responded to the incident with another tweet: “Yep. That picture happened. Ugh. My tech issues have now reached new heights, apparently.” He didn’t treat it like a big deal either, calling her a “hilarious dork” online.

Crotch shots are an inevitable result of the paparazzi era. Misdirected messages are an inevitable result of the rise of relatively insecure social media as a major means of communication. Hathaway and Pill are smart enough to know that the mistakes and embarrassments that happen are not about them, even if Matt Lauer isn’t wise or self-aware enough not to know that, and to hold back from embarrassing himself.