I’m glad to see Sir Patrick Stewart calling on men to prevent violence against women, particularly given the vicious harassment campaign against feminist commenter Zerlina Maxwell that commenced after she dared to suggest that maybe we should teach rape prevention to men rather than asking women to take all sorts of precautions that might or might not work to guard themselves against assault. In an appearance on Friday:

The 72-year-old British-born actor, best known for his roles in “X-Men” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” served as host for the launch of “Ring the Bell,” a global campaign calling on 1 million men to make 1 million “concrete, actionable promises” to end violence against women.

“Violence against women is the single greatest human rights violation of our generation,” Stewart said.

“This is a call to action—not an action that will make things better in six months’ time or a year’s time,” he continued, “but action that might save someone’s life and someone’s future this afternoon, tonight, tomorrow morning.”

First, I think it’s great to see a genre-fiction icon like Stewart speaking out on violence against women, and speaking from a place of personal experience. That’s something women are often asked to do to personalize women’s issues, but that also gets them dismissed as subjective or overstating problems. Hearing that domestic violence affects men as well is powerful testimony, and takes some of the weight off women to repeat their stories, and to make the argument that such violence may be directed at women, but that doesn’t mean that its effects are confined to people who are physically damaged. To have Stewart define masculinity as solidarity with women strikes me as a useful thing in the geek community, though I think it’s definitely worth talking about concrete action that respects women’s agency, rather than setting up domestic violence survivors as simply another version of the Damsel In Distress.

And I think it’s important to talk about what concrete steps can look like for men who don’t conceive of themselves as violent (or in the conversation Maxwell started, as potential rapists), or who don’t have direct personal contact with domestic violence right now. How do men start and frame effective conversations with other men, whether it’s about the presentation of women’s issues and violence in the real world, or about content they’re consuming together that may be casually violent against women, or may employ violence against women and sexual assault as a lazy way of generating stakes? What are good ways to teach consent-seeking as that push back against pick-up artist techniques and attitudes, some of the only guides to being more socially engaged that some men in the geek community ever encounter (a point made valuably, and pushed back against, by the wonderful Dr. NerdLove, who I had the privilege to meet up with here in Austin)? Being committed to not being personally violent against women in a theoretical way is a wonderful thing, and one I’m glad to see men embrace, but it’s the kind of mentality that can also make men think that they’re the kind of people who could never possibly be violent towards women, which contributes to the inability to see one’s own bad acts. Trying to reduce a culture of violence, and to promote the idea that violence against women ought to be something that makes men feel uncomfortable for their own sakes, is something rather different.

This post discusses plot points from the fourth season of Justified. Read at your own caution if you aren’t caught up.

As I’ve watched Justified over the past several weeks, I’ve been struck by a sense of how crowded the show has become. It sometimes seems as if everyone is descending on Harlan County, which is simultaneously sprouting new layers of law enforcement, a Native American community, and teenage miscreants. But last night it struck me why I haven’t loved this season of the show, even as I’ve loved the evolution of Boyd and Ava’s relationship this year. Much of what makes Justified special is its attention to its setting, and everything the show’s been adding lately has made Harlan more obscure and less specific.

The story of Drew Thompson was supposed to be a story about the arrival of the serious hard drug trade in Harlan. But instead, it’s ended up being about people in Harlan responding to, and in Boyd’s case, manipulating, Theo Tonin, the Detroit crime boss who was pulled into the show last season by the presence of Robert Quarles. The problem with the Tonin storyline though is that it doesn’t actually tell us all that much about Harlan or the people who live there. Theo, at least so far, comes across as a fairly generic mercurial gangster who indulges his son and has a henchman who wanted his fatherly approval. He doesn’t represent Detroit in nearly the same way Boyd or Yorkie-owning, Dixie Mafia-running Wynn Duffy tell us about Harlan by letting us see a very particular vision of crime in Harlan.

And the time spent on Thompson this season has ended up taking away from any number of other, more local, and more interesting subplots. I was terribly disappointed to see the initial plot by Harlan’s elite to hire Boyd to blow a hole in a slurry pond so they could claim EPA clean-up funds to address the resulting disaster turn into a cheap assassination plot. That’s a fascinatingly diabolical idea rooted in real dangers—coal slurry threatened the Tuscaloosa water supply in 2011—and it would have provided both fascinating commentary on a long-running American industry and a throughline to Boyd’s experiences as a coal miner, first as a teenager with Raylan, and in season two.

The slurry plot could have made physically manifest the ways in which coal mining has had a morally poisonous influence on Harlan. Coal has helped economically stratify the county, something that became very clear when Boyd and Ava went house-hunting in Clover Hill, the neighborhood where Ava’s mother worked as a cleaning lady when Ava was a child—”They locked up their jewelry whenever she came over,” Ava says, a little sadly. “Are you sure I can’t show you something a little further down the hill? There are some lovely starter homes down there. Beautiful views. Quaint,” their realtor told them, trying to shoo the couple out of the neighborhood that might by polluted by the implications of their all-cash purchase and unpolished diction. “You and your fiancee might want to think about the commute..I ask because the banks are getting very stringent with applications.” It’s not that no show or movie has ever focused on poor or unwanted people moving into a rich—or white—neighborhood before. But Harlan’s class dynamics are specific, and, just as Boyd and Ava have discussed, the role of Crowders in Harlan is specific, persisting as they suspect from one generation into the next, requiring radical action, or at least a Dairy Queen franchise, to change.
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The case of Oscar Pistorius, the Olympic runner who has been charged with the shooting murder of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, has shone a dispiriting light on everything from the horrendous rates of violence against women in South Africa to the media handling of Pistorius, a famous athlete, and Steenkamp, who was a model. But while this is a decidedly minor concern, I’ve found myself thinking about the gap between Pistorius’ legend and what appears to have been the reality of his domestic life alongside the decision by the executive board of the International Olympic Committee to recommend that wrestling be dropped from the games starting in 2020.

The official declaration that one of the foundational sports of the Olympic games doesn’t have enough interest from the public to justify its continued inclusion in the competition, and an accusation of murder against an athlete who transcended the loss of his legs to compete against the best runners without disabilities in the world, may not seem to have much in common. But collectively, they’re an illustration of the financial and commercial stake has in burnishing the reputation of someone like Pistorius.

Because the Olympics—and NBC, which owns the broadcast rights to the games in the United States—can’t trust that extremely large audiences follow many of the sports involved, and thus that they’ll develop rooting interests on the merits, they need something else to pull those viewers in, to help them decide which competitors they’ll back if there are multiple candidates on the American national team, and to help them identify which athletes they’ll root for if no Americans are available. Inspirational stories are the primary mechanism of doing this, and to a certain extent, the main product NBC is actually selling. It may be frustrating to some viewers that life stories and interviews with athletes take up so much broadcast time, and make it harder to broadcast competitions live. But without them, it’s hard to imagine that the ratings of the games would be so high, and thus so financially valuable.

The Olympics and its broadcast partners have a direct financial interest in Oscar Pistorius being an extraordinary young man who transcended the loss of his legs below the knee, rather than someone who had had the police visit his house on multiple occasions because of “domestic incidents.” They have an investment in the idea that competitive ice skaters are nice little girls, rather than women with ex-husbands who solicit assaults on their competitors—Olympic athletes have financial interests, rather than simply national honor, at stake, too. Sometimes those interests mean that the Olympics get behind a useful story, championing someone like Gabby Douglas, and as a result, highlighting the whiteness of that sport, and bringing in new audiences for it. And sometimes it means obscuring what it means to live in some place like South Africa, and the extent to which overcoming some of the limitations his disability placed on him doesn’t mean that Pistorius was somehow exempt from participating in or becoming a victim of the violence, particularly the violence against women, that plague South Africa.

The Olympics were initially supposed to bring the world’s countries together. But it’s one thing to get the nations to set their differences aside and observe a truce, and another to use uniformly cheerful stories about adversity overcome to paper over the differences in where athletes come from, and even their own varied humanity. That anyone’s surprised that an Olympic athlete could end up charged in a domestic violence murder is a testament to the success NBC does in creating a uniform product, and to how deeply and easily we buy into it, over and over again.