This post contains spoilers through the February 14 episode of Justified.

Despite the fact that Dewey spent much of this episode running around convinced that he’d lost his kidneys and Raylan shot a woman—”I can’t believe you shot me,” she protested before dying. “I can’t believe so either,” a drug-befuddled Raylan told her—it struck me as a warm and loving episode of the show, as close as Justified will ever get to doing a Valentine’s Day-themed episode.

First, let’s take Raylan and Winona. He’s coming home late to her, but he’s developed, if not a feminist consciousness about how little work he’s doing to get ready for their new life, a conscience about it. “Seriously. You’re seven weeks pregnant. Ready to move. I haven’t done anything to line up a place for us. I’m just out there running and gunning,” he castigates himself. I’m almost sorry Winona lets him off the hook, telling him, “Alright, you’ve convinced me. I’m angry, but I’m still not going to fight with you. I’m done thinking that I could change you. And I’m done trying to convince myself that I could ever feel about anyone the way I feel about you.” But it’s interesting to see Raylan seriously consider changing his life on his own, and not because, as Art suggested, his woman is just telling him that he should. Fatherhood is a serious thing, and I’m glad the show respects Raylan, and us, enough to show him doing some independent thinking on the subject.

Then, there’s Raylan relationship with Dewey, which ends up being critical to finding the man who cut him up. Dewey’s misadventure is as tragicomic an exploration of the changing mechanisms of American commerce as anything I’ve ever seen on television. Who knew the rise of credit cards could put such a hit on small-timers? “I don’t have time for that! I need cash! Where do people use cash?” he wails to the appliance store salesman, before complaining to a stripper that “Don’t tell me guys pay you by credit card? I saw some girl on television who said she could make $3,000 a night on the pole. Given she’s a nine and you’re a six if I’m feeling generous, but I figured you’d be good for a grand or so!” “It’s 10 o’clock in the morning,” one of the girls points out. Dewey reminds me of the characters on Raising Hope, to a certain extent: he’s not very smart, and he does some bad things, but he’s not unworthy of our affection, or Raylan’s. I thought the single line by the cop that “He’s your fugitive. Knock yourself out,” was a lovely summation of the reasons Raylan is both successful and entangled here in Harlan.

And speaking of entanglements, gosh do we have a lot of them coming at us. First, it’s clear that Limehouse kept Mags’ money—and it’s less clear that he can keep his people on lockdown. “The only way I can see him finding out from this end is if someone were to tell him,” he declares of Dickie Bennett. “I’ll stop him. Besides, I heard they fixing to send him back to Trambell.” Then, Quarles first attempt at forging an alliance with Boyd gets him a lecture about Carpetbaggers’ history in Harlan, which is not uniformly positive. But it’s hard to imagine he’ll leave satisfied with a bourbon.

Novelist Jim C. Hines writes, among other things, fantasy interpretations of fairy tale princess stories. And when his readers started asking questions about the way women are posed on the covers of his — and other — novels, he did something rather extraordinary. He didn’t just illustrate men in similar poses. He tried to hold them himself, and found that they didn’t just ludicrous. They were painful. I’m not going to include an image here because you really should click through, look at all of them, and read about the specific discomfort he experienced in each one.

Now, obviously covers are usually pictures of characters in action, rather than posing for formal portraits. So it’s not as if these characters are forced to stay in these positions for long periods of time. But if even getting into them requires the body to move in illogical and uncomfortable ways, that says a handful about the cost, and lack of naturalness of producing images that are supposed to be coded as sexy. If images like these are supposed to be what we find attractive, then maybe what we find attractive isn’t really human.

Parks and Recreation comes back tonight*, and to celebrate, I’ve got something special! I talked to Nick Offerman at the NBC party about Ron Swanson, feminism, libertarianism, and an upcoming episode of the show he wrote that happens to deal with all those gender issues.

There’s an ongoing conversation about whether manliness is on the run in American pop culture, and I feel like I always end up holding Ron as proof it’s not true. How do you think he fits into current trends in masculinity on television?

Well, I also have felt a dearth in manliness over the years that I’ve been in the business. Men, action heroes have shaved chests now. There’s been a real sort of denuding of the man’s man. And I feel like maybe that’s why people are responding well to Ron because he’s the plumber that we all know and love. The guy who goes back one too many times at Thanksgiving to load up his plate.

But Ron also likes strong women. Do you think the character suggests that there’s no contradiction between being masculinity and feminism?

Well, yeah. There’s an episode coming up that I actually wrote that kind of touches on that. With modern feminism, we’re sort of seeing the backlash of feminism where all these powerful women are in charge of things and they’re saying, “Oh wait a second, these emasculated guys are not nearly as handy as we were at running a household, so now I’ve got to take care of the kids and be an executive.” And you know, I think Ron, also speaks to that issue because he despises weak women in the exact same way he despises weak men.

So the show’s calling for a gender truce.

Absolutely. The show and Ron, I think, declare that everyone should be allowed to just do their thing and we can all get along and get kissed once in a while.

I live and work in Washington, and I have libertarian friends so I love seeing a libertarian represented on television. Where do you think Ron fits in to the political spectrum?

Well, it’s a good question. I think Ron is a little too cartoony to fit into the real political spectrum. There’s way too much gray area in any political affiliation in modern America. And I think if Ron were really a living, breathing American, he wouldn’t have any time for American politics. He’d probably end up in a cabin in Montana with his guns and just wanting to be left alone, and not wanting to hear about, not wanting to be bothered to have to think about the political race every four years.

But Ron’s libertarianism also seems undercut by Leslie’s competence and enthusiasm. Do you think Americans would be more enthusiastic about government if they saw more out of it?

I suppose. I think the message is that, and it’s one that we could all really use, that being a good neighbor should come before your politics. No matter how you feel about fiscal issues, you should still be willing to lend a hand so we can all exist in a community and have a happy life.

*My recap will be up tomorrow, though a bit late: I’m seeing Veep and Game Change tonight, so I’ll have to catch the episode after the HBO panels in the morning.

Thanks to Amanda for writing the first installment of what makes the great women of the last 10 years of television great, and what we can learn from them for the future.

By Amanda Marcotte

When I first got into “Community”, I had serious misgivings about the Britta Perry as a character. There’s so few lefty feminist characters on TV to begin with, and it initially seemed that they were going to ride the worst stereotypes about feminists: that they’re shrill, stupid, and humorless. It is true that the other characters do treat her that way, calling her “the worst” at every opportunity. But it’s become clear that after a shaky start, Britta has emerged as possibly one of the most unique and interesting characters on TV, an awkward but sweet woman who came to terms with her social rejection a long time ago, and now happy to let the constant insults aimed at her roll off her back.

Sady Doyle has already sung the praises of Britta, so I’d be remiss in not quoting her:

I….. realized that this goofy sitcom with zombies and Claymation episodes actually had the most fully rounded, human feminist character — principled and shallow, pure of heart and poor of judgment, unrepentant hipster and full-on dork, tough and vulnerable, privileged and struggling, and (what really set her apart from the Lemons and Knopes) in possession of an active, casual sex life, which she controlled — that I’d seen on network TV.

The fact that, but for an ill-advised episode where she professes her love to the uninterested Jeff (which the show quickly retconned by having her take it all back), Britta has lots of sex with different men and, in a move that’s quite unusual for TV, she’s never punished for it. On the contrary, those who judge her for it look like prigs and jerks.

Once I realized that, I began to see how the show subtly uses people’s casual cruelty to Britta to say more about them than her. Because she’s a feminist with a self-righteous bent, the other characters dismiss everything she has to say out of hand, without any regard to whether she’s right or wrong, and on those occasions when she does something stupid or awkward, they pounce in order to reinforce their prejudices against her. Despite the fact that her friends believe she’s wrong no matter what she does, Britta admirably doesn’t let people’s low opinions get to her. (Feminist bloggers can attest that this is a valuable, hard-earned skill.) Jeff Winger particularly tries to put her in her place all the time, and she simply shrugs it off, giving him a pitying look for not seeing what a prick he’s being. While there are plenty of scenes in the show where Britta embarrasses herself with her awkwardness, as often as not plots turn on situations where a character blows Britta off when she offers insight, only to find later that she was right all along, much to their chagrin. See: Jeff ignoring her warnings that he has daddy issues, leading him to escalate an already bad situation with Pierce. Or when Troy and Abed forbid Britta from speaking ill of their friends, which gets them into a friendship with a genocidal maniac, despite Britta’s hints about his character.

The essence of Britta came out most clearly in the season three episode “Remedial Chaos Theory”. It’s one of the weirder episodes in an already weird show, exploring seven alternate timelines resulting from a different member of the study group going to pick up pizza. In the final timeline, Jeff gets the pizza, which gives Britta a chance to sing along loudly to “Roxanne” by the Police without him shushing her. The result is that it’s the happiest of all the timelines, with all the characters gleefully dancing like dorks. In the constant power struggle between Jeff and Britta, the show’s writers clearly side with Britta and with embracing yourself as you are, warts and all.

I wouldn’t normally do this, but this post is spoileriffic for The Magician King in a way that reveals the essential conflict of the book if you haven’t read it. So ABANDON ALL HOPE OF STAYING SPOILER-FREE YE WHO ENTER HERE.

I want to come back to our conversations about class in The Magicians and The Magician King. But I wanted to discuss something else first. Namely, the way the violent sexual assault Julia experiences at the hands of a god she and her friends summoned by accident, and the sexual degradation she suffers in the course of her magical self-education acts as the engine of Quentin’s moral awakening.

I actually think that one scene in the novel before the ritual to summon the god does a nice job of separating out genuine sexual desire from sexual performance that’s expected of you. We know that in the course of her desperate quest for magical knowledge, Julia’s resorted to sex repeatedly if asking nicely won’t do, and that her main relationship with one of the first hedge witches she meets is cemented more by need than by genuine desire. So it’s genuinely moving when Julia finally sleeps with one of her friends from the chatroom for depressed geniuses that he’s helped her hold it together and finds out that sex can be physically and emotionally rewarding, that it opens her up to confidences from her partner, a greater understanding of him and herself: “She didn’t think she’d ever done it just because she wanted to before. It felt good. No, it felt fantastic. This was the way it was supposed to work…she felt pleasantly fleshly. She was mind and body both, for once.” It’s a forceful assertion of the idea that even if you lose your sexual way, that you can find it again, that pleasure is not rendered forever inaccessible by trauma.

Which makes it frustrating when the book takes back that premise. Granted, getting raped by a deity does seem like it would be of a different magnitude, and the scene of Julia’s rape (which for my money, is more detailed and disturbing than anything that happens in A Song of Ice and Fire) is sensitively, if disturbingly, observed — apologies for the very long blockquote:
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In two delightful pieces of news, Kathryn Hahn is rebounding from the cancellation of Free Agents by signing up to star as Leslie’s City Council opponent on Parks and Recreation, and Louis C.K. is will reprise his role as Leslie’s ex-boyfriend Sergeant Dave Sanderson. These strike me as good developments in this slightly sentimental season for two reasons.

First, Leslie deserves a real race. One of the joys of Parks and Recreation is Leslie’s hyper-competence, but it’s become a little bit too effortless as she’s conquered everything from the Pit to Joan’s Gotcha Dancers. It’s time for Leslie to stretch, and to stretch over something other than a boy. Running for office is the dream of her life, and it should be a heroic quest, not just another one-off episode. And after avoiding the mechanics of the campaign, I’m excited to see the mechanics of the race kick into play, to see Chris write speeches for Leslie in a West Wing nod, to see Tom to find his purpose not as an entertainment mogul but as a different kind of public servant. And I want to see Leslie face a realistic obstacle, rather than an entirely ridiculous one.

Second, I think it’ll be intriguing to see Leslie at least temporarily reunited with a boyfriend who gave her the option of coming with him when she moved, but who left anyway when she said no. Is this whole season going to be a refutation of the idea that you have to make tough choices in order to achieve your dreams? Or will Dave be a counterpoint, someone who looks back on Leslie fondly but is certain in his decision?

Richard Florida has been getting a lot of attention for a breakdown that illustrates how big the gender pay gap is for workers across all sectors of the creative class: in all of those professions, men make $82,009 on average compared to the $48,077 women pull in. And the situation’s not much better in the arts. In the arts, design, media, entertainment, and sports, 47.5 percent are workers and 52.6 percent are men. And women in those fields make an average of $35,141 each year, compared to men who make an average of $50,382 — women earn 69 percent of what their male counterparts make. It’s true that some of this could be explained by a difference in the amount of work they’re putting in: women in arts, design, media, entertainment, and sports work an average of 34.4 hours per week, while men work an average of 39 hours per week. But women in the field also have slightly more education than their male counterparts, an average of 14.7 years to men’s 14.5. The rest of that adjusted-for-working-hours $9,400 disparity is coming from some place other than working mothers. And it’s a pretty sad distinction that it’s the second-smallest adjusted pay gap in all the fields Florida and his collaborators surveyed.

I’ve been particularly struck in the past couple of days by two great pieces, one by S.E. Smith on Tiger Beatdown and one by Courtney Martin in the Nation, about the challenges of doing work in the feminist blogosphere. It’s not so much the testaments to the truly evil things people write to and about women on the Internet, though I agree with S.E. that it cannot be reaffirmed enough: if you’re not the person who is being threatened, the extent of the awfulness can take time to sink in. But both pieces brought up different aspects of a similar problem: how costly infrastructure is, and how difficult it can be to maintain.

S.E. writes:

This is something else people don’t talk about, very often; the fact of the matter is that if you run a feminist or social justice site, you will be hacked. Probably on multiple occasions, especially if you start to grow a large audience. Some of these hackings are just your usual cases of vandalism, people testing servers to see if they can do it, not with any specific malice directed at you. Others are more deliberate, more calculated, and they come with taunting and abuse.

Many feminist sites stay on services like Blogspot because of the higher security they may offer; people who host their own sites do so in awareness that if they aren’t very knowledgeable about technology, they need someone who is for when they get hacked, and it’s not if, but when. Readers often don’t notice because it flashes by, or it causes problems with the backend, the site management, not the front end. Sometimes they do, when hackers inject malicious code that changes the appearance of the front page, or attempts to load malware on the computers of visitors, or just takes the site down altogether, sometimes with a message making it clear that it’s personal.

And Courtney explains the cost, and what it means for expansion:

Like Feministing, Racialicious, a destination for online readers interested in racial justice, spends its revenue—which comes from intermittent fundraising drives and limited ads—on tech and hosting fees and other basic maintenance. “Strains have been starting to show and most of them are financial in nature,” explains editor Latoya Peterson. “Simply put, a good blog takes a lot of time. It’s really easy to spend so much time on Racialicious and then realize you haven’t pulled in any paid work for that week, so rent is going to be rough next month. A lot of people get so burned out in the process of producing, creating and engaging, that the emotional tolls are super high.” Despite running a popular and well-respected site that draws about a quarter of a million readers per month, Peterson loses money every year as she doesn’t get paid and is, in her words, “on the hook” for the expenses…

Currently, most online feminist organizations are structured as nonprofits—obliging them to fundraise from private donors and foundations that still generally don’t understand the ways in which the internet are being used to make social change. Emily May, founder and director of Hollaback, which is building an international movement against street harassment using mobile technology, online advocacy and on-the-ground organizing, says, “We’ve had to hustle really hard for every dollar, in part because most foundations just don’t have a portfolio that we can fit into.” Their budget last year was $81,256 cash and $114,113 in in-kind services, according to May, and most of it came from unusual sources, like the Instructional Telecommunications Foundation and an older male donor who admitted to “hating the internet,” but loved the idea of women in solidarity, fighting back against violence in public spaces….

Tiger Beatdown’s Sady Doyle solicited donations from readers when she was in danger of losing her apartment. As Doyle has made a name for herself with smart, outspoken feminist analysis, the “real pay,” as she puts it, has come from freelance writing and speaking opportunities. Today, she pays contributors to Tiger Beatdown a modest stipend out of her own pocket, but recognizes the need for more systemic support: “If specifically feminist media is going to be marginalized by media as a whole (and it really has been), we have an obligation as a community to do what we can to ensure that there are spaces where it is provided, and that the role of the public intellectual is financially supported outside of the academy.”

I have to admit, I’m thankful every day that I work at an institution that’s big enough to hire a ninja-like webtech team that makes sure we’re up and running smoothly (almost) every day, though of course code pushes do wonky things occasionally. But not every blog is going to want to become part of a larger institutional structure, and not every blog can. And not every blog and not every blogger can wait for foundations to make cultural changes and recognize the importance of Internet publishing. I wonder if it might make sense to try to jump-start an independent fund specifically to provide infrastructure support to the progressive, and specifically feminist blogosphere to handle some server costs and to provide free or low-cost hacking response and tech support (and open-source resources for beginners on both topics), and freeing up folks to raise money they can spend paying contributors and expanding the range of their content. I’d kick in a recurring contribution for something like that. And given the success of something like Womanthology’s fundraising campaign, I think and hope others would, too.

Amanda Seyfried has apparently officially taken the role of Linda Lovelace in a biopic of the Deep Throat star that’s been in development for a long time and been through multiple recastings. I’ll be curious to hear what folks who work in or closer to the industry think of the casting and the project, but I’ve always found Lovelace fascinating — she was, as Daphne Merkin pointed out in her obituary, at the crux of every major debate about pornography since she helped the genre go mainstream, or close enough to it, in Deep Throat, and through her conversion and years as an anti-port crusader, and her withdrawal from a feminist movement she felt used her and into an accommodation with her past — in other words, sort of where society as a whole is today. Given the breathless and panicky debates we have about pornography, it’s worth a serious and considered look at that history in its context. The People vs. Larry Flynt is a great movie, but it’s largely from a free-speech perspective, which isn’t the only one worth considering here.

I also really like Seyfried, who’s very good at playing ingenues with more going on beneath the surface than she lets on, whether in Mean Girls or Big Love. I don’t think In Time gave her very much to do, but it proves she can put on a bit more of an edge. I hope the script is enough to do the issue and the actress justice, and to make clear the distinction between the idea that doing porn is inherently oppressive and the idea that forcing people into porn and taking their compensation from them is oppressive.

This post contains spoilers through “Day 2″ of Neal Stephenson’s Reamde. Feel free to spoil beyond that, but please label comments as such. For next week, lets read “Day 3″ and “Day 4.”

One of the things that I like best about this book, which, though I think so far is definitely not Stephenson’s best or most audacious, and in fact, really feels like a parody of Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum (which is a really fun, useful thing to do, but not what I’d expected), I’m enjoying in a propulsive kind of way, is how it handles relationships between the genders. It’s not so much that they’re realistic, or even aggressively subversive. But I really appreciate — even though it may be as much a fantasy for me as the Frat Pack movies are for men — that the main object of a great deal of chivalry is a nerdy Eritrean refugee who knows more about video games that her ex-boyfriend and builds realistic Eritrean deserts in a fictional world.

First, there’s Sokolov’s entrance, which I’ll get back to in a minute and from his perspective:

Over Zula, he made a bit of a fuss, because he was that kind of guy. It didn’t matter why he was here, what sort of business he had come to transact. Women just had to be treated in an altogether different way from men; the presence of a single woman in the room changed everything. He kissed her hand. He apologized for the trouble. He exclaimed over her beauty. He insisted that she make herself comfortable. He inquired, several times, whether the temperature in the room was not too chilly for a “beautiful African” and whether he might send one of his minions out to fetch her some hot coffee. All of this with meaningful glances at Peter, whose manners came off quite poorly by comparison.

This is all sort of funny and horrible and slightly off as well as being charming, because Sokolov is in the midst of an operation that is murdering someone Zula’s been working with, calling her a “beautiful African” is kind of creepy and reductionist, and part of this chivalry ends up being a ploy to drug Zula and put her on a private jet bound for China. But at the same time, there’s something genuine to it, something that’s not exclusive to Sokolov. We already know that Richard has gone to extreme lengths to keep Zula protected. Peter’s gotten them into this horrible mess because he wants to hang on Zula. Sokolov brings her flowers along with the coffee, which is totally unnecessary. And then, they’re joined by a hunky but vulnerable Hungarian who, when he meets Zula, who goes in for a handshake, “bent forward and kissed it, not in an arch way, but as if hand kissing were a wholly routine procedure for him.”
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