As I wrote after seeing the movie at SXSW, Cabin in the Woods, I wrote that the movie is a fantastic extension of Joss Whedon’s long-running interests in the bureaucracy of evil and the beauty of the monstrous. The work that Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford are given to do as the control room operators of the Apocalypse, the torture pornographers who happen to be humanity’s saviors, is just a delightful, funny, sensitive use of both men. And the gorgeousness of Whedon and Goddard’s monsters is something to behold—I found myself unexpectedly moved by the man with the gears embedded in his skull and the ballerina dentata that Dana and Marty encounter in the elevator.

But I was disappointed by one element of the movie, which felt to me like a bit of a regression from Buffy the Vampire Slayer: the treatment of Jules, the blonde sexpot who is the first of the characters to get killed by the murderous hillbillies the friends unwittingly unleashed in the basement. Whedon told Vulture that he sees Jules’ character as an attempt to answer some of the same questions as Buffy was:

Cabin isn’t overtly a feminist work necessarily, but it is built on the same question that built Buffy the Vampire Slayer: If you have a blonde who is perfectly nice and funny, why are you intent on her coming to a bad end? What is the purpose of the final girl, as she’s called? All these people, all the characters behave a certain way, and there is a progression of what they have to do, to allow themselves to be written off as sex fiends or druggies or bullies or complete idiots in the face of true danger, and you just don’t get in the way of that. It’s about being stereotypes versus fleshed-out people. There was never a question — the nudity had to happen, because the movie is about objectification and identification and that’s what horror is about. Drew and I were not unhappy if the hot blonde took off her shirt — hey, we thought it was a good decision! — but mixing titillation and mutilation started to become a very weird confluence. It’s not the same kind of pleasure for us. Those are two separate things. But that’s the foundation of what we knew was part of the film, and we were the most timid filmmakers ever about it.

But Jules’ character is the one that’s least-played with, the least-subverted, and the one we see suffer the longest. We learn that Dana isn’t really a virgin—she’s just the best the people orchestrating the sacrifice have to work with. Curt, the giant jock, turns out to be a pre-med smarty. Stoner Marty’s protected from the malign influences of the people manipulating them because the pot he’s smoking ends up inoculating him to the pheromones they’re pumping into the cabin, and he’s the one who figures out how to get them into the complex. (Holden doesn’t get much of a fair shake either, and it’s too bad that both of the characters of color in the movie are somewhat quiet and detached). But we don’t get a clear debunking of whatever stereotypes we’re supposed to have about Jules. Clearly, she’s being influenced by the chemicals, the heightened moonlight. But we don’t know what her base behavior is like, whether she and Curt were already sleeping together (though I assumed so) before the trip, why her actions here are surprising—when we meet her, after all, she’s bugging Dana to be less of a prude.

I asked Whedon about this at South By Southwest, where he seemed kind of irritated by the question, telling me that “I don’t think Jules comes off as dumb…We did want to be making that movie at the same time that we were talking about that movie and making images that were sexual and sometimes exploitive.” (After that line drew a lot of applause, he noted “I don’t think I’ve ever been applauded for exploitation before.”) I agree with Whedon that those things aren’t incompatible. And a movie is always going to offer less time to develop its characters and debunk simple tropes than a television show us. But I was sorry there wasn’t a little more detail in there, something that would have heightened the sense that even if, in the balance, the world isn’t worth saving, there’s some real pain in the loss. If anything, Cabin in the Woods feels like it’s coming from Willow before Xander talks her down at the end of Buffy season six, rather than Buffy herself.

You all, by this point, know that I love the show—it’s all over the top of this blog. But I know not all of you did. Twitterer Rhiannan Root told me she expected “more attitude from the lead. She put up with a lot of BS in the pilot. I expected her to have more respect for herself.” MsCareerGirl said that she “was really disappointed and kinda grossed out by the characters.” I don’t think those reactions are wrong—how much you like Girls entirely depends on how much tolerance you have for the deep well of humor that can be found in grating and pathetic behavior, and how much you enjoy recognizing that in yourself (the answer for me is a whole bunch). But I do think they say something interesting about male and female anti-heroes, and why we have a bunch of the former and almost none of the latter.

The male anti-heroes that we have tend to employ what we understand to be traditionally male traits, just in excess. Walter White’s first step down the road to perdition comes out of a sense that his family will have no means of supporting themselves after he’s gone (an interesting, inherently arrogant assumption that the show’s never convincingly examined, turning Skyler’s attempt at running a business into black comedy). Tony Soprano is excessively decisive. Seth Bullock is preoccupied with honor and justice and defending both. Stringer Bell is engaged in the quitoxic project of turning a drug gang into a legitimate business. All of these are active rather than passive traits, and the characters tend to err when they take action rather than when they delay it.

Hannah Hovarth, by contrast, is an anti-heroine precisely because she doesn’t act, and when she steps, wrong-foots herself dramatically. She puts up with absolutely ridiculous treatment from Adam, who she’s sleeping with but is definitely not her boyfriend. When her boss at the publishing house where she interns dismisses her smugly, she has precisely no response for anything he’s saying (even though she could probably put the Labor Department on his ass). She can confront her parents only when she’s high, and then not with anything close to efficacy.

Passivity, and dependence are all traits that we find humiliating, no matter the proportions they come in, while decisiveness, activity, and standing on principal are all traits we have positive associations with, and so we’re attracted to the people who exhibit them, even when they’re wildly misapplied. The former set of traits is coded as female, the latter as masculine. It’s one thing to respond to a female anti-heroine who is defined as such by her masculinized behavior, whether it’s Sarah Linden’s single-minded focus on her career and bad mothering in pursuit thereof, or Cersei Lannister’s impressive cruelty. Whether a mass audience is ready to embrace a female anti-hero whose anti-heroicness is defined by an overabundence of negatively-coded feminine traits is another question entirely. And it suggests that maybe we’d be better off if we found Tony Soprano’s murderousness less endearing as well.

1. It’s hilarious: “The totem of chat. The lowest, that would be Facebook, followed by Gchat, then texting, then email, then phone. Face to face would be ideal, but it’s not of this time.” “I wouldn’t take shit from my parents. They’re buffoons. But my grandma gives me $800 a month…I supplement. But it gives me the freedom to not have to be anyone’s slave. You should never have to be anyone’s fucking slave. Except mine.” “I was live-in educator to these three children, and they all sang, and their father was a brilliant pacifist thinker.” These three lines from the pilot aren’t even close to the funniest things the characters say in that half-hour alone. And it gets funnier from there.

2. It’s delightfully progressive about sex and sexual health: Girls is one of the only shows on television where people talk about sexual health and reproductive rights like actual people in real life do. “What was she going to do? Have a baby and take it to her babysitting job? That’s not realistic,” Dunham’s character Hannah says when her friend Jessa (Jemima Kirke) gets pregnant and decides to have an abortion. In a delightful parody of oversoberness about reproductive choice, Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) tells Jessa, who is smoking a joint the night before her procedure, “What you’re going through is like really, really hard for any young woman, and it totally makes sense that you would want to escape through drug use. But you have to know, you’re not just my cousin. you’re my friend. And I could not be more proud of you for getting this abortion.” When Hannah heads in for an STD test and one of her friends makes fun of her obsessive fear of AIDS, Hannah grumbles “I have obsessive fear of HIV that turns into AIDS. I’m not a fool.” And Dunham told me that she worked extremely hard to make sure a subplot in which her character is diagnosed with HPV and tries to find out how she could have gotten it medically accurate. That accuracy and frankness goes hand-in-hand with well-developed plots and very funny dialogue.

3. Lena Dunham is basically the female Louis C.K.: Emily Nussbaum made the comparison explicit in her New York Magazine cover story—and reports that Dunham once dressed up as C.K. for Halloween. The comparison is apt: whether it’s Dunham’s bodily frankness, the relentless and hilarious chronicle of failure and self-criticism, or even masturbation, Lena Dunham is a younger, more hopeful version of Louis C.K.

4. It’s one of the only shows on television where the characters have realistic wardrobes and apartments: Dunham turned down the larger sets HBO offered her to make it easier for the cameras and crew to get around in favor of making sure her characters would live in reasonably-sized apartments—she told me of New Girl, “I love that show, by the way, but every week there’s a new room I didn’t know was there! It’s like that real estate dream you have in New York, where it’s like over there! Over there! Over there! It’s really wild, that New Girl apartment.” And she fit her costumes with Spanx on, but didn’t wear them she was shooting so Hannah’s clothes would look like they didn’t fit, a symptom both of her lack of money and of the way the character hasn’t quite settled into her body.

5. The friendships are wonderful: Rebecca Traister expounds on this theme at length in Salon, reveling in the way that Girls shows that friends can be your true partners. That larger point aside, it’s just fun to see the characters go through what seem like well-worn conversational paces—”Sex from behind is degrading. point blank. You deserve someone who wants to look in your beautiful face, ladies,” Shoshanna reads from an advice book, only to have Jessa snap at her “What if I want to focus on something else?”—curl up in each other’s beds, rock out to Robyn. Speaking of which…

6. The show’s sense of pop culture is spot-on: This may seem like a little thing. But Girls does a tremendous job of actually populating the show with references, conversations, and music playing in rooms that the characters would actually watch and listen to. Whether it’s Robyn, or Kelly Clarkson, or a game show hosted by Jerry Springer called Baggage, in which people reveal their worst secrets (Hannah says of hers: “My littlest baggage is probably that I am unfit for any and all paying jobs. My medium baggage is that I bought four cupcakes and ate one in your bathroom just now. And my biggest baggage would be my HPV.”) Culture is a way we communicate with each other, and find the people we like. That Girls gets this right is just another indicator of its commitment to creating scenarios that are wonderfully emotionally true.

These “anti-gender” women have it in for anyone who embraces her femininity, maternal instincts and capacity to nurture as their highest priority — postponing or passing up other laudable opportunities to work at, say, a law firm or as a marketing executive.  They despise the notion that some women may indeed be drawn — instinctively and happily — toward creating special and loving environments in which to raise their children, while spending all their available time sustaining and enriching those environments and those children.

They despise the parts of themselves that may be drawn to such roles, as well.  That’s why women like Hilary Rosen make such outlandish statements, to begin with.  They’re essentially talking to themselves — albeit, with the rest of the world forced to listen — trying to reassure themselves that their own choices in life weren’t only equally as good as those of other women, but better. Far, far better. They feel like their choices are better because they have thrown off the shackles of roles that were once “expected” of them, leaving them not only freer than, but superior to, those women who don’t feel enslaved at home, but feel fulfilled at home.

Unsurprisingly, Ablow assumes that gender norms are good and haven’t been used to discriminate against women for almost all of humanity. Perhaps he’d like to roll back all of the freedoms women have fought for over the past century so they can fully embrace their “maternal instincts” with nothing to distract them from what he seems to see as their true calling. Ablow, of course, includes a jab at Rosen for being a lesbian, suggesting she’s only capable of supporting “alternative lifestyles.”

As Carlos Maza points out at Equality Matters, Ablow’s column includes all his usual pop-psychology tropes:

• Violating professional ethics standards by diagnosing a public figure without permission or a formal examination
• Peddling unscientific and sexist stereotypes about how men and women are supposed to behave
• Using any excuse to take an unprovoked potshot at the Obama administration

But all of that aside, Ablow accidentally concedes that the intention of Rosen’s comments was exactly right, suggesting that many of his clients “wouldn’t be going to work for very long if their spouses made millions as investors (as Mitt Romney has done).” If Ann Romney really didn’t go to work, choosing instead to “allow her husband to go out and make the money to support all of them,” why doesn’t Ablow simply agree with Rosen?

The members of Ron’s news team are posturing, peacocking, competitive, wannabe gentlemanly idiots even before Veronica Corningstone, a sexy, smart female anchor transfers in to join their team as part of the rising tide of women’s lib:

Once she arrives, the team reacts with sheer panic. Has there been a better encapsulation of uninformed, sexist ranting in terror at the loss of privilege than Brick Tamland hollering “I don’t know what we’re talking about!” and “Loud noises!” in the movies since?

These guys know absolutely nothing about women.

And the great joy of the movie is that, by its end, it’s about feminism’s victory. The women at the station where Ron and his team work stand up for themselves and demand better treatment. Veronica proves herself as a smart, competent reporter and anchor. Sports reporter Champ Kind learns that just because Ron’s heart is engaged doesn’t mean he’s lost his best friend. No one loses, unless you count Luke Wilson’s repeated maiming in the news team anchor rumble, still one of the funniest action sequences in quite some time. We need more men in pop culture to have that realization that the rise of women doesn’t automatically make their lives poorer. When it comes to family bands and bear births, feminism can mean that everybody wins.

Several weeks ago, Tanner Colby wrote in response to manifold charges that Mad Men has done poorly in addressing the role of race and the lives of black Americans during the period it chronicles, “Mad Men isn’t cowardly for avoiding race. Quite the opposite. It’s brave for being honest about Madison Avenue’s cowardice.” I don’t know if that’s quite true. It might be more accurate to say that Mad Men is best understood as a show about the sixties told through the stories of the people whose lives were among the last reached by change in that tumultuous decade. The limitations of those characters, by necessity, become the show’s—there are no meaningful black characters with sustained story arcs in Mad Men because none of the show’s main characters have meaningful and sustained relationships with black people that recognize the full humanity of African-Americans.

It appears that could change in Mad Men’s fifth season, though not because the show’s characters are any less solipsistic or any more inclined to reach out beyond the limits of their own experience (unless it’s to add new power dynamics to their sex lives). Rather, it’s because the African-Americans who live in New York and Connecticut, and whose communities and worldviews have been evolving beyond the notice of the people at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, have decided to finally take these powerful men in their gorgeous buildings at their stated words.

That change begins when SCDP’s rivals at Y&R decide that it’s hilarious to taunt a group of, as they describe them, “cops and negroes and kids” demonstrating to ask the Office of Economic Opportunity, founded in 1965 as part of President Johnson’s War on Poverty, to fulfill its promise. The advertising executives, who have already put up hand-lettered “Goldwater ’68″ signs and hollered at the demonstrators to get jobs, pelt them with paper bags filled with water. But they find the tables are turned on them when a number of women and children, accompanied by a white, male reporter march up to Y&R.

There’s something fitting about the fact that they confront an aging secretary first—the most vulnerable person in the firm has to turn away the vulnerable people calling the firm to explain its conduct. God forbid an executive actually have to account for himself when he can pit members of disadvantaged groups against each other. It’s entirely too on the nose when one of the women tells the secretary “Don’t call us ridiculous! Is this what Madison Avenue represents?” and then spotting the guilty parties remarks, “And they call us savages.” The point isn’t that they’re savages, it’s that they’re raging children, afraid of anything they find unfamiliar or threatening. They’re pathetic, but no less dangerous for it.

The men of SCDP get that their rivals are in a fix, but they don’t understand why their behavior is shameful rather than simply unstrategic. And that misunderstanding is why they trip themselves up when Roger insists it’ll be a delightful joke to take space in the advertising section of the Times announcing the their firm, unlike Y&R, is an equal opportunity employer.

First, it sets off Joan, who marches into the office with her son to make sure her job is safe—once again, it’s women and people of color who feel pitted against each other by men who are certain their positions are secure. And then, it welcomes in a flood of black job applicants who have decided to take the advertisement at its stated word, and ignoring what Roger believed to be its archness and sophistication, have decided to come after the jobs SCDP thought it didn’t actually have to offer to gain points. This isn’t Don’s letter swearing off cigarette company business. It’s not a game, and it’s not another act of branding. And you can’t joke, as Roger and Don earlier joked about not hiring Jews, when the people you aren’t hiring show up at your door and put the question to you directly so your answer won’t stay private, and confined to the realms of people small enough to find it funny. The rapid-fire conversation when the partners see the neatly-dressed, patient applicants is revealing. “I don’t know why we can’t just hire one.” “Because we’re not hiring.” “Fire that receptionist.” “We can’t have one out there.”

And an inability to refer to black people directly isn’t the only way the partners don’t know how to talk to or about people who were previously so far distant that they have no language or conversational experience to draw on, no sense of what’s appropriate or respectful. When Lane tries to at least halve their problem by announcing that they’re only hiring secretaries (oh, the conflicts that are past, and passing, and are yet to come), he struggles to find the words to address the men, saying: “You are free to leave. I mean, you are welcome to leave. You may go.” It’s a funny, uncomfortable moment, and one where the show sees Lane in a way he can’t possibly clearly see himself.

Would it have been nice for Mad Men to move race to the center of its narrative sooner? Absolutely. But I’m not entirely convinced it would have been realistic for these people, who even as they sell the world of tomorrow to their clients cling resolutely to the privileges awarded by the past, to have been quick to understand and explore the way racism shapes their lives, decisions, and reactions. That’s a flaw of Don Draper and his peers, and yet another signal of how far they may be left behind and the things their backwardness will deny them. “We’re going to the Statue of Liberty,” Don tells Sally, Bobby and Eugene during their weekend with him and Megan. “You always say that,” Bobby reminds him, “but we never do.”

Why is the town so hot and bothered about what started as a self published e-book that flew under the radar until a Today Show segment and New York Times article turned up the heat? Those who don’t get it are scratching their heads and dismissing it as “mommy porn” and say while it will be aimed at the female demo that embraced Eat Pray Love and Sex and the City, these two go at it like rabbits in vivid S&M and bondage scenarios that will lead to a sure-fire R rating at least. Guys probably aren’t coming, and that rating locks out the young girls.

Those who do get it say that the author has tapped into a perfect storm of female sexuality and taboo romance with an unattainable man, themes common to works like Twilight Saga and True Blood. They say the book has stimulated an elusive zeitgeist hot button that every studio wants in a book to movie franchise. Guys might not get it, but it’s spreading like wildfire among females age ranging from young women to grandmothers.

I’m amused, but there’s something pretty pathetic about the fact that the entertainment industry is still surprised by the idea that ladies have erogenous zones, and sometimes like having them stimulated by pop culture. Have they ever been to the romance novel section of a bookstore? Or had an assistant who’s been to the romance novel section of a bookstore? I hope a lady executive lands this project and makes major bank off it. Though history suggests that even if that happens, her male counterparts won’t learn a damn thing from the experience.

Of Whitney‘s 20 episodes, just 7 were written by women, and of those seven, only three were written by women other than show creator Whitney Cummings. The other show Cummings created, 2 Broke Girls, has been influenced much more by showrunner Michael Patrick King than by Cummings (she wrote just one episode of the show), though it’s actually doing better than Whitney at getting episodes written by women on the air: women have written 9 of the show’s 20 episodes, while men have written 11. On New Girl, almost twice as many episodes were written by men (11) as by women (6). Liz Merriweather, the show’s creator, wrote two out of those 17 episodes. It might be hard to imagine, given how much the show seems like a Female Chauvinist Pig archetype, but a majority of Are You There, Chelsea? episodes are written by women—6 out of 10. And it’s the only show on this list where every episode is directed by a woman, Gail Mancuso, who’s also directed an episode of Suburgatory, and is reteaming with Roseanne Barr on her new NBC sitcom Downwardly Mobile. Suburgatory also has a narrow majority of its episodes scripted by women, including series creator Emily Kapnek, 10 out of 19. And Up All Night is the undisputed champion—in a world where having 13 of a show’s 20 episodes written by women counts as an overwhelming victory.

These numbers are a striking reminder that we can’t count on female showrunners and show creators to do all the work of getting more women working on television programs. And we shouldn’t ask them to. Being a woman doesn’t mean you don’t enjoy working with men, or that you can’t learn from men’s perspectives. And we shouldn’t ask women to deny themselves those pleasures and those insights just to make up the gaps created by men who aren’t curious enough to want to work with women, and as a result are missing out on fresh and exciting perspectives, as well as potential friendships and working partnerships. If women creators or showrunners are solely responsible for getting more women writing for television, then the cancellation of a single show or a mass decision by studios that lady-run or lady-created shows are no longer a trend they want to ride could create a massive dropoff in the number of women writers. Until men and women are equally invested in getting more women’s voices in writers’ rooms, those numbers won’t improve in a permanent way.

And these fall’s comedies are a reminder that we can’t—and again, probably shouldn’t—count on female creators and showrunners to give us positive or nuanced depictions of women. After all, if your success in comedy is predicated on the idea that you don’t act like a girl—Cummings infamously suggested that Brooke Hogan and Pamela Anderson should drink “vat of Magic Johnson’s blood,” a line that’s pretty far beyond the pale no matter your gender—or like a lady—the entire premise for Chelsea Handler’s career—where are the incentives for you to tell thoughtful, self-reflective stories about women? Being the women hangs with the guys can be a precarious position, one that’s in need of constant reinforcement, and which doesn’t always yield to a situation like the one described in New Girl, where the boys in question become sympathetic to and champions of said girl’s particularly female perspective and needs. It’s one thing for networks to value women for what demographics they can bring in during primetime, or for a certain kind of performance of femininity. It’s another to value women for the full array of perspectives and experiences they can bring to the table, and the stories they want to tell once they’re sitting at it.

This is not to say that everything is terrible. Up All Night‘s developed into a moderate success for NBC by telling stories about women’s experiences as professionals, as mothers, and as romantic partners in a way that doesn’t require them to ingratiate themselves to male viewers—and it’s been rewardingly sensitive and smart in portraying the challenges of stay-at-home fathers. New Girl has evolved from an irritating and irrational celebration of a character who seemed beamed in from Mars to a more realistic, and more genuinely engaging portrait of a group of friends, though it’s largely done so by figuring out how to flesh out its male characters, rather than by making Zooey Deschanel’s Jess much more realistic. Suburgatory remains warmly, winningly weird.

And we’re not done for the season yet. On April 11, ABC is premiering Don’t Trust the B—- In Apartment 23, a roommates comedy starring Krysten Ritter and Dreama Walker from the very funny Nahnatchka Khan. HBO follows on April 15 with Girls, Lena Dunham’s miraculous new series about a group of long-standing friends who move to New York after they graduate from college and struggle to find their places at a time when the economy is unforgiving but the expectations for success are high. If we’re lucky and the networks are patient, this first round of female-created and female-centered comedies could be just that, a foundation for the employment of more women, for telling many more kinds of our stories.

There’s already a fair bit of pop culture that explores the lives of stay-at-home dads, of which the best, I think, is Up All Night. But a lot of those depictions are still rooted in the idea that fathers taking on primary responsibility for their children or women supporting their husbands and families as the sole breadwinner is a strange and new thing. And in these worlds, what we understand to be masculine and feminine is pretty much the same thing, with a dose of daddy grooming rituals to keep things hot at home.

This goes hand in hand with our conversation from a couple of weeks ago about world-building. But I’d love to see someone take a book like The Richer Sex and use that as a basis for thinking about a science fictional world. We’ve had some good science fiction, like The Handmaid’s Tale and Children of Men that’s come out of a rethinking of the value of women’s fertility: when it goes up, women tend to be in even more danger of finding themselves under men’s control. But I wonder if we can imagine a future where women are more economically powerful men that is culturally different but not inherently antagonistic. What does masculinity look like when it’s divorced from the exercise of power? And what does femininity mean when it’s divorced from domesticity. I’d imagine different in the short-term and long-term, but that’s a thought experiment worth doing.

I appreciate that the day I wrote a post arguing that Community’s static approach to its characters and their potential—or lack thereof—for growth was one of the benefits of the show, it returned with an episode that moved a number of the characters forward, if in fits and starts.

Community’s sometimes had trouble deciding if Pierce is just an unpleasant, manipulative person, or if he’s deeply wounded, and this episode was a convincing example of the later approach. Dressed up to look like, as Troy puts it, “a wealthy murderer,” Pierce is looking for business opportunities to prove that he can be as impressive an investor as his father was. And the other members of the group point out that he can move one of their number forward as part of his project, turning Shirley’s long-dormant plan to open up some sort of baking business into a reality now that a vacancy’s opened up in the Greendale cafeteria.

But Shirley has to figure out what she really wants. At first, she insists that when she and her husband get engaged again that it means the ends of her plans, at least temporarily. “I am going to start a business! Soon! I just have floral arrangements to pick and a DJ to hire!” she tells Britta. And when planning sessions don’t go exactly according to plan, Shirley complains to Pierce, “I’d rather be with my man planning my wedding, and you’d clearly rather be with Halle Berry in 1999.” But when they get down to brass tacks, impressing Dean Pelton with their pitch—”I cannot believe you learned all this at Greendale!” he marvels—Shirley’s clearly in her element. And she and Andre work things out even after she’s late to the rehearsal dinner when she tells him she’s ready to step up and take responsibility for their family, and he needs to let her. For someone who often seems so mired between frustration and a carefully controlled emotional facade, it’s great to see Shirley standing up for herself because she has a dream, rather than because she’s on the defensive about religion or where she’s at in her life. And I hope she and Pierce can find a way to fight back and beat the Subway: Community hasn’t had a villain for a while, and it would be nice for the study group to have an affirmative cause.

In that vein, I really appreciated Britta’s emergence as a genius wedding planner, even though she dismisses her mad skills at floral arrangement with the reminder that “There are people dying in Uganda.” Her ambivalence about what her talent means for her politics was very funny. “This may shock you, Annie, but I come from a long line of wives and mothers,” she intoned sadly. And as the episode progressed, it was a reminder of why Jeff and Brita are actually a much more compelling pairing than Annie and Jeff: they’re both misanthropes with gooey centers who hate themselves more than they hate the people around them. “I promise to make no more than 70 percent of what you would make at the same job,” Britta promises bitterly as she and Jeff stumble drunkenly up to the brink of a mock wedding. You can hear her terror of surrender.

The C story, in which Troy and Abed decide to normalify themselves to make sure they won’t upset the wedding didn’t carry quite as much heft, and I was sorry for that. The show’s had an interesting debate in the past about what embracing weirdness means to each character, whether it’s Troy figuring out that he’d rather be in a goofy costume inspired by Alien fighting zombies with his best friend than hitting on chicks as a sexy Dracula; or Abed finding a potential flirtation with a secret service agent who sees the world the same way that he does. I wish the episode had more time to explore what it means to Abed to be getting along with a pretty girl at a wedding, for once, what it feels like for Troy to be back in his normal guise. They’ve gained an enormous amount from their friendship, but I’m curious to see what that relationship gains them when they aren’t hanging out in their Imaginarium or shooting Troy and Abed in the Morning.

Remember in January when I talked to Nick Offerman and gave y’all the word that he had written his first episode of the show, and that it dealt with the question of whether Ron Swanson is a feminist? Well, this was that episode. And I think it may have been one of my favorites of the season, particularly in the way it kept the stories adjacent to but not involving Leslie moving along.

The A story itself, though, was pretty good. I’m glad the show is finally dealing with the fact that the campaign isn’t just a machine that reinforces for Leslie and Ben how right they are for each other. Because he’s doing his job right, and because he’s deeply invested in it, Ben can’t just be the adorably tense, dorky dude Leslie loves so much: he’s a tense, dorky dude with the power to tell her what to do. And sometimes that stuff isn’t much fun. But when she blows him off, it’s a disaster, resulting in an impromptu, drunk campaign interview that could halt her rise in the polls, of not knock her out of them completely. What made the story so great, though, was not the stretch-limo chase to Indianapolis to get the tape (a development that made me devoutly wish Parks and Recreation could find an actual way for Tom to grow). Instead it was that even in the midst of an epic cock-up, Leslie managed to notice people Pawnee wasn’t serving well-Pawnee’s airport workers-come up with a plan to help them, and win their loyalty such that they’re willing to do her a solid. The story was a perfect mix of acknowledging Leslie’s fallibility while reaffirming her fundamental dedication and talent.

I also just loved watching Ron click with Andy’s women’s studies professor at their celebratory dinner after he passed his first college class. “My father once told my mother that God made Eve from Adam’s rib,” he says, explaining that while he’s not technically a feminist, he stands in solidarity with strong women. “She broke his jaw.” It’s an interesting contrast with Chris, who is almost too deferential, telling the professor, “I didn’t want you to think I was objectifying you with my male gaze.” She goes home with Ron, who isn’t making any effort to be any less masculine-”No need. Porterhouse. Rare. Quickly,” he tells the waitress-but is also fully on board with what she teaches. Masculinity and feminism, in this case, are two great tastes that go great together.

And I found the C story, in which Donna blows off a date to hang out with Jerry, who proved to be unexpectedly dedicated to stuffing envelopes, surprisingly sweet. We see Jerry lose so often that I’ve enjoyed seeing him find himself in his element on Leslie’s campaign, whether he’s running phone banks or stuffing mailers. Even if he screws up, as he did last night, it’s nice to see him as the person in Leslie’s life other than Ben who has best stepped up to help her, and in doing so, has found a bit of hi,s

Harry Potter is the most popular character of the last 15 years, but is he really unique?

I have nothing against stories where boys get to grow, and be empowered, and slay the dragon, and get the girl. But I don’t exactly think we’re lacking in those kinds of narratives. Across generations and countries, the most popular literary and cinematic phenomenon of the last decade and a half is a nice kid named Harry Potter who achieves both personal happiness and major societal change. Christopher Paolini got to live out that narrative both in real life and on the page when he went from self-publishing homeschooler to best-selling author with his Inheritance series before he was 20. The most kid-friendly superhero in movies and cartoons is Spider-Man.

But I am generally sympathetic to the idea that just as we need more expansive roles for women in pop culture, we need more flexible roles for boys and men that allow for a broader range of emotions. And so I asked Tamora Pierce last year about whether we needed different kinds of boys to act as heroes and role models for male and female readers alike (she is one of the authors I think does best creating fully-realized boys and men). “The majority of boys have male heroes. Even if the characters are animals, they’re male. Girl heroes are by far the minority in children’s literature, which is absolutely infuriating to me, because this was the status quo when I started, and the numbers have not changed that much,” she said, explaining why, though she’s working on her first series with a male main character, she’s more concerned about providing innovative stories about women. “It’s not that I have anything against boys. I just see a need for girl heroes.”

And I wonder if the rise of authors like Pierce, and of a vigorous conversation about roles for women and girls more generally, even if it hasn’t gotten us to character parity or all the depictions we’d like, is something that guys would like a male equivalent of. There’s no question that there are clear archetypes of male characters, from Bad Boys to Nice Guys, and forums for discussion of them ranging from the Good Men Project to lots of good feminist writers. But are there authors or filmmakers who folks think are doing a uniquely good job of building particularly innovative male characters? Clearly there’s some unfulfilled hunger out there for something new. And I’d be curious as to what the men in the audience are feeling most engaged by.

Since you’re probably not one of the (very few) people who are watching Enlightened, HBO’s excellent, if uncomfortable show about a corporate drone who has a breakdown, followed by an epiphany, and begins living out her principals in all sorts of hilariously awkward ways, you probably don’t get the joke in the title of this blog post. But the Enlightened episode “Consider Helen” was one of the most impressive things I’ve seen on television in a while: a quiet day spent with the mother of the main character, who is grappling with private and unresolved griefs her daughter is too self-involved to acknowledge or understand. All of which is a long way of saying that until that episode of television, and until I started watching Sons of Anarchy, I don’t think I realized how thirsty I was for the perspectives of older women on television. Enough with the women who are meant to reflect me now or in ten years. I want a sense of the women I’ll become, the grand crones and the quiet ones, too.

One of the things I appreciate most about Sons of Anarchy is the way Gemma is allowed to have specifically female problems, and to have those problems treated as if they’re on a level with the hurts and angers of Jax, Clay, and the other members of the club. When, in the first season, when Cherry shows up in Charming after sleeping with Clay, and Gemma breaks her nose with a skateboard, the show could have decided to treat Gemma as ridiculous, as if she’s overreacting. Instead, we get that very funny scene of her and Clay hollering at each other in jail, Gemma refusing to be bailed out. Both halves of this late-middle aged couple are acting as if they’re teenagers. They are equals in their absurdity, both permitted to feel overpowered by their reactions to each other.

Similarly, after Gemma is raped (a plot that I think is handled better than almost anything else in the series), Sons of Anarchy deals with her sexual anxieties respectfully and in a way that insists that rape victims shouldn’t be treated as marked by their experiences. It’s terribly, terribly sad to hear Gemma tell Tara that “Clay’s never gonna… want to be inside something that’s been ripped up like me…Love don’t mean shit. Men need to own their pussy. His has been violated. He’ll find another. It’s what they do.” But the show insists she’s still wanted, first in Tig’s advances towards her in the wake of the attack—Sons of Anarchy probably spends more dialogue insisting that Gemma is attractive than any other individual character—and in her eventual reconciliation with Clay.

It’s tremendously moving to see Clay exceed her expectations of him, not just having sex with her again but seducing her, clearing off her office desk and declaring as only Ron Perlman can, “I want my wife.” Her hurt and recovery are couched in the language of ownership: neither Charming nor the MC are exactly feminist paradises. But even when Gemma puts off telling Clay and Jax about the fact that she was attacked to avoid hurting them and destabilizing the club, both of the men in her life make her recovery a priority when she finally does tell them. Later in the series, she may be marginalized as just an Old Lady, beaten for daring to step beyond that role, but at least in that moment, her husband and her son can elevate her recovery.

In that same season, when Luann Delaney, Gemma’s best friend, is beaten to death in her pornography studio, it’s another fascinating example of how a group of men and women deal with the same event differently. While the members of SAMCRO are buzzing with talk of retaliation, Gemma’s grieving. Her shattering the plate that holds their dinner is simultaneously a domestic revenge for their callousness—she’s the bad housewife ensuring they don’t get to eat—and a refocusing of their attention away from masculine posturing towards her genuine loss. Luann is not a profit center or an Old Lady to Gemma—she is Gemma’s closest companion, and being her equal means she’s the one who can truly appreciate Luann’s loss.

Sons of Anarchy also privileges the private and the domestic when Gemma goes on the lam, and ends up coming to terms with the fact that her father needs to be in assisted living. While Clay and Jax are dealing with a far more operatic emergency, the kidnapping of Abel and the breakdown in relations with their Irish gunrunning connection, the show gives as much weight and time to Gemma’s experience of a vastly more common problem. Her terror at her father wandering off (in an attempt, as it turns out, to commit suicide) is just as real as Jax’s screams of agony on the dock as Abel is taken away from him. Watching Gemma leave her distraught father at his new care facility is shattering. It may not be as evil as murder, but it shatters her. Whether creator Kurt Sutter intended it or not, this sequence is a critique of the show’s violent action sequences: you don’t need to castrate a rapist or shiv a prison guard to cut your readers to the quick, to provide them with an emotion so strong they want to turn away.

And it’s fitting that the show explores Gemma cutting ties to the last part of her life before she became an Old Lady precisely at the moment that, after several seasons of painting her as a queen, Sons of Anarchy begins to explore the extent to which Gemma is a limited woman. Because while she’s clever, conniving, and sexually powerfully, Gemma isn’t educated like Tara is. She doesn’t have a formal position of power with an organization or a community, like Margaret does. And she doesn’t have an independent source of income, like Lyla. Without those resources, Gemma’s hugely vulnerable when her powers of persuasion fail. Watching her shrink before Magaret’s judgement, a woman she once felt free to threaten and coerce, reinforced for me how far Gemma had fallen and how vulnerable she felt almost as much as watching Clay beat her did. Perhaps, in the fourth season of the show, it’s stupid of Gemma to believe that she can restrain a raging, wounded Clay, but we’re given very little evidence that her powers, be they sexual or moral appeals (Katey Sagal really could play a Roman wife in Shakespeare) have failed her before. And when they do, she recognizes it.

What will be interesting for Season 5, I think, is how Gemma fares now that she and Clay have been deposed and are estranged from each other. Tara may insist that she’s smarter than Gemma, that she owns Jax because she knows him best, but neither woman could convince him to kill his adoptive father. And Tara can only truly take Gemma’s place once her hand has been ruined, and she believes her ability to escape is compromised. Becoming the Queen of Charming carries some power with it. But being the power behind the throne makes you much more vulnerable than conquering an independent empire.

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.

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.