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.

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.

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 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:

Julia was ready to die—she closed her eyes and let her head fall back, baring her throat for Him to rip it out. But He didn’t. His hairy hands were on her. He dragged her across the room and forced her upper body down so she was bent over the yew table. Julia didn’t understand, and then she did and she wished she hadn’t.

She fought Him. He pinned her torso on the wood with one hard, heavy hand, and she tore at his fingers but they were like stone. She had agreed, but she hadn’t agreed to this. Let Him kill her if He wanted. It hurt when He tore her robe off—the fabric burned against her skin. She tried to look behind her at what was happening, and she saw—no, no, she didn’t see that, she saw nothing—the god’s big hand working casually between His legs as He positioned Himself behind her. He kicked her bare feet apart with a practiced kick. This wasn’t His first time at the rodeo.

Then He pushed Himself inside her. She had wondered if He would be too big, if He would tear her open and leave her gutted and flopping like a fish. She strained against Him. Exhausted, she rested her hot forehead on her arm in what she supposed was the manner of rape victims since the beginning of time. Her own hoarse panting was the only sound.

It took a long time It was not a timeless period; she didn’t pass out or lose track of time. She would have said it took between seven and ten minutes for the god to finish raping her, and she was there for every second of it. From her vantage point she could see Failstaff’s thick legs on the floor, not moving anymore, overlapping Gummidgy’s long brown ones, and she could see where the two who had died by the door lay, a huge continent of blood having flowed out from under the stone block and joined into one shape.

Better me than Asmo. She couldn’t see Asmodeus, because she couldn’t look at her, but she could hear her. She was crying loudly. She sounded like the little girl she still essentially was, a little girl who had lost her way. Where was home for her? Who were here parents? Julia didn’t even know. Hot tears flowed down Julia’s cheeks too, and slicked her arm, and wet the brown wood.

The only other noises were those made by Reynard the Fox, the trickster-god, grunting softly and hoarsely behind her. At one point a couple of rebel nerve endings attempted to send pleasure signals to her brain, whereupon her brain burned them out with a pulse of neuro-chemical electricity, never to feel again…The fox-god barked loudly when He came. She felt it. The terrible, unspeakable thing, which she would never tell anybody, not even herself, was that it felt wonderful. Not in a sexual way—God, no. But it filled her up with power. It flowed into every part of her, up through her trunk, down her legs, and out through her arms. She clenched her teeth and shut her eyes to try and stop it, but it even reached her brain, lighting her up from within with divine energy. She opened her eyes and watched it fill her hands. When it reached the tips of her fingers her fingernails glowed.

And then He took something from her. As He withdrew His penis from her, something came out with it. It was like it caught on something—a transparent film, it felt like, something inside her, the same shape as her. It was something invisible that had been with her always, and Reynard ripped it away. She didn’t know what it was, but she felt it go, and she shuddered when she felt it. Without it she was something different, something other than what she had been before. Reynard had given her power, and taken something in payment that she would have died rather than give up. But she didn’t get to choose.

What bothers me about this is less that it’s graphic than that it’s final. Julia loses her soul when Reynard rapes her, and she never gets a chance to get it back. The only way she’s able to heal is to acknowledge that her humanity is unrecoverable. And for some people, I’m sure that’s true.

But I think what bothers me is a sense that this is less Julia’s story, and more the story of how a morally and emotionally somnolent person’s finer sensibilities were awakened by the hideous trauma suffered by a friend and his complicity in the events that lead up to it. We know that after Quentin’s sexual and emotional betrayal of Alice, and her self-sacrifice to save him, that Quentin’s becoming oriented to the needs of other people for the first time in the beginning of The Magician King when he worries that Julia’s gone profoundly strange. And his moral growth is, if not complete, at least kicked into high gear after he and Julia encounter Our Lady Underground: “Quentin wasn’t transformed, but something else was going on with him: he was down on his hands and knees for some reason, just staring at the wooden planks of the deck…That was death, this is live. I will never confuse them again.” When Julia tells him the truth about what happened to her, it’s a sign that he is awakened. When Eileen threatens to not let Julia go through the portal, Quentin steps up and takes some responsibility for her, insisting that “Julia wouldn’t have done what she did if I’d helped her learn magic…Julia did what she did because of me. So if you want to blame somebody, blame me. Put that wrong on me where it belongs and let her go through to the Far Side. Where she belongs.” Her wholeness becomes his wholeness. His sacrifice of the opportunity to go to the Far Side, of his crown, of the dream of his life, may be the first generous act Quentin commits.

The idea that men are affected by rape, too, that we bare shared responsibility for the state of our sexual culture — that’s not a bad thing to communicate to readers. In fact, it’s a set of critically important ideas. But it makes me really sad to think that it takes a woman he essentially abandoned, even though he knew she was vulnerable and that his actions contributed to her mental breakdown, getting raped and experiencing the theft of her soul, to wake Quentin up. That’s a horrible price to have to offer up to move our conversations forward. And I wonder if it would have been a more searching act to leave us with Julia rather than with Quentin in a true act of sympathy and deference, a handing over of his story to her.

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?

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.

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.

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.”

Zula seems like a fairly capable woman, so I’m not really concerned that she’s going to be a pure damsel in distress. Especially because in these chapters, we get inside her head a bit more, and find someone who’s capable of being lulled into playing video games when she could be calling the police; someone who took a desperate walk from Eritrea to Sudan and is left with the sense that “the nerves in the soles of the feet were connected more tightly to the brain than any others;” who looks out the window when her adoptive father doesn’t want her to and sees a meth cooker after he “had made a mistake with the anhydrous ammonia line and been sprayed with the chemical, which had sucked all the water out of his body.”

And in showing us why a number of very different men and by extension we might like Zula, this section also gives us a sense of what Zula values, a system that’s framed by Eritrea and by Iowa. Reflection on her breakup with Peter, she catalogues the things she likes about him: “Other than his physical beauty, which was pretty obvious. Those occasional left-handed insights, like the arches. Another thing: he worked very hard and knew how to do a lot of things, which had put her in mind of the family back in Iowa. He was intelligent, and, as evidenced by the books stacked and scattered all over the place, he was interested in many things and could talk about them in an engaging way, when he felt like talking.” When she meets Csongor, she delivers, in an internal reflection, a rebuke to the ideas inherent Judd Apatow’s movies, thinking:

Neither of these men had much in the way of formal education, since each had decided, during his late teens, to simply go out into the world and begin doing something. And each of them had found his way from there, sometimes with good and sometimes with bad results. Consequently, neither had much in the way of money or prestige. But each had a kind of confidence about him that was not often found in young men who had followed the recommended path through high school to college and postgraduate training. If she had wanted to be cruel or catty about it, Zula might have likened those meticulously groomed boys to overgrown fetuses, waiting endlessly to be born. Which was absolutely fine given that the universities were well stocked with fetal women. But perhaps because of her background in refugee camps and the premature death of her adoptive mother, she could not bring herself to be interested in those men. This quality that she had seen in Peter and now saw in Csongor was—and she flinched from the word, but there seemed little point in trying to distance herself from it through layers of self-conscious irony—masculine.

Obviously, this isn’t the only way to be a man, though Stephenson seems to have a bit of a fetish for aspects of it: self-madeness, a sense of responsibility in both presentation and deed, a willingness to be decisive, even aggressive. Sokolov thinks to himself at one point that “Waging war on his enemies had been Sokolov’s habit and his profession for a long time, but being chivalrous to everyone else was simply a basic tenet of having your shit together as a human and as a man.” Richard’s friend Chet turns his motorcycle gang from drug-running to the Society for Creative Anachronism as a way to “stay in touch with their masculinity but with a more modest body count. The change in emphasis seemed to coincide with some of the surviving principals’ getting married and having kids. They got rid of most of their guns and took advantage of Canada’s surprisingly easygoing sword laws, riding around the provincial byways with five-foot claymores strapped to their backs. They met in forest clearings to engage in mock duels and jousts with foam weapons, and they went to Ren Faires.” Some of this is pretty silly. And Stephenson’s definition of masculinity seems to contain a requirement that you acknowledge when you’ve done something really dumb, or, as Csongor puts it, “I am just the latest in a very long line of Hungarians being talked into extremely stupid adventures by Germans, Russians, whatever. But it took me into this culture where I was cool. Respected. Powerful drugs for a teenager.”

I’d be curious as to what male readers think of this framework so far. It’s striking to me that while we’re getting a big discussion of what it means to be a man, no one’s tried to lay down a right way of being a woman. I’m not going to go so far as to say that turnabout is fair play, but it’s nice to see a world where Zula gets to be awesome and desirable without having to be regulated.

I sort of appreciate that his sister, even if she’s seen this before, smiles when she gets the news. There is something pretty satisfying satisfying about the reveal. Luke is pretty much impossible in Empire Strikes Back, being stupid about riding late, ditching the Rebels pretty much sans explanation (I bet Mon Mothma was most seriously displeased), underestimating Yoda, and ditching his training. Finding out Vader’s his father isn’t just a validation of Yoda’s teaching, etc. It feels kind of like the just reward for being semi-bratty. Of course, the whole getting-your-hand-chopped-off thing is a little much, and serves us to remind us that Vader is not exactly good parent material. That Luke and Leia ended up being reasonably decent people is testament to Obi-Wan’s skills as an adoption agent.

Getting so upset over a name feels silly sometimes, but if you can get people to reject membership in a group, you’re a step closer to getting them to not make more substantive gestures of membership, like, say, donating time and money to Planned Parenthood. Of course, it doesn’t help that awesome feminist creators may put strong women on screen, or situations that explore the systematic oppression of women, but neglect to (or carefully avoid to) name feminism for what it is. Correct me if I’m wrong, but does anyone ever explicitly label themselves a feminist or call sexism by its name in Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Though I will say, hearing Anya, talking through her wedding vows, declare that “I, Anya, promise to… love you, to cherish you, to honor you, but not to obey you, of course, because that’s anachronistic and misogynistic and who do you think you are, like a sea captain or something?” is awesome.

It’s sort of depressing that this is the case, but I really believe that years from now, this episode of Parks and Recreation is going to be help up as a major moment in romantic comedy. To have a piece of pop culture where not only is love, or the possibility of love, not the highest value, but where the highest expression of love can be to let someone chase their dreams rather than stay with you, is genuinely revolutionary in a pop culture that preaches either that women need to get over their workaholism or that women can have it all. It helps that the episode was beautifully acted. But I hope that people recognize the writing here for the accomplishment that it is.

I can’t tell you how relieved I was when Ann raised the prospect of Leslie not running for City Council to stay with Ben, and Leslie responded automatically, “Which is out of the question.” I knew Leslie was going to make a compromise, but I was terrified that the show would decide to have her choose Ben, regret it, and get into the race late. The show’s always taken a slightly silly tack on Leslie’s ambition, whether through something like the omnipresent headshots in her office, or her explanation that “I was playing with the Geraldine Ferraro Action Figure. That I made myself.” But to have Leslie insist, and the people around her support, the idea that this is the dream of Leslie’s life is genuinely beautiful. It is such a higher exhibition of love for Ben to tell her, “Everything you’ve accomplished, you have earned and you have worked for. I don’t want anyone to think you got where you are by sleeping with your boss,” than to try to keep her with him.

And as I argued in April, this episode was a real victory for the idea that it’s Leslie’s optimism in government that is validated by Parks and Recreation, not Ron Swanson’s libertarianism. It makes sense that when Leslie runs from her fear of breaking up with Ben, she runs to Ron, who has fled his ex-wife with what is apparently an emergency camping kit and a warning to get the beef chuck out of his desk before it goes bad. Leslie and Ron are each other’s reality checks, a balancing act between extreme optimism and extreme pessimism about the potential of government. But tonight, Ron affirms Leslie’s most private dreams. “I might not win,” she tells him. “You’ll win,” Ron insists. And the show could have stopped there, letting Ron groan about the inevitable big-government liberalism that will propel Leslie into office. But it doesn’t. “I might not run,” Leslie suggests, still turning the idea over in her mind. “You should,” Ron affirms. Because at the end of the day, Ron’s skepticism about government doesn’t actually include Leslie. Her optimism and competence are just overpowering, inspiring Andy to competence, Ann to persevere through an inbox that is “literally filled with penises.”

This wasn’t the funniest-ever episode of Parks and Recreation, but it strikes me as a genuinely important one, from Leslie’s run; to Chris’ unquestioning support for Ann once she becomes an accidental sexual harassment victim; to Leslie’s emergence as the perfect campaigner when she tells an interviewer “When men in government behave this way, it betrays the public’s trust. Maybe it’s time for more women to be in charge.” These are little things. But the episode was a weird glimpse of what it would be like to live in a much more feminist world than the one we actually reside in. And it’s hopeful, and funny, and genuine. And I want to go to there, much more than I’ve ever wanted to go to any slight alternate universe I’ve seen on a sitcom.

The best way Up All Night‘s found so far to do that is to do gender reversals, to put words that might be dismissed if they were coming out of Reagan’s mouth in Chris’s. There’s one very funny scene of Christina Applegate wrestling herself into a skirt, but otherwise, the show doesn’t harp on her baby weight. Instead, Chris promises that in his new role as stay-at-home Dad, “Maybe I’ll get the old Nordic track about, get my body back to where it needs to be,” only to have Reagan sigh: “The much talked-about, little seen body renaissance.” The first time Chris ventures out grocery shopping, he’s confronted by an ominous older woman who fawns a little too aggressively over baby Amy and comes home with a giant wheel of cheese because he can’t navigate the aisles. And he freaks out about leaving his law firm to take care of Amy, explaining that he’s angry, but he doesn’t know who at.

And when, in the morning when they get out of bed after their anniversary party, he voices a universal truth after Reagan complains about having to go into the office. “Yeah, ’cause raising a human’s no work at all,” he snapped. It shouldn’t feel this good to hear a man admit that raising children is labor. But it really does.

First, there’s the explicit statement that Sady thinks nerds are inherently inflexible morons incapable of accepting criticism or thinking deeply about the material they love with an eye towards its political flaws:

Because here’s how it goes, when you criticize beloved nerd entertainments: You can try to be nuanced. You can try to be thoughtful. You can lay out your arguments in careful, extravagant, obsessive detail. And at the end of the day, here is what the people in the “fandom” are going to take away: You don’t like my toys? I hate you! So, get it out of your system now, because, guess what, George R.R. Martin fans? I don’t like your toys. Deal with that. Meditate for a while. Envision a blazing bonfire in a temple, and breathe in its warmth and serenity. Then, imagine me dumping all your comic books and action figures and first-edition hardback Song of Ice and Fire novels INTO the bonfire, and cackling wildly.

Shockingly enough, saying things like this doesn’t actually make you cool. It makes you another iteration of the kind of person who insists that feminists like, say, me or Sady Doyle are shrewish harpies incapable of nuance or conversation. Now, sexism is more entrenched and more broadly impactful than disdain for nerds. But that doesn’t actually mean that these kinds of statements are useful or clever when they’re deployed by feminists against nerds in a way that they’re not when they’re deployed by misogynists against feminists.

It is much, much easier to dismiss an entire genre or way of engaging with culture than to sort through it, to learn about the way people read it and take meaning from it, to identify, for example, the reasons that fantasy literature can be both profoundly meaningful to women and a fulfillment of male fantasies. But declaring something unsalvageable just means that you’re lazy, not that you’re correct. It forecloses any possibility of change within a community, or as Paul Crider put it in response to Doyle deleting a bunch of comments on the site by men, “If a male is intrinsically incapable of contributing valid criticism of a feminist critique, then what is the point of a male trying to understand the critique at all? ” And such broad-based attacks on nerds ignore the work of people who identify as members of that community and are working to make it a better, safer place, be it the women of the Mary Sue or the women of the Con Anti-Harassment Project.

But beyond that, there are a couple of assumptions in Sady’s criticism of the novels that as a feminist critic (though not one who does exclusively feminist-focused work), I find problematic.

1. That reading literature set in an actual historical period or a fictional one represents either an embrace of the values of that period or a nostalgia for them. Or as Sady puts it: “I could talk about how the impulse to revisit an airbrushed, dragon-infested Medieval Europe strikes me as fundamentally conservative — a yearning for a time when (white) men brandished swords for their King, (white) women stayed in the castle and made babies, marriage was a beautiful sacrament between a consenting adult and whichever fourteen-year-old girl he could manage to buy off her Dad, and poor people and people of color were mostly invisible.”

This strikes me as a profoundly odd assumption to apply to art in general, if, in fact, that’s what Sady believes. Do we think that people watch Mad Men because they would prefer to live in a time where men dominated business? That we love endless remakes of Pride and Prejudice because we think there’s something romantic about having to marry to avoid poverty? Certainly, we watch period shows of all kinds because of the juxtaposition between those times and our own, but to assume that the result is automatically a yearning to turn back the clock seems quite strange. Mad Men and The Hour remind me how closely the past nips at my heels as a woman in a profession that remains dominated by men. Jane Austen is popular because she’s produced characters that feel freakishly ahead of their times, and scenarios that, if you take out the particular economics of the moment, translate seamlessly to the present era.

And it seems particularly bizarre to assume that people read A Song of Ice and Fire because they want to live in the world depicted in it. The medieval era is a useful setting, because the conflicts are smaller enough than our contemporary ones that it’s possible to imagine that a single character can have an impact on the outcome, but big enough to feel that said impact is meaningful. Sady may find medieval warfare boring, which is her prerogative, but that does not mean that medieval warfare is inherently boring (the constant treatment of preferences as facts is one of the things I find most offputting about this mode of criticism), and the scale of it means that critics like Spencer Ackerman have been able to extract applicable lessons and metaphors about strategic thinking from it that are accessible to everyday readers. I tend to find the banking subplots both interesting and usefully, grimly analogous to our present situation. I read these novels with a profound thankfulness that I don’t live in this time period, but with a feeling of being energized by the characters’ triumphs. If I had an actual office, I’d have a replica of Needle over my desk, not because I want to live through Arya Stark’s privations, but because her strength in them reminds me of the smallness of my own obstacles, the tiny magnitude of risk I face in confronting them, and that spurs me on. People want to be part of the Brotherhood Without Banners not because they are really psyched to be peasants trying to survive in a country where the nobility is actively hostile to their flourishing, but because groups based on affinity for fiction can be really rewarding!

2. That it would be more productive to use fantasy to imagine a land where the threats to women that existed in a commensurate era were eliminated. As Sady says: “Reader, here are the things that George R. R. Martin changed about Ye Olde Medieval Europe, when he set out to write A Song of Ice and Fire: Religion. Geography. History. Politics. Zombies. Werewolves. Dragons…Here’s what he left in, however: Institutionalized pedophilia.”

In this case, all of the things that George R.R. Martin changes about Europe and Asia are meant to make that world harder to live in. The religious clashes are more charged because magic is actually operative in the world. The larger distances make travel more challenging, and also make the prospect of organizing a substantive challenge to the ruling dynasty, be it by competing nobles or peasants, vastly more difficult. Zombies, werewolves, and dragons supercharge the dangers of nature. The weather cycle, which let us not leave that out, dramatically increases the stakes of winter. The reason that endemic sexual violence is a part of his world is because it’s part of Martin’s efforts to tell us that Westeros and Pentos are really terrible places to live in.

Beyond that, though, I have some questions about the idea that fantasy’s purpose should be to present idealized worlds. I happen to like fantasy because it provides alternative worlds where I can play with ideas about everything from military strategy to gender roles. It’s fiction that requires active consumption and debate. And I vastly prefer that kind of culture to narcotizing dreams of societies where all of our problems have solved. First, those kinds of stories are inherently difficult to build narratives around. Second, the idea that we can build a perfect society without a cost is delusional and dangerous, and some of the most valuable work science fiction and fantasy does is explore and weigh those costs — it’s the reason I’m so excited for In Time. Third, fiction that has some tie to, amplifies, or inverts our current problems is actively useful. I’d be fascinated to read about a society where women are economically, politically, and sexually dominant, and what sexual and domestic violence looks like in that world because of how it would stimulate my thinking about the things men do and have done to women in the world I live in.

3. If you’re going to depict sexual or domestic violence, you need to justify that depiction according to a higher standard—but the criteria for doing that are totally unclear. Per Sady, who says Martin “is creepy, primarily, because of his TWENTY THOUSAND MILLION GRATUITOUS RAPE AND/OR MOLESTATION AND/OR DOMESTIC VIOLENCE SCENES.”

No one, of course, should be forced to consume material that they’re uncomfortable with. And I appreciate the work of feminists who have created trigger-free safe spaces for those who need them. But I’m troubled by the fact that Sady and a lot of other feminist critics don’t seem to have a good explanation or brightline for when a scene of sexual or domestic violence is acceptable in art—not that I would necessarily agree with where they drew the line—because without one, they’re in danger of setting a standard where no depiction of sexual assault is ever permissible. I’d be curious to know what Sady thinks of the gender dynamics in The Mists of Avalon, a much more explicitly feminist work about the decline of a matriarchal society that also has depictions of rape that are much more graphic than those in A Song of Ice and Fire: there is, for example, an explicit description of what it feels like to be violently penetrated by a man with a very large phallus, which is awful to read, and very, very powerful. Is the rape of Doctor Melfi in The Sopranos acceptable by Sady’s terms? The attack in Irreversible? The scene in Waitress where Jeremy Sisto is driving and hitting a pregnant Keri Russell?

A standard where it’s only acceptable to depict sexual assault in a way that no one could possibly be aroused by it would be impossible to enforce and besides the point. Sady’s set up a paradigm where only her sense that the scenes of sexual assault in George R.R. Martin’s novels are inappropriately arousing counts. No one else’s experiences reading the books are valid, because no one could possibly respond to the news that Robert Baratheon raped Cersei Lannister by thinking it reinforces his patheticness and gives some nuance to her subsequent sexual affairs; that, as Erik Kain has pointed out, Tywin Lannister forcing his son to have sex with his wife after she’s been gang-raped is as much an assault of Tyrion as it is of Tysha; or that Jon Snow’s love affair with Ygritte is a powerful and beautiful illustration of the appeal of sexual freedom and mutually rewarding sex in contrast to the rape and coercion that Westeroi society have made the norm. Wishing that sexual assault didn’t happen, or that people didn’t eroticize fantasies of assault or compromised consent*, won’t make it happen.

My dear friend and sometime writing partner Lux Alptraum outlined another problem with this sort of standard-setting an exchange we had a while back:

What’s really interesting to me here isn’t that some people might find that scene in “Game of Thrones” to be sexy or arousing–no, what I’m fascinated by is the fact that we view sexual violence as a completely different class of behavior than (for want of a better phrase) nonsexual violence. Because, let’s face it: movies and TV are full of tons of scenes of people getting murdered, maimed, and killed…and while it’s sometimes brutally realistic and painful to watch, more often its highly stylized, very pretty, and–dare I say it?–even sexy. Yet outside of a few occasional grumblings, we never seem worried about what enjoy these candy colored scenes of brutal mayhem might say about us, or if it means we’re harboring some secret desire to be a serial killer. No, we seem perfectly aware that one can enjoy the fantasy of horrifically violent actions without actually being a violent person–in a way that we don’t seem to be able to accept with sexual violence in pop culture.

4. That to depict female incompetence is sexist.

It strikes me as oddly myopic to read a novel where literally every character makes grave strategic miscalculations as arguing that women’s bad decisions are caused by their lady bits. What’s interesting about A Song of Ice and Fire is that it depicts a world where norms and rules of engagement are shifting, rendering outcomes unpredictable for men and women alike. There is no man who seems like a more gifted rule or powerful strategic thinker than any given woman in Westeros or Essos, except perhaps Doran Martell and Varys, neither of whose plans have come to fruition yet, so it’s a bit too soon to tell. But it is telling that Sady entirely omits from her analysis Ygritte, Jon Snow’s lover, who keeps him alive when he’s failing to integrate with the wildlings; Melisandre, who is the most powerful religious figure in the novels and the only advisor who manages to keep her ruler on a trajectory that’s both strategic and moral; the Sand Snakes, powerful, aggressive Dornish women who are setting out to set various parts of Doran’s plan in action; Asha Greyjoy, by far the most strategically intelligent person in the Iron Islands; and Meera Reed, who manages to keep Bran, Hodor, and her brother alive on their quest to find the three-eyed crow; that she ignores that Brienne of Tarth is the highest living exemplar of chivalric ideals.

A world where women are perfectly safe, perfectly competent, and society is perfectly engineered to produce those conditions strikes me as one where we can’t tell any very interesting stories about women’s struggles and women’s liberation. If we tell ourselves stories in order to live, it doesn’t strike me that we do ourselves any favors as active feminists by leaching depictions of sexual violence, women making bad decisions, and institutionalized sexism from our fiction, or by dismissing entire swaths of consumers or modes of consuming fiction.

*I would be uncomfortable with a feminist standard where sexual fantasies or sex play that involves gender and power dynamics that would not be acceptable in say, the workplace, or between people who do not have prior agreements about limits, are off-limits.

*I know, I know. I should give Mad Men another shot. I promise I will catch up before the next season starts.

But this isn’t the first time West has stirred up controversy with comments about women. Given his short time in office and his own accusations of sexism by political opponents, West has compiled a rather unimpressive record of associating with misogynists, stereotyping the role of women in society, and engaging in outright misogyny of his own:

West contributed to a Florida magazine that called women “oral relief stations”: Before he was elected to Congress, West was a monthly contributor to “Miami Mike’s Wheels On The Road,” a biker magazine that billed itself as the “South Florida Biker’s Bible.” The magazine has featured multiple overtly misogynistic articles, including one asking readers to imagine having sex with Wasserman Schultz. At other times, the magazine’s writers referred to women as “oral relief stations,” complained about women who said “their knees hurt,” depicted women as servants of men, and suggested that they should wear “slave chokers” as accessories.

West claimed liberal women were “neutering” American men and causing a crisis of leadership in America: In a speech to a Women Impacting Nation (WIN) meeting, West blamed liberal women — “these Planned Parenthood women, the Code Pink women” — for “neutering American men and bringing us to the point of this incredible weakness.” Such women were fighting “to have our men become subservient,” West said, before bizarrely adding that this new-found subservience would continue to make the nation’s debt and deficits grow.

West compared conservative women to Spartans, asking them to “raise strong men”: In the same speech, West compared conservative women to the women of Sparta, who he claimed were the real strength behind the men of the ancient Greek city-state. The role of conservative women, West said, was to “raise strong men,” just as it was in Sparta. As Mediaite’s Frances Martel noted at the time, Spartan women had no political rights and were trained to be strong solely for the betterment of males. West’s comparison to Sparta implies that he believes “strong women are to raise strong men,” Martel wrote. “Strong women are not just to be, the way strong men are.”

This list, of course, does not include the numerous policy positions West has taken that would have adverse effects on women, including his joining the fight to defund Planned Parenthood.

Already, West has begun fundraising off of the instance with Wasserman Schultz. Meanwhile, he remains defiant about his assertion that she is unladylike and continues to defend his comments by claiming that he can’t possibly be anti-woman, since he has “been married 22 years and [has] two daughters.”

With the exception of Dora, who is a small business owner, and Raven, who’s back to school, finding career paths seem like fairly low priorities for your characters. Is that an intentional decision to leave a clear path to focus on their emotional lives? A function of time moving more slowly in the strip than it is in the real world? Is it a function of living in a college town without a lot of non-academic industries or a terrible economy? And whatever happened to Hannelore’s counting business?

A lot of it is based on who I was in my twenties, and the Northampton folks I know who are that age now. When you’re living in a college town and all you’ve got is a liberal arts degree, you’re pretty much gonna take whatever job you can get that pays the bills and isn’t too demanding. I think the philosophy is that working a job that is relatively low-responsibility and low-committment gives you more time and energy to focus on the stuff you REALLY care about. That’s certainly how I felt about it when I was 23!

But I also think that is a bit of an illusion and a trap that you can get caught in. Even if it’s a low commitment job, you’re still giving it hours and days and months and years of your time — suddenly you’re 25, or 29, and you haven’t really “done anything” with your life, and you’re not entirely sure how that happened. And that’s something I’m planning on exploring more in the relatively near future, with Marten in particular.

I imagine that Hanners still does the counting business on the side. With her family connections, she probably doesn’t actually NEED to work to support herself, but it’s important to be at least somewhat free of that kind of a family dependency. Working at CoD is more of an enrichment exercise for her than a means to make money.

Speaking of emotional lives, I’ve always really liked Faye’s interactions with her therapist. Did you do research to make those scenes realistic? Are they drawn from personal experience? What impact does having a lot of your characters in therapy, all probing fairly painful things, have on your thinking about how the cast as a whole interacts and how they make decisions?

The therapy strips are really hard for me to write, actually, because therapy is such a personal thing — everyone’s process and relationship with their therapist is going to be different. Mainly I just try to make sure the therapist doesn’t do or say anything that seems patently false or unrealistic, and hope for the best. I do exaggerate things for humor’s sake — a lot of the stuff Dr. Corrinne tells Faye probably wouldn’t be “ethical” in the real world, but WHATEVER IT’S MY COMIC AND I CAN DO WHAT I WANT, *DAD*

The characters spend so much time talking to themselves and each other about their Problems anyway that a lot of their interactions are a kind of weird, codependent group therapy. When it comes to decision making, there’s always a temptation to have characters always make the best choices, because I like them and want them to be happy. But that’s unrealistic and boring, so I do my best to have them fuck up now and then.

On a less-realistic note, you’ve obviously toned down some of the science fictional elements of the strip over the years. One thing I’m curious about, though: is this a world where the rules of how things work are significantly different? Or our own world, just with a few extras? Or set a bit in the future?

I would say it’s significantly different, but in subtle ways. It’s set in the present day, but a lot of the technology is further along or went down different paths. They developed true AI back in the nineties, so intelligent machines are as commonplace to them as mp3 players or DVDs are to us. They’ve got space stations that people permanently live on, you can raise a kid on one. Space technology also developed a lot more- the attitude of “space is the future, we have to get there NOW” that America had back in the 50s and 60s never really abated in the world of QC. I think a lot of the reason the QC world seems more “advanced” is because they never lost that emphasis on space exploration and development- so much of our technology comes from that field, and it’s been dying a slow death ever since the end of the Apollo missions, which is a real shame. The pessimist in me doesn’t think we’re ever going back to the moon, let alone getting to another planet. Which kind of means we’re doomed! I hope attitudes change. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, with the end of the Space Shuttle program and no real replacement in sight.

The sci-fi elements generally get pushed into the background because the character-driven stuff is more compelling for me. I have plans for a side-project that, if it ever gets of the ground (ha ha ha), would be set in a similar world but a lot more fantastic in focus.

I spend a lot of time writing and thinking about fandom and community, so I loved the way Toto references shaped the narrative around Faye and Angus getting together, and the way common interests have brought together characters like Marigold and Dale. Has spending time at conventions shaped any of those storylines or the way you think about how people build communities around the art and culture they’re passionate about? To what extent do you think fandom and cultural interests can be the basis for strong and meaningful friendships and relationships?

I don’t know that conventions have shaped them so much, the way you interact with people at a convention is, in my experience, radically different than how you do it in the outside world. But if you’re passionate about something and you meet someone else who is also passionate about it, you’re either going to make a new friend or a new enemy.

The concept of fandom actually bothers me a bit — it seems like describing yourself as a member of a “fandom” means you’re more invested in the community that has grown around a given thing than you are in the thing itself. And while I can appreciate the sense of community and enrichment that being part of that community brings, it also prevents people from trying new things. Doctor Who is a great show, but there are so many people out there doing Doctor Who fan work when they could be making stories of their own. MS Paint Adventures is a great comic, but there are so many people out there making troll versions of themselves when they could be making comics of their own. Of course I’m probably biased. Because I’ve been “making things of my own” for years now, I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t do that.

I think you can make a meaningful relationship out of just about anything, if both parties are interested in doing so. There’s no reason why mutual interests in popular culture wouldn’t work!

And on that note, you have a passionate fanbase of your own, and folks have strong opinions about what should happen in this universe you’ve created. Are there times when you shape storylines or character arcs based on fans’ interests? How do you decide if fan feedback is useful or not? Are there decisions you’ve made based on fans’ requests and critiques? Or do you separate out that kind of information from your own creative process?

I have a pretty strong filter for what feedback is useful and what isn’t. People on my forums posting “omg Dora is such a bitch Marten needs to man up and slap that ho” is not particularly useful.

But if I’ve done something stupid and didn’t realize it, then it can be a godsend. I’ve gotten some flack over Tai’s promiscuity and how it could be interpreted as being anti-feminist or anti-lesbian, and while I don’t agree with the most extreme things people have said about the subject, it is something I think I’ve mishandled a bit in the past, and I’m going to be more thoughtful about it in the future.

Positive feedback is ALWAYS useful — I’ve been trying to be a little more ambitious with my artwork lately, and the response to that has been extremely encouraging.

Let’s examine this line of argument, shall we?

1) LeBeouf says that Fox was overly sensitive about some of the things Bay asked her to do on-set:

Mike films women in a way that appeals to a 16-year-old sexuality. It’s summer. It’s Michael’s style. And I think [Fox] never got comfortable with it. This is a girl who was taken from complete obscurity and placed in a sex-driven role in front of the whole world and told she was the sexiest woman in America. And she had a hard time accepting it. When Mike would ask her to do specific things, there was no time for fluffy talk. We’re on the run. And the one thing Mike lacks is tact. There’s no time for ‘I would like you to just arch your back 70 degrees.

2) He goes on to add how great it is to work with a Victoria’s Secret model who is comfortable being his character’s surrogate mommy/housewifey:

Rosie comes with this Victoria’s Secret background, and she’s comfortable with it, so she can get down with Mike’s way of working and it makes the whole set vibe very different…Sam’s sort of frustrated. He has no purpose in life. When he was with the Autobots, he had purpose. He was needed. But he’s got this very supportive girl who’s having him go to these job interviews and trying to nurture him, get him back on his feet. It’s a different female energy than he experienced with Mikaela, who was a very cold biker chick. This woman’s more of a maternal, loving type. Sam wants a domestic, eggs-in-the-morning kind of a thing.

3) And then declares that Fox’s developing feelings about her sex-symbol status are shallow: “Megan developed this Spice Girl strength, this woman-empowerment [stuff] that made her feel awkward about her involvement with Michael.” One can assume the word subbed out after “this woman-empowerment” is actually “shit,” right?

I just can’t with this nonsense. Shia, a few lessons: Megan Fox has the right to make the difficult decisions that often face actresses trying to get into the industry and get cast by famous directors. She also has the right to decide those decisions were wrong or that she’s retroactively uncomfortable with them and uncomfortable with the work she’s doing now. Directors have a right to fire her or not hire if she doesn’t want to do certain kinds of work, but with that comes the right of everyone else to think they’re gross. You, with all your uber-feminist roles in noted films like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, have the right to make a damn fool of yourself, as well as to show some actual sympathy towards female coworkers who face choices you don’t.