There are a lot of pop culture landmarks that I missed as a result of growing up largely without a television and with a cultural worldview that was obsessively centered on books for the first eighteen years of my life to the exclusion of almost everything else. As longtime readers of this blog will know, that’s something that I try to make up for, mixing in classics with a firehose-like stream of new movies, television shows, books, and movies. And over the winter break, I knocked one of the titans off the list when I finally sat down to watch The Godfather. It’s a tremendous movie, and watching it made me want to revisit an unexpected but surprisingly logical companion piece: the 1994 adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.

If The Godfather is about Michael Corleone’s inability to escape his father’s business, and about men’s desire to become their fathers, Little Women is about the ways women help their daughters transcend their own experiences. Just as women are nearly invisible figures in The Godfather, from the passivity of Vito’s wife to the movie’s relatively slim treatment of Kay’s motivations for accepting Michael’s proposal after his return, men are relatively secondary figures in Little Women. The girls’ father and Marmee’s husband is absent for almost the entire first half of the novel and the movie, Mr. Lawrence, their wealthy next-door neighbor is a kindly but distant patriarch, his son Laurie is an interloper, if a beloved one, and Mr. Brooke and Professor Bhaer are suitors rather than fully-developed characters.

Instead, the main drama is between the sisters themselves, and in the question of their mother’s hopes for them. Where Vito Corleone dreams that his son Michael will become not just legitimate, but a legitimate leader in society, Marmee harbors more modest aspirations, governed by both gender and time period, for her little women. She hopes that her daughters will be able to marry for love, that they’ll have the opportunity to see something of the world beyond Concord. All of Vito’s dreams are frustrated, his son Sonny is gunned down while doing the family’s work, his adopted son Tom enters the family business even though his ethnicity might have excluded him from it, his great hope Michael kills a police officer and a Mafia rival and ends up becoming the next Don Corleone, and his son Fredo ends up dead on Michael’s orders.

But in their own ways, Marmee’s daughters fulfill her aspirations. Meg, her oldest, marries modestly, but for true love, and for a husband who is more present in her life than Marmee’s husband was in hers, and who, unlike Meg’s father, doesn’t impose difficulties on the family in pursuit of his political ideals. Beth dies young, a fate no mother would choose for her daughter, but she leaves the world in a perfect and brave communion with her family’s Christian ideals. Amy, her youngest, marries both well and for love, gaining security for her whole family without compromising her ideals. And Jo, her second-oldest daughter, travels furthest beyond the bounds of the role proscribed of her as a woman, tasting modest literary success and finding a husband who eventually helps her found a school where she educates the scions of wealthy families in a way that comports with Marmee’s ideals and also gives poorer children an opportunity for social promotion and intellectual advancement.

In a way, and certainly not intentionally, these very disparate works have ended up capturing the dynamics of masculinity and feminism that we live in today. Women have, through very difficult work, carved out new paths for ourselves and passed them down to the generations of women that have followed after us. Men keep getting handed down the same old archetypes of how to be a man, the same demands to avenge violence done against their families, to provide, to take responsibility that isn’t theirs, to pass judgement, to provide strength. We’ve got a lot of culture that argues that this is a tragedy in and of itself and that it can lead to dreadful ends, that the diversion of Michael’s considerable talents from the sphere where they were supposed to be useful—American public life—to another one where they’re applicable—organized crime—is a terrible waste, that the rechanneling of Walter White’s talents from science and teaching to meth production results in monstrosity. But we don’t have enough triumphs and new models, enough stories of boys growing beyond their fathers in a way that produces incredible joy for both parties. It’s no mistake that Louisa May Alcott, who gave us Little Women gave us her Little Men, the story of a woman who, having transcended the limits laid out for her, raises surrogate sons who are allowed to be more than angry, more than greedy, more than merely brave.

I’ve been thinking a lot about why I like Big Boi and Kelly Rowland’s “Mama Told Me” so much, other than the fact that it’s an utterly irresistible, summery jam that came out just as winter’s descending:

I think it’s mostly that it reminds me of a piece I’d like to see a hip-hop historian write, about the shift from sampling, which renders the sampled voice, be it male or female, passive, to the much more prevalent practice now of having female artists record original hooks and choruses for hip-hop songs that renders so many of them effective duets.

This is, of course, not, a new phenomenon. Jewell, in an oral history of The Chronic published last month in honor of the album’s twentieth anniversary reflected on her role in bringing women’s voices into hip-hop songs, saying ” It all worked. My singin’ over their hard rap lyrics; rap had never accepted that before. I put my soft, sultry R&B singing on their records. Now every rapper has to have a female on their songs.” My regular Twitter interlocutor Soul Honky, to whom I am much indebted suggested an earlier structural explanation: that the popularity of “It Takes Two,” which heavily sampled singer Lyn Collins, prompted a crackdown on sampling that made it legally and financially more expedient to have a female singer record original vocals for a track.

Whatever the origin is, there’s something fascinating about the fact that hip-hop, a genre that gets slammed for the misogyny of its lyrics by legitimate commentators and concern trolls alike, with hugely varying degrees of fairness, is also probably the kind of music that puts men and women in musical conversation within the same song with the greatest frequency. Part of what’s fun about “Mama Told Me” is listening to Rowland’s voice spill out from the limitations of the Solange-level-sunny chorus to take over the song in its second half. Part of what’s fun about listening to Estelle’s “American Boy” is to hear Kanye West, or at least the character he’s playing, flirt with Estelle based on the characteristics she’s laid out for what she’s looking for in a man. As a feminist, one of the reasons I love hip-hop so much is that it’s fun to hear men and women talking to each other instead of past each other, the way they so often seem to be doing in traditional pop and rock.

It’s been, if I’m to be perfectly honest, a disappointing season of fall television. Promising shows like The Mindy Project haven’t lived up to their potential. Sophomores like Homeland have given me heartburn, even if they still have credit to draw on. And even a new show I love, Nashville, hasn’t attracted viewers in numbers that would make me feel secure about its future. As with baseball, this is a wait until next year kind of game, which is why I was so excited to get my hands on Josef Adalian’s guide to the dramas in development for the 2013-2014 fall television. These are seven of the non-S.H.I.E.L.D. shows that have me feeling most excited, which doesn’t mean that they’ll actually make it to the air, or be good when they get there, or last. But hope springs eternal, and here are the things that will carry me through the upcoming hiatus and hopes of better when we return in midseason.

1. LA Woman (NBC): Graham Yost, who runs Justified, on a network, with what sounds like a female main character, in a spy drama? Yes please. Maybe they can get Carla Gugino, who’s been spending a lot of time on television as a guest star of late, to star and make us all remember Karen Sisco.

2. Meridian Hills (The CW): I like feminism, Mila Kunis, and period pieces, so the idea of Mila Kunis producing a period piece about the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment that’s about feminism invading the country club, sort of like The Help but without all the condescending soft racism and stereotyping, sounds like something that would make me very happy. Also like the strangest thing to make it on air ever, if that actually comes to pass. But I’m glad to see Kunis’s Seth MacFarlane-assisted clout’s at least going to some interesting chance-taking.

3. Untitled Surgeon General show (NBC): As someone who interviewed not one but two surgeon generals when I was in high school, and who loves David Kessler’s A Question of Intent , I am naturally predisposed to be excited about the idea of this project. For the rest of you who aren’t similarly hilariously dorky? This show has the potential to do two different things: come up with a way to make a medical procedural that’s about health policy, and offer up a reminder that there are parts of the federal government that do things other than try to catch terrorists.

4. Untitled George Washington show from Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson (NBC) and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Fox): My belief that we should have a lot more Revolutionary War and colonial America in our popular culture is a matter of public record. Washington isn’t necessarily the character I’d choose, but the Hudson River Valley is a fascinating place. And I’m glad to see some networks making the effort to tap a weirdly untapped part of our history and cultural memory.

5. Sex Diaries adaptation (ABC): Since I complained yesterday that our television has gotten more violent and more interested in violence without any corresponding interest in sex and sexuality, I’m curious to see what will come of this adaptation of one of New York Magazine’s most famous features. Also, just from a format perspective, I’m curious to see how ABC adapts the feature. Will we spend an episode on a character? Have the show follow a small bundle of characters whose sex lives are interacting with each other? Pass off from miniseries to miniseries?

6. Wired (The CW): With the exception of The Big Bang Theory, television spends a lot of time wedging geeks into stories as medical examiners, or quasi-hackers, or nerds at the edge of social circles. I like the idea of a show that recognizes that geekiness is also a big business, and tells an origin story about the rise of Silicon Valley. Think the Nolan Ross stuff that’s been the best part of Revenge this season, but with more room to breathe.

I skipped Black Rock at Sundance, even though I love The League‘s Kate Aselton, because it takes a lot to get me to watch a horror movie. The last one I watched was Drag Me To Hell, which I watched because it was about the mortgage crisis, and from which I learned that you should never foreclose on a powerful gypsy. But Black Rock looks like the rare horror movie that could lure me out from my general moratorium:

There’s something really powerful about the promise of a piece of popular culture that insists that a woman has the right to say no at any point in a sexual encounter, no matter how flirtatious she’s been or how willing she’s seemed up until that point, and that she has the right to say no without being judged or attacked. And it’s even more powerful to make that point, and then emphasize how terrifying it is to live in a world where people feel like they’re entitled to sexual access to you, and if not to that access, to enforce the way they think you should behave. In fact, watching this trailer felt like a metaphor for doing feminist work, particularly on the internet: it can be frightening, and it can be hard, and sometimes people appear out of the blue to turn on you. But when you fight back, and when you see the people who are fighting back with you, sometimes you end up recognizing capacities you didn’t realize you had, and support you didn’t realize was there the whole time.

Contra my hope that Disney’s announced Star Wars Episode VII would draw storylines from the Expanded Universe—I’ll just have to hope for a Rogue Squadron television show, someday—it sounds like Disney’s going to start from scratch. As E Online reports, “‘It’s an original story,’ a LucasFilm source tells me. In other words, forget the Star Wars novels. Forget the graphic novels. Forget everything you think you know about what happens to Luke Skywalker. According to my sources, Episode 7 will literally be nothing you’ve ever seen or read before from the Star Wars universe.” The Guide To The Star Wars Universe stone-cold nerd in me will admit to being somewhat disappointed (though I still don’t think this means they scrap the continuity for sure—it could just mean they spin out to a different era or part of the galaxy). But I still think it’s worth thinking about what made both Star Wars and the Expanded Universe so addictive, and what could distinguish this franchise from the other ones in play in the media landscape.

One possibility, which I wrote about in Slate today, is that the franchise could jump ahead of its competitors by focusing on the female characters that have always been one of its strengths: Read more

If you want to know what it looks like when male artists show solidarity with women and women’s issues, the Dublin hip-hop group Original Rudeboys just provided a great example of it, turning down a chance to open for Chris Brown:

A member of the group Sean Walsh said: ‘Even though it’s a huge opportunity to play in the O2 with a major hip hop star and a substantial fee was offered, we are completely against Chris Brown’s assault on Rihanna.’

The group also claimed they didn’t want to mislead their own fans as their latest single ‘Blue Eyes’ is about domestic violence.

Sean said: ‘In addition, with our latest single ‘Blue Eyes’ being about domestic violence it goes against everything we are about as a band and supporting Chris would send out the wrong message to our fans.’

It’s one thing to talk the talk, and another to take an actual financial and long-term growth hit in order to stay consistent with what you believe—or, like John Scalzi, to spend actual time and energy arguing the good fight instead of simply saying the right thing when you’re asked and it’s convenient to do so. I hope this comes back for them in all the best ways. And while it’s a little hard to track down good streaming audio of their stuff, I’d be up for hearing more of this:

On a related note, the argument’s been made, I think effectively, that some of the reaction to Chris Brown has been racialized, making a black man a scapegoat for domestic violence while famous white men with even worse records get to continue on their way. I do think that there’s an extent to which Brown appears to be trolling people who are dismayed by his behavior, since disapprobation seems to have hardened support among his core fans, as is the case with his decision to dress up as a jihadi stereotype for Halloween.

But I do think that there are racial differences between the response to Brown and the response to white men of a certain profitability behaving badly. And I can’t think of a better example of that than how quickly a silence descended around FX’s decision to work with Charlie Sheen, and to stay in business with him after the first ten episodes of Anger Management, and the fact that when the news came down yesterday that Fox had struck a deal to syndicate the sitcom on nine affiliate stations, that it went relatively uncommented upon. I’d like to think that the news that more Fox divisions are getting into business with a guy with a long record of violence against women is news. And if equality is what we’re after, I’d like to see the same kind of pressure on Sheen to behave constructively and respectfully towards women if he wants public approbation that’s being applied to Brown.

Last night’s football game between the Bears and the Cowboys may have been a regular-season game, but it marked a rather more dubious milestone: the Cowboys opened what I imagine is the first underwear outlet in a professional sports stadium:

How ’bout them Cowgirls. Pink, the shop for young women from Limited Brands Inc.’s (NYSE:LTD) Victoria’s Secret chain, has teamed up with the Dallas Cowboys to open an NFL apparel store inside Cowboys Stadium. Jerry Jones, owner of the National Football League Dallas Cowboys, told a Dallas radio station that the store was opening Monday. “We think it’s cute as a bug,” Jones said, according to reports.

I hate the trend of turning arenas into amusement parks, in part because they imply that whatever sporting event is taking place there isn’t actually engaging enough to hold an audience’s attention. And I think the kinds of extras teams add to their stadiums are telling. Kids, who are presumed to get bored during games, get Build-A-Bear Workshops and playgrounds. And now women can shop for cute clothes while their husbands or boyfriends enjoy the game. Men, it’s presumed, fueled by beer and grease, will be glued to the game, even if they end up watching it on a flatscreen at one of the bars that crop up at stadiums in one of the great weird cons professional teams have pulled off with miraculous success.

I’m all for team gear that actually fits women, demand for which teams seem to have capitalized on rather nicely, if I may say so about my Wes Welker jersey, and I’m up for almost anything that dissuades teams from seeking public financing for stadiums. But it would be awfully nice if franchises focused on making the actual experience of staying in your seat and watching a game appealing, rather than by cynically suggesting that ladies need malls and kids need jungle gyms to make it all the way through to the final seconds of the fourth quarter.

My pals at the Mary Sue posted Ms. Magazine’s inaugural 1972 cover next to the one the magazine is running for its fortieth anniversary this month. And as much as the comics-lovin’ gal in me is excited to see Wonder Woman back in her role as cover woman, I couldn’t help noticing some of the differences between the covers, which in subtle ways have a lot to say about where feminism was forty years ago and where it is now. Take the 1972 cover:

The billboard calls for “Peace & Justice In ’72,” rather than making specific feminist demands. She’s in a landscape where the war in Vietnam and the blasted landscape it’s produced are in danger of intruding on the American main street, and Wonder Woman rushes to catch a war plane before it crashes, perhaps into that schoolbus. In this reading, feminism is part of a much larger left movement, but the implication is also that it has a larger role to play. The cover lines may be about paid housework and body hair, but Wonder Woman, as the personification of feminism, is solving not just any problems she might have as a super-powered lady, but the problems of everyone else. This was a time when people still talked about misogyny as a root cause of war, something that seems awfully distant from our mainstream political discourse now.

Flash-forward forty years:

Wonder Woman’s striding through the streets of Washington, the capitol in the background. Unlike the cover forty years ago, when the women on the street were dwarfed by the Amazon striding above them, Wonder Woman appears to be following a group of multi-racial young feminists carrying signs about the War on Women and voting in 2012. The movement’s survived into the next generation, and its constituency is broader than it was back then. But its theater of operations has gotten smaller: institutional feminism is part of the patchwork of the left, but nobody’s claiming that feminism will get us out of Afghanistan. Part of it, I think, is that in those forty years, feminists have had to spend a lot of time consolidating and defending our early gains, instead of pursuing new goals. It’s hard to to move into new arenas when we’re still trying to hold on, for example, the right to choose.