Romantic comedy was once a noble genre, a place to work out not only will they or won’t they, but why or why not, and should they or shouldn’t they? The Lady Eve may be a goofy romp about a conwoman and her beer-heir mark, but Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda’s spiky courtship is all about how much we can overcome deeply ingrained prejudices about class and sexual experience. In When Harry Met Sally, the two main characters talked their way through what makes a good relationship for a decade—and worked out their attitudes towards their careers and themselves as friends—before they got together. And movies like Annie Hall defied the traditional meaning of comedy—it ends with a breakup, not a marriage—to acknowledge both the power and potential for heartbreak of modern relationships.

But in recent years, romantic comedies have gone timid. In the quest for PG-13 ratings, they can’t say much about sex. And in their desire to rake in dollars, an interchangeable array of blonde or blondish heroines with disposable jobs in PR and fashion have spent ninety minutes resisting an similarly dull assortment of disc jockeys, television producers, and businessmen. A few R-rated romantic comedies from Judd Apatow and the creators in his orbit have broken the mold, but they haven’t been enough to change the conventional wisdom of the industry.

All of this is the reason Tanya Wexler’s Hysteria, about Mortimer Granville’s (Hugh Dancy) invention of the vibrator in Victorian England, is simultaneously a delight and a relief. There is a will-they-or-won’t-they couple at its heart, of course: when Mortimer, who believes in the germ theory of medicine, takes a job with women’s physician Dr. Charles Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce), he meets Dr. Dalrymple’s very different daughters, dutiful Emily (Felicity Jones) and Charlotte (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a socialist feminist who runs a London settlement house. While Mortimer plans to take over Dr. Dalrymple’s practice and becomes engaged to Emily, he’s drawn to Charlotte, whose ideals appeal to him even as she rejects the diagnosis of hysteria, which gives Mortimer his living, as an attempt to disguise the true dissatisfactions women experience. And when her political work gets Charlotte put on trial and branded hysterical, Mortimer must decide if he will let her be institutionalized and subject to an involuntary hysterectomy or maintain his devotion to the diagnosis that’s made his career. I spoke with Wexler about the declining stakes of romantic comedy, the importance of careers and values in successful relationships, and how she ended up making romantic comedy for men. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

One of the things you brought up was the decline of the romantic comedy, and this is very much a romantic comedy. I was curious if you thought that reflected the inevitable homogenization of any genre when Hollywood gets their hands on it, or whether consumers have actually backed away from romantic comedies where the issues are larger than will they or won’t they?

I think a lot of romantic comedies revolve around will they or won’t they. And yes, will they or won’t they get together is where ours is, but it’s not quite the central question. It’s more how will they? I think a lot of the better writing in romantic comedies these days has tended towards the R-rated romantic comedies, Knocked Up, Bridesmaids…I think Knocked Up, they take the characters, you put them in really hard situations, and you see how they deal. I think that’s a good thing. But the kind of witty banter, the kind of Hepburn-Cary Grant stuff is just not around as much, and it just felt right for this story, with this quirk of history.

It seems like in a lot of romantic comedies, the characters don’t really get treated like adults. Their careers raen’t particularly important to them. It’s a little infantilizing. One of the things that’s fun about Charlotte is whoever she ends up with has to share her values.

And her passion for her work. I think that’s where they connect first and foremost is they’re passionate about their work and what they believe in. They’re both true believers in their own way…I think one of the things you try to figure out is what kind of movie you’re trying to make. And I knew, on a very core level, I was making a romantic comedy. In that, I think the fundamental kind of question is about how and who you fall in love with, what draws you to people.

The movie is a lot about progressives in different ways. Mortimer, his character is a medical progressive. The rest of his life, he kind of fits tidily into the box. It doesn’t make sense for him to buck the system because it’s set up for him. But in the end, he can’t deny the truth in front of his face. His friend Edmund, played by Rupert Everett, is a progressive in science and technology, and he also doesn’t fit neatly into the box as a gay character. But he is part of the aristocracy, and he’s wealthy, and has ways around it. And Charlotte is the girl who can’t help it. She knows it would be easier not to raise her hand in the back of the classroom, so to speak, but she still has something she has to say. She knows it would be easier for her, but she doesn’t know how to be anything else. She’s a truth-teller.

In this kind of film, what their job is illuminates their character’s journey. It’s also important because it’s how it all happens. Because he’s a doctor who gets a job treating women for hysteria, that’s how he meets her. I’ve been looking at a lot of other films right now, and we’re always trying to get away from anybody’s job because it’s about the relationship. And sometimes it can be very cheesy and stupid to resolve something about the relationship through they achieve something at work. It’s kind of sideways. But in this case, I think so much of the film is about acknowledging the truth that’s right in front of you even if culture wants you to pretend it’s something else. And the only way these two are ever going to get together, the big obstacle between them is their differing opinions about what the truth is and what’s acceptable. Until they can find a way to each other as passionate people who are true believers, they’ll never be together. And they’re not even trying to be together…It’s when he wakes up that their relationship starts to work out.
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Though Ridley Scott’s recent interview with The Daily Beast’s Marlow Stern runs a full two pages, virtually all of the media attention has been on its final sentence:

“And we’ll definitely be featuring a female protagonist [in Blade Runner 2].”

But the entire interview – which focuses not on Blade Runner 2, but on Scott’s long history of films starring women – is well worth reading. What it’s like to pitch a female-led action film, in Scott’s own words:

“It’s far more considered normal to have a female in the lead [than it was in the past], and yet, studios will always look at the bottom line and the value of a female lead versus a male lead globally, because none of the budgets for these films are getting any smaller, so they have to take into account the bottom line from a business standpoint.”

Last January, I wrote an article for The Atlantic called “The Rise of the Female-Led Action Film” that traced the shift of the action genre – which was once Hollywood’s most sexist genre, and has gradually become one of its most progressive. Ridley Scott and Alien writer Dan O’Bannon deserve much of the credit for this change; though Alien was groundbreaking in many ways, its most enduring legacy is protagonist Ellen Ripley, whose first silver-screen outing in 1979 represents the tipping point of the action genre’s shift from sexism to feminism.

James Cameron (the other great feminist action director) gets the credit for Ripley’s shift to a full-fledged action icon in the 1986 sequel Aliens. But the seeds of what the character would eventually become were sown in the original Alien’s ending. At its core – and unlike its three direct sequels – Alien is a horror movie, right down to the “final girl” at the end. But Scott makes an important distinction that separates Ripley from the “final girl” of Alien’s horror contemporaries:

“In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre […] that girl was still standing at the end covered in blood, but she’d survived rather than won. The difference with Ripley was that she had won and survived.”

Given his history, it’s unsurprising that Scott decided to cast Noomi Rapace as the lead in Prometheus after being impressed by her performance as Lisbeth Salander – arguably the most iconic new female character of the decade – in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

And the Blade Runner universe offers just as many opportunities for both insight and critique. Though the original Blade Runner’s feminist themes are far less front-and-center than Alien’s, there’s a scathing feminist critique embedded in its story as well. Blade Runner features an enormously gender-stratified society. All of the characters in power are men, and each of the major female characters is a replicant, with Daryl Hannah’s Pris getting the worst of it as a “basic pleasure model.” When replicant Roy Batty breaks one of Deckard’s fingers for each of the female replicants he’s “retired” during the film, he’s breaking the government tool that has literally dehumanized – and eventually dispatched – each of the most important women in his life. We know nothing about Blade Runner 2’s female protagonist, who could easily turn out to be a blade runner or a replicant (or both). But I’m thrilled by the idea of revisiting Blade Runner’s gender-stratified dystopia through the eyes of a woman.

When my friend Brandy asked me to accompany her to a “women’s arm wrestling event” a few months ago I happily obliged. As it turned out I was about to participate in the first ever meeting of the “Boston Arm Wrestling Dames,” or BAWD, a local branch of the Collective of Lady Arm Wrestlers (CLAW).

I recently came across two posts by Salty Eggs’ staff writer Tara Nieuwesteeg that tackled the sport – particularly whether events like the one I attended – are feminist in nature. In the first post,  “Ladies Arm Wrestling is a Thing,” Nieuwesteeg writes:

It’s not completely clear why this is a feminist endeavor. Yes, it’s females doing something cool. As with roller derby, here are a shit-ton of like-minded people who probably feel very strongly on things like reproductive rights, equal work for equal pay, women’s healthcare, and a general message of promoting women as people. Don’t get me wrong: What they’re doing is awesome. But should ladies’ arm wrestling really take off (which I suspect it will), it would be nice to see these women use their collective arm strength for something not just awesome, but maybe a little bigger, too.

In the original posting, Nieuwesteeg’s commentary was prompted as a reaction to a NYT article that called the sport “feminist.” However, after hearing from participants, and supporters of CLAW and its chapters, she was still hesitant to apply the label, titling a follow up post, Is Lady Arm Wrestling Feminist? Yes, But…

As with many commenters on the original article I was unsure about why Nieuwesteeg questions whether these events are feminist in nature. She answered, in the follow up, by addressing commenters and arm wrestlers directly:““Calling something “feminism” just because it consists of women doing something fun and bad-ass isn’t enough anymore.””

The mission of CLAW is to “empower women and strengthen local communities through theater, arm wrestling, and philanthropy.”  Yet somehow, this mission falls short of feminism in Nieuwesteeg’s view because it is somehow not enough or perhaps too frivolous.

Here’s where I disagree with her – and with the “but” in the title. As I posted on twitter, there’s always room for any of us to do more or do bigger , but what does “bigger” mean? And what qualifies as big enough to be feminist? While CLAW is fairly young as an organization, it’s had an impressive impact in its short existence – and it continues to grow at a rapid pace with leagues springing up all over the country. (Boston is about to host it’s second “brawl” and has already had to switch to a much larger venue).

Poking around on the CLAW main site, and visiting the sites and pages of a few other affiliated chapters, it’s easy to see the reach the wrestlers and these events have had. During the inaugural event I mentioned earlier, the Boston arm wrestlers raised $2,000 for Elizabeth Stone House, a local charity that works with homeless families and helps victims of domestic violence. CLAW reports over $175,000 raised for charities ranging from domestic violence shelters, family planning advocates, rape crisis centers, LGBTQ organizations, and many many more.

I would argue that CLAW, and its spinoff organizations, are not about just fun and bad-assery (and even if they were, why does that exclude them from feminism). At their core, the arm wrestling events that CLAW puts on are about empowering women whether through entertainment or advocacy – and I fail to see what is not feminist about that. Moreover, womens’ arm wrestling is a subversive form of entertainment. Having attended a bout in my home city, I can say, confidently, that this is not anything near what you’ll find on main stream television – this is not male-gaze driven entertainment – it’s about women’s voices.

I find something inherently troubling and dangerous for feminism as a whole if, within the movement, we are questioning the identities of those participating in events like womens’ arm wrestling bouts.  CLAW provides a safe space for women to embody characters, satirize pop culture, politics and current events, while socializing and effecting meaningful change in their own communities.  Why, I wonder, does it seem to Nieuwesteeg that these things need to be exclusive?

While I don’t believe it was the intention, Nieuwesteeg’s posts are indicative of a problematic and exclusionary attitude prevalent in the overall movement today. Personally, I find it neither productive, nor helpful, to question the identity of anyone who self identifies as feminist or to infer that their own particular brand of activism is lesser because it does not meet some as yet determined standard.

As women (and feminists) we’ve got enough on our plates finding our own spaces and making our voices heard – does publicly diminishing the efforts of other women, by suggesting they “do more,” really help?  There’s a suggestion in here that the women involved in arm wrestling events do more – without really knowing, fully, what it is that they all do, or are inspired to do by these events, in the first place.

The ultra-conservative attempt to push women out of the public sphere has a new frontier: the Arizona Charter Athletic Association. Our Lady of Sorrows, a school run by a breakaway Catholic sect, has forfeited the league’s high school baseball championship rather than put their team up against a squad that includes a girl named Paige Sultzbach—a team they already played and lost to twice during the regular season.

Our Lady of Sorrows gave a statement to ESPN explaining that the school bans co-ed sports and will not play a co-ed team because “proper boundaries can only be respected with difficulty” under those circumstances. Despite the fact that it takes a lot of imagination to imagine boys and girls getting frisky on the basepaths or across vast swaths of outfield in full view of the public, Sultzbach and her team have been more considerate of Our Lady of Sorrows’ views than they have been of her rights to participate in sports programs under Title IX:

From early on, Paige tried to blend in, her mother said. When the coach referred to the kids as “guys and gals,” Paige spoke up and said that they all wear the same uniform, so the coach should just call them all guys.

Her teammates have stood up for her.

During Mesa Prep’s two previous games with Our Lady of Sorrows, Paige didn’t play out of respect for the opposing team’s beliefs, but that wasn’t going to be an option this time, Pamela said.

“We respected their school rule … but she took it hard,” Pamela said. “She didn’t like it and neither did her teammates. They went out and played the best they could because they wanted to prove a point.”

As depressing as this story is, it’s encouraging that Sultzbach’s teammates have supported her. The reason it’s important to let girls try out for their high school baseball teams, to have women in all arenas in public life, is not just because it’s nice for women. When 15-year-old girls play second base for championship teams, edit magazines and hold high office, sometimes men find that they like having women there. The more boys figure this out, and the more feminism becomes their cause too, the harder it will be for anyone go give credence to the idea that girls don’t belong on baseball fields or anywhere else in the public square.

I spent a bunch of last week immersed in the music of my youth and today’s for a piece in The Atlantic on boy bands, specifically The Wanted and One Direction, which are taking teenage girls’ radios (or whatever the newfangled equivalent is) by storm. Our default assumption tends to be, I think, that boy band songs are substanceless trifle meant to make girls feel all lovey-dovey. But listening to this stuff through the years is a reminder that when boys talk to girls about love, even and maybe especially in commercial packaging, things can get awfully creepy.

Take the Monkees “Daydream Believer,” which is kind of breathtaking in its condescending dismissiveness. The girl in question is a “daydream believer / and a homecoming queen.” She couldn’t possibly have real concerns:

Then, there’s the Jackson 5′s “Stop (The Love You Save),” which is literally slut-shaming from the lips of a kid who’s too young to be having sex:

From my own era, ‘N Sync’s “Girlfriend” is textbook negging. “Does he even know you’re alive?” are not words to make a woman feel treasured—they’re words to make her vulnerable:

And the Backstreet Boys’ “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” is the weirdest, neediest thing of all time, the inverse of wooing, paired with a truly terrible attempt at a “Thriller” ripoff:

I don’t know what it says about how conditioned preteen girls are that we listen to these songs and hear professions of adoration. Clearly, the only solution is to hook the young women in our lives up with Boyz II Men sooner:

Normally I wouldn’t do this, but Cabin in the Woods relies so much on the element of surprise, that you should not read this post if you haven’t seen it and care about being spoiled on it.

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.

Next week, I’ll start a new regular feature where I discuss Veep, HBO’s new comedy about a bumbling female vice president, and Girls, Lena Dunham’s sly deconstruction of Sex and the City, together, because I’m struck by their riffs on the same themes. But I did want to talk a little bit about last night’s premiere of Girls.

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.

The summer after I graduated from college, I watched all of Sex and the City as reassurance that I wouldn’t be sexmurdered, as Law & Order: Special Victims Unit seemed determined to tell me, and after 30 Rock premiered that fall, as reassurance that, short and bespectacled though I might have been and remain, there were options beyond Liz Lemonhood. I say all of this not to let you know that you will only like Girls, Lena Dunham’s brilliant new comedy for HBO about four young women fumbling through their early lives in New York if you liked Sex and the City. Quite the reverse. Those of us who love Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha will see ourselves, and be able to laugh at ourselves in Girls. But there’s an enormous amount there for those of you who didn’t. And while the show is unfortunately really, really white for a show set in New York City, on all other counts, it’s a show so good it’s almost implausible to me that it was made at all. Need specifics other than my good word, which appears at great length here in an essay for The Atlantic based on a long interview with Dunham? Here are five reasons to watch Girls after you get your dose of Game of Thrones on Sunday:

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.

The joyous news is upon us: after years of waiting, we’re finally getting a sequel to the seminal frat pack movie Anchorman. Ron Burgundy and his mustache and jazz flute will ride again! I hope, though, that Anchorman 2 is smart enough to recognize that a lot of what made the original—a story about an outrageously manly San Diego news team learning to deal with their new female coworker in the 1970s—such a comedic masterpiece was its feminism. As a satire of blustering, clueless masculinity and male misconceptions about women, Anchorman is nigh-unequaled in our recent popular culture.

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.