I wrote yesterday about the news that DC Comics is preparing to have a major male character in their stable, previously assumed to be straight, come out of the closet. Today the news comes that rival comics giant Marvel, already ahead of DC in the movie business is one-upping DC once again when it comes to depictions of gay characters: Canadian superhero Northstar will propose to his non-superpowered boyfriend in an arc that will lead to the first superhero comics wedding between two men. Archie Comics got there months ago with the wedding of Kevin Keller and his boyfriend (the two met during their military service), but it’s still a big deal to see a superhero, a masculine ideal if there ever was one, marry a man, to show the superhero community standing up and celebrating that couple. Whether you live within the story or experience it from outside, that’s some heavy hitters to have in your corner. And the way Marvel’s talking about the arc is great:

“The story of Northstar and Kyle is universal, and at the core of everything I write: a powerful love between two people who have to fight for it against all odds,” said comic writer Marjorie Liu in a statement. “This is the quintessential Marvel story, one that blends the modern world with the fantasy of superheroes in order to tell an exciting story that begins with a wedding and continues in ways you can’t imagine.”

Although Northstar’s story marks Marvel’s first gay wedding, the X-Men comics are known for tackling civil rights — including gay, lesbian and transgender issues — in their panels. Much has been made of the parallels between the mutant outsiders of the comics and gay youngsters grappling with identity and stigma. Other gay and bisexual Marvel characters include Mystique, Colossus (the Ultimate version), Destiny, Karma and Graymalkin.

“The Marvel Universe has always reflected the world outside your window, so we strive to make sure our characters, relationships and stories are grounded in that reality,” Marvel’s editor in chief, Axel Alonso, said in a statement.

I said this about Jay-Z and I think it’s true here, too. Presenting stories about gay people and gay couples as if they are the status quo, and as if they’re consistent with your stated values, and putting people who disagree in the position of shaking you off that ground is one of the most powerful ways to change the tenor of gay rights debate. And when it comes to narrative, doing more than simply announcing someone’s gay is critical: giving them a full, rich lived experience and insisting that ought to be the norm because it’s good storytelling is one of the best way art can fight for equality and reconfigure the terms of our conversations and assumptions.

‘

I agree with Tyler Lewis that what’s most striking about Jay-Z’s endorsement of marriage equality in the wake of Obama’s public statement of support is his nonchalance:

Even more than stirring appeals to the legacy of civil rights, I think this tone, these suggestions that marriage equality is just logical is useful. The Proposition 8 trial was a valuable small-scale expose of the contortions foes of marriage equality put themselves through to try to come up with a scientific or sociological justification for their views. But if on a larger scale, people like Jay-Z can convey the impression that support for equality is a more natural default than support for discriminatory laws, it’ll be easier for people who don’t have deeply thought-out reasons to oppose marriage equality to simply side with the default. And the more folks like Obama and Jay-Z speak up, the greater lie they can give to the unfortunate and divisive perception that black Americans are uniquely homophobic. We need both to convince new allies, and to recognize the ones we may have unfairly dismissed.

Apparently, the New York Post’s Phil Mushnick thought it was clever to write, in reference to Jay-Z’s work as part owner of the New York Nets:

As long as the Nets are allowing Jay-Z to call their marketing shots — what a shock that he chose black and white as the new team colors to stress, as the Nets explained, their new “urban” home — why not have him apply the full Jay-Z treatment? Why the Brooklyn Nets when they can be the New York N——s? The cheerleaders could be the Brooklyn B—-hes or Hoes. Team logo? A 9 mm with hollow-tip shell casings strewn beneath. Wanna be Jay-Z hip? Then go all the way!

“I guess I won’t need my color TV anymore now that the Nets will be wearing black and white,’’ writes reader John Lynch. And reader David Distefano now wonders what’s left for the Nets to choose as “their alternate third-uniform to sell during nationally televised games.”

And his editors saw fit to let this get into print, which perhaps says more about their failings. If you can’t see Jay-Z — the guy who made it possible to be viably middle aged in hip-hop, a long-established businessman, a guy with a wife and kid — as anything other than an ignorant thug, you’re willfully blind in the same way as people who look at President Obama and insist on seeing a radical. No one who sees the world through lenses that distorted should be trusted to interpret it for the public. And it’s contemptible to make money off that kind of willful blindness and the pleasure people get out of casual racism. This column may be the consequence of Mushnick’s views being taken to their logical extension. But someone let him off the leash.

Mos Def, performing under his Yasiin Bey stage name, took a shot at turning “Ni**as in Paris,” the most recent single off Kanye West and Jay-Z’s joint album Watch the Throne, into a piece of biting social commentary:

I don’t necessarily think that “Ni**as in Paris,” which is pretty obviously about the distorting influence of wealth, needed a socially conscious-remix as an antidote. That said, the riffs on the original are pretty funny, turning a bathroom hook up into a parody of Cosby-like concern with how young black men present themselves; a joke about lesbians into a commentary on fast food and diabetes; and I pretty much lost it at “Prince Williams ain’t do it right if you ask me / If I was him I’d put some black up in my family.” I’m less compelled by the slightly apocalyptic stuff towards the end, but it’s a pretty comprehensive and clever inversion of the song.

And it’s also part of a noble semi-tradition of other rappers poking Kanye and Jay-Z about their politics. Kanye may have gone socially-conscious on his remix of his own song, “Diamonds from Sierra Leone,” but the line that everyone remembers from that song is Jay-Z declaring that “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.” It took Lupe Fiasco to drop actual knowledge about the history of the contemporary diamond trade and talk jewelry depreciation:

The video for Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “Ni**as in Paris” isn’t exactly something we’ve never seen before:

Visually, it’s a clear descendant of both the Gnarls Barkley video for “Crazy”:

And the ghostly big cats seem like they probably strolled over from the menagerie on the set of Frank Ocean’s video for “Novacane”:

But “Ni**gas in Paris” does a really nice job of showing us a pulsing crowd that almost seems to be undergoing mitosis looks from the perspective of the men on stage. There’s something profoundly disconcerting about the way a normal audience suddenly splits into wild geometry or the passage through the crowd is suddenly full of horror-movie sets of identical twins. If this is what the world looks like when you’re an insanely famous person, it’s a lot less appealing than it looks from the outside.

It seems likely that the poem in which Jay-Z, theoretically swore off use of the term “bitch” to describe women to mark the birth of his daughter, apparently writing: “I rapped, I flipped it, I sold it, I lived it now with my daughter in this world I curse those that give it. I never realized while on the fast track that I’d give riddance to the word bitch, to leave her innocence in tact…No man will degrade her, or call her name. I’m so focused on your future, the degradation has passed,” is a fake. But I’m curious about the reaction to the poem for the moment when it seemed like it might be true, which ranged from cautious optimism to intense anger that Jay-Z would profit from the degradation of women and have a late conversion only when he finally had a baby girl to be responsible for.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the question of prior bad acts and conversions lately (more on this to come later this morning), and as much as I understand the frustration that it takes a big change like a birth to get important men to recognize obvious sexism. But when it comes to hip-hop and misogyny, I think it would probably take someone who is not only famous, but has a lot of market influence, having a late and profound conversion to make a difference. It’s very hard to change norms, particularly around the use of language and representation. Given how normalized a word like “bitch” is, whether in hip-hop or comparatively anodyne network television, you’d have to convince people that the term was degrading before you could even start a conversation about moving beyond it.

I’m also not an absolutist about language — “cunt” may not be my favorite term of all time, but Deadwood could back up its use of the word like nobody’s business. And I don’t think that a total ban on any particular terminology makes sense given the demands of artistic license. But if someone like Jay-Z could, through Roc Nation or through personal relationships, begin a conversation about whether terms like “bitch” and misogynistic narratives are the best, most creative things artists can put out, that would be a useful conversation. The depth and repetition of prior bad acts should determine how willing we are to forgive and give folks credit for trying to do the right thing. If Jay-Z or someone else of his stature whose sins against women were essentially limited to terminology, announced an intention to do better, I’d be curious to see what they’d do next, but entirely open to welcoming them to the conversation.

The bridge is yours.

-Tim Tebow: powered by elves.

-Poor, sad Ben Stein.

-Teaching Fight Club.

-I am also pretty excited about these sci-fi and fantasy movies.

-Branding AIDS.

-I just really love listening to Jay-Z rap about how much he loves the women in his family:

I think we’re going to see a lot more advertising like this trailer for House of Lies, which describes a management consulting firm run by Don Cheadle, Veronica Mars, and Jean-Ralphio by telling us that “They’re the one percent, sticking it to the one percent”:

The 99 percent/1 percent dichotomy is valuable, in art as in politics, because it’s clarifying. Labeling someone a member of the 1 percent is suddenly an easy way to tag them as a villain. The term doesn’t just imply wealth—after all, we have a lot of culture that suggests the benevolence of wealth, the rich are using their money to stock Batman’s arsenal or having revelations and giving it away—it implies a kind of inherent callousness. The messaging of the political movement suggests that the 1 percent will run roughshod over the rest of America, so it’s not that much of a leap to believe they’d turn on each other. It’s that assumption—without the labeling—that’s at the core of Revenge, in which only immense wealth lets Amanda take revenge on all of the classes of society, from investors, to social climbers, to politicians, who framed her father—and did wrong by the rest of us. And it’s interesting to see the circle of 1 Percent villains widen out in House of Lies from the investment bankers of Margin Call and the wealth of Tower Heist to management consultants, a profession that’s quite efficiently captured a large chunk of elite college graduates, in part by selling the idea that you can become a member of the 1 percent by gaining skills you’ll later use to do good for the 99 percent.

Asserting that you’re a member of the 99 percent is less obviously indicative—there is a lot of difference between being in the bottom 1 percent and being just below that 1 percent—but asserting membership in the 99 percent is shorthand way of asserting a worldview and a set of priorities. That kind of affinity is powerful, so it’s not remotely surprising to see folks like Jay-Z try to bandwagon it, with Rocawear’s quickly-pulled Occupy Wall Street t-shirts, which the mogul planned to use to capitalize on a trend without, of course, contributing anything to it.

-I’m not particularly excited for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, but I am excited for Trent Reznor’s soundtrack.

-George R.R. Costanza.

-Men are more valuable to TV networks than women.

-Someone needs to stage a sci-fi intervention at AMC.

-If you’re going to blow a lot of money on something silly, this looks like a reasonably enjoyable way to do it: