I don’t remotely agree with my sometimes-Slate colleagues David Haglund and Daniel Engber that this week’s episode of Girls, in which Hannah hooks up with a handsome doctor whose trash cans she’s been misusing, was “the worst episode of Girls ever.” But something that the two of them said that struck me as particularly truthful in a revealing way:

Engber: I felt trapped by my unwillingness to buy into the central premise. Narcissistic, childish men sleep with beautiful women all the time in movies and on TV, so why should this coupling be so difficult to fathom? I think it’s because Hannah is especially and assertively ugly in this episode. She’s rude (“what did you do?” she asks Joshua, referring to his broken marriage), self-centered (“I’m too smart and too sensitive”), sexually ungenerous (“no, make me come”), and defiantly ungraceful (naked ping-pong). In sum, the episode felt like a finger poked in my guys-on-Girls eyeball, or a double-dog dare for me to ask, How can a girl like that get a guy like this? Am I small-minded if I’m stuck on how this fantasy is too much of a fantasy and remembering what Patrick Wilson’s real-life partner looks like?…

Haglund: resumably there are things that Hannah would not, in any world that resembled our own, get. Such as Patrick Wilson, for instance. I want to suspend my disbelief—just as viewers have, for generations, imagined that Al could get Peggy and Homer could get Marge and Jim Belushi could snag Courtney Thorne-Smith. But the show needs to work harder to make that seem feasible. And not pile implausibility upon implausibility.

Why is it that we believe that Jim Belushi could plausibly be married to Courtney Thorne-Smith? Or that Katherine Heigl’s character in Knocked Up, a beautiful, upwardly mobile entertainment reporter would end up with pre-weight-loss, unemployed Seth Rogen, simply because his character stepped up by performing the basic adult human task of obtaining a job? And why is it that we don’t believe a sexually available weirdo like Hannah Horvath could have a several-day fling with a depressive, divorcing, lonely doctor because he happens to be played by Patrick Wilson? Is it that in men, being funny is considered the equivalent of being beautiful for women? Are male characters are required to have one positive characteristic, whether it’s a sense of charm, or the expressed desire to not be a a deadbeat, where women need to be both a certain level of hot, as well as be desirable in other ways? Are movies and TV that feature pairing between schlubby guys and attractive women really doing the equivalent amount of work it would take to make long-term relationships between those characters credible that it would apparently require folks to believe that someone might want to keep Hannah around for a couple of days?

I can see how Hannah’s hookup with Joshua might not have been plausible for everyone in the audience. After all, who invites random strangers into their living room for lemonade, as Joshua did when Hannah showed up at his door after spotting him at Grumpy’s? How many of us kiss random strangers simply because we’re on a quest to have dramatic experiences that will be fodder for later fiction writing? But I think there’s a strong case that we’re simply more used to seeing men date and marry above themselves, at least when it comes to looks, in popular culture. That doesn’t mean that those pairings are, themselves, more credible, or that more work’s gone into making them credible, just that we’ve had more training in suspending disbelief when it comes to them.

I went to see Ted, Seth MacFarlane’s movie about a man, his talking teddy bear, and the long-suffering woman who usually loves them both, on Friday night, not quite sure what to expect. I’m not an enormous MacFarlane fan—he’s always been someone who doesn’t have a precise or necessarily interesting sense of the distinction between how his characters see themselves and their often-abhorrent behavior and how his shows see them. But I found Ted surprisingly thought-provoking, mostly because of how it illuminates what seems to be a significant and under-acknowledged factor in the slacker-dude movies of the last seven or eight years: class.

John Bennett, the mid-30s rental car slinger Mark Wahlberg plays in Ted is in many ways a stereotypical Bostonian, possessed of the exaggerated bray lots of filmmakers think is inherently hilarious and a wardrobe full of Red Sox garments in a proportion that would be unfathomable to people from outside the region. He’s also a man with what the movie suggests is a limited understanding of race and racial nuance—Ted begins with a made-up Boston tradition of Christian kids gathering to beat up neighborhood Jews on Christmas eve, and John is the kind of man who orders his girlfriend Lori (MacFarlane regular Mila Junis) Cristal at their anniversary dinner because “all those rich black people can’t be wrong.” These are the kinds of exaggerated traits that are a MacFarlane hallmark, whether in the person of Family Guy‘s blinkered patriarch Peter Griffin, or here. But John’s accent and his racial attitudes are class signifiers, as much as his job at a rental car company or the extent to which John feels threatened by Lori’s boss Rex (an unctuous Joel McHale), who thinks that he, not John, can care for Lori properly.

Ted never really has the guts (or the stuffing) to explore that tension. There are hints at it—after John tells Ted he has to move out, Ted works as a checkout clerk at a supermarket, where he meets a woman named Tami-Lynn, and take her on a deeply awkward double date with John and Lori, ruined by Tami’s breach of etiquette. But the movie abandons the question of whether John will be promoted into management at his rental car office or pursue a new, higher-status career in favor of a silly caper plot, and casts Rex as such a villain that there’s no sense that Lori is facing a real or difficult choice between the two men. It’s too bad, because Ted might have been a sharper (and not coincidentally more Bostonian) movie if it had the nerve or the attention span to explore the tension between working-class white communities and the highly educated professional, academic, and creative classes in the region.
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Maybe it’s just where I am in my own life, but it seems like all the actors who are slightly older than I am, who several years ago were making movies about dating are now making movies about getting married. Jason Segel and Emily Blunt are in The Five-Year Engagement, which I hope to catch this weekend. Alison Brie is getting married in Save the Date, and Lizzy Caplan is thinking about it. Kirsten Dunst and Caplan are panicked about their singleness in Bachelorette, which is supposed to be a more caustic riff on Bridesmaids. And Judd Apatow, who several years ago was making movies about people coming together as families, whether the main character becomes a stepfather like in The 40-Year-Old Virgin or an accidental father in Knocked Up, is now making movies about middle aged parenting with This Is 40, his look at the married couple who were supporting characters in the latter movie:

I can’t quite decide what I feel about this yet other than vaguely apprehensive. Is this going to be a self-improvement comedy? A tragedy about holding a family together? Where do these people get all this time to self-improve? Don’t they work? And is this what it really feels like to be 40? I sort of thought 40 was going to be awesome.

Last week kicked off with Two and a Half Men creator Lee Aronsohn‘s declaration that, in terms of raunchy comedies starring women on television, “Enough ladies. I get it. You have periods…we’re approaching peak vagina on television, the point of labia saturation.” So it’s wonderfully refreshing to hear Judd Apatow, when asked about his recent projects that star and are about women, and about the female comedy boom, say:

I got bored of penises. I said, ‘enough of that.’ No, I just like immaturity, I like to show people struggle and try to figure out who they are. I’m a guy and so it leaned guy for a while. But one of the projects I’m most proud of is Freaks and Geeks, which is about a woman in high school struggling to figure out which group she wants to belong to, so for me, it goes back and forth…It’s just because it’s a single camera show and we’re on HBO and it’s uncensored. There are limitations when you’re doing a sitcom, in terms of language and how long you have to tell a story. But we’re big fans of all of those shows. My friend Jake Kasdan, who produced Freaks and Geeks, is one of the producers on New Girl and we’re all obsessed.

It’s always funny to me that anyone would remember Freaks and Geeks as anything other than a show with male and female co-main characters. I suppose that has something to do with the fact that Linda Cardellini’s subsequent career been much, much quieter than that of almost any actor with a significant role on the show. John Francis Daley’s on Bones and has launched a successful screenwriting career. Seth Rogen and Jason Segel have morphed from manboys to heartthrobs. James Franco is James Franco.

Given how much time men and women devote to figuring out each other’s behavior and motivations—and how they should tailor their behavior in response—in real life, it’s always struck me as bizarre to assume that men would only want to watch stories about men or that women would only want to watch stories about women. Apatow’s curiosity shouldn’t seem so refreshing and logical. But in the world we live in, he’s practically a beacon of sanity.

When we talk about reproductive health in popular culture, as progressives, we mostly talk about the essential invisibility of abortion. But the debate over Obama’s contraception coverage rule really ought to raise something related into sharper relief: the near-absence of any kind of depictions of contraception in our popular culture at all.

It’s not as if contraceptive use would be difficult to incorporate into pop culture with a relative minimum of effort. When you show a heroine doing her morning routine for the first time, show her popping a pill before she brushes her teeth. If your heroine is going to drop her purse and meet the hero when he stops to help her, have a pill pack in the mix of her stuff. Include condoms in the set dressing for your hero’s bedroom. When you have a couple go to bed, have someone reach for a bedside table drawer. It doesn’t need to be showy or obtrusive, though it is possible to make using condoms an alluring part of a sex scene. It’s entirely possible to incorporate the things people really do in their everyday intimate lives without interrupting the flow of a scene or making a bit deal out of the fact that your characters are doing something normal.

There are, of course, ratings reasons that you might not show a character clearly putting a condom on in a sex scene. But if you’ve got teenaged characters who are going to have sex for the first time and the plot doesn’t call for an accidental pregnancy; or even adult characters going to bed who want to make sure they try to get, it’s not hard to add a preparatory scene that includes the characters making sure they’ve got their birth control figured out. Even Knocked Up, which is about an accidental pregnancy, managed to work in a scene about condom use and sexual communication gone wrong. (Judd Apatow appears to have some condom issues, given both that scene and the condoms-as-agents-of-penis-destruction scene in The 40-Year-Old-Virgin.)

And figuring out how to code contraception use in a positive way is important. One of the reasons I love Sons of Anarchy so much is that it’s one of the few shows in which characters actually use or talk about contraception like grown-ups do. But often, contraception use is coded negatively. The Sons talk about using condoms when they’re sleeping with women other than their old ladies. Porn star Lyla’s use of birth control pills and Plan B isn’t a sign of her sexual agency so much as her deception of Opie and a symptom of their larger communications problems and incompatibilities. I love Tara, but it’s inconceivable to me that a professional woman who seriously loves her career and has an uncertain relationship with her biker boyfriend wouldn’t at least think about trying to protect herself from getting pregnant by accident.

It shouldn’t take product placement deals by Trojan to get condoms and other forms of contraception into our pop culture. But if it does, I suppose that’s one sort of product placement I could tolerate.

It’s very good news that the Affordable Care Act might eliminate copays for birth control—as Matt singles out, even the relatively small cost of those copays can be an obstacle to use. But I think making contraception cheap and readily available is only one part of the use equation. And one thing that would be incredibly useful is if pop culture showed more people actually using contraceptives.

I really like Love & Basketball for many reasons, including that it ends up being a story about a man who supports his more successful wife’s career, but the thing that’s stuck with me most is the fact that when the main characters, Monica and Quincy, have sex for the first time, the movie doesn’t cut away during foreplay, but shows Quincy getting a condom out of his dresser drawer and putting it on (SF my W, but your mileage may vary):

Sex and the City, which is theoretically super-frank about sex, shows condoms in Carrie’s purse and stored by Steve in Brady’s diaper bag, but I don’t remember a sex scene that actually includes a man putting one on. There’s one episode where a potential partner wants Samantha to have an HIV test before he’ll sleep with her, and of course Miranda and Steve don’t use protection when they have the sexual encounter that results in their son. But for characters who have as much as sex as they do, contraception and condoms are a surprisingly small part of the conversation.

Judd Apatow’s movies make contraception seem kind of bizarrely complex, whether it’s Ben, who’s too drunk to get a condom on in Knocked Up (and it makes no sense that Alison isn’t on oral contraception), or Andy, who finds condoms totally mysterious in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. It’s a confusion that sort of emphasizes the man-child nature of the characters, but that none the less doesn’t read as particularly true.

It goes without saying that most movie sex scenes aren’t particularly realistic period, nor are they particularly complete. But it would be pretty easy to incorporate that step into movies, or to have characters ask if someone’s on the pill when they sleep together for the first time. And even if stories aren’t romantic comedies or dramas, to include the fairly routine popping your pill before you brush your teeth or before dinner in the infinite montages of characters getting ready in the morning. Background is important here, and safe sex is both about the heat of the moment and about routine.

-Bridesmaids is going to be the most profitable movie Judd Apatow’s ever been involved with.

-Something else we can blame Michael Bay for: giving Tyrese Gibson PTSD.

-You Don’t Mess With the Zohan is surprisingly funny, also not in violation of copyright law.

-Rob Thomas, please stop torturing me with promises of a Party Down movie.

-I’d be much more excited for the new Mission Impossible movie if it was about Jeremy Renner and Simon Pegg teaming up to take down Tom Cruise:

Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s Miss Representation, which I saw this afternoon at Netroots, should have been right up my alley. In a conference that’s full of political and policy discussions, of course I was going to make a beeline not just for a movie screening, but for a screening of a movie that insists on the importance of media and popular culture to understanding our politics. And the movie has some intriguing arguments. But mostly, it reinforced a question I’ve really been struggling with about how to do feminist media criticism. It’s really easy to document hideously sexist depictions of women in every form of media, and we do it all the time. But isn’t what we need to figure out how to shift the market so viewers demand different things and companies feel compelled to give them to us?

One thing Miss Representation does well, if all too briefly, is point out that the range of roles women can play, the things women can be, in pop culture has narrowed dramatically since the moments when actresses like Barbara Stanwyck ruled the screen. “We allowed women to really embody all the contradictions of being a human being back then,” one commentator says during the movie. “They could be the femme fatale, and then turn around and be the mother…and we accepted that.” It would be interesting to actually document trends in the number of kinds of roles women could play in movies and on television, and to try to identify moments when the diversity of roles for women contracted. But the movie doesn’t really do that, or explain why what the market appears to demand changed.

More specifically, the movie spends a lot of time linking media representations of women and their ability to run successfully for office. Sure, it’s insane that Geraldine Ferraro’s dress size became part of her biography when she ran for vice president. And there’s no question that women’s looks and their self-presentation become part of campaigns, distracting from real questions of policy positions and competence. But the movie sort of undermines its point when Newsome compares the United States unfavorably to countries like Cuba and China in terms of the number of elected officials without addressing their media culture. Are depictions of women uniformly better in international pop culture than in the U.S.? I kind of doubt it—there seems to be some real anecdotal evidence that one of the problems with getting better representations of women in American movies is that those depictions won’t play well in international markets.

And look, there’s an obvious domestic market for something else, an urgency about it, a sense that women are wounded by our culture. “I don’t know how we survive it,” Margaret Cho says in the movie. “I don’t know how we rise above it.” It’s awful watching a girl crying as she explains why poor self-esteem lead her sister to harm herself. “What can I do so my little sister isn’t getting hurt by the media? What is it going to take for someone to take a stand?” But there’s a sense of surrender in the movie, and the outside campaign attached to the movie mostly consists of trying to get viewers to take a pledge to “see Miss Representation the film, use my voice to spread the word, and challenge the media’s limited portrayal of women and girls.” There’s a call to go see movies made by women, especially on the opening weekend, but it’s part of a quick montage—and it comes mid-way through the closing credits. It would be nice to see something more actionable, whether it’s asking viewers to contribute to a fund to support women screenwriters and television writers who are working on new projects, or to help raise money for distribution of movies that, unlike this one, aren’t getting aired on Oprah Winfrey’s cable network.

At one point, Geena Davis says that the central assumption of Hollywood is that”Women will watch stories about men, but men won’t watch stories about women…Nobody’s ever really proved that that’s true.” The interesting thing about the media moment we’re in right now is that the market might be about to disprove it, whether through the box office success of Bridesmaids, or through the fall crop of television shows created by and starring women. In a way, I wish I could see the movie Miss Representation might have been a year or two from now, when it might have been able to be about a moment when women, and the men who are their allies, successfully fought back. Maybe the moment will fail. But if it works, even in a limited way, we could be at a really exciting tipping point. And if it comes to pass, it’ll be critical to understand the conditions and people who came together to make it happen.