I hadn’t seen the covers for the Game of Thrones comics adaptation until Latoya Peterson tweeted this one out in horror:

It’s amazing how even an original, powerful franchise with its own following can get squished into comic book conventions even when they don’t fit very well. Here, Dany’s a standard comic-book babe with an impossibly tiny waist and significant-sized breasts, even though her character has just hit puberty in the scene from the novel depicted here. Even if she’s been aged up, as she was in the show to make the depiction of her marriage to a Ghengis Khan-like barbarian less problematic, the way she’s portrayed here is about serving her up as a delectable object, not to explain how frightening what’s about to happen to her is.

Even worse may be this cover:

The scene that’s depicted here? The one where Dany looks like she’s having an orgasm? It’s the moment after she, in extreme grief at the loss of her husband and the fact she’s been abandoned by her people, does something that everyone around her thinks is suicidal, but that turns out to be an act of vision that makes her a critically important and sought-after leader. Also, all her hair burns off. But no, that couldn’t possibly be what’s important here. What’s important is that she look devourable, whether by dragons or by men.

Well, this makes American politics look positively sober-minded and feminist:

Julia Orayen has posed nude for Playboy and appeared barely dressed in other media, but she made her mark on Mexican minds Sunday night by carrying an urn filled with bits of paper determining the order that candidates would speak. Not that viewers were looking at the urn. She wore a tight, white dress with a wide, tear-drop cutout that revealed her ample decolletage. The image was splashed across newspaper front pages and websites by Monday.

“The best was the girl in white with the cleavage at the beginning,” tweeted former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda, who is also a New York University professor.

Orayen’s name jockeyed for third and fourth place throughout the day under Twitter’s Mexico City trends, where a click revealed her previous work, including an almost-nude spread commemorating Mexican Independence Day in which she appears in minimal garb modeled on images of Mexican founding father Jose Maria Morelos.

Alfredo Figueroa, director of the Federal Electoral Institute responsible for organizing the debate, blamed the incident on a production associate hired by the institute to help with the debate. The institute later issued an apology to Mexican citizens and the candidates for the woman’s dress.

The problem here isn’t really the dress, or the fact that Julia Orayen has posed nude. It’s that the debate organizers thought that what the event really needed was a hot female presenter to kick things off. I can’t imagine it ever crossed their minds to hire a man for this position—because of course we need reminders that often in politics, men are supposed to be the main characters while women are their pretty supporting players—or that they specified professional attire for the presenter. I’d be curious as to what candidate Josefina Eugenia Vázquez Mota, the lone female candidate in the race, thought of the fact that some of her rivals apparently went all goggly-eyed when Orayen came on stage. They, and Figueroa shouldn’t apologize for Orayen’s dress. They should apologize for turning a serious process into a stupid, sexist spectacle.

CNN contributor and conservative blogger Erick Erickson said he liked the idea of excluding women from The Masters golf tournament, saying, “I don’t want to be hanging out at some women’s event!”

The Augusta National Golf Club, which hosts the tournament, has never admitted a woman as a member in its history, but its discriminatory policy sparked controversy this week after it decided not to extend membership to the new female CEO of IBM, which sponsors The Masters. Augusta has offered membership to previous IBM CEOs (all men).

Both President Obama and presumed GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney have spoken out against the policy, as has South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R), but Erickson sees the debate over the prohibition on women as a “partisan” issue. “Who freakin’ cares?” he said during a lengthy rant in support of the policy:

ERICKSON: Who cares? Who cares that she wasn’t invited into the club? She’s a woman — women aren’t allowed! …. It is striking to me just how political the president wants to make everything. The war on women coming home to The Masters. Who freakin’ cares? [...]

I don’t care that The Masters are a male-dominated event. I don’t care that women aren’t members of The Masters. Frankly, I kind of like the idea that women aren’t members of The Masters. Good Lord, I don’t want to be hanging out at some women’s event! Can’t men go anywhere and just be men? There are plenty of places where women can be women. … You know what Mr. President, why don’t you just leave the partisanship out of golf?!

Listen to the clip, via Media Matters:

Erickson decries the partisanship of the issue, but even though Romney took an identical position to Obama’s, Erickson dismissed Romney’s opposition to Augusta’s policy by saying, “At lease he was smart enough to know that we don’t want to wade into the war on women with Augusta.”

Augusta National golf club has never admitted a woman member it its history, but that gender discrimination policy is being put to the test this week. IBM, a sponsor of The Masters golf tournament which Augusta National is hosting, has a female chief executive – Virginia Rometty. (IBM’s prior four male CEOs were all given honorary membership.) Rometty is expected to be at Augusta National today, and media reports are asking whether she’ll be allowed to don the famous green jacket, which is traditionally worn only by club members and Masters champions.

Both President Obama and Mitt Romney have issued statements indicating their disagreement with the club’s policy. Meanwhile, club chairman Billy Payne insists that Augusta will decide for itself whom to allow in its ranks.

The golf writer for the New York Times, Karen Crouse, weighed into the controversy yesterday, telling GOLF.com in an interview that she would like to use her influence to bring about a change:

“If it were left to me, which it seldom is in the power structure of writer versus editor, I’d probably not come cover this event again until there is a woman member,” Crouse said Thursday. “More and more, the lack of a woman member is just a blue elephant in the room.” [...]

“I love the [Masters] tournament for the reasons the players do — the course is beautiful, the history is abundant,” Crouse said. “But I find it harder and harder to get past one thing that’s missing. [PGA Tour commissioner] Tim Finchem is not making a stand. High-ranking players with daughters are not willing to talk about it. Somebody has to make a stand. Why not me in my own little way?”

Crouse’s willingness to speak out about a discriminatory policy that affects her personally didn’t go over well with her employer. The New York Times’ sports editor Joe Sexton admonished her publicly:

Contacted by The Associated Press, New York Times sports editor Joe Sexton said the comments were, “completely inappropriate and she has been spoken to.”

Crouse deserves credit for being willing to stake a principled position on the issue, despite knowing it would anger her male colleagues and the existing power structure. As Alyssa Rosenberg has previously observed, women reporters are often subjected to double standards that devalue their opinions.

In our conversation about Two and a Half Men creator Lee Aronsohn’s recent complaint that, in terms of bodily female humor on television, “we’re approaching peak vagina on television,” one line of defense was that he was simply expressing a perfectly legitimate preference. His comments weren’t as horrifying as those of the racist fans of The Hunger Games who, in response to a character who is described as dark-skinned in the books being played by an African-American actress, tweeted things like “Kk call me racist but when I found out rue was black her death wasn’t as sad #ihatemyself.” But both strains of thinking get at something important: preferences in art aren’t neutral things unaffected by larger cultural forces that shield the people who hold them from any charges of racism, sexism, or homophobia.

Dan Savage wrote as much recently in response to a reader who wanted to know if his preference for masculine white men made him a jerk or biased: “You’re entitled to your preferences — but I hope your preferences are yours. I hope you’ve given your taste in men some thought and you can honestly say that these are your preferences, Masculine Man, and not just gay beauty ideals and/or masculinity standards that the culture stuffed down your throat and up your ass. And if they’re your preferences, well, you’re entitled to them. But you’re not entitled to be an asshole about them.”

It’s one thing to prefer stories about male characters, because that’s who you relate to most easily. It’s another to mistake that preference for some sort of proof that stories about men are inherently superior or more sophisticated. If you’d rather not watch gay people have relationships and build families, no one’s forcing you, but it’s worth interrogating why you feel that way. If you’re uncomfortable watching characters carry out their lives in a cramped, less-than-perfectly-maintained house but fine watching characters waltz through unrealistically enormous apartments, you might want to get to the root of that impulse. And if you bond more closely with a white child than with a black one, you should think about what that means on a deeper level than an #ihatemyself hashtag. There’s nothing wrong with treating entertainment as if it’s a source of fun rather than vitamins. But if being comfortable in your enjoyment means being comfortable in a narrow set of ideas, that’s not a neutral position, much less an admirable one.

Ladies and gentlemen, your sexist of the day, perhaps your idiot of the year, and winner of the I’m Terrified of the Female Body and Grossed Out By Its Processes Award, Two and a Half Men creator Lee Aronsohn! Who told the Hollywood Reporter that he’s sick of female-centered comedies because “Enough ladies. I get it. You have periods,” and declared that “we’re approaching peak vagina on television, the point of labia saturation.”

Because talking about Michael Fassbender’s penis is endlessly entertaining, but having to hear that ladies have menstrual cycles, take birth control pills, and enjoy sex is just unbearable, right? Because even though the number of female characters on television tends to hover in the low 40 percent range, we’re just saturated with vaginas, because god forbid stories about men and their ish don’t absolutely dominate the media? Because even though those shows Aronsohn’s complaining about have actually created more writing and directing jobs for men than women, and resulted in some really awful portrayals as a result, we couldn’t possibly let women come to expect that they’ll have access to stories both about them and by them, could we? Because where would that leave poor, suffering, disadvantaged American men?

Maybe I shouldn’t be shocked that the creator of a show as middlebrow, as worshipping of lotharios, as willing to give a leading man like Charlie Sheen a pass on his behavior with a morals clause that could only punish him for a felony, as Two and a Half Men apparently has a ten-year-old boy’s attitudes towards women and their genitalia. But that Aronsohn is dumb and woman-fearing enough not just to believe this, to blithely admit he believes it to a major publication tells you everything about how cosseted Hollywood’s disgusting sexists are. You want to know why we get what we get on movie and television screens? Why, as Vulture asked after their drama derby assessing the last 25 years of television honored almost no performances by or stories about women, there are a dearth of great women’s dramas? Because there are, apparently, no consequences in Hollywood for being perfectly open about how much you despise women’s bodies and the contours of women’s lives. But hopefully that won’t be the case forever, so Aronsohn and his ilk can get acquainted with what it actually feels like to be marginalized.

It’s been nine years since Augusta National Golf Club emerged largely unscathed from a battle with feminist activist Martha Burk, who led a protest outside the club’s signature event, The Masters, over its policy forbidding female members. But in two weeks, the club may be forced into the 20th — er, 21st — century, thanks to IBM’s decision to make Ginni Rometty its first female CEO earlier this year. Rometty’s promotion has the club facing quite the dilemma, as Bloomberg reports:

As Augusta National Golf Club prepares to host the competition next week, it faces a quandary: The club hasn’t admitted a woman as a member since its founding eight decades ago, yet it has historically invited the chief executive officer of IBM, one of three Masters sponsors. Since the company named Rometty to the post this year, Augusta will have to break tradition either way.

Change comes slow at Augusta, a club that clings to tradition proudly and loudly, even if that tradition is full of discrimination. The first black player won his way into The Masters field in 1975, but Augusta ignored outside pressure to admit a black member for another 15 years.

Its response to women has been the same. It trudged on in the wake of the Burk protests, winning over golf fans (equality be damned) by airing the tournament with limited commercials after she pressured sponsors to pull out. Just last year, it banned a female reporter from entering the players’ locker room, drawing protests from male and female journalists alike.

Rometty’s situation, though, gives her leverage Burk never had. The CEOs of the other two Masters sponsors, Exxon Mobil and AT&T, are both members, and they’ll both be donning the club’s signature green jackets next week. If Rometty isn’t allowed to join them (and given Augusta’s history, she probably won’t be), it will send another message to the 6 million American women who play golf and countless others who watch it that even if they are capable of breaking every last one of corporate America’s glass ceilings, they aren’t capable of playing golf with the boys.

The Masters, as CBS likes to remind us, is a “tradition unlike any other.” This year, though, Augusta has a chance to break with one tradition it should have ended a long time ago.

Jennifer Lawrence is tiny—even before Lenny Kravitz, playing stylist Cinna to her post-apocalyptic teen reality contestant Katniss Everdeen, cinches her into a corset to put her on display before the decadent residents of the Capitol—so why did critics and fans alike start discussing whether she looks famished-enough to play the lead role in The Hunger Games? Rue and Thresh, the Tributes from District 11 who face off against Katniss in the 74th Hunger Games, are clearly described as dark-skinned in Suzanne Collins novels, on which the movie is based, so why did fans react to the casting of black actors in those roles with racist outbursts and claims the casting “ruined the movie”? Along with making an enormous amount of money, The Hunger Games seems to have brought out the worst in a whole bunch of people.

Julian Sanchez has a great post on why, even beyond the reading comprehension issues involved, it’s so disturbing that readers would assume all the characters depicted in the franchise are white:

The book doesn’t dwell on this, though, and a reader skimming along at a fast clip could be forgiven for missing the two quick references. The deeper stupidity here is the assumption that the default race of any character is Caucasian when it’s not stated explicitly, and that casting a person of color in this case would represent some kind of deviation from the book’s implicit characterization. This would be wrongheaded for an adaptation of a book set in the present, but at least quasi-understandable: The social realities of people of color in contemporary America are different in a variety of ways, enough so that we do generally expect authors to make at least passing reference to a major character’s minority status.

It makes no sense at all, however, in a dystopian sci-fi novel (implicitly) set two or three centuries in the future. First, we have no real idea what the racial dynamics of Panem are like, so there’s no particular reason to think Suzanne Collins would need to make note of it if Katniss were of (say) Korean or Chicana descent. Second, and maybe more to the point, non-Hispanic whites are already projected to constitute less than half of the U.S. population in 2050, long before the earliest possible date for the events of the book.

The weird bodysnarking of Lawrence, exemplified by Manohla Dargis, of all people (she wrote “A few years ago Ms. Lawrence might have looked hungry enough to play Katniss, but now, at 21, her seductive, womanly figure makes a bad fit for a dystopian fantasy about a people starved into submission.”) reveals both ignorance of the text and another kind of problematic default. Katniss is better-fed than her District 12 peers in part because of her ability to hunt, and she gorges herself during her time in the Capitol so she’ll have energy to burn in the arena. But more importantly, Dargis and the other folks who questioned whether Lawrence who was too thin to play Katniss forget how dramatically Hollywood actresses restrict their diets in order to look the way they do. Lawrence and company may not be starving, but their bodies aren’t exactly a naturally-occurring default, either.

It’s frightening to think we’re still stuck in a place where white is the default for characters and that choosing otherwise provokes such extreme anger, and that even an actress’s carefully maintained, tiny body isn’t starved enough to satisfy some people: she has to look like death, and still be a powerful huntress, too.

I’ve always been vocal about the fact that Mad Men is not precisely my cup of tea—I’m not overly compelled by the acting, but most importantly, the show has covered the half of the sixties I’m less interested in. I can understand why it’s interesting to observe, and even to sympathize with, the people who would face stunning losses of their privilege as the Civil Rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and anti-war movements emerged and blossomed into powerful new forces in American society. But I’m just more interested in the people who are busting out—it’s why I was a sucker for the Mattachine Society subplot* in the quickly- and justly-cancelled The Playboy Club; why The Weather Underground, which should be mandatory viewing for anyone who wants to pontificate about sixties radicalism, is one of my favorite documentaries of all time; and why I would love to see someone adapt Blanche McCrary Boyd’s Terminal Velocity, a great, sublimely weird book about a Southern co-ed turned Boston book editor turned lesbian feminist.

I understand this as a personal preference, but coming out of your chrysalis has always more interesting to me than retreating to your fort. And I’ve joked that I’d be happy with Mad Men if Sally Draper grew up and joined the Weather Underground, broke Don’s heart, and turned the whole thing into American Pastoral. Alternatively, I’d accept Peggy saying the hell with all this, leaving New York, joining the Boston Women’s Health Collective, and helping shepherd through the first edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves.

This year may be the one when I finally get what I find most personally satisfying out of Mad Men: a more direct confrontation between generations and over values. I’ve seen the pilot, which is excellent, but which I won’t discuss until Monday (when I will discuss it at length) for fear of angering a very spoiler-sensitive Matt Weiner. But I will ask: what are you hoping to get out of Mad Men this season?

*Seriously. Somebody please make this show.