Kanye West’s debuted a new song, “New Slaves,” for a mass audience on Saturday Night Live this weekend, and as an art project last Friday, projecting a video for the song on buildings in London, Chicago, New York, and Sydney. Among those locations was the Prada store Fifth Avenue:

It’s a fitting choice of venue, given that “New Slaves” is a complex discussion of unpaid, bonded labor, and American consumer culture. At Salon, Natasha Lennard has a great discussion of the facts behind a central section of West’s lyrics in which he raps about the rise of private prison companies that pay prisoners far below minimum wage that’s in part become successful because of the demand for incarceration created by the War on Drugs:

Yeah they confuse us with bullshit
Like the New World Order
Meanwhile the DEA
Teamed up with the CCA
They tryna lock niggas up
They tryna make new slaves
See that’s that private-owned prison
Get your piece today

But where the track gets both more psychologically perceptive and less comfortable is in West’s look at the way African-Americans are treated in the luxury consumer market, and what it means to join a class dominated by people who do things like put black men in prison for profit. At the beginning of the song, West teases out an important dichotomy that explains how racism changes, but doesn’t dissipate, as African-Americans acquire wealth and the social capital that often accompanies it:
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This post discusses plot points from the May 19 episode of Game of Thrones.

If last week’s Game of Thrones was a meditation on what makes for a good relationship between romantic and sexual partners, or between friends, this week’s episode narrows its focus to ask what makes a good friend. It’s a question that gets introduced in a conversation between Arya, who’s sulking that her attempt to run away has lead her into the custody of a man who’s on her kill list, but who she doesn’t quite have the courage to try to take out. “There’s no one worse than you, she tells the Hound as they ride towards a river so placid that it seems the war has never touched them. “You never knew my brother. He once killed a man for snoring,” the Hound tells Arya, before moving from the specific to the general. “There’s plenty worse than me. There’s men who like to beat little girls. Men who like to rape them. I saved your sister from some of them.”

“Second Sons” has many reminders that the men from that terrible day in King’s Landing aren’t alone, and the bloodlust that griped the crowd isn’t the only thing that can move men to downgrade consent. Mero, the commander of the Second Sons, the sellswords hired by the Yunkish slavers to keep Dany out of their city, immediately moves to try to make Dany feel powerless by sexualizing her. First, he tells Dany he’s sure that he had sex with her in Lys—and suggests that she’s a prostitute, not a leader of her own people. “Take your clothes off and come and sit on Mero’s lap and I may give you my Second Sons,” he tells her jovially, then asks to see her vagina as the measure of whether she’s worth switching sides to support. He sniffs at the genitals of Missendi, Dany’s translator, and warns both Dany and the younger woman that “The Second Sons share everything. Maybe after the battle, we’ll all share you. I’ll come looking for you when this is over.” Sex for someone like Mero isn’t just preferable when the woman doesn’t really have agency. It’s a way to deny women agency in the first place.

And Essos mercenaries aren’t the only people who downgrade the consent of the women they have sex with. “I’m a mistake,” Gendry reflects of his parentage on Dragonstone. “I’m only here because my father grabbed my mother instead of the next girl in the tavern.” And Robert Baratheon’s son in name if not by blood shows off his nasty streak again at Sansa Stark’s wedding to Tryion Lannister when Joffrey tells Sansa that his engagement to Margaery Tyrell hasn’t shifted his interest from Sansa, and makes clear that her marriage to Tyrion Lannister doesn’t bring her under protection meaningful enough to give Joffrey pause. “Congratulations, my Lady,” he tells her in a sickening tone. You’ve done it. You’ve married a Lannister. Soon you’ll have a Lannister baby. It’s a dream come true…It doens’t really matter which Lannister puts the baby into you. Maybe I’ll pay you a visit tonight after my uncle passes out. How’d you like that? You wouldn’t. That’s all right. Ser Meryn and Ser Boras will hold you down.”
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When Sloane Stephens and Serena Williams met in the quarterfinals of the Australian Open this January, the tennis media rushed to compare the two — one a 20-year-old budding star, the other perhaps the most dominant player the game has ever seen — and develop the idea that they had a relationship in which Williams was mentoring Stephens to follow in the 15-time Grand Slam champion’s footsteps.

Before the match, in which Stephens became the first American woman younger than Williams to defeat her, espnW said the two “quickly became friends” upon meeting the summer before, while Britain’s Daily Mail said they “get along well off of the court” because of their “obvious similarities.” The media quickly built up the mentor-protege storyline, even though Williams dismissed it, telling a reporter who asked about it directly that “it’s hard to be a real mentor when you’re still in competition.”

The idea of a special relationship between the two players blew up today, when it became clear that it “wasn’t the fairy tale the media made it out to be.” Stephens, it turns out, doesn’t consider the most dominant player of this generation a friend or a mentor, and she isn’t particularly interested in the “next Serena” label that has been tacked on her back in the weeks since her victory in Melbourne, as Marin Cogan detailed in her excellent piece examining the expectations facing the young tennis star in ESPN The Magazine’s upcoming issue:

“For the first 16 years of my life, she said one word to me and was never involved in my tennis whatsoever,” says Stephens. “I really don’t think it’s that big of a deal that she’s not involved now. If you mentor someone, that means you speak to them, that means you help them, that means you know about their life, that means you care about them. Are any of those things true at this moment? No, so therefore … ”

I offer: “They want the next great American player.”

Stephens says: “They want another Serena.”

That the two don’t have the fairy tale relationship has now become a story itself, with outlets proclaiming that Stephens “ripped” Williams in the interview. But none of that answers why it was so important that such a relationship exist, or why such a relationship was expected. Williams, after all, doesn’t seem the mentoring type: she eschewed the tennis academy culture favored by many young players to be coached by her father — a fact that has earned both resentment and skepticism in the tennis world — leaving her without many of the traditional structures that surrounds other players. And in a game that is inherently individualistic, perhaps no recent player has displayed such a singular focus on dominating her opponents as Williams. The idea, then, that she would set that aside to aid a player who is coming after the very mantle she has set seems absurd on its face. The idea that Stephens, who matriculated through academies, never considered Williams her favorite player, and has a coach who was a former pro himself, would need such a mentor seems nearly as hard to believe.

So why did the myth of that relationship persist? It grew, as Cogan notes, in part because the players allowed it to, even as Williams downplayed it. But did it also endure because the semblances between Williams and Stephens — they are both African-Americans, they are both women, they both play somewhat similar styles of tennis — made for an interesting storyline in a tennis world that, frankly, needs them? The same media accounts that outlined the mentor-protege relationship referred to “obvious similarities” between the two, the fact that it would be a “a mirror image in some ways” when they stared across the net at each other, and that Serena originally was fond of seeing “another black girl” in the lockerroom.

Williams, though, has never been considered a mentor to other young Americans, like Melanie Oudin, who arose as Next Big Things during her career, and we’ve never expected male athletes, like Tiger Woods or Roger Federer, who shared her focus and drive to mentor younger players who followed them. Did we need the sport’s biggest African-American star to mentor the first major African-American player to come after her? Do we expect that a young woman in a sport where so many Next Big Things failed before needed a big sister on the court to succeed? Do we hold our top women to a separate standard, asking them to ease their desires to beat each other so that they can be friends too? We never asked Federer to mentor a young Rafael Nadal; we’ve never questioned why Tiger Woods wasn’t helping someone else win The Masters.

Of course it’s desirable for the two players to get along and treat each other with respect. But the expectation that Williams should be a mentor to Stephens, and that Stephens needed Williams to mentor her, is unfair to both of them. Why should we expect Williams to welcome a competitor and set aside the quality we’ve admired most about her — her ability to focus on her goal of dominating opponents the way no one has before? And why should Stephens want to be “another Serena” instead of just “the next great American player,” a role she could define for herself? And instead of enjoying their greatness, why do we need them to be friends, too?

This is an incredible shame:

ROBOT 6 has confirmed rumors circulating this weekend at Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo that parent company AOL has shut down the comics news site ComicsAlliance. The move came Friday amid the abrupt closings of AOL Music and several music news and video sites.

Launched in its current form in August 2009 by Laura Hudson (AOL had briefly operated a lower-profile comics blog with that name), ComicsAlliance featured a mix of news, humor and commentary and a staff of contributors that most recently included the likes of Caleb Goellner, Chris Sims, Andy Khouri and David Brothers. Hudson left the site in June 2012, to be replaced as editor-in-chief by former Vertigo editor Joe Hughes.

It’s not just the loss of jobs for good writers that’s unfortunate. It’s that Comics Alliance, which I started reading under Hudson’s leadership, was a place where liking comics wasn’t incompatible with thinking about the race and gender of people who created them, or where you could enjoy something and still interrogate why you enjoyed it. So much of popular culture coverage is geared towards either trivia or towards feeding the beast of unalloyed enthusiasm that brooks no criticism or analysis. Comics Alliance was a place where the highest form of liking something was taking it seriously, giving it credit, and also assigning it responsibility. Pieces like Laura’s analysis of the presentation of Starfire in the New 52 made a valuable argument that sexism wasn’t just bad for its social impact on readers, it made for bad storytelling and bad art. If there’s any upside to this unfortunate news, I hope that Comics Alliance writers find new jobs quickly, and bring that ethos to a whole range of new publications that could benefit from it.

In my favorite new illustration of the persistent belief that, when it comes to gender, male experience is considered general and unbiased while female experience is particular and annotated, novelist Amanda Filipacchi browsed through Wikipedia and found out that someone has been recategorizing entries on female American fiction writers so that they’re weeded out of the “American Novelists” category and ghettoized off in an “American Women Novelists” category—the “American Man Novelists” contains rather fewer entries. She writes in the New York Times:

I looked up a few female novelists. You can see the categories they’re in at the bottom of their pages. It appears that many female novelists, like Harper Lee, Anne Rice, Amy Tan, Donna Tartt and some 300 others, have been relegated to the ranks of “American Women Novelists” only, and no longer appear in the category “American Novelists.” If you look back in the “history” of these women’s pages, you can see that they used to appear in the category “American Novelists,” but that they were recently bumped down. Male novelists on Wikipedia, however — no matter how small or obscure they are — all get to be in the category “American Novelists.” It seems as though no one noticed.

I did more investigating and found other familiar names that had been switched from the “American Novelists” to the “American Women Novelists” category: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ayn Rand, Ann Beattie, Djuna Barnes, Emily Barton, Jennifer Belle, Aimee Bender, Amy Bloom, Judy Blume, Alice Adams, Louisa May Alcott, V. C. Andrews, Mary Higgins Clark — and, upsetting to me: myself.

I can see a world where it makes sense to categorize novels, though not novelists, by their subject matter. Some days, I want to read about male experiences and read through the eyes of a male main character, somedays I want to live in a woman’s world, and others I want to hang out with, I don’t know, a genetically-engineered fifteen-year-old girl. There’s a service to readers in a project like that.

But sorting out authors by gender, and sorting out only female authors by gender, is an attempt to create a differing assessment of male and female writers. Novel-writing is not an inherently male activity. And it’s not even one that started out male and to which women had to gain entry. Female fiction writers like Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d’Aulnoy, scandal writers like Anne-Marguerite Petit du Noyer, and playwright and novelist Aphra Behn were all there at the beginning. A female perspective in fiction is no more distinct and particular—or offputting to large number of readers—than a male one, and visions like Ernest Hemingway’s or Saul Bellow’s are deeply tied up in their gender, rather than reflective of some American baseline. It’s not more substantive to care about fishing or war than it is to care about love or domestic life. But to acknowledge that male and female perspectives are both equally particular and equally interesting would require acknowledging that they’re both, well, equal.

“You go to college. You meet a boy. You drop out. You get married. Struggle for a year in New York while he learns to tie a tie and then move to the country and just start the whole disaster over,” Sandy, the teenaged violinist who’s been living with Betty and Henry Francis, tells Betty over a midnight snack during the first episode of the sixth season. Betty’s reaction is telling—not anger, precisely, but frustration. “That’s an arrogant exaggeration,” she tells Sandy. But it’s also the first time someone has but the trajectory of Betty Hofstadt’s life, with all of its disappointments and wasted potential, in an actual context and acknowledged to her that her choices are shaped by larger expectations, rather than simply telling her that she’s a selfish, immature brat. Lots of fans dislike Betty, whether she’s been Draper or Francis. But Betty’s story in the season premiere left me hoping that Mad Men might finally be recognizing bigger plans for her, that just as Don’s found himself at sea and Peggy and Joan have, through very different means, found places for themselves in the changing world, the sixties might finally reach Betty Hofstadt deep inside her cellophane prison.

Through the show’s first five seasons, Betty’s often acted—or been treated—like a petulant little girl in ways that have made it easy for other characters to dismiss her, even when she’s been correct about things. Betty’s impulses are poorly directed, whether she’s confiding in Glenn Bishop, the neighbor boy who is closer to her daughter Sally’s age than her own, or shooting a neighbor’s birds in a fit of pique. She lives in a world of double standards, hoping to use Don’s adultery against him in the divorce proceedings and acting shocked when Henry’s lawyer assumes that she and Henry have also had sex outside of Betty’s marriage, even though she, too, had sex with an utter stranger in a bar. And she’s a terrible mother, chastising Sally for minor offenses and imposing a rigid discipline on her daughter even as she chafes against the expectations she’s internalized for herself.

But that doesn’t mean that Betty’s wrong all the time, particularly when it comes to Don. When she cooly told her first husband after he grabbed her “You want to bounce me off the walls? Would that make you feel better?” Don resorts to belittling her because she’s actually correct, telling her, “Sometimes I feel like I’m living with a little girl.” And when Betty uncovers Don’s original identity, she says two things that are particularly true, and that illustrate the idiocy of the strictures she lives with. “I’ve respected your privacy too long. Open it,” Betty commands Don after she discovers the contents of the drawer, a statement that piercingly illuminates the insanity of living with someone you barely know, a fate that’s true for many of the married characters on Mad Men. And after the truth’s been explained to her, Betty wants to know “Am I supposed to love you?” really asking if she’s supposed to accept Don’s elaborate fiction because he wants her to, and because it’s been a means by which she’s been well-provided for.
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Golf’s most iconic tournament, The Masters, begins Thursday at Augusta National Golf Club, which has traditionally faced scrutiny this time of year because of its male-only membership policy. Last fall, though, the club relented and extended memberships to two women, former Secretary of State Condolezza Rice and private investment executive Darla Moore. Ahead of The Masters, Rice walked the grounds at Augusta last week clad in one of the famous green jackets donned by Augusta members and Masters champions.

Augusta’s first female members aren’t the only milestone for women in golf this spring, though. On March 26, EA Sports released Tiger Woods PGA Tour 14, the latest in its line of video games named after golf’s biggest star. And for the first time ever, the game features the Ladies’ Professional Golf Association (LGPA) Tour alongside the men’s tour.

Gamers have long had the option to play the game as female professionals like Natalie Gulbis. The new version, however, gives them the option to play not just as women but to create female players and play a career mode that takes them up the amateur ladder to the LPGA Tour. It even includes the Kraft Nabisco Championship, the biggest tournament on the LPGA Tour schedule. And in a nice touch of gender equality, the game also allows female players to compete against the men on the PGA Tour, which isn’t unrealistic: LPGA players Annika Sorenstam and Michelle Wie have both competed in men’s events before.

This isn’t entirely new territory for EA, which included international female stars in NHL 13, its hockey line, and plans to add female players and teams to its line of soccer games in the coming years. Still, it’s a welcome step to include not just a handful of recognizable female athletes but the entire league in which they compete, particularly given that some versions of the game are branded with the Masters logo and that it was released in time for this week’s tournament.

There are more than 6 million female golfers in the U.S., according to the National Golf Foundation. Plenty of them are LGPA Tour fans, and plenty of them also play video games. As I wrote when EA announced it was including women in NHL 13, its great that the company is acknowledging that women deserve to be able to identify directly with avatars when they play these games in the same way men do. More importantly, video games can have a major positive experience on young people like the girl whose father hacked Donkey Kong to make the princess the hero. So in a sports world where women still face sexism and questions about their legitimacy as athletes, something as simple as equality in virtual reality can go a long way in planting the seeds of equality in actual reality too.