This post discusses minor plot points from Mad Men‘s sixth season, though none that Matthew Weiner has requested that critics refrain from talking about.

The sixth season of Mad Men kicks with an image that’s an equivalent of a John Deere lawnmower to the foot: Don Draper reading Dante’s Inferno to himself, murmuring “Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the stright road, and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood.” Don’s been in the midst of a midlife, or perhaps life-long, crisis since Mad Men‘s earliest days, so it’s not as if he’s suddenly wandered off the right road. But when season five ended with the clear implication that Don would always stray from his intended route, no matter the woman along for the ride with him, it left Mad Men with a problem. If the show’s argument that Don can’t really change, what does it have left to say over the two more seasons creator Matthew Weiner has budgeted for it?

The premiere of season six offers a number of options. One potential new theme is mistaken identity. Don’s spent years concealing his birth as Dick Whitman, but he seems disconcerted by the extent to which people buy his polished image. “You some kind of astronaut?” a veteran asks him in a hotel bar. “I’m in advertising,” Don tells him, a bit rattled by the extent to which his pitch has obscured even the fake identity he’s built for himself over the years. Megan, who continues to find success as an actress, finds herself mistaken for one of her characters. “Excuse me, Corrine, I hate to bother you. I know your name isn’t really Corrine,” a woman from Minnesota approaches her. “You’re so much trimmer than you are on television…You just have a way.” Betty, who’s given much more to do this season, to the improvement of the show, even finds herself rattled by the assumption that she’s nothing but a judgmental suburban housewife.

Then, there’s the idea of flawed men reconciling themselves to their inability to transcend themselves. “They all open the same way. And they all close behind you,” Roger Sterling complains, using a metaphor that new life experiences are supposed to function like doors. “Look, life is supposed to be a path. You go along, and these things happen to you, and they’re supposed to change you. Change your direction. But it turns out that’s not true. It turns out the experiences are nothing.” Later, Mona Sterling, meeting up again with Roger, remarks “That man never tires of embarrassing himself.” When Roger assumes she means her new boyfriend, Mona corrects him, saying “I’m talking about Don.” Playing more aggressively with how Don would like to be seen, and how others see him, could broaden the emotional scope of the show in effective ways beyond the question of whether it’s possible for Don to transcend his instincts for deception. If he’s settled that question with a no, then there’s still plenty to be interested in as other people discover the extent to which he’s flawed, a dynamic that marked the end of his marriage to Betty and Peggy’s departure for his competitors.
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Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban told ESPN this morning that his team would consider drafting Brittney Griner, the 6-foot-8 standout for Baylor University’s women’s basketball team, in the second round of June’s NBA Draft.

“If she is the best on the board, I will take her,” Cuban told ESPN’s Tim McMahon Tuesday night. “I’ve thought about it. I’ve thought about it already. Would I do it? Right now, I’d lean toward yes, just to see if she can do it. You never know unless you give somebody a chance, and it’s not like the likelihood of any late-50s draft pick has a good chance of making it.”

At 6-foot-8, 208 pounds, Griner would be undersized at both center and power forward in a league where the average front court player weighs in around 235 pounds (based on my own quick calculations), and while she’s sized more closely to the typical NBA small forward, that’s a position I can’t recall her playing in college or international ball. But that doesn’t mean she couldn’t fit in somewhere, and she was a three-time All-American at Baylor, where she scored 3,283 points and blocked 748 shots. She also wouldn’t be the first woman to get drafted or try out for the NBA. In 1979, the Utah Jazz drafted Delta State star Lusia Harris in the seventh round; the same year, UCLA star Ann Meyers tried out for the Indiana Pacers. So if Griner wants that chance and an NBA team is willing to give it to her, it is a chance she deserves and one she should take.

That chance, however, should be a real one, not a publicity stunt aimed at selling tickets, as the Jazz selection of Harris admittedly was. The perception of female athletes is already too skewed by an inherently sexist world of sports to give Griner a cynical shot — or worse yet — a cynical spot on the team. Take, for instance, the immediate reaction ESPN received when it promoted Cuban’s comments on Twitter with the hashtag #GrinerNBA. The responses were overwhelmingly negative, ranging from people wanting to see her get dunked on by LeBron James and other male superstars to those saying she belonged in the NBA because that’s where “men” play or demeaned not only her skill but her size, her appearance, and her voice.

The disgusting responses #GrinerNBA received aren’t just aimed at Brittney Griner, though. They’re emblematic of a sports culture, particularly among fans, that simultaneously objectifies the appearances of female athletes and rejects them as incapable athletes. It’s no secret that the bodies of female athletes (and women in general) are objectified in ways that men’s bodies rarely, if ever, are. And women like Griner who don’t fit the “sexy” model are instantly judged as not sufficiently feminine. That helps foster stereotypes of female athletes that create problems in their own sports and drive women and girls not to sports but away from them. It also prevents us from seeing women like Griner as the phenomenal athletes they are, from appreciating their skills and accomplishments as athletic triumphs and not as diminished products because of how they look or because they aren’t playing the men’s game.

That we have so far to go in viewing Griner and other female athletes on their own merits, both as sportswomen and as people, is precisely why her NBA tryout, if it happens, can’t be a cynical stunt. Her success or failure should be based on her merits alone, and if it is, neither Griner nor the NBA will be any worse because of it. Cuban seems sincere. That’s good, because a real chance, no matter success or failure, will continue the fight to slowly break down the barriers and perceptions that face female athletes. A publicity stunt will only reinforce them.

The Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas has made a splash in advertising circles with a racy new print spread that portrays bellhops as a symbol of a very different kind of quality and service:

I’m all for the general recognition that heterosexual women like to look as much as heterosexual men, and that as consumers, we’re not necessarily going to be satisfied by the idea that, say, gorgeous women should settle for funny, schlubby guys who don’t have their lives together. But what struck me most about this ad wasn’t that the bellhop was naked below the waist—it was that we don’t see his face at all. It’s one of the most literal transfigurations of a man—and in particular, a service employee—into an object of consumption that I’ve seen. Men, when they become sex objects, are not generally considered to have handed in their brains in the same way that gorgeous women are often expected to behave as mute objects. Channing Tatum may take his clothes off in Magic Mike, but the whole point of the movie is that there’s a brain and a heart somewhere to the north of that gyrating pelvis. Giving heterosexual women eye candy may seem like a form of third-wave equality. But if the form of that eye candy becomes a race to the bottom where it’s not clear whether women or men are treated worse or presented as more powerless or unrealistic, that doesn’t seem like much of a win.

In next week’s episode of Sundance Channel miniseries Top of the Lake (which premiered last night), Robin Griffin, the New Zealand police detective investigating the pregnancy and then disappearance of a twelve-year-old girl from her home in a rural community, quietly and almost casually sinks a dart in a man’s shoulder in the middle of a bar. It’s a shocking, violent act, particularly for a female character on television. But it’s also in keeping with the finest work of Elisabeth Moss, who plays Robin, and who stars as Peggy Olson Mad Men: she’s one of the best actresses working today at conveying anger from a female perspective, and exploring the constraints on how women are allowed to express that anger.

In Top Of The Lake, we learn before we meet Robin that she has a difficult reputation. “Robin Griffin,” a local police officer remarks after a young girl, Tui, is found up to her chest in a freezing lake—and after she is pulled out of the water, discovered to be pregnant—and it becomes necessary to pull in a detective with more specific experience, Robin is called in because she is in the area, visiting her mother. “This is going to be painful,” another remarks. When Robin arrives on the scene, she’s impatient. “I want this window covered with sheets of A3, and I want her on my own for as long as it takes,” she says of the room where Tui is waiting at a table, in full view of everyone in the precinct. “Clear? I want a clear yes from everyone.” When Robin objects to the idea of Tui being sent home, a police officer tells her “She can’t get any more pregnant.” “She could be attacked for being pregnant,” Robin snaps back at him.

But if Robin seems like a live-wire of tension, she has good reason to be angry. Her mother is undergoing treatment for cancer. Tui’s case comes at a moment of great tension in the region where she lives. Her father, enraged after a local realtor, Bob Platt, sells a tract of land that he believes was promised to him to a group of women who are setting up a quasi-feminist commune, drowns the man during an attempt to scare him. When he learns of Tui’s pregnancy, his instructions to the detective who called in Robin are harsh. “Here’s what you do. You get on your radio, you phone the detective, and you tell her she’s had a miscarriage, or she’s marrying the kid down the road,” he demands, trying to delay time. “I had my first orgasm when I was seven, my first fuck when I was eleven. So she’s a slut. Her dad’s a slut…But she’s not having a baby. I wouldn’t do that to one of my bitches.” The reaction of men in the—except for the commune—overwhelmingly female town is just as ugly. “Are you a feminist?” one of them asks Robin in an upcoming episode. “Are you a lesbian?” asks another. “You’d be better off being a lesbian,” a third chimes in. “Nobody likes a feminist except a lesbian.”

If the attitudes are frightening, even worse is the likelihood they’ll be made manifest. Tui’s father shoots a dog in front of Robin. The implication after the realtor’s death is that if the women don’t move off the land he believes to be his, he could come after them next. And what’s been done to Tui already, and what could have been done to her after she vanishes from the commune, is horrible enough. It makes sense that Robin is angry, and in a place where she’s been physically intimidated already, it’s not surprising that she’d defend herself, as she does when a gun’s pointed at her. And it’s unnerving that she’d strike first through the creative means of the dart—or, as the show suggests, that she’d be involved in a domestic incident where a wall was punched in. Robin’s enraged by sexism and sexual violence, and she’s responding by claiming a kind of physical power—and more importantly, physical aggression—that’s often reserved for men.
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After launching a Kickstarter campaign to fund a long-term project that would examine the roles women play—or are consigned to—in video games, Feminist Frequency video blogger Anita Sarkeesian was subject to a vicious, violence-saturated campaign of harassment. While it was awful to watch Sarkeesian be threatened and slandered for the sin of wanting to do her job well and comprehensively, the utter inability of her harassers to shut her work down has been wonderful to watch.

And I’m cheering Sarkeesian’s perseverance even harder now that the first installment of her project, titled Tropes Vs. Women, is out—and it’s terrific. Examining both the depiction and gameplay of characters like Pauline, Princess Peach and Zelda, Sarkeesian goes back to the origins of the Damsels In Distress trope art and literature, explores how the trope migrated into video games after the rights to Popeye characters couldn’t be secured for a video game, and examines how the trope became valuable to the video game industry:

At the beginning of the video, Sarkeesian, explaining that “This series will include critical analysis of many beloved games and characters,” says something that everyone who loves a piece of culture ought to be required to recite five times every morning while looking in the mirror: “Remember that it’s both possible and even necessary to simultaneously enjoy media while being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects.” If that ability to hold two ideas in your head at the same time, to enjoy something while recognizing that it might have problems, is what the people who tried to harass Sarkeesian into silence are so afraid of, it only reinforces how intellectually cowardly and inept they are. The need for something to be immune from criticism isn’t a sign that it’s perfect and everyone else is wrong: it’s a sign you can’t defend the things you love. That’s a position any self-aware person ought to be embarrassed to defend.

In a long interview with Vulture, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl creator Issa Rae talks about everything from her big-television show I Hate LA Dudes (which sounds like it didn’t get an ABC pickup since they’re shopping it to cable) to her love for Tina Fey. But I was struck by how she talked about White Jay, the love interest for the character she plays on Awkward Black Girl, and who, as it turns out, was the product of a similar process that produces characters of color on majority-white network television show. She explained:

It’s really kind of superficial. The first season, we were growing in popularity, but my producer at the time was saying in order to reach a bigger audience, and to reach white people specifically, you have to put a white person in the show. I was like, “Oh my God, that makes so much sense.” So we chose this character Jay. He was only supposed to be a one-off character. But once we premiered his episode, the audience went crazy in the [YouTube] comments section. I don’t want to bang anyone over the head with the same interracial tropes you’ve seen in the past. It just seemed like a fun story line. His name was initially “Jay,” and the commenters named him White Jay. So we stuck with that.

I’ve been writing a lot recently about the assumption that colorblindness—which in pop culture, frequently functions as casting an actor of color and then refusing to think about how that character’s race might have affected their life experiences, perspectives, or even cultural touchstones and tastes—is progressive, arguing both that erasure of racial experience and perspective is a sin in and of itself, and that it often flattens characters, denying them detail and depth. The flip side of colorblindness, of course, is obnoxious and counterproductive, casting a character of color to provide nothing other than a familiar and reductive dose of blackness, or Asianness, or Latinoness, as if diversity is the equivalent of Tarragon.

What Rae is describing is the intention that can help guide cultural products through a default to colorblindness on one hand, and reductive stereotyping on the other. The assumption that you need to add characters of color to a majority-white show, or a white character to a show that’s mostly about characters of color is an irritating underestimation of audiences, a reflection of the fact that in a lot of directions, pop culture is bad at teaching people to be interested in characters who aren’t like them. But if a showrunner gets handed that directive, it would be awfully nice if their instinct was to create something distinct, rather than to respond to a demand driven by lowest-common-denominator concerns with either a stereotype or a cardboard cutout. That alone isn’t enough to make a character work—you’ve got to actually do your homework for that—but it’s a reaction that really ought to be natural.