In The New Republic, Marin Cogan dismantles a central assumption of Netflix’s House of Cards, the idea that all female reporters in Washington are constantly sleeping with sources for stories. The show got Washington Herald-turned-Slugline reporter Zoe Barnes’ arc wrong, she argues, not because no reporter ever succumbs to the personal charms of a staffer or member of Congress, but because the show reverses the dynamic. Instead of throwing on v-neck t-shirts and push-up bras and heading over to Congressmen’s townhouses, the more common dynamic is powerful men in Washington putting the moves on women they assume are interested in them. Marin reports:

As a political reporter for GQ, I’ve been jokingly asked whether I ever posed for the magazine and loudly called a porn star by a senior think-tank fellow at his institute’s annual gala. In my prior job as a Hill reporter, one of my best source relationships with a member of Congress ended after I remarked that I looked like a witch who might hop on a broom in my new press-badge photo and he replied that I looked like I was “going to hop on something.” One journalist remembers a group of lobbyists insisting that she was not a full-time reporter at a major publication but a college coed. Another tried wearing scarves and turtlenecks to keep a married K Street type from staring at her chest for their entire meeting. The last time she saw him, his wedding ring was conspicuously absent; his eyes, however, were still fixed on the same spot. Almost everyone has received the late-night e-mail—“You’re incredible” or “Are you done with me yet?”—that she is not entirely sure how to handle. They’re what another lady political writer refers to as “drunk fumbles” or “the result of lonely and insecure people trying to make themselves feel loved and/or important.”…“I think journalism schools should have workshops for young female reporters on managing old men who have no game and think, because you’re listening to them intently and probing what they think and feel, that you’re romantically interested, rather than conducting an interview,” says Garance Franke-Ruta, a senior editor at The Atlantic. “Every female reporter I know has had this issue at one time or another.”

Marin’s piece clarified for me the reasons I reacted so viscerally to the element of the show that portrayed Zoe as the initiator of her affair with Frank, and her colleague Janice’s revelation that, despite slut-shaming Zoe, she too was sleeping her way up the ladder. The arc wasn’t just a male fantasy—it was a fantasy that erases an ugly reality by inverting it. It’s not Frank’s fault for stepping out on his marriage, or putting Zoe in a position where she feels like she has to put up with his advances to get a story. An ugly scene between them in which Zoe asks Frank “If you just want the girl who will do your bidding, you have that. Why do you have to fuck me?…Why do you need this? You don’t seem to get any pleasure out of it. I certainly don’t,” is, in the framework of the show, at least partially her due for being naive enough to think that what was going on was something other than, as Frank puts this, “a transaction between two consenting adults.”

What Marin is talking about is a very specific form of sexual entitlement. But this week also saw the debut of Said To Lady Journos, a compilation of the way female reporters have been harassed on the job. “If you got shrapnel in your ass, I’d be happy to take it out,” a contractor says to a reporter in Iraq. “Why don’t we make it a camera, and turn it on you?” a city councilman tells a reporter who is asking permission to tape record their interview. And these are the things that people are saying to female journalists in person.

In combination, it makes the thought of recommending journalism as a career to young women kind of exhausting. Be ambitious? Pop culture will tell people that you’re an amoral blogslut. Get sexually harassed on the job? You were probably Zoe Barnes-ing it up. This is not to say that no woman with a reporter’s notebook and a hard pass has ever behaved poorly, or that journalistic sauciness doesn’t make for compelling drama. But when it comes to sexism fatigue, the Evil Girl Reporter has me particularly tuckered out.

The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport has released its 2012 study of minorities and women covering sports at America’s news outlets this week, and unfortunately, its findings haven’t changed much since it released its first study in 2006.

According to the Institute, 90 percent of sports editors are white and an equal percentage are men. As the first chart below shows, whites make up at least 86 percent of all assistant editors, columnists, reporters, and copy editors covering sports too. And as the second chart shows, at least 80 percent of those in each category are men:

The most interesting part of the study, though, is that without the world’s largest sports outlet, the numbers would be far worse. ESPN is the target of constant (often deserved) complaints in the world of sports journalism, but when it comes to diversity, the Worldwide Leader is leading the way, as the Institute’s president Richard Lapchick wrote at Sports Business Daily:

In the new report card, of the 12 people of color who are sports editors at “Circulation A” media outlets (the largest newspapers and dot-coms, with a circulation of 175,000 or more), four work for ESPN, which employed two of the six African-American sports editors and two of the four Latino sports editors. If ESPN’s people of color were removed, the percentage of sports editors in the “A” organizations who are people of color would drop from 15 percent to 11 percent.

Of the 11 women who are sports editors at this circulation level, six work for ESPN. If the ESPN sports editors who are women were removed, then the percentage of female sports editors at this level would drop from 14 percent to 8 percent.

Those numbers translate down the ladder too. Without ESPN, the percentage of columnists of color working at top outlets would drop from 20 percent to just 7 percent. Without ESPN, the percentage of female columnists at top outlets would drop from an already-low 13 percent to just 5 percent.

Indeed, ESPN has a strong diversity hiring policy outlined on its web site and it has won numerous awards for hiring a diverse cast writers, editors, and columnists. It regularly features minority and female hosts, analysts, announcers, and journalists on both its scheduled programming and its live broadcasts. ESPN is proof that there are qualified minority and female reporters and editors out there, and it is also proof that the rest of the sports world needs to do a better job finding them.

But ESPN also has the benefit of being able to cherrypick from the entire sports world, since most of its reporters are already established names before they join the Worldwide Leader, so the idea that this is a problem that begins and ends with the hiring process fails to explain the problem entirely. The problem starts well before hiring and runs far deeper.

As Chip Cosby, a sports reporter and former colleague of mine, explained in September, minorities face obstacles involving access, economics, and history. Many young minorities don’t see journalism as a way into sports, and many are less able to pursue jobs that are pretty low-paying before a reporter climbs the rungs to a top beat or columnist job. Even if they wanted to pursue writing, many don’t see it as a profession that is accessible to them, since they don’t often see minority reporters writing and talking about the sports they follow. Most of those problems also extend to women, who still face stigmas when reporting on sports, especially when they cover men.

Many of those problems are beginning to fade, thanks in large part to ESPN, which has made both minority and female sports reporters covering sports more visible and prominent. But as the latest edition of the Institute study make clear, many of the barriers blocking both minorities and women from entering the world of sportswriting still exist.

Beasts of the Southern Wild star and youngest-ever Best Actress nominee Quvenzhané Wallis is a lovely little girl who shows plenty of signs of turning into a reliable talent and a charming presence on the awards-season publicity circuit. And for some reason, she became the target of some of the most unpleasant jokes both during last night’s Academy Awards and in the commentary about them.

Seth MacFarlane cracked that “to give you an idea of how young she is, it’ll be 16 years before she’s too young for Clooney.” It was a line that could have been at Clooney’s expense, if it hadn’t seemed so congratulatory—both MacFarlane and Clooney have a tendency to date much younger women. And as I wrote earlier today, MacFarlane immediately defused any sense that he was going after Clooney by tossing him a mini-bottle. Mega-stars, it seems, must be protected from any hurt feelings or criticism, but little girls? Not so much. Things got worse later in the evening when the Onion’s twitter feed Tweeted, and subsequently deleted “Everyone else seems afraid to say it, but Quvenzhané Wallis is kind of a c—, right? #Oscars2013.” It was jarring and appalling to see that kind of language directed at a nine-year old girl, even if there’s a world where the concept of the joke could have been funny. Suggesting that a little girl who carries purses shaped like puppies and has a habit of flexing adorably on the red carpet or when the camera comes to her is secretly a Machiavellian schemer or a diva is a reasonable joke to me, and a similar schtick was a long-running and successful plot point on 30 Rock. It even could have been a riff on the irrational haterade directed actresses like Anne Hathaway. But the Onion’s choice of sexual, nasty language blew up that possibility: it was programming to the character length, not the actual quality of the gag.

To the publication’s credit, the Onion appears to have realized this. The company’s CEO, Steve Hannah, just published a Facebook post asking for Wallis’ forgiveness:

I offer my personal apology to Quvenzhané Wallis and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the tweet that was circulated last night during the Oscars. It was crude and offensive—not to mention inconsistent with The Onion’s commitment to parody and satire, however biting. No person should be subjected to such a senseless, humorless comment masquerading as satire. The tweet was taken down within an hour of publication. We have instituted new and tighter Twitter procedures to ensure that this kind of mistake does not occur again.In addition, we are taking immediate steps to discipline those individuals responsible. Miss Wallis, you are young and talented and deserve better. All of us at The Onion are deeply sorry.

But beyond the Onion’s apology, it’s worth thinking more deeply about why the attempts at satire aimed at Wallis went so badly last night.
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Seth MacFarlane’s performance as an Oscar host last night was a perfect advertisement for MacFarlane’s brand of humor. He opened with a number about the fact that he—and we as audiences—have seen female Academy Award nominees’ breasts. It was a bit that could have been a perceptive riff about the fact that women are asked to get naked, and to get naked in different ways, than their male counterparts, and could have tweaked the 77 percent of Academy voters who are men for voting for those roles, rather than recognizing female actors for performances that are non-sexual. Instead, he went in an entirely different direction that made for a faster, but not nearly as deep joke, bringing in the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles. A comedic sensibility that goes to Boobs + Gay Men Who Don’t Like Boobs = Hilarity may be commercially viable, but it’s as fleeting as adolescence.

From there, MacFarlane dug in as hard as he could have on one of the few comedic lanes he’s capable of working in. He used Quvenzhané Wallis, who is nine, to make a joke about George Clooney’s fondness for dating younger women, then tossed him a drink as if to reassure one of Hollywood’s most powerful and respected actors that he’d never actually make a crack at Clooney‘s expense. He suggested that Jennifer Anniston is hiding a past as a stripper. He made jokes about actresses throwing up to fit into their dresses. He thought it was funny that Javier Bardem has an accent. I’m no Chris Brown fan, but even MacFarlane’s joke about Brown was badly constructed, saying “Django is a movie where a woman is subjected to violence, or as we call it, a Chris Brown and Rihanna date movie,” ignoring the fact that Django is a movie where a woman of color is subjected to tremendous violence by white men and saved by a heroic black man who is taking on a chivalric role that was previously specifically reserved for white men.

What bothers me more than anything else about these jokes is how boring they are. I’ve heard variations of them countless times from people who think they’re hilarious, and act as if no one has ever unearthed such comedic gems before, and they’re always wrong. They are the scraps of humor actual comics left on the table a decade earlier in their careers after they learned that playing to people’s dumbest, most stereotypical assumptions is not actually the same thing as joke-making. But the laziness of MacFarlane’s brand played particularly poorly at the Oscars given the movie industry’s very real problems with both women and derivativeness, in a celebration of what’s supposed to be Hollywood’s best, the things that the profits of things like The Avengers make it possible to keep in production.
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The Archdiocese of Philadelphia’s Catholic Youth Organization banned 11-year-old Caroline Pla from playing in a boy’s football league earlier this year, even though she had played in the same league for more than two years and had been voted onto the league’s all-star team after the 2012 season. Last week, the CYO reaffirmed that decision, upholding its ban on female participants in grades 5 through 8.

The original ban was about safety, the CYO explained then, even if there were no indications that Pla was in any more danger than any of the 11-year-old boys playing football. When they upheld the ban, the reasoning shifted to fears of “inappropriate contact” between male and female players, even though neither Pla nor her family had ever given thought to such an issue before.

At nearly the same time, a football league far larger than the Catholic Youth Organization took a step in the opposite direction. In 2012, the National Football League formally instituted a rule allowing women to participate in its league, and next week, the annual regional scouting combines for amateur players will feature its first female participant.

Lauren Silberman, a 28-year-old former college club soccer player, is attending a regional combine with the hope of becoming the first woman to play in the NFL. The odds that Silberman, a kicker, will make a team are longer-than-long, but that doesn’t matter: the NFL provided a path for women to participate, and for the first time, one will. There are more than 1,600 girls playing on boys’ high school football teams, and multiple women have played college football, so Silberman almost surely won’t be the last woman to go out for the team.

But these stories aren’t as much about football and making the team as they are about just having the chance to play. Women now enjoy far more access to sports than they did 40 years ago, when Title IX became law, but female participation still doesn’t match that of men. Neither does funding, even though sports participation has substantial health, education, and economic benefits for the women and girls who participate. It’s wonderful that the NFL is expanding access to women, but those efforts are undermined when youth leagues like the CYO, where there are more girls who want to play and fewer who have access, refuse to let the Caroline Plas of the world play the games they love.

Playing off its popular “30 for 30″ series of sports documentaries, ESPN Films this week rolled out “Nine For IX,” a series of nine documentaries that will celebrate the legacy of Title IX by telling the stories of female athletes and examining many of the issues women in sports still face today. Its films will explore racial and sexual identities of women in sports, the exploitation of female athletes as sex objects, discrimination faced by female reporters in male lockerrooms, and other issues that aren’t necessarily unique to women athletes, like disability, homosexuality, and the glory and heartbreak that come just from playing sports.

As great as the Nine for IX series will be and as positive as it is that ESPN is shining a bright light on the issues that affect women in sports every day, though, the series somehow manages to reinforce that there is still a wall between the games women play and those played by men. All nine films in the Nine for IX series, which will air from July 2 to August 27 on ESPN, were directed by women. And obviously, all nine are about women. Compare that to the 30 for 30 series, now in its third season. Just four of its 51 films have featured a female director or co-director, and just three have told the stories of female athletes. None of the series’ 10 short features that has aired or is in production is about women, and only one was directed by a woman.

What Nine for IX makes evident is that both stories about women in sports and female directors are readily available. Venus Williams beating racial discrimination, Audrey Mestre overcoming disability, and the U.S. Women’s National Team’s 1999 World Cup victory aren’t just great women-in-sports stories, they are great sports stories. They aren’t just triumphs of great women, they are triumphs of great athletes. The Nine for IX series is aiming to produce the same sort of informative, humanizing, and provocative films 30 for 30 is known for, and it is using the same type of high-quality directors that have made 30 for 30 a success so far, which only makes it more baffling that stories about women in sports and films directed by women have been so absent from the series since it began in 2010.

It seems that ESPN has determined, perhaps unintentionally, that the best way to tell stories about women in sports and the best way to utilize female directors is to tie them to a transformative event that will broadly appeal to women. But while ESPN has taken many positive steps to boost women’s sports and the roles of women in sports, and while it is rightly celebrating the success of Title IX, it shouldn’t need a special anniversary to talk about women in sports and the challenges they still face. And it shouldn’t need a special event to turn the cameras over to female directors. That it does serves as yet another indication of how far women in the world of sports have to go, even four decades after Title IX became law.

Having finally seen and fallen in love with The Godfather, I decided I should go back to Mario Puzo’s original novel of the same name, the pulp classic that became a masterpiece. I’d been told that there’s a lot more in the book about Hollywood, which there is, and which remains a relevant critique of that city’s sexual culture today. But I was mostly curious as to whether Puzo had more to say about the women who hover outside of the doors who are shut in their faces by the Corleone men.

He does, but The Godfather remains an odd book when it comes to women, and is odd in a number of different ways. The size of Sonny Corleone’s penis comes up more often than his mother’s actual first name. Apollonia, Michael’s first, Italian wife is an utter blank, an expanse of “satiny skin” for Michael to consume, and to imprint with English and driving lessons. It remains utterly inexplicable to me why Kay Adams ultimately decides to take Michael Corleone back, much less to marry him, after he not only disappears on her without notice, but after he returns, as Mama Corleone puts it, for six months “He no call you up? He no see you?” Her decision to follow consigliere Tom Hagen in abandoning her own ethnic and class background to become a compliant Italian wife, quashing her concerns about Michael’s affairs and saying Masses for his souls every morning, is a compelling counter to the assimilation the Don hoped his son would achieve: Michael doesn’t just fail to break away from his Italianness, he brings Kay back with him. But there’s a fundamental gap in her story. And Connie Corleone never gets to be anything other than a shrew, until the moment at the end of the novel, as well as the film, when in her hysteria, she accuses Michael of murdering her husband Carlo, and gets dismissed as crazed by grief even though she’s absolutely correct.

The one woman who does make it out—or at least, who finds a way to live in the Corleone family orbit without being compromised by it—is Lucy Mancini, whose story is essentially a massive red herring, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Johnny Fatone’s Vocal Cord Surgery. Puzo does precisely no work to grow real thematic connective tissue between Lucy’s story and the rest of the novel, which is strange, because after Kay, she’s the woman on which the novel spends the most introspective time. And she’s also, frankly, a character with an arc I’m surprised Puzo dreamed up, given the treatment of the other women in the novel, and their position as profoundly mysterious creatures, particularly when it comes to sexual desire.

Lucy enters the novel as Connie’s maid of honor at her wedding, a position that’s given Lucy the opportunity to seduce Connie’s older brother, Sonny. He’s attractive to her in part because of what she’s been told about her body and its lack of desirability: “In her two college love affairs she had felt nothing and neither of them lasted more than a week. Quarreling, her second lover had mumbled something about her being ‘too big down there.’ Lucy had understood and for the rest of the school term had refused to go out on any dates.” Sonny, because he’s well-endowed, doesn’t treat Lucy like she’s sexually inadequate. And alone among the women in The Godfather, Lucy’s opened up to the possibility of an affair that’s solely about her own sexual fulfillment, without being treated like a slut, either by Sonny, or anyone else in the Corleone orbit. When Sonny dies, “her dreams were not the insipid dreams of a schoolgirl, her longings not the longings of a devoted wife. She was not rendered desolate by the loss of her ‘life’s companion,’ or miss him because of his stalwart character. She held no fond remembrances of sentimental gifts, of girlish hero worship, his smile, the amused glint of his eyes when she said something endearing or witty. No. She missed him for the more important reason that he had been the only man in the world who could make her body achieve the act of love.”
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