Over the past several days, we’ve heard a great deal, about the happy (if you can call the tend of ten years of torment straightforwardly happy) ending to a horrific triple—or maybe quadruple—kidnapping in Cleveland, and the man who brought it about. Charles Ramsey, who lived near the house in which Amanda Berry, Michelle Knight, and Gina DeJesus were held, raped, and tortured for a decade, became a hero when he responded to Berry’s calls for help, thinking he was intervening in a simple domestic violence incident. And he has become an internet celebrity thanks to an interview he gave about the case afterwards. The speed with which the latter status has eclipsed the former has been striking, and raised interesting and important questions about our willingness to turn people of color into memes rather than heroes.

At NPR, Gene Demby points out that the ways in which men like Ramsey become memes, and the grounds on which they’re treated as if they’re likable, are reductive rather than respectful, cute rather than heroic—and when those images crumble, the credit we extend to them and the rewards that follow tend to disappear:

But race and class seemed to be central to the celebrity of all these people. They were poor. They were black. Their hair was kind of a mess. And they were unashamed. That’s still weird and chuckle-worthy.

On the face of it, the memes, the Auto-Tune remixes and the laughing seem purely celebratory. But what feels like celebration can also carry with it the undertone of condescension. Amid the hood backdrop — the gnarled teeth, the dirty white tee, the slang, the shout-out to McDonald’s — we miss the fact that Charles Ramsey is perfectly lucid and intelligent.

And at Slate, Aisha Harris breaks down the ways in which the “memorable soundbites” uttered by people like Ramsey or Antoine Dodson becomes the most memorable thing about them, rather than the acts that brought them to public attention in the first place. She writes:

It’s difficult to watch these videos and not sense that their popularity has something to do with a persistent, if unconscious, desire to see black people perform. Even before the genuinely heroic Ramsey came along, some viewers had expressed concern that the laughter directed at people like Sweet Brown plays into the most basic stereotyping of blacks as simple-minded ramblers living in the “ghetto,” socially out of step with the rest of educated America. Black or white, seeing Clark and Dodson merely as funny instances of random poor people talking nonsense is disrespectful at best. And shushing away the question of race seems like wishful thinking.

I think both Harris and Demby are correct, and that it’s worth sorting out both a conscious and unconscious set of impulses that are at work in meme-ifying people in these particular circumstances.
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Jason Collins may be the first man to come out of the closet not just to people in his immediate circle, but to the country as a whole, while still actively pursuing a professional career in Major League Sports, but he wasn’t the first man out in baseball. That was Glenn Burke, who in the seventies was out to both Dodgers management and his teammates, and who came out nationally after his retirement. And apparently, Jamie Lee Curtis and her production company have been trying to get an adaptation of Burke’s autobiography into production, and are hoping the momentum of Collins’ announcement might help them make it happen. As Deadline summarizes the story:

Drafted by the Dodgers and touted as a potential star, Burke got off to a flying start when he became the only rookie to start in the 1977 World Series. Burke also took credit for inventing the high-five in 1977. Waiting on-deck at Dodger Stadium, he was first to congratulate teammate Dusty Baker with that up-high slap, after Baker hit his 30th home run in the last game of the season. While his adversity was nothing compared to what Dodger predecessor Jackie Robinson faced when he broke baseball’s color barrier, Burke’s decision to come out of the closet probably hastened his demise. In his autobiography, Burke wrote about how Dodgers GM Al Campanis offered to pay for a pricey honeymoon if Burke would get married in a Rock Hudson-like charade, but the ballplayer wasn’t going along with the sham. Campanis later was fired for appearing on Nightline and making outlandish racist remarks. Burke’s stats show he did not live up to the potential expected of him, but he seemed at peace with his decision to not hide his off the diamond life. “They can’t ever say now that a gay man can’t play in the majors, because I’m a gay man and I made it,” he said. He was diagnosed with AIDS in 1994 and died a year later at age 42.

One of the most important things movies can do is get under-acknowledged history to a mass audience. Milk, for example, mattered so much precisely because it introduced a mass audience to the idea that the gay rights movement was, in fact, a long-standing effort, and one that involved heroes and martyrs who fit into conventional narratives about sacrifices for social progress. A biopic of Burke could similarly help combat the idea that sports were a previously heterosexual zone that was somehow colonized by gay people, reminding mass audiences that there have always been gay athletes, even if they didn’t choose to share that fact with fans, or if fans weren’t astute enough to pick up on it.

And I’m also excited about the possibilities of a Burke biopic precisely because the audience would come to it with few assumptions and expectations. One of the things that I found deadening about 42, and what ultimately would have sucked the air out of any Jackie Robinson biopic was how familiar everyone was with the story. It’s mandatory to have set-pieces like Pee Wee Reese’s public embrace of Robinson or Leo Durocher’s dressing-down of the Dodgers who didn’t want to play with a black man, no matter how well or how human each of those moments has the potential to be. But with a story about Burke, nothing will be mandatory. Everything will be new. And as a result, the movie can be more human and relaxed, less stiffly conscious of history, something that serves good art, as well as humane arguments for equality.

When the National Basketball Association’s Jason Collins came out as gay in a Sports Illustrated article Monday, he became the first active publicly gay male athlete in major American sports. That he was the first publicly out man is important to note, since female athletes have been open about their sexuality since at least 1981, when pro tennis player Billie Jean King was outed in a court case and another pro tennis player, Martina Navritilova, came out on her own. Since then, a number of female athletes — the WNBA’s Sheryl Swoopes, Chamique Holdsclaw, and Seimone Augustus, soccer player Megan Rapinoe, and U.S. Women’s National soccer coach Pia Sundhage, to name a few — have come out of the closet.

Brittney Griner, the top pick in the WNBA Draft, joined that list last week in an announcement that was as nonchalant as Collins’ was bold. Griner had already been open about her sexuality, she said, and it seemed that the reason the public didn’t know that was because nobody had bothered to ask. The separate comings out of Griner and Collins were telling for their differences, both in how they were received but in how they were covered in the media. That Brittney Griner was gay didn’t seem to shock anyone — as far as we’ve come in questioning gender roles, if a woman is interested in sports, tall and physically powerful, or both, those are considered indicators that she might be a lesbian. But when Collins came out, people were shocked, and they likely would have been shocked by any other male athlete coming out, even as we’ve become more accustomed to the idea that there must be gay men in professional sports.

The reason for those differences says a great deal about the way society views sports, masculinity, and sexuality. A man who excels at professional sports and has relationships with women has his work, his body, and his sexuality in alignment with norms of traditional masculinity. He’s seen as physically strong, heterosexual, and athletically gifted. A man who is physically strong and athletically gifted but is sexually attracted to men challenges the notion that there’s a relationship between traditional masculinity and heterosexuality. Being gay, it turns out, doesn’t make a man physically weak and passive.

That assumed relationship between masculinity and athletic ability is precisely what changes the equation for women. It isn’t feminine, in society’s eyes, to excel at sports. Where a man who pursues athletics as a career is conforming to gender norms, a woman—straight, gay, or bi—who goes into sports is defying them. And because heterosexual women are assumed to be feminine, women who excel in male-dominated fields, or who exhibit strength normally associated with men, find themselves subject to having assumptions about their sexuality made on the basis of their bodies or their skills. And the ways in which they diverge from gender norms risk becoming more important to the public than the things those divergences let them accomplish.
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On Saturday, at the first baseball game in Boston after a suspension of the one that was scheduled to be played as city police and federal officials were hunting for Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, David Ortiz declared at a pregame ceremony, “This is our fucking city. And nobody gonna dictate our freedom. Stay strong. Thank you.” Normally, this is the kind of thing that would have invited a fine, but Federal Communications Chairman Julius Genachowski tweeted on the agency’s official account: “David Ortiz spoke from the heart at today’s Red Sox game. I stand with Big Papi and the people of Boston.”

It was an apparently inconsistency with agency policy that lead Lawyers Guns and Money blogger Erik Loomis to note: “It would be nice if the FCC would more generally assume people are grown-ups and allow the language used in everyday life to be part of mass media on a more general basis. I’m not sure that reserving the word for political occasions where the agency’s head deems it appropriate has much value.”

He may not precisely get his wish. But the good news is that the FCC is opening up comments “on whether the full Commission should make changes to its current broadcast indecency policies or maintain them as they are.” As Eriq Gardner explains further in The Hollywood Reporter:

According to an advance copy of a document set to be published on Friday in the Federal Register, the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau and the Office of General Counsel is seeking comments on whether it should maintain current protocol or change with the times on issues including isolated expletives on TV and fleeting instances of non-sexual nudity. The call for comments will surely invite attention from broadcasters who have fought several high-profile legal battles in recent years. Broadcasters believe that it’s time for a change.

In 1978, in FCC vs. Pacifica Foundation, the Supreme Court took a look at comedian George Carlin’s famous monologue, “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television” and considered the government’s role in regulating indecency over the public airwaves. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens upheld the FCC’s authority while preaching some vague restraint. “We simply hold that when the Commission finds that a pig has entered the parlor, the exercise of its regulatory power does not depend on proof that the pig is obscene,” he wrote.

This is a significant opportunity to reassess an area of broadcast policy that’s shifted back and forth over time and that observers on every side of the debate have found frustrating. It’s an area where I’ll almost be as curious to read the comments and see how they break down as to see where the final ruling lands, particularly given our current debate over the impact of depictions of violence in the media on real-world acts of violence. And I hope one area of the conversation that emerges is the relative treatments of sexual content, sexual violence, and other categories of violence. If parents really believe that violent media has an enormous real-world effect on their children, I’d expect to see more people writing in to suggest that depictions of violence be treated with similar care and suspicion as depictions of nude bodies or consensual sexuality. And I hope we can have a discussion about the actual relative harms of these depictions, and of fleeting language, uttered in instances in which public figures behave a lot more like human beings than most of the people we actually see on television.

This post discusses the seventh and eighth episodes of the first season of Veronica Mars.

As I’m watching my way through Veronica Mars, I’m learning how to watch the show, which is a good thing—good television doesn’t just figure out what it’s doing for its own self, it finds ways to communicate to viewers what they ought to be looking for in an episode. And what I’ve learned so far is to look for theme in the cases of the week, rather than plot in particular. These two episodes do a nice job of fleshing out the theme of reputation, while also playing with the way that Veronica, Logan, and Weevil are perceived—and perceive each other.

In the first case, Jessica Chastain plays Sarah, a neighbor of Veronica and Keith’s who turns out to have been raped by her mother’s boyfriend, and is pregnant as a result of that sexual assault. The case itself isn’t deeply concerned with that larger theme, though it touches on it in two ways. First, is the idea that while Sarah’s boyfriend Andre may be a cheat and a jerk, those two things don’t necessarily make him a murderer. And then there’s Keith’s perspective on the case: “Young attractive girls who take up with troubled men and disappear without warning?” Keith warns Veronica. “I’ve handled a hundred of these cases in my life and they often end badly. Prepare yourself.” It’s true that Sarah is troubled, but not in a garden-variety way. And while things end badly—Keith ends up having to shoot Sarah’s attacker to protect her—they don’t end up badly because she’s a mess, but because something terrible’s been done to her.

The second case deals much more directly with the question of reputation, as Veronica takes the case of Meg, a popular—but kind—cheerleader who finds herself devastated when a new purity test becomes the school craze, and when a website begins selling test results that purport to reveal the deepest secrets of Neptune High students. The results that are being sold as Meg’s suggest that, contrary to her squeaky-clean image (in contrast to that of her sister’s), as Duncan puts it, “Meg was one of those Britney Spears virgins. And you were her noble Justin, keeping it all on the down low.” But while other students are all too ready to believe the worst of Meg, Veronica, who’s been the subject of unpleasant rumors herself, and who has direct experience of Meg’s decency after her clothes are stole when she’s in the showers at gym, isn’t so easily duped. “Meg, you’re the last good person at this school,” she reminds her friend. “I believe cartoon birds braided your hair this morning.” What she discovers, though, is how willing Meg’s purported friends were willing to tear down her sexual reputation in the hopes that losing that would make it harder for Meg to achieve in other areas, whether she’s winning parts in the school play or anchoring Neptune High’s student news show. It’s a canny recognition of a screwed-up hierarchy that sets up Meg’s virginity as the most valuable part of her, far above her goodness as a person, her skills as a singer, or her abilities on television.

And the episode pivots in an interesting way Meg seeks out Veronica not just for her expertise as a private eye, but for advice on how to handle being widely and publicly slandered. “I don’t see how you do it…Deal. The way people talk about you. Does it bother you the things they say?” Meg asks her. “No,” Veronica tells her. “Here’s what you do. You get tough. You get even.” But how is she supposed to get even with someone like Wallace’s mom, who tells her son “I thought we talked about you hanging out with that girl…We have a chance of making a fresh start in Neptune. There have to be some respectable kids in your school.” Keith’s intervention with her difficult tenant might help her estimation of the Mars family name as a whole, but it may not fix the perception that Veronica’s promiscuous. And Veronica has to cope with her father’s desires for her and the ways in which they contrast with her desire to stay close to him by staying in private eye work. “I think you’ve got a future as a highly paid, Ivy-leage educated executive of some sort who never thinks about private investigation again in her normal life,” Keith tells her. Whether she hears is another question.

Two people who do seem to be getting on the same page are Logan and Weevil, who after getting zeros on a test from a rigid English teacher, discover that the reputations that work for them in different ways can also be very effectively against them. “The glow of your father’s wealth and celebrity may be enough to get you through high school, but do you know what it will get you in the real world?” their teacher tells them. “Mr. Navarro, you find Mr. Ecchols amusing enough now, but I wonder if you’ll find him so entertaining in ten years when you’re pumping his gas.” They jab back and forth at each other in detention that turns into a poker game. “How do you people not make yourselves sick?” Weevil jabs at Logan, who asks him in return, “If I donate to the United Latino Pain In The Ass Fund, will you shut up?” “You’re almost as bad an actor as your father,” Weevil tells Logan. “You know you don’t need a diploma to steal hubcaps?” Logan aks again. These two are clearly meant to be friends, and it’s a minor delight when Logan bails Weevil out of his expulsion. The next best thing to a good friend is a good enemy. And your bad reputation can be an enormous source of strength.

I’m late to Tegan and Sara’s excellent Heartthrob, but listening to standout track “Now I’m All Messed Up,” I noticed something interesting. In the song’s excellent, heartwrenching chorus, the twins sing “Now I’m all messed up / Sick inside, wondering where / Where you’re leaving your makeup / Now I’m all messed up / Sick inside wondering who / Whose life you’re making worthwhile”:

What’s intriguing about those lines is not just that they’re good and precise, but that the default interpretation of them would probably be—the rise of makeup for men in certain circumstances notwithstanding—that Tegan and Sara are singing to a woman. That shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who’s followed the band for more than half a minute: both of the twins are gay and in long-term relationships with women. But where in the past, those songs and lyrics that clearly referenced women, like the deftly sketched object of desire who is “Dignified in what she does / When she sings the smile that she brings / To all of you unaware of what’s to come ” in “Superstar” were part of what, along with their production, made them kind of a cult group. I think I heard them for the first time at the Women’s Center in college. Now, it doesn’t seem to have pigeonholed them at all. Even if it’s women singing about other women, plenty of guys seem to be able to hear their own experiences in lyrics like these.

A similar kind of identification-bending happens in Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own” when she sings that “I’m not the guy you’re taking home,” a bit of language that could be part of a language barrier, but more likely, seems to be Robyn simultaneously conjuring up “stilettos and broken bottles” and speaking in the voice and to the experience of her gay male fans:

It doesn’t seem to me yet that this kind of pronoun fluidity to mix up the gender of the person we imagine as the protagonist of the song, or the expectation that you can identify with a song even if the sexual orientation of the lyrics or the gender of the singer clearly aren’t yours has completely conquered pop music. And of course there have always been cross-gender affiliations between singers and their audiences. But I wonder if this kind of protean approach is less closeted than it once was, if it’s less a form of code than simply a reflection of social and musical reality. Whatever it is, if it gives Tegan and Sara a chance to break out to mainstream audiences while still writing songs that are clearly addressed to women, it makes me very happy.