Posting is going to continue to be light because of Netroots Nation, but that doesn't mean we're content-free. Today I had the honor of being the first guest in an interview series Think Progress is doing with Google. Alyssa Rosenberg and I chatted about pop culture, and because it's the source of the most fascinating pop culture going on these days, that means we talked about TV.

We don't wear the Ray-Bans throughout the whole thing, but you know, wearing them for some of it had to be done. 

Sorry about lack of blogging. I'm traveling to Providence today to go to Netroots Nation. I'll be on two panels.

And then the one I submitted:

Last year, there was a lot of drama because the annual evidence that right wingers are that childish and immature, which is a conference called Right Online conservatives always try to schedule nearby, happened to be in the same hotel where most of the Netroots-goers were. That's how I managed my brief and strange meeting with Andrew Breitbart in the street, and that's how one belligerent wingnut got arrested for trying to pick a fight with Netroots attendees. One of the advantages of having it in Providence is that Providence apparently isn't big enough for two conferences, so the "me too" wingnut conference is going to be far away in Las Vegas. But that doesn't mean that there won't be interesting stuff to blog, I'm sure. It is, after all, an election year. I'll also be tweeting, so if you're interested, follow me there. 

Who's going this year?

At RH Reality Check yesterday, I wrote, "One of the more frustrating aspects of dealing with anti-choices is their tendency to lean on arguments that are so shoddy that they’d be laughed out of a junior high school debate tournament." And, as if the universe was trying to prove me right, I've discovered this Tumblr called---wait for it---Checkmate, Pro-Choicers! This site is where the bloggers store what they believe are their best arguments. Not the argument that convinced them, mind you. The argument that convinced them is, "Female sexuality is evil and a system of forced pregnancy and jail time for unauthorized fucking is the only appropriate response." The blogmistress Rebecca admits that's what convinced her in the About ME! (yes, that's how it's titled) section:

Please keep all submissions, comments, and reblogs kind and Christ-like. Even though many girls who have abortions may be sluts, this blog is not about calling them sluts.

In other words, we all hate those slutty sluts, but since this stupid Satanic country isn't ready to throw them in jail for fornication, we have to promote disingenuous arguments about ensoulment of embryos. Like Jesus Christ said, it's important to throw stones at the sluts, but when called out on it, deny that's why you did it, because we don't have the polling numbers yet to ban sex outright. 

Personally, I think they should lead with the "slut" argument. It's what convinced them! I always try to lead with the argument that convinced me. It's not only the only honest-thing to do---Christ-like, even!---but also a proven method of winning people over. The slut argument got you, right?

Enough preliminaries! Let's look at what this blogger feels are the strongest, best arguments the anti-choice movement has to offer, besides the "gross, sluts" one, i.e. the one that actually convinced the blogger and her fellow antis.

In a sense, you almost feel sorry for the blogger, who has never seen a biology textbook and, while a legal adult, appears to believe that pregnancy is a process where Jesus tells you that you don't have any periods for nine months and then, at the end of this period---a period where you have no weight gain, no pain, no stretch marks, no rise in blood pressure, and certainly no labor and delivery---the stork drops a baby off at the door. Of course, even if that were the case, I'd still support abortion rights, because I reserve the right to refuse any package delivered to my house without my permission, and that especially includes one containing another person I have to clothe, house, and feed.

All through this Tumblr---and through anti-choice rhetoric generally---is this assumption that we have no real world experience with what abortion bans look like. In fact, you start to get the impression that they think abortion was only invented in 1973, by those noted doctors on the high court. So antis feel free to just assume that all an abortion ban means is that the concept of "abortion" is wiped away, and women never, ever think about hitting the eject button if they have an unwanted pregnancy. 

Of course, in reality, we have tons of evidence that what in fact happens when you ban abortion is that women---who aren't waiting for the day that this blogger believe will come, and Jesus comes down to settle the question of whether or not embryos have souls for eternity---continue to know damn well that they aren't carrying a fucking baby around anymore than having an egg and some flour on hand means you've got a cake. And those women go on the black market for abortions. If they're of means, that means they find discreet professionals who offer the service because they, like all people with common sense, know that acorns aren't trees. But if they're poor, they go to people who often have no idea what they're doing. 

This isn't speculation. The rate of abortion is actually higher in countries where it's banned, suggesting that if you're "pro-life", the last thing you want is an abortion ban. The black markets that are handling those abortions are---duh---unsafe. There's no "if" here, no future date when all this is suddenly resolved. We actually know right now what each side's policy gets. If we get our way, abortion rates are lower and exponentially fewer women die or are disfigured by abortions. (In fact, if done properly, it's one of the safest surgical procedures that exists, and far safer than childbirth.) If antis get their way, the abortion rate goes up, as does the rate of women dying or being injured by unsafe abortion. No ifs. No judge making a final proclaimation in the future. We already know the score, and we know it now.

Yeah, well, because they had a choice. 

Okay, not to be too glib, but the notion that once a woman has a child, she realizes it's the best thing ever and will want nothing more but to have one baby after another is easy enough to disprove. It's not just that women tend to use contraception after giving birth, either. 61% of women getting abortions have children already. Anti-choicers tend to see forced childbirth as a way to turn childless "sluts" into obedient women who will never question patriarchal authority again. In reality, a lot of women who have children know even more how much work it is, and are even more determined to keep their family at a size they can afford and manage. The notion of "regret" is psychologically unstable, of course. Do we know if women regret having children, when there is no safe space for women to express such an emotion? No, of course not. But we do know that woemn can assess the evidence on hand and make choices for themselves, and we have plenty of evidence that even women who've experienced motherhood aren't always eager to have another baby.

Anything that's human and alive is "human life". That's just tautological. Which means that it's also meaningless. People are "human life", and embryos are "human life". But all cells in your body are human and alive. The most obvious example is sperm, which is human and alive and survives outside of the body, unlike embryos. So it actually has more claim to "people" status than an embryo, since it's got one more trait in common with people than embryos. Which means that if you think abortion is murder on these grounds, you think that ejaculation is genocide. None of the antis I talk to seem to agree, suggesting that they don't believe this argument about "human life" at all, but simply are trying to avoid talking about the argument that actually convinced them, which is that female sexuality is evil and should be subject to criminal penalties.

If you believe that anything human and alive is the equivalent of a person, and you believe that "human life" is so precious that bodily autonomy doesn't trump it, then this argument presented here means that you're a murder if you pop a zit, cut yourself and bleed, or even comb your hair. All those actions kill human life, as they all destroy cells that are are alive and human, and therefore people. And of course, definitely ejacuation. Under this proposed philsophy, all men absolutely have to be in jail for life for all that killing.

There's some entries on here that are boring, mostly because they're lies. The usual ones: that abortion causes breast cancer, that childbirth is painless, that a 4-week embryo can feel pain, that abortion bans mean no one gets abortions, and that Susan B. Anthony was "pro-life", which wasn't really a thing in the 19th century. (Also, there's no evidence that she weighed in on the abortion debate that was happening at the time either way, but it's important to understand that abortion was a really different thing back then. Imposing our struggles over medical procedures over a time when germ theory was still controversial is just bad history.) But this might be my favorite bad history:

I love the "your Queen" stuff. Conservatives are so wed to the idea of blind allegiance to authority that they can't understand liberals relationship to certain historical figures conservatives hate, like Margaret Sanger, who they hate because she basically invented the concept of birth control. (She was in fact largely anti-abortion, so really, the only reason they can hate her is her role in the creation of contraception, in case you forgot for a moment that the anti-choice movement is as opposed to preventing pregnancy as they are to terminating it.) You see this with creationists, who assume biology is a "religion" and that the writings of Darwin should be regarded as the revealed texts of an opposing faith, as opposed to scientific writings. So they think if they can poke holes in Darwin's argument, evolutionary theory will collapse. Of course, that's not how science works. And that's not how thoughtful people understand history.

This is the logical fallacy known as "argument from authority", though a sort of weird conservative version of it, where liberals are assigned authorities and then called out if we don't slavishly agree with everything they say. 

Sanger's opposition to abortion makes more sense if viewed through her utter devotion to the cause of birth control. She was, thankfully in most regards, absolutely fanatical about the idea that pregnancy prevention would liberate women, and she was willing to cling to every argument that got her political leverage for this purpose. Any negative thing that birth control prevents was something she clung to, including abortion. Indeed, many women---myself included---use contraception primarily to prevent abortion, because childbirth is simply not an option. In the nascent days of the birth control movement, therefore, positioning abortion and birth control against each other made a certain amount of political sense. It's important to remember that abortion was illegal, and Sanger's experience with it was as a dirty, dangerous back-alley thing. Sanger's colleagues came around on the abortion issue as the political conversation shifted, and as the understanding grew that we'd never achieve Sanger's utopian vision of a society that had no unintended pregnancy. 

Anyway, I almost feel bad shooting down these arguments, because they're so self-evidently silly. But this Tumblr is, by its name, an attempt to round up the best arguments for an abortion ban. It's tragic that such shoddy, illogical, childish, evidence-free thinking gets taken seriously at all. When you really look at the anti-choice movement, it becomes clear that argument-wise, they're no different than Birthers or 9/11 Truthers or any other weirdly obsessive conspiracy theory cult that wouldn't know a good argument if it bit them on the ass. 

Discussion question: What are the odds this is a parody Tumblr, established by a pro-choicer trying to put all these arguments into one place so you can see how paper-thin they are? I'm guessing 20% odds. The blogger speaks fluent Christianese, after all. Plus, I think a pro-choicer wouldn't slip in ones like the "no period" one, which are just too silly to be believed. Either way, the important thing to remember is that these really are their best arguments. I've never seen better ones proposed, honestly. 

I suspect the trend among recaps today is going to be to contrast Don and Lane's approach, because Don is (like Joan) a survivor, and obviously, someone who commits suicide by definition can't be.* But as you'll see in the video, Marc and I saw Don and Lane as the characters paralleled to each other, with Sally's journey being the counter-narrative. Don is in love with the drastic solution, destroying everything before to create a blank slate. Well, nothing destroys everything before quite like a suicide. Lane's suicide was the ultimate expression of wiping the slate completely clean, which is why his resignation letter was boilerplate. Don falls in love with the idea of killing yourself symbolically for rebirth---he's killed off Dick Whitman, killed off Don the creative guy who works for someone else, Don the married suburbanite---but as he cuts Lane down from the wall, the possibility that running out of options for surviving a killing off of one's self looms.

One of the most common gripes I see about Mad Men is that it's not critical enough of capitalism. Personally, I've never cared; the ambivalence the show embraces on the subject has always been a strength as far as I'm concerned. It echoes how people actually feel about things like advertising, which is a mix of concern, indifference, and fascination, depending on the moment. But this episode was practically a diatribe about the unsustainability of the grow-at-any-cost mentality that drives capitalism. Capitalism discourages the "rich enough" mentality. That's why Don is outraged at Dow's people saying that 50% of market share was enough. Why not go for 100%? What Don fails to realize as soon as he says this is that once you hit 100%, there's no where else to go. But if your whole model is based on continued growth, hitting 100% might as well be hitting 0%. Don thinks that's sustainable; wipe the slate clean and start over. Lane's death, however, shocks him into thinking perhap he was overconfident about that.

As the episode makes clear, one problem with the always-growing mentality is that it encourages borrowing endlessly against the future. People convince themselves that they don't have to limit the credit extensions, because since all those investments will pay off in the long run, you're just spending money that might as well already be yours. But eventually the whole scam reaches a breaking point. On the individual level, it's like Lane's; he's discovered, and it's all over. On a macro level, you have market bubbles that burst. The latest economic crash is the most blunt demonstration of this. Just as Lane created the illusion of prosperity for the firm by borrowing $50K, banks created the illusion of national prosperity completely on borrowed money that created a real estate bubble. Just like the banks, Lane got a bailout to cover the inevitable hole that's created. I don't think we're meant to see the plugging of that hole as a bad thing in and of itself. The bank bailout kept our economy from a complete crash, and we're meant to assume---with Don's remarks to Megan---that his willingness to write a check to cover up for Lane's discrepancy is helping keep the whole thing afloat as well. 

But just because you can create stopgap measures to minimize the fiscal damage of capitalist overreach doesn't mean that everything is hunky-dory. The firm has to deal with Lane's dead body in his office. We have to deal with the high unemployment and teeming numbers of people who've lost their homes in the crisis. Just like a dead body in an office, there's nothing you can do that's going to make that go away. Fresh starts are an illusion.

Menstruation seems like a weird thing to introduce in the midst of all this, but as we say in the video, it's a counterpoint. The cyclical nature of a woman's body is seen as the exact opposite of the voracious capitalist model. We go into it in more detail in the video.

I do have to wonder how much Jaguar is paying for the product placement, since their cars are clearly becoming the symbol of the disposable economics of exponential growth capitalism. They're lemons---we're reminded of this again by Lane's inability to kill himself in one---and they exist to be all flash. The American cars that Don loves so much were still the representation of stability. If you bought a car from an American manufacturer back then, you had reason to believe it would last you decades if you took care of it. (Even when I was in college, there were a lot of people who still had, as their everyday cars, vehicles that were three decades old.)Is it any wonder, then, that Don and Glen's existential anxieties are actually soothed for a moment in an American car? For a moment, the possibility is raised that trying to build something that will last---gasp, a legacy!---might have more value than always looking for the next big payday. 

Thoughts? Feelings? I think it was obvious from a couple episodes ago that Lane was going to be the suicide, but do you feel it played out? I thought the strategy of seeing everyone's reactions before we saw the body helped fix some of the anti-climax issues that come with such a heavily foreshadowed death, but YMMV. 

*At least when suicide is a literary device. In real life, a suicide attempt can be just a very weak moment for an otherwise survival-oriented purpose, but if they get unlucky, it's the same result as someone who attempts a lot before finally succeeding. 

Life is basically returning to normal, putting me in the mood for a Panda Party. The weirdest part of minor outpatient surgery is that while I didn't really need antibiotics or any painkillers beyond aspirin, I was exhausted anyway for a day and a half. But by yesterday afternoon, I was back to my old self, and will be it total fighting form by Netroots Nation. So celebrate with me with a Panda Party!

Check out this insanely funky band from the 80s that I was listening to on Spotify last night:

I wouldn't be surprised to hear some of their grooves on the dance floor at the Netroots Nation Pro-Choice Pro-Party. If you'd coming to Netroots Nation, do not miss this. 

Marc and I've largely been on a 80s funk-dance kick, and so I wouldn't be surprised to hear this classic, either:

In the meantime, Panda Party!

My usual response to Cary Tennis's advice column at Salon is to read it, maybe chat with friends for a second about it, shaking our heads in disapproval all the way, and move on. But today, woof. I really feel the need to step in. Sometimes I think people write Tennis because they know they should be writing Prudie or Dan Savage, but they fear getting good advice, because they know in their hearts the right thing to do, and they're not there yet. And Tennis will happily keep steering them down the wrong path. 

Before I even start to quote today's letter, I want to point out that Tennis's answer is based on a completely incorrect assumption, that a man who retains sexual desire for other women after commiting monogamously to one can properly be considered mentally ill. He not only accepts at face value the concept of "porn addiction", but also everything else the letter writer rolls up into it, such as her belief that his "illness" causes him to look at other women and that masturbation itself is a manifestation of his "illness"---that if he was healthy, all of his sexual energy would be directed to her and her alone. Accepting that this is an illness is all kinds of messed up. What it is would be better labeled as "normal", "human", "healthy", and "get over it". The recently released DSM-V not only rejected attempts to get "sex addiction" or "porn addiction" listed, but in fact delisted the closest thing to it, "hypersexuality", putting it in the index. They should have dropped it completely, but I guess there's still enough Christianists in the therapy world with power to keep some kind of symblic nod to the idea that being horny makes you mentally ill. Instead of looking to what the scientific establishment has to say on this, Tennis instead directs this letter writer towards anti-porn hysteria, some of it emanating from our friend Naomi Wolf. He even suggests some sex-negative therapists. 

Now, as will become clear, I do think a lot of men look at too much porn and have all sorts of weird sexual issues. I don't, however, think they're mentally ill. I think they just grew up with a giant heaping of male privilege and its naughty little cousin, anxious masculinity, and they're drawn to porn not because they're horny so much as it soothes them to see women being put in their place, over and over again. This guy is probably one of them. But the answer is not to shut down porn use, masturbation, or sexual attraction outside of relationships. Sex isn't the problem. Male domination i s, and there are plenty of guys out there who can be horny and respectful of women at the same time. A little experience makes it easier to suss out who is who. 

Now, there's a lot of red flags in this letter that Tennis should have noticed. 

I am 20 and have been living with my boyfriend, who is much older than I am, for over two years.

Red flag #1: The letter writer was dating a much-older man when she was underage. This already should be sending up missiles of WTF, enough for you to start crafting a response that involves, "Dump him, and find someone your own age, instead of a grown man who trawls high schools looking for dates. 

Previous to being with me, he was single for five years and he watched porn daily. Soon after I moved in, I discovered he was into teenage porn. I asked him to stop watching it, and he promised he would. A few months later, I found he was still watching it daily. He told me later that he would sneak it while I was in the other room and masturbate to it. I explained to him that aside from it being creepy, I also considered it unfaithful.

Red flag #2: He was single for five years until he talked an underage girl with probably no experience dating prior to him into being his girlfriend. Red flag #3: His sexual fantasies center completely around girls that are below the legal age of consent, which his girlfriend likely was when they met.

I did not understand why my body wasn’t enough to satisfy him. I was willing to give him sex whenever he wanted, yet he chose to relieve himself to other girls.

Red flag #4: The low self-esteem, passivity, and submissiveness evident in talking about sex as a matter of a woman offering her body up to a man to "relieve"  him. It imagines sex as being similar to a man using a woman as a human toilet, instead of sex being a mutual exchange of pleasure. We can begin to see why this girl was perhaps easy pickings for the kind of creepy guy who treats the playground like it's Match.com.

Naturally, they go through all the bullshit ropes: Him pretending not to look, her spying, him pretending to go to therapy (or actually going, but not listening, because hey, sex addiction isn't a disease), her trying to clamp down harder. In fact, she gets completely out of control.

I also decided that keeping him away from triggers would help him not crave it as much (he agreed). Whenever we would rent movies for example, we would choose ones without nudity in them. I also went as far as refusing to go to the beach with him (because I knew that if we went he would be checking out young girls and may even have to masturbate to them later on).

By placing these limits on his behavior however, I am worried because I adversely made him hypersensitive to seemingly nonsexual things such as a girl wearing short shorts. Now that he is deprived of nudity he has admitted to becoming very aroused by things that were formerly not very arousing, since that is all he has access to.

Ugh, only 20 years old and already she's acting like the fun-free wife-as-mother whose job is to place "restrictions" on her naughty son-lover. I think I just made myself ill. Without intervention, this young woman is on a highway to an embittered middle-aged woman who writes screeching blog posts about how the evil feminists are ruining it for other women with their slutting it up, all to avoid admitting what the real problem is, which is that she has low self-esteem and hooked up with a creep because he was the first taker. 

Here is what's really going on: This young woman met her boyfriend, who is much older, when she was in high school. She was at least 17, and possibly younger. He is one of those creepy fucks who likes teenage girls, because he has power and control issues. Now that she's no longer a teenager and---gasp!---is approaching the decrepit old age where she can legally drink, she's beginning to worry, I'm guessing correctly, that he's losing interest. He's not into women, just girls, and ugh, the girl he used to be with is betraying him by becoming a woman. So he's masturbating more to barely legal porn, and checking out teenagers, most of whom are probably creeped out, which is just another ugly reminder of the kind of weirdo she hooked up with. But instead of seeing this for what it is, her self-esteem is so low that she instead is getting clingy and controlling herself. The porn is a red herring. If she was in a healthy relationship with a non-creep, she might see that.

Solution: DTMFA. And after you do that, find a therapist yourself to work out your self-esteem issues. Not one of the sex-negative ones suggested by Tennis, but one who can talk you through why sex isn't a weapon for the sexes to fight each other. Spend some time masturbating yourself, and really thinking of your body as an instrument for your pleasure, instead of an object for men to "relieve" themselves on. Monogamy is way more meaningful if it's about two people sharing their sexualities together, instead of being your man's one and only sperm bin. And don't blame yourself for spending the first few years of your dating life with a creeper. You got some ugly misogynist messages as a young woman that thwarted your basic anti-creep instincts, but you're young and you have plenty of time to right yourself and have genuinely fulfilling romantic adventures.

Thanks for all the well wishes, folks! Everything went well, and I'm mostly tired, but should be back to lifting heavy objects in no time. (Or 48 hours, according to the doctor.) Since lifting heavy objects is my favorite thing to do, this was welcome news. 

And thanks for all the recommendations! I love Netflix streaming, but the biggest problem with it is it's really hard to find the good stuff. I knew in my heart that there was a lot of worthwhile stuff lurking in its depths, but knowing where to start is rough. The algorithm that creates recommendations in not just Netflix but nearly all sites like it struggles to really come up with stuff you like, or maybe it's just me. Liking one sci-fi show doesn't mean I'll like the others, but it's hard to program je nais se quoi into a computer. I'm not mad about it, but just find it one of the more mundane, everyday problems that makes making computers think "like humans" so frustrating and likely impossible, at least in my lifetime.

As a thanks to you, I want to share this awesome article by Emily Nussbaum about "Community" and "Dr. Who" and the dialogue between mainstream and geek entertainments. For some reason, Nussbaum employs the euphemism "passionate fan" to describe people who are commonly known as geeks, perhaps because a lot of these passionate fans don't identify as geeks, both for their own reasons and because, frankly, the geek community isn't having it. But what she notes is that these two shows---"Community" and the reboot of "Dr. Who"---have in common is that they balance their geeky obsessions with more universal human concerns. 

What she doesn't go on to say, but I think is an interesting extrapolation, is that this is exactly why so much "geek" culture has gone mainstream. In fact, there's a long-running joke on the show "Party Down" about this. One of the characters is an aspiring screenwriter, but he constantly harangues everyone about how the only good sci-fi is "hard" sci-fi, i.e. sci-fi that minimizes relationship to maximize time spent on detailing out the imagined workings of the various sci-fi Macguffins that move the story ahead. (The comedy of this is heightened by dwelling on the least plausible kind of imaginary science that populates sci-fi.) The sci-fi and fantasy shows that make the leap into the mainstream are the ones that focus on human relationships, making them more "literary", and allowing people who aren't interested in the trappings of fantasy narratives themselves to get engaged. The best of these manage a nice balance, where they don't completely eliminate the geekier elements; fans who were unwilling to listen to light exposition about space travel and other geeky things wouldn't make it through "Battlestar Galactica", and fans whose eyes shut the second they start hearing about the pedigrees of various demons wouldn't get very far in "Buffy the Vampire Slayer". But these shows had a good sense of how to rein that stuff in and make sure that the focus was always on relationships and emotional storytelling, anchoring the story in something we all understand, which is people. 

I'm definitely in the category of fans who have no interest in the "hard" geeky stuff, but eats up what I consider successfully mainstreamed stuff like these aforementioned shows, and stuff like "Game of Thrones". What I find interesting about all this is that, from my viewpoint that's basically outside of geekiness, I don't see a lot of antagonism from inside World O' Geeks towards the mainstreaming of their obsessions. Which is interesting, because most people who have drawn an identity from a subculture tend to get very defensive of that subculture, and suspicious of travelers who want to stop by, get something out of it, and then move along. Part of it probably has to do with a geek ethos of inclusion, but I also think it's because most geeks are seeing a material advantage from the mainstreaming of their obsessions. One of the big problems with old school stuff is that there wasn't much money being thrown at it. Mainstream geeky fare, however, can get a bigger audience, which means more money, which means more special effects, bigger name actors, better editing, and it means all the best talent can be recruited for a project in general. The expansion of San Diego Comic Con alone shows how much material benefit long-standing geeks get from the mainstreaming of their culture. 

Just a few thoughts before I retire to the couch to watch some of the stuff you guys recommended. I should be in full fighting form tomorrow. Meanwhile, thoughts on this? Is the mainstreaming of geeky stuff good or bad for geeks?

So, I have to get minor outpatient surgery today, which requires a period of fasting (which I'm uniquely terrible at) and probably a day of recovery. I expect I won't be able to blog in this time; being hungry/thirsty is too distracting, and the doctor told me it's usually a day of recovery. You never know! I may get bored or something.

Nonetheless, a heads up. And a request: I've got both HBO Go and Netflix streaming on my iPad. Any recommendations of light, but entertaining fare available on either that could make my time in purgatory less miserable? Open thread about that and whatever you like, as long as you avoid trolling. 

One of the common complaints about Mad Men issued by those wishing to appear to be daring contrarians is that the sexism of the show is often of the mustache-twirling type. "Why can't it be more complex?", they whine, posing as if they have secret knowledge that the pre-second wave era wasn't as bad as it was. When people say this, however, I think they inadvertantly expose themselves as not as familiar with the mid-century surburban literature that the show owes its entire existence to. For instance, on Mad Men, Don drives his wife to drink by philandering with women who are by and large his equals. In John Updike's contemporary novel Rabbit Run, Harry Angstrom cheats on his wife by exploiting a marginalized woman (who gets by with prostitution) for housing while refusing to let her use contraception, on the grounds that it fucks up his mighty mojo. When this drives his wife to drink, she accidentally drowns the baby in the bathtub. That said, you get the feeling that Updike has more love for his creation than Weiner for Don Draper. (After all, Don eventually pays for his sins by getting kicked out of the house. Rabbit, not so much, though it is a bit more complicated than I have time to explore here.) All of which is to say that Mad Men actually soft pedals the attitudes of the era more often than not, for the entirely reasonable purpose of not making the audience hate the male characters so much that they can't get invested in their storylines. 

Well, usually. And then, when they buy your investment, they hit you over the head with a plot that seems like it could have sprung from the pages of mid-century literature instead of sticking to the concerns of our era, refracted through a 1960s lens. Which is totally what happened last night with the Joan story.

As you'll see from the video, Marc and I  have a very different take on what happens with Joan than a lot of reviewers, who are stuck on their horror at what transpired. What can I say? I'm not surprised that the male partners conspired to prostitute Joan; they visit prostitutes all the time, and don't have much language in their culture for understanding prostitution outside of a woman's "honor". (The only objection that even Don can come up with is that Joan can't be for sale because she already has an owner, her husband.) In a lot of ways, Joan just did what she's done her whole life, which is to leverage her sexuality for survival and often advantage. Is prostitution really different from trying to get a rich husband? Sleeping with high level executives for favors, gifts, and maybe a shot at the ring? The only reason this one's a shocker is Joan has actually worked herself into a position where she felt she didn't have to prostitute herself anymore. But as we note in the video, she created a situation where she never will have to again. That's why, as you'll see in the video, we're way more skeptical of Don's motivations in trying to stop her than most reviewers. I think this episode is going to be an excellent litmus test for viewers' unexplored attitudes towards sex work. The reason that we're more appalled that the partners would pimp Joan out than we have been at their frequent visits with prostitutes before is simple: We think of Joan as a "real" person that we respect. But really, all those prostitutes are "real" people. These men have always been like this; we just have to deal with it now that their gross attitudes are being inflicted on a character we love. 

But Joan herself does something very unusual on this show: She overcomes the odds and snatches a victory. 

Most TV shows are interested in looking at characters as moral actors making choices of their own free will, but Weiner is doing something much different with Mad Men. The show is far more interested in exploring how circumstances are everything. The characters are routinely shown as making bad choices because good choices are unnervingly off the table. I like that, because it's much closer to reality than most shows; most people who make bad choices do so because the "good" choices aren't very good. Peggy and Joan's paths to power exemplify this. The reason Peggy gets to play the game on her terms and be rewarded for her work instead of her sexuality isn't because Peggy is smarter or bolder or better in any way. It's because she was born about 7 or 8 years after Joan. That's it. Peggy got to come into her own in a world that's got a little more room for valuing women for their minds instead of reducing them to sex objects. But Joan is able to turn that boat around for herself. If the men who rule the world only see her as a sex object, by god, she's going to sleep her way so far to the top that they have no other choice but to see simply as the boss. Once in a blue moon, someone does figure out how to game the system. Of course it was Joan Holloway who had that shot. Obviously, men of that era---and frankly still---think that it's more dignified to hire or pimp out a prostitute than to be one. But I felt at the end that Joan's quiet dignity and history with these men will help level the playing field. 

One last thought: Joan and Peggy are the characters who really surged ahead in this episode. Megan, however, fell behind yet again. Of the three, only Megan is married. For women on Mad Men, being married is like the kiss of death, which I think is pretty consistent with the strictures of the time that feminism was fighting against. Of course, the real question is how much have we really changed? What was a little disconcerting to me about this episode is you could have had all three storylines happen in 2012 with very little tweaking. Feminism has opened more doors, but the interpersonal political bullshit has far from faded.

By the way, Jaguar put up the most epic tweet last night after the episode ended. (Since they're product-placed out the ass, I'm sure they got the script well ahead of time.)

Naturally, the spoiler police were all over them, demonstrating neatly that being a member of the post-airing spoiler police is more about killing everyone else's fun in order to prove your importance to the world than anything else. There's a lot of ego on deck when you demand that the rest of the world not enjoy having online discussions of their favorite shows because you're too weak to skip over spoilers until you have time to watch your DVR. And yes, I live by my own standards. I often don't get to see "Game of Thrones" or "Girls" until a day or many after it airs, and so I just skip over the freaking Twitter comments about them until after I've seen it. Any kind of rule that would prevent Jaguar from delighting the world with this tweet for no other reason than the rest of us have to cater to your schedule is narcisstic and weird. 

What did you think of this episode? Do you agree with Marc and my assessment of Don as kind of a fool? Do you think Peggy did the right thing? Joan? How much do you want to kill Pete Campbell? What do you think of the men's choices, especially in light of my theory that Mad Men is about how much we are all products of our era? Did you like the bait-and-switch of the title, which led you to believe the episode was about adultery, but in fact, it ended up being a reference to the different choices that different women get to make?

From a tweet by our own Jesse Taylor, I discovered two very startling things today. One, a naked man decided, for no discernible reason, to pounce on a likely homeless guy taking a nap at 2PM on the side of the freeway and chew his face off. Two, some people are so obsessively racist that their only reaction to this news was to jump into comments and gripe about a nearby hip-hop festival (many attendees who were put out by the ensuing traffic jam caused by the incident). This, even though there are many details in the story that should distract even a hardened racist from his obsession, such as the fact that the victim appears to have lost quite a bit of face (but is so far surviving) and that the officer on duty had to shoot the attacker multiple times, because the guy didn't stop chewing his victim's face when shot the first time. 

There are a couple of important lessons to be learned from this.

1) As George Romero predicted in his iconic film on the subject, American racism will not be suspended even in the event of a zombie apocalypse. 

2) But as we've learned from roughly every zombie film ever made, the people who can't rapidly rearrange their priorities to accommodate a zombie apocalypse are the first to be eaten. Which means that the guys shaking their fists at the evil hippity-hoppers are going down, giving the rest of us a chance to shore up our defenses against the undead.

Remember, folks, that despite the love of rednecks in zombie movies, it's the effete urban dwellers that have some serious advantages. We can, after all, hole up in tall buildings that are incomprehensible to the zombie mind and drop stuff on zombie heads. 

I agreed to do a chat today at the Guardian about abortion rights with Naomi Wolf. I thought it would be a quick and dirty educate the folks kind of thing, but instead it got really heated. Instead, she wanted to get me embroiled in a weird discussion about how naughty and irresponsible people are who don't use contraception and how much we should hand-wring over the moral implications of abortion. Check it out, it was amazing. Unfortunately, I'm suffering bruises on my head.

Needless to say, Wolf's entire defense of her confuzzled point of view on this is that she's not a prude---oh no!---but that she has real concerns about those irresponsible kids screwing and drinking with their hot young bodies as if they're not aging like the rest of us. But for all her concern about the lack of use of condoms, I have to remind readers of this snotty comment of hers from a couple years ago:

But feminists are in danger if we don't know our history, and a saucy tattoo and a condom do not a revolution make.

Which is it, I have to ask? Are condoms the sure sign of basic moral responsibility or are they frivolous examples of how feminism has its priorities misplaced? Depends, I suppose, on if you're having too much fun. 

And let's not forget Wolf's infamous anti-porn tirade. She doesn't oppose porn because of the widespread misogyny, of course, but in fact for the same reasons that religious conservatives condemn it: Because the only naked lady a man should be thinking about, much less looking at, is his wife:

In many more traditional cultures, it is not prudery that leads them to discourage men from looking at pornography. It is, rather, because these cultures understand male sexuality and what it takes to keep men and women turned on to one another over time—to help men, in particular, to, as the Old Testament puts it, “rejoice with the wife of thy youth; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times.” These cultures urge men not to look at porn because they know that a powerful erotic bond between parents is a key element of a strong family.

Never mind all the people who don't think that coupledom means the end of being a singular erotic being, and who in fact find that having a fantasy life and a sense of erotic possibility to keep things from going stale with their partners. Which I suspect is more common than people who say, "Well as long as I avoid masturbating, I'll get pent up enough to get aroused enough for a bout of unimaginative sex with my partner." But it gets better. While denying in typical Wolf fashion that she wants women to cover up so as to make sure that men really don't see any woman but their wives, she then, well, endorses it by envying women who live in cultures where hair-covering is mandatory on the grounds that depriving their husbands of visual stimuli that isn't them must make them so hot by comparison. It was deeply depressing.

But nothing ever beats the classic Wolf where she claimed that "some" colleges found that the number one health problem in the clinics is anal fissures from all the butt-fucking. It immediately reminded me of the urban legend that's thankfully fading where it's claimed that aging gay men are incontinent from all the butt-fucking. Spreading these myths says more about one's hang-ups than about the realities of sex out there.

But you know, her weird fixation on ascribing unintended pregnancies in this country mostly to stupid drunk kids who think they're too good for condoms is strictly professional. I'm sure of it.

Unsurprisingly, the feminist community has risen up to protest Hustler's misogynist nastiness against S.E. Cupp. Even though we all universally hate Cupp for so obvious about cashing in on sexism for the cash benefits, we're all intimately familiar with being sexualized as a way to discredit us---it's a near-daily thing for me, part of the wallpaper at this point. Gloria Steinem specifically had porn producers try to discredit her by pasting pictures of her into sex scenes on posterboards to protest her offices, once again showing that mainstream porn thinks the worst thing you can say about a woman is she's sexually active. But generally, the feminist defense is unsurprising. We've never had a "no conservatives" policy when it comes to who benefits from feminist activism. Conservative women get legal abortions, get job opportunities with equal (or getting closer, anyway) pay, get to go to previously all-male universities, and get to vote because of feminism. We don't get thanked; we get spit on. But we don't hesitate to defend all women---including conservative women---from sexism, because, to quote Faith-as-Buffy Summers, it's wrong.*

I'm getting a ton of abuse right now, especially from Michelle Malkin, because they're furious that feminists are doing what they were complaining that we weren't doing (until they were educated otherwise): defending Cupp against misogynist abuse. The conservative narrative is that racism and sexism aren't real things, but just weapons to score points against political enemies. The "proof" of this is that liberals supposedly ignore this stuff aimed at conservatives. They need this proof, because it allows them to pretend that liberals decrying racism and sexism are just trying to score political points, and to continue insisting that racism and sexism aren't real problems. Having feminists actually speak out against Hustler's nastiness ruins the narrative, and so feminists must be attacked for fucking it up. And attacked with....you guessed it! Sexism. It's been pretty entertaining, watching the sexist accusations against myself and others fly. It's the usual stuff: attention whore, insinuations of sluttiness, swipes about our unfuckability, being called "honey". A lesson is to be learned from all this, I suppose.

Anyway, it's all the more reason to have a Panda Party! Kick back, listen to some tunes, play some if you like. I'm often bedazzled by the huge gulf between the left and the right when it comes to having a sense of humor and a sense of fun. Clearly, our party hearty skills are an important weapon, so sharpen them up in the Panda Party before going out and having fun this weekend!

*First piece of evidence for the startling lack of humor on the right: I bet some wingnut makes a fuss over this, not getting the joke. Because one thing that voting Republican seems to do first to someone is remove their ability to understand a bit of ironic posturing while making what amounts to a straightforward assertion, which is the lingua franca of Gen X liberal circles. 

Been awhile since I've done a Bamboo review, but I spent a little over four hours, in bits and chunks, watching the HBO documentary made in conjunction with the CDC, the IOM, and the NIH called "The Weight of the Nation". Four hours seems like a long time, but the issue of obesity, nutrition and exercise is---as readers are no doubt aware---a complex issue that really needs to be looked at in depth. The first episode explored the surprisingly diverse negative health effects of the systemic lifestyle shifts towards more calories/less exercise that have overtaken this country in the past decade. It also put beyond a shadow of any real doubt that a high fat-to-other-tissue ratio on the body is a discrete problem, and even if you moderate the effects by having a health lifestyle, the fat itself throws your metabolism processes out of whack and helps set the stage for diabetes. I didn't know that, so that was interesting. The second episode, and the one that got the most negative press from fat activists before the documentary was even released, focused on the concept of weight loss and dieting. I'll return to that one in a minute, because I also had concerns going in and found they were largely unnecessary. The third episode focused on prevention in children, because the research demonstrates that the root of lifelong weight and nutrition problems is set in childhood, and if you can emerge from childhood with good health habits, you're exponentially more likely to carry them on throughout your life. The fourth episode focused on the various social structures that have created this problem, though let's be clear that throughout the documentary, the filmmakers are very careful to avoid lambasting fat people as individuals and instead the entire focus is on this as the result of social changes. Which makes sense, since the argument that Americans suddenly got weak-willed in illogical, and the evidence that this is a result of social change is overwhelming.

Before I went in, my biggest concern was that weight loss would be positioned as the solution to our epidemic of heart disease, diabetes, and other nutrition-related problems. After all, the second episode was focused on weight loss and dieting. The problem is that evidence shows that the vast majority of people who diet lose weight and then gain it all back. Even though a person who is obese stands to prevent or decrease the symptoms of various nutrition-related illnesses by losing weight---which is why doctors concentrate on it---as a public health initiative, the focus on weight loss is a non-starter. It's like trying to cure an STD epidemic only by treating people after they get ill, but to make it even worse, only doing so with drugs that work 5% of the time. That's not going to work. Indeed, prior to the airing of this documentary, that was the biggest concern touted by fat activists, that weight loss would be presented as a solution when it's not. 

Having now actually watched the documentary, I would say that they actually did a really great job of using the public interest in weight loss to draw people into a discussion about prevention, but without leaving people who are obese and suffering without any hope of improvement. The majority of the second episode focused on why dieting was bad and why weight loss is nearly impossible, and much of it sounded quite a bit like what you'd read from an evidence-based fat activist website. They didn't pull their punches, but instead were brutally honest in showing how much of a sacrifice it is to lose a whole bunch of weight and to keep it off. The section on gastric bypass emphasized how dangerous the surgery is and followed a man who had complications. Two of the women profiled who lost more than 100 pounds a piece and kept it off were followed, so you could see the excessive amount of calorie control and exercise they had to endure to maintain. (One woman subsists on 1100 calories a day, which is about 2/3 of what she's probably be able to eat if she hadn't gained and then lost a bunch of weight.) A ton of people were asked how many times they had lost a bunch of weight and regained it all. The diet industry was singled out as a major villain, with one expert witheringly pointing out that their business model is based on yo-yo dieting. Yes, they provided information on what people have successfully done to lose weight and keep it off, but they didn't softball it, but made it incredibly clear that while it's not impossible, it's really hard, and functionally impossible for people who can't make the time for it. Most importantly, they laid out the science of why losing weight and keeping it off is so difficult, which is that getting fat resets your metabolism and you can't go back. So, for instance, if you gain and then lose a bunch of weight, you have to eat fewer calories and exercise more to maintain that weight than someone who weighs as much as you but never gained in the first place. Once you realize that, you realize why dieting doesn't work and lifestyle changes are nearly impossible to maintain. 

In other words, I felt like they pulled something of a bait-and-switch, but for a good cause. They lure the audience in with the promise of discourse about weight loss, something Americans obsess over, and then make an argument for why our obsession with weight loss isn't the answer. Which sets the audience up to be more invested in the next two episodes, which focus strictly on what created this problem and what we need to do to fix it.

The answer throughout is always, always that it's a systemic problem and not the fault of individuals. The filmmakers and the experts they consult are extremely invested in making it clear that they don't hold individuals making "bad" choices accountable for this. Repeatedly, for instance, they point out that a person's BMI is surprisingly predictable based on nothing more than a zip code, which I thought was a nice, clear-cut way to get the audience out of the "personal responsibility" framework of utter meaninglessness, and move them towards the "collective responsibility" framework that actually suggests solutions. From there, we're treated to two episodes where food marketers, agriculture subsidies, conservative politicians, increasing work loads, and underfunded schools and communities are targeted as the cause of the problem. I was particularly interested in the emphasis on how overworked Americans are, which is an aspect that a lot of other writers on this issue don't look at. One in four Americans doesn't get any physical activity at all, and the reason pegged in this documentary is their jobs---between commuting to and from work and sitting at a desk all day, people just don't have time. Turns out that stress is a major factor in developing obesity, because being stressed out tends to override a lot of brain functions that prevent overeating. One expert talks witheringly of how stupid the concept of "free will" really is, and how it's a distraction from the real issues, which are that our society pressures you at every turn to eat more and exercise less.

I want to praise the filmmakers for not falling into the trap that many programs and writings on obesity do, which is to dehumanize and objectify fat people. Part of this is time; with four hours to spare, there's lots of time to really get to know the subjects as whole people with jobs and families and lives. But it's also a matter of conscientiousness. It's clear that it was important to the filmmakers to get the voices of fat people into the film, and to get a diversity of such voices---all ages, classes, and races. Nor were fat people constrained to the role of subjects; many of the experts consulted or shown working were themselves fat, and no big deal was made of this. The filmmakers also made a point of not desexualizing fat people, which is a common and unfortunate trope elsewhere. Wedding photos, dates with spouses, that sort of thing: They did a good job at not turning fat people into a desexualized Other, but really put an emphasis on, for lack of a better term, normality. The documentary also made sure to interview a variety of experts, instead of just positioning white guys as the only real authority. The result of these choices was a real feel for how our health care problems related to nutrition and exercise are collective problems, and made the note of optimism that the documentary ended on feel earned. 

I just want to ditto everything Lindsay says here about Hustler's idiotic attempt to "defend" reproductive rights by making crass sex jokes about silencing S.E. Cupp with sex. I like to make fun of Cupp's obvious play-acting at being a fantasy sex kitten for the easily aroused and rather slow-witted conservative fan base that never seems to grasp the contradictions, but "neener neener, you suck cocks and that makes you a stupid bitch" strategy that Hustler is taking is misogynist and demeans not just women, but sex itself. 

I'd like to add, on top of everything Lindsay says, that this is just yet another example of how silly it is to equate mainstream pornography with sex positivity. Mainstream porn like Hustler is really sex negative. Anyone who thinks that accusing a woman of being sexually active is a way to insult and demean her is---and I would hope this is obvious---sex negative. The notion perpetuated in most readily available porn is that sex degrades and demeans women. I fail to see how that tacit argument is any different from the anti-choice movement's virginity worshipping. Misogynist porn and anti-choice activists also agree that women's purpose in life is to be the biological servants of men, though they approach it from different angles, with porn producers seeing women as here to serve men sexually and antis seeing women as vessels for the almighty seed. But by and large, they're singing the same message: women are inferior, women are here to serve, sex is degrading to women. Which is why it's laughable that Hustler is posing like some kind of supporter of reproductive rights, because ideologically, they're far closer to the antis. 

I have no problem with porn per se. I look at it, and if you're willing to do a little work, there's stuff out there that minimizes or even, on occasion, eliminates the "women are trash" messages of mainstream porn. Human sexuality is only a little about genitals, and mostly about fantasy and what's going on in our heads, so erotic materials are not just inevitable, but desireable as a way for people to get more pleasure out of sex. But most of the mainstream stuff reflects, the crudest way imaginable, larger cultural narratives about how sex is dirty and women who do it beneath contempt. Hustler is just the most obvious example. Admitting this is the first step towards envisioning a world with better porn that manages to be hot without being woman-hating. 

New polling data out today shows yet another bump in support for same-sex marriage after Obama's announcement that he supports it. More importantly, there's an all-time low in opposition, down to 39%. This polling data was taken two weeks after Obama's announcement, so it's reasonable to suggest that what we hoped would happen---that the President coming out to support gay marriage would help normalize it and push more people into the "yes" column---is already coming to pass. Since most people change their minds pretty slowly on this stuff, we can probably see even more dramatic effects down the road.

One very important thing to note from this survey is that contrary to the stereotypes that are constantly brandished about black voters and gay marriage, support for same-sex marriage amongst African-Americans polled is higher than it is amongst the population at large.

The poll also finds that 59 percent of African Americans say they support same-sex marriage, up from an average of 41 percent in polls leading up to Obama’s announcement of his new position on the matter. Though statistically significant, it is a tentative result because of the relatively small sample of black voters in the poll.

It may be tentative, but I think the shift represents something a lot of us have been saying for a long time, which is that opposition to same-sex marriage isn't as hard and fast as the activist homophobes would have you believe. A lot of the negative reaction you get from polling is due to straight up cognitive dissonance; people tend to think of marriage as a heterosexual institution, and the idea of two men or two women marrying each other causes a negative reaction based more on unexamined prejudices than on open bigotry. Which means that all it will take to get those folks to move on the subject is getting used to the idea, and having the President support gay marriage openly is a huge step in that process. One of the most unfortunate tendencies of our species is that we're oriented towards going with the flow over all other things, and if we imagine the flow is against gay marriage, a lot of us will be against it for no other reason than that. But that also means that all we need to do to fix the problem is change the direction of the flow. 

That's why visibility is so important. There was a knee-jerk Eeyore reaction to Obama's comments about supporting gay marriage from many liberals, which is to immediately minimize and say it doesn't matter, because blah blah policy is the only thing that matters. (Of course, as some prominent gay journalists pointed out, Obama's policies were way ahead of his public statements in the pro-gay direction.) This polling data strongly suggests against that claim, as does piles of research on why people believe the things they do. Perception is important. Leadership is important. I made a couple of silly jokes about the rapper-a-day rate of celebrities coming out after Obama and saying they support gay marriage, but that sort of thing matters. Bringing the privilege of being straight men who are famous and well-liked to the table matters. In an ideal world where rationality was the only factor, it shouldn't, but people being the pack animals we are, celebrity endorsements for legal gay marriage from the likes of Jay-Z and Ice Cube matter. This is only the beginning; I really do think Obama's announcement will look like a major tipping point when this is all history.