Someone at Fox really doesn't get Dollhouse.

A few more links for today, as my brain is otherwise useless.

* io9 has your Disney/Marvel crossovers in the other direction. I too am looking forward to the Dark Mermaid Saga.

* Again with the Comics has scans from Chris Ware's extremely rare "Floyd Farland: Citizen of the Future." Get them before the C&D.

* Who's ruining air travel now?

* Biden breaks down 2010.

* Today in our awesome post-racial society.

* And could Jennifer's Body actually not be all that bad? Feministe reports.

These attacks were hardly taking place in a vacuum. They came only months after violent, gendered threats on technology writer Kathy Sierra made international headlines when they blossomed unchecked on popular and respected tech blogs, even going so far as to include her personal address and phone number, and ultimately causing her to withdraw from public speaking and shut down her blog. They came less than a year after the law-school website AutoAdmit was sued for supporting a culture in which female law students were systematically harassed and threatened in discussion threads that invited commenters to vote on the relative hotness of nonconsenting women, discussed some women’s daily routines in terrifying detail, and threatened to “hatefuck” them when the women dared to object.

Female bloggers writing on not-explicitly-feminist sites, even progressive ones, knew that no matter what topic they were addressing, comments would inevitably devolve either into discussions of their fuckability, or of their extreme status as “feminazis.” And, according to a 2006 University of Maryland School of Engineering study, female-named chat-room users got more threatening and/or sexually explicit messages than male-named users—25 times more, in fact. The phrase “blogging while female” had already entered the cultural lexicon, and every feminist blogger knew it.

When Trolls Attack, in Bitch Magazine.

Wednesday miscellany!

* Startling: 50% of people think women should be legally required to take their husbands' names. Watch out, most married woman under forty I know! They're coming for you.

* Jonathan Lethem talks to The Jewish Daily Forward about the greatness of Philip K. Dick.

* Have we reached our civilization's tipping point? See also: why climate change is worse than we feared.

* AMC greenlights zombie series. Sounds promising. Between this and Red Mars AMC is making a strong push for my particular demographic.

* As of tonight, Microsoft can no longer sell Word.

* Another Battlestar reboot? Already? Really?

* Lesser-known editing and proofreading marks. (via)

* 'Gathered, Not Made: A Brief History of Appropriative Writing.'

* And Ze gets philosophical.

You partake in a medical experiment. In the experiment you are given one of two pills. You don't know which one until after you take it. One shortens your life by 10 years, and the other lengthens your life by 10 years. You have just found out which pill you took. The question is: which pill do you think will increase the quality of your life the most? Would one make you change the way you live your life more than the other?

Wednesday catchup.

* Rest in peace, Rosie the Riveter.

* Dollhouse tease: Joss will write and direct the premiere.

* Transformers FAQ. Spoiler alert:

I am already incredibly sick of this movie, and I'm just typing questions about it. Sam resurrects Optimus, Optimus kills the Fallen, end of story, right?
Pretty close. Sam dies, though.

Really?
Yeah, for a little while. But then the Transformers in heaven send him back because he still has work to do.

Fuck you.
I'm serious.

Fuck you. There's no way.
It's true. The 6-7 Primes are there in the clouds like Mufasa's head in The Lion King, and tell Sam he's awesome and he needs to live again so he can bring Optimus back to life.

* MMORGS and sociology: "City of Heroes character 'Twixt' becomes game's most hated outcast courtesy of Loyola professor." Via MeFi.

* "Judgment Day," famous anti-racist EC comic from 1953, controversial in its day, at Comics Should Be Good:

'Why Chicks Cry': an exhaustive look at sexism and romance comics from the 1950s and '60s. Via MeFi.

Still more links.

* Shepard Smith: Fox News's email has become "more and more frightening." I've asked before, but why is this man still on Fox?

* Rush Limbaugh picked the wrong day to make a birther joke.

* Jeremiah Wright picked the wrong day to say something incredibly moronic about "them Jews."

* There is no right day to propose a Full House remake. Stamos! Via Occasional Fish.

* Fear the Emanuel hegemony.

* Fear the myth of perpetual copyright.

* 50 scientifically proven ways to be persuasive. In terms of understanding the human psyche, the academy is still decades behind the advertising industry.

* 'Supervolcano may be brewing beneath Mount St Helens.' Yikes. (And get me Bobby Jindal on the phone.) Via MeFi.

* Guantánamo's Uighurs have been sent to Palau. More from Yglesias, Attackerman, Greenwald, and the Plank.

* Linda Holmes criticizes Pixar for going to the princess well for its first female lead.

* The Sopranos and postmodern irony.

Yet formally self-conscious and deliberately ambiguous though it tended to be, "The Sopranos" was by no means so completely decentered in its “overall moral or thematic attitude” as all that. On the contrary, it seems to me to have been very definitely grounded what might be called (for want of any better phrase) a deeply pessimistic Freudian moral sensibility.

Via Kotsko.

Monday tidbits.

* Early polls out of the Senate race in Pennsylvania, post Specter-shuffle.

* An end to the Boston Globe? (UPDATE: No?)

* Bibles and scripts from your favorite TV shows: 1, 2. (Via Zack.)

* Condition your child the Darrow way. (Via Neil.)

Rumor has it that Kim McLane Wardlaw (9th Circuit) may be the front-runner for the Supreme Court. You know she'd be a good justice because she's got "law" in her name. But there's also a certain poetry in this, as she wrote the lower-court brief in the case that most recently highlighted the gender imbalance on the court, Redding v. Stafford, in which the 89%-male body held that it was no big deal for a thirteen-year-old girl to be subjected to sexual humiliation from school officials in an fruitless effort to find ibuprofen on her person.

Adam Wolf, the ACLU lawyer who represents Redding, explains that “the Fourth Amendment does not countenance the rummaging on or around a 13-year-old girl’s naked body.” Wolf explains that he is arguing for a “two-step framework,” wherein schools can use a lower standard to search “backpacks, pencil cases, bookbags” but a higher standard when you “require a 13-year-old girl to take off her pants, her shirt, move around her bra so she reveals her breasts, and the same thing with her underpants to reveal her pelvic area.” This leads Justice Stephen Breyer to query whether this is all that different from asking Redding to “change into a swimming suit or your gym clothes,” because, “why is this a major thing to say strip down to your underclothes, which children do when they change for gym?”

This leads Ginsburg to sputter—in what I have come to think of as her Lilly Ledbetter voice—"what was done in the case … it wasn’t just that they were stripped to their underwear! They were asked to shake their bra out, to stretch the top of their pants and shake that out!” Nobody but Ginsburg seems to comprehend that the only locker rooms in which teenage girls strut around, bored but fabulous in their underwear, are to be found in porno movies. For the rest of us, the middle-school locker room was a place for hastily removing our bras without taking off our T-shirts.

More discussion on the very disappointing decision at Pandagon and The Paperback Museum.

Dollhouse, on the other hand, really was pretty decent. Definitely the best episode of the series so far. If I have complaints—which I do—it's with:

1) The Echo reprogramming / mole bit, which drew a little too bright a line around the silliness of the show's premise. How did the mole accomplish the insertion of such a detailed, uh, parameter, in the fifteen seconds Topher happened to be away from his desk? It reminded me of a classic bit from Family Guy:

Brian: Hola! Um...me, me llamo es Brian. Ahh, uh, um lets see, uh, nosotros queremos ir con ustedes.
Mexican: Hey that was pretty good. But actually when you said, "Me llamo es Brian," you don't need the "es." Just, "Me llamo Brian."
Brian: Oh, you speak English.
Mexican: No, just that first speech and this one explaining it.
Brian: You...you're kidding right?
Mexican: Que?

2) The attempted rape and murder of Mellie is an illustrative example of how hard it can be to separate commentary on misogyny from misogyny itself. (See Joss's interview at NPR for more on Joss's self-awareness about this problem.) The violence in the scene is exceptionally brutal, and the way it is shot is a deliberate quotation of the Jenny Calendar scene from Buffy Season 2. The audience is primed first to think of the usualness of this sort of filmic violence, in other words, so that the subversion of the woman-in-refrigerator trope has more salience.

On the other hand, the scene can only be described as pornographic in its composition, from the way the characters are dressed and blocked to the camera's fixation on Mellie's body. It's the same sort of problem that arises when Dollhouse (which is at its essence as show about misogyny and rape culture) uses Eliza Dushku in short skirts speaking in a breathy voice to promote itself. Joss has a lot of feminist cred and you certainly want to give him the benefit of the doubt, and I'm sure we're all cognizant of the realities of the television marketplace and corporate interference—but this remains a needle that Joss will have to be very careful in trying to thread.

On the more global level of mythology, Dollhouse 1.6 works very hard to expand the show past the tight hermeticism of the first few episodes. Through the Wolfram-and-Hartization of the Dollhouse and the urban legend trope this world has suddenly grown a lot larger and a lot more interesting. Now this is a show that's as much about global capitalism as it is about sexual violence, and really about the intersection of the two—which seems very promising. I'm excited to see where Joss takes these ideas now that he has a freer hand.

I'll admit to having grown cold on Dollhouse the last few months, but this interview with Joss on NPR fills me with a lot of confidence: he's obviously thought things through.

Jacki Lyden asks Whedon to explain how a show starring a young female character who has no free will isn't the ultimate misogynistic male fantasy.

"I won't necessarily say that it isn't that," Whedon says. "The fact of the matter is that, in the wrong hands, it is a completely misogynist thing, except it's happening to men as well — but what we're trying to do is take someone's identity away in order to discuss the concept of her identity."

Whedon says the first group he pitched the show to — after Dushku and Fox — was the board of Equality Now.

"I knew that would be the toughest room I would ever sit in," Whedon says. "What I basically told them was I was examining the idea of fantasy, and some of the stuff that would happen would be good, and some of the stuff that would happen would be kind of awful, and that the whole point was going to be to blur those lines, to take what we want from each other sexually, how much power we want to have over each other."

Potential!

However, the situation is far from perfect.

Whedon says the Fox network wasn't particularly comfortable with these themes either. The original pilot episode of the series, which included discussion of the actives performing more altruistic deeds, was scrapped in favor of one that amped up the action and conspiracy.

Whedon says Fox also asked him to turn down the volume on some of the sexual themes.

Damnit, Fox, why do you hate us so much?

A few midday links.

* There's a new viral site for Watchmen with links to background ephemera created for the film. I'm getting excited for this one despite myself. Via Candleblog.

* Bookninja considers Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem, with links to other negative reviews at the Guardian, L.A. Times, the Times of London, and Seattle's Post-Intelligencer. I thought it was okay, if not quite up to its moment, and in any event there were parts of it I quite liked to hear said:

Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,
picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

I'm sure it reminded more than one Springsteenphile of his song "American Land."

The McNicholas, the Posalski's, the Smiths, Zerillis, too
The Blacks, the Irish, Italians, the Germans and the Jews
Come across the water a thousand miles from home
With nothin in their bellies but the fire down below

They died building the railroads worked to bones and skin
They died in the fields and factories names scattered in the wind
They died to get here a hundred years ago they're still dyin now
The hands that built the country were always trying to keep down

* It turns out Dirk Benedict is sort of totally crazy.

There was a time, I know I was there, when men were men, women were women and sometimes a cigar was just a good smoke. But 40 years of feminism have taken their toll. The war against masculinity has been won. Everything has turned into its opposite, so that what was once flirting and smoking is now sexual harassment and criminal. And everyone is more lonely and miserable as a result.

Uh..... huh.

* China censors parts Of Obama's speech. What's more, they did it in a weirdly self-conscious, self-aware way:

At one point, Obama said earlier generations "faced down communism and fascism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions." He later addressed "those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent—know that you are on the wrong side of history."

The Chinese translation of the speech, credited to the Web site of the official China Daily newspaper, was missing the word "communism" in the first sentence. The paragraph with the sentence on dissent had been removed entirely.

A little too on the nose.

* And the first press release from the Obama administration has been released.

At 8:35 AM, the President arrived in the Oval Office and spent 10 minutes alone in the office. He read the note left to him by President Bush that was in an envelope marked “To: #44, From: #43”. At 8:45 AM, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel came in to discuss the schedule of today’s events. The First Lady came into the Oval Office at 9:10 AM. We will release a picture shortly.

Oh, to get one's hands on that note.

Salon's Broadsheet has full coverage of the sexing up of Tina Fey, while Jezebel counters with photos of the provocatively unsexed-up younger Fey. My personal favorite Fey is "Weekend Update" Fey, c. 2003, who I'm certain is still in there somewhere, finding this sort of nonsense completely ridiculous.

'God's Wife': excerpt from a NOVA story on the "Bible's buried secrets" dealing with Asherah, whom the ancient Israelites considered the wife of YHWH. From the second link:

Rachael Kohn: Now something must have happened which radically removes Mrs God from the scene.

Diana Edelman: Yes, Mrs God was obviously quite popular, well I think what happened really was the development of monotheism. In the period when Judah and Israel were States, we had a national religion which is perhaps best called Yahwehism and in that we had the divine couple, Yahweh and Asherah, and there we other gods, below them. We have mentioned in the Bible pestilence and plague, we have sun, we have moon, we may have Lady Wisdom, if she’s not Asherah reincarnate, so we had a range of deities. And in that set-up, the male god not only is judge of the earth, and in charge of the created order, but he’s in charge of the fertility of the crops and the fertility of the animals. It’s his wife who is particularly responsible for human fertility. And we find this set-up throughout the ancient Near East. As a matter of fact, if Israel and Judah hadn’t had it, they would have really been the oddballs.

But Israel, well Israel ceased to be in 721 BC, Judah continued that religion. When it was sent into exile there was a change, and it’s when they come back from exile that it seems that Mrs God has been ousted. She’s no longer welcome in the Pantheon. And it’s when we get the new Temple rebuilt in Jerusalem the traditional date for that is given under Darius about 515 BCE.

We have all sorts of funny things in that new Temple. No.1, we don’t have The Ark any more. The primary symbol of Yahweh when he used to be the God of Judah, was the Ark, which seems to have been tied up with the title Yahweh of the Hosts, showing him a very martial God; that symbol is gone. Now it’s not like they couldn’t have had that symbol in the Temple. They could have easily rebuilt an Ark. So what we’re seeing here is a change in the understanding of God and God’s function. Yahweh is being depicted in a new way. He’s no longer just the God of Judah, he is a universal God who controls all of history. He isn’t a warrior God any more because he doesn’t have a particular nation he can be warrior God of any more. Even though we’ll have language that he is going to go out and suppress the nations himself, we find this in some of the prophetic language, even from his late period.

Along with this change though, we no longer have a wife. Asherah is gone, probably the other Gods in the Pantheon as well are all becoming absorbed into this deity whose name used to be Yahweh Sebaot, but now he’s become Yahweh Elohim, the Goddest of the Gods.

The new SurveyUSA poll puts Obama up 6 (!) in Virgnia, 51% to 45%. (Looking at the trend and the internals, I think it's fair to say that those pay equity ads should be airing nationwide.) I've been a VA booster for months because the fact is that without Virginia, McCain just can't win; taking the states which Obama seems to have locked down (the Kerry states - NH + IA + NM), he just needs nine more for a tie (which he wins) and ten for an outright victory.

So flipping either Colorado or Virginia, by themselves, is enough, provided he doesn't slip in Michigan or Pennsylvania—and right now he's ahead in all four...

The Sarah Palin pick has crystalized what I'll throw up here as my Boldest Prediction Ever: the next elected president of the United States, after Obama, will be a woman. Hillary Clinton exposed not only the potential political advantages of a female candidate—a surprising reversal of historical trends that she simply failed to capitalize on early enough—but also a palpable hunger that the "highest, hardest glass ceiling" be broken. And Palin's selection proves that this hunger extends even across the aisle.

We can't know right now, of course, but from where I'm sitting it seems likely that the next totally open election will take place in 2016, when Barack Obama steps down after his second term and presumably-still-VP Joe Biden (being just a few months older than John McCain is now) will be too old. I'd actually take odds, if that does come to pass, that both parties run women at the top of the ticket in 2016. In game theoretical terms there's just too much net potential advantage to be lost in allowing the opposing party to run a woman while you run a man. That hunger won't be getting any smaller in eight more years of waiting.

I hope I'm right. It'll be a very good day for America, and a better day still if she's a Democrat.

Sci-Fi has a trailer up for the Battlestar Galactica prequel Caprica, while Joss Whedon is frantically running around trying to reassure everyone that the shooting of a new Dollhouse pilot doesn't mean that Dollhouse is the new Firefly.

Also in Joss Whedon News, there's been some pushback on Dr. Horrible over the fact that he's once again killed over a female love interest in order to provide character development for male characters. I guess not even the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer can escape the siren song of a woman in a refrigerator.

I've got a review of Sarah Hall's Atwoodesque dystopia Daughters of the North in this week's Independent. This review sort of skirts the line of what's acceptably graphic for print and what isn't, and frankly I'm a little amazed that I wasn't asked to rewrite the second paragraph—but I wasn't, and I mean it when I say the scene really stuck with me in a visceral way.

Here's the kernel:

It's this hope that may seem very far away in our moment of extraordinary rendition, emergency powers and unrestricted executive authority, a moment that isn't at all hard to connect with Hall's dystopia—which is why it's a little strange, and yet somehow at the same time absolutely necessary, to set out to read a book that you know will deliberately toy with and then destroy any hope you have for a better tomorrow. It's something like picking at a scab. Many of us have read Atwood and George Orwell, after all—and even those who haven't will learn all they need to know about what sort of book this is if they pay careful attention to the italicized words on the book's first page: English Authority Penal System Archive—record no. 498: Transcript recovered from site of Lancaster holding dock. Statement of female prisoner detained under Section 4(b) of the Insurgency Prevention (Unrestricted Powers) Act. We know what sort of book we're in. We know this can't end well.

I'm reminded a bit of the words of the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano: "Let's save pessimism for better times." And yet Hall's dystopian story of resistance and struggle, even in its inevitable defeat, must be read at the same time as a kind of optimism, striking in its final pages a defiant chord that reminds us power can sometimes be defeated, if not always, and if always at great cost.

A lot of people are linking to this 1939 "Marital Rating Chart" that Boing Boing found earlier today. Click the image for the full size:



What's so wrong with wearing red nail polish?

Elsewhere in the theoryverse you can find critiques of various types of theory (with varying levels of informedness and generosity) in The American Scholar and Alternet, both via MeFi.