Quiz! Who said the following, in reference to the presence of women on television?
Enough, ladies. I get it. You have periods. … [W]e’re approaching peak vagina on television, the point of labia saturation.
Was it?
- W.F. Price of The Spearhead
- Christopher in Oregon, legendary vagina-hating Man Going His Own Way
- Reddit commenter VjayjaysAreIcky69
Trick question! It was actually Two and a Half Men co-creator Lee Aronsohn, complaining to The Hollywood Reporter about the female-centric sticoms that have popped up of late. (There’s plenty to complain about when it comes to shows like Whitney and 2 Broke Girls, but “the main characters have vaginas” ain’t it.)
In a keynote address at the Toronto Screenwriting Conference, Aronsohn also defended his show’s tendency to portray women in a less-than-flattering light:
Screw it. … We’re centering the show on two very damaged men. What makes men damaged? Sorry, it’s women. I never got my heart broken by a man.
So brave, Aronsohn, so brave, standing up to the Matriarchy like that!
On ThinkProgress, Alyssa Rosenberg lays into Aronsohn:
[H]aving to hear that ladies have menstrual cycles, take birth control pills, and enjoy sex is just unbearable, right? Because even though the number of female characters on television tends to hover in the low 40 percent range, we’re just saturated with vaginas, because god forbid stories about men and their ish don’t absolutely dominate the media? Because even though those shows Aronsohn’s complaining about have actually created more writing and directing jobs for men than women, and resulted in some really awful portrayals as a result, we couldn’t possibly let women come to expect that they’ll have access to stories both about them and by them, could we? Because where would that leave poor, suffering, disadvantaged American men?
And then she takes on the entertainment industry in general, for tolerating his troglodyte views:
[T]hat Aronsohn is dumb and woman-fearing enough not just to believe this, to blithely admit he believes it to a major publication tells you everything about how cosseted Hollywood’s disgusting sexists are. You want to know why we get what we get on movie and television screens? … Because there are, apparently, no consequences in Hollywood for being perfectly open about how much you despise women’s bodies and the contours of women’s lives.
Maude Lebowski, what do you have to say about all this?
sexy Shakespeare for actors and scholars
https://depts.washington.edu/asuwxpcl/courses/view/12SP.27.14901
You see that thing pictured in the OP? Six of them attacked me once, but they were so scared of my super manly-man manliness that they didn’t even dare leave their eldritch dimension of pure chaos and insanity to come and get me.
Who ever heard of TV being entertaining?/end snark
I mean we all know that there’s only one kind of humor and one kind of entertaining thing to watch right?
@ Wisteria
As soon as I saw the first bits of news about that shooting I knew that it was going to turn out to be motivated by misogyny. Taking place at a nursing school, most of the victims women, female classmates talking about how scary they found the guy when he was still a student…it fits the pattern.
My thing with the “I’m so superior tv is for the uneducated masses” line is those people don’t seem to recognize EVERY SINGLE FORM OF MEDIA AND ART ever has both good and bad stuff in it.
I mean, really. Have these people ever browsed a bookstore? I have no issue with anyone who likes any kind of book but the idea that books are automatically higher class than tv… just, no.
Don’t get me started on theatre.
I appreciate people here calling out the anti-TV bullshit. It has always pissed me off, but I haven’t been able to articulate why. Probably because I’m an idiot who sacrificed her last brain cell to “Peep Show”. But, God, it was worth it.
Wasn’t Shakespeare’s plays once considered as entertainment for the uneducated masses. I heard that once, but might be wrong,
Y’all should try being a lifelong comics fan. It’s excellent training for (1) not caring what anyone else thinks of your favourite medium and (2) becoming comfortable with the fact that 99% of your favourite medium’s output is utter shit.
Smart does not mean not dirty.
Classical or canonized does not mean no sex, drugs, rock’n’ roll.
They’ve been bowdlerizing Shakespeare since the Victorians, maybe longer (not my field).
There’s damn good tv on these days–and odds are had Shakespeare been writing today, he’d be writing for tv (theatre people in England back then were one step above whores and pickpockets–it was POPULAR entertainment. People paid a small amount of money and stood in the open to watch the plays).
Plays didn’t become admitted to the higher elite cultural status until we had film to appeal to the masses.
Then tv took the lowest cultural status (ditto comic books and such).
(delayed in posting because tornado warning!)
@Kyrie: Yes, they (Shakespeare’s plays) were.
His sonnets were the ‘elite art.’
And they were dirty too! (My medievalist/early modern colleague teaches the WHOLE Shakespeare, and once she told me about a male student coming up after the introductory lecture to the sonnets and telling her if he’d known they were pornography, he wouldn’t have given a copy to his younger sister for her birthday! FILTH they are!)
Heh, semi-relevant anecdote: I still have fond memories of the time in high school that my class was reading several of the sonnets and came to 128 (“How oft, when thou, my music, music play’st”), and my teacher asked the class, “So what is he saying here?” The conversation went something like this.
Student A: He’s saying that his girlfriend or whatever is beautiful like music.
Teacher: Well, yes, sort of, but think more straightforward. What is this poem about?
Student B: How he wants to be a piano to be close to her, since she touches the piano and stuff.
Teacher: Okay, yes, but that’s not quite what I mean. Just spit it out, guys.
Me: It’s about him being horny.
Teacher: THANK YOU! SEX, people! SEX SEX SEEEEEEEEX!
@Ithiliana:
Bullshit.
Yeah, the Globe and playhouses like it had the standing-room in front of the stage. But they also had stalls and boxes for the upper classes.
Elizabeth I and James I (VI of Scotland) are both reputed to have enjoyed the Bard’s soaring language and his genitalia jokes.
Ollie Cromwell’s Puritans burned down all the playhouses because they were stick-in-the-mud killjoys who did think plays ruined the character of the working classes. They were some of the worst classists and patronizing gits ever to walk upon England’s mountains green.
Please don’t try to claim that the Lord Peter Wimseys of the world did not go to the theater until the motion picture came along to make Gilbert & Sullivan respectable.
@Falconer: I don’t think I quite claimed that.
Sure, the elites could enjoy theatre and did.
But as an art form–it took a while to become as elite as say, poetry.
And the ‘respectability’ of actors (and others involved with theatre) was pretty dicey as well–lots of tie ins with prostitution.
My general point is that Shakespeare was not held in the same status during his heyday as he is not, i.e. canonized as the GREATEST literary figure in “Western civilization,” etc.
But then I only did a master’s in theatre as well as a couple in English–back in the day–my information may be out of date–that was all over by 1982 when I dropped out before doing my exams in the theatre dept, and went off for a while. I didn’t go back for my doctorate until late 1980s, and I didn’t do theatre or drama or Shakespeare then, just the contemporary stuff.
So, do you have any citations for these claims so I can update myself? Becuase when I’ve taught Shakespeare in my intro to lit (NON majors course), with critical essays and editions, a lot of the contemporary stuff they have (contemporary to Shakespeare) didn’t contradict what I remembered from my coursework back in the day (and the only students in my course who knew women couldn’t be actors then knew it from SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE!).
Because while Shakespeare isn’t read for fun by many anymore, a lot of films based on his work or his life (barely) are pretty popular, and not all that highbrow.
@ ithiliana
That’s why I love seeing Shakespeare performed. They always underline the sex jokes. I heard (on TvTropes, but it makes sense) that “Much Ado About Nothing” has a sex joke in the title–“Nothing” being slang for the vulva and vagina. Is this accurate? It certainly sounds like something Shakespeare would do, and it is a perfect pun for a play on supposed unchastity (she is chaste, therefore it is a big ado about nothing, but it is also about her genitals, so it is much ado about… uh… nothing).
My class had a similar experience reading John Donne’s “The Flea”, which is about the speaker trying to convince his girlfriend to have sex even though they are not married. As my teacher said, “If you’re laughing, that means you get it.”
@WordSpinner: I learned in my Shakespeare courses (and I took every single one as an undergraduate from the two faculty who taught it, plus sonnets, plus other elizabethan plays) that “Much Ado About Nothing” was a sexual reference: no thing being zero which symbolizes the vagina/emptiness!
I also fondly remember the Shakespeare midterm question “What does the “IT” in “As You Like It” refer to!) (As I recall my very lengthy enthusiastic answer was SEX! It refers to Sex! And I got an A! Yay! )
Performed Shakespeare is wonderful — it’s too bad that so many English professors have worked so hard to kill the love for Shakespeare (and as an English professor, I claim the right to say it).
@Holly,
“When you’ve been on your feet for twelve hours, forms of entertainment that “stimulate your mind!” aren’t necessarily what you’re looking for; when you’re cooking and cleaning and chasing the kids around and just want something in the background to keep you less-bored, you can’t very well read a book.”
I kind of disagree with this. I used to live in a working class family and many times had to be the one looking after my younger siblings as well as doing chores and going to school. At my current minimum wage job, I have often done weeks long stints of overtime sometimes reaching well over ten hours a day. Despite all that, it’s never stopped me from reading a book. People relax in different ways.
That said, not everyone’s an intellectual or likes reading, so in some cases TV may very well be the only way people have of winding down (I personally watch only one show once a week and nothing more, but that’s just me). But again, I don’t think it’s appropriate to state that at the end of a busy day, one can’t read a book because stimulating one’s mind is too hard at that point. Doesn’t square with my experience, where reading was relaxing because of the mental stimulation I had otherwise not gotten during the rest of the day (school and work included).
@ithiliana: Sorry. That was a knee-jerk reaction, and ill-considered on my part.
Pax?
@Falconer: total pax! And I wouldn’t be surprised if my “knowledge” was out of date (last time I took a Shakespeare class was probably in 1980). And I’m sure what I said was way oversimplified!
@Ithiliana: Well, all’s I’ve got is a B.A. in Lit. and no formal theatre history so it seemed like I pulled the tiger’s tail. A tiger with three masters.
And with the degree of reading comprehension I just exhibited, it’s a wonder I’ve even got so useless a degree as I have.
More on TV, some of the shows are good, don’t get me wrong. As I said, there is one I watch once a week, and there are probably more I might enjoy, but I just don’t have the interest to flip through channels until I find something I like. My main problem with TV (aside from the sexism, racism, etc.) is the constant commercials! Even, when you try to catch an episode on the net, it’s broken up and there are commercials between it (at least if you do it legally). The only commercials I enjoy are trailers for movies. I HATE commercials. I hate the repetition; I hate the interruption of what I’m watching; I hate the lack of creativity; the sexism, racism, etc.. So unless the show is good enough to endure all that, I’ll take a movie or a book any day.
There is a reason I still buy TV show DVD sets Alex even though most of them are online now. Commercials.
@Alex: Amen to hating commercials! I don’t know if this is true for all of the country, but all the PBS stations I’ve seen don’t interrupt their programs with commercials. Then you get ten or fifteen straight minutes between the end of one program and the top of the hour.
I’m not sure how the BBC does it. Do they have commercials? All the BBC programs I’ve ever seen lack commercial breaks. Watching SyFy (uuurrrggghhh) butcher Doctor Who so I can get sold Cialis is irritating, to say the least, and sometimes they put in a commercial break at the minimum 10 minute interval regardless of the dramatic tone of the episode at the moment.
RE: Alex
That’s why I buy DVD sets of the TV shows I like! No commercials, and I can watch Justice League and stuff whenever I like!
Also, we live in an oppressive society. It’s going to saturate all media. I mean, I heart superhero comics, but… they’re really REALLY nasty.
–Sneak (who’s borrowing Rogan’s account w/permission ^_^)
@Falconer: Eh, I was a professional student for quite a while (see, there was this unemployment problem in the early 1980s, and people with college degrees couldn’t get jobs, and I could keep getting hired as a TA, and the salary then covered my very very very cheap needs–a lot of years, I earned about 5K), and I like school. So I just kept going! But the point still stands–a lot of what I learned then is totally out of date now.
I had great fun assigning all the films in my intro to lit courses; plus the play! Three Hamlets! And my students would tell me that they would get teased at the video store, and have to show the syllabus to prove they weren’t trying to “cheat” in their English class by watching the film–this was in the 90s–but I couldn’t possibly teach a Shakespeare class on any but the most introductory level now.
@Alex: I have a book handy, and we mute the commercials except the ones we like (what can I say, we’re GECKO fans), and analyze the commercials, but yeah MUTE!!!
And reading during the big chunks of crappy ones.