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?
Alex – while I’m a huge bookworm and don’t disagree with your essential point about finding time to read, I think maybe you misread what Holly said. It wasn’t “after you’ve finished cooking and cleaning and chasing the kids around and just want something in the background to keep you less-bored,” it was “when you’re cooking and cleaning and chasing the kids around and just want something in the background to keep you less-bored.” It’s not that your mind is too tired, it’s that reading a book generally requires at least one free hand to hold the friggin’ book. :-p
Which three? Not Gibson’s, I hope, unless you’re trying to teach folks how not to do Shakespeare.
I ask, realizing that the sheer staggering number of movies of Hamlet out there means I probably haven’t seen all three of them….
@Polliwog,
Yeah, you’re right. Missed the tense, I guess. Sorry to Holly, then. Personally, though, again in my experience, I’d sometimes have music playing in the background rather than the television. I like to focus on things, and it’s just inconvenient to go back and forth between doing chores and seeing what’s happening on the TV. It’s one of the reason I don’t like it when a TV is playing at a restaurant; it’s enough to be distracting, but there’s too much else going on to actually focus on the show, which I don’t want to do in the first place because I’m there to eat out and converse with family or friends, not watch TV.
Regarding DVD sets, the problem is I’d have to know I’ll like the show first, which means watching it on TV, because those DVD sets can be damned expensive (at least the ones for the shows I like seem to be -_-).
@Falconer: Branagh, Olivier, and yes, Gibson. I wanted to emphasize how different interpretations of the play could be made and defended (or not) on various grounds. You will be glad to know that the class generally did not like the Gibson; however, they found the Olivier (unintentionally) hilarious. It was an intro to lit taught with a genre approach as a general humanities course, so the idea was to give them some basic approaches on how to move beyond personal response and analyze literature.
Another year, I did a Harry Potter film first (film is a genre), then the HP novel, and some poetry (we had this sort of three genre thing going). Students loved it–the HP fans adored it, and the people who never read HP said they’d be interested to see what the controversy was about.
Another time I did Romeo and Juliet (my least favorite play) with Zefferelli (sp may be all wrong), and Luhrman’s to version (I adore Luhrman’s — my students uniformly hated it, and it led to some interesting discussions).
They didn’t like Luhrman’s version? I thought it was one of the better ones.
I took a year-long class on Shakespeare in college and really had a lot of fun. We did do five versions of Hamlet in a week, though, and that was enough Hamlet for a while.
>>Regarding DVD sets, the problem is I’d have to know I’ll like the show first, which means watching it on TV
There are… methods… of seeing TV shows on your computer that will allow you to sample the wares, as it were.
You guys are Luhrman’s R+J fans? I always feel like I need to put on riot gear before I tell people I liked that version. (But I did.)
Hipster anti-TV sentiment from Mr. Show:
http://youtu.be/XCumH8LRo1A?t=1m8s
If you haven’t seen Mr. Show, the skits all segue into each other like Monty Python and similar shows, so the first half of this particular clip is a random recurring Bob Odenkirk dumb-ass ass-hole character. The link start playing at the relevant bit.
Start the clip from 1:08 for the hipster bit. Looks like wordpress ate the starting time when it embedded the video.
Ozy Has Thoughts On TV.
My family was very anti-TV when we grew up. In our house, the television was on when someone wanted to see a show that they were a fan of and off most of the time. So I never developed the skill of half-watching the TV. Whenever it’s on in other people’s houses I tend to focus all my attention on it; if I’m doing chores I’ll often stop what I’m doing to watch if I’m even remotely interested. So while I kind of understand Holly’s point about having it on in the background while doing chores, man, give me my music. 🙂
My primary problem with watching TV is that I’m far too easily distracted in visual mediums. My usual attention span, if I am not watching it with someone else, is about twenty minutes. So if I want to watch something that isn’t MLP I have to recruit someone else to watch it with me and talk about it while we’re watching. My problem is that people keep telling me about quality TV and I keep being unable to view it because no one will watch it with me. 😛
I pretty much just watch TV on my computer. Computers are awesome.
tl;dr: Ozy does not like TV, still thinks TV is cool.
In our house the t.v goes on for various reasons. Like a show we like, background noise while cooking or puttering, cuddling time, etc. Pretty much when we are home for one reason or another a t.v somewhere is on. We are huge jazz fans and we do listen to a lot of music, while having dinner or when people are over, etc.
People are all weird and different from each other. We don’t need to like the same thing, nor does one thing need to be better then the other.
What I don’t get is people who spend 4 to 12 hours online a day and then say they hate television. That makes no sense to me whatsoever. It’s like your junk brain rot is better then someone elses. Never mind video games, I have nothing against them but we don’t play them and I’ve seen more then a few anti-t.v people who can spend hours a day playing them
Yes there are people who can spend hours online only surfing news worthy brain heightening material. There are also t.v people who only watch the likes of PBS. I’d say they are about even and both should just get over themselves, myself I read manboobz (great but not really enlightened stuff) and tune into house hunters international (also the same) at about the same hour per week rate.
I’d say if you are reading this and think you’re too enlightened for t.v then perhaps you should turn off your computer or video games and read another book, but not a light book….. only real literature for you.
Oh look what TV show is his favorite.
UGH! I hate this stuff. Women are expected o not mind watching male-centered shows (which are often fine and well!) but some people act like female-centered shows are lesser and men should have, and would have no interest in them.
Yeah, Kavette. The “I never watch TV and am so much better because of that” people are annoying. Unless the reason you never watch TV is because you haven’t the time because you are curing cancer or feeding starving children in Africa all day, I really don’t think there is a need to be pretentious about it. Also, I don’t think the cancer researchers and children feeders have the time to look down on people watching TV anyway. They’re actually busy doing something.
Sorry, off topic…
Regarding Shakespeare, drama and class issues:
You could only be a playing company in London in Shakespeare’s time if you had noble patronage. The entire public theare was propped up by the legal fiction that it was not a commercial enterprise but was instead a way for the companies to rehearse their plays so they could be performed at court. It was, of course, a wildly popular and profitable (for some) form of mass entertainment as well, but it was understood that the only thing keeping the industry from being shut down by city authorities was the fact that it had the support of the crown.
So as far as drama being a prestigious art form… it’s kind of a mixed bag. People thought Ben Johnson was giving himself more credit than he deserved as a simple playwright by having his plays published in folio, and Thomas Bodley didn’t collect plays for his library. On the other hand, when your company is literally called The King’s Men you’re not exactly a full-fledged populist.
@Katz: Luhrmann’s R+J was the first date I ever went on, so I have some sentimental connection to it. But I thought the modern-day conceit was a bit much, perhaps. Certainly I’m not going to beat people up about it.
@Ithiliana: We had to do Branagh’s Hamlet in something like three sittings. I enjoyed it immensely.
Just something about Gibson’s Hamlet irritated me. I guess I’m blind to its artistic merits.
I haven’t seen Olivier’s Hamlet although I have watched his opening soliloquy from Richard III and loved it to pieces. I have seen his Othello and I remember thinking, at the time, why didn’t they get a black guy? But I was, like, twelve.
RE: Falconer
Saw Branagh’s Hamlet in high school. Very enjoyable, but oh god, does Branagh put the HAM in Hamlet!
RE: TV
I myself can’t really watch TV easily, because it is a black hole of all my attention. Doesn’t matter what’s playing, it could be a damn BANK commercial, I’ll still stare at it and have a really difficult time focusing on anything else. It’s TOO immersive for me. Like, sometimes that’s a good thing for me, but rarely. I’ve never been able to understand how other people can have it as a “background noise” thing. Augh, I’d go insane! (My aunts and uncles are like this; as a result I always navigate around their home so my back is to the TV as much as possible.)
Internet is also distracting, but at least the pages (the ones I look at anyway) tend not to move, or make noise. So I can, y’know. NOT be completely devoured by it.
Anyone who thinks TV is inferior to books has obviously never watched “Spirited Away,” after reading “The Haunted Vagina,” that’s all I’m saying. But then, I have to argue with pretentious brats who think comics are intrinsically inferior to prose.
yes! i’ve never understood english teachers who see shakespeare as a thing that’s primarily there to be read. it’s a play! you’re meant to see it!
and now a lot of kids have almost everything they’re reading available in some form to stream on netflix. when i was in theater history that service was still in it’s infant stages, but now i think i can find half my syllabus on there. just the other day i realized i can stream marat/sade.
@Alex
I’m not sure where you are, but if you have netflix available to you it’s pretty cheap and I think there’re no commercials (not sure).
I remember seeing the Laz Buhrmann version of R+J in secondary school, after reading the play. I wasn’t all that impressed with the play, but the whole modern renditioning seemed so corny at the time, I couldn’t stop laughing. I haven’t rewatched it since, so I don’t know if I’ll have a more favourable opinion. But as it stands right now: dear God, was that cheesy!
Studying Shakespeare in high school, we watched a stack of movies, sometimes studied along with the books or just as an example of how they sound to an audience. Most of us thought that R&J was fantastic (!! Mercutio in drag!)…although it got a bit much when our teacher would pause the tv whenever Leonardo came up on screen to sigh over the pretty.
That said, I did have another English teacher talk about Colin Firth’s “crisp English chest hairs” while studying the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice in conjunction with the book. D:
@Sharculese
It depends on the objectives of the course. Students, both of the high school and university undergraduate levels, tend not to grasp a lot of what goes on in Shakespeare (and a lot of literature in general) on their first pass through it – they can follow the plot and enjoy the play, but they can get that just as easily outside the classroom. If your goal is to get them thinking/talking about the language of the play (most university English classes strive to teach close reading/critical thinking/analytical writing) I find that it’s best to make them go through it line by line (and make them watch it several times, and make them act it out themselves, and all the other things I would like to do if schools would only give me the time and resources to do them).
Oh yeah, and printed editions of Shakespeare’s plays sold like hotcakes during Shakespeare’s own lifetime, so even people who had the opportunity to see a Shakespeare on opening night saw plenty of value in just sitting down and reading the darned things too.
I’m just disappointed that schools aren’t issued human skulls when doing Hamelt. I had to improvise and do the ‘Alas, poor Yorkic’ speech to a whitreboard rubber.
Also, I celeberated a friend’s brithday party, which explains the spelling.
When I was like 12,my brother had this string of plastic skulls that came with one of his action figure monster guys and I tried to make them give the speech. No one else got the joke. I was such a nerdy child.
I think there’s a lot of value to reading plays, especially stuff like Shakespeare and even some of the best of the modern stuff like Samuel Beckett, Suzan Lori-Parks, etc. You can slow down and take your own time, get every word. Anyway, the text is Shakespeare himself- everything beyond that is someone else’s contribution.
And also, come on. High school kids pretty much don’t read unless you make them. It’s a matter of priority.
Really, Dave? All high-school kids need to be forced to read? I know I hung out with the drama geeks, but no one had to make us to read.
@Dave: Anyway, the text is Shakespeare himself- everything beyond that is someone else’s contribution.
You don’t know much about the textual history of Shakespeare’s works, or what high school textbooks do to ’em, do you?
Also, how much teaching experience do you have?