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?
High school kids pretty much don’t read unless you make them.
Kids these days, amirite?
@darksidecat
Dinky nerd five!
What about David Foster Wallace? Do you like DFW, Dave? Blah, his writing is garbage. If he wrote a play, it’d be STINKO!
@Katz: I know! Back in MY day, we slogged through two feet of snow wearing cardboard shoes every day after our cold oatmeal so we could carry our stack of books back to the library and check out more!
These days, they claim to be reading books on this liddle screens, but comeon, there’s no way that makes any sense!
Hah! *shakes cane*
@Abeegoesbuzz: I see what you did there!
Kids don’t read these days. REALLY. I have a few bookshelves that would say differently.
And, yeah, they edit the shit out of Shakespeare to make him “okay” for teenage consumption, so the moral guardians won’t freak.
and yet, mysteriously, they remain plays. dramatic experiences first and ‘literary’ experiences second. no amount of co-option can ever change that.
snrrrrt
i got a question for people who say romeo & juliet is their least favorite. like i can see where you’re coming from, but you seriously think it’s a worse show than midsummer, where literally nothing is a stake because you know from the outset that magic is both the cause and solution to everyone’s problems?
@Sharculese
I don’t dislike R&J, I just dislike people who think it’s about ‘twu wuv’. They’re horny simpletons who met, married, and then offed themselves in the space of less than a week! As for Midsummer’s, I mostly like it because I guy gets turned into a donkey. I will admit the plot isn’t particularly deep, it’s mostly a vehicle for humour.
I’m pretty amused by the “high schoolers don’t read” thing. It’s been quite a while since I was a in high school, but I promise that the five large bookshelves, one closet, several large patches of floor, and god-only-knows-how-many boxes that contain my collection of books didn’t just pop into existence when I turned 18.
Also, there’s something extra silly about arguing that teenagers are universally anti-books in the wake of the Hunger Games, Twilight, and Harry Potter, which clearly all sold very few copies and were not at all appealing to the average 15-year-old. Clearly.
I think there was a De-motivational poster pointing out that R&J was not that romantic because it involved two teenagers and six deaths.
Yeah, that’s annoying – I think (I hope) it tends to be people who’ve never actually read or seen the play, and have therefore managed to completely miss the point. Shakespeare isn’t exactly subtle in making it much less a “love story” and much more a “these teenagers are horny idiots, and yet they still manage to be smarter than their parents insofar as they are just fucking like horny idiots instead of killing each other over some stupid hand-me-down feud” story.
Ithiliana- cardboard shoes? LUXURY! We’d have thought ourselves kings if we’d had cardboard shoes! We had walk five miles uphill through an ice age to get to a place where we could make shoes for ourselves out of cold oatmeal and our books were made of stone tablets and we were grateful to get it!
it’s not that the plot isn’t deep (it’s a comedy, it’s not supposed to have a deep plot). it’s that at the outset, we know what causes all the problems (magic) and we know what’s going to solve all the problems (magic) what everyone does in the interim is kind of irrelevant. as a story, that can work, as a performance it can’t, because there’s nothing for the actors to strive towards.
i had a professor back in undergrad who insisted that midsummer was obviously a masque and that shakespeare would be embarrassed to find out it was still performed today. he wasn’t a historian, and as such he didn’t really have any support for it, but when it comes to basic form I’ve always thought he was on to something.
I liked midsummer more than romeo and juliet. Shakespeare is a master of cheesy and over the top, and that usually works better with comedy anyways. I particularly like Comedy of Errors, with its two sets of separated in infancy identical twins. That shit is better by far than any version of the Parent Trap, and I have seen every version because my cousin forced me to watch them.
Also, we know the ending of a lot of comedy movies pretty well even now, and we still enjoy them.
okay, i’ve calmed down and i feel like being less of a dick now. i don’t have a problem with english teachers treating shakespeare as ‘literary’ but first and foremost plays exist to be experienced. treating plays as literature tends to suck the life out of them: i read tom wingfield railing against his fluorescent tubes when i was eleven, but i didn’t really appreciate it until i saw john malkovitch deliver those lines.
the literary value of a theatrically line is secondary to how it sounds in the mouth of the character who speaks it, and a talented actor takes the sum value of those lines, finds the progression from one to another, finds the growth of the character from beginning to end in a way that no mere reading and recitation can ever achieve.
i’m fairly presentationalist in my approach to theater, and i loathe american fealty to stanislavski and the method, but i do believe that drama is achieved in the way the character is inhabited and become, and mere reading of the text, absent the other work of a skilled actor, will always be insufficient
“and yet, mysteriously, they remain plays. dramatic experiences first and ‘literary’ experiences second. no amount of co-option can ever change that.”
I have no idea what this even means but thanks for posting it anyway, I guess!
that’s not the issue. we know by definition that a shakespearean comedy ends happily for everyone. that’s what makes it a comedy. my problem with midsummer is that we know from the outset why everything ends happily, and that the solution is simply ‘magic’.
look directly above this post
I mean, Heminges and Condell just worked with Shakespeare and acted in his plays during The Bard’s lifetime, clearly their crazy scheme to get people to READ Shakespeare is utter silliness.
this is the weirdest argument from authority ever?
like cool, his actors had the brilliant idea to write his shit down. that was revolutionary and the world would be different without it. i’m not sure how that means they intended his works to be read and not performed, tho?
While we’re talking about kids these days…
maybe a better way of saying what i meant is that i feel like picking apart the text for its literary value is a really myopic approach and that readily becomes apparent as soon as you try to approach it from a dramatic standpoint.
and yeah, that shit has it’s value, shakespeare was a master of language and style and all that, but more importantly, these are characters that don’t exist until someone breathes life into them, and we’ve erected a method of teaching shakespeare that robs kids of that fact.
what i meant about co-option is that there’s a cultural tendency, that i think most teachers of literature reinforce, to focus on that literary aspect to the exclusion of all else, and to behave like that literary aspect is the be-all-end-all of the text.
i remember when i first took script analysis one of the lessons was ‘you know how you learned about the thinker/doer dichotomy in hamlet? that is a shitty way of thinking about hamlet the man that’s only going to impede you in understanding who hamlet is” and being really resistant to it at the time because i was locked into that literary perspective on the character, and only years later, when i worked on a production of hamletmachine, realizing that that literary perspective really was impeding me and that i needed to abandon it.
the literary world tries to hold a monopoly on shakespeare’s works that doesn’t belong to them and that’s actively holding us back, and that’s what i’m against.
I agree with Sharculese-Shakespeare is boring as all get out when I read him but I can happily sit through any live performance and enjoy the play.