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Quote of the day: “We’re approaching peak vagina on television, the point of labia saturation.”

Ladies, please! We don't need to see THAT.

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?

  1. W.F. Price of The Spearhead
  2. Christopher in Oregon, legendary vagina-hating Man Going His Own Way
  3. 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?

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katz
12 years ago

High school kids pretty much don’t read unless you make them.

Kids these days, amirite?

Creative Writing Student

@darksidecat

Dinky nerd five!

abeegoesbuzz
abeegoesbuzz
12 years ago

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.

What about David Foster Wallace? Do you like DFW, Dave? Blah, his writing is garbage. If he wrote a play, it’d be STINKO!

Ithiliana
12 years ago

@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*

Ithiliana
12 years ago

@Abeegoesbuzz: I see what you did there!

ozymandias42
12 years ago

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.

Sharculese
12 years ago

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)

and yet, mysteriously, they remain plays. dramatic experiences first and ‘literary’ experiences second. no amount of co-option can ever change that.

Sharculese
12 years ago

What about David Foster Wallace? Do you like DFW, Dave? Blah, his writing is garbage. If he wrote a play, it’d be STINKO!

snrrrrt

Sharculese
12 years ago

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?

Creative Writing Student

@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.

Polliwog
Polliwog
12 years ago

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.

princessbonbon
12 years ago

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.

Polliwog
Polliwog
12 years ago

I don’t dislike R&J, I just dislike people who think it’s about ‘twu wuv’.

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.

Need to know
12 years ago

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!

Sharculese
12 years ago

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.

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.

darksidecat
12 years ago

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.

Sharculese
12 years ago

and yet, mysteriously, they remain plays. dramatic experiences first and ‘literary’ experiences second. no amount of co-option can ever change that.

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

TGMoxley
TGMoxley
12 years ago

“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!

Sharculese
12 years ago

Also, we know the ending of a lot of comedy movies pretty well even now, and we still enjoy them.

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’.

Sharculese
12 years ago

I have no idea what this even means but thanks for posting it anyway, I guess!

look directly above this post

TGMoxley
TGMoxley
12 years ago

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.

Sharculese
12 years ago

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?

katz
12 years ago

While we’re talking about kids these days…

Sharculese
12 years ago

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.

princessbonbon
12 years ago

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.