Merry Christmas, if you’re into that sort of thing!

Laserqueen,

Yeah, I guess I see the overall arc of the show differently. Although I’ll have to give spoilers to explain some of that. So you might want to skip this if you don’t want them.

I do want to start out with a couple of caveats. The first is that it’s progressive for its time. It’s not necessarily all that progressive for today. Except for the fact the actors, the wardrobe and the sets all look legit midwest small town working class. Not the Hollywood version of that where people who look like underwear models live in spacious shabby chic homes and wear semi-expensive clothes. The second is that I may be over-analyzing way too much. I do that sometimes!

I think what the show is really about, whether or not it’s intentional is how hard it is to break out of the roles preassigned by our demographics. No matter how much you try and bootstrap, the odds are against you. That’s actually in a way much more radical than a story about someone marginalized – in this case by gender and class – becoming super successful. In other words, I think the show is about how the American dream is a lie.

Roseanne tells off her greedy and abusive boss and leads a walkout at the Wellman plastics factory at the end of season 1. Seems triumphant, but season 2 finds her having to scramble to find an even crappier job. I don’t think this was done to show that she must be punished for stepping out of her place. It was done to show that workers are put in a no win situation by capitalism. Either take the abuse or stand up for yourself and risk financial ruin.

Jackie I wouldn’t say is a failure at being a successful career woman. More like a late bloomer. She is the one who came up with idea for the Lunchbox restaurant and talked Roseanne into joining her. Although unfortunately I think the ego of Roseanne (the real person) caused it morph more into the baby of Roseanne (the character) pretty quickly. To me, Jackie seems like a character who is suited to being more of a free spirit but gets gaslighted about it by a conservative mother, a sister who is a little bit jealous and bitter because she got stuck with marriage and kids so young and a small town environment. So she’s seen as neurotic and whacky but is only forced into that role because she’s surrounded by people who want her to make more traditional choices. She does eventually divorce Fred and becomes a business owner and home owner and single mom. A modest home and business, sure, but that’s okay.

Then there’s Darlene and Becky. They’re very different from one another. But they’re both smart girls who aspire to get out of Lanford and be successful. They both end up not accomplishing that so much. Darlene because she gets pregnant at a young age and ends up married to David and Becky because she runs off to marry Mark when Dan’s bike shop closes and he has to take a job in Minneapolis. Again this could be seen as in favor of young women getting married and having kids instead of wanting careers, but I don’t think this is what is meant. Roseanne expresses a lot of dismay and guilt over these circumstances. She wanted to give them more, but she failed and now they’re going to end up just like her.

These stories are so much more realistic to me than the stories about plucky small town girls making it in the big city or whatever. They seem more progressive, but at their heart they’re selling the conservative notion that if you just work hard, you’ll achieve the American dream. In reality, it isn’t impossible to move up in class but it is extremely difficult. It takes a combination of luck and really hard work that is just not in the cards for most people. In my opinion, the arc of the series demands that the audience recognize this and empathize with the characters even if they’re not the perfect ideal of the noble poor person that conservatives like.

Dan absolutely represents the typical working class white man who is terrified of deviations from traditional masculinity. He’s still a sympathetic character because John Goodman is likable, he’s a good dad and he doesn’t actually hate anyone who’s not a white male. He’s even got a hippyish past. He reminds me of my own dad actually. Except my dad is skinny. But the show’s jokes do often make fun of his need to embrace masculine gender roles so much. For example, he starts complaining about how these days white men are blamed for all the world’s problems. His friend Chuck, who is black responds by saying “maybe that’s because you did everything.” The joke is on Dan. Not on the SJW PC police that hate poor innocent white man.

The show is by no means perfect. There’s slut shaming of Jackie. Ableist jokes about Dan’s mentally ill mother. Gay jokes that aren’t probably ill meaning but are based in stereotypes about gay people. I’m definitely not trying to say it’s beyond criticism. Just explaining in a very tl;dr fashion why I do find radical in its own way.

@Jenora Feuer

It has its rough or weak spots (doesn’t every series?), but it has heart, and I’m willing to overlook a lot if a show has heart and the cast looks like they love working together.

Oo, Watchmen! I do have some thoughts on Watchmen.

Thought one: the film was fairly dreadful. It streamlined the plot a little, but for every improvement, it left out three important elements of nuance that gave the story life.

For instance, Nite Owl II – his whole character is that he’s an ornithologist and a bit of a romantic, who compensates for his unimposing and unconfident everyday self by living out the mythology of the owl. For instance, his sonic weapon to disable his opponents and avoid direct confrontation is based on his experiences of observing owls terrify their prey with a screech before striking. What does the movie do? Make him a punchman who punches.

There’s quite a few elements of Rorschach’s story that the movie badly fudges – for example, his first murder, where the actor playing his victim manages to turn “begging for mercy” into such an act of smugness that the audience is clearly supposed to want him to be brutalised. Also, his lifelong obsession with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which ties in to his hatred of his mother and idealisation of his father, and comes to a head in the complete collapse of his identity at the book’s climax.

Also, by substituting Ronald Reagan for Robert Redford, the film clearly missed the intended alternate culture of the story’s 1980s. And making Ozymandias overtly queer and simpering and sneering… that was just outright tasteless. Who the hell thought that was a good idea?

There’s a folder on his PC just labelled “BOYS”.

I was once at the taping of an interview with Terry Gilliam back when he was promoting Tideland; he mad a comment that he had been offered the chance to do Watchmen, spent time trying to work on it, then gave it up mostly because he decided he couldn’t actually do it justice in a film and “didn’t want to go down in history as the man who ruined Watchmen“.

Might have been interesting, since both Gilliam and Moore tend to be very good at layered works and both heavily into the ‘artistic expression’ end of things. I suspect they would have either loved or hated working together with a passion.

Also, I’m Worried About a Thing, and want to vent. Sorry in advance for what’ll be a long-winded derail. It has to do with sexual harassment by professors and about my social ties.

At the university I graduated from, specifically the department I was in, there’s been a sexual misconduct scandal – profs abusing their authority to hit on students, spread rumours about them if the students didn’t sleep with them, etc. Once a particular blog post got publicity, lots of former students started speaking out.

I was oblivious to it when I went to that school (between 5-10 years ago), since my social skills were almost nonexistent. I did hear rumours that someone I’ll call Prof. A would hit on female students and was told “try not to be in the office alone with him”. At the time I thought “oh, no worry, I’m not really the type that attracts older men” (true, but… ick, past self – way to be selfish).

I’m anxious about this because of all the shit that other students went through, but also because it’s making me drastically rethink my opinions of two other teachers – I’ll call them Prof. B and Prof. X.

Prof. B is a man I took 3 classes with. I liked him and respected his teaching, and he never violated my boundaries. I spotted him at a couple of events after I graduated, and I “follow” him on social media. Turns out he’s one of the people named as a (potential, at least) abuser.

Prof. X is a woman I took a class with in a different institution. She’s excellent in her field, but I have a poor view of her as a teacher. That, again, is biased by personal experience. My problem wasn’t just her teaching style, but some hurtful things that she said. For example, she once asked me out of the blue “Do you have a learning disability?” when we were talking alone about schoolwork. (I do have ADHD, which makes me bad at deadlines, but it was undiagnosed at the time). My brother also had her as a teacher, and had a similar bad experience. Thinking back on it, she could have been trying to be helpful, just phrasing things in a bad way, but it came across as invasive and insensitive.

Now, Prof. X is retweeting and sharing stories of students who are speaking out about their sexual harassment, and while this is awesome, I keep thinking she’s a hypocrite at some level. Also, I feel like if I cut off all contact with Prof. B, that would be unfair; but if I continue to be in touch with him (where “in touch” means “occasionally replying to his Tweets”) that it would be somehow unfair to the students who’ve been harassed.

I’m writing an email to a student who I was in his class with. Maybe she can help sort this out. I’m saying that I support her, telling her what I heard about Prof. A, and asking if she knows anything about Prof. B.

Perhaps I should also send Prof. B a private message on Twitter and ask him to speak out against this stuff, without saying I think that he’s involved? No, I think that would be a bad strategy. But what to do, if anything??

If anyone has any advice, I’d appreciate it. I’m bad at social things, but I want to support those who’ve been harassed and not be an apologist for any sexual misconduct.

TL;DR I realize *intellectually* that people can be good in one area and bad in another, but seeing it unfold like this is worrying me. 🙁

Note: I have to get off the Internet, but I’ll be here tomorrow, hopefully.

Testing to see if my avatar picture change takes. If it does, it’s my kitty Dracarys. Isn’t she cute?

@wwth: chief manatee

Dracarys is gorgeous! Lookit her colours. Does the white go further than her chest?
I love calico/tortoiseshell cats – they’re so diverse and pretty. Wait, is that white genocide? 😀

Re the comic/graphic novel discussion above, it’d be great if Varalys dropped in. She’s like a human encyclopedia on this, and her blog is fantastic reading.

@weirwoodtreehugger: chief manatee

I hated Sucker Punch. Barely legal women in sailor fukus jumping around chopping up computer-generated samurais, orcs, and Nazi zombies with katanas, and yet its director has the nerve to try and claim that it’s somehow a feminist parable? Please. If the above doesn’t constitute masturbatory fodder for weeabos, otakus, gamers, MRAs, Nice Guys, incels, neckbeards, permavirgins and basement-dwellers, then Red Dawn doesn’t constitute masturbatory fodder for gun-toting, flag-waving, Hummer-driving yahoos. He might as well have tried to claim that the hentai series La Blue Girl was a feminist parable, for crying out loud.

Valya: you are entirely correct … but … you probably don’t realize how intensely anti-Communist propaganda was pushed in the US until the USSR collapsed. (I’m a Democratic Socialist, not a Communist, but very few Americans of the pre-1990 period would have believed that there was any difference. And right-wingers in comments sections still call liberals Commies. There was one on the Washington Post today.) I myself feel that there is essentially little difference between the old czars and the communist leaders and Putin and his oligarchs — authoritarians are all pretty much the same.

But, from the point of view of many Americans who support the Republican Party, it makes all the difference in the world whether Putin is or is not a Communist. The right-wing (Republicans, generally) in America has always supported tyrants and dictators, as long as they were not Communists. Putin fits right in with those traditional beliefs. The common belief in the American right is that Europe is a terrible place because of Socialism and Muslim immigration. Sweden in particular is considered hell on earth, where if a woman is lucky she won’t be raped by a Muslim man EVERY day. Putin, on the other hand, is seen as a great defender of the white Christian (heterosexual) world. I know; it’s fucked up.

Ugh, Katie (Date rape? Never happens. Or at least not very often) Roiphe is at it again.

With the Threat of Being Doxxed by Harper’s, Creator of ‘Shitty Media Men’ Spreadsheet Outs Herself

In a brave piece on New York Magazine’s The Cut, writer Moira Donegan has come forward as the creator of the “Shitty Media Men” list, a Google spreadsheet on which women could anonymously report sexually violent or inappropriate encounters with the men of media. This follows much uproar at the news that Harper’s would soon be publishing a cover story by Katie Roiphe, and that it was rumored to out Donegan as the list’s creator.

https://jezebel.com/with-the-threat-of-being-doxxed-by-harpers-creator-of-1821976371