Since we don’t live by politics alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
Life, Culture and Politics from BrisVegas
Larvatus Prodeo was an Australian group blog which discussed politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
frist! I’m watching A Game of Thrones. It’s very good.
It’s very misogynist though. So was Deadwood and The Walking Dead. I think American TV is going through a dark period in this regard.
Erecting fencing to prevent a newly discovered species of Bandicoot, known as the Oobercoot, from getting at the veggie patch.
akn I know where you’re at: I surrounded my veggie patch with corrugated iron sheets, reclaimed from the dump, buried to a depth of around 25 cm and all pop-riveted together and supported by weldmesh to 2.5m; that kept out the bandicoots and other ground foragers. I then had to run bird netting over the top to keep out flying menaces; the gate I made from and old bed frame covered with scraps of reclaimed mosquito screening ; my neighbour mumbled something about the mozzies still being able to get in over the top.
Generally, we still do our veggie shopping at Woolies !
Went to an SES debriefing. But it was ok. We ran away when a storm approached before anyone could ring. The clouds parted and I was out into the garden, not picking the Jonquils, but instead tackling the jasmine stranded in some hitherto unindentifiable fruiting ornamental which weeks ago was engulfed. I’ve made a nice mess of ‘clippings’. And now it’s a bit dark.
sg Has American television ever been ‘in the light’ in this regard?
Link, I think it goes in cycles. Think of Cagney and Lacey, Rosanne, Buffy, Star Trek, Firefly. They may not be perfect, some may be sexist or set in a sexist world, but they don’t show the level of casual misogyny in some of the more recent shows. I know it’s not American, but compare Robin Of Sherwood – set in a gritty “realistic” mediaeval world – and Game of Thrones. You can make stories where women’s roles are limited to “realistic” roles, without making them misogynist; and i’m sure you can make them sexually explicit (and even depict sexually aggressive milieus) without seeming to revel in it – which is what Deadwood and Game of Thrones seem to do.
I found Deadwood unwatchable, like Carnivale. From Carnivale I formulated what has turned out to be a pretty good rule of thumb – any drama that cribs its soundtrack from a famous film is also cheating in other ways, but to cover its ludicrous plot and paucity of character it will fling a bunch of Weird! at you. Deadwood is infected with the same smug sense of its own superiority that I hated in the West Wing. I gave it a good chance, soldiering on through the whole of the first season despite twisting my optic chiasm with my repetitive eye-rolling, but whatever its charms I am apparently completely immune.
I can understand that, su. I really like Deadwood but I have to put aside a lot of reservations (mainly, but not only, about the misogyny). Particularly in the second season, when a brothel run by women opened up. It’s actually connected to a historical event, but the female brothel owners in the tv show seemed to be much weaker than those in the real life story. Which is a big pointer to the possibility that the misogyny in the show isn’t being done just to depict “gritty realism” but is something of a preference for the writers.
All that aside, I can also understand not liking the cowboy language, etc. I love it, but strokes for folks.
The Walking Dead was even worse for this.
Oh the language itself didn’t bother me, but the “look at me ma, I’m swearing” aren’t I out there, a fucking transgressive gem”attitude that went with it (which admittedly could be all in my head, I am a particularly cussed consumer of tv dramas), shits me to tears. Since you seem to know a bit about it, is there some historical basis for believing that in the 19th century glot, saying cocksucker every alternate word was usual? It’s not even good for drinking games as you’re under the table after a quarter of an hour, though now I think on it, for non-fans that is not such a drawback.
Speaking of profanities, over here they’ve only just begun showing the new series of The Thick of It and it’s pretty great, but the hour long special “Spinners and Losers” was rug-bitingly funny.
su I remember being so surprised by the use of c**s**ker every 10 seconds that I thought it might possibly be historically accurate, so I checked it and found a website where the director defended the use of it even though he accepted it wasn’t historically accurate. So there you go.
I also thought at first that it was the “transgressive gem” attitude driving the swearing, but I found it did work to build a (very unpleasant) environment that made the show work (for me). It could be a tad exhausting though.
Game of Thrones is doing the same thing, but using perhaps more believable language (the usual f and c words). It’s not the swearing that I’m taken aback by so much as the classical, theoretical (and thoroughly unnecessary) misogyny. e.g.
Person 1: That castle’s The aerie, it’s said to be impregnable.
Person 2: Give me 10 men and climbing ropes and I’d get the bitch pregnant
Couldn’t just say “get inside” or “take it.” Oh no, had to write the penetrative subtext in big bold letters. I don’t think this would have been done in previous eras, even without the word “bitch.” It’s of a piece with saying you “r*ped” someone when you beat them in a computer game.
There’s also the way men talk about the first man they killed as if it’s the first time they had sex, and the careful construction of an atmosphere of violence and continuous sexual exploitation, that’s surely well above anything that actually happened in the middle ages. I noticed that in Deadwood, too.
I think there’s a generation of script-writers and directors in Hollywood (Especially HBO?) who must really hate women.
Oh yes, we’re soaking in it, Marge. I’ll probably avoid Thrones then. There’s always some reason why what looks to me to be unfettered and gratuitous violent misogyny is justified by blah de blah de blah. It seems the trick to maximising the amount of misogyny per unit is to be a bit writerly about it: see the collected works of Nick Cave.
I found Deadwood unwatchable too, mainly because of the liberal use of swearing which I guessed (rightly as it seems) was way off the mark historically which rendered the entire concept nowt more than a complete load of tosh and a thinly veiled excuse to show men as tough bastards who’d kill you as soon as look at you and women as prick-teasing whores who’d fuck anything for money. (sorry ’bout that)
sg, Did you read Roseanne Barr’s article which was kicking round the a couple of months ago? It was a good insight into sexism in America, specifically in writing rooms. Now I can’t seem to watch anything that comes out of the US without seeing ample evidence of this. Even down to some inane crap I chanced upon other day where the son lets mom drive because she so likes to.
I spent Sunday laid up with a very debilitating pain in my left foot which is going to be looked into by a podiatrist today. On the up side, I did get to finish reading Adrian Goldsworthy’s The Fall of the West: The Death of the Roman Superpower.
Paul, it might be a thing I had/have which I was told was Plantar Fasciitis. Since then I haven’t been able to shake the mental image of little Hitlers in my feet causing pain!
I’ve had the same thing Helen (and perhaps Paul Norton). Really horrible, but with stretching and physio, relief is possble.
Plantar Fasciitis: entirely remediable once you pass through the pain barrier. Accept no surgical solutions if this is the diagnosis. Stretch that foot.
su, I think there’s more of it than there used to be (see above examples). I remember Susan Faludi saying that the 70s were a high point of feminism in pop culture, and I think she may have been onto something.
Link, I think the idea of Deadwood was that it was trying to represent the frontier life more honestly than previous goes, and the stories I read about the real Deadwood really made it seem like the kind of town where people killed each other for very little; but I also got the impression the misogyny was overdone. Maybe not the racism, though. Another thing I find disturbing about Deadwood is the subtle hints in it that the writers admire the culture there. Makes me think of Tarantino with his oily desire to be a killa gangsta.
I would’ve thought terms like cocksucker etc were much more 20th century. Indeed, and my memory might be faulty here, I can’t recall actually coming across them in American lit until James Baldwin in the early to mid 1960s. Anyway …
Transferred chapter 8 to a new disk. Was getting near the end of the other one. Then stopped work as there was a sort of day-long thunderstorm up here. Read more of the book on the Saratoga campaign for the rest of the day.
Watched Midsummer Murders on TV. at night.
Su, can we do a link swap? Here is the link I found saying that both the specific sexual swearwords (e.g. c**ks**ker) AND the non-sexual use of what we now think of as generic swearwords (the various fs and cs) didn’t happen in the era of Deadwood. I think I’m going to write a blog post about it and i’d like to see the Rosanne Barr article if you can remember it.
Was the cockeral de-feathered before it was sucked?
Sg, I didn’t reply because it was Link rather than me you meant to ask for the Barr article, but in case you haven’t found it already it’s here.
You’ll get no argument from me on the trajectory, I grew up in the seventies and was a teenager in the eighties, a short, relatively free breathing space sandwiched between two oppressive archetypes of female behaviour; compulsory domestic servitude and compulsory pornification.
Faludi’s description of the revivification of the male hero/saviour post- 9/11strikes a chord because in the last year there have been a number of occasions when some lefty males have effectively told women they have to choose between feminism and the latest saviour on the block — Assange, Dominic Strauss-Kahn, there’ll be another one along any minute.