This time around those diamond skinned horrors leap and vault across New York like art deco Ubermensch. They are propelled by opulence, and arrogance, their own supremeconfidence forged in dollar, dollar bills y’all. Daisy and Tom Buchanan shine like platinum and drip with bombast. They are Baz Luhrmann’s sparkling playthings; Daisy wears a laser cut blond bob, Tom’s voice explodes like a WW1 Howitzer.

Daisy’s cousin and Tom’s college acquaintance Nick Carraway moves into a small house in Long Island. Nick is wide eyed, bushy tailed, a Harold Lloyd double minus the glasses, clinging onto morality rather than skyscrapers. In Luhrmann’s kaleidoscopic zoom fest, Nick is writing the story with a pen styled like a silver gothic spaceship. It’s a cheap trick. Nick marvels at Gatsby, swoons for Gatsby the transparent millionaire who lives next door to him.

Gatsby’s mansion throbs day and night with bad house music, the kind played at Mardi Gras and Kylie Minogue concerts. Gatsby is an out of body spectator, passive and aloof as the great and the good, the bad and the worse wreck his anachronistic shindig.

Champagne and flappers slide and drizzle down his walls like an early 1990s Pushca warehouse party. And all the while Gatsby gazes past the orgy directly at the green light, pausing briefly to seduce his neighbour.

In “Dune” David Lynch folded space, In “The Great Gatsby” Luhrmann’s camera travels faster than that, careening up and down buildings, peeking through windows, swirlinlike the wit around the Algonquin Round Table. New York can’t catch its breath; it hyperventilates in the sonic boom of CGI. That’s the point; Gotham distends its jaws and consumes those dreamers who dare to climb too far from the cradle.

Gatsby would be God, a deity obsessed with bending time to his will, bringing nature to its knees. He would move heaven and earth for his memories. Film is the perfect medium for his folly. Only Leonardo DiCaprio can unravel human perfection in such spectacular fashion. Carey Mulligan, Joel Edgerton and Tobey Maguire witness his destruction but it’s not enough.

“The Great Gatsby” is fragile, flimsy, stronger when it pauses and weaker when it sprints. Luhrmann doesn’t have enough depth to make Fitzgerald’s characters truly shallow. The vagaries of the current economic climate are scratched at, the irony of Jay-Z writing the soundtrack ignored. The idea of a film of “The Great Gatsby” is much like the idea of the green light visible from Daisy’s dock, beautifully perfect when unobtainable. The reality of a film of “The Great Gatsby” once more dashes our hopes and dreams.

Today, I take a look at three shows with potentially very issue-laden storylines, and think about where the producers could take them. The results are not very heartening, but they are a stark reflection of the state of Hollywood.

The Following

The Fox drama centering around a serial killer shows no sign of slowing down after the explosive finale, leaving both Claire (Natalie Zea) and Ryan (Kevin Bacon) badly injured on the floor of his kitchen. Their survival seems predictable—after all, the show revolves around them.

But how they survive is a bigger question, and one that’s not so easy to answer. Hardy apparently has yet another set of scars to add to his library of on-the-job injuries, but what about Claire? From the look of the angle of that knife, she was stabbed squarely in the spine, which could result in neurological damage, including potential paralysis.

Will we be seeing Claire using a wheelchair for mobility for next season? And how is she going to deal with the likely post-traumatic stress disorder she’ll be experiencing in the wake of being terrorised by her brutal ex-husband and viciously attacked by one of his followers?

These are questions that intrigue me, because they could be handled in a lot of different ways, and some of those ways are very, very bad. Claire could be dealing with adjustment to a significant disability, which might involve a mourning period for her as she struggles with the changes she’ll be making in her life. Will we see her working with physical therapists and a counselor to empower herself as she rebuilds strength and takes on the immense emotional costs she’s endured?

Or will we be seeing Claire trapped in the age-old trope of damsel in distress to be saved by Hardy? Given The Following’s record, I suspect this is the more likely outcome. Claire is likely to be positioned as a damaged character who can only be healed by Hardy’s sensitive and loving attentions, rather than a strong, powerful woman who’s enduring some difficult times.

I would love to see Claire taking charge of her life, working through her trauma, and becoming a more complex character for it. That will undoubtedly involve significant ups and downs for her character, but that’s what could make it all the more compelling a journey.

But I’m not sure I can trust Fox to do that.

Ironside

This midcentury classic is being revived on NBC, with Blair Underwood in the starring role, and the revival is immediately sounding warning bells for me. On the one hand, I’m delighted to see a show with a man of colour in the leading role, and it’s even better to see a disabled character at the forefront, but that’s where my worries begin. For one thing, Underwood will be in cripface for the drama, and for another?

Can anyone say ‘confined to a wheelchair’? Because that’s what all the media are saying about this character, and this show. The use of a horrifically outdated and shackling term in reference to wheelchair users is telling; it reveals how people think about those who use wheelchairs for mobility, and how Underwood’s character will be received.

I love the premise of a detective drama with a disabled detective heading up the team. What I am not so much in love with are the troped comments about him emerging already, or the promise that he’ll be ‘hardly limited by his disability [sic].’ Which makes me think we won’t see much of what it means to live with a significant impairment in a world where accessibility is a constant issue.

It’s irritating that they couldn’t find one wheelchair using actor for this role, given the large numbers of full and part-time wheelchair users who would love an opportunity like this. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that casting calls for the role hadn’t specified a disabled actor, or were held in inaccessible spaces, because both of these practices are par for the course in Hollywood.

While I have a deep love for characters who happen to be disabled, I don’t like those who are defined by their disability, as Ironside clearly will be. This role could represent a great opportunity for a balanced and nuanced depiction of disability—not one that totally erases the character’s disability, not one that turns the disability into another character on the show—but I doubt we’re going to get that.

Elementary

It’s already shown itself to be a standout series, and it’s here that I’m resting most of my hopes with the possibility that just this once, I might be justified in putting my trust in a television series when it comes to depicting a minority character with nuance and complexity. It’s handled Lucy Liu as Joan Watson with flying colours, it’s created a racially diverse depiction of New York that rings true to life (according to those with familiarity in the subject), and it’s broken down significant barriers in the Holmes canon.

One of those barriers fell at the very end of the season with the introduction of Miss Hudson (Candis Cayne), a beloved figure from Doyle’s books. Yet this Miss Hudson is not a quiet wilting lily like that of the books, content to flutter around and tidy up a bachelor flat while sticking more or less quietly in the background. She’s a character with history, a character who’s extremely savvy and sharp, and a character whom I hope we see a lot more of as the show progresses.

She also happens to be transsexual, and not only that, she’s played by a trans actress. This is huge in a world where trans women are routinely played either by cis women or by men skirting up for a crude mockery of the trans experience. Cayne is flawless in the role, and her revelation is subtle, underscoring the point that trans women are women, nothing more, nothing less.

While the show sadly threw in an ‘Adam’s apple’ comment to make sure that less-observant viewers picked up on the fact that she was trans, it seems to otherwise be sticking with treating her neutrally, which is a rare and beautiful thing. I strongly suspect we’ll be seeing more of her as the series progresses because we’ll have need for her critical skills and she makes a fantastic incidental character, given her great chemistry on set.

Elementary appears to be on a path to model how to include minority representations well, and here’s hoping they keep it up, turning my fantasy of a positive storyline or characterisation into a reality. As for the rest of network television? It’s safe to say that it has a long way to go before it’ll be in the running. Let’s just say that I suspect I’ll be needing a barf bag to watch the Ironside pilot.

All three, upright and full of cheer, are all I need to make this mothering Sunday a sunny day. And so, because I’m good with numbers, I’m counting my blessings o-n-e by o-n-e.

No honestly, I’m loving today. These are just happy blots of mascara. Perhaps its manufacturers simply forgot to test it on Mama Birds, whose not-so-little ones, have all flown away to pastures new. And on a day like today, the only sound that echoes in my empty nest is my poor, old ruffled nerves.

Although in my opinion it is definitely worthy of an Oprah Special or two, no one appears to give this ‘empty nest” syndrome the gravitas that is its due. Browse through Amazon and you’ll be spoilt for choice when it comes to all the manuals you’ll find on how to cope with the perils of life after “proper” retirement. But your “I’m Feeling Lucky” search would have hit the jackpot if you find just one used book that tackles the vacuum as big as China that a mother faces when stripped of her unpaid responsibilities.

Hard as I try, its occasions like these that make a mockery of all the effort I’ve put into pretending that my empty nest is as jolly and busy a place as it used to be.
Despite, of course, all my husband’s best efforts to highlight the bright side.

Surely, he argues, it’s a wonderful thing to find that the satellite bill is finally earning its keep now that we can roam the airwaves as we please. What about the unbeatable feeling of living in a hazard free zone? No more tripping over the latest and greatest bicep building machine!

Even I, he points out, must appreciate the drastic improvement in noise pollution. Isn’t it wonderful to be able to speak without having to compete with a drum kit bought on the cheap when one of the boys was going through his Ringo Starr phase?

And what about the thrill, he asks, of reaching out for a cold Coke and actually finding one in a full fridge that doesn’t need replenishing the day after my weekly shop.

But I’m having none of it. His carefree cajoling is completely lost on me.

I repeat, one more time, the sorry tale, of how the other day, I made a complete fool of myself at my local supermarket. There I was, in the queue to pay, when I burst into tears. I had just realized that half the stuff in my trolley were goodies I was accustomed to buying for three teenagers, whose cravings and hunger bangs, were worse than any of those found in a packed prenatal class of yummy mummies-to-be.

I was also not giving in to my husband, when with unbridled glee, he started to move in all his beloved DIY stuff into one of the boys’ bedrooms. My rant of refusal contained more X rated words than all the nuts and bolts in his handyman box. Unreasonable behaviour, it may well be, but it’s my way of dealing with how surreal it was when I first visited my eldest at his university dormitory.

He pointed out, proud as punch, that this is where he studied now. My face, with no surgical help, beamed right back in frozen splendour. It helped deafen the growl from my heart that was whimpering in disbelief “oh no you don’t. You study at that old battered IKEA desk that nearly broke your dad’s back as he carried it upstairs to your bedroom when you were thirteen.”

So, here I am and there they are. Unnaturally, uncluttered boyhood desks, waiting for their owners to make them a mess, once more. Alongside beds, which were home to one of our favourite bedtime rituals.

We would all get into one bed and start singing, that old as time, nursery rhyme:

There were ten in bed and the little one said “roll over”
So they all rolled over and one fell out…..

They had been taught at school that, as one by one they rolled over and out of the game, the last one would say, “goodnight.” But my youngest changed it to “there were none in bed” when his older brothers had grown and flown.

There was no heart clenching sense of poignancy, then—he was still there. But, in time, he spread his wings too, and somehow it doesn’t work anymore, with just his dad and I left to play the game.

I know they won’t – but it won’t stop me from trying to get them to reenact it, when we are all together again. Maybe, just maybe, this time, if I dangle the keys for the new car tantalizingly long enough in front of them, they will humour their batty old mama. Anyway, thankfully, I don’t have to wait too long—Mothering Sunday means ‘here comes summer” and the boys will be home soon.

But until then, I just know tonight’s going to be one of those when my I-pad’s “5% Battery Left” sign is going to be dismissed. I know that I am going to be left with a tablet that has overheated on emotions. It will need to recharge its batteries before it can go on.

But recharge it will, just like me and the rest of the world’s merry band of redundant mothers. We’ll go on, connecting and reaching out. And while I’m at it, I might as well finally pluck up the courage to remove “There Were Ten In Bed” as the ringtone on my mobile.

From now on, I’m going to answer all calls to the anthem of my own youth: “We are Family.” Perhaps, an equally cheesy ditty, but nevertheless, it’s going to rock this nest! Across a twelve hour time difference and a continent or two away, we are family. Forever and always. Happy Mother’s Day, everyone!

Photo by Robert Couse-Baker, licensed under a Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Though clearly an album deeply embedded in electronic dance music, this is Daft Punk’s most organic album yet. In lead-up interviews, the duo have spoken of “[recreating] what we used to do with machines and samplers, but with people.” It many ways, the album recalls the disco albums of the late 70s, with pulsing live drums and session musicians aiming for machinic precision. First single “Get Lucky” works well as a mission statement, with Pharell’s falsetto cooing over a lean repetitive groove looped to disco sublimity.

It’s definitely an audacious move in this age of computer generated EDM, and a risky one with few peers. One point of comparison is house gods Masters At Work’s 1997 Nuyorican Soul, which featured a similarly stellar guestlist and nostalgic viewpoint. But where Nuyorican Soul painstakingly recreated the disco past, Random Access Memories insistently foregrounds its contemporary status with vocoded vocals on almost every track. “Instant Crush” features Julian Casablancas from The Strokes crooning through a vocoder over a chunky New Wave groove. It’s instantly memorable and expertly balances the retro and futurist elements. “Fragments of Memories” features a nicely lazy vocal from Todd Edwards, looking back on a soon-ending holiday.

This is not to say that everything works quite so well, though. The eight-minute long “Touch” features the hammy Broadway vocals of Paul Williams alongside a children’s choir and an extremely cheesy disco section, and other discordant synth sections. It’s packed with ideas, and some of the string orchestration is lovely, but it’s a strange journey that doesn’t quite gel. In interviews, the duo have suggested this song to be the centrepiece of the album. Williams finishes the “you’ve given me too much to feel/you’ve almost convinced I’m real/I need something more, I need something… more.”

Given Daft Punk’s penchant for robotic masks, it’s an interesting twist on posthumanity to be sure, but one that makes sense in the light of Bangalter’s statement to the Guardian that “[We tried] to make robotic voices sound the most human they’ve ever sounded, in terms of expressivity and emotion.” A debateable claim. With a few exceptions – the monotonic “Doin It Right” – the vocoders work, but they don’t really connote very much at all.

But what does it mean, if anything? What is the point of making robots sound human? With few lyrics, it’s hard to really see the record as staking out much of a claim linguistically. Similarly, the cobbled-together signifiers of the 70s and 80s are pleasurable, but not really saying very much at all.

Random Access Memories is undoubtedly a unique sounding album, well-crafted in every sense. It sounds like a million dollars in an electronic moment where almost everything is made on laptops and the same few Digital Audio Workstations. Ambition permeates almost every bit of the album – something to be lauded in a time where music has become culturally devalued as important in itself.

It is a very good album. But a masterwork it is not, not really pulling all of these elements together into a completely convincing, whole artistic statement. It doesn’t really feel like it means anything at all. Random access memories indeed.

Tom Chadwick (Chris O’Dowd) is a rather sad sack sucked into looking into his past by a mysterious photograph he founds in a trunk left to him by a deceased great-aunt, finding the hunt a great way to distract himself from his rather pathetic life.

Relatively newly divorced and flailing about for a job, he’s surrounded by a best friend (Tom Bennett) who cleans zoo cages for a living, a sister (Nina Conti) who travels everywhere with a hand puppet named Monkey, and kooky antiquarians who seem to hinder as much as they help with this quest. When he finds a photograph of a rather imposing and martial-looking man and his father tells him it was probably his great-grandfather Harry Chadwick, he thinks this might be the explanation to so many questions that have been plaguing him.

At the very least, it’s evidence of an illustrious ancestor who might give his live some kind of redeeming value, and assembling a family tree might uncover other delightful surprises if he can stick with the tedious work it requires. Chadwick sets off to find out who his family was, not expecting some of the surprises he will encounter.

In Guestian tradition, the comedy is deliciously wry and dry, without the obvious pratfalls and big laugh moments one might come to expect from US television. Guest’s characters are all complete and utter oddballs, and this is what makes the show so understatedly hilarious; they view their lives as utterly normal and mundane, while embodying a set of truly peculiar lives.

Even the moments of the show that cause discomfort, like some of the casual racism, add to the bizarreness of the setting and underscore the peculiarity of the characters; it is the racism itself that we are supposed to be laughing at. Whether we’re watching scenes between the characters or candid ‘interviews’ (the show, in a technique echoing to Guest’s other work, is presented in a documentary format), a wry liveliness crackles through the characters and the setting. The single-camera style gives it a very intimate feel, turning the project itself into a bit of a meta-commentary.

With the big budgets available in filmmaking, including for documentaries these days, single-camera projects have a certain amount of beloved pet project appeal, making them seem like the lesser siblings of their more storied counterparts; these are stories that people are passionate and desperate to tell, even though they have virtually no funding. The style thus gives Family Tree a ‘little engine that could’ feel that makes it feel like a diamond in the rough, and that’s well brought-out through the cinematography, sets, costumes, and other design elements of the show.

The artistic team have kept the show creatively very true to its roots, rather than creating an artistic mismatch with the aesthetics of Guests style. Naturally, Family Tree is not a real documentary, but it is a fascinating examination of a subculture, and an exploration of modern British life through a deeply satirical but still somehow loving lens. These characters seem to realise on some level precisely how ridiculous they are and they freely admit it, denying viewers the opportunity to simply laugh at them, because any laughs ultimately turn back on the one doing the laughing, rather than the object of the laughter.

Family Tree catches Tom at an important point of his life, as a thirty-year-old looking back over his life and wondering what he’s made of it thus far, and what he’ll make of it in the future. The desire to suddenly probe into the past isn’t unique at this age, and like many people who start investigating their heritage, Tom’s likely to uncover all sorts of peculiar, sad, amazing, and unexpected stories about his family and his past. Along the way, he might learn more about who he is, but those findings will come from the journey of exploration itself, not from the people he finds on the branches of his family tree.

This is a show well worth making part of your summer viewing schedule; if you’re a Christopher Guest fan, you’ll love this fresh entry, and if you have a certain fondness for journeys of family heritage, quietly compelling documentary-style comedies, and Brit-coms, you’ll definitely want to make this one a must-watch. Family Tree is a testament to the flexibility HBO is going for in its programming, illustrating that HBO isn’t all bloody dramas and sex (though ‘The Box’ did feature an antique dildo), but also highly witty, sharp comedies. With programming like that, it’s no wonder cable is beating out the networks in terms of buzz, even though it has yet to conquer the ratings reach.

Lauren Wissot: Could you talk a bit about how this project came together? It seems like the stars aligned when it came to matching a high profile, stellar cast – including Andrea Riseborough, Clive Owen and Gillian Anderson – with Tom Brady’s under the skin script (containing an ending that in some ways is as bleak and unsettling as anything in the “Red Riding” trilogy, for which you directed the second part based on David Peace’s novel “1980”).

James Marsh: I was sent a script by the producer, and I have to admit, I picked it up with a heavy heart. It was about the IRA and The Troubles in Northern Ireland, and I think a lot of people in the British Isles, including me, are just glad that we seemed to have left them behind (at least for the time being). But the script intrigued me. It’s not really about the sectarian conflict in Ireland but the Peace Process, and it had a great central premise that I could relate to: what would it be like to be a spy on your own family in your own household? Clive Owen was really my first choice for the role of the MI5 agent in the story – and whilst we danced around a few other actors, his schedule became clear and he really wanted to do it. That really helped the film come together financially. Andrea had intrigued me for a while, and once I met her, it was an easy choice to cast her. She’s so smart, and has a lot of technique plus a genuine empathy for all the characters she plays. Physically, she just disappears into every part she takes on. We did a lot of work on the script before we actually shot the film – mainly cutting it right down and finding different ways to create suspenseful scenes – and not relying on expensive action sequences, which the original script had recourse to. The ending of the film was actually changed, and rewritten in the final weekend of the shoot. The original ending was a bit frenetic and predictable – with chases and shootouts – and I wanted something simpler and more chilling. I wanted to give Collette the same choice all over again – at the end, she can choose to be with her family or seek the protection of MI5. Whatever choice she makes, someone is going to get destroyed.

LW: Speaking of “Red Riding,” you seem to gravitate towards stories based on novels or on real-life characters and events (or on novels based on real life). You don’t really work in the abstract way that many directors do, finding inspiration from a mere idea. Do you think this is a result of your research beginnings at the BBC?

JM: My background, as you know, is in documentaries so I guess I do look for dramatic ideas that seemed rooted in reality and believable characters. But I also look for themes and bigger ideas in all the work I do. They are what support you and keep you interested across the years that you work on a film. In “Shadow Dancer,” I was very intrigued by the duality of Collette’s life and the idea of being a traitor in your own family. And I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that a lot of very bad things happen when people have good intentions – you see that in “Project Nim,” with Paddy Considine’s character in “Red Riding,” and again with Mac, Clive Owen’s character in “Shadow Dancer.” In both cases, the more they try and do the right thing, the more exposed and vulnerable they are.

LW: I found it a bit strange that after such a highly successful run on the festival circuit it took so long for “Shadow Dancer” to be released theatrically in the States. Was there some sort of distribution holdup?

JM: Indeed. The film was picked up by a distributor at Sundance 2012 who then got out of the business of distribution. Thankfully, Magnolia had also been after the film, and they were happy to take it on. (Working with the company) is a comfortable fit for me – as we worked together on “Man On Wire,” and had a very good relationship on that film. I think the VOD/limited art-house release model is a good one for a film like this.

LW: You’re in a pretty elite club, one of only a handful of directors possessing the skill to move seamlessly between narrative and documentary production. (Herzog, Winterbottom – and now, excitingly, Sarah Polley – are the only other filmmakers working today that immediately spring to mind.) Do you even mentally distinguish between the two forms? Does alternating fact and fiction keep the craft of filmmaking fresh for you?

JM: Interesting that you mention Sarah Polley – who seems indecently talented. She’s a fine actress, too. I loved her documentary “Stories We Tell.” It was one of the best examples of a personal story boldly challenging both the form of the documentary and our expectations about narrative, and indeed family itself. There’s a big difference in how a feature and a documentary are made – but actually, the objective for me is always the same. Organizing the story visually and thematically, understanding its rhythms. I am obsessed with the structure of my films, and the same principles apply to both genres of filmmaking – tell the story as clearly and efficiently as possible.

LW: You live in Denmark, but as far as I know, don’t work there. Any plans to do so? (I’m actually surprised you haven’t made a movie in Scandinavian territory, especially considering the Danish film scene is so vibrant right now.)

JM: Well, I don’t really speak the language and I’ve still got so much to explore in my own territory – which I guess is the UK and the US where I also lived for many years. I have gotten involved in some documentary projects here – as a consultant and advisor. The documentary form is in very vigorous health in Denmark. There are some great directors who are consistently making challenging work that’s having an impact on the international festival circuit.

If you can’t remember, you’ve got company: I failed that exercise myself. The power of a mother’s voice is undeniable; it comes from a place so deep and ancient that the actual words she speaks are often overlooked, fogged over by a misty emotional aura. Politicians often invoke images of their own mothers, or the mothers of their children, to add to the mythmaking about their own journeys to power or to simply score political points. Pollsters cite the “soccer mom” demographic in elections, as if this were a real group with real positions on issues (it isn’t).

As a mother with progressive politics, I frequently succumb to the temptation to assume that other moms share my values, my passions, my causes. But every time I do, I find myself humbled by the complexities of reality. In public debates over policy issues that increasingly impact women and children, I’ve found that it is important to tune our eardrums to the right frequency for actually hearing what mothers think. Once the misty emotional aura dissipates, mothers’ voices are usually among the most calm, sane and logical ones we will read or hear on any issue. And their opinions, like those of any other group, are diverse and unpredictable.

Take gun control. I would surmise that mothers whose children have been murdered by gun violence would scream out for very strict gun control laws. I, for one, would gleefully flip a switch right now if it would magically disable every firearm on Earth. I’d like to believe that all mothers think as I do. But, like the old Gershwin song says, it ain’t necessarily so. Individual mothers have varying things to say on the subject.

Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton–the mother of Hadiya Pendleton, who was murdered in a Chicago park just days after performing at Obama’s second inauguration—said recently that she does support “common sense measures” to control gun violence. “Something’s wrong with the way the laws are structured, perhaps,” she said in a press conference in March at the White House Easter Egg roll. Cowley-Pendleton is no political prop for gun-control advocates. She sounds as dispassionate, measured, and self-controlled as the president himself. I don’t know how she maintains such composure as she grieves for her daughter, but I do know that she is likely to win over more voters to gun control with her sanity than I would with my global-firearms-off-switch idea.

Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin, the teen slain in February 2012 says Trayvon’s killer is using Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law to try to escape accountability for the killing. Fulton said in an interview recently that she wants “some type of remedy…to try to prevent this from reoccurring.” In three sets of interviews, Fulton does not go into detail as to what remedy that might be. It is likely that she is well aware of the heavy toll that the enforcement of gun laws can take on black communities. Though it hasn’t been studied, community activists in cities like Chicago and Oakland say that more black youth than white gun owners wind up being incarcerated whenever new gun control laws are passed. Whether this is a factor for Fulton or not, it is clear she prefers to focus the public’s attention on bringing her son’s killer to justice rather than calling for any sweeping change in the law. I respect and support her for speaking out, although I don’t share her perspective.

When mothers act collectively, their power becomes concentrated and their message distilled to unmistakable clarity. At least two groups have emerged as collective voices for mothers for gun control laws following the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT in December: Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America is the major one. Their list of demands is short and simple, and their organizing follows the model of another effective older collective lobbying voice: Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Translating the grief of losing a child into an organized call for public policy change seems almost alchemically difficult; yet these moms pulled it off within a month of the shooting, mounting a legislative campaign that for the first time posed a true threat to the powerful gun lobby.

Which brings us to Mother’s Day: another monument to the sanity and toughness of American moms. First proposed in 1870 via an impassioned public proclamation by early feminist leader Julia Ward Howe, Mother’s Day was intended to be a day for mothers to pour into the streets to agitate for an end to war. For a long time I claimed to know the origin of Mother’s Day and cited Howe as its Founding Mother. I was wrong. Howe’s proclamation didn’t actually prompt the nation to begin observing Mothers’ Day. When Howe’s idea for a peace-activists’ holiday failed to take hold, Anna Jarvis took up the cause in memory of her own mother, who had founded Mothers’ Day Work Clubs in five cities to improve sanitary and health conditions and who had worked to reunite families after the Civil War. In 1914, following years of campaigning, Jarvis’ version of Mother’s Day was made a national observance by President Wilson, and we celebrate it on the second Sunday in May to this day.

But, unlike Howe’s passionate poetry, Jarvis’ gritty West Virginia version of the holiday brooked no sentimentality. She wanted a Mothers’ Day that was as solemn, quiet and honorable as the work her mother did to restore normalcy to war-ravaged cities. Instead, to her horror, people began sending their mothers greeting cards and flowers instead of actually visiting their mothers and working toward peace for Mothers’ Day. Though Jarvis never had children of her own, her ferocity about Mothers’ Day reveals a deep understanding of the ferocity of motherly love and the need for mothers’ voices to be heard.

Whether speaking alone, writing powerful poetry, or speaking collectively through lobbying for public policy changes, mothers deserve to be part of the record as we contemplate how to respond to world events. They play a role in their childrens’ lives, yes; but they are not blank cardboard cutouts with nurturing expressions and no political awareness. Public policies like immigration, war, gun control, and public safety laws help to carve the silhouettes of mothers’ lives. That should be enough to make us heed their actual words on the issues that affect them and their families.

Photo by Yuri Levchenko, licensed under a Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Sam Morril chose not to have that conversation for 13 days. When he did respond, on his Facebook, and after the article was published, he said – basically – that he had the right to offend people.

It’s hard to engage with Sam Morril’s response, because it is, among other things, a hash of cliches so thoroughly unoriginal, and so completely in line with what I described about this dynamic in my original piece, that there’s really nothing to say about it that I didn’t say four days ago, before it ever happened. “Comedy comes from dark places,” check. “Other comics tell rape jokes,” check. “You ambushed me,” check. “My mother thinks I’m funny,” check. (Also, awwwww.) “Political correctness police,” check and mate.

Likewise, engaging with Sam Morril’s fans, friends, and defenders seems pointless. There’s not a lot you can do to explain the ills of institutional sexism to guys who go with “humorless fucking bitch” or “bloody cunt” as their first response to mild questioning. Generally, people tend to know that those terms are sexist. Generally, people tend to know that insisting that women should shut the fuck up about sexual violence and let the men talk is widely considered a misogynist position. If they’re doing it, it’s not for lack of information about the perceived sexism of their behavior. Mostly, this is malice, not mere ignorance, doing the talking. And so, convincing these people that I’m not a wicked PC cunt out to take their fun away is like convincing a two-year-old there’s no monster under his bed. You can reason with him all you like, but he’s scared.

What Sam Morril thinks — and what his fans overwhelmingly think — of this conversation is that there shouldn’t be one. It’s something he states, more or less directly, in paragraph seven of his response: “Stand-up comedy is a performance, not a discourse. There are bouncers there whose sole purpose is to make sure our performance goes uninterrupted.”

Sam Morril’s performance, as it happens, did go more or less uninterrupted. What happened is that somebody wrote about it, after the fact, in a way that he didn’t like. But his confusion, here, is both interesting and telling: He doesn’t perceive a significant difference between a bad review and heckling. Both of them are the same thing – someone speaking, someone challenging him, when she doesn’t have the right and should be silent.

So what interests me is why this particular conversation is so threatening. Why it makes so many people so deeply angry that I asked Sam Morril questions, and printed his lack of response. This conversation gets to something deep, and primal, about who has the right to speak, especially about violence against women, and what they have the right to say.

On to Morril’s response. I won’t quote every line and every word – you can find the full version on his Facebook – but it begins:

First, let me say that I do not condone rape, and it is never my intention to write a joke that upsets people. I never write a joke thinking, “this’ll show ‘em.” I’m a comedian.

I don’t imagine Morril thinks it’s a great idea to go around raping women. He does think it’s a good idea to make jokes in which he portrays himself as someone who rapes women, and causes them physical harm, and finds it funny when bad things happen to them, which is what I questioned.

He also says that doesn’t intend to write jokes that upset people. In fact, Morril advertises himself as a comedian who upsets people, Tweeting about how he should have caution tape over his mouth in headshots, his bad effect on “unsuspecting audiences.” So we’re starting off with half the truth, but it’s a start.

[When] you paraphrase jokes on very delicate topics, you’re stripping them of their meaning and irony, the things that makes them funny. In my N word joke you referred to, you decided to leave out the punchline, which is pretty important when you’re quoting a joke, especially about such a sensitive topic. The punchline is that the crowd thinks: “We thought he was going to say the N word, then thank God…It’s just a rape joke.” It’s a moment of relief, but really it’s much worse. It’s a commentary on political correctness, not an approval of rape. Your reaction compounds the irony. My joke on political correctness brings out the political correctness police.

If Sam Morril felt that I misrepresented his joke, he had over a week in which to correct my quotation of the joke, because I wrote him an e-mail in which I quoted that joke, to which he did not respond until after the article was published.

You mention the “reasonable” and “intelligent” Louis CK. Well, Louis has plenty of jokes about rape. Ever heard the one? “You should never rape a woman…Unless you want to have sex with her and she wont let you…Then what other choice do you have?”
Many female comics joke about rape as well. Sarah Silverman has one: “I was raped by a doctor, which is so bittersweet for a Jewish girl.”

Well, I think I said “usually” reasonable and intelligent. I don’t think that joke is very good. Louis CK also written many other jokes that I do like, about sexism, about racism, and about people taking cell phones for granted. He’s proven that he can write three-dimensional, interesting female characters, for which I give him extra credit. (He’s also said, as readers have pointed out to me, that he didn’t intend to defend Tosh, for which he gets an apology and extra credit again.) Silverman isn’t someone whose work I follow closely, but she’s made me laugh, and I think she’s a smart woman, and I think some aspects of her act are subversive in a way I really like. If we’re talking jokes about rape that we like, I think Tig Notaro’s “No Moleste” is brilliant.

I take individual comedians, and individual jokes, on their individual merits. The point isn’t that some jokes contain the word “rape,” and are therefore all equally bad. The point is how those jokes work. I thought Morril’s jokes, and particularly Morril’s rape jokes, worked in a way that was specifically bad.

Do you understand that neither Louis nor Sarah approves of rape? Do find it necessary to send them the pages of rape statistics that you sent me?

Here’s the rub – the idea that someone must, by default, consciously and willfully “approve” of rape if they make a joke that supports attitudes which result in violence against women. The idea that those “pages of statistics” have no bearing or relevance to the jokes Sam Morril tells. The idea that being asked to look at them is, in itself, an insult.

What those “pages of statistics” say is that violence against women – both intimate partner violence and sexual assault; Morril only addresses one, but I asked him about both – are incredibly common. If 25% of all people reported being mugged, we’d declare a massive public safety crisis. If one in five Americans had influenza, every news channel would broadcast 24-hour coverage of the plague. But for women, those epidemic rates of assault – one in four, one in five – are the low numbers. Among more marginalized populations, they go up, until the survivors are actually in the majority.

What this means is that we live in a culture where hurting women, because they are women, has been largely normalized. There are assumptions ingrained in the culture that are allowing these huge numbers of gendered assault to exist. Because we live in culture, we absorb these harmful attitudes without realizing it. It’s not a fault or a sin or a sign of being an evil or consciously harmful person. It’s a sign of being a human in a culture that needs improving. A man who shares these attitudes is not “bad;” he is normal. But so is violence against women, and that’s the problem.

Most pernicious among these assumptions is the idea that violence against women is fundamentally not as serious or as tragic as harm done to other people. That having an emotional reaction to it, in fact, is the bigger problem: That women who get upset about this or even speak about it are “hypersensitive” or out of line.

One result of these attitudes is widespread violence against women. Another result is a man getting on stage and telling a series of jokes that end with the punchline “I have raped women,” or with harm done to women, with the expectation that he will not experience any serious blowback or criticism. A third result is the perception of that criticism, when it does arise, as a socially impermissible attack from a hypersensitive, out-of-line female who should have stayed quiet.

They’re not three instances of same thing. They’re three different things that arise from the same basic assumption. And the assumption is that violence against women is nothing to get angry about. It’s certainly not as worthy of mass outrage as, say, a comedian getting a bad review.

You conveniently left out the sentences in your initial first email where you wrote, “you really stood out from the other comics.” You wanted to engage with me so you pretended to be a fan by complimenting me. Very tricky!

Sam Morril did, in fact, stand out from the other comics, because he told two jokes, and the punchline of both was “I raped a woman.” As I said, that didn’t happen with the other comics. The assumption that a writer would only want to engage him if they were also “a fan” speaks to Sam Morril’s deeper assumption that the only appropriate or permissible response to his work is praise.

You completely misquoted a story I told to portray me as a misogynist or worse.

If Sam Morril felt that I had misunderstood or misremembered his story, he had eleven days in which to correct me, because I wrote him an e-mail which included my perception of the story, to which he did not respond.

There are lots of bad people out there who do evil things. I think your time would be better spent attacking them. Most of them have no sense of irony either. You clearly were not interested in having a conversation. For some reason, you chose me to ambush[.]

You might not want to use words like “attack” and “ambush” to refer to difficult interview questions or bad reviews, when you publicly giggle about raping chicks, and intersperse that with long stories about how a woman who told you to leave her friend alone wound up getting punched in the throat at your request. I’m just saying. That’s a little bit of irony you might not intend.

I got a Tweet from one of your readers 2 days ago saying, “someday I hope a man forcefully penetrates your asshole with their veiny cock. Rape jokes won’t be quite as funny after that.” Also, “or maybe your mother gets raped, or little sister. I don’t think you understand the culture you’re adding too.” Should I take that threat seriously? Do you condone this? Is that the kind of behavior you’re trying to motivate?

No, and I condemned it immediately after I read Sam Morril’s response. I’ll condemn it again now, and note that a large chunk of the original article was about the fact that wishing rape on someone is unacceptable.

I’ve yet to see Sam Morril denounce any misogynist, violent, or threatening comments aimed my way. He did do this, with one of them:

Woody Allen says, “Comedy is tragedy plus time.”

Again: Might not want to use the guy who fucks his kid as your personal Yoda. Just, you know, since “irony” is important here.

Comedy is an art form. We get paid to say whatever we want, and I’ve earned that right to do so on good stages by putting in work year after year, and proving I can do it well.

Well, aside from the debatability of that last point: Criticism is a job. We get paid to state our opinions, whether or not they flatter the subject. It looks as if Sam Morril and I are both doing our jobs.

The sad fact is, I think Sam Morril’s job is a lot more important than he does. An art form is inherently bound to its social context. It both mirrors culture and changes culture. If an artist believes that his work has no ability to influence or affect people, he believes his art is powerless. I think that believing art is impotent is far more insulting than believing that art can be harmful.

And Sam Morril’s art is harmful. This is a conclusion I’ve only really come to in reading his fans’ responses to the article, but, yes: Sam Morril harms people, particularly his fans.

To really talk about this, let’s talk about what great comedy is capable of. Louis CK points out common stupidities in a way that challenges his audience to become smarter, to think more closely about themselves. Sarah Silverman’s audacious crudeness challenges her audience’s ideas of femininity, of how a woman can present herself in public. Maria Bamford talks about having mental illness, and makes you laugh with her; Maria Bamford is one reason that more people in this world are willing to think about mental illness with empathy and nuance. Tig Notaro comes on stage and tells people she’s got cancer, her mother is dead, and her heart is broken, and then she turns tragedy and grief into catharsis. She asserts the power of great comedians to use the darkest and most frightening material to create joy.

Sam Morril inspires people, too. He inspires people to write “sounds to me like there were some bloody cunts in the show,and she didnt have the balls to confront you at a human level but instead hides behind here shitty writing and cuntness,long live rape jokes and fuck female cry babys.” He inspires them to say, “nothing like the profound wisdom of a humorless fucking bitch.” He inspires them to say, “could have been anyone of us but you were planted right in that estrogen warpath” and “she tires so easily — Ambien’s unnecessary.” Sam Morril inspires people to think about women getting raped and punched, and to laugh about that, and to respond to the people who aren’t laughing with open, openly misogynist rage. He inspires people to feel like sexism is just pretty darn okay, and a good way to have fun, and anyone who gets in the way of their fun, no matter how she does it, is some humorless crybaby bitch on her period who didn’t get asked to the prom and who’s probably been raped.

And it’s that – the assumption, or joke, that came back more than once in these comments, that I had only written the piece because I’d probably been sexually assaulted or “victimized,” despite my not having mentioned it once in the piece – that’s really my closing argument, when it comes to Sam Morril.

Because these comments — of which there was more than one — seemed to think that having been raped or assaulted made a woman less qualified to have an opinion on how sexual violence is portrayed in art. It was part of the general trend of how I was portrayed: Damaged, weak, emotional, irrational, stupid, “taking things personally” or letting my emotions cloud my silly little feather-brain so that I was incapable of truly appreciating the objective might of a man’s Art. These stereotypes are ancient. But what stands out, here, is that on top of the standard-issue “women are not smart or strong” sexism, the specific problem was that I might be a rape survivor. When someone writes that “I’d love to see the article she wrote for her first rapist” (as a commenter on Morril’s original post did), or “you were victimized at some point in your life, you’re angry at the world, and you’re super-jealous of people who are able to enjoy themselves,” as a commenter on this site did, the specific message they are sending is that survivors of rape and assault are stupid, bad, weak people. And being asked to think about them is ridiculous, and stupid, because they don’t matter.

The bottom line is: I know more about comedy than you.

Possibly.

I know more about funny than you do,

Oh, how I wish that were true.

and nothing was ever made funnier by political correctness.

But nothing was ever made smarter by refusing to think about it, and nothing was ever made worse by kindness, and no society or art form was ever destroyed by asking difficult questions, though plenty of terrible things have been caused by suppressing them.

Sam Morril makes bad art. And Sam Morril thinks he’s doing a super job.

Photo by Daehyun Park, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Rhimes is famous for the diversity of her casts and storylines, and Yang does not fit easily into a model minority stereotype although some might be tempted to stick her there. While on the surface she might seem to be a stereotypical high achieving Chinese-American, there’s more to Yang than that. Her Judaism is an important part of her character, as are her interpersonal relationships with the people around her, and while she is absolutely driven, academically and surgically talented, and an alpha woman, these traits are carefully depicted as being innate to Christina, not innate to Asian-American women—no Dragon Ladies here, thank you.

Yang’s career has risen and fallen over the course of the numerous seasons of Grey’s Anatomy as we’ve seen her achieve great feats, but sometimes be brought down by hubris. Thinking of herself as the best, she sometimes makes dangerous mistakes, or doesn’t think through situations clearly; it’s this, in part, that makes Yang such a compelling character. Her determination to be herself and stand up to authority gives her a spine of steel, and sometimes that gets her into trouble.

She’s also, par for the course with Rhimes’ tendencies toward soap opera, experienced some tumultuous personal relationships. Not just her complex, sometimes dark relationship with Meredith Grey, but also a series of relationships with surgeons who occupy strange roles as simultaneous mentors and lovers in storylines that raise uncomfortable questions about power dynamics. The latest incarnation has been the relationship between Yang and Doctor Owen Hunt, a trauma specialist with military experience who’s become the Chief of Surgery.

The relationship between Hunt and Yang has inevitably changed both characters. Yang learns a great deal about give and take in relationships, interrelating with people she loves, and finding out how people work. Her sometimes impetuous, devil-may-care approach doesn’t always work well with Hunt’s communication style, and she’s learned to adapt herself, to find new footing. Hunt, meanwhile, has learned that trying to muscle women around doesn’t necessarily work out.

Their relationship and later marriage has been strained by the usual Rhimes-induced tensions, like plane crashes, fights over patient care, and Yang’s brief determination to train elsewhere, but one of the biggest and most notable tests has cut to the core of Christina’s character, and to larger conversations about reproductive rights and autonomy, not just on Grey’s Anatomy but in the world in general: Hunt wants a child. Yang does not.

From almost the very beginning of the series, it’s been made clear to viewers that Yang has no interest in being a parent; she sees herself as a surgeon first, and rightly feels that she can’t give a child the attention and love she would deserve. As Yang puts it in a conversation with Hunt, “I don’t hate children. I think they should have parents who want them.”

This has been one of the parts of Yang’s characterisation that I love the most, as someone else who has also chosen not to have children, and who experiences social pressure as a result. In pop culture, childfree people are extremely unusual, and when we do appear, we’re usually converted by a pregnancy, a baby suddenly appearing in our lives, or some other outside factor. The message sent by pop culture is that childfree people don’t really exist; we just need some persuading to come over to the right side of things.

To see her maintaining firmly that she doesn’t want children over the course of multiple seasons (and in the face of pregnancy) has been a huge landmark for childfree people. Yang is committed. She doesn’t want children. She becomes a role model and a positive depiction to point to, which is a lot to load a character with, but she’s one of the few examples of a childfree character who remains consistently childfree, right down to telling Meredith that she doesn’t think she would make a good secondary guardian for her best friend’s children because she knows she can’t give them the lives they deserve; Yang says she’ll make a great aunt, but that Meredith’s children need a real mother in the event of Meredith’s death.

One of Yang’s more recent struggles involved a conflict between her and Hunt when she became pregnant and knew she wanted an abortion, triggering a massive falling-out between the characters. Hunt attempted to manipulate her into keeping the baby, using a variety of emotional tactics to compel her, but ultimately, Yang pointed out, “This isn’t pizza vs. Thai. You don’t give a little on a baby.”

She chose abortion. And with support from Meredith, she was able to convince Hunt it was the right choice—at least, so she thought, until he screamed loudly at her in a public place that she’d ‘killed his baby,’ highlighting a serious social issue. There are some who truly believe that abortion is murder, and Yang and Hunt’s relationship represents a collision of a terrible divide: a pro-choice independent woman making choices that are right for her and her body, and the man she loves, who believes that she killed a human being in a selfish act, depriving him of the opportunity of fatherhood.

In Rhimes’ portrayal, Hunt did not come out well. Viewers were clearly supposed to consider his behaviour over the line and inappropriate, to sympathise with Yang, to feel that she made the right choice, which she did. She doesn’t want children, we know she doesn’t want children, and thus, we cannot be surprised when, in the event of accidental pregnancy, she chooses abortion.

I’m worried, however, about the direction Yang has started to become over the most recent episodes of Grey’s Anatomy. While I expect characterisations to change over time, it seems that Rhimes and the writers are weakening Yang and diluting her essence in a way that’s toxic, damaging, and not true to her as a character. This isn’t Yang in the depths of depression, as we’ve seen in the past, or Yang making radical life changes.

This is Yang subverting who she is to please her partner, this is Yang considering a total flip of her beliefs and attitudes in order to keep Hunt satisfied, and it chills me to the bone. Not just on its face as a horrible thing to see in pop culture when we already see so much of it; how many strong, fantastic, independent women have we seen creators tear down, like River Song on Doctor Who?

But also because this is Christina Yang we are talking about, a woman who will go toe-to-toe with anyone or anything to fight for herself, her patients, and her friends. A woman with a strong core of self-integrity and very secure self-knowledge. A woman who knows herself, knows what she wants, and isn’t afraid to express herself. This is a woman who has remained emphatically Christina Yang through all Rhimes’ slings and arrows, and now we’re to believe that a man could casually undo all of that?

Grey’s Anatomy’s most recent multi-episode story arc revolves around Ethan, a young boy who’s been effectively temporarily orphaned; his parents were brought in to the hospital after a car accident, and his mother died of complications while his father remains unconscious after a cardiac event. His grandmother, meanwhile, thinks she can’t take care of him, and Ethan has bonded to Hunt like a limpet. Hunt looks after Ethan with puppy-dog eyes at every opportunity, and Yang’s stance on children seems to be undergoing a strange shift.

Lying in the on-call room at the end of the most recent episode, she calls Hunt on his baby fever, saying he seems to have changed his mind about children after she’d made it explicitly clear that a relationship with Christina Yang would come childfree. Hunt claims he wants her, but does he? He seems on a direct path to take Ethan in, and troublingly, it seems like Yang might be willing to give after all, staying with Hunt and becoming a foster parent.

Which would be an utter betrayal of everything she’s been over many, many seasons, and of her role as a childfree icon. This is the problem with having so few representations on television; if there were two dozen childfree characters on television, having one change her mind wouldn’t be remarkable. In fact, it would be a perfectly reasonable and accurate depiction, because some childfree people absolutely do change their minds and take children into their lives.

But when you have so few, and they all end up having kids, it starts to chafe. Especially in a case like this, where Yang has been so emphatic for so long, and has gracefully and beautifully explained why parenting is not for her. To have her go back on that now in order to please Hunt, thereby going against her earlier statement that a kid is not something you ‘give a little’ on, would be a terrible move, and it looks like Grey’s Anatomy might just be headed that way unless Ethan’s father wakes up, or Hunt makes a drastic decision and chooses Ethan over Christina.

And if he does, I doubt very much that the story will end there.

To understand how hard this was, for me, I should start at the beginning. Which was: On April 15, I went to a comedy show. The opener was one Sam Morril. And his opener, as per my notes, went as follows: “My ex-girlfriend never made me wear a condom. That’s huge. She was on the pill.” Pause. “Ambien.”

When Sam Morril tells a rape joke, he pauses for a moment, then says some variation on the phrase “that was a rape joke.” He invariably sounds both proud and delighted. I should know. I heard him do it several times.

And it went on. He saw a woman fighting with her boyfriend, and something bad happened to her, and she said it wasn’t funny, but it was. He bothered a girl at a bar, and her friend said that the girl wasn’t interested in him, so he eventually paid someone to punch the woman who had stopped him from hitting on her friend. (Sam Morril is apparently a big fan of stories about women getting physically hurt when they object to the concept of having sex with Sam Morril.) It wasn’t just the occasional rape joke, or the occasional self-congratulation for telling the rape joke, that made the set so exhausting. It was just the steady, relentless, predictable drone of a man whose only punchline was some variation on “I do not like women.” At one point, I flipped him off. Then I flipped him off again. Then my face started developing a nervous twitch. And then we hit the night’s highlight:

“Hey, I’m attracted to black women. Yeah, I had sex with one once.” (Once!) “It was kind of awkward, because the whole time I was fucking her, she kept using the N-word. Yeah, the whole time, she just kept yelling out, no!”

At that point, much like any of Sam Morril’s conscious ex-girlfriends, I just fastened my eyes to the ceiling and waited for him to finish amusing himself.

So I told my editor I was going to confront him. Something big, and rude, and embarrassing. I’d send him an e-mail – maybe I’d just quote a bunch of rape statistics, and ask him to rate how funny they were on a scale of 1 to 10 – and I’d wait to see if he responded.

I had a reason for being invested in his response. Last summer, the entire Internet had been set aflame by comedian Daniel Tosh essentially threatening a female audience member with rape for objecting to his rape jokes. She had a blog; she used the blog to relate what he’d said; Daniel Tosh, who had an entire show about the goddamn Internet, was apparently shocked and mortally wounded that someone in his audience had a blog.

Which would have been obnoxious enough on its own, without the stand-up comedians of the world rallying around Tosh. And yet, rally they did: Patton Oswalt referred to the woman as “some idiotic blogger,” and lamented that Tosh had been made to apologize to the woman he’d wished would be “raped by like two guys.” Dane Cook helpfully informed those who were offended by Tosh that “it’s best for everyone if you just kill yourself.” (After you get raped by the two guys, I guess. It’s a remarkably rough night Cook and Tosh had planned for that woman.) Even the normally reasonable and intelligent Louis C.K. got sucked into defending Tosh’s comments – although, thankfully, he didn’t go the route of Doug Stanhope, who hashtagged his Tweet about the controversy, simply, #FuckThatPig.

He was, yes, referring to the woman that Tosh had threatened. Because this is how it goes, between female comedy fans – especially feminists – and male stand-up comics. Let’s be entirely clear here: These are grown men who get paid money to stand in front of an audience and say, quite literally, whatever they want, as long as they think it’s funny. And yet when women talk back, especially if it’s not flattering, we’re “idiots,” pigs, better off raped, or better off dead. These guys grow up, go into entertainment, and then react to the presence of an audience as if it’s a form of armed robbery. But female comedy fans exist. We go to shows. In the age of social media, our microphones can be as big as any comic’s, or bigger. Why shouldn’t they hear what we have to say? More to the point: Why do they still act as if it’s avoidable?

Because they do. One year and approximately seventy thousand blog posts later, people were still hiring Sam Morril. Because, you know. What could possibly go wrong?

So, I wrote to my editor, I was going to do it differently. I was going to give him no possible chance to claim that he’d been ambushed, or stabbed in the back. I was going to find him. I was going to tell him exactly who I was – “My name’s Sady Doyle. I’m a feminist journalist and pop culture critic, and I attended your show on April 13,” is how I opened my first e-mail — and I was going to tell him that I planned to write about his show. I was going to do this whole thing as fairly as possible. While still, you know, planning to write an entire piece specifically for the fun of humiliating the guy in public.

He wrote back.

Lets do it, Sady! Shoot me the questions. Thanks for thinking of me.

Best,
Sam

It was at this point that the story changed. He’d responded. In fact, he’d responded almost right away. There was a chance I could actually talk to the guy. And so I started to have doubts about my initial premise. A list of rape stats and an invitation to rate them on the scale of humor: I could do that. I could send that. I could print that. It would have been splashy, and it would have made my point, and – moreover – I was absolutely certain that he would be unable to respond to it. He would look like a coward. I would look like a hero.

But it would have been a lie. It would have been worse than that: It would have been shitty journalism. I could game the system, pre-determine the outcome, give Sam Morril something he absolutely couldn’t respond to without looking like an asshole, and absolutely couldn’t ignore without looking weak, and then reveal to my readers – as if it were a surprise – that I’d managed to make the guy look bad. I would have looked brave to the outside world, while knowing deep down that I’d risked absolutely nothing. In point of fact, I would have been no better than a stand-up comic bullying an audience member for not laughing at his jokes. To do this thing right – to do it fair – I had to come to the table with the presumption of good faith. I didn’t have to pitch the guy softballs. But I had to give Sam Morril an honest chance to write back.

So I sat down. And I wrote the nicest e-mail I could manage.

Hi Sam –

Thanks for responding so quickly! And I’m sorry that I didn’t do the same. The fact is, I have one main question, and it is: What’s with all the rape jokes?

 

I know the relationship between feminists and stand-up comics can be notably contentious on the rape joke issue. (Think Tosh.) And to be blunt, I sent you the e-mail because your set made me really mad. That’s probably what you were going for. But instead of firing shots at each other from the safety and comfort of our personal Twitters, maybe it’s worthwhile to talk about it. This conversation tends to get stuck in one repeating pattern: Feminists say rape jokes are offensive, comics say they have the right to offend people, and we just keep repeating the same lines from that point forward. So, even though I would expect you won’t like some of these questions, maybe this is an opportunity to open a dialogue.

 

One in five women reports being sexually assaulted. For women of color, that number is much higher; one study says that over 50% of young black women are sexually assaulted. (One of your jokes: “I’m attracted to black women. I had sex with one once. The whole time I was fucking her, she kept using the n-word. Yeah, the whole time, she was yelling NO!”) On your Twitter, you warned people that they shouldn’t attend one particular set of yours if they’d recently had a miscarriage or been raped. So, like: Are you comfortable excluding that big a chunk of the population from your set? I always wonder this, about comedians who tell a lot of rape jokes. You presumably know that it happens. Do you know that it happens this often? Is it a realistic possibility, in your mind, that not just one but several of the women in your audience have experienced it?

 

It’s not just that. An even higher percentage of the female population, 1 in 4, reports having been assaulted by a partner. 30% of all murdered women are murdered by their partners. To be blunt: You make jokes about hitting women. You also make quite a few jokes about killing them. One extended bit was about getting someone to hit a girl who didn’t want you bothering her friend, because you “couldn’t” yourself. On your Twitter (paraphrasing here): “I would never hit a woman. Or push one. Out of the way of a moving bus.” The basic punchline in your set was, the girl got hit, and you caused it. The punchline in your Tweet is that a woman gets killed. The punchline in your extended series of Tweets about Pistorius: Girl gets killed.

But in your Tweet about the Boston Marathon, you write that “this violence is infuriating.” What’s the difference between the violence perpetrated at the Boston Marathon and the violence that will affect about one-quarter of all women during their lifetimes, and account for no small number of deaths? That’s not a set-up for a joke. I just want to know. Why is only one of those infuriating?

 

Finally, Sam: The two rape jokes I counted in your set weren’t just about the concept of rape. They were jokes in which the punchline was that you raped a woman. (That didn’t happen with any of the other comics on stage, even though I remember at least one other joke about domestic violence, and the host did a long riff about rape.) And then a story in which the punchline was that you indirectly assaulted a woman. Given these numbers, what’s the benefit of presenting yourself to an audience — which is likely to contain some women, and some assault victims — as someone with an interest in raping and hitting women? Even as a joke? Where’s your pay-off there?

 

And I want to stress: I actually do want to hear what you have to say here. People keep having the same fight, and nothing changes on either side. Maybe this is a chance to actually have a conversation. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

S.

To date, we have received no response from Sam Morril.

Photo by visual.dichotomy , licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Generic 2.0 license.