I was on bloggingheads.tv again, and this time I was a guest host! And I didn’t even talk about Israel/Palestine*! Squee! (Thank you, vacationing The Posner Show host Sarah Posner!)
I was really, really lucky and got to talk with Alyssa Rosenberg, who writes for Think Progress and The Atlantic and is easily one of my favorite pop culture writers (certainly one of the very few I follow regularly). We talked about women in pop culture, the economic incentives for the production of sexist entertainment, Louis C.K.’s response to Daniel Tosh’s “wouldn’t it be funny if she was gang-raped right now?” joke, and whether pop culture can in fact be separated from politics. I talked about talking with my kids about all this stuff, Alyssa talked about the importance of diversity in entertainment, and we agreed that problematic entertainment is far more interesting than homogeneity. Plus which, I suggested that even the mighty Joss Whedon (Firefly, Avengers) isn’t perfect—and posited that that’s okay! (And please note: I was wearing a Firefly tee as I posited that positing. I am a Browncoat).
Following is a three minute snippet. To watch the rest of the episode, please click through to The Posner Show at bloggingheads.tv (and again I say: Thank you Sarah! And thank you bloggingheads!)
*
Emily L. Hauser - In My Head 
dmf
/ July 20, 2012their bringing you back (and science saturdays!) is a welcome glimmer of hope on the web, now if you can just get the blogginghead in chief to leave the middle east coverage in your capable hands…
annoyedatpolitics
/ July 20, 2012Excited to listen to it when I’m no longer at work. Just FYI, the link is broken (at least for me, on Firefox) but I was able to find it.
emilylhauser
/ July 20, 2012GAH! Thank you so much for telling me! It was kind of a fraught evening, trying to figure out a way to get that little tiny thing up, with emails and efforts and failures and hair-pulling. I’m not surprised I linked to a bad link to my own blog at one point! Sigh.
Thank you! Fixt nao.
Paul Wartenberg
/ July 20, 2012Alyssa’s got a wonderful post in response to the tragedy in Colorado…
http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2012/07/20/553901/the-dark-knight-rises/
LizR
/ July 20, 2012This whole conversation was awesome, and I especially liked where you guys went with the idea that we need more female characters and more female-centric stories, because not every story is going to speak to every person. I really enjoy feminist criticism of media, but some of it can end up in a place where no media about women is good because its vision of womanhood doesn’t meet the impossible standard of speaking to the experience of every woman on the planet. The more media about women we have, the less the burden of representation is on each individual piece of media, and the more space I think there will be to enjoy things that are problematic while acknowledging their issues.
zlionsfan
/ July 20, 2012“This video is private.”
I haz a sad.