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I wonder if anyone else wept while reading Sunday's "Modern Love" column in the NYT, written by the husband of a paraplegic woman. Whenever I hear these amazing stories of unconditional love, I wonder what I would do if faced with such tragic circumstances. As the uninjured spouse, would I rise to the occasion and become the selfless caretaker able to handle my beloved's involuntary bowel movements in bed and loss of sexual sensation? If I were the injured spouse, would I even want my husband to spend the rest of our lives taking care of me and cleaning up after me, all the while knowing that he will never be able to experience mutually satisfying physical love with me again? Or would I be like the wife in the article and wonder how long I could go on in my altered physical state? Would I consider assisted suicide a better option than lifetime dependency? If allowing oneself to fall madly in love with someone with no guarantees that he/she will not treat your heart like a doormat is among life's biggest risks, allowing that person to regularly see you at your most vulnerable and least physically appealing state has got to be the ultimate expression of trust. I guess that's a husband-and-wife thing that totally amazes a single person like me.
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Margaret and Marjorie, we're framily and all, but yikes do I disagree with you about the finale of The L Word. My feeling? Thank Sappho that's over! I hate to quote a man right now, but I'm with James Wolcott: The episode "set lesbianism and the art of storytelling back about fifty years."
Coming into this final season, you'd think I would have learned not to expect basic narrative cohesion or even entertainment from The L Word, but Season 6 failed to meet even my barely there standards. It was, in short, an utter abomination.
Yes, Jennifer Beals is magnificent (the suit she wore in the cast's final strut across the screen almost made the whole nightmare worthwhile), and Laurel Holloman can act, as can the gorgeous Rachel Shelley (naturally, she was given nothing to do all year except drink and stare into the middle distance), but I feel certain I could've gotten just as much out of this season if I'd watched the whole thing with my finger on the fast-forward button.
But you know what really annoys me? The final season of The L Word failed to obey the fundamental law of Showtime. Showtime is the poor woman's premium cable channel (actually, the rich woman's, since it's truly elective—HBO is what you get if you can afford only one premium option), but it long ago came up with a winning formula: Don't worry so much about a script, just cast a bunch of attractive people with nice bodies and have them go at it on a regular basis. (I stuck with Showtime for five seasons of Soul Food, and believe me, it wasn't for the story lines.) The final eight episodes of The L Word might as well have played on network TV for all the skin we saw—it was as if they were pre-censored for their second run on Logo.
Many people have observed that network television's gay and lesbian characters never get to have sex, but I didn't imagine that their cable siblings would be similarly deprived. Thank heaven for Bette and Tina's final-episode bedroom scene. It was over in an instant, and we viewers glimpsed nary a nipple, but at least it was there, and at least they enjoyed it.
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Margaret, like you, I will miss the gal pals of The L Word and loved spending Sunday nights with them. Although I've read about the show's straight male fans (no surprise there; we all know that watching beautiful women make out is the ultimate cliché guy fantasy), I wondered how many straight women like me watched the show and found the characters entirely relatable despite our differences in sexual orientation. Not that a world of only beautiful, perfectly coiffed, no-body-fat-having, lipstick lesbians actually exists anywhere outside of Hollywood, but their heartbreak over relationships gone wrong, their struggles to find respect and equality in male-dominated workplaces, and their quest to find love and meaning in their lives are things that most women understand.
I admit, though, that I never got into Max's transition from female to male, and unlike you, I found the baby shower scene entirely unbelievable. No strongly self-identified man as the bearded Max, who was clearly distressed about his pregnancy and abandonment by his scared-off lover, could stomach such a silly, girly, frilly baby-shower. And it seemed out of character, and a bit insensitive, for the highly sensitive lez girls to subject Max to an event so closely linked to female identity—birth and motherhood. Still, I wished the finale might have had Max giving birth and turning the baby over to Tina and Bette.
I, too, was happy to see the infuriating but sometimes sympathetic Jenny get her comeuppance, but I'm not sure she was killed off. (Alice seemed too genuinely upset to be the murderer.) I wondered if Jenny offed herself as the ultimate expression of her narcissism. The way she signed off on the video she made for Tina and Bette was very ominous, don't you think? And her character had always been self-destructive and sometimes highly emotionally unbalanced. (Wasn't she a suicidal self-cutter early on?)
The L Word, like Queer as Folk before it, was a pleasant antidote to the stereotypical one-dimensional depiction of gay people we sometimes see on the small screen. I liked and accepted the girls and I want to believe that they would have felt and done the same for me.
So what's a committed cable-watcher like me to do now that my favorite lez girls have gone the way of Sex and the City's Samantha, Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte? Wait for the movie?
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We're not the only ones obsessed with Michelle Obama's guns. Here's this week's New Yorker cover via Jezebel. Her arms are conspicuously covered in every frock! Is The New Yorker scared of Michelle's bold sensuality, just like David Brooks is?
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ABC's Castle starts tonight, starring swoony Nathan Fillion as a best-selling crime author who teams up with a tough female detective (Stana Katic) who doesn't want anything to do with him and so, of course, is stuck with him, likely forever. In Will-They-Won't-They shows like this (or since they always "will" eventually, they're really Will-They-When-They shows), the chemistry is all that matters, and these two only sort-of have it. Fillion is smarmy, charming, slutty, and light-hearted, and so, in the grand tradition of opposites attract, Katic's character is anal, uptight, and emotionally shut down. In other words, she's a bummer, which doesn't exactly help them steam up the screen.
This premise—dude's a loosey-goosey ham; gal's a borderline shrew—has become the de facto setup for these shows going back to the ur-WTWT series Moonlighting. In it Bruce Willis played the most charismatic, lovable sax-playing detective ever to grace a television set and Cybill Shepherd his extremely hot straight (wo)man. Most of the programs that have followed in Moonlighting's footsteps have cribbed this formula—wacky guy, grounded girl—from X-Files to Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman to House and The Mentalist. (On Bones, the woman is the wacky protagonist, but the fella's still the fun one. Part of Bones' wackiness is that she's a humorless workaholic.)
Clearly this formula can work—Moonlighting remains an exuberantly silly, entertaining, and cutting-edge show that prefigured both the dramedy and single-camera comedy by about two decades. (It also combusted after three seasons because WTWTs aren't really designed to last much longer, even though the various networks keep pretending otherwise.) When it does work, it's usually because the writing and acting flesh out the female characters so they're more than just a drag. (Scully, obviously, rules, as does Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally.) But when it doesn't, as with Castle, it's not just the female lead, but the whole show, that's the bummer.
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Selena Roberts has an uplifting column in this week's Sports Illustrated. Her subject is a girls high school basketball player in Massachusetts who broke Rebecca Lobo's state career scoring record, scored 51 of her team's 57 points in their final game this season, and earned a scholarship to Memphis next season. All interesting stuff, but what warrants this player primo real estate in SI? Bilqis Abdul-Qaadir "is expected to become the first Islamic player in NCAA Division I history to take the basketball in full [Muslim] dress," including a head scarf next season.
Abdul-Qaadir doesn't shroud herself in a burqa, but she does cover her arms and legs underneath her uniform—she's ever-grateful for Under Armour, she says—and, far worse, she endured taunts of "terrorist" early in her career.
What strikes me about her is not just how she's accomplished so much in the face of such challenges but how grounded she is. She's happy to answer sincere questions about her religion; just don't ask her if she's wearing a tablecloth on her head. (I watched this video of her breaking the scoring record, and, while her "full dress" doesn't look different from what a runner might wear in a late-fall cross country race or early-spring track meet, it's easy to imagine how hard it is to be "different" in high school.)
I'm the first to admit that I'm a little bit sexist as a sports fan. I've been to a handful of WNBA games, and I usually at least pay mild attention to the women's Final Four, but my autumn Saturdays are spent finding the best football game on my cable package, and I'll spend hours researching my March Madness bracket. But I'll be checking in on Bilquis when she takes the court next season.
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Your question is valid, Jessica; comfort indeed breeds complacency, but that's not all bad. Your cohort has benefited greatly from movements and legal challenges brought by your mothers and grandmothers, and the indignities you did not suffer afford you a deep sense of security in your rights and opportunities (not to mention safe, sterile abortions). Your forebears' storm-the-barricades protests resulted in the confident, educated, creative, and self-aware women of your generation. Lacking belly fire on issues you consider long-settled does not mean that you are a bunch of wimps, however. Boomers are entirely too invested in their own methods. You will fight your ideological battles in your own style, bringing cool-headed aptitude and intelligence to challenges that, inevitably, will need to be overcome.
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I’m with you, Dayo. I cannot quite believe we are entering the third week of sleevegate, wherein America cannot find anything more interesting to pick over than Michelle Obama’s right to bare arms. You’re correct that Maureen Dowd’s fainthearted “defense” this weekend was hard to follow. She sets up David Brooks as the Neanderthal who finds the first lady’s display “ostentatious” but then half piles-on, smirking that “the only bracing symbol of American strength right now is the image of Michelle Obama’s sculpted biceps. Her husband urges bold action, but it is Michelle who looks as though she could easily wind up and punch out Rush Limbaugh.”
I keep wondering if her critics have a problem with Michelle Obama because she's too sexy, as they say, or because she has pretty much flushed the glamour rulebook down the toilet. Unlike past political glamazons, from Nancy Reagan to Sarah Palin, Mrs. Obama doesn’t meet a fashion rule she hasn’t busted. It’s not just that she shows her arms instead of her gams (a la Palin) or the high-lowbrow fashion mix (shocking!) even Dowd grudgiungly admires. It’s more that she just doesn’t seem to care what any of us think of her, including America’s Next Top Model, David Brooks. And that must be driving Washington mental.
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Emily, I read that same article about abortion clinics having trouble restaffing, and what stuck out was this quote about my generation from Hope clinic Executive Director Sally Burgess:
Younger women have always had access to abortion care, they don’t fully appreciate the battle that was fought to have it available to them. And more important, I don’t think they know how precarious the option is at this point, even with Obama’s election. ... What I observe for women in their 20s and 30s—there are fewer who really have the fire in the belly for this.
It reminded me of the comments from lesbian separatist Lamar Van Dyke in The New Yorker a few weeks back about the lack of radicalism in young people today as compared with the '60s and '70s. And I still wonder: Is it just boomer posturing, or are we really a generation without "fire in the belly"?
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Read Liaquat Ahamed's op-ed in the NYT on Sunday, and see if you don't wake up at 3 a.m. with night terrors. Ahamed is the author of Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, which is about how decisions by the economic leaders of the last century led to the Great Depression. In his op-ed, Ahamed says that the current economic meltdown has been catastrophic for the nascent democracies of Eastern Europe and that Europe is too fractured to exercise the political will to rescue them. As you cast your mind back over the 20th century, you will recall that European economic instability has spawned the kind of leaders and social movements that resulted in unprecedented death and destruction. Let's hope we're not at the edge of another abyss.
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The NYT worried this weekend, in the Style section, about the graying of the cadre of abortion counselors who have done battle for access to the procedure since the 1970s. They're the women who worked out of fortress-like buildings, in out of the way places, where protesters made sure the job was never hassle-free—and sometimes physically risky. The article correctly pointed out that a new generation of counselors and doctors is filling these positions in big cities but not rural areas. That's especially true in swathes of the South and Midwest. The director of Planned Parenthood for South Dakota is also the director for Minnesota and one other state.
This map has for a while made me wonder: Are buses and planes the future of national access to abortion? Should the groups that support making the procedure available raise money to pay for women to travel to the cities where clinics aren't under seige, and counselors and doctors don't have to be pioneering true believers to work there? It's a strategy that wouldn't further the mission to fulfill Roe by making abortion available everywhere across the country. It would add to the travel burden some rural women seeking abortions already face. And so it's unlikely to appeal to the abortion-rights groups. Unless and until they really can't staff the outposts. At that point, maybe there will be a new rallying cry: The Roe Bus, coming to take you away.
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A guest post from intern Margaret Johnson:
Sam, I was psyched to watch Being Erica Thursday night after your glowing recommendation, but I was on a plane at the time, and JetBlue's 36 channels of Direct TV apparently do not include the Soap Network. Guess I'll have to wait for next week.
But speaking of girl crushes, last night Showtime aired the series finale of The L Word. And while I won't be so sad to see Jenny (Mia Kirschner) finally go, I will miss the rest of cable's loveliest lesbians. Sure, their creators have made some missteps over the show's six seasons, including some criminally bad writing—the debut episodes of Seasons 4 and 6 come to mind—and the carnival flashbacks that terrify for all the wrong reasons. The show has also taken heat for casting only a few real lesbians and for making the whole cast so—gasp—pretty! (Creator Ilene Chaiken's response to the latter criticism: "You wouldn't have watched the show if they weren't.")
In my book, though, the L Word's accomplishments far outweigh its shortcomings. First of all, it brought Jennifer Beals back into our lives. Secondly, one word: Carmen. The show also deserves kudos for clarifying points sometimes misunderstood elsewhere—see Season 2's endearingly awkward discussion between the cast and Gloria Steinem on how not all feminists are lesbians, and vice versa—and just for some moments of great television, like the tragicomic chaos of last week's baby shower for Max.
Rumor has it we're in for a spinoff that has quirky Alice (gay golden-girl Leisha Hailey) in prison. (Can she really have murdered Jenny? Discuss.) I wouldn't put it past her to smuggle in a dry-erase board and some expo markers and link everyone in the pen into one happily charted family.