The XX Factor

Seventies-era tennis star Jimmy Connors has a new autobiography out, and he's using it to take some nasty jabs at his former girlfriend and fellow tennis champion Chris Evert. Jessica Luther of the Atlantic explains:

“But now, 35 years later, Connors is releasing a biography this week titled The Outsider, in which he strongly hints that during their whirlwind affair in 1974, Evert got pregnant and had an abortion. He says that she did so without allowing him to be part of the decision-making, though he states that he ‘was perfectly happy to let nature take its course and accept responsibility for what was to come.’ He bitterly writes to Evert in the book, ‘Well, thanks for letting me know. Since I don't have a say in the matter, I guess I am just here to help.’”

Though in the book Connors indicates that he made that last remark to Evert over the phone, Luther’s larger point stands: Connors is trying to shame Evert by making a spectacle of her private reproductive choices. And while Evert shouldn’t need a defense either way, the memoir seems fantastically unwilling to acknowledge that a tennis star at the top of her game has good reasons for not wanting to be pregnant. Instead, Connors comes close to implying that his then-girlfriend’s decision to abort resulted from a misunderstanding of his intentions, when in fact he “was perfectly happy to let nature take its course and accept responsibility for what was to come.” (He’s just as glib and self-aggrandizing about other sources of tension, such as Evert’s pesky desire to be comforted after a loss. Those headaches go to show you, he writes, that “You can’t have two number ones in a relationship.”)

There’s a callousness to the way Connors sandwiches details about the abortion in between his tennis results. “That all happened during one of only two pro tournaments I didn’t win in 1974,” he contextualizes, in a line so unselfconsciously self-absorbed it led one Slate colleague to wonder if he suffered from Asperger Syndrome. Even if part of his pique stemmed  from being asked to “handle the details” of the procedure, without having a say in whether it happened or not, it’s hard to take him seriously as a spokesman for the notion of equal partnership. (“You can’t have two number ones,” etc). If, in some magical alternate reality, the young Jimmy Connors had gotten pregnant, are we to imagine he would have waited a second before enlisting Evert’s help in taking whatever steps he thought best?

Maybe we should thank Connors for underscoring why it’s important for women to have the right to unilaterally choose abortion. No man should have a glimmer of a wisp of an opportunity to pressure you into giving him a baby that will tie you to him forever, especially if he can act as caddish as the “Brash Basher of Belleville.”  

In a statement released on May 9, Chris Evert seemed understandably upset:

"In his book, Jimmy Connors has written about a time in our relationship that was very personal and emotionally painful. I am extremely disappointed that he used the book to misrepresent a private matter that took place 40 years ago and made it public, without my knowledge. I hope everyone can understand that I have no further comment."

Here’s how I would have phrased it:

Look, Jimmy, it's totally unfair that some of us can get pregnant and some of us can only impregnate. But in the grand scheme of things, this system brought to us by mindless evolution is much more unfair to women than men. Not only do women have to undergo the indignities of menstruation and routine gynecological care, but if we do get pregnant, we're the ones who either endure the abortion or have our bodies painfully bent out of shape to bear the child. In exchange, we get decision-making power over those pregnancies. Full stop. The alternative—giving a man the right to force childbirth or force abortion simply because he once had sex with you—is too terrible a violation of human rights to be tolerated in a civilized society.

So stop whining already. You sound like McEnroe.

We're coming down the home stretch of the third season of Game of Thrones, with two hopefully-climactic episodes to go. And while it remains to be seen who will be left at the top of the heap, given that the last two seasons ended in the rebirth of dragons and a very firey defense of King's Landing, here's where the Lady Power Rankings stand as of this week:

1. Daenerys Targaryen: There's skill, like knowing how to keep your temper when gross dude-bro sellswords treat you like a prostitute, or building up a daunting army with your wits. And then there's luck, like having a romance novel cover model kill your enemies, tell you that your beauty means everything to him, and offer up 2,000 highly trained soldiers to join your forces. If I were Dany, I'd head for Vegas instead of Westeros right now, because everything's coming up Targaryen.

2. Melisandre: If Dany's getting lucky outside of Yunkai, Melisandre appears to have wrangled herself the best job in the seven kingdoms: having sex with cute guys and using their blood to cast whammies on her enemies. And not only is Stannis Baratheon firmly in her camp ("I never believed,” he explains to Davos Seaworth, “but when you see the truth when it’s right there in front of you, as real as these iron bars, how can you deny her God is real?”) but Davos has made peace. With internal obstacles to her power resolved, Melisandre seems positioned to become a major player.

3. Cersei Lannister: She may be stuck trying to make conversation with her super-gay husband-to-be, Loras Tyrell, and trying to restrain her total monster of a son from sexually harassing his new aunt at her wedding. But at least Cersei gets to have a lot of fun threatening her future sister-in-law with stories of Lord Rain of Castamere, who "built a castle as grand as Casterly Rock. He gave his wife diamonds larger than any my mother ever wore. And finally, he rebelled against my father. Do you know where House Rain is now?...Slaughtered.” And unlike the Tyrells, her plans haven't taken a major hit.

4. Lady Olenna Redwyne: When you're stuck trying to figure out the screwed-up genealogy of your new relatives rather than putting plots into place, you're having a bad week. But at least, unlike her grandchildren, Lady Olenna doesn't have to marry into the Lannister family, so that's something.

5. Margaery Tyrell: Margaery's charm reaches its limits this week when, after trying to flatter Cersei Lannister, the older woman tells her “If you ever call me sister again, I’ll have you strangled in your sleep.” Her total beast of a future husband, Joffrey Baratheon, would rather threaten Sansa Stark with rape at her own wedding than talk to Margaery. And her beloved brother is depressed. None of this takes away from Margaery's skill set. But she's playing a cold hand right now. 

6. Arya Stark: Running away from the Brotherhood Without Banners proved to be a bad call for Arya last week when she wound up in custody of the Hound. But after she considers bashing his head in with a rock, it turns out that Arya may have hit some serious good luck. "There’s plenty worse than me," Sandor Clegane tells her when she pouts at him. "There’s men who like to beat little girls. Men who like to rape them. I saved your sister from some of them.” And it's not just the Hound's remaining decency that's on Arya's side. Having quit the Lannisters' service, he needs an alternative income source, and his best chance at that is ransoming Arya back to her family.

7. Sansa Stark: When the best thing to happen to you at your horribly depressing wedding is that your husband makes a joke while telling you he won't maritally rape you, you are not doing well. Let's hope Sansa doesn't start hitting the flagon regularly.

8. Gilly: Gilly's luck actually proves better than Sansa's this week, as Samwell Tarly turns out to be better with an obsidian dagger than he is with, well, anything else. But she's still beyond the wall, Winter is still coming, and ice zombies are still coming for her baby.

I’ve never felt more scrutinized by strangers than when I was pregnant. During my third trimester my body felt like public property. Sometimes this was pleasant—older women on the subway would chat me up about my impending arrival. Often it was less so. People I passed on the street wouldn’t meet my eye, they’d stare right at my stomach. Once, a man leered at me, which felt much more invasive than cat calls did before I was with child. I suppose it’s because I had no control over the way my body looked, and I felt much more vulnerable than usual because I had a helpless baby I was supposed to be protecting.

If I felt so exposed as a knocked-up nobody, I can only imagine how bizarre it feels to be pregnant as a famous person. Which is to say that the language and insane press coverage around pregnant women on the red carpet—featured in this weekend’s New York Times—is not entirely a positive thing. Certainly it’s great that women feel like they no longer have to hide for nine months because they’re pregnant, and it’s additionally wonderful that celebrities are excited to find a style that suits their altered shape. But the obsession with pregnant stars—the scrutiny of their weight, the weird disembodied discussion of their “bumps,” the endless tracking of their shape the second their children exit the womb—is completely creepy, and it’s only getting worse.

It’s telling that the Times piece, which pretty much entirely skirts the creepiness issue, mentions an academic paper about pregnant celebrities called “The Baby Bump is the New Birkin,” [PDF] and misses its point entirely. The Times very selectively quotes that paper, making it sound like body-conscious pregnancy fashion is good for women. But in fact, the paper’s thesis is as follows:

“No matter how fashion-forward these celebrities are, media coverage of their pregnancies stops short of its emancipatory promise: Tabloids and glossy magazines watch and judge these pregnant bodies. Given that celebrities provide models of fashion that everyday women try to emulate, the sexy new baby bump establishes standards of pregnant and post-baby female beauty that are unattainable—perhaps even undesirable—to most.”

Furthermore, the obsession with pregnant celebrities makes the very average experience of motherhood seem freakish. A few weeks ago, Us Weekly used the headline, “Kate Middleton Parades Baby Bump in Clingy Dress, Bonds with Dog.” So basically this headline is about a woman walking a dog. But, because she’s pregnant, she “parades” her “baby bump in a clingy dress.” It’s perverse that the more visible pregnant women become, the more they’re objectified, and the more absolutely defined by their “bumps” they are than ever before. If a pregnant celebrity feels good in a body-con dress while gestating, more power to her. But I long for the day when there doesn’t have to be a New York Times article deconstructing it.

Proponents of legal abortion could not make up a more heartbreaking scenario to prove their point. Beatriz (not her real name) is 22 years old with a one-year-old son. She has both lupus and kidney failure.

She is also 23 weeks pregnant with a non-viable fetus. The fetus is anencephalic, which means that if the pregnancy comes to term, the baby will be born with half a brain.

Beatriz’s doctors have advised her to get an abortion because the pregnancy is interfering with her chances of treatment and, ultimately, survival. Problem is, Beatriz lives in El Salvador, where abortion has been illegal since 1998. If she goes ahead with an abortion, both she and her provider will be subject to criminal sanctions, which may include prison terms of up to 10 years. According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, 46 Salvadoran women have already been charged with illegal abortions; of those convicted, three are serving prison sentences.

As moving as this predicament is, it has not swayed the Catholic Church. José Luis Escobar, Archbishop of San Salvador said, referring to Beatriz potentially getting an abortion, “it’s incredible, it’s inhuman, it’s against nature.” He added, “Sure, she [Beatriz] has health problems, but she’s not in grave danger of death. Since we need to consider both lives we need to ask, whose life is in greater danger. We think that the fetus is in greater danger.” It should be noted that most anencephalic fetuses die in utero before coming to term. If an anencephalic fetus does make it to term, it is not likely to survive the first few days after birth.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have both weighed in on the case, demanding that the Salvadoran government exempt Beatriz from the abortion prohibition.  So has the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the U.N. body overseeing human rights violations in Latin America.

Beatriz first requested an abortion in March. In April, her lawyers appealed to the country’s highest court asking that Beatriz receive a therapeutic abortion. (A therapeutic abortion exception has never been approved since the ban was put in place.) The Supreme Court accepted the case and convened to hear it this week. But yesterday, instead of resolving the issue, the Salvadoran high court kicked the can down the road. They said they needed an additional 15 days to review the suit.

Beatriz will enter the third trimester of her pregnancy in two weeks. Even if the Court issues a positive decision, they are putting her health and life in greater danger: the more advanced a pregnancy, the riskier the abortion procedure. With each day that goes by, Beatriz’s pregnancy is progressing and the case for legal abortion is strengthening. It remains to be seen if the Supreme Court of El Salvador is listening.

Last night at the Tampa Bay Rays stadium, 9-year-old Alayna Adams, whose father has been deployed in Afghanistan for the past year, threw out the first pitch only to discover the man in the catcher’s mask was actually her father, Lt. Col. Will Adams. I’m still wiping my eyes at the sight of this long-legged sprite rushing in joy and shock to his arms. But I wish I’d never seen the video, and that the people in the stadium had not been allowed to be voyeurs. Though I know these reunions are staged for the best motives, a parent’s return should not come as a shock to the kids.

The children of our military personnel bear a heavy burden. They deal with the long absences of a beloved parent. They endure the gnawing fear that one day there will be a surprise—a stranger in uniform walking up the front steps to deliver awful news. A parent serving in the military is not the same as a parent on an extended business trip. Even the expected return of a military parent who may have been gone for a year can be overwhelming. It seems unwise to surprise these children as if springing a trip to Disneyland on them. This post explains that an unexpected return can have all sorts of negative ripple effects, from encouraging a child’s belief in the power of his or her own magical thinking, to causing pain for kids whose parents are not scheduled to come home (or who may never return), to undermining the sense that school is a stable, reliable place.

The surprise return has become such a staple that it’s even spawned two reality show series, Lifetime’s Coming Home and TLC’s Surprise Homecoming. As a Washington Post story critical of these reunions points out, both shows were done in cooperation with the military. ABC’s Good Morning America shows reunion clips (some from homecomings they've helped arrange) to give viewers a quick fix of warmed hearts and jerked tears. A site devoted to surprise returns offers a “best of” reel, presumably using a Richter scale-type measurement of amazement and weeping. The surprises can be elaborate—Mom emerging from a giant gift box at a school assembly, Dad whipping off his Darth Vader costume. But military homecomings are complicated emotional events, especially for children, and turning them into public spectacles in front of classmates or strangers can add to the stress.

I’ve only been able to watch a few of these videos. I’ve found myself turning away from the rawness of the emotion. I feel like an intruder seeing the children’s overwhelming relief, their uncontrollable sobbing. Our commander in chief has done such a good job as a father keeping his children out of the public eye and giving them the privacy they need. I wish this administration would encourage the military commanders to put out word that the children of returning service members deserve to reconnect in a safe, private space.

Yesterday, Lenore Skenazy wrote this article about why it's important to take young children outside and then leave them unsupervised.

The idea is that at around 10 a.m. parents take their kids to ... their local park. And then they leave them there ...

If they're at least seven or eight years old, why NOT leave them there with the other kids gathering? It could be their first chance to finally do that thing we did as kids without thinking twice: Play.

As the author of a new book about my experience as a dad, I'd like to counter Skenazy's argument by saying to you other parents there: Please, don't leave your stupid kid alone at the park.

First of all, what kind of park are we talking about? There are different kinds of parks, you know. If you live in a gated community in Idaho and there's a small playground at the end of your cul-de-sac, that's a wee bit different than dropping off your kid at an Upper West Side kiddie war zone. There are THOUSANDS of children at those parks, all jostling for sandbox time and plugging up the swirly slide. No responsible human being just leaves a first grader at this kind of park for hours at a time. That's lunacy.

More important, leaving your stupid kid at the park means I'm the one who ends up having to deal with him when he decides to put someone else's dog in the baby swing. Where are you, Miss Enlightened? Who's gonna make this little idiot come correct? If you want a nanny, pay me. There are kids of all ages at these parks. Those of us with younger kids HAVE to watch over them. And when your stupid kid steps on their head to commandeer the monkey bars, what then? Two seven-year-olds should be able to resolve their own conflicts on a playground. But an unsupervised tussle between your seven-year-old and a two-year-old ends up with my kid being thrown over a railing. You, Miss Hippy Dippy, should at least be NEARBY, so that I can grab you and tell you that your child won't stop piledriving babies into the mulch.  You can't just go have lunch at Panera and expect anyone to congratulate you for it.

I agree with Skenazy that kids that age should be left alone to play and build their imaginary princess forts and all that. But her solution to just abandon a seven-year-old for a day isn't the right one. Many Americans live in neighborhoods where the infrastructure inherently presents more hazards for a child playing alone. Maybe I want my kid to bike to the park, only there are no sidewalks to get there. Maybe they have to traverse a four-lane highway and cross a Wal Mart parking lot to get there.  The reason too many kids stay indoors these days is because many exurban areas are set up in a way that actively encourages it.  If you live on a farm, you can let your kids out the door in the morning and then go ring the dinner bell for them to come in at 5pm.  We do not all live on farms.

A seven-year-old isn't old enough to bike down to some park alone. A ten-year-old? Fine. I get that. Ten-year-olds are big and strong and annoying. But a younger child should have unsupervised play in a less crowded, less hazardous area: a backyard, a basement, a school recess. You have to have some measure of common sense about what kind of environment you're leaving your kid in. And you have to be a good judge of what the right age is for fully unsupervised play in the environment you're dealing with. When I was twelve, I used to bike down a railroad track to town to go rent video games and steal Playboys. Twelve is a good age for that sort of thing. I would not suggest an eight-year-old do that. He wouldn't appreciate the Playboy as much anyway.

There is definitely an obesity crisis in America right now, and shutting in your kids doesn't help matters much. But Skenazy's "just leave them!" proposal is an airy fairy idea that doesn't take into account where you live and how your community is set up. Many of us CAN'T leave kids to play on their own, and there are legitimate reasons why. Those are the deeper issues that need fixing. Kids need better places to play than what they have now. You are not kickstarting a revolution by adding the extra twist of you being twenty miles away. 

Whenever a new acquaintance learns that I report on porn sets, I end up fielding a similar line of questioning about What It’s Like. Are the performers trapped? Are they hurt? Coerced? On drugs? Do they have no other options? Are they dumb?

Most of those questions have easy answers—it's usually “no”—but it’s difficult to communicate the full lives and experiences of a diverse group of people working in an industry steeped in public fascination and shame. Now, I can tell them to buy a ticket to I Love Your Work, a new online documentary that follows the lives of nine women over ten days of shooting a lesbian porn film in New York City in 2010. Jonathan Harris, 33, followed these women from wake to sleep, capturing ten-second video clips every five minutes of whatever they happened to be doing—taking the subway, sharing their wedding photos, putting on their shoes, discussing their tattoos, debating feminism, talking about frogs, walking in the park, undressing for the camera. Then, he compiled the footage into a six-hour interactive experience, and offered it up to viewers for $10 for a 24 window of access. (You can watch the trailer here). I talked to Harris, 33, about his experience making the documentary.

Slate: You followed nine women working on the set of a lesbian porn film. Why did you choose to focus on this particular set of people?

Jonathan Harris: I think porn plays a complicated role in many of our lives. Most men (and many women) watch porn, but very few admit it. It is simultaneously ubiquitous and hidden.  For most of us, porn is a series of fantasies, engineered to make us feel aroused, always slightly out of reach, and usually experienced in private.  I wanted to understand the realities of the people who produce those fantasies.  I wondered what their fantasies would be like. I wondered what it was like for them to be objects of anonymous desire, and, in turn, what they desired.

Slate: The porn industry is subject to endless public debate, but we rarely get a look at the full lives of the people who make it. Did the project change any of your own preconceptions about porn?

Harris: Definitely. When I see porn now, I see real people performing. I think about their lives, what they had for breakfast, what their apartment might look like, where they get their groceries. The power of pornographic fantasies is diminished for me now, because I understand the role of makeup and lighting and camera angles to convey a certain image that usually has very little to do with reality. And I think this is ultimately a really humanizing thing to realize. It makes me feel better about my own body, and about the bodies of other people in my life. I can still appreciate the fantasies, but they have less control over me now.

Slate: You filmed these women for ten seconds every five minutes. Did anything happen in all of those 4 minutes and 50 second gaps you wished you'd been able to catch on tape?

Harris: I filmed at least 10 seconds of video every five minutes, and sometimes more.  In the editing process, I selected the best—the most interesting, sensible, continuous, or beautiful—10 seconds of contiguous video from that five minutes of real-world time, and that's what's in the final piece. The whole idea of the project was not to show too much—to keep the tantalizing feeling of porn that is constantly just out of reach.  It's like a strip tease, or a peep show, or a teaser, but in this case, the teaser is for everyday life.

Slate:  The interactivity of your project reflects how we consume porn on the internet—jumping from clip to clip, catching glimpses of video in between mundane email replies and, sometimes, visits to performers' own blogs. How has the internet changed the way that we consume porn, and view it on a cultural level?

Harris: The Internet's clearly made porn more accessible, so a much higher percentage of the population experiences it now than in, say, the 1990s, when you had to pirate some sketchy VHS video tape, or walk into a seedy magazine shop and hand over your money to get a pornographic magazine. The stakes are much lower now. Porn is something you can watch instantly, anonymously, secretly, and without spending money. It's bright and easy. And because of this, I think it's starting to make sex in general more normalized. I see the American Puritan ethic as beginning to recede a little, and people are opening up to each other about their sexual desires. You see this pretty clearly in something like the 50 Shades of Gray phenomenon, which probably wouldn't have happened if porn hadn't already set the stage. The very fluidity of how we consume porn now— like you say, between checking emails— has made sexuality a more integral part of life. It's no longer something that has to be buried away and done in the dark. People can claim what they like and talk about it openly. I think the prevalence of porn has a lot to do with this shift, although of course not everyone's there yet.

Slate: Nobody pays for porn anymore. Why pay for a $10 for a ticket to I Love Your Work?

Harris: I Love Your Work is not really porn. … it's a project about how people live their everyday lives. It's just as much about youth, fame, gender, fear, vulnerability, honesty, and privacy as it is about porn and sex. Most of all, it's a rare chance to experience a day in the life of nine different human beings, moment to moment, unfiltered and unedited. It's not like reality TV, where there's some editor with an agenda, manipulating the footage for a certain effect. In I Love Your Work, the editing is totally neutral—entirely determined by the time constraints—and this neutrality gives a feeling of raw honesty and truthfulness.

When I was doing research for a piece about the uber-successful Emanuel Brothers and what their parents did to encourage them to be so competitive, I ended up talking to Ashley Merryman, the co-author of Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing. According to Merryman and her co-author Po Bronson, part of what might have made the Emanuel brothers so ambitious from childhood is that they were all boys, and that there were three of them. Girls tend to play in pairs, while boys arrange themselves in groups, and group play breeds the competitive spirit. So what’s behind this, and why does playing in groups make boys more aggressive?

Harvard evolutionary biologist Joyce Benenson speculates that the instinct for men to align themselves in groups goes way back in human history. Men hunted in groups, and so they had to learn to get along quickly in a bunch, and this quality was supposedly bred into men through natural selection (maybe you got picked off by a lion if you didn’t bond with the group). Whether or not you buy this, Merryman and Bronson cite a 2004 study from Benenson that shows male infants as young as six months prefer photographs of groups to photographs of pairs or individuals. Girl babies show no preference.

In Benenson’s studies of older children, the differences are starker, Merryman explained to me over the phone. “In observed lab studies of six- to eight-year-old boys, they spent 70 to 80 percent of their time playing in groups,” while girls spend less than 20 percent of their time in groups. Boys are so desperate to arrange themselves in groups that “when [researchers] put a pair of boys in a room and forced them to talk to each other, they ended up talking about what it would be like to have a group of boys there.” By contrast, “Girls in a group will look at each other and try to find a single friend.” This behavior extends all the way up to the boardroom.

So why does it matter? Because men’s experience in groups may be why they not only compete more as adults, but why they’re also less concerned about the outcome of the competition, Merryman and Bronson argue in Top Dog:

“Groups are rarely a collection of true equals. It’s expected that, within a group, people will have different experiences, abilities, resources. That’s often the group’s greatest strength. Therefore, as long as everyone has signed on to the group’s larger purpose, its members don’t need to conform in other ways...Occasional challenges to group hierarchy can be welcomed, because they force everyone to improve over time.”

Furthermore, the natural communication style of groups is assertiveness—you need to pipe up to be heard over the din of several. Not so with dyads. The natural communication style of pairs is “a mutual exchange of feelings,” Merryman and Bronson say. “In a conversation between two people, even a mild difference of opinion can be perceived as a threat.” Because women are socialized to have this self-deprecating style of exchange from their first interactions, it’s no wonder they have trouble making themselves heard in the office.

Essentialist takes on how children behave are tricky, and it’s possible that kids follow a more fluid set of rules than the researchers suggest. Still, after reading Top Dog, I want to stick my daughter in soccer as soon as she can stand upright, so that she’ll get used to speaking up in a group. If she’s not athletically inclined, it will be debate team all the way.

Of all the changes J.J. Abrams made to the Star Trek universe when he re-launched it in 2009, one of the sharpest was the decision to make half-human, half-Vulcan Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Nyota Uhura (Zoe Saldana) not just colleagues, but a couple with great sexual chemistry and some crackling dialogue.

They bickered over Uhura's first assignment after her graduation from Starfleet Academy. Spock, Uhura’s teacher as well as her boyfriend, had sent her to the U.S.S. Farragut "to avoid the appearance of favoritism," and Uhura protested in a scene that let her be both sexy and professionally ambitious. "Did I not, on multiple occasions, demonstrate an exceptional aural sensitivity, and I quote, 'an unparalleled ability to identify sonic anomalies in subspace transmissions tests?'" Uhura snapped (and punned) at Spock. And the tenderness of their relationship brought out the human side in Spock, particularly after he saw his home planet of Vulcan destroyed by a terrorist. "What do you need?" Uhura asked Spock, kissing him tenderly after the attack. "I need everyone to continue performing admirably," Spock told her, broken up. They were a partnership of equals.

But in Star Trek Into Darkness, this refreshingly grown-up relationship (at least by the standards of blockbusters) has taken a back seat to the bromance between Spock and James T. Kirk (Chris Pine). Kirk jumps between the two on every occasion. "Are you two fighting? Oh my God, what is that even like?" he asks eagerly. And when they finally bring their grievances into the open air, Kirk's right there in a shuttle with them, like a roommate who just can't help butting in.

Even when Uhura gets to do actual work in Star Trek Into Darkness, the movie manages to bollix up her role. When the crew gets stuck on the Klingon homeworld of Kronos, Uhura reminds Kirk, "You brought me here because I speak Klingon. Then let me speak Klingon." But instead of allowing her to achieve victory through diplomacy, the movie first lets a long shot linger on her posterior while she talks to a group of Klingon warriors, then turns her into a damsel in distress who needs to be rescued by her male crewmates. At the movie's climax, Uhura fires a bunch of shots at the movie's primary villain, but it's her boyfriend who ultimately puts the bad guy down, fueled by his anger at—you guessed it—the man's treatment of Kirk.

There's nothing wrong with treating friendship like it's an important stake in an action movie, and the relationship between Kirk and Spock has always been critical to Star Trek. But it would be nice if Into Darkness acknowledged, as Iron Man 3 did this spring, that a man's girlfriend can be as good a colleague and partner in combat as his bros.

The season finale of FOX’s The Mindy Project aired on Tuesday, and it was a deeply emotional episode for me. The primary emotion I am feeling is relief. After following Mindy Kaling's impressive writing and acting at NBC's The Office, I’ve spent the 2012-2013 television season desperately trying to like The Mindy Project. I have failed. How did one of the most subversive figures on network television end up making such a bad show?

In a TV landscape dominated by white men, Kaling is the rare woman of color to create, write, and star (as New York obgyn Dr. Mindy Lahiri) in her own network sitcom. White men fill a unique role on Kaling’s show, too—they appear in the form of Mindy’s constantly refreshing stream of man candy, who Mindy beds (and usually, discards) at breakneck speed. This week, Rachel Sklar called the show “subversive and sexy” for its depiction of a single woman who “unapologetically hooks up with a parade of adorable guys” with none of the sexual shaming or cloying melodrama that accompanies most depictions of single ladies on television. And as Nisha Chittal recently told Jezebel, “it's really interesting that Mindy Lahiri dates white men,” which she sees as a “conscious decision to refute the stereotype that South Asians only date other South Asians.”

Theoretically, The Mindy Project’s take on hooking up does sound radical. If only it weren’t so boring in practice. On the Mindy Project, men come and men go, but they never go anywhere interesting. Take the guest appearances of the Meyers brothers: In the show’s second episode, Mindy meets-cute with a charming architect played by Seth Meyers. The pair plan a date, but we don’t see it; in fact, we never see Seth, or hear about him, ever again. Later in the season, Mindy flirts at a bar with another charming guy played by Seth’s brother, Josh Meyers, who turns out to be a prostitute. He, too, gets one episode, then disappears. With the right comedic tone, Mindy’s quick turnover of love interests could play out like a fun–or even dark—inversion of rom-com tropes: No, Mindy doesn’t end up marrying the handsome architect after a series of clutzy romantic blunders; she unwittingly falls into a Pretty Woman situation with a guy who looks eerily similar, and that doesn’t work out like the movies, either. But ironies like those aren’t given any space for exploration on the show. Every time Mindy presses the reset button on a new dude, her thin character development resets, too.

It’s potentially subversive that Mindy doesn’t get too emotionally invested in her sex partners. The problem is that we don’t get invested in Mindy herself, either. Occasionally, The Mindy Project will make a bid to insert some emotional heft into Mindy’s romantic life, but these moments also feel like stunts as opposed to stories. For instance, the show clumsily hints at a brewing attraction between Mindy and her coworker, Dr. Danny Castellano, by arranging for them to inadvertently touch hands on a bumpy plane ride.

Maybe the problem is Mindy’s inability to dig deeper inside herself. When one of Mindy’s past partners unexpectedly resurfaces on her birthday with a thoughtful gift, Mindy tells him that after their hook-up failed to materialize into a relationship, she “cried every night.” But we never actually saw Mindy cry. Is she even capable of it? The attempt to bolster Mindy’s unapologetic hook-ups with these melodramatic touches doesn’t feel sexy and transgressive—it feels disjointed, even oddly sociopathic. Even Mindy’s friends and coworkers feel similarly disposable and largely stereotypical. When Mindy’s initial married-with-kids BFF proved boring, writers threw in a new, single (also boring) BFF to pick up confidante duties. The show’s first season also traded in a woman in a wheelchair whose main shtick is acting inappropriately sexual, and a black nurse who communicates largely through singing.

This isn’t Louie, where Louis CK’s constant romantic interactions form the absurd set pieces for his existential anxiety. It’s not 30 Rock, where stereotypes are pushed to absurd limits for comedic effect. The Mindy Project is a potentially subversive take on modern love, shoehorned into the outdated trappings of a run-of-the-mill wacky workplace comedy. It is bad. But it doesn’t have to stay that way. At the end of the season finale, Mindy articulates her character’s main romantic tension: “No guy has ever wanted to commit to me before, because I work too much, I’m kind of selfish, I’ve never voted, and usually a guy figures that out, and then they leave,” she says. Then, she rushes to the hospital, unzips her party dress, wipes off her lipstick, pulls on her scrubs, and delivers triplets. That was the sexiest moment on the show this season, and it had nothing to do with any random guy.