Glance at butts, gaze at work performance?

Glance in the streets, gaze in the sheets.

Thanks, LW, for the link. I enjoyed it. It relates in interesting ways to the prior argument about make-up on this blog.

I would also submit as related prior work: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Suppress_Women's_Writing

This article is fucking garbage from the get go. Seriously, go on Youtube and watch some Doll and Em and then True Detective and then try and do a meaningful comparison that ends with Doll and Em being "a much tighter work of art, was breezily and inaccurately labeled a "satire" and forgotten." Christ, minutes of my life were wasted reading that nonsense and I want them back.

You should always just read the glib summary.

Very good - I really like the concept of the glance and all the examples from real life. But I don't follow the examples of TV shows that she sees as being taken seriously or not taken seriously. Leaving aside Doll And Em, I just don't understand this focus on things that "receive critical attention" as if that is what the maker of a TV show is aspiring to, rather than aspiring to be popular, run for years and years, develop a intense fan base, provide good roles for actresses, etc.

It's not just True Detective that feeds this manic disappointment that we compulsively convert to praise. We overread Mad Men. We overread House of Cards. We overread Westworld and Mr. Robot and Game of Thrones. These are competent shows, but they're analyzed and adored well beyond their just deserts because we're so hungry for fiction worthy of our scrutiny. The only female-centric show to have received comparable critical attention--some of it unwarranted--is Girls.

Comparable critical attention from who? Who defines the cultural zeitgest so that the list of "analyzed and adored" includes the incredibly commercially successful Game of Thrones... the incredibly commercially unsuccessful but critical favorite, Mr. Robot... and Girls?

If you want more female-centric shows that have the fate of Girls, instead of Weeds, Nurse Jackie, Big Love, Big Little Lies, Scandal, The Good Wife, not to mention all the more "trashy" shows like Penny Dreadful, The Borgias, Orphan Black, and True Blood... I don't see why you want that.

The article is hard for me to evaluate because my pop culture intake is so much different from Loofbourow's. If gswift is right that her evaluation of Doll and Em vs. True Detective is screwed up, then pretty much the whole thing falls apart. But I haven't seen either series.

Where I do intersect with Loofbourow, her specific examples don't look good at all.

She mentions Crazy Ex-Girlfriend as an example of how "we still have not quite learned to see female storytellers as either masterful or intentional." But this seems waaaaay off.

Regardless of how you feel about it, CEG is definitely the work of a sitcom auteur. If critics don't regard it that way, then you could reasonably suppose that the critics weren't willing to give credit to a woman with a unique take on the musical and the sitcom.

But the critics fucking love that show. In three seasons, its lowest Rotten Tomatoes score is 95.

Other examples:

-We over-read Man Men? There was a lot going on in that series.
-To the extent Brave was written off as just another princess movie, this was done by critics with a feminist sensibility. I don't take Loofbourow to be criticizing a strain of feminist thought, at least not intentionally.
-People had trouble internalizing the fact that all of the central characters in Girls were supposed to be shitty people? To this day, that's something people still misunderstand about Seinfeld. That doesn't appear to be a gender-specific issue.

Another problem is that the article conflates two things that ought to be carefully separated: The culture's unwillingness to listen to serious female voices; and the culture's unwillingness to recognize the seriousness of women when they are permitted to speak.

So you get a muddled discussion of how Elizabeth Gilbert was only taken seriously when she wrote about men.

[T]he same writer praised as "a top-notch journalist and fiction writer [who] braids keen and provocative observations about the American frontier, the myth of the mountain man, and the peculiar state of contemporary America with its 'profound alienation' from nature into her spirited and canny portrait" was subsequently lampooned for writing "chick lit."

Where is this going? If she's being coherent, she has to be taking this in one of two directions: either offering a contrarian re-evaluation of Eat, Pray, Love, which she found much more serious than the critics allowed; or a lament that this serious-minded woman had to write crap if she was going to write about women. We get neither:

I still haven't read it.

So what's her point? Her point is that the book was dismissed as chick-lit and therefore she decided it wasn't worth reading. What is her remedy? Should women like Gilbert be given more credit for the great work they do about women? Or should publishers be more willing to let them do great work about women? Or should critics praise the work of serious women writers even when it's not good?

She doesn't care. She says her entire point is made regardless of whether Eat, Pray, Love is any good. The fact that it was criticized made her unwilling to read it, and that's the problem. I can't work out how that's not complete bullshit.

The funny thing is, the broad strokes that she paints are clearly on target. "Male glance" is quite good, and it's pretty clear that women have trouble both doing serious work and getting credit when they do it. But her examples, to the extent that I am familiar with them, are extraordinarily weak.

"Weekend Longread" is intended as guidance for commenters, right?

At most meetings, if you want to unload a wad of science, you need to use fewer characters than your comment. But you can use a figure or table too.

"If gswift is right that her evaluation of Doll and Em vs. True Detective is screwed up, then pretty much the whole thing falls apart."

No, it doesn't. That's a very minor point.

That said, it's a very impressive piece that's also exasperating. It would have been a better essay if the parts about prestige TV was just cut out. She could have picked so many good examples of what she's talking about.

Girls is good now?

I kid, quite apart from whether the viewer is supposed to be in on the characters being terrible people it was just an awfully written show.

I never watched it, but I do remember, in the heyday of Girls takes, the horribleness of the characters being oh-ohed at as a clear and present danger to RL society, with little reference to its intentionality. I couldn't give a citation though.

Girls, at its best was really really good. Certainly as good as Mad Men. Both shows lacked consistency though.

11: Yes, again, I don't want to criticize the article, these are great ideas but I think they apply to how people view other people, not necessarily how people view cultural products.

Glib summary: Male work gets overestimated and overanalyzed, female work underestimated and underanalyzed.

Surely the "overanalyzed" and "underanalyzed" part of this is true, for cultural products. But the list of things that get "overanalyzed" is extremely short. It has to be something that's in the zeitgeist SO much that your all-purpose cultural critic feels they can't get away with ignoring it and they have to come up with something to say about it. I've seen similar articles about extremely successful female novelists whose work is nonetheless not considered Major Work, like a Jonathan Franzen. But... at this point with novels, isn't that list just Jonathan Franzen and maybe two other people? And they get mocked all the time for their pretensions as well. Whose approval are you seeking?

And how many creators want their work to be overanalyzed? I would rather have my work be appreciated.

I'm not about to read a book described as 'literary' unless it was written many decades ago, back when literature was allowed to have an interesting plot.

15 last: Well, there is that very popular author of so-called "chic-lit" who is always complaining about her kind of literature not being taken seriously.

At various times it's seemed like very popular authors Stephen King and John Irving were genuinely anguished that critics didn't take them seriously.

Anyway, my sense is that most "serious" writers are thrilled at first just to be published, and then ecstatic when their book becomes a bestseller, but then after a few more bestsellers, they're miserable if their genius isn't universally recognized.

Of course if their genius is universally agreed upon, they're miserable for other reasons, so I guess it's a wash.

John Irving tried really hard to be boring enough to be literature, but (*SPOILER ALERT*) the guy getting his dick bit off during a highly unfortunate episode of oral sex really stands out. King is a better writer, but I've never read the horror ones, but the one where the guy comes out of a coma and (*SPOILER*) can see the future was really good.

TBH, I'm not sure I actually read Irving. I may be thinking of the movie.

I just can't help feeling it should be spelt Loughborough.

"Tonight is kind of special, Loughborough beer."

Irving is a much better writer than King, and has a lot of credibility with the critics.

Irving has a weird relationship with feminism (at least to my way of thinking) and I'd be interested in seeing a feminist critique of his work.

This thread's turn to discussing male authors is kind of hilarious tbh.

I would rather read nothing but Stephen King for a year than have to read nothing but John Irving for a day.

I mean, popular, nerd-friendly, middlebrow series are overanalyzed and overrated by online TV writers because it gets clicks, and because those articles are written by and for middlebrow nerds that wants prestige TV to be better than it is. (True detective was an anomaly in not being *that* popular, but so was Girls. True detective also lent itself to nerdily obsessive decoding and explainers, which presumably brought clicks.)

That's beyond the scope of the essay, but she needed different examples or no examples at all.

This thread's turn to discussing male authors is kind of hilarious

Not really - the original essay also mentions more male than female writers.

Loofbourow cites Twain on Austen:

She makes me detest all her people, without reserve. Is that her intention?

Haven't read any Austen, but like Moby, I watch movies. In context, Twain is specifically citing Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. Does Austen intentionally make her main characters unsympathetic, as Loofbourow suggests here? They seem nice enough in the movies, even if they have their quirks. Was Austen a precursor to Dunham and Larry David?

Twain died in 1910, so he's not a great example of current problems with the male glance, but in context, he was mocking Austen in the comical way that he did others. Loofbourow omits the punchline.

Here's what Loofbourow gave us from Twain:

Then is it her purpose to make the reader detest her people up to the middle of the book and like them in the rest of the chapters? That could be. That would be high art. It would be worth while, too.

And here's the next line:

Some day I will examine the other end of her books and see.

Twain was nasty and funny as a literary critic. Here he is on James Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses. Opening line, citing praise of Cooper from academics:

It seems to me that it was far from right for the Professor of English Literature at Yale, the Professor of English Literature in Columbia, and Wilkie Collins to deliver opinions on Cooper's literature without having read some of it.

24: I haven't read Irving in a long time, but I liked his work a lot and I lack confidence that my opinion has aged well. Hence my interest in criticism specifically from a feminist perspective. A lot has changed since Irving wrote about men and women back in the '80s.

Mostly because of Sex and the City.

she needed different examples or no examples at all

Harsh, but fair.

27: Twain's reaction to Austen is unusual -- some of her characters are meant to be unsympathetic, but nowhere near all of them.

Twain was an inventive and verbally ingenious man who never let a concern for accuracy or fairness get in the way of insulting people he didn't like. And there were a lot of people he didn't like.

I will say that I read Twain on Cooper long before I ever tried to read Cooper. And that I read a lot of eighteenth and nineteenth century writers for pleasure, so I figured, later on, that Twain was probably overstated in his criticisms, and Cooper couldn't be that bad.

Cooper really is pretty bad.

For a native of Missouri, he wasn't that big of an asshole.

I still haven't read it

This bothered me also-- I agree that it's a flawed essay for this whole incomprehensible digression. Her takedown of Real Housewives however I felt was really perceptive and (to me) completely novel.

One good insight outweighs four and a half bad ones in my mind, so she wins.

Jennifer Egan and Zadie Smith are both good contemporary women writers. I actually also like Jhumpa Lahiri a lot.

Crazy Ex Girlfriend is brilliant. I'm most of the way through season one-- episode 13 or 14 mocked something pretty subtle toward the end of the episode, but I've since forgotten exactly what. I don't have access to Doll and Em, don't think that youtube is a great way to check it out.

31: I get that Twain's take on that is unusual, and seems to be simply incorrect or at least, as ajay suggests, unfair. But Loofbourow's point is the opposite -- that Austen's characters are deliberately unsympathetic, and that Twain fails to acknowledge her intention.

32: One supposes that in a different era, he might have been an Unfogged commenter. Heck, that guy from Mad Men probably would have fit in here, too.

35: Her takedown of Real Housewives however I felt was really perceptive and (to me) completely novel.

I can't recall a time when I've been so broadly sympathetic to the thesis of an essay and been so unhappy with seemingly everything in it. Real Housewives isn't minstrelsy.* This is a ban-worthy analogy:

The pleasure comes as much from our fantasy that she's blind to her own humiliation as it does from the grotesque performance of abject femininity. There she is, the creature we love best to hate, the Stupid Reality TV Woman.

The irony, of course, is that you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone more aware of what they're caricaturing than a minstrel or a reality star, whose job it is to magnify their own outsize aspects the way eyeliner magnifies eyes.

It is absolutely not the job of minstrels to "magnify their own outsize aspects." If you have to compare Housewives to a discredited performance of a past era, "freak show" comes much closer -- and yes, circus freaks and Real Housewives no doubt do share an awareness of the nature of their performance.

* "Minstrelsy" is a new word for me. I had thought it was "ministrelry."

Crazy Ex Girlfriend is brilliant.

Comity. Rachel Bloom is just amazing.

But Loofbourow's point is the opposite -- that Austen's characters are deliberately unsympathetic, and that Twain fails to acknowledge her intention.

No, she doesn't quite say that -- she's limited, I think, to saying that Twain unfairly dismisses the possibility that Austen is producing whatever effect she's having on him purposefully. Twain suggests and dismisses the possibility that Austen is engaged in 'high art', which unfairly underrates Austen's skill. Loofbourow doesn't commit herself to saying that Twain is right that Austen's characters are all unsympathetic, which makes sense because while some of them are, many of them aren't to most readers, and don't seem to have been intended to be.

38: Twain unfairly dismisses the possibility that Austen is producing whatever effect she's having on him purposefully.

Look at your words "whatever effect." You're elliding the actual effect, which Twain and Loofbourow are both quite clear on. Did Austen deliberately set out to produce the loathing that Twain feels -- and that Twain would regard as "high art" if it were deliberate?

Loofbourow is right that Twain says this was not Austen's intent. Loofbourow endorses Twain's rather silly description of Austen's characters. She says Twain fails to recognize that, as with Girls, Austen was conducting an "experiment" in populating her stories with unlikable people.

Loofbourow:

The implication, naturally--Twain's a master satirist--is that Austen is incapable of this brand of "high art." No woman would intentionally conduct such an experiment. No, the effect she produces on Twain must be a combination of accident and his own powers of perception; his unreserved hatred of a particular character is due to his idiosyncrasy and superior social and literary taste, not her authorial control.

What "authorial control" was Twain failing to recognize, if, in fact, Austen didn't mean for Elinor (for example) to be loathsome?

Clip from Palm Beach Story against 36's "It is absolutely not the job of minstrels to 'magnify their own outsize aspects'."

Freak shows have surprises and a definite theatrical framing. Minstrelsy less so.

lw

First, what Twain is calling 'high art' isn't writing loathsome characters, it's writing initially loathsome characters that later become sympathetic. Does Austen pull it off? Twain's punch line, which you quote, is that he wasn't interested enough to bother finding out -- whether he's right or wrong about Austen, he's explicitly dismissive enough to not care which it is.

And when I said 'whatever effect' I meant that while Twain's perception of Austen's characters as universally unlikeable is unusual, that's not a judgment of literary merit. A reader might like or dislike a character, but think that even an unlikable character was skillfully portrayed -- Twain's implication that his dislike of Austen's characters is due to her bad writing is unjustified. It is possible for Austen to have had the 'authorial control' to portray Elinor precisely as she intended, and for that portrait to have been unappealing to Twain because he dislikes that kind of woman.

I don't read Loofbourow as endorsing Twain's hyperbole that all of Austen's characters are unlikable -- she's focusing on his unwarranted dismissiveness.

The linked article seemed too long to read profitably, and I will fully admit to potential cultural sexism, but holding up Doll & Em as a good example of anything is bizarre. That show is unwatchable!!

A claim that True Detective had any particular profundity was obviously always already nonsense, but I thought it was a fun horror genre police procedural with the ridiculous philosophical whatever nice window dressing for the fun shlocky horror-detective show. And there were some nice scenes, actors, characters, etc. I even sort-of liked the second season that everyone hated, in part because I liked the idea of a show about Vernon.

I mean, I make my living in part from the existence of TV, so it's not like I'm not inclined to take it seriously, but at some point the impulse to slap people in the face and say "stop it, it's just fucking TV" isn't a bad one.

The idea that men pass over profound art by women because women aren't supposed to make good art sure seems right, but if you can write the following sentences (from the linked piece) "I blame no one for hoping True Detective's promise of revolutionary art would come true. I hoped it too" there is probably something wrong with you.

40: That type of thing would be a better analogy, but I don't think that qualifies as minstrelsy, which, as far as I know, requires adopting blackface.

Oh?

42: Seems like we've pursued this as far as we can. I can only again quote Loofbourow's description of her problem with Twain:

[H]is unreserved hatred of a particular character is due to his idiosyncrasy and superior social and literary taste, not her authorial control.

44.2: Right. It's true the shows centered on or written by women were, except for Girls, underrepresented in the heyday of "quality" cable dramas, when bloggers would devote thousands upon thousands of words analyzing every episode. But for the most part I thought that whole trend was kind of a waste of time and mental energy.

I eventually stopped reading Amanda Marcotte because after a while it seemed like she wrote about nothing except Mad Men.

One of these days, I'm going to watch that series. Also, Sopranos and The Wire.

Huh, I did not know that-- I thought minstrelsy included both self- denigrating caricature like 40 and its imitation in blackface.

44.1 TV, especially TV about the past is socially powerful. Many people, including past and current world leaders, confuse televised depiction with reality.

S2 of True Detective was I thought much better than S1

I thought S2 was a mess with the seeds of several good shows in it. If they'd pared it down and focused on just one substory it would have been great.

Speaking of TV, last night I learned that TWYRCL had never seen Predator.

I... I... I....

Is anyone else watching Homeland? It's kind of painfully on the nose right now, but less so than reality.

Homeland is racist.

Seriously, they had some shows take place in Beirut* and made it look like Kabul or something. *Actually probably shot in Morocco.

53.2 Cool, but why the segue into "Crazy Train"?

Homeland was just weird and bizarre in its grasp of what was actually going on in the Middle East. No, Iran is not the shadowy power behind al-Qaeda!

S1 of CEG is amazing, but S2 and S3 are a mess. Still a lot of great music, but when I do a rewatch down the road I'll probably stop halfway through S2 and then just listen to the soundtracks for the rest.

54 on topic because Homeland is female-centric.

43: The philosophy in TD.1 wasn't just window dressing, even if it wasn't particularly profound. The nihilism is the horror of it. That's why the ending sucked.

Good point though I didn't think the ending sucked THAT much (for the kinda show it was)

Tbf, I can barely remember how either season ended.

But honestly, I think I might rank Arli$$ above "Dot and Em" on my HBO show list, and Arli$$ was terrible. I guess that's the patriarchy for you.

Fuck it, I have a boring project due which means, with the help of Wikipedia's "programs broadcast by HBO" page, let's do this, for ones I've seen. I'm weighting viewing experience in the moment and perceived originality, which is why I put the Sopranos ahead of the Wire, also Wire-first feels boring and kind of pious, plus I feel like the shittiness of "Treme" and what have you has lowered David Simon in my eyes. I'm also only counting original scripted non-variety programming for adults, so no "HBO World Championship Boxing," no Fraggle Rock, no Kids in the Hall or Mr. Show.

Everything above the First and Ten Line is "OK to very good." Everything beneath First and Ten was bad to ludicrously unwatchable. First and Ten itself was a pretty good show that no one remembers, so it is the perfect dividing line.

Sopranos
Wire
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Silicon Valley
Deadwood
Big Love
Eastbound and Down
Six Feet Under
True Detective
Flight of the Conchords
Girls
Oz
Family Tree
Extras
True Blood
Crashing
Insecure
Crashing
Rome
First and Ten

"The First and Ten Line"

Treme
Sex and the City
Vice Principals
Hung
Vinyl
Doll & Em
Hello Ladies
Dream On
Bored to Death
Entourage
The Newsroom
Carnivale
Luck
Enlightened
Aril$$ (I gues Doll & Em is better actually)
Mind of the Married Man

I'm not sure we got through S1 of Homeland. It was enough.

We're nearing the end of S2 of Versailles.

You forgot Poland!!

Oh, I forgot "Tanner '88." I may be the only person on the blog who has seen and vaguely remembers "Tanner '88." It goes above the 1st and Ten line, barely.

Maybe not barely. Slot Tanner '88 between "Girls" and "Oz."

Holy shit I had forgotten that Cynthia Nixon was the DAUGHTER in Tanner '88!?! Tanner '88 is relevant to today!!

Kim Cattrall was in a Columbo episode. Nixon was probably too young for that, at least it would have been creepy to have in a bikini lounging at a pool.

Whoa I forgot Game of Thrones. Right after Six Feet Under.

64: Wow! Did you really watch all those shows?

I've kinda wasted my life.

I'm not sure whether to watch Season 2 of Westworld. I didn't really like Season 1.

This article somehow never even mentions Big Little Lies?

Have you considered that maybe they didn't want you to like it?

76 reminds me that the movie version of Eat, Pray, Love is the worst movie I've ever seen. It hadn't occurred to me that the process of adaptation might have been an act of misogyny.

If the book version had been the worst movie you'd ever seen that would be kind of impressive.

Goddammit. My brain is just pure fail right now. I'm having like three conversations at once agitating against Facebook and my language skills are thus occupied in good and noble pursuits. So, yes, the movie version was a movie.

I still haven't read the book version of Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, by Fred Saberhagen.

WRT Homeland: I haven't seen any prior seasons barring a random episode or two, so no comment on those. The current season has various absurdities, but I think is interesting in that the current season (apparently rewritten in mid-2017) has essentially an alt-hist Hillary Clinton administration besieged by a Russian infowar campaign. I think it's kind of notable that this is happening on a primetime cable show.

(Which isn't to say it's good. It isn't, so far.)