Misogyny doesn't respect electoral results

[I'm submitting this to Style, but I'm putting it here so it'll be online somewhere if it doesn't get picked up.]

C.S. Lewis once claimed “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”; similarly, we as a nation are at a point where the greatest trick institutional misogyny ever pulled was convincing the world it was defeated once and for all at the polls.

            To be sure, after a 2012 full of ugly, anti-woman legislation and statements, it was a relief to see Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock lose their senatorial campaigns (and Bob Marshall never get to begin his) and record numbers of female candidates pull out wins. But to reduce the war on women to an electoral contest is to miss the real problem. People like Akin may receive particular scrutiny for their backwards views, but they don’t develop in a vacuum, and all over the country, we’re getting demonstrations that the attitudes that fuel misogyny, and actively hurt women, run deeper than an election.

            Look, for example, to the case of Steubenville, Ohio. Steubenville, like a lot of small towns, is very much defined by its high school football team. So it was something of a local scandal when two players were charged with the sexual assault of a 16-year-old girl at a party in August. The victim herself did not realize she had been assaulted until pictures relating to the assault were distributed via social media. Beyond its local relevance, the story was largely ignored until recently (the New York Times ran a story on the case, but it went largely unnoticed due to the tragedy in Newtown, Conn. around the same time), but what’s really disturbing is that the town’s treatment of the victim has been less “Friday Night Lights” and more “The Lottery”. Not only have locals referred to the victim as “the train whore” on Facebook, one of Steubenville High’s football coaches told the New York Times that "She had to make up something. Now people are trying to blow up our football program because of it." And most disturbing of all, the hacker collective Anonymous released a video in early January of a former Steubenville High student describing the assault and laughing. Steubenville High’s head coach has not benched any of the accused players. 

            Meanwhile, in Congress (a sentence opening that never bodes well), the House of Representatives failed to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, due in large part to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s decision to block the reauthorization in December; according to the Huffington Post, Cantor insisted on the removal of a provision which would allow tribal authorities to prosecute non-Indians who had committed sexual assault on reservations. According to the watchdog group Media Matters for America, all three major television networks failed to report on Congress’ failure to reauthorize the law.

            Closer to home, the Virginia General Assembly, which found itself in the midst of a PR nightmare after attempting to pass sweeping, invasive anti-abortion legislation last year, has introduced a host of similar legislation for the 2012 session, as well as three separate bills by Delegate Bob Marshall (of course) that would allow companies to deny their employees contraception coverage.

            Ugly mob mentality in a small town, congressional gridlock and a fringe conservative GA fixture showing off might seem like tenuously-related subjects, but under the surface, they are all symptomatic of a larger problem: despite the post-mortems claiming the 2012 election was a referendum on misogynistic policies and ideology, the “war on women” simply takes too many forms, on too many levels, for it to be “won” in one fell swoop.

            Repellent though they are, people like Todd Akin or Rush Limbaugh are actually among the less dangerous members of the anti-woman fringe; as extreme as their views are, they don’t have the discretion or intelligence to make them palatable to the public. The truly dangerous ones are people like the Virginia General Assembly or the apologists for the accused in Steubenville; rather than simply dishing out soundbites that appeal to the base and alienate the mainstream, these people are actively doing things that hurt women and society as a whole, but we don’t recognize the threat as long as they don’t say ridiculous things like “legitimate rape”, even if they’re on video laughing about sexual assault. One of the truly unfortunate things about our 24-hour news cycle is that a major story, no matter how important, is likely to vanish from mainstream coverage after it has “had its day”. And it’s especially hard for the media to address the fact that things like misogyny aren’t simply going to be “won” by one side over the course of a few months. But in the meantime,

women are still being victimized, and the people doing it don’t care whether or not that fits the narrative.

The 5 Best TV Moments of 2012 (originally for Style)

Hey everyone- this was originally for Style Weekly, but they weren't able to run it, so I figured, for lack of anywhere else, I'd post it here instead. Enjoy.

Much has been written of the recent renaissance in quality television, with the small screen attracting an unprecedented amount of top writing, acting and directing talent, and we hit peak level for all three in 2012. Here are 5 of the best moments television gave us in 2012. Be warned, spoilers follow.

5. Richard Harrow’s Rampage (Boardwalk Empire, “Margate Sands”)

Tragic, disfigured World War 1 veteran Richard Harrow (Jack Huston) was a breakout fan favorite, but for most of the season he was removed from the main plot, which involved the escalating war between Atlantic City boss Nucky Thompson (Steve Buscemi) and volatile Brooklyn gangster Gyp Rosetti (Bobby Cannavale). Richard’s storyline mostly involved his budding romance and his determination to protect Tommy, the young son of his late friend Jimmy (Michael Pitt). But when Rosetti’s crew took Tommy hostage, all bets were off; in an artful, brilliantly-shot homage to the climax of “Taxi Driver”, Richard (a man so desperate for companionship he keeps a scrapbook of photos of happy families) unblinkingly waded through the gangsters with an arsenal that the NRA would call excessive, all for the sake of a little kid. Awww, we think.

4. Sherlock and Moriarty’s Confrontation (Sherlock, “The Reichenbach Fall”)

As long as it took for the second season of the BBC’s brilliant modernization of the Sherlock Holmes stories to arrive, it was just as well that it was even more brilliant than its predecessor; in the finale, the legendary detective (Benedict Cumberbatch) found himself on the roof of St. Bart’s Hospital with his nemesis, “consulting criminal” Jim Moriarty (Andrew Scott), who had managed to get acquitted for a jewel heist he was on tape committing and then proceeded to falsify seemingly airtight evidence that Sherlock was a fraud. Now, Moriarty, his giggling psychopathy reaching a fever pitch, revealed the final phase of his plan: Sherlock could either leap to his death in disgrace, or, at Moriarty’s signal, snipers would kill Sherlock’s closest friends. The two actors each give their best performances of the show as we see what happens when a man who seemingly has all the answers finds that he doesn’t.

3. Joan Lays Down the Law (Mad Men, “Mystery Date”)

When office manager Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks) was raped by her fiancée in the drama’s second season, it was (and still is) one of the show’s most disturbing scenes; almost as chilling was the fact that she went through with the marriage, as would be expected of a woman in the era, and maintained the illusion of marital bliss, until this year’s fifth season, when her husband Greg, back from Vietnam, revealed that he would be returning of his own volition, Joan had finally had enough, accusing him of needing the army to “feel like a man”. “You’re not a good man,” she spat. “You never were, even before we were married. And you know what I’m talking about.”  While throwing Greg out makes Joan a single mother in the mid-60s, far from advantageous circumstances, it was extremely cathartic to see someone so abused by the time and system she lived in getting to fight back.

2. When Arya Met Tywin (Game of Thrones, “A Man Without Honor”)

The appeal of “Game of Thrones” is more than just its fantasy setting, its obligatory sex and violence, or even the brilliant Peter Dinklage. Rather, its secret is how it finds universal human connections in a fantasy context. Case in point: an arc in the show’s second season wherein sword-wielding tomboy Arya Stark (Maisie Williams), on the run after her father’s execution, found herself disguised as a servant girl selected to be a cupbearer. The man who selected her was Lord Tywin Lannister (Charles Dance), the icy patriarch of the same family whose schemes had led to her father’s death. As Arya attempted to conceal her identity, the two ended up making a genuine connection, with Tywin displaying exceedingly rare vulnerability as he told her of his son’s learning disability (strongly implied to be dyslexia). The kicker? None of this was in the novels that the series has otherwise meticulously followed; it was just great writing and acting that made perfect sense for the characters.

1.      Ben’s Proposal (Parks & Recreation, “Halloween Surprise”)

“Parks & Recreation” is a show that, as bizarre and outlandish as it can get, never loses its underlying heart, and the romance between Pollyannish city councilwoman Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) and her tightly-wound political consultant boyfriend Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott) was always one of the show’s most sincerely sweet plot threads. Viewers were led to fear the worst when Ben was offered a job managing the campaign of a senatorial candidate in Florida, a world away from Leslie’s beloved Pawnee, Indiana. And then, in the episode’s final scene, Ben quietly, unexpectedly returned, dropping to one knee and telling her “above everything else, I just want to be with you forever”. Leslie, her usual perkiness giving way to tears of joy, exclaimed “yes” before Ben could even finish the question. Poehler’s performance is even more exceptional when you consider that she was only a few months removed from her separation from Will Arnett at the time.