Source: AMC

I made a conscious decision to not make any comments about “The Walking Dead” until the season had finally wrapped. In tradition of previous seasons, the entire plot doesn’t come into full fruition until the last few episodes, therefore it would be very presumptuous of me to make comment until I’ve seen everything play out first. But now that the season has officially wrapped, I can honestly say that I just wasn’t feeling season three.

 [Warning: there are plenty of spoilers below so if you have yet to see the final episode or the show period, you might want to stop reading now]

Earlier in the season, I started noticing certain racial and gender tropes, which I thought would get better towards the end of the season but nope, it got kind of worse. By the season finale, which aired Sunday night, I was still wavering on the proverbial fence about whether or not this entire series is either an allegory for the pitfalls of following a society based around white male supremacy or an actual celebration of the Anglo-Saxon patriarchy and supremacy.

There is certainly a familiar hierarchy to this apocalyptic series, which appears to place white male masculinity as the highest importance of protecting. Sure, this season brought about the death of “Merle,” the camp’s resident hillbilly racist, who turned into a zombie and was put down by his own hillbilly brother. However Merle’s death also came with redemption by martyrdom for leading a zombie-bomb against the Governor and Woodbury camp. And yes it is true that the series main character is “Rick,” a white middle class Georgia sheriff who woke up from a coma to find a zombie apocalypse going down. Therefore it would make sense that the storyline revolve around him. But there is no indication as to why even as the main character, Rick should be awarded leadership of a camp of survivors, especially when there are more qualified, yet marginalized, individuals.

Years ago, Spike Lee spoke about the “Magical Negro,” a trope (some would argue a plot device) used in both literature and in film and television, involving a black person used for the primary purpose of the white protagonist’s self-discovery. This is certainly true of characters like “T-Dog,” who it would seem never really had a real name (for all we know it could have been Kunta Kinte) and was only there to save white folks. And it is certainly true of “Tyreese,” who despite being physically stronger and capable of leading a team of his own through the zombie apocalypse, is reduced down to a non-threatening teddy bear of a man, who has capitulated to white male leadership this entire season – even at times when the dominance comes by way of a small white male boy name “Carl.” After being forced from the prison by a mentally unstable Rick (who at the time was advised by his dead wife to not let them in), Tyreese and his crew, who has now been reduced down to one black woman, are invited back into the camp of survivors only after proving that they would be no threat to Rick and Carl’s WASPy masculine authority.

Yet outside of the Magical Negro trope there are other magical representations, which makes it clear that everyone non-white and non-male is there to teach our white males a lesson or aid in his self-discovery– even at the expense of the others’ own lives. For instance, the only other able-bodied white male on the series (who hasn’t been killed off or been killed by Rick) is “Darryl,” who hails from the poor, southern backwoods, redneck part of whiteness. Despite being a white male, Darryl has the misfortune of hailing from what John Edwards used to call the second America, which also gets the bum end of the stick from WASPy America. Despite being stellar with the bow and arrow and the hunting knife, Darryl does not have the confidence and takes shelter under first Merle, the white supremacist and then under Rick’s command. The same with “Glenn,” the spunky and eager-to-please Asian American kid. Despite becoming the camp’s strongest and smarter members, Glenn happily and mysteriously takes his place under Rick’s guard and becomes the camp’s model citizen. I’ll let you read between the lines of that one.

If you caught the last episode of Gentlemen Uncensored, you’d know there was a bit of unfinished business. The fellas jumped into a discussion on sex and what you should do if your sex drive isn’t matching your partner’s, but somewhere along the way the convo got a bit sidetracked by bigger overarching issues like traditionalism and patriarchy. Check out the next part, as TMor gets the guys back on track and tries to offer  up real solutions to this very real issue.

GENTLEMEN UNCENSORED

• Sneak Peek: Gentlemen Uncensored
• Episode 1: Why Get Married?
• Episode 2: Why Get Married? Part 2
• Episode 3: Sex And Patriarchy, Part 1
• Episode 4: Sex And Patriarchy, Part 2
• Episode 5: What Is Good Sex?

MEET THE CAST

• Meet Chris Kazi Rolle
• Meet Anthony ‘Tmor’ Morris
• Meet Ainsley Burrows
• Meet Carlos Walton
• Meet DJ CEO
• Meet Harold Church

In episode 1 of Gentlemen Uncensored, it seemed marriage may not be in the cards for all of the fellas, but one thing they are all down for is sex. The question is what are their expectations of women — and themselves — in the bedroom, and how much of what they claim they need is based on true desires or simply what they’ve been taught to want. Check out part 1 of the discussion.

GENTLEMEN UNCENSORED

• Sneak Peek: Gentlemen Uncensored
• Episode 1: Why Get Married?
• Episode 2: Why Get Married? Part 2
• Episode 3: Episode 3: Sex And Patriarchy, Part 1
• Episode 4: Sex And Patriarchy, Part 2
• Episode 5: What Is Good Sex?

MEET THE CAST

• Meet Chris Kazi Rolle
• Meet Anthony ‘Tmor’ Morris
• Meet Ainsley Burrows
• Meet Carlos Walton
• Meet DJ CEO
• Meet Harold Church

From Alternet.org

On Friday, xoJane, the irreverent women’s blog founded by Jane Pratt, posted the latest in its “It Happened to Me” series, first-person confessionals on topics that are sometimes whimsical (“My Toilet Exploded. Again.”), sometimes dark (“This is the First Time I’ve Written About My Rape, and I’m Doing it For You, Todd Akin”), sometimes awkward (“I Tried to Have Sex With My Gay Best Friend”), but nearly always shocking. Shock is what xoJane does best — it is, after all, the publication whose former beauty editor, Cat Marnell, wrote an essay about using Plan B as her preferred form of contraception, and posted regularly about her spiraling drug addiction until the site fired her for refusing rehab.

Shock draws attention. Shock generates pageviews. And this installment, by freelance writer Jenny An, seems poised to blow all of its predecessors out of the water. It’s been tweeted and Facebooked thousands of times and is now the most commented-on “It Happened to Me” story ever. It may yet end up as the most discussed piece in xoJane history; the editors are savvy — they’ve since given the story prime positioning as the main feature on the site’s home page. Which seems odd, given that the story is seemingly about as insider-y an inside-baseball piece as you might possibly imagine: Titled “I’m an Asian Woman and I Refuse to Date an Asian Man,” it’s an extended and somewhat bizarre diatribe in which An outlines the reasons why she finds dating someone of her own race to be anathema, and chooses to date white men instead.

“It has nothing to do with skin color,” the subtitle says. “It has everything to do with patriarchy.” An then goes on to write that she’s “one of those [Asian girls] that date lots and lots of (mostly, but not always) white guys. Why? It’s simple: I’m a racist.”

Now, to proudly out yourself as a “racist” in the second line of a first-person confessional takes a nearly terminal excess of chutzpah, blissful ignorance or both. It also serves as a smoking gun that something was up in the piece’s narrative — that maybe it shouldn’t be taken entirely at face value. Especially when An goes on to state bluntly that her “pale, white-bread boyfriend jokes that I’m one of the whitest people he’s ever met”; that “Dating white men means acceptance into American culture. White culture”; that she’s “drinking the same Kool-Aid as everyone else [of] white supremacy. The idea that white is still tops, SAT scores, corporate jobs and fancy degrees be damned” — all while simultaneously acknowledging that her “thinking is Fawked up.”

For me at least, it triggered the same instinctive reaction I had when I first encountered the now-infamous Wall Street Journal book excerpt, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” by Yale law professor and mother of two Amy Chua, now better known by the sobriquet Tiger Mom: These are ideas and phrases that have been consciously engineered and carefully chosen to generate maximum backlash.

Which is why, when I posted An’s piece to my Facebook circle for comment, I did so with the following message: “Oh, boy. Girlfriend is so totally trolling. But…thoughts? And by thoughts, I mean thoughts that aren’t a long string of expletives. Thank you.”

Trolling is the online term for — we’ll let Wikipedia chime in here — posting “inflammatory, extraneous or off-topic messages in an online community, such as a forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response.”

Trolling is often done merely to taunt or prank (especially as a kind of hazing to newcomers to an online community). With the rise of the clicks-for-cash business model in digital media, however, trolls have found a new place in the Internet ecosystem: As highly effective breadwinners for the sites in which they nest.

Source: US Magazine

Beauty makes the world go ‘round, or at least the United States, probably Brazil too, and several other countries. It’s the billion dollar industry of cosmetics, hair processes, and diets we buy into—some of us on a small scale, others much more so. It’s the biggest topic discussed in magazines, there are television shows about it, and it all gets presented to us under the guise of some anonymous being known as “the media.” At this point that should probably be code for women because typically there’s a female editor-in-chief, art director, and/or marketer presenting these beauty ideals to us, while in the next breath speaking out against the pressure on women to be light, white, and thin.

Ashley Judd recently spoke out about this idea rather harshly in an op-ed piece for The Daily Beast in response to the negative attention she’s been receiving about her looks. Her 43-year-old face has been described as “puffy,” in the media, which she says is a result of a combination of a thing called aging and a sinus infection she’s been treated with steroids for, but she goes much further by calling out her criticism as sexist patriarchy men and women are all too comfortable participating in these days. She writes:

“That women are joining in the ongoing disassembling of my appearance is salient. Patriarchy is not men. Patriarchy is a system in which both women and men participate. It privileges, inter alia, the interests of boys and men over the bodily integrity, autonomy, and dignity of girls and women. It is subtle, insidious, and never more dangerous than when women passionately deny that they themselves are engaging in it. This abnormal obsession with women’s faces and bodies has become so normal that we (I include myself at times—I absolutely fall for it still) have internalized patriarchy almost seamlessly. We are unable at times to identify ourselves as our own denigrating abusers, or as abusing other girls and women.”

No one is arguing that women aren’t more vicious toward one another than men have ever been about our bodies but what people are questioning is the validity of the argument’s source considering Ashley has benefited quite nicely from this system. Now that she’s no longer in her prime and feeling some of that backlash 99% of other women experience on a regular basis she wants her body to be off limits and some say that isn’t fair. She reminds me a bit of Tyra Banks making a big deal about the “media’s” focus on women’s bodies on her talk show only after she’d gained 30 pounds or so. Everything is good when these women are on the desired side of the beauty equation but when things move a little downhill for them personally suddenly the outcry comes. The stance seems a bit contrived. But still I wonder, was Ashley upholding a patriarchal system of sexism when she appeared nude in movies or basked in the celebration of her beauty by the press or was she simply being herself and making good use of her genetics?

I think this is a hard line for women to walk on a daily basis. Who doesn’t want their physical beauty to be recognized, even celebrated, at least by one other person on this earth? Does that make us hypocrites because in the same breath we also don’t want to be scrutinized for our perceived shortcomings? I remember reading an article on ForHarriet.com when an author mentioned not complimenting little girls on their looks in order to make them see their value outside of the physical and that’s a very interesting concept and one that certainly doesn’t follow the norm. We’re almost trained to acknowledge one another’s beauty as a universal complimenting system that in the case of Ashley Judd can come back to bite us.

I think all women are in solidarity on not wanting our physical characteristics to be objectified, but what objectification looks like from one woman to the next is quite different as well. A video vixen calls herself a model and says she’s profiting off of the genes the good lord blessed her with. A woman outside of the industry might consider her a h*e who sells sexual fantasy for profit and sets women back centuries. Like beauty, objectification is sometimes in the eye of the beholder, as is oppression. It could easily be said magazines are preying on the insecurities of women when they spout out tips to drop 10 pounds in two days or suggest how to look younger, prettier, and thinner but is it fair to assume all of that advice is rooted in a desire to help women become more desirable for men as opposed to simply wanting to look good for ourselves?

The other day someone mentioned on an article I wrote about knowing when something is really an example of racism that the word sexism would benefit from a similar breakdown, and I agree. I do think the criticism directed at Ashley Judd totally comes from a place of ill motive intended to break her down I’m just not sure it’s rooted in sexism. As a whole, we’ve become an increasingly insensitive and judgmental society in all respects, with beauty being the most obvious because it’s most easily displayed (or not). The question is, if criticism of women’s bodies is internalized patriarchy, then what is celebration of distinct ideals of beauty and is it wrong for men and women to participate in and benefit from that as well? If so, Ashley Judd may need to backtrack because her change of heart from enjoying being the object of men and women’s admiration to now not wanting to be critiqued for having fallen short somehow may have just stuck her foot in her mouth.

What do you think about Ashley Judd’s comments? Is her point valid or is she a hypocrite?

Brande Victorian is a blogger and culture writer in New York City. Follower her on Twitter at @be_vic.

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