“Mad Men,” my favorite TV show of the moment, offers a poignant look at the trials of women in the workplace in the early 1960s. The series is set at a growing ad agency on Madison Avenue (that’s copywriter Peggy Olson, played by Elisabeth Moss, above), and it’s full of cringe-worthy moments. Seven of the show’s nine writers are women, which Amy Chozick notes is a rarity in Hollywood television.

Joan Wickersham, who worked as a copywriter in a Boston ad agency in the 1980s, writes in the Boston Globe that “long after the 1960s, the workplace was still stuck in the same cultural blind spot satirized in ‘Mad Men.’” She shares this story of a client presenting prototypes of two computer games, one targeted to boys and one to girls. The boy’s game involved building a railway empire; the girl’s game involved deciding where to put furniture in a house.

I suggested to the client that maybe the girls’ game needed a little more substance. The boys’ game was ambitious, intellectually challenging – couldn’t something similar be devised for the girls? Or maybe they didn’t need their own game. Maybe they’d be just as excited as the boys about building a railway empire. Maybe . . .

One of the men I worked with gave me a look. A look that said: “You’re being a pest, and a troublemaker. Shut up.’’

And I did.

Fast forward another 25 years, and consider Wal-Mart’s gendered back-to-school commercials, as described by Claire Mysko:

Boy version with Mom voiceover: “I can’t go to class with him. I can’t do his history report for him, or show the teachers how curious he is. That’s his job. My job is to give him everything he needs to succeed while staying within a budget…I love my job.” Cut to boy with his new affordable laptop. He’s getting applause from his teacher and the students in the class as he delivers a report.

Girl version with Mom voiceover:“I can’t go to school with her. I can’t introduce her to new friends.” Cut to girl nervously asking “Can I sit here?” to a group of girls sitting together at lunch. “Sure, I like your top!” one of them answers. “Or tell everyone how amazing she is. But I can give her what she needs to feel good about herself without breaking my budget. All she has to do is be herself.” Cut to smiling girls walking arm-in-arm down the hallway.

It appears that much work still needs to be done.

I’m still watching Joss Whedon’s “Dollhouse,” and I’m becoming mildly intrigued. Television reviewers had only been given episodes 1-3 when they made their initial, mixed at best, reviews of the series. I wanted to wait until I got through episode 4 before I starting making any pronouncements.

So now here’s a tepid one. The story has great potential as an allegory for women struggling for agency in a increasingly subtle patriarchal world, but it is fulfilling that potential at a snail’s pace. And the feminist themes are being continually undermined by the marketing of its star, Eliza Dushku, who recently posed on the cover of Maxim.

I don’t agree with Nancy Franklin of The New Yorker that the “primary qualification Dushku brings to the part is that she graduated with honors from the Royal Academy of Cleavage.” In fact, I could easily see her growing into the role or the role growing into her.

Like Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Buffy, Echo, Dushku’s character, is valued by others because of her stereotypical beauty. It’s an explicit part of her skill set, as the operators of the Dollhouse put it. Like Buffy, I’m confident (and I can begin to see the seeds being planted) that Whedon is planning to play off of the stereotype and assumptions — and ultimately play against them.

Franklin misses the point when she continues to say, “In terms of gender studies, it is notable that Dushku’s demeanor as a zombie is much the same as the demeanor many actresses her age resort to when trying to project an image of themselves as unthreatening and ‘feminine’: a slouchy walk, a bobbly head, and ever-parted lips.”

She is that way because the operators of the Dollhouse — and their clients — want her that way. By exposing this gendered system, the show can — potentially — undermine it. But Whedon is clearly walking a fine line here, and when The New Yorker doesn’t get it, you might need to make access to the allegory a bit clearer.

And you might want to have a word with Fox and Dushku herself about the messages they are sending off-screen (or at least outside the narrative of the show).

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Before we say a final goodbye to the Republican National Convention (and the good times had by all!) let’s take a moment to spotlight news stories, columns and an open letter to the Alaskan governor that transform the “R” for Republicans into Reality.

Jesus Was a Community Organizer: Joe Klein explains, in language simple enough for Rudy Giuliani to understand, exactly what a community organizer does — and specifically what Barack Obama did. The MoJo blog has more. And the Boston Globe has a story today featuring community organizers who are none too happy about the insults.

The Mother of All Hypocrisies: Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, wrote an open letter to Sarah Palin on women’s rights that is a must read. Over at Slate, E.J. Graff explains the difference between feminism and feminine chauvinism.

In a column titled “Mirrored Ceiling,” Judith Warner asks, “Why does this woman — who to some of us seems as fake as they can come, with her delicate infant son hauled out night after night under the klieg lights and her pregnant teenage daughter shamelessly instrumentalized for political purposes — deserve, to a unique extent among political women, to rank as so ‘real’?”

Calling Out Contradictions: Kudos to Jim Kuhnhenn and Jim Drinkard of the Associated Press for putting together a handy rundown of false claims and exaggerations made at the convention. The issues covered include Obama’s tax plan, the infamous “bridge to nowhere” and Mitt Romney’s back-to-the-future moment.

Meanwhile, Ted Anthony, who covers culture and politics for the AP, notes that the Republicans want it both ways when it comes to the Palin family: “Hey, media, leave those kids alone — so we can use them as we see fit.”

Finally we turn to “The Daily Show” for a delightful exchange between Jon Stewart and Newt Gingrich on the politics of language:

When Brian K. Vaughan’s science fiction comic epic Y: The Last Man began several years ago, Christine was right on it, praising its “mature and complex look at gender politics.”

Brought to life by Pia Guerra’s stunning artwork, Vaughan’s vision reveals the great potential of both the science fiction and comic genres. As Vaughan says, “Good sci-fi is always about our world rather than some far-flung future.” And he has created a subtle but very relevant political statement.

Well, it’s nice to know that such a vision can find a wider audience. Check out Douglas Wolk’s glowing review in Salon of the concluding volume of the series — just released in June — calling it the end of the “wittiest, most entertaining story about gender in recent memory”:

Vaughan gets a lot of mileage out of speculating about what would happen if all men really did vanish from the Earth: Vatican City, for instance, would become a mausoleum, and so would the floor of the Tokyo stock exchange, but the Israeli military would be just fine. Long-distance commerce would be a disaster for years, thanks to the highways being blocked by enormous pileups caused by half of all drivers abruptly keeling over. Australia, as one of the few countries that allowed women to serve on submarines, would rule the waves. Supermodels would be forced into new lines of work, like driving a garbage truck full of men’s corpses. (America’s next top undertaker!)

But “Y” isn’t an argument about what really would happen if the men were all transported far beyond the Northern Sea, or even a bildungsroman, as much as it is a wickedly clever satire of patriarchal culture. It’s a story about men and the chaos and ruination they’ve brought to the world, in which all the “male” roles are played by female characters. There are ferociously funny little riffs on women getting by on their looks, “man-to-man” conversations, “women and children first,” men as protectors and women as protected, women as sexual temptresses of men, men asking women to smile, “proving one’s manhood,” and practically every other kind of awful gender essentialism.

Vaughan has gone on to write for ABC’s “Lost” and even for the “Buffy, The Vampire Slayer” comic series — and there’s a “Y” movie in development. So expect to continue seeing the world through his unique lens.

Every summer, it seems, I go through my Liz-Phair-regret phase. It’s probably because on our near-annual roadtrips, Liz Phair’s first three albums — “Exile in Guyville,” “Whip-Smart” and “whitechocolatespaceegg” — are still, to this day, in heavy rotation in the car’s CD player.

Besides being full of fun, quirky and complex music, they are powerful and risky feminist statements. And that’s not because they explicitly promote some agenda of empowerment — but because Phair deftly picks at life’s complexities; she is full of desires and doubts, strengths and weaknesses.

My love of these albums made Phair’s sudden but deliberate and self-aware attempt at pop stardom (by eliminating the quirks and dumbing down the lyrics) all the more devastating. It’s been awhile since she made that transformation in her fourth album, “Liz Phair” (2003), and boggled the minds of fans and rock critics alike. If you want to revisit that cultural moment, see the vitriolic critiques by Mim Udovitch in Slate or, from one of her early advocates, Greg Kot in the Chicago Tribune.

What makes this summer’s regret phase particularly poignant is that Liz Phair seems to be going through it as well. Or at least that might be a pop psychologist’s take on her 15th-anniversary reissue of “Exile in Guyville” and the accompanying tour in which she plays the entire album. Greg Kot uses the opportunity to revisit the past himself, while Jim Derogatis of the Chicago Sun Times saw her kick-off concert at the Vic Theater and, well, didn’t like it.

While Phair might be trying to make up for some lost time, she still doesn’t seem to fully “get it” — to realize her own contradictions.

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Watching Michelle Obama on “The View” (watch it yourself while it lasts), you see all her very admirable strengths — and you see a predictable campaign strategy emerging. As Jodi Kantor and Michael Powell over at The Caucus put it:

The virtue of a show like this is clear — not only is there a fair dollop of politics, it’s a very useful forum for a candidate, as they can talk about Third Rail topics such as race in a chatty, just between us fashion… . A smart place to roll out the non-makeover makeover.

That’s not to say the discussion isn’t full of shopping tips, a pantyhose debate, motherhood, etc — all the post-Hillary-”standing by my man” safe stuff that allows us to know that Michelle is, first and foremost, a woman.

And of course, not a dreaded feminist. That was made clear long ago, in an early 2007 interview with the Washington Post: “You know, I’m not that into labels. So probably, if you laid out a feminist agenda, I would probably agree with a large portion of it [...] I wouldn’t identify as a feminist just like I probably wouldn’t identify as a liberal or a progressive.”

“The View” appearance, though, certainly reveals that, when she wants to/is allowed, Michelle can be a great, measured spokesperson for the Obama campaign on a variety of substantive issues. Like her husband, she has an uncanny ability to seem like she is never breaking a sweat, no matter what she is asked. And she absorbs other viewpoints with a friendly smile and talk of diversity and a transcendence of party politics.

Basically, she’s really cool — someone, as I’ve said before, with whom everyone (black and white, woman and man) wants to hang.

Let’s just hope she isn’t confined in this new/old role — and she’s able to makes some enemies.

Yes, make enemies — a great indulgence in a campaign season but a potentially profound way to show leadership and demonstrate that true “change” will requires sacrifice and will inevitably be, at times, unpopular. That sense of non-negotiable values is what made John and Robert Kennedy moral touchstones for a generation.

So if someone calls her out on her supposed lack of patriotism or her supposed racial antagonism or if someone turns her intelligence and self-confidence into negative “manly” qualities, she shouldn’t just say they are “lies,” which they are. She herself should use the opportunity to lead us into needed conversations about the power of dissent and the complicated history of race and gender in America.

Now that would be really, really cool.

On eve of what might be the end of the Hillary Clinton candidacy (Obama should, at least, have ensured himself a majority of the pledged delegates after the primaries in Kentucky and Oregon on Tuesday), my joy is mixed with both bitterness and regret.

While I am a happy Obama supporter, I’ve waited too long for this day to come, and I am resentful of the way Clinton has dragged out this primary process for what I can see as nothing other than self-absorbed reasons at best. Her race-baiting throughout the campaign worsened my already low opinion of her campaign tactics.

But I have been regrettably silent in this space about the disturbing misogyny that has permeated much of the media’s coverage. To do a little make-up work, let me point you to a YouTube video that is a very effective primer to the conversation:

The words of Edward R. Murrow and the fictional Howard Beale are a little much, but the pattern in the clips is devastatingly clear.

The overwhelmingly male pundits and the pontificators couldn’t get a handle on how to talk about a powerful and prominent woman on the campaign trail. They fell back again and again on numerous stereotypes — from the nagging wife to the emotional wreck — instead of taking her seriously.

Marie Cocco (The Washington Post) and Connie Schultz (The Capitol Times) have articulated the sad consequences of the media’s gendered coverage extremely well.

E.J. Graff, though, might have the most substantial critique of a media that systematically refuses to recognize women’s worth. Although her revealing research doesn’t explicitly reference the present campaign coverage, it goes a long way toward explaining it.

It’s about time.

It’s been two decades since “Pretty Woman” made prostitution seem cool — a path to self-esteem and self-empowerment — and I have rarely seen, outside of academic journals and hard-hitting documentaries, such an effective puncturing of that cultural myth as I read today in an opinion piece by Anne K. Ream and R. Clifton Spargo of the Chicago Tribune, who were inspired by the media’s recent treatment of Ashley Alexandra Dupre, the prostitute who famously serviced the former Governor of New York, Eliot Spitzer.

Of course, the glorification of prostitution began long before “Pretty Woman,” but as Ream and Spargo point out, since that film hit the big screen, the myth-making has reached ridiculous extremes — from “Pimp and Ho” nights at clubs to “Turning Tricks” pole-dancing at gyms.

And that’s not even mentioning TV shows like HBO’s “Cathouse” — “where a Nevada pimp and his ‘girls’ are portrayed as one big, happy, sexually uninhibited family.” That show and others “are an ode to the joys of being sexually serviced by women.”

I realize we need to be careful not to condemn sex workers for their choices — which are often made from a very limited list of options. But we need to make sure we don’t end up justifying a system that ultimately devastates women’s lives.

Ream and Spargo rightly note, “Our cultural fascination with and glamorization of pimping and prostitution do not make for a kinder and gentler sex trade.” And they go one to cite statistics — from 90 percent of prostitutes having been victims of childhood sexual assault to jaw-dropping mortatily rates:

A comprehensive 2004 mortality study, funded by the National Institutes of Health and conducted by the American Journal of Epidemiology, shows that workplace homicide rates for women working in prostitution are 51 times that of the next most dangerous occupation for women (which is working in a liquor store). The average age of death of the women studied was 34.

Yet somehow it’s almost conventional wisdom that prostitution, if done right, can be a savvy career move and an avenue to self-fulfillment:

Nowhere was this more clear than on a recent edition of “Larry King Live.” During an interview with Natalie McLennan, the woman who allegedly trained Dupre at the escort agency New York Confidential, King asked, “Do any hookers ever marry their johns?”

“They do!” she exclaimed, telling King the tale of a fellow “girl” who “went on a date with a client and then we never saw her again. It turns out that they met and they fell in love and she never returned. It’s a real sort of Cinderella, ‘Pretty Woman’ story, you know. Which is I think . . . just a fantastic story — ”every girl’s dream.”

For the vast majority of women working in prostitution, however, the reality is less fairy tale, more grim fable. But who wants to let that get in the way of a good story?

This is one of those dominant cultural narratives that we must do a much better job of resisting.

A vegan Gentleman’s Club is something right out of The Onion — but you can’t make the comments of Casa Diablo owner Johnny Diablo up (unlike his name):

Mr. Diablo isn?t concerned with the “feminazis,” as he calls them. As a vegan himself, he says he hasn?t worn or eaten animal products in 24 years and is worried about cruelty to animals. “My sole purpose in this universe is to save every possible creature from pain and suffering,” he said.

And I know objectification of women and commodification of a movement are important issues — and I’ve spent a great deal of space here writing about them — but I can’t help but laugh at some of these well-intentioned lines and quotes from New York Times writer Kara Jesella:

Casa Diablo is just the latest example of selling veganism with a “Girls Gone Wild” aesthetic [...]

Isa Chandra Moskowitz, a cookbook author, is among those who believe such images twist the vegan message. “As a feminist, I?m not keen on the idea of using women’s bodies to sell veganism, and I’m not into the idea of using veganism to sell women’s bodies,” she said.[...]

The issue of sexism in vegan circles is “extremely polarizing,” said Bob Torres, an author of “Vegan Freak” [...]

Vegans who use sexuality to promote the cause say it is a good way to convert carnivores — in particular, men [...]

The article actually does a very good job at getting across the diversity of the vegan community — and the difficulties of tying together progressive agendas and of resisting easy compromises to advance a cause.

But, you gotta admit, it’s a pretty silly way to spark the conversation.

So I dropped in on the new TV series based on the “Terminator” movie franchise: “Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.” And the usual lowest-common-denominator limitations of broadcast TV are certainly present. Everyone is “hot” (even the freaky and geeky kids at John Connor’s high school) — and many of the characters feel trapped in stilted, predictable dialogue.

Despite these shortcomings, however, the ideas that motivate the narrative are so compelling that they more than make up for the sloppy execution — at least for now. Sure, the TV series and movie franchise use well-worn science fiction tropes — from time travel to machines becoming conscious and rebelling against their creators. But they make them fresh in such a way that both the movies and the TV show are more about the instability of modern identity than a more primal fear of technology. They deftly explore what makes us human and what human qualities might become our collective downfall.

It helps, of course, when explorations of identity aren’t afraid to present a realistic portrait of men and women. Unfortunately, as many critics have been pointing out, the waifish actress Lena Headey in the TV series isn’t very believable as Sarah Connor — who, as portrayed by a well-built Linda Hamilton in the movies, has gained a gritty, muscular physique over the years as she has constructed a guerrilla resistance force of sorts aimed at dismantling the machines that will otherwise lead to the apocalypse.

Check out the comparison pictures here. The PR shot of Headey handling a gun, especially when juxtaposed with an action shot of Linda Hamilton in T2, is particularly disturbing — echoing a phallic fetishization of women and guns that makes it look like an ad in Soldier of Fortune.

As members of the Sarah Connor Charm School and other feminists have noted, Linda Hamilton’s portrayal of Sarah Connor was an iconic inspiration for many women who rebel against the dangerous and debilitating standard of beauty in American culture. Unfortunately, when put in the context of images of women in music, magazines, advertising, TV, films and elsewhere that have come to dominate the cultural landscape in the last couple of decades — a virtual body image apocalypse, you might say — she feels like the last real woman we’ve seen.

We were disturbed a couple of months ago when not a single film directed by a woman made the AFI’s list of the Top 100 Movies of All-Time. Thankfully, the Alliance of Women Film Journalists came to the rescue with their own, alternative list that features women more prominently.

Christy Lemire of the Associated Press, however, reports that the institutional bias reflected in the AFI list is very much a reality in Hollywood, even though female directors are “flooding today’s theaters more than ever.”

On one level, Lemire’s article is a depressing one, as it reflects on dismal statistics and first-hand accounts that reveal how sexism persists in all aspects of the movie business.

Julie Delpy directing “2 Days in Paris”

But as Lemire discusses all the new female-directed films set to be released — from Julie Delpy’s “2 Days in Paris” to Shari Springer Berman’s “The Nanny Diaries” to Robin Swicord’s “The Jane Austen Book Club” — hope springs.

And even though someone like Delpy is sick of only getting requests to direct romantic comedies, her strength and humor makes you feel she’s in this struggle for the long-term:

They’re looking for a female director, and it’s all about a relationship. You know what? I don’t want to make a movie that they want a female director for. To me, first of all, it’s condescending. What does that mean? Is it about breast feeding?

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Patty Hewes (Glenn Close) and Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne) in “Damages”

TV is quickly becoming the place to find “multidimensional female protagonists.”

“The list of gutsy women with more than a few flaws is long — “Saving Grace” (TNT), “Bionic Woman” (NBC), “Painkiller Jane” (Sci-Fi), “The Sarah Connor Chronicles” (Fox), and “In Plain Sight” (USA), to name a few,” writes Gloria Goodale of the Christian Science Monitor.

She begins the story by discussing “Damages,” the FX drama starring Glenn Close in the scariest role she’s ever had (yes, including “Fatal Attraction”).

Chuck Barney of The Mercury News also notes the trend:

It wasn’t all that long ago in Hollywood that television was viewed as a grungy stepsister to the big screen, and established performers avoided it unless they were desperate. But two things have happened to gradually alter the perception: Movies became hopelessly obsessed with youth and formulaic big-scale concepts; while television, on some fronts, matured and broadened its storytelling scope.

The eminently watchable Lili Taylor has a first-hand perspective on this trend since she plays a therapist with her own issues on “State of Mind” (Lifetime). And she’s worried that a trend too easily becomes a cliche in Hollywood: “It seems like TV is pushing itself more. And if it’s pushing itself, it’s going to probably push itself off in the realm of the feminine. I think what happens is when you have a formula, a lot of times the female character is going to suffer.”

When one hears that the producers of “Bionic Woman” are proudly touting it as “post-feminist,” I begin to get a little anxious myself.

Having seen the premieres of both “Saving Grace” and “Damages,” I think there’s plenty to like in both series. Holly Hunter’s Grace, an Oklahoma City detective in “Saving Grace,” is a dynamic and complex character that defies most stereotypes. But the show’s major conceit — an angel that comes down to reform her — threatens to undermine the ground-breaking possibilities within that character.

Glenn Close is equally remarkable as attorney Patty Hewes in “Damages,” but her co-star, Rose Byrne, is the surprisingly effective narrative centerpiece — she reveals the many layers of her character in subtle gestures and expressions. The show has less flaws than “Grace,” but then it aims a little lower — it’s much more concerned with being a taut thriller than a character study. But it looks like it’s going to be a very enjoyable ride.

Speaking of thrillers, Cherry Jones is set to be the next president on “24.” Just when I thought I could finally let go of shamelessly contrived Fox series, admitting that Mary Lynn Rajskub as Chloe was not enough of a reason to keep watching, it keeps pulling me back in …

A Virtual Moral and Spiritual Crisis: Mitt Romney’s latest campaign ad identifies video games as part of “a cesspool of violence and sex and drugs and indolence and perversions” in which “our children now swim.” Matt Peckham of PC World (yes, PC World) correctly tags Romney as just the latest in a long line of politicians that have fomented a “climate of fear” to create a more malleable populus.

By the way, is gambling “indolence” or a “perversion”? In either case, Romney will probably be happy to know that the producers of Second Life have outlawed gambling in their virtual world — which is beginning to feel like a “ghost town,” according to ValleyWag.

On the other hand, evangelizing is making a much smoother move into that same world — at least for the Jesuits. Father Antonio Spadaro tells the Financial Times: “This virtual Second Life is becoming populated with churches, mosques, temples, cathedrals. synagogues, places of prayer of all kinds. And behind an avatar there is a man or a woman, perhaps searching for God and faith, perhaps with very strong spiritual needs.” (Thanks, Lede, for the lead)

And whether it’s Second Life, MySpace or Facebook, Henry Jenkins, building off of Danah Boyd’s research, wants us to consider the “participation gap” among online users.

Drawing Well: Tim Cavanaugh of the Los Angeles Times is surprised to learn that sales of comic books have been increasingly steadily for the last five years. He’s been used to hearing only of the impending death of the genre:

If it’s striking how many movies are based on comic book properties these days, it’s even more striking how few of those properties were minted within the last decade or so … A favorite sport of industry watchers is figuring out just how the form went from being something youthful and dynamic to becoming something fearful, risk-averse and cramped.

He sees some hope in — you guessed it — the web, where sites like PvP and Modern Tales are pushing the envelope and turning a profit.

Comic books, of course, have always been a strange mixture of regressive and forward-looking ideologies. Lyle Masaki at AfterElton is sure to spark a conversation with his list of “ten of the coolest gay superheroes you (probably) haven’t heard of.”

Adhir Kalyan as Raja in “Aliens in America”

Aliens in Hollywood: Lisa de Moreas, whose laugh-out-loud columns make me feel like she’s a stand-up comedian in a television critic’s body, is having her usual fun at the summer press tour in Beverly Hills. But the story she tells in the second part of this column is both funny and revealing.

De Moreas loves the upcoming CW sitcom “Aliens in America” — in which a Pakistani exchange student finds both friendship and prejudice in America. She sees it as the next coming of “Freaks and Geeks” (and from the hilarious trailer, I’m probably going to agree).

Other critics, though, took great offense at its portrayal of a bigoted Middle America. De Moreas’ transcription of the critics’ confrontation with “Aliens in America” producers could be the basis for a sitcom itself.

Black is Intellectual: African American public intellectuals are not a rare breed — the incestuous mainstream media just make it feel that way, according to David A. Love’s insightful analysis in The Black Commentator.

Mark Anthony Neal’s defense of Michael Eric Dyson in PopMatters makes a similar point from another direction. Dyson, according to Neal, has been the source of scorn both for his popularity and for presenting too reductive and celebratory a picture black life: “This widely circulated and decidedly worn ‘poverty pimp’ thesis has been applied to figures as diverse as Reverend Jesse Jackson, Cornel West, and the current cadre of hip-hop generation intellectuals, who supposedly, as the critique goes, wallow in victimization and refuse to hold the black rank-and-file, particularly black youth, accountable for bad behavior.”

But Neal says we should show praise Dyson and others who have “leveraged the appeal of popular culture” — whether that’s television, hip hop, etc — to fight the good fight. Neal brings up BlackProf.com and Professor Kim’s News Notes — which we have been long fans of here at PopPolitics — as examples of how black intellectuals have harnessed the blogosphere.

Finally, Cornel West himself reinforces both Love’s and Neal’s perspective in a recent interview with the Washington Post, where he defends Dyson and his own forays into music and other modes of cultural expression.

I Want My Culture Back: David Browne and Alan Riding, from two very different perspectives, are lamenting the demise of serious culture — art that challenges us, both intellectually and politically.

Browne, in his “Anti-Cheese Manifesto” for the Huffington Post, admits his own obsessions with low-brow pop culture but refuses to celebrate them: “The danger in perpetually embracing the awful is the way it trivializes sincerity and makes earnestness seem mawkish and old-fashioned. It says: Don’t take it all so seriously, since nothing matters … Perhaps it is simpler to chuckle than invest genuine feeling in anything, since that can be too chancy, too uncool, and too emotionally risky.”

And Riding, in a column for the International Herald Tribune, writes from a more nostalgic perspective, recalling the way the arts in the past have directly challenged corrupt and repressive governments. He sees recent spectacles like Live Earth as symptomatic of a culture that values performance over action.

Viva Ruth Frankenburg: Speaking of intellectuals, culture and political engagement, it’s worth reading some of the homages to the recently deceased Ruth Frankenberg, a ground-breaking British-born sociologist. Donna Haraway, an exemplary intellectual in her own right, wrote the obituary for the Guardian, in which she praised her feminism and anti-racism — and her nuanced exploration of the complicated intersection between the two. Dana Goldstein has a more personal response to Frankenburg’s work on her blog, Une flâneuse.

In a provocative Salon article — “Hillary is from Mars, Obama is from Venus?” — Michael Scherer lays out what he sees as the upside-down gender politics of the Democratic primary campaign:

When Obama travels the country, he does not appear to worry much about posing with guns or wearing those khaki workman jackets that made Kerry look so silly in 2004. Instead, he sings an empowerment ballad on the stump that would make most lady folk singers proud. “The decision to go to war is not a sport,” he tells crowds, rejecting the male metaphor. “We can discover the better part of ourselves as a nation,” he says. “We can dream big dreams.”

In contrast, Hillary Clinton has run her campaign with all the muscular vision and authority of the macho candidates of yesteryear. “I’ve seen her stand up to bullies,” announced Christine Vilsack, the former first lady of Iowa, when she introduced Clinton at a rally in Des Moines last week. On the stump, Clinton repeatedly tells people that they should let her take control of the country, eschewing Obama’s more abstract calls for national soul-searching. “If you are ready for change, I am ready to lead,” she says. “I want to be the president who sets goals again.” [...]

Obama, who currently trails Clinton in the polls, especially among working-class women, has run a campaign that is virtually free of macho symbolism. He is, instead, a self-consciously inspirational candidate, who is always talking about things like coming “together for a common purpose.”

Readers who are concerned with the perceived “feminization” of the Democratic party, which they believe caused John Kerry, among others, to lose on the national stage, have responded angrily to Scherer’s argument.

But more conscientious readers have more substantive, thought-provoking critiques. They point out, for example, that Scherer is too caught up with the masculine/feminine binary, even while he is pointing out that it’s just a “social construction.” Why can’t Obama simply be labeled an empathetic, compassionate, consensus-building man? For that matter, why can’t Hillary be just a tough woman?

Race, moreover, might be a big factor in Obama’s reluctance to go macho, since Obama has the extra burden of dealing with white people’s fear of the angry black man.

Putting this discussion in a broader cultural context might help us understand better the gendered and racial pressures on Hillary and Obama.

Jenn Pozner of Women in Media and News breaks down the promotional materials for a new Fox reality show coming this Fall: “When Women Rule The World.” The tension on the show will come from the fact that “the men must accede to the women’s every demand, 24/7.”

Pozner points out that Fox is setting up the show to be part of a long-standing feminist backlash that demonizes strong, independent women. But, in the middle of a presidential campaign where gender is front and center, it also feeds into the inevitable strategy the Republicans will take to undermine Hillary, if she becomes the Democratic nominee.

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I’m not a big fan of lists of top films, songs, books, etc — at least as far as they attempt to be the last word on “greatness.” Having said that, when a list is revealed — whether it be by the New York Times or a random blogger — I can’t help but peek.

My curiosity does not stem, though, from a need to order my universe or to feel good about the cultural choices I’ve made. For me, the lists grab my attention because they always reveal much more about the list-makers — and their social context — than the genres they are attempting to classify.

And no one seems more exposed this past week than the American Film Institute (AFI), who just issued the 10th anniversary edition of their “Top 100 Movies of All Time” (which was unveiled in primetime on CBS)

As Melissa Silverstein of The Huffington Post pointed out almost immediately, not a single female-directed film made the list. What’s equally disturbing:

The films themselves are boy-centric, and the only ones that are women driven (after The Wizard of Oz) include: Sunset Blvd; All About Eve; Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (give me a break); The Sound of Music; and Sophie’s Choice.

Inspired by this dramatic exclusion, the Alliance of Women Film Journalists (AWFJ) just issued their own “Top 100” list — voted on by its members. Amazingly, it shares only 22 films with the AFI list

Even though female directors or a female focus were not requirements, AWFJ’s list devastatingly demonstrates that the AFI’s dismissal of women in film is part of the institutional sexism — the “old boys club” mentality — of the film establishment.

How can you look at the diversity and quality of the films on AWFJ’s list and see any other explanation?