Who the fuck recommended The West Wing thing to me?

like while I'm down for leftist critiques of the West Wing, I'm not down for leftist critiques from white men who decide to criticize the portrayal of women without apparently TALKING to any women

so I listened to the ep on the pilot, which did one of my least favorite things from dudes who think they're being feminist, which was to describe the cast as "Allison Janney and a bunch of white men" (they acknowledged that Dulé Hill exists, but he wasn't in the pilot so)

that's cool, except Janel Moloney exists.

like, she exists, and is a major part of the show

like, there are other female regulars, but I can understand the critique in their case--Mrs. Landingham is great, but she's not core cast in the way Janney and Moloney are

this sort of erasure-of-women-and-their-agency-to-make-the-point-that-women-are-erased-and-denied-agency happened in The Dig, on Netflix, too

by the way, despite that, I HIGHLY recommend The Dig

it's a nice quiet movie about passionate archaeologists being nice and taking care of each other, and the British Museum is the bad guys

and the fashion is great

and it's beautiful

and it's about Sutton Hoo

HOWEVER

it has in it the character of Peggy Piggot (better known as Margaret Guido), who was, at the time of the Sutton Hoo excavation, *already well known and respected and had directed at least one dig*

She was a badass, read about her here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Guido

So in the movie (and presumably, in the book it's based on), Peggy is a sweet young thing who's shy and subordinate to her closeted, misogynist husband, who's brought on to help with the dig because she doesn't weigh much

Peggy, in the film, locates the burial chamber in the ship they're digging up... by stepping on it and falling partway into it.

In other words, in order to make a point about how women like Edith Pretty (herself an amateur archaeologist in the film) were key in archeological discoveries like Sutton Hoo but were limited in their roles by misogyny...

...it turns a well-known and respected archaeologist who was brought onto the project *because she was badass enough that even sexist old British men respected her* into a bumbling newbie who's constantly put down by everyone around her

Similarly, the two guys on this podcast, in order to make their point that the West Wing cast is mostly white guys, especially in the pilot, erase a major female character.

And wow, the comments on the top post of this thread are all about the West Wing.

There's plenty to rant about there, people, but I'm ranting about this crappy white dude PODCAST CLAIMING TO BE A LEFTIST CRITIQUE OF IT

so yeah, they proceed to be like "oh, man, this show doesn't have any women in the main cast except for Allison Janney."

Then they start in on Lisa Edelstein's character in the pilot.

So, in the pilot, Lisa Edelstein plays a sex worker named Laurie who decides to sleep with Sam, one of the inner-circle staffers, who doesn't know she's a sex worker, and then they accidentally switch pagers, leading to a potential scandal for him

and omfg is there a lot to critique there

however, this podcast spends a long time explaining about how this is all an adolescent fantasy about being the one guy that the sex worker likes so much she doesn't charge him

so, number one, they keep using the term "prostitute," which is sort of... eh, dudes

but also, like, sex workers are allowed to have love lives outside their work, and it's not like there's some clunky conversation about "dude, I'm a sex worker but you're SO AMAZING that I just had to sleep with you"

what happens is she sees him, thinks he's pretty, and they have a one-night stand, they mix up their pagers, he figures out that she's an escort, and awkwardly explains that he's a White House staffer and is worried that this could get used against him

Like, later in the series, he gets gross about trying to "save" her, but in the pilot, it mostly seems to exist to introduce the idea of oppo research being a thing that people in politics have to constantly worry about, not a fantasy about winning over a sex worker

And I dunno, it feels like if you're going to talk about the dynamics of a show showing a WH staffer sleeping with a sex worker who's off the clock, maybe, I dunno, *bring on a sex worker* to talk about that scene? Instead of being two white dudes sniggering about it?

But then, THEN we get to their discussion of the pilot's handling of religion.

In case you didn't watch TWW, let me summarize as briefly as possible.

Remember this aired in the 90s:

Josh, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, is on some Crossfire-like tv hour with Mary Marsh, an Ann Coulter-like figure.

Josh is Jewish. At some point, things get heated, and Mary, a conservative Christian, tells Josh that he doesn't worship the same God she does.

Josh tells her that her God got indicted for tax fraud.

Now everyone is wondering whether Josh will get fired.

So this podcast spends quite a bit of time objecting to the idea that anybody in a Democratic White House would give a shit about what a conservative Christian commentator had to say, and being appalled that the show portrays some "good" conservative Christian pundits.

Specifically, they spend some time on a scene in which Leo, the chief of staff and the one who's going to have to fire Josh if the (very Christian) president decides so, tries to smooth things over with a prominent conservative Christian who has pull with the others.

This guy is portrayed as a relatively reasonable conservative Christian, by the show's standards--someone who is very much a political operative but who also has his own moral convictions, but who treats Leo like an old friend.

All of this culminates with the decree that Josh must apologize to Al Caldwell (the "reasonable" conservative Christian pundit) and Mary Marsh (the Ann Coulter analogue).

At the meeting, Marsh makes antisemitic comments about Josh, which causes everyone to lose their shit, and then the President appears for the first time in the pilot, shuts them down, and makes a speech.

The podcast makes one offhand comment about the antisemitism, and then spends a bunch of time talking about how religion is portrayed in the show.

so here's the thing

that moment is actually the driver of the entire episode

You don't know what's going on, why Josh is acting the way he's acting, why Toby, despite being portrayed in the pilot as a complete misanthrope, is trying to help him, or even Toby's strangely intimate advice to Josh.

Why a scene in which Leo emphasizes the President's Christian-ness?

Why is Josh's zinger, which is certainly snide, but not exactly scandalous, being treated as such a big fucking deal?

Like, the entire episode plays VERY differently once you've seen it.

The revelation in the final confrontation that Josh and Toby are both Jewish is a reveal. It gets immediately one-upped by the appearance of the President, but it's the thing that explains some weirdnesses.

Why would Aaron Sorkin, a pretty loudly Jewish showrunner, pitching a network pilot in the fucking *1990s*, in which the big Masks Off moment for the villains of the pilot is them slipping up and saying something antisemitic out loud, go out of his way to Not All Christians?

Gee, you oblivious putzes, I WONDER WHY.

Like, do you remember the 1990s? Because I sure do.

Christian parents and pastors got to come lecture my class--my class at a PUBLIC SCHOOL--about the evils of Dungeons & Dragons.

Christian parents got to *demand that my PUBLIC SCHOOL* protect their children from the knowledge that non-Christian beliefs existed by providing them with alternate activities during our science classes and world religion units.

Like, do you remember how fucking far everyone from Democratic politicians to PUBLIC SCHOOLS was willing to bend over backwards to Not Offend The Christians?

Like, oh man, in my social studies class--in PUBLIC SCHOOL--when we talked about the Holocaust, discussion of the role of the Catholic Church was limited to "they tried to protect Jews but Hitler was anti-Christian so they had to be careful."

A very loudly Christian girl in my class raised her hand. "Why didn't the Jews just convert to Christianity?" she asked. "Then Hitler wouldn't have killed them, or if he did, they could go to heaven."

"I don't know," said my teacher.

Like, that was the overall tenor of the 1990s, at least in flyover country. Christianity had to be handled like spun glass, and if Christians said anything about Jews that wasn't ravingly antisemitic (and what counted as ravingly antisemitic was according to Christian standards)

It was treated with serious consideration while Jewish kids sat silent.

Like, NO ONE who was a state employee wanted to risk offending Christians.

so, like, Aaron Sorkin is pitching a TV show in which, in the PILOT, he's portraying conservative Christians as the bad guys, having a Jewish guy call them out, and then having them respond with open antisemitism, and you wonder why he hedged his bets with some "good" Christians?

SERIOUSLY?

Like, they're going on about "Josh's line wasn't that big of a deal, people sling much worse around on TV all the time, why's everyone freaking out about it?"

which entirely misses the context of the fucking 1990s in politics

it also misses the context in which Josh *said* the controversial thing, which was a Christian woman on national TV suggesting Jews (or at least, the ones in the White House) don't worship the "real" God

like, I don't remember whether we actually ever learn whether Josh believes in God, but he certainly is Jewish, and "Jews worship a different God than Christians" is actually a very old antisemitic canard

it's fleeting, it goes by fast, and unless you're either a Jew who's heard it before or someone who's studied antisemitism, you'd miss it

which also kind of feels like the point

Josh reacts to a subtle antisemitic dig by snapping back, and then gets gaslit by pretty much everyone he works with, because they don't see it, they just react to his *response*

But we have to wonder, watching it, why everyone's treating this as such a big deal

well, as it turns out, Josh's ultimate boss is Very Christian, so Josh can't trust that he's not going to sympathize with the Ann Coulter lady since suddenly this is about insults to Christianity

And then we've got Toby, who's probably the one guy who knows very well what's going on, and is like "dude, I don't like you, but I don't want you to lose your job, and I warned you ahead of time that you had to tread on eggshells"