The Thing About Your Past, It Must Always Last.

Dear Ryan Murphy,


PLEASE. I am begging you on bended knee: Stop writing plotlines surrounding Will Schuester's gross obsession with Emma and inability to function romantically! Because it's not endearing, watching him ruthlessly pursue a woman who has already clearly rejected him. It doesn't make me cheer for Will and Emma as a couple to watch her get him shirtless, then abruptly become horrified with herself and run back to the boyfriend who has been good for her. It makes me feel icky, and it makes me want to turn off the show.

And R.Murph, that's a shame. Because you have all the ingredients for something really wonderful in this show - you have a bunch of charismatic young people who really understand and embody the characters they are playing, and each of them deserve the opportunity to shine in plotlines that actually show their character development.

Mercedes stepping up to play Frank-N-Furter was INSPIRED. She completely rocked that solo, and I would have loved to have seen more from her this episode.

Brittany and Santana just had a big fight, and we didn't see how they worked it out. You had them singing and dancing together during Touch-A Touch Me, but couldn't you have given them a scene together?

Mike Chang, who has been my favorite character since before you even gave him lines, is finally getting a little more room to shine, but why don't you give us a story line that actually shows some of the family problems he's been hinting at in his fight with Tina and his parents not wanting him to do the show?

Just - just stop with Will. He's awful. He didn't start out that way, in fact I kind of liked him for a lot of the first season, but episodes that focus on him are always awful and icky and leave me wanting a shower. His romantic life is pitiful and gross, and the reason those story lines creep me out as much as they do is because the show writes those stories in a way that's asking me to feel sorry for him, or cheer for him, or be on his side. And I can't be on his side, Ryan Murphy. I can't be on Will Schuester's side because I think that he has terrible attitudes toward women, and that he's bad for Emma. Despite his frequent moments of remorse over his behavior, Will Schuester has shown himself to be incapable of genuine self-reflection and has a disturbing tendency to act incredibly selfishly without regard to how it will affect the people around him, including the students he is responsible for.

And the thing is, Ryan Murphy, that you don't actually have to figure out how to *fix* Will as a character. In fact, I don't want you to (or, to be quite honest, think you can). Just stop focusing the plot on his storylines and give the other incredibly talented actors in your cast some space to shine.

I am a fan of the show. I love that it tries so hard, and takes on issues that other shows don't. When it's good, it is so good - but it has problems. And the problem that poses the biggest danger of making me turn the show off for good? Is Will Schuester.

All that said, there were a lot of elements of the Rocky Horror episode that I liked. At this point, though, an actual show recap is a whole other post.

I consider myself a good feminist. A living-in-the-real-world, we'll-never-be-a-perfect-society-but-we-can-at-least-be-better, I-think-it's-ok-to-sometimes-laugh-at-myself feminist, but a good feminist nevertheless. But I don't consider myself someone who toes the pitchfork wielding line of extremists who tell me that I'm a bad feminist if I don't take the most radical point of view. I don't consider myself someone who is so firmly rooted in what I believe that all I can do is shout it more and more emphatically, shutting down the lines of communication with people who think differently than I do.

There's this event that has been advertised on campus for the last few weeks. It's happening this Wednesday. It's an event that, in the interest of not shutting off lines of communication with people I disagree with, I will probably end up attending. The advertising for this event has been intentionally radicalizing, blatantly one-sided, and in the case of the table-topper pictured at the top of this post, actually offensive to me. Mostly because of the hypocrisy represented in the line "IF YOU ARE A WOMAN, YOUR BODY IS A BATTLEGROUND". Excuse you, if you don't think that the blasted patriarchy you're fighting so hard against should be permitted to create a discourse that constructs my body as something I don't wish it to be (a sexual object, a childbearing object, a care-taking object &c. &c. &c.) then WHAT GIVES YOU THE RIGHT TO DO EXACTLY THE SAME THING? My body is NOT a battleground on which you are permitted to stage your fight, my body is my own.

Yes, yes, yes, the body is a cultural object the meaning of which is not derived from a sovereign (ie singular and centralized) power but rather is entrenched in a cultural discourse and is constructed out of social, political, and cultural meaning. Ok, I understand that you want to shift that discourse. But how about instead of keeping notions of gender and sexuality so firmly rooted in the body you move it away from the physical body, from biological sex. How about you don't reaffirm the already existing notions of objectification of the female body by structuring it as a thing devoid of will or agency, something that is acted upon rather than something that acts. Because a battleground does not fight back, a battleground is appropriated for the use of the soldiers who fight on it. A battleground can be destroyed, ravaged, torn apart, with no final affect on the battle.

So my body is not your battleground, Sunsara Taylor. Not yours or anyone else's. And if the fliers I have seen plastered all over campus are truly reflective of your views then I fear your so-called revolution will do me as a woman more harm than good. I guess I'll see you at your event tomorrow, because now that I've critically engaged in your advertising I'd better at least see if it matches the views you present at your talk.

Edit: Attended the talk. A lot of outrage, not a lot of solutions. This is my unsurprised face.

The other day I was reading through the forums on another site and I noticed that on the "where the candidates stand on the issues" thread that there were a couple of posters who dislikes Obama for his Pro-Choice stance. And while I try to respect opinions and stances which differ from my own, I couldn't help but feel like the posters in question had not fully thought through the issue. So I responded with my thoughts, which I am reposting here. Because I feel like this issue is important, and needs to be thought about in a more nuanced way than it is typically treated in political debate.

( Thinky Thoughts on Abortion Rights )