Once more, into the mailbag. Participating are The Third Estate Sunday Review's Dona, Jess, Ty, Ava and Jim, Rebecca of Sex and Politics and Screeds and Attitude, Betty of Thomas Friedman Is a Great Man, C.I. of The Common Ills and The Third Estate Sunday Review, Kat of Kat's Korner (of The Common Ills), Cedric of Cedric's Big Mix, Mike of Mikey Likes It!, Elaine of Like Maria Said Paz, and Wally of The Daily Jot. Last week, as often happens, we mentioned Carly Simon. Bill wrote in to steer us to Daniel Garrett's review of Carly Simon's Into White entitled "The Spiritual Beauty of a Sensual Woman: Carly Simon’s precious collection Into White." An excerpt from the review:
Thought and feeling, sensuality and sadness, are to be found--connected, whole--in Carly Simon's singing on Into White. I write these lines of appreciation, and I wonder if they will convey how special the collection seems to me. I recall (I read) that the music journalist and professor Greg Sandow advised his class at Juilliard, in Fall 2000, that a review should tell a story, be written in plain language, and describe what the music is like, and what experience it allows, the objective and the subjective; and Sandow recommended that, when attempting to write music reviews, students pay attention to, and consider including commentary regarding, point of view, musical details, evocative expressions, idea exploration, and thesis. One wonders what became of his students. Are they writing scholarly books on music? Are they the ones now writing one-hundred word summaries--sarcastic; or mindlessly approving--on contemporary music in glossy magazines, summaries that do not discuss the music as much as share prejudice about the profile of the performer and her (or his) genre? Would they know what to make of Carly Simon? I come to Carly Simon’s new work as a past admirer. I remember liking her songs "Anticipation" and "Legend in Your Own Time" and "Share the End" when I was still in short pants, riding a bike. Her "That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be" was a cool dissection of marriage, her "You're So Vain" a simultaneous celebration and deconstruction of a suave lover and man of the world, and her "We Have No Secrets" was about how honesty can hurt. She expressed and gave insight to desire and possession and pleasure in "You Belong to Me," "Jesse," and "The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of," among other songs as the years went by, as I went through high school, college, my first jobs, and optimistic but flawed attempts at relationships, as the world changed. However, I do not like her now simply because I liked her then. Into White is like a meal of fresh steamed vegetables, baked fish in a creamy sauce, with mineral water and white wine nearby, and the promise of sweet fruits and other desserts, after weeks of eating food offering empty calories and no nutrition. I am thinking not only of taste, and not only of value and use: I am thinking of worth.
Kat has reviewed Simon's Moonlight Serenade, No Secrets and Into White, so we'll toss this one to her.
Kat: First, thank you to Bill for recommending the review. I'll toss out a link to at my site this week. Garrett's review explores the CD itself as well as the problems in today's music criticism or what passes for it. While I agreed with the points he made, I responded most to his writing, his style of writing, in the review. There's a lightness to Into White -- not a lightweight album, a lightness -- that can be very difficult to nail down. Reading, I saw him searching and struggling to convey it and I believe he got it across. He's also exploring the struggle in music criticism that some tend to think is over but I see it as ongoing and do not think the camp embracing their own uselessness have won. I think he's captured that struggle better than anyone else this year.
Dona: On that last part, I'll jump in because Kat's been addressing that for some time. It's present in the first review she did at The Common Ills and she came down especially hard, a month later [see "Why Does Music Suck So Bad, Part I" and "Why Does Music Suck So Bad, Part II"], on the type of critic who confuses stats and figures and autobiographical details with a music review. They seem to think that their synposis with one or two details about the new CD itself somehow count for exploring a CD. I think she really captured it well in those and, when I read it, I immediately thought of that hideous piece of garbage The Nation ran on Courtney Love's CD.
Kat: Which didn't even know the basics on song length but a critic wanted to play stats and no one in the editorial department appeared to know how to fact check. That entire article needs footnotes and a correction from the magazine. I appreciate what Dona's saying because it's something similar that brought me into The Common Ills community. C.I.'s covering similar terrain in "Ellen Willis," but C.I. was making comments along those lines earlier. That's why I ended up e-mailing in the first place. And C.I. and I were sharing these e-mails about music and C.I. kept saying, "You should write something on this." I know C.I. still encourages visitors to the public account to start their own sites and I don't know if they do or not but if it wouldn't have been for the repeated encouragement, I probably wouldn't have written anything for The Common Ills. But I really do believe that a good portion of the blame for what dominates the charts today has to do with the state of music criticism and with so many wanting to appear 'hip' and willing to praise the unpraiseable. To use Justy as an example, when teeny boppers -- of all ages and genders -- lather on the praise, you can pin it off on the fact that they want to sleep with him -- probably not do the deed, but cuddle -- but what's the excuse for music critics? He's doing nothing but bad, glorified disco and music critics, real ones, would have sliced and diced him in the seventies. His reheated left overs today get sloppy, open-mouthed kisses from alleged music critics and that's as much why you can't listen to top forty radio as is the corporate takeover of radio and music. I enjoyed Garrett's review a great deal and probably should leave it at that because I could talk about it and music and the state of music criticism for hours.
Jim: And many of our readers would enjoy that. So we can stay on this topic a bit more. Betty made the point about the lack of attention given to and importance placed on music in her latest chapter "2 Dull White Chicks Whining and Boring the Hell Out Of Me."
Betty: I enjoyed Garrett's review as well and wish I had read it before I wrote my chapter. I was building on Kat and C.I. there and just really attempting to make the point that alleged music coverage in The Nation never goes beyond the superificial so evident in Katrina vanden Heuvel's bad blog posts. I was rushing to get my final draft completed and up so I only had time to mention a few -- Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Holly Near, Ben Harper, Bright Eyes, Rickie Lee Jones -- but what's really amazing to me is that things are happening in music -- and have been -- but The Nation can't write about it. The most they can offer is a cover story on Bob Dylan -- the same magazine that offered a cover story on Howard Stern, for example -- and there's the tired vanden Heuvel this week dropping back to "For What It's Worth" which is a wonderful song -- and one Kat quoted recently in her review of Stephen Stills -- but really had nothing to do with anything in her post. That's a song from the sixties, she's writing about the No Nukes movement coming back to life. It's the sort of pathetic thing she regularly trots out that only serves to demonstrate she doesn't know the first thing about music. And of course, Kat had covered it better in "No Nukes, Ralph Nader" Tuesday.
Elaine: I would agree 100% with that. Like Betty, I saw the post reposted at Common Dreams, I don't think any of us goes to The Nation website. I was curious when Our Lady of Mass Rip Offs posted. Her post ran at The Nation on Thursday. Kat said everything that needed to be said on Tuesday. One woman is mentioned in vanden Heuvel's long list and we all know how The Nation seems allergic to women. She offers a dopey history lesson that's ahistorical and, no surprise, fails to credit Dr. Randall Forsberg for the work she has done.
C.I.: Has done. She passed away this month.
Elaine: Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know. But Dr. Forsberg and other women, many, many other women, were so important to the nuclear freeze movement, to awakening the world to the dangers -- certainly you could include Dr. Helen Caldicutt, but there were many, many women -- and they are all erased as vanden Heuvel goes running to yet another man. It's shameful, it's pathetic and women especially should call it out.
Rebecca: Oh come on, Elaine, you know the Queen Bee hates women and you know she gets away with it repeatedly. But, yeah, women should call it out. They should be calling it out loudly. But I had an e-mail from a guy named Mel who wrote me to complain that just raising the documented sexism at play at The Nation got his post, he believed, deleted from a website, apparently a left website but it's just another White male site yacking. If it was deleted, the White male yacker doesn't know the first thing about anything.
Ava: He's a putz and an economist, no one in the college considers him left and no one was surprised that the guy Mel would complain to you that the very serious issue of sexism would be deleted and declared forbidden as his monkey-ass website. He's drowning in a tinier pond that Katrina's floating in and I passed your blog post on two women I knew who had for a professor. I should hook you up with them because their remarks were blistering.
Jim: I think this is a good point for a shift that will expand this topic. Ty, this is really your feature, the mailbag, so you want to grab it.
Ty: We're going to come back to music because Jess had a comment and we'll go out on that but on the issue of sexism being overlooked by the left, 16 e-mails came in on a topic from 2005. This was the first any of us were hearing about it. In 2005, a number of left voices were taking their works to Hustler magazine. They included Amy Goodman, Greg Palast and Christian Parenti among others. Twelve mentioned it and asked us to address, four accused us of ignoring the issue. To be clear, we'd never heard of it.
Elaine: I don't think any of us read Hustler, or scan the trashy photos. For those of us on the East Coast, participating by phone, we learned of it only hours before starting the writing sessions for this edition.
Cedric: Not just the ones on the East coast. And Hustler's known for its rampant racism. I mean within the African-American community. I've never picked up a copy but it's well known for its racism.
Betty: Right. I'm not defending the others, Playboy, Penthouse or what have you, but in the Black community, Hustler's got about the same image as Tommy Hilfiger. I know when that film came out in the 90s, there was an attempt to make him a hero but it didn't go over in our community. His image is set in stone. I knew that Goodman had interviewed him and C.I. had pointed out at some point, probably when that interview aired on Democracy Now!, that they would never link to him or anything on him at The Common Ills, another sign of awareness as Keesha would say, but I didn't know people like Parenti were actually taking their wares to Hustler magazine. I was honestly shocked when this was brought up earlier. I don't think there's any excuse for it.
Wally: The two things, just to backtrack, that shocked me the most were, first, that it wasn't in 2002 or 2003 and second that C.I. groaned and I thought, "Oh, C.I. knows this story" until C.I. started saying, "I don't want anything to do with that crap."
Ty: Right, I was explaining the e-mails that had come in during the week and C.I. kept cutting me off saying "I won't be involved in promoting that magazine." It was about my third time where I got across that this was about an issue from 2005.
Rebecca: C.I. loathes the magazine and the man -- as do most feminists -- and it's not a topic that will get raised with C.I. I remember when the piece of trash film came out, a few did try to raise it and C.I. would shut them down.
C.I.: I'll comment, but let's get back to Wally's comment about the timing first.
Wally: Well I don't know Hustler's history and don't read it, have never picked it up. I do know it's trash and I kept asking, "You mean 2002 and 2003, right?" I was assuming that these people involved, and there were others, were involved because they were attempting to stop the illegal war from starting. I'm not justifying it or excusing it. But I thought the only way something so ridiculous could happen would be if they were attempting to stop an illegal war when the mainstream media was silencing dissent, debate and discussion. But this was after the illegal war had started, after it was past the one year mark and, from the e-mails Ty received, was not focusing on Iraq. Again, I'm not saying that would make it right but I am saying that as frustrated as so many were with the echo chamber mainstream media, I would have been less shocked if I'd heard that this was to prevent the illegal war from starting.
C.I.: First, we need to give credit to Aura Bogado of KPFK and Free Speech Radio. According to the e-mails, she's the one who raised the issue. Others may have as well and, if so, e-mail and we'll give credit where it's due. It couldn't have been easy for her to raise it -- for a number of reasons -- and her strength needs to be applauded. She details how Hustler has repeatedly attacked her and they've done that with a number of strong women in attempts to silence them over the years. Their image, as Cedric and Betty have noted, is well known and includes attacks on people of color and attacks on feminists of all races and ethnicities. I do think, for those who ended their association with the trashy magazine, that it was the racial aspect that made them do so. I think sexism continues to be tolerated within the left and, at times, encouraged and supported. I do understand the need to get the word out but I do think there are standards involved and I'm honestly confused as to how anyone could think Hustler was a worthy outlet for the left? I mean, maybe people were ignorant of it. That could be. Only Not In Our Name offered an explanation -- and an apology.
Rebecca: I think you're exactly right that it's the racial issue that made some cease their relationship. There's no way anyone involved confused Hustler with The Saturday Evening Post. It's a smut magazine, pure and simple. Before you get into their attacks on women and people of color, that is a known. The left's long applauded the Playboy interviews and whether you think that's wrong or right, the fact of the matter is no one, regardless of whether they've picked up an issue or not, could confuse the two magazines. They knew they were working with a cheap, nudie magazine considered smut and, from a public relations standpoint, they were willing to devalue their brands by doing so. When I briefly did public relations in the entertainment world, there were magazines that offered coverage of struggling clients -- Hustler wasn't one -- and I would turn them down because a write up in them wouldn't have helped, a photo spread wouldn't have helped. I don't want to pin the blame on Goodman, who broke off the relationship after one article -- a transcript -- because that's not fair to her. But I do have to ask what she or others involved with Democracy Now! were thinking? A woman is not going to 'expand' the minds of the people flipping through -- with one hand -- that magazine. At best, she could have hoped a few would begin watching the program while jerking off. I'm not sure how much they could have absorbed if they did so since the blood would have left the brain. But with Goodman it was obviously a mistake. I don't think you can say she was thinking, "I'm okay with the magazine." With others, with the men, I do think that issue remains out there, that question lingers. And for Susie Bright . . . Her ridiculous claim that it serves southern men is so racist and so uninformed. Hustler is not a regional magazine. She seems to suggest that the racism involved is 'good old boy' racism and that it can only be found in the south. It has an audience nation wide and Bright's excuses were so laughable and so ridiculous that I cannot and will not offer her the same leeway I will offer Goodman.
Mike: It's also true that Bright's remarks noted a long relationship between herself and the magazine.
Rebecca: True.
Mike: Bogoda's article on this, it just boggles the mind that she had to write it, that she had to say, "This is what they've done to all and this is what they've done to me." I mean how desperate are you for readers that you'll resort to getting in bed with that kind of a magazine? I understand C.I.'s point about sexism being tolerated by the left and I think that's true historically but for me the big shock was Christian Parenti. I would hope a Greg Palast would know better but I'm aware he's a baby boomer and probably just thinks "Boobs! Cool!" His writing with regards to women -- his tiny output on women -- hasn't shown any indication that he's gone beyond his school boy attitudes. But Parenti's a whole other generation. He's older than me but there's no way he didn't realize what he was getting into and grasp how offensive it was.
Wally: And trashy. I mean Hustler is just seen as trashy besides the points everyone else is making. It's not seen as working class, it's seen as trashy and I think that goes to Rebecca's point about where she'd let her clients appear.
C.I.: Rebecca?
Rebecca: No. Wally says it, if you've got something to add, go ahead.
C.I.: I think that the mental likening of "trashy" to "working class" reveals a class bias. As Wally points out, the two are not the same. I think it's a really elite view to say, "Well this is where working class men go." I think it's rather insulting. It happened, as we understand it, the bulk of the participation is over. As Wally pointed out, had it been an issue such as stopping the illegal war before it started, the urgency might have allowed for a justification. I wouldn't have but that's for each person to decide. Both those deciding whether or not to appear in the publication and those deciding what they think of people appearing in it. I do wonder if some of the same people would have agreed were it Inches, Honcho or any other number of magazines with male nudes? I rather doubt that many of the men would have agreed to it. They might agree to coverage in The Advocate but that's not a skin magazine. I'll stick with Goodman and ingore the men because I would be blistering if I touched on them -- she will go anywhere to get the word out -- around the country, on a back breaking schedule -- and I can see her being unfamiliar with the history of Hustler due to the fact that there's a 'free speech' contingent on the East coast, where she's based, that rushes in to defend that type of 'free speech' repeatedly. At times it seems the left offers more defenses of pornography than anything else. I'm sure you could find, in the same time period, more defense of porn than of Lynn Stewart for example. So I'm not going to condem Goodman. But I will note that the same left 'leadership' on the East coast that rushes to ridicule and lampoon the West coast, is one that frequently justifies pornography, and provides pedophiles with a forum regularly while doing everything they can to overlook any attacks on women. That's why I say that it was race that caused many to cease their relationship. The same set loves to pretend that their area is purged of racism -- and expresses complete surprise when it surfaces in the region -- and stereotypes other areas as backwards.
Betty: Which we all saw last month.
C.I.: Which we all saw last month. That said, a struggling writer, I'm not going to slam. Someone who can't get their story out any other way . . . It's nothing I'd ever resort to but so be it. But to see that magazine as a promotional tool, which appears the way many saw it, it a bit different from someone attempting to pay the bills. On Susie Bright, I'll plead ignorance. I've never had any use for her so I can't comment on her.
Jim: On the issue of porn itself? C.I., I'm talking to you?
C.I.: Oh, sorry. Umm, visuals never really did it for me so I've never understood the portrayal of a nation flipping through magazines. I can't imagine I'm the only one who doesn't get off on a photo.
Rebecca: Can I tell a story?
Jim: Please.
Rebecca: In college the issue of porn came up because it was that mind-set, that lefty male thing. And a group of students were going to put out what we'd call erotica today. A single issue. But they were high on Henry Miller and they were saying they were breaking down walls and barriers. For a change, it was one of Elaine's boyfriends and not mine involved. When we found out, Elaine, C.I. and myself, we argued against it and were told that if we thought it was limiting we should contribute. So we did. I worked and worked on mine, which was nothing but my then biggest sexual fantasy.
Elaine: She put more time into her short story than she ever did into any class.
Rebecca: As I said, I worked and worked on mine. C.I. thought the whole project was idiotic and dashed a piece off during a poli sci class only because I was begging and pleading and pointing out that it would be the usual stereotypes of women and the more we could bring it, the more encompassing the view would be.
C.I.: It was a philosophy class.
Rebecca: Oh, that's right. It was Plato's Symposium or something being discussed. Anyway, that story was hot. So hot, the student published journal bumped it up to the front and Elaine's boyfriend and everyone else couldn't shut up about it. I'll turn it over to Elaine.
Elaine: So my then-boyfriend, when the book is bound and published and distributed to a small group on campus, is boasting about the publication, which he oversaw, and at one point throws up C.I.'s story in our faces, or tries to, and notes that it is as stereotypical as anything else in the volume. And C.I. replies that he's just confessing to his own stereotypes. No one, and this includes me, grasped that we were supplying gender and other details to C.I.'s story written in the first person and never using anything more descriptive than "I" or "you" in terms of details. It could have been about two men, two women, a man and a woman, a woman and a man. The gender was supplied by the reader and the role of "you" -- the object of lust -- was cast by the reader as well.
Rebecca: And I couldn't believe it. That was a hot story and I'd read it several times. Originally just because I was grading my own story against it. And I'd never picked up on that.
C.I.: So apparently if you want phone sex or a trashy letter, I'm the one to go to. Anything else on the topic of Hustler before we move on?
Rebecca: Blah, blah, blah. Hold your horses. But the whole story was just the intense thing and I don't think the deed was actually done it but it was so hot. Anyway, to change the topic, using Christian Parenti, I doubt very seriously he would want to be billed as "Christian Parenti, as featured in the pages of Hustler." And that really is what it comes down to from a public relations standpoint. Do you want that credit? If you do, participate, if you don't, don't. I do agree with C.I.'s point that if someone has a story, say Seymour Hersh had a blockbuster exclusive that The New Yorker wouldn't publish and no one would touch, I could see using that magazine and I also agree that emerging writers or writers with no other outlets are to be judged differently. But if they use that outlet, they need to be aware they are opening themselves to questions and issues and they should be prepared to answer about them.
Dona: One question on this, before we move on, sometimes community members will Google for something C.I.'s covered and click on a link to find a porn site. I know C.I.'s addressed this with Beth for Beth's column in the round-robin but just to get it out there.
C.I.: Sure. I don't know who reposts outside the community. Some people do. I know a variety of sites have and that includes legal sites and porn sites. I'm not asked and I'm not notified. I have nothing to do with it and I've never tried to track anyone down and say, "Stop!" Nor would I. I'm focused on doing entries for The Common Ills. Beth asked because a member had found an entry reposted with nude photos of women's breasts. Beth's the ombudsperson for The Common Ills, for anyone arriving late. We discussed the issue, she reproduced our discussion in her column in the gina & krista round-robin, and my attitude was, "I don't have the time to track anyone down. I'm not sure that I would if I did. Members know the site's address. If someone clicks on something like that at work, I'm not responsible because I'm only responsible for The Common Ills." I'm not the net police and I'm not anti-nudity or even anti-photos of nudity. To know where I stood on a certain site's portrayal of nudes would require me doing research and I have no interest in doing that. If someone's reposting a snapshot or whatever, that's their business. I don't have time to surf news site online. I certainly won't waste my limited time searching out nude sites.
Dona: You said, I'm quoting from Beth's column, "It doesn't offend me. It doesn't excite me. It has nothing to do with me. Presumably, it has something to do with Iraq."
C.I.: Right. That's my attitude. Beth did research after she got the complaint and had a number of sites -- some nude sites, some not. Some provided a link to The Common Ills, some didn't. It wasn't about me. Certainly in the cases of people presenting it with no credit, it couldn't be seen to be about me. It was about Iraq and it had nothing to do with me. I was neither offended nor flattered, angry or thrilled for myself. It's about Iraq. It did bring home the importance of including at least one line about war resisters. There are slow days where there is very little -- sometimes nothing -- about war resisters in the news. Since anything could potentially pop up somewhere else, it drove home the need to always include war resisters.
Ava: I know we're trying to wrap this up and it's really turned into a roundtable and less of a mail bag, but I want to comment on a point C.I. made earlier. There is a pipe and elbow patches faction on the East coast that will insist that there is no issue there and there are women who will go along with that, who will be silent, because to call it out is to risk the attacks on your own sexuality. Now the right has their own multitude of problems, but the topic is how people of the left came to be publishing in Hustler and I think it needs to be noted that the mentality, the mind-set, is very sexist. And I agree 100% that what would be rightly called out on the West Coast gets silenced by the pipe and elbow factions on the East coast. Being opposed to images of women being abused or post-abuse does not mean being opposed to nudity.
Ty: Good point, let's toss to Jess for an unrelated topic.
Jess: Well, actually, it is related. A community member brought up a music issue this week and I thought of it when the topic of the Carly Simon review came up. A community member wrote a review, years ago, at Amazon about Joan Baez and was censored. He provided the e-mails back and forth between himself and Amazon over this and Baez's voice was described in praise and one of the terms was "sexy." Amazon, a few weeks after the review was posted, took out "sexy" and put in "[physical]" -- in brackets to note that they had changed it.
Kat: That is ridiculous. I know we've discussed that before, I'm not sure if we've done it online, but we've discussed it before.
Jess: The use of the word "sensual" to describe Carly Simon is why I bring it up. One assumes that if Garrett had posted his review up at Amazon, he might have to grapple with censorship.
Kat: There is a world of difference between sexy and a sex object and that's apparently escaped Amazon's knowledge.
Jess: And reading over the e-mails forwarded, I'm just amazed at the struggle it took to get "sexy" put back into the review. I'm going to quote some, "A quick search of amazon.com will find that word used to describe many voices, bodies, etc. in many posted reviews." Here's from another, still arguing for "sexy" to be put back in -- or if it won't be that the entire review be deleted. "'Physical' (or '[physical]') does not even work as a word substitute." And this: "Is it 'sexy' that was found offensive in my writing by whomever changed it? Or is it that it's applied to the voice of a woman who's over sixty? What I'm asking is, was this an ageism issue?" I could go on and on quoting from the e-mails but it is just ridiculous that Amazon attempted to censor the use of the word "sexy."
Mike: How long did this go on?
Jess: Forever. There's an intense back and forth. And then some weasel named "Joshua S." -- weasel because he's an employee of Amazon and unlike the others won't sign his full name -- writes back, "After researching your inquiry, I found that the phrase does not violate our guidelines and was edited in error." It wasn't an accident, previous e-mails make that clear, including one from a James Pogatshnik makes clear. Amazon found "sexy" offensive when used to describe Joan Baez' voice.
Kat: I think "sexy" was a good call on Baez' voice. It is warm and alive. "Sensual" is a good call on Carly Simon's. The lesson here is do not post your reviews on Amazon. Go to Blogger/Blogspot and create your own site. If you post on Amazon, they own your reviews, you don't. I'm sure that "ownership" allows them to edit as they see fit. So just don't post a review there. Blogger/Blogspot has no charge and you can post the same review there, post it as you want and not have the hassle.
Ty: With the wrap up, there were other e-mails we intended to get to. One of the most e-mailed topic last week was about Ava and C.I.'s call on Bionic Woman. Some viewers had stuck with the show a bit longer and had seen the same problems Ava and C.I. pointed out. They hadn't noticed it so much in the first episode but they say the new Jamie is, Lynne, "a drip" and, Ralph, "incapable of having fun," and, Margaret, "very, very slow. It's like she's in remedial spy class and unable to grasp even the basics so the message appears to be 'Look how stupid women are.'" There were many other e-mails on that and I wish I could note all of them. There were other topics as well and maybe a few of them can be picked up next time. Any thing to add to the comments?
Ava: Just that this was the big problem with the remake and why we hit hard on the way the character was being trashed in the remake. She is very slow and unable to abosrb basics. Her teachers are all male.
C.I.: In one episode, I think it already aired, she will need someone to watch a young female. Despite the fact that there's only one-non-Bionic Woman in the whole show, that's the only one Jamie can think of. People should have raised eye brows over that as they should when her male trainers make smarmy comments to her such as "I'm a breast man." No one involved seems to grasp the level of on the job harassment they are displaying -- or Jamie's acceptance of it -- or the sexism that reeks throughout the entire show. As for the sense of fun, that's why we noted that the original, played by Lindsay Wagner, had a sense of humor. This Jamie is a drip and never even gets excited about her bionic powers. Ty, explain the illustration because e-mails will come in on that.
Ty: Kat and I did the illustration we use for this feature. It's a play on words and we thought it was humorous. I'll also again note that I am gay and Kat, who is straight, and I had both heard from mutual friends, "How come men's flesh is never noted?" I'm unfamiliar with any illustration we've offered that featured female flesh up to that point, but Kat and I were game and we came up with the illustration we use back in January.
