"Love the way we communicate"

"I got something to say you know but nothing comes

Yes I know what you think of me you never shut up"

Tori Amos - Silent All These Years

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Spoilers for the TV series Dark and especially the police procedural Criminal follow.

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A few days ago, Wikipedia's front page managed to surprise me by a lone editorial choice:

Female wrongdoing? Is that... a thing? Heretofore, like every other media outlet, Wikipedia has held firm to the dogma of female superiority, refusing to present women as anything other than pure, brilliant agents of progress martyred for their pluck and heroism. But beyond the simple willingness to acknowledge female criminals, consider how rarely you've seen any media, whether factual or fabulist, acknowledge on an even simpler level females as agents of conflict. A documentary called Island of the Sea-Wolves again surprised me with a first-episode cliffhanger in which a low-ranking bitch approaches the den in which her superior in the pack hierarchy has given birth. Will she kill the pups? Be killed in turn? Dun-dun-duuUUN! Now, by the laws of narrative arcs and and knowing a few things about wolf packs, you won't be surprised by the next episode beginning with the reveal that auntie was just stopping by to babysit. But the documentarians' willingness to even float the idea of two females in conflict/competition goes against the grain of traditional nature shows, wherein males are vicious thugs constantly butting heads and females are kind, nurturing mommies unless they need to hunt prey in order to feed their young as kind, nurturing mommies, an' you don't ask no more questions, capisce?

 

The previously impregnable (pun intended) feminist fortress of moral entitlement has been gradually accumulating such minute cracks over the past years, albeit at a frustrating tectonic pace. Straddling docu- and mockumentaries, we have Diane Morgan's hilarious portrayal of the dull in more ways than one Philomena Cunk. Though fundamentally a positive character (sure she's a certified moron but she is Trying to make sense of things damnit) adopting an everywoman as the voice of the terminally befuddled juxtaposes her almost uniquely against occasional male experts on each topic of the week.

 

Or if you're more into games, though Wrath of the Righteous pandered far more than it should have to social justice idiocy, it also included negative female characters like Camellia and Wenduag indicating (unlike, say Wasteland 3 or Deadfire) some self-awareness on the issue of gender relations and the company's next project, Rogue Trader, more conspicuously avoided classic "man bad; woman good" juxtapositions. Cyberpunk 2077 gave me another pleasant surprise if you advance the main quest until meeting your muscleheaded best bud's mother and girlfriend, who turn out to be cut from much the same simpleton cloth as himself. More shocking that the mystical curio shop owner ditz deliberately did not move into his place when he offered because:

Wow. Giving a man some space? In fiction writ large, any such situation would merely present an irresistible opportunity to paint the guy as a heartless monster for not giving his assuredly better half absolute control over every single aspect of his life, cf. every rom-com and dom-com ever written. Then there's Colony Ship, where your potential companion Knurl gives a pretty stark description of how a matriarchal society is established: through the sacrifice of men. 

Few dare to follow this all too rare precept: not only that women are capable of the same crimes as men, but that it is women's greater propensity for emotional subversion and femininity's instinctive entitlement to be protected and provided for which must be scrutinized for harmful and oppressive potential. More shocking when this shows up on television, a more tightly censored industry predictably slower than games to bite back against feminazi control.

 

Dark, a brilliant series in other respects as well (though I still dislike the ending) gave us the character of Hannah, a touchingly vulnerable girl, later a soulful lover and mother... and chillingly illustrative of mundane feminine manipulation. No, not as some femme fatale superspy with torpedo tits and legs up to her armpits, but as a perfectly regular salt-of-the-earth small-town gal with no scruples against lying, cheating, guilting, seducing and betraying anyone around her in order to establish control. 

 

Then there's Criminal, in its various incarnations. The French and Spanish series were weaker, more theatrical, so their swipes against the crime drama status quo were also halfhearted at best. The German series gave us a battered husband, but had to make him an official minority to placate the morality police by upping his oppression score. Plus it still only acknowledges female guilt in adopting stereotypical masculine direct aggression. It was only in the second British season, as their last hurrah, that they dared present the application of femininity as criminal: defamation, lying, projection of one's own faults upon the hated other, weaponizing society's protective apparatus itself by playing the victim. Two episodes out of sixteen, far better than most series ever average. A female child abuser externalizing her guilt. A man falsely accused of rape by a female coworker for no motive more noble than extorting cash through the legal system. That second works particularly well because his character was tempered, in a reverse of Cunk's case, not to appear too sympathetic. He's a self-gratifying yuppie blowhard, yes, but this only outlines the fact that unlikable does not equal guilty. His desperation when it's become clear that even when the case is dropped the system doesn't give a shit that the mere accusation is enough to destroy his life drives home the point of our societal disdain for males' well-being far more poignantly than had the prosecutors suddenly sympathized.

 

But such examples are still few and far between. For every tentatively transgressive episode like Criminal's "Alex" networks can run several days-long marathons in which men are nothing but vicious, cackling villains born to sin. Special Victims Unit is rounding out three decades of top ratings on the precept that men are disgusting pigs deserving of police brutality. The notion that all evil comes from men fuels entire networks like Lifetime. Dark's creators' next series, 1899, immediately dove into "man bad, woman good" rhetoric from its first scenes, probably to redeem themselves in the eyes of bigots. When a no-name video game company becomes the talk of the town out of nowhere, it's a safe bet it just put out a "female protagonist" title fighting evil men for uncritical critic praise. I wonder how many jokes Diane Morgan's obligated to tell about men leaving the toilet seat up to compensate for every episode of Cunk?

 

So I guess in a couple of days we'll be talking about censorship.