So, the NDA signed by producers of The Apprentice just expired, and one of them has published a tell-all article. Most of the article is about how they used standard reality-TV tricks to portray Trump as being wealthy and intelligent, when in reality he was, and is, a deeply indebted buffoon.

The money shot, however, comes when Trump and the producers are preparing for climax of the final episode, when the winner will be decided.

Per the FCC's rules for game shows, producers could not be involved in deciding who would be fired each week, or who would ultimately win: it had to be Trump's decision alone, like contestants and viewers were told it was. The producers could, and did, give him a presentation about the strengths and weaknesses of the contestants each time he had to make a decision. These were recorded, in case questions ever arose about whether the producers had crossed the line.

So, for the final episode, there were two contestants remaining. Both were men, one white, the other Black. They'd both done well in the final challenge of the competition. As the producers were summarizing the points for an against each candidate, this happened:

In the finished program, Trump chose the white contestant as the winner.

(Four years later, Trump would propagate the baseless conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not a native-born US citizen and therefore had not legitimately won the presidency.)

The article also describes how women working on the production faced discrimination based on whether or not Trump wanted to look at them while they did their jobs:

And there's a third anecdote where he pressures a woman producer to break the FCC rules, while being casually misogynistic toward a contestant:

This information is pretty unlikely to persuade anyone who wasn't already persuaded by any of the other things Trump has done and said, which would for anyone else be a career-defining scandal. But it is a useful reminder of who we're dealing with.

(Link is to Slate, an x-number-of-free-articles-a-month site, but the incognito window trick works.)

Important update to this story:

This journalist has a plan for how to get the boardroom tape of Trump discriminating against Kwame Jackson on the basis of his race, while referring to him by the n-word. (Note: the producer who wrote the original story says he thinks the tapes are not recoverable, but he doesn't say why he thinks that.)

First, this journalist has traced where the tapes would be: the production company has changed hands since then, but now belongs to Jeff Bezos/the Amazon conglomerate.

Secondly, he has checked with the FCC, and what the producer described in his article would be illegal game-show fixing--the exact thing that the producers were trying to avoid being accused of, when they decided to record these sessions.

Thirdly, he has ascertained that either the FCC itself, or the Senate committee that oversees the FCC, could demand these tapes--because of the game-show fixing, not the the specific word--and even subpoena them if they are not produced.

So, if you think it might be beneficial for the public to see a tape of Donald Trump saying the N-word while committing a crime, you can reach out to either the FCC, or the Senate Commerce Committee to say so!

The chair of the Senate Commerce Committee is Maria Cantwell, she is a Democrat out of Washington, and here's her website.

Here is the FCC's contact page, and here's a list of the Senate Commerce Committee members. If you happen to be a constituent of one of them, they'd be a great person to reach out to about your recent but intense commitment to uprooting racism in game shows!

(Another Slate article; the incognito window trick still works.)

yeah we put your girl in the fandom and they villainized her beyond comprehension. yeah sorry they took out all the nuance and made the argument completely black and white. yeah my bad. we can’t reverse it. sorry.

We put your girl in the fandom and now she's just the "one who has the braincell". Sorry, they made her a "queen" so she can't be funny or vulnerable or do anything except sigh and wrangle the boy characters. Like a mother, yeah. Yeah, it's still better than it would have been fifteen years ago. Sorry.

Oh gawd every time you think it's over it gers BETTER

🙌🏻 🙌🏻 🙌🏻 🙌🏻

“The way we were directed by the studios, I was to walk behind him, never side by side. I mean, that is fucking priceless when I think about it now. When we would get out the car and walk towards the house I would have to be behind him, even though I had equal dialogue.”

“I can only imagine that at the beginning, they wanted me to be the sidekick,” she said. “Or that, somehow, maybe it was enough of a change just to see a woman having this kind of intellectual repartee with a man on camera, and surely the audience couldn’t deal with actually seeing them walk side by side!” 

“I don’t know how long it lasted or if it changed because I eventually said, ‘Fuck no! No!’ I don’t remember somebody saying, ‘Okay, now you get to walk alongside him.’ But I imagine it had more to do with my intolerance and spunk than it being an allowance that was made.”

— Gillian Anderson.

Her tuition so damn high she can wear whatever tf she wants

Spite goals

There’s a better thing to her story. She CONTINUED her thesis in her underwear and afterward her professor said “what would your mother think wearing those kinds of clothes”

And she responded “my mother’s a feminist also a gender and sexuality studies professor. She’s fine with my shorts”

i think the best part is that a majority of the class also stripped with her in solidarity

Just to give a little more perspective after reading the story:

The sequence of events is a little jumbled in the telling above. The actual chastising from the teacher came days before the woman’s thesis, during a practice run of her presentation. This was not a spur-of-the-moment thing where she just whipped off her clothes for the sake of being angry. Chai took the time to think things through before deciding this was the way she wanted to protest. She used critical thinking and level-headedness to decide instead of becoming volatile and aggressive, she would choose non-violent protest. 

I just don’t like the way the story’s being told by others because it makes her come across as “overly-emotional” and “erratic” (as women often do in the media, because it’s easier to attribute extreme action to “hysteria”), whereas in actual news reports, she had time to think about her decision and choose the best way to handle what happened to her. 

Sources: 

“When Misogynists Become Terrorists” – a must-read from Jessica Valenti in The New York Times.

A New Hampshire Republican State Representative anonymously created the “Red Pill” subreddit.

Wow.

these aren’t just bullshitter dweebs in their mom’s basements trolling the internet, these are men who formulate the way we implement laws and who govern the way we live our lives.

^^^ Hello, yes, everyone needs to see this. It’s not always a bunch of nobodies trolling around on 4chan. It’s, doctors, lawyers, judges, businessmen, bankers, law enforcement, etc. People who have pulls on society. They literally don’t see other groups besides themselves as human or equal

…holy shit like this is bad really really bad but so much clearly so if you’ve ever read the scum that floats to the top of the Red Pill. Like basically he was just outed as the creator of a neo-nazi misogynist pro-rape forum explicitly to recruit online loners and groom them like it’s EVERYTHING we’ve been saying these people do but this is like, the hive.

For the anon asking why not trust red pill guys

Fuck Conservatives

Fun fact: the Red Pill was 90% of the reason I left reddit. I think it’s important everyone understands why, without having to subject yourselves to actually looking at the subreddit.

The Red Pill is a confluence of gross misogyny, rape culture, and vile social darwinism, all tied up under the banner of it being the “truth” behind some grand lie that is PC culture; that is to say, taking the red pill to withdraw yourself from the Matrix, a metaphor nearly as dated as the ideals they espouse.

If you think I’m exaggerating, I’m not. I spent nearly two years on reddit before toxic bullshit like this drove me out. These people build an elaborate construct about treating women like property and sexualizing children because ~evolution~ programmed them to like it, and ~evolution~ can’t possibly be wrong, as though club-wielding Neanderthal brutes are something to aspire to and not something we left behind millennia ago.

They’ve created an incredibly detailed fantasy about how women are evolutionarily predisposed to react to certain behaviors of “alpha males” (another false equivalence; the theory of the alpha male comes from a since-disproved theory about wolf behavior), and how the trick to success in sex is about taking on these characteristics which, spoiler alert, explicitly encourage treating women like garbage.

I cannot overstate how incredibly toxic the Red Pill is and how disgustingly large the community became by the time I left reddit. I wish I could say I was surprised that a Republican senator founded it, but this is the kind of shit they’ve been legislating for years.

MFMMG??

wow who would of thought that the GOP would like to create a subset of right wing bigots in disenfranchised youth who will vote for them

From being called a “worthless bitch” who “needs a shock collar” and “seems castrating,” it’s hard to overstate how much sexist bullshit Hillary Clinton has had to put up with in the media.

I’m looking at screenshots of this horde of furious girls and women destroying Joss Whedon on twitter and it’s so great

Motherfucker you knew you were a misogynist and a fraud in 2002 when you wrote the autobiographical Buffy episode about Andrew the filmmaker fetishizing the pain and hero stories of the house full of women who despise him, and now it’s finally coming crashing down on you and happening in real life.

I sincerely hope some of those girls calling him a piece of shit and a trash can and demanding, “fight me” shook him; this has been his deepest fear about his behavior towards women for over a decade now, but he hasn’t made a change, and he’s always known on some level that he deserves to be hated for it.

BUFFY: Are you still filming me? Stop. ANDREW: But it’s a valuable record. A-an important document for the ages. ‘A Slayer in Action.’ BUFFY: ‘A Nerd in Pain.’ Would they like that? Cause we could do that.

BUFFY: When your blood pours out it might save the world. What do you think about that? Does it buy it all back? Are you redeemed? ANDREW: No.

Ugh ok ok I actually have a ridiculous amount of words about this (hi ocelot, can I post those emails from 2012??)  But I wanted to say that this… idk.  This has been a long time coming for Joss and it’s absolutely a bed he made for himself, and it makes me gratified on a brutal visceral level to see it coming back to bite him, but a lot of that anger is watching an artist I loved curdle into his own self-hate and turn into the kind of awful man he used to write about.  Joss…Joss has had a recurrent fantasy of self-loathing and shame about his treatment of female characters and actresses that started, afaik, in season 6 of Buffy, with the introduction of the three nerd villains Warren, Jonathan, and Andrew.

The initial patriarchal villains of the Buffyverse were men who abused women using either brute strength or political power: Angelus, the Watchers, the Mayor. The three nerds introduced another kind of misogynistic male antagonist that grew to dominate and completely consume Joss’s work in the 00s: the nerdy, story-obsessed guy who used his intelligence and mastery of technology to abuse and control strong, heroic women.  Nerdy men who, like Joss, either created or tampered with the women they wanted total control over, either by building androids or altering existing women, usually via invasive medical torture.  Joss the writer invents the character of Buffy while having workplace clashes with her actress Sarah Michelle Gellar;  Andrew, Warren, and Jonathan drug their girlfriends into compliance and create the BuffyBot to obey their will.  This villain character would show up again and again in Joss’ later works: the scientist who had, thanks to his technical and storytelling skills, been given custody by higher powers over women who would normally be far out of their range of influence. And, uncomfortably, all of the actors cast for these roles bore a striking physical resemblance to Joss.

When Joss aired “Storyteller”, I was surprised and impressed.  It was penned by Jane Espenson, Buffy’s strongest staff writer, and was a story about Andrew the Joss doppelganger filming the house of potential Slayers for a series he called “Buffy, Slayer of the Vampyres.”  A major theme of “Storyteller” was Andrew’s intrusive use of the Buffy cast’s personal lives and pain to make a good story, his refusal to acknowledge their privacy, and possibly, as Anya kept insisting, to use his videos as masturbation material.  It seemed like a huge moment of self- awareness and self-reflection about the relationship Joss had to the real and fictional women who worked for him, especially given the conflicts he had at the time with actresses like Charisma Carpenter over her character Cordelia and personal bodily autonomy (pregnancy).   It was self-critical and raw and I was incredibly proud of Joss for being willing to go there in such a public way.

Buffy ended, and Andrew redeemed himself, but the misogynist-nerd-self-loathing metastory intensified. One of the aspects of the Three Nerds villain arc that had always made me profoundly uncomfortable was the way Joss positioned the boys’ nerdy pursuits and lack of traditional masculinity– not just their treatment of women– as something inherently repulsive.  Viewers were supposed to be disgusted by the sight of three dorky boys nerding out over Star Wars figurines.  Buffy and the house full of potential slayers call Andrew vile names for being a nerd, not in response to his behavior; by the end of his run, I felt the urge to protect Andrew, not from the girls, but from Joss, who was clearly using him as a punching bag onto which he was projecting his own self-loathing.  (Eventually Joss was quoted saying that Andrew was, as had been hinted, gay, but would remain in the closet indefinitely “because it’s funny,” something that horrified and enraged fans, but which Joss seemed to view, appallingly, as as an ultimate emasculation.)   

The next major Joss project was Dollhouse, with evil scientist and Joss lookalike Topher Brink programming, manipulating, and violating various women into playacting roles he’d scripted for them.  It was such a blatant story about Joss and his actresses it was difficult to watch.  Like, My Feminism Is Just An Excuse To Exploit Hot Actresses, I Am Such A Disgusting Creature!!!  Coming soon to the CW!   His next project, the webseries I Am So Horrible And My Feminism Is A Sham, featuring NPH as the Joss stand-in, was similarly cringeworthy. 

A big outlier here is Wash, from Firefly and Serenity, who almost fit the pattern, but not quite, and that “not quite” was enough of a problem that, like the similar character Oz, he had to be written out of the story.  Alan Tudyk had the same general physical resemblance to Joss and the same dress sense as Andrew, Topher, and Billy Horrible.  His dinosaur theater sessions looked and sounded like the action figure games the Trio played, and the blurb for Joss’s media company, Mutant Enemy.   But unlike all the other nerdy blond men of the Whedonverse, Wash was in a equal and loving relationship with the strong soldier woman he adored.  Other characters in the series were preoccupied with the traditional gender role imbalance in Wash and Zoe’s marriage and questioned whether Wash felt emasculated by his wife being stronger than he was, but both Wash and Zoe were completely above and untouched by it.  She was a warrior woman and she was married to a dorky guy who told stories and who wasn’t the most physically powerful man on her crew.  She could have broken him in half with her pinky and they loved and respected each other and had a happy, healthy marriage. This was, somehow, too much for Joss to handle, and so Wash had to die. 

When venting about Joss I want to say that the problem isn’t that Joss was always terrible, or that all of his work was tainted or had a poisonous message from the beginning.  It wasn’t; Buffy was and still is incredibly important; it had the kind of powerful emotional intelligence that burrows into your heart and stays there and I think it still stands by itself, years later.  Buffy still stands.  Charles Gunn still stands.  Anya still stands.  When my mother passed away last year, I watched “The Body” like a ritual, and I know I’m not the only person to have done something similar.  That canon isn’t going anywhere.

The problem is that at some point in his career, Joss became so intent on the masochistic fantasy of being hated by strong women for being a nerd that he spent a decade writing stories about violating those women to ensure they would hate him.   I wish Joss had ended that obsession with “Storyteller.”  I wish he had talked about the feelings that made him want to make “Dollhouse” with his therapist and tried to make things right with Charisma Carpenter instead of turning those particular personal demons into a bad TV show.  I wish the ideas of intimacy and equality weren’t so threatening to him that he had to write men like Oz and Wash out of existence instead of trying to evolve into them.  I wish he hadn’t let himself fall into that pit of destructive self-loathing back in 2002, and I wish he hadn’t stayed there so long that he started to turn that hate outward onto the women he perceived as loathing and rejecting him.  I wish he hadn’t turned, in twenty years, from the man who wanted to see the blonde girl in the horror movie survive and thrive into the rich bastard who thought it was funny to call Natasha Romanoff a cunt on IMAX and who called her a monster for being the victim of medical abuse.   I’m still laughing angrily at Joss being driven off twitter by a mob of angry, betrayed female fans, because wow does he ever deserve it, but man, Joss.  It didn’t have to be that way.

I think this is the best summation of the Joss Whedon issue that I’ve seen thus far.

This is so good.

Why I need feminism

*driving home*

Me: Let’s see what’s on the radio.

DJ: “It’s a tragic day for all men today—Leonard Nimoy died. Most boys had a Star Trek phase growing up. You girls probably have trouble telling the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek, but trust me, it’s a big deal that he’s gone.”

Me: …

Me: Seriously? What year is this?

Leonard Nimoy is rolling in his fucking grave

Fake geek boys don’t even know that women are why Star Trek got on air to begin with (Lucille Ball of Desilu productions!), women are why it stayed on air (fangirls writing letters to Paramount & NBC keep it from getting dropped!), women ran the first conventions (Joan Winston!) and women wrote the first guidebooks (Bjo Trimble!).

Fake geek boys don’t know that Leonard Nimoy was an outspoken feminist who campaigned to get equal pay for the female actors on the show, and who after his Star Trek days continued to advance feminist goals like fat body acceptance.

Star Trek is women’s territory. Get the fuck outta my sci-fi, fake geek boys, and take your ignorant sexism with you.

The struggle is real. See The DUFF in theaters this Friday! Get your tickets now!

if your ‘friend’ says some bullshit like this to you and you feel even remotely like the girl in this promo looks, drop them so fucking fast because they are toxic assholes.

god. what a horrid fucking piece of tripe.

I WAS JUST ABOUT TO POST ABOUT THIS PIECE OF SHIT.

If I NEVER see or hear about another movie where the “ugly” girl is bullied by her own so-called friends and gets made over and gains confidence and see you guys bullying is totally good for you! EVER EVER AGAIN IT WILL BE TOO SOON.

We get at least one of these a year it seems like.

jesus that’s mean "REAL TALK" IS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT TEARING PEOPLE DOWN. HONESTY IS NOT CRUELTY. Unsolicited advice about other people’s looks and clothes is bloody rude. And if someone DOES ask you for advice about their looks or clothes, it wouldn’t hurt you to phrase it kindly. “You could improve your posture” > “Your posture sucks.”

Jim Buchy, y’all,  a Republican member of the Ohio House of Representatives.

Oh wow didn’t expect the end.

While I agree with the message, we should also be teaching boys that it’s okay to cry.

Boys can cry and I will hug them bc it’s okay to be sad and cry

The point of this ad (to the second commenter) is that, in telling boys they can’t cry because they will be perceived as weak, you create emotionally-stunted men whose only method of expressing themselves is through violence and aggression. In saying “man” is interchangeable exclusively with “strong”, they grow up to believe that anyone who ISN’T a man (women, queer people) IS weak, and thus they have warrant to harm them.

These things are linked.

In ending toxic masculinity, you end misogyny and queerphobia. That’s why the ad says “Start with the boys”, because at such a young age, males are susceptible to all sorts of harmful ideals. I myself was, and it’s taken me almost 20 years to wash them off, and you know what? There’s still more to do.

In creating emotionally-healthy young boys, you create an environment where men respect others who are different to them. In ending traditional masculinity, you end patriarchy.

^

#it is AOK for boys to cry,and to talk about how they feel,to SAY 'I'm feeling sad' or 'I'm upset' or 'I'm scared' #as well as being less likely to channel their feelings into violence and hostility to others, #they are less likely to turn in on themselves and become self-destructive

Justice for all Indigenous Women! by Jessica Sabogal | Montréal

1 in 3 Native American women are raped within their lifetime, and are at extreme risk of violence from non-native (white) men. x x x

Despite push from the UN for a national inquiry, Canada continues to largely ignore the violence against Native Women. x