• In the print version of the magazine, but not online, How Was Your Week?, by Awl pal Julie Klausner, got tied for his final pick. That's... nice that it got a mention! It's very good. Perhaps you will enjoy, if you can stand the fact that Julie doesn't have a penis.

• There is also the podcast of Ronna and Beverly, who are barren harridans.

• Throwing Shade, with Bryan Safi and Erin Gibson: they talk about lady and gay stuff! But that's so marginal, so be careful if you listen.

• You Had To Be There, with Nikki Glaser and Sara Schaefer, which happens in Sara's apartment, so you know it's all "domestic" (probably about oven-cleaning techniques?).

• There is Elizabeth Laime's Totally Laime Podcast, which is about advanced tatting and needlepoint.

• There is also Who Charted?, with another man-woman team, which is about the pop culture that is popular (but probably dumb).

Surely there are more? Tell us about them!

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This current weirdness might end up helpful for us real people; the gendering of box office is totally a question for marketers and studios and trade paper journalists, not the vast majority of us who actually just like to go see movies that we like. Why should I care if women have to "coerce" their boyfriends to attend a movie that stars a lady? Why should I care if something is a "bro" movie!

For the "spate" of lady comedies, Bridesmaids was back in May and Bad Teacher came in June and What's Your Number? was in late September, all being followed up by the artsy pedigreed version of the foul-mouthed lady genre, Young Adult, arriving in a week.

For the boy movies, well, August brought The Change-Up, which borrows the conceit of a magic fountain (I knowwww) from When in Rome (garbage) to create wonder and mishap! Hoo boy! In which: a dumb skeevy dude and his married overachiever best friend change bodies and the loser guy learns about how to succeed and the overachiever dude learns to mix things up and amazingly, they both totally avoid having sex with people because the screenwriters would find it un-overcomeable. It's ridiculous; it's like, one minute the skeevy dude in the married dude's body is like "I'M GOING TO BANG YOUR WIFE" and then he's overcome by feelings and can't and the uptight dude in the player-dude's body is like "I'M GOING TO BANG THIS HOT WONDERFUL CHICK" and then he just can't because of also his feelings.

So... somehow, no one ends up having sex.

Lots of everyone criticized the (actually rather delightful!) Anna Faris vehicle What's Your Number? for being sex-negative and slut-shaming and whatever (I mean, sure, the point of the movie was that she was kind of a whore for having slept with 19 people, which, haaaaaa, uh oh am I in trouble) but in the end at least she could have sex. (To be fair, her romantic attachment object in the film also has the sex with people, or at least we see ladies regularly leaving his apartment, but that's evened out by her having "been around.") And in Bad Teacher, our striving lady hero totally does her financial-romantic target but it's only because she seduced him and she gets to have sex with him because he wasn't The One For Her Anyway and meanwhile the whole movie the Right Guy For Her remains chaste to get her attention. She can do dudes, or at least Timberlakes, and actually does, but The Right Guy can't.

Weirdly, when you start to look at it, it starts to seem like men cannot have penis-in-vagina sex in pop movies pretty much! For instance, the only real sex that happens in either Hangover movie, as far as I can recall, and admittedly it's a bit of a blur, is in the sequel, directed by Ang Lee's son (oy!), when the groom of that movie's bachelor party has sex with a prostitute. A male prostitute, as it turns out! Penis-in-vagina for men is a dealbreaker: somehow, test screenings or something have convinced Hollywood that the audience (either the men in it or the women in it or both) will totally reject men actually having sex. Even (especially?) in the rom-coms; the formula there of sleazy dude plus lady prevents Josh "Snacky" Duhamel from having sex in Life As We Know It, whereas uptight K. Heigl (blurgh, crazy eyes!) shacks up with some dude while she's on hiatus from her Unexpected One True Snacky Love—despite that he's supposed to be the one that's "been around." (This is pretty much exactly what happens in The Ugly Truth, too! AKA, the last movie in which Gerard Butler will ever be hot.)

I'm sure there's a thousand exceptions that I'm totally forgetting. But somehow there's become this thing where it's a total betrayal that no one can write their screenplay out of if dudes have sex. Good news though: now Gerard Butler will solve all that with 2012's Playing the Field, sure to be nominated for zero awards. Here is the studio summary: "A former professional athlete with a weak past tries to redeem himself by coaching his son's soccer team, only to find himself unable to resist when in scoring position with his players' restless and gorgeous moms." Wow, it sounds like he'll actually maybe have sex in it, before he gets reformed. Likely however no plane ride is boring enough to make me watch that.

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Which is horrifying for a number of reasons—the biggest one being that if you’ve been following the arc of women in power positions in relationship to the economy you’ll have observed them to a one getting forced out directly or indirectly, or simply made to leave by default, and also you’ll have noted that in all these situations the problem basically is that each of these women were doing a good job. An exceptional job, in fact. That’s the problem.

I’m thinking about Brooksley Born at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission way back in the 90s. She wanted to regulate derivatives which she saw as being likely to make some big problems for the economy down the road but in response to this realization and that she wouldn’t shut up about it they (Lawrence Summers, that whole crowd) unplugged her commission instead; I’m thinking also about Patricia Small who was in charge of the endowment at the University of California, for years, who made billions of dollars for UC and she was essentially forced out when the Regents decided to reorganize the UC treasury so she would not have the final say on how they made their investments. The Regents (who brought us Arnold, who helped dump Grey Davis, who was actually calling the White House to help him stop those power outages Enron was manipulating) wanted to make more money quicker and basically, very quickly, they broke the bank of the UC endowment with a ton of bad investments right after she left. What’s up with Sheila Bair (a Republican!) who just left the FDIC, who arcanely wanted to protect home-owners, not banks, crazy! And now Elizabeth Warren. I'm sure by lumping all of these superstars together I am suggesting something essentialist about women, perhaps that women often are much more capable of doing a better job of economic planning and managing the purse strings in economic watch-doggie circles than the men who gleefully are pulling the strings around her, showing that old team spirit. When I think of team here I remember the one moment I was a substitute gym teacher in a public school in Boston and a girl was actually standing there in gym class smoking. I said put that cigarette out. She passed it to her right. I said put that cigarette out. She passed it to the right. So in effect nobody was smoking because these girls were a team. This is the kind of team I'm talking about. The problem with these individual women, the economic soothsayers I’m talking about, is that they are effective, which in itself in this world of team management is enough of a reason to get rid of them. In the case of Elizabeth Warren the good news is that she will return to Harvard and to Massachusetts and we anticipate that she will swiftly in the next election unseat the idiot truck-driving Republican Senator Scott Brown. And she will do it with such style and panache that it will be a pleasure for all of us to watch. Often the people who start things don’t wind up running them and in this case in particular I think it’s not always bad.

After The Social Network I felt sick. Was it the scene of the girls having coke snorted off their abs, or all the other girls who threw themselves at the inadequate boys who invented Facebook, if you believe this account, because they wanted to get girls. The film was set in a boy world emanating from Harvard and with some exceptions (Elizabeth Warren and a few others) I basically think of Harvard as the school started for and by witch-burners and that’s what it remains. It is the club. I am always haunted by the line in Susan Sontag’s diary: Don’t say anything bad in public about anyone from Harvard. Cause then they would leave you out here, I guess. I think the people in there who are not in favor of witch-burning don’t stick around long and the ones who stay are actually quite into it. Witch burning has always been the fast track to success in America. I thought The Social Network was a bad film because I simply think that no story is surrounded by nothing but itself. If it is, it isn’t a story. The filmmakers seemed willing to suggest that Mark Zuckerberg was and indeed always will be a lonely nerd, but the last words we read on the vanishing film were this: Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest billionaire in the world. That’s the meaning of the film, cause it’s the end. The gleaming white text on black looks us right in the eye and says: good for him. Like family. The kid’s smart. He’s laughing all the way to the bank (to meet other men?). And meanwhile girls are idiots and fools. You think it says something else. I think it’s quietly genocidal. I mean in a spiritual sense. Instead of pole dancing you can be a pleasure rug. Just lie down! The money will come.

Why did I like The Rite so much. Is film viewing pleasure patently narcissistic. I do believe that’s true for a large part. I wanted to see The Rite because I miss my simple beliefs in exorcism. I believed in exorcism as a child and I also feared that I would tip unwittingly towards the side of Satan. Consuming The Rite the other night in my artist colony single bed I thought to myself quietly that perhaps I am Satan. I have lazily and simply made room for him and this is my life. Placidly evil. Eating peanuts, farting and drinking tea in bed. The role of the young priest (full of doubt but winding up somehow in Rome witnessing and later actually performing an exorcism on Anthony Hopkins, who has been making his living for a long while now being possessed and saying the most evil and spot-on shit in the world, to men, to women, to everybody, castrating the whole damn tribe of humans and don’t we deserve it!) that role is played handsomely and slightly foolishly by Colin O’Donoghue. He’s smug when he should be a little nervous, he plays it broadly when he should be calmed and changed by his experience, in short he is not a great actor, or is even trying, but he is the ideal character for all of us to glom onto as the stand-in for our own awkward and badly-played lives. At the end he is going home to Chicago where, the post-titles tell us, he is working as a successful exorcist today. Put these two moments together. One man is a billionaire, the other is an exorcist. What a world. By implication it seems the young seminarian has found faith. Yet his last line in the movie is “cool,” delivered inexactly, which confirms The Rite as an utterly flawed and weirdly satisfying film. In the pre-titles we are told that the film was suggested by real events, so is this or is this not true? He lives? A slacker exorcist? Maybe? Now that seems to me to be unbelievably cool. And even better is the hard fact that exorcisms being performed widely across America today got to the big screen through a suggestion—that is so gentle, even feminist, well feminist-man, in its quiet way of coming to power. Is it true that today even the Catholic Church is only auditioning for its own reality. That’s the implication, a very leveling one, so times they are a-changing. But through all this hoop-de-doo The Rite steadfastly claims to know about evil and this film is frank about the reality of its existence.

The Social Network is not frank about evil. It really doesn’t know. Do you? Is there evil in the world. Well just watch a government divided between those who want to heap more opportunity on the rich and openly sabotage the middle class, the “working people” (is any one? Working, I mean) in America and the poor—and the poor and the working people by and large do not know their true names. Most of them except for the most frankly indigent and drug dealers will proudly call themselves middle class—isn’t that in fact a big part of the problem. So bear in mind that in The Rite we learn that to destroy evil—and Satan, we must learn his name. The Catholics still have that down at least.

Here’s my point. (I think this is four.) Washington is divided today between those who passionately support a widespread not-knowing in order to continue to develop and grow the greatest economic split between the haves and the have-nots in the history of our country, that’s what one side has grown (not jobs but that), and the other—well they are all confused at best. Maybe a handful are asserting that we ought to more heavily tax that increasingly wealthy class (to which our Congressmen and President all belong, yay, team!) and not cut back from the legions of suffering Americans for whom the original social network—medicare, social security, education—constitute the single thing (well jobs and unions too...) that might still be keeping them from truly becoming the poor, and of course the social network directly helps the poor too.

Some people in our government think that this is probably the right thing to do—maybe even including our President but he doesn’t know how or where to make his point. This is the man who came into office on a wave of charm. Where did that charming man go. Barack Obama! Come back and talk to us. The women in The Rite were not so much stupid as possessed. They’re rolling on the floor and acting crazy, biting and snarling, because Satan’s got a hold on them. And why not. If they acted like they knew what they were doing, or what the rest of us should do, they’d probably get fired. Better to twitch on the floor and eventually go to hell, don’t you think. Least you have a job. Least you know who and where your boss is. He’s not some sad little pig sitting on top of the world, shrugging and getting blown, while it blows up. Bring Satan back. His name we know.

Eileen Myles is the author, most recently, of Inferno: A Poet's Novel, available from OR Books. Her books of poetry include Not Me, School of Fish and Sorry, Tree; other books include Chelsea Girls and Cool for You.

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The repercussions of having a woman writing TV are unknown but we expect the very worst.

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Oh right. Scott Thompson. And Graham Chapman, of Monty Python. These two might prove a comedy "rule" that gays are often funny when in groups of straight people. Or when they are English: Stephen K. Amos, Simon Amstell, Matt Lucas, Julian Clary, Paul O'Grady. And Kenny Everett and Frankie Howerd and Kenneth Williams, RIP! Or when they are of an English province: Trey Anthony, say, from Canada. And Tommy Sexton. And I guess Trevor Boris counts! Then there's... oh, Dave Rubin!

There's a pretty equal number of ladies, of course. Don't ever confuse Judy Gold and Julie Goldman. (Jews! I know!) Also don't confuse Wanda Sykes, Elvira Kurt and René Hicks. That's racist. (I'm kidding, it's not. See what I did there?) Margaret Cho still counts. Also I will namedrop Alec Mapa in the interests of diversity!

Of the greats, you have Rip Taylor and Lily Tomlin. And more, hmm... I guess Eddie Murphy, if you count those who may prefer our sexual partners to be in that wonderful middle ground between gender norms. And Andy Dick counts. (There is such a thing as bisexuality!)

But now. Think of the least funny people you know: Susan Sontag, Bret Easton Ellis and Jeffrey Dahmer. All gay. All devoutly unhumorous. Why aren't gay people funny?

Nature
They're not funny from birth. Like, genetically. (I think that was the plot of Gattaca.)

Nurture
Their parents raised them to not be funny.

And that's it.

Oh.

Well, there's one possibility we can't discount. Let's call it the Tina Fey thesis.

The Tina Fey Thesis
So you know how ladies are treated kind of as a sidebar in comedy? Or as a flavor? (Like the way the blacks are treated in the visual arts world. Like, "Oh look, Mark Bradford can hold a paintbrush!" Not like, "Oh look at this awesome painting," period, the end. Yeah, sorry, pet peeve.) Well, the ladies are taking up "all" the space. (By "all" I mean the 22% remaining space not taken by straight men.) They are the flavor. Who needs gay flavor when you have lady flavor?

Plus most of the straight men in comedy want to have sex with the ladies, though some of them aren't so picky. As you know!

Meanwhile, straight guys think the lady-gay pact is out to get them. Why did Nick Di Paolo finally just get his first one-hour Showtime special? "Because the people in the industry are dumb fucks. They’re too busy looking for, you know, for the next funny chick or funny gay guy. I’m just another white guy in the mix."

Oh, that's why. (Wait, no it is not. It's actually because Tim Allen was finally too busy and/or dead.) But I do believe that he believes this.

But the gays also did this to themselves.

So right: women in comedy were choosing between being in a boy's club or doing comedy about being a lady, and sometimes doing both. The gays had less of an option of being in a boy's club, so quite frequently they did comedy about being gay, so as to build an audience, but also, regarding which, zzz. Ellen's sort of an exception, but not totally: it was all subtext. (The shoulder pads mostly.) Gay comics hit a ceiling because, um, even gay-topic comedy gets boring to (fickle) gays soon. And it certainly doesn't interest straight people.

Mmm, message comedy. God bless! So with the gays in this box—which was a profitable box for some of them!—there was nowhere to integrate. They weren't going to shame their way into writer's rooms for sitcoms, weren't going to do that well in TV in general. (They do so-so, to be fair. I mean, "Will and Grace" exec producer Max Mutchnick is back with "Shit My Dad Says"! That's... grreaat. Enjoy.)

So now women are busily on a militant task force to take over comedy, while they are sucking all the gay air out of the room inadvertently. (We should all demand more pieces of a smaller pie, not a bigger pie!) It's very, very violent, this struggle. They started with equal space on Chelsea Handler's show ("lucky them") and they will next launch an assault on, I dunno, Craig Ferguson or something.

But eventually the women will bring some gays with them. Because all women are equally nurturing and fair-minded. That will be in the year 2035. Then we will know the truth about whether gays can actually make with the funny.

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Still, in the end, none of this matters. Who knows better than the folks that cover politics that there's no difference between negative and positive attention these days? Now go get me some coffee, ladies.

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Is writing just a job. Writing books, writing poems. If it is then the message to women is to go elsewhere. But they can go to hell—these messengers, the collective whoever or whatever that is saying it. I don’t believe that this is a job. I think writing is a passion. It’s an urge as deep as life itself. It’s sex. It’s being and becoming. If you write, then writing is how you know. And when someone starts slowly removing women from of the public reflection of this fact they are saying that she doesn’t know. Or I don’t care if she thinks she knows. She is not a safe bet. Interestingly the poetry world is getting celebrated for its VIDA showing of nearly equal gender parity in reviewing etc. The problem there though is that the majority of the poets writing are female. It’s true. That’s who takes workshops, that’s who gets MFAs, you can easily get some numbers there and frankly in the poetry scene the women are the ones who are generally doing the most exciting work. Why? Because the female reality is still largely unknown. And language is the thrill that holds the unknown in its vague and shifting ways. That’s writing. But despite the fact that there are more females in the poetry world, more females writing their accounts somehow only a fraction of them are able to bob to top of the heap. So the poetry world is in effect performing a kind of affirmative action for men by giving their work a big push ahead, celebrating men’s books at a much higher ratio to the amount and quality of work actually being produced. And I’m not entertaining for a moment that this is because male work is better. I’m female and I don’t so much think female work is better. Female reality is not better. But female reality has consumed male reality abundantly—we have to in order just to survive so female reality always contains male and female. That seems interesting as hell so at the very least I think it’s a lot more interesting than a monotonous male reality. Which seems just sort of staid and old. Tapped out. Female reality (and this goes for all the “other” realities as well—queer, black, trans—everyone else) is more interesting because it is wider, more representative of humanity—it’s definitely more stylistically various because of all it has to carry and show. After all, style is practical. You do different things because you are different. Women are different. Maybe not the women who routinely get invited to take part in the men’s monolith. They are another item. But women as a class are different. That’s how I dispense with the quality question.

But here’s the actual problem. If the poetry world celebrated its female stars at the true level of their productivity and influence poetry would wind up being a largely female world and the men would leave. Poetry would not seem to be the job for them. I think that’s the fear. Losing daddy again! Plus women always need to support, I mean actively support male work in order to dispense with the revolting suggestion that they are feminists. I supported Hillary Clinton with my vote but did you notice she wasn’t really a feminist until she was losing. Well what does feminism mean? Well I think it means that you don’t do much in your work except complain about injustice and describe the personal sphere and talk in a wide variety of ways about labias. You think I’m kidding. Cause I actually do that in my most recent novel—I thought well women in the art world are always celebrating their labias so maybe I should do that in writing. What a great, funny, even masculine idea. To use the pussy as material. So I wrote five pages of pussy wallpaper and gave it to the editors at VICE who did publish it but confided in me that the money people really had to be convinced that it was not entirely disgusting. With all the dirty and violent and racist things that VICE has done, this was um a little troubling. Do we really want to send that kind of message to our readers. What kind of message is that. I guess a wet hairy soft female one. I mean a big giant female hole you might fall into never to be heard from again. I mean and there’s just always a danger if you’re a feminist that you’re also a lesbian (I am) and the only way to really make it clear that you are not that (or that “it” means nothing) is to firmly vote with the guys, kid with them, and be willing to laugh at other women (to demonstrate that you have “a sense of humor”) and not push too hard to include women in anything. Speaking frankly as a lesbian I have to say that the salient fact about the danger zone I call home is the persistent experience of witnessing the quick revulsion of people who believe that because I love women I am a bottom feeder. I am desperately running towards what anyone in their right mind would be running away from. Which is femaleness, which is failure.

And one does after all want to be read as a man. As a man who is a woman perhaps. Can’t we just all be men and some have these genitals and some have those. I heard that that’s how they saw it in the middle ages. And some died after having thirteen children and some just got another wife. Women finally are all replaceable and that’s the real truth. The more different we get the less likely we can fit our foot in the tiny shoe. And that’s the gig. Not being female, but being small. But I want to be loved because I am. That’s all.

Eileen Myles is the author, most recently, of Inferno: A Poet's Novel, available from OR Books. Her books of poetry include Not Me, School of Fish and Sorry, Tree; other books include Chelsea Girls and Cool for You.

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