Update: Lindy West takes her Twit and goes home

Well, nobody could see that coming. Before I had time to get up the preceding post discussing Lindy West’s arrogant histrionics^†, she took the drastic step of blocking me from her Twitter account.

My crime?

@thelindywest It’s @SethMacFarlane, FFS. Who expects PC or feminist humor? Don’t presume nobody notices. It’s just part of the expectation.

No, really:

Even better, Ms. West offered me an animated picture of someone named Alithea making a masturbatory gesture.

Briefly, then: You’re doing it wrong, ladies.

A Note to Lindy West: You’re Not Helping

Poor Lindy West.

No, no. It’s just that as much as I sympathize with feminist issues, her whine—along with the rest of society’s apparent shock and horror—about Seth MacFarlane’s performance as host of the Oscars just doesn’t sit right.

West’s rant at Jezebel, titled, “Sexism Fatigue: When Seth MacFarlane Is a Complete Ass and You Don’t Even Notice”, is the sort of thing that really doesn’t help anyone or anything:

A strange thing happened on Sunday night when I watched Seth MacFarlane joke that Zero Dark Thirty is a movie about how bitches be naggin’, and listened to him croon about how lovely Jodie Foster’s naked boobs looked mid-simulated-gang-rape. I felt…nothing. Just nothing. Nothing beyond exhaustion and an extreme desire for wine, anyway. I wasn’t happy about it, but compared to what I was expecting from MacFarlane, it was a yawn. Compared to the sheer volume of hate and misogyny I filter every day for my job, it was a sneeze.

So I wrote happy jokes about other stuff instead. I bowed out, essentially. And I was thrilled to read and disseminate smart takedowns of MacFarlane’s primetime misogyny on Monday morning, letting other people do the heavy lifting that I was too fatigued to engage with. Because this fatigue—it’s really something.

My struggle as a feminist and a critic isn’t to contain my outrage—it’s to remind myself to feel anything at all.

This fatigue is self-induced. There’s no other way to put it: You’re doing it to yourself, Lindy!

National Review Online: Conan the Barbarian should be PG-13

Did you ever have one of those moments when something so obvious sticks out that you nearly lose an eye to it, but at the same time it’s so damnably stupid you almost don’t want to tell anyone about it because, well, it’s just that stupid?

Such is the case with John J. Miller’s lament about the newly-minted Conan movie:

As a fan of Robert E. Howard and his character Conan, I’m of course looking forward to seeing the new Conan film. But I can tell the producers already have made one major mistake: It’s rated R. How dumb is that? My son, who has read and enjoyed dozens of the old Marvel comics, almost certainly won’t be seeing it now. The film should have been PG-13. My guess is that it will struggle commercially just because of the rating–and old-timey fans of the original stories will grumble for another generation about how Hollywood messed up.

I mean, where do you even start with that?