#tmp feminism

[scarlettblythe]

omg i need to know what you thought about that episode

Okay, so first of all, a disclaimer: I’m done being mad at Danny.See, here is the thing: I don’t believe in marriage. Not for me, personally. I don’t like, enforce this on anyone else - I only want for my loved ones to be happy - but for a host of ideological and personal reasons it is not for me.

And something I have always been aware of, very aware, is that discussing this with my partner is always going to be kind of fraught. There’s this weird presumption of dishonesty, when you’re young and talk to someone you’re with about marriage. When I say I never want to get married, people tend to assume I’ll ‘change my mind’ as I get older. Some men assume I’m flat-out manipulating my partner, trying to trap them by being the ‘cool girl’ who ‘doesn’t need a commitment’.

Unlearning socialised crap is a slow and painful process. One of my favourite things about this season is how it has shown that process, over and over again, drilling that into us until it is physically painful. This finale smashed me in with a damn hammer and left me to consider the consequences of not unlearning. Of what happens when you fail.

And now, I’m done being mad at either of them. All I have is love and cocoons of blankets for them both.

Discussing marriage is always a convoluted conversation, full of doublespeak and presumed dishonesty, even when you’re both communicating as clearly as you can. And that isn’t our fault. We work hard at honesty and genuine commitment. It’s because we’ve been told by everyone around us to expect a particular reaction. My partner has had too many people tell him I’m just trying to be the Cool Girl to not doubt my honesty, just a little, when I say marriage is not something I’ve ever wanted. I’ve had too many people, including his parents, drive home the importance of marriage to not twinge when he says he doesn’t give a crap, to not wonder if he’s secretly hoping I’ll change my mind.

Over this season, I’ve seen Danny and Mindy go through all of this. I’ve seen them struggle to believe each other, or instinctively believe but then have that messed up by outside influences. Part of the reason I react so strongly to Peter’s jokes about Mindy ‘trapping’ Danny is precisely because that is something I have been accused of. Multiple times.

What’s more, I’ve seen them both bend until they almost break. They’ve both been trying to compromise, changing how their lives are going to turn out for the other. Mindy never thought she’d be living with a curmudgeonly old man, accidentally pregnant, no marriage on the horizon and tied to New York by people she loves. Danny never thought he’d be in a relationship again, never thought he’d have kids at all, certainly never thought he’d be living with anyone.

Neither of them are living their dream or their ideal, and that’s okay. Relationships, partnerships, even marriages include compromise and revisualising your life. That revisualisation often leads to something even better than expected, and that’s a wonderful kind of luck. Sometimes, it’s something just as good, and well, that’s as much as we can hope for. Sometimes, the compromise is too much, you lose too much of yourself, and that’s when it’s time to part ways.

On Danny

I meant it when I said I’m done being mad at him. That’s because, while his perception of marriage in no way lines up with my own (apart from mutual scepticism), I understand what it’s like to not want something, and be told that you’re the abnormal one.

Because make no mistake, Mindy, my baby, my love, that was her argument. That she was normal. That wanting marriage was normal. It’s actually a compelling argument to use on Danny, because god knows he thinks he’s deficient for not wanting to get married. More accurately, he thinks he’s too deficient for marriage, that marriage is for other, less broken people.

This is key: Danny thinks marriage breaks relationships, just like in Be Cool he thought committed relationships break love. His ass-backwards logic is that the only way to commit to Mindy is to not marry her, because if he marries her he’s dooming their relationship to fail.

I think what he said about Christina and Alan is really important here: he said that he and Annette had each thought the person they chose was the greatest person in the world, and marriage made them hate each other. Danny didn’t marry Christina out of obligation or because it was ‘normal’. He did it because she filled his heart and mind, because she was immense, talented, extraordinary. Because he loved her, he couldn’t imagine his life without her. And marriage, marriage opened up all of her flaws to him. Suddenly he had to deal with her selfishness, her vindictiveness, her need to change him. 

For Danny, that means marriage made her that way. Marriage turned her into someone terrible, someone he couldn’t stand. He turned her into someone he couldn’t stand. 

This is even more heartbreaking when he references Alan, because of course we know now just how manipulative and disgusting Alan is. We know that Alan’s addiction, his feckless irresponsibility, his avoidance, that none of that is Danny’s fault, nor Annette’s. Danny doesn’t believe that. Danny thinks, on some level, that he and his Ma drove Alan to drink. That marriage drove him to be his worst self.

Danny never wants to be his worst self for Mindy. He never wants to turn Mindy into her worst self. He has to have her.

And all this season, he’s been fighting to unlearn this. Letting her in, to the point where he’s excited to have her move in, that’s been a massive compromise. Of course Danny would hope that was enough, that he’d stripped off enough pieces of himself, that the trauma recovery was done now and he could live the rest of his life in his comfort zone.

Of course, he’s wrong. Because he picked the wrong women to knock up, if he didn’t want to take this recovery all the way.

And honestly, in my own recovery I’ve sought out people to love who had qualities I wanted. I’ve sought out stalwart, loyal people to teach me how to be practical, solution-driven, and how to let people in. I’ve sought out positive people to teach me how to reframe my mindset. I’ve sought out cheerful people to teach me how to put things out of my mind and enjoy myself, emotional people to teach me how to break through the shell I live in. 

I think Danny’s the same. But the upshot of choosing such wonderful people with so much to teach? You have to fucking learn. Even when you don’t want to. And when you can’t learn, you have to learn to let go.

Danny’s at a crossroads, and the final shot, his final words, they’re where he makes this choice. Does he strip off one final piece of his armour? Does he want to be normal? Or is he still desperately hoping that if he strips off enough small pieces, Mindy will let him keep the big piece?

She won’t. And I will support her in that, to the ends of the earth. 

On Mindy

Oh lord, to be normal. Mindy has been chasing the fairytale of normal her whole life. Chasing what she’s been told to want, what she sees everyone around her getting. That’s why she ruined a wedding over a man she later admitted she didn’t even care about that much. That’s why she fought so hard to keep Casey, even when he turned into a massive disappointment for her. Honestly, I think it’s a lot of what has always attracted her to Danny: that he knows The Right Thing, and does it. That he, from the outside, exists within a rigid framework of social norms and mores.

What’s interesting for me is not that normal is inherently bad - of course not - but how often for Mindy, normal isn’t comfortable once she has it. She seems to feel the same tension we all do, between fitting in and striking out on our own path, and ultimately, for Mindy, the most comfortable way always seems to be skewing normal, just a bit. Finding something within hailing distance of normal, something parallel but not quite there. To be honest, Mindy is far too adaptable to change to ever settle for less.

I think that her adaptability, and her comfort with Skewed, is a lot of why she’s been so patient with Danny for so long. She knows she’s been asking him to change far more quickly than he’s ready for, and that the pregnancy put that into overdrive. And she doesn’t mind, a lot of the time. When she does mind, she does something about it. When Danny isn’t giving her what she needs, she goes out and gets it for herself. She gets to decide.

So she’s decided she’s done waiting for Danny to heal, and I can’t fault her for that. Of course it breaks my heart, but it’s also quintessential Mindy strength and force of will. She moves quickly. She doesn’t dither. She isn’t uncertain. She has never been anyone’s nurse. She is the damn doctor. She finds the problem and excises it. Aftercare is another person’s role.

And if that means she lets Danny go, she knows it will be for the best. Perhaps not for Danny, who will grow all-new armour without her, but it will mean that Mindy doesn’t make sacrifices she’s watched generations of women make, for no reward but the pride of the man asking her to make them.

The only question I have, one that I feel certain will be answered in Season 4, is why Mindy would only tell Danny that she wanted normal. Because subconsciously, she knows that’s never been what’s good for her. While Danny’s convalescence is not what she wants for her life, neither is the picture-perfect image of the nuclear family she had in her head in Season 1.

What Mindy needs, to be frank, is to critically interrogate all the dreams she has, because a lot of them conflict with each other. She’s been socialised to have a checklist for her life, but she is too irregular a woman to be satisfied with platitudes about ‘having it all’, and she’s not organised enough to remember where she even kept the damn checklist. She probably wrote it on the back of a candy wrapper, then ate it.

She’s asking Danny to heal, and that is more than fair. But in the meantime, she needs to be looking at herself, at the life she’s fighting for compared to the life she keeps asking for. Because the decisions she’s making are not the decisions she’s always told us she’ll make, and that tells me that Mindy is more Skewed from Normal than she’s ever wanted to admit.

[scarlettblythe]

mysudsyboyflyf reblogged your post and added:

Or garlic. I guess I don’t literally think he was...

I mean, I don't think he was specifically trying to control her portion sizes, so much as he personally eats that much so he assumes it's adequate. I mean, when she said she wanted dessert he ran off to find her that gross banana. If she said she was still hungry at any point I think he'd run all over the city to find her something disgusting like a green smoothie. But Mindy wasn't complaining about still being hungry (and you know she would), she was complaining about being bored and stuck with gross-tasting food. It's possible he was trying for "small meals often" to help combat her nausea (it's the only thing that works for me!) but honestly I don't think the writers thought it through that much. I think they just found the idea of Mindy eating kale hilarious, and the small portion sizes were meant to highlight how impossibly dull the food was. (That said, I didn't notice the portion sizes as being especially small at all. I mean, that chunk of chicken was about how much I eat in one sitting. It's a 'normal' portion. But then I eat like six meals a day. But so does Mindy!)

I mean, I think that it says a lot about how he's changed as a character that he went straight to trendy foods like low-carb diets with things like kale or steel-cut oats. The point was obviously to drive home to the audience the idea that 'healthy' isn't a one-size-fits-all thing that trendy superfoods can guarantee. It was meant to poke fun at diet culture and health culture.

On a character level, I interpreted it as Danny feeling scared and insecure and uncertain of what's 'right' for baby, and not wanting to take any chances of potentially screwing up the most important thing in his life. So uncertain that he's swayed more by the idiot advice of health blogs than by his own common sense. I mean, no-one needs kale. Plain spinach or silverbeet will do you just as well. Danny knows that, really. Just like Danny knows that pregnant women need iron and Mindy could actually really use a steak.

I posted a whole bunch of stuff about how I found the reproductive politics of this episode fascinating. Danny's desperation to take control of a process he's biologically excluded from was really poignant, because (cis)men really do seem to struggle with that. Like, they're entitled to the whole world, but here is a thing that no matter how hard they try, they can never truly take command over, that will always be outside their experience, that will never be theirs. It was great to see Danny framed so definitively as ridiculous for trying to control Mindy instead of trusting the mother of his child to look after things herself.

I stand by my assertion that given the choice, Danny would carry this baby himself because his desperation for control and his protective instinct (hello, child raised in an abusive home!) make it impossible for him to accept the idea that anyone can protect his child like he can. I'm really enjoying seeing that need for control made to seem so absurd and for even those choices people will judge Mindy for (like her diet) framed as her choices to make. That's been fucking wonderful for me, and I'm so grateful for how the show handled it.

[scarlettblythe]

can you talk about that last scene on the mindy project and the one in her office i thought mindy kaling did a good job in it

Oh my god, how far has MK’s acting come over the past season? One of the things I love about her is how hard she works to learn from those around her, and she has definitely been watching Chris. The break in her voice, the restrained tears tracking down her face? It was brilliantly done.

This scene was really important, though, because it touched on a really relevant feminist issue: the rights of a pregnant person.

Here you have Mindy, pregnant with a child she loves and wants the best for, but struggling to make the best choices. This is so real for so many pregnant people, who have to suddenly deal with their body being hijacked by a cluster of cells. A cluster of cells they want, perhaps, but even so. Suddenly, they’re not just making decisions for themselves, but at the same time their body is running off without them and changing everything, making them sick, tired, shifting their muscles and tendons and organs in new and painful ways. And it is still their body, which made the way the show handled this really important.

One of the most interesting dynamics for me is that between a pregnant person and their partner, and the reality that while both probably want decisions regarding the foetus to be 50/50, they can’t be, because those decisions impact the pregnant partner so much more than the person not carrying the baby.

And Danny is a control freak.

A control freak who has chosen to be with Mindy Lahiri. A woman whose stubbornness is legendary. A woman whom he has never been able to control, whom he can’t even influence as much as he’d like.

He looks at her and sees their baby, a baby he helped make but she has to do all the hard work of growing. On a subconscious level, Danny would probably rather be the pregnant one. Or to grow that baby in a lab incubator somewhere he can keep an eye on the little one, make sure everything is perfect. Instead, he has to trust Mindy to do all this hard work, and as a rule, Danny doesn’t trust. 

So in the scene where Danny goes off at Mindy, Mindy’s acting was completely heartbreaking. Because Danny is actually out of line. He’s scrabbling for control, trying to take charge the only way he can. When it doesn’t work, when Mindy’s agency reminds him yet again that what happens to his child is completely out of his sphere of influence, he goes nuts. 

And Mindy takes it. For the first time ever, she takes it. She feels so keenly that she’s in the wrong, so guilty over her struggle to make choices for two beings at once, that the tears start falling before she can remember that she is important, as well as the baby.

The show never explicitly says this. It never comes out with an After School Special moral. But nonetheless, the scene in which Dr. WhiteAndBoring tells Danny to give Mindy a break reinforced the idea of Mindy as a person, not just a baby incubator. A person with responsibilities outside of herself, just as Danny has a responsibility to quit smoking for the sake of their child, but still, a person first. 

This was wonderful to me because in the minefield of activism around pregnancy, love and support for pregnant people often goes by the wayside. They become objects and symbols, judged for every decision they make as though a candy bar will be the thing that kills their unborn foetus. Rampant ableism reinforces the idea that if a child is born disabled, it was almost certainly the pregnant parent’s fault, and it is an unmitigated tragedy, leaving the pregnant parent a failure and the baby worth less.

So this wonderful, gentle, loving reminder that we don’t stop being people just because we’re pregnant? Yeah, I adored that. And we couldn’t have had it without Kaling’s acting in these two scenes.

This episode was such a gift. So far, the whole storyline has been.

[scarlettblythe]

Love to hear your thoughts on Danny's reaction to Mindy saying "the kid will be fine because you're the dad". When he looks away and says "Really? ", it reminds me of the end of WAP, when he asked Mindy "What if I want to move in with you"?.

Yes. Oh my god, I get the best asks. Fuck yes. I'm doing a happy dance right now, and I am a ballerina so it is spectacular. 

I love your interpretation because I never drew that parallel. They're two very different scenes and Danny is in a very different mental place, but his uncertainty, his drive to make this work, they're coming through so strongly in both.

What's especially interesting about the parallel, though, is how it lines up with Mindy telling Danny she'll be just fine without him.

What About Peter was the first time she said that, and you could see then the wheels turning in Danny's brain, the automatic connections being made from not being needed to being abandoned.

Now, I need to digress for a second, because the following is a message I think the show has really driven home this season, and that is the difference between being needed and being wanted. Being needed, necessary, indispensable? That is how Danny Castellano makes sure no-one else leaves him. It's not healthy.

Dependence isn't sexy. Sometimes, as for disabled people and their carers, dependence is necessary, but it leaves the dependent vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. It's no accident that what abusive people do is to cut off their partners' other support structures so that they have exclusive rein on being needed, often even taking control of finances. Dependence is not sexy.

I'm driving this point home so hard because I've seen several people now judge Mindy for saying (three times now) that she doesn't need Danny, and even rejoicing in her saying in DCIMN that she does need him.

"If she doesn't need him, why is she with him?" Because she wants him. And that is so, so much better. Need is impelled, forceful. Want is freely given. Want is choice. Want is having all the options in the world, and knowing this is the best one.

For a man like Danny, being needed is the poor man's cousin to what he really craves, which is to be wanted. He can't imagine anyone choosing him freely, but Mindy did, over and over again. He's still wrapping his head around that, and his natural instinct is to assume some correlation between want and need, to panic and worry when she says she'd survive without him. He subconsciously wants control, possession. He can't have it. Other people cannot be owned.

This season we've seen Danny slowly come to some kind of peace about that, and Mindy's consistent reaffirming of the mantra of want/need, that's been an important touchstone for the series to show where Danny is at.

The first time, we get to watch his instinctive panic, his drive to make her stay, and we get to see Mindy having none of it. 

The second time, we get to see Mindy's request for help go awry, and for her to reaffirm that it doesn't matter, because he's not there to help her. He's there to be with her. This is crucial for Danny, because much as he seeks it out, being needed is a drain. For Mindy to reinforce that she chooses to have him with her regardless of how their madcap schemes work out? That's laying the groundwork for Danny to let go of a neurosis that is not helping him.

The third time was in the doctor's lounge. And what I love about that moment is that Mindy is trying to give Danny the chance to freely choose her. To not take on another obligation he's going to resent, but to choose love and family. She's trying to give Danny the chance to want her. To want their baby. And inside, in the small insecure place she tries to hide, she's trying to bolster her confidence in case he suddenly decides he never wanted her at all.

So when Mindy said in DCIMN that she needed him, that she couldn't do it alone, that's the context. It's not true, of course, regardless of how insecure she is after weeks of failing to correct her diet. Mindy can do anything, and she would definitely survive without him. What is true is that she is stronger with him. They have grown together, chosen each other, and they are better as a team. A team riddled with cigarette ash and cheese puff dust, but a wonderful, loving partnership nonetheless.

So when you say the scene in WAP reminds you of that scene, that's what I see. A trajectory in which Mindy learns how to vocalise her love for Danny in a language he'll understand, and Danny learns to let go of his lifelong scrabble for control and allow himself to be wanted.

It's important, because soon for the first time in his life he truly will be needed, by a tiny scrap of humanity that literally will not survive without him. And it's going to take all his want, all his choice, all his freedom to survive those sleepless nights with his fragile happiness intact, without retreating into a pit of worry and fear. And it's going to take his faith in Mindy's choice to help him weather the storm.

[scarlettblythe]

The Sauce Joke

The moment where Danny suggests Mindy quit, stay home and make sauce is one of the most subtle callouts of sexism and classism I’ve ever seen. They’re jokes that aren’t terribly funny, but they are social commentary, and they are character growth, and both are absolutely lovely.

As gloriagilbertpatch has pointed out, Danny’s sexist notion that the woman should stay home from work is as much about classism as it is sexism. Can you imagine Danny getting home from school and starting the process of making dinner with exacting care, so that when his mother got home from cleaning hotel rooms she would have a hot meal waiting for her? And imagine, for a second, the tears in her eyes, her frustration because much as she appreciated it, she knew it should have been her taking care of him?

I bet all Annette wanted was to be able to quit, stay home and make sauce for her boys.

Now don’t get me wrong, there’s his usual undercurrent of sexism here. After all, Mindy is canonically an absolutely hopeless cook. If anyone’s quitting to make sauce, it should be Danny, but his ironclad idea of how things should be, that men should provide and woman should care, that won’t let him consider that. That is sexism.

But there’s more to this than that. The classism, and the different perspectives on how class functions, is reinforced by Mindy’s assertion that it is the twentieth century, and women can have it all - well, rich women. For Mindy’s parents, after all, wealth meant education and opportunities. It’s unsurprising that Mindy would now view her wealth as freedom from the bonds of having to just be a wife and mother. For Danny, meanwhile, wealth means you’re free to take care of your family, your children. For Danny, wealth means your children don’t have to take care of themselves.

For Danny, wealth would have meant him never learning how to make sauce.

[scarlettblythe]

what do you think about danny buying mindy a house

Thank you thank you thank you for this amazing question. You’re the best and I adore you.

First of all, I would like to say, as a human being in a relationship, don’t do this. Don’t buy a house without your significant other’s consent. You might think it’s a cute gift but it’s their debt too, now. Shows do this all the time and it’s always ridiculous. I didn't even like it when my partner bought a TV without mentioning it. A house? Fucking forget it.

Seriously, people of the world: Do not ever, ever emulate Danny Castellano’s romantic gestures, unless they involve dancing. That’s it. If there is no hip-swaying, no body rolls, assume that it is a stupid thing to do.

So as for what I think about Danny buying Mindy a house, that’s pretty much it. I think he’s an idiot who needs to learn to use his words. But wait! There’s more! And that’s what I think Danny was thinking when he bought the house. To be honest, that’s probably a lot more interesting than my predictable, feminist thoughts.

The Trope is Gross

My first thought for comparison when I saw this episode was Jim and Pam from The Office, in which Jim bought his parents’ house. Pam loved the gesture, which was lucky because the house itself was terrible, and I spent the entire episode groaning at how anyone could find it adorable. It was huge and impulsive. Pam had never said she wanted to live there. It put them in huge amounts of debt - it’s not like either of them were millionaires. They didn’t own other property so they could keep it as an investment but live somewhere else. In short, it was extremely risky and disrespectful, and Jim got lucky. He was lucky that Pam liked it. Hell, even he didn’t think she was going to for a while there.

So yeah, I groaned extremely loudly when I found out about the brownstone. However, it occurred to me as I watched how different this situation is: Firstly, Danny explicitly says that Mindy has always wanted a brownstone. This was at least an idiotic purchase made with her needs in mind. Secondly, Danny is extremely wealthy, and also extremely stingy (I mean, responsible, whatever) with his money. This is a debt he can cover, especially since he and Mindy aren’t defacto or married yet, so his debts aren’t yet hers. Thirdly, Danny has two other apartments in Manhattan, in case she hates the brownstone. They’re not going to be homeless if she comes home and rejects it. He can fix it up, sell it off at probably an extremely nice profit, and they can pick something else together while living in his apartment.

This was a stupid, stupid thing for him to do. But the truth is, if you are ever going to be this much of an idiot, you’re going to want to do it when in Danny Castellano’s position. He’s covered. This is never going to be a mistake that ruins their entire future.

The Story is Great

What’s wonderful about this on a storytelling level is how perfectly this shows Danny’s character growth over this season.

As Mindy points out to him, it wasn’t long ago that he was “really, really nervous” about having her move into his apartment. It also wasn’t long ago that Danny read in Mindy’s diary that she wanted to be engaged by Christmas - a ticking time bomb that has only been lightly addressed by the narrative since, with no explicit mention of how it’s affected Danny’s decision-making.

For me, the brownstone is the culmination of both of these things.

It is a grand gesture, and Danny loves those. But at this point, Danny must be feeling like his standard gestures are getting a little hollow. He's gone running for a ring before, after all, when he screwed up Mindy's fellowship. Hell, he even jumped straight to a ring when things went south with Christina. In this show's history, a ring from Danny mostly means "I fucked up." 

Let's not forget, either, that the last time he asked his mother for the ring, she responded by telling him to fix the problem rather than just try and patch it up with a grand declaration. And whether or not Danny wants to marry Mindy, what he wanted even more was to do what she'd asked of him: to ask her to move in, sometime when he's not really, really nervous.

He's still nervous - he wouldn't be Danny otherwise. But it's the good kind of nervous, because far from a conciliatory gesture, what he's trying to provide for Mindy is something certain to build her life on. He's addressing both issues in one: that she asked to move in, and that she wants to know that this is real. Not just with a ring, but a home, a family home. It is a physical representation of the life he’s building.

The last time Danny bought property was after his divorce, at a time when he was certain he would be single for the rest of his life - so certain that he bought his mother the apartment next door. His home is his vision for the rest of his life. When Mindy asked to move into his apartment, she wasn’t just asking for more closet space. She was asking him to take his plan for the rest of his life and tear it to shreds. 

I’m not surprised Danny didn’t want Mindy to move into his apartment. I think, on a mental level, Danny could never see Mindy fitting into a space that was deliberately chosen to help him accept his solitude. When he knew he wanted Mindy, and wanted it to be forever, the first step had to be to find somewhere that could happen.

And Then There's Mindy

Who comes home for a weekend trip to find the perpetually emotionally-stunted Danny Castellano ready to give her everything she's ever asked him for, at the worst possible time. 

One of the things I loved most about this episode was how it showed that in any relationship, you're not both developing on the same schedule. Yeah, you both grow and evolve. You're both learning lessons. But those lessons don't match up in a convenient, episodic (heh) manner. Sometimes they outright contradict each other, and you end up lying on a bed with them, confused as fuck and wondering why you bothered working so hard to change in the first place.

The brownstone was the most beautiful way to illustrate that. It's a wonderful symbol of Mindy's goals, the things that in Season 1 she was desperate for, that in Season 2 Danny couldn't give her, that Season 3 Mindy is starting to question the need for. But it's also a perfect symbol for Danny's growth. Best of all, its broken-down glory and endless possibilities leaves us all faced with what it looks like when you're not sure if you and your SO are growing together any more.

And god, haven't all of us in long-term relationships been here, at some point? Haven't we all had conversations with them where we realise we aren't on the same page, even when we'd spent years working towards something we thought they wanted? This brownstone, unlike Jim and Pam's fanservice home, feels relatable and real. It feels uncomfortable. It doesn't fit right. It's come along at the wrong time - somewhat like other recent developments *cough cough*.

So weirdly, despite all my misgivings, and my absolute objection to the entire concept on a feminist level, I'm pro-brownstone. Not as a plot device, but as part of Danny's continued character development and Mindy's Project. And because this is the only time in my life I've seen this terrible, terrible trope done well. TMP has a history of taking tropes I hate and subverting them. I am so grateful to see that this is one of them.

[scarlettblythe]

the-omniscient-narrator replied to your post:the-omniscient-narrator replied to your...

You’re not a bad feminist at all. It’s just they say so many uncalled for BS it’s hard to get upset about all of them. The Hispanic catcalling thing was another random joke that fell flat. Sokay though, I’ve just become more of a casual viewer now

And this is ultimately what it comes down to. Like, I have a really high tolerance for problematic content. I think part of that does come down to my fascination with it - I once spent ten minutes interrogating a guy in one of my tutorials over why he called his friends 'bitch boys' when they lost at golf. He was super annoyed and it was hilarious.

Not everyone has that tolerance, and nor should they. Not everyone engages with media like I do, either, with their Nerd Glasses on and an intense desire to connect every dot. Some people just want to enjoy 22 minutes of comedy, and that's hard to do when half the jokes aren't funny because they're at your expense.

[scarlettblythe]

the-omniscient-narrator replied to your post:the-omniscient-narrator replied to your post:I’m...

She could’ve used her ‘ass that doesn’t quit line’ - just anything to say she was attractive and can’t help attracting admirers. It felt skeevy. Lazy writing m’dears, I don’t expect much from TMP anymore tbh. They’re quit callous about so many things

And yeah, just to make the point that Danny was secure, they definitely could have. Like I said, I really don't think many people look at Danny as a misogynist to begin with, so the idea that he needs to 'grow' from that isn't one I see talked about a lot.

I think the fact that I don't expect much from them is why at this point if it only moderately supports rape culture, I don't get terribly bothered by it. Like there was a lot of problematic shit in this episode, and to be frank the "only Hispanic men are catcalling me" line bothered me a lot more because there wasn't a narrative purpose for it, it was just a bad joke.

It's easier for me to get past something that's problematic but at least serves a function than something that's just blatantly there to get laughs by insulting a bunch of people.