Categotry Archives: let’s hear it for the ladies

by

Fear and Loathing in my Netflix Queue

Categories: (un)popular entertainment, kyriarchy, let's hear it for the ladies, teh tranz

As a filmmaker (or, perhaps more truthily, an art student who did not receive an F for her sole video project) I feel it is my duty to view as many films depicting trans folk as the doctors will allow me. ‘Tis a quest not without peril. When a visit to the SF LGBT Center brought me face to face with Clair Farley, a subject of Red Without Blue and number three on my list of “people who have inspired me to do make great changes in my life who I hope never to meet in person because I know I’d lose my shit”, spoiler alert: a lot of shit was lost. I stared at the floor, dodged her questions (did I mention I met she was doing my intake for an employment services program? OF COURSE I DIDN’T, UGH SO FUCKING LIKE ME) and when I realized that the chances of me winning that golden ticket that would let me rearrange reality so that instead of giggling uncomfortably to myself I could instead escape to a universe where I was gainfully employed and she and I were bff who played Chu Chu Rocket on the weekends were fairly slim I just made shit up. Dante never specified what the punishment in hell is for people who try to convince their heroes that blogging counts as a form of community volunteering, but I’m willing to guess it involves having something put in your anus that you’d rather not. Oh, and once I was asked to leave a screening of Normal, but it was agreed that if I never stated who I threw my notebook at and why they would keep it off my record and let me squeak by with a written apology.

Dangers be damned, I saw Beautiful Boxer, the biopic about Muay Thai boxer Parinya Charoemphol, or Nong Toom. As a safety precaution, I had Ms. Pacman plugged in just in case I needed emergency escort to my “happy place”. Much to my surprise, I thought it was an amazing film, and my gripes with it were limited and tied entirely with the storytelling and not the portrayal of Parinya (I thought the dream sequences were contextually inappropriate when done outside of her first person narrative, though I must admit they were poetically executed and relevant to the film’s message). So rare do I find films that engage me emotionally while sating my hunger for organically choreographed violence. I feel it served as an illustration of the fallacy behind the notion of transitioning to avoid the struggles and challenges traditionally assigned to men, or as my father put it “acting delicate and weak and girly to avoid having to live up to my responsibilities”. And I thought Kyoko Inoue playing herself was pretty fucking neat. Yeah, that’s all I have to say about it. This isn’t a film review. This is a reaction piece. So yeah, you’re still gonna have to rent it or read the reviews on IMDB if you want to bluff your way through a conversation about it in your little Livejournal group. Sorry.

The film is very clear with presenting and expressing a common criticism levied against Parinya and those behind her career: she was a gimmick and novelty act that mocked the sport of kickboxing and her trans identity was exploited and paraded about for profit. To this I say “eh, that’s one way of looking at it, where I come from we call that the wrong way”.

To suggest that the Thai boxing establishment’s acceptance, support, and promotion of Parinya’s gender expression was somehow more profit-minded than the minds behind Manon Rheaume (the first and only woman to play in the NHL)’s stint with the Tampa Bay Lightning or fuck, let’s just go for broke here, Jackie Robinson playing in the MLB, is to contribute to a the ignorance of the machinations of the kyriarchy. The underdog from a troubled, prejudiced life who’s talent just has to be shared with the masses regardless of their latent bigotry is a noblie lie disguised as a marketing ploy disguised as a human message. The real tragedy is not, I believe, in the tokenization of one’s identity to be part of the majority’s broadway production, but in the refusal by those who have benefitted from your sacrifice to acknowledge the good you may have done for your community. Without the scream queen, there’d be no ass-kicking Whedonverse heroine. Without the Hays Code-era sissy, there’d be no Brokeback Mountain. That’s just how hiearchy works. When we break free from our cage in the kyriarchal circus, they’ll just find someone else to fill our place, and then we, sitting in the audience, will have to decide between shutting the fuck up and eating our kettle corn or bum rushing the stage and burning the tent down.

In a society where hierarchies exist (i.e. all of them) the minority takes on an air of mystique and curiosity. Thus we are forced to ask ourselves, as minorities, whether it is better to be an attraction or risk being unseen by society. The answer will be different for each and every one of us. Parinya played the game, made enough money to afford SRS, is a successful model/actress, and could probably break every bone in the body of any asshole who thinks they’ll “teach this shemale a lesson”. If you could play the system like that and win by that much of a margin, you’d have already picked out your stage name. But you can’t. The minority underdog is the bizarro affirmative action: they meet their quota once and then it’s closed to everyone else. Personally, I prefer my chances against the system as opposed to with it. But fuck, ask me in a year or two if and when Comedy Central is looking for a caustic plus-sized trans woman with no indoor voice. For now, I find it more efficient in the long run to just be happy for her success and hopeful that it will start a trend of acceptance of trans people in professional sports and instead direct my rage to those instances where people are being played by the system. The bearded lady, the conjoined twins, they know they are part of a sideshow. The microcephalic (or “pinhead” for those of you who fear Wikipedia) does not. Try, if you can, to fight and prevent the greater injustice of the two. The famous and successful can take care of themselves.

And they’re giving me the sign to wrap up, but I do want to point out that Parinya Charoemphol is often credited with pulling Thai kickboxing out of its slump and re-establishing its popularity in Thailand.

Me-1 You -0.

Get used to this.

by

The Multiplexes Giveth…

Categories: (un)popular entertainment, let's hear it for the ladies

“So do we get to watch Steel Magnolias?” That was my long-suffering girlfriend’s response when I told her about this particular writing gig. This is an ongoing joke between us. Every so often, she’ll ask if I suddenly like Steel Magnolias and I’ll tell her that I still don’t like it and she’ll mutter something like “the estrogen isn’t working.” My take on that film is similar to Manhola Dargis’s take on Nora Ephron in an interview she gave to Jezebel earlier this year:

“Sometimes I think women should do what various black and gay audiences have done, which is support women making movies for women. So does that mean I have to go support Nora Ephron? Fuck no. That’s just like, blech.

One of the things that most annoyed me about Steel Magnolias was the Julia Roberts character, who contracts one of those diseases whose main symptom seems to be a tendency for the character to get more beautiful. In film circles, it’s known as Ali McGraw’s Syndrome and dying beautifully is a hallmark of weepies.  Women are never asked to go all Robert De Niro when it comes to looking bad on screen, and it’s particularly egregious here. The only time I can remember actually seeing a major actress get anywhere near what dying from an incurable disease might really be like was in Mike Nichols’s Wit, in which Emma Thompson’s prickly English professor is confronted by the unpleasant facts of the end of her life. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a legitimately great movie and you SHOULD see it, but I’ll never, ever watch it again myself. It looks too much like my mom’s slow death from breast cancer, and I imagine it looks like what my own death might be like at some nebulous time in the future.

Which brings me in a roundabout circle to what’s on my mind today. Continue reading →

by

In Unexpected Delights

Categories: (un)popular entertainment, cis-o-rama, gender oh eff me, i get around, kyriarchy, let's hear it for the ladies, teh tranz

Hey, the takedown of that London Times article I did over at Tiger Beatdown got included in the 13th Carnival of Feminists! Drop by to read the other stuff, you know it’s good!

And in other unexpected pleasures, I haven’t been flayed to pieces in the comments section at the Guardian. And Julie Bindel replied to me! And I replied back! Wow!

by

Teen Titans

Categories: beating them at their own game, let's hear it for the ladies, vive le feminisme

My inner cynic gets a lot of work. (In fact, I think she’s the only one who does get any work done here; at least, she always seems to be in the office.) I have a natural bent towards sarcasm and cynicism, the product of a German Catholic upbringing that my parents leavened with their social activism and wry humor.

So it shocked my inner cynic, bless her tiny, carbonized heart, to open up Google Reader–her favorite task, as it constantly spews out precisely the misguided bile that keeps her chortling with glee–to find a post from The F-Bomb.

And soon we were shoving my inner cynic out of the way, delving into the fabulous posts on this wonderful blog, written for, about, and by–teenagers.

Teenage feminists.

Is that not a delicious bagel of wonderfulness with a schmear of awesomesauce on top?

The place is indescribably cool. Check out this post on a screening of “The Secret,” and thrill as Julie calls “classism” about that piece of claptrap. Classism!

At this point, my inner idealist was hogging the mouse, clicking through the pages with an angelic sigh.

If you know a young woman in your life, point her to this site. If you know a young man, point him there as well. It is fantastic, and the only thing I regret is that there wasn’t something like this when I was a kid.

And I owe them: because I’m totally stealing the idea to show this interview with Joss Whedon, which is like getting a second bagel of wonderfulness, with awesomesauce and cream cheese. (Because sometimes awesomesauce isn’t enough.)

by

Adventures in Transition, Special Zeitgeist Edition: Where No Trans Has Gone Before

Categories: all about me, gender oh eff me, let's hear it for the ladies

This post, ducks, will be a bit different in that it’s going to be personal and I won’t just be using my personal experience as a way to make a larger point. (Well, not much, anyway.)

I went to my first bridal shower on Saturday. At least, my first one as a woman; I seem to recall showing up to my fiancee’s shower back in the Pona Time before I transitioned.

Like a lot of women, I suspect, the prospect filled me with emotions, most along the lines of “do I have to do this?”

Not initially, though.

I found out that my friend Joanna was going to have a shower when I called her from Thailand, a few days before I left for home. My friend/lackey/McDonald’s wallah had returned to the States, and I finally decided to spend a small fortune and use my cell phone to call folks at home. Joanna was one of the first I called; we’ve known each other since high school, albeit with a nine-year interregnum between graduation and accidentally running into each other in a grocery store.

I wasn’t expecting her to have a shower; she isn’t having a bridal party (dashing my last, best hopes of being a bridesmaid; oh well), but her mom wanted to throw her one and she gave in. I was simultaneously glad to hear that she was having one and bracing myself to not be invited.

Except that I was.

I was very touched, because I felt so–well, accepted. Not so much by Joanna, who’s always been supportive and morphed from friend to closet girlfriend with ease. But it meant a lot to me that she was willing to bring me into such an intimate family occasion, especially one as highly gendered as a bridal shower.

That feeling lasted a few weeks. Then the dread set in.

Events like this play merry hell with my insecurities. It’s times like these when I feel most acutely my lack of a girlhood, the huge gaps in my socialization into ordinary female society. Normally, that doesn’t bother me: after all, I’m not exactly unhappy that nobody told me I shouldn’t study military history, or challenge my teachers, or be bad at math. (I took care of the last one all by myself, ducks.) But times like these, so encrusted with (ok, stupid) tradition and drenched in (ok, ridiculous) mores–these leave me feeling exposed.

Or worse, leave me fearing that I’ll be exposed.

I mean, what am I supposed to bring? What’s the etiquette? Will I make a huge faux-pas? Sure, I can (and did) ask my mom about this stuff, but I can’t help but feel a little foolish: for not knowing, for needing to ask, for feeling that I needed to ask.

As it turned out, I had no worries. Most of the people who came already either knew me or knew about me and were all really lovely. A few had no idea (as I didn’t) what the hell the wishing well was for. I had a pretty good time. Except. (You knew there would be an except, right?)

One of the women was somebody I didn’t really know. We talked and as it turns out she knew my background, and we had a…well, sure, pleasant…little talk about some of my trans stuff. But sitting across from us was a woman I had never met before, a nice lady from Oklahoma. And at one point I noticed her listening to me and the other woman talking.

The next time I heard her refer to me, she used male pronouns.

This sort of thing happens occasionally; my official rule is to give people three screwups before I correct them. But this one put me in a fix: either say something, and draw attention to it, or ignore it and let her think that she was right. (But seriously: there weren’t any men invited, I was wearing a dress, I was wearing high heels for fuck’s sake–how do you think I prefer to be addressed?) I let it go that time. But it wasn’t fun.

I rode the train home with several women from the shower. One of them talked about her boyfriend, and we all chimed in with advice and opinions. It was the very stereotypically female-gendered end to a very stereotypically female-gendered day.

My head was in a bit of a whirl. Part of my transition has been to finally put some distance between me as a trans person and me as a woman. That is, after all these years of being trans, of having that as the most important part of my life, I really want to try and just be for a while. I’ve done a gradual retreat from trans-only spaces, including a message board where I had been a long-time commentator.

But. I had been out with these other women, all or almost all of whom knew, and it wasn’t a big deal; they didn’t treat me any different than any of the other women at the party. So maybe I shouldn’t worry about it, maybe I shouldn’t care who knew and who didn’t? Maybe it didn’t matter.

But why did that make me feel so bad? Was I trying to be something I thought I had to be? (That worked out so well the last time I tried it.) Would I be happier not having anything trans in my life anymore? And if so, what about this blog, which gives me great pleasure to work on, even as it draws me back deeper into a world I am ambivalent about.

I still haven’t figured it out yet. I hope I do. Because being stuck in the twilight zone of genders got old years ago.

by

Annie Get Your…

Categories: let's hear it for the ladies, media tool kit

Randy Cohen, who writes the “Ethicist” column for the NY Times, has a modest proposal: keep men from openly carrying guns as we do today (in most places, ducks, in most places) but require women to carry them. It’s mostly facetious, but he does touch on the usual statistics: 90% of all gun violence is committed by men, and strangely (but rightly) hits on Susan Faludi’s observation (without referencing her, though) that occupations once considered high-status when dominated by men (secretary, frex) become low-status when dominated by women. (Ah, that’s the answer to the American epidemic of gun violence: sexism! The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems!)

The comments are more interesting. The old canard (ahem) about guns solving the problems of 2,00,000 violent crimes. (Really? Think it’s that easy to shoot someone? See, for example, this, as well as S.L.A Marshall’s contention that only 25% of soldiers fired their weapons during WWII.) A surprising number of women write about their experiences owning weapons. One woman hopes that this will lead to guns in designer colors. Then there’s this charming passage:

Before you recommend to arm all womyn and unleash them on mankind please remember the import of the following two words:

Premenstrual Syndrome (PMS).

Ya know, folks, I happen to have pretty first-hand experience in the differences between male and female hormones, even if I don’t and won’t ever cycle. But given the disparity between male and female violent crimes, given how often men come to blows over minor disagreements (I saw two guys nearly get into a fight just yesterday–in the middle of the sidewalk. At 9 AM.), given how the culture of masculinity celebrates testosterone-soaked rage–why is it always women who are supposed to have the hormone problem? Don’t they also say that women are better at social networking? Shouldn’t we be telling guys to stay out of politics because their brains just can’t deal with the complexities of international diplomacy? Shouldn’t we tut-tut men for getting into a fight over who was the better hitter in 1939 by saying that they shouldn’t let their hormones get the better of them?

Yeah, probably we should. If arming women helps to bring that about–well, Mr. Cohen, sign me up.

by

Two Cheers for Monarchy

Categories: Humorless Tranny™, let's hear it for the ladies, teh tranz

Over at Shakesville there’s a heartwarming post about an openly gay student who was elected prom queen. (You can read the original story here.)

I’m certainly glad to know that a high school can be so accepting; the idea of a student being openly gay at my high school was unthinkable, and that was only–well, more than a decade ago. And I’m really happy that Sergio Garcia can be open, and be himself.

All that said, I’m afraid I have to be a bit of a wet blanket about this. Call me a Humorles Tranny™, but I as a trans woman I see a few complications with this whole thing.

First, I have to wonder: would somebody who was openly trans have been elected prom queen? (Maybe; it happened in Fresno.) Then there is the question of why somebody who doesn’t identify as female is even running for prom queen. According to the article, “He thought the role [of prom queen] would suit him better than prom king.” Yeah–isn’t that kind of the point? I mean, if he had been elected prom king, if the student body would have been happy to put him into that bastion of heterosexism, then you might have something to really talk about.

According to the article, his campaign began as a stunt “but ended up spurring discussion on the campus about gender roles and popularity.” Which is really wonderful–we need to have these discussions, especially in high school–but I can’t help feeling that it remained something of a stunt til the end.

For example, the article repeatedly makes it clear that despite running for prom queen, Sergio is all man.

“[I’m] not your typical prom queen candidate. There’s more to me than meets
the eye.”
“He also promised that he would be wearing a suit on prom night, but ‘don’t
be fooled: Deep down, I am a queen.”
“‘I don’t wish to be a girl,’ he told the Los Angeles Times. ‘I just wish to
be myself.'”

Call me oversensitive, but I see a lot of subtle trans- and femmephobia in there. There’s the clear implication that if he were to wear a dress, that would be somehow wrong. His “more than meets the eye” clearly echoes trans stereotypes in the media, from porn to movies. And fuckall, how am I supposed to read how he doesn’t want to be a girl–yet runs for prom queen–as anything other than the idea that a boy who did want to be a girl and run for prom queen would be weird, as opposed to his decidedly non-weird candidacy?

I’m sorry to be coming down so hard on this kid; truth be told, I’m happy that he won, happy he goes to a school that’s so accepting, and happy that the reporting on the story doesn’t smirk or treat the whole thing as ridiculous.

But compare this nice, respectful story about a clean-cut gay kid who gets to be prom queen with this (triggery) piece about a nice, respectful trans kid who gets elected prom queen. Thrill to the wondrous transphobia: the refusal to use her preferred name (Crystal), the emphasis on her height in heels (cause, you know, she’s totes a dude in drag), and fuckitall, the unconscionable refusal to use her preferred pronoun–even after noting she prefers to be called she. You read that story–picked up without comment on a website whose mission statement is “To encourage a world where globalization is not about homogeneity and exploitation, but rather, about diversity and cooperation”–and, if you are like me, you get pissed off and throw a wet blanket on somebody else’s party.

Because seriously, great for you Sergio, but am I really supposed to be happy that a guy took another woman’s job, even if that job is stupid and heterosexist to begin with?

by

The Second Awakening: A Moral History

Categories: let's hear it for the ladies, teh tranz, This Was My Life, tiger beatdown rocks, vive le feminisme, why i blog

“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience.”

–George Orwell, “Why I Write”

I want to thank everyone who dropped by in the last day or so–it is a remarkable experience to see your page views jump 9,500%, even if it is humbling to consider how few visits you got beforehand. (Especial thanks, of course, to Sady of Tiger Beatdown who gave this blog a rave review.)

I am still figuring out not only what this blog’s subject matter will be but also how to live a feminist life. I’ve talked before about how I slowly awakened into a feminist consciousness, and then found myself roused a second time as a result of my transition. But I don’t think I’ve conveyed the profoundness of the changes I’ve experienced in the last–can it be so short?–16 months.

I think I was always some sort of weak-valence feminist. My mother may not have used the term for herself, for some reason, but she definitely believed women should have all the rights of men. She’s told me over the years how she prefers the conversation of men of her generation, because she dislikes the domestic subjects most women of her age engage in–perhaps an over broad generalization on her part, but there is no question that she felt she had the right to engage in the traditionally male spheres of politics, religion, social policy, etc. Certainly my father was like-minded; neither of them gave their children any hogwash about “proper” gender roles.

So I grew up about as gender-blind as a boy in the 1970s could be, or at least a boy in the 1970s who was conscious of wanting to be a girl, or at least wearing girls’ clothing–I wasn’t always sure of the difference, early on. (When I was maybe four or five, I sometimes would run up to the mirror in my bedroom in the morning hoping I’d been changed into a girl overnight. Sometimes–sometimes I would delay getting out of bed, hiding under the covers in order to hold myself in some sort of Schrödingian state of not-maleness, trying to hold on to the desperate possibility of transformation. That there was a way to collapse the waveform without using a mirror never occurred to me; so you can see that the distinction between being a girl and dressing like one wasn’t particularly clear to me yet. And that I was a very weird little boy. But you’d probably gathered that already.)

I think by the time I knew what a feminist was I had no problem describing myself as one–at least as far as my understanding of what a “feminist” was anyway; I had heard it meant that you believed in women’s rights–I was ignorant of the larger controversies. Perhaps that was a good thing; I was generally incredulous of people who didn’t call themselves feminists–it seemed ludicrous to deny that women were people just as good as men, as outdated as racial prejudice, which my parents had strenuously sanitized from our upbringing.

That is not to say that I was some Kwisatz Haderach of gender-studies, the result of some cabalistic breeding program perhaps founded by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Dr. Blackwell. Like most men of my position–and I’ll call myself that for the purposes of this post, even though there are some issues in applying without qualification the label of “man” for what I was–I was largely unconscious of my privilege, and I picked up the usual assortment of stereotypes, falsities, foolishnesses and outright idiocies. Some were survival tactics–if you walk amidst the world of men without the courage to show your real self, you learn how to camoflouge yourself–some were simple artifacts of my time and gender, and some were just stupid blindspots. I didn’t believe in any of the idiocies I sometimes mouthed–the occasional misogynistic/homophobic/even, god help me, racist joke–but neither did I believe particularly strongly in the opposite positions, at least not strongly enough to protest very loud. I had no courage of my convictions; being all-in was terrifying to me; I was, in short, your garden-variety fauxgressive.

I am deeply ashamed of all that today.

The first signs of any changes happened during my marriage, which I know I have not talked about before. My wife and I had suffered through a few years of tearful impasse about my transness–this was back when I still identified as a crossdresser–only to come to a fairly reasonable accomodation. She sometimes would come with me to dinners and social events with other trans people, and in turn I was experimenting with metrosexuality and ways to enjoy my masculinity. During this time I met helen boyd and began to learn about feminism beyond my lukewarm “women’s rights” position.

It was the beginning of the 21st century, Bush was in office, political oppression was in the air, and I was reading Backlash and The Beauty Myth and for the first time really waking up to the misogyny all around me. Yet my motivation was complex…part of it was the realization that as a crossdresser, a person who sympathized with women, who saw myself at least in part as a woman, I needed to go beyond the trappings of feminity and learn about the real experiences of women; part of it was meeting bold, feminist women and listening to their stories; and part of it was the progressiveness and liberalism that I found myself taking up now that they were threatened. Even so, while my passion for feminism grew to a white-hot passion, it was still an intellectual passion–at root, I could always take solace in my disconnection from it on an everyday level.

A young trans woman of my acquaintance once asked me about life as a woman. She had been reading my diatribes against transphobia and misogyny on a message board we both belonged to, and wanted to know, was it really so bad? Was she really going to feel constantly oppressed?

No, I said, it wasn’t so bad–but the thing is, once I had transitioned, I never had to seek out misogyny again. Before transition, I could ignore it, I needed people to point it out to me–but after transition, I see it constantly. And that changed everything; I was shorn of my detatchment; the political became truly personal, and awoke my outrage.

And that is the essence of the second awakening. I cannot claim to know, to feel what it is like to have been the target of misogyny my whole life; I’m not sure I can even claim to know what it’s like to feel transphobia my whole life–it is difficult to make evaluations like that when you’re in the closet. I have no doubt that I will make a lot of mistakes in the future as I continue my mission to discover what a feminist life will look like for me. Which is why I am so glad for the women I’ve found in the feminist blogosphere, for Liss and her Shakers, for Pam and her Blenders, and especially for Sady and her Beatdowns–because it was Sady who gave me the template for the kind of blog I wanted to write, one that was mostly impersonal (I am anonymous, after all) but still came from a deeply personal place of passion and outrage, to create something that wasn’t just reportage or even opinion, but my own work of art, a monument to my implacable fury.

I’m still learning. But I’m thankful to have you along for the ride.

by

Southland: I love LA

Categories: let's hear it for the ladies, stuff i like, tv (not trans)

So based on some good reviews, I’ve been watching Southland, NBC’s new policier. (I usually record it on my DVR and watch it while dilating in the morning. Is that gross? You’re right!) I had some reservations, because it stars that guy from The O.C., one of the more amiably idiotic recent shows, and also because the previews made it look like it would concentrate mostly on beat cops, and I wasn’t sure there was enough of a show there.

Happily, I’m wrong; Southland is the best new police show in years. And it also tells the stories of the detectives in the squadroom.

I have a weakness for two different kinds of crime-based programming: police procedurals, and amiable con-artists with a heart of gold. Thus: Law & Order, and The Rockford Files are both favorites of mine.

Southland is a both a primo policier (it takes a very gritty view of police work) as well as a character-driven drama. It portrays squadroom life as messy, complicated, and confusing–in fact, I’m still sorting out all the characters, because the same group does not appear in each episode. In trying to show a realistic view of the sometimes larger-than-life characters who inhabit the police station, it’s easily the best show of its type since Homicide–a drama that while great in its own way, never lived up to the promise of its initial episodes. Southland holds out promise of not falling into the trap of falling in love with its own characters–all though we are gradually seeing them get fleshed out, they are still grounded in the everyday struggles of police work.

But that’s not enough to earn a mention on this blog.

What I’ve liked so far is that there are signs that there will be several strong female characters, led by Regina King’s Detective Lydia Adams. It was her character who solved the show’s very first case, and in this week’s episode, she fights to solve a case that normally falls through the cracks–the murder of an African-American prostitute–and vents her exasperation that LA has over 3,000 rape kits backlogged in their lab.

I like Detective Adams.

On the officer’s side, in addition to Ben McKenzie’s really not as annoying as I’d have thought Ben Sherman and Michael Cudlitz’s amusingly no-nonsense Tom Cooper, we have Arija Bareikis as “Chickie” Brown, a single mother who wants to become the first female SWAT trooper.

I like this show.

Southland has three episodes left in this season; NBC has renewed it for next year. I may even like NBC now.