13th February

Eventful day today! Fun activities + thoughts of the day:

• Met with Colin, my new supervisor! Would have been better if I hadn't forgot it was happening and shown up half an hour late probably, but it was nice to meet him. His main advice was to look at some more TV studies stuff in specific, and that I could potentially use Bournemouth University's library for it. I'm planning to get a card for the BU library, but unfortunately they have a weirdly high number of requirements, so that will have to wait until I've printed off an ID photo and got some proof of address together.
• WELL NEOCITIES CRASHED AND DELETED THE REST OF THE NOTES I MADE TIME TO REWRITE THEM AGAIN. FUCK MY STUPID BAKA LIFE AS USUAL.
• Also advised thinking about the potential benefit of the research to TV culture - should spend some time unpacking my contextual review
• We also had the Aby Warburg visual research seminar and collage workshop with Willem - I honestly wasn't expecting to find it super useful, but I found arranging images to make connections to actually be a very good way to inspire new ways of thinking about the topic and get my thoughts in order! I also went on some fascinating (if dubiously relevant) research tangents looking at the wonderful world of asexual zines!!
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• The main thing I've been thinking about because of the collage workshop is, perhaps unsurprisingly, BoJack Horseman. I've been watching seasons 4-6 this week so it's very much on the brain. Looking at the ace zines that referenced 50s imagery and comparing them to season 4 of BJH got me thinking about that season's interest in gender and relationship dynamics and expectations, even outside of the asexuality plotline. The season features a lot of flashbacks to BoJack's mother Beatrice growing up in the 40s and 50s, and how she was screwed up by the norms of the time, like her dad's expectation that as a woman the only thing she'd ever do was get married and have kids. I think it's interesting that the first season of the show to deal explicitly with asexuality also has a more general interest in sex and relationships - we can also see it in Princess Carolyn's storyline about wanting kids and eventually going a non-traditional route deciding to try to adopt a baby as a single parent, and in that season's breakdown of Diane's marriage to Mr Peanutbutter, which in part falls apart because Diane gets sick of PB not understanding her and not understanding the sexism she has to deal with. Overall I feel like it comes down pretty heavily on the side of being critical of traditional relationship/family structures and the expectations around them, which again feels not irrelevant to asexuality.

Reading of the Week: The Marriage and Sexuality Double Feature

Started reading The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault, which I've so far found very interesting and surprisingly relevant today! Notes from part one:

• Discussing the view that discourse about sexuality has been repressed since Victorian times: "Repression operated as a sentence to disappear, but also as an injunction to silence, an affirmation of nonexistence" (p.4)
• "By placing the advent of the age of repression in the seventeenth century, after hundreds of years of open spaces and free expression, one adjusts it to coincide with the development of capitalism: it becomes an integral part of the bourgeois order" (p.5)
• Argues that the reason why people argue this is "the sexual cause - the demand for sexual freedom, but also for the knowledge to be gained from sex and the right to speak about it - becomes legitimately associated with the honor of a political cause: sex too is placed on the agenda for the future" (p.6)
• ABSOLUTELY BANGER QUOTE: "A suspicious mind might wonder if taking so many precautions in order to give the history of sex such an impressive filiation does not bear traces of the same old prudishness: as if those valorizing correlations were necessary before such a discourse could be formulated or accepted" - Pedestalising sex is just as "prudish" as repressing it!! Banger!!! (p.6)
• Describes an idea presence in this sexuality discourse that "tomorrow sex will be good again" - if we can get rid of repression!! (p.7)
• "The existence in our era of a discourse in which sex, the revelation of truth, the overturning of global laws, the proclamation of a new day to come, and the promise of a certain felicity are linked together" (p.7)
• "My aim is to examine the case of a society which has been loudly castigating itself for its hypocrisy for more than a century, which speaks verbosely of its own silence, takes great pains to relate in detail the things it does not say, denounces the powers it exercises, and promises to liberate itself from the very laws that have made it function" (p.8)
• Defines his question (HIS RESEARCH QUESTION PERHAPS) as: "Why do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment against our most recent past, against our present, and against (p.8) ourselves, that we are repressed? By what spiral did we come to affirm that sex is negated? What led us to show, ostentatiously, that sex is something we hide, to say it is something we silence?" (p.9)
• Acknowledges that "It is certainly legitimate to ask why sex was associated with sin for such a long time" but questions "we must also ask why we burden ourselves today with so much guilt for having once made sex a sin" (p.9)
• "How does one account for the displacement which, while claiming to free us from the sinful nature of sex, taxes us with a great historical wrong which consists precisely in imagining that nature to be blameworthy and in drawing disastrous consequences from that belief?" - basically Foucault thinks everyone else is a big fat hypocrite (p.9)
• Lists "three serious doubts" against the "repressive hypothesis": "Is sexual repression truly an established historical fact?", "Do the workings of power, and in particular those mechanisms that are brought into play in societies such as ours, really belong primarily to the category of repression?", "Did the critical discourse that addresses itself to repression come to act as a roadblock to a power mechanism that had operated unchallenged up to that point, or is it not in fact part of the same historical network as the thing it denounces (and doubtless misrepresents) by calling it 'repression'?" (p.10)
• Makes it clear "I do not claim that sex has not been prohibited or barred or masked or misapprehended since the classical age" but argues that "it is a ruse to make prohibition into the basic and constitutive element from which one would be able to write the history of what has been said concerning sex starting from the modern epoch" (p.12) - so basically he agrees with some elements of the repressive hypothesis but considers it a massive oversimplification

I've also continued reading Minimizing Marriage by Elizabeth Brake. Notes from the book:

• Now, I don't want to kick things off arguing back against my good friend Lizzy B (what cool kids like myself call Elizabeth Brake) but I do have to object somewhat to her assertion that "divorce [...] is not widely seen as a serious moral wrong" (p.25) - now to be fair divorce is definitely a lot more widely accepted now than it once was but I think this is heavily dependent on where you live, your community, etc. I feel like there is still plenty of stigma about divorce - its seen as a failure - and also plenty of people who would seek to benefit from making it even more stigmatised and harder to access. Oh my god who was that right wing weirdo youtuber who wanted to make it illegal for a woman to divorce a man without consent because his wife left him? STEPHEN CROWDER IT WAS STEPHEN CROWDER!!!
• Incidentally I found this interesting and slightly terrifying article while googling that information. Also feels worth noting that again, the UK only introduced no-fault divorce in 2022. While a lot of people wouldn't consider divorce immoral, there's still clearly plenty of people who do and are fighting to make it harder to access on that basis.
• OK TO BE FAIR TO LIZZY SHE DOES ACKNOWLEDGE THIS IN THE IMMEDIATE NEXT PARAGRAPH. That said I still think she's being a tad optimistic, especially considering she's focused specifically on "unilateral" divorce i.e. where the decision to divorce is made by one person
• In her explanation for why divorce is morally OK she argues that "wedding vows - insofar as they concern love - are not promises" because "(a) we cannot promise to do what we cannot do and (b) we cannot command our love" - also references the famous Jane Austen quote "[W]e can command our actions, but not our affections" (p.32)
• "Someone who truly intends to carry out a promise whose performance is impossible simply fails to promise" - uses the example of promising to take someone to a bar that you don't realise has been torn down (p.32)
• "In contrast to the claim that married love is a matter of settled (p.35) affection, many people hold marital love to a higher standard of intensity, intimacy, and exclusivity than love for family or friends" (p.36)
• Another point about what can or cannot be promised: "Some specific acts cannot be promised because doing so would alienate inalienable rights. Arguably, sexual autonomy precludes alienating the choice of whether to have sex on a given occasion; if so, spouses cannot promise sexual access" (p.40)
• "People do not always marry believing they will love each other forever. They may love each other but be open to the possibility that love will not last. They may marry for a host of legal or practical reasons, such as economic benefits, work visas, health insurance, or pensions. They may marry for social or psychological reasons such as respectability, recognition, emotional security, or parental or peer pressure. These may not all be good reasons for marrying; but the social meaning of marriage is composed of this vast array of understandings of marriage and its purpose" (p.41)
• I think Brake makes an interesting point about commitment: "There is no decisive moral or prudential reason to develop or maintain commitments. Nor need commitments, when we have them, be unconditional or permanent. Commitments to projects, goals, or persons may be full and whole-hearted without being permanent or unconditional." - applied to relationships, there's no reason why someone who has a permanent monogamous relationship should be more morally correct than someone who doesn't (p.52)
• Also argues against the idea that marriage should always be exclusive - "These arguments for exclusivity in love and sex must confront the testimony of people for whom jealousy is not as strong, or who sustain polyamorous loving and sexual relationships, or who prefer to endure some jealousy to obtain greater variety and interest. Overwhelming sexual jealousy and the need to be most important for one other person - as opposed to being important to a number of people, within a group or constellation of overlapping relationships - are not universal" (p.55)
• "According to Susan Maushart, married women suffer more health and psychological problems than do unmarried women, they face an unequal division of domestic labor, and they benefit less from marriage than do men. 'Wifework', the extra work married women typically do, has economic and emotional penalties for women, and and economic vulnerability makes it difficult for women to exit abusive marriages. But marriage also protects economically dependent wives through divorce law; ironically, it enacts measures to protect against the vulnerabilities and dependencies that gender-structured marriage creates." (p.59)
• References Aristophanes' Lysistrata - "In which women refuse to engage in sex until their husbands end the Peloponnesian War" which sure is. a play (p.59)
• "The bonds of marriage may prove burdensome to men as well as women: Husbands face social pressure to undertake an impersonally defined male provider role, and entry into marriage could be a point for defying those gender role expectations rather than simply internalizing them" (p.59)
• "There is a long philosophical tradition of arguing that marriage uniquely enables certain human goods" (p.61) - mentions Bloom, Hegel, and FitzGibbon as arguing that marriage promotes commitment, "unconditional allegiance to a common good" (p.62), and other similar values
• "Bloom assumes that permanent commitments within sexual relationships are more fundamental to social cohesiveness than commitments in other settings. This is of course because male-female sex can produce children. But one parent - or three - can be just as committed as two. And a child can learn commitment through his teacher's attitude to her class, his mother's commitment to her career, or his sister's to social justice" (p.63)
• Again reiterates her other point that "commitedness is not unconditionally valuable" e.g. someone might be committed to an immoral cause (p.63)
• "Arguments that marriage promotes virtues like committedness have been influential in recent political discourse. Marriage-promotion policies in the United States take commitment as an an essential element of marriage and blame female and child poverty on male irresponsibility, which is to be remedied through marriage. Conservatives have blamed feminism, permissive divorce law, and premarital sex for creating irresponsible parents, rudderless children, and selfish citizens." (p.64)

Why no show will ever treat me as well as BoJack Horseman did

BJH has got my brain going into fucking overdrive dude. I finished seasons 4 and 5 and started season 6 this week, and I feel like it's consuming all my waking moments. Guys I can't lie I feel like I forgot that asexuality can sometimes be depicted in things that are also good. What the fuck. I've spent so much time watching bad sitcoms and 2000s trash TV and the worst season of Sex Education and Heartstopper which is like. fine I guess. BJH is so GOOD.

The first thing that strikes me about BJH's portrayal of asexuality is how funny it is, in a way that I'd kind of forgotten I missed. While most shows I've seen portraying asexuality (or at least portraying it explicitly) seem to lean towards being serious and educational, BJH actually has fun with its asexuality storylines. Season 4, the season where Todd discovers he's asexual, is perhaps more clearly didactic, with a lot of scenes that seem intended to educate the audience about asexuality and its nuances. Also, this is entirely vibes-based, but it feels like a level of discomfort there - the writers seem kind of nervous about portraying asexuality. I feel similarly about things like Sex Education and Heartstopper. However, where BJH becomes really special is in season 5, where it really seems to shed this discomfort and need to educate the audience.

The two main asexual storylines in season 5 are Todd dating fellow asexual Yolanda (and getting into increasingly absurd shenanigans in an effort to not out her to her comically hypersexual family) and Todd trying to have a relationship with Emily, who isn't asexual, a problem Todd attempts to solve by building a malfunctioning sex robot that ends up getting accidentally made CEO of his company. I like these plotlines because they both have a great balance of absurd comedy while also clearly being based on real and grounded experiences of ace people (struggling to come out to family, dating someone who isn't asexual etc.)

But really I think there are two main factors that set BJH a cut above the rest: First, its asexual character is an actual main character, as opposed to a side character, love interest etc. I think the main issue with a lot of the other shows I've watched is that the ace characters have very minor parts and so they don't have time to be developed properly, like O, or they don't get to have much personality outside of being The Aroace One, like Isaac in Heartstopper. By the time Todd gets his first asexuality storyline, he's already been a main character for two seasons that the audience has had time to get attached to. He also has a clearly defined personality outside of just being asexual: he's naive, kind, good-hearted, goofy, and prone to coming up with ridiculous plans and ideas. Because he's a main character, this also means the show has time to take his story beyond just discovering he's asexual - we see him experiencing dating woes, trying to meet other asexual people, etc.

It also means that we see asexuality through the eyes of an asexual person - because the asexual characters in other shows are side characters, it often feels like we're looking through the perspective of the non-asexual characters. Sometimes this is fine, and sometimes you end up with something like Sirens which imo just has kind of a really gross vibe of a bunch of men judging this woman for not wanting to have sex with one of them. (Also BJH has the advantage of being actually funny. lmao)

The second advantage is that BJH has multiple asexual characters, so it's able to show a whole range of asexual experiences. A show with only one ace character risks the implication that this character is what the writers think ALL asexual people are like. However, BJH shows different ace characters ranging from the goofy, clownish Todd to the serious, no-nonsense Yolanda. Even outside the named ace characters, the show depicts members of the wider ace community through the asexual meet-ups we occasionally see Todd attend.

The only problem with BJH is that I wish we had more representations of asexuality like this. Personally, I think the last season of Sex Education might actually come closest, for giving us an ace character with a strong personality and storylines about more than just learning about asexuality, however as I mentioned I found the execution lacking.

To go off on a brief tangent, and not to imply that I know better than the Sex Education writers, but I think that the ace storyline in that season would have been stronger if instead of the bizarre counsellor election plot, they'd instead focused on O and Ruby's relationship. I think there's a genuinely interesting story there about O feeling like an outsider and protecting herself by deflecting onto someone she saw as weaker than her, and then growing to regret it, as well as the popular Ruby being confronted by a reminder of her dark unpopular past. There's a really interesting story buried in there about the two of them reconnecting, but in the show it's consigned to like. one flashback. and then buried under a lot of stupid bullshit. (It would also maybe make it feel more connected to the previous seasons by emphasising O's status as a figure from Ruby's past from the start but idk). Anyway when will someone write something with the kind of deranged brilliant energy of BJH season 5 again.

Anyway transcripts are once again here

Other Events of the Week

• Had the first macro lecture of the term on Wednesday! It was with Louise Laing from fashion company Phygital Twin. A lot of it went pretty over my head since I'm not a fashion student but it was sort of interesting from the perspective of discussing changing trends in the tech industry. A lot of it felt quite relevant to my experiences working with kids and young people. Anyway on a related note I think need to start regulating influencers and what they're literally right fucking now.
• Went to see Legally Blonde The Musical at the Pavilion with my friends and flatmates! I know my project is on TV specifically but man it would really be so interesting to look at how sex and relationships are portrayed in musical theatre, since romance is often considered such a central part of the medium - almost every popular musical has some kind of love story and big romantic song, and Legally Blonde is of course no exception. Maybe even more so with this musical, actually, since the whole plot is about a woman going to Harvard Law to try and impress her ex, before she realises that he's kind of trash and she can do better. Great musical but truly one of the more obviously-written-by-straight-people things I've ever seen (meant with love).
• Speaking of musicals, I've got really obsessed with Groundhog Day The Musical again. And what do you know - it's yet another musical based on a romcom-adjacent movie! I do think it's maybe a bit more sophisticated in its portrayal of relationships than Legally Blonde - I like how cynical Phil and Rita both are, I think Playing Nancy is interesting in how it criticises the culture Nancy grows up in even if I wish the musical actually went anywhere with this character, I also like how the musical sort of ends up being more about community than it is a straight-up romance story. I just really like Groundhog Day - both the musical and the movie it's based on! I like the idea it presents that if given limitless power and freedom from consequences, the average person will eventually end up using that power to help people, even if helping people won't even achieve anything concrete. And maybe none of this is actually relevant but I think it bears saying.
• Everyone keeps trying to get me to watch Hazbin Hotel, either because there's apparently an aroace character in it or because some of the songs can be applied to Angel the Series my worstie if you really squint. Considering how in the zeitgeist the show is right now (at least among the kind of people I teach in my animation class), I should probably check it out. Becca showed me the one scene they apparently reference asexuality. I wasn't particuarly impressed and seemingly neither were they.

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