It’s not difficult for me to hate characters like Barney from How I Met Your Mother. Last Monday’s episode, The Bracket, demonstrates it perfectly. It’s not a show I watch, for reasons Purtek highlighted in her review of another episode, and because I have no real desire to. I happened across five minutes of it last week, and sought out the full episode just to make sure what little I saw was as bad as I thought. That’s 20 minutes … READ MORE

A couple of weeks ago, on this thread, I mentioned that men are constantly portrayed as competing for women in a way that makes the woman essentially irrelevant. We use game metaphors to describe the system, but the winner and loser–the agents of participation–are always just the men. The women, I said, are the ball, the object you score with.

How I Met Your Mother decided to construct an entire episode (”The Belt”) around proving this point for me, throwing in … READ MORE