“True Detective” And HBO’s Women Problem
Friends told me that “True Detective” had righted itself over the past few episodes, so I caught up and watched last night’s installment. And it was back to the usual junk. Ani, the Rachel McAdams (pictured) character, has drug-induced hallucinations revealing that she was probably molested as a girl. This is such a hackneyed trope on television. As Laura Hudson said in Wired: “There’s a tendency in media to reduce women to their genitals and what men want to do to their genitals; too often, the combination of ‘woman’ and ‘bad thing that happened in the past’ defaults to ‘something bad happened to her genitals, probably.’†Last night’s “True Detective” included the usual HBO double-standard-nudity bullshit: a hooker party that was a great excuse for the show to have a massive orgy hazily in the background of Ani’s hallucination, because female nudity makes everything better. (Hey, if “Game of Thrones” does it it must work!).
