"Just a heads-up."

Liberal woman informs everyone that she won't be dating white men anymore.

Groundbreaking information.pic.twitter.com/2lC5Kqm0Qb

— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) March 29, 2025

Ridiculous on so many levels, but I'm just going to highlight the exaggerated enunciation — "as a WHiTTTTe woman."

It made me think of this TikTok video criticizing Rachel Zegler ("Snow White") for over-enunciating:

Why, exactly, is Caitlyn Jenner attacking Dylan Mulvaney?

There's this:

. @MarshaBlackburn thank you for speaking out and having a backbone - one of the best senators we have. Let’s not ‘normalize’ any of what this person is doing. This is absurdity! https://t.co/YmQcuwWKhj

— Caitlyn Jenner (@Caitlyn_Jenner) October 26, 2022

I got there via "Caitlyn Jenner Piles on Trans TikToker, Calls Body Positive Video ‘Absurdity’/The anti-trans attacks against Mulvaney come days after her interview with President Biden surrounding transgender rights and policies" (Rolling Stone).

I've been avoiding the Mulvaney-at-the-White-House story. Not sure why. I'd already seen many Dylan Mulvaney videos on TikTok, including the one that reenacts the opening sequence of the old TV show "That Girl" (and the subsequent version of that where Marlo Thomas looks on and is (or acts) choked up about the tribute to her long-ago perky, girly youth). 

"When I was a kid, we were 'free to be you and me' regardless of sex."

From the top-rated comment at "How Do I Define My Gender if No One Is Watching Me?" (a NYT column we discussed yesterday, here). The full comment, which is from Kate in Oregon:

It would appear to me that the current cultural obsession with gender and how one identifies with it is a distraction from true self-knowledge and understanding of each person's unique personality. The current ideas around "gender identity" pigeon-hole people into behaving certain ways to signal their "gender" but what does it even mean? When I was a kid, we were "free to be you and me" regardless of sex. Now it seems like things are going back in the other direction. Girls like pink and boys like blue and if a boy likes pink, he must have something different about his gender identity? It is regressive.

From the Wikipedia page for "Free to Be You and Me": 

The original idea to create the album began with Marlo Thomas, who wanted to teach her then-young niece Dionne about life, in particular that it is acceptable to refute or reject the gender stereotypes expressed in children's books of the period. In an Emmy Legends interview Thomas explains:

I told my sister Terre "it would take Dionne 30 years to get over it (stories featuring traditional gender roles) the same as it took all of us. We need to find her some different books to read" and she said "You go and find 'em." Well there weren't any. And not only weren't there any, I was in the bookstore one day looking around and found this one (picture book - I'm Glad I'm a Boy! I'm Glad I'm a Girl! by Whitney Darrow Jr.) that showed a pilot on one page and a stewardess on a facing page (with a caption) that said "Boys are pilots, girls are stewardesses." Well I nearly had a heart attack right there in the bookstore....

Here's another high-rated comment from the NYT column, from another woman in Oregon, Lunita: 

The author "jokes" that gender is a social construct... it is! Feminists have been working to dismantle gender (the hierarchy of men over women and the sex roles associated with that) for decades, which makes it all the more disappointing that most liberals assert its existence as internal and innate. You should express yourself however you please, but performing "gender" to an audience is not affirming; the fact that the author needs external validation for this proves how alienating it is. Gender is a caste system that needs to be abolished, not an identity to be celebrated.

Here's the reference to joking in the original column: 

My friends and I had long joked, “Gender is a social construct!” every time one of us needed shoring up after a messy encounter with the expectations of the gender-conforming heterosexual world. But without that world, we now added a rueful punchline: “Too bad there’s no more ‘social’!”

A montage I'd like to see on YouTube: TV characters watching TV and talking about how TV is like or not like real life.

For example, in "Friends," the friends are watching TV, and the character Joey — who is an actor (played, of course, by an actor) — says: "It really hit me last night. I'm gonna be on 'Days of our Lives.' And then I started thinkin' about all of you, and how these are the days of our lives.”

That's from "The One With the Lesbian Wedding" in Season 2. As you may know, I've been given the box set of the complete episodes of "Friends" and I am watching them all. Here's the uncut script of that episode.

There must be a hundred examples of characters on TV watching TV and speaking as if they are real people and saying something about the TV/reality distinction, giving us the joke of seeing them on TV while we're here in reality. For all I know, there's a sitcom where the characters are watching that episode of "Friends" and hearing and commenting on that very line "these are the days of our lives."

Could somebody else collect all those examples and make a montage for me?

By the way, back in the 90s, that line would be called "going meta," and it was a very popular comic device. Maybe it got overused and trite and was largely abandoned, and I'm liking it in a kind of retro-throwback-ironic way. Nostalgic for going meta?! What a concept!

There's other going meta just in that episode. For example, Marlo Thomas is playing Jennifer Aniston's character's mother, and Marlo ("Mrs. Green") keeps enthusing about how she wants to live like her daughter ("Rachel") — single, free, in NYC. This involves getting a divorce from Rachel's father. Rachel says, "Couldn't she have just copied my haircut?" That's funny because in real life, the Rachel haircut was the rage. A photograph of Rachel was probably the most-shown-to-a-hairstylist photograph ever.

If you think too much about "going meta" you'll be ready to close the door on it again too. Go ahead, shut that door. It's over there. In the fourth wall.

The name I looked for in the tributes to Mary Tyler Moore: Marlo Thomas.

When Mary Tyler Moore died, was she celebrated as a television first having something to do with feminism? You can't say "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" presented a new kind of woman without dealing with the earlier show, "That Girl":

That Girl is an American sitcom that ran on ABC from 1966 to 1971. It starred Marlo Thomas as the title character Ann Marie, an aspiring (but only sporadically employed) actress, who moves from her hometown of Brewster, New York, to try to make it big in New York City. Ann has to take a number of offbeat "temp" jobs to support herself in between her various auditions and bit parts. Ted Bessell played her boyfriend Donald Hollinger, a writer for Newsview Magazine...

That Girl was one of the first sitcoms to focus on a single woman who was not a domestic or living with her parents. Some consider this show the forerunner of the highly successful The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and an early indication of the changing roles of American women in feminist-era America...

At the end of the 1969–1970 season, That Girl was still doing moderately well in the ratings, but after four years Thomas had grown tired of the series and wanted to move on. ABC convinced her to do one more year. In the beginning of the fifth season, Don and Ann became engaged, but they never actually married. The decision to leave the couple engaged at the end of the run was largely the idea of Thomas. She did not want to send a message to young women that marriage was the ultimate goal for them, and she worried that it would have undercut the somewhat feminist message of the show.

"The Mary Tyler Moore Show" did not begin until 1970. Look how similar the opening credits are for the 2 shows:





When I first saw the MTM opening credits I wondered how could they get away with such a rip-off. Also, I think MTM was a throwback to the 1960s and actively old, not new at all. Now, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" turned out to be a great, great show, undoubtedly one of the best shows in the history of television. I just hate to see descriptions of it that give credit for being ahead of its time. It followed "That Girl."

"Women aren’t any meaner to women than men are to one another. Women are just expected to be nicer."

"We stereotype men as aggressive and women as kind. When women violate those stereotypes, we judge them harshly. 'A man has to be Joe McCarthy to be called ruthless,' Marlo Thomas once lamented. 'All a woman has to do is put you on hold.' In one experiment, researchers asked people to read about a workplace conflict between two women, two men, or a man and a woman. The conflict was identical, but when the case study was between two women, the participants saw it as more damaging to the relationship and expected them to be more likely to quit. When men argue, it’s a healthy debate. When women argue … meow! It’s a catfight."

Write Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant in "Sheryl Sandberg on the Myth of the Catty Woman."

And I'll just add: Women co-authors aren't any more credit-demanding than men co-authors. It just looks better to have their name as part of the title.

Did "Free to Be You & Me" imply getting a lot of work done to one's once perky face?

When did you first encounter Marlo Thomas? Did she look like this?



That is indeed her, in 1960, on an episode of "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis," but you're more likely to know her from the late-60s show, which was infectiously popular when I was in high school, "That Girl":



(Look at the image on the kite at 0:38 and you'll see what got me onto this topic: the question, raised in the previous post, of what the Lululemon logo looks like. Sidenote: those opening credits were totally ripped off by Mary Tyler Moore, who kind of also stole Marlo's whole concept of the modern woman.)

Obviously, she needed to get some work done to look like "That Girl" and not that girl that was on "Dobie Gillis." Look at her father:



I grew up watching his show, "Make Room for Daddy." Anyway, Marlo went on to that "Free to Be You & Me" project, which began in 1972, when I was 21 and not interested in that sort of thing, and not just because it was for children and parents, but because it was square and middle class. I don't think I have ever listened to a single track on that record, but I know it had a huge impact on younger people. (I wonder if Obama's mother played it for him. I'll bet she thought it was too square, too middle class.)

Here's an example of a blogger — Melissa at On the Rag Mag — who idolized Marlo Thomas:

I grew up worshiping her because of her involvement with Free to Be You & Me. OH MY! How I loved that album and the show. To say that I was obsessed with it would be an understatement. To tell you that pretty much anyone associated with the project brings tears to my eyes, warmth to my heart, and a tingle to my nether regions would not be a lie.

For someone who loves Marlo not because of "That Girl" (or "Dobie") but because of "Free to Be," it's stressful to look at what she's done to herself:



Melissa says:

Marlo Thomas is a woman of her generation, and the way she chooses to age is up to her. I was really sad to see her stretched and snipped beyond recognition, but that is her choice. No one can stay young forever, and we all deal with the aging process in different ways. It’s a mind fuck no matter how you go at it, and it’s her face so who am I to say anything?

Oh, bullshit! You did say something. Quit pretending you didn't. It may be "up to" Marlo to decide what to do, but she did it precisely to affect what we see. She did it to us as well as to herself. We can complain. We can try to influence others not to make the same awful mistake. And there's just so much hypocrisy, or at least that's what I would say if I had any familiarity at all with the songs on "Free to Be You & Me."

As to whether "the aging process" is "a mind fuck no matter how you go at it," if that's the level of wisdom you've reached, that doesn't speak well for the foundation you acquired from "Free to Be You & Me." One more reason why I will continue to refrain from ever hearing "Free to Be" and to believe that it's drivel.

1963 TV: the magic makeover of a nerd girl.

The magic is done by Ray Walston, Bill Bixby's favorite Martian, and the girl is Marlo Thomas, pre-"That Girl." The early 60s sitcom style is perfect, especially the music. Note the sexual innuendo at 1:55 — "This ship will never get off the ground" — and the music — and Walston facial expression — that punctuates it. The makeover segment, which begins at 2:10, is the sort of thing that used to — still does? — drive feminists mad.

The new TV season — do you care?

Throwing Things lists some things they care about. Here you can see which new shows Television Without Pity is going to recap.

And, hey, the recap from the final "Six Feet Under" is up already. The recapper, M. Giant, reveals on the last page that he's moving on to recap that big new HBO series, "Rome," which starts tonight. Are you going to watch? Can we transfer our "SFU" habit onto "Rome"? Are we going to try?

MORE: I cared deeply about the new TV season when I was a teenager — and so did all my friends. We eagerly awaited the TV Guide issue that described all the new shows and talked a lot about which ones we thought we're going to be good. We made a point of trying nearly every one. That was back in the days when shows like "Bewitched" and "That Girl" were coming out. We were so into TV. Half of us started affecting the vocal mannerisms of Elizabeth Montgomery and Marlo Thomas!

UPDATE: I watched "Rome" for about 20 minutes. It was the sort of roiling, writhing ancientness I expected. I found I just didn't care.