OMFG. This is a completely incoherent critique of Orange is the New Black because–get this!–the show which is about a women’s prison doesn’t portray male prisoners realistically or accurate to their numbers in U.S. prisons. See if you can make more sense of it than I can.
Hey, Concern Troll: where was your column about the mis- or under- or stereotypical representations of women on just about every other television program or movie ever made? Did you have this concern about Oz, or Silicon Valley, or The Bachelor? I guess I missed that. All I can see is that you’re complaining that you can’t see a man like you on the one semi-high profile program on TV that features women’s stories (and not just white women’s stories!)
Talk about missing the point, which is to put you in the mind of the women whose experiences are portrayed. That’s their experience with men, dig?
Historiann 
inorite?!?!? That’s exactly what I thought when I read it – though from the title alone, I probably shouldn’t have wasted my time. Patriarchy is having issues with its decline.
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As a friend of mine said mockingly a few weeks back over dinner, channeling Margaret Hamilton: “My privilege! My beautiful privilege!”
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Won’t someone think about all of those menz being displaced by a single show about a women’s prison? Such an injustice!
If I start listing television shows and movies about men in prison, I could be beyond the capacity of my two hands to count them all. Somehow, though, this one show constitutes a horrible attack on men. Go figure.
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How dare a show about a *women’s prison* not portray male inmates sensitively??!? The NERVE of that woman for… um… not being held in a men’s prison?
Solution: next season, Larry goes to prison too! That’ll even things out.
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How hard is this show to watch? I know it’s had good reviews, but I’m afraid it would leave me upset and depressed.
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I don’t find it hard to watch at all. It’s intense, and what I like about it is that it IS more honest about the world we live in than (for example) glamorous crime procedurals. Unlike CSI, L&O, etc., it’s much more up-front about the neglect, poverty, and racism that feed the prison industrial complex. Yes, most of the women’s back stories are very sad, but they’re always portrayed as individual humans making the best decisions they can in the moment.
When you think about it, most of the great stories in literature and in other media are just like that, right? Mme. Bovary, Anna Karenina, Ethan Frome, The Scarlet Letter, Mildred Pierce, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, etc. Few have traditional “happy endings,” because the essence of drama is conflict. Except so few are focussed on the lives of poor and/or African American women or Latinas.
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on the up side, for once the comments are awesome & worth reading 🙂
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It was in The Atlantic, possibly one of the worst edited mass market magazines there is. That is all.
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