We like writing about fun TV stuff, like the hot new ad for "My Burberry" perfume with sexy supermodels Kate Moss and Cara Delevingne. The two women are wearing nothing but Burberry trench coats strategically open. They are pulling each other close, spraying each other with perfume, getting their hair mussed, looking playfully in love, all while Joss Stone sings a smoky, bluesy version of "I Put a Spell on You." It's a little shot of pseudo-lesbian erotica, and we admit we like it. A lot . If Burberry wants to sell their perfume with lesbian sensuality, we know we should complain about exploitation and appropriation, but all we really want to do is watch it again.
We also want to alert you to Transparent, the comedy-drama web series produced by Amazon Studios created and directed by Jill Soloway. The story revolves around a Los Angeles family and their lives following the discovery that the father Mort (Jeffrey Tambor) is transgender. The series was picked up for a full season by Amazon Studios, and will premiere in full this month and next.
As fun as that ad is, as great as Soloway's show is, as enticing as the new season that bursts open throughout October is going to be, the major TV event of the past 10 days continues to unfold, and that is what we want to unpack, as the deconstructionists say. That TV event is the current scandal, growing broader every day, of violence in the NFL.
We've reported on this problem numerous times over the years, most recently when San Francisco 49ers offensive tackle Jonathan Martin was bullied off the Miami Dolphins team in Oct. 2013 after a two-year pattern of anti-gay (even though Martin is not gay, to our knowledge) and racist attacks. Several players participated in the bullying and harassment, which included racial and homophobic slurs, and numerous threats of assault. Martin filed suit against the team, and in April 2014 a series of texts and emails sent to Martin were revealed by ESPN. Martin had been so traumatized by the harassment and hazing that he checked himself into a hospital in addition to leaving the team.
Martin was portrayed as a "sissy" who couldn't handle the boys-will-be-boys atmosphere of the NFL, and there implications that he was gay and too "sensitive." At the time, the Martin debacle was presented as a single, anomalous event. Fast-forward to now, where the violence within the NFL is being exposed for what it is: rampant, endemic, and basically excused when players are vital to the team. In the past 10 days, five different players have been revealed as violent, charged with varying degrees of assault against women and children. The NFL has repeatedly turned a blind eye to that violence.
In watching this scandal unfold and thinking back over the tone of the Martin case last October, and the message that if a man can't handle non-stop abuse and threats of violence he must be gay (as if that's the worst thing a man could be!), we think the chasm between us and them, gay and straight has never yawned wider, and it has been writ large on TV in recent days. Why the chasm? Because quite simply, we are not them . The national problem needs to be named: straight male violence against women, against children, against us LGBT people. Straight male violence is at epidemic levels in the U.S., and around the globe. The NFL is a mere microcosm of that.
The President has spoken out about the NFL violence "as a father of two daughters." On Sept. 19, Pres. Obama, with Vice Pres. Biden (author of the Violence Against Women Act as a senator) in tow, gave a press conference about new initiatives he is leading to end another epidemic of straight male violence, campus sex assaults.
"Sexual violence isn't just a crime, it's a civil rights violation," Obama told the TV audience. "We don't condemn sexual assault as loudly as we should. It's on all of us to reject the quiet tolerance of sexual assault." Biden added, "Every one of these statistics is a life."
That phrase, it's on us, is the president's hashtag, which he enlisted a ton of his best TV-star buddies to promote. On Sept. 19, a slew of PSAs began airing starring Jon Hamm of Mad Men, and Kerry Washington of Scandal, among others. Breaking into daytime TV isn't done lightly (sponsors lose money), but doing so made clear just how important this issue is to the president.
There was another press conference that broke into daytime programming Sept. 19. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell held a press conference to give his explanation of what had transpired since Sept. 8. His press conference, not the President's, led the evening news on all networks. The reason we feel this NFL scandal, a massive TV event, needs to be addressed is because it stratifies what we see every day in scripted TV shows: straight male violence against women and against LGBT people. We women and queers are the most common targets in scripted drama series or even sitcoms. Women in jeopardy is an actual thematic structure for TV, and has been since TV began.
That chasm we spoke of between our community and the straight community? It's because gay men don't beat the crap out of women in public, on video, and get away with it. That's straight men. Because gay men and lesbians, bisexuals and trans people are not the purveyors of violence in America, although we are often, increasingly often, the victims. Straight men beat the crap out of women, kids, gay men, lesbians, trans persons and other straight men, and get away with it on a daily basis. Especially if they are celebrities. And we see it on TV over and over again. The microcosm of the NFL scandal has played out on TV every night since Sept. 8. The closet door on straight male violence has been torn off, and awe can see how the same guys who often make our lives a living hell are now being (maybe) held to account.
USA Today sports editor and ABC News consultant Christine Brennan said on the Sept. 20 Nightline that the domestic violence scandal in the NFL is the biggest and worst sports scandal ever. Bigger than the steroid and doping scandals. And, Brennan said, the NFL has completely blown their handling of it.
The reason the NFL story is so huge and the scandal so far-reaching and that it's all playing out on TV is because the NFL really exists as a TV franchise. The season begins in August with pre-season games. Then the weekend after Labor Day, the actual season begins, and runs through December or early January. The Super Bowl, in the end of January or beginning of February, is the top-rated TV event of the year. Nothing comes close to it.
The NFL season consists of 256 games. And while baseball is supposed to be the quintessential American sport, there is nothing that draws people, women as well as men, to TV like football. There is no other sport that takes up as much TV air-time as football. It is on network and cable, day and night. And while college football has many devotees, the big money is in the NFL. The Super Bowl is the most expensive TV program in U.S. history. There are 110 million viewers, one in three Americans. The ad revenue from a 30-second commercial during the Super Bowl costs $4 million. Tickets at the 50-yard line cost $10,000.
But few of us are sitting at the 50-yard line. We're having Super Bowl parties and contributing to the revenue that revolves around the Super Bowl from our sofas. The NFL brings in more money for TV than anything else. It is a $10 billion industry which, in January, NFL Commissioner Goodell pledged to triple by 2027. Oh, and that $10 billion? It's free and clear, because inexplicably, the NFL has tax-exempt status. That's how much we love football.
TV land is where most Americans still spend between four and eight hours of their day. TV is where we first saw the video of Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice punch his then-fianc�, now wife, Janay Palmer Rice square in the face, knocking her unconscious in the elevator of an Atlantic City casino. The NFL scandal has turned ESPN into an investigative news network that should have forced Roger Goodell to resign.
But in his press conference, Goodell, after saying repeatedly that "I got it wrong," "I disappointed everyone," and "Problems with the league begin with me" in response to the Rice incident, also said he never considered resigning. Oh, the hubris.
CBS This Morning co-host Norah O'Donnell got the exclusive first interview with Goodell on Sept. 10. In that interview he denied knowledge of the "extent of the incident" before the TMZ tape. Between that interview and his Sept. 19 press conference, Goodell was MIA. It took nine days for him to say nothing and to continue to lie in the face of incontrovertible evidence from TMZ, ESPN, ABC and other network and cable exposes that he knew more that he intends to ever admit to. In our selfie and social media era, the "pics or it didn't happen" mantra seems to be Goodell's as well.
Anyone who watches TV, and that is most of us, knows that violence is on the up-tick. And nearly all of that violence is perpetrated, as it is in real life, by straight men against the vulnerable. Most dramas include an act of violence every four minutes, according to the people who record this stuff to give TV its MPAA ratings. That's a lot of violence, especially as that's an average. We watch some of the most violent shows on the tube and love them, including The Following, Hannibal, True Blood, The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Dracula, Breaking Bad, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Sons of Anarchy and Criminal Minds. In fact, if violence isn't a major theme in a TV drama series, the show is often dubbed a chick show. Because straight men and violence go together.
The LGBT community knows without needing the Dept. of Justice to tell us that hate crimes and violence against LGBT people are on the rise. And the DoJ calls domestic violence the most common violent crime in the U.S.; one in four women is a victim. But on TV, almost all women and LGBT people are victims.
In less than two weeks, five NFL players have been named in assaults on women and/or children. In addition to Rice, Adrian Peterson of the Minnesota Vikings was arrested and charged with child abuse for beating his four-year-old son with a tree branch. Prior to the beating, Peterson stuffed the boy's mouth with leaves so he would not scream. The child was beaten on his bare thighs, buttocks, testicles, arms and back. The child's physician reported the injuries to authorities. Yet the NFL only benched Peterson after sponsors objected. Because football is about TV, and TV is about money.
There's almost no one on TV who hasn't weighed in on this issue, but some stand out. On The View, Rosie O'Donnell said, "What's interesting to me is that we, as a country, support football. They've had studies that show it's life-threatening to every player. They have traumatic brain injuries. They're taking steroids, which really changes their judgment. They're encouraged and paid to be violent. Same with fighters, with boxers. It would be wonderful if they were able to separate the violence of their job with the violence in their life, but I don't think that's how human brains work. I don't excuse any violence towards anyone, but I do understand how a guy who knocks people over and pushes them down for a living and gets cheered might do that in his private life."
On the Sept. 19 Late Show, David Letterman asked TV host and former NFL star Michael Strahan about the incidents. Strahan said, "You need to be aggressive on the field, but this is not a business that you take your work home with you. This [domestic violence] is an epidemic." Strahan said he hoped the non-stop attention to the issue would help women in abusive situations to "step up to protect themselves, to save themselves."
Letterman said, "This is beyond chilling. Everything we have learned, it's beyond chilling." It is beyond chilling, and we personally think that as members of a minority group regularly victimized by straight male violence both in real life and on TV, we should name the problem and make demands that it stop. GLAAD is there not just to approve when TV gets it right, but also to name the problem when TV gets it wrong. But GLAAD has been silent on this latest controversy and GLAAD needs to point out that we, the LGBT community, are continually victimized by just this kind of violence, in real life and in representations of us on TV. The NFL culture of violence has used us and the "sissified" gay man trope to beat (literally) people with.
We urge you all to note the times and dates where LGBT people are the TV victims, where sportscasters reference gay men as sissies or pansies or any of those encoded words that slur our community. We need the NFL (which still has a team called the Redskins in 2014!) to cease its violence against us. This scandal began, in part, with Martin last year, and the gay slurs everyone ignored because the only people lower on the social strata than women are gays. When this scandal will end, we don't know. All we can say is, Stay tuned.