Charlie Sheen, Chris Brown, & Violence Against Women

[Newsgrape.]

On Tuesday, Feministing posted an article “On Charlie Sheen and Chris Brown”, which I think everyone should read. It's a cogent analysis of the role played by racism in the internet and media response to Charlie Sheen, Chris Brown, and their respective violence against women.

Brown tweeted his frustration at still being asked questions about his violence against Rihanna two years on, pointing out that nobody is taking Sheen to task for his history of violence. Obviously it is not okay for Brown to be “over” it, and we need to keep questioning any public figure who has done such a terrible thing – but, in the second half of his tweet, he kind of has a point.

When I wrote about Charlie Sheen, back at the beginning of all the ugliness that has gone down in his current media blitz, I (somewhat naively) considered him solely from the perspective of his TV role, and I (very naively) concluded that his role on Two and a Half Men makes the snarky denizens of the internet leery because of its uncomfortable resemblance to real life. Obviously, this has proved not to be the case: cyberspace will forgive any sin if it finds something funny. Sheen's twitter account garnered a million followers quicker than anyone had before; he has been fawned over by numerous talk show hosts who are happy to avoid difficult topics as long as he talks about tiger blood and goddesses and winning; and many of the things he has recently said became memes inescapable on the web. For the past month, we have all been talking about Charlie Sheen, but we have not been talking about his abuse of women.

The Feministing article does a good job of tracing the connection between racism and violence against women in the US back to times of slavery, and showing how the image of African-American men as aggressors against (usually white) women still pervades US culture. This is a perfect illustration of the phenomenon of intersectionality. Obviously violence against women is a feminist issue, but in this instance the cultural response is such an inextricable blend of misogyny and racism that we simply cannot divorce the two, and attempts to approach this sorry story as a purely [implied: white] women's issue are dishonest and counterproductive.

An astonishing number of people do not take systemic racism seriously. They deny its continued existence today, or they try to soften it by calling it “subconscious” or “latent”. But ours is a world where a TV executive can refuse to hire people of color for years, and nobody notices until he admits it out loud. How much more overt can it be?

Violence against women is not taken seriously either. We are told that feminism has achieved its aims, in the West at least, and we are “over-sensitive” to perceived instances of misogyny. But in the West a prestigious newspaper can still blame an 11-year-old for being gang-raped by dozens of men. How much more overt can it be?

The Charlie Sheen débâcle of the past month has been characterized by misogyny; with our treatment of Chris Brown for comparison, it's evident that racism also plays a part. A man of color with a history of violence against women appals us. A white man with a history of violence against women entertains and delights us. Everything about this phenomenon is shameful and sickening. We in the media and internet need to start showing a sense of responsibility. We need to start asking the uncomfortable questions and we need to stop perpetuating the same old systems of injustice. Social media and information/communication technology can be a powerful force, and we should be using them to do something worthwhile.

Fortunately, the life cycle of a meme in cyberspace occurs at warp speed. Already it seems the internet has tired of the great Sheenstravaganza of March 2011: tickets for Sheen's forthcoming tour have undersold, and we internauts have turned our derision and glee to newer phenomena. This has more to do with pop culture's infinitesimally short attention span, however, than it has to do with morality. On Newsgrape, my “Charlie Vs. Barney” post has more hits than anything else I've posted there, and I regret not using that pulling power to write something more responsible. Like everyone else who has written about Charlie Sheen without foregrounding his history of violence, I can only say: mea culpa. I'll try to do better next time.

Charlie Vs. Barney: A "Womanizing Jerk"-Off

[Cross-posted at Newsgrape.]

So, Charlie Sheen is in the news again, but this time a few people who wouldn’t normally comment are taking notice. The refrain seems to be concern for Sheen’s health, even his life, because his show, Two And A Half Men, is such a money-making machine that nobody will ever tell him regular human things like ‘no’ or ‘beating your wife is not okay’ or ‘seriously, man, just get your ass to rehab and stay there’.

The people expressing this concern are not fans of Two And A Half Men. Personally, I don’t know anyone who is a fan of Two And A Half Men, though an awful lot of people must be, given the average 15 million US viewers it’s been drawing for seven seasons. Full disclosure: I have never actually seen an entire episode, only clips. Coming perilously close to doing some research, I considered watching one before writing this article, but come on, that’s 22 minutes of precious Word Bubble time.

What I do know, from my extensive readings on this here internet, is that Charlie Sheen’s character, imaginatively named ‘Charlie’, is that breed of person known in ye olden times as a manly man, and in modern scientific circles as a humongous douchenozzle. He hooks up with a bazillion different women and is a jerk to them, in episodes with charming titles like ‘Round One to the Hot Crazy Chick’ and ‘The Crazy Bitch Gazette’. If I’m to believe articles like these, this is more or less the entire premise of the show.

Coincidentally, this description of Charlie applies pretty much identically to a character on another CBS sitcom: a show with lower, but still respectable, ratings, and a much greater critical cachet; a breakout character arguably responsible for much of the show’s popularity, and beloved enough to have ‘written’ two books.

Both are womanizing, misogynistic assholes. Why do we interneterati hate Two And A Half Men’s Charlie Harper but love How I Met Your Mother’s Barney Stinson?

I can think of at least three reasons.

First, the context of the show. People who talk about television on the internet tend to consider How I Met Your Mother a good show. At its best, it does something novel with the three-camera sitcom format, utilizing its flashback structure to tell stories in unusual ways and to build a world of consistent detail – guaranteed to appeal to an internet culture that delights in scrutiny of a show’s mythology. Even Two And A Half Men’s most ardent apologists can’t argue that it tries to do anything new, either in its comedy or in its situation.

Second, the context of the character. Barney is a supporting character on How I Met Your Mother. Protagonist Ted is sometimes derided as boring, but he grounds the show in a fundamentally decent and relatable character, which allows Barney to be totally outrageous: as with Zaphod Beeblebrox, you want to have a drink with him – you don’t want to be him. Charlie, however, is the protagonist on Two And A Half Men, and so the viewer can only enter the show’s world on his terms. If you find his terms unappealing, you’ll likely not enjoy the show. (It doesn’t help the misogyny charge that the primary ensemble on Two And A Half Men comprises, well, two and a half men, whereas the How I Met Your Mother ensemble includes two women.)

Third, and most significantly, the relationship between the character and his actor. Neil Patrick Harris’s turn as a womanizing jerk was initially funny because it essentially reprised his performance as a fictionalized version of himself in the Harold & Kumar movies (where, in turn, it was funny because it was a spoof of the Former Child Star stereotype); since November 2006, it’s been funny because we know that he is a monogamous gay man, and now a father of two. The way Barney objectifies and uses women is funny because it bears no relation to reality – the joke is “Barney Stinson, played by Neil Patrick Harris”. Charlie Sheen, on the other hand, really is a womanizing, wife-beating, alcoholic drug addict. That’s hard to laugh at.