Given the popularity of these shows, as well as their natures, it would be a sin of omission not to condemn them.

Let's start off with a bit of fun with titles. Everyone Loves Raymond -- everyone without a hint of cultural sophistication or sensitivity, that is. Buffy, the Embarrasingly-Written "Tough Grrl" -- "grrl" being a cutesy sort of animalistic growl, a word that should grate on you like a pink turret decorated with flowers on a tank, preferably a plastic one that thinks it's real; the show is alternatively known as Fad, Buffy's other name (as in fading, as in lacking-even-the-charm-of-grunge-music). And then there's Friends -- featuring anything but.

Friends is a horrible show. Yes, it’s filled with promiscuous women whose every move screams “I’ve swallowed more loads than most prostitutes.” Yes, everyone on the show, male and female, exhibits nothing above a rudimentary I.Q., leaving a viewer with the slightest bit of intelligence with nothing to identify with. It makes 90210 seem like a PBS documentary. Just look at the fans: screaming idiotic teenagers yelling "Rachel!"

"Gee, hun, a dozen guys shot their load into your pussy -- which, that’s right, you spread for them, right? I just love nothing better than imagining your vagina leaking semen, other men’s semen, again and again over the years. Boy, that’s sexy. And, let’s see, you put fourteen dicks into your mouth, took them into your throat, gagged for their pleasure, and then brought them to orgasm by letting them fuck the beautiful face of the woman I love." Fuckin’ hilarious. Ha ha fuckin’ ha.

In a more just society, he would have knifed her to death. Now that would have been funny. “You’ve got a great résumé for this job I could hook you up with -- through my friend. A friend who wears very colorful dress, speaks in jive, drives a Porsche, and lists ‘putting the smack down’ as one of his hobbies. And it pays well too. But you’re damaged goods, hun. A fun time -- and not just for me, apparently -- but hardly a good investment.” Then when she protests, as a good feminist and not without a teeny bit of desperation, that she has the right to let her pussy lips be parted for any Tom, Dick, Harry, Bob, Pat, John, or Chris who she happens to meet -- which may well be true, in the sense that a person has a right to cover their body with scars and maggots but it certainly doesn’t make one attractive, the presumption being not that one has a right to do so but that no one has a right to be disgusted in response -- then he could kill her, and as her eyes roll back in her tiny, protoplasm-filled head, his strangling hands covered with garish make-up, we could hear that ever-refreshing laugh track signal our own participation.

(It's not as if anyone likes these girls for their scintillating conversation. Or their deep well of knowledge and aesthetic appreciation. Or their ability to drive and chew gum simultaneously. That is to say, if not for their bodies, well-used or not, why would anyone want a relationship with such a girl? People don't have Jennifer Aniston on their high school walls because of her discourses on the varied strains of neo-Platonism. Then again, the boyfriend in question was hardly a genius with much cause to object, save his own sexual Puritanism by comparison, but that lack of intelligence is only to be expected. He was, after all, on Friends.)

Friends has none of the panache of Seinfeld, none of the melancholy of Cheers.

Then there’s Malcolm in the Middle -- he's the filling part of a crap sandwich, you see. I saw one episode of this horrid show, which seems to feature yet another family with a dumb, petty father (like The Simpsons) and monsters for children. In that episode, the father actually feigns an injury so as not to play -- and be defeated -- by his boys at basketball. (Ye hah. Yay, basketball. Always a sign of an intellectual drama -- or person.) Forget that he is so petty as to cheat while competing against them. What was really horrible -- offensive beyond belief -- is that his sons, in the final game, punch him in the testicles -- in slow motion no less -- in order to win the final shot. What wonderful family values. Yet another attack against male genitalia masquerading as comedy. This is America’s Funniest Home Videos with its slow-motion, backwards-motion, and oft-repeated hits to daddy’s groin. Just wonderful.

This isn’t even male-hating; it’s not that intelligent. It’s just an unconscious adaptation of the general hatred of men in our culture. Imagine a show that has a woman punched in the clit -- or a mother on a sitcom who has kids who twist her nipples, causing her to double over in agonizing pain as this father did. There’d be instant protests.

And, again, what’s worse is that it’s not even -- remotely -- funny.

People who watch this shit should be shot. Or at least rounded up and used as a food source.

Not that I have an opinion on the matter, mind you.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT THIS WEEK

A mini-site for Matt Wagner's Grendel has been added. The Darius Notes main page has a sweet new design. And, as always, many small updates have occurred within The Continuity Pages.

That's right, I'm still running three days ahead with this column. Feel free to worship.

Your assignment for this week is to go buy a book by Camille Paglia -- and read it. You can find her in the sex, pop culture, or literary theory sections of bookstores. I think she makes mistakes, but I increasingly think that she's the only writer I know who seems to get present-day industrial culture in a wide historical consciousness, the kind of stuff that's basic to me but that I rarely, rarely see in print. It's as if most authors, even educated ones, don't have the first clue about basic historical developments -- or can't relate those developments in a fluid way to the subject at hand, whatever that is. Few works, fiction or not, from the second half of the twentieth century will survive as anything but historical artifacts of a very deluded, feminist age that got almost all the basic facts wrong. I'll be there, and I think Paglia will as well. Such writing is the antidote to many incorrect historical and sexual assumptions that dominate contemporary "thought."