This video is also pretty clear evidence that Sorkin outright hates women.

These Women

I don't have any thing new or original to say on the topic, so this will be it, but I'll link and quote a couple of articles re: Aaron Sorkin's women problem

The NPR review has been cited before, but here are a couple of quotes:

This article is called "On Aaron Sorkin and The Newsroom's Woman Problem"

From Entertainment Weekly's review: (emphasis mine)

And from Time's review:

Anyway, I'll post here if I have new or original thoughts, but anyone who wants to take up the "Aaron Sorkin writes women just fine!" torch can do it with the writers at EW or Time or Gawker or wherever.

I think Sorkin is just incapable of writing a normal relationship. Just from the first episode of the WW, if anyone was having emotional fits over a relationship, it was Josh getting all pissy about Mandy.

This was a cross post, but nath, do you think that Sorkin is incapable of writing female characters, or he seems to have written bad female character on this show? Because from my viewing of the pilot, all of the characters seem to suck, the women no more so than the men. You did post this quote though:

And this is seen as Sorkin portraying the female character in a poor light????? That arc ends with her producing a great memo without a mans help.

This is totally fair and 100% accurate. The guy has a really screwed up view of relationships, there is no doubt. All I am saying is his dysfunctional characterizations are equally aimed at men and women.

Change thread title to "Everything that misogynist Sorkin does wrong."

Nath must hate the way women are written on the show "Girls."

I think the most accurate thing to say is that he write relationships really badly and usually in a way that involves humiliation / degradation of the women characters involved. Even the women cited in that quote often behaved poorly and nonsensically in their personal lives (I'm particularly thinking of Dana in Sports Night, first with her "You say you're not into me anymore and I can't handle that so I'm going to keep trying to make you jealous" approach to Casey in S1 and then with the "Dating plan" in S2).

Specific to "The Newsroom" you can consult the articles I cited.
See, this is why I'm not offering myself up for discussion anymore. People are just going to post hyperbolic bull**** to assail my credibility and avoid the real issue.

The real issue is your position is simply not supported by the evidence and you are now realizing as much.

Sorkin writes dysfunctional relationships for both men and women period. Any other view is simply not correct whether that person works for Gawker or not.

There are problems with The Newsroom but it's portrayal of women is not one of them.

Let's also not forget that in Sorkin's world Facebook exists because girls would not go out with Zuckerman. Another stable male relationship brought to you by Sorkin where all men are level headed and in functional relationships according to Nath.

I really wasn't very impressed with the first episode, and I do think some of the criticism is valid. I just also think that some of the criticism of the show is people wanting to create their own narrative, so that they can push a specific agenda they have.

I mean really? You don't think that's reaching?

At the end of the episode, Will references the baseball game, and admits he and Mack's dad showed up to dinner drunk. Ah yes, because all men are just drunken buffoons who can only bond through sports. Way to paint us all with the same brush Sorkin.

Come on. There is such a thing as looking too hard for something that isn't there.

thank you!

was driving me crazy

Again, it's far from just nath that's pointing this out about Sorkin. It's a pretty common critique.

I can see why people don't see it. Sorkin writes in a way that somewhat discourages this type of critical analysis. He wants you to get swept up in the moment, because he writes moments and big swells of emotion exceptionally. If you're fine just going along with the ride- you won't care about this stuff. (and I don't know that there's anything wrong with that, for example, Drive and Hanna, movies I both reallly, really, enjoyed- are total "go long for the ride" movies. With Sorkin, I don't think it works as well because of the weight he wants to place upon the subject matter. You can't act like everything matters and then make all these little cheats to get to you point).

You don't have to look very hard if it's always there. The stuff in the Newsroom wouldn't mean much were it not for similar patterns in everything he's done. Any of his little bits all by themselves would just be amusing character beats/stories. It's all those bits in total, and their repetition, that give you insight into Sorkin's impression of the default female condition.

What agenda do you think this is? Because if it's "better written, less insulting female characters" is that really something you wouldn't get behind?

I read all the articles he posted and have heard others and they are all just wrong and there simple is no evidence that Sorkin's writes men differently than women.

Is Sorkin heavy handed yes.

Does he portray a fantasy world that could never exist yes.

Does he often use big moments to manipulate the audience yes.

Does he recycle character plot and lines yes.

Do his bad moments fall way down yes.

Is the first ep of Newsroom really uneven yes.

Does he portray women differently than men no.

I've seen this mentioned a few times and i can understand seeing this as sexist but i think it says more about Sorkin being uncomfortable with writing situations that don't call for paragraphs of dialogue.

I saw him on the Colbert Report the other day and he's clearly kind of an awkward guy who probably has as much trouble writing more casual dialogue as he does engaging in friendly banter - at one point he was offered a set up for a quip and instead went on a much more disjointed, half mumbled version of the opening rant from Newsroom until eventually the audience started laughing at the awkwardness of it all and he stopped, awkwardly.

In the instance of the quote about the shopping, i can't help but feel like if the characters had been two men he would have made an equally clumsy attempt at capturing how "guys" talk amongst themselves along the lines of "oh man, you and me are gonna pound some brewskies later!".

I agree that some of his female characters could be better written but its crazy to pretend that the men aren't as useless in their personal lives as the women, at least in the West Wing which is the only show of his i've watched in its entirety.

Anyway, i really enjoyed the pilot but I made a conscious decision to just treat the whole thing as an absurdist liberal fantasy drama and just allow myself to get swept up in it, obviously the whole thing is utterly ridiculous but that didn't stop the West Wing from being great and I'm certainly willing to give this a chance.

I'm not as familiar with his past work as others in this thread, and I do generally respect the opinions of those ITT that are criticizing aspects of his work. But I still disagree on the way the women were portrayed in the first ep, particularly Mackenzie.

I think her and Will came across pretty similar in the first episode. Both come across as strong, intelligent individuals. Both are flawed. Both seem pretty damn inspired by one another.

I can see my opinion changing as the show goes on, especially given some of the criticism ITT and outside of it. I just disagree when it comes to what I saw last week.



The idea that he's misogynistic/sexist. I think some people came into this show ready to tee off on him, regardless of whether or not what they've seen so far merits it. I would of course be behind better written female characters.

I wouldn't say he's overtly a misogynist or sexist, I'd just say that the way he writes women tends to suggest that he believes they're rather emotionally immature. That doesn't really mean "he hates women" as much as "he has a problematic bias that is frequent in his work".

Saying that he has a 'women problem' though implies that it's something not present in men. I'm only really familiar with the WW, but you can't convince me that the majority of the male characters are emotionally mature either. Toby is a barely functional curmudgeon, Josh is just a little kid, Sam is hyper naive, Leo is an alcoholic who gives up on his marriage, etc. In this pilot, the outgoing producer bails at the last moment on his dinner plans, Will gives back a million bucks because he can't stand having to work with his highly qualified ex, those aren't exactly highly evolved, emotionally mature men either.

I think there is plenty of evidence that Sorkin takes a patronizing view towards his women characters. It is clearly the conventional wisdom and a meme has developed around this. The question is why? Does he view women as fundamentally incapable and incomplete without men? People write about what they know, and maybe all the women he knows fit this model? Or maybe he is just lazy, falling back on cliches when it comes to dealing with relationships and gender issues?

I think a lot of the criticisms presented in the articles Nath quoted indicate the latter. The whole "I'm gonna take you shopping" thing doesn't feel sexist to me. Cliche? Yes. Easy? Yes. Lazy? Yes. If he changes that line to "I'm going to buy you a drink" then I'm assuming this scene is not a problem.

And the scene where Maggie's boyfriend offered to write the memo for her and she refused made the outgoing EP appear sexist, but presented Maggie in a positive light. Now if she failed at the task and had to go back to the boyfriend for help, that would be sexist.

Seems to me that Sorkin (who we know has had plenty of personal struggles) has lousy life experiences from which to write women and relationships. He struggles with this, so he falls back on cliches. Overall I think that the vast majority of his characters, both male and female, are pretty two dimensional - great at work and lousy in their personal lives, which obviously overlap. There is not much nuance on either front.

JMill brought up a good point about Girls. Many of Lena Dunham's women characters demonstrate the same things as Sorkin's. Why do we not care there? First, they tend to be more multidimensional and second, they are well thought out and rely less on cliches. And it doesn't hurt that they are written by a woman.

I'm going to keep watching but will be on the lookout for why Sorkin has this problem. Is he simply lazy, or does his view of women prevent him from writing them in a more well rounded fashion.

Sure, most of his male characters are flawed as well- but in more nuanced ways.

Here's the way I realized this.

Watch Sports Night- love what I see between Jeremy and Natalie, in part because unlike most TV they actually paint the guy as having a clue and not being some oaf. That was different and neat.

Then you watch more Sports Night and realize that it's kinda the same with Casey and Dana, only weirder because Dana's supposed to be really smart and basically devolves into the same person.

Then West Wing, and it's Dona and Josh, and a bit of CJ- and suddenly it's no longer novel that the guy was right and the girl was being a bit dense. Now it's just the same thing over and over again.

Then Studio 60, which does all the same stuff but worse, and kinda burns off any remaining goodwill I had for Sorkin at all because it's so unaware and self-important about such a silly thing.

All that said- I think the problems with the Newsroom are much, much greater than the way the women are being written, and if that was the only problem, then it would still be an excellent show.

I appreciate Nath's research, and his views are backed up by some pretty impressive sources.

But I still dont agree with those views.

The relevant woman thing at the moment is that in tonight's episode we get to eyeball Olivia Munn.

That is all.

This discussion reminds me a lot of this:



Basically every Sorkin character ever has been extremely good at their job with a completely ****ed up personal life.

Perfect post. Exactly right.

Final thoughts-- after all, there's a whole new episode to pick apart tonight!

jmill, it's interesting you brought up Girls earlier, because I feel like I'm getting the same reaction here that I did from Girls defenders when I pointed out problems I had with their show. Namely, they would pick one criticism out of context to focus on and dismiss without regarding what it says, or what I'm saying, about the work as a whole.

Here's an example from you:

The shopping line by itself? If it were one example, yeah, sure, it might be reaching. But nothing is "by itself"; everything has context, and the context of a guy who constantly writes women as flighty, emotionally immature, and personally incompetent writing that line makes it a little offensive, as it's lazy, stereotypical, and comes attached with the way Sorkin seems to regard women in general. It's no longer one throwaway line; it's part of a large pattern of patronizing disregard Aaron Sorkin seems to have towards women's personal and internal lives.