I hear you, and thank you for the thoughtful and ahysterical discussion. There's still a little more scapegoating lurking around the edges there than I think may be justified, but I'm not interested in getting into it with you (I did move away, after all).

But the main thing I want folks from elsewhere to understand is this:

<<So, when we diss the entire South, it's not every last Southerner in the South we are dissing. No, it's the people those Southerners elect to represent them. We find those representatives to be an appalling embarrassment, if not an actual danger to the Republic.

Can you blame us?>>

Yeah, I can. What you're ignoring is that there are many thousands, even millions, of left-leaning Southerners in those states who did not vote for Strom Thurmond or Jesse Helms or Lester Maddux (oops, no one voted for Lester Maddux!) or George W. Bush or Spencer Bachus.

Those people work tirelessly year after year to stem the lingering tide of racist ignorance the region's history has bequeathed it. They are the people who helped Jimmy Carter get elected governor of Georgia, Douglas Wilder get elected governor of Virginia, and Barack Obama win states like VA and NC. They are my family and friends in Georgia, Florida, North and South Carolina, Louisiana, Tennessee, Virginia and, yes, even Alabama.

They do not deserve your thick-brushed scorn. Rather they deserve your respect and support. Do them the courtesy, with my thanks.

I was gonna stay out of this one, mostly because of the sheer volume of the critical posts. But I was interested in hearing a better reasoned defense of Ms. Williams' side than she herself was able to muster, and so I turned to Hellacopter's posts with interest.

Sadly, what I saw was not reasoned or helpful. And thus spurred me (no pun intended) to respond.

Answer a few questions for me. Do you ever think about your body image to please your mate? have you ever thought twice about walking (or running) alone after dark? or, have you ever been harassed by women, when doing so? have you ever been raped- sober or inebriated?... so go ahead and continue to get your boxers in a bunch over a salon broadsheet post...assholes.

Okay, I'll answer.

1. All the time. Always have. I've seen enough ill treatment of overweight women to convince me that they do indeed have it worse than we overweight men do, but boy oh boy, that means they must have it bad, all right -- because my life as an overweight male (since the age of 6) has at times been so hellish, I've had paraplegic friends tell me they'd rather be in their own shoes than mine.

2. All the time. The idea that men don't feel anxiety or fear of attack by strangers is ludicrous. Of course, we're also expected to suppress those emotions and be prepared at any moment to throw down to demonstrate our manly lack thereof. It's actually a complicated place to be. (Not saying it's worse than being female in those situations -- I don't think it is -- but we're none of us supermen, no matter how we may feel obliged to front, and society makes particular demands on us just as it does on you.)

3. I have never been raped. I have, however, been a victim of physical sexual harassment by a professor while in school -- and while it's certainly not the same thing, I will allow as how that experienced seriously freaked me out and opened my eyes to what women deal with far more often in that area. Also, of course, I'm a human being and have the ability to sympathize even when I can't empathize. If that matters to you at all. Which I gather it may not.

Finally: the "assholes" thing is simply pathetic. Do we have to do that? Really?

As for "Observe and Report," I haven't seen it and nothing I'm hearing is making me desperate to. But I do think we ought to be able to agree that, regardless of whether it's good for them, people will get inebriated. (So will some animals, for that matter.) It's going to happen. And one of the consequences of inebriation is a loss of the ability to make sound judgments.

Another is the loosening of inhibitions -- in fact, I don't think it's outrageous to say that's really pretty much WHY we drink (or take drugs or whatever) when we do. We want to lose a bit of the control we normally exert over ourselves, to give over to impulses our sober minds would talk us out of. To let our socialized civility drop a bit for a while, male or female. That is, I think, essentially the point. Of course, we're a lot better at doing that in ways that aren't likely to hurt us when we've only had a drink or two, rather than twelve.

To decry the straightforward depiction of inebriation and its common consequences, therefore, would be disingenuous and dishonest. Celebrating them overmuch would be equally wrong, I think, but from what I gather, "Observe and Report" depicts both Rogen's and Faris's characters as pretty crummy people, so I'm not sure I understand the need to generalize the scene into an endorsement of date rape. (I know, people laugh at the scene, but people laugh at things for all kinds of reasons, including being uncomfortable with what they're seeing or what it implies about them.)

The one thing I've seen that I agree deserves unqualified criticism is Rogen's public statements in interviews that Faris's character's line at the end of the scene "makes it all okay," which of course it doesn't. He deserves heat for saying that -- but that's not the same as saying the movie deserves heat for showing what it does. (Maybe it does, but again, I haven't seen it, so I'm not going to assert that.)

And finally, regarding the sub-headline on the article: Why is everyone so certain that the "controversial sex scene" wasn't MEANT to be disturbing? Again, from what I've heard, that seems to have been the point.

You may now commence hurling epithets once again.