A few days ago, I wrote a blog post about Susan Boyle that provoked quite the response. I’m not going to complain about the series of outraged comments I received from Boyle fans, bizarrely personal as some of those comments were, because as someone who writes on a public website, I have intentionally opened myself up to the feedback of anyone with access to a computer. It would be unreasonable to expect to become a blogger without encountering some negative opinions of one’s ideas and writing style, just as it would be unreasonable to expect to become a popular singer without encountering negative opinions of one’s talents and image.

But as some of the comments were genuinely provocative, I’d like to discuss them further.

I was really hoping that as a culture we were just going to let this one go, but as I just read a series of blogs and gossip sites attacking someone for criticizing Susan Boyle’s album, I guess we’re not yet done with this particular sob story.

For the uninitiated (and extremely lucky), Susan Boyle is a singer who shot to instant fame when a YouTube clip of her audition for Britain’s Got Talent went viral last April. Though she ultimately finished the competition in second place, her debut album, I Dreamed a Dream, was released in November and immediately sold an obscene amount of copies, breaking all sorts of records and becoming 2009′s highest selling album in the world.

Why has this shy, middle-aged Scottish woman so captured our society’s attention? Basically, because she isn’t very pretty.

Men’s figure skating is pretty much inherently queer. It’s a bunch of guys competing to be the absolute best at twirling around on ice, while wearing spandex and sequins.

Physically impressive? Worthy of attention and praise? Definitely. The embodiment of normative heterosexual masculinity? Not so much.

But the world of athletics is notoriously uncomfortable with homosexuality and hints of femininity in men (and often in women), so commentators and many competitors do their best to put a butcher spin on the sport. Much like for gymnastics—figure skating’s summertime cousin in spandex—the narrative of men’s Olympic skating finals focuses as much as possible on masculinized values like technical difficulty and strength, rather than feminized values like grace and beauty. The important people in figure skating are terrified of their sport being seen as too pretty, too girly, and, frankly, too gay. This is why Johnny Weir is a problem.

Lost is a show that often gets praised for its cast’s diversity. Major characters have belonged to widely varying ethnic groups, age ranges, socioeconomic statuses, and nationalities — an attention-getting move in a television culture still hugely reliant on pretty white 20- and 30-somethings. While Lost‘s racial make-up is still problematic (for example, the only Middle Eastern character is an Iraqi torturer), it is fairly refreshing to see a show where a man in his late 50s is seen as a complex and still-developing character, where non-whites have more to do than act as sassy sidekicks.

So why, then, does Lost have such a problem with women?

The Super Bowl, with its bulky men hurling themselves at each other and its scantily clad cheerleaders bouncing on the sidelines, doesn’t seem to be in danger of garnering a reputation as sexually progressive. But as time goes on, it becomes more and more apparent that the sports and entertainment executives responsible for planning and marketing this huge cultural event are deathly afraid of even the smallest hint of sexuality-based controversy, as if the tiniest step away from safe, controllable heterosexuality could bring the biggest game of the year crashing down.

If you were conscious during 2004, you might recall that viewers of that year’s Super Bowl became briefly acquainted with Janet Jackson’s breast. The colossal controversy that ensued, based on the idea that there are few things as potentially scarring as a glimpse of the naked female body, was apparently enough to keep even today’s Super Bowl planners cowering in terror.

Since 2004, here are the acts who have performed at the Super Bowl halftime: Paul McCartney, The Rolling Stones, Prince, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, and The Who.  All male, all over 50, and all decades beyond the height of their musical relevance. Prince, the most sexually suspect of these middle-aged targeting acts, performed covers and less provocative songs like “Purple Rain.” His pants fully covered his backside.

Allowing a woman, a young man, or anyone whose music has the slightest chance of being sexually daring is presumably too much of a risk to take, despite the fact that in previous years, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, No Doubt, and TLC had all performed without causing international controversy. One overblown scandal concerning a female and a young sexual male (Justin Timberlake), and the Super Bowl is unwilling to try again.

Besides halftime, the major non-sports-related Super Bowl topic is the commercials, which people watch and analyze as if they were miniature tv shows. This year, CBS made the questionable decision to break its policy of not selling ad space to political groups by airing a commercial from the controversial conservative organization Focus on the Family. …

For film studio execs, the Holy Grail is the four-quadrant film.  Prospective audience members are divided into four groups (young men, young women, older men, older women), and every once in a while, a film like Avatar comes along to attract viewers from every demographic and therefore make obscene amounts of money.

But James Cameron films aside, it’s hard to make a movie that everyone in the world wants to see.  Because of this, there’s another piece of conventional film industry wisdom: if you want to make a blockbuster, aim for younger men.  The idea behind this is that young women are much more likely to tag along to whichever new action/superhero/explosion porn film their boyfriend or husband wants to see than young men are to sit through a movie specifically aimed at women.

If you look at the highest grossing films of the last decade, this seems to be true.  Superhero movies, like The Dark Knight and Spiderman 3, and other action franchises, like Transformers and Star Wars, are the ones setting the records.  And while there are certainly many women and girls who love these movies, comic book and action/adventure plots are the stuff of traditional masculine fantasies.  The really big movies are made for the boys.

The industry is surprised, then, when women and girls show off their purchasing power.  When Sex and the City debuted in 2008 and broke a few box office records of its own, critics were shocked, even though it was a very well-publicized film based on a hugely popular and culturally significant TV show.  The LA Times found the film’s $57 million opening “surprising.”  Entertainment Weekly called it “stunning.”  The New York Times labeled it “an unconventional hit” powered by “its legion of female fans.”  Apparently it could in no way have been predicted that large amounts of women would go to see a movie that was made for them.

But while Sex and the City set records for the highest grossing romantic comedy of …

At about 11:26 Sunday night, several of my friends suddenly became very, very angry.  As the culmination of the music industry’s year-long effort to make sure that Taylor Swift never runs out of shiny metal objects, the 2010 Grammys named the country crossover superstar’s Fearless the “Album of the Year.”  Her competition included the Dave Matthews Band, Black Eyed Peas, and the other two dominant women of pop music, Beyoncé and Lady Gaga.  The vast majority of the “how the **** did that tone-deaf hack win?” outrage came from Team Gaga, and understandably so.  While DMB, BEP, and Beyoncé are long-established and well-awarded artists, Gaga has managed to strut her way through several months as the biggest story in music without garnering any major awards.

Lady Gaga is by far a more interesting artist than Taylor Swift.  She’s developed an endearingly disturbing public persona, and her performances are almost exclusively ridiculous and awesome.  Swift, meanwhile, is a bland interview and an embarrassingly terrible live singer.  But in some ways, Swift’s Fearless and Gaga’s The Fame are pretty similar.  Both women have a frightening ability to churn out catchy pop hooks, and both use the same subject matter over and over.  Gaga sings over dance beats about partying, having sex, and being famous; Swift sings over dreamy guitars about dating, growing up, and learning important life lessons.  And there’s the real difference between the two: The Fame is a statement from a young, sexually comfortable woman, while Fearless tells the story of a child.

Taylor Swift is 20 years old.  Lady Gaga is 23.  And yet they seem to exist in entirely different worlds of female experience.  Gaga goes to clubs, meets attractive boys and girls, and then encounters the inevitable complications.  For all of her lace face mask and fake blood wearing ways, her music reflects the real sexual and romantic lives of many Americans her age.  But Swift, though an adult thriving in a high-pressure career, writes about love as if she were a fifteen-year-old.  Literally: the …