Further further thoughts about "The Diplomat."

You create a character like Kate who is smarter than her husband and just as ambitious and capable of handling herself in the world, and then you send her out to the audience with a bear trap clamped to her leg. That is her husband. And instead of removing the bear trap from her leg, she considers limping around with it on for the rest of her life because the bear trap that is her husband works on her emotions. She can't imagine herself in the world without the bear trap, even when she tries, and she keeps clamping it back on every time she makes a run for it.

The show creates a woman like this because they want you to like her, and they are certain you won't like her if she leaves the bear trap in the woods to rust. They are certain you will only like a woman who suffers and feels known to herself because she stays hobbled. The writers feed this kind of character to the world and people say, that's just like reality. Yes, women are idiots and do that kind of thing to themselves. What are you gonna do. They're women. That's how women are.

This is the culture of marketing. You create a product that doesn't exist by insisting it does exist, and in time people believe it must exist because it has been marketed. Marketing produces the product that doesn't exist. That's what Kate is. She is marketed as real, and so people assume she must be real and people, and by people I mean women, look into themselves and recognize themselves in Kate because the marketing has been so successful they believe in the product, and the product they believe in is that female humans are by nature damaged and will prefer the bear trap to freedom. If women are fooled into thinking they do, it's because everything in the world conspires to make them think their nature is weak and small.