This post is part of the ongoing Alphabet Series. Listen along to my recording on YouTube and/or read the article below ♥♀

Greetings one and all. Did I not promise a post sometime in the month following the last one? Well, I’m delivering. Kaboom! To be honest, I am writing this to take a break from the massive amount of work that I’m currently immersed in. Writing is relaxing to me. Teaching is not. So, I’ll do a little segue here before launching into my main topic.

After years of teaching university in the poorly paid, Chinese public education system, and after a pandemic-inspired, lengthy, unemployed period that was awesome for my physical health, but not great for the soul or pocketbook, I managed to land a job in a high school back on the Asian continent. Now, I haven’t taught high school in over a decade and there is definitely a reason for that… But the world has been closed, jobs have been nearly impossible to get, and Canada is one hell of an expensive place to live when you are a deliberately single female – and especially one without children and the myriad financial benefits that go with that. So, after hundreds of applications and then being dicked around by a few potential employers and then again by several abusive online companies looking to pay experienced, educated teachers $5.00 an hour, I felt lucky to land a job at all. I felt lucky even though anything below university level is usually a nightmare simply because outside the Western world, teachers actually have to work harder than the average worker, and certainly harder than any Western teacher. I’m talking 6 teaching days a week, including evenings and Saturdays, and then all the prep and homework/test grading that always ends up leaking over into most of your Sunday.

But here I am. It’s not all bad. I think the hardest part is being a seriously introverted (although feigning extroversion) person forced to be ‘on’ and interacting with people for hours and hours and hours at a time. A true introvert may actually like people, but their energy comes from non-social sources and they can be seriously depleted and weakened with prolonged interaction. Introverts forced to deal with extroverts may come away feeling ‘vampired’. Energy-sucked. (I made the mistake of spending 8 hours with a major extrovert who was a straight breeder, male apologist, and BLM-supporter on top of that, this past spring. I had to spend much of the next day in bed recovering, I felt so horrible.) So let’s just say, that after a week-and-a-half of classes and being forced to spend my non-classroom hours in a teachers’ room used by 60 teachers, but that only seats 25, I’m feeling like absolute shit, energy-wise. But it’s a job, right…?

Back to the topic at hand, though. The next post in the Alphabet Series. Interestingly, and not planned in any way, I could have used my newly adopted region as my K-word, but I don’t know enough about the place yet to write anything truly interesting. Maybe in the future if I ever get time out of what feels like a new cage…

But for today, K is for (Mr.) Kaplan.

I considered a few uninspiring options before settling on the great topic of Mr. Kaplan. Who could forget ‘Karen’ – a racist, sexist, ageist slur and silencing term used against middle-aged white women who dare speak out about anything, including their own rapes. I’ll refer you to RadFemSpiraling who does this topic justice in a way that I haven’t and who, in my opinion, is the de facto leader of the unofficial celebratory Karen Klub. Rock on. K is also obviously for kill, something men like to do to women often after raping them or just because they are throwing a mantrum and can’t handle their own blatant obsolescence. K is for kink, now mainstream rather than an ‘alternative lifestyle’, and used as a weapon to shame women into consenting to sexual abuse, torture, and rape by men so as not to appear boring, prudish or a goddamn lesbian of the non-man-fucking variety (!) K is for kindness, one of the new obnoxious, finger-wagging words used by the Cult of Positivity to shame women into accepting abuse by men and their bitches and into keeping their mouths shut to prevent their ‘toxic negativity’ (aka truth-telling) from spoiling the illusion that everything is hunky dory in the world. K is also for knowledge – the barring of the accumulation of which is a cornerstone of slavery – prevent education and slaves don’t realize they’re slaves. Finally, k is for kitchen, as in “get back in the”.

But let’s get to Mr. Kaplan.

Many of you may be wondering who the hell this is, and may have noted that this is one of the rare times that I’ve written about a person using their name. Mr. Kaplan is, despite the honorific, a woman, and she’s entirely fictional. She, in and of herself, isn’t that important, and it doesn’t really matter whether you know who she is or where she comes from. It is what she represents that is important here. She’s a supporting character on a way-too-long-running American television show.

She’s fictional. She’s in her 60’s. She is neither especially masculine nor feminine, and is what society would call ‘plain’. And she is a lesbian. One of the few on television, and certainly one of the very, very few who is over the age of acceptable fuckability. In fact, there are so few older lesbians portrayed on television that there isn’t even a stereotype for what they should look like.

Mr. Kaplan, aka Kathryn ‘Kate’ Nemec, played by the spectacular Susan Blommaert, is the highlight of, and dare I say, the only reason to watch a series called The Blacklist. In a nutshell, James Spader (the lead actor) plays an international criminal who turns himself into the FBI to get close to a young and silly female agent for unknown reasons in exchange for helping to catch major international criminals. It’s not the most interesting of premises, and I feel like we’ve seen this theme before many times. Mr. Kaplan is the Spader character’s ‘cleaner’, and we get to know her gradually over the four seasons that she is allowed to exist, including how she came to adopt the nickname ‘Mr. Kaplan’ and how she came to be forced into the employ of the Spader character. In my opinion, if you feel you need to watch the show, you can stop when she is killed off; there wasn’t much to stick around for after that.

As you may have guessed, I don’t actually recommend The Blacklist. It is a misogynistic vanity production – James Spader is not only the lead character, but also one of the Executive Producers, which may explain why such a show managed to stick around for 10 excruciating seasons. I’ve read male commentary on the show and found it hilarious and typical how ‘versatile’ they think Spader is as an actor. In reality, he’s pretty 2-dimensional. Since his youth, he has continuously played weird and aggressive, often psychopathic, males with some sort of inexplicable sex appeal. Whatever looks he may have once had disappeared long ago, but he still embarrassingly tries – unsuccessfully, I might add – to pull it off in his older years. Even in one of his last major television roles as the narcissistic psychopathic CEO of Dunder Mifflin for a season of The Office, he was almost a carbon copy character of what he does on The Blacklist. It’s a role he does well, but it is only because he’s a bit of a one trick pony despite the undeserved kudos males give him. And it is actually rather easy and natural for males to play narcissists and psychopaths for obvious reasons, and I don’t credit male actors with much talent when they manage to pull off a convincing bad guy. Anyhow, The Blacklist exists to give the flagging Spader a platform to monologue endlessly, especially about unbelievable sexual exploits and to give cameo appearances to other ugly old male actors with waning careers. It also helps that the female lead is not only poorly written – a standard post-year-2000 stupid smart girl who gives an abusive male 1001 chances to stop abusing her – but she is also sadly played by a rather untalented actress, Megan Boone, who spends more time striking a pose than delivering convincing lines. But for men to shine as actors, they must surround themselves with greater mediocrity than their own and prevent the real talent from showing up. Boone makes Spader look good, relatively speaking.

To get back to Mr. Kaplan, she does have a major flaw, and I blame this on male and straight female writers. She has this bizarre devotion to other people’s children. Despite being medically trained with graduate degrees, ability in multiple languages, talent and intelligence, she devotes her life to being a nanny and subordinate of glorified housewives and tantalizing, slutty, bad girl-mommies who order her around and treat her like shit. I guess this is supposed to sit better with the ignorant, lesbian-hating, American viewing public. If you must have a lesbian character at all, and especially one who isn’t young or hot, then you absolutely must make her obsessed with children as the poor dear clearly laments not being born a straight breeder – a true woman.

But despite this flaw, Mr. Kaplan’s final season as a live character is worth watching as she finally grows a pair of ovaries and takes her revenge on the Spader character for his years of bullshit. But even that comes to an acceptable end in the eyes of the American public when the male-powers-that-be decide she has to be killed off for being too interesting and multi-dimensional. Seriously, she is infinitely more interesting than the Spader character, and we couldn’t have that now, could we…? Curiously, the creators of the show initially wanted Mr. Kaplan to be played by a man. But I guess men can’t play nannies… unless it is supposed to be a joke. And this character wasn’t created for comic relief. Nevertheless, I can’t even imagine Kaplan as a male now – they did such a surprisingly good job of casting Blommaert in the role. Really, she was the only really interesting thing about the series.

So I conclude with this: Will the portrayal of an existing and significant, but largely deliberately ignored  segment of the population open the door to more lesbian characters, especially of the non-stereotypical variety? Probably not – at least not in the way that gay males and even male trannies have been embraced by television writers. But perhaps slowly, over the next thousand years, if we still have television and haven’t completely destroyed the planet and our couch potato lives, we’ll have a few more interesting lesbian characters to follow.

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