Yesterday, Joanna Robinson of Vanity Fair published an article about the new cast for the upcoming season of "American Horror Story: Hotel." The article confirms, by way of showrunner Ryan Murphy, that "this season is going to focus more than ever on the men." Robinson goes on to speculate why this season will be such a dudefest and, while the idea that Murphy has signed on a hoard of nearly identical white guys so that Lily Rabe can systematically murder them thrills me to no end, I'm not psyched about season five's newest additions.

For starters, I seriously question the people (like Ms. Robinson, Linda Lowen, and Diane Gordon) who laud AHS for its "empowering" female characters. While many of the women of AHS have done empowering things, women disproportionately face outright violence and oppression throughout the series. In season two, "Asylum," I loved seeing Lily Rabe sing the vintage feminist anthem, "You Don't Own Me," to Jesus Christ himself, but it didn't undo all of that season's thematic misogyny. Since that entire season was undercut with the repeated brutalization of Sarah Paulson and Chloë Sevigny's characters, cool moments like the "You Don't Own Me" lip dub seemed like aberrations. Similarly, though the latest season, "Freak Show," included some powerful women, they were too often violently harmed by men (namely Finn Witrock's character, Dandy). AHS' third season, "Coven," is the only one that breaks this pattern a bit, since its main cast is almost entirely compromised of women. However, as the season's first episode includes a graphic gang rape scene and much of the show's token gore is directed at black characters, I'm not about to celebrate.

This latest development in casting, coupled with the show's representational past, proves just how easy it is to be a white guy on TV, both in front of and behind the camera. In front of the camera, AHS' white male characters become cheap facsimiles of social reality. Behind it, they're played by (nearly identical) rich, well-employed white men.

While AHS' white male characters are frequently written off as "insane" and left to their own violent devices, the show's female characters and characters of color are left to bear the brunt of that violence. The privilege of being written off as insane, steeped in ableism, is also one only afforded to white men, both fictional and real. AHS occasionally offers its marginalized viewers some catharsis by allowing women/people of color to harm the men or white people who have hurt them (see: Lana and Dr. Thredson of "Asylum," Marie Laveau and Marie Delphine of "Coven"), but this lip service to racism and misogyny is cheap in the wake of centuries of white, patriarchal oppression.

I realize, now, that when I first watched AHS in high school, I was not so terrified by the fantastical horror as I was by its grounding in reality. The real American horror story is not Tate Langdon, undead white high school boy; it's Tate Langdon, mass shooter. From Tate to Twisty, the show capitalizes on the violent potential of white men in order to inspire shock, not to critique the actual state of society.

Since men have all of the oppressive power in practically every season of AHS, the notion that it's finally time to "focus more than ever on the men" for season five is insulting, at best. Especially since all of the men look exactly the same. When Vanity Fair announced the news, Black Twitter was quick to sound off with apt witticisms, the crux of which were: we're tired of seeing rich white guys dominate the media. When (as reported by Buzzfeed) 50 percent of characters on TV are white and 57 percent are men, it's both boring and upsetting to see AHS regurgitate the same stagnant representation. I would point out Murphy's tendency to cast gay men (Matt Bomer, Zachary Quinto, Neil Patrick Harris, now Cheyenne Jackson, etc.) as a positive, if they weren't all white, cis, and usually employed to play violent, misogynistic heterosexuals.

Even if these actors were hired to be systematically offed by Lily Rabe, the point is, they've been hired. And who wants to bet that, unlike many of the murdered women in AHS' past, these victims will get some kind of backstory? Personally, I'm rooting for a "Coven" reboot with better writing.