…yep, everybody’s got an opinion about the feminism or lack thereof of the facial cum shot. 346 comments since noon today, for reals. I’m just sayin’, you don’t see this kinda action on a blog post about tort reform, for instance.
Why Am I Not Surprised
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009Whackjobs
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009
About 12 people were carrying guns, including at least one semi-automatic assault rifle, outside a building where President Obama was speaking today.
CNN’s Ed Henry reported seeing a second man with an assault rifle, but that has not been confirmed.
These reports come less than a week after two people brought guns to a presidential event in Portsmouth, N.H.
Another man in Portsmouth was spotted carrying a gun in a leg holster outside the school. The unconcealed weapon was legal under New Hampshire law and he was not arrested. Later, when asked why he brought the gun, he replied, “That’s not even a relevant question. The question is, why don’t people bear arms these days?”
“These days..?” What days, exactly, were those in which people routinely walked around town with a gun (or two) hanging out of their trous? Um, yeah, if you guessed that for at least the past 100 years that would be never, you are correct. As a matter of fact, the last time this was a phenomenon that could be routinely seen anywhere in the United States was in the late 1800s in the western territories, and even then, it wasn’t your standard everyday citizen who carted an arsenal along with him as part of his daily routine–it was, well, the criminals. Ie, those who intended to terrify the standard everyday citizens into doing what they wanted them to do, which generally consisted of activities that were directly in opposition to those standard, everyday citizens’ best interests.
Pathetic. Lame. And yes, scary, because there’s nothing scarier than a deadly weapon in the hands of a total flaming moron, I admit. It’s bad enough that those types are allowed to operate motor vehicles, frankly. However, scary is not the same as intimidating–intimidation only comes into play if the persons generating the scary are not simultaneously inspiring a generous helping of contempt in the bosoms of their targets. As the law enforcement personnel present on the scenes consistently say: “If we need to intervene, we will intervene at that time.” (The Y-A-W-N! accompanying those statements is unspoken, but pretty damn hard to miss.)
Oh, well. These types are prime candidates for acquiring themselves Darwin Awards at a much higher rate than the rest of the population; I think we can just sit around and wait for natural selection to take its course. And hopefully they won’t accidentally blow off anyone else’s foot before inevitability catches up with them.
More complaining about Watchmen!
Wednesday, March 11th, 2009I went and saw Watchmen the night before last. It was OK. I will give them credit for this much up front: it did not feel like a near-three-hour movie. It was not physically painful in the way, say, Titanic was. So, kudos on that, at least.
And I won’t get more into the Antigone/Marcotte topics, other than to give my two cents here rather then have my shining wisdom buried in long threads, which I have not read to their completion so if I ignore something you commented on, you know, forgive me.
And I will spoil the living fuck out of this thing, because my main gripe is with the ending. For your convenience, after my list of non-spoiling complaints, I provide a cut.
1) Dear Zack Snyder: Could you put more schlong in your movies? There’s really no such thing as too gratuitous.
I don’t know how to feel about the films of Snyder’s that I have seen. On the one hand, it’s nice to see male bodies treated like we’re used to seeing female bodies treated. I saw Watchmen with two guys, one who had seen 300 and one who hadn’t, and the one who had said “Well, you kind of feel bad about yourself after watching all those perfect-looking men run around basically naked the whole movie.” “Welcome to the world of women,” I said. Because it’s true. And I generally like his sex scenes, because he directs some of the only sex scenes I’ve seen in a movie theatre that even come close to looking like people actually having sex. Good sex, not romantic comedy sex, but actual sex where both parties get to enjoy themselves. Sure, the people having sex are generally far more attractive than people are in real life, but I’m ok with that because if I ever want to see normal people having sex, well, I have the internet. For movie ticket prices, give me sexy. But not too sexy, because I have to believe it, ya’ know.
On the other hand, sometimes it’s ok for sexy things to hit the cutting room floor. Watching a Zack Snyder movies always leaves me with a creepy feeling that I know too much about Zack Snyder’s fantasy life. And Dr Manhattan’s giant blue god-dick was creepy in its inert ginormousness, like a stuffed blue gym sock taped to his nether regions. I mean, if you’re going to put cock out there where everyone can see it, make it move a little so it doesn’t seem like it’s just kind of floating in the air in front of Dr Manhattan, untroubled and unconnected to the motion of his body.
2) A little updating might not have killed the story line. When the movie first ended, I was quite critical, until my roommate, who had read the comic, explained to me that it was written in 1985, and exactly how closely they had kept to the source material. Knowing that made it a little better. But what seemed gut-wrenchingly scary to people in 1985 (namely, the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction and the fact that there was now enough firepower on the planet to vaporize everyone and everything multiple times) is background noise to people my age and younger, and I am way closer to 30 than I’d like to admit. For us, it’s always been that way, and so the sense of urgency and fright the beginning of the movie was trying to convey seems almost as quaint as those 1950′s videos of children being trained to hide under their desks in the event of nuclear explosion. Oh! For those innocent times when only two superpowers had access to nukes, which were large and obvious and prohibitively expensive! Before the internet, there were no instructions to make your own nuclear bomb on the internet.
I’m old enough to remember the falling of the Berlin wall and the end of the cold war, and while I knew it was a big deal, I remember not being quite clear as to why. The fear of the Soviets and the complexities of the cold war did not make it down to elementary school children in a clear and convincing matter, which is probably part of the reason people who would never joke about the Nazis find Soviet kitsch to be hilarious. By the time we were old enough to understand, it was over, and it was recent enough in history to always be cut short by the end of the year – it was never treated with the same depth or repetition as say, the Civil War or WWII.
The result was I found a lot of that movie to be hokey until I really sat and thought about it. And I’m a thinking, reading person who loves Russian novels and has read quite a bit about Soviet history in the last year or two. Hell, I just returned a library book about fucking chess’ role in the Cold War, OK? I’m saying, I’ve done my independent study on this topic. If the point was lost on me until I had some context for when and why the story was written, imagine how little of it is getting to your average 18-35 year old movie goer? Yeah, that’s right. Your point just got lost in well-choreographed gore and gratuitous blue wang.
3) Could you have made Silk Spectre II look less like Xena? The whole time she was kicking ass I kept on thinking of that Simpson’s episode: “I didn’t know Xena could fly!” “I keep telling you, I’m Lucy Lawless!” She can keep the cute little wiggle dresses though. Those were awesome.
And finally, spoiler, and probably the only place Antigone might agree with me.
(more…)
Finally! I’m so excited that I get to weigh in too
Monday, March 2nd, 2009
My heroine when I was aged 7 or 8 (far left). Other than the long hair, it is distressingly difficult to tell her apart from her two penis-bearing companions. I’m really amazed that Vox approved of this.
Amanda at Pandagon writes fairly often about the new Battlestar Galactica TV series. I don’t really read those posts beyond the occasional skim, primarily because I don’t watch the show and therefore the in-depth angst and debating about character motives, plot lines, etc. end up being pretty meaningless to me.
As it turns out, though, I should’ve been commenting on ‘em all, all along! This dude, who I have vague memories of reading about a few years ago and coming away with the impression that he has bad hair that he’s really proud of (and my memories are so vague, I may even be confusing him with someone else, but that would mean that I have no memory of him at all–so let’s hope, for his sake, he’s at least the bad-hair guy)…but as I was saying–
“Vox” (that is his name, right? Like, that’s such a classic Battlestar Galactica name, too!) begins his article by stating the following:
Starbuck goes off on the new “Battlestar Galactica” in a 2004 essay that looks increasingly on target as the current series fades away.
“Starbuck?” By this does he mean “Dirk Benedict, the actor who played the character “Starbuck” in the original series..?” This strikes me as an odd way to refer to a person–like stating that “Conan” gave a speech about the state of California’s budget last week. Then again, I’m not sure that Dirk Benedict has actually done anything of note since his role in the original Battlestar Galactica series, while Arnold Schwarzenegger has, so maybe that’s not the best comparison I could make. But anyway, I’m going to have to fly with the assumption that we are talking about Dirk Benedict, as it’s never cleared up one way or the other during the course of the article.
The embedded paragraphs, presumably from “Starbuck,” are pretty lame. Whatever “Starbuck’s” acting qualifications were or are, a future as a professional writer does not seem to be in the stars for him. For instance, slamming the current remake because it doesn’t conform to the old-school moral principles embodied by, he holds up as examples, Margaret Thatcher and Katharine Hepburn–and the flaw here, he states, is because the current remake is clearly female-driven. Which makes me wonder what men he thinks were in control of the programming of the Margaret Thatcher and Katharine Hepburn cylons that rendered them “male-driven”…or really, if anything resembling “thought” entered into the writing of those paragraphs at all. I would agree for sure that “emotion” did, though, especially this part:
The male characters, from Adama on down, are confused, weak and wracked with indecision, while the female characters are decisive, bold, angry as hell, puffing cigars (gasp!) and not about to take it any more….
As I recall, the only character on the original series who puffed a cigar was…oops, you guessed it…”Starbuck.” Hell hath no fury like an aging B-grade actor’s signature prop scorned! I admit I did feel a pang for him when I read that “cigar” line, though. Poor guy!
But back to my original theme–why I never comment over at Pandagon on the Battlestar Galactica threads, nor have I written anything at all anywhere on the subject–because, as I said, I don’t watch the show. HOWEVER–! Vox has taught me that that is not a requirement to parse the thing down to its bones–these are the only requirements you need!
1. Quite liked the cheesy original show
2. Watched about three minutes of the “re-imagined” version
Well, hell, me too! On both counts! So let’s see what the Voxster has to say:
In that three minutes, the blonde Cylon chick murdered an infant in its stroller, then had sex with someone as her metal backbone glowed red.
You know, my three minutes of viewing time ended up being a sequence where a bunch of people were standing around talking at each other in a vaguely spaceship-y, futuristic setting. I also failed to bird-dog Janet Jackson’s exposed nipple during my viewing of Superbowl XXXVIII. I wonder how it is that I never tune in in time to catch the interesting, anti-family-values shit, like evar. Is it all a massive coincidence of timing, or is it perhaps more likely that I don’t run around desperately searching for the most sensationalist viewing bytes in any given programming to enable my powerful need to be self-righteously offended? Hard to say.
But really, it’s all about how the bitchez suck and if you really start to analyze it, how they don’t even qualify as real people. Really! The Voxster:
Whatever modicum of vague interest remained after that was destroyed when I heard that Starbuck had been given a sex change.
It would have been interesting if Dirk Benedict’s character had undergone a sex-change operation and started demanding that his fellow Galactites refer to him as “Starbuckina!” But sadly, no–what Vox means is, the character of “Starbuck” is a female character, which is really about the worst thing you can do to a character–change it from a male to a female. Why is that such a henious and hideous offense, though, you may ask..? Does the part involve the character being a sperm donor or writing his name in the snow without using his hands..?
Nah. But Vox doesn’t really say why it’s so offensive. He makes a few rather vague allusions to “realism,” though he fails to pinpoint exactly why a character being female instead of male is not realistic. (I feel “real,” and I’m, like, a chick–am I delusional? Anything’s possible, I suppose!) Maybe his lack of clarity was brought home to him in his comments thread, because he provided an update to the original article where he dragged a comment up from the muck to use as a clarification of the whole realism aspect:
Watching Kara Thrace knock out guys in the boxing ring and stand toe-to-toe with men twice her size, I realized its nothing but PC schlock.
I can’t really speak to any actual scene in the new Battlestar Galactica that the commenter above is referencing–I can’t say if it looks “realistic” or not. However, I’m trying to imagine it looking less realistic than, say, Sylvester Stallone kicking Dolph Lundgren’s ass in Rocky IV or Ralph Macchio becoming such a master of martial arts after a few months of washing Mr. Miyagi’s car that he can kick the ass of any number of dudes twice his size and with decades more unarmed combat training–aren’t cinematic fight scenes frequently exercises in suspension of disbelief? Or does the presence of Teh Penises on all of the actors sufficient to suspend ALL disbelief no matter how unrealistic the pugilistic comparison..? Teh Penis! because men use that when they engage in hand-to-hand combat…!
Yes, it’s gotten silly. And in case you didn’t think that has been clearly enough underlined, Vox underlines that his own self:
You know, given that a woman has never been known to knock out a man in several thousand years of pugilistic combat,
No woman has ever knocked a man out! Oh, that NEVER EVER HAPP–
Gosh, that took about three seconds of searching YouTube.
a dead giveaway that “she” was a robot
Ha ha, yeah! I think I’m done here.
Happy Halloween! P.S. No Fatties.
Sunday, October 5th, 2008It’s the Halloween season again, and I for one am thrilled. Corn mazes, haunted houses, Halloween parties and guys who think they’re funny giving me an easy intro back into blogging. That’s right, it’s the return of perennial Slut-O-Ween opinion pieces.
Over the past week or so, I’ve done a lot of Halloween shopping. Bob, you gigantic nerd, you’re thinking. What are you doing shopping for Halloween stuff in September? You truly are a titan of thunderous stupidity.
Yes, “titan of thunderous stupidity.” That’s where we start. Get ready for a heartbreaking work of staggeringly hilarious slut-shaming genius. Oh, and subtlety. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but Bob’s impressive vocabulary and concern for his precocious step-daughter don’t do a great job of masking his real All-Saint’s-Day-Eve bitch. Can you guess what he’s really saying by the end of this post? Try it!
But we also noticed something else that we found a little annoying. Halloween costumes, it seems, have fallen into two general buckets. First, there are the costumes for men and boys. Second – and this is the far larger of the two buckets, from what I’ve seen – there are the costumes for hookers.
Don’t worry about it too much, Bob. For last year on my campus, boys were stripping down and slutting up for Halloween in record numbers. The end of October in Ohio isn’t great for slutty costumes, so it was a bit nipply in the streets for all genders, if you get my drift.
Shopping for Halloween costumes these days is a lot like hanging out at Dr. John’s, but with less personal lubricant. Everywhere you look, there’s a Naughty Nurse or a Slinky Vampire or a Just Trying To Pay For College Police Officer. It’s crazy.
Can I ask you something? What is the deal with Halloween costumes? /Seinfeld, -10 points for your shitty segues.
Still, though, we were surprised at the fact that this was even an issue we had to deal with at all. Since when did Halloween turn into Dracula-Meets-Caligula? Listen, don’t get me wrong. I’m a guy. As a guy, I’m a huge fan of 22-year-old girls showing up at Halloween parties dressed like they’re going to spend the evening giving lap dances. I’m a little bit upset that this trend arrived on college campuses well after I graduated, but you know, I just need to let that go.
Dracula-meets-Caligula? I’m going to assume that Dracula represents traditional Halloween and Caligula represents slutdom. There are several reasons why this is not a great analogy. First off, it’s well known to any vampire fan that the vampires represent forbidden lust, and that a proper vampire novel should be indistinguishable from erotica. Caligula is not a great example of wanton slutness, despite his sexual perversity, because he was better known for being a tyrant, and his sexual antics were way freakier than just showing too much leg once a year, you know, because he was insane. Also, Cali was a guy and we’re slut shaming women here. But, not all women. Just the fat ones.
The thing about this whole trend toward Hookerween is that, well, this isn’t a college town. There are plenty of women in this town who can pull off a I’m Sorry Did I Drop My Pencil Pirate costume and really rock it. God love ‘em; they make the world go round. But, I’ve been to the mall. I’ve been to Six Flags. I’ve eaten at Old Country Buffet. This town needs somewhat more modest Halloween costumes, and it needs lots of them. Heck, not just this town. Most towns.
Bwaa haa haa! Get it? Fat women in tight clothes make his penis limp! Oh, god, it’s hilarious. This guy is such a great writer, and it’s easy to see why his blurb at the end of the column namechecks both Amazon and Facebook.
The end of the column is only noteable for the shout-out about how attractive his wife is (“Don’t get mad, honey, when I said fat old women can’t hold a candle to hot ass 22 year olds, of course I make an exception for you”), and of course craven groveling to the spouse at the end of a lame column where you use her daughter as an excuse to tell women which ones you think should be skanking it up is the hallmark of a ballsy, excellent humor writer who will certainly be very successful someday.
Condoms: Like my long-lost best friend. Or my long-lost friend that was only my friend because she was friends with my best friend, you know, the one who told me my senior prom dress looked like a lampshade.
Monday, August 18th, 2008I’ve gotten to take a long sabbatical from these guys, but the endless round of business trips has now claimed yet another casualty in my life; my hormonal contraception. Impressively, in spite of being away from home on short notice on a regular basis for days at a time for more than a year now, I hadn’t yet managed to forget to pack my pills…til about two weeks ago. Sadly, a three-day hiatus is enough to render the reliability of said hormonal contraceptive dicey at best, so I dumped the rest of the month down the toilet upon my return home and informed the significant other that we were going to get to relive the earliest days of our romance til I could restart a new pack next month.
We’ve had a few adventures since then–like him discovering that by far the best place to buy condoms is the grocery store, where they are openly and innocuously stashed next to the disposable razors in the toiletries aisle; drugstores lock ‘em up next to the “Nicorette” at the prescription counter and glare suspiciously even at a man who is clearly well beyond the age of consent who expresses an interest in purchasing some. He also neglected to read the varietal descriptors on the box and, for anyone out there who is curious, “Climax Control!” condoms do indeed work, to the point where the poor sucker who innocently put the thing on may never achieve one. (I’m still trying to figure out who thought that the icy numbness which results after inserting your penis into a condom filled with lidocaine-spiked lubricant was some kind of brilliant sexual invention, and if anybody ever buys these twice.)
Oh, the joys of condoms! And apparently I’m not the only one who wishes they were anywhere near as conducive to fun or even efficient sex as they are to pregnancy- and disease-free sex. There’s a guy out there who has spent a lot of his adult life working on just that–Jan Vinzenz Krause, a German sex-ed instructor. Actually, he sounds like a very cool and useful guy–
As a teenager, Krause, now 30, had trouble finding the right size condom, which set him on a quest to aid other similarly befuddled young men. In 2001 he developed an online condom adviser, which provides printable measuring tapes and instructions to help men determine which condom, out of all the brands available in Germany, will fit the best. According to Krause, more than 300,000 people have used the free service.
This really is a problem–I have had in the past both a boyfriend who could barely keep the condom on, obviously not a reassuring situation, and another who lost his erection every time he put one on because they were so tight they literally cut off the blood flow to his penis. So among other things, this guy has invented spray-on condoms, which I think I actually did read about in the fairly recent past:
The prototype, which began testing last year, consists of a hard plastic tube with nozzles that spray liquid latex from all directions, much like the water jets in the tunnel of a car wash. According to Krause, there are numerous advantages to his spray-on condom. “The condom fits 100% perfectly, so the safety is much higher than a standard condom’s, and it feels more natural.”
Unfortunately, there are still a few bugs in the system. I’m not too worried about the first few bugs mentioned–
The men who tested the spray-on condom had a few hesitations, Krause says. Some were “a little bit afraid to use the tube” and would only try it on their fingers. Others worried that the mechanism, which hisses as it sprays, might ruin the mood.
Dingalings with this level of “techno-fear” probably have a multitude of other issues that dwarf this one and possibly don’t even use condoms at present due to the level of technical difficulty and intimidation presented by the packaging and unrolling phases of the operation so we can discount them, and unless you or your partner has some kind of snake phobia, I really doubt that a brief hissing sound is going to make anybody incapable of functioning. However, the next bug is a little more significant–
But the most serious problem with the design — which is what has kept the product off the market thus far — is that the latex takes too long to dry. Liquid latex currently takes two to three minutes to vulcanize, making it impractical. “For people to buy it,” Krause says, “it needs to be ready in five to 10 seconds.”
Well yeah. Three minutes is a long time, especially if you can’t touch anything to help it maintain its, er, turgid state and have to be super-careful not to move around and accidentally bump into or brush off the drying latex, and of course the are-we-there-yet?-are-we-there-yet?-how-bout-now?-well-how-bout-now? mindset is a mood-killer even when all you’re doing is driving to Grandma’s. So hopefully some genius chemists out there will figure out the secret of fast-drying latex soon. Of course by that time I’ll be back on the pill…
Cheating cheaters who cheat.
Monday, August 11th, 2008I didn’t have any desire to write about the Edwards thing, but, I suppose, this isn’t just about what I want.
In that post, Lisa takes issue with Rielle Hunter’s sister trying to “defend her honor” against a flurry of vicious attacks.
Lisa does not come to her rescue,
Excuse me. What honor? This woman had a blatant affair with a married man, whom she obviously knew was married, for at least a year. She’s a “good and honest” person? What on earth is your definition of good or honest?
Which is, I think, a rather severe character judgment to make when you know exactly one thing about a woman, and it’s presumably the worst thing she’s ever done.
The worst person on the planet
Sunday, July 20th, 2008We have a contender.
Meet Dmitri. He’s a pick-up artist, which in itself gives him about 50 million douchebag points. He met a woman named Olga, who talked to him for a few minutes, gave him her card, and said, “Call me.”
So he did. She wasn’t home, and he left the second-douchiest phone message in history. Olga seems to be a sensible woman who, in realizing her mistake, did the sensible thing and just didn’t call him back. So a few days later, he fired back with the douchiest phone message in history.
Have a listen. He’s from Toronto, and the comments from the good folks at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore in that article are just wonderful.
Hat tip: Rantipole6
On Foreskins, From A Person Who Does Not Now And Indeed Never Has Had One
Monday, May 26th, 2008It makes me wary of espousing any opinion on the subject that appears to be laying down the law! in any way, shape or form. I imagine that some men feel the same way about espousing an opinion about the morality and/or legality of abortion, especially basing any such opinion on the way an abortion would personally impact the life of someone who was having one–
“It is self-evident that a mother who comes to regret her choice to abort must struggle with grief more anguished and sorrow more profound, when she learns, only after the event, what she once did not know: that she allowed a doctor to pierce the skull and vacuum the fast developing brain of her unborn child, a child assuming the human form.”
–Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion on the Supreme Court’s 2007 ruling in Gonzales v. Carhart, upholding the federal partial-birth abortion ban
Hey, I did say SOME men!
But anyway…
Figure Out What This Guy’s Standard for Real Masculinity in Movie Actors Actually Is and I’ll Give You $5
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008I’ve read the article twice now and it appears to be a mishmash of confusion and bitter longing for he knows not what, except that it has something to do with erect penises. Help me out here..!
Don’t feel like you gotta be subtle, man, just tell us how you really feel.
The appearance of Jason Segel’s genitalia in the romcom Forgetting Sarah Marshall had American critics crowing about how the film has courageously broken one of the last taboos in mainstream cinema. Yet Segel’s flaccid member looks pathetic and laughable, especially because it’s attached to a body that is doughy and pallid. It can’t seriously be accused of being capable of anything, let alone of breaking a taboo. So obviously devoid of sexual intent, it symbolises not so much his character’s abject emotional condition at his girlfriend’s rejection of him, but the sorry state of masculinity in American movies today.
Goodness. What little we women know about what it is to be a man. So, do you guys have to shoot by the bathroom mirror in a flat-out sprint on your way to the shower every morning so you don’t catch a glimpse of your pitiful limp wanker? Is every time you hit the urinal like a knife through the heart, having to touch that sluggish tube of flesh? Do you ever scream YOU CAN’T BE SERIOUSLY ACCUSED OF BEING CAPABLE OF AAAAANYTHING!! at it in a paroxysm of shame and bitter mockery? Do you ever give it a few points for at least being the conduit of pee from your body?
No, you cannot touch my boobs
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
Hey, I wonder why more women aren’t into sci-fi and fantasy.
In LiveJournal Land, an interesting hoopla has erupted around The Open-Source Boob Project. The story starts at ConFusion in Ann Arbor, an annual sci-fi, fantasy, anime, gaming, comics, etc., convention. If you’ve ever shown up at a con wearing a set of boobs, you know that the gender and personal space dynamics can get a bit—well, touchy. It’s not that there aren’t female geeks (and if you don’t read her already, check out Karen Healey for awesome feminist analysis of comics and geekdom), but the majority of cons are still sausagefests and not always female-friendly.
This year’s ConFusion took the creepy vibe that women often feel at cons to a whole new level, however.
“This should be a better world,” a friend of mine said. “A more honest one, where sex isn’t shameful or degrading. I wish this was the kind of world where say, ‘Wow, I’d like to touch your breasts,’ and people would understand that it’s not a way of reducing you to a set of nipples and ignoring the rest of you, but rather a way of saying that I may not yet know your mind, but your body is beautiful.”
Obviously, the solution to our sexually repressed, sexually confused culture where women are objectified and reduced to a collection of body parts is to instigate a con-wide gropefest. Being geeks, the guys in charge of this project decided that the gropefest needed to be perfected and streamlined, so by Penguicon, they had two sets of buttons that could be issued to women, advertising the availability status of their ta-tas.
I can only assume from reading the post that an empowered, post-patriarchal utopia ensued.
Oh, it didn’t? I wonder why. Springheel_jack has an excellent smackdown:
The ferrett wonders why a man’s asking, out of the blue, if he can feel up a woman’s boobs shouldn’t be understood as “a way of saying that I may not yet know your mind, but your body is beautiful.” But this is simply to ask why he shouldn’t be able to continue to treat women as they have always been treated. Body first, sexual delectation to men first, as object first, “mind” – i.e. as a human subject – very firmly second. It’s simply to intensify the condition of patriarchal gender relations that already existed – or, to put it more simply, it’s a frustrated man’s fantasy of putting women back in their place.
And here we have the usual libertarian solution to everything – in the name of a false individuality, itself the product of an illegitimate reification and universalization of the social conditions of propertied white men – we have a retreat into the worst of the dark days of gender relations before feminism, offered as a so-called “advance” into a “more honest” and “freer” world. This is pernicious masculine ideology at its most pure and most insufferable. In the name of “empowering” women, we have…more of the same poison that women have been trying to free themselves of for all this time.
Go read the whole thing—I can’t add much to his analysis beyond to say that it’s spot-on. Obviously, this is not just about geekdom. Certain problems are more pronounced in geekdom because a lot of the standard modes of interpersonal relations and social niceties go out the window (and rightly so). But the patriarchy doesn’t. You can tell, because no one was proposing an open-source nutsack-grabbing project.
Look, I have a nice set of boobs. Really nice, according to some. Ever since I got them, I’ve been fending off assholes who think they have the right to grab them, whether I want it or not. I don’t need a button to advertise whether my boobs are touchable or not—if they are, gentlemen, you’ll know about it.
Update: Misia has a response. You should read it.
Buy our product. Otherwise, vaginas win.
Friday, April 18th, 2008You stupid weak baby. You pussy-whipped prissy-pants cooter-licking nancy boy.
You probably think this is about the spark plug, don’t you? And in some ways, it is. The spark plug is sort of like the cock of your car. Scratch that — it’s the cock of your SUV, truck, or (in certain select instances) your sports car. If you drive something that can be classified primarily as a “car,” then you’re pretty much driving around in a vag. You’re advertising to everybody that your ball-busting shrill-shrieking attention-demanding whore of a ball and chain calls the shots. Because they’re the only people with any interest in “cars.” Anyway, the sparkplug is your vehicle’s penis. It looks like a penis, especially when you light it just so for an ad. And you can’t get anything done until it shoots its load, which is pretty much the spark of life for your entire engine. So the least you can do to show your nagging bitch who’s boss is caress the cock of your ride. It’s not gay, it’s just man time. I mean Man Time.
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