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I can see the Cosmo headline now.
When I look at a photo of RP, I think, "What a handsome young man! I would hit that." Then he opens his mouth and it's gone. Is that why God invented ball gags?
Microsecond. I'll show myself out.
I couldn't really see what this movie is supposed to be about because the editor spent more time FADING than showing a single image for more than a microsection. EASE UP ON THE FADE BUTTON, EDITOR.
I'm with you, limesix. I really tried to like them when my friends pushed them on me, but I only got through the first one and one movie. It just kept making me wish I were reading Susan Cooper again as a kid. Those books were terrifying and awesome. Maybe it's because I teach college literature and, when I ask my English majors (ENGLISH MAJORS) who their favorite author is and they say Rowling, I get bored. I die of boredom every time. I am a ghost a thousand times over now. Because liking Rowling doesn't mean they're curious about gothic literature or mythic children's lit or even fucking fantasy novels; they just like Harry Potter. Maybe it's also because whenever I spot a sexy dude with a big fat book on the subway and I'm all wondering what his deal is (Pynchon? Wallace? Fielding? George Eliot?), maybe I could hit that, he'll turn a bit and I'll see it's fucking Harry Potter. Lady-boner-killer.
God, I want to give you a hug. I'm 31 and still working out a bitch of an anxiety disorder. It's really hard to explain to people who know me where it comes from, because the usual response is still this "toughen up! don't let it get to you!" stuff I heard when I was 8. It's not a rational response. And when people really like you immediately, and say wow you're really great, are you always waiting for them to tell you of course they're kidding? It doesn't matter how far away from that I get; I just lost trust in people right at the moment when I was figuring out what people are and do and how they treat each other. I don't know if it's any kind of advice, but I was 28 when I started saying to myself that the only thing that kept me from killing myself in 4th grade was the fantasy that when I was older, I'd be so much more free. So I owe that little miserable kid who I once was the gift of just fucking doing whatever I want.
That is, I don't put primary blame on bystanders, of course, but when all these people are asking how to get all this to stop, they seem to be talking exclusively about the bullies and the bullees, when the only thing I ever saw stop a bullying session was a neutral party expressing that it wasn't cool.
It would be great if schools and parents took the thing about solidarity seriously. I think that while there are going to be bullies, and there are always going to be weird kids, we should also be talking to the kids who are neither, and teaching them that siding with the weird kid is always the better thing to do. I didn't expect them to be my best friends or even snitch, but just one or two people saying "That's not cool" would have made a world of difference for me. With adults, there may be only a handful who openly tell racist/homophobic/misogynistic/transphobic/mental-illness jokes, but there are a lot more who find it easier to laugh perfunctorily along than to make it clear that they don't find it funny. It seems like no one's hurt if there's not a "victim" in the room, but it makes the joker feel like it's OK. Can we please come up with things that are funny other than the fact that some people get treated like shit (because that's not actually funny)?
Just wanted to second DSN here. I got made fun of a lot for being "some kinda lesbian" when I was a kid, and I did have girl-directed thoughts all that time. As an adult, I'm bi, and pretty generally queer, which I think people imagine means you can stay closeted easily. But everyone's always known, and people have always been shitty about it. The only people who aren't shitty about it are people I come out to. Their ammunition is your closetedness. If you're not ashamed of yourself, they don't have anything to use against you. This is the kind of advice I hated when I was a kid and people said that haters gonna hate and they can smell fear, but it's pretty true. If you act ashamed, they can do so much more damage. Small-town gay people are just as likely to find a tightly-knit, caring community as anyone, and it may even be more supportive than it would be in, say, SF or NYC, where no one gives a shit about one more gay kid. Find allies.
Brian, I did this too, and also feel horrible about it. Every now and then I check up on that guy (I made fun of his dirty hair to someone--luckily, everyone still hated me too much to make a meme of it), who left our school after one year and ended up becoming a cutting-edge physicist. His success doesn't absolve me, but it's good to know he's alive. Lord knows he had it hard enough without the second-biggest loser in school piling on.
Oh man, this made me cry. I was bullied for about five years in elementary school--beat up, pranked at school and home (usually some kind of joke on the theme that some boy or girl liked me when of course that person would rather die, etc.), made fun of almost constantly, at school, home, and church (especially church). It sucked. I tried to kill myself a bunch of times, and I was just a little kid--8 years old. Luckily, at 8, it's pretty hard to get the stuff you need to kill yourself. It Gets Better, yes, but it still had a rotten effect on my life. By high school, I found some good friends and became very social. As an old woman, I'm as socially successful as I could want to be, and no one guesses that I've ever been shy or sensitive. But every now and then, if some adult starts teasing me in that weird tone that kids have, like they're laughing at something on TV rather than a live human person, I totally revert to being 8 again, all sullen and weepy. I really hope visibility stuff like this helps these kids, and not just to find friends when they're all grown, but when they're kids, to feel like adults are people they can trust, who aren't just going to tell them to toughen up. Being a kid is so fucking hard I can't even think about it, and this habit of cringing and expecting the worst can last long after the bullying stops. Somebody please put a stop to my #seriousgumming.
And the stock market has a profound effect on what happens in "real" business transactions (as opposed to speculation), so in effect what seems to be a commentary on economics in effect becomes a cause of economic decision-making. So yeah, in a way, it's pointless to say one or the other is exclusively to blame, but I do think there is a dangerous tendency to point the finger at misogynist women for perpetuating messages that are a response to the murky territory of the experience of male misogyny. Most of these magazine articles, IME, are all about trying to give straight men even more of a voice about how women should behave--lots of interviews with individual dudes like "Steven P says, 'Maybe it's just me but I just don't like women who have slept around'" etc. And instead of the commentary responding with "Steven P. can suck a dick" it says, "Let's take this really seriously and start worrying about it." Ugh. But, yeah, give a young girl other things to read when she is a child and when she is old she will think Cosmo and Glamour are written by aliens from outer space.
Most of that shit totally came true. I read it in 1997 and the following fourteen years have been like deja vu.
True. Also: I <3 Francesca Fiore.
I like to think of women's magazines as the stock market of misogyny. So there's all this real misogyny out there, dudes behaving all shady and blowing off girls who aren't ashamed of sex, or whatever, but it's not the only thing happening. Then women's mags make bets about what's going to be the next hot misogynistic trend to capitalize on it, and everybody reacts to the magazine as if it's the problem, rather than the weird secret unspoken shit that's actually happening. What do I know, though? I stopped counting at 30.
I'd say this is sort of the equivalent of when you take a super-ridiculously hot and awesome sexy actress with charisma to burn and you put glasses on her, give her a bun, and make her trip over something to show she's totally unattractive. If they actually cast a real nerd girl or a loser stoner guy in one of these movies, it would be unwatchably awkward.
Word up. Give ME a print-out of Oyster smiling.
I am never ready to see Carrot Top. I made a little out-loud noise of shock as I scrolled down, despite having read the title.
I totally agree with lilbobbytables above, of course, that it's stupid that the majority thinks it can "give" the oppressed minority a voice. But I'm wary of dismissing discussions like this that are about the history of racism in the US because, while we love to talk about the Holocaust and Apartheid and all that, Americans pretty much hate thinking about the shit that has gone on here, and fairly recently, that involved, if not us, our parents at least. Like, my students cannot believe that Loving v. Virginia was as recent as 1967, but ask them how their parents would act if they brought home a partner of the "wrong" race and it's a whole other story. I guess I'll be more satisfied when movies can talk about shit happening now as opposed to far-off Mad-Men-land, but eh.
My mom reports having read this book, and it made her think about a lot of things that she didn't think directly at when she was a child and her (white) family on the Gulf had a (black) maid. First of all, it wasn't just rich white ladies with impossibly huge homes who had maids. Where she grew up, even her family of eight people, who lived in a tiny house in a shitty neighborhood, had a maid. Second, most women--especially black women--didn't drive, so someone had to take the maid home at the end of the day. But a white man couldn't be seen in the car with a black woman in the front seat, so her dad would take one of the kids along to sit in the front and force the maid to sit in the back. Etc. I don't think that reading the book or seeing the movie would say much that young people don't know. I teach about the history of race and labor in college, and my students seem mostly able to think about it. But I guarantee you that in the deep south there are plenty of white folks who work very very hard at never thinking about this shit ever. (See "segregated prom"?)
Man, when I lived in Park Slope, I said, no way am I ever going to Williamsburg ever what a pain. Then I moved back to Williamsburg and dude Gowanus is sooo farrr. (It's not that far.)
Hip women of color do white men's laundry ironically.
I'm not going to say that boob jobs are ever going to be fully out of fashion, but I earnestly hope that one day someone figures out how to do it without gluing two half-spheres all cockeyed to a girl's chest.
I started thinking about how when people sing on Rock Band, they rarely clap the claps; they tap the mic. That is, they aren't super-immersed into the fantasy that they're really doing the thing, but just want to score the most possible points. Then I imagined someone trying to rack up a really high score on this game by figuring out you can just tap the controller as it hangs in space, or slap it on your own thigh instead of spanking a real person, and that made me even sadder. Also: being spanked with a hard plastic thing against your coccyx does not seem sexy to me. Ow.
"I thought making sure that this character was real was really important.” -- Ashton Kutcher http://www.dnaindia.com/entertainment/report_ashton-kutcher-quit-gym-to-make-no-strings-attached-character-seem-more-real_1511537
I noticed that poster and thought of all kinds of things I wanted to write on it, but never would because I am a city employee and already have to report my previous citations every time I do anything and am a magnet for police even at my advanced age, and took note of the addition, which relieved some of the pressure of how much I hate it. Sometimes I wonder if the entire popular culture industry got established as an organization to put an end to casual sex by advertising it constantly but then showing everyone falling in stupid love at the end.
Um, Gabe and I have the same subway station. WEIRD.
Totally. I am definitely going to explore artificial otter insemination so I can become a mother in the only way I know I know how.
After emo got co-opted by 13-year-olds somewhere around the year 2000, it's become increasingly uncool for adults to have negative feelings. I watch cute videos to anaesthetize myself so I don't accidentally express anything unpleasant ever.
My Chinese is super-basic, but "Wo Zhi Nu Ren Xin" definitely does not mean "What Women Want." Google Translate suggests it means "In My Line of Angry People," but I'm guessing something is lost there. Any Chinese speakers here?
Devoted fan. (The avatar is from the epic Aldo Kelrast plotline.)
I thought What Women Want was a 500-year-old misogynistic stereotype, but it turns out What Women Want is a 200-year-old misogynistic stereotype. #progress
This is what happens to me when I try to date ironically, too.
In my mind, I am pronouncing this like it's a Serbian surname. Yoostitch.
The Academy especially loves true stories about the most privileged people who have ever lived overcoming adversity, I think. I'm sure kings have anxiety disorders, too, but no, my heart wasn't really bleeding.
Hailee Steinfeld sort of has to win Best Supporting, since she had 35 times the amount of acting to do than anyone else in her category. I do hope she wins, but it would be better if they'd just let her be tried as an adult.
Can I ask why everyone's so all about The King's Speech? I thought it was a fine movie, nice to watch, reasonably entertaining, but about as innovative as adding a little curry powder to chicken salad. No h8, just wondering if someone can explain it to me.