asshat: karl rove

So.
Yesterday, Karl Rove called Obama 'cooly arrogant:'

"Even if you never met him," Rove said, "You know this guy. He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by."

Clearly, if making snide comments was all that counted I guess that makes all of Gen X 'cooly arrogant.'
But I digress.

1. how many black people actually belong to a country club?
2. of those black people, how many would actually make snide comments about their fellow privileged country clubbers?
3. how many country clubs actually allow smoking?
4. since when does 'cooly arrogant' mean something bad when pop culture/literary/cinema tells us 'cooly arrogant' men are frakking hot?

A Few Cooly Arrogant Men We (ok, I) Have Loved:
Mr. Darcy

Captain Wentworth

Toby Stephens

Cary Grant

James Bond

Daniel Craig, James Bond

Pierce Brosnan, Thomas Crown

Steve McQueen

Rupert Everett

Omar Sharif

Peter O'Toole (when he was less cadaverous)

Jean Reno, Swept Away

Morpheus

George Clooney

Clive Owen

almost every Regency romance hero ever written

Batman

Magneto

Bruce Willis

Prospero

Severus Snape

Nick Charles

Mr. Tibbs

Han Solo

Spencer Tracy

Paul Henreid

Humphrey Bogart

Spock

Feel free to add your own.

In the meantime, the GOP needs to resolve their collective cognitive-Obama-dissonance if the best they can come up with is calling Obama a milk chocolate WASP.

Iron Man: my new boyfriend

oh. my. god.

i don't care if you've never heard of Iron Man, never read a comic book (what are you, a philistine?), never even knew comic books existed and don't give a crap who Stan Lee is. i don't care if your boyfriend owns all these weird dolls (oh, action figures) and they're taking over your apartment and all you want to do is pile them in the backyard and set them on fire.

this movie is teh bomb.

it's better than the X-Men movies (not that hard); better than Spiderman and his tired adolescent angst; and gives the recent Batman a serious run for its money, if not totally surpassing it with the quality of the script, acting and action. this movie made a man encased in titanium erotic. hello!

favorite bits:

1. Robert Downey, Jr. - how hot is he? how funny and witty and sad can he be? and when his eyes get all teary and he's regretting all his life decisions in a cave in Afghanistan? sigh.

2. The bromance - at last, masculine friendship that isn't totally about measuring the size of one's dick.

3. The pacing - hail to Jon Favreau for making a movie that actually captures the 'ohmygod what's going to happen now???' spirit of comic books. every beat in the story was struck blam blam blamblamBLAM!

4. The script - wow. dialogue that was actually character-driven and not merely 'cartoony.' it was sly, spry and wry. loved it.

5. Women I could like - ok, there's only one woman who really matters and Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) wasn't a screamer, a frail chick who needed to be rescued or a belligerent neurotic with issues. she was capable, supportive, knowing and decidedly not foolish. (the other woman in the movie just needed to be recast. the actress was awful and bland.)

6. Humor - at last! a comic book movie with a sense of humor! i'll chalk this up to Favreau and Downey's snarky sensibilities. yeah, the Christian Bale Batman has a certain hangman's noose humor about it, but it's so...heavy. blah. and the X-Men movies? pullease. dour, overbearing and way too earnest about its own allegory. give me the wink and the sharp quip delivered by a guy you can actually believe can carry it off.

7. Robert Downey, Jr. - sigh. really. he is just so...yummy. sure, he's short; he's in his 40's; he's a little worn on the edges. that's history, baby! and sure, when he takes off as Iron Man there's a little balletic grace to that little hand flip he gives that might not be really very macho. but i don't care! he's hot!

i'm about to start babbling about this movie. i should stop.
oh! but one more thing!

now i'm gonna have to start reading Iron Man - and isn't *that* the measure of success for a comic-based movie?

(thank goodness saturday is Free Comics Day.)

burning questions...

is it horribly wrong - when someone you've hooked up with in the past (and with whom you hoped to continue a casual liaison) appears to have taken advantage of an improved mental state and moved on - to feel sort of put out by it?

was watching the unbearable 'tell me you love me' with Roomie the other night; is it true that married women are really stunned that their husbands look at porn? i mean, really. who is stunned that men look at porn?? for that matter, isn't it understood by now that women also look at porn? (or is this a generational thing?)

speaking of TMYLM, how can i scrub the image of jane alexander, naked and having sex on a chair, off my inner eyeballs?

can we please have movies about neurotic people of color now? i mean, i'm getting sort of bored by all the representations of quirky/conflicted white folks in popular culture now. and i don't think the tyler perry movies count.

i guess what i'm asking is: who's the Wes Anderson for brown people? (great critique of wes anderson's work here.)

why is the #66 chicago bus the most crowded motherfrakker ever? hm? and why don't the folks who ride the #66 understand the Move to the Back rule ?

why isn't every parent of daughters reading Packaging Girlhood? i bought it for my sister and it's so good, i think everyone should read it with their daughters. (if i had a daughter we'd be talking about this book.) they even have a website.

Advocacy Alert: Tell the CW No Never Means Yes!

from the ywca metropolitan chicago:

Tell the Media that No Never Means Yes!
In August, when the CW network announced Kevin Federline was going to guest star in a few episodes as a front man of a band called ‘No Means Yes,’ we asked the producers of the popular show One Tree Hill to change the name of the band before the season began. We thought the band name winked at sexual assault – an all too common reality for their target demographic. YWCA USA CEO Lorraine Cole, YWCA associations from Illinois and Greater Los Angeles agreed. The name of the band had to change!

But the CW is silent. Maybe they didn’t hear us. Maybe they don’t take sexual assault seriously.

For the YWCA’s Week Without Violence, send another message to the CW and tell them that No Never Means Yes!

Go to their Advocacy Action Center to send an email. Spread the word!

[and i am not exactly a disinterested party here]

update: if you need a good reason to protest, here's a guy who didn't even give women a chance to say no and raped women he met on Match.com. and he got away with it. totally gross.

this is offensive, tom ford

in a move that demonstrates that being an A-gay does not automatically translate into being a feminist, tom ford's latest ad for his men's cologne hammers that point home:

you know. just in case you didn't get it the first time:

[thanks, Feministing!]

between american princess and bratz, there's jesus toys!

wasp jerky: Toy Story

down in comments, the ever-reliable WaspJerky has brought to my attention the existence of faith-based toys. barbie makes me gag, bratz make me want to hide in a cave and american girl place just makes me tired. i have NOTHING against wholesome toys. i, myself, had a very modest Holly Hobby that i loved until my german shepherd ripped off her head and it had to be repaired. she wore the cutest bloomers!

but wasn't leah the Ugly Sister jacob picked??
so why is the Ugly Sister dark skinned? huh? huh?
i mean, come on - elizabeth is a shiny blonde! when do OT women get to be blonde and fair-skinned??

(how embarrassing it would be if some bible savvy reader discovered a verse in the OT that said something like '...and Leah, who was black as pitch, went to the well and drew water...blah blah blah.')

but that's not what i want to bring to your attention. direct your eyes to Wasp Jerky's mention of the sex shoppe for christian married couples!

tee hee!

dear jesus, teach me to fry it up in a pan

from Feminary we get this nifty post about Southern Baptist Seminary offering a new set of courses for women (i.e, the wives of seminary students.)

gender studies? sorta.
hermeneutics of gender? a little.
historical context of women's lives in the bible? uh...
how to whip up a casserole, sew a dress, keep that quiver full AND help your husband with his greek?

exactly!

read on (bold and italics are mine because i just can't believe it):

Southwestern Baptist, one of the nation's largest Southern Baptist seminaries,
is introducing a new academic program in homemaking as part of an effort to
establish what its president calls biblical family and gender roles.
It will offer a bachelor of arts in humanities degree with a 23-hour concentration in
homemaking. The program is only open to women.

lordy. lordy lordy lordy.
it's christian home ec. i can't take it. i really can't. there is nothing more nightmarish for me than hours of Home Ec specifically designed to bolster frakked up traditional gender roles. maybe if my mom had taken some of these courses she wouldn't have been so angry...she would have sipped the kool-aid and learned to play some hymns on the organ, like a proper pastor's wife.

OMG! you have to look at their brochure: the sanitary napkin font, the soft focus photo, the uplifted (white) face. it's a christian romance novel cover! and it has the ubiquitous lavender rose!!

some of their course offerings:
Embracing Femininity

i think i'll just stop there. my brain just broke.

a sobering reminder we're at war

anyone catch The Daily Show last night?

there was a really sobering moment when jon stewart confronted the author of dick cheney's new biography and it was a thing of beauty.

earlier, he'd played the clip of Cheney being eerily prescient, but then he said that the difference between the liberals and the conservatives on the iraq war was that the right lied and used their lies (even when they admitted they knew the truth) to brand those who didn't believe their lies as traitors and un-American. then he wondered why we should believe anything this administration, especially cheney, has to say about their accomplishments when they've been wrong about everything.

when the author tried to mitigate all this and say that the right never really did any of those things, they just have a different way of viewing solutions, he was booed by the audiience and Jon Stewart got super serious:

Stewart: Let me say this: I think there's a real feeling in this country that your patriotism has been questioned, by people in very high-level positions, not fringe people. You know, I myself had some idiot from Fox [News Channel] playing the tape of me after September 11th, very upset, and them calling me a phony, because,
apparently, my grief didn't mean acquiescence. So, I think that it's a fair point to say—
Hayes: I think we can agree that we shouldn't be questioning other people's patriotism; on the other hand, I think it's totally legitimate to talk about different ways of handling the war on terror and for them to make their case.
Stewart: If they were to make their case on that, I'm saying to you, I think we'd have a fair argument and agreement on how to move forward. They haven't done that, and the evidence that they haven't done that is, he made that case in 1994, he knew those were the problems, and they never brought it up in the run-up to the war. (snip)

the segment was very sobering. no laughing. no jokes. just really disappointed resignation that our administration just screwed the pooch for the past 6 years and turned against its own citizenry to do so.

you can find a transcript here.

men don't make passes at girls who wear glasses...

Feministing has a great post about some bullshit article that whines about a 40-year old woman who can't find a man.

are you kidding me??
WHY are people still writing these lameass articles?
why are we still listening to fools who say things like 'smart girls will never be married because they're too smart?'
conversely, why can't i find the article that says 'smart women tell little man-boys to take a flying fuck'?

i mean, please. PLEASE!

aargh. the inherent sexism of our popular culture is almost enough to make me wanna send a stink bomb to some magazines.

hello, Kitty: threat to global masculinity

horror of horrors!
who will save us from the egregious crimes of bad policemen?
Hello, Kitty!!

one one hand we have the 'isn't it funny?' factor of modern thai crimebusting; on the other hand we are presented the same old tired thinking that anything 'girly' is kryptonite for 'real' manly men. what is more shaming than an official reprimand? this from a police officer:

“This new twist is expected to make them feel guilt and shame and prevent them from repeating the offense, no matter how minor,” he said. “Kitty is a cute icon for young girls. It’s not something macho police officers want covering their biceps.”

cute. pink. girlish. childish. feminine. danger to masculinity everywhere. elicits shame and guilt.
who knew Hello, Kitty had so much power?

hey, let's make a bunch of these armbands and drop them on iraq.

To Punish Thai Police, a Hello Kitty Armband - New York Times

bad mommy monday: celebs have moms, too

more on the way our culture judges and scrutinizes mothers - even celebs' mommies:

But the amount of derision directed at mothers seems out of proportion.
“We still have a virgin-whore binary in American pop culture, and this governs motherhood as well,” Professor Douglas said. The same way in which girls are labeled either good or bad, so are mothers. The same level of censure does not seem to apply to sons, whose risky behavior is often seen as merely a rite of passage.
Professor Douglas thinks the reproach directed at some celebrities’ mothers speaks to the particular kinds of lessons that mothers are supposed to teach their daughters — lessons Lindsay, Britney and Paris seem not to have learned. “It’s supposed to be a mother’s job to train her daughter into how to domesticate her various desires,” she said. “If we see a young woman who hasn’t done that, the mother has failed her tutorial.”

i love that phrase: 'domesticate her various desires.' good mothers are supposed to teach us how to tame desire, make them homey, safe, appropriate. make them 'feminine.' i also like the connection the piece makes to bourgeois values and idealizations of womanhood. so victorian.

and if you go to these different gossip sites (where female judgment runs rampant), you'll read that these lessons about appropriate motherly/daughterly behavior are well-ingrained. (though, apparently, easily discarded, as well.)

but, as the article notes, scrutiny of the father and of sons is not often done - and this perhaps is an oversight. where is the surveillance of fatherly behavior? where is the constant preying on the behavior of sons gone bad?

(where is the chastising of joe francis' mother, for instance? why has his home training gone unnoticed, while the parenting skills of the girls he preys on becomes fodder for vicious speculation?)

how would our popular discourse change if we, for instance, began a hyper-close look at sports figures and their daddy issues? (or their absent daddy issues?) would we say that doping and cheating and violence and dog-fighting and assault could be laid at the feet of these athletes' fathers? (even if the fathers aren't present, their absence IS a presence, one could argue.)

but no. that's not as much fun as looking at a woman self-destruct and then blaming her mother. so much better to kick a woman than scrutinize a man.

Sometimes Mothers Can Do No Right - New York Times

talk about unintended consequences

apparently, this is what happens when we export our mini-series: we play into the hands of genocidal insurgents!

Refugees fear sharing same fate as Kunta Kinte Chicago Tribune

here's an alert i received from planned parenthood:

TV Networks need condom sense

Two television networks have decided to reject a new condom commercial. The ad is intended to cause a stir — turning the “men are pigs” maxim on its head by suggesting that a guy willing to take responsibility for safer sex by using a condom isn’t so bad. But the real controversy is coming from FOX and CBS, which have
declined to run the ad, even in the late-night hours typically reserved for
adult-oriented products like Viagra.
According to The New York Times, FOX’s explanation reads, “Contraceptive advertising must stress health-related uses rather than the prevention of pregnancy.” Yet, half of pregnancies in this country are unintended, and teen pregnancy is a public health epidemic. The truth is, condoms prevent sexually transmitted infections and unintended pregnancy - making them a commonsense public health solution.

Learn more: View the ad on YouTube.
Take Action: Send a letter to FOX and CBS

ok. we can't talk about how condoms can prevent pregnancy?? since when? we're so squeamish about sex we can't even talk about preventing pregnancy?

the mind boggles. what utter stupidity.

horror, torture and misogyny! all mixed in together.

like a disgusting stew.

Jill Soloway: Remove the Rating for Captivity - Living Now on The Huffington Post

goodness knows i'm a fan of a certain kind of horror film.
self-referential horror that makes fun of itself while it scares me? check.
well-written old school ghost stories, vampires, haunted houses, monster flicks, scary cemetaries? i'm all for. (like, The Haunting, The Changeling, Ghost Story, Scream, and even The Exorcist because it was creepy as all hell.)

but there's a certain kind of film i can't stomach anymore: the Saws, the Hostels, the Turistas. all of them. can't. take it. the torture, the eroticized killing, the elaborate fetishistic murder just skeeves me out and makes me hurt the way looking at porn now makes me hurt.

just lately, i've been watching the quick tv ads for Captivity and it turns my stomach: stalker capturing a woman and some guy and torturing the hell out of her. this is entertainment? this is what we need to see to get our rocks off now? woman-hating death porn.

gross.

and, if you read solloway's column, you'll see the grossness isn't an accident. it's done on purpose; it's a thoughtful kind of 'accident'; the misogyny is how the film will succeed. it's built into the marketing and business plan. sick, really. and if you read here, you'll see that the disgusting dude who created it is counting on our shock and repulsion to drive more people to the film.

well, i don't want to drive folks to see the film. i want the film to disappear. so we're thinking about that at the office - how exactly to make it disappear.

i mean, if the fundamentalists can make a regular old movie about evolution disappear, can't we make a piece of woman-hating crap just fizzle out of existence?

[read about it at feministing and it's been bothering me all day.]

movie nights to come

i don't know about you, but i'm excited about The Golden Compass release.
a few years ago, a friend of mine from grad school was in town and while we walked through borders the way we'd walked back in ann arbor, he recommended phil pullman's series, His Dark Materials. my friend called it a version of Paradise Lost but told from lucifer's point of view and said that it was the anti-harry potter: dark, complex, subversive.

i read the first and second book and had to agree: these were terrific books. if you're a churchy person who likes children's books to be at all simple and easy, then these ain't for you. these are books that house a challenging moral universe that does not conform to 'christian' analogy, necessarily. in other words, it's not C.S. Lewis, but it's terrific literature just the same.

the movie's coming out in december and if they don't keep the dark complexity it'll be a piece of crap. but if they do, it'll rock.

(if you've read the book, you'll be familiar with daemons and if you go to the site you can create your own. the site's pretty neat. anyway, mine's albus, a male lion who personifies modesty, pride, solitude and inquisitivity. yeah, that's pretty much me in a shell.)

oh, and another movie i'm looking forward to?
I am Legend. this has to be one of the best vampire stories around and when i saw the trailer i breathed, 'awesommme!'
such a dork.

jesus camp

just got home from 'jesus camp' movie night at a friend's house.
yikes. we all had to have a couple of cigarette breaks to just get through the thing.

some things i noted:
first, i never grew up pentecostal so the whole speaking in tongues thing to me is just silly. i mean, it's gibberish, people. no one can understand you. watching little kids get whipped into a frenzy of tongues-speaking disturbs me a little; it's irrational, hyper-emotional and seems just a bit psychologically irresponsible and manipulative of the adult who controls it.

second, my issue with the movie has nothing to do with biblical doctrine. if you're a homeschooling, anti-evolution, fundamentalist, pentecostal evangelical and this is the way you want to raise your kids, then have at it. but it made me ask what the ramifications are of raising a group of children to be totally paranoid, with huge persecution issues and believing in the rhetoric of war?

for me, it doesn't matter if you're evangelical or a hippie on a greenpeace boat: the process the movie traces is a perfect one for raising a flaming radical who may or may not bear a significant resemblance to timothy mcveigh. in particular, i'm thinking of the scene where the kids are exhorted to smash porcelain cups with the word Government written on them. the symbolism is simple, yet effective. what's the difference between smashing the government to make it more holy and smashing the government because of its politics and policies? sounds like two faces of terrorism to me.

and i think of the scene at the end of the movie, where little rachael approaches a group of older african american men in an effort to 'witness' to them and she asks them if they died, do they know where they'd go? (typical witnessing gambit) one of them says heaven, she presses how does he know and then they leave when it's clear that the men aren't going to say any different. as she's crossing the street with her little friend she says, 'i think they were moslem.'

my friends and i laughed our asses off. it was funny. but it was also telling: here's this little girl, totally raised to look at anyone who doesn't believe what she believes as the Other. and what's the form of this Other? a moslem.

disturbing, man. (oh, and never mind the part where the kids are practically genuflecting in front of a cardboard cutout of president bush. euww. idolatry, anyone? oh! or the part where they tape little plastic fetuses on their hands and pray for an end to abortion. do i want these kids in charge of my reproductive health access? hell no.)

should folks see it? i think so. it sparked a lot of discussion in my group about our different faith traditions, what being 'saved' is and if that's a requirement for all faith groups and then led to a broader discussion of recent supreme court decisions and why alito and roberts perhaps need to experience the Rapture before anyone else.

(oh, and the ted haggard stuff is just priceless.)

movie night with ding's friends

a scene of weekend movie watching with ding's friends, who all come to the church via different roads if at all:

JMD:
Movie Night? This Sunday, maybe? KS has Jesus Camp and if she's available and you guys are, maybe that'll work?
Roomie:
Jesus Camp at your place? Praise be.
TG:
Would love to see you all but I'm afraid I cannot endure another viewing of
Jesus Camp.

AK:
Fine by me. Can we move the TV to the balcony so I can smoke? Just curious.
JMD:
Okay, let's just say Sunday is it. KS, if you can't make it I can find the movie but we will miss you. TG, you will miss our sing-along, but that's your loss ;-)
Roomie:
7 pm is cool with me, but I'm not averse to making it 6:30 on your deck with a cold one. I need to bone up on the words. Shut Out De Do' Keep Ou' De Debil....
AK:
Can we get a hymn book? I grew up Methodist and didn't learn all those crazy Jesus songs for kids.
KS:
I believe that overhead projected sheets are more the thing. Happily, since all the songs basically have one 4 line stanza repeated ad nauseum, they aren't too hard to pick up - as an example of the top of my head, I present...

Ri-ise and shi-ine and give God the glory, glory;

Ri-ise and shi-ine and give God the glory, glory;

RISE and SHINE and (clap) give God the glory, glory;

Chil-DREN of the Lord.
JMD:
Don't even get me started. Oh, okay.

Cuz friends are friends forever if the lord's the
lord of them. And a friend will not say never because the welcome does not end.
And though it's hard to let you go, in the father's hands we know. That a
lifetime's not too long...to live as friends.

This is, of course, for the last night of camp. Big tearfest.
Roomie:
You pulled out Michael W. Smith. He trumps Amy grant. But you know what? I don't care about the singing, all I care about is the diorama. I will call the black
yarn right now for my lion's 's mane..... something something about some kid in a lion's den. i'm changing the kid to a penguin. I'll bring the shoebox.

Ding:
If you turn DANIEL into a penguin I think I’m going to pray that Thursday's hurricane hover outside your window.
Roomie:
Screw you. My Daniel can be anything he wants to be. Message over the man, dude.
Apologies--and huge shout out to TG. I am so, so, so sorry you're being dragged into the eye of the fundamentalist dragon show. Praise Holy Mary, mother of god, catholic sistah.

Ding:
Whatever.
As soon as we watch the damn thing I’ll go into a fundamentalist flashback and melt into a pool of drool, it'll be that traumatic.
It’s our only way of coping.

GP:

My personal favorite...

I am the churchYou are the churchWe are the church, together. (My favorite line)
All who follow Jesus, all around the world,Yes! We're the church
together.

It's a global message, and yet, completely exclusive. Trickery!

Ding:
Which shows the total cognitive dissonance it takes to be a part of it.

KS:
Indeed. My favorite necessary cognitive dissonance is:

'We are better than the Catholics because we reject the idea of an intermediary coming between God and the individual - oh, and by the way, here is exactly what the Bible means and requires of you - just trust us on it - please, no questions. Really. This is what it means. Yes, I know even the very first book of Genesis seems to contradict itself, but believe me, for reasons you can't possibly understand
having to do with the Fall being masterminded by Eve, you just have to trust us
that the rib/helper of Adam version is more right than that simultaneous
creation of man and woman crap. OK, lets move out of Genesis and turn
to Paul's reminder that women should be silent in church.'

No I'm not bitter at all.

it's half day friday

Knocked Up - Movies - Review - New York Times
i love seth rogan. he's adorable.

my Roomie calls this movie "a premise that could be solved with one visit to Planned Parenthood" and while that is true, it does not prevent me from wanting to see it and AO Scott's thumbs up just makes me want to see it more.

(a hardened New Yorker moved to almost tears? awesome.)

the onion: smarter about the current state of choice feminism than most feminists

Women Now Empowered By Everything A Woman Does | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

my favorite part (other than the whole thing):

Whereas early feminists campaigned tirelessly for improved health care and safe, legal access to abortion, often against a backdrop of public indifference or hostility, today's feminist asserts control over her biological destiny by wearing a baby-doll T-shirt with the word "Hoochie" spelled in glitter.

"Don't tell this bitch what to do," said Kari Eastley, 24, a participant in the Oberlin study and, according to one of her T-shirts, a "Slut Goddess." "I wear what I want when I want, and no man is going to tell me otherwise. We're talking Pussy Power, baby."

and, in an eerie echo of linda hirshman's main thesis in her manifesto, Get to Work!, there's this part:

Klein said empowerment is now accessible to women who were long excluded.

"Not every woman can become a physicist or lobby to stop a foundry from dumping dangerous metals into the creek her children swim in," Klein said. "Although these actions are incredible, they marginalize the majority of women who are unable to, or just don't particularly care to, achieve such things. Fortunately for the less impressive among us, a new strain of feminism has emerged in which mundane activities are championed as proud, bold assertions of independence from oppressive patriarchal hegemony."

i bow to the onion. this piece is a fantastic skewering of how the women's movement has been rendered banal by the deliberate misreading of 'the personal is political.' bowing bowing bowing.



[the Big Idea in hirshman's book:

"The Opt-Out Revolution may be in reality only a leveling off, but in this context it is the end of the beginning. Deafened by choice, here's the moral analysis these women never heard: The family - with its repetitious, socially-invisible, physical tasks - is a necessary part of life and has obvious emotional and immediate rewards, but it allows fewer opportunities for full human flourishing than public spheres like the market or the government. This less flourishing sphere is not the natural or moral responsibility only of women. Therefore, assigning it to women is unjust. Women assigning it to themselves is equally unjust." (p.24-25)]

ah, the female gaze

it's gettin' all springtime everywhere, and i don't know about you, but my sap is running. (it's running nowhere, but that's another, more private, post.)

yesterday, the roomie (who is, incidentally, enjoying her unemployment more than a normal human being should) went to Artopolis with a girl friend of ours. she saw some awesome art and came home swooning about industrial, metal furniture that she wants for our new place (when that happens, i'll let you know) but then the swooning over furniture evaporated when she started ranting about all the female nudes all over the place:

roomie: i couldn't believe it! i mean, if i saw one more nipple i was gonna die. painting after painting, statue after statue, naked women! i mean, what the hell?! even the female artists - all their feminist painting and crap and STILL ONLY NAKED WOMEN! i started to get seriously pissed off.

ding: hm. (keeping her mouth shut because roomie gets mad when ding mentions 'patriarchy.')

roomie: for the love of god, show me some naked men! where where the naked men? oh, yeah, over by the sensual masculine gay art! arrgh! you know? and, seriously, where do they expect me to mount a wall length painting of some naked chick and her pudenda? my dining room?!



anyway, Where Sheelzebub indulges in the female gaze at Pandagon.

of course, any and all beefcake suggestions are welcome down in comments.

heh.