Cheat To Win

This is so fucking important right now.

Compliment away, friends. Let’s compliment the shit out of each other. But let’s be really cognizant of what we compliment each other on, and what that says about what we expect from each other, and what we consider valuable and worth mentioning. It doesn’t matter what Salma Hayek says, because she’s so pretty!

I’m not one to beat a dead horse, but let’s go back to that ignorant ass clown known as Tyler Oakley.  You made a video about how homophobes are on the way out.  You claimed that they were on the wrong side of history, and that this country will no longer tolerate their intolerance.

How bizarre, considering you referred to these opponents as “bitch” continually throughout the piece that lasted all of two minutes.  You also cast a man professing to be straight in the video, and he portrayed gays in the reductive, tired stereotypes in which you seem to find offense.

Not to mention the fact that a few studies on the rising tide of support for gay marriage in no way indicates that homophobia, sexism, transphobia, or racism have been eradicated in this country.  If you need me to discuss the intersectionality of oppression and the firmly entrenched institutionalization of these concepts, please ask.

Bravo to those belonging to gay straight alliances in their high schools; their work is important and a great first step.  We need gay straight alliances in Congress - and state legislatures, school boards, everywhere - if we want legitimate change in our culture. We need to truly seek out and destroy bigotry in all of its forms, because hatred is not a hierarchy; homophobia is not magically more important than any number of other prejudices in our country.

I’m sure you think that wearing a t-shirt, cursing at a faceless audience, and swinging your metaphorical dick around with palpable male white privilege is a lesson in satire and progressive thinking.  In the long run, though, it just makes you look childish.  Please work towards making real change and not just cheap shots.

With beliefs like these floating around, we have to remind ourselves that it’s 2011.

It’s hard to believe that this many years after Stieg Larsson ended sexism it’s still possible for public figures to issue dismissive, crude, and derogatory statements about women, but it would appear not everyone has gotten to “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” in their book club yet. Until that day comes, here are the worst, most insulting, and simply bizarre quotes about women we heard this year outside of a YouTube comment thread.

Huffington Post’s  2011’s Most Absurd Quotes About Women — And Who Said Them

Seriously, these are infuriating and should serve as reminders to all of us about just how much more we have to go in this world.

Such an intersection between male privilege (especially that of the gay male variety) and misogyny.

There is a seduction at work in shows like these; one which plays on the viewer’s need to feel enlightened, even as it satisfies her baser desires. Characters in these societies can do and say things that we simply wouldn’t accept in contemporary characters. (The other fictional character to make my boyfriend yell was Pierce Hawthorne on Community; he’s also racist and sexist, but the episode that induced yelling was one in which Pierce taunted a suicidal boy until he cried. Dan Harmon, Community’s showrunner, had to spend the rest of that season resolving the problem of Pierce: How to convince viewers to care for a character who had gone from stupid to actively life-threatening. Compare to Roger, who is beloved without ever having to reform.) Plenty of viewers will explain to you that this is “critique,” that we’re watching the shows to get a sense of how bad these eras were. But we can get that from studying actual history. To keep us watching, the shows have to give us something about these worlds that we enjoy. Beautiful costumes, maybe. Or sassy one-liners. Or sexy characters.

Or maybe, just maybe, a chance to see people do misogynist, racist things without facing consequences. Me, I’ve never been turned on by the sexism ofMad Men. But as a smoker, I’ll be damned if I can watch the show without swooning over all those guilt-free indoor cigarettes. Or without lighting up myself. Or even yearning — guiltily, irrationally, momentarily — for a world where marriage was taken for granted, and “success” and economic security were as simple as working as a receptionist for a few years, then marrying a wealthy guy who looked like Jon Hamm. (Seeing the fates of the wives on the show tends to cure that, quickly.) Not everyone who watches these retro-oppression stories is a bigot; in fact, very few of them would admit to racism, or sexism, or even homophobia, all of which are considered immoral, or at least socially clueless, in contemporary society. (Sexist, racist Roger Sterling is a distinguished, silver-haired playboy; sexist, racist Pierce Hawthorne is a fumbling, white-haired buffoon.) But as the articles in praise of Sterling show — what men really miss, apparently, is “the freedom to be men. To not be civilized and sensitized and effeminized to within an inch of their lives;” the idea that being a “man” in a culture that had such a narrow, aggressive, anti-“effeminate” definition of the term might not feel like “freedom” is apparently not something Matt Labash has considered — there is a sick thrill in watching fictional characters act out, celebrate and enjoy the darkest undercurrents of our culture.

Sady Doyle wrote a phenomenal piece that simultaneously takes down Mad Men, justifies its hype (to an extent), and eviscerates the crop of copy cats coming down the pipe this fall.

The belief that female sexual expression is uniquely dehumanizing is a double standard, no matter how much you dress it up in feminist language.  Instead of condemning young women for the length of their skirts, why not use that energy for condemning anyone who would think that a woman is lesser-than because she wears a miniskirt?

The fact that Lisa Belkin continues to experience gainful employment is shocking. Here’s a great take-down piece on her newest bullshit article.

Well, this is appropriate and not at all misogynist.

This is incredible. Chalk up another reason to why I love DC.  

(via illuminaughtybynature)

“We don’t necessarily think it’s problematic for women to be portrayed as ‘sexy.’ But we do think it is problematic when nearly all images of women depict them not simply as ‘sexy women’ but as passive objects for someone else’s sexual pleasure.”

Your semantics are questionable at best, HuffPo.  At worst, they’re downright offensive.

See, that’s funny, because all of her songs are about needing a boy to feel complete.