Chemical Fart Products are Gross

There are many elements of keeping house up to popular standards that I neither understand nor perform. Accoutrements such as dust ruffles, doilies, napkin rings, hot water bottles, electric blankets, mops and tricked out tupperware all seem pointless extra crap to take up too much space with little true function or utility. But none of them draw the same level of disgust and repulsion as air fresheners. The size of the product display for fake scent is fairly astonishing when you go to the supermarket. Take the commercial posted above for a Glade room deodorant which farts out a continuous spray of stank. Are people curing meat, conducting surgery, cultivating indoor compost heaps or anything similar to require synthesised lilac and pine odors in forced concentration? I just do not get this. It's nothing less than toxic chemicals masquerading as nature.
That's just as creepy as the spot's suggestion that a day in a woman's life should be that she never leaves the house or stops caring for others.

Male Evolution on Film

Some writer for EW was jizzing about how great Nicholson is in the diner scene for Five Easy Pieces (1970), which led me to recall how awful it is, one of those ham-fisted scenes of tough guy grandstanding of epic proportions. Tell me just how exactly the middle aged, overworked and underpaid waitress is 'oppressing' the privileged young rich guy? Like she doesn't have to deal with a dozen entitled jerk-offs each shift who want her to account for the restaurant owner's policy? If you want to stick it to your daddy, go ahead, but leave the working woman alone.

Contrast the macho thuggery of the hippie era with Tarantino's first film 22 years later. Holy crap, even with all the gun play and bloodletting, he imagines a crew with more empathy for the women waiting tables than the Jack ass managed. Every dude at the table knows Mr. Pink is dead wrong for not 'believing' in tipping wait staff. Pink sounds like an MRA crybaby with a dry eye for the brutal reality of women in poverty or in the workforce in general. I'm guessing if he had pulled the chicken salad crap, every other dude at the table would have shot him for being such a rude pig.

The Way It Is Can Change

Each time I hear a guy apologise for outlandish behaviour or practices among men, such as institutionalised sexism or any manifestation of patriarchy wherein girls and women should expect to eat crap and take less than their full measure of dignity and rights as human beings, almost always, the fallback rationale contends ‘it’s just the way things are,’ or more to the point, the fixed way some men view the world. Never mind the fact that folks who argue discrimination as the natural order have a not-so-secret vested interest in making arbitrary power seem legitimate, but an additional problem is that guys who excuse unchecked privilege among their brethren all too often characterise men as uncivilised brutes; those unfortunates caught in some paludal evolutionary cave-man vortex, which renders them unable to exercise impulse control or a functional moral compass. You’ve heard it before. By way of explanation, we hear of a particular guy: ‘he snapped,’ ‘he couldn’t help himself,’ ‘he lost control,’ ‘men are programmed to view all women as boink material,’ that he was ‘just being one of the lads’ or whatever record spins round to gloss over the perceived inexorable right of some men to act like predatory knuckle walkers. Why every guy doesn’t stand up and cry foul when this Men are from Mars rubbish appears leads me to cast a gimlet eye over the business of having their-cake-and-eating-it-too dimension of privilege. Gender differences and power differentials are masked in presentation as a routine matter of essential human nature. Why anyone would settle for such a retrograde estimation of the human capacity for justice, progress and empathy proves bafflement.

Pop culture bursts with evidence illustrating how much people are capable of embracing progressive relationships and ideas based upon equality and fairness. For example, in an ironic turn, Joan Crawford’s titular Daisy Kenyon serves as celluloid exhibit A for how much society has changed regarding the existence or treatment of child abuse. It’s really quite shocking by today’s standards. Otto Preminger’s 1947 drama situates Crawford as the sympathetic other woman who gives up on waiting for her married beau (Dana Andrews as Dan O’Mara) to leave his wife Lucille (Ruth Warnick). Instead she marries an impulsive GI (Henry Fonda, takes a departure from his usual bloodless method and musters a serviceable effort for the part). Dan’s marriage busts up shortly after Daisy weds Peter. The plot is all pot-boiler adult with plenty of noir-ish under and backlit scenes set in Daisy’s loft in The Village. The point for the modern viewer to catch the vapours occurs with the characterisation of the relationship between Lucille and her daughter played by Martha Stewart (IMDB lists the name Mary for the girl, except I kept hearing ‘Marie’ when I watched it). Off-screen we hear Lucille smack the girl around in a serious way. Frequently, Dan, his daughters or Daisy refer to Lucille’s abuse, yet the result affects nothing more than a shrug of shoulders. Lucille’s little problem, that she physically and psychologically terrorises her daughter, casts the spurned wife as something like the original Betty Draper. Nowadays, we watch Mad Men and shout at Mrs. Draper-Francis for being so cruel and heartless to her daughter. (In general, Mad Men serves as a cautionary tale for how messed up society was back in the supposed good ‘ol days, what with the Jim Crow racism, sexism in the secretary harem dynamic added to the blind acceptance of child abuse). Even Sally gets some degree of intervention in the guise of a therapist who at least lends the girl some context to bolster her self-image amidst her mother’s abuse. The O’Mara girl isn’t so lucky.
After a day in court, where Dan pretty much halts the proceedings to cave to Lucille’s demands in order to spare Daisy ugly treatment on the stand, they meet his daughters in the corridor, a screen shot of which is featured above. Marie/Mary holds a handkerchief against her ear. Dan explains to Daisy that there’s some bleeding as a result from an injury Lucille inflicted as a means of taking out her frustration over the divorce. There’s a brief pause for pity and then the abuse disappears. Pause on that for a moment. An 11 year-old girl still bleeds from an attack she sustained days ago, she could have brain damage among other trauma, a fact which is overlooked without concern. Child abuse in 1947: It’s just the way it is.

I’m optimistic that someday folks will observe the pay gap, objectification of girls and women, rape culture and gender essentialism with just as much disbelief that we could stand by and allow such injustice to persist.

Members of a Pack

The dog walker lady sent me this picture of Omar and Kima looking like model citizens for their afternoon playtime with a pack. She keeps telling me how great they are while I wait for the 'but' to rear its head. She finally gave me one. Apparently they hide under the table or desk when she comes to pick them up and I'm not here. Lady, you don't know the half of it.

When the Zombie Apocalypse Comes, Do Your Own Damn Laundry

As Jacqui, Jeryl Prescott had the best lines in the third episode of The Walking Dead.

The adult women line the lake scrubbing laundry by hand. With a raised brow she deadpans "I'm beginning to question the division of labour."

Cut to Shane catching frogs with the boy, or all the other men in camp lollygagging around while the women do the grunt work. She wondered why the ladies were stuck doing the Hattie McDaniel work.

Indeed.

Zombies or not, men should not be above domestic toil.

I Hate Olives Almost as Much as Being Called 'Meg'

My simple order, a cheese pizza and garden salad seems pretty hard to fuck up, right?

I like a clean pizza, nothing on it but sauce and cheese.

It was fine even if the crust smelled funny, like hair in olive oil.

Then holy cannoli, when I opened the salad I performed a full-body recoil because of all the chopped green olives. Cue the wretching. They were all over the place. I had to throw it out.

*shudder*

Elle Does Greenface

What the Dickens is Joyce doing up there in the corner?

Lucky Charms? Oh say it ain't so.

Usually the glossies wait until March before they resort to the Greenface Oirish feature.

Not only is everything hideous for the piece in December US Elle, the prices are eyepoppers of another sort.

The Zanotti sparkle-green flats in the centre are listed at $495.

Off to the right, the Van Cleef & Arpels shamrock necklace goes for $5,000.

Those Miu Miu sandals (are they gladiators circa 2005?) are tagged as $450.

Even worse, the BluGirl t-shirt retails for $800 and the skort-looking skirt for $540.

I'm woozy from all the expensive green cheese on display.

Community: How You Make Me Giggle

By far the best line of The Aerodynamics of Gender episode:

"Why name your daughter Megan? Are you stocking up for a bitch shortage?"

Ahahaha.

Awesome.

Headlines You'll Never See in Lady or Lad Mags

Can Men Really Have it All?

Women's Weight Insignificant

Diets Don't Work

Feminists Love Men

Pornography is Creepy

Body Hair on Women is Sexy

Intelligence More Important than Beauty

Stop Worrying about What He Thinks

Opinionated Women are Hot

Try Talking to Her Rather than Trying to Score

You Never Need to Buy Anything Ever Again

Racism Bad. Gender Essentialism Good.

This French PSA campaign against racism bears the tagline 'Your Skin Color Shouldn't Dictate Your Future,' which certainly sounds like it promotes an ethical civic climate.

The execution seems problematic upon closer inspection, when you notice the gender essentialism present.

The ad suggests that the girl can only hope to be a cleaning lady, while the boys enjoy the more prestigious and higher paid positions of road and construction worker. She's dressed in a blue cap, grey smock and blue duster that look inspired by Dickens, with only a hint of pink relegated to gloves and a bucket underneath the crib. It transmits a subtext about how the girl's less feminine or female as a menial member of service staff. By contrast, the boys wear recognisable attire from a modern workplace.

According to this series, tracking kids for life and limiting the scope of available social mobility based on race is wrong.

But hey, go ahead and allow a narrow prism of gender to shape their lives instead.

A summary for the campaign could be: Women Clean Up and Men Build Stuff.

Yeesh.

Prosaic Fantasy Stems from Privilege

A constant refrain among the littany of sexual fantasy and spank-bank material for many a dude registers a bit about men reduced to sexual slaves, always at the behest of some leather clad hottie. In this pedestrian video for a crap tune, Slash's Beautiful Dangerous, belted out by Fergie, the plot boils down to another version of 'sexy-crazy bitch' who drugs and binds the man she desires. Not to be a Debbie Downer, but just how does Fergie manage to haul him from the car and to a flea bag motel when he's at least twice her weight and size? On a practical level, women built like Fergie can't pull off the logistics necessary to slip a mickey for sexual predation.

This type of exercise in male erotics is galling because it's so far removed from reality. Most men can rest safe that they'll never be restrained against their will and raped by a woman. Slash's fantasy ranks with Don Draper paying a sex worker to smack him around. Dudes choked on privilege are able to relegate submission and victimisation to fantasy role play.
Slash has so much agency he can turn weakness into a wank fetish.
How obnoxious.