Have you been feeling like a lemming lately? Here’s why:

High Five Is Out, Fist Bump Is In

“Who’s the more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him?” Thanks, Obi-Wan, you bring up a good point. My first reaction to this video, in which a greeting style that has been around for over a century is presented as something new and exciting (and in which “putting up your dukes” is presented as something that still happens), was the same reaction that one might have to a teenager who has just learned that a mouse is not only something for your computer but also some kind of small animal.
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Filed by Bil at 7:37 pm under The Media, Fightin' Words
2 Comments

I’m currently reading Maureen Dowd’s terrific 2005 best-seller Are Men Necessary?: When Sexes Collide.

Dowd is a gender/political columnist for the New York Times, and her book is witty, engrossing, and very well-researched. I may have a crush.

In addition to the evolutionary/biological tidbits I am picking up (some scientists believe that all men will be sterile within 125,000 years!) (within my lifetime, a lesbian couple will be able to conceive a child by implanting DNA from one egg into the other egg–no sperm needed!), Dowd has a lot to say about dating, sex, and post-feminism gender games. Fascinating stuff.

I shall here quote from Chapter Four: Why the Well-Hung Y is Wilting, Even as the X is Excelling. In this part of the chapter, Dowd confronts the oft-lamented double standard whereby men who sleep around are seen as studs, and women who do the same are labled sluts. It’s been talked to death, of course, but I particularly like this quote from Natalie Angier’s book Woman, which I guess I’ll have to pick up next (as soon as I finish reading that book I lifted from Lucas’s NYC apt without his knowledge):

“Women are said to have lower sex drives than men, yet they are universally punished if they display evidence to the contrary — if they disobey their “natural” inclination toward a stifled libido. Women supposedly have a lower sex drive than men do, yet it is not low enough. There is still just enough of a lingering female infidelity impulse that cultures everywhere have had to gird against it by articulating a rigid dichotomy with menacing implications for those who fall on the wrong side of it. There is still enough lingering female infidelity to justify infibulation, purdah, claustration. Men have the naturally higher sex drive, yet all the laws, customs, punishments, shame, strictures, mystiques and antimystiques are aimed with full hominid fury at that tepid, sleepy, hypoactive creature, the female libido. “
…
“Would a man find the prospect of a string of partners so appealing if the following rules were applied: that no matter how much he may like a particular woman and be pleased by her performance and want to sleep with her again, he will have no say in the matter and will be dependent on her mood and good graces for all future contact; that each act of casual sex will cheapen his status and make him increasingly less attractive to other women; and that society will not wink at his randiness but rather sneer at him and think him pathetic, sullied, smaller than life? Until men are subjected to the same severe standards and threat of censure as women are, and until they are given the lower hand in a so-called casual encounter from the start, it is hard to insist with such self-satisfaction that, hey, it’s natural, men like a lot of sex with a lot of people and women don’t.”

Heady stuff. Smart, too. I’ve always said there’s no such thing as “casual sex,” but these ladies say it better. You can link to Angier’s article, Men, Women, Sex, and Darwin here and you can get Dowd’s superb book here. If you’re so inclined. By which I mean female. Because, let’s face it, I don’t think many of you (hetero) guys are clamoring to see yourselves painted with her brush. Though, in one of my favorite quotes in all literature, Dowd admits, “I don’t understand men. I don’t even understand what I don’t understand about men. They’re a most inscrutable bunch, really.”

Filed by Chelsea at 11:58 am under Pop Culture, Gender Identity, The Media
1 Comment

Yeah, yeah, yeah, more politics crap. I know.

Listen up, though, young folks. This particular speech by presidential candidate Barack Obama may very well go down as one the great speeches in our nation’s history. Or it might be forgotten by next week, you never really know. But if you’ve got forty minutes to spare, check this video out. Even if you’re not an Obama fan, it might be good to be able to talk knowingly about this speech some day.

Filed by Bil at 12:24 pm under The Media, Politics, Racism
No Comments

This may just be the best tourism ad in the universe.

Surprisingly, there are people – lots of people – that think this ad is bad for New Mexico. I can see why they might think that, but I would tend to side with this ad. It reaches people through the pop culture of the Roswell legend. Who doesn’t like aliens?

One of the main arguments from the political opponents is that it doesn’t show the beauty of the state. Of course, I don’t live there, so I can counter that everyone knows about the beauty of the state by now, and really, to someone from New England, the whole American Southwest looks the same (in the same way that to someone from the American Southwest, all of New England looks the same). So why New Mexico over Arizona? Well, on top of the desert beauty, there are aliens. Case closed, I’m going to see the aliens.

It’s an interesting (if not completely useless) debate.

Here’s another one!

P.S. We are still waiting for those pictures you promised, Bil. Yes, yes, I know.

Filed by Bil at 5:14 pm under Pop Culture, The Media, Politics
No Comments

I know I’m not the first to note this, but I pass by it every day on the newsstand in my building.

Oxymorons are way funnier when they are unintentional.
And on the cover of magazines.
And printed a bazillion times.
And clearly visible all over the world.

Witness Michael Jackson, cover boy for this month’s Ebony Magazine, looking as white as the driven snow.

ebony |ˈebənē| noun: heavy blackish or very dark brown timber from a mainly tropical tree.
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Filed by Chelsea at 10:41 am under Pop Culture, The Media
1 Comment

You know what’s really bad? I recognized most of the people in this video. I’m not quite sure I should have admitted that to you.

Filed by Trevor at 3:05 am under Gay Agenda, The Media
No Comments

Let me start off by stating that I agree — Cheney must be impeached. I encourage you all to go to impeachcheney.org and sign their front page petition. Tell your representative, if you know who that is. Get everyone you can to go and sign this petition.

Now, having said that, I would like to point out that their YouTube-based propaganda campaign is dishearteningly shitty.
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Filed by Bil at 11:56 am under GOP, The Media, Activism
2 Comments

Certain things kind make me want to cry. Obviously, the fact that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney will have spent eight years in the White House is one of them. But sometimes it’s the little things that make me weep inside.
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Filed by Bil at 9:50 pm under Pop Culture, The Media
6 Comments

This obituary of Kurt Vonnegut is as ill-informed and spiteful as anything else that’s come from FOX News — I really wish they’d just stick to distorting current events and stop short of impugning the work of one of America’s greatest literary minds. I had a hard time figuring out if this was meant to be an obituary or an op-ed piece. Take this particular gem, for example:

“Vonnegut, who failed at suicide 23 years ago, said 34 years ago that he hoped his children wouldn’t say of him when he was gone: he made wonderful jokes, but he was such an unhappy man. So I’ll say it for them.”

I’m sure his kids appreciated the initiative, as well as hearing their father referred to as “rich and irrelevant.” Don’t you go to hell for this stuff?

Filed by Trevor at 10:32 pm under Pop Culture, The Media
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I can hardly contain myself — The Onion News Network finally launched today:

Immigration: The Human Cost



Between this, Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert, I have all the news outlets I need. Oh, and maybe that appallingly bad Half-Hour News Hour just to switch things up. It must be seen to be believed.

Filed by Trevor at 9:35 pm under The Media
2 Comments