.too much to love. August 11, 2009

.authored by something.of.substance.

.is love blind?.

The feminist blogosphere is (rightly) up-in-arms over the mockery o f the women on the FOX spectacle “More to Love”.  There is nothing revolutionary about fat-mockery or bigger men chasing big women.  What strikes me as most fascinating about this show is how the women’s preferences are still never considered.  Like other reality “romance” shows,  it is assumed that the object of all these women’s undying affections will be the dud they’ve selected; the supposition  is women always fall in love with whomever extols the most cliché romantic notion of love or with the idea of love itself and that  they have no expectations beyond that.

Women only get their turn to select from (supposedly) eligible bachelors once they’ve been rejected on national television.  For example, every “Bachlorette” only gets a selection of eligible bachelors once sent home on a previous show (and if the public feels sorry enough for her plight).   And, while Luke, the plus-sized player on “More to Love”, does seem like a genuinely nice, three-dimensional sort of fellow, the idea that bigger women  are only attracted to bigger men is as ridiculous as assuming women are only into men for their money.

In his blog, Gender Studies professor Hugo Schwyzer comments that “for men who have not yet extricated themselves from homosocial competition, their own self-esteem and sense of intra-male status may decline in direct proportion to their girlfriend’s weight gain”. In short, the heavier the girlfriend, the worse men feel about themselves. As if women exist solely as self-esteem boosters for men or as though relationships aren’t for the mutual partnership and satisfaction of both individuals but to serve as benchmarks of a socially-limited notion of success.

.full of denial. April 14, 2009

.authored by something.of.substance.

.the picture of (mental) health?.

When we see pictures of people in other countries looking as skeletal as Tori Spelling does in the one at left, we are usually asked to send money to help them build a well and buy rice.  But we aren’t in another country; we are in America.  And, here in America, when we see the protruding bones of others, we spend millions attempting to re-create how they did it.

When we publicly confront people with our supposition of their eating being abnormal, there is no doubt they will deny it. A key component of eating disorders are the cognitive distortions that keep you from seeing any problem with what you’re doing to correct your perceived problem with your body. Therefore, simply speculating (whether publicly or privately) that some star or another starves his or herself happy, does no good. If anything, it reinforces their mindset by demonstrating a need to acknowledge their obsession- their weight- for any reason. If there’s no choice someone will come right out and freely admit, “yes. I starve myself and purge on occasion when I actually eat”, why splash their Eating Disorder Denial (EDD) over the daily pages of gossip rags?

The latest to engage in EDD (whose past participants have included Lindsay Lohan and Mary-Kate Olsen) is Tori Spelling who recently blamed her skeletal figure on us just “not having seen her pregnant in the past few years”.   In past interviews, she blamed “tension with her mother”.  This is what happens when people start asking questions you cannot answer:  you blame.

No one would believe these excuses in a vacuum. Even though we are constantly inundated with visuals of rail-thin, ghastly gaunt women, we can still recognize someone who has all visible bones as unhealthy. Yet, we accept these excuses and they even help keep our society enmeshed in a body image crisis. When celebrities constantly deny their distortions and refer to their looks as “healthy” or the result of “losing baby weight” or “simply working out once a week”, they aide in enabling disordered eating for everyone (themselves included). Ours is a culture obsessed with celebrity. Part of our obsession  is driven with the seeming perfection of those we idolize and kill ourselves attempting to emulate. Even though we know, as graduates of high school health classes, that no person (especially over the age of 30) has a metabolism strong enough to waste them away, we accept their excuses and alter our perceptions to include what used to be disturbingly unhealthy as the new reference point for “normal”.  We engage in as much EDD as the people who do so to keep their disorder alive.

.conscious people do it better. April 11, 2009

.authored by something.of.substance.

.if she's breathing, she's obviously into it.

Why do Seth Rogan’s characters seem to always have to get their dates black out drunk to have sex with them? In “Knocked Up”, Rogan and an (initial) one-night stand Katherine Heigl were both so drunk they couldn’t communicate the condom issue which landed them in the title mess. In “The 40 year old Virgin”, Rogan scored only with the fall-over drunk bar flies. Even Rogan, in an interview with Starpulse, acknowledges that he prefers his women unwilling to engage in any action: “I gotta say, they should make a support group together, Blonde Girls Forced to Have Sex With Seth Rogen in Film,” Rogen joked. “You’re in there, Anna [Faris]. Sorry.” Drunken “conquests” aside, the forced sex he has with co-star Anna Faris in their new movie “Observe and Report” sounds like nothing short of rape.

What’s at issue here is that pesky concept of “informed consent”. Without having seen the movie, I am approaching the questionable scene at-hand from the stand-point of film reviews, press interviews and public commentary. During the scene depicted by the above screen shot, Farris’ character is beyond intoxicated on a combination of alcohol and anti-depressants.  Escorted home by mall cop Rogan, she vomits before he goes in to kiss her and eventually ends up in bed where he has sex with unconscious, puking torso.  What makes the scene “OK”, according to Rogan, is that she wakes up mid-fuck to ask him: “Why’d you stop, motherfucker??”.  This, everyone involved is telling us, is her consent…and our reason to laugh.  I, personally, don’t understand what’s supposed to be funny.

A poll of readers on The Huffington Post suggests others are not so humorless as I when it comes to the comedy of consent.  In an article commentary of the same scene described here, 36.46% of respondents voted that this sort of sex is “…a JOKE people. Get upset about more important things” while only 29.06% of those polled sided with the other end of the spectrum tha “[T]otally unacceptable. It’s sick and wrong”.  To put those stats into words, over one-third of readers find rape funny always with nearly three-quarters of people finding it funny at least sometimes.

.WL.: the new hit teen trend April 7, 2009

.authored by something.of.substance.

(originally published 2/22/09 on WL  + addendum added  3/8/09)

The horror of intimate partner violence, as demonstrated by celebrity music couple Rihanna and Chris Brown, is in no way glamorous.  Or, so you’d think. Yet, teenagers interviewed by the Chicago Tribune not only supported Brown’s actions but started coming out as members of intimate partner violence themselves.  Here’s the twist:  they’re showing off the wounds they’re proud to have incurred in the name of “love”.

Not every teen interviewed by the paper condoned violence.  Some called it “bogus” and others said violence is never allowed.  These teens appear to be in the minority.  As written in the February 20th article for the Tribune:

“…other teens insist violence is sometimes justified in relationships.

While young fans have plastered Rihanna’s MySpace page with notes of support, many comments on Brown’s page express delight at the possibility that he battered a woman.

Kriana Jackson, a sophomore at Sullivan, said it’s a sign of a broader culture of acceptance of abuse.

“There was a girl at school this week with a scratch on her eye,” Jackson said. “She was talking openly about her boyfriend hitting her, but she was smiling and saying it was funny.”

Young people carry these attitudes into adulthood, experts say, and young targets of dating violence are more likely to succumb to aggression in later relationships. …”

Google searches for “Rhianna and Chris Brown in  love” are up.  YouTube videos like “Chris Brown & Rihanna KISSING” have seen their views jump into the multi-millions in the past week.  Comments are also rising accordingly.   Surprisingly (or maybe not), public opinion is split two ways.  Either intimate partner violence is seen as a “mistake”-

“god, EVERYONE makes mistakes. we’re not perfect. stop hating on chris and just imagine for a second, you’re in his position”

or indefensible-

“All men who hit women for any reason need to be eliminated period. Chris Brown you look like a woman beater.. I can see it in your eyes.. It’s sickening to see all these unreal affectionate pictures of these 2.. Don’t ever let a cute or pretty picture of a couple fool you. The handsome, talented man can hypnotize you with his fame and popularity, but is only good at putting on his act. In reality he mostly likely only has 3 brain cells..”.

.if you can’t beat them, BFF them. April 5, 2009

.authored by something.of.substance.

And, in case you weren’t sure that feminism was all but dead, Facebook is bringing back Party Barbie with a technological vengeance.

As I logged into my Facebook.com home page today, one of the perpetually pervasive ads in the right-hand column caught my eye. Forget that the “ads” are placed there based upon key words they find anywhere in your profile or that this Big Brother approach to marketing creeps me out and let’s focus on the ad itself for a moment:

Be Barbie’s BFF

Hey, remember me? I haven’t seen you in ages! Life has been crazy lately: Fashion Week, huge parties, boy drama. Fan me and let’s chat!

Become a Fan of Barbie: All Doll’d Up

Not only does this advertisement presuppose that I have warm and fuzzy feelings of nostalgia for Barbie but that, because I’m female, I’m seriously and into fashion, parties, boys, or any combination thereof. Barbie always did have tunnel vision.

.WL.: fuck “fake” April 4, 2009

.all natural.

.authored by something.of.substance.

(originally posted on WL 11/11/08)

I’d like to make an announcement: it’s time to retire the term “fake”.

No, I don’t mean you have to give up fake to describe things such as the chicken in Kentucky Fried, Pamela Anderson’s boobs or the orgasm you had last night. Fake as a retrospective of personality, however, needs to go.

Before I go any further, I would like to present “fake” as defined in the Urban Dictionary:

“if your bitch moans and looks you in the eye its fake”

“Sometimes applied to people who are accused of being something they are not. See poser.”

“A person, the vast majority of the time a female, who acts too nice to be real in order to lure in pathetic dopes and use/betray them, frequently crushing the victim’s soul in the process. Symptoms of fakeness include wearing a huge, phony, Botox-looking smile the entire time, saying “Hiiiiii! How are you!” a lot, using an overly sweet tone of voice that’s so dripping with sap it makes you want to vomit, and just generally being overly perky all the time. A fake chooses her victims very carefully, usually very naive individuals, waits until the victim has divulged their deepest, darkest secrets, then spreads them all over the school and makes sure the victim is absolutely miserable. AVOID AT ALL COSTS.”

It certainly goes without saying that all of these definitions represent a slang use of the word and not the legitimate dictionary definition any of which usually reference fraud or counterfeit items or practices. If that’s true and we can apply “fake” to refer to people’s fraudulent or counterfeit personalities, how would we really, genuinely prove such a thing?

.who’s to blame?. February 15, 2009

.authored by something.of.substance.

.pass the buck.

This just in: an airplane crashed; something went wrong. In the latest example of this all too familiar scenario, Continental Connection Flight 3407 crashed into a Buffalo, NY house killing fifty people. Almost as soon as the iced over plane went down, the news began relentlessly reporting every tragically inane detail. The de-icing system was activated. No birds were involved. The plan nose-dived- wait- flat-bellied into a house. And, the latest announcement, the plane was flying on autopilot which was, in such weather conditions, against some airline policies. Depending on the situation. What started out as an un-biased accounting of a tragedy soon turned into a blame game. Someone needed to be responsible. Someone needed to be at fault. This person, speculatively, is the pilot. I think he learned his lesson.

.what’s luck got to do with it?. September 21, 2008

…cross posted on Wordy Laundry.

Please note: this will be the last cross-posted article (save for those I believe to be of immediate importance to both blogs). Please bookmark, save, or add Wordy Laundry’s main page to your Reader so you don’t miss out when the site begins sporting its own regular updates tomorrow!

.authored by something.of.substance.

.barker and goldstein: not so lucky?.

Entertainment news venues were working overtime this weekend to keep the public updated on the condition of Travis Barker, former drummer of Blink-182 and +44, and Adam “DJ AM” Goldstein, former fiancé of Nicole Ritchie and celebrity beat spinner, after their Lear Jet crashed during take-off. The two celebrities were left severely burned- hospitals have reported second and third-degree burns- but expected to recover fully. Four other people including the pilot, co-pilot, Barker’s assistant, and a security guard were killed in the crash.

The internet is over-run with stories and speculation regarding this tragic accident. And, wherever there is a report, there is a response. Fans, well-wishers and even one person claiming to be “the antichrist” have emerged to proffer their opinions about everything from burn placement (one guy speculated that if Travis Barker was burned from the waist down and DJ AM sustained burns on his head, the only “logical” explanation could be that DJ AM was performing certain sexual acts on Travis Barker at the time of the crash) to recovery time to drawing correlations to the plane crash death of singer Aaliyah in 2001. There are even comments from people who are glad the duo was engulfed in flames; apparently, if your tattoos are offensive or your songs aren’t up to scratch a fair percentage of the general public thinks you deserve to burn alive for your crimes against musicality. A smattering of people even claimed that the lack of Jesus Christ in these two men’s personal lives contributed to this event.

However, most people were talking about what a “miracle” it was that these two men survived. This seems like a perfectly innocuous statement. I mean, even Dr. Fred Mullins, the executive director of Joseph Still Burn Center in Augusta, Georgia was quoted as saying: “Anybody who can survive a plane crash is pretty lucky”. What I want to know is, wouldn’t they have been pretty lucky if they weren’t in a plane crash to begin with? Wouldn’t the “miracle” have been if nothing happened in the first place? Or, perhaps more pointedly: what do the families and friends of the deceased four in the crash think about the supposed “miracle”?

.watch/listen.- Eli Mattson’s “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word” September 19, 2008

.authored by something.of.substance.

.the new piano man.

I’m not a huge fan of song covers, especially when either the song or the singer is iconic. So, you can imagine my initial reaction when I was flipping past America’s Got Talent the other night and heard that Eli Mattson, a 26 year-old trained pianist and somewhat Blues singer from the Midwest, would be covering Elton John’s “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word”. While this is a popular Elton John song, it doesn’t seem to be as iconic as, say, “Tiny Dancer”, “Rocket Man”, or even “Circle of Life”, it is still widely recognizable- and open to . And, though it is Billy Joel who carries the nickname “Piano Man” (after his song of the same title), Eli Mattson might just take it from him.

.america, the hypocritical. September 17, 2008

…can also be found on Wordy Laundry!

.authored by something.of.substance.

.Celebrities dig Obama.

Have I entered an alternate dimension? I could have sworn that, just a couple of weeks ago, the Republican agenda for President was working militantly to dismiss Barack Obama as the wrong choice because of his, and I quote, “celebrity”. Wasn’t he repeatedly denounced for being so popular? Weren’t multiple ads about the legitimacy of his politics created to attack his well-liked persona? And, yet, I don’t hear anyone in the Republican Party denouncing their own Governor Sarah Palin for her recent surge in notoriety. Ironic, isn’t it, that the Republican should benefit from their own hypocrisy! Why, you ask? Because in our celebrity culture, Americans have forgotten that politics is simply a smoke-and-mirrors act on a national stage and we’re the ones being fooled.

I started writing about Governor Palin and the McCain/Palin ticket the hour it was announced she would run with Senator McCain. I was angry and insulted and frustrated that Republicans believed that, simply because I had a vagina and sometimes wore lipstick, I would relate to this woman. I acknowledged the brilliance of adding her to McCain’s lackluster campaign. But, I also kept the faith that America would see right through this slight-of-hand and get back to the business of voting on the issues rather than the celebrity. I mean, once again, wasn’t that a chief point against Senator Obama?!

.McCain digs Bush.

Rather than dissipating, Palin’s popularity continues to surge ahead. For example, my blog has received no less than 500 hits from “Sarah Palin” searches in the last week. This would not be such a point of contention for me should they be researching her policies or her positions; I can certainly understand and support anyone attempting to learn more about the person one bout of melanoma away from running our country. Instead, the search terms look something like this: “Sarah Palin Vogue”, “Palin Beauty Pic”, “Sarah Palin Bathing Suit”, “Palin Miss Alaska Swimsuit”, “Palin in college bed” (really?!), “Sarah Palin Fashion” (is she debuting a collection at Bryant Park?), and, my personal favorite, “Sarah Palin condom”.