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* On Tiger Beatdown, The Rejectionist writes about attempting to evade misogyny by adopting acceptably “masculine” interests. (This tactic works for both men and women!) Namely: Drinking too much, and reading “manfiction”:
When I was younger I did that thing that some of us ladies do, the thing of working very hard to be The Girl Who Was Cool Enough to Hang Out With the Boys. Being that girl was an exhausting job, fraught with peril; it involved drinking a whole bunch, not talking much, constantly making sure the boys knew how much more down I was than other girls, and carrying around at all times one of the following three novels: All the Pretty Horses ,On the Road, or Junky (even at the highest pinnacle of my internalized misogyny, I never made it through Henry Miller). It was an unforgivable sign of weakness to read books about (let alone by) women, who sat around in kitchens popping out babies, harping on their menfolk, and doing the dishes. Women were boring! They were gross! Passive! Or just plain mean! They didn’t think much! They couldn’t possibly do exciting things, like drive cars across the country or drive spaceships to the moon, kiss girls, duke it out with their fathers in a sudden eruption of years’ worth of Repressed Sentiment, pursue villains craftily, or survive the streets of turn-of-the-century London as cunning and wily orphans. A professed affinity for Manfiction was a central tenet of this precarious Cool Girl identity; a Cool Girl was always ready to support the literary analysis presented by the dudes, even after consuming a fifth of bourbon at three in the morning.
* Hysteria! introduces us to man candles, or as I like to call them, “mandles.” One of them is “fart” scented:
There’s not much analysis to be had here, other than to point out that anytime a company or marketing department attempts to define “masculinity” via something like a scented candle, hilarious results ensue. Some of the candles come in scents that you’d pretty much expect – baseball, football, golf course. Oh, and of course “fart.” Because no man is leading a complete life if he isn’t entirely surrounded by fart jokes. Then, of course, there are the strange selection of apparently manly food items: pot roast, pizza, popcorn (?), bacon. They can be paired with manly drinks, which consist solely of “cup o’ joe” and beer.
What really gets me, though, are the weird concept scents that they create once they run out of obvious objects that seem “masculine.” The line offers not only a “garage” scent (which smells of oil and rubber) and a “fishing dock” scent (which we do not carry, thankfully), but also a candle called, simply, “FREEDOM.” Apparently, Freedom smells like cinnamon and candle wax. Who knew?
* In the fall, the Supreme Court will hear arguments concerning the right of Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church to picket military funerals”
A sampling of the signs carried at [Iraq veteran Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder‘s] 2006 funeral at St. John’s Catholic Church in Westminster, Md., included “God Hates the USA/Thank God for 9/11,” “Semper Fi Fags,” “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” and “Priests Rape Boys.” The demonstrators abided by the law and stayed away from the funeral itself.
* Dr. George Tiller was murdered one year ago yesterday.
* Bitch Magazine writes on the recent barroom assault of Kat Stacks, a woman known for kissing-and-telling about sleeping with celebrities. Apparently, Stacks made some unkind comments about rapper Bow Wow; in retaliation, a man hit Stacks and demanded an apology on Bow Wow’s behalf in a videotaped assault. Bitch‘s Andrea Plaid is wondering where the feminist outcry is:
When I read about the assault on Twitter, I found only one group who passionately spoke out against the men who perpetrated the violence against Stacks and those (men and women) who defended the assailants: mostly black feminist-minded people—and it was mostly black women at that. . . . Everyone else was deafeningly silent. . . . Kat Stacks’ assault evoked no reaction from any other group of people. If all the feminist rhetoric about violence against women—that we should stand up and speak out wherever we see it—is true, then the violence committed against Kat Stacks is indeed a feminist issue and, honestly, I’d half-expected a bigger outcry from other people down with ending such violence.
However, it is such selective victim-choosing that cements the cynicism of feminism really being about and for certain people.
Photo via marek.krzystkiewicz, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0