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This year on the Sexist, the pageviews accumulated like so many cats draped across my spinstery blogger frame. I’d like to take a minute to thank you all for clicking and commenting, even those of you who accidentally stumbled onto this blog while searching for porn. Especially you guys.
Below are the 10 most popular blog posts of the past year, with commentary on everything from semen facials to sexy librarians to nipple slips to Sarah Palin. Damnit! You all were just looking for porn!
10. Semen Facials Are Like Weddings, in which the degradation of porn can be ignored in the bedroom (as long as we can address it on the blogs):
Facials are like weddings. We all know that the institution of marriage is one of the patriarchy’s all-time greatest hits, in which women are sold into sexual slavery from father to husband in exchange for livestock. And yet, who derives the greatest joy from weddings? Women! It’s the craziest thing. But even though we all know that weddings were clearly institutionalized to facilitate the willing subjugation of women, feminists figure out a way to do it anyway. Why? Probably because even though we all know it’s sexist as fuck, weddings—like facial ejaculation—still make some people happy. And feminists deserve to be happy, too. But that doesn’t mean we should forget about the sexist tropes that sometimes inform our happiness (and our sex lives).
9. Library Conference Secret Twitter Proves Librarians Sexy, Stern, in which some librarians wish to silence the sexual overtures of other librarians:
Some librarians are exhausted by the conference’s material (”I have reached the point of the conference where I no longer give a damn about anything anyone is saying any more.”) Others are inspired by a perceived lack of cultural acceptance for a librarian’s sex life (”I am an adult. I am a librarian. I enjoy good sex. Including at this conference. What is the problem?”). Most of them, for whatever reason, are talking about fucking—that’s the “sexy” part. Not everyone is happy about it. That’s where “stern” comes in.
8. Huffington Post: Liberal Politics, Sexist Entertainment, in which nipple slips emerge as a liberal mainstay:
The problem is that people really do care about nipples. They care so much about nipples that the Huffington Post devotes pages and pages of photographs to them when women accidentally (or, you know, against their will) reveal them to the public. In that way, there’s no difference between the religious conservative who is scandalized by a bare breast popping up in the middle of his football game and a liberal Web site which devotes its resources to naked chicks. A woman’s body part is a priority. Real women’s issues, not so much.
7. The Onion’s Best and Worst Rape Jokes, in which the hilarity of rape jokes is all about the target:
I’ve written a lot recently on who can successfully tell a rape joke and what targets are fair game for the butts of those jokes. One perennial source of rape humor, the Onion, gets the rape joke dynamic right a lot of the time. The format has a lot to do it: as America’s leading source of fake news, the Onion is always skewering the media along with its make-believe subjects, and media treatment of sexual violence is often ripe for satire.
6. The Rapiest Quotes From “I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell”, in which Tucker Max‘s jokes rely on almost (but not quite!) rape:
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Max’s stories succeed on orchestrating sexual conquests that are increasingly outrageous, drunk, dubiously legal, painful, objectifying, and embarrassing to his sex partners. In order to continue to one-up himself, Max intentionally pushes the line of consent—getting drunker, getting her drunker, leaving his sex partners to fend for themselves—naked—on the street, hiding his friend with an undisclosed video camera in his closet while they’re doing it. It’s not hard to think of the ultimate scenario these increasingly absurd sexcapades are inching toward—it’s, like, rape, dude. And now—thanks to Max’s movie tour—undergrads everywhere can compete to have the consensual sex that’s most like rape without actually being a prosecutable offense. Sure, some dudes might fail and actually rape chicks. Oh well!