This ad is bad enough due to the disturbing, creepy and regressive gendered messages, and lots of people are talking about that. To be clear, I don’t see myself supporting the idea that having men buy things for you is some kind of grand life achievement (one to be impressed by!), no matter what the context.
But will someone please tell me what the fuck this commercial has to do with ice cream?
I’ve watched it three or four times now, trying to work out the link. And I’m absolutely convinced that there isn’t one. The “fall in love” line is extremely tenuous at best. I mean, if advertisers are going to make these kinds of shamelessly sexist ads, shouldn’t they at least try to find a way to defend it as somehow related to the product? I can’t even work this out on a “they’re selling a lifestyle” level. Is there a Dairy Queen lifestyle that I’m unfamiliar with, where children are taught that it’s women’s job to look pretty, and men’s job to throw money around to impress them?
This has to be part of the reason why I so rarely watch television . . . and why I mute the ads when I do.
PD at Shakes has this up: a long post about LGBT PDA and self-censorship, including a bit about a couple of het friends who took her up on a challenge to be closeted, to conceal that they were a couple, for a week.
They lasted exactly three days.
My friend returned to me in tears on day four and said: “I’m sorry. I had no idea what it is like for you.”
***
That is how I lived for the first 32 years of my life, whether I was single or coupled.
And while my current self-editing is not nearly as extreme as it was before I made the choice to live as an out lesbian, it’s still self-editing.
I should note that I spotted it at Alas, where Amp discusses it.
Your blogger in PR last week, with the book she’s been reading for five effing months because she spends too much time on the internet and reads too many things for law school, leaving Tony Judt 2/3rds incomplete. This makes her sad, and potential partners will probably reject her for it.
Yes, I judge people by their literary choices. Do you list The Da Vinci Code as one of your favorite books on Facebook? Talk about how great Ayn Rand is? Read John Grisham novels somewhere other than on an airplane or the beach? Think that God is super smart for having written the Bible? Even worse, say that you don’t like to read? I’m running in the other direction (especially when it comes to dating you).
Yes, it’s judgmental. Yes, perhaps it is a little mean. I don’t care. Dating is a compatibility game, and I don’t imagine things would ever work out with someone who thinks Dan Brown is the height of great literature or that Ayn Rand had some awesome ideas (or was even a decent writer). Literary taste can be a pretty good weeding-out mechanism, and for me it’s right up there along with foodie- and wino-ness (can’t date a guy who only eats to live and doesn’t really care what he puts in his mouth); progressive values (no Republicans, Libertarians or apathetic people, please); and an interest in politics, feminism media (that’s pretty much what I do all day, so I’d like to be able to talk about it). And you definitely have to like dogs. Preferably big ones.
Before someone jumps on me for being snobby or judgmental, this is a values issue and, as I said before, a compatibility game. There are a lot of things that are worth compromising on, but the things that take up a good deal of my time and that I thoroughly enjoy — food, wine, politics, reading, and adorable slobbery hairy beasts — I want to be able to share with my partner. Other people might privilege other things, and that’s fine too — I’m sure there are plenty of people who seek out partners who share their religion or their vegetarianism or their love of music or their passion for sports or whatever else.
So before this gets too serious, what are your unconventional deal-breakers in relationships? And has anyone read any good books lately?
That’s right, I said scrubbing. Scrubbing sweat off of underage boys in a locker room. It’s central part of a new game for the Nintendo DS called Duel Love, in which you play a female transfer student who ends up as the personal trainer for a secret “Fight Club” at her new high school. That’s right, the companies that brought you Pac-Man, Tekken, Power Rangers, Tamagotchi and many more now bring you… scrubbing down sweaty boys and giving them massages!
Romance comics for girls, often featuring delicate, beautiful boys who fall in love with the plucky or cipher-like heroine — or, just as often, fall in love with each other — are nothing new in Japan. It used to be that you could pretend this was just another Or in the United States; check the Manga section of your local Barnes & Noble. Dating games based in similar scenarios (often called otome, the Japanese word for maiden) are nothing new either, but they’re getting to be bigger and bigger-budget projects. And utilizing new technology as well… as you can see in the trailer below, you have to actually scrub back and forth with the Nintendo DS styles, and here’s a picture instructing the player to blow into the microphone to clear away the steamed-up shower stalls. Why, whatever on earth for?
I don’t get the gay, gay gay Logo channel, but thanks to the power of the Internet, I was able to purchase and download their latest entry into the reality-dating show category: Transamerican Love Story, starring a trans woman and eight bachelors who vie for her heart. Before you slap your forehead, know that the setup is nothing like There’s Something About Miriam, a similar show where the entire “haw haw” gag was that the bachelors didn’t know the star was trans. The entire cast knows that Calpernia Addams is a transsexual, and they’re all up-front in the first episode about their own dating histories too. Interestingly, the cast is quite a mixed bag of sexual preferences and identities and experiences (or lack thereof) with trans women. Less interestingly, the guys are mostly a bunch of boring schlubs… but that sort of fits with the “frog prince meets princess” theme they keep subtly inserting.
(Some light spoilers coming up.) The most interesting thing about Transamerican Love Story is exactly how ordinary they’ve managed to succeed in making it. There are definitely more queers & trans people around than usual, and host Alec Mapa alone seems to be deliberately raising the gayness quotient of every episode by 300% percent. But as Addams said in an interview with ABC News, “When they actually see the show, they’re going to be surprised. They’re going to see a girl next door from the south living in L.A. and trying to date.” And that’s pretty much what the show is, more or less the same as “the Bachelorette,” but with a little bit of dealing with trans issues here and there–always getting an important mention, but never allowed to interfere too much. Heck, they threw the creepy “I only date pre-ops” car salesman, who used to have his own (failed) trans-porn site, off the show in the first episode. (And just when I was looking forward to being appalled by his fetishizing “best of both worlds” statements in a future episode…)
The “ordinary straight girl next door” at the center of all this is Calpernia Addams — who, it must be said, is far from your average “plucked off the casting couch” reality-show star. Although she’s certainly not a household name, she’s probably one of the most famous trans people in this country — first entering the spotlight in a brutally real tragedy, as the girlfriend of Private First Class Barry Winchell. Winchell was murdered by a fellow soldier in a fight originally sparked by the fact that he was dating Addams — a story later used for the film Soldier’s Girl. But wait, there’s more! Addams also wrote a book about her experiences, helped organize and performed in the landmark trans-inclusive Vagina Monologues in Los Angeles a few years back, and does activism and consulting related to media portrayals of trans people. And now she’s starring in a reality dating show.
I probably sound a little like a gushing fan. But what really won me over to liking Calpernia Addams was not her creative work or media activism. It wasn’t even the fact that she apparently named herself after Wednesday Addams’ great aunt, who was sentenced to dance naked in public for witchcraft–although that’s kind of awesome in its own right. No, it’s actually the fact that she cracks my shit up with stuff like this:
Earlier this week there was an update in the death of Sanesha Stewart: apparently the man who is suspected of killing her — let’s be clear, he was dragged from her apartment early in the morning, covered in her blood — had known her for quite some time. That doesn’t seem to fit with his claim (and the media’s original lurid story) that he was shocked to find out that Stewart was trans and flew into a homicidal rage as a result. Sadly, I wasn’t surprised to hear this at all.
Most Feministe readers will agree that the “trans panic” defense is bogus, and that one’s own fear or disgust of queer or trans people is hardly an excuse for violence or murder. But a lot of these “panics” are suspicious on more levels than one. In similar killings in the past, there’s been evidence that suggests the murderer knew very well that the victim was trans, and may have killed her in order to erase the association between them. The revelation in Stewart’s case brought to mind the aptly titled 2003 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, “Disposable People.” Washington DC activist Earline Budd, who’s dealt with her own share of transphobic violence on top of fielding more than a dozen calls a month about other trans people being assaulted, sums it up well:
Budd, like many transgender activists, believes the “discovery crime” motivation is often bogus. Most transgendered people are up front with potential sex partners about their identities and anatomies, she says — and even in cases where they’re not, “how can you say that’s an excuse for killing somebody or beating them up?”
Bella Evangelista’s murderer, Antoine Jacobs, is reportedly considering a “panic defense” when he goes to court.
According to Sgt. Brett Parson, head of Washington’s GLLU police unit, Jacobs told police he and Evangelista “were engaging in sex for hire, he liked it, the act was completed, they parted ways, and some of his friends said, ‘Hey, man, that’s a dude,’ and he returned and shot her.”
Budd suspects that Jacobs simply got embarrassed when his friends found out he’d been with Evangelista, who was well known as a transgendered woman in the neighborhood where Jacobs lived.
“This was all to show off for the guys,” she says. “He came back and confronted her, and when she turned around to walk away, he pulled out a gun and shot her and just continued to shoot her. In the back. And that’s a panic defense? Come on now.”
Now that the grades are in, I can begin my foray into blogging with a brief post on the wonderful world of dating, Internet style. Here’s one woman’s success story:
One of my pet peeves are individuals who speak in computer lingo. I wanted to see if this man could write complete sentences and carry on an interesting conversation. Could he be compelling? I was also looking for a complete gentleman. As we women know, that’s so very hard to find.
I was delighted to see that not only could he respond in complete sentences, but he had an interesting life of challenges, losses, and, in the end, success.
Our lives paralleled each others in so many ways. I didn’t want the first evening to end so quickly. I was referred to as “ma’am,” as in “ma’am please,” and “thank you, ma’am.”
Here’s a beautiful example of male college students who think that being offensive is the same thing as being funny: The Sentinal “humor” piece “Mock of Love.” It’s a set of “spoof” suggestions for the second season of the VH1 Bret Michaels dating show Rock of Love. The irony is that if you’ve ever watched Rock of Love (you won’t admit to it, so I’ll do it for you), you’ll know that no one could mock the show better than its mere existence does. The jokes write themselves — including the incredibly misogynist ones.
Now, I can’t say that we should expect much from a publication whose poll in the sidebar looks like this (the options are bad enough, but what people actually chose is even worse). But Antonio Ciaccia takes things to a whole new level of douchery, managing to insult everyone on pretty much the most vile terms possible, and miserably failing to actually be funny.
Contrary to popular opinion, feminism and romance are not incompatible and feminism may actually improve the quality of heterosexual relationships, according to Laurie Rudman and Julie Phelan, from Rutgers University in the US. Their study* also shows that unflattering feminist stereotypes, that tend to stigmatize feminists as unattractive and sexually unappealing, are unsupported.
…
They found that having a feminist partner was linked to healthier heterosexual relationships for women. Men with feminist partners also reported both more stable relationships and greater sexual satisfaction. According to these results, feminism does not predict poor romantic relationships, in fact quite the opposite.
…
In fact, feminist women were more likely to be in a heterosexual romantic relationship than non-feminist women.
It’s not complicated to figure out why feminists would have more fulfilling relationships and better sex lives. When you see your partner as a human being and not a means to an end, you’re going to pick a partner you actually like, and your partner is going to feel valued for who they are, not for what they can give you. When you think that sex is a mutually pleasurable event where both partners should be comfortable and fully satisfied and neither should feel guilty or mistreated, you’re going to have better sex. When you see women as full-fledged people with full human rights — not baby incubators, not “the fairer sex,” not “compliments” to your existence, not status symbols, not holders of sex, not property, not your own personal support staff — you’re going to enjoy their company more. And they’re going to enjoy yours. (more…)
A Sundae Never Looked So Gross
from Cara @ Feministe 09 May 2008 7:26 pm
