Gender, Media, My favorites, race

Rube Goldberg of Feminism and Rap

Nicki Minaj likes to have sex with women and I don’t do music reviews. Pink Friday is absurdly good though, and this is why.

Note: Please don’t read this without listening to the album. Each song is linked in the number before it. Click on them. Listen to them as you read or before, but listen. It’s really fucking important.

1. I’m The Best. Nicki just starts out her CD with something that we all know but maybe have forgotten: I’m The Best. How do we know that? She explains that she wasn’t given this out of nowhere, she worked from nothing to this superstar status. She isn’t the first to make it big, but other people became big for themselves, whereas Nicki did it for us. She became a megastar because we needed her to become a megastar. She explains that she is the best because it’s selfless for her to be the best – to be the one everyone loves, and she hopes someday the rest of us will be as smart and amazing as her because it’s lonely being so much better than the rest of us. I hope I can make her less lonely.

2. Then she starts her album for real with the words: “I am not Jasmine, I am Aladdin.” Just as in fairy tales we’ve been told since we were tiny, the rap game has been a patriarchal world. Nicki’s having none of that. Thus she declares that she is not the useless pretty girl who is simply the impetus for male actions – she is male action. Then she calls herself a cunt because she has a vagina and she is fucking proud of it. She is male action with a pussy. She uses a lot of fairy tale imagery to remind us that we are constantly bombarded with gender roles – specifically ones that make the man the chivalrous savior with a large sword and the woman the helpless piece of skinny being held prisoner by a dungeon dragon.

Who does she get to be featured on this track (essentially the first track of the album)? The voice of patriarchy – the biggest, whitest name in the rap game. Eminem plays his part well, explaining that he doesn’t take shit from women and if they stand up to him he’ll rape them and film it. He then offers a game plan as to how to defeat his patriarchal rain of terror. If life sucks: “kick it back in the face.” She does kick him back in the face but she illustrates how hard it is to combat this when the male norm in power, represented by Eminem, when that power says things like: “All you little faggots can suck it, no homo” and that gets regarded as reasonable.

3. Then she busts out the best song of the 21st century that starts with “Shitted on ’em, I just shitted on ’em.” In case you forgot, she’s better than everybody else and she’s into fucking girls. Like a man. She’s better than a man. She fucks more girls than whatever male idol you have, because (a) “A lot of bad bitches beggin me to F1” (she rhymed F1 three times in a row) girls want to fuck her (b) “She ain’t a Nicki fan, bitch is deaf dumb” so that explains the few girls that won’t fuck her – they’re stupid and can’t hear how amazing she is (c) “If I had a dick, I would pull it out and piss on ’em” because she doesn’t have a dick and she needs to remind you of that.

4. She’s better than a man, right? She’s established that. Then comes her most clichéd girly song. She’s post-modern. Nicki is a woman and sometimes she likes to fuck men. She’s not just showing her feminine side though, she’s showing that when she shows her feminine side it necessitates her being defeated by a man. By subscribing to a feminine archetype, a man sees “right thru her.”

5. “Me against them.” This is a rap album and rapping is about bragging – about battling and winning. Here Nicki explains that she is not just the best but she’s the best despite the fact that everyone is constantly trying to bring her down. How are they bringing her down? By defining her as a female rapper, or a pop star, or as any word because “[She] is not a word.” “I am not a girl who can be defined.” She is Nicki Minaj. She refuses to be defined by anyone else because only she can define herself and she is simply defining herself as the best – as the winner – as “the voice of an entire generation.” She is the ultimate rapper because she refuses to define herself as a rapper.

6. Just when you think it’s simply an album about bragging about how amazing she is, she displays her vulnerability and hypocrisy. “Yes, I’m a beast and I feast when I conquer/but I’m alone on my throne.” She wants to make it on her own, but she’s scared of what making it on her own will make her, and she needs you to save her. Who is “you?” That will be answered later.

7. The first assumption we would have about who she is calling out for help – who can save her from her hypocrisy – would be her friends. So she sings a love song to her friends at Young Money. But they can’t save her. They are simply a moment to her. They created a wonderful moment, but it is a moment. A moment that she is thankful for because moments create the whole, but it is not the whole. You have to enjoy all the moments. “Everybody dies, but not everybody lives.”

8. This is how I know I’m right/brilliant. The version I downloaded had “Check it Out” as the next track and I thought it was weird. It didn’t fit the narrative of her thought process. So I checked out her official tracklist. The next song is “Here I Am.” This is the answer to who can save her. Confused? Don’t be.

Nicki, in a very dark song, keeps exclaiming “here I am.” She’s desperate for attention from this same, still unnamed person who can supposedly save her from becoming the monster that she thinks fame will turn her into. “Everything in life is old.”

9. The mood shifts drastically to cheesiest sounding, girliest love song to this person who can supposedly save her. She desperately pleads that this person come back to her – this person that she supposedly wronged and wants back in her life. Who is this person? Well the song is called “Dear Old Nicki.” Just when you thought she was showing all this vulnerability as a woman and she was gonna need a man to complete her, she says “fuck you, yeah I’m vulnerable, but the person I need to save me is not some man, but rather a woman, and not just any woman, ME. Me will save me. But me before the fame.”

Every single line is fantastic in this song, but essentially it is just saying: “I’m glad I did what I did because as a famous person I can do good, but before I was famous I didn’t have to worry about the shallow things that maintain fame and I miss those moments – those moments when I was a different person.”

10. Then she plays the first single that made her popular. Just to remind us bitches that she can sample Annie Lennox and still be a bad ass bitch that will blow your mind. And she needs “your” love. Who is you? Her. Old her.

I really like Rube Goldbergs, and I’ve never been able to explain it validly – there is no real use to them. This is why. This album is the Rube Goldberg of narrative. Each track triggers the next track. This is why I like Rube Goldbergs because they defy narrative in that they mean nothing while simultaneously being a slave to narrative in that there is no way to move on to the next piece without finishing the first part.

comedy, Gender, Horny, My favorites, Poop

I Have Fun: Or Poop and Kanye’s Dick

I always walk to the front of the subway station because there are fewer people in the front two cars then in the middle ones closer to the entrance. I like to sit when I travel and I don’t care if it means more walking. To me, walking and standing are interchangeable – it’s only once we allow another object to help out with our fight against gravity that we truly relax.

At the front of the Easter Parkway/Brooklyn Museum stop there was a pile of human poop. I guess the people who walk all the way to the front of the station are either people who are aficionados of laziness and efficiency or people who don’t have access to a toilet. I didn’t mind being grouped with these people, as long as it meant I would get a seat next to a wall of metal bars I could rest my head. I hung out by human poop. It was so worth it.

Not only was their a seat empty, but the entire car was devoid of humans. From Eastern Parkway all the way to Grand Army Plaza I was going to be alone in this moving cart of metal bars and slippery seats. This is how I would get my start as a member of the fantastical dance troupe that dances in the streets. I jungle gym’d harder than Kanye West Emmet Till’d. Then the train stopped at Grand Army Plaza. No one entered my car! I had 3 more minutes of intense breakdancing off a moving vehicle’s walls! The doors began to close! But then a rich couple came running across the platform to join me last second. I had to sit.

Dancing>sitting>walking>standing.

Fun>comfort>movement>boring.

This is the problem with people and the fact that they can be offended.

I should have kept dancing – that was what was in my heart, but I couldn’t because I thought they might judge me poorly because of their suits and their non-smiles. I was on my way to a place full of suits and non-smiles and I was wearing jeans, a vest, and my ridiculous facial hair that make me look like a pedophile attempting to attract the children of pirates by reminding them of their fathers. My alma mater had invited me and some other burgeoning arts performers in New York City to mingle with other alums who had a lot more money in an attempt to convince the latter group to give donations in order to build our college’s arts center.

I was greeted by a tray of seared tuna topped with wasabi infused caviar on a daikon radish. I don’t usually eat fish, but it’s hard to say no to things that have infusion in them. The rest of the night was me not knowing what to say. See, I wanted to talk about how amazing it was that Kanye West put pictures of his penis on the internet, but I felt like people who worked in undescribed finance positions were not interested in that.

I enjoy fun, but I also feel it my duty to allow others to enjoy fun. If they want to do whatever, they are allowed to do whatever and if I don’t like it, I don’t like it. It’s seems simple and without nuance, but it has plenty of nuance. Don’t force upon someone your definition of fun, and walk away when someone tries to force upon you their definition of fun.

Why did they invite me to this event?

They know that the performance I do is just me complaining about how I couldn’t get laid in college, right?

Attention Whoring, Gender, Horny, Indignant, Media, My favorites

My Non-Monogamous Relationship With Hulu

I originally wanted to break this fast by writing about my adventures in facial hair. The post sucked. The only sentence I liked was “it started as a novelty on my neck” and that’s only because I’m into alliteration.

I watched Chuck and Lie To Me this morning to wake myself up. It’s not because I don’t have things I need to do – I have a lot of chores to accomplish before work today, but because I missed Hulu.

This is the way I should start this post.

Hulu is the best girlfriend I’ve ever had. She’s always there when I need her to tell me stories as I cuddle with my giant u-shaped body pillow that I got off craigslist for free. She’s there to give me vague sexual arousal that can transition nicely into porn. And most importantly she doesn’t need me when I’m busy and when I come back has just stored up hours of time for us to hang out in her neat little queue. I love her little queue. The bigger it gets the bigger I get. She’s perfect because she allows me to have the non-monogamous relationship that I always wanted – one where the relationship part is still accented highly.

I have a confession to make.

I like my relationships. I like the ones I get in. For the most part they are healthy. I enjoy being in them. I’m happy.

Whew. That was tough. I didn’t want to have to admit that.

The point is that I like being in a relationship. I just like to be able to put it on the back burner for anything else. Hulu lets me do that. It’s not that I need to be able to sleep with other people – though Hulu wouldn’t care. It’s just that I want Hulu to feel comfortable sleeping with other people because she knows I don’t care. It’s not that I need her to not pester me when I have more important shit than her needs – Hulu always gives me a number in parenthesis next to the word “Queue” that lets me know how long it’s been since we’ve hung out, which directly corresponds to how guilty I need to feel. It’s just that I want her to know that I will come back and spend obsessive hours fawning over her glossy moving images and full screen buttons, but sometimes I work on other things and may need time away.

I watched trailers on Hulu for 2 hours last night.

I needed to catch up.

There are five movies out right now about people attempting to have non-monogamous relationships and failing because love is too strong.

First is Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis deciding to be Friends With Benefits. Which means that they are like totally friends and then they decide that they should also have sex because they are beautiful. But like she’s totally cool with that even though she’s a woman – which we can tell because she likes to chest bump and watch football. This is not how non-monogamy is done. This is how patriarchy is enforced.

Then it’s Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman try to do something where they have No Strings Attached. This one is totally supposed to work because it is totally the girls idea!!! She’s the one that’s too busy and men don’t have feelings and don’t want to get attached anyway – especially men who have friends like Ludacris! Don’t worry guys though. Even though she says she doesn’t get jealous and hates monogamy, when he starts playing the field (you know, like we men do) she realizes that they need to settle down and tell their kids about the time Ashton brought a bouquet of carrots to the hospital because of that inside joke with bunnies.

Then Adam Sandler pretends to be cheating on a wife that doesn’t exist to get a series of girls to Just Go With It. But then! Love! Ahhh! Big boobs! Slow walking! Big boobs! Love! Big boobs! Blonde! Now he has to follow through with the lie and pretend Jennifer Aniston is his wife. Wacky! She has kids. She’s a woman who lives like a normal person whereas the man is sooooo weird and wants sex all the time – whoaaaaa! And now he just wants to settle down but his lies are catching up to him. This movie is about honesty, guys. That and enforcing gender roles.

What about Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway experiment with Love and Other Drugs. This is about a guy who likes sex so much that he starts selling a exist pill that allows guys to have sex even when their bodies are telling them no and in no way help a woman. Then a girl comes around who lives even more free spirited. Why’d I say “even more free spirited?” Because that’s what it’s called when a man lies to a bunch of girls to sleep with them and then enforces his capitalist position of power to ruin lives just to get his rocks off. She on the other hand is bizarre because she’s into just sex too. WEIRD! Don’t worry, she’s not. She’s dying and she can’t handle the fact that she’s dying so she’s just doing a bucket list of sex with hot dudes to distract herself. If she were a real woman, she’d want to settle down as soon as the guy does – like a good little girl.

Also there is Owen Wilson and Jason Sudekis getting a Hall Pass from their wives: Christina Applegate and Pam from The Office. A hall pass is where they get to fuck who ever they want for a week. Obviously they can’t fuck anyone because only marriage is the safe way to stay in a happy sexual relationship.

Sometimes Hulu can be a bitch. Sometimes she expresses the wrong opinions. But that’s what I love about her. That’s what I love about our relationship.

We don’t always have to agree but we’re always willing to listen, and that’s really the key to a non-monogamous relationship – because as soon as I find someone I agree with on everything I’ll want to settle down because it would be like hanging out with a mirror that fucked me.

I want a mirror that fucks me, but until then I’ll live non-monogamously with Hulu.

You need to watch those trailers – here: TimberKunis, AniSandler, KutchMan, GyllAway, 4way

Gender, Media

Hip Hop’s New Accidental Feminism

In Dane Cook’s first Comedy Central special (something I can quote from memory because I spent ages 12-18 watching 12-18 hours of comedy central) he has a joke about how men and women are different because men go to the clubs to find women to go home with and women go to clubs to just dance. “Let’s just dance! Just put our purses in a circle and dance!”

It’s a pretty boring joke from a boring comedian that seems cliched and shows a lack of understanding of the ability for people to defy their gender norms. It’s pretty age old and annoying to assume that all men are hunters and women are the hunted. We have to strive toward and for, while women need simply to show off their goods by dancing. They don’t want it. We want it and we must take it.

Recently we have some songs that accidentally mark the artists responsible as feminists.

Taio Cruz’s song Dynamite makes absolutely no mention of girls but talks exclusively about how great it is to go dancing with your boys.

“I came to dance-dance-dance-dance,
I hit the floor cause that’s my plans plans plans plans,
I’m wearing all my favorite brands brands brands brands,
Give me some space for both my hands hands hands hands.
Yeah, Yeah.”

He talks of dancing, dancing, wearing cute clothes, and dancing. This sounds like the female in the Dane Cook joke. There’s the Bechdel test – “(1) it has to have at least two women in it, who (2) who talk to each other, about (3) something besides a man” to determine if a movie is feminist (I also hate this test because it tends to imply that this is the only way a movie can be feminist, while talking about sex with a man about men can be feminist). In any case, it begs the question: Is a rap song feminist if it has a man talking about doing something in an environment that has women, but refuses to objectify women, or even bring them up? Well this passes the test.

I say accidental because watch the video. This is boring reminiscent of every late ’90s early ’00s rap video where women’s upper thighs and bare backs are constantly zoomed in on for no reason besides more jerk off fodder.

Also Usher has this lyric as the chorus of his new song: “Dance, Dance, Dance like it’s the last, last, last night of your life.”

On another but related note, Lil Wayne gives a woman agency. Despite the fact that we’ve given women sexual (and only sexual) agency in rap songs for a while, this is different. She not only can get what she wants with her pussy, but refuse what she wants with her pussy.

What does this say? It says we’re winning. The journey is obviously not over, but when people are accidentally doing things that are feminist, that means it is becoming a part of mainstream culture. When sexism isn’t cliche, but rather feminism is, then we’ve succeeded. I think the new passion fruit, sparkling, vodka wine that DJ Kahled is forcing into all of his videos is proof that gender roles are being busted up.

In my research for this article I’ve also discovered that Ne-yo is a drunk superhero who makes enemies with one eyed ninjas in white suits, and that is also pretty cool.

Attention Whoring, comedy, Gender

I Know You Hate My Dick

I have a show in a week at The PIT. It involves nudity. It involves me doing some weird shit to my body and my penis. I love my penis. I really do.

It’s taken me a long time to come to terms with the love affair I have with my penis. People hate my love affair. People don’t want to like the relationship I have with my penis – they want to think it’s clichéd and annoying and that I just want to gross everyone out.

Mostly, they want to think that’s a bad thing. I think being annoyed is an important part of life. I think understanding clichés is how we change as a society. I think being grossed out is a part of self-reflection. My penis is an important, society changing tool of self-reflection.

I was told by a friend who is pretty consistently wrong that she was sorry that she didn’t laugh at my joke about my erection but she just doesn’t find it that funny despite the fact that she understands its funny to us guys. She explained that it’s the same as how I wouldn’t find jokes about periods and vaginas were that funny. I told you she was consistently wrong. I love jokes about periods. I love jokes about vaginas. I think they are just as important or more important that jokes about my penis. Let’s just recognize that our genitals are gross and the fact that we think they are gross is simultaneously depressing and true.

We refuse to show anybody a part of our body – a piece of ourselves – unless we get close to them. That’s stupid. We’re equating a physical chunk of our flesh with vulnerability. Vulnerability is much deeper. Deeper than a vagina. Even your mom’s vagina. And that shit is deep. Because I shoved my penis in it. Really hard. and my penis is long. So long that it extended the depth of your mom’s vagina. It wasn’t very pleasurable for either of us, it was more of an experiment to see if we could change the makeup of our bodies. We succeeded. We’re going to try to publish the results. The paper is called “My Penis Makes Your Mom’s Vagina Deeper: or 20,000 Inches into the C.” They’re trying to get the movie rights to my paper. But I want to sell it to a classy studio like Focus Features. It’s in litigation right now.

Attention Whoring, Depressed, Gender, Horny, Lonely, My favorites, Nostalgia

Attract: A Post, A Female Post

Women, to me, are nostalgia bottled into breasts and butts.

I am still attracted to female anatomy, and maybe even more to the pain they feel from being subjugated to constantly being forced into playing the victim card in our patriarchal society – a pain I falsely understand as my own, but I don’t like women the way I did in the past. In the past, women represented an unattainable but very frequent goal. Something I knew I wanted, but didn’t understand how to get. Something that I gave too much power to, too much agency because society took so much of it away from them. When one combines a desire with an unwillingness to chase that desire, one gets nothing, and I got nothing. I wasn’t quite comfortable with that, but I understood it. I never felt anger because others (women) didn’t understand my how my sexual attraction was really just a selfless release of power – that I was constantly attempting to give the gift of agency to women I felt emotionally entangled with only to see my gift re-gifted to a man more willing to play with power. I understood their confusion because I was also confused as to what I was doing.

Whenever we grow, we also grow a comprehension of our past. We look at what we did and say “Why did we do that?” and then we answer that question because now we have to ability to look at the situation in a rational manner as opposed to being wrapped up in the emotional turmoil we’ve convinced ourselves is so important. I’m not saying that emotion isn’t important, but rather that it is fleeting. Emotion takes a lot of energy and to dwell on things that make you cry will make you tired. Constant tiredness is a symptom of depression.

I look back and understand a lot of my mistakes with women – but at least I had goals to fuck up. I haven’t truly desired a relationship in years. When I do find myself into a girl, it’s because I find my relationship to her similar to a relationship I used to have with someone else. Someone I had tricked myself into liking. Someone who I gave power and agency to only to get pats on the head and emotional diatribes back. Someone who makes me resent myself because they didn’t screw up, but I did. I was doing things wrong and I see women now as only an opportunity to make up for my mistakes. My mistakes were not that I didn’t bone them or make out with them or tell them how I felt. My mistakes were that I gave them agency and then forced them to use it. Agency is a lot of work and I wouldn’t let them be lazy. I love being lazy.

Laziness is not about not exerting energy, but also about being a selfless member of society. Laziness allows others to express their opinions. Laziness is listening. Laziness is helping others instead of helping yourself. This may not be the common definition laziness, but I am uncommon and therefore so are my definitions.

I was wrong in the past. I wasn’t maliciously so, but I didn’t allow people I was attracted to the same life that I had because I thought that no one else should have to deal with having my life. Now I do because I recognize the happiness I have, but I’m no longer attracted to anybody – truly.

Recently I hung out with two people that I spent far too much time obsessing over at different points in my life. My relationship to both is similar. They are similar. I miss them.

I miss them when they are right there because I will never be able to feel like I did. I really just miss myself. I don’t like that self that I miss, but he’s interesting. I wanna know what he thinks sometimes. I wanna know how he would feel right now. But I can’t because he doesn’t exist any more because he has been taken over by me. I killed him and I want him back. Not more than me, but with me.

A story I have been working on for a while starts off: “I need to explain to you all that while I hate myself, I hate all previous incarnations of myself even more.” I use the word hate and love interchangeably because as I’ve said before: “Hate is not the opposite of love, apathy is.”

I used to think of the graphical interpretation of my emotions as some sort of strangely oscillating sine wave where hate was below the x-axis and love was above it. Somewhere along my journey of life I added absolute value signs around the function of my life and love and hate became the same thing, but nearing zero became as depressed as I could be. I must be happier now. I at least enjoy everything more, but I want to hang out with all the previous incarnations of myself that weren’t this wise, that weren’t this understanding, that were attracted to these girls for all the wrong reasons.

I now find myself still attracted to them, but I fear it is just nostalgia. It is just me missing that scared little facial hairless boy who didn’t understand why giving didn’t result in receiving. Who didn’t understand that giving results in giving and receiving results in receiving and only once you do both are you truly adding absolute value signs to you emotions. Even I’m confused by what I just said, but I think I want to be. I want to be confused again and fall in love again and hate again and have it not mean the same thing over and over so I pretend. I pretend to myself that I want something that I wanted before hoping that I can get back any of those previous incarnations of myself and play with them. I really just want to play with myself.

I guess I succeed in doing that pretty often because I tend to masturbate to all these feelings of nostalgia, and also to breasts and butts.

comedy, Death, Gender, My favorites

The Rule of Three, Transitions, and Death

Candy and medicine are flavored the same. This is why two people can taste the same thing and one can say “eww this tastes like medicine” and the other can say “yum this tastes like candy.” The distinction is only based on preconceptions.

Example: A dude tastes a drink – it is pink: “Ewww. This tastes like medicine.”

Example: A guy who loves claiming his open-mindedness tastes a fruit beer that has an emphasis on the fruit part – “Yum, this tastes like candy.”

Example: My dad tastes a piece of vegan bark/bread that he thinks all of my friends should try – “Wow, this tastes like candy and steak. You would love this.”

My dad is an lovable dope mixed with an angry indignant mixed with a lot of homemade tofu. He’s who I both look forward to becoming and who I desperately fear becoming. All of this comes out best when he calls me with questions on “his facebook.” Questions like:

“Who’s this person on my facebook? How’d they write all this stuff on my facebook?”

“How come your friends are always playing with my facebook?”

“This woman wants to be friends with me, but I don’t like her. What do I do?”

The last one is a reasonable facebook concern. I recently was thinking about friendship requests from people who need not request friendship and wrote this:

“Adding you to the audience of my blog so that I can know when you release a new hot track for free is not us being worth uncomfortably connected after you go through a shitty breakup with my friend who I am not quite close enough with to indignantly defriend you through claims of loyalty.”

Loyalty is silly. I like support. I like to support others who I am friends with and I like when my friends support me, but forced support is obnoxious. I don’t want someone supporting me who doesn’t want to support me. I recently supported a friend who would definitely qualify as someone whose boyfriends I will not friend for fear of the last sentence becoming true. Between songs this happened:

Person A (singer): “I’m gonna play this little diddy.”

Person B (audience member): “You’re a little diddy.”

(silence)

Person A: (Tunes guitar)

Person B: “In a good way.”

Me: Fuck you. First off you are horribly unclever. Had you been insulting I wouldn’t have said that because at least insults demand a certain level of cleverness, but you weren’t at all. This brings me to point #2. What is the good way of being a little diddy, and more importantly, what is the bad way that you feel came through so clearly that you had to apologize for your horrible indiscretion.

There are no quotation marks around my line because I am the gender neutral definition of a pussy.

Of course there isn’t really a gender neutral definition of a pussy. Which is too bad. I would like to see there exist one before I die, but there won’t. We can’t forget the past and we can’t stop using pussy as a term to describe vagina. All of these short pieces were things I wrote on a folder I was carrying around one day. They all relate to death.

a) Candy and medicine are the things you have as a child and a dying person respectively. It seems as though the longer we strive to look at things as candy the longer we will not be a dying person.

b) I don’t want to become my dad because that means I’m closer to being a dying person.

c) That audience member wasted so much of my time as I had to complain in my head about her. I am so much closer to being a dying person because of her.

Okay, so maybe they don’t all relate to death that well, but I am definitely scared of being a dying person.

comedy, Gender, Indignant, Media, My favorites, race, Socialism

Conservative Bureaucracy

America’s Got Talent might be the worst show to ever exist. When I say that, I don’t mean that it is the least entertaining (According to Jim got 8 years of television time), and I don’t mean to say that it is badly produced (It is, but that’s not my point). I mean to say that is the most actively harmful show to ever be in America.

As Lady Gaga is finally proposing weirdness as a goal worth aspiring to in the pop culture world and Taylor Swift offering the opposite – a boring cliched approximation of what other’s have already said, but this time as a different overly small white chick – we have to start taking sides. This is more than (but definitely somewhat influenced by) sexism, and racism – but this is at it’s heart a battle for or against change. By letting ourselves fall into society’s booby trap of xenophobia we are accepting our world the way it is despite the fact that all good things have come from changing to something new. (Great article about how shitty Taylor Swift is)

I find it interesting that anti change is at the center of all of the talking points of the right:

1. Keep marriage the same as it has been.

2. Keep poor people poor, and rich people rich (aka- capitalism).

3. Keep women in the kitchen and the bedroom.

4. Keep people of color in different neighborhoods so that we don’t have to look/be scared of them.

5. Evolution doesn’t exist.

I guess this isn’t interesting, but rather obvious. Liberalism is defined as desiring change, and Conservatism is wanting things to stay the same, but it frustrates me that people can buy into Conservatism. How can anyone feel like the best thing to have happen is to have nothing new happen?!? Fuck our world.

Fuck America’s Got Talent.

This guy gets on and is doing something weird. Something new. Something possibly shitty, but possibly really interesting. They don’t even let him do his thing because they don’t like new talents, they like cute white boys pretending to be urban and aspiring to shitty shallow morals because it’s less dangerous when the kid’s dad is a CPA. The show demands that we only like things we’ve already seen before. And it tricks it’s fans into thinking that. It’s fans are mindless citizens of a dystopian future where no one is allowed to voice creativity unless they fill out the appropriate paperwork to make sure it fits some structure of creativity that has been previously determined acceptable. It’s interesting that liberals are the ones who get accused of being too into bureaucracy, when it’s conservatives who are demanding a form of social and cultural bureaucracy that is all encompassing, and that’s not as obvious.

Gender

Instructions are Boring

We all have broken up with a person because we wanted to be single. Usually people do this because they feel as though they will have more fun finding random ass, or at least new ass. I’m always the guy who wants to be single when he’s in a relationship, but it is not because I’m excited about the other ass possibilities. I constantly desire to be single so that I have more opportunities to get rejected.

Have you ever talked to someone who tells you a story about how they got mad pussy-laid? Of course you have. Have you ever wanted to talk to that person again? Of course not. Stories are only good when the person who is telling it has a shitty life. I strive to have a shitty life because at least then I’ll be able to talk about it. I much prefer being unhappy as long as I still get to satisfy my narcissistic desires to talk about myself.

So, I’m a connoisseur of getting shot down – usually by shooting myself down. This does not mean I go to clubs and talk to girls hoping that they will reject me – that takes no skill and provides no story. My stories involve hand-written scripts, peeing in bushes, wearing shoes to bed, and impotence. That’s how a story is made, not by asking if I girl wants to bone to have her respond negatively. The only reason my stories are interesting, and they fucking are, is because my motivation is so foreign to most. Most people would not see rejection as a success, so most people are interested in videos like this:

I am also interested in videos like this. This video is incredible. I would very much like to know how many people would be turned on by someone who sees body parts as edible. Hannibal Lecter was such a ladies man.

I argue against capitalism too often, but is there a better argument against it than realizing that being entrenched in a culture of consumerism causes relationships to be reduced to sales pitches? Yes there is. Capitalism causes people to say things like: “Women need to fill their funnel with lots of guys” (4:07) without realizing the hilarious innuendo they’ve just used on local news.

This is dangerous though. When women are given advice like in order to sell yourself you can’t sell your body it puts an importance on the female body that only serves to further ingrain the idea that sexual agency as the only agency a woman can take. She says hold back your bullets so that they still want you as if the only reason he’ll come back is if he still has pussy to conquer. Because of the patriarchal society we live in, a lot of men do feel like sex is an act of conquership – just notches in the bedpost, but not fighting against that concept is the same as agreeing with it. Blondie might be right in that her steps may get you married, but that is a short term solution that only forces women for generations to come to have to follow those same steps.

Defying norms isn’t simply about standing up for what you believe in, but also about creating a comfortable environment for others who don’t conform to their supposed norm to stand up for what they believe. I love eating and therefore find it attractive when a woman can cook. I would never ask other men to find that attractive.

I got bored writing this because I figured out where I was going and attempted to wrap things up. Let’s pretend this is some meta hilarity about how I hate following directions so much that I refuse to make my writing coherent.

Gender, Indignant

MaleBox Bashing

I’m tired of being told that women hate men. Or feminists hate men. Or really that any large group of people hates men. As a man who is hated by women (and men), I know a little something about being hated, and us penis-holders are not hated.

Lately I’ve been following the growing popularity of Male Studies because of friend/comedian/blogger, and every day I get more frustrated. This causes me to delve deeper into my research so that I can hopefully become as frustrated as a person can be. I then found this article. Granted, it was written in 1994, so I take everything with a grain of salt – or whatever they used to sodiumize their food in the ancient 90s.

This article is very emblematic of the rest of the male studies. It states that men are all being called the purveyors of hatred toward women and that all men have subjugated women to lesser roles, while simultaneousnessly men are being subjugated to the role of fatter, slobbier fuckhead by all women.

Again: They are getting mad because they are being lumped together as the reason for sexism, yet they lump together all women as the reason for sexism. Let’s put aside the rediculously obvious hypocrisy and try to find some argument that doesn’t sound like the pathetic cries of a six year old who is slowly realizing that his complaints don’t make any sense because arguing against this hypocrisy is as worthless as discussing the reflexive property. Let’s pretend that they (and when I say they I do not mean all men, but rather all 4 people it supposedly too to put together this massive piece of rotting idiocy) are arguing that women have created the male gender role that defines men as the less attractive, grosser, less worthwhile sex that must do the work and pay the bills. Or as they say:

“People come in two models: Women (good, nice) and Men (the heavier, hairier life form).”

Also keep in mind that women have propagated the idea that all men are responsible for the demeaning gender roles that have been placed on women that only supposedly create an environment where women get less money and more sexual assault. The article uses a novel as evidence that women are blaming all men. Yes. They use a quote from a character in a novel who is disgusted with men in the 1950s as evidence that men are now the bad guys. I understand that it’s hard to not resort to the easy rebuttal that this argument is just blaming women for exactly what they are doing themselves, but try to understand how they feel.

They feel as if they live in a matriarchy controlled by an unseen, not truly tangible force that speaks only to the needs of women.

“We are at the tail end of the deconstruction of patriarchy, which has been going on since the turn of the century. The last acceptable villain is the prototypical white male.”

Which they later go on to say is actively harmful because all successful societies have been patriarchies not matriarchies – despite that there has never been a modern matriarchy to give this statistic any validation, but back to how they feel.

They feel like their point of view is perceived as silly and worthless because representations in TV and movies of people with similar genitalia are typically silly and worthless. They feel like to fight back they have to fight back against an entires system and not just one woman in power. So they blame all women. They get angry and frustrated that their point of view will not be heard and they resort ot rash generalizations hoping that by being offensive and provocative at least people will listen. They point out the roles they are supposed to play and cry out that “those roles don’t define me!”

So that’s somewhat understandable, right?

If women were the one’s creating these gender roles seen on TV – In 2005 only 19% of film writers were women, and in 2006/07 only 28% of television writers*. If women were the ones making the laws – Only 16.8% of voting members of the house and 15.3% of the senate are women* (This ties us with the Muslim country of Turkmenistan). If women controlled the money that funded these laws and gender roles – Women earn 73.4% of what men do*. If any of these statements were true, then this would be an understandable, if not completely reasonable response. In other words: If they were women, this argument would make sense. But until they stop desiring to be the victims that women actually are, I’m not gonna stop wanting to kick them square in the vagina they so obviously wish they had – I’m going to continue to want to go MaleBox Bashing. Who wants to join me?

Nisse Greenberg

Category Archives: Gender