In the definitive inside-joke of Socratic theory, today we get our nationalistic drank on in Sam-for-Jon Adams celebration of our American bicentennial plus 32. And while we do, let us take a barbecue-smoked moment to consider our dear friends not present (no citation needed) – our brothers and sisters serving overseas. This is an amalgamation of two pieces posted back in April, with a few new bits thrown in for good measure – and to meet the Lucasfilm-imposed Special Edition criteria.
Unfortunately, though, we didn’t have the CGI budget or the heart to change one thing: just like Han still shoots first, so does W.
The Few, the Proud, the Pornless
It is a bit of an understatement to suggest that this is not the best time to be an American soldier. You know the story: two wars, both ill-conceived and managed with nary a shred of competence; rampant foreclosures on the homefront, many falling upon the families of the soldiers abroad. And even though the GI Bill did indeed pass, we were first treated to a chorus line of right-wing hawks squawking on about how we should be afraid of treating our boys and girls too fairly. Because, as you might guess, happy soldiers might be less inclined to dodge roadside bombs and kill things.
No wonder why we provide them with armor so feeble that it can be compromised by a bag of Funyuns.
And then there is the coup de grace, the proverbial money-shot which the religious right – in the you-can’t-too visage of Donald E. Wildmon – and his senatorial adherents (re: ass-gobblers) have tossed off across the collective nose of the military’s men and women with greater incivility and eye-stinging fluidity than the hardest of hardcore S&M porn. Specifically in the glory loophole-closing of the Military Honor and Decency Act, which would disallow the sale of any materials deemed pornographic or obscene on military installations.
The offending materials? Playboy and Penthouse. And, just for the record, let us first agree that in the eighth year of the Aught-Nots, anything Hefnerian or Guccionesque is about as offensive as homelessness or Janet Jackson’s peek-a-tit. Okay, maybe the skin-rags are a tad more offensive than that. We’ll call it a push. I mean, come the fuck on. Caligula was only controversial for about 15 minutes. (And that was only because most of us really wanted to see what Vidal had envisioned.) Although, in the spirit of fairness, I can see why anyone would consider reading 40 years of endless Updike stories offensive on some level.
I feel a bile-fueled (and possible bio-fueled; anger and snarkishness are both highly bio-degradable, not to mention wholly sex-positive) rant about to nut itself – plan accordingly.
Donald E. Wildmon, our Made Coach of morality, began his indelicate thrust for this legislative pork-barreled paucity of decency back in November, upon realizing that the new television season featured less openly gay characters than seasons past (because as we all know, sexual orientation and situation comedy are a dangerous brew). With his magic decoder-ring of didactical coitus interruptus, he has shone a light upon the true threat to our military’s continued insecurity: the right to procure jack-off materials on-base.
Enter Rep. Paul Broun (R., duh), a trollish hybrid of a Georgia peach-Hobbit and ESPN’s bastion of belligerence, Woody Paige – neatly neutered into the anti-vadge cog of the Bush ex machina. It isn’t bad enough that he opposes the House’s move to de-propagandize the Pentagon’s continued selling of war, or at least trim some of the more Kobe-like fat from it, as the hawks are afraid of losing out on the ‘benign’ propaganda. Whatever that means. It isn’t even bad enough that he has thrust himself to the forefront of the right’s agenda to reintroduce the Federal Marriage Protection amendment – yes – it’s an amendment – with a capital fuckin’ A – to the Constitution – with a capital C-you-next-Tuesday – to ban forevermore any and all instances of gay marriage.
That’s bad enough. But what’s worse is that the tube-tying of the Military Honor and Decency Act is being performed by its own anal-retentive architect, Rep. (and doctor) Paul E. Broun:
“Our troops should not see their honor sullied so that the moguls behind magazines like Playboy and Penthouse can profit,” Broun said in a statement.
Of course they should be able to read whatever they want. What in the good name of fuck does honor have to do with a little hardscrabble gratification? Are we then to infer that being blown to bits by suicide bombers is the true path to honor? Or is honor only attained by knowing that their disassembled bodies will be draped with the stars and stripes?
If that’s honor, then maybe Rep. Broun should sign up for some.
And considering the feckless clusterfuck of a mission our boys and girls have been so ungently ass-hooked into, shouldn’t We the E-People be doing a little more to ensure their masturbatory rack-time? Shouldn’t we be shipping giant HAL-sized computer processors brimming with Fucking Machines, I Shot Myself, Anal Marauders, and Abby Winters? Shouldn’t we be USO-ing any and all willing porn stars, MILFs, cocksmen of the first (and girthiest ) order, Suicide Girls, Grabby Award winners, plumpers, plushies, WAMsters, and anyone else who wants to provide a little entertainment?
Besides Cassidey, that is. See – porn stars do lead by example.
And back to us - shouldn’t we be shipping refrigerator-sized crates of Jenna Jameson UR3 Pussy & Ass replicas, as well as water and sand-proof Rabbits, Fun Wands, G-Spot Ascertainers, and Tristan Plugs to our men and women – a veritable Pynchonian wonderland of jack-offery – and in weekly batches? With a few jetpack-sized kegs of Astroglide to top off?
Therefore I hereby propose my own bill, The Give a Fuck Act. All of the above, donated by the porn-swilling masses – that’s us, dear readers (citation needed). Because they deserve it. And goddamnit, they fucking need it. If anyone is in need of a good lay, it’s a US serviceman or woman, orientation negligible. That’s a truth as self-evident as all the DPs, upskirts, and group-floggings clogging up my hard drive.
And yours too.
So go on. Give a fuck to someone who really needs it.
July 4th, 2008
Posted by
The Snarling Misanthrope |
Morning Junket |
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William Congreve, in his infinite wit, alleged that Hell in all its toasty variety isn’t hardly a match for a woman who’s man done her wrong. Another, wittier William, suggested “O, what fools these mortals be.” They’re both correct. Put these two ideas together and you’re left with the basis of a little anecdote I like to call “The Blow Off or the Blow Job: A Cautionary Tale.”
Angela was impulsive, to begin with. This impulsiveness wasn’t of the mostly harmless “You get the car, I’ll get the bags, we can make the shore by dawn,” variety; or even of the slightly scary “You get the gas, I’ll get the match, we can make the shore burn by dawn” variety. No, this was impulsivity of the singularly useless variety, because invariably the only person bound for trauma due to this impulsivity was Angela herself.
On this particular occasion, while watching a zombie movie with her man du jour, he leaned over to begin the customary pre-coital groping and whispered those most important of little words: “I should probably tell you, I’ve been fucking my ex.”
Angela, understandably, felt scorned. In fact, she felt downright outraged. After all, this fuckable ex of his was not your standard, garden-variety ex. This was, in fact, an ex who became an ex by going on vacation and (*surprise!*) getting married to someone else. This was an ex whom Angela had been trying to exorcise from her man for several months by loving words and lacy thongs. And now, not only was all her hard work for naught, but it apparently had all been to win the heart of a man who’d just proved himself to be an utter cretin.
What to do? As the zombies on the screen popped open skulls, and the cretin at her side popped open her buttons, she considered her options.
Were she mildly impulsive, she might have drawn back in horror, beat him about the head and shoulders with her left shoe, driven him from the house, and then spent the remainder of the evening defaming him all over teh internets.
Were she scarily impulsive, she might have lured him into a carnal embrace, strangled him to death between her milky white thighs, and then propped him out on the ex’s front lawn.
Alas, she was neither of these. Pushing him away, she paused and stared coldly at him. And just about the moment his expression suggested the question “I can’t has cheezburger?” was flickering through his mind, she struck. Like a snake pouncing atop an unexpecting mouse, she tore off his trousers and gave him a blowjob.
Perhaps you wonder at this. After all, a blowjob, by virtue of the presupposed squick factor of the general modern female, is generally considered a reward. And it was a good blowjob, by even the most exacting standards. And possibly, it was made better by the fact that the recipient could not possibly have seen it coming. It might in fact be the paragon of stealth blowjobs. So, given those facts, perhaps you think she intended castration to be the denouement of her plan: bring him to the depths of pain by first bringing him to the heights of pleasure.
No, what she planned was far more inexplicable.
Acting in a uselessly impulsive manner she completed her ministrations, rose, and positioning herself at eye level with the man who done her wrong, she snowballed him.
“You didn’t just…” he said, wiping the load (but not the smile) from his face.
“Oh yes, I did,” she crowed, sitting back to savor the justice meted out and the continued zombie carnage.
“…The Hell?” the zombies asked, pausing momentarily to consider this alleged punishment.
The Moral: Some brains are not worth saving from zombie buffets.
July 3rd, 2008
Posted by
The Educatrix |
Bitches Please |
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‘I am losing my shit’, the distressed parlance of women and gay men (and soon to be adopted by the bromantics!), is one of the great emotional feces-smears on our nice white linen shirttails. This phrase is the linguistically-emotional equivalent of IBS. With slightly more tantrum-throwing. But what I am more concerned with are the specifics, the inner workings, of this oddly pinched loaf of phraseology.
How does one lose one’s shit? Does one throw the shit at tourists? And if thrown badly, does the shit hit the fan? Is it done verbally, in that the shit-loser is talking shit? Is this some sort of emotional-colonic wish-fulfillment thing? If it is, that’s some seriously deep shit.
But just so we’re sure – when one loses one’s shit, is it the whole shit-load? Or is it just a piece of shit?
Once the shit is lost, where does it go? Is there an office in each city with a box labeled Lost & Found Shit? What if it got accidentally taken to the city dump? Would you find your shit there, covered with flies, like, well, flies on shit? Do you even want it back? I mean, what if it’s all perforated with used syringes? That’s some holey shit.
Do you have to buy your shit back? Is it held in hock by some scary shit-kickers who live in a brick shit-house? And if you don’t pay them off, would they renovate it and put it back on the market, in a brave act of flipping your shit?
And if nobody bought it, would they toss your shit into the nearest creek, to see if it floats? It would be a shame to lose all of one’s shit that way; it would absolutely be up shit’s creek without a paddle. Not to mention that the creek itself would be entirely full of shit.
Or maybe they just take it out back and shoot the shit.
But maybe it’s a bit more innocuous than that. Maybe your shit goes down a hole when you lose it. Be careful when retrieving it – entering a foreign shit-hole can land you in some serious shit. Or maybe you took it skiing with you and dropped it – after all, everybody knows that shit rolls downhill.
Or maybe you lost it when you visited your friend’s horse and cattle ranch. And by the time you find it, it may have already been re-appropriated into bullshit or horseshit. Or maybe that crazy mare kicked it up atop the barn – in which case you’ll find your shit on a shingle.
Or maybe, if you have a really tough shit to find, you can hire a detective to track your shit down for you. And when he comes back empty-handed, you can shake your head and say to him, ‘no shit, Sherlock.’ But if he comes back with the right shit, you can tell him, ‘that’s the shit!’
Or what if you lost your shit in flagrante delicto? Could you bear knowing that you’d had the shit fucked out of you?
But if the shit indeed cannot be found, does that leave one emotionally constipated? More importantly, what are the consequences of shit-loss? Surely it cannot be a good thing to be without shit, sans shit, shitless – shit out of luck. That might be a good thing, however; if one is shitless, then one need never worry about having shit for brains, or losing one’s shit on anyone else: and if someone accuses you of doing so, you can simply say, ‘I shit you not.’
Which then raises the question of self-control: can you hold your shit down? Can you hold it back? Or do you need to strap it down, tie it up, hold it in and wait it out? Can you, for the good of others, eat shit like crow?
Just because shit happens doesn’t mean you should let your shit get the best of you. Because then you’d be a total shithead. And nobody wants to put up with that shit.
And since we’re having so much fun, does this mean we can get Michael Stipe to re-write “Losing My Religion” to “Losing My Shit”?
That’s me in the corner
That’s me in the spotlight
Losing my shit
Although, as much as I love the shit out of R.E.M., if I ever have to hear Peter Buck strum mournfully on a mandolin again, I am seriously going to lose my own shit.
So next time, instead of losing your shit, wouldn’t it be nicer to just give it away – especially with so many underprivileged people out there who really don’t know shit? Seriously, try giving a shit sometime.
July 3rd, 2008
Posted by
The Snarling Misanthrope |
What's My Predicate? |
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Today we welcome to our strep-laden Junkbuzzed family one Maneating Lemur. Maneating Lemur is a media critic who posts his blatherings on a daily basis over at Lemurvision, and golly, he’d be delighted to hear from you. Hell, if he met you in person, he might even buy you a cookie.
Many of you gentle readers may be too young to remember, but there was a time when rock ‘n’ roll was a joyous, anarchic affair. Rock stars lauded the glories of unbridled self-indulgence, consumption of copious amounts of really fun chemicals, and, get ready for it, fucking. It was okay to be happy, have a good time, get down with your sweetheart, and come buckets. Glam taught us that it was perfectly fine to fuck anything that moved, irregardless of gender. And then there’s disco. We’re not gonna trudge into some turgid screed about musical quality or lack thereof, but damn, those people knew how to party. True, they looked completely fucking ridiculous. But they were getting some. Goddamn, were they getting some.
Now? Not much sex, not much fun left in our music. Not really a resurgence in Puritanism, it’s a full blown embrace of outright misery. That nasal fucker who shrieks for Linkin Park is crawling in his skin with wounds that will not heee-ullll. On every. Fucking. Song. Billy Joe Fucktard from Green Day let it be known on the band’s first single that masturbation’s lost its thrill in that really fucking noxious faux British accent he affects. Masturbation will NEVER lose its thrill. That glorious knowledge that you can come even when there’s nobody around to fuck should give us all a warm, rosy glow that sustains us through even our darkest days.
Trent Reznor’s gotta shoulder the blame for a lot of this. In ’89, with Pretty Hate Machine, he got unbridled industrial misery on the airwaves and it’s flopped around there writhing in its own excrement for the last two decades. Sure, on a good day, Trent can reel out a good tune and his lyrics were actually sincere, but fucking Hell, man, lighten up already. At least he’s not afraid of sex; the man does want to fuck you like an animal, after all. But he taught legions of listless, talentless kids that relentless whining coupled with machine noises were the key to stardom.
And goddamnit, the formula worked. And now instead of blazing up in the parking lot of the Gas ‘N’ Sip prior to going back to the house the parents left vacant when they flew off to Palm Springs and having primal, clumsy sex in Mom and Dad’s bed, giggling insanely all the while, the aspirations or our youth have shifted to manufacturing existential angst and miring themselves in an impenetrable cloud of gloom in a desultory attempt to appear deep.
Fuck that. Have some fun, goddamnit. Shoplift that box of Trojans and resolve to put every single one to good use. Start groping each other in the mallplex again. Walk right up to that girl who keeps giving you those sideways glances in Comp Lit and ask her out. Just because she gives you a raging woodoid. Just because you can. And when you write your first three chord wonder, sing about something fun. Sing about sex in the backseat of your ’97 Kia or copping a feel in the mall and not giving a shit about who’s looking. Love, sex, and fun – that’s our fucking birthright. Let’s start tearing the roof off of the joint again.
July 2nd, 2008
Posted by
Maneating Lemur |
The Junk Chord |
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We’re like, really sick this week, thanks to a summertime case of strep throat. And so, while we’re enjoying our cocktail of Sudafed, Amoxicillin, Vicodin, and Jim Beam, we thought we’d turn to our all-time favorite comfort surf: giggling at pictures of badly-photographed penises on Craigslist.
Until we heard about this. Apparently Jay-Z and Oasis (they’re still around?) are enjoying a good, old-fashioned rock feud. The skinny: Oasis (meaning, one of those polite, pale, subtitles-needing Gallagher bros.) said that Jay-Z, nor any rapper, should be allowed to headline the revered Glastonbury Festival, which Jay-Z had been selected to do. Now, this is the same Glastonbury Festival who has featured such deserving headliners as Moby, Coldplay, and, well…apparently Oasis every other year.
So Jay-Z took care of business -the other nigh, onstage, at Glastonbury. By mock-singing Oasis’ “Wonderwall”. And Jay-Z is officially our new hero. Thanks, Mr. Z!
July 2nd, 2008
Posted by
The Snarling Misanthrope |
Asides |
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I never really understood the concept behind the saying ‘having your cake and eating it too’. It just doesn’t make much practical sense. I’ve had a great many cakes in my lifetime – of all flavors, textures, and sizes. And I ate the thrice-layered fuck out of each and every one of them.
Now, if they changed it to ‘you can’t have your genitals and fellate them too’, I’d be a little more accommodating. That makes sense. I’d totally sign off on that one.
And what about ‘piece of cake’? How is the ease of an action relative to a serving of cake? I mean, unless you’re a patisserie (or actively fucking one), pieces of cake aren’t that easy to come by. You only have two options: either you make the cake yourself (which involves a trip to the grocery store, a lot of needless mucking about in the kitchen, the wait-but-don’t-forget of cooking times, and the angry pacing of waiting for it to cool down enough for you to actually slice off a piece of cake. The second option is to go out and purchase some cake. This gets trickier, if you have any good taste about you. Supermarket cakes are renowned for their impenetrable sponge-like cakey centers, and faux buttercream icing that tastes more like an asshole freshly felched of corn syrup than anything resembling butter or cream. Which then means that, if you want a good piece of cake, you have to go find a reputable bakery, assuming one exists in your town.
There’s nothing easy to any of this ‘piece of cake’ business. So how about we change it to ‘piece of ass’? Because, in this day and age, getting a piece of ass (gender irrelevant) is far easier than obtaining cake. After all, you can’t get cake off Craigslist, can you?
Unless Shakespeare was seriously ahead of his time when he wrote, ‘my cake is dough’. Because if you’ve got enough dough, you might be able to have your Craigslist date/escort/cop bring some cake over with them.
That’d be a piece of cake that you can have and eat too.
July 2nd, 2008
Posted by
The Snarling Misanthrope |
What's My Predicate? |
no comments
1. Sacred Cows have it rough.
Roll call!
Masters, mistresses, masochists, mummies, mummifiers, naughty mums, slaves, SAMs, submissives, subs, hoagies, ponies, puppies, pain-pigs, pain-dogs, horn-dogs, rain-dogs, reined sluts, pain-sluts, pleasure-sluts, boy-toys, stable-boys, unstable-boys, tops, bottoms, spam-bots, brats, switches, doms, dommes, dominants, dominas, diaper-wearers, diaper-sniffers, pee-drinkers, fart-sniffers, wigwams, WAM-sters, Teamsters, nyotaimorians, Goreans, doms in DeLoreans, fems, feminas, femdommes, feministers, fisters, fasters, strict Uncle Festers, abandoned slave fosters, bitches, butches, butchies, bears, bi’s, auctioneers, collar wearers, collar-bearers, genitorturers, genitorturees, DMs, GMs, newbies, wannabes, bondage-queens, face-sitters, rail-splitters, Gor-flavored Peeps, plays-for-keeps, hockey fans, Shibari senseis, stabbers, stumpers, plumpers, big booty bumpers, ashtrays, Oompa-Loompas, Gor masters, plaster-casters, doormats, kumquats, pieced twats, role-players, Druid-like naysayers, oversharers, somewhat apprehensive toilet slaves, sex-positive BDSM educators, sex-positive furniture slaves, anti-sex neo-cons, writers of bad erotica, readers of bad erotica, frustrated Craigslisters with ennui set to ‘experiment’, Edmond Dantès, Charlotte Brontë, and the crew of the Edmund Fitzgerald:
yes, it’s that time again – time to plunge our hands into the too-fertile soil that is BDSM. For those of you who aren’t aficionados, BDSM is one of the great sacred cows of the sexual side of teh Internets. BDSM is the bloated cow that sustains itself exclusively on its own steroid-enhanced milks and shits, until its skin is pock-marked and its features sagging like a pair of breasts popping free from a PVC dress. Eventually you have to make a decision – are you going to get any return on your investment?
As Mark Twain said, “sacred cows make the best hamburgers.”
Get your bibs on, folks – it’s dinner time.
Because someone has to say it. It may as well be me. So hold on to your intricately-bound ids, leather-hooded egos, and banana-bruised super-egos. Because this is gonna hurt. It’s time someone deconstructed the sangfroid of our communally bondage-friendly psychischer Apparat – sorry, Freud.
Deep breaths, people. Ready? Here we go…
…Your submission is not a gift.
I’m gonna let that sink in a minute.
Your submission is not a gift.
No. Nope. Nada. Not happening. Not buying any of that. Sorry.
2. Kathy Griffin is neither a gift nor funny.
How, you say, can this be?
A gift is something that is meant to be free. No reciprocity or other transactive act is required. Submission, on the other hand, is one-half of a BDSM-flavored relationship. And a relationship is nothing if not a transactive act. Therefore your submission is a conscious decision. It is a choice. It is also a contract. (If not play-acting at its finest; that’s not a condemnation, but rather a calling-out of bullshit and handing it a long-overdue yellow card. I used to play Cowboys and Indians when I was little: there was no gift-giving in that, either. This is just the grown-up version. With more expensive accoutrements and engorged genitalia.)
There’s no spooky mysticism, no hooded druids of teh Internets telling you what to do. Oh, wait, yes there are. But you should really ignore them. These are vampiric sorts who rarely leave the house, rarely interact with people in person, and spend most of their time lecturing teh Internets on The Protocols of Kink. And they probably own a lot of movie-replica swords. (For which they will leave the house from time to time, to hang out with the guy who sells replica Xena swords at the local swap-meet every other Saturday.)
So…what is a gift? Well, first off, let us agree that we as Americans are no longer in possession of inquisitive minds that want to know. Rather we are purely acquisitive Americans. And for us, gifts are objects of greater acquisition; material objects – preferably brand-name, and most preferably returnable. Candle-holders are a gift. Unevenly pinstriped socks are a gift. (And a future re-gift.) A card for free coffee is a gift. Those nasty chocolate-cherry cordials? Gift. (Bad gift, too. Save them for in-laws or the disliked girlfriends of your siblings.) But your submission? Most definitely not a gift – because you can’t give away something that should by all rights be earned. Unless of course you are picking Supreme Court justices.
Trying to pass off submission as a gift is as backward and futile as trying to con straight men into believing that Kathy Griffin is funny. It’s insincere and tactless; and there is nothing worse than an insincere gift. Well, except of course for Kathy Griffin. (It’s as if scientists finally cracked the code to de-aging Joan Rivers – but as her body was magically re-humidified, her sense of humor was sucked painfully and embarrassingly dry. Turning on Kathy Griffin’s show makes my television safeword itself into turning off, and that, dear reader – NO citation needed – is a hard limit.)
Submission, like all things American, is big business – it’s like a carefully orchestrated, big-money dug deal going down just out of the Patriot-enActed jurisprudence of the DEA, Family Research Council, Christian Coalition, FEMA, the 1986 New York Mets, Scott Weiland, an Abel Ferrara screenplay, and mom and dad. Because everything has to be just right in order for the deal to be consummated: the kinks/kilos have to match; the trust ratio/dollar amount has to be tallied and approved; and safewords are the big guys looming in the background like ex-wrestlers armed with automatic machine-guns. If everything matches up, then the deal (and presumably the submissive) goes down. If not, then everything goes straight to hell, be it in a blaze of gunfire, or a protracted series of angry tirades on Craigslist Rants & Raves about how the bitches just don’t ‘get’ you.
And let’s be seriously honest here. Most gifts are purely conditional – even gifts which you imbue with the best intentions. If you give your grandmother a gift (new nightgown – grandmas love nightgowns; it’s in The Grandma Handbook), on some level you will expect her to give you some Grandma Money to go along with the pinch of your cheek.
3. Free gift with purchase.
Actually, there is a strong connection to gift-giving to be made. Submission is like a GWP – free gift with purchase. Well, it’s actually a qualifying GWP – you can’t just buy the $3 baby cow-creamer and get your free crap – you have to buy the baby cow-creamer and the $27 giant cow serving platter. And let’s not forget the list of exclusions, which is almost always excessive:
- Limit 1 Per Customer (this can be challenged; some years ago, a group of angry men filed a class-action lawsuit and won, which led to the birth and rapid spread of polyamory)
- For a Limited Time Only (until the FDA approves something stronger than Xanax)
- No rain checks (which goes a long way toward explaining all the scores of horny, dissatisfied customers)
- While supplies last (because in a free-market economy, demand must exceed supply, except for stupidity, which is a commodity that is never is short supply)
- May not be combined with any other offer (does not apply on Craigslist)
- Not for Resale (for all you fucking weird Gor people)
And if submission is a gift – or even a GWP – then how does one proceed in matters of looking a gift ponygirl in the mouth? Do purple-leather/PVC corsets and bodices now qualify as gift-wrap? And what about our national gift of choice – the gift card? Can one get a gift card to some submissives-in-stasis warehouse – kind of like Costco, but without all the soccer moms, where a dominant/switch/generally angry person can waltz in, grab a sub, flash their gift card, and be on their evilly merry way, with a pat on the back and a ‘and thanks for shopping at Subs R Us!’ (Not related to Subway – although that would make one helluva Jared diet, eh?)
4. BDSM as online RPG
It’s a cop-out; it’s corny; it’s campy – it’s creepy and crass, like using a Hallmark card to tell someone that you’ve inadvertently given them herpes. It’s the worst kind of passivity; the act of extracting from yourself all measures of culpability like a badly-grown wisdom tooth – emphasis on the wisdom.
It’s easy to lose sense of yourself when you don’t know what it means, or worse – don’t want to know. Easier still to hate yourself – and BDSM, the Home Internet Edition – is the perfect refuge for the self-loathing. Because for every self-loather, there is someone ready to take full advantage and possession.
It’s easy to call yourself a gift and give it away, knowing that you’ll only have to see yourself through someone else’s astigmatic eye. Now if you really want to give the submissive or dominant in your life a gift, just give them these words:
If you love something, set it free. If not, take it back for store credit. It might cover one of those replica swords.
And if you really want to get a deserving dom/sadist kinda guy a gift…well…you can never go wrong with a replica Boba Fett helmet.
July 1st, 2008
Posted by
The Snarling Misanthrope |
Shrinking the Subbies |
no comments
Our blue-ribbon panel of sexperts, out of work country fair judges, hypochondriac clowns, Ritalin-snorting soccer moms, married men who’ve yet to lie their way into tonight’s Craigslist hookup, and drag-queen showgirls made-up to look like Ann Coulter – have selected these as required reading:
Our dear Ellie has an article up at Naughty American, about phone sex, diapers, and the regurgitative abilities of cats.
The Big Gay Homosexual Auto-Replace: seriously, just go read this. Like, now.
Credit cards, kids, and computers: what could possibly go wrong?
Shakesville’s got the skinny on the inherent douchebaggery of male online dating columnists. We can only hope that one day we will be considered as douche-worthy.
And speaking of douchebags, listen to this, and, in Dmitiri’s words, “let the romance begin“!
And finally, it’s the best headline ever this week.
July 1st, 2008
Posted by
The Snarling Misanthrope |
The Blog-Snog |
no comments
It seems that the new Pixar film Wall-E has computer-generated fat people in it, as part of a cautionary tale aimed at its own target audience. This is not going over well, as fat people from Wal-Mart to the blogosphere are stomping their feet, as apparently they are deeply offended at the suggestion that fatness might lead to the end of the world though their own materialism, consumption, and complacency.
Just like now, maybe?
So just how many different ways can one say Get Over It?
Following is a repost of a piece from several weeks ago. It seems a little more apropos now…
The Fat and the Furious
I am known within my circle of intimates as The Person Asshole Who Will Stop At Nothing To Get A Laugh. Even when the laugh is extracted through the cruelest means possible; a root canal of comedy, if you will. Case in point: recently, a friend, amongst mixed company, announced that his workday left him drenched in stink and sweat. To which I blurted, in my best It’s-Schtick-Time voice, “you must have smelled worse than a fat girl’s asshole.”
And the world stopped on its axis. Practically fell off, really. A hundred million fat-sympathizers full of white-hot glare turned, ruby-quartz glasses cast aside, immolating me with the magnifying glasses of their searing orbits; and me, the tiny-peckered ant, writhing and smoldering on the desert floor of my own cruelty.
“You can not use that on your blog,” I was instantly told, the ‘not’ shot out with the ferocity of a souped-up nail gun; the cross of the t bloodied my introspective self and led me back to reason. Or the edge of it, anyway.
The world (and accordingly, the Web), as you already know, is full of sizeists. The untrimmable fat at steak/stake here is Fathood itself: Fear of Fat, Fat-Hate…this is our national eggshell issue. We can talk about racism (a little; we sure like that Obama fella); we can talk about sexism (a little; boy, now that she’s finally dropped out, we sure like Hillary again); we can talk about homophobia (a little; but do we have to talk about that right now); but when it comes to Fathood, everybody clams the fat fuck up. This is the issue we skirt around (in skirts of ever-changing size) in hushed voices, afraid to be labeled Fat-Phobic – or worse – that our bellies, chins, or arms are too big for the Fat-Phobia of those around us. We are a culture of consumers, oft lost in the shimmering whale-belly of our own consumption, all of us over-consuming to some degree or rationale, and all of us mired in a thick Hollandaise of self-loathing over it. And all the while we find ourselves rapt over the by-the-pound trials and tribulations of the C and D-list celebutards on Celebrity Fit Club, as if our own weight-issues could be vicariously solved by the likes of Jani Lane, Biz Markie, and the Snapple Lady. Ain’t happenin’. (Hey, I loved Homicide. But do I really need to give half of a flying fuck about the puffy, drug-encroached, Schmoo-like shape of Daniel Baldwin? But for the record, Victoria Jackson is still kinda hot. That’s a tip for the ladies: you know how you’re always saying that funny guys turn you on? Well, it works the other way around too.)
We’re all overly sensitive about our weight. And we really need to Fucking Get Over It. Yeah, I’m approximately one ribeye and three pudding cups away from Fathood, and you know what – so what.
As men, we are expected to have some meat on our bones. (Unless the seeker-girl is from the emo/Goth or Austentatious factions, who tend to prefer their boys hipbone-protrudingly thin, and paler than a vampire – because there is nothing sadder than a fat Goth boy.) Oh, we think we know that you’d like us to be hard-bodied musclemen, but it ain’t happening, and we both know that. Between our receding hairlines, tick-like bellies, and steadfast refusal to stop listening to bad 80s metal, we’re just not worth all the weight-addled worry.
Whereas we as men are expected to expect a girl who resembles a boy more than a girl. And yes, I know that there are patches of boys out there who do prefer boy-like girls. However, allow me, dear reader, (citation needed), to poke a few feeding tube-sized holes in that one. Boys, you see, are largely carnivores. Any boy who tells you differently is lying to impress his vegetarian girlfriend, or the cute vegan girl who sells smoothies at the local co-op. But we like meat. We like to gnaw at it, pull at it, pinch it, caress it, admire it from up-close and afar, and in our own company kick around classic butcher’s terms such as Delmonico, Skirt, Butterfly, and Great Tits.
As for me, I exist in a manly and magically-delicious realm, the cholesterolic Pangaea of Not Quite Fat and Not Quite Thin. Or rather, my size can only be determined with the help of an industrial meat-packing scale, on a strictly part-by-part basis. I am in a way like the oft-desired girl with the tiny waist and giant, McIntosh-shaped bottom, except that the apple of my body’s eye is located squarely (or roundly) at the onset of my stomach. Which, now that I think of it, isn’t what most girls tend to fantasize about.
Unfortunately, my weight fluctuations have had absolutely no impact on the length or circumference of my cock. It does not swell in tandem with my belly; actually nothing else finds itself similarly enlarged. I am something of a foul-mouthed stork. I have skinny, half-toned legs, the kind that Lyle Lovett always wanted, thanks to a New York-pedestrian upbringing; pipe-cleaner arms that are far more suited to blogging than actually, you know, working; and any pecs I possess need the letter k to finish them off.
And you’re worried about what I think? Or what any other boy thinks? Or the fashion rags? No, seriously? (Please note that I am staying out of the fray of girl-on-girl hate. I have known more than a few schoolteachers, and the one cardinal rule they always offer is this: if you should come upon a girlfight, the only thing you can do is stand aside and let them fight. Or else you’re gonna get your ass mauled.)
Let me present, if I may a few revised ground rules for how we, upstanding (sorta), intellectual (on our better days), and well-meaning (well…) boys and girls address the issue of Fathood:
- First things first: ‘BBW’ has got to go. Or, as I like to pronounce it, ‘Bub-ub-wah’. It’s stupid; it’s full of self-hatred, and it sounds desperate for validation. If you feel that you have to tell people that you are beautiful, then the issue might be with your own sense of self. And to the men who (probably) created the ‘Bub-ub-wah’ tag, and live by its code: seriously, you aren’t helping. In fact, you are probably causing more harm than non-harm. So just stop it.
- Furthermore, there is no shame in the word ‘fat’. It’s just a word. And as far as words go, it’s a pretty goddamned apt one. Also, ‘alternative body-style’ has to go away. An ‘alternative body-style’ is when you grow a third leg, a few extra digits, or an ear on your labia. That’s ‘alternative’. Fat is not alternative. Fat is just fat. It’s neither good nor bad, until you yourself define its context. However! I am, as always, willing to negotiate. So here are a few other terms which we deem acceptable:
- We’re sort of okay with Rubenesque. (I am also okay with a good Ruben sandwich.) I’m even more okay with comparing women to R. Crumb drawings. ‘She’s like an R. Crumb drawing come to life!’ is a familiar shout-out of mine. And, for all you comics geek-girls out there, there is no shame in being compared to an R. Crumb drawing, or looking like you fell out of a Los Hernandez Bros. comic.
- But really, the go-to word here should be ‘curvy’. ‘Curvy’ only means one thing: curvy. And curvy is always nice; trust us on this one. Because all the best things in life have curves on them: pretzels, planets, breasts, lilies, couches, my penis, oranges, mangoes, asses, and cute little Ewoks.
You still have it better in the biological sense: as you get bigger, your tits and ass tend to follow suit (and we, your devoted worshippers, like the objects of our gratification biggie-sized, even when we say and sometimes insist that we don’t), whereas our penises disappear underneath Huttesque rolls of fat, like a sort of cock confit. Advantage: You.
Don’t believe me? Go to your local Wal-Mart. (Oh, stop being such a fucking elitist about it. Yes, Wal-Mart is evil. But if you want to see what America really looks like, then you’ll get over it for a few minutes – because America does not look like a fucking Birkenstock outlet. Really. It doesn’t.) Walk around the store, and count all the fat women shopping, with bony-assed little dudes hanging off them like Rhesus monkeys. That isn’t disproportionate food-rationing in action, folks. It’s just another American truism: if you have breasts, ass, and vagina, the boys will like you.
Self-image is sort of a lie, when you think about it, because it’s yours – yet it is mostly informed by others. It is a constantly graceless ballet of transposing, projecting, and dick-inflicted worry-warting that serves no real purpose other than keeping Haute Couture (as opposed to Randy, as much as we might like to tap out to our Fathood at times) and Big Pharma rolling in dung-heaps of your hard-earned cash.
On the other hand, we have boys, who, according to scientists and nutritional anthropologists, only developed the self-image gene sometime in the early 1990s. Blame it on Richard Dawkins and his meme machines. But, yeah, we grapple with it a little. Well, until feeding time rolls around again. It’s not like the 50s, when all men had to do was work (and drink way too much and then ignore the needs of their wives; deny civil rights to Women, Black America; and pretend that Homosexuality was nothing more than a good laugh at the lodge). No; we’ve evolved. Kindasortayaknowmaybe.
The easy thing to say here is that there are no easy answers to the slow-cooked interrobang of our national Fathood. But that’s a cop-out. Yeah, there are a million studies telling us that diets don’t work – usually margined with ads for more quick-fix diets, diet-drugs, and dress-sizes that not even an expensive heroin habit could help attain.
If my fat breaks away from me like a former Yugoslav republic, then so be it – great. I’ll merrily recognize its sovereignty and go on with my life (the land-speed record for eating pudding cups). Because shame, like posh cognac, is best reserved for doings of wrong. Dinner doesn’t count. And neither do pudding cups.
You only live once. So try to enjoy it every now and then. Because life is short, folks – short, and usually kind of fat. And that is totally A-O-fucking-kay.
June 30th, 2008
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The Snarling Misanthrope |
Media Mayhem |
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Ironica
n.
1. erotica for the too-hip-to-jerk-it (or at least admit it); such as The Zombie Survival Guide, Death Cab for Cutie records, or anything written/uttered by John Hodgman
2. a shitty emo-metal band from Finland (who, as much as they suck, still cannot approach the black hole of suck that is Death Cab)
June 30th, 2008
Posted by
The Snarling Misanthrope |
The Sexicon |
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