Wednesday, February 25, 2009

"Sheesh... men! Am I right, ladies?"

By popular request (one person is "popular" around here), I will point out the thuddingly obvious: this Good Housekeeping article on "18 Clues He's Still Crazy About You" is retarded. It's jokey of course, but the jokes are only funny if you accept their basic premises as true. So hopefully they're not very funny.

1. When you wear a T-shirt, boxers, and socks to bed, somehow he still thinks you're cute.
"Somehow?" "Still?" Jeez. So in general, a set of really sexy lingerie just on the hanger would be sexier than an actual slightly disheveled woman?

4. He automatically smooshes all spiders for you.
It's funny, I think of things like this as "outdated"--of course modern women can smoosh a damn spider--but they're more accurately "never-dated." My mother killed rats with a shovel and so did my grandma. Women (at least in the lower 99% of society) have never had the luxury of squeamishness. We're half of goddamn everyone; if we didn't pull our weight in scary and icky situations humanity would be up to its neck in spiders.

6. After you rear-ended that Lexus in the parking lot, his very first words were "Are you OK?"
Boy, woman drivers, am I right fellas?

10. He understands which old boyfriends are fair game and which aren't.
I read this for a slightly different interpretation of "fair game" and it made much more sense to me.

11. He doesn't "whoop!" while watching the Super Bowl anymore. OK, he does, but he's definitely cut back the whooping by about 20 percent.
Oh good, because like most women, I fucking hate seeing men enjoying themselves.

18. He may forget to give you a card for Valentine's Day, but at least he understands this is a criminal offense. And he's prepared to pay the price.
Good Lord, we're both so lame.


I guess this is just a cute little puff article that was written in about five minutes and has no particular reason to exist, but it showcases such pernicious attitudes. And I hate to play the Humorless Feminist, but eh, shit wasn't funny to begin with.

Anyway, um, I did this all on request, so if you this entry was boring, blame Lance. Shame on you, Lance! You sent me some lame jokes and I failed to make them better! And it's all your fault! Dammit, Lance!

15 comments:

  1. D'oh. Better now.

    ...Sheesh, second time in a row. Woman webmasters, I tell ya...

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  2. Not to point out the glaringly obvious or anything (well, no, actually that's exactly what I'm doing); but isn't Good Housekeeping magazine, by the simple virtue of it's existence, totally retarded?

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  3. Anyone who squishes spiders - especially in my name - is not my hero. :P

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  4. In our home, I'm not allowed to kill the spiders. :-/ But I do take acception to any kind of bug sharing my space, they all must DIE. I'm very adamant about flies. I HATE flies. I kill my own bugs most of the time. I can't leave it to my boyfriend. He gets all interested and wants to stare at them then "accidentally' drops them. :-/

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  5. Kill spiders? Sacrilege! That's like smashing a kitten. Actually worse, because spiders are cuter than kittens. And as far as I've seen, they don't bite. I don't get why people find them so scary. Then again, my grandmother kept tarantulas.

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  6. Hooray, I'm internet-famous and blamed for things!

    ... it feels tingly.

    In any event, you don't give yourself enough credit. I like your treatment of the football one in particular; I love the mental image of a woman using a decibel meter to figure out how loud her husband is being while enjoying sports, and estimating his love accordingly.

    And that's without the implicit assumption, of course, that ladies simply don't enjoy sports on their own...

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  7. do you still have a livejournal? You're pretty much my favorite person on the internet these days.

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  8. Gawd, what tedious dreck. Does anyone take articles like this seriously?

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  9. Okay, coming in Veerrrrry late here... liked me some cosmocking & just clicked the subect and got all your cosmocking posts. Been reading through them over the past few days & gotta say, they're generally pretty fun.

    But then you pull out "retard" at the beginning of this post. Really? REALLY? WTF?

    I was appalled and immediately thought about commenting. Then I thought, you know what's weird? She thinks that's an okay word to say, but she doesn't use "Lame" at all.

    And then? FAIL.

    Did you just have a bad day, or what? I'm reading these things in reverse chronological order. Does that mean you've gotten the message by now, but future cosmocking is going to be filled with this stuff or do you just think these words are okay to use, but not part of your everyday vocab?

    I hope you're notified of comments, cuz I'd love to know what's actually going on. I like a lot of your blog, but I don't want to read this stuff. Right now it feels like a small risk, based on the current sample, but I just don't know.... It would be nice to have some sort of reassurance that you don't use disabilities as insults anymore.

    thanks,
    --)->

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  10. Cripdyke - I don't anymore. However, the blog being the multi-thousand-post thing that it is, I'm better off letting it reflect my personal evolution than attempting to re-edit the entire thing.

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  11. Oh, I don't think you should re-edit it. Reading in reverse chrono-order it was just surprising to come upon after pages & pages of you NOT using it... and I thought someone should tell you if no one had. And if it was a present-but-rare part of your vocab, that seemed possible.

    I *like* that your blog reflects your growth/evolution/transition. I wouldn't want it re-edited. Doing that would be like Cosmo air-brushing all their photos (well, digitally airbrushing in photoshop, nowadays - I'm showing my age). I think giving people examples of change makes change seem more possible and makes it seem less horrible that we bought into some common social yuckiness at one point (or even presently).

    Anyway, that's enuf for an old and apparently obsolete issue. Thanks for responding. Makes it easier to read the rest of the Cosmocking series which has been great fun so far.

    --)->

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  12. Oh, and on a totally different note:


    am I the only one who reads this blog who thinks women wearing boxers to bed is actually HOT?

    And boxers, tshirts & socks together can be actually just as deliciously attractive, though by itself it reminds me more of winter practicality than hotness OR being "disheveled". On someone more butch, the boxers do a great job of highlighting the butchness even when all or most other clothes are gone. On someone more femme, they can highlight femme qualities just by their presence. Either way, they can be a lot of fun. They are actually least "fun" when on someone more "neither" than "either" butch of femme b/c there's no particularly gendered attitude to play off of. In that case, they seem more normal/unremarkable than any expression of something gendered. anyway, all that's to say that I think cosmo is saying that gender inappropriate = UNsexy. However, I think that while emphasizing gender can be fun, being gender inappropriate is terribly, terribly sexy. it's when boxers are unremarkable & ungendered that they are less sexy. But even then they aren't UNsexy. They just aren't an inherent turn on b/c they seem "normal".

    Altho I'm myself more neither than either, if I had to be one or the other, it would be femme by a mile & I happily wear tshirts & underwear to bed. It's been a long while since I had a pair of boxers, but that's not reflective of anything other than the difficulty in getting decent boxers for a reasonable price. So I guess they aren't automatically normal since I'm part of the category of people that might wear them "normally" and I don't wear them anymore. But if I did wear them, it wouldn't be a gendered statement. It would just be that I finally found a pair for a reasonable price that didn't look like it was going to fall apart in 2 months (hello, "Hello, Kitty" boxers: I'm talking about YOU.)

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  13. "When you wear a T-shirt, boxers, and socks to bed, somehow he still thinks you're cute."

    Do the words "attainable" or "real" mean anything to Cosmo?

    "4. He automatically smooshes all spiders for you."

    I do not "smoosh" spiders. I don't like killing things if I can avoid it, and as far as I can tell the spider's done absolutely nothing to me or my girlfriend except maybe trigger her "EEK A SPIDER" reflex. I'm most likely going to be laughing at your inability to handle an 8-legged creature which are generally speaking less than .1% of your size... and disappointed in you as a human being if your first response is "I DON'T LIKE THE WAY IT LOOKS SO KILL IT!"

    "11. He doesn't "whoop!" while watching the Super Bowl anymore. OK, he does, but he's definitely cut back the whooping by about 20 percent."

    That strikes me as a sign of depression.

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  14. No one's pointed this out?

    6. After you rear-ended that Lexus in the parking lot, his very first words were "Are you OK?"

    THOSE SHOULD BE THE FIRST WORDS OUT OF ANYONE'S MOUTH AFTER ANY AUTOMOBILE ACCIDENT! I don't care what you're driving or who or what you hit!

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