Anchor Anguish

The following is my imitation of every TV news network in America. Ahem:


"Gas prices
gas prices
gas prices.
Obama.
terrorism.
mosquitos will kill you.
vegetables will kill you.
cell phones will blow up. give you tumors. and then kill you.
this just in!--research shows that vegetables will not kill you. However, everything else still stands.
gas prices are high
foreclosure
debt
recession
unemployment
economy
gas prices
obesity.
doom, doom, doom
the world's going to hell.
there's a serial killer on the loose! lock up your daughters.
breaking news--research shows that locking up your daughters may lead to suicide, STDs, and Alzheimers later in life.
statistics
gas prices.
gas prices
death
doom
done.
Britney spears is pregnant.

I'm Katie Couric, thanks for watching."

The Col-Jerk Report

Uhh, i don't really think Steve Colbert likes us all that much.

Judging by how he treats his feminists guests, i'd say the women's libbers rank just above Bill O'Reilly but right below Jon Stewart on his List of Things to Destroy Using Dry Comedic Irony.

I mean, honestly Steve. First Ariel Levy, now Jessica Valenti?

But I know that its your job to play the smug, satirical show host and wear badly tailored suits and wire-rimmed glasses so you can cross your arms with a raised eyebrow to prove how pensive and intellectual you are, before reading irrelevant jokes from a teleprompter and waiting for the eruption of audience laughter who are either a.) paid actors Or b.) on acid.

I also, totally, get that you have to challenge the views of these crazy "feminists" with those biting skills you learned back in Debate 101 and your acerbic wit to deliver the list of punchlines you probably have on a napkin underneath your desk. And i understand that by the look on your face, everything Ms. Valenti is saying is akin to the wamp-wamp-wamp Charlie Brown language or ebonics from those rapper guys on MTV, and that you wish--between glances at your punchlines and not-so-casual glances at her breasts--that she would just SHUT UP already, and let you say something funny because you only have an hour, damnit, to make things happen, so you're going to do a bit about the naked lady on the book cover because, hell, what other questions can you think of when never even heard of "Jessica Valenti" or all this "feminism" stuff until like, five seconds ago, when the producer told you backstage, and even then you were too busy moussing your hair into that perfect mini-pompadour shape to listen, because if you're going to out-do Mr. Stewart you've gotta have The Do, you know what I'm sayin'?

And that's the whole joke, right?: pretending to hate America and Bush and all stuff, but then pose in front of a flag so everyone knows you're J.K; that you're just being ironic and totally sarcastic, because you looked up the definition of irony (or at least your assistant did) on Wikipedia and thats what it said, right? Pssh, i got you, Steve. Now if only those uptight ol' biddies could get with the program (your program, of course) and just let you make your freakin' jokes so everyone can tell you how funny you are after the show.


Har-de-har-har, indeed.

Barbie 90210 (Tits and Turkey)

Femspo for the day: A cartoon i drew, despite my limited artistic skills...

(click for larger)


Plastic surgery always makes me think of Thanksgiving turkeys. In fact, I'd bet a cosmetic procedure is practically identical to that of turkey preparation. I mean, in both scenarios, the subject (the turkey/girl) is sliced, diced, cut, carved, slashed, and gutted with sharp utensils and then stuffed with foreign objects. Granted, the turkey will probably be mutilated by your Aunt Agnes wearing a Christmas sweater and a fanny pack, whereas the woman will dish out a few grand to be mutilated by an uncertified lab-coat wearing nurse's assistant who will tell you "its normal, you have nothing to worry about" when you complain that your tits have turned a yellowish green color and fallen off.


But. yeah. other than that though, its basically the same.


And while being able to fill out that hot pink halter top you saw in Abercrombie will cost a pretty penny, and certainly may leave you permantly disfigured, its totally worth it, as you will reap the endless benefits of doing so:


1.) The most obvious one is simple: you will have gigantic knockers. You will now be known as "so-and-so with the big puppies" and your fuckable rate will be inceased by a whole 5 points. They will be the convo starters in every social gathering you find yourself in from then on, causing you to come up with clever nicknames for your new friends as party-lines (Laverne & Shirley, Peanut Butter & Jelly, Mary-Kate and Ashley etc.) that will just crack the guys up. OR, if you have a particularly low I.Q, and one-liners like these prove to be too challenging, you dont have to talk at all. You can do something as simple as, oh, wear a tank top. As your male conterpart will be so entranced with the XXX beach balls two centimeters from his face, no conversation will really be necessary.


2.) If you should be brutally murdered by a random sociopath, buried four feet underground in some abandoned forest in Wyoming, and are found by hikers ten years later, but cant be identified because your body is so decomposed, they identify it by tracing the serial number in the silicone. Trust me. It's happened.


3.) Besides those already mentioned, fake knockers offer an extra perk that boring ol' natural ones don't: you always have a large, inexplicable space between each one. This offers a nice little storage compartment, to fit items such as cell-phones, I-pods, and wallets, keys, whatever! Now thats what I call a built-in closet!


4.) Fights will be relatively easy to win, or at least to bear, with your new assets in place. When, say, the bitch down the street gets testy and declares a catfight, or your husband is undergoing "work-related stress" and decides to rough you up to relieve it--a blow to the chest (wherein most girls would hurt like a mother) will be virtually pain-free for you. Once you've had them for a while and they begin to form their rock-life structure, any boob-bopping will feel like punching a brick wall with your bare hands. You will bloody knuckles! You will make grown men cry! Arnold Schwarzenegger will step down and deem you the "Tit-a-nator".


And you, after getting this taste of bliss from the hands of your surgeon, will definetly be bauk .

Kissing Girls is Hardcore

Katy Perry kissed a girl. And she liked it.

Apparently, she wants everyone to know this, as her moronic single, "I Kissed A Girl" has been on nonstop radio rotation, for no reason other than the fact that it serves as softcore audio porn.

I knew this lyric lip-locking couldn't circulate in the mainstream too long without being deemed a "grrl power" song, compliments of Pink and Avril Lavigne fans who think Perry's homosexual debaucheries are cause for a sisterhood celebration. (these are also the same idiots who pushed Destiny's Childs' "Independent Woman" as a feminist anthem, despite the fact that "Cater 2 you" was released soon after, proving that all that independence was just too much for the gals to handle.)

But to anyone who is not a.) stupid and b.) Katy Perry, this "in-your-face-i-care-about-seeming-as-if-i-dont-care-what-people-think" persona is both contrived and ridiculously cheesy. She creates stereotypical rebellion with dumb, blunt remarks about her ex boyfriends that somehow pass as feminism, which only proves that Perry and her posse only understand it in simplistic terms: ranting about ex-boyfriends + becoming a temporary lesbian = feminist. (the way that wearing your father's tie over a wife beater and using cotton-candy colored dye from the drug store was in Avril and Pink's case)

And i'm sure that Katy's already hard at work on her next wretched album, which i assume will be an "ultra-sexy" extension of the first one. I just hope she know's "I Got Crabs, and I Liked It" won't be as catchy a title.

[Follow up 7/14: I was just informed about an article that either proves a.) I am a prophet. or b.) the mainstream music industry is so utterly predictable.]

Hipster Guys Make Me Cry

I like hipster guys.I do. I like their thickly framed glasses, and unnecessary need to squeeze into their little brother's Ryan Adams T-shirt.I like their chain-smoking habits, their Beatnik reading material, their oh-so-tortured artistic souls,their vegan moral codes, and their inexplicable desire to be ironic or "authentic". These are precisely the kind of guys i am friends with, the kind of guys i respect and admire and come to appreciate.

But more often than not i am mentally pelted with two critical questions: 1.)How does any oxygen get to his junk while squeezed into skinny jeans 5 sizes too small? and 2.) Why does the hipster guy pride himself on participating in EVERY socio-political cause known to (wo)man EXCEPT feminism?

Honestly, they will squeeze into "I heart PETA" T-shirts and rip the rabbit fur coats off of runway models during fashion week, or dive in front of moving vechicles as a bizarre anti-war protest gimmick. They will peel through clothing at "vintage stores" and the Salvation Army so as not to contribute to the child-labor sweatshops in Tahitti. They read the Cornel West Reader and the Autobiography of Malcolm X and claim that it made them aware of their privledged socio-economic status as a corn-fed suburban white boy. They will wave the rainbow flags with the fags. They will live green. They will create T-shirt slogans like "The only Bush i trust is my own" and spend their spring breaks on voter registration commitees and raising money for some international AIDS fund while their peers are kegging-it-up for Girls Gone Wild videos. But when it comes to women's issues, they suddenly morph into Bush 2 .

But this isn't a complete conundrum, because, you see, i've deciphered the code behind their women-related apathies, and it is this: They simply feel left out.

It seems that feminism is one of the only politcal posses to keep the edge exclusivity still visible; to basically say, "step back, Jack Keuroac, we got this." It never discouraged the support of free-thinking men, but it did not actively depend on it. The great thing about feminism is that it is a movement that must start and end with women. It is one that decided to manifest itself straight from the core; with girlfriends and mothers and sisters and daughters, and to make point of our concerns first. Men looked up and saw a bunch of women tinkering around with picket signs and talking this nonsense about equality without ever really asking them to be apart of it. They felt obsolete and unimportant, and decided to oppose feminism, to hate it, destroy it, and reclaim their power! This is one of man's most primal instincts: reject what has rejected them.

And even the others, the hipster guys who believe they should be exempt from feminism's wrath because they dont, say, beat up on their wives. But even these men, while certainly better than those who are blatant mysogynists, are still not blameless because they don't do anything. They bite their tongues when screaming would be the more appropriate response to a culture that is raping, killing, and mutilating their sisters and daughters and mothers as a passtime. They sit down, they are passive and apathetic when they need to be angry as fuck that there are people who are groped, hit, mocked, laughed at, restrained, belittled, and denigrated on a daily basis. They believe they are informed and compassionate because they plant neighborhood trees or visit nursing homes, but never realize that you cant call yourself a humanist until you call yourself a feminist.

And no, it isn't just the fault of men. I really believe that eventually women will wake up, shake themselves out of their masochistic mindsets, and they will have to do that on their own. But in the meantime, it would nice to have a little help.

What Sex and the City Can Teach Us (But Probably Won't)

I'm going to give the writers of the inexplicably overrated and mostly moronic television series/movie Sex and the City the benefit of the doubt: I'm going to assume that the characters Charlotte, --the oh-so-wholesome girl next door who spends her entire life either a.) whining about wanting a husband b.) whining about wanting a child c.) fetching a husband of child, or d.) gushing obnoxiously about how happy they both make her--and Samantha, the 40something "nymphomaniac" whose preference of do-em'-ditch-em' sex over monogamous relationships is almost refreshing, as cultural symbolism. I'm going to assume that the entire purpose of having these two characters interact with one another, despite their personal differences, is to illustrate the classicly epic battles of two seperate entities. You see, ladies and gents, it isnt just Charlotte vs. Samantha, that exist in these cliched, badly written scenes. It is conservatism vs. liberalism. It is ancient vs. modern. Marriage vs. singledom. Good vs. evil. And, of course, it is feminism vs. patriarchy.

And while i know the only reason the S.&T.C writers created Samantha is because she gave a good excuse to shoot a tacky graphic sex scene every 30 seconds, the logic behind my theories are still supported.

Because for every quasi-feminist, sex-obsessed Samantha that exists in America, there will a Charlotte, vowing to hang herself by the sheets of her JC Penny canopy bed if she isn't hitched by age 30. These women seem to flock to their appropriate piles and branch off into the two opposing camps:

Camp # 1. The Charlotte camp. --This one is usually a mix of brainwashing via housewife mother and Billy Graham television programs. Even if they aren't religious, these women believe that her body should be cherished and respected in a Holy fashion. This undoubtedly means: a.) No sex until marriage so that on your wedding night, your new-fangled hubby will be so profoundly impressed with your incredible ability to keep your legs closed, that he will never tell you that he just slept with your best friend at the bridal shower and may have a hefty case of Chlamydia. b.) No sex on the first date, because a man will be so impressed with your incredible ability to keep your legs closed (in the name of respect!) that he will never tell you that he slipped a roofie into your chardonnay at the dinner party. Or c.) No mastubation or impure thoughts, as this may lead to violation of rules one and two, not to mention the eternal damnation and shame that should face you for reaching sexual satisfaction without aid from a dilapidated penis. These are women who take Cosmopolitan quizzes that tell them if they may be too aggressive (or bitchy or apathetic or arrogant or outspoken) to get a man, (The answer, is always, "yes") they use cheesy cliches for their virginity, like, "flower petals" or "gift of virtue" and lecture hookers on the importance of letting her flower grow until the right man comes along to pick it. They are women who cannot fathom a life where a man does not control it, run it, make it, or destroy it. They are, frankly, utter morons.

Camp #2, the Samantha Camp, is, predictably, the opposite. They are wild and untamed. They are women who go up to men in the bars to set a time and a place. They say "fuck" more times than they say "making love", they are single, and they like it, because they don't have to answer to anyone (and wouldn't even so). They use men like men use women, as physical tools of sexual desire, but can only ever be sluts when they do. They make married women nervous, make them curiously question their husbands whereabouts and check pants pockets for phone numbers. They are women subjected to, "dont you ever want to get married?" questions and have to, exhaustedly, perpetually, come up with an answer. They are women who get jobs and statuses, and lives that don't revolve around a man, they learn to change their own tires and pay their own rent. They are free and absolutely, undeniably, unstoppable. And they are feminists.

The only trouble is, like the women of Sex and the City, there are still far too many who start out wanting to be Charlotte, and always end up happier as Samantha.

Slick 70's Slogan

Femspo for the day:

"77% of anti-abortion leaders are men. 100% of them will never be pregnant."

Perfect.