This Open Thread has been brought to you by Adrienne Rich, the groundbreaking feminist poet and thinker, who died this week.
A lot of people are going to be mourning the feminist theorist, author of Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence (which, don’t get me wrong, has that classic second-wave combination of “what the fuck?” and “holy shit, changed my views of feminist theory FOREVER”). Me, I’m mourning the poet. Adrienne Rich was one of the first people taught me that modern poetry could be brilliant, that not everyone was inferior to my beloved Greeks, and that poetry that didn’t rhyme or scan wasn’t necessarily like playing tennis without a net.
Adrienne, I will miss you, and I will always regret that I never got to hear you read your poems.
Below the cut is one of my favorites, Two Songs:
1.
Sex, as they harshly call it,
I fell into this morning
at ten o’clock, a drizzling hour
of traffic and wet newspapers.
I thought of him who yesterday
clearly didn’t
turn me to a hot field
ready for plowing,
and longing for that young man
pierced me to the roots
bathing every vein, etc.
All day he appears to me
touchingly desirable,
a prize one could wreck one’s peace for.
I’d call it love if love
didn’t take so many years
but lust too is a jewel
a sweet flower and what
pure happiness to know
all our high-toned questions
breed in a lively animal.
2.
That “old last act”!
And yet sometimes
all seems post coitum triste
and I a mere bystander.
Somebody else is going off,
getting shot to the moon.
Or a moon-race!
Split seconds after
my opposite number lands
I make it–
we lie fainting together
at a crater-edge
heavy as mercury in our moonsuits
till he speaks–
in a different language
yet one I’ve picked up
through cultural exchanges…
we murmur the first moonwords:
Spasibo. Thanks. O.K.
I’ve seen a few people around the internet saying that homosexuality can’t be genetic because natural selection would make them go extinct. Evolution doesn’t work the way these people think it does, because of mendelian genetics. Evolutionary explanation for why gay men aren’t about to go extinct: http://www.livescience.com/2623-gays-dont-extinct.html http://someone-to-talk-to.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=289:sexual-antagonism-theory&catid=43:scientific-research&Itemid=63 Basically, gay men like men, but their sisters like men MORE, and the result is that the female relatives of gay men more than make up for any reproductive shortfall. The same principle doesn’t seem to work for lesbians and their male relatives however, so the nerds with the labcoats are… Read more »
http://www.danoah.com/2012/04/a-teens-brave-response-to-im-christian-unless-youre-gay.html
This. So hard.
@marc2020 I dunno, those ‘our product outperformed Brand X’ commercials seem to be kind of passe now. But, the point is to make your product memorable, so then there’s the challenge of finding hundreds of original ways to say ‘my product is the best product,’ when technically only one guy’s telling the truth in that instance, barring subjective customer preferences (Dual-blade, triple bluade, or straight razor – which shaves better?Whatever works for you.) One of the weirder ones for me is things like candy-bars. Who is Snickers competing with? A Snickers is pretty specifically the only caramel, peanuts, nougat, and… Read more »
@JE: Her plan was to try to “kill the Force” by setting off another calamity.
@ Ollie
Self promote away. 😀 I love shameless people. It was a good post and I left one of my long overly nuanced comments on it.
@ marc2020
Gonna reply to you to. 🙂 Just gotta go home first.
@Jay It’s not really the products themselves I have a problem with rather the way they are marketed like razors and comparing them to engines because all men like engines and machinery and stuff its ridiculously self conscious and to me shows they don’t have allot of faith in the brand or the people buying it. Also in advertising your products like this it turns the product into what Mark Simpson describes as a “manly strap on”, also to stay on that topic allot of these hyper masculine ads end up becoming unintentionally camp anyway. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-simpson/fag-up_b_987725.html If I were to… Read more »
The Future of Small blogs (which looks precarious)
My (lady) governor has announced on “The View” that “women don’t care about contraception!”
The Future of Small Blogs has me kinda worried.
Governor Nikki Haley (my governor, she sobbed), says “Women don’t care about Contraception!”
@ Jay Generally – I think it’s relevant to note the necessity of the two industries you mention in your last paragraph. The gaming industry is recreational and optional, and if it wants women to be involved (or if women want to be involved) it’s reasonable to suggest that they make it more woman-friendly (note: NOT “feminine friendly” which is something entirely different). The hygiene industry, on the other hand, is more of a necessity (as I’ve written about here: http://ollieroberts.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/selling-stuff-to-men.html – apologies for not being able to format this better). I’m not suggesting that men have stupid preferences or… Read more »
@Doug: Having played through it several times I’m still not sure what Kreia’s plan at the end is, but I’m pretty sure it involved you killing sion (and her) and destroying Malachor V so I guess you did go along with her plan, even if your character doesn’t know it
Re: The Cracked Article “The 5 Most Insulting Ways Products Are Advertised to Men?” I pretty much agree with the concept of the article, and I definitely agree with their opinion on most of those campaigns sucking, but it seems to devolve in places into just mocking the concept that anyone would ever make anything for men. There was the mockery about the redesigned loofah and the ‘zero’ vs. ‘diet’ for instance. I agree that advertisers shouldn’t suggest I’m a eunuch just because I don’t buy their product, but I don’t think think its cool to just outright mock someone… Read more »
I <3 Kotor II.
/me wishes that he had the option to go along with Kreia's plan in the endgame
@ superglucose: “Which, of course, makes reading “boring.”” Actually, reading IS boring. I used to devour over a thousand books a year. Now I walk into any bookstore, look through the entire fiction section, and can’t find anything I’d want to spend more than 10 seconds with. Same thing at the library, except when they still carry older books… and those are still as good as they used to be. One recent book series stands out, being popular for girls but even more so for boys! It involves a certain School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Why are there not more… Read more »
One last thing, I remember when a female friend said something about a “strong woman.” I realized that I didn’t think of her as a strong woman, and I told her that. I told her that she was beyond “woman” or “man” to me. That it didn’t make sense because saying that someone’s a “strong woman” is like saying “you’re strong… for a woman” or “you’re strong… for a man.” I told her I thought she was a person, which was something more than what a man or a woman could ever be, that she didn’t have to restrict her… Read more »
grrrrr… “It shouldn’t be a woman thing” is not a counterargument to “education has become a woman thing.” And as for the intersectionality of it… well… I’m starting to feel like a lot of the current wave of feminists want to believe that nothing has changed at all. It’s really disconcerting; actually, because it feels like people assume that the assumptions surrounding women and gender are the same today as they were 10 years ago… when they’re not. Progress is being made. It’s even being made as we speak: ffs 9th circuit court of appeals declared gay marriage constitutionally protected… Read more »
Got it in one daelyte! Now to go write a post about it….
@dancinbojangles:
“I swear I’m gonna put my foot through the next TV that tries to use sex to sell me a damn hamburger.”
If we all did that we’d soon run out of TVs.
@Danny:
Yes, the idea that sex sells doesn’t mean it’s always relevant, or wanted. I saw evidence of such in the tshirt ads on that very article.
The same can be said about romance in movies or fictional entertainment. My rule of thumb is violence, coarse language, nudity – two out of three max, any more and the plot gets lost.
Is it me or is there a sixth item missing from this list of, The 5 Most Insulting Ways Products Are Advertised to Men?
Umm, who are you saying were the baddies at the Barnard Conference?
I have too many feelings about her to sort them all out… but there was an image in “Of women born”–one of those verbal images only poets can write; of children frolicking w/their mothers, and she asked us why this is the exception instead of the rule, why we see parenting as continuous values-instilling, making children mind their manners, stand up straight, put on your shoes, etc. Very hippie stuff, but it made me cry, she wrote it with such intensity. Indeed, why do these precious moments slip away from us, and we mostly remember looking over spelling tests, etc?… Read more »
Cracked.com have out done themselve with this one http://www.cracked.com/article_19758_the-5-most-insulting-ways-products-are-advertised-to-men.html
The Atlantic has a pretty decent article on asexuality: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/04/life-without-sex-the-third-phase-of-the-asexuality-movement/254880/
I think it’s pretty interesting to observe phenomena like asexuality starting to head toward mainstream awareness. There’s plenty of stupidity in the comments though.
@monkey: I also dislike that article, because it sort of makes it sound like any complaint about women’s behavior that men have is bullshit and whiny. There are some legitimate complaints about the dating scene from a male perspective, like the pressure to initiate and so forth, that NSWATM has covered admirably. It doesn’t hit on how hatred resulting from such pressures is really an outgrowth of pain. Certainly, the hatred is a poor way to manage that pain, but that doesn’t make the original complaint less valid. Women complain about men as a group doing bullshit stuff all the… Read more »
@monkey:
I do notice that about half of the fifth item in that list (about powerlessness) does nothing but mock how powerful men (not men in general, just the few at the top) think they are powerless.
Okay, I know Cracked is a humour magazine, but I’m really not sure what to make of this…
http://www.cracked.com/article_19785_5-ways-modern-men-are-trained-to-hate-women.html?wa_user1=2&wa_user2=Sex&wa_user3=article&wa_user4=trending_now
The comment section is pretty vile, but the article makes a LOT of generalizations, not the least of which is that all men are heterosexual…