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Posts tagged ugh
This is perhaps the grossest thing I’ve read since ever, but that’s okay, because the qua-line makes up for all of it, as it includes:
“He has also authored several books on how to get laid in the United States, South America, and Eastern Europe.”
Wow. Several books. I would probably just write, “Don’t frustratedly masturbate onto a page and call the remnants thereof a manifesto against women who speak out for equal rights on the basis of their appearance, not their ideas,” but, sure. Several books. That works, too.
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Written Wisdom: Fat-igue
I read this post, in which Howard Stern (who used to be known as a very popular shock jock, and is now better known as one of the judges on America’s Got Talent (I think he’s still doing that, anyway)) dismisses Lena Dunham as being “a fat little chick” and lost it.
Maybe this is because this comes shortly after reading a NY Post columnist backhand complimenting Dunham’s show, Girls, in a piece in which she called Dunham “blobby,” going so far as to write, “Interestingly, the gorgeous Marnie is the one who is now totally unlucky in love. Sometimes it just doesn’t pay to be smart, breathtakingly beautiful, nice and kind. Not when there are blobbies who are willing to take their clothes off in public constantly—even when they aren’t in character.”
I am not going to dwell on the fact that to call Marnie—a character for whom I do have empathy, given her capacity for uptight bitchiness—nice and kind is to see the show through a very particular (and, you know, sort of false) lens. Nor am I going to say that, here in the world in which Lena Dunham and Allison Williams and this Post writer and you and I all live, there are heavy girls who are having sex all the time whilst classically attractive according to the bullshit standards of beauty of 2013 girls remain untouched, and vice versa, because, for every body type, there is another person who thinks it’s desirable (I would, however, encourage you to read this piece, which says so more eloquently than I ever will). I’m not going to go on and on with what a sickeningly sexist point this is. I am not even going to rant about the fact that “blobbies” is not a real word.
I am going to say this: If the best charge you can level about Lena Dunham, or about any woman, in the public eye or otherwise, is that she is fat, you are boring and about as irrelevant as Howard Stern post moving to Sirius Radio.
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When you’re done reading this piece, on what rape culture in India has in common with its American counterpart, you can go on to read this piece, by the ever-excellent Jessica Valenti, on “the onus on women to mitigate men’s sexual ‘desire,’” both in rape cases and in classrooms (i.e. a girl being called out in the middle of class to change her skirt, because it’s distracting other [male] students). You can follow it with this piece, on a girl who, after discovering that she had been sexually assaulted at a party because people had taken and shared photos of the event, used social media to get justice for herself, after the prosecutor and judge tried to deny it from her. And then you can read this one, on the contrast between the reactions to the Penn State scandal and the case in Notre Dame in which a young woman killed herself after her accusations against a football player were greeted with disrespect and threat, and that the difference is probably because we expect the latter to happen as a regular part of This American Life. You can go on to read this piece, about how regularly sexual assault is covered up, to the benefit of players and the detriment of the accusers, who are threatened by peers and administrators alike, at the good, wholesome, Catholic Notre Dame. And you can even, if you’d like, read this piece, about the reality that we live in a country where all of the above happens, and in which Congress let’s the Violence Against Women Act expire, but in which we don’t act or speak as though we think there’s a problem at all. And you can read this, all of this, and travel further and further down the rabbit hole of articles about rape culture and sexual assault, and you can wonder what else, exactly, there is for you to do about the fact that your country ‘tis of thee is ignorantly, blissfully allowing articles like this to honestly be written about its treatment of women and girls within its borders.
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Written Wisdom: On the tired, huddled masses
Every week in my German speaking class one pair gives a presentation on some topic, normally related to Germany (I say “normally” because we started out with an awful (and awfully detailed) presentation on alternative forms of energy that really had very little to do with Germany, but other than that they’ve basically all been about Germany). Yesterday the topic was immigration in Germany.
The girl who did the first half talked about demographics, whatever, and it was informative and fine. And then. Oh, and then.
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This is Ben Shaoul (the one in the sweater and cap), who was the subject of a story in the NYTimes Metropolitan section today. The most frustrating part of this story about Ben Shaoul, Great Neck, Long Island-raised (obviously) heir to a Persian Jewish real estate dynasty and community college drop out turned tycoon is not that he’s gentrifying the East Village, because maybe he’s just taking part of the inevitable, nor that he’s completing construction with no regard for anyone’s safety, because, sure, he’s a businessman first, nor that he’s bullying out rent-controlled tenants and then pointing to the fact that no court or city agency has ever found that he’s violated anything when of course they haven’t, because the tenants are small and he is big and rich and that is the way the world is.
No, the most frustrating part is that, in response to all that, Ben Shaoul’s complaint is that people don’t have enough nice things to say about him. That they don’t tell him what a nice guy he is and what a good job he’s doing. That a reporter says to him, “People say that you turned off their heat and said their apartments were for rent when they clearly weren’t and did construction that endangered the people who are living there and that you have no sign of stopping because you are getting richer and more powerful and nothing else matters” (I’m paraphrasing), and all he can say is, “I’m a regular guy, I have feelings. Is it hurtful when people write things that are bad. Yeah, it’s hurtful” (I’m not paraphrasing at all).
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Written Wisdom: On Twitter last night (Or, A Tale of Two Emails)
I woke up this morning to two emails.
One was from a woman at the international office of the university at which I will be doing research in the fall.
The other was from a friend, asking how I set off a mutual acquaintance, to whom I have not spoken since junior year, on Twitter last night.
(WARNING: It’s about to get real angry up in here)
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Signed, sealed, delivered: Russian man, I hate your mullet
Men of Russia. Let me put this simply: Get rid of your mullets.
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To Do List: Write this Paper
Here is a list of things I am frustrated with, angered by, and sick of at this moment in time.
- Nationalism
- Russian nationalists
- OH WAIT. NOPE. THAT WAS IT.
