Sexual Tension, Feminism, Rihanna, and the Boob Song.

I want to clarify my personal stance on sexism before I get into the boob song. I believe that women should have a right to control their own bodies, first and foremost. If that includes abortion, birth control, or the lack of both, then I support it. I believe women should be making the equivalent wage for the equivalent job as men. I do not think genitalia should denote worth or ability, but rather merit and hard work. I also believe that women have fallen prey to their own nature that has been exacerbated and promoted by men. Meaning that they get bitchy and take it out on each other, and this, sadly, includes feminists.

A clear example of this is the idea that a woman is somehow less than valuable…or less womany…if they do not work, raise kids, work some more, fuck like a porn star, have a billion friends for whom they are always always there for, and cook, clean, and generally run the entire world on less than minimum wage. Most significant, here, is the idea of an at home mom. We suck, according to American society. Really, I don’t know how many times I’ve heard…from women…that I should work, that I suck balls, that I am pandering to a sexist idea. So, yeah, now would be a great time for me to work. My kids are grown, my life is my own. Working on it, no pun intended. And while I do that, I also write. Also a fucked up choice according to many feminists. Unless I’m putting out pamphlets on how badly men have fucked up my life.

THIS PISSES ME OFF.

First, if we are to embrace the true attitude of what I think feminism means, then we need to support ALL women, not just the ones that we pick and choose. This includes the women who had no choice but to stay home and raise their children as well as the women who CHOSE/CHOOSE to do so. There is not a damn thing wrong with instilling your own children with your beliefs, your values, and your love. Just as there is nothing wrong with doing it the other way, and working your tail off either because you have to or because you want to. I could go into an entire bitch-fest about men and how they suck and how they’ve ruined my life, but that’s a pile of horseshit. I AM RESPONSIBLE. Are there assholes out there? Hell yes. Are there men out there, specifically in our government, that I’d like to deny health care to  for a month or two so they could see what it was like. Fuck yeah. But the only person that can ruin my life is me.

Which brings me to Seth MacFarlane. He’s gotten a lot of heat for a couple of things he did at the Oscars, and I have opinions. Probably too many, but I have them and a blog is for sharing, right?

Regarding Rihanna, the complaint is that women go back to their abusers, that it’s never funny, and that he shouldn’t joke about it. I can see that. She is an abused woman, and as one who got out of a domestic violence situation, I realize it can be extremely difficult, especially if you so desperately want it to get better, and even more difficult when you have kids. Domestic violence is not funny.

MacFarlane joked,”This is the story of a man fighting to get back his woman, who’s been subjected to unthinkable violence. Or as Chris Brown and Rihanna call it, a date movie.”

This does border on the irreverent, but let me explain why I think this joke is more commentary than offensive material. First, all women who are in domestic violence situations should know better…don’t get your panties in a twist, I am not done…but that doesn’t matter a rats ass when emotions and feelings of inadequacy are involved. There are a great many things we should know better than, and staying in an abusive relationship is high on that list. But we’re people and we fuck up, and we fuck ourselves over quite a lot.
What I would like to say here, and it’s not really in defense of a joke that may or may not be tasteless and insensitive, is that domestic violence has taken a back seat to a lot of other crap that has been going on in the world lately. With the economy in shambles, women getting shafted a million different ways to Sunday, and the mass murders, domestic violence has been swept under the rug. MacFarlane doesn’t strike me as a woman beater…although who knows, admittedly…but he does strike me as a comedian who says shit that no one else will even touch. Rihanna has gone back to her abuser. The question we should ask is why? What makes her feel that she cannot live without an abusive lying piece of shit that treats her like a piece of garbage? And then somebody should go kick the shit out of Chris Brown. Yes. I’m advocating violence. MacFarlane may have pissed off a lot of people, but he’s gotten them talking. And talking about domestic violence is ALWAYS preferable to the alternative, which just leads to more abuse and more secrets and lies.

And the boob song. Really? This offends people. It was funny. Straight men love boobs. I’m a straight woman and I like to look at boobs occasionally…I like to compare and try to figure out which ones are real…and who the Hell knew that we’ve seen Kate Winslet’s breasts so damn many times? This is symptomatic of a society that is so afraid of a part of a woman’s anatomy that they will freak out if they see a pasty covered nipple, or a person nursing in public. And that’s the point, right? If you advocate public nursing of babies…which I do…then you advocate men being silly over the sight of said breast.
They aren’t the Spaghetti Monster. They are not going to eat you alive, they are not going to turn your pre-pubescent boys (Or girls) into sexual perverts ready to rape and pillage…the hormones do that without boobs…and they certainly are not going to rule the world. Let me tell you, if that were the case, my girls and I would be well set up on a small tropical island all by ourselves.

Boobs are not the enemy and they are not offensive. We should talk about them with pleasure, and Seth MacFarlane made it silly and ok to like to look at boobs. War is offensive. Fucking poverty is offensive. Assholes telling me I can’t have birth control is offensive while they take their stupid blue pill so that they can make more babies that they don’t want to pay for, ever, is highly offensive. Boobs are not.

Whether or not you like MacFarlane, people are talking. I’m not sure who would offend less people as an Oscar host. Maybe one of those redneck guys, and I hate them so the majority of America would probably love it. Or the guy with the puppets, who I find so racist I want to puke. But none of them have boobs so they’re ok, right?

Conspiracy Theorists Should Bury Themselves in a Bunker

I’m very much beginning to hate conspiracy theorists. I remember when a conspiracy theory was at the most silly, and maybe even a little bit fun. Area 51, the Bermuda Triangle, even Marilyn Monroe and JFK was scandalous and titillating rather than out and out lunacy. Even better, the standard and most believable Conspiracy Theory has some truth to it. We all know MM and JFK played at disrupting the free world with their shenanigans, because sex is like that, and there are weird things that happen in the Bermuda Triangle. Area 51 does exist and nobody is allowed to go there.

But the theories that are getting promoted as truths these days are beyond ridiculous in the most insidious and dangerous manner. The best CT feeds on fear. Aliens are going to come down from space, eat our brains, and shit out baby aliens that will continue the cycle, or the CIA killed Kennedy because they couldn’t control him, and by extension control the rest of us. Or, while cruising around Bermuda, we’re all going to disappear and be molten lava in the Mid-Atlantic ridge. Fear based silliness, somewhat believable, yet ridiculous in nature if you spend five seconds to think about them.

Today’s conspiracies are more frightening in that they not only take a tiny bit of the truth, they twist that tiny little bit and turn it into something straight out of HP Lovecraft.
An example:http://www.naturalnews.com/036922_census_bureau_racial_profiling_internment_camps.html

Natural News disguises itself as a site for fighting GMO foods, and discussing holistic healing and foods for cancer cures and the like. It does do this. However, this site also attaches itself to every vile discussion of government manipulation as it can. Guns, Obama not being a citizen, FEMA stuffing people into Concentration Camps, which are in actuality prisons in North Korea.

Why this is so awful, is that people are all fired up about Monsanto and the GMOs, which ARE important to either defeat or regulate, so if THAT information is true or at least somewhat reliable, the rest must be true as well. Because people do not think, do not want to think, and want to be spoon fed their information rather than finding out the simple truth.

Other conspiracies are dangerous for the limitations that they bring to discovery. People who think that Benghazi, or 9/11, or the mass murders committed with assault rifles have been engineered by an evil empire are clouding the real issues, whatever they are.  Who committed the crimes, and further why so that we can prevent it from happening again, becomes mired in fallacy, lies, and fantasies that fiction writers would love to create as the next great American novel. If we continue to believe that the government…or The New World Order…is hiding everything from us (of course, they’re hiding some things. The nature of a small group of people governing is to hide things from the masses), then we cannot ever find the truth, and give those left behind some relief from their suffering.

The internet has become both a thing of beauty and one of horrible lies and a feeding ground for lunatics. And the people taking advantage of those lunatics. It comes down to that thinking thing again. Is it logical that Bill Clinton killed 342 people and no one noticed except a few vigilant crusaders who obviously are not “on his side”? Or that Bush, who while stupid, seems like a nice enough guy, ordered the planes to crash into the World Trade Center just to go to Iraq? They engineered false information which we all know about. How the Hell would they hide a conspiracy of such epic proportions?
And that’s the crux of the problem. How many people do you know that can truly keep a secret? Really, truly? It’s just not logical.

But the problem is reason is not a priority. The Texas GOP literally campaigned in this last election on a platform to get rid of critical thinking because it causes people to become disgruntled with the status quo.
If  you don’t think any of this affects you, I suggest you read 1984. People love to quote Orwell in terms of what Big Brother and how our privacy rights are being eroded. One of the theories that are out there right now, in fact, is that the digital tv boxes have small cameras and microphones inside of them to tape everything we are doing. As do cable and satellite boxes.
But more frightening is the fact that these conspiracy theorists as well as those who like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are screaming at us about the evil liberals are getting their language into our consciousness. This “think speak” becomes the norm rather than the unusual, and we all roll our eyes and go on with our day. Except for the millions who believe that the Aliens are on their way and that Obama sent the invitation through the Hubble telescope. And that’s the problem. Those of us who think are complacent because we don’t understand the kind of crazy these people are. It isn’t that they’re afraid. It’s that they WANT this shit to be happening. It makes their lives meaningful in a world of work work work, retire, die. They need an outlet of some kind and we’re all too busy doing the same thing to notice.

Anatomy of my brain; how I write on a daily basis.

I don’t write like most writers. I don’t set hours aside each day, although I try, or at least try to think about writing every day. But when I have a private moment I write in my head. When I go to sleep I imagine space operas, treasure hunts, and beach rendezvouses with the sun setting across the Aegean Sea, melting into the midnight blue water, a sea nymph escaping the heat of the day for the cool of her ocean home.

Yes, I really do think like this. When I drop Paul off I do this too. Shorter time, shorter story, but always always writing in my head, playing with words. Maybe it’s escapist, maybe not. Maybe it’s just how my brain works…and I know my brain is often happier thinking about other things than the road or the rent or the groceries.

The other thing I do is think about characters and their characterization. I generally write character driven stories and even the novel I’m working on, while a kids’ fantasy, still focuses on the kids and their life at home. For me, this lends authority to why exactly any child could survive an alien landscape as well as explaining why they would even want to become heroes, even in another land.

Most times, my stories are an attempt to portray reality, and often they can be painful to write, and I imagine to read. That’s because I think. A lot. I think about who this person is, why they are the way they are, what they are capable of, what kind of coffee they drink, who they love if they are capable of love at all, what their favorite color is…you get the idea.

I am also pretty infatuated and fascinated by evil. What makes someone evil? What makes them hold a gun or a knife or a bottle of poison with the idea of murdering a boyfriend? What makes them molest a child or rape a woman. That gets pretty damn dark because I have a very very vivid imagination. Very. And I struggle with that until I get it out of me, either on paper, or just abandoning it. I’m not very good at abandonment.

An example:

Vincent prefers to be called Vincent, disliking the more familiar Vince. His father called him that, and he simply can’t abide the dizziness that swells his head at the thought of his father.

Here I am already setting up the character. He’s neurotic, and his father leaves him with unpleasant feelings. This is a form of delayed decoding, hopefully the reader, if Vincent makes it to paper, will be interested in wtf is wrong with this guy.

He (Vincent) eats lunch in the same place every single day. The grass in the park, the wintery sky, the leaves on the trees, they all change with the seasons, but never Vincent. He sits at the same bench, the one painted a forest green to blend in with its surroundings, the one in which Carlito declares his love for Maria eternally, the one that is slightly off-kilter and tilts to one side when he sits down, every single working day of his life. He takes no time off for vacation. Never calls in sick. Never is late after lunch or in the morning.

I like to use repetition. It can help a simple situation seem more sinister, or more urgent.

But not today. Today the bench is occupied by a blonde woman. Well, more like a blonde girl. Her lunch is spread out upon the bench covering the faint tracings of Maria’s name, and she is rocking the bench…rocking!..it in time to whatever is playing on her Ipod, while she stuffs greasy potato chips into garishly painted red lips.

Now we’re starting to get a feel for Vincent. He’s judgmental, easily irritated, and is more concerned about his personal space than making a love connection. This leads to more questions, which is what I want. Is he gay? Is he married? Is he just a prude?

His head begins to spin, just as it does when people call him Vince. He feels his breath leave his lungs and he is unsure if he will be able to gather it back again. The girl’s blonde hair glistens in the sunlight, golden strands emulating the simple, delicate crucifix dangling over her loosely buttoned red shirt. Vincent attempts to slow his breathing so that he can think, but he only causes himself pain as he pulls in shaky breath after shaky breath.
And then he sees that delicate chain surrounding an equally delicate neck, sees its thickness growing from tiny links holding the body of Christ between the soft swells of the girl’s breasts to a thick, bristly rope, sees it pull the invader on the bench toward the tree shading his bench, invisibly gathering her into its branches as her eyes bulge in her face, her neck swells and her face turns blue over the rope and she hangs there, her legs shaking, her hands clawing, and her breath, much as his had, fails to give comfort, and finally fails to give life at all.

Ah, so is Vincent imagining her death?

Who is this guy, to be so upset over a bench, one that does not even have his name on it?

I’ll have to think on this for a while….just wrote this this evening, for this exercise. So, I’ll think for a bit, and I’ll decide what he wants to do with this interloper, how much of these short paragraphs I’ll keep, if any, and how he fits into any work I’m doing.

But tonight? Tonight, Greece and the gyros are looking kind of awesome.

Please leave any comments you’d like…I like comments. 🙂