Archive | April, 2008

Porn Part 2: The High School Years

12 Apr

Pornography hurts people. It destroys relationships, prevents people from developing healthy sex lives, cripples the sense of empathy, and generally hinders people’s ability to form the kinds of connections that make life interesting and worthwhile.

When boys start looking at porn at an early age, they become desensitized to women’s feelings. Boys of 10 or 12 are too young to understand anything going on in a porn video except that it gives them boners and that women apparently like to be treated like a set of holes. I know that’s a gross way to put that, but that’s the message in most porn, isn’t it? They don’t learn anything about female sexuality, they don’t learn how women want to be treated, they don’t learn that sex can be anything more than sating a biological need, like eating or going to the toilet. Or masturbating.

These boys become teenagers and have their first sexual experiences, and they don’t understand why things are so very different than the fantasies porn created for them. If they’re thoughtful, they may have realized that women don’t really like to be treated like a set of holes, and they end up learning to live with the frustration created by the fact that their partners don’t do the things they’ve learned to associate with orgasm through years of watching porn. If they’re unthoughtful, they may ask their partners to do the things they’ve seen in videos, in which case their partners will either go along despite not wanting to do such things, or they’ll say no, which leads to the same frustration.

Boys also know that love exists, and they usually want to experience it, if Snoop Dogg and Maxim haven’t beaten it out of them yet, but the messages of pornography make navigating personal relationships difficult. How can young boys associate love with sex, when sex as they’ve been exposed to it looks like something you do to someone you don’t think very much of? I met a friend’s 15-year-old brother when I was 24, and he asked us if he could talk to us about his relationship problems and get our advice. He said, “I really liked this girl a lot, but she let me fuck her. Now I don’t think I like her anymore. I mean, she let me fuck her!” Let that marinate for a minute.

Girls generally don’t use porn to masturbate, so they usually don’t develop an association between orgasm and images of women being used/abused. Still, their first sexual experiences can be fraught with problems, too. Boys raised on porn don’t know what to do with a real female partner, so early sexual experiences are usually at least very disappointing, and likely uncomfortable and worrisome, for girls. Boys come to their first sexual experiences hoping that the girls they have sex with will duplicate the behavior of women paid to allow men to use their bodies, and girls come to their first sexual experiences hoping to be romanced and treated gently and carefully. They want sex and love to coexist, as it should, and are shocked when boys they liked enough to have sex with seem to develop hostile feelings toward them after they sleep together.

I know I’m generalizing, but our society (in the form of its media, porn included) tends to train young people to have exactly these expectations, and the fact is that it generally turns out exactly thus. There is a MAJOR disconnect built into this scenario, and it sadly reflects the reality that most young people face these days.

Alright, you’ll say, but early sexual experiences are almost always weird. Yes, but it isn’t as if actual sex replaces the influence of porn once we lose our virginity. Instead, even more complicated and conflicting issues arise once the two meet.

To be continued…


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Porn Part 1: How I Became A Rad Feminist

12 Apr

I’ve put off writing this post for quite some time because I knew it would be a long and fairly mentally tiring one, but the time has come for me to tackle the subject that brought me into feminism. I’m of the opinion that there is absolutely no defense possible for pornography consumption, and that pornography is a force that operates only to the detriment of everyone who comes into contact with it. That includes men. I’ll talk a little bit about the abstract theoretical problems inherent in pornography, but it’s really the everyday human costs of the industry that I’d like to discuss, because that’s where people feel and see the negative effects of pornography on their lives and the world we have to live in.

It seems today that a large portion of the young people in this country think being into heinous porn is some kind of hip, countercultural statement, especially for women (more on that delusion can be found here). That idea is pretty tired; when I was a teenager (mid-1990s) a lot of the dudes I knew already thought watching gnarly porn was some kind of lifestyle choice you made to go along with your skateboard and your Circle Jerks t-shirt. They would watch it in groups and come to school laughing their asses off about how gross it was. Although I’m sure there was some masturbation going on somewhere, a lot of the cachet of watching porn at that time seemed to revolve around the weirdness of the representations of sex in most porn; back then it wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is now, and it generally wasn’t as hardcore as it is now, so hardcore porn tapes struck people as bizarre, as wildly different from their own sexual experiences. It was like finding out about the weird shit people in other countries eat: it might be exciting, but the excitement came from the foreignness of it.

I had never really seen any of it. My exposure to pornography had consisted of finding a Penthouse in my uncle’s bathroom cabinet at age 7 and watching a few Emanuelle movies on Showtime when I stayed up all night as an adolescent. I had no idea what these dudes were talking about, I just knew it sounded fucked up and mildly interesting for that reason. Then I saw some. Some asshole friend of some dude I dated thought it was hilarious to put porn tapes on in front of girls to get a reaction out of them, which he did once when I was at his house. It doesn’t surprise me, when I think back on it, that this guy was one of the few dudes I knew who owned hardcore porn tapes. He was a serious asshole, and he hated women. He treated the girls he dated like valueless property, he constantly cheated on them and sexually abused them, and he was always asking my boyfriend why he “let” me do this or that. I hardly remember what was on the tape, but I knew I felt like I’d been slapped in the face after I watched it, and not just because this jagoff had put it on in an attempt to upset me.

I decided at that point that I didn’t think porn was cool, that I didn’t think it furthered whatever kind of iconoclastic vibe these idiots thought they were laying down, and that I wasn’t going to date dudes who were into it. I probably couldn’t have explained very well what my reasoning was at the time except to say that I thought it was gross and that only dudes who treated women like shit were into it. What can I say, I’ve always loved generalizations. They work really well when you don’t feel capable of or interested in explaining yourself.

Most of my male friends at the time were on my team about the whole thing; they thought porn was something 12-year-olds got excited about but that mature motherfuckers like themselves (late-teens pretentiousness is awesome) should have outgrown it. It was something their dads did. Lame! I’m sure they were lying in at least some sense, but I didn’t know it at the time. It didn’t matter. Using porn for anything but irony-laden entertainment was shameful in the early and mid 1990s, at least among my circle of acquaintances, so no one was copping to it.

Then when I was 19 I found a porn tape in a drawer at my boyfriend’s house (Buffy the Vampire Layer — no, I’m not kidding). I felt completely justified in taking it out to the driveway and breaking it with a hammer. It was akin to cheating in my mind, and I was enraged to think that I had spent 4 months dating someone who was clearly an asshole, as I had decided all men who were into porn were. He came out and screamed at me that I had no right to destroy other people’s property and that I couldn’t tell him not to watch porn.

Something had happened in the space of a few years. Young dudes who had prided themselves on how non-mainstream they were and who rejected the kinds of roles society wanted to force them into had found a way to adopt one of their fathers’ worst habits and reclaim the right to use images of women being exploited without shame or irony. The same dudes who had been shocked by these videos to the point of giggling and telling people about them in whispers at age 16, at 19 were so accustomed to hardcore porn that they no longer bothered discussing the more shocking aspects of the images they had seen but instead recommended titles to each other and bemoaned their girlfriends’ “jealousy” that threatened to impede their access to images of women being used. Male privilege had outstripped iconoclasm, as it always does.

Well, it wasn’t jealousy that motivated my inveighing against porn. I will readily admit that I didn’t think it appropriate that someone in a monogamous relationship ought to be looking at images of other naked women and masturbating to them, and I still don’t, but that wasn’t the major issue. The major issue, as inchoate as it was in my mind at the time, was that I was devastated to find myself stuck in a relationship with someone who was at best incredibly unthoughtful and unreflective, and who at worst thought of women — possibly myself included — as less than human. I was already an undeclared feminist at the time, but that event pushed me to start thinking about pornography and its effects on women’s place in the world and on people’s personal relationships, and it pushed me to start thinking about the relationship between gender issues and the general nature of authority and nonconformity. And we all know thinking about that leads to radical feminism.

That’ll be the end of the personal information.

To be continued…


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Fuck yeah.

9 Apr

Too bad Dove is owned by the same company as Axe.


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I’ll be back soon.

8 Apr

I’m in the process of a bunch of crazy processes.  I should be bombarding the world with posts on Friday or Saturday. For now, have a look at some of the search terms people used to get to my page:

  • how does a stripper open her butt hole?
  • how do guys get their butholes bigger
  • women waxing their buttholes
  • friends mom fuck
  • do women shave there buttholes
  • have a boner
  • bobby lee faux hawk
  • fuckable women
  • sexy underage strip
  • chines sexy girls
  • avoid-women

Unbelievable.


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I don’t give a shit about chocolate at all.

4 Apr

I’ve got an example of the switcheroo that I’m not quite sure what to make of, although I think I smell some misogyny in it somewhere. I’m sure I’ll find it by the time I get to the end of this blog, which I’m starting with no particular plan in mind.

Have you ever found yourself standing in your kitchen at 3 AM licking a plastic bowl in an obscenely sexual manner? Me either. Even if the bowl did, at one time, contain some kind of chocolatey substance. I think the reason I’ve never done that is that a) I don’t starve myself, and therefore b) I’m not obsessed with food of any kind. Apparently that isn’t the case with most women, or at least that’s what Betty Crocker would have me believe with her commercial for her Warm Delights (TM – ding!) line of microwaveable chocolate cakes meant to be eaten before they cool down sufficiently. Watch this if you need to stretch whatever muscles keep your eyes in place with a good rolling.

The women in this commercial are nothing short of fiendishly lustful when it comes to their bowls of molten cake. Honestly, I’m glad the commercial ends when it does, lest I be forced to watch one of these women rub the bowl on her crotch while grunting. Imagine that the women in this commercial were to be replaced by men. No fucking way, right? It’d be the funniest thing on TV. So what’s the deal with this shit? Why isn’t it strange for a commercial to feature a woman fondling an empty dessert bowl like it’s Mark Wahlberg?

I used to work in an office. Pretty much every office in the known universe has at least one person, usually a receptionist, who keeps a bowl of Hershey’s Kisses on her (I don’t want to generalize or anything, but it’s a her) desk. That bowl without fail attracts swarms of women who, wishing to get away from their desks and bullshit with coworkers but not wishing to take up covert pot smoking, will descend on the bowl of chocolates and guiltily wolf them down. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has heard some woman moan and groan over a piece of cake or candy, lamenting the “sin” she’s committing by eating it in the first place: “Oh, I’m so bad! I really shouldn’t have done that. I’m going to hate myself tomorrow, but I can’t resist!” The fact that women are experiencing feelings of guilt, shame, and remorse as a result of eating something is absurd and points to a few troubling (and, I’ll admit, obvious) problems with women’s relationship with food and their bodies, and possibly even their conception of morality.

Fascistic beauty ideals lead to some serious problems. I’m beginning to feel like a propagandist, what with how many different ways I’ve had to word this same concept, but here goes: when a culture tells women that their worth lies in whether men want to fuck them, they’ll do whatever they think they need to do to increase the number of men having inappropriate and objectifying thoughts about them. Considering the fact that sexual manipulation is one of the only sources of power women possess, their tendency to go along with the fuckabilty mandate isn’t all that shocking. The kind of woman men want to fuck, as represented in mainstream media, is roughly a size two, so the message is fairly clear: if you want any of the limited kinds of power and esteem that women can gain in this society, don’t eat anything, especially anything that tastes good. Hence the obsession with the opportunity to eat fattening foods and the fact that these cake-eating women look close to orgasm in this commercial.

It’s perfectly acceptable for these women to behave lustfully with regard to food, which is odd considering the fact that they aren’t permitted to do so when it comes to actual sex.  Really, what commercial have you seen in which women are expressing sexual desire for something besides a bowl of sugar? I suppose it really isn’t much of a shock; women aren’t allowed to express sexual desire without being labeled sluts, so it has to go somewhere. Best direct it toward something that doesn’t threaten men’s control over the realm of sexuality. Something like cake.

I suppose I’ve figured out where the misogyny lies in the Betty Crocker Warm Delights switcheroo, and it’s even worse than I suspected. Many women are so indoctrinated with the “be fuckable or die” (that shit’s copyrighted, dude) ultimatum that they’ve lost the plot. There is nothing immoral about eating something that tastes good, even if it does become apparent that you’ve done so after the fact. There is nothing ethically unsound about nachos (they make vegan ones, you know). What’s ethically objectionable is harming your health and removing all the joy from your life in order to increase the number of Coors Light drinkers who want to pork you. Feel guilty about eating meat, or buying gas, or listening to house music, or liking Family Guy, but eat the goddamned cake and tell the world you aren’t signing up for the starvation plan.


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Further evidence of Bill Maher’s assholery

4 Apr

For some reason I’m watching his show, and he just said the most insane thing. He was talking about urban problems and he said to Congresswoman Barbara Lee, “‘Urban’ has been a codeword for ‘black’ lately, which is ironic considering the fact that they were brought here to work the fields.” I told you he wasn’t cool.


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Dennis Miller on the Daily Show was like Qianlong talking to Lord Macartney, okay?

4 Apr

Let me guess: you have no idea what the title of this blog means. Why? Because it’s a fucking Dennis Miller joke (i.e. the joke is based on a simile that relies on a completely esoteric reference as the punchline).

I was watching The Daily Show once and happened to catch an interview with Dennis Miller. He spent the whole time basically doing what he always does, which is show off his ridiculous (and random) knowledge of historical events of varying obscurity by comparing current celebrities and politicos and their follies with past events. He didn’t let Jon Stewart talk at all, which is also a recurring theme with him whenever he gets his smarmy, bearded mug in front of a camera. So, after he machine gunned the audience with a stream of these “jokes,” he basically told Stewart why he supported the War on Terrah, then fucked off.

There are three problems with Dennis Miller. First, although everyone considers him to be an erudite and sharp-witted motherfucker, I don’t know how smart or knowledgeable he actually is. He could very well sit down with Wikipedia every night to prepare for his TV appearances and write a script, which takes very little knowledge or intelligence. I suspect that’s the case, because he never lets anyone get a word in edgewise and he won’t allow anyone to change the course of his monologues. He won’t even deviate from the script long enough to answer a host’s questions.

Second, even if he does somehow possess more knowledge and intelligence than 95% of Americans, I still don’t know where his audience comes from. I’m fairly well educated, but I don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about half the time. That makes me wonder who does. Is it just another case of people pretending they understand something they don’t because they think they are the only one who doesn’t get it? I hope not, but I suspect so. Considering the fact that most Americans can’t name the Vice President and know more about the Taco Bell menu than history – even that of their own country – I doubt the average TGI Friday’s patron knows dick about Shay’s Rebellion or the Defenestration of Prague.

That last point brings me to my third and final problem with Mr. M. Let’s say Dennis Miller is a genius. In that case, what the fuck is he doing hosting a right-wing wankfest on CNBC? And why has he dumbed down his “comedy” on that show so that your average Republican asshole can understand it? And when did he become a George W. Bush fanboy? He used to make fun of born-again kooks and right-wing nutters, but now every chance he gets he tells everyone how essential the War on Terrah is to the survival of the country. (“Dennis, how do you feel about the death of Anna Nicole?” Dennis: “The media coverage of this thing is like the Paris Bread Riots of 1725. But seriously, I really think that we have to support the president on this deal in Iraq.” I made that up, but he could have said it.) It’s funny, though, because for once he employs no obscure analogies to explain his opinion, maybe because he doesn’t really believe what he is saying. I suspect that he has adopted his pro-war stance because you have to be a GOP ass-licker to get on cable news these days (MSNBC notwithstanding), which makes him a total sell-out, also a point against him.

All in all, he’s a pretentious douchebag, which is offensive enough on its own, but which is much worse when he becomes a complete phony on top of it. He has a few other mannerisms that annoy me (ending every sentence with a sneer and an arrogant “okay?” as if he’s just told you what year it is, for example), but these are the three real problems that Mr. Miller needs to think long and hard about.


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Believe it or not, this has nothing to do with my screen name.

4 Apr

Big shit happened in 1992. There was some sort of major shift in American culture that saw its peak in that particular year, and I have yet to hear anyone even mention it. I can’t put my finger on a cause, but there were definitely larger factors than music and fashion trends at work. But what were they? I mean, it couldn’t have been Desert Storm because – let’s be honest – who gave a fuck about that? Maybe it was because it was a leap year. Or was it the Bush-Clinton-Perot runoff and the upcoming handover of power? I sense that the reader at this point will be wondering what the fuck I’m talking about, so I’ll explain.

Pop culture in 1990 and 1991 seemed to be suffering from some kind of 80s hangover. Hair metal was as good as dead, the possibilities for far-fetched sitcom premises and movies had been exhausted, and excessive hair products and make-up were tired (for women AND men), but all of those things, in some haggard form, crossed the decade divide and stumbled on into the 90s. Shitty records like Warrant’s “Cherry Pie” and Poison’s “Flesh and Blood” and embarrassing sequels like Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey and House Party 2 just kept coming out, while shameful TV series’s like that abominable Cosby Show spin-off A Different World just kept on going. There was simply nothing coming out that could replace them. Until 1992, that is.

There were obviously big musical changes afoot before 1992, but ’92 was still the turning point. In addition to the two bands mentioned above, there was Trixter, a band that was sort of a last gasp – along with Slaughter – before that whole scene of longhairs was replaced by dudes with long hair who weren’t trying to compensate for wearing make-up by being misogynistic pigs. We all know that Nirvana (although “Nevermind” had come out in 1991) got really huge in 1992 because music editors have been verbally blowing them ever since. I had a copy of Bleach in junior high, but I’m always way ahead of the curve. It was in 1992 that cholas at my high school started wearing that shirt with the fucking baby on it, and that meant that Nirvana had swum (swam?) into the main stream. About 6000 other bands followed, most of which sucked, but at least they were better than another Cinderella record.

A big shift happened in the rap world in 1992, too. NWA and Eazy-E had been around for years, but they were never mainstream; their shit was just too dirty. What changed? 2-Live motherfucking Crew won their case in the Supreme Court in 1992, that’s what. A cultural shift had taken place; it was now possible for a record about dicks and guns to go platinum. But it wasn’t meant to be for NWA, because Dre and Cube had broken off to hang out with Nate Dogg and Warren G and some other dude with “Dogg” in his name, and for some reason they weren’t into Eazy-E or MC Ren anymore. The resultant album The Chronic came out in 1992, “coincidentally.” That album sort of “changed the rap game.” I think it also made the spate of 1990s ‘hood films possible. (And speaking of the ‘hood, the fucking LA riots happened in 1992!)

TV completely blew in 1991. It also blew in 1992, but it blew differently. For one thing, The Real World came out (What the hell would be on TV right now if it weren’t for The Real World?), launching the career of my favorite TV personality of the 1990s, Eric Nies (later of The Grind fame). Melrose Place also debuted in 1992, saving the night-time soap opera genre after the demise of Dallas, Falcon Crest, and Dynasty. I think what the success of these two TV shows illustrates is that, by 1992, people were sick of the contrived story lines of the 1980s and wanted things boiled down to three essentials: people having stupid conversations, doing it, and fighting with each other. The entirety of 1990s television followed this format (e.g. Seinfeld, Friends, Thirtysomething, and all of the family sitcoms like Home Improvement, Full House, and Family Matters, none of which featured aliens, robots, or adoptees of another race/species/nationality).

Speaking of reality, people were getting sick of 80s-era artificiality, and nowhere was that more evident than in fashion. You could sort of see the change coming in Trixter (sorry if I’m making too much of such a lame band) whose music was still kind of silly and cheesy like the other late-80s hair metal bands, but who refused to wear (obvious) make-up or hairspray. Trixter actually presaged grunge fashion by wearing ripped jeans and flannel shirts. Big hair was tenacious. I had ridiculous hair in 1990 and even 1991. But in 1992, my shit was long, straight, and there was no product (especially no aerosol product) in sight. Dudes suddenly stopped putting hairspray and gel on their hair and drying the front to look like a frisbee while leaving a small, free-flowing mullet in the back. That was kind of sad, actually. But alas, it was over. Even neon, which had managed to hold on into 1991 in the form of bubble necklaces and surf clothing, finally died, as did spandex, which disappeared in 1991 in its last form, those biker shorts with lace at the bottom.


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I’m sure you now see what a cultural turning point 1992 was. But what factors came together to lend that year such import? Was it the promise of residual Reaganism finally disappearing from the zeitgeist if his protege left office in 1993? Or was the shift in politics a manifestation, rather than a cause, of the cultural shift taking place?

The greatest pool party the world has ever known

4 Apr

I was thinking today about how in New York I’ll most likely never get to go to a pool party and how much I missed southern California for that reason (and that reason only). Pool parties are fucking awesome, especially if there’s barbecue involved. So this led me to think about some of the more memorable pool parties I have attended, and I landed upon an experience I had when I was 12 that I feel like I need to share with the world.

Getting drunk when you are 12 is almost always fun, but it’s even better when it’s sanctioned and bankrolled by an adult. I had been drunk before I was 12; I think I remember guzzling down some pink box wine with my friend Elisabeth at around age 8, and I remember going, “Mom, let me taste your wine,” then swilling half the glass on many occasions when I was a kid. (Somehow she always fell for that shit.) Anyway, although I had been drunk before, I had yet to get drunk openly at a party attended by several of my friends, a bunch of adolescent boys, and one of my friends’ pervy step-dads (there were many).

My best friend at S– M– Junior High was Bobbie C., and we got into some serious trouble together when we were 12 and 13, including sneaking out in the middle of the night to make out with high school boys, dating 18-year-old dudes our parents thought were 14, and stealing all kinds of shit at the mall. Her parents were super cool, as was her brother Rick, an Ozzy Osbourne fan who gave me my first NWA tape. Her parents were cool like mine were, though, meaning they were cool but they were totally not willing to let us do anything stupid to fuck our lives up. In contrast, our friend Shawna’s parents (at least her dad – I’m sure she had a mom, I just never met her) were, uh, not that strict. The dad was always having these white-trash Budweiser parties and his nasty friends were stoked that he had a 12-year-old daughter who would invite her friends over. One of the dudes he always had over was named Jim (I totally don’t remember his name, but I need to call him something), and Jim had a step-daughter named Shanoz (I think that’s how you spell it), who of course everyone at school made fun of.

Shanoz was having a 13th birthday party and Jim was in charge of the celebration. He invited me, Shawna, Bobbie, and like 5 dudes that we knew from school to a pool party AT NIGHT, where there would be wine coolers for the drinking. We were all stoked. Jim had to lie to our parents to get them to let us go to the party instead of us having to do the lying, so in our minds it was basically the greatest thing that had ever happened to us.

The night of the party rolled around and this guy came to pick all of us up IN A VAN. He immediately started telling the girls to hang out in their bikinis and started passing wine coolers around before we got anywhere near the pool, which was some kind of community pool near their house. Since Shawna, the fast-ass of the group, had a boyfriend who smoked, we all decided we were going to take up smoking that night. It was fucking hilarious, these four girls in bikinis, me being the only one who had boobs yet, sauntering around a pool smoking Marlboro reds without inhaling while drinking Fuzzy Navel Bartles & Jaymes.

Then everyone got drunk. Shawna and her boyfriend were in the van, and I couldn’t find Bobbie or this dude she had a crush on named Jeremy. I wandered around the pool and the parking lot drinking my second (or maybe even third) B&J, wondering why the hell these idiots wanted to hang out in some stupid van instead of getting wasted with me under the stars. I eventually got bored with posing by the pool and went to see what kind of action was going on in the van. Shawna and her boyfriend were practically humping, as I remember it now, and Bobbie was on the floor with Jeremy doing something or other, sort of wiggling. The other two dudes were in and around the front seats with Jim drinking Budweisers (none of that bitch punch for these guys) and smoking, and Jim was asking them whether they “had anything real to smoke.”

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I totally salted Bobbie’s game that night. First, I told her to get up off the floor, leave Jeremy there, and come outside to drink with me. (I already had my priorities straight at the tender age of 12.) Then, when she went to change clothes, I made the mistake of engaging in conversation with Jeremy, who then spent the rest of the night asking Bobbie questions about me. Dick move, but totally unintentional.

By this time it was almost 10 PM, which meant those of us whose parents gave a shit about us would have to go home, so Jim took me and Bobbie to Bobbie’s house. Her dad came outside to check out the scene, and he apparently could tell Jim was drunk and was super pissed. I could tell because he called my dad to discuss it, which would have stricken fear into Jim’s heart had he known, considering the size of our two dads and the football and bar fights in their collective past. We went to Bobbie’s room, where she began to divulge the details of her first contact with a boner, something I wouldn’t understand for another few years. “I like touched his thigh and then he had like this really hard boner.” Great. I had already asked my mom when I was 9 what a boner was, and she had replied tersely, “a penis.” I knew not to inquire any further. Bobbie was about as helpful. I already KNEW a boner was a wiener and it was hard, but what was it LIKE? Nothing. Totally fucking useless.

I think that’s the end of the story. Loose ends: We thought we had gotten away with getting drunk, and I guess we sort of had, since our dads thought it would be unfair to bust us when an adult had gotten us drunk. Shawna had her first kid when she was 15 with my friend Richard, and her second one when she was 18 with my friend Bryan. Bobbie moved away a year later and we didn’t really get to hang out anymore, except for the time when we were 13 that me and my friend Janette got some 18-year-old dude named Willy to drive us the 115 miles to her new house. But that’s another story.

There’s a feminist message in there somewhere, no?


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Something to think about

3 Apr

From this post:

“That’s the thing about patriarchy. It does the defining, not you. That’s what makes it the dominant paradigm. You can abstain from sex, you can fuck your way across the universe, you can be a stone butch dyke with a utility belt, you can get your boobs amputated and your uterus ripped out, you can be sex-neutral in your own crackpot mind, you can be ugly or hawt, you can be the Democrats’ presidential nominee, you can even age out of desirability, but you will always be defined in terms of, and used according to, that which the dominant culture describes as your essence: sex.”


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