Cherry Poppin' Daddies

It sounds like simple-minded misogyny for men to complain that they don't "get" women, like women are one thing, a monolith of inscrutability made enigmatic by a sheer act of will. There's a root-level hostility in dismissing women as unknowable. It's the recasting of humans as a reductivist puzzle, as in: what is the absolute minimum I have to say and in what order must I say it before you'll agree to remove your pants and underthings? Seriously, if any of you know that, I can be reached here in the comments section or via email.

I grew up with women. I was surrounded by women all my life. I take the more evolved, enlightened view that chicks aren't really all that complicated, man. They like shiny baubles and things made out of chocolate and movies where somebody gets The Cancer. It doesn't have to be actual cancer, just something debilitating enough to precipitate an emotional catharsis, preferably between mother and daughter, before the closing of the third act but before the epilogue where the surviving character talks to a headstone. You find some way to work two of those things into an evening, you're guaranteed at least a handjob. Even if you don't really want one. They can't help themselves. It's basic estrogen math. It's the same impulse that compels them to be interested in shoes.

So this guy in North Carolina gets more shit because the city council he's on turns down family planning money that includes paying for contraception. And all he says is “If these young women are being responsible and didn’t have the sex to begin with, we wouldn’t have this problem to begin with." And everyone screams "misogyny! misogyny!" just because it kind of suggests that all sexual responsibility lies with women alone and we'd all be better off (and healthier! and wealthier!) if these nasty bitches would just learn to keep them legs together.

While I certainly can't in good conscience endorse a call to action that involves women giving it up less often, I can say I think I understand his point completely. Notice he makes no mention of men in his quote. Yet, as I understand it, contraception is designed specifically to prevent pregnancy which, with apologies to my gay friends, can still, as far as I know, only be done between opposite gendered couples. And within the bonds of marriage. Between two people in love. Missionary-style. I got my sex talk from someone raised in Catholic schools. Some of my information may need some updating.

The points is, I know where he's coming from. He doesn't mention men not because he's failed the simple equation of the necessary elements for conception in a non-laboratory setting. I think it's because he suspects that women have achieved or are on the brink of achieving the one thing that all men ultimately fear: female autoinsemination.

Let's review: 1) He's anxious about the need for contraception among females, and 2) No similar rebuke or chastisement for men. Therefore obviously he must not be considering male involvement at all in the pregnancy process. Ergo, we've reached the event horizon entering into the long-suspected dystopia of total male obsolescence.


It's a logical fear to harbor. The anxiety is rooted in the mystery of the female reproductive system. Men's is easy. We carry ours around, out in the open and even, when the mood strikes, posted on craigslist for everyone to see. It's a pretty simple single-plug system. And that's just the hardware. Even the software is eventually externalized, given the right stimulation. The lady parts are all obscured from view. It seems demure and coquettish, but it's time to ask the question: what do they have to hide? And just when we try to get close, they excrete a smokescreen of menses to keep us away so we never develop the basis of knowledge to even ask the right questions. Something's going on up there. The whole thing smells fishy to me.

I think in sniffing around this, I've also accidentally uncovered the culture warriors' identification and objection to the so-called Gay Agenda. Lesbians can't be left alone together unsupervised by a man. We're not really sure how it is they have sex together, but who knows if some combination of non-penile genital collision might accidentally spark a cascade effect resulting in a hatchling of some kind. I'm sure they're working on it. Like a Manhattan Project set to Melissa Etheridge records.

We can't be too careful. And we're done arguing with you about this. No sex, ladies. Of any kind. You sit there, nice and quiet, smelling nice and rubbing the lotion on the skin, until some nice man comes along and consents to marry and impregnate you in that specific order. We know that if we leave you to yourselves for too long, you'll manipulate nature in such a way that will lead you to smash through the barriers we had the love and foresight to erect for you and eventually threaten society as a whole. At least that's the warning I took from Jurassic Park.

Rusty's Trombone

Despite my attempts to conserve both my energy and my immortal soul by deliberately uncoupling myself from the 24/7 news cycle of political infotainment, even I couldn't avoid all the Sturm und Drang over Rush Limbaugh calling a college student a "slut" and a "prostitute." The popular culture noise level rose so quickly from Deafening to Ubiquitous, for a minute I thought Whitney Houston had died again.

I was also confused when I heard that this Sandra Fluke was going to college at a place called Georgetown, which is run by Jesuit Catholic priests. I had heard somewhere else recently that college makes people hate religion, so the idea of a college run by a religious order was like hearing about a madrassa run by Zionists. I thought "What kind of short-sighted, self-loathing, nihilistic..." and then I kind of trailed off when I remembered Jesuits are intellectual self-selected celibate quasi-ascetics required by fiat to oppose same-sex unions while surrounded only by other men. That kind of squared that circle for me.

There is, as I said, a lot of noise on this Sandra Fluke thing, but we have to think about the people whose voices are getting lost in all this: the sluts and the prostitutes. They're out there, fucking indiscriminately, either in exchange for cash or to fill the unfillable crater at the center of their souls where their sense of self-worth should be. Not bothering anyone. Well, in the case of the prostitutes, bothering some people, but usually pretty gently and just as we walk past. They just want to know if I'm "looking for a date" which is kind of flattering actually, so I guess "bothering" wouldn't be the right word. If I had to characterize what it is sluts and prostitutes are doing, I suppose I'd call it "soliciting." Soliciting with intent.

I'm sure I'll get some backlash for using the word "slut" at all along the lines of "Oh, I see, some woman who is sex-positive and unhindered by the shackles of patriarchal demurity has to have 'low self-esteem,' right? I spit on you. All of your family should die." First of all, hey: a little harsh there at the end, Hypothetical Militant Reader. Let's try to keep it civil. Time of the month or what? Jesus.

Secondly, I did use the terms "slut" and "prostitute" but who said I only meant to apply it to women? Maybe you should reconsider your own linguistic and social prejudices, hmm? There are men out there degrading themselves every day just to get their end in anything they can talk into sitting still for 30 to 90 seconds. If women do that, they get to be "sluts" and people line up to diagnose it as a debilitating character flaw and fix it with the cooling salves of self-help audio books and the Oprah Winfrey Network. Male sluts, they hurt too. They have a hole to fill as well. Many, many holes, in fact. How could you need a better metaphor?

Let's have the proper respect, is all I'm saying. Sluts and prostitutes are out there, of all genders, providing a valuable service as a sexual outlet for America's married men. Without that kind of an outlet, where would America's men be? All that pent-up sexual frustration and loneliness will turn on us eventually, leaving us sedentary, overweight, depressed, angry, senses dulled by addiction, muttering to ourselves in a small, dark room, painting word-pictures with our pain, trying to get someone, anyone, to listen.

Clickthrough

I'm trying to figure out why it is I've never mass-forwarded an email containing a joke, a list, a profound thought, a list of profound thoughts, cat pictures, dog pictures, political demagoguery or things attributed to George Carlin that George Carlin never said.

It's not that I'm entirely anti-social. I send things via email. I have a facebook account that sometimes gets an update. I think I even did a serious one about what I was actually doing once. Twitter I tried and failed at, but it wasn't a total waste: I was able at least to find out what the absolute basement of my attention span was. And Pinterest... OK, look, I've only got so many hours in a day. It's not that I insist on unscrutinized, unmediated cultural and personal experiences, it's just that I think I've finally run out of username/password combinations I can reasonably be expected to remember. Ever since this Jeremy Lin thing took off, my standard CoupleInchesOfPain is taken almost everywhere I try to go.

And I'm not going to pretend I've always been the savvy digital eminence grise you sort-of see before you. No, I'm not lurking here in the internet backwater in a format largely abandoned some time before MySpace really took off because I lack the drive or ability to adapt. It's that I've determined it's the best way to exert a subtle influence to mold the interwebs into an image of my choosing. Although I will admit recently I've been feeling I may have hit the "subtle" part of the plan a bit too hard.

No, I was an early adopter. Back to the days before AOL, when the internet was Prodigy and some local bulletin-board-style sites. I know what the scream of a 14.4 baud-rate modem sounds like. And in the course of that long education, I opted into a lot of shit I ought not to have. My virus rate in the early days was practically Sheen-ian. And yet for some reason, the email chain never really tempted me.

Part of it might just be my base-level skepticism when it comes to the idea of magic. A lot of "FOREWARD THIS TO 9 PEOPEL AND MAKE A DIFRENCE!!!!" broadsides are less Jeffersonian paeans to public culture and a little bit more along the clap-to-save-Tinkerbell-from-the-poison lines. The logic of how an email list might positively affect a little girl with cancer, for example, was never really spelled out. It's not that I discount my own occult influence, I'm just worried there's a limit to it and I'm saving it to seal the deal when I finally get my chance to sleep with one of the Bangles. Some dreams die hard.

My main objection to email forwarding is practical: it leaves a paper trail. All this work to save the trees and develop the digital workspace and still, paper trail. The trees aren't happy enough with us killing way less of them, no. It's not about being left alone anymore, it's about revenge. They've followed us from their world into the digital realm, like Hugo Weaving in the second Matrix movie. Unless that was the third Matrix movie, then I mean that. Anyway, the paper trail follows us wherever we go, leaving a bright line of legally-admissible footprints behind us. How many "private jokes amongst friends" does it take before everyone knows you're a pro-bestiality racist? Turns out it can be just one.

Nope, not me. It's part luck and part common sense, but I've been clean thus far. Whatever I feel about bestiality and racism is going to die with me and my black dog.

Sotto Voce

I wanted to feel bad that Whitney Houston was dead. I re-listened to the songs. Not by choice but because I made the mistake of turning on the television/turning on the radio/going into a grocery store/listening while outside my house in the days immediately following her demise. Being dead has been amazing for her pop culture visibility. She hasn't been this big since '94.

Yep, there was no denying the level of talent. She could sure sing the crap out of songs well outside the genre and scope of things I would be interested in in any way. And there was that one time she heroically mouthed along to a pre-recorded version of the national anthem before that Super Bowl. Those things together makes the news of her death particularly... tragic?

I don't object to the overuse of words normally. "Literally" has literally lost its meaning and "awesome" has wounded the concept of awe in itself, probably mortally. But look, language evolves, it changes. We're all using all of it wrong by increasingly comprehensive degrees depending on how far back the standard is set. When I think of all the Shakespearean euphemisms for "penis" I either can't use or will never know, something that is probably a tear rolls from one of my eyes.

So yeah, dead pop stars aren't really all that "tragic." And yes, I know all the details about how she lost all her money and was ravaged by addiction and self-doubt and was married to the fourth lead from New Edition. All these are unfortunate things. But look, I missed this week's episode of "Modern Family" because I forgot to clear the backlog on my DVR. We've all got troubles.

But maybe being dead is more of a boon to a reputation than I'm giving it credit for. My DVR travesty is dismissible not because my Q rating is submeasurable but because I've thus far lived, rendering the incident not only transient but addressable. As upsetting as it is, it has proven to be survivable, and thus doomed to be lost in the vast and growing horizon of experience spreading out behind me.

So I guess the point is: be mindful of what you're doing in the moment because it will seem incredibly important to everyone if suddenly you die. Something that occurs to you in passing or you pick up in curiosity with every intent of quickly putting down again immediately becomes a defining aspect of your personality forever and ever. Or at least until the people who knew you also die. It will also help if one of them has a BDSM dungeon for posthumous discovery or something similar. You know, to take some of the heat off.

Drowning in a bathtub honked up on prescription drugs tends to leave an non-triumphal final impression. When I go, I'd prefer not to be thought of as "tragic." It doesn't seem likely though as mostly I prefer showers.

Dog Botherer

I turned 18 in 1992, which means my first opportunity to vote for president was Clinton vs. George H.W. Bush. Or as hindsight has christened him, "the good Bush." Of course we didn't know he was the good one at the time. There was never really any chance that I was going to vote for him. I don't know that I could even tell you what any of his policy positions were in any detail, I just know that he was kind of a dick to MTV News' Tabitha Soren, with whom I was at the time desperately in pretend love. And thus a white-hot, unthinking, lifelong affiliation to a political party was born. It seems shallow, but remember: I was getting my sophisticated political analysis from MTV News. Depth wasn't exactly my thing back then.

For some reason, the hindsighters like to point to Clinton playing saxophone on Arsenio Hall as some kind of political touchstone moment for Generation Xers like myself, which I never really got. I mean, it was a saxophone. The only thing that tells me? Band nerd. And worse: school band jazz ensemble band nerd. He went on television and butchered "Heartbreak Hotel," a song that was old when my dad was born. Yeah, that really spoke to my political soul. Actually, my positive feelings for Clinton (as opposed to my anti-Bush-ness) were based more around his reputation as a pussy hound. This was a band nerd AND a student government dweeb. If he was out there slinging it around with a two-count hit of social leprosy like that, there was hope for me too.

My full accounting of presidential voting then went: Clinton-Clinton-Gore-Kerry-Obama. All Dems. My distaste for Kerry as a candidate was bordering on Romneyan, but he ran against what will remain in my mind the worst president since that pointy-faced one from 24. You know, the one between the black guy and the lady. That was only partisanship in the way Titanic survivors favored floating bits of flotsam to the grip of icy death in the bottomless deep.

I fancy myself an open-minded, free thinker. I lie to myself and say I'd consider voting for a Republican, but if I'm being honest, it's only if a Republican came out and said a bunch of things no Republican would ever say. The socially libertarian, religion-has-no-place-in-politics conservative died with Barry Goldwater. The sliding spectrum is moving so steadily to the right, by this time in 2020, Ronald Reagan will have been an appeasement-minded, tax-and-spend, anti-movementarian traitor. So there doesn't appear to be any room amongst Republican candidates to appeal to even a centrist votership without a serious fear of being eventually pitchforked to death.

I guess in the meantime, if I'm looking to qualify for my bipartisan bona fides, I'll have to settle not for a GOP candidate who appeals to what I want as a voter, but just one who exercises a little bit of personal consistency and intellectual honesty. Maybe it's not the best year to go looking for something like that when all we've got are the plasticine Romneys and the volcanically eructational Gingrich.

I've decided my only potential chance to not vote for Obama would have to be Rick Santorum. This quote is making the internet rounds:

“This whole idea of personal autonomy, well I don’t think most conservatives hold that point of view. Some do. They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do, government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues. You know, people should do whatever they want. Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world and I think most conservatives understand that individuals can’t go it alone. That there is no such society that I am aware of, where we’ve had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture.”

Say what you want, but that isn't a mealy-mouthed position shot through with cognitive dissonance at best and rank, unvarnished cynicism at worst. If Mitt Romney asked what it would take to get my vote and I said "A pony," I think he'd find a way to imply I could, with confidence, invest in a small stable or other outdoor housing shelter of roughly pony size.

If I said the same thing to Rick Santorum, he'd probably take me aside and deliver a stern lecture about how beginning down this path would eventually lead me to want to fuck the pony. Is it bullshit? Is it a quasi-fascist attack on basic human dignity? Yes it is. But notice: he doesn't really take the time to pretend it isn't. When his position involves limits on personal freedoms, he says "I am against personal freedoms." It's shockingly refreshing.

I don't have to vote for it. But I can respect it.

Just to be clear, I don't respect it. People shouldn't respect things that are stupid. But you know, it's internally consistent. Give a guy credit for something. It's as bipartisan as I'm going to get tonight, but it's not nothing.

Pinko

I don't have breasts.

Well, in a technical sense, I guess I do. There are nipples anyway, although I haven't quite yet figured out what it is I'm supposed to do with them past cover them with Band-Aids should all common sense one day fail me and I find myself running a marathon. As far as I can tell, the whole male breast complex is one more in the long list of anatomical features withered to the purely aesthetical by vestigiality, like my tailbone, my appendix and the part of my brain devoted to remembering the lyrics to songs I hate. None of these things have yet to benefit me in any way, and in the case of the latter, quite the opposite by making me vulnerable to singalongs of "Pour Some Sugar on Me" at sporting events or karaoke nights.

But just because I don't have breasts doesn't mean I don't care about them. As a worst-case Kinsey 2, I appreciate them, of course, the way reproductive evolution has taught me to appreciate them, as my progenitors did: accidentally exposed on websites devoted to celebrity nudity. I also acknowledge their astounding practical gifts to nurse our young, hold up dresses and sell me light beer. And snack food. And muscle cars. And power tools. And America as an idea. And whatever the fuck it is GoDaddy.com does.

I acknowledge that since baby formula has been invented, none of these things are strictly necessary, but that doesn't mean we should reserve our reverence for breasts. They drive American commerce and keep Mardi Gras relevant. The entire economy of New Orleans as a city depends on them. That city has endured enough.

So I hate to see a breast suffer. Few things make me less happy. This is why I was against the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation from the beginning. Once I realized the name meant they were against breast cancer though, I warmed up though.

Today, though, even with a clarifying name change to Susan G. Komen for the Cure, there's still a shitstorm of controversy surrounding the most pro-breast group operating outside of Victoria's Secret and Mötley Crüe.

Yes, apparently the group has decided not to participate in funding Planned Parenthood specifically because of its anti-procreation menu of services. I have to say I saw this coming. I've always warned that nothing good can come of a war between breast and uterus. It's a lose-lose situation for everyone. Plus the issue concerns women almost exclusively and come on, you know how chicks get, man...

Most of this, I think, is the fault of the communists. And by communists of course I specifically mean Susan Sarandon. If she hadn't worn that red ribbon to the 1993 Oscars to protest the existence of Haitian AIDS or whatever it was, we wouldn't have been dragged down this road of ribbons of many colors. Yellow ribbons for soldiers, green ribbons for marijuana legalization, puzzle ribbons for autism, blue ribbons for State Fair champion livestock... The accessorization of pathos has gotten out of control. The Komen people with their pink ribbons and wristbands and T-shirts have simply been the most visible, the largest, the most bloatedly overexposed of all the ribbonated causes.

And in America, there are two things we do instinctively and ruthlessly: 1) hate communists and 2) a public perception backlash. Susan Sarandon stuck that red ribbon up there in the area of her own spectacular and hypnotic breasts and wooed us all down this long road of collectivism and good-feeling. We're only going to do that for so long in this country, comrade. We believe in outrage. We believe in sanctimony. We believe in abortion on demand. And in none of these things will we ever be denied.

Darth Me

The main problem with being in charge is that, on occasion, people will ask you questions. No, I guess that's not completely right. The main problem with being in charge isn't that you get asked the questions, it's just that implicit in the acceptance of the in-charge position, you have abdicated your right to shrug your shoulders and turn your unperturbed attentions back to YouTube videos of cats being afraid of things. People actually want you to know the answer. Often to questions on subjects to which you are entirely unfamiliar. What kind of a system is that to run a household/workgroup/business/major political party?

Orientation training is fine, but the inherent weakness in all orientation training is that it is stupid. I'm sure it's all devised with the utmost attention to techniques of memory retention and maximum input efficiency, but at a certain point, it has to become obvious to everyone that every instance of "orientation" fails because learning is experiential. Orient me all you like, but as a new hire/newly promoted/leading vote-getter, I've never been here before or done any of the things people are now going to ask me to do. In a nutshell, I'm the least likely person to benefit from your orientation as I, as evidenced by the fact that I require orientation, lack any of the practical knowledge to make it worth your time or mine.

As a new-to-it person in charge of the smallest of sub-groups at my place of non-blogging employ, I thought I'd take this opportunity to protest the expectation. Granting me any kind of decision-making authority in the first place is already quite a black mark against the entire company I work for, institutionally speaking. The idea of another human being asking me about the details of their health insurance open enrollment or whether or not they have permission--permission!--to leave early to go pick up their kid or whatever... All I can think of in the face of all that is: hey, you get your kid on your own time. I start letting you run around, my boss is gonna be all over my ass, you goddamned communist freeloader hippie.

And just like that: I'm the Man. Not in the good way, the 1990s black urban pop culture way. In the bad way, the 1970s black urban pop culture way. If I were in a movie, I'd be played by Robert Vaughn. Not the Man from UNCLE Robert Vaughn, after that, a little older, a little heavier, tons more racist. Not concerned with the trivial challenges of the working man. No, I'm busy plotting how to introduce lethal narcotics to the ghetto and maybe after that, working on my machine to kill Superman.

Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. On the relative scale using "absolute" as a guiding metric, middle management power corrupts exactly as much as the native ego is conditioned to allow. In my case, one more promotion and I'm going to go full-blown Pol Pot.