I'm rather embarrassed to admit that I'm addicted to Hot Chicks with Douchebags, but let me explain. The writing is often clever and hilarious, and there's actually quite a bit of revealing cultural commentary. For example, DB1 offers this explanation of the douchebag phenomenon:
At its essence, if I were to attempt to make a generalized definition, douchebaggery is simply about the affected performative role-playing of the peacocking male in an utterly false and constructed way. It is about the adoption of cultural signifiers of "the stud" as an attempt to woo the female by inverting attraction, by making the male douchebag perform as the object of the female's gaze -- to feminize himself. This attempt at gender inversion, an almost mythic reinvention, allows the male to become the object of attraction through invocation of the tropes of gender masquerade. In this way, the male douchifies himself in the hopes of hiding his true self. Douchitude is the mask, the role being played, which hides the douche from his true reality in hopes of, well, getting jiggy with the hot.
I'd actually love to be in a room where Judith Butler is sitting in front of a computer analyzing these images in a think-aloud protocol way.
Plus, a commenter in this post claims that douchebaggery is about the hyperreal, as DB1 had pointed out that the three guys in the post actually looked more like drawn cartoons than people.
BlogTO asked me to do a small interview. Here it is! Was a pleasure to do.
Sorry, but that's all I can manage to say after reading this. Seriously, what else can you say?But, a hearty thanks to Twisty for compiling all of this horrifying news and for the brilliant analysis.
And that would be Mandolin's brilliant post at Alas, where she is guest blogging this month. Expanding on Hugo's post from last year, Words are not fists: some thoughts on how men work to defuse feminist anger, Mandolin examines how this observation becomes even more true the less privilege the "attacker" is perceived to have.But I want to take it farther than Hugo does. People don’t just say “
I've been distracted by health issues involving my family and myself, so things have been quiet around here. So, let's get some new blood in here!
To be included in either list, a blog must include at least one female writer and deal with politics at least part time. If you think you belong on the list, write to me and tell me whether you belong on the Liberal or Conservative list.
If you'd like to be featured on the blog, just write your answers to these 6 questions, and send them to morgaine*at*the-goddess.org.
Interview Questions:
Name:
Blog:
Liberal or Conservative?
Tag Line: (optional)
Location:
How did you start blogging? Why do you keep at it?
What are your most important issues?
What’s the nicest recognition you’ve ever received from the media and/or the blogosphere?
Who is your audience? What is unique about your blog?
Most frustrating aspect of blogging?
What’s the one point you’d like a reader to take away from your blog- the one thing for them to really “get”.
Quote: (Wrap up with a quotation – one of yours, a famous one you like, a personal Motto – be creative.)
Impeach GonzalesIf you'd like to take your Democracy back, click that link and let's get that criminal out of the Justice Department.
Thanks!
According to reports out of the U.S., the FDA is about to approve a drug that will allow women to greatly reduce or shorten all together their menstrual bleeding.
"Women are proactive about their bodies much more so, as they should be," Knatz says. "They're saying, ' . . . I don't want my period. How can I stop that from happening?' "
Still, many women view menstruation as a natural part of life and are reluctant to shut it down artificially, at least to a prolonged degree. Some experts warn that little is known about any health risks from suppressing periods for a lengthy time. Experts interviewed say these medications would not hamper getting pregnant once women stop taking them.
The Arizona RepublicI personally find these types of medications questionable. Is there a good reason to have a period? What does it do for the body? Is it useful?
Science has yet to give us a good answer on this one (draw your own conclusions why) so why would we suppress periods without knowing what benefit we draw from them?
Maia has a beautiful (albeit recycled) post at Alas in which she uses Jessica Valenti's new book as a jumping off point to discuss what it is that brought her to feminism.I was once a middle-class girl who was too scared to call herself feminist, the audience of the book. But I didn’t change my mind because feminism seemed easy, but because I realised what how hard the women who had been before
Heart at Women's Space/The Margins: The 1st Carnival of Radical Feminists.Ms. Jared at Sinister Sister: Mothers File International Human Rights Complaint Against United States. I got this in my inbox last week, too, and kept meaning to blog about it. But Ms. Jared actually did it. That's why she's a better blogger than me*.Lost Clown at Angry for a Reason: Besides Bad Coffee. Here's another
The agency I work for is being featured, and the founder interviewed. The Today Show sent out a camera crew last week and got about 16 hours worth of film...which they will cut down to about 4 minutes. With any luck, I won't end up on the editing room floor.If you can, please tune in and watch -- or set your tivo, dvr, or vcr. Even if I do end up on the editing room floor, it should still be a
