Internet: Get Better
I haven't had time to read LJ recently, so I was up way too late last night catching up. And this is what I got:
* An Onion AV Club writer venting her frustration that, whenever the AV Club interviews a reasonably attractive and successful woman, the comments section fills up with posts from men saying they'd fuck her, bragging that she's not good enough for them to fuck, and saying that they don't know her work, but they can just tell she's a stuck-up, stupid bitch who wouldn't be worth fucking. I checked the Onion AV Club and found this an accurate assessment. (Apparently, if your bio mentions that you wrote a humorous essay about getting locked out of your New York apartment, but you also have a vagina, it means you must be a rich, stupid, shallow Park Avenue bitch, because what other kind of woman lives in an apartment in New York?)
* Two professors arguing that it's okay for a man to rape a woman if he really, really wants sex, because it's exactly the same as a starving man stealing a loaf of bread.
* An autobio comic by a brilliant young cartoonist in which a male acquaintance tells her that all women would be happier if they quit their jobs and devoted themselves to raising children, complete with the typical guffawing about how he'd LOVE to be a stay-at-home mom because it'd be just like loafing around the house playing Guitar Hero all day. If you've ever wondered why brilliant young female cartoonists often have such short careers, rest assured that it has nothing to do with the number of times they're told by helpful people to stop drawing and concentrate on babies.
* A friend commenting that a strange man on the BART spotted her reading a difficult-looking book and told her that no one would want to marry a woman who reads books like that.
* A friend discovering for the first time the creepy misogyny in Piers Anthony novels, which dredged up embarrassing memories of how much time I wasted in high school reading Piers Anthony. I have a very clear memory of getting fifty pages into the zillionth Xanth novel and suddenly realizing that I had never laughed once at any book in the entire series. And I hated the way all the female characters were either dumb bimbos or manipulative witches, except for Chameleon, who was both a dumb bimbo and a manipulative witch. Why did I read those things? And why did the sci-fi/fantasy community hail Anthony as a genius back in the '80s? Why were those books bestsellers while Terry Pratchett struggled to gain a foothold in the U.S.? It's weird how much this stuff continues to bug me.
* Dan Savage, who I can usually count on to get me out of a blue funk, whining yet again about how he doesn't dare write advice in his sex column criticizing a woman, because those mean old women will attack him for it. Look, I like Savage, and I hate the "women are perfect incarnations of the Goddess and can do no wrong" crowd, but I wish he'd get this particular bug out of his ass already. I know from his column that he gets plenty of stupid, self-serving mail from men, but when a man writes him a stupid email it's just an individual man being stupid, and when a woman writes him a stupid email it's Women Ganging Up on Poor Dan Savage Again. I resent being lumped in with stupid people. Also, I hate reading the comments after he posts a column like this, because it's all lonely men giving each other high-fives cuz Dan told the bitches off.
Over in the "women being awful" column, there's those two Jezebel bloggers who got drunk and made tasteless jokes about date rape on a video podcast, which the liberal blogosphere is treating as the end of modern feminism (Two women were obnoxious in public! What reason do men have ever to take women seriously again?) but I can't work up the energy to care about after wading through the other crap.
I don't want to make smug, sweeping accusations against an entire gender, because I'm not Dan Savage, but I desperately hope I come across some posts about men curing cancer or rescuing baby pandas or something.
* An Onion AV Club writer venting her frustration that, whenever the AV Club interviews a reasonably attractive and successful woman, the comments section fills up with posts from men saying they'd fuck her, bragging that she's not good enough for them to fuck, and saying that they don't know her work, but they can just tell she's a stuck-up, stupid bitch who wouldn't be worth fucking. I checked the Onion AV Club and found this an accurate assessment. (Apparently, if your bio mentions that you wrote a humorous essay about getting locked out of your New York apartment, but you also have a vagina, it means you must be a rich, stupid, shallow Park Avenue bitch, because what other kind of woman lives in an apartment in New York?)
* Two professors arguing that it's okay for a man to rape a woman if he really, really wants sex, because it's exactly the same as a starving man stealing a loaf of bread.
* An autobio comic by a brilliant young cartoonist in which a male acquaintance tells her that all women would be happier if they quit their jobs and devoted themselves to raising children, complete with the typical guffawing about how he'd LOVE to be a stay-at-home mom because it'd be just like loafing around the house playing Guitar Hero all day. If you've ever wondered why brilliant young female cartoonists often have such short careers, rest assured that it has nothing to do with the number of times they're told by helpful people to stop drawing and concentrate on babies.
* A friend commenting that a strange man on the BART spotted her reading a difficult-looking book and told her that no one would want to marry a woman who reads books like that.
* A friend discovering for the first time the creepy misogyny in Piers Anthony novels, which dredged up embarrassing memories of how much time I wasted in high school reading Piers Anthony. I have a very clear memory of getting fifty pages into the zillionth Xanth novel and suddenly realizing that I had never laughed once at any book in the entire series. And I hated the way all the female characters were either dumb bimbos or manipulative witches, except for Chameleon, who was both a dumb bimbo and a manipulative witch. Why did I read those things? And why did the sci-fi/fantasy community hail Anthony as a genius back in the '80s? Why were those books bestsellers while Terry Pratchett struggled to gain a foothold in the U.S.? It's weird how much this stuff continues to bug me.
* Dan Savage, who I can usually count on to get me out of a blue funk, whining yet again about how he doesn't dare write advice in his sex column criticizing a woman, because those mean old women will attack him for it. Look, I like Savage, and I hate the "women are perfect incarnations of the Goddess and can do no wrong" crowd, but I wish he'd get this particular bug out of his ass already. I know from his column that he gets plenty of stupid, self-serving mail from men, but when a man writes him a stupid email it's just an individual man being stupid, and when a woman writes him a stupid email it's Women Ganging Up on Poor Dan Savage Again. I resent being lumped in with stupid people. Also, I hate reading the comments after he posts a column like this, because it's all lonely men giving each other high-fives cuz Dan told the bitches off.
Over in the "women being awful" column, there's those two Jezebel bloggers who got drunk and made tasteless jokes about date rape on a video podcast, which the liberal blogosphere is treating as the end of modern feminism (Two women were obnoxious in public! What reason do men have ever to take women seriously again?) but I can't work up the energy to care about after wading through the other crap.
I don't want to make smug, sweeping accusations against an entire gender, because I'm not Dan Savage, but I desperately hope I come across some posts about men curing cancer or rescuing baby pandas or something.