sundries

[rm]

J.D. Salinger has died.

Boston people! Tomorrow night! Go Rogue! Awesome burlesque and circus show tonight. Go go go go go go. I've seen these people perform and there is some serious star power on that stage.

via reannon: a teacher harasses an eleven-year-old male student by tying his long hair into three ponytails and encouraging his classmates to mock him by calling him "girl" and female names. This is why feminism is everyone's issue and this is why LGBTQ rights are everyone's issues. If being female and/or deviating from any given person's idea of a gender norm weren't considered bad, fuckery like this wouldn't happen. Of course, in the case of a teacher so mean-hearted, I have to imagine they would have done something else appalling on a different issue, given the chance.

Will CBS air a gay dating ad during the Superbowl?

iPad feminine hygiene jokes reach CNN.

Dior has clearly seen Moulin Rouge and just about every movie musical from the 1950s. I am full of love. Really hate Lagerfeld's collection for Chanel this go around though. And I really love Lagerfeld as a rule.

Us: Americans Talk About Love.

51stcenturyfox alerts us to the slightly surreal Dan Savage column this week in which he discusses M/M/F threesomes and Twilight.

This one's from amand_r: Apparently Australia has banned the appearance of small-breasted (A-cup) women in porn because they resemble underage girls. If one extrapolates "logically" from this shit we wind up with sex with the non-buxom being criminalized or something. Australia has also banned porn that depicts female ejaculation. Because the way women's bodies actually can be? Indecent and disgusting apparently. This has me more enraged than I can describe. Look, it's like this, no matter how privileged your body (i.e., mine -- thin, hour-glass shaped, white, no visible disabilities) if it is is female, IT IS ALWAYS WRONG. That's the world we live in.

Comments

[dorei.livejournal.com]

I kinda liked the Chanel collection ... with the exception of that sad green dress and the short/cullote things.

[bodlon.livejournal.com]

- ARGH. I never quite had a teacher this bad, but I had one who was close, and was glad to be out of his class when I started to become more heavily/openly gender-nonconforming.

- Will CBS air a gay dating ad during the Superbowl?

Dude, does the guy in that picture look suspiciously like Alan Tudyk to you? More to the point, if they do air it, that's a major culture shift that will take me some time to parse out fully. Huh.

- Us: Americans Talk About Love

Okay, this article is sort of a crazy-ass crash of so many things that I have personal associations with I'm finding it dead creepy. Including freaking "Basquiat." What the fuckery? Also, how fascinating is it that this article touches on something with a man that's always front and center in articles about women who are successful?

[amand-r.livejournal.com]

Man that whole site that article came from is a chronicle of fail. Really.

[wordweaverlynn.livejournal.com]

I'm all in favor of protecting children. Making sure they have good nutrition, health care, plenty of books, safe places to live and play -- and yes, protection from violent or sexually coercive adults. (Or children.) Banning flat-chested porn actresses doesn't do a God-damned thing to help.

And neither does allowing such teachers and aides anywhere near the classroom.

[newsbean.livejournal.com]

One of the most woman friendly (and woman run) porn companies in the world is located in Australia. Being that they depict real women (with hair in all sorts of places like underarms, even!) I can see this really affecting them.

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

...damn! I didn't know that. Not good.

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

Some people should not be in the same vicinity as children.

I wouldn't hold my breath of the gay dating ad.

I love those clothes, in a remote sort of way. I'm in that inbetween stage of my life where I'm wearing clothes for comfort and not really back to dressing up like I did as a kid.

Australia has been stricken off my possible place for immigration. Holy shit. This and the internet censoring thing? They're in a paranoid place.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Whoooo, Dan Savage! But that was kind of a weird column.

[newsbean.livejournal.com]

Also, I do feel obligated to bring up Savage's "Bad Tranny" (his words!) column: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/SavageLove?oid=13054

http://tigerbeatdown.blogspot.com/2008/11/profiles-in-douchery-dan-savage.html

[rm.livejournal.com]

Yeah, alas, I know about that (and the fat-hating).

[sethg]

Related: an iPhone app for tracking one’s menstrual cycle. (Having neither an iPhone nor a menstrual cycle, I have no idea if this is actually a useful product, but some Googling suggests that there are several applications in this category.)

[redstapler.livejournal.com]

I have a friend who uses it and says she likes it a lot.

[fmanalyst.livejournal.com]

I wonder how useful it is for cycles that no longer seem to have any rhyme or reason.

[moizissimo.livejournal.com]

I have a cycle that's 4-7 weeks long, depending. It's really useful for me, because as the data starts to be built up, I'm seeing a larger pattern. It'd be more useful if I also tracked how I was feeling/what exercise I did, but I don't. :)

[demotu.livejournal.com]

Australia has banned the appearance of small-breasted (A-cup) women in porn because they resemble underage girls.

What the HELL? As a less-than-A-cup woman myself, that really upsets me, since I sure has hell would like to see women who looked like me in porn, rather than constantly feeling inadaquetly under-boobed.

Furthermore, if they were actually interested in getting rid of the child-porn-like bits? They'd made shaved or waxed genitals illegal, not small boobs. At least (almost) nobody naturally has a hairless cootch.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough (just in terms of statistical rarity), I have a friend/former lover who alopecia totalis, but point taken. What Australian government should really do is stop deciding what the body means and in which manners what type of women are allowed to be sexual.

[demotu.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I didn't actually mean they should do that, just if they felt they had to, small boobs is a stupid first target. Up with acceptance of alopecia! :)

And God, yes - this idea that the government is coming down with "this is what an adult female body looks like", is horrendous on so many levels. Couldn't an A-cup porn star file some sort of discrimination lawsuit, saying it prevented them from earning a living?

[rm.livejournal.com]

I mean, sure a lot of the appeal of a-cup stars in porn is for the "barely legal" market, but if the woman's an adult.... also, seriously? This hits queer porn in all sorts of weird ways -- how are trans bodies going to be allowed on screen? watch about porn for gay women that feature (often small-breasted) butch women?

[demotu.livejournal.com]

And the fact is, however much it squicks you, the "barely legal" market is still legal, qualifiers or not. Plus, most women are nearly or entirely fully developed by 18. My boobs haven't gotten bigger - except due to weight gain - since I was sixteen or so, and I hit puberty rather late!

[natf.livejournal.com]

Exactly. I was a C by age 15 and am now an E (age 42). Using A sized boobs as an age 18 descriptor is nonsensical.

[editrx.livejournal.com]

It's not at all rare for women to lose some if not all their pubic hair from menopause. So ... yeah, people do have "naturally" hairless pubic mounds.

[malle-babbe.livejournal.com]

I've got A cups, and I am 5 feet tall. Is my whole appearance indecent now?

This reminds me of a proposed law on the ballot (http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1686729,00.html) in Colorado in 2008 that wanted to grant fertilized eggs human rights. Great, criminalize having a miscarriage, that's a brilliant idea...

There are a great number of people that never grow out of the "girl parts are icky" phase.

[laughingacademy.livejournal.com]

Not enough *facepalm* in the world for that Australia story. I guess the legislators in question never met anyone like my childhood friend Mariana, who was a C-cup at the age of eleven.

[lovefromgirl.livejournal.com]

Oh, Australia. *smack*

[imaginarycircus.livejournal.com]

There is a Rogue poster five feet from my face in the coffee shop. Whoa.

[chaos-by-design.livejournal.com]

That is just about nine kinds of fucked up. Your son's hair isn't any coach or teacher's business. And he should be allowed to wear it as long as he wants, because he's not hurting anyone by having long hair. Cripes!

[natf.livejournal.com]

I really feel for your son but the following made me love life just a little more:

It appears that he sought some advice on how to deal with an insane parent on his team and got an education instead.

[firinel.livejournal.com]

That is surreal, Savage is generally very... not rational about bisexuals.

[better-late24.livejournal.com]

Seriously, did Apple not consider this mockery when naming it the iPad? Way to deviate only one letter from the iPod, as well.

[natf.livejournal.com]

Steve Jobs even called it the iPod at one point in his presentation as well. I think the problem is that the alternatives were worse: iTab (drugs), iTablet (Moses and drugs), iSlate (ancient and out of date) - I cannot think of anything better than iPad myself and did not even think of the Maxipad/CoverFlow connotations until rm tweeted about the jokes she was seeing. Then again, I have not used pads since I was 13 which is a LONG time ago!

[nobodyreally.livejournal.com]

As a geeky woman, the part that got me was that the parody already existed. Worse, if there had been a single woman in the room, she would have already seen it. THAT is why we are dying laughing: the sexism that so many boys in the biz have clung to just bit them in the ass.

Ignorance may be bliss, but it is also funny as hell.

[lilacsigil.livejournal.com]

The small-breasted women ban is not true (http://www.crikey.com.au/2010/01/29/has-australia-really-banned-small-breasts/), but the ban on female ejaculation is true. Nevertheless, under current laws, any porn featuring a body type that is thought to "resemble a child" can be banned; as can any "deviant" sex act. We are having major, major censorship issues here in Australia - this is just one of them (http://www.efa.org.au/) (annoying but informative pop-up on that site). While our current government is far better than the Howard government in many ways, it has a frightening tendency towards "best for you" anti-democratic initiatives.

[curriejean.livejournal.com]

That's officially it. I'm writing my Owen-makes-Gwen-femjaculate fic TOFUCKINGNIGHT.

FURY.

[rinkori.livejournal.com]

RE the school harassment: This site lists the email of the principal in question--and you can postulate the teacher's email from that format. I imagine they're receiving enough emails of displeasure but one or two more can't hurt.

[editrx.livejournal.com]

Australia has also banned porn that depicts female ejaculation.

That horrifies me. Christ on a crutch; way to make women who do ejaculate feel even more like freaks.

[sparkindarkness.livejournal.com]

The logic, it does not make sense. Small breasted women are children now? Gah