Wanted: Snuff porn and women-hatin' in a two hour package

You know, I really regret not walking out of Wanted and asking for my money back. I also really regret not expressing how much I hated this movie to the male friends I saw it with.

Wanted was about as close as you can get to snuff porn without actually watching something illegal. The movie's only redeemable quality is that the script decided to throw in some existential fate plot themes at the end, just to break up the monotony of violent garbage.

The camera angles made me nauseous. Fight scenes, which were the entirety of the movie, were shot in such a shaky manner that I felt like I had eaten twenty pounds of nachos and then rode state fair rides for three hours straight. Then they were slowed down, randomly, so that the audience could get a good look at the blood and bruises. Know what is the only thing more exciting than two hours of violence? Two hours of slow-motion violence. Oh yeah!

Not only did the movie glorify violence, the protagonist's goal of using such violence is to "be the man". Several times in the story, the protagonist fervently wishes for someone to utter the exact words, "you are the man!" When someone does, it is only in recognition of his violent ways and hot love interest. In case you did not catch that, violence is exciting! Killing people on command, emotionlessly, is the definition of manhood! Where's the moral of the story? When I could find one, it was that the purpose of life is to be as much of a badass violent jerk as possible. Because that's exciting, whereas being a normal citizen is pathetic.

So besides the glorification of violence, what else did Wanted have to offer? The million dollar question, my dear readers, is the hatred of women.

Although there are a slew of men in the film (duh, it's an action film), there are only three women. Let's go over their roles.

1. Janice the fat boss - Janice was the bitchy boss that everyone in the audience should love to hate. Her shrill relentless tone and overly made-up face is supposed to be as comical as her girth. Women in power are fat and annoying, or so the writers of Wanted think. Our protagonist gets his comeuppance by telling her to stop being a bitch (seriously, that's the exact word he uses) and expresses some sort of vague pity for her grotesque fatness, which is apparently the reason why she could be such a horrible person to him.

2. Cathy the ex-girlfriend - Cathy is skinny, but she's also a whore. She sleeps with his best-friend, because that's what women do, you know. Them women always take advantage of teh menz. The only interaction she seems to have with the protagonist is to nag and complain. Then the movie switches to a completely unnecessary sex scene where the audience gets their fill. Because Cathy is skinny, she gets to be fucked. But she's still portrayed as a bitch, and a whore.

3. Fox the assassin - Jolie could have potentially played an empowered female role. Little to my surprise, nothing is further than the truth. I should have known as soon as her code name was revealed as "Fox". Jolie's only purpose in this film is to teach Wesley how to be bad ass, inspire him to magically curve a bullet with his awesome chauvinist powers to avoid hitting her, be the victim of a violent crime as a child to inspire her to kill people, show her bare ass for no apparent reason, make out with him in front of his ex to show that bitch how manly Wesley is, and then kill herself in the process of saving him.

What have I learned from Wanted? Well, I learned that if you're fat and a woman, you're a horrible bitch. I learned that if you are skinny and a woman, you're a horrible nag and a whore. I learned that if you are skinny, powerful, and a woman, you're a pornorific plot device who gets to play second fiddle to someone with less experience than you, have the honor of having sex (or at least appearing to) with the male protagonist, and then kill yourself for him.

I also learned that gratuitous violence is really really awesome if it is accompanied by horrible camera techniques, pointless slow-motion, and a complete void of morality.

Wanted looks and feels like a teenage porn addict and gun enthusiast's wet dream. If I did not know better, I would have thought that it was satire. Of course, the only thing sadder than someone out there thought that this could possibly be a good movie is that seemingly everyone thinks it was a good movie.

Failing at Irony and Alienating Your Allies: The Liberal Dude's Guide to Satire

So I open my blog reader and the Huffington Post. What do I have the pleasure to find?

Oh Christ, who's the genius behind this?

I know this might be rocket science to liberal dudez who think things like rape are funny, but this really tasteless and poor excuse for satire is not inducing anything but my gag reflex. You know you fail at irony when your art work is indecipherable from the message of those you intend to mock. While I was sleeping, someone decided that mocking the Republicans by depicting the Obamas with racist stereotypes was effective and funny. I can imagine a bunch of balding upper-class white dudes giving each other congratulatory back slaps around some editor's desk at The New Yorker, engaging in mutual masturbation inflation of their over large egos as their wit goes to press.

You know what's really funny? Mocking Nazis by walking around in public, in places where there may or may not be Jews, and acting and dressing in such a manner completely identical to Nazis. So what if you offend a few Jews along the way? Your completely nonsensical message must be conveyed in the manner you see fit, even if you offend a demographic that would otherwise be allies. I might be white, but even I know that the picturing of an afro-sporting woman in military fatigues is probably a dig at her deviant blackness and her radical opposition to white culture. Also, if you think drawing racist depictions of prominent political figures is funny, you might be racist.

The purpose of satire is to shock and inflame your opposition. If your illustration could be used as a poster for the far right and you are offending your political allies, then it's about time someone fired you.

Then again, I am not really surprised. Anyone remember this? :

That was a "liberal" blog, the DailyKos, really failing to understand the nuances of irony.

Heads up to white dudez: if you think the appropriate manner to object to bigots on the right is to be a leftist racist, on the name of "humor", kindly get the fuck out of my political party.

Women aren't Human

As much as I would like to deny it, some people really do think that women aren't human.

Really.

Consider the Humanist. He or she says that they are opposed to Feminism. They object to the "raising of one gender above another" and would rather spend time crusading for human rights. Among those that profess such lofty sentiments are MRAs, intellectuals, liberal dudez, anti-feminist women, and control-troll writers.

So how do I know that they think women aren't human?

Simple! If they profess those who are for women's rights are against or not for human rights, they are operating under the premise that the movement for women's full agency is somehow in opposition or contrary to the movement for full human rights. The only way that an ideology that speaks for the female gender, or 51% of the global population, is not for human rights is if women are not human.

So next time someone tells you that they think feminism is anti-human rights, or that it is too myopic, tell them that you don't associate with morons who think the prerequisite for humanity is a penis.

On Staying Single

Notice that I am not just single currently, but that I am staying single. This was not a conscious decision. I did not sit down one day, feminist ideology in hand, and decide to stay single for political reasons. It just happened. I haven't been in a relationship for two years. For a woman in her twenties, this is so odd as to be alien.

When I was in middle school, nothing could have been more important than being in or wanting to be in a relationship. Boys were just beginning to notice me, probably because I was one of the first girls to have her breasts grow beyond the mosquito bite phase. Luckily for me, I did not grow up in the Paris Hilton era. Britney Spears was still keeping most of her clothes on the late 90s when the pre-teen girl uniform of choice was polo shirts, short shorts, and high ponytails.

Regardless, my desire for a boyfriend and to look good had nothing to do with my sexual desire. Although I had curves and breasts to rival any grown woman, my sexual drive had not matured. I heard about masturbation, mostly from the eighth grade boys, but such things held no interest for me. Even the extremely progressive books on puberty that my parents bought me detailed male masturbation explicitly, although some of them spend a bit of time on female masturbation as well. Curious, I attempted this masturbation a couple of times. Nothing really much happened, presumably because my sexual drive had yet to develop (it would in high school), so I gave that up.

Why then, was the pinnacle of pre-teen social life the drive to attract boys? I obviously did not know what to do with them when I got them, and I had no sexual desire for them. I was putting on a performance, plain and simple. The dominant social message of the time, and I assume it has gotten worse lately, was that a girl should aim to look sexy and have sex, but her own enjoyment of the sexual act had nothing to do with it. This held true for my twelve year-old self: I was not attracted to boys in a sexual manner, and I had no personal desire for sex. I was simply responding to social norms. If I said a boy was cute, it was not the case that I was attracted to him. I simply recognized that he fit within the acceptable range of male appearances, and I wanted him to want me. My desires did not play into the equation at all.

As I moved on from middle school and entered high school, my sexual drive finally blossomed. I had a healthy desire for sex and masturbation by the time I was fifteen. Still, however, I cannot think of a time that I wanted a boy more than I wanted him to want me and the social power I would gain by being sexy and attached to a suitable male. I was also doing battle with my monstrous crush on my female friend at the time by denying to myself that I probably was not as straight as I would like to be. Nevertheless, the idea of a boy competing for me or spending time on his appearance for me was laughable. By the time elaborate hair and makeup routines were the norm for girls my age, boys had yet to grasp the concept of showering daily.

Simply put, being sexy was more important than being sexual. The conflicting messages of abstinence and MTV had done battle, and the result was "be sexy, be hot, be available and wanted. Your sexuality is shameful." It was not important that boys were attractive, and they largely were not, it was important that I was attractive to them. Due to my extremely extroverted personality and unwillingness, even then, to play weak or dumb, I never succeeded.

In college, the drive to be wanted and not to want became funny in its intensity. The antics of my peers inspired mental images out of a porno: buckets of male ejaculation everywhere, but no elusive female orgasm. Men were still boys, and still had not grasped the basics of hygiene that were common sense to the average eleven year-old girl. And why would they? All around them women were wearing next to nothing and viciously fighting for their attention with deeper tans, deeper v-necks, and higher shoes. All they had to do was sit back and enjoy.

After a disastrous series of boyfriends where the male orgasm was far more present in our relationships than the female orgasm, I had the luck to fall into Feminism by way of a Women's Studies course. Among the considerable changes in my life, I stopped wanting men to want me if I did not want them back.

Simply, if my sexual pleasure had no part in the equation, I wanted nothing to do with men. If they were not attractive, their attention was gross and creepy. It was surprisingly easy to find my dry spells becoming longer and longer, only broken up by my mostly pleasurable forays into lesbian relationships.

How was this so? Once I gave up performing the sexy routine, guys largely did not want me. Which was fine with me, because most guys my age hadn't touched a razor or bar of soap in half a week. My university was like a scene out of a pornography: most of the women were conventionally attractive, but the men were as lazy with their appearances as they were with their health.

Today, I find it pathetically funny how my pursuit of my own pleasure--wanting attractive men, wanting sexual fulfillment--removed me from the dating scene. By raising my standards to men that I wanted, instead of men that wanted me, I had to find men that spend a comparable amount of time on their appearance and would be invested in my pleasure as much as their own. Unsurprisingly, the men who spent as much time in front of a mirror as I did (which wasn't much, considering that I stopped tanning and wearing large amounts of makeup) were the ones that dated the most feminine women, who had the personality of swine, or who were more interesting in acting out their favorite pornography than pleasing their significant other.

What I realize today is that the dating scene revolves around male pleasure. Male orgasms, male lust, male appreciation of beauty. If I wanted female orgasms, my lust, and my appreciation of male beauty I was holding out for something that did not exist. Or, if it did, it was not available to me once I stopped tanning, obsessing about how flat my abs were, and wearing hundreds of dollars of makeup.

In conclusion, I stay single because it's pathetically easy, but not by my design. Perhaps one day I might stumble upon a man who is as invested in looking good for me as I would be invested in looking good for him. Instead of me wanting him to want me and him wanting me, I would want him and he would want me. Then we could meet in the middle, form a relationship based on mutual attraction, admiration, and lust.

How sad that society has made such things the exception, and not the norm.

It's EVOLUTION because we're ALL ABOUT THE BABIES

So I was walking down the street today. I came across a dog. The dog was ugly, and it smelled a bit. I decided that I wanted to kick that motherfucking dog. I was going to kick the shit out of it. It hadn't done anything to me, but I still wanted to see it cry.

So I drew back my foot and kicked that damn dog. It yelped, and then made to run away. Someone else had already had my bright idea, because the dog's leg was broken, and by the festering look of it, had been for some time. So I shifted by weight and prepared for another kick, pleased that my prey could not escape.

Before my Converse could connect with the matted side of the mongrel, a police officer came out of nowhere. He whipped out his pad of ticket paper and prepared to levy me a heavy fine for animal abuse. As he asked my name and other vital statistics such as the middle name of the brother of the person I lost my virginity to, I could see the hate in his eyes. He shook his head every so often, as if my mere existence necessitated a random negation when his questioning would pause.

"Wait, officer!" I exclaimed.

His pen paused, his mustache twitched (all men of the law should have commanding facial hair), and his eyes, squinted in the glare of the relentless Arizona sun, met mine. 'Make my day, motherfucker,' they said to me. I intended to deliver.

"I have a biological impetuous to kick dogs! It's an evolutionary tactic, you see."

Steely gaze narrowed further until his craggy face was bisected by the squint of his skeptical eyes.

"Really, uh, sir, it is!" I shifted, paused, and regained my composure as my posture shifted and my hands animated to punctuate my relentless intelligence. "You see, when we were all cave men, dogs used to carry off babies. I know this because I read it in a fancy university study. Or perhaps I didn't, or the study was flawed, but you and I know that dogs could, at one point, eaten babies. So it's hardwired into humanity, officer, this need to kick dogs. We know that they could turn feral on us in their hunger at any moment. Even though dogs today don't carry off babies or go feral in hunger, they used to. So men naturally have the urge to kick dogs. It's there right beside the genetic code that makes hair grow on my balls. I couldn't help myself, officer. I did it all for the evolutionary success of my species!"

Gasping, panting, my hands and pedantic cadence paused. Surely my oppressor knew of my futile struggle with evolution. I had to kick that dog. How could I be punished for the continuation of the species?

And then the officer shifted his stance, dropped his notepad to his side, drew back his foot, swept his gaze up my shocked face as his mouth twisted into a gleeful grin, and he kicked the dog.

Body Positivism: Health in a post-BMI Mentality

One of the most valuable things I have taken away from Feminism is how to love myself and everyone, no matter what shape they are. I especially have to give a hat tip to the lovely ladies over at Shapely Prose for all of their hard work. I feel like the battle to accept myself, and others, is constantly uphill. The work of feminists and fat acceptance activists has helped me increase my self esteem and be healthier, mentally and physically.

Nevertheless, various health issues connected with food run in my family. For years, I struggled to control my intake and exercise religiously. This struggle was mostly fruitless, because I love to eat and cook. Running in place on a treadmill was nowhere near as fun as inhaling the heavenly aroma of home-made risotto as I stirred it on the stove, and then receiving glowing compliments on my culinary abilities from my family and friends.

The age-old "diet and exercise" shtick wasn't sticking. Fat Acceptance mentality in tow, I decided to go to a friend-recommended local nutrionist for a check-up that I refused to receive from my weight-obsessed general physician.

Before she began, I set a few rules. No talk of BMI. No discussion of weight and "weight classes". I stressed that I really did not care about what size I wore. I wanted to know if I was getting the right vitamins, if my cholesterols were in balance, and I could pass basic physical fitness tests. In short, I wanted to know everything worth knowing, and nothing that wasn't worth knowing. If I was healthy and moderately fit, I didn't need "weight loss tips".

She agreed, thankfully. I don't know how well such rules would have worked for regular nutrionists (she was more of the natural hippie variety), but she was perfectly agreeable, and understood why I asked her to leave such inconsequential things out of my check-up.

I passed the physical fitness tests, with moderately high endurance ratings, but low strength ratings. She said those could be increased with more fiber in my diet and simple things like carrying more grocery bags at once. I'm awaiting my blood and urine tests though.

I feel like looking after my health in this fashion is much more productive. Weight does not really determine a lot of health issues. I could have the body of a super model, but be malnourished. I could be as toned as an Olympic athlete, but have serious cholesterol issues. More than weight and BMI, excesses and deficiencies of certain vitamins and minerals in your blood are responsible for various ailments. Besides, dieting has been found to be useless in the long run, and a constant drive to "improve" my body, on the assumption that it is "bad", is not healthy mentally or physically. My intestinal disorder and allergies can and have put me in the hospital. I have no wish to screw around with food unnecessarily.

Fat Acceptance and health are not mutually exclusive. In fact, I have found them to be very inclusive indeed. Here's to enjoying food, my body, and my life!

Men's Rights Activists

So I'm sitting on my bed, reading the news. I have this nifty tool installed in Firefox called StumbleUpon. Basically, when I click a button I am randomly referred to a web page that the tool thinks I would like, based upon my votes on other sites. I give a lot of thumbs-up to activist pages, so I was not surprised to be referred to a rights group.

What I was surprised to find, however, was that the rights group was a men's rights group.

I was curious. What are Men's Rights Activists? Do they champion the causes of men in Africa who can't afford to feed their families? Do they push for a male birth control pill? Do they speak out about abusive parents?

No.

They speak out about the "violence" that the feminist movement has done to men. They talk about the Femi-Nazism of the government that punishes men for being masculine. They rage against women who ask ex-husbands for child support and alimony.

Basically, they think that society is out to hurt men by making them act like humans.

Their basic tenement is that men should be free to act like men. By men, they mean homophobic, hyper-masculine, violent, abusive, irresponsible failures of humanity.

How do I know this? Why, they are opposed to feminism. Feminists hold that the default definition of masculinity alienates men from their emotions and empathy, and is ultimately damaging to the individual and society as a whole.

Men's Rights Activists, on the other hand, hold that the gun-toting, children-leavin', anti-sissy model of manhood is the only thing holding humanity back from anarchy.

Really.

They also claim that both women and men are equally oppressed, or that men are oppressed more than women. Which is evident, of course, when one considers that less than 1% of the world's wealth is owned by women.

Men are "success objects" they say, and burdened as providers. Because, you know, women that labor unpaid in the house or underpaid as a teacher or maid are lazy lie-abouts.

They say that violence against men is more pandemic and tolerated then violence against women. While more men are mugged or killed in war, MRAs fail to comprehend the obvious: the people killing men also happen to be men.

Men killing and hurting men. Men killing and hurting women. Men killing and hurting children. Men running nations and sending men to their deaths. See a trend? In general, the subject of such violent sentences is typically a man. The very notion that women, or feminists, are responsible for the actions of men is laughable.

Largely, however, MRA groups tend to concentrate on one particular area: divorce law. They maintain that men have lost the right to a fair trial in family law and custody settlements. This, of course, is the fault of women.

The majority of law-makers are men. The majority of judges are men. Hell, the majority of high-paid lawyers are men. Perhaps they are responsible?

No! Who's to blame? Well, their "bitch of an ex-wife" who wants child support and alimony.

Despite hundreds of peer-reviewed studies sporting statistics that women, more often then not, get the short end of the stick at every point of the marriage life-span, including divorce, MRAs hold that men are being systematically attacked and oppressed by a justice system that they, as a gender, have largely perpetuated and dominated since antiquity.

If, by accident, the website I was perusing stumbled upon a legitimate concern to "men's rights", they approached the discussion in such a misogynistic and hostile fashion that hilarity ensued and rational argument was absent.

Yes, but the feminist movement can be hostile and angry, right?

Of course. Notice, however, that mainstream feminists reserve their rage for social forces that oppress humanity, disgusting criminals, sexist leaders, and, in general, people and forces that are actually doing something wrong.

MRA activists direct their rage towards women, and in particular, their ex-wives. The privilege that these largely middle-class white men receive and exercise is rendered completely invisible. They deny or ignore men's domination of powerful institutions, traditional familial structures, and popular culture.

When they do discover an example of a man without power, they typically ignore the fact that these are examples of men's powerlessness in the hands of other men. The injustices that men suffer by the hands of the legal system are largely the fault of modern male lawmakers, and wholly the fault of historical male-dominated institutions.

That is not to say that their observations are unfounded. Plainly speaking, men have lost power in all areas of modern life compared to their historical counterparts. This is not because of some feminist conspiracy or culture of man-bashing, it is because as society moves to correct millennia of inequality, the privileged will perceive a loss of power as resources are distributed more equitably.

For the purpose of illustration, assume that society has one pie and a group of four people. Because of various social doctrines, Bob gets to take half of the pie as his share. Mary, Rebecca, and Peter each then take a sixth of the pie for themselves, but only after years of political struggle and pie-lessness. Mary looks at everyone's pieces and finds that Bob's piece is far bigger than hers. She can think of no real reason why he is entitled to a bigger piece. So, she gets Rebecca and Peter to join her in demanding their fair share. Bob is eventually forced to give up half of his piece, so that everyone has a fourth. Bob thinks to himself, "why, this sucks. I was always told that it was my birth-right to have half of a pie. Now, I have to content myself with a fourth of a pie. I have lost pie. This is all that bitch Mary's fault".

Bob is right: he has lost pie. However, Mary and the others were right to demand more pie. If Bob wanted to blame something or someone, he should blame the people that originally decided that pies must be divided unfairly, or the social forces that inflated his expectations of what his "share" ought to be.

Men are given a far bigger share of the "pie" of wealth, power, and prestige than they are rightfully entitled to. MRAs are not wrong to observe the loss of those privileges, but they are wrong to view women, who still have yet to achieve full equality by law and otherwise, as the enemy.

When men are born into a society that indoctrinates them into a culture of inequality, but simultaneously purports equality as a social value, men develop the notion that their unfair share of global wealth and power is rightly kept, and that such inequalities are somehow "equal". When these advantages are taken away, and made more equitable, a man feels as if he is being treated unfairly.

What MRAs advance is the notion that, as men, they are treated unfairly by increasingly equitable (but not wholly so) legal systems. In that, they are absolutely right. Given that the definition of "man" as "he who is rightly entitled to a larger share of worldly power and wealth by the chance of being born with a penis", men are being treated poorly by the justice system.

As humans, however, these men are treated more than fairly, if not outright favored, in everything from family law to criminal law.

They are favored, by men, because they are men. If they are killed, hurt, or treated unfairly, they are largely abused, also, by men.

Such self-reflection, however, is beyond the power of those who maintain that violent and robotic models of masculinity are something to be preserved instead of destroyed.