(hetero)sexism: "We all worship you already!"

My awesome** friends were kind enough to set up a profile for me on GreatBoyfriends.com! How lucky am I!?* Now it can only be a matter of time before Mr. Right appears in my inbox!* [fingers crossed.]*

Conveniently enough, GreatBoyfriends has established these two ranking systems, one for girls and one for boys, so that users can quickly and easily assess whether or not they want to date someone!

for girls:
for boys:
I can't really tell if the best* part about this great* new site is that it tells me right away if a chick is moody/if a guy has got the moolah to buy me a sparkly ring, or if it's the friendly, flattering* rhetoric of their emails.





------------
* : sarcasm
** : not sarcasm

Thank you, pituitary gland!

Freud would have loved this

In typical Moe fashion, Moe introduced me to this little piece of reality the other day: there is currently a movie about the premise of which is a toothed vagina. I mean, I don't know the story, but what else could be important to know about such a movie.

Seriously?

I want to like this,

but it feels a little too second-wave-y for my liking. Or something. Your thoughts?

Happy Women's Month, by the way.

Not unrelated, I re-watched Roman Holiday this past weekend, and I was struck, during this scene especially, with a tinse of regret at not haven taken any film classes at UIUC. I just want to sit around and talk about this scene, and the one before it, all day. Maybe I'll watch it with students one day.

Blog for Choice Day 2008

My brain is working hard to wrap itself around some heavy lesson planning, and anyway, I don't think I could put it better than Melissa did.

Vote pro-choice! (Sorry, Gram.) (Actually, I'm not sorry.)

s/he with a teaspoon of offensive

They are 100% sure 10% of the time that I am "A Woman!" This graphic has got to be kidding me.

(Click to enlarge.)

The makers of this quiz can expect a strongly-worded email from this 10% Woman over this question:

as All-American as apple-pie and racism

Hugh Heffner's minions are on campus this week, holding auditions for Playboy Magazine's "Girls of the Big Ten" pictorial for their May 2008 issue. Here's the DI's report, which I find fascinating. (The bolds are all mine.)

The article opens, "In a well-lit room off campus, Monday morning, an anxious group of blonde college coeds auditioned for a coveted spot in what is arguably the most well-known men's magazine in the world, Playboy Magazine. The magazine is currently searching the Midwest for the 'All-American college girl'..."

Then we get, "[Woman's name], sophomore in ACES, was one of the blondes auditioning for the issue."

Further on there's, "a 2005 alumna of the University [who] had a lot of support from her friends and family when she posed nude for Playboy... The cute blonde's pictorial consisted of..."

And then a final note from the photographer, "'For this shoot, the ideal candidate is the girl next door, freshly scrubbed, cute college girl.'"

But she better be blonde, huh?

So what's the deal? (I'll leave aside the complex social connotations of pornography; because, I really don't feel informed enough to speak much on the issue.) If they're looking for the "All-American" model, though, is the assumption that "All-American" means blonde, and implicitly, White? The accompanying photos feature a model with a Latina-sounding name, but she's blonde, too. I'm pretty troubled by these implications.

And then there's the whole girl motif that runs throughout the story. Is there not a difference between girls and women? The reporter reassures us that a UIUC alum who's posed for Playboy in the past had her parents support, which reinforces the childlike descriptions of her and the other models the article references. These women are university students! Here they're reduced to "cute."

There's also some naturalization of heterosexuality going on in the article. Playboy gets introduced in the lead as a premier men's magazine; one model insists that she has her boyfriend's support; another gushes that "when people find out [she] was in Playboy, especially guys, the way they act around [her] completely changes." Defining Playboy's audience as male without qualifying that identifier with "heterosexual," the article seems to assume that Duh, of course men are straight. And if we didn't get it right away, the two models make sure that we know that they know that this whole thing is about heterosexual men's responses to "the girls."

quitting

I really don't like quitting. It's not that I completely buy into that whole quitters-never-win mantra. Just personally, I don't like not finishing things. Call it a compulsion. Even if I hate a book, if I've read the first twenty-five pages, I have to finish it. I always have to clean my plate.

And today I had to drop a class. I've been saying I need to drop that class for at least a week now, but it took a lot of self-pep-talking to be able to log into the registration site and finally do it. In the end, I made it about someone else. I thought that if I told the prof I was dropping then it would be easier for me to actually do so. So after class this morning, I went up and broke the news to him that I'm a horrible disappointment to all that is ENGL 396: English Avant-Gardes. I'm glad that I did; because, the class is full, and the kid next to me was glad that now he can register for it. So I didn't quit; I gave my spot in the class to someone else. How selfless of me.

In memory of my enrollment in the class, I'll say a bit about the interesting stuff we were looking at. Today we were talking about the first of two issues of a little modernist magazine put together by the bitter, self-righteous, and sort of cool in spite of that Wyndham Lewis, called Blast. Blast, in this instance, probably used more for its meaning as an impolite word, closer to damn than fuck. Here's a few images of its pages, which are visually ...awesome.

the cover -- described by the Chicago modernist magazine Little Review as "something between magenta and lavender, about the colour of a sick headache"

Double-clicking on this will make it easier to read, and it's worth reading, I think. One of my favorite bits: "WE NEED THE UNCONSCIOUSNESS OF HUMANITY --- their stupidity, animalism, and dreams. We believe in no perfectibility of our own." Hilarious.


These two are interestingly juxtaposed, and get even more fascinating when considered with some of the next pages that go on to "BLESS ENGLAND!" and "BLESS FRANCE."
"--Oh !-- Papa is wonderful: but all papas are!"
Love it.

One page I find particularly worth noting is this one that addresses the Suffragettes, those crazy women who wanted to vote and be allowed to get divorces and other radical things like that.

It's condescending as hell. (And I would have, had I stayed in the class, gotten to learn more about the issues of misogyny and feminist theory within the context of English Avant-Gardes.) "(You don't mind being called things?)" So annoying. And yet, the magazine still has to address the Suffragettes. They can't be ignored within this text because their energy, though Lewis seems to be working hard to polarize it from the energies of the Avant-Gardes, is ultimately present. It's working against the same blasted British stasis that the Artist, the Individual, is if the the Artist or the Individual is one who eschews his (deliberately not his or her) categorization by class, gender, race, education, etc., and who creates movement. And so even though Lewis here advises the Suffragettes to "stick to what [they] understand," meaning not art, he still gives space to the Suffragettes within Blast, within his art.

There's so much more to say, but the reason I had to drop the class is because I don't have the time to get the requisite writing done for it.

I got all these images, by the way, from the Modernist Journals Project at Brown. The whole of both issues of Blast are available for the viewing there.

I'm a genie in a bottle

I can't figure out how to get this photo upright. It's an advertisement for a scholarship awarded to high school students who have civic service experience. I'm not sure what the pink flower is for, except to deter any insecure high school boy trying to establish his masculinity from applying.


"COME SEE WHAT SHERRY IS GOT COOKING" Yes, please.


The kids are still periodically elaborating on their bubbled-in answers. This one's particularly scary.


And if you don't go inside to speak with Mr. Lee, is that an indication that you don't love your family?


Here's Arianne and I working today. Some kids called us Christina Aguilera.



This is what Christina Aguilera looks like.