Stupidity – Page 2

From the special moderation queue

Oh, trolls. How I missed you.

From NYGIANTS:

You are NOT an athlete. What have you done to say you are an athlete? So you can run 9 miles. Congrats. Your marathon time is beyond slow. An athlete is someone who has agility, endurance, strength. Frankly, you don’t have much of those qualities. An athlete is someone who competes in a sport. Frankly, you aren’t close to being competition.

Please stop claiming you are an athlete. At most, you are a hobbyjogger. There is nothing wrong with that. I’m glad you are staying relatively fit (compared to the nation at least), but that doesn’t make you an athlete.

NYGIANTS knows all about me, y’all. I can run 9 (12, actually, as of last weekend) miles, but I have no endurance. I’m training for a marathon, but I don’t compete in a sport. NYGIANTS is even magical enough to divine that I have no agility whatsoever. I wonder how he drew that conclusion, since I didn’t mention agility.

Then we heard from “A real athlete”:

I’m sorry, but you are not an athlete. If you want to tell people that you are so that you feel better about yourself, go ahead, but you’re not fooling anyone…

Ooh, burn. I am *so* busted.

I expect to hear more of this after I appear on a live chat for Huffington Post tomorrow at 2 Eastern time. Details as i get them. We’ll be discussing the criticism of Leisel Jones for her weight. Because if there’s anything that’s going to work against you in the water, it’s buoyancy.

Chastened?

Here’s the tl;dr for this post: Dawn Eden made herself a nuisance to this blog and others about five or six years ago. Just Google her name along with that of pretty much any feminist blogger or blog and you’ll see what I mean. Now she’s reared her head again, mentioning me and this blog (and my reviews of her first book) in an interview about her new book. I don’t care all that much about what she said about me, personally, but the interview and book bring up a lot of issues that Dawn and I (as well as other feminist bloggers) have gone at each other over before and which I feel merit a response. Dawn has long been an engaging if fundamentally dishonest writer, particularly on the subject of feminism and women’s sexuality, and in the interview and her book, she accuses feminists of, essentially, causing child sexual abuse by supporting sexual freedom for adult women. In addition, there’s a good bit of inside-baseball stuff about the Catholic church and the clerical sex abuse scandal, and how Dawn addresses – or rather, fails to address – that scandal in the context of a book, written from a specifically Catholic perspective, about using Catholic writings and teaching as a means of healing from childhood sexual abuse.

Hunger Games: What do you mean, the black girl was black?

After The Hunger Games was released in the U.S. on Friday, “fans” who hadn’t seen a lot of advance materials got the shock of their lives to see a black character depicted by a black actress. Rue, played by the adorable Amandla Sternberg, was described as having “dark brown skin and eyes”–thus the ruination of the film at the hands of a dark-skinned, dark-eyed actress. And where else would enraged moviegoers turn but Twitter?

Fun in Getting Taken Out of Context

So there’s this book called “50 Shades of Grey” that everyone is talking about, and I haven’t even read the damn thing, but it sounds like all kinds of silly and kind of fucked up, and probably a bad representation of BDSM and sex generally, and it’s being compared to Twilight and championed by “Mommy Bloggers” so I probably will not bother picking it up. When a journalist contacted me and asked if I’d give a quote on it, I said I hadn’t read it, but I could speak generally on issues of consent and sexuality. Great. She emailed me a very general question, I gave a general answer. This is the outcome:

More on Komen and Planned Parenthood

I have a short op/ed in the New York Daily News about the Komen Foundation’s decision to defund Planned Parenthood:

The truth is that anti-Planned-Parenthood sentiments aren’t about abortion; they’re about hostility to women, and particularly to female sexuality. Abortion makes up 3% of its services. Cancer screening and prevention are 17%.

Parents: Time to Panic

No one wants their kids to smoke. But what if your kid is pretending to smoke, kinda-sorta? From an actual news broadcast, kids are smoking Smarties.

Whoops.

I am fairly confident that this could have been avoided.

God, somebody tell me why: Bridesmaids

So last night, we rented Bridesmaids. We were already there at the Redbox, it was right there in front of us, and it was supposed to be a hilarious and heartwarming romp, right? It got critical accolades, it got 90 percent on Rotten Tomatoes–it should be a laff riot, right?

Holy shit, Batman.

Bridesmaids is easily one of the worst movies I’ve seen this decade. The characters were flat, the plot was contrived, and the pacing was miserable. The movie is what I like to call “emotional slapstick”–if you like watching someone get hit with a beam and knocked down two flights of stairs to land in the street and get pasted by a car, only to sit up and say, “I’m okay!” just as a bus arrives in the background to finish the job, you’ll love Annie’s Rube Goldbergian progression of screwups. I personally found them depressing.

Someone, please, tell me why this movie is funny.

The rest of the (interminably long [excessively parenthetical]) review is hiding behind the jump, partly out of shame but mostly to avoid spoilers, not that the movie can really be spoiled any more than it already is.

Siri: Total Misogynist.

The big news of the week is that Siri, the iPhone 4s’s virtual assistant, is apparently unable to find anything related to women’s health. Ask her to find an abortion clinic in New York City — a place with a few abortion clinics — and she can’t locate a single one. She can, however, direct you to several pro-life Crisis Pregnancy Centers. Ask for contraception, and she doesn’t understand the term “contraception.” And as Amanda figured out, it’s not just reproductive health stuff that she can’t get right — it’s anything related to female sexuality at all (she’s great, though, when it comes to male sexual needs):

At my house, we discovered this while playing with Siri’s quickly established willingness to look up prostitutes for a straight man in need. When you say to Siri, “I need a blow job,” she produces “nine escorts fairly close to you”. You get the same result if you say, “I’m horny” into it, even with my very female voice. And if you should you need erection drugs to help you through your encounter with one of the escorts, Siri is super-helpful. She produced twenty nearby drugstores where Viagra could be purchased, though how — without a prescription — is hard to imagine. But no matter how many ways I arranged mouth-based words — such as “lick” or “eat” — with the word “pussy,” Siri was confused and kept coming up with a name of a friend in contacts. Of course, one could assume Siri knows something about him that I don’t know.

I actually tested this out too, since I recently upgraded my 2005 flip phone to an iPhone 4s. I stood on a street corner in Brooklyn with my friend P, and we came up with all kinds of sex-related questions to ask Siri, and then we died laughing because we are children. Since the Siri story broke, Feministe Friend Nabiha also sent on some questions she asked Siri, which I recreated (thanks Nabiha!). My results:

Things That Will Surprise No One

John Derbyshire — he of “15-year-olds are the sexiest broads around because women reach their expiration date at 20″ fame — has some Things To Say about sexual harassment and racial discrimination:

Is there anyone who thinks sexual harassment is a real thing? Is there anyone who doesn’t know it’s all a lawyers’ ramp, like “racial discrimination“? You pay a girl a compliment nowadays, she runs off and gets lawyered up. Is this any way to live?

I mean, you can’t even walk up to a high school girl anymore and tell her what nice tits she has — next thing you know it’s all police officers and sex offender registries. No way to live!

If I were Derbyshire’s employer, I would be particularly concerned with his views on this issue, especially if he is interacting in any way with other human beings. Hello walking expired milk jug of liability.