Community Toast

A bunch of people who participate in our online community forum are toasting each other for the New Year at the stroke of midnight, wherever they are, and we’ve created a map to show where we all are.

Happy New Year, MHBers! I am still quite pleased and proud to have started and moderated this little community for so long now, and I couldn’t do it without all the interesting people for whom it is an online home – for a while, for years, for as long as they need.

Fembots Have Feelings, Too

I mention, every once in a while, that the worst kind of misogyny I experience is in the trans community, and well, here’s a whopper.

It was brought to my attention because the person writing is commenting on my post about the “misogyny-watch” blog I mentioned earlier this month. Jamie, the author of this post, doesn’t seem to understand that I was fully cognizant that the blog’s creator was critical of misogyny, and when someone assumes I’m an idiot, and blasts forth like this without checking in, I can pretty much guarantee they think the words “angry” and “feminist” go together too. Oh but wait! Not just angry, but:

Perhaps, if same sex marriage ever becomes legal, she might someday even find herself as an acceptable alternative as a wife, compared to the angry, selfish, calculating, uncompromising, increasingly unfeminine creatures that more and more men are starting to view women as.

The “she” refers to a “t-girl” which is some communities is parlance for a trans woman, although it tends to be a label assumed by a kind of trans party girl, and which is the label Jamie uses for herself. If you can get past the atrocious grammar, do check out that list: those of us born with vaginas are a fcuked up lot indeed. And yes, that was saracasm, meaning: I do not actually think people born with vaginas are fcuked up, but the fembot who wrote it sure does. Get ready for one surreal, post-modern piece of archaic bullshit:

So she doesn’t mind deferring to a man. In fact, unlike real women, or most transsexuals, it delights her to do so. She’s an old-fashioned kind of girl. She expects her man to take charge, and is completely comfortable adopting a subservient role. She knows how hard it is to be a man, and she knows she doesn’t enjoy it. So instead of trying to be a man that wears heels, which is what so many women these days seem to aspire to, she’s more than happy to be a man’s idealization of what a woman should be: soft, feminine, unchallenging to his masculinity. Someone who uses their femininity to comfort a man, and make his life more bearable, not who uses it to give him another headache that he needs to find a way to escape from.

Someone who understands that cleaning the house, making dinner, and taking care of all those little details in life, and providing a sexual outlet for her man is not a “chore,” but one of the advantages of being a woman. That accepting one’s feminity is realizing that you have not been relegated to second-class citizenship, but instead, you are being protected and shielded from the harsher realities of the life, and your acceptance of a man’s dominant role is a fair exchange for being shielded from those realities.

But, it takes a man, a man who has lived those harsher realities, to realize just how precious and valuable a thing femininity, and the traditional women’s role in our society is, instead of viewing it as a prison as women tend to do these days.

Hooboy: Only a man understands what it takes to be a woman. I think we may have broken the space-time continuum with that one.

For the record: I will not engage this issue any further than this. Having been misinterpreted and slammed on someone else’s blog, I thought it necessary to clarify my original intent and to further define misogynist views. That is all.

Happy New Year to one & all!

Survey: Partners Whose Husband Come Out as TG

SURVEY: “A Study in the Relationship between Changes in a Wife’s Self-Esteem and the Discovery that Her Husband is Transgender: What is the Perceived Meaning of the Discovery?”

If you think you might be interested in participating in this survey, please read more below the break, and contact the person doing the survey. I am not doing it, do not endorse it, but do not suspect it, either.

Continue reading “Survey: Partners Whose Husband Come Out as TG”

New Expedia Ad: Genderbent

The actor who plays the cool goth chick on NCIS is the new spokesperson for Expedia, and in the new commercial she does for them, she is showing various hotel rooms which are empty – or supposed to be empty – until she shows one where a man who has just taken a shower is walking across his room with a towel wrapped around his waist. He realizes in a split second that he can be seen, shrieks, and then — cups his breasts. I can’t describe it any other way because that’s exactly what he does: doesn’t cover his chest, doesn’t cross his arms — he cups his breasts. And shrieks.

There is nothing otherwise interesting about the ad, but that was especially unusual, and I have no idea if the gender variance is what’s being played for laughs or if the idea that she accidentally choosing the wrong room – she says “oops” or something similar – is what’s supposed to be funny.

Two Tune Tuesday: Final 2010 Edition

I’m loving this list of NPR listener-chosen albums of 2010, and even more the tracks off those albums. And while I can’t help but laugh when I hear Cee Lo Green’s “Fuck You” – ain’t that some shit? – my heart (and feet) go to Janelle Monae who is just fucking fantastic in her black & whites, tuxedos, & pompadour:

“Tightrope” is, hands down, my favorite song to dance around my apt to (not that I ever do that).

AND, because I live in this neck of the woods now, here is a list of the best albums to come out of Milwaukee this year. Kings Go Forth are like Philly soul all over again (though I haven’t seen them live yet), and I suspect Eric & Magill will hit bigger than they have so far. Fans of Rasputina / Dresden Dolls / Squirrel Nut Zippers absolutely need to check out Scarring Party.

Myths of Male Orgasm

Why not link to a post about male orgasm for Boxing Day? Too much eggnog & so too drunk to fcuk, as as the Dead Kennedys used to sing… or maybe that itch isn’t getting scratched in the ways it needs to.

I will add one other “myth” about male sexuality that I find most people don’t realize: plenty of heterosexual men want less sex than their female partners. Lots of them need trust, and love, and commitment to get turned on and to get off.

That is, as Sarah Sloane points out, we all tend to think of ourselves as gendered sexually, when mostly we’re just individuals with different hormone levels, libidos, attitudes about sexuality, ways that we use/desire sexuality, intimacy & orgasm (which are, of course, three different things, & do not always exist together). Some attitudes & aptitudes are encourage more in men and women, and vice versa, but all of us should expect not to live up the “superhero” versions of our sexualities as presented by – well, porn, Cosmo, romance novels, etc.

How the Other Half Lives

My friend Lynne alerted me to a post about the uselessness of women. I wish I could say it surprised me, even a little, but essentialism is essentialism is essentialism, whether that’s expressed in “women should rule the world” attitudes or “women are useless” attitudes. To me: same coin, different sides.

What amazed me even more was this post on the same blog about terminology in this “manosphere.” I hate to say it, but the stuff is so pathetic I just feel sorry for them in their hateful little world. Okay, not really, but I can’t even imagine what it’s like to live in that tiny a brain.