the john next door
I used to have a subscription to NewsWeek. Used to be a pretty decent magazine. Well, I thought so at least… I was younger, maybe I just didn’t know any better.
Regardless, I let that subscription run out years ago when I stopped caring about the magazine. The articles seemed less and less substantial, more and more sensational. There just wasn’t much point in reading it.
And, it seems, things haven’t changed much in the last few years. Or, if they have, they’ve changed for the worse.
NewsWeek has a new, sensational article about The Growing Demand for Prostitution. Except that it doesn’t actually talk all that much about prostitution… It lumps pretty much every kind sex entertainment together and calls that a “growing demand” for, specifically, prostitution. But, what can you expect from an author who calls herself a sex work abolitionist? She’s obviously got an axe to grind.
Which isn’t to say that biased people can’t do good research and write good articles… Honestly, everybody is biased in some way. And good reporters are constantly putting aside their biases in favor of objectivity. But this article doesn’t do that. She doesn’t quote any real sexologists or sociologists or anything.
And then she rolls out the whole “human trafficking” thing… Somehow she leaps from legal sex entertainment like strip clubs to children being sold into sexual slavery. Without, of course, a trace of actual evidence.
Somehow “Nearly 100% of men in the study said that minors were always available for purchase in Boston” even though about half of the men she interviewed had never seen so much as a lap dance.
I guess I’m not surprised that garbage like this is getting written. The United States is going through another Puritanical phase… Or maybe it’s always been this way, but less obvious. Regardless, there are a lot of folks out there who don’t want you to enjoy sex, who don’t want you to drink alcohol, who don’t want you to have an abortion, who want to make sure you go to church – basically who want to turn the whole of the nation into some kind of fundamental Christian state.
But I am surprised that something like this made it into NewsWeek.
Then again, when CNN’s breaking news revolves around a new viral video on YouTube, I guess maybe I shouldn’t be.
embaressment
This kind of shit makes me embarrassed to be a heterosexual, male gamer. Well, but I guess it isn’t just the hetero male gamers this time around…
Penny Arcade has a comic, and a summary…
Basically, there are an assortment of romance options in Dragon Age 2. One of those romance options is a fairly forward male who makes passes at the player and gets annoyed if you don’t reciprocate. Which all makes perfect sense if you’re playing a female character…
But BioWare wanted to be inclusive, and made all the romance options available to both male and female characters.
Which means that if you’re playing a male character, you’ve got a gay guy hitting on you and being annoyed if you don’t reciprocate.
One heterosexual male gamer out there is thoroughly bent out of shape by this. Thinks BioWare isn’t catering to him enough.
And one gay gamer out there is also bent out of shape by this. Thinks that BioWare is portraying gays unrealistically.
Seriously.
Folks… It’s a game… They’re characters… They aren’t supposed to be some kind of benchmark to measure your sexuality against. There are gay people out there who are forward and get their feelings hurt if you don’t reciprocate. This character is potentially one of them. Deal with it and move on with your life.
clarity
A few months back I posted my thoughts on how stereotypes affect me as a man.
It was not terribly well-received.
Greta Christina has done some research and come up with a much more eloquent version of basically what I said.
definitely TMI
Carnal Nation | Jennifer Love Hewitt “Vajazzles her Vajayjay”
Actress Jennifer Love Hewitt claims she “vajazzles her vajayjay” with Swarovski crystals and you can too! In the video below, she tells talkshow host, George Lopez, that she began decorating her “precious lady” like a crystal ball to feel better after a rough breakup. She advises other women to do the same and exclaims that she is currently vajazzled in hot pink for the show.Since the vajayjay is actually the space on the inside, it seems unlikely that she actually glues crystals inside of her vagina, but she may very well attach them to the outer portion of her privates – her vulva.
Hewitt even offers to bedazzle Lopez’ goatee and when the amused host suggests that the crystals could be irritating for “the dude”, she replies, “I’ve had no complaints.