Consider that this happened in an evening when the Oscar host Seth MacFarlane cracked a gag that cast George Clooney as Humbert to Wallis's unwitting Lolita, and it starts to look less like a baffling lapse, and more like frat Hollywood asserting itself over a small black girl. You can act, the jokes imply; you can even be brilliant (as Wallis is in Beasts of the Southern Wild); you can be as cute as you like in your beautiful dress and your puppy-dog handbag, and we the Hollywood fraternity reserve the right to remind you that you are nothing but female, heading for a future where, six years from now, paps aim a long lens up your skirt and everyone calls you a slut because you didn't take the precaution of binding your legs together before getting out of a car.
We got the joke. And understand the satire. It was just straight up the wrong word to use. And MacFarlane's Wallis/Clooney "joke" was downright disturbing.
Can't you take a joke? Yes, I can take a joke. I can take a bunch! A thousand, 10,000, maybe even more! But after 30 or so years, this stuff doesn't feel like joking. It's dehumanizing and humiliating, and as if every single one of those jokes is an ostensibly gentler way of saying, "I don't think you belong here." All those little instances add up, grain of sand by grain of sand until I'm stranded in a desert of every "tits or GTFO" joke I've ever tried to ignore.
Margaret Lyons, Link
Etc.
I assume, if you're reading this, that you are most likely a human being with eyeballs in a head on top of a torso with nipples on it sitting on a butt attached to some genitals and legs and feet. Or some approximation thereof, give or take a few limbs/eyeballs/genitals as needed. In that case, congratulations! You have a body. And your body is—truth!—naked under your clothes right now. Look to your left. Look to your right. Literally 100% of the people within your line of sight are also naked under their clothes! And if, for some reason, some of those clothes happened to come off, or go invisible, or get burned off by acid rain or the erotic ray-gun of a lecherous sex-doctor, you might accidentally behold your neighbors' nakedness. And do you know what would happen then? Literally nothing. Nothing would happen to anyone.
Lindy West, Link
Well, not nothing. But nothing harmful, at least.
One of the most erotic experiences of my life remains book-sniffing, in a Bangkok hotel room, by myself, the Dutch translation of Crime and Punishment while rolling around on a bed of loose pages from Gravity’s Rainbow.
Teddy Wayne, Link
In this book there is a whale and some men…I will not give away any names.
Lincoln
Michel, from a book report
constructed of sentences in negative Amazon reviews of Moby Dick, Link
Read that whole thing, because it's hilarious.
The IKEA “Lack” side table is $9.99 if you want it in “birch finish,” and $7.99 in plain white, a color which — when not imbued with high modernist sheen — concedes to a post-industrial grim boredom, even guilt, that is always trying to find its way back into the woods. This may be Walt Whitman’s fault, who saw a “journey work of the stars” in a blade of grass, so I have him to blame for my meandering horoscope.
Jimmy Chen, Link
The problem with Sephora... is that, like many drugs, too much is never enough. Sephora is a smoke monster, a rainbow, a Mobius strip of promises. There's no getting a grip on it. There is no end. There's only more. You can chase the dragon of self-improvement slash self-enhancement slash self-acceptance until the day you die; there's always a new fragrance, a new lip color, a new miracle cream right around the corner. Sucking your bank account dry. You go in for a lip balm and come out with body polish, dry shampoo, BB cream, and Kat Von D's "Sinner" smoky eyes palette...Oodles on display, a myriad of options, infinite possibilities. When you think you've finally found the solution, the crutch, the key, either you run out and need more; they stop making it and it vanishes like so much sparkly Guerlain Terra Cotta dust; or you find that what once satisfied you no longer does the trick. A deliciously sticky honey trap, from which you never fully escape; you leave, but the pull is strong, keeping you coming back.
Fucking Sephora, man.
Dodai Stewart, Link
Sephora, a.k.a. the reason I have nine different kinds of facial moisturizer in my bathroom right now, and nine dollars in my bank account.
Let Jenna Marbles explain to you this phenomenon of "goo hoarding":
Criticisms about representations of gender (or race and other diversity) are often countered in fandom by sociological or scientific analyses attempting to explain why the inequality happens according to the internal logic of the fictional world. As though there is any real reason that anything happens in a story except that someone chose to write it that way.
Fiction is not Darwinian: It contains no impartial process of evolution that dispassionately produces the events of a fictional universe. Fiction is miraculously, fundamentally Creationist. When we make worlds, we become gods. And gods are responsible for the things they create, particularly when they create them in their own image.
Laura Hudson, Link
Every word that has ever been put to paper (or screen) is the product of some bored human writing it. I hate when people treat fictional universes like some magical reality separate from the mind of the person who created them. If a made-up world contains profound sexism, racism, homophobia, class discrimination, etc., it's either to explore said concept in regard to its existence in the real world, or it's just thrown in because the writer can't imagine a world that doesn't contain those things. Which is unfortunate and really sad.
Here's an adorable video to cheer up your dreary Tuesday.
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