The Origins of Douchedom

Have you ever gotten your period so hardcore you wish you could drop kick your uterus into submission? The crimson tide drowns me out every single month with it's cramps and lethargy, but I can't once say that I've been hit with bitchy "PMSing". While it's plausible that someone experiencing the exruciating pains that no man will ever understand even if he were shot might be inclined to bitch, I still call bullshit on PMSing. The only time I've been unreasonably bitchy in reaction to something physical is when I'm hungry (so stop consistently eating EVERY SINGLE ONE of my goddamn LEFTOVERS, disgusting bitch of a housemate! ugh. i'm sorry, i just can't even get into this right now.)

Anyhoo, the reason I call bullshit on PMSing is because I think people will attest anything feminine as inducing hysterical bitchiness. Even though men are bitches, "bitch" is still intrinsically female, and I know this is because of the original meaning of the word, but this isn't the first female=crazy lingo to impregnate our language with anti-woman sentiments. "Lunatic" originates from the root "luna", referencing the moon, an archaically female symbol. We are told that our periods move by the moon, like the tides; "lunatic" is literally defined as "affected by the moon", or by transitive property, "woman".

"Hysteria" as we know it is almost synonymous with "crazy bitchness", meaning "an uncontrollable outburst of emotion or fear"; but it's root is synonymous with "of the womb" (hence, "hysterectomy"="removing the uterus"). What's interesting is that this is hysteria as we know it, but what about hysteria as ye-olde-English-speakers knew it? As I know this hysteria, it is said to be when a woman gets all uppity cuz her man couldn't hit that right. The cure was, um, a, er, "pelvic massage". Ha! Men had to go to grimey hookers on street corners while women just went to their doctors (who I'm imagining looked like that Cuban doctor in "Sicko")!

But Victorian era fantasies aside, there are still more liguistic fallacies. We say someone looks "ravishing" if they, well, if they look good, I guess; but to "ravish" means essentially the same thing as to "rape". So to look ravishing is, then, what? To look rape-worthy? To make the boys uncontrolled around you? Other familiar words like "rapture" hold the dual meaning of the sexual abduction and sexual ecstacy or enchantment, the desirable definitions of which are all attested to have come about after the oppressive. At one point, the root of "oppress" even served to mean "rape".

That's how I always viewed rape: as the ultimate oppression of someone else. I've heard a broken-into diary described as "mind rape", and I've described anything that forces me to submit to another's desires which contradict my own as "rape". Some people say that no one can "force" anyone to do anything, but I also call BS on this. People are manipulated everyday into doing that which they do not want to do. We are oppressed by the mutation of nasty words like "rapture" into sexy words, like "rapture". It suggests a universal mind-changing from a woman's point of view, maybe what she hates is actually what she desires. These words rape all women by telling us that we have a disadvantage, an unsound mind, because we menstrate and don't orgasm in the one min - er - short time it takes you to orgasm.

I've read a lot recently about the meaning of "rape" and where to draw the definitive lines; but to me, rape is anytime someone is manipulated into sex. That doesn't stop at "no means no", women (and possibly men) are raped everyday when they are guilted into sex. If a man puts loads and loads of effort into courting you altuistically, then brings it all up again when you're fooling around to make you feel you "owe" them something, even if you don't want to, then this is rape even if you say yes. If you are someone who says yes, going against your own will: it is because the man preyed on your insecurity of how you come off to others, or even a worry of what he will say about you. I can't help but feel that nowadays, men are looking more for someone to manipulate than someone who will openly engage in anything.

So many guys I know show off about "how far" they went with chicks that normally don't put out. It's the idea that they broke her, the rape factor, that amazes their audience. The system of baseball analogies even helps them arbitrarily rate each hook-up, to see who gets the furthest. This pissing contest has gone so far that "pick-up" artists like this mega-douche "Mystery" are selling books and teaching seminars about how to "get" any woman in bed; and he justifies it all with his Wikipedia knowledge of evolution, saying that the circuits of his brain are programmed (if it's so essentially human, why must you use computer terminology?) to make him wants lots and lots of different women, and the circuits of her brain are programmed to make her scratch her hand when she begins falling for a man's trickery.

He's not the only one to abide by this fucked up defense of rapturous activity, as he's not the only douche to continue to live against humanity's consistent urges for the opposite. The fact is, that if women were not considered objects to be had, most "gray-area" rapes wouldn't happen. I call bullshit to saying that a woman shouldn't get black-out drunk in order not to be raped, as well as the idea that men "don't know" whether or not a woman wants to have sex when she's black-out drunk. First of all, people who are black-out drunk, without fail, either puke or pass out...what kind of a douche, except a score-keeping rapist douche, would sincerely want to have sex with that? Second of all, if I can boldly claim that some women, even when they say yes, are being raped by fears of societical impropriety or rejection, I can kind of see young frat boys having the same fear. Maybe being exposed to this wacky game of baseball from age eight makes us all believe we must abide by it to some degree...and hearing wacky, homophobic (if all men solely want to spread their seed and all women solely want to be taken care of by rich men, then it further strengthens allegations that homosexuality is not natural - giving clout to religious thoughts over science) interpretations of evolution as defining our implicit human nature just fucks us all up even more.

If "gray-area" rapes were not necessarily prosecuted with the threat of criminal imprisonment looming above, there is a chance an honest understanding of rape in the context of modern society can pull through, as well as an opportunity to change "gray" to "non-existent" through some sort of rehabilitation. With criminal trial, confused students are forced to view their actions as either right or wrong, themselves being 100% responsible or completely innocent, and once the trial is over, so is its discussion. Juries may find a rapist innocent if they think the crime is not worthy of the punishment and if a rapist is not convicted, the raped feel guilty and victimized simultaneously. It's the judicial system which deals with rape that has failed the young boys who drown deeper and deeper into the abyss of douchedom everyday, but more excruciatingly, the young girls they oppress.

Tuesday, February 26, 2008

"It looks like we have somebody who fainted..."

http://gawker.com/357361/the-power-of-obama-compels-you

Click and behold the power of Obama!

I love how everyone in this video could not seriously care any less about the person who passed out. They just watch silently as Barack saves the day by embarrassingly drawing attention to the fainter, asks if anyone's a medic, then hands them an unopened bottle of water which he always seems to mysteriously have on hand. Sometimes he even apologizes to the crowd for the interruption, and if we're lucky he'll suggest a reason for the fainting: people trying to run up to the stage to see him, people getting too excited to see Oprah, and my personal fave; "she probably just didn't eat lunch". Of course the woman didn't eat lunch Obama, women always skip meals in order to stay trim for YOU, you sexy beast! LOL! You are sooo hilarious. And your false modesty is a gift for all womankind. See, you may tell us a different excuse everytime, but we all know the fainting happens because of the shock and unrelenting awe produced by being near you; you're basically heroin.

If someone around me ever passed out at an Obama rally I would shriek like a banshee, non-stop, for at least four minutes before fainting myself; and if I awoke with anything other than Barack Obama on my face performing CPR, I would consider him a callous oaf. Then, I would explain to him that no, I in fact did have my lunch, as well as my hourly speedball, and to please, continue.

My mom used to tell me about how when she was a little girl in India Christian missionaries used to come to her house, vainly attempting conversion door-to-door. They would enter, my grandmother would give them tea and cookies, and one of them would then unfalteringly choke on the cookies. The other one would, rather than perform the Heimlich, get down on his knees and pray to Jesus, as the other miraculously would stop choking. They would then explain that, if it weren't for Jesus, they would be dead right now.

Obama doesn't want to be JFK! He wants to be JESUS!

Barf.

Sunday, February 17, 2008

"She's giving me that death stare...that means she wants me"

What's the worst pick up line you've ever heard?

This may not even be a pick up line, but whatever the fuck it is, I've heard it several, several times.

It's when a man comes up to me and asks why I look so sad, or worse yet, simply DEMANDS that I smile.

Why the FUCK would I smile?! What kind of a moron goes around all day with a dumb grin on their face? I would PUNCH that person, not that it would matter because they have obviously been drugged. No one that is not on painkillers or heroin should be smiling at any and all given moments.

I am neither on painkillers nor heroin. I am not trying to impress your supertan, hairless, tank-top wearing, faux-hawk ruining ass. I will most certainly NOT smile when you tell me to. And it in NO WAY affects me when you tell me to stop looking so angry because it's making YOU depressed, or scaring you. That is clearly my purpose. I can't waste my time mindlessly chatting it up with you at Giovanelli's when Degrassi is about to be on and I just need a snack. I am TRYING to drive you away from talking to me. Yes, I noticed four minutes ago when you pinned your drunken eyes on me, hoping I would turn, look embarrassed and shocked that someone actually noticed me, look away, then look back and smile, have you come over so I could fakely giggle at all your not funny jokes until we finally decided to go back to your place and make it to third. I would never go to third with you, or anywhere with you. I will never wake up next to someone who has armhair stubble. And when I slightly grin upon your request for me to moronically smile, it is only because I don't feel like smacking you in front of all these other dumb bitches with whom you may actually have a chance. When you still stick around after that, eventually leading to you requesting a high five, that is where I MOTHERFUCKING DRAW THE LINE.

I am not going to high five you. I already fucking grinned at you, that was like rape for me. I hate the high five. When did it even leave the sports world and enter the world of flirting? I used to dream as a child of flirting being when a suave older gentlemen approaches you, says impossibly smart and funny things while still dedicating most of his attention to making YOU feel smart. No, not cute. Not hot. SMART. Everywhere I look nowadays it's girls being insulted and mocked...by men who want to get into their pants. Rather than my fantasy of a man being impossibly smart but still appreciating my intelligence, all I see are dumb men pretending to be smart. Unfortunately, pretending to be smart only entails treating those around you as though they are dumb. And never letting anyone else get a word in. And when a girl does manage to get a fucking word in, they PRETEND to be making you feel smart by saying something like "Yeah, that's true..." (BTW: this is not making someone feel smart, it's trying to quickly end their talking so you can resume your own. Everyone knows this.) but interjecting your own pretension with a slight correction of what that silly girl got wrong. Guess what dude, she's NOT wrong. She can have an IQ of fucking 38...if you're trying to get in her pants SHE'S NOT FUCKING WRONG.

I learned to evade such situations in my own life by being unrelentingly rude and, for the men who still stick around and still want to buy me drinks, I never stop talking myself and get a perverse satisfaction from watching them nod along and blithely agree just as I used to, oh so long ago. I know what all the douchebags and fans of douchebags are thinking: that I probably never again spoke to a man since I started this process of weeding out. Actually, I speak to men all the time, and it's my general experience that 1) it is only the smartest men who bother to treat you as though you are smart and 2) men LOVE being put in their place and the most fun men are the ones who can hate on themselves (less work for you). I can't tell you why, but I can tell you that there is more than one man who doesn't mind hanging out with me as I do nothing but insult them. And their friends.

So basically, to the drunk tan douchebag at Giovanelli's: no I will never fucking high-five you or any of your actual-conversationally challenged friends who could never handle talking to a woman, and must depend on the desperation of all those chicks who merely shaved their legs and don't want that time to have gone to waste to feel good about themselves. That's the most indicative part of all of this: it's clear that YOU are talking to girls to feel better about YOURSELF, not "just to get ass". I don't know about others, but I PREFER the dude who is sooo sexually motivated that he's willing to endure my endless analysis of Hillary Clinton, Anna Wintour and Oprah for several hours just in order to get into my pants. Men are supposed to have only one thing on their mind, you can't have opinions, ideas, or corrections for women. So drop your silly antics. And while you're working on dropping the high-five, and the "Smile!" from your flirting lexicon, go ahead and delete the generic head-nod-of-acknowledgement, taking lots of pictures with a girl, taking her hand and putting it in your pants...while on the dancefloor, "You're so cute!" as your only response to ANYTHING she says, calling other girls fat and ugly (only we're allowed to do that), and "I was against the war, and I know we fucked shit up there, but we have to stay in Iraq because you can't leave it fucked up! So I said that in class, but the professor didn't agree, he was too much of a hippy. That's why I got a D.".

What's that? I'm a BITCH? Um. DUH.

Thursday, February 7, 2008

if you're having girl problems i feel bad for you son...

"But Derek, I love you, in a really, really big pretend to like your taste in music, let you eat the last piece of cheesecake, hold a radio over my head outside your window, unfortunate way that makes me hate you, love you. So pick me, choose me, love me."

Ugh. Ok, it turns out I can't just turn off my boner for Hillary because she flip-flopped over Iraq AND thinks she has to be manly to win. That is TRUE love, Meredith Grey.

Tuesday, February 5, 2008

i guess an age-denying woman who isn't running things is better than a penis-envying woman who is...

I was, for all intents and purposes, a "Hillary girl". Yes, Obama's amazing, and yes, he was against the war from the beginning. But, well, he's not a woman, and I thought it was TOO IMPORTANT to have a woman president RIGHT NOW, at a time when women think they are dumber than men and are ubiquitously watched in the media in order to glorify each and every one of their drug-fueled screw-ups (while "respectfully" ignoring those of Heath Ledger and his fellow party boys...). This seemed like the perfect time, as it ran parallel with my own life, and my own ten year anniversary with myself of adding a feminist undertone to my everyday existence, brought graciously to me by the Spice Girls. They brought a message of fun, feminine "power!" to little girls everywhere, and now (in a week), ten years later, will personally deliver the message in Newark. They even said that Margaret Thatcher was the first Spice Girl. It seemed like maybe, after eights years of political/general awkward adolescent weird-girl turmoil America would provide the seventh. Even Ann Coulter, the seething bitch of the right wing (who I totally respect, if for nothing else, for shouting over all those dumbfuck men who surround her every television appearance, putting them in their dumbfuck places) came out in support of Hillary, I believe, because of the basic American NEED for a woman president RIGHT NOW.

Then Oprah, the seething bitch of daytime tv, came out in support of Obama. It was the first time the mere idea of her without makeup wasn't what made me nauseous. A woman with such vast influence over everyone with nothing to do at 4 PM every single day had the AUDACITY to go out and support someone, knowing her audience blindly follows her every move. But if she absolutely had to support someone, it should have been Hillary, cuz even Ann Coulter knows the importance of having a woman president. I was crushed, I began to become unsure of my girl, but I knew I needed to just hang in there, and that everything would work out. Come on. It's Hillary.

With Ann, Oprah, and Hillary all under 24-hour watch, I had forgotten about the head seething bitch, the angriest mamasita of them all, my idol, the mother of all sassy ho's, the reason we can just accept Juno: Anna Wintour. Of course, she would be classy enough to not come out in support of ANYONE (unlike certain too-fat-to-grace-the-cover-of-Vogue bitches)...No, no. She was never given the chance to reject Hillary cuz Hillary rejected her. Hillary believed a spread in Vogue would be "too feminine".

Anna Wintour is the opposite of Oprah. The ultimate proof that an old woman can be thin, hot, iconic, classy and run EVERYTHING. She never changes her position. She always says the right thing. She covers up what she has to. She doesn't have issues. She could have saved Hillary, and she clearly wanted to, seeing as how she allowed her on the cover despite her previous ultimatum involving a complete abandonment of navy blue suits. Because Anna knew the importance of having a woman president. But alas, it has nothing to do with Anna why I will never, ever, ever, on this super Tuesday vote for Hillary Clinton. At least those other women only believe themselves to be dumber than men. Hillary actually believes she has to be a man, or at least manly, to be a successful woman. As the idea that the only presidential female in my life might be one who botox's her cheeks (it's either botox or Michelle Obama was never taught to smile and is now awkwardly learning during all her interviews) overwhelms me, I must make an apology: I'm sorry, Hillary, but you are just not woman enough to be my president.

"The notion that a contemporary woman must look mannish in order to be taken seriously as a seeker of power is frankly dismaying. This is America, not Saudi Arabia. It's also 2008: Margaret Thatcher may have looked terrific in a blue power suit, but that was 20 years ago. I do think Americans have moved on from the power-suit mentality."

i told you i was trouble

Over the past month I replaced my past addictions with an addiction to celeb gossip, which cleanly satisfied me for a while but of late has severely let me down. Honestly, I would like to know if actual, my-aged people find Britney, Lindsay, or Amy Winehouse's in-and-out-of-rehab-on-and-off-the-wagon sagas interesting in any way. Yeah, they're fucked up, yeah, they might be bipolar, but who seriously cares? Isn't everyone bipolar nowadays? And isn't it inherently characteristic of undiagnosed sufferers of bipolar disorder and similar ailments to be alcoholic/drug addicted? And isn't it completely unreasonable to ask a twenty one year old to never have a drink again?

While my heart seriously fears for Amy Winehouse's well-being as I need her to live for my OWN sanity's sake, I can't take hearing about these three women and every little slightly crazy antic which ensues in their lives for one more second. It's obvious why they're all drug addicts: for the same reason WE are drug addicts: because drugs exist, we have money, and we are BORED. And nothing's fun anymore. And we have no confidence.

But these things will change, as they do with everyone. I'm not saying they don't need rehab, or that they don't need help if they're bipolar, but I think we need to stay the fuck out of their lives for the drug addict's and bipolar sufferer's around us sanity's sake. They're drug abuse makes ours look glamourous, and it makes it look like drug binges and the insanity which follows are our own person cries for help, so we are allowed to fuck up in our lives...we need "help". We've had perfectly traumatic suburban lives which led us to this mess. It's a cracked-out vacation disguised as a breakdown. They media doesn't realize...the breakdown happens well before the drugs.

Yes, these ladies are supposed to be role models. But they're also twenty somethings, as am I, and I know the life I live. No one would know of their antics had the media not existed to blow them up. As someone trying to change, it makes me cringe everytime I turn on the tv, or try to read about how badly dressed the celebs are these days, to instead see them act the exact way that I'm trying to forget. Not to mention the fact that blowing up drug use undermines the actual problems in these people's lives. Amy Winehouse is codependent...only not with substances, but with men. This is what leads to addiction. Her music, as well as Rolling Stone cover story expose this fact, yet no one makes anything of this. The blaringly ugly need for her man on Amy's album is what makes it so torturously human, and amazing ("You go back to her, and I go back to us"?). In her first album, she even addresses her distaste with the way she looks, and her shock that a man even likes her. She clearly uses men to validate herself, a quality I've witnessed in drunk bitches everywhere.

The media makes it seem like stopping drugs/drinking will end one's problems when it's in fact the problems that cause the "addictions". I bet fixing one's generic life problems would end their altogether desire for the substances. There's a lot of talk in health classes about addiction and withdrawal, as though the drug is the thing making you addicted, and not your desire for the effects of the drug. Whether they just let you forget for a little while, or they make you feel smart, confident and as though everything is ok, it's obvious that once everything IS ok, you would no longer need the drug. The truth is that we're more addicted to having problems than feeling OK. Drugs don't actually make people feel good. Maybe the first few times, but the more you do them, the more your problems learn to permeate through the drug and still prod at you in your fucked up state. It's like we're just trying to train our bodies into feeling pain and torture no matter what. We smoke so that we can't breathe, we drink to be hungover, we get high to be paranoid, and we get coked up to talk endlessly about our problems, and the world's problems (cocaine is always the most ambitious pain-causer). Then we cry for help, get better, realize our faces are still too fat and no one could ever love someone who had to pluck their eyebrows every week, and fall right back off the wagon.

Monday, February 4, 2008