Afternoon Dumb

Apparently 4Chan wanted to see how follow-the-herd-of-stupidity feminists were. So they conspired to make up a hashtag, #PissForEquality, encouraging people to pee their own pants, then take a picture of it and upload it for the world to see, to protest... um, whatever. Victimization or something.

Content Warning: It worked.

Making fun of pumpkin spice lattes is now sexist.

Actually, what it really more is is racist, because this gets put down a lot as a specifically white girl thing; but the rules are that you can't call out black racism. It's always safe, on the other hand, to say something about men's sexism.

According to a Swarthmore College student's op-ed, the real reason that people make fun of pumpkin-spice lattes is that our society thinks everything girls like is stupid because "girls don't get to have valid emotions."

"It all comes back to sexism," Min Cheng writes in a piece for The Phoenix, Swarthmore's official student newspaper. "People love to hate on what girls like."

"The PSL hate seems to me like a symptom of a larger problem: girls don't get to have valid emotions," she continues. (Exactly what a latte flavor could possibly have to do with your emotions is unclear -- but maybe I just haven’t been drinking meaningful-enough coffee.)

Lest you think she’s not making any sense, Cheng gives plenty of other examples to prove her point. Her piece — which, by the way, is titled "Evaluating Masculinity, Hidden Sexism, and Pumpkin Spice Lattes" -- explains that people also make fun of leggings, Uggs, North Faces, Taylor Swift, Instagram, flower crowns, crop tops and Grey’s Anatomy (arguably the worst show in the world, except for maybe Gilmore Girls) and Pinterest.

Can I hate people who make up fake dramas about trivialities to invest their meaningless lives with some jumped-up sense of purpose?

Or would that be denying people's "emotions"?

K-Timpf points out that it's a standard media trope to bust men's chops for the stuff they like.

In fact, it's a standard trope of feminism.

How do you square this bitching about men's enjoyment of being awesome with that silly crap about pumpkin spice latte non-liking behavior being sexist?

The size of G.I. Joe's biceps and Arnold Schwarzenegger's guns in the Terminator movies is proof that the dominant form of masculinity is out of control.

That message and similar ones were conveyed recently to students during Vanderbilt University's "Healthy Masculinities Week," organized by the Margaret Cuninggim Women’s Center. Attendance for students was optional.

The Vanderbilt week kicked off with a lecture by the first man to minor in women's studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Jackson Katz. (His alma mater now offers a bachelor's in women, gender and sexuality studies.)

The self-described "anti-sexist activist" and filmmaker said that sexual violence and domestic abuse are men’s issues and that men would "benefit tremendously from having this conversation."

Katz founded a consulting firm that "provides gender violence prevention and leadership training to institutions in the public and private sectors" and has pioneered the use of bystander training in the U.S. military, according to his website....

Political correctness has value, Katz said....

He showed clips from his film Tough Guise, in which Katz claims "there has been a ratcheting up of what it takes to be considered menacing in the 1980s and 90s."

As evidence, Katz noted that G.I. Joe's biceps have gotten larger over the years and that Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone use bigger guns for their iconic roles as the Terminator and Rambo than did Humphrey Bogart in his 1930s and 1940s film roles.

Another speaker said that the three most destructive words in the English language are "be a man," or "don't be a pussy," because they... I don't know, teach men to be brave and tough and respond assiduously to challenges, when the proper response is to cry about it and give up or something.

Short Day: So. I let my body-clock get seriously out of whack (you may have noticed) and decided, sometime around 5:50 am this morning, that rather than go to bed, I would just stay up all night so I could go to bed early this night.

I think the only way I can adjust my clock is to force myself to stay up for 30 or so hours and go to bed at like 6 pm tonight.

Blogging today will be super-crappy, far crappier than usual. Probably bullet-point stuff. Quote and link without any effort, because i'm kinda dozing off as it is.

I'll probably stop really early too.

But, hopefully, I will be posting earlier than 1:30 pm from now on.

posted by Ace at 11:13 AM

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