Happy Birthday!

I would like to apologize for being a day late in wishing fellow April-baby cbreakr the happiest of birthdays. I was locked away studying yesterday, my apologies. I hope the day was a happy and fulfilling one. Happy (belated) Birthday!

Stuff to procrastinate with

One of my favorite occasional blogs (as opposed to those I check everyday, several times a day), is Tiger Beatdown. Sady Doyle is one of those people, who, like glvalentine, makes absolutely everything fucking funny. It's safe and accessible feminism with humor, thus giving lie to the "humorless feminist" stereotype. That stereotype fucking sucks. It muzzles women. Today, I had to refrain from commenting on a friend's LJ post that was a bunch of sexist drivel made in pursuit of a political point. If you're that friend, you probably suspect it's you. I'll spare you the suspense: it was.

Anyway, Tiger Beatdown has a post up by a dude--dudes who can be feminists!? WHOA-OA. He happens to be gay, which might explain his lack of being cool with patriarchal norms. He has a post about the de-gaying of movie trailers, specifically about the de-gaying of the trailer for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. There really is no argument you can make against his thesis.** While Scott Pilgrim has two gay characters and at least one assumedly bisexual character, few of them appear in the otherwise awesome trailer. Coupled with the other examples he cites about Valentine's Day and, more damning, A Single Man, it's hard not to see the trend. Even when the movie is about a gay man mourning the death of his lover, gayness is absent.

It might have behooved him to do a little more research to ascertain that, yes, those characters are in the movie (neither he nor people in the comments seem to realize that). I, for one, am astonished that Wallace wasn't in the trailer given how fully half the laugh-out-loud parts were his doing. That's okay, I forgive him for not doing his research fully: he gave a shout-out to Hollywood Montrose of Mannequin fame. Yes, it is possible to be famous for being in that movie. I'd also like to point out this character to the Hollywood anti-gay-trailer squad: I didn't realize Hollywood was gay until I was in college. I really just thought he was weird. To be fair to me and my obliviousness, he is weird. (He hangs around--voluntarily!--with Andrew McCarthy, for one.) His defining traits have more to do with his outrageous--even for the 80s!--fashion sense and tendency towards hysterics than they do about his being into guys. Notably, however, he does talk about dating men. SHOCK.



**He's right that Wallace is absent, and the authenticity of the bisexual's dual-gendered interests does read as if it's just a fad, not a lifestyle. But he's talking out his ass when it comes to the other gay character, seeing as she's featured fairly prominently in the trailer. Their choice of phrases about the evil exes is also not as he represents. So, really, perhaps Scott Pilgrim was not the best trailer upon which to launch the Bitch Ship.

More procrastination

A worthy commentary on the idiots who want to--literally--whitewash the goddamned Civil War.

To be sure, the economic differences between North and South contributed to the war, and one can never forget that money motivates where morals do not. But you know what made the Southern economy so sucky? SLAVERY. Not just an affront to the belief in humanity as a force for good, but also the means by which the South would, had it won, impoverished itself (on all counts) indefinitely.

There was an episode of The Simpsons where Apu becomes an American citizen, and he attempts to explain the many and varied reasons the Civil War happened, and the man applying his test interrupts him with, "Just say slavery." I think it's very telling that it takes some serious effort to come up with a reason outside of that. Usually, the effort takes one of two shapes. One, it's an academic effort, examining the causes and issues behind the most simplistic of explanations that do not, ultimately, challenge the summary put forth. Or, two, it's bullshit meant to distract and override what you know to be true: that those who expound upon the Confederacy are corpse-raping douchenozzles.

What? They are.