It's frightening what some people think is funny.
I hadn't heard of this tool-bag before reading this article but it's pretty fucked up.
Read the article here.
Showing posts with label misogyny. Show all posts
Showing posts with label misogyny. Show all posts
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Socialist Worker on "Tucker Max"
Thursday, July 9, 2009
AskMen.com apparently thinks that all hetero men are manipulative abusers.
Via Shapely Prose comes this article from AskMen.com: Top 10 Subtle Ways to Tell Her She's Getting Fat.
As one SP commenter put it: Shit like this makes me terrified to date. And who wouldn't be terrified, when popular men's magazines train their readers to be abusive, lying misogynists? It doesn't exactly make you want to get a profile on eHarmony, when this is apparently the air we breathe.
My favorite suggestion is this:
Right! It's the same phenomenon, like, totally! Men want to show their strength and enjoy being touched, and women ... hate themselves and their bodies! The parallel here is remarkable!
Ask any man and he’ll tell you that he instinctively flexes his biceps whenever a woman touches them. The same thing goes for a woman when you make contact with any unwanted flab: She recoils and feels embarrassment.
Monday, May 25, 2009
My alter ego did it: letting Eminem off the hook
I've never been much of an Eminem fan. But thanks to my younger sister's absolute worship of him throughout 1999, I've got a lot the Slim Shady LP pretty well memorized. His unforgettably pointed, nasal voice still goes straight to my bones. His voice, after all, is inseparable from his words: those dark, skillful raps were some of my first experiences with real misogyny in music. And that was before I would have named it as such.
The media blitz surrounding Eminem's return to the scene and his new album, Relapse, is as much about the artist as the art. It appears that Marshall Mathers (his given name) is rediscovering his creativity and talent, while recovering from some serious drug addictions.
But reviewers can't avoid mentioning -- and in many cases, rationalizing away -- the misogynistic violence that fills Eminem's songs. On National Public Radio, reviewer Robert Christgau points out Relapse's indebtedness to an obscure hip-hop genre called horror-core.
Horror-core songs are so outrageous, they're impossible to mistake for acts of advocacy. No one will think Eminem plans to lynch Lindsay Lohan with 66 inches of extension cord in "Same Song & Dance."
Whether these images of strangling Lindsay Lohan -- a young woman who has been the punch line of so many misogynistic jokes, it's a wonder she can leave the house -- are "acts of advocacy" is, for me, irrelevant. These descriptions of violence against women are the air we breathe. They make it easier to publicize -- and then dismiss -- the image of a pop diva's battered face. They change the entire context in which violence against women occurs.
The New York Time's piece on Eminem's return to the scene focuses on his "multiple-personality" schtick: at any point in the rap, the voice we're hearing could be Marshall Mathews, Eminem, or Slim Shady -- his particularly virulent alter ego. Slim Shady is the one who abducts, abuses and murders women, including Mathers' ex-wife Kim. And somehow, that ought to make these lyrics easier to swallow?
These folks seem eager to point out that Eminem's probably not really a bad guy: he's just playing a role. His songs are "exposing" male jealousy and rage. He's not advocating that anybody be abducted and strangled in a car. Lohan's name just happened to be the rhyme he needed.
I don't want to sound like Andrea Dworkin here, and I don't claim that violence has no place in art. But why is nobody talking about what happens to a society that can actually process this kind of violence ... and call it a joke?
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