A few weeks ago, I found a new hobby. For an hour or so every night, I would collect a handful of the most illiterate and horrifying Craigslist personal ads imaginable. Then, I would send the links to my boyfriend and before bed, he would read them to me as phonetically as possible in order to really emphasize the I am so fucking desperate I can’t be bothered to spell-check this well and mostly because my internet access at the library is about to expire quality of each ad. As bedtime stories go they had everything – a fallen hero (or more realistically, someone who never got up in the first place), usually some sort of infidelity that required a clandestine meeting, and of course, the deeply disillusioned idea that their dick was worthy of a honey baked ham, much less a woman with an equally savory, but somewhat less edible, vagina.
Like many of my hobbies, it was short lived and able to be done from the couch. There are really only so many times you can laugh at the fact that an alarming number of people don’t know that there is a difference between ‘woman’ and ‘women.’ Oh, and not surprisingly, seeing the cock and balls of men who seemingly traded in all of their potential for extra hair on their taints can put a damper on your sex life.
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The other day, I was at Red Robin for what was at least the fifth time this month because I can’t just kill myself in one afternoon like everyone else, I have to do it as slowly and with as much ranch dressing as possible. While trying to pretend my turkey burger was something more than a feeble attempt to offer the illusion that I’m health conscious as long as there’s cheese, I was told that I should start writing about gender misconceptions but…in a way that’s funny.
I chewed on it, but couldn’t get excited about it. Mostly because repeating patriarchy over and over again or spelling ‘woman’ with a ‘y’ is never funny or even remotely enlightening. The last time I boarded that ship, I tried convincing my ex’s best friend that women are equal to men, but the response I got was something along the lines of, “Yeah, but that doesn’t apply in the real world.” I shrugged it off, because since this was coming from someone in their fourth year of community college, their concept of the real world was not one I was concerned with. But then I started thinking about what I could get excited about, and that, of course, is uncircumcised cock.
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Kimberly-Clarke, manufacturers of Depends adult diapers, have recently added to the pot of men vs women, dogs vs cats, bacon vs tampons bullshit with a new ad campaign for their line of adult diapers specifically designed for women and men. Since I’m not quite kinky enough to claim that I’ve ever used adult diapers, I assume that this is good news for those who do. However, the commercials possess a Miss Arizona-esque brand of what the fuck. While I realize that they probably came to life with some consideration of the audience they’re targeting, it’s insulting to assume that everyone over 60 has this idea that women are only good for making Apple Brown Betty and men are good for drinking Cognac and talking about WWII.
So far, there’s one commercial featuring white people, and one featuring…everyone else, or “coloreds”, if I’m to assume Kimberly-Clarke’s stance on how people over 60 think. One focuses on who rules the world, the other, driving. They both share this strand of totally wacky and endearing banter between one self assured man and one expectedly passive woman and you’re just like, “Aww, old people…is there anything they won’t say?” It’s really not even necessary for me to sum them up based on the embarrassingly predictable topics, but it suffices to say that the men are adamant that men rule the world and are better drivers while the women are kind of loosely committed to the idea of anything not involving grandchildren.
Somehow, these subjects exceed at being both painfully irrelevant and socially damaging. It’s kind of like when Billy Baldwin is allowed on TV–no one really cares, but you know it can’t be good.
It’s possible, however, that I’m over thinking things and missing the point that it doesn’t really matter if men or women rule the world or know how to effectively merge, as long as whoever is in charge is wearing a cable knit sweater. Regardless, why am I going to take the opinion of someone who can’t even keep their urine under control? Talk to me when you have tips on how to blame your soaked crotch on faulty plumbing.
This week, I watched Transgeneration because I took two Xanax and thought, “This could be fun.”
The problem with me is, I sometimes get really involved with the people on these docu-dramas or whatever term you want to use for “reality TV but not really.” For instance, one time I watched MTV’s True Life: I’m Dead Broke and there was this guy whose family didn’t even have running water (aka broke) and he was trying to join the Army so he could support himself, but he couldn’t because he was on probation for stealing cars. I looked him up later and found out that he did the smart thing and reproduced. I also discovered that there’s a donation fund set up, and he even has an entire blog dedicated to him, which means you’ve made it only without all of the money and perks.
So, essentially, Transgeneration is a documentary (comprised of 8 episodes) that chronicles the gender transition of four college students. In all candor, I cringe to use the term gender in this context because gender isn’t something you are, it’s something you do and so to say transgender implies that you can either be 100% male or 100% female and anything in between is classified as freak . So now that the profound pillow stitched adages are out of the way, I’ll go on.
I had an unexpected reaction after watching Transgeneration. I predicted that I would watch it with a tear in my eye and cheer them all on for wearing their pink ponchos or boxer briefs and I did, for the most part. I absolutely couldn’t stand T.J. (top right) and I wasn’t keen on Lucas either (bottom left), which is interesting because they’re both female to male transfers. After piecing this together, I tried to explore why I had such a negative reaction to the two. I’d like to think that it’s because T.J. was your typical pretentious grad student, who took an ethics class and now totally gets the meaning behind “No blood for oil” and Lucas just smoked a lot, put even Pauly Shore to shame in his use of “dude” and wore a lot of Abercrombie & Fitch. While under average circumstances this is plenty of fodder to qualify for my “Why do you exist” list, part of me wonders if there was something in me reacting to the fact that these men were rejecting femininity, and in the process, inadvertently making me feel insecure. It’s kind of like when you have a favorite movie (let’s say…Home Alone II: Lost in New York ) and you start talking to someone about it assuming they’ve seen it, but they haven’t and you’re outraged or even worse, they have seen it and they’re like “I didn’t really like that movie.” Maybe this is just me unveiling more of my unsuspecting Lorena Bobbitt-esque insanity, but I always walk away from those encounters feeling kind of slighted. Sure, I know that it’s just a matter of preference and that’s ok because I mean some people are Vin Diesel fans and I don’t hate them for it, but deep down I’m just kind of like, “I don’t get it…Macaulay Culkin was at his best, and oh man, when Joe Pesci’s head catches fire and he does a handstand over the toilet to put it out, that’s hilarious how could you not love that?”
So I don’t want it to seem that I’m trying to say that these men are crazy because like, tits get you tons of free shit so how could you want to get rid of them. What I am saying is that this Gender Identity Disorder bullshit has nothing to do with the individual, but everything to do with everyone else who is uncomfortable with a man who wouldn’t want to be a man and a woman who wouldn’t want to be a woman. Even before birth, so much emphasis is placed on genital-defined identity, so imagining a life in which you don’t (or can’t) relate to your penis or vagina as a means of sexual, physical, or mental expression is aberrant and must mean that something is wrong.
Point is, gender is performative anyway, so why should it matter if you have a dick under your pantyhose?
Sometimes, denial can be funny.
