I won't give this twat too much attention, as he is already staring down the gaping maw of a very angry internet, but apparently James Gunn compiled a list of superheroes people might want to have sex with. The post has been taken down, the cached version is here.
There are plenty of ways to remark upon the physical beauty of a person (or fictional character) without coming off as a complete prick. This is not the way to do that.
On Storm: "Storm is once again our highest ranking woman-of-color and considering most of our other women-of-color on this list are green or blue or pink, that’s quite a feat." Yes, because brown is a terrible color, ESPECIALLY for skin. What a motherfucking dick. On Batwoman: "This lesbian character was voted for almost exclusively by men. I don’t know exactly what that means. But I’m hoping for a Marvel-DC crossover so that Tony Stark can “turn” her." This. Bitch. I will wreck this bitch's face. On Batgirl: ""Being a teen mom and all, you know she’s easy. Go for it." You've got to be fucking shitting me.
He also says a bunch of shit expressing his utter disgust at even the potential situation of being in bed with another man, Gambit (we get it, you like PUSSY AND ONLY PUSSY AND YOU'VE NEVER EVEN THOUGH ABOUT PENIS AND YOU ONLY ACCIDENTALLY TOUCHED A GUYS BALLS LIKE ONE TIME BECAUSE IT WAS SUPER FOGGY IN THE LOCKER ROOM SHOWER). That's okay, buddy. Gambit is so out of your league. Enjoy your flame war. You earned it. Leave this tit some love, if you wish.
I try really hard not to be a recalcitrant little asshole when it comes to my atheism. I understand the profundity of true faith, and the good it can do for people. I've tried really hard to quash my militant atheist ways, and have been guilty of condescending anti-faith finger-wagging douchebaggery in the past. I won't rag on somebody for having a religion anymore (I will poke fun, though, there's a difference).
One thing that really bothers me, however, is the observation of others faith during the holiday season.
My fiancee's mother is very religious. She attends Christmas Eve mass, and expects her children to do the same. She is an extremely sweet lady, and is not mean, coercive, or passive aggressive about it. She simply requests that they join her. My fiancee and her brother have, in the past, gone to mass with their mother, and been good-natured and silly about it (he'll quietly sing Christmas hymns and insert his dog's name into the lyrics under his breath). My fiancee has not requested anything of me, neither has her mother, but we're visiting her mother for Christmas this year, and I recognize that it's likely that I will expected to attend without question.
Religious services, particularly Catholic services, make me profoundly uncomfortable. I went to mass with a friend and her family a few years ago, intending to soldier my way through it, thinking it would be no big deal. In the middle of the mass, the priest brought a bunch of kids up to the altar, started reading them bible verses, and began engaging in what can only be described as blatant indoctrination. He began a call-and-response with this group of kids, who were so eager to be part of the group, telling them that they had to listen to Jesus. That Jesus was the ONLY way. That they were bad people if they didn't stick with the church forever and ever. These kids were 5 and 6 years old. I had to go outside and smoke.
I respect others faith, to the best of my ability. It doesn't help that there are large groups of people who, on a daily basis, try to strip me of my humanity (as a gay person) using their "faith" as their excuse. I will not berate one for one's faith. However, I deeply resent the fact that those that do not subscribe to a religion are constantly expected to defer to those that do. I've been told that politely opting out of the ceremony would be horribly rude, and that I should be embarrassed to even consider such a thing.
The Catholic church actively works to cover up the rape of children by priests. The Catholic church pays no taxes, and contributes only about 4% of its total profit to charity. The church does back flips to keep women from positions of leadership. The church grants women the right to exist insofar as they are willing to incubate a fetus at the cost of their own life. The church refuses to allow the members of its clergy to marry and live fulfilled lives and pursue normal sexual and emotional happiness. The church wags firey fingers and damnation in the face of children when they dare to have a sexual thought, and sexually and emotionally stunt entire generations of people.
I despise these things. I have a huge, huge problem with these things.
These are not things I will bring up, at all, during Christmas. I have no desire to rob my fiancee's mother of her faith. It just bothers the hell out of me that those of no faith always have to defer to those that have faith. I hate that it makes me a total douchebag dickface for even considering opting out of hanging out with the members of an institution that, in my opinion, does more harm than good anymore. I just want the same respect that I attempt to bestow upon others. Is that too much to ask?
You go to church, I'll stay home and clean your bathroom, cool? Cool.
Excuse the urgent, tinkling, anxiety-inducing music, I mostly wanted this clip because of Romney's fun quip about emergency room care:
"Well, we do provide care for people who don't have insurance," he said in an interview with Scott Pelley of CBS's "60 Minutes" that aired Sunday night. "If someone has a heart attack, they don't sit in their apartment and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care." Yup. It's as simple as that. Just, fucking fuck you, you sentient pile of veneers and stolen pension funds. You are so far removed from the people you would try to preside over, it's like a different fucking planet.
I don't think Mitt Romney is so stupid as to believe that emergency room care, for the uninsured, is free. I do believe, however, that he has no idea how the average emergency room bill affects people who aren't shitting greenbacks.
In 2006, for a few months, I was actually playing with the idea of dying. Just, up and quitting. One day, about a year after my dad committed suicide, walking home from class, I said to myself..."I think God is asking too much of me." That thought repeated itself over and over and over again in my brain, and would not stop. I paced around my room, and I actually remember my mind breaking. I started simultaneously laughing and sobbing, and tore apart my entire room, doing mostly nothing except making a hellish mess, but trying to tell myself that I was looking for a picture of my father. I spent the next few hours hyperventilating. I called one of my best friends, who came over, utterly bewildered, and forced me into a car. She and another friend helped me into the campus medical center. I couldn't stop hyperventilating, so they gave me an Ativan. I remember my friends telling the nurse, "Yea, this has been a long time coming."
The day after, depressed as fuck (and probably feeling the after-effects of the Ativan), I sat at a diner with my friend, pushing food around my plate. Thought about dying. Still pushed the food. That's when I knew I was truly fucked up. I can eat, like, anywhere. Anytime, anyplace. If I can't eat, something is severely wrong with me.
I decided to check myself into a looney bin, despite my lack of insurance. It's one of the best decisions I've ever made.
It wasn't the same as an emergency room, but it was close. That was a pretty fucked up time for me, and I have no idea what I would've done if I hadn't put my safety and sanity into the hands of other people. Four days in that place cost me over $5,000.00.
That's a drop within a drop within a DROP in the bucket to someone with as much money as Mitt Romney. I didn't have insurance, but I was lucky in a lot of ways. I didn't (and don't) have kids, I didn't have a ton of bills to pay at the time, and I was still a student, so I could coast on loans for a while. Something tells me a desperate, single mother of two working a full-time job and wrangling her family doesn't have the time OR money to cart herself off to the looney bin. So, what? Fuck her? Emergency rooms aren't free. I've heard horror stories of people who ended up paying tens of thousands of dollars to fix broken legs, to have emergency appendectomies, to have surgery on a heart that just up and quit. Yes, they're alive, the hospitals have an obligation to stabilize them. They're alive, and they're eyeballs deep in fucking debt for the rest of their lives.
Mitt Romney has no idea what it's like to have the weight of a giant medical bill fucking you in the back of the skull every day until you're practically insane with anxiety. Never in his life will he ever feel that. That in itself isn't the problem, the problem is that he cannot get on the level with people who feel that every fucking day.
Hundreds of honest, hard-working people kill themselves every day because they're well-aware that a trip to a shrink, for an uninsured person, is the cost of a monthly car payment. So they snap, kill themselves, and restart the cycle of abandonment and depression in the children they leave behind. Thousands of people with debilitating abdomen pain pop some Advil and grimace through the day because they'd rather pretend that nothing's wrong than acknowledge that colon cancer runs in their family, and that cancer is fucking expensive to treat. Millions of people ignore their dental health (until a few months ago I hadn't been to the dentist in over a decade), their obesity, that funny way they have of wheezing when they sleep, the fact that their prescription glasses are 20 years old, and by the end of the day, they have blinding migraines.
I'll say it again, Mitty, fuck you. You have no concept of these problems, and what's worse, you do not care to have a concept of these problems.
Leave behind every single cent you have, get an entry-level job at McDonald's, and care for three young children all by yourself for a couple of years, and THEN you might have the stones and compassion it takes to run a fucking country.
I agree with every point being raised by this video, but I also think other unmentioned factors are at stake. I was reading the comments in a Jezebel article the other day (the article addressed street harassment), and somebody (an American) asked what experiences they've had in other countries. People mentioned that in places like Norway and Sweden, they experienced next to no harassment whatsoever, whereas in places like Russia, Mexico, and the U.S., they were afraid to use public transportation or even the public sidewalks, the harassment was so bad.
I think there are several factors at play in the objectification, subjugation, and general oppression of women, and an emphasis on looks is just one of them. The other one? General unrest. Malaise. A feeling of powerlessness.
The powerlessness does not belong to women alone. An obscene gap has slowly been widening, a gap between the rich and the poor. I was watching The Hunger Games last night (meh book, mediocre film), and I thought about the absurdity of a country in which (spoilers), 90% of the population toils to produce food, clothing, and all other necessary goods and services, while slowly starving to death for lack of access to the very goods they work their asses off to produce. The remaining percentage of the population oversees all distribution of the goods they'd done nothing to reap, all while luxuriating in a bounty of plentiful food, miraculous healthcare, and absurdly expensive fashion.
It's absurd, until you consider the fact that Mitt Romney (sorry, we're getting political, get over it), a man who wants quite badly to oversee this country, yet says fucking stupid shit like this:
We're not nearly as deep into the horrifying political dystopia illustrated in The Hunger Games, but there's a reason those films are so popular, and it's NOT just Liam Hemsworth.
There is unrest. Men and women go home every night, wringing their hands, tearing their hair out, trying to figure out how they're going to pay the enormous electric bill AND pay their student loans AND get enough groceries together to make sure their fucking kids don't starve to death. And they have full-time jobs.
When people become angry, frustrated, when they feel powerless, when they don't have a (well-deserved) opportunity to ask their congressman face-to-face what the FUCK they were doing when they passed more legislation that squashes the poor and downtrodden...they tend to take it out on somebody they know is unlikely to fight back.
In my opinion, people experience more street harassment in countries in which the general population is already feeling pretty fucking pissed off. Street harassers don't harass women to actually get any play (I'd like to hear ONE story in which a guy yelling "Hey baby lemme see them titties" actually got laid), they harass women to feel powerful. They leer, they shout, they grab, and the subtext is, "I could fucking have you if I wanted to." It gives them some of their power back. It validates their feelings of abandonment and entitlement.
Women are raised to be pretty, thin, submissive, and nice. Men are groomed to run the fucking world, and then get pissed off when they don't get the opportunities they were promised, or their behavior gets questioned in any way (see: Chris Brown's fucking PSYCHOTIC mother and her obsessive Twitter account containing nothing but insufferable caps-lock rantings of what an absolute angel he is).
I am NOT giving violent men an excuse. Many lower- and middle-class men are victims, but being a victim does not give one permission to victimize. I am simply saying that this problem, this systematic oppression of women in our country and others, is FAR more complex than we realize.
As countless others have said, we need a Revolution. We need to elevate women, AND the middle class. We need to teach our boys that women are not sentient blow-job machines, and that enthusiastic consent is key. We need to teach our little girls that makeup is just fucking face paint, and does not make you a complete person. Elective surgeries will not land you your own personal Christian Grey (WHOM YOU SHOULD NOT BE STRIVING FOR ANYWAY).
We need to throw acid in the face of apathy and put these goddamned power-hungry money-hoarding utterly smug politicians back in their place. They serve us, and they should never forget that.
So all this rape garbage in the news recently has pushed me to the point of absolutely no return. Instead of a well-thought-out, articulate breakdown of why it's not okay to tell anyone else what to do with their uterus, I kind of fucking snapped on some stranger.
I was browsing the ACLU's page, and good ole' Mikey (last name withheld, even though this fuckbag was on the very public forum known as facebook), and Mike was comparing those who "commit" and condone abortion to those that would commit and condone genocide. I kind of lost it.
Ariel McAnultyMan, Mike, your hand must be tired from writing checks for all these "babies" you'll never meet, carry, or raise.
Ariel McAnultyAlso, with regard to (HA) "genocide": a blastula is not a person, at all, no person should ever be forced to be a baby machine, ever, and we're at, what, 7 billion people now? And how many of that 7 billion are already starving to death? Yep, that's what we need, MORE babies. MORE desperate mothers, more people on welfare, more unplanned and resented children. Magical!
WalterI wonder how many of the anti-abortionists here are prepared to adopt and raise the unwanted babies they're so eager to usher into the world? A show of hands please?
WalterWhat's that you say? There's no such thing as an unwanted child? You don't say! Well then, tell that to the estimated 143 million to 210 million orphans worldwide.
Ban abortion in the United States and we risk over 1 million additional orphans *per year.*
Ariel McAnultyHow 'bout it, boys? How many "saved" babies have YOU adopted, and taken care of, and paid for? Show them hands! @ Mike: that's what it comes down to, you thinking women who control their own sexuality are sluts ("keep your pants on."). You go home at night and jerk off to your sanctimonious bullshit ("I saved so many BABIES today!"), and then as soon as they're born, they conveniently leave your head. They leave your head, and a good number of them unplanned-for babies starve to death. An acorn ain't a tree. A baby's not a baby until it's born, and can exist on its own. Not only to you masturbate to your own "goodness" (cough: oppression of women), you do so AND get to maintain your perch up there on top of the patriarchy. You're not good. PLEASE don't think you are. It's sad, sanctimonious fucking garbage. You contribute to nothing but despair and oppression. @ William Fowler: A blastula's not a baby, it's an unformed clump of cells that is FAR from guaranteed a shot at personhood. Nobody gets lynched for exfoliating or having a haircut. See previous comment.
Ariel McAnultyP.S. I have never been pregnant, have no intentions of ever being pregnant, and even I recognize that it's NONE of my business whether or not a woman is ready to raise a child. If you want to prevent abortions, advocate accessible birth control, and shoot down fucking abstinence education. Every state that advocates it has teen birth rates that are through the roof. Shaming women who are perfectly capable of deciding if they're ready to be mothers does nothing. They're not listening to your man-splaining.
Mike An unwillingness to raise your own child says more about your lack of character and integrity than it does about ours and the character of the flea bags you're having sex with...
Ariel McAnultyKeep talkin', Mike. Your false colors (compassionate baby-saver!) are fading, and your real colors are coming through (women are baby factories that should listen to ME in my INFINITE WISDOM). You have no idea who I have sex with, yet you judge me. You are resentful that you cannot control women you don't know. You will never meet them, or their potential OR actual born children. Yet you try to control them. A million women could be having abortions right now *and you'd never even know*. You refuse to answer questions about all these "babies" you're "saving", so I'm guessing you don't adopt them all. Which means they stay with the likely broke-ass mothers that can't afford to raise them, which is why they were considering termination to begin with. YOU. Cause POVERTY. And DESPAIR. NOT this magical, stupid land where happy babies lead happy lives. You're a monster. P.S. $11 billion dollars a year is spent on public assistance for unplanned children. You're HELPING :D! Busybody, self righteous asshole.
Mike Why is it liberals want us to take responsibility for their birth control, their abortions and their children? No, this on you asshole - grow up and be a man and take care of your fuckin' kids..
Sounds like you have issues with your mommy Walter, and you Ariel, daddy didn't love you much did he?
WalterThose who would dispense with woman's choice like to play at being moral, but in reality *their* morality extends only as far as the borders of their imaginary ideological fantasy worlds.
Walter @Mike: You're bringing my mother into it? That's desperate dude. Besides, I know a white flag when I see one. Have fun wanking to your ideology. ;-)
Ariel McAnultyD'awww, you think you're gonna make me CRY. Adorable. I'm Mike and I'm losing so YOUR MOMMIES AND DADDIES DIDN'T LOVE YOU DID THEY? Irrelevant. Sticks and stones may break my bones but you're still a fucking hypocritical douche. STILL no word on that giant mansion you're building for all of these unplanned-for children, Mike! Can't wait to hear about it!
Of course I know that not all women who choose not to have an abortion give birth in shit-covered hellholes in a ghetto somewhere. Not everyone who gets abortions are poor, nor do they always choose abortion for entirely selfless reasons. Irrelevant. You don't know that persons circumstances. You will never meet them, or their unborn "child". You benefit not at all from "saving" babies. If you are "Pro-Life", all you do is shame women and attempt to influence their lives so you can go home and stroke off to your own perceived moral fortitude. Let us not fucking kid ourselves.
You are not pro-life. You are simply sniffing your own fucking farts.
Mind your own business, donate to charity, and do what fucking Jesus said. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Sometimes that means leaving each other alone. Some women consider abortion, then change their minds, and not all of them wind up miserable, as I suggested in my rage. All that means is that having that baby was a good choice for THEM.
I was browsing the ACLU's page, and good ole' Mikey (last name withheld, even though this fuckbag was on the very public forum known as facebook), and Mike was comparing those who "commit" and condone abortion to those that would commit and condone genocide. I kind of lost it.