I hate to be pedantic but one does not wear 'a' panty any more than a pant. Panties and pants come in the unit of a pair. The panty is the part that encases one leg, historically connected at the waist in a crotchless manner. The principle is the same as in a pair, albeit indivisible, of scissors. (There is also, of course, the issue that underwear for women uses the diminutive form of "panty/ies" while even the smallest set for boy-children are under"pants".)
I mean how easy is it to get confused when the town in question has car washes going by the name of "Gentle Touch" and offers: Membership can be purchased for "Exterior Washing" which is available at all locations or "Full Service" which is only available at select locations from 8AM to 5PM every day.
#5) Unbearable Lightness of Bimbo: A manically cheerful blonde rides a gloomy, rather anthropomorphized, polar bear. Fortunately she seems to have a custom made halter for the purpose.
#4) A New Kind of Bunny: Polly Borland riffs on the animal motives of pinup posing--with spooky results.
#1) I am probably sick for even categorising this artwork as a pinup. But... oh well. I am having trouble finding the original, does anyone remember the artist's name?
I previously noted evidence of mainstream disrespect in the UK for the Haka. On that occasion it was the BBC, now followed up by a pointless ridiculing of the Haka by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
I think, rather sadly, of the support New Zealand has given to tours of our country by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the veneration of Shakespeare in general which remains a compulsory part of our school curriculum. But the time has long past where on culture art is "high" and anothers "low".
The Haka is also a historical and living artistic creation. As artists the producer and players should have had some notion that the Haka is, as such, due respect and under legal protection from abuse (having been recognised by the NZ government as the property of Ngati Toa).
There have always been horny teens. There have always been ways of fixing an image. There have aways been ways of transmitting an image--even if you had to chisel it on a rock and attach it to a very hefty carrier pigeon.
If a 16-year-old girl takes a picture of herself and sends it to someone, where is the victim? And in the absence of a victim, where is the crime? I am as against child porn as anyone but can there even be such a thing as remote self-child-abuse?
Looking through the latest releases it occurs to me that comics are one of the most vibrant continuations of pinup art. Not coy, kitch or retro, but serious pinup art. Yes, you can also read them for the stories and not all of the art is pure cheese/beef-cake. But honestly, I like pinup and the Lycra costume cliche was invented for a reason.
That said the female characters seem to be given the pinup treatment far more often. If I scan the covers, there are certainly exceptions, but female heroes are far more often posed in a static, near bare pose. The male characters are more often portrayes as active, dynamically foreshortened, conventionally clothed or face close-up (females typically get a face+cleavage closeup).
The male characters also display a wider range of physical types and ages. There are not very many visibly middle-aged, small-breasted or warmly dressed heroines. Yes, the males show the greatest excesses of 'roidy physique, but there also also slight, older, shorter and rather average-looking male heroes.
I like pinups, but lean towards wanting a pinup male and a hero female. So I have to wonder when the comic industry will ever offer a product equally accessible to female readers--who are the most spendthrift and voracious readers of almost every other literary format. Comics may reflect their audience but the also create it.
So isn't it about time the big boys like DC and Marvel gave us less the of Barbie comics (remember Princess bloody Amethyst?) and bouncy bondage-bitch styled Batwomen, and more heroines we can actually relate to a little... and perhaps beefcake sidekicks posed on the cover?
Why are the news media acting like she is a new character when she has been around for a few years now? (Since 1956 by name, and 2006 as lesbian). And who told them her name is Kitty. I mean, Kitty Kane? (Sounds like a stripper name). I hope Kate isn't actually getting all kitten-y.
I assume it is a combination of the announcement of her new series to star in as announced at the recent NY Comic Con, and someone with bad handwriting.... (I hope). Comparing this character in her debut with a sneak preview of her new book, it is nice to see a superhero female finally wearing sensible shoes, isn't that dangerously close to a stereotype? ;) Although she is still clearly a fashion conscious character with that lipstick (Um, isn't that a stereotype too? LOL).
Then again, based on this concept sketch it seems like the crucial issue of shoes isn't really nailed down. Maybe that is even the source of the confusion, eh? (They look a bit like "kitten" heels....)
It is one of those teacher cliches to say there are no stupid questions. Bur as evidence to the contrary allow me to present this reader-submitted question from the February 1965 issue of Sexology magazine.
"Dear Doctor: during sexual relations with my wife I always have to manipulate her clitoris until she reaches orgasm. My wife says that during relations my penis never touched her clitoris. As far as I can see, what we are doing amounts to masturbation, only I am doing it to her instead of she doing it to herself. Will this endanger her health and make her sterile?"
I have previously written about how the recaptcha system appropriates the labor of users without their explicit understanding and consent, and without an 'opt out' option. To me, forced or unacknowledged labor is an issue of fairness and a desire for an informed and empowered society. Yes, it may only add up to a few minutes a week, but the principle remains the same.
Thus I am suggesting a course of protest action. When filling out a recaptcha you see two words. In many cases it is easy to deduce which is the word there for the user's benefit (to show they are not a spam bot) and which is there to make the folks at Recaptcha money and kudos (by requiring use to interpret a work from a document they are probably being paid to digitize).
When I feel I know which word is an attempt to appropriate my labor (often a non-word like a syllable or number) I instead type the word "slave" in response. If you feel as I do about this issue you might try doing the same. So long as you correctly fill out the word that is there for visual verification your comment will still go through as normal.
Interesting times we live in. Take for example this student newspaper editorial from historically African American all male More house college. Putting aside for a moment the WTFage of wanting to go to an all male college (unless one is gay), the gist of it is 'be as gay as you like, so long as you aren't feminine'.
And I quote: "It's not so much that "straight" men of Morehouse are uncomfortable with the gay lifestyle, but more so because it is constantly and quite robustly thrown in their face. Does being a gay man include adopting the traits of a woman? Because if that's the case, there's a more fitting school, and it's called Spelman College.
I'm all for being who you are. If you like women, go on and date women. If you like men, be my guest and date men. But if you are born a man, you should be just that--a man. If I have to look twice to tell if I'm looking at a man or woman on an all-male campus, then something is tragically wrong.
At this rate, Morehouse College may find itself in a difficult situation. What happens if and when one of our gay Morehouse brothers decides to go the next step and undergo a sex-change operation, and is then physically considered to be a woman? Does Morehouse have the right to ask that student to leave?
A massive population of feminine males and possible transgender students could critically damage the reputation of Morehouse and perhaps decline the amount of admissions, "
Just when I think I have seen it all, a writer like (I shit you not) Gerren Gaynor comes along to show how far people will go to hold the line. You want to screw men, fine, all men together... groovy. You want to be feminine, that's hideous.
Obviously. When it comes to women it seems that messing with 'separate but equal' is a slippery slow towards... honestly I am not sure. Something very very bad, apparently.
People seem to like talk talk about being "post" (after) a movement. But what would post-feminism be? Can you be over, or after, liberation? Certainly not while sexism continues to be pervasive in most cultures and overt slavery in some. But I think Eve Ensler, author of the Vagina Monologues is quoted as saying:
"I don’t know about language. Feminism. Does the word get in our way or bring us together? If the word is not working for people, then maybe it’s time to find another word. On the other hand, women gave their life, time and energy for a word, and fought for our rights and dignity and our jobs — and fought for the rights of women to speak out. The women who are against feminism wouldn’t even have a platform today if there hadn’t been feminists."
And I think this is right. We cannot be "post-feminism" in the sense of feminism as a mission, goal or movement ceasing to existed. But I think it is being integrated into a wider mission of social justice which encompasses a greater and more inclusive, and less combative, sense of fairness.
Women cannot be a group treated in isolation because no person is just a woman and a perspective of fairness and equity embraces gender, nationality, disability, sexuality, race, species, environment and so much more. We do not have to choose which fight to fight because no one should have to wait in line for equal treatment.
And a fine balance needs to be maintained between being prescriptive about trivia versus persistent about injustice even in its implicit forms. There is a place for levity and a pace for solemnity--to give a trivial example when I do my shopping I find it funny as hell that someone would call their yogurt "Brown cow fruit on the bottom". Because what I want to see on the bottom of My yogurt sure as hell isn;lt "brown cow-fruit".
But I do think that calling a yogurt "Cultural Revolution" is part of a pervasive trivializing of the suffering of some groups we neither know nor care very much about. In the 60s many western nations were having an area of liberation and opening up of possibilities. In China The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was a power struggle during which poor choice in government lead directly to the loss of over 20 million live to famine and as a response to that a new movement ruthlessly suppressed the intelligentsia (with torture and work camps) and lead to the widespread distraction of cultural and religious organisation and relics and undermining of human rights and deaths of another half million people. Naming a luxury food product on this way seems appallingly glib to me.
Feminism is a part of our present and a part of our past--a part of our history which we should never move back towards. So even if we move beyond the narrow confines of the term "feminism" is should not be treated as a joke or a derogatory term. The traditional tendency to take things serious is because even trival reflection of indifference to suffering can be very telling about the principles at the heart of our culture. And that is what needs to be opposed and changed, just as much now as ever.
But as you saw the sketches I thought you might like to see the one I finished. It is my dark tribute to Valentine's day. Which is, when you think about it, kind of a morbid Saint's day anyway....
Once upon a time the British went all over the world collecting "exotic" specimens and generally going on about how weird everyone else in the world was. And it seems that this aspect of their culture persists in behaviors such as putting the Maori Haka in their "Odd Box" along with chocolate pedicures, a stoat freaking out and the philharmonic orchestra doing a comedy piece with whoopie cushions. The coverage itself was no more than mildly condescending but the exhibition of the Haka as an oddity is just not respectful--especially with no effort made at all to understand its real purpose and meaning.
I wondered for a moment if this post was off topic, but it isn't. This blog deals less with "women" and more with gender. And the Haka is not a curiosity, it is a dance and demonstration that is a crucial part of performing both masculinity and femininity within Maori culture. The dance types referred to more generally as Kapa Haka include the Haka which is a challenge made to a visiting group to determine their intentions, they come in male and female forms and range from a rejoicing welcome to a prelude to battle (or an attempt to avoid it by demonstrating overwhelming prowess).
The All Blacks (national rugby team) use a ceremonial Haka, Ka Mate. Other Haka for women include Ka Panapana and Ake Ake Kia Kaha. These dances are every bit as important and meaningful as a national anthem, flag, religious icon or prayer. And the Maori performers are taking them to the UK with goodwill and respect. Perhaps they should receive the same in return? The Haka is, at its very heart, a statement that these are people worthy of respect.
Ka Panapana
A ra ra! Ka panapana, A ha ha Ka rekareka tonu taku ngakau Ki nga mana ririki i pohatu whakapiri Kia haeramai te takitini, Kia haeramai te takimano, Kia pare-taitokotia ki Rawhiti ... A ra ra,
It is throbbing! A ha ha! My heart is throbbing with delight for the common people, like stones stuck together They've come in their multitudes They've come in their thousands and alighted upon the Eastern sea.
Ka Mate
Ka mate, ka mate Ka ora, Ka ora Tēnei te tangata pūhuruhuru Nāna nei i tiki mai whakawhiti te rā Ā upane, ka upane Ā upane, ka upane Whiti te rā, hī!
'Tis death, 'tis death 'Tis life, 'tis life This the hairy man that stands here who brought the sun and caused it to shine A step upward, another step upward A step upward, another step upward The sun shines!
This book turned up in the mail in a lot of old paperbacks I got off ebay. It is the back cover, so I didn't see it before the book arrived. Deja voodoo.
Actually as the covers of sleaze paperbacks go, this is rather nice. The front cover is a little more... overt.
Personally I think it is funny, it really is. Kitty-chan is plenty edgy already, appearing on official products including a vibrator and unofficial products from rosaries to Uzi's. What could a fashion label possible add to what the uber-Kitty has already accomplised? Answer, a man-Kitty servant with an enormous head and black nail polish
The Science of Pornography Vol 2: an illustrated study without equal for scope, impact and significance.
"It is obvious that there are no hard and fast lines to classification and identification of pornography. One to fifty specifics can occur in any given bit of erotica: we see no point in trying to emulate the intelligentsia who spend lifetimes trying to separate man's mental, mechanical and emotional responses into properly labeled containers. Pornography is for fun, no matter how it is looked on by the rednecks and bluenoses."
I periodically get pulled into semantic arguments. Normally because someone is protesting that what they write, or more intrusively that what I write, is not pornography. This is usually on the basis that it is something else.
It has a plot.
There is romance.
The characters develop.
It is literature.
Sex is included only as strictly necessary to the plot.
As if a depiction of sexual pleasure is somehow banished, elevated or redeemed by the presence of any "worthy" feature. But the question is, what needs to be redeemed or excused? In what world are the categories of aesthetics, intellect and arousal so clear demarcated and sex still banished to shameful sinfulness?
In the end Mr. Scott does not quite manage to practice what he preaches. The very author that makes these remarks in this volume from the 1970's shrouds his words in pseudo-science. Because a book about pornography of written by an enthusiast would be gratuitous and banal. It must be disguised, redeemed, excused... by a shallow veneer of faux clinical detachment and academic discourse.
Virgin is a damned weird word. But since the middle ages we have been all about saving the virgins. And when it comes to forests, at least, I can agree with it. Besides, plastics really need to be replaced wherever possible. This is is my free infomercial for wheatware. It can do most things that hard plastic can, like make a hanger, comb, spork or guitar pick and for a similar price--but when discarded it is rapidly biodegradable. Although I have lingering reservations about using a food plant in this way. We don't really need anymore green products driving up the price of food. Be it fuel or forks it seems to me that non-edible biomass could be used instead? But unlike the corn used in biofuel, there is a wheat surplus in the US so this product line is probably not impacting the normal consumer's bottom line.
For a change of pace I thought you might like to see some of my sketchbook items, after my post about zentai. I'd explain what they are about but I think for any given picture it is either fairly self-evident or rather inexplicable even to me.
I was browsing Amazon the other day when the I saw this:
My first thought was that I rather hope "swollen bud" is a statistically improbable phrase. But "inside the book" obligingly revealed book after book employing this phrase--far more often in relation to a woman's clitoris than any part of a plant. And they come up because books taking part in "Inside the Book" have their entire contents as search terms, and especially SIPs.
"Statistically Improbable Phrases, or "SIPs", are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!™ program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book."
But I do wonder if Amazon really intended anyone who might be searching for a book on how to prune a rosebush to received these kinds of suggestions. And of course then I couldn't help but try and see what the weirdest SIPs I could find were, like....
Today's classic cover is a subtle little number from Avon, circa 1951. Of course any erotic meaning you take from the title is entirely down to you. "Willy" is actually the name of the lady and she has to sleep in that contorted pose to stop her makeup from ruining the pillow covers.
Creative choice of character name is also apparent with the heroine's mother, Tennessee--not to mention a male character apparently called Homerette and another called Red White. Not to mention Tom Kitty and Fuzz. Oh well.
As is always the case, the content of the book are not nearly as interesting as the cover suggests.
There are categories of behavior considered feminine and masculine. The degree to which they actually relate to biological sex aside, we seem to value the masculine pattern more than the feminine.
A key example is a range of behaviors that might be called helping, serving, deference, following or assisting. Kids are told over and over that they need to develop good leaderships skills, but it is a simple statistical fact that most of us will follow more than we lead.
Nor is this a bad thing. When I get on a Boeing I don't demand the right to fly the plane. I lack the skills and qualifications and would get everyone on board killed. Knowing when to defer to others is at least as import, as admirable, and as intelligent as knowing when and how to lead them.
In ancient Roman times the Goddess Venus was referred to as Venus Obsequens. We seem to have lost the idea that an entity even as powerful as a good my deign to fulfil the wishes of others out of gracious goodwill and a desire to favor the worthy.
Meanwhile in modern animal behavior scientists are belatedly determined that pecking orders and rutting fights are only half of the explanation of animal society. Equally crucial is how groups give allegiance and who females choose to mate with. In normal society, leadership is not seized and love is not won, both are typically given as a free choice, to those who are worthy.
With the old and new wings of feminism continue their cat fights about who get to be on top, neither seems to want to proceed from liberating the female, to liberating the feminine. If ever there was a time where we needed to value the proper and informed gift of deference, it must be now.
As Karen Overall writes, in the Journal of Veterinary Behavior: "Deference is not analogous to submission or subordination. Deference is about relative status that is freely given, not imposed ... The animals to which most others defer is the animals that behaves most appropriately given the context, not the animals that must always be at the door first, or must eat first. In fact a need to control regardless of context can be neither adaptive, nor normal."
Leading, following, and horizontal teamwork are all equally admirable when they best use the abilities of the individual and further the goals of society. Which probably why Venus not only prominently worshipped by wives, but also politicians who placed her temple on the original "Capitoline" hill an--in the case of Julius Caesar--proudly claimed descent directly from the "Obsequious" Goddess.
