{ 2008 07 12 }
Genitals on the Outside
- How many people have seen the ads for NuvaRing? (I know, I know, but between being tired and reading emails, I didn’t realize I was watching commercials until the jingle unnerved me.) When they first said “medicated vaginal ring,” I wondered whether it was specific to a labial or clitoral piercing, but the website clarifies it as an insertion device which may dislodge, for instance, “while…straining during a bowel movement, or during intercourse.” Somewhere, someone is including this - as well as the potential implications for oral sex - in a horrifying comedy sketch. The website also assures potential users that “NuvaRing cannot go farther than the cervix.” Having neither a vagina nor a cervix of my own, this strikes me as akin to someone saying “push that up your nose - there’s no way it’ll hit your brain.”
- The ladies of Slate spent much of the week engaging in discussion inspired by an article in Oprah’s O magazine entitled “Divorce Dreams.” (Though the full article appears to have been hidden from the internet, a portion is available here.)
Some would say that, being an unmarried man, I’m out of my depth when pontificating on the lives of married women. I cannot disagree. Nevertheless, I would be remiss if I brought this dispute to your attention without adding my two cents. The article in question, “Divorce Dreams,” describes its author’s husband thusly: “like every other male I know, he is a Moderately Bad Man.” My suggestion? Re-examine your notions of good and bad. Is this a question of goodness or acceptability? If you’re extrapolating to say that about half the world’s population is, at best, “moderately bad,” then you should consider the possibility that your perceptions are a bit out of whack. Once you’ve got that nailed down, you might benefit by acting to improve your situation; it’s just a thought.
More broadly, this strikes me as an issue of Second-wave feminism v. (what I’ll somewhat ignorantly call) Post-feminism. The arbitrary distinction I’m imposing is between those who assert that women have been oppressed because men are actually inferior (readers of my old blog may recall my view that second-wave invective is, at best, tiresome) and those who really just want sex and gender to become non-issues. I’ve read some pretty low-brow men’s magazines in my time, but I’ve never seen a man with enough brass under the hood to openly crap on his wife/girlfriend for the benefit of the reading public. If you think it’s okay to do that to your husband - or to encourage other people to do so by printing such palaver, regardless of its accuracy - then you should realize that you’re speaking very loudly to your own disbelief in gender equality.
- What’s probably more disturbing about the preceding bullet point than either the originating article or the amount of time spent dwelling on it is the fact that at least one of the otherwise respectable women of Slate’s XX Factor was reading O magazine.
This month’s feature, I shit you not, is “Men! What are you thinking?!” I was thinking the writing couldn’t possibly be as banal as that premise, but that assertion was quickly disproved. With the possible exception of David Granger’s FAQ, all the responses available online are facile, humorless and either explicitly reverent of womyn or self-deprecating on behalf of all men. (Granger eked out an exemption purely on strength of wit, and that’s saying a lot.) Yes, Maxim and its ilk are equally superficial, but, whereas Oprah peppers the prose with intimations such as “Spirit, to me, is the essence of who we are” (I suppose there are lesser people to plagiarize than Aristotle.), juvenile men’s magazines are up-front about being superficial - as are fashion magazines such as Vogue. Therein lies their redemption, such as it is. Humbug, Oprah. Humbug.
- [Unrelated:] Mark your calendars. Choke, the next of Chuck Palahniuk’s novels to be adapted to the big screen, hits theaters on September 26th. Personally, I’m still debating whether or not to re-read the book as a warm-up.
cwoy2j | 14-Jul-08 at 11:39 pm | Permalink
Totally didn’t know about the Choke movie. Sam Rockwell and Anjelica Houston? I’m there dude.