Meninism

1. Whores

Plenty of men are feminists. It can be a confusing choice: there is not alot of guidence for young men in the area and the menimist is bound to make the mistake of taking the wrong position, using the wrong vocabulary and assuming every female he sees is a feminist. (I would put the actual number at 2 women out of ten in any given room USA). The other day I was in audiance of a Creative Career panel and was one of only two men in the room--All five of the panelists and the MC were women. The other man, a young man, was definitely a confused feminist. He sat in the back of the room and could not will with his mind his eyes up from the table.
The most interesting panelist of the afternoon was an Art therapist from New York. I said a few words to her afterwards to staunch the itch from the sting that not a soul was interested in speaking to her. Eighty percent on the sign-in sheet were communication majors and after the Q and A they all lined up before the Marketing/PR speaker. The marketing panelist was the youngest of all the other creative career speekers and part of her spiel was "I didn't have alot growing up and I want alot now." Yep, the ladies just lined right up.
. . .
All marketing and adverstising people are whores--male or female--they are partaking in a souless simoniac act that does nothing--nothing to add to the enlightenment stew that so many other jobs spend their time stirring. Now, Linda and Patty, my two older sisters both work for the biggest advertising agency in the midwest. So, do I think they are whores? no. yes. What they do is whore-ish. There is nothing sexual about the word "whore" and it's too good a word to waste on a sometimes sad and menimistlly confusing prostituion. Whore is gender neutral, therefore unsexual. It is the selling, the buying and trading of lies.

2.

I was virtually raised by my two sisters and mother. My father was deeply involved in the commmunity and like most children of community parents the lessons of absence stressed civic involvement over...involvement.(Dad- I love you) I didn't learn much in the way of manerisms growing up. Most of what I learned about being a man came from the women I dated who showed me what they expected from me--being a man.
The other day, D and I were watching Barrymore's Whip it --itself a nice feminist narrative-- and I was struck with the perfect missed oppurtunity to gender-switch a classic colloquialism. In the scene where Ellen Page is being goaded into trying out roller derby, a beutifully freckeled Alia Shawkat says, "You don't have the balls". I turned to my wife and asked, "Why didn't she say 'You don't have the tits"?
I know the word balls sounds more lyrical than tits. Just saying Balls activates the fat bottom lip and playfully slaps the cheeks together--"Balls" while tits is a sharp "ta" that picks the tongue against the roof of the mouth and squirks out a quick impolite V of air. "Tits".
I am also well aware of the psychological beach that is associated with women who have undergone mastectomies and understand the implications of switching gender nouns and the abrasiveness, tactlessness--all that. I feel like a asshole for even broaching the subject. (see #1) Ask a man between testosterone treatments if the loss of his testicals is a major blow to any man's hood and he would cry, "Bollucks. Yeh."
Saying tits or balls is not classy anyway, so if you're inclined to use the term, you're not thinking of our loved ones--the cancer patients. My real point is not so somber: it is not fair to men to associate such crass languange only with men's mentionables when women in the new vulgar world use it just as freely. If you are a women, use the term, step up, own your anatomy,
"Have the tits."

3.

I have only seen one man in a Yoga exercise show and he didn't speak. His role was to demonstrate the more difficult poses. In a field dominated by women, just once, I would like to hear a female Yogi say this:
"Now, take your time through this next move. And men, if your boys get in the way, just spread your feet apart a few inches. You may find that tucking during this pose is more effective."
I would buy that video. I might even buy her cookbook.

Questionnaire

I used to be happy to answer peoples questions because questionnaires are much more impersonal than real life. Back when the cigarette companies were in full offensive mode they would send attractive girls and guys into bars to ask customer opinion in exchange for a pack or two. My solution more than once was mustard flavored smokes. Seriously. Yum. I was finally over questionnaires after I had taken the Scientology personality test that asked something like 200 fairly complex questions before I realized that one day I would die and none of this would matter. I was at a coffee shop at the time, the owner was trying to turn me on to Steely Dan (This would not be the last fan to do so). I still wonder if the point of the test was to leave an existential crack in my soul. Before I had a cell phone telemarketers would call me. I could hear the relief of getting a young person on the line and I would answer their questions and then at the end when they would try to sell me a TV guide, I would mock innocence at the notion they only really wanted to sell me something. I did this until I realized I being quite a dick for doing it and I should spend my time otherwise. Now, no one ever asks me for my opinion. At the mall the other day, a booth of market researchers completely ignored me as I walked by. I am older now, no longer part of the demographic that spends every dollar made on hip wares and too young for childrens diva barbie cereal.

Quiet

Quake

An ex-girlfriend of mine who went by the moniker, Killcreek, beat the creator of Quake, a first person shooter game, online while attending KU. She eventualy started dating the person she beat and became quite famous in the gaming world. You have to understand that back then in the nineties, woman gamers were few, so her presence was a noted big deal. I found out about this from my friend Joel, who always seems to know the whereabouts of people we went to school with, be it drawing comics for the now defunct Spin magazine or showing up on the Johnson County Police Website. One day I recieved a call from him informing me that Killcreek was in a Playboy spread entitled Girls of Gaming, or something like that. Long story short, as I proceded to masterbate to her centerfold I was stopped short. It wasn't that I felt like a pedophile, although she had skipped a grade when we were dating in the fifth grade. It was more, a feeling of corruption--a perversion of innocence. Like some how I was corrupting a moment--a feeling--like the sting of nostalgia, an era. That if I somehow defaced these childhood memories I would be crossing a threshold, some sort of event horizon that I would never be able to escape, and the surviving future would be something new and almost biblically horrible.
SEE ALSO: J GEILS BAND

Q

I picked the letter Q to be cute or coquettish. Actually, I like the way it sounds when a child says it in running down her ABC's. QRS-T. Look at it and say it, like you have just learned it. QRS. The way Q seems to stumble into RS, like a rotund woman on a downward escalator sticking her highheel into the back of the letter R, thus stumbling in S and T. Like she has some sort of grudge against R and S and T, as if she--or lets admit it, Q could very well be the drag queen of the alphabet--has watched Wheel of Fortune since its inception and has finally had enough of being ignored. Like the puking quare quack at some right wing tea party, a flaying quaker who insists his quartan is just waiting to be delivered. Like I said, I picked the letter Q to be cute or coquettish.