Some 65 years after their service, the 300 surviving Women Airforce Service Pilots are being honored with the Congressional Gold Medal.
The House of Representatives on Tuesday passed a measure awarding the women one of the national's highest civilian honors. The Senate passed a similar measure in May and President Obama is expected to sign it.
With only about a quarter of the former WASPs still alive and all in their late 80s or older, it was important for the House to act quickly, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Florida, a sponsor of the bill, told CNN.
"This is a largely overlooked veterans group. They haven't gotten the medals they deserve, the recognition they deserve," Ros-Lehtinen told CNN.
…The WASP records were sealed for more than 30 years. In 1977 Congress voted to make them eligible for veterans' benefits.
"I didn't care for veteran status, but now I could have a flag on my coffin ... that is important to me," [Deanie Parrish] said.
Parrish married a pilot after the war. She and her daughter, Nancy, for over a decade have documented the work of the WASPs. Read more about the WASPs at the Wings Across America Web site.
While some of the WASPs say the medal itself is a nice gesture, more importantly they say they hope the publicity will teach younger generations about their accomplishments and remind some still skeptical men just how capable women are.
Blub. Read the whole article, seriously. There's so much great history there.
I think it's the only thing that will protect me from this:
The Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen team are in the UK, to premiere the film and plug the mercy out if it. My own video from the London press day is coming soon, but in the meantime, the BBC have popped their own interviews online and, by the by, broken a story on the nextIndiana Jones film.
Newsround presenter Lizo Mzimba squeezed Shia LaBeouf for some details on his upcoming projects and according to the sometime Jones Jr., Steven Spielberg has “cracked” the story for the next movie and is “gearing that up”.
There’s been a long standing rumor that Spielberg and Lucas are planning a hand-down of the torch from Harrison Ford to Shia LaBeouf, a rumor that started before part four yet still stands. How true that story is I have no idea, however, but I’m not exactly keen on the idea. For an Indiana Jones skeptic like myself, Ford’s winking charm is one of the most enjoyable ingredients in the series and I don’t know how much I’d care about a revision of the recipe that didn’t include it. Shia seems to be growing out of his particular charms, I think. He was a perfectly good nervy-awkward teenager, but I don’t know where he goes from here.
Well, there's always that "instantly communicate with monkeys somehow and get them to attack Nazis" angle. Maybe they could work that in there again.
Ugh. Between this and the other completeshitedrippingout of Hollywood these days, I wonder if I'll ever go to the movies again.
So, Spudsy and Deeky and I have already parsed the megafail that is the premise of Sacha Baron-Cohen's upcoming trainwreck Brüno, in which the straight actor purports to expose homophobia by portraying a mincing gay stereotype, without a trace of irony.
Now that the marketing for the film is in full-swing, the collection of idiots that is the American media is playing along, with MTV giving Baron-Cohen the opportunity to do his predatory gay shtick at the MTV Movie Awards, and various outlets allowing him to do interviews as Brüno, complete with all the gays-are-funny double entendres that are a hallmark of the character.
Today I see that GQ is featuring Brüno on its July cover:
[Click to embiggen.]
My first thought was: When was the last time they featured an actual out gay man on their cover?
The answer is possibly never. I went back through every cover since Jan. 1990, and among the hundreds of actors, singers, athletes, politicians, and other famous men pictured, not a single one of them is gay and out.
It would rock my world if, on July 10, the day Brüno was scheduled to open, Sacha Baron-Cohen instead announced that the entire thing was a scam, designed to reveal the depth of the American media's hostility toward real, ordinary gay people, and every scheduled showing of Brüno would actually be a screening of The Celluloid Closet.
But somehow I don't think that's going to happen.
Instead, it will just be another straight dude being a hugely offensive wanker and calling it edgy, dismissing his critics as humorless losers. Rinse. Repeat.
Despite President Barack Obama's pledge to introduce a new era of transparency to Washington, and despite two rulings by a federal judge that the records are public, the Secret Service has denied msnbc.com's request for the names of all White House visitors from Jan. 20 to the present. It also denied a narrower request by the nonpartisan watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which sought logs of visits by executives of coal companies.
1. The keynote speaker at the Flashbelt convention gives a wildly inappropriate presentation that includes, among other things: slides of "a woman's lower half, her legs spread (wearing stilettos, of course) and her shaved vagina visible through some see-thru panties that say 'drink me'," doodles of a penis coming on a face, and "a self-made flash movie of an animated woman's face, positioned as if she's having sex with [the user], who gradually orgasms based on the speed of [the user's] mouse movement on the page." The speaker and the event organizer insist the material was not misogynistic.
2. In association with next month's Comic-Con in San Diego, IGN runs a contest that is open only to men:
The other day, comics blogger Johanna Draper Carlson broke the news that video-game site IGN was running a contest tying in with District 9, the new movie directed by Neil Blomkamp and produced by Peter Jackson. District 9, of course, is the movie about aliens landing on Earth and being forced into horrendous internment camps, thus demonstrating the evil of segregation and treating intelligent beings like second-class citizens. But this message was lost on IGN and the film's publicists, who put together a contest aimed only at males:
This sweepstakes is open only to males who are both legal residents of the fifty (50) United States and Washington D.C. and who are at least between 18-24 years of age as of July 23, 2009.
The winner of the contest would go to Comic-Con where he (and it has to be a "he") would take part in a "journalistic assignment" relating to District 9, interviewing people connected to the movie, under the supervision of someone from IGN.
…When the controversy continued over the weekend, IGN finally backed down and created a second contest, just for women. Men have until June 22 to enter their contest, women have until July 3, since their contest was created later. Still, the fact that IGN's contest was originally for men only sends a terrible message, and I'm left wondering if the contest's female winner will have the same "journalistic assignments" as the male one.
3. Also in anticipation of Comic-Con, the LA Times runs "The Girls' Guide to Comic-Con 2009," which explains Comic-Con isn't "just for nerdy guys anymore," and helpfully offers advice to the ladeez since "we've got a pretty good idea of what eager girls can expect (aside from one heck of a line for the 'New Moon' session)."
Women can look forward to "rushing the stage, offering to do star Jake Gyllenhaal's laundry on those washboard abs that he acquired for [Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time], since he spends much of it fighting, shirtless or both. Jake, we don't want to know how to quit you." (Oh, hello there, gay joke. Nice to see you amongst the misogyny, as per usual.) And naturally, women need nothing more—nothing!—than "the hunkiest Aussie to ever play the undead," unless it's a werewolf to "keep you warm [and] sympathize with your monthly curse." Dire.
Nintendo DS owners that pre-order the limited edition game Strike Witches will be treated to a pouch shaped like Bloomers (buruma) shorts—the shorts traditionally worn in gym by Japanese schoolgirls.
Bookmark this post for the next time someone asks you where all the girl gamers are.
Please enjoy—and by enjoy, I mean hold in contempt while using as a reminder of why you're a womanist/feminist/ally—Judd Apatow answeringVanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire.
Make sure you take time to appreciate the super-duper extra specialness of how not a single woman makes his lists of living people he most admires, favorite writers, or heroes. Like most dudebros, the only women worth shit to him appear to be his own wife and daughters, i.e. the women he owns.
If you wanted to ensure I would never, ever, tune in to watch an episode of your new sports show Joe Buck Live, launching the series with a guest panel that included Artie Lange, and allowing him to monopolize the entire panel segment with misogynist and homophobic humor while professional dudebros Paul Rudd and Jason Sudeikis chuckled along, was an excellent strategy.
And lest you think this is the grumbling of a silly girl who never watched your sports shows anyway, for years I watched your Wimbledon coverage, have seen dozens of boxing matches, have watched countless numbers of your sports documentaries, and I've enjoyed many episodes of On the Record with Bob Costas/Costas Now and Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel over the years.
But you quite obviously don't want me as a viewer of Joe Buck Live, and I am happy to oblige.
Yes, I know I'm a hypersensitive and joyless hysteric who needs to get a life and [insert your own literal or ironic accusation here], but something about this ad is rubbing me the wrong way:
If you can't view the video, it opens with the shot of a dairy cow from behind, then cuts to a close-up of the teats of its udder, which begin to "moo" and stretch, as if they're reaching out toward something. The moo-and-reach happens about half a dozen times, then the shot pulls back to reveal a little white boy on his knees in the grass next to the cow, taunting the udder with an Oreo cookie and giggling. Text: "Oreo. Milk's favorite cookie."
So what's bothering me? Well, there's the facelessness of the cow, which is turned away from the camera; and there's the udder being given separate agency from the whole animal, seemingly more agency, a life of its own; and there's the little boy taunting the udder, playing with and manipulating the talking, thinking teats—none of which, I'm certain, would have struck me quite the same way if "cows" didn't regularly serve as stand-ins for "women" in modern advertising.
Elle and I recently had a conversation via email about this very thing, which I'm reposting with her permission.
Elle: Liss, I'm begging you to step into the role of mind reader and tell me what the hell am I trying to say! Seriously, I wanted to see if you understand where I'm going with this: Something about the comparisons (wrong word) between cows and women, esp. since cow is a commonly used insult for women.
It begins with this [Real California Milk Happy Cow Audition], filtered through the lens of this and this, and a million stories about Madonna and other "divas."
There's also the fact that the cow competition is set up like "America's Next Top Model" or something and that here you can hear other female cows making snide comments and a male cow drooling over the "contestants." Also the female cows' bios are something.
Maybe I'm wrong, but that commercial pissed me off when I saw it yesterday. Does everything have to be sold through gendered stereotypes?
Liss: I totally understand where you're going with this. At least for me, part of the thing about assigning stereotypically (and almost universally negative) female behavior to dairy cows specifically is that dairy cows are: A. All female; B. Live a life of female-specific servitude (i.e. they exist to lactate); C. Virtually indistinguishable from one another.
The tacit message is that all women are the same, valued exclusively on their service to others, and, ha ha, are totes bitchez, amiright?!
*headdesk*
There's also something just generally horrible about its being dairy cows—forcibly impregnated, enslaved as lactation machines—who are cast as demanding divas.
It sort of flaunts in the face of the reality that women are still chattel in large parts of the world, treated quite literally like livestock, that there are still loads of people in this country who would force women to carry unwanted pregnancies to term and believe a woman's place is "in the home," making and raising babies.
Elle: You know what—I had thought about the forced lactation (and that being the queen of dairy cows is what they're supposed to aspire to, what makes them happy), but somewhere disconnected and didn't think about forcible impregnation!
Ahhhhh!
Because now I'm thinking about how that does apply to perceptions of women—how many people comfort themselves by thinking that women are happiest "in the home," being queen of the domestic sphere.
Liss: It might actually take years to unpack all the whatthefuckery that goes along with this campaign, lol.
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Which I now leave you to attempt in comments. And naturally it's not just cows that are stand-ins for "human woman," but other livestock, as in the White Castle advert that casts a pig in the role of female stripper. The problem is that the animals are not merely being anthropomorphized; they're being inserted into a preexisting stereotype of womanhood, turned into a literal substitution for a female human. When women and cows (or pigs) are treated as interchangeable entities, it casts the Oreo commercial in a very different light indeed. I don't imagine Oreo was unaware of that eventuality.
A week ago, David Letterman made a joke during his monologue that, while visiting New York with her mother, Governor Sarah Palin's daughter got "knocked up by [Yankee third baseman] Alex Rodriguez." The joke was supposed to be about A-Rod's reputation as a ladies' man and Bristol Palin being a teenage mom, which is a pretty shitty joke to make to begin with—but the daughter accompanying Palin was not 18-year-old Bristol, but 14-year-old Willow. That made it beyond merely tasteless and slut-shaming; that made it a rape joke.
Conservatives, predictably, went into high-gear lambasting Letterman—which would have been a lot more impressive if they'd ever done the same in situations like, for instance, conservative blowhard Bill O'Reilly suggesting a 15-year-old boy who'd been kidnapped and held captive for four years probably stayed voluntarily because he was having "a lot more fun then when he had under his own parents," then refused to apologize it was confirmed that the child had been repeatedly raped and tortured by his captor.
Fauxgressives, predictably, defended Letterman and mocked the very idea that the joke was inappropriate in any way. I certainly understand the impulse to hold in contempt the caterwauling conservatives whose selective outrage is more strongly suggestive of political opportunism and the chance to hit a public liberal than any genuine concern for the Palin daughters, but just because the people making the charge have no integrity doesn't mean they're wrong—it's not a progressive position to defend a joke that was, at worst, a statutory rape joke, and, at best, a slut-shaming joke, directed in either case at a young woman who never sought the public's attention in the first place.
Last night, Letterman apologized.
All right, here, I've been thinking about this situation with Governor Palin and her family now for about a week—it was a week ago tonight, and maybe you know about it, maybe you don't know about it—but there was a joke that I told, and I thought I was telling it about the older daughter being at Yankee Stadium. And it was kind of a coarse joke. There's no getting around it, but I never thought it was anybody other than the older daughter, and before the show, I checked to make sure in fact that she is of legal age, 18. Yeah. But the joke really, in and of itself, can't be defended.
The next day, people are outraged. They're angry at me because they said, "How could you make a lousy joke like that about the 14-year-old girl who was at the ball game?" And I had, honestly, no idea that the 14-year-old girl, I had no idea that anybody was at the ball game except the Governor and I was told at the time she was there with Rudy Giuliani...And I really should have made the joke about Rudy... [audience applauds] But I didn't, and now people are getting angry and they're saying, "Well, how can you say something like that about a 14-year-old girl, and does that make you feel good to make those horrible jokes about a kid who's completely innocent, minding her own business," and, turns out, she was at the ball game. I had no idea she was there. So she's now at the ball game and people think that I made the joke about her.
And, but still, I'm wondering, "Well, what can I do to help people understand that I would never make a joke like this?" I've never made jokes like this as long as we've been on the air, 30 long years, and you can't really be doing jokes like that. And I understand, of course, why people are upset. I would be upset myself.
And then I was watching the Jim Lehrer "Newshour"—this commentator, the columnist Mark Shields, was talking about how I had made this indefensible joke about the 14-year-old girl, and I thought, "Oh, boy, now I'm beginning to understand what the problem is here. It's the perception rather than the intent." It doesn't make any difference what my intent was, it's the perception.
And, as they say about jokes, if you have to explain the joke, it's not a very good joke. And I'm certainly— [audience applauds] Thank you. Well, my responsibility—I take full blame for that. I told a bad joke. I told a joke that was beyond flawed, and my intent is completely meaningless compared to the perception. And since it was a joke I told, I feel that I need to do the right thing here and apologize for having told that joke. It's not your fault that it was misunderstood, it's my fault. That it was misunderstood. [audience applauds] Thank you.
So I would like to apologize, especially to the two daughters involved, Bristol and Willow, and also to the Governor and her family and everybody else who was outraged by the joke. I'm sorry about it and I'll try to do better in the future. Thank you very much. [audience applauds]
It sounds, at least to me, like an earnest apology, recognizing that intent is irrelevant and acknowledging that there are legitimate objections to the "joke"-gone-awry, and I believe it should be taken as sincere and accepted in good faith—something Governor Palin has already done (in her inimitable way) and many of the conservatives who are calling for Letterman to be fired have not, because, of course, they don't really want an apology, or even for Letterman to do better in future; what they want is to see Letterman ruined, for reasons that have nothing to do at all with a joke about Palin's daughter, which is exactly the kind of joke at which they'd laugh themselves, if only it had been made about the daughter of a liberal.
And now that Letterman has apologized for exploiting the Palin daughters to get laughs, I wonder if the conservatives who have been exploiting them to fight the same old bloody war the past week, and the fauxgressives who have defended their exploitation to fight the same old bloody war the past week, will apologize, too.
A so-called "Christian" group in Wisconsin has some hot plans for a book in a local library.
Francesca Lia Block, an award-winning author of young-adult books (the "Weetzie Bat" series among them), has known for a while now that one of her novels, "Baby Be-Bop" is at the center of a controversy in West Bend, Wis.
A few days ago, she found out that it might be burned at the stake. "Baby Be-Bop" is on a list of titles that a local group calling itself the West Bend Citizens for Safe Libraries objects to seeing in the public library. In February, the group asked the library's board to remove a page of recommended titles about gay and lesbian issues for young people (including "Baby Be-Bop") from the library's Web site. Then they demanded that the books be moved from the youth section of the library and placed with the adult collection, "to protect children from accessing them without their parents' knowledge and supervision."
[...]
Now an outfit called the Christian Civil Liberties Union has gotten in on the act, suing the library for, according to the West Bend Daily News, "damaging" the "mental and emotional well-being" of several individuals by displaying "Baby Be-Bop" in the library. Since attempts to label the novel as "pornographic" have failed, the (somewhat shadowy) CCLU hopes to brand it as hate speech, in part because it contains the word "nigger." The complainants, described as "elderly" by the newspaper, claim that Block's novel is "explicitly vulgar, racial [sic] and anti-Christian." They want the library's copy not only removed but publicly burned.
"Baby Be-Bop," a title from the Weetzie Bat series that describes the youth of Weetzie's best friend, Dirk, is, in Block's words, "a very sweet, simple, coming-of-age story about a young man's discovery that he's gay." Dirk is beaten by gay bashers but steadfastly clings to the possibility of finding love. Block finds the disingenuous charges of racism particularly distressing. "Obviously I use those words, including 'faggot,' which is also in the book, to expose racism and homophobia, not promote it," she said. "It's a tiny little book," she added, "but they want to burn it like a witch."
I wouldn't question the CCLU in the area of "hate speech;" they seem to be experts in that field.
It's one thing to want a book that might be considered inappropriate for children put on a shelf in a library that clearly states that it is meant for adults, but this book doesn't sound anything like that; contrary to the feverish obsession of these ignoramuses, there's more to being gay than just having sex. (True to form, the folks who carry on about morality and the Radical Homosexual Agenda are a lot more preoccupied with sex than any normal person -- gay or straight -- should be.) To advocate for publicly burning a book brings it to a level of psychosis that reaches way beyond looking out for what's appropriate and what's not. These people have a deep-seated phobia about anything connected with homosexuality, and it's pretty scary that they're disturbed enough to come out, so to speak, with their rage and their hatred.
These folks have a lot to learn about civil liberties, not to mention a lot about Christianity, too.
The New York Times editors mince no words in taking the Obama administration to task for its failure to champion gay rights:
The Obama administration, which came to office promising to protect gay rights but so far has not done much, actually struck a blow for the other side last week. It submitted a disturbing brief in support of the Defense of Marriage Act, which is the law that protects the right of states to not recognize same-sex marriages and denies same-sex married couples federal benefits. The administration needs a new direction on gay rights.
...If the administration does feel compelled to defend [DOMA], it should do so in a less hurtful way. It could have crafted its legal arguments in general terms, as a simple description of where it believes the law now stands. There was no need to resort to specious arguments and inflammatory language to impugn same-sex marriage as an institution.
The best approach of all would have been to make clear, even as it defends the law in court, that it is fighting for gay rights. It should work to repeal "don't ask, don't tell," the law that bans gay men and lesbians in the military from being open about their sexuality. It should push hard for a federal law banning employment discrimination. It should also work to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act in Congress.
The administration has had its hands full with the financial crisis, health care, Guantánamo Bay and other pressing matters. In times like these, issues like repealing the marriage act can seem like a distraction — or a political liability. But busy calendars and political expediency are no excuse for making one group of Americans wait any longer for equal rights.
What's your favorite silly question game to play with friends?
Iain and I, and many of our friends, are big fans of "How Much Would Someone Have to Pay You To...?" (which I'm guessing is self-explanatory), "Would You Rather...?" (in which two hilariously heinous options are posed for selection and explanation of one's choice, the latter being the fun part), and the always-popular "Who Would Win in a Fight?"
Last time we played, Kenny Blogginz asked me, "Who would win in a fight: Gandalf or Robocop?"
I replied, "Obviously, Gandalf. Insects can wreak havoc with machinery, and he would recruit kamikaze moths to fuck Robocop's shit up. He could win via mothstrike from the other side of the world."
KBlogz told me that he has asked many, many people that question, and many have chosen Gandalf, ultimately indefensibly, but that mine was the most creative strategy and defense of my choice that he'd heard. I naturally beamed with the pride of the impossibly nerdy.
Via Think Progress comes another story about another Republican engaging in more racist fuckery on the internetz: Sheri Goforth, a legislative staffer for Republican Tennessee state senator Diane Black, emailed a picture of the 44 US presidents, where President Obama is represented by a set of googly eyes set against a black background:
I don't even understand what's supposed to be funny about this. The whole joke is that he's black? Oh, my aching sides.
Nashville Is Talking asked Goforth about the email:
She confirmed she had sent it and also said she had received a letter of reprimand from her superiors but said she will stay on the job.
When I asked her if she understood the controversial nature of the photo, Goforth would only say she felt very bad about accidentally sending it to the wrong list. When I gave her a second chance to address the controversial nature of the email, she again repeated that she only felt bad about sending it to the wrong list of people.
"I went on the wrong email and I inadvertently hit the wrong button," Goforth told NIT. "I'm very sick about it, and it's one of those things I can't change or take back."
Wonkette pretty well sums it up: "Yes, yes, Republicans must be careful not to hit the 'wrong button' when sending out the racist bullshit. Sadly, our liberal technology sector has yet to create a button that would only send your racist fuckwad idiocy to fellow mouth-breathing racist cretins who think there is NOTHING as funny as the idea of…people with dark complexions."
...who was bringing up two very lovely girls—when, all of a sudden, she needs to have toe surgery followed by bedrest, and the full-tilt dipshit she calls a husband has to care for their kids himselffor an entire weekend.
Sure, for a couple workdays I was able to call in reinforcements (my mom and mother-in-law), but an entire weekend lay ahead in which I was to be the prime caregiver to Lorelei, who was just hitting 6 months, and Isabelle, our 3-year-old. Meanwhile, my wife was upstairs in our bed, on painkillers and armed with her cell phone so that I was always just a speed dial away from doing her bidding.
This would be a weekend in which I couldn't do only the fun stuff -- like playing blocks and watching cartoons -- with the girls. I was obviously going to have to feed both of them (three times a day!), and I would have to tackle Herculean tasks like giving baths, changing all of the diapers, putting them both to bed, and even giving medicine to Lorelei, who had an ear infection.
Oh my fucking gawd. It's a miracle the poor man survived.
As was reading this piece of dreck, another in a long line of dreadful parenting and relationship pieces featured at CNN recently, I was thinking surely the moral of this story would be such that the author's framing (that Fathers' Day is given short shrift) was the opposite bookend to a realization that, in far too many cases, fathers haven't actually earned equal recognition from their own families.
But...no.
I was fixing a French dish I like to call poisson et pommes frites (um, fish sticks and fries), when I caught Anderson Cooper on CNN. He was in Baghdad, surrounded by American soldiers, saying he was exhausted and scared. Yet he warned the audience not to be too impressed with him. In a few days, he would fly home. The soldiers would remain at their posts.
Now, I'm not comparing our girls to Iraqi insurgents, but I do appreciate more than ever that mothers are usually the soldiers in the parenting battlefield. Even full-time working moms do more child-rearing than us dads, studies have repeatedly found. Fathers tend to play the part of the dashing news reporter, swooping into parenting duties just long enough to get our hands dirty. My wife deserves her weeping cherry tree. And like most moms, she is worthy of much more.
Yet I think we dads merit at least a little more than boxer shorts, soap-on-a-rope, and neckties. We don't get the good stuff because we're paying for the sins of our fathers, and our fathers' fathers. But these days, dads are changing diapers, warming bottles, and taking our kids to the park. We may not be where you want us yet, but we've evolved, and we're involved.
So says the man who just admitted he leaves almost the entirety of childcare in the hands of his children's mother. He doesn't regularly feed them, bathe them, dispense their medicine, change their diapers, or put them to bed, but somehow he's still "involved" and deserves the same recognition as his wife, that selfish harridan who keeps her cell phone handy during convalescence to make her poor, put-upon husband do "her bidding," even during weekend days when he couldn't recruit some other female relative of his daughters' to care for them!
Just as much as the moms, we appreciate the cards, the praise, and being treated special on our day. So if any of you mothers now feel guilty enough to spring for a slightly nicer Father's Day gift -- say, a plasma TV with a 50-inch screen -- make sure it also has built-in speakers with surround-sound.
Yeesh. Someone get this guy a cookie already.
Maybe a 50-incher that has spelled out in chocolate chips: "Father of the Year."
"DOMA is not 'neutral' to a federal employee serving in your administration who is denied equal compensation because she cannot cover her same-sex spouse in her health plan. When a woman must choose between her job and caring for her spouse because they are not covered by the FMLA, DOMA is not 'neutral.' DOMA is not a 'neutral' policy to the thousands of bi-national same-sex couples who have to choose between family and country because they are considered strangers under our immigration laws. It is not a 'neutral' policy toward the minor child of a same-sex couple, who is denied thousands of dollars of surviving mother's or father's benefits because his parents are not 'spouses' under Social Security law. Exclusion is not neutrality."—Joe Solmonese, President of the Human Rights Campaign, in an open letter to President Barack Obama regarding the administration's craptastic defense of DOMA.
Shaker Vgnvxn sent me the link to the poster for Nia Vardalos' new film, My Life in Ruins, which features a highly-retouched image of Vardalos:
[Click to embiggen.]
Vardalos is 46 years old, and in candid images of the actress at the premiere of the film, she looks like a 46-year-old woman:
[Click to embiggen.]
There's nothing wrong with being a 46-year-old woman, and there's nothing wrong with looking like a 46-year-old woman. There's also nothing inherently and objectively unattractive about a 46-year-old woman. Only according to some bullshit beauty standard that expects women never to age is there shame in showing the hard-earned lines of a life fully lived, and only in a vain and immature culture which axiomatically favors youth over experience can there be found justification for dehumanizing Vardalos into a plasticized doll-version of herself and calling that an improvement.
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By way of reminder: Comments that try to suss out what changes, exactly, were made, and even comments noting that, for example, the removal of laugh lines because they are ZOMG wrinkles actually robs a face of its character or humanity, are welcome. Discussions of how "she looks prettier/hotter/better in the candid picture" and associated commentary (which would certainly make me feel like shit if I were the person being discussed) are not. So please comment in keeping with the series' intent, implicit in which is the question: If no one can ever be beautiful enough, then to what end is the pursuit of an elusive perfection?
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