Do you like riddles? I do. Here’s my favorite:
What goes around a button?
You might think the answer is “a buttonhole.” But you would be WRONG!
Well, technically, you would be right, but the correct answer to this riddle is “a goat.”
Because goats go around a-buttin.’ You know, like butting things.
Ok, that joke only works when you say it out loud, and it’s a bit of an open question as to whether it works at all. It’s from a very old and very bad book of jokes and riddles I encountered as a child.
Look, I didn’t say I liked GOOD riddles. I sort of prefer the terrible ones.
And I’m in luck! A few days ago a drive-by commenter left a giant angry dump of a comment in response to one of my posts from way back in 2011. I didn’t let the comment through moderation, but it contained a riddle, of sorts, that I would like to share with you all.
What “is similar to a man wearing small tight thongs and having an erection?”
Set aside the issue of why this fellow is wearing more than one thong, and see what you can come up with.
A banana in a bikini?
A sausage in a small hammock?
A roll of quarters in a diaper?
I’m running out of ideas here.
One of those long balloons that they make balloon animals out of, inside a bag that’s too small for it?
Nope!
The answer is: “Women wearing provocative clothes.”
Let’s let Jon explain it:
Women wearing provocative clothes is similar to a man wearing small tight thongs and having an erection. HOw would you feel men hanging out like that? WOuld you invite them to meet your wife/daughter?
First of all, I don’t have a “wife/daughter.” And I am troubled by Jon’s assumption that I am anti-thong, when it comes to men. I’m not. Dude thongs are fine, in moderation. I’m wearing one right now. I require visitors to put on thongs before entering my apartment. I put them on my cats, when I can catch them.
NOTE TO EXTREMELY LITERAL-MINDED READERS: I’m not really wearing a thong. I don’t actually require visitors to put on thongs before entering my apartment. I don’t put them on my cats. I was making some little jokes. That said, I don’t really care if guys wear thongs to the beach, though they should really cover up (and try to think of very unsexy things) if they get erections. As should anyone who gets an erection in public.
In the post that Jon is responding to, I took issue with a fellow who suggested that women who “dress … provocatively and leav[e] a man in an unfinished state of excitement” are essentially assaulting men. Things that this fellow regarded as “provocative” included jeans, high heels, exposed hair. Some of his other arguments were even more, er, provocative.
But let’s get back to Jon, who had many further thoughts and theories he wanted to share with me and my readers, most of which involved explaining how totally wrong he thinks I am, and most of which have nothing to do with my post.
Here are his thoughts on non-verbal communication,
Most human communication is non verbal. For example, if I wink at your wife, are you ok with that? I am just winking right? No David (author) don’t be judgmental! Well that’s called “hitting a girl!”. So provocative outfits create the same sense as sexual organs on a man’s face. It sends non verbal sexual messages.
Er, sexual organs on a man’s face? How exactly did we get from winking to sexual organs on a man’s face?
Women are not a minority – they form 51% of the population and are a MAJORITY.
Thanks for the tip!
Women failures in mathematics, sciences, sports, jobs are not a man’s fault.
How about grammatical errors made by men? Whose fault are they?
In fact most men are not anti-female. At the very least they usually love their mothers, grand mothers, daughters and maybe wives.
‘Maybe wives?” I’m sensing some bitterness here.
Women have failed in these areas as they are just not good enough and lack that white matter in brain that is created by 20,000 evolution and male testosterone. These are biological facts.
Would any biologists care to comment on these, er, facts?
Women do better than men in fields that require caring and nurturing such as certain medical fields (nursing, gynecology), giving birth to babies and raising them.
I will concede that having a uterus does give someone a bit of an advantage when it comes to giving birth to babies.
That said, I am not suggesting preventing women from pursuing their dreams but dont expect 50% of Einsteins and newtons to be women. In fact there has never been a great female scientist of the rank of newton, gauss, euler etc. All major scientific inventions (even minor ones actually) are all male.
WE INVENTED THE MAMMOTH TO FEED YOU.
Nature has designed the human female body to carry babies and be sexually attractive to a man. If this was not the case, human species would not have made it this far. It is the very reason that men have hair on their faces and a muscular body. Its called evolution and you cant (and there is no need to) challenge 20,000 years of human evolution.
Men have hair on their faces so … women can be sexy to them?
I’m thinking Jon might have mixed up some of his notes from Biology 101.
But speaking of sexy, let me just end this post with a dude in what appears to be a Speedo or Speedo equivalent.
I don’t know why, biologically speaking, he’s holding a nailgun, but then again I wasn’t paying careful attention in Biology 101 either.
Also it kind of looks like someone else’s face has been photoshopped over the original Speeo-wearer’s face. I have no idea why. Let’s just call that another riddle.
Tracer is canonically non-straight?
That’s cool.
And complaining about it is stupid.
But also: meh. It’s something that literally will never come up in the game. It’s a game about running around and shooting people. Blizzard has put a lot of work into the characters and backstory and world building… while also creating a game in which all of that is completely irrelevant.
It’s kind of like Rowling saying that Dumbledore was gay. Great, I guess, but ultimately weak-sauce. There’s no way you’d ever know just from experiencing the work itself. It is something that never comes up and is never addressed, so it’s really just a token nod to inclusivity.
Isn’t also true that Blizzard was planing to change/remove the butt pose before the guy complained because they also felt the pose was too out of character?
@brian, Blizzard is publishing little comics and things about the lives of the characters. The one in question has Tracer trying to find a gift for her girlfriend for Christmas. So, sure, it won’t come up in the game, but it’s not a throwaway comment from Blizzard – they spent time and money to make the comic. I don’t think we should minimize that sort of positive effort. Your mileage may vary, of course!
Dumbledore, as representation for the queer population, actually bothers me a bit, although I rather liked the Harry Potter series, with all its glorious plotholes and terrible problematic places. He’s this… “good” gay, the gay who tried to act on it once, got seriously burned, and never mentioned it in polite society again. I mean, props for the nod to C.S. Lewis, but in general, the closet is a sad and lonely place. Would it have killed the author to put one picture of Dumbledore and “longtime companion” smiling and waving from the wizard equivalent of a Sandals resort?
‘Compassion is weak and womanly, so it’s lesser.’
Except in those cultures where compassion is considered a spiritual strength, and of course men have more of it than those practical nonspiritual women.
The Shrek thing reminds me of a ‘science in the pub’ talk I went to once where the speaker kept using ‘ladies’ underwear!’ as a synonym for something weird, mysterious and kind of funny. I didn’t tell the dude directly, but I wrote to the organisers (this wasn’t the first or only misogynist thing that had happened in these talks) that a good chunk of his audience saw ladies’ underwear every day and didn’t find it particularly bizarre.
“Thongs” plural is an Australian term for the kind of sandals that we New Zealanders refer to (correctly) as “jandals”.
Pretty much exactly this happens on an episode of Friends – minus the binoculars. Any guess as to who the creepy dude is?
(Spoilers: It’s Ross. Of course it’s Ross.)
I recently rewatched Friends in its entirety and seeing so many episodes in order in a short timespan really drove home just how creepy, gross and entitled Ross is. When it originally aired I was a teenager and empathized with him even though I was girl because all my crushes were always unrequited. As an adult, I’m very creeped out that a grown man approaches relationships like an angsty self centered 15 year old brat. I always want to tell Rachel to run! The worst was when Rachel had to work overtime and couldn’t pay attention to Ross all the time and he became convinced she was cheating on him with a coworker. He started acting all clingy and jealous and after she explicitly told him not to visit her at the office, he showed up anyway with a bunch of obnoxious romantic gifts and food and broke her office. That relationship was borderline abusive. In my head cannon Rachel changed her mind, moved to Paris after all and took Emma with her.
It’s like the other thread where we were discussing how romance and horror are sometimes indistinguishable because the romance in pop culture so often involves stalking and manipulation.
It is no surprise that the horrible term “friend zone” was either invented or popularized by that show.
Sorry. I could rant about how terrible Ross is all day.
@WWTH
Don’t even get me started on that whiny, entitled, “we were on a break!” crap. Yes, but you also lied, tried to cover it up, and, more importantly, hurt her but want to feel justified in doing so.
I love this new logic from the alt right MRA crowd that women were not ever oppressed, they never wanted to be anything but mothers and wives, that women are dumb and act like children and they would be of no use if men couldn’t have sex with them and impregnate them.
Blaming women for their own oppression, acting like religion is for their benefit since they are just sad little flowers, and pretending that women never did anything in history because they were dumb, not held back by religion, sexism, tradition and mothering. They make no sense and only come off as being the biggest misogynists so insecure that they must blame women for everything that has gone wrong in their lives….all women. It is enough to make me avoid strange men like the plague.
@WWTH
Yeah I’m in the middle of a rewatch, and Ross is definitely the worst.
Also an interesting thing I’ve noticed is that despite how much talk there is about Joey being generally sleazy and a bit of a creep, when you look at his actions in the show he’s mostly just a hornball with little shame, and he has a relatively solid foundation of consent. He’s not perfect by far, but for a show in the 90’s, he gets a lot of things right. Heck, his catchphrase is a verbal (if rudimentary) consent check.
Like, when they’re all in Vegas and Ross and Rachel are getting wasted in the hotel room, Joey gives Rachel “How you doin?” and when she replies positively, he sternly tells Ross not to let her drink any more, because he knows she’d never act that way sober. Think about that: Joey understands the impact intoxication can have on your ability to consent better than the majority of men today. (Ross then gets drunk married to Rachel, lies about getting it annulled, and then tries to convince her to stay married, because he’s worried about how poorly it reflects on him to have been divorced 3 times. Ross is the worst.)
SO GLAD I am not the only one who saw Ross as cringemaking. You could just tell he turned uber-nasty when he got angry, the “cleaning his fist and it went off” sort, and all the gaslighting, all the time. Kudos to Schimmer if it’s not actually part of the actor’s personality and get that man typecast as “mild-mannered serial killer” posthaste.
Yeah, the worst thing Joey really did was have sex with women and not call them. But there’s no indication that he either manipulated them into sex and/or strung along women by pretending he was going to commit when he had no intention of doing so. I don’t think people are obliged to call a sexual partner afterwards if there’s been no established romantic relationship beforehand.
He also didn’t take advantage of drunk Rachel in the alternate universe in which she’s in an unhappy marriage and wants to cheat with Joey because she’s a fan of him on Day of Our Lives. Alternate universe Ross still sucks though. Carol won’t have sex with him and it never occurs to him to actually talk to her about it.
Ross also sucks because he forgets all his son once Emma is born.
I may have watched these episodes too many times.
I just want to say Hedy Lamarr. No, not the idiot in Blazing Saddles. I suspect Mel Brooks of doing that on purpose. Who else could put a radio engineering joke in a western…
She was an actress and a co-inventor of frequency-hopping spread spectrum for torpedoes. Guess what also uses spread spectrum? Every current cell phone on the planet. Many computers have a BIOS option to turn it on to spread out any unwanted radio frequency output. I don’t know what movies she was in, but she sure was smart.
Has no one (MRA idiot not included) heard of Marie Curie? There are many female scientists, and if a borderline illiterate misogynist can’t think of any names, who cares?
@ WWTH
I didn’t watch Friends and didn’t get the humor in it that my classmates in high school seemed to love. But your description of Ross’s creepy entitlement just reminded me of the bullet I dodged when I got spoiled by a review of Passengers and turned away from seeing that movie today.
Dear sweet ceiling cat it’s a sci fi psychological horror that thinks it’s a romantic comedy! The main “protagonist” does something horrifyingly selfish and continues acting creepy and entitled, and the movie treats him as sympathetic and goes yes what he did was wrong but he was just so lonely and he’s really a sweet guy and AAAARGH!!
@JS
Oh, yeah, I work as a radio operator a lot with radios that operate on frequency hop as a necessity, and when I learned that I made sure to spread the knowledge that this crucial piece of opsec tech was invented by an actress. It’s sad that I even knew who Hedy Lamarr was from her acting even as a Millennial, but had never heard of her scientific accomplishments before coming across a Tumblr post of all things. Obviously, there is some serious lack of education on women’s history in this country, and Women’s History Month has not yet remedied this fact.
You’re welcome. 🙂
Now, a serious word of caution for adult male Speedo wearers; if you wear your Speedos regularly be sure to keep an eye on the logo on the front. After a while the letters have a tendency to flake off starting at the ‘S’ end.
Now, a public swimming pool is no place to be when your Speedo trunks are missing the ‘S’.
It’s a mistake I won’t be making again any time soon. 🙂
@JS,
That’s HedLy Lamar, as the character was always quick to remind people. XD
@Scildfreja Unnýðnes, @Dreemr,
I don’t want to necro the thread you two gave me advice in at this point, but I did want to thank you for it. Thinking about it, I do have places around here (Mike Pence’s old stomping grounds, if you can believe it) I can ask for referrals.
Again, thanks.
I could feel them with my hands… but only with their consent. 😉
And seriously, this is ridiculous.
@Flora – Congratulations, that’s awesome! 😀 I remember you were worried about those exams!
20,000 Evolution, another candidate for a band name.
You know, I’ve been looking for a good addition to my name…
@Aunt Podger Thanks for the link! It made me so furious I had to dump an angry screed into their contact box:
Could have done with some editing, but at least I was polite enough to save myself from groping, eh?
Nature has ‘designed’ (misnomer of natural intent, but whatevs) the human female body to do… like, a trillion different things a minute. And, sure, some feeemales have babies and attract men. If that was all their bodies were equipped to do, they’d die of pretty much any and everything before they got old enough to do either. Jackass
@Axe
It’s a terrible “design” for having babies, too. It’s just not terrible enough to kill off the species.