By David Futrelle
So Twitter is currently a bit overrun with ironic “hot takes” accounts celebrating the absolute awfullest expressions of opinion on Twitter and off. My favorite at the moment is one called @RoastieTakes, an account run (presumably) by some bitter young incel that is intended to highlight “the worst of the female race.” (“Roastie,” if you haven’t yet heard, is what incels like to call women, based on the notion that oft-used vaginas end up with labia that look like slices of roast beef.)
But oftentimes what Mr. Roastietakes thinks is the worst is actually sort of the best, as these “Roastie Takes” demonstrate.
— Roastie Takes (@RoastieTakes) April 30, 2018
— Roastie Takes (@RoastieTakes) April 26, 2018
— Roastie Takes (@RoastieTakes) April 25, 2018
— Roastie Takes (@RoastieTakes) April 26, 2018
— Roastie Takes (@RoastieTakes) April 27, 2018
FACT CHECK: Ok, sure, so none of this is actually true except for the date. There weren’t a lot of “early suffragettes” hanging out in bathing suits in 1921, a year after women in the US got the right to vote. (The women who had been “early suffragettes” who were still around then were elderly.) And that’s not pizza. These particular gals were actually contestants in a pie-eating contest and most of the women in the pic are watching, not eating. According to Snopes, this falsely labeled pic has been floating around the net for years. Evidently “History to Learn,” an anonymous account that posts lots of random old pics of things ranging from “A Civil Servant with a manually operated traffic signal, Philadelphia, 1922” to “14-year-old Gwen Stefani receiving an autograph from Sting in 1983” doesn’t check its facts very carefully.
But, come on, the idea of women activists launching a campaign to annoy men by donning bathing suits and eating pizza in groups is awesome and if anyone decided to do this for real I would support it completely.
I have concluded that incels not only hate women; they hate joy.
There’s so much entitlement in ‘aggressively wrong and the fault lies with the world in not making everything clear to me’.
And now for some reason I fancy a pizza. Oh the power of the internet.
I started knitting vulva-themed corsages and stuff a year or so ago. Some are themed to storytelling and myths too, like a mermaid one with a shell clitoris and seaweed pubes.
It was after the pussy hat protests when some right wing woman had a huge rant online about how vile and disgusting it was that women “were knitting genitals” – which, if you’ve seen the pink hats with ears rather suggested the ranter had either never seen labia, or had never seen a pussy hat.
So far this year they were in a Nasty Women art exhibition and got auctioned afterwards to raise money for a domestic violence charity, and I’ve been invited to bring some along for use in sex ed for adults with learning difficulties. Got to knit some more.
@bluecat
Huh. I’d have imagined mermaids as being pubeless, for streamlining (and for related reasons, mermen and mermaids would be generally indistinguishable at first glance). I probably overthink these things, though.
I’ve sometimes envisioned biologically plausible mammalian merfolk, who, like whales, would have vulva-like genital grooves in both sexes. Now THAT was an exercise in overthinking.
I will point out for those unfamiliar with her that Ellie Taylor is a British model turned stand-up comedian. This NSFW bit (from the satirical news show “The Mash Report,” in which she plays a news reader) seems appropriate here:
This has inspired me to eat some cheese.
Lumipuna: when I draw mermaids I draw them like that, and with dolphin rather than fish tails. Also fat and bald since that makes more sense. I have a long history of overthinking mermaids.
Don’t forget contracting nostrils up in the forehead, and talking without mouth movement.
Babies are 10 kg at birth and ready to swim, because they don’t need to pass a pelvic opening.
*hearts in eyes at mermaid commentary*
Before fact-checking, at a glance the pizza thing wasn’t all that unbelievable to me because that really is how little it takes to send these particular men into a rage.
Gawd, I love The Mash Report.
I would like to add it was white women who got the vote, native women got the vote in 1930s, Asian women-1940s and black women didn’t get the vote til 1960s.
Anyway I would love to eat pizza or pie or both with those ladies.
I always point out that mermaids are always drawn with mammalian tails, and the scales are simply and example of archaic biological ignorance being interpreted literally by later artists. Merfolk have horizontal flukes, like all aquatic mammals; I’ve never seen a depiction with a vertical tail like a fish has. The ‘half-fish’ descriptor dates from a time when whales and dolphins were described as fish, taxonomy being rather rough in those days.
Roast beef haters?
I guess some men just prefer sausage. No shame. It’s ok to be honest about it.
I think the unifying theme of @roastietakes is shame. The premise appears to be that women should feel shame at all times. The pizza pictures, the staying-at-home-in-a-bra tweets, and so on all address different topics, but they’re all women unashamed of the way they’re handling those topics.
Fruitloopsie
All women in the U.S. were enfranchised by the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.
However, many states (the states handle both state & federal voting) set up heavy barriers to prevent minorities from registering and voting.
That was the point of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s – a legal right that is not supported or is directly hindered through society’s actions, might as well not exist.