To hear some romantically challenged manosphereans tell it, cell phones have ruined modern women by delivering them so much attention — from Facebook and Instagram likes to countless messages on dating apps. This, the misogynists claim, makes women too stuck-up to date the regular hardworking men that are their “looksmatches,” instead enjoying endless hookups with a succession of Chads. And it makes these regular men sad.
If any men decide they want to post long essays on the unfairness of a cell phony world, a quick search through the stock photo archives will return a whole host of pictures of women enjoying their cell phones perhaps a little more than they should.
With apologies to The Hairpin’s legendary Women Laughing Alone With Salad post, let’s call this micro-genre of stock photos Women Celebrating Alone With Cell Phones.
And for those of you who prefer men:
For more excursions into the wonderful world of stock photos, check out our Women Pointing at Themselves Alone (WIthout Salad).
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These women look entirely too happy. Each one of them needs a manospherean in her life to make her miserable.
As for the men, yes, of course they look happy. That is their right in a patriarchy.
…None of the photos show the message they’ve received.
It could range anywhere from “You just won fifty thousand dollars, no, really, we don’t want to know any details about you, you’ll see when your back statement arrives” to “Pizza’s ready”.
Hmm.
It’s been a while since I last had a good pizza…
Yeah, that the kind of photos used by apps selling you dreams, here, in France, like the ones about online betting (sadly legals), supposedly make-you-rich-work-at-home counsellors and other “independant traders” moneying their “advices”.
Worst thing is, multiple analysis made by anti-racist and/or anti-precarity associations had shown that those things are often aimed at the more precarious persons. Here, a lot of those online betting advertisments show POC in street/sportwear (usual stereotype of do-nothing-leaving-on-State-help-or-drug-retailler) and if statistics are to be believed, they are indeed the bigger share of customers of those apps (especially sports related one, with the exception of the PMU). Unscrupulous hope sellers with a touch of racism, such humanists.
This. The expressions look ridiculous, until I think back to some of the things I learned over cell phone, such as when the lab called saying they found a drug my father’s life-threatening infection was not resistant to.
@ Robert Haynie & Dave
Several of these, especially the first couple of guys, say drunk at a bar or cheering their sports team to me, possibly both at the same time.
I can’t see how anyone can be that excited by a phone that’s not a Nokia 3310.
@Alan Robertshaw
You’ve never pulled 3 new S Rank units in a 10 pull, which was effectively free, during a Dive fest in Mega Man X DiVE. That’s really exciting. I got three of my best units that way. Without putting a cent into the game. That’s really exciting.
I think the women looking pleased about the blank screens are happy that they didn’t get any messages from creeps. “Look! No assholes!”
Totally O/T; but I just wanted to share this.
Background: There’s a place here called MBR Beagles. They breed the dogs for use in medical experiments.
A bunch of very nice people, calling themselves ‘Camp Beagle’ have been both protesting, and attempting to highlight the rather appalling conditions, at the location.
They have had quite a bit of success in the media. Drone footage has been especially useful in that regard. A picture being worth a thousand words and all that.
So, perhaps unsurprisingly, the company sought an injunction to try to stop them doing that. ‘Ag-gag’ as it’s called. The protesters don’t have any money of course, but we were able to assist them a bit with the court stuff.
We’ve just been alerted as to the court’s decision…
@Alan Robertshaw:
I can’t see how anyone can be that excited by a phone that’s not a Nokia 3310.
Hey—I was more than satisfied with my 2010 ten-dollar Tracfone LG420G flip. At 81g/2.87oz and 91.95 x 47.50 x 18.54 mm/3.6 x 1.9 x .73 inches, it fit snugly into the smallest of pockets and had Internet connectivity, a voice recorder, Spanish and Greek as well as Anglo-Roman characters, a camera with surprisingly sophisticated photo-editing—I used it to make original art—and a Symbols menu that allowed the user to enter all the punctuation to be used in a sentence at once, without having to switch back and forth. (Some of us, strange to relate, still like to plan our sentences in advance.)
(It also came with an unintended glitch that allowed the user to receive incoming texts free: you could read the message by hitting the side scrolling button with the phone closed.) I used it for ten years, and would be doing so to this day had somebody not phased out the 2g network.
@ full metal ox
Ooh, if you have any images still, I’d be very interested in seeing that.
In other news, Parliament has a new cat. He’s called Attlee. (After this chap.)
Larry, the No 10 cat’s, thoughts on the matter.
https://twitter.com/Number10cat/status/1538854801789829125
Attlee in the bobby helmet is too cute.
I like the look of him — good solid tabby moggie, basic British chap getting on with business. And probably smarter than some of the MPs.
@Alan Robertshaw:
Ooh, if you have any images still, I’d be very interested in seeing that.
Disclaimer: the picture quality is going to suck; the resolution was 176×220 to begin with, and because the phone in question mysteriously lost the capacity to send attachments about a year before I upgraded, I never got them ported.These are photographs taken (with a cheapass 4g flip phone) off its screen.
This is a mountain valley landscape, created from solitude, boredom, and photo-editing from inside a studio apartment in the flat Till Plain region of Ohio:
http://i.imgur.com/0iQmdKQ.jpg
This science-fiction cityscape is the one I’m proudest of. The background was a photo of morning sunlight filtered from beneath a bedsheet. There was a menu of gag embellishments you could add to portrait photos, including things like devil horns, clown noses, and pig snouts—one option was a rectangular set of 8-bit sunglasses, whose shape struck me as a potential cinder-block. By shifting between small, medium, and large sizes, and varying the layers of color by repeatedly tweaking the color-reversal, antiquing (which bathed the color scheme in a yellow overlay), and fiddling with the RGB ratios, I built up the skyline:
http://i.imgur.com/Q2nMQJS.jpg
@ full metal ox
I genuinely like those. I’m a big fan of abstract art, but also semi abstract. So I especially like where people take real world imagery but then work it so it just becomes conceptual.
I also think the lower resolution and size actually adds to them. It gives them the context from how they finally arrived here. Although obviously I haven’t seen the original.
(and now you’re getting an idea of how pretentious I can be in galleries)
@Alan Robertshaw:
Even as a non-Brit, I recognized that name… but then, mostly because I’m also a Goon Show fan and there’s a reference to him in at least one episode. In ‘The Dreaded Batter-Pudding Hurler of Bexhill-on-Sea‘, which was recorded in the 1954 but set during WWII:
@ jenora
I must confess I’m not a particular fan of the Goons. Although having said that there is one bit I just love cause it’s so sweet.
One of the characters asks where Eccles is. Eccles responds he’s under the sink. He is asked what he is doing there and replies:
“Everybody gotta to be somewhere.”
That is very Zen.
But may I recommend, if you are not already familiar with it, Round the Horne.
That show is just sublime.
I have enjoyed it, “many, maaaany, times.”
@Jenora Feuer:
How on Earth can anything that was recorded in 1954 reference a character from Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation?