Spending your big two-one at two gay hotspots may be a tell-tale sign of things to come.
Thursday, September 29, 2005
Monday, September 26, 2005
Don't Cha Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me
Just a few rebuttals on Wendy Shallit's column:
Some sort of pervasive pressure, apparently, requires "everyone who is sexually liberated . . . to be imitating strippers and porn stars."
I don't know anyone who aspires to become the next Annabelle Chong. Neither have I heard anyone telling me that they would love to emulate Natalie Portman's role during her strip scene in Closer. Pamela Anderson is more of a well-endowed celebrity to me than a woman role model.
What's so wrong with wanting to look good anyway? We all need to exercise a more and eat less anyway. Glamour magazine tells me that: Gwen Stefani works out three days a week for a hour. No wonder she's got killer abs. Beyonce Knowles eats six small meals a day consisting of fish, fruit and vegetables. She does strength training (leg lifts, stair steps and push ups) three times a week in addition to her routine of bike sprints and Pilates.
Women are vain. We've been vain since the beginning. We're not kickboxing and counting calories for you men. We just want to get into that pair of skinny jeans that Kate Moss reportedly bought three pairs of in Diesel. We're doing this for ourselves.
Just a few rebuttals on Wendy Shallit's column:
Some sort of pervasive pressure, apparently, requires "everyone who is sexually liberated . . . to be imitating strippers and porn stars."
I don't know anyone who aspires to become the next Annabelle Chong. Neither have I heard anyone telling me that they would love to emulate Natalie Portman's role during her strip scene in Closer. Pamela Anderson is more of a well-endowed celebrity to me than a woman role model.
What's so wrong with wanting to look good anyway? We all need to exercise a more and eat less anyway. Glamour magazine tells me that: Gwen Stefani works out three days a week for a hour. No wonder she's got killer abs. Beyonce Knowles eats six small meals a day consisting of fish, fruit and vegetables. She does strength training (leg lifts, stair steps and push ups) three times a week in addition to her routine of bike sprints and Pilates.
Women are vain. We've been vain since the beginning. We're not kickboxing and counting calories for you men. We just want to get into that pair of skinny jeans that Kate Moss reportedly bought three pairs of in Diesel. We're doing this for ourselves.
If male chauvinist pigs "regarded women as pieces of meat, we would outdo them and be Female Chauvinist Pigs: women who make sex objects of other women and of ourselves."
Ashton Kutcher and Mark Wahlberg were both underwear models for Calvin Klein. Tyson Beckford's naked upper body was plastered on many male and female magazines to advertise Ralph Lauren's Polo Sport fragrance for men. These are examples of men being used solely for their outward appearance.I quote from Virginia Henley's Tempted:
"Ram was wise enough not to go for her sensitive nipple. Instead he curved his warm fingers around the delicious swell of her breast and cupped it in his palm....As his insistent hands removed her shift, she was aware of his sex, hard and throbbing against her bottom cheek...whispering wanton words into her ear as his hand stroked down across her hip and belly, seeking the secret, scented place that shielded her woman's centre."
Now if that's not porn I don't know what is. Videos of Paris Hilton just don't hit the right buttons on women the way trashy romance novels do. Women prefer reading their porn rather than watching it. It's a more intellectual choice anyway since we do leard a few new words along the way.
My women role models are Aung San Suu Kyi, Condoleeza Rice and yes, The Pussycat Dolls. Aung San Suu Kyi has been under house arrest since May 2003. Her crusade for democracy in Myanmar is really something. Condoleeza Rice is Secretary of State to the US government. That's really something as well, considering the fact that she's African American and also a woman. As for The Pussycat Dolls, well, they're just really hottttt.
Friday, September 23, 2005
Feminism Goes Down the Drain
Wendy Shalit's article is really cool -I never thought this way about the current state of the women's lib movement before readint it. Anyway, won't dwell too much on substance this time. ;)
Her opening paragraph really attracts the reader. Starting off with one short statement and going on to three questions. The questions grow in length from the first to the last one. It makes the opening sound good and more structured. I would feel weird if the first question was the longest compared to the other two or the second question, for that matter.
The second paragraph sums up what she wants to say in this article. Sort of her nutgraph, I guess.
Paras 3 and 4 are basically quotes: the former introducing the idea of the Female Chauvinist Pig and the latter underlining the fact that there is a problem here.
Para 5 has two more question marks. Another quote to double underline that there is a problem.
Para 6 is just one sentence but its the longest sentence throughout the article. It's 53 words long!
"Everyone in Ms. Levy's book--whether it's middle-class girls who feel anxiety about appearing "hot" or grown women who confess to Ms. Levy that "accumulating sex for its own sake . . . is not that sexual"--shows that a woman's experience of sex and love is very different from that of an adolescent boy or a man."
Para 7 tells us why we've got this problem.
Para 8 is an example which strengthens the fact that there is indeed a problem with the female population. (It hurts me to type this). I don't think she put it there to tell us for the umpteenth time that there is a problem; she probably wanted to add colour to the piece.
Para 9, is a smart and witty effort. Good play on the use of pig.
Summary:
1. Questions posed go from short to long.
2. If you want to pose another set of questions (para 5), don't use the same number of questions again. Try not to make them sound like the preceding ones by:
Different relative length, maybe.
Different sort of questions. Questions in Para 1 give examples to the reader. Questions in Para 5 do not give examples, Shallit asks solid questions here.
3. Add colour with examples and quotes.
4. Long sentences, if structured well, can work.
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
The Mysterious Man
The problem with John Roberts is that we don't know what kind of person he is. He just won't tell us. When questioned by Senate Democrats last week, Roberts made it impossible for many to draw any conclusions about his character.
Rather than telling them what he'll do if this and that happens, he just says that he'll follow whatever the Constitution states. The guy's smart: Firstly because it means he'll keep an open mind when judging cases, with no preceding prejudice. Secondly, because it's impossible to find fault with his answer since he's basically not giving them anything to fire at.
What Dahlia Lithwick says in her column from Slate is true. Sure, Roberts seems like someone who can approach cases without letting his personal opinions get in the way. He's a by-the-book man.
But there are many different ways to look at something. What if he reads the law from a different slant?
And if the US is appointing Roberts as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, does that mean that they want all courts in the country to emulate what he's like? As Lithwick puts it, John Roberts is passive. He's a yes-man. Whatever's written in the Constitution, he'll follow. The question is this:Can judgements actually be "principled and fair" if they exclude personal insight and are based entirely on a bunch of words written a long time ago.
When talking about the technicalities of the column, Lithwick does a good job except for the part where she begins to explain about "law-plus" in paragraph eight. I got a little lost there but the conclusion to the article managed to convince me on her stand.
The problem with John Roberts is that we don't know what kind of person he is. He just won't tell us. When questioned by Senate Democrats last week, Roberts made it impossible for many to draw any conclusions about his character.
Rather than telling them what he'll do if this and that happens, he just says that he'll follow whatever the Constitution states. The guy's smart: Firstly because it means he'll keep an open mind when judging cases, with no preceding prejudice. Secondly, because it's impossible to find fault with his answer since he's basically not giving them anything to fire at.
What Dahlia Lithwick says in her column from Slate is true. Sure, Roberts seems like someone who can approach cases without letting his personal opinions get in the way. He's a by-the-book man.
But there are many different ways to look at something. What if he reads the law from a different slant?
And if the US is appointing Roberts as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, does that mean that they want all courts in the country to emulate what he's like? As Lithwick puts it, John Roberts is passive. He's a yes-man. Whatever's written in the Constitution, he'll follow. The question is this:Can judgements actually be "principled and fair" if they exclude personal insight and are based entirely on a bunch of words written a long time ago.
When talking about the technicalities of the column, Lithwick does a good job except for the part where she begins to explain about "law-plus" in paragraph eight. I got a little lost there but the conclusion to the article managed to convince me on her stand.
Monday, September 19, 2005
Friday, September 16, 2005
New Words
I learnt two new words today.
Muffin-top:
What you get if you pair tight jeans with a skimpy top that exposes your flabby tummy; the excess bits of flab which hang out; what Australians call love-handles
Yuck.
Recrimination:
An accusation to counter attack a previous accusation.
Micheal Kinsley recriminates the charges put forward in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Sure, none of us would have predicted that a natural disaster like this would strike so suddenly and so destructively.
In defense of the US government, Kinsley argued that the idea of levee improvement was quite a crazy idea and that the US government had more pressing needs, specifically national security, to attend to.
However there was one key accusation which he failed to deliver a recrimination on: the US government’s slow response in providing aid to the one million survivors who are now homeless.
But there are no recriminations possible. It’s a fact that the President failed to act quickly enough to fix the situation. Kinsley ignores this fact entirely. This makes his argument weak because he does not even address the issue.
He should have said that while no one could have prepared for Katrina’s visit, much more could have been done to clean up after she left.
Kinsley uses a lot of sarcasm and writes his column as if he were having a conversation with the reader. To gun down Senator Mary Landrieu’s charges that the US government did not pay any attention to her when she pressed for levee improvement, he highlights other “pressing issues” which she pushed for such such as more boats for Louisiana shipyards.
He’s got a great punchy ending and he drives his point through. But he’s left out a very big hole in his argument.
I learnt two new words today.
Muffin-top:
What you get if you pair tight jeans with a skimpy top that exposes your flabby tummy; the excess bits of flab which hang out; what Australians call love-handles
Yuck.
Recrimination:
An accusation to counter attack a previous accusation.
Micheal Kinsley recriminates the charges put forward in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Sure, none of us would have predicted that a natural disaster like this would strike so suddenly and so destructively.
In defense of the US government, Kinsley argued that the idea of levee improvement was quite a crazy idea and that the US government had more pressing needs, specifically national security, to attend to.
However there was one key accusation which he failed to deliver a recrimination on: the US government’s slow response in providing aid to the one million survivors who are now homeless.
But there are no recriminations possible. It’s a fact that the President failed to act quickly enough to fix the situation. Kinsley ignores this fact entirely. This makes his argument weak because he does not even address the issue.
He should have said that while no one could have prepared for Katrina’s visit, much more could have been done to clean up after she left.
Kinsley uses a lot of sarcasm and writes his column as if he were having a conversation with the reader. To gun down Senator Mary Landrieu’s charges that the US government did not pay any attention to her when she pressed for levee improvement, he highlights other “pressing issues” which she pushed for such such as more boats for Louisiana shipyards.
He’s got a great punchy ending and he drives his point through. But he’s left out a very big hole in his argument.
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