Man Laws and Woman Rules, Episode 1

One of my hobbies is playing board games, and I like a good sale as much as the next guy (o.k., probably more than the next guy).  Imagine my elation, then, when I saw the 50% off sign in the window of a game store in a local mall yesterday.  Though I didn’t have a “Cash in the Attic” moment, I did find a game I couldn’t resist buying.  It’s called Man Laws and Woman Rules: The Game of Life’s Unwritten Rules.  I thought it would be fun to play it with all of you.

The Goldilocks Dilemma

A week or so ago, I saw a slide show of “strange plastic surgeries” on MSNBC’s web site.  While I’m pleased that the site listed these procedures as extreme (even “oddball”), I was struck by one thing in particular.  Two of the surgeries were meant to remedy complaints about women’s calves.  If a woman had “cankles”–large calves that stretch to her ankles (hence eliminating the “normal” curve the ankle/calf distinction creates)–she could correct the flaw with liposuction.  If a woman had “radish calf”–large, muscular calves that apparently create too much of the aforementioned curve–she could inject botox to reduce the size of the muscle.  The upshot of all of this is that a woman must neither have a calf that is too big nor too small.  Like Goldilocks’ proverbial porridge, a truly feminine lower leg must be “just right.”

Loving your bits

I recently watched a BBC America documentary (part of the BBC Reveals series) called Perfect Private Parts. The hour long documentary is about labiaplasty and other genital plastic surgery. Labiaplasty, for those who don’t know, involves cutting and reshaping one or both sets of the labia, to make them smaller.  The documentary is adamantly opposed to any surgery and the director, Lisa Rogers, states on camera that she is making the film in hopes of not only understanding why women undergo labiaplasty, but  also dissuading viewers from considering these surgeries.

Better sex through science

Last week, a study by scientists at King’s College London concluded that the g-spot doesn’t exist. Oh darn. Of course, if you look at the study, you might notice that first of all, the study was conducted by giving  “participants a survey asking whether they believed that they had a “’so called G-spot’.” That’s about as scientific as asking people if they believe in evolution and when some people say “no” publishing a study that declares that there is no such thing as evolution.

But more amazing is the fact that fifty-six percent of the respondents said “yes.” However, “because stimulation of the G-spot is supposed to induce orgasm” the scientists concluded that the women were “confused.” Let me correct my analogy of the previous paragraph. That’s like asking a bunch of biologists if evolution is true and when they say “yes” publishing a study that claims their answer proves they’re confused.

Paint it Black

By now you’ve probably heard, read about, or experienced the odd Facebook meme of women posting their bra color as their status, supposedly in order to raise awareness of/for breast cancer.  Mashable’s brief article about the phenomenon was picked up by The Huffington Post, but I can’t find any other media coverage.  Moreover, no one seems to know who is responsible for starting this meme.  That’s probably for the best because the whole idea makes very little sense.  Here’s why:

Back to the Future

I was channel flipping tonight and came across One Hit Wonders–Sex Hour on VH1.  Now that’s quality TV! And one of the songs they played was “It’s Raining Men” and I was reminded of just how fabulous it is, so I had to share it (thank you Youtube):

So what would a lioness be?

This post has nothing to do with best of/end of the year/end of the decade/retrospective. Jes sayin’.

So a friend sent me a link to this New York Observer essay. After reading it several times, I’m 99% sure it is a joke, a satire on the way we’ve taken to describing various types of women as cats (for a much funnier and clearly satirical article, see this blog response to the Observer article. The original article describes the behavior of the “cheetah,” a term used to describe “women past the first flush of youth wanting to date or at least fuck ‘above their station.’”

Lovely.

Wedding Crashing

Confession time.  My current guilty pleasure is the TLC show Say Yes to the Dress. Yes, Friday night Professor Bean and I are curled up watching brides try on gown after gown, break down in tears when they find “their dress,” and spend thousands of dollars. So what do I, a rabid feminist, get out of this show?

Playboy and the Western World

Professor Moss and I recently upgraded our cell phones, and apparently one of the “fun” features of newer phones is the ability to download screensavers and other personal touches onto one’s phone (maybe this isn’t so new, but it’s new to us).  Since I enjoy a bit of window-shopping as much as the next fellow, I decided this morning to browse the possible screensavers available to me.

My cell provider divides screensavers into categories, and many of these are banal but predictable (sports, movies, music, etc.).  I was intrigued, however, by two categories in particular: “For Him” and “For Her.”  My blog-radar began to beep uncontrollably.  What, you may ask, is in each category?  The surprising thing isn’t so much the differences in gendered screensavers as the one glaring similarity.

Hit me baby, one more time

Early Friday morning Tiger Woods crashed his car into a fire hydrant and a neighbor’s tree, was taken to the hospital and released after being treated for facial lacerations. This much is fact. And while the mainstream media has stuck to the facts, the gossip columns (especially the website TMZ) has had a field day claiming that Woods was driving away after a fight over his infidelity, that his wife smashed the window of the SUV with a golf club and that Woods’ injuries are due to his wife, not the crash.