Love / Shove

Sister Spit: Then and Now

Kjerstin Johnson — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:19:34 -0400

Sister Spit: the Next Generation just started their Fall '09 tour! This year's tour features Ben McCoy, Kirya Traber, Sara Seinberg, Ariel Schrag, Beth Lisick, Rhiannon Argo, and of course, Sister Spit and RADAR founder Michelle Tea.

This month's article from the Bitch archives is a flashback to Issue #11 (before there were even themes!), where a young Kira Garcia tags along for 1990's Sister Spit tour. Check out her tour diary, "Why Don't We do it on the road" online!

Check out their tour dates below or visit their official site (they're also heading out again next April).

Dear Beauty Industrial Complex: Take Your LATISSE and Shove It.

Kelsey Wallace — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 14:38:26 -0400

Dear Women,

We realize that we're already making you feel bad about your hair, breasts, lips, butt, legs, and overall body type, but our work is far from over. We would now like to introduce you to a new, hopefully self-esteem-lowering, chock-full-o-side-effects cosmetic designed to make you feel like your F*ING EYELASHES aren't good enough. Please watch the following video, feel the requisite amount of inadequacy, ignore the dangers, and write your doctor a big fat check for some LATISSE today.

Sincerely,
Your Beloved Beauty Industrial Complex

Dear Industrial Beauty Complex,

Congratulations on your commendable attempts at shoving an unnecessary, potentially harmful eyelash drug at us. Good call using Brooke Shields as your spokesmodel, since she is pretty cool and we liked her speech at the Michael Jackson memorial. Good work also on the use of phrases like "inadequate, or not enough lashes." No woman likes to hear that she might be inadequate, even if the message is coming through a commercial that is playing at 1:00 a.m. on the Style Network. You also deserve a pat on the back for your tagline: Grow Your Own Lashes. It's almost like you're challenging us to be better, stronger women by taking prescription drugs to make our lashes prettier. Touché.

However, we regret to inform you that your attempts to make us feel shitty about our eyelashes and thus procure prescription drugs are not going to work. We're smart enough to put together that problems with eye pressure, eyelid skin darkening, itchy eyes, and increased brown iris pigmentation mean that if we use your product we might turn into a red and brown-eyed itchy mess who looks like she hasn't slept in a few years. Somehow we just don't think that the longer lashes would hide all of that. Here is a video that further details some of the side effects of your product (in case you were wondering):

Eye pruritus, conjunctival hyperemia, skin hyperpigmentation, ocular irritation, dry eye symptoms, and erythema of the eyelid? NO. THANKS.

In addition to the "contraindications" outlined above, we regret to inform you that we no longer wish to be marketed to as if we were insecure infants who happen to have disposable income (though that is how you wish we would behave). Playing to our insecurities by claiming that we are "inadequate" and that we need your help to grown our OWN LASHES is not only insulting, it's ridiculous. In case you haven't heard (though we're sure Brooke Shields has) we are in the middle of a serious economic recession, and as if pumping our bodies full of harmful chemicals in order to bat longer lashes wasn't bad enough, you also want us to pay doctors out the nose for it. I guess you think all of those people fighting for health care reform really just want prettier lashes, don't you?

So cut the bullshit, Beauty Industrial Complex. We've got it bad enough already with non-prescription cosmetics. Let's save the doctor's visits for women who need health care, and leave our eyelashes out of it.

Sincerely,
Women

(Clearly I am unable to speak on behalf of all women here, so please leave your own comments below. Thanks!)

Feminism: Cool in college, ugly in the "real world"

Andi Zeisler — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 16:45:09 -0400

"[The word "feminist"] has an ugly ring to it. I actually stopped using the term a while ago because it sounds so mean. It sounds so unsexy. I think it's come to [indicate] angry women who don't like men at all and don't like having sex, so I can see why people stray away from it. It's not one of those things you want to bring up in everyday conversation. But I know I am one....

I think I used to use the term a lot more. When I first got into [porn] I was just out of college, and it's sort of cool to use the term in college. But when you get out in the real world, it has such an ugly connotation, and people don't even think you're strong — you just sort of have to be that strong woman. You don't want to have to sit there and explain yourself to everyone...you can just sort of get your message across by being who you are." — Joanna Angel, in $pread, summer 2009

Lies and the Lying Feminists Who Tell Them: the latest from Christina Hoff Sommers

Kjerstin Johnson — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:11:26 -0400

"Feminist misinformation is pervasive," Christina Hoff Sommers writes in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education.“Persistent Myths in Feminist Scholarship” is the latest from the author of Who Stole Feminism: How Women Have Betrayed Women and The War on Boys: How Misguided Feminisim is Harming our Young Men, adding to her legacy of anti-feminist feminism and raising a stink over the contemporary feminist movement in academia.

Sommers criticizes (not for the first time) errors in the women’s studies books Domestic Violence Law and The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World, both well-known and acclaimed texts in women’s studies. Sommers does make the point that “One reason that feminist scholarship contains hard-to-kill falsehoods is that reasonable, evidence-backed criticism is regarded as a personal attack.” But rather than explaining this claim with more substantial and researched evidence, she only continues to cite specific, and at this point over-used, examples (which frankly do border on personal attacks) from her past books, lectures, and articles.

It’s certainly a problem that errors exist in textbooks—feminist or not—and I have to agree, “Students deserve better. So do women victimized by violence.” But as Heart at Women’s Space rightfully points out:

Sommers might have some shred of credibility if she ever took a look at any of the glaring errors to be found about women, women’s issues, women’s history in a gigantic number and array of revered and honored college medical texts, legal texts, psychology texts, science texts and history texts. But she is, again, oblivious to these and worse than that, doesn’t acknowledge the way they oil the patriarchal machine and keep it functioning, the way that it would take an avalanche of college texts making exaggerated feminist claims to begin to make a dent in the way the system favors and benefits men.

(And this was written in January in response to Sommers’ lecture “What’s Wrong and What’s Right With Contemporary Feminism,” a portion which is reposted on Feminist Law Professors). Heart's response is just as fitting and accurate to the recent Chronicle piece as it was to the lecture.

Similarly, Laura Flanders’s criticisms of Sommers on FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting), written in 1994, are equally valid years later: “[Who Stole Feminism] is filled with the same kind errors, unsubstantiated charges and citations of 'advocacy research' that she claims to find in the work of the feminists she takes to task.” In the Chronicle article, Sommers cites other female professors' work (specifically Christine Rosen, Noretta Koertge, and Daphne Patai). Just who am I supposed to believe in academia anyway?

Bitch readers might remember the Insider/Outsider issue’s article “I Can’t Believe it’s Not Feminism” by Julie Craig, a Who’s Who for anti-feminist “feminists” which featured both Sommers and Daphne Patai (mentioned above--it's not surprising she passed Sommers's test for a credible source). Craig touched on Sommers co-optation of liberal vs. radical feminists debate into “equality vs. gender feminists,” and how women’s studies have always been “a particular bee in Sommers’s bonnet”:

[Her] shortsighted analysis ignores the diversity of women's studies faculties and the existence of other critics of classroom radicalism, and her generalizations do not paint an accurate picture of feminist education any more than they adhere honestly to the realities of feminist philosophy.

Sommers hasn’t changed her tune in the seven years since, and "Persistent Myths" continues to recycle her claims leveled against women's studies. She actually asks "Are there serious scholars in women's studies?" It turns out that yes, there are, as Hoffman cites THREE women's studies professors who are "models of academic excellence and integrity" but claims they are "exceptions to the rule."

I have some brief criticisms of my own on Hoffman's three-point conclusion on "Persistent Myths."

1) False assertions, hyperbole, and crying wolf undermine the credibility and effectiveness of feminism. The United States, and the world, would greatly benefit from an intellectually responsible, reality-based women's movement.

My first inclination was to concede--this seems like a valid statement, give it a green checkmark. But taken in context of Sommers’s work, it’s merely a feminist cloak over a more conservative viewpoint. It’s impossible to argue that the feminist movement shouldn’t be “intellectually responsible” and “reality-based”--it's undebatable that we should be guided by integrity and righteousness. But this statement represents Sommers’ view of feminism as a monolith, and discounts the critical diversity within a sprawling multi-generational, transnational, and all-around multi-faceted movement.

2) Over the years, the feminist fictions have made their way into public policy….President Obama recently issued an executive order establishing a White House Council on Women and Girls. … He and Congress are also poised to use the celebrated Title IX gender-equity law to counter discrimination not only in college athletics but also in college math and science programs, where, it is alleged, women face a "chilly climate." The president and members of Congress can cite decades of women's-studies scholarship that presents women as the have-nots of our society. Never mind that this is largely no longer true. Nearly every fact that could be marshaled to justify the formation of the White House Council on Women and Girls or the new focus of Title IX application was shaped by scholarly merchants of hype.

Feminism inspiring national policy and wide-sweeping change? Not on Sommers’s watch! I think she's actually advocating against the White House Council on Women and Girls, seeing as gender inequity is no longer an issue. From Hillary Clinton's bid to presidency to recent CNN articles, I'm sick to death (as I'm sure most of you are) of the post-feminist world myth. Though I suppose if you're one to defend Larry Summers, you would think Title IX is a relic from the past.

3) Finally, as a philosophy professor of almost 20 years, and as someone who respects rationality, objective scholarship, and intellectual integrity, I find it altogether unacceptable for distinguished university professors and prestigious publishers to disseminate falsehoods. It is offensive in itself, even without considering the harmful consequences. Obduracy in the face of reasonable criticism may be inevitable in some realms, such as partisan politics, but in academe it is an abuse of the privileges of professorship.

Now that’s just pretentious. And I have to go look up “obduracy.”

Sommers quotes Joel Best as saying that a bad statistic is “harder to kill than a vampire,” and it's hard not to see anti-feminists in the same, bloodsucking, undying sense.

The New York Times "Reaches Out to Heavier Young Women"

Annalee Schafranek — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 04:42:30 -0400

Wednesday's New York Times Fashion & Style section featured an article on the recent "outpouring of fashions aimed at trend-driven, round-figured teenagers and young women." Round-figured? Outpouring? Is that model in the frozen food section of a grocery store?

Courtney at Feministing posted an excellent dissection of Ruth La Ferla's article here, but there were a few points I needed to "expand" on (bad pun? Get used to it! NYT provided us with many more verbally-disappointing gems). As a starting point, let's look at the list of descriptions for "plus-sized" women used in the article:

Outsize, rotund, round-figured, large-sized, woman of size, big-girls, girth, full figured, curvy, larger young women, overweight...

What is up with this lingo? Admittedly, I understand the fear of mislabeling and, thus, being misunderstood as an writer. However, in an article partially about fat acceptance, the f-word is only used in a passing quote. Was this an attempt to avoid a negative or condemning bias? Think again! The article not only ended with the ever popular health angle, but it also dismissed the legitimacy of any body-acceptance from these marginalized "women of size"

“It’s important to reclaim ‘fat’ as a descriptive, as even something positive,” argued [Annie] Maribona of Fat Fancy. But others point to serious health consequences of being overweight. Andrea Marks, a specialist in adolescent medicine in Manhattan, suspects that “the vast majority of overweight girls are not so happy.” Apparent self-acceptance, she added, may be a cover for defiance or resignation.

This attitude, along with the totally whack list of used descriptives, contributed to an overall tone of body bias. Women larger than a size-12 are discussed as the "diseased them." It is clear that the author does not consider herself part of this demographic, otherwise she may have reconsidered her assertion that there has been a recent "outpouring of [plus-size] fashions." With full disclosure, I consider myself as being on the smaller end of the plus-size spectrum, and I know that I sure as hell am more frequently forcing my body into clothing rather than seeing clothing made to fit my body. It is because of stores like Portland's own Fat Fancy (which i have supported for more than a year now) that I can have a shopping experience where I don't feel like there is something fundamentally wrong with my shape. However, stores like these are few and SO far between.

And who is comprising La Ferla's category of big girls? Is there a shared "plus-size" experience, or are size-12 girls treated differently from size-24? The article constructs a slightly varied community of larger well-known women (Beth Ditto, Adele, Jennifer Hudson, Jordan Sparks) as a reference point for readers, but still falls back on the familiar cop-out of valuing selective curve (read: tits and ass). In the course of the article, La Ferla conveniently exposes her own size hierarchy, inspiring my friend to wonder "Why does Beth Ditto have girth but Jordan Sparks is glamorously curvy?" The media appears to frequently holds up "curvy," conventionally good looking women like Scarlett Johansson and Salma Hayek as a way to cleanly avoid accusations of fat discrimination. But while Andrea Marks may mistake my body confidence as resignation, I think that many girls have long been aware of the media's own resignation to rarely attempt to construct and discuss the female body in realistic and encompassing terms.

At the end of the day, is visibility still visibility, regardless of the values of the messenger? Does it matter that plus-size clothing (and plus-size clothing providers) is receiving attention in the fashion section of the New York Times? What do you all think? And, as a slight side topic, are there Fat Fancy-esque stores in your hometown?

Papa Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Strippers. Or Feminists: this week in awkward right-wing campaign videos

Kjerstin Johnson — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 17:06:24 -0400

…come to us via VideoGum! First up is country ballad against porn (and strip clubs, and dirty thoughts), “Somebody’s Daughter.”

This video has a man driving through the rain-soaked (presumably sin-soaked as well) streets on his way home, interspersed with stock '90s imagery taken from country music videos and Hallmark commercials (music boxes, home videos, mothers with babies, the stuff memories are made of, etc). If the melodrama of these images don’t get the point across, the lyrics do:

The moment she was born
Her mommy and daddy cried
Taken by the wonder of life
From Barbie dolls to ballet shoes
From roller skates to lipstick and rouge
She's become a lady overnight
Why do I see only flesh and look right past her heart
I try to tell myself I can't help what I feel - then I remember

She's somebody's daughter
Somebody's child
Somebody's pride and joy
Somebody loves her for who she is inside

It's almost five minutes to sit through, but just so you know, things get really intense when he opens up his laptop!

This is actually only one of several music videos made for SomebodysDaughter.org, offering “freedom from the crushing grip of porn.” Are strip clubs and pornography frequently problematic? Yes. If it’s ruining your family life should you seek counsel and remedy? Well yeah. Are there better ways to address it than imagining her mom and dad at her college graduation/birthday party/dance recital? And reinforcing images of all women as “our little girls all grown up?” Oh yeah! This video adds to some recent conversations on the prevalence of porn in society, and while I'm pretty uncomfortable with most porn and strip clubs, if the Somebody's Daughter campaign is all about casting men as sexual perverts for liking porn and women in the sex industry as a dependent innocents, then I doubt it's adding anything new or progressive as far as curbing the more harmful aspects of pornography and "gentleman's clubs"....though I have to give them some credit, this is by far one of the unsexiest videos I’ve ever watched.

Feeling sad and guilty after all those picture frames and graduations and home wrecking websites? This next video is a bit more lighthearted.

It’s hilarious! It’s so campy! Everyone's in on the joke, the music is purposefully cheesy, and everyone is overplaying their role! Like that wholesome cookie-baking mom! That adoring, love struck, striped-sweater-wearing boyfriend! And that straight-laced girl who goes away to college and then comes back a tatted-up, Tai Chi-ing, incense-burning, feminist rhetoric spouting, rainforest tree-hugging deviant! Who’s pregnant! Wait…I’m not actually familiar with that archetype. Did I mention she’s pregnant?

This video’s called the “College Casualty” (and you thought the ROTC was risky!) and is one of the more creative videos produced by the College Weekend Workshop, a webcast made for Christian families before they send their sons and daughters away to college to hopefully avoid becoming “another statistic.” (Cause statistics….are bad? Can’t you get an STD from them?)

The camp of the video falls short when you realize that the “After” Kim is actually what parents fear their kid will come home as. I can forgive conflating every liberal stereotype but the pregnant thing is pushing it (Although what’s wrong with Tai Chi? That it sounds foreign? Why not substitute “curry” or “Barack Obama”?). For the last time, being a feminist does not equal a) being sexually promiscuous and b) ending every sentence with “… created by a male-dominated society.” I can only imagine she got pregnant from her clueless boyfriend because they didn’t receive proper sex education (speaking of conflating stereotypes).

Don't call him an "abortionist," and other issues with coverage of the Tiller murder

Andi Zeisler — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 16:51:20 -0400

The murder of Kansas physician George Tiller is a devastating and, unfortunately, perfect illustration of the stupid, hypocritical, blindered self-righteousness of the anti-choice movement. And just as painful as the news itself is seeing the variety of twists and dodges with which the mainstream media does—or doesn’t—cover it.

Let’s start with CNN, which I turned on this morning in hopes of seeing some on-site coverage from Wichita, where the man who shot and killed Tiller at his church Sunday morning was now in custody. What I got was a CNN anchor telling us that he’d show us footage of a press conference—but only for the 40 secords or so until the CEO of General Motors was ready to start his press conference, because god forbid GM’s bankruptcy declaration is shunted aside for even a minute. For crap’s sake, it’s only been months in coming, CNN. We didn’t really have to see every awkward twitch and hear every paper-rustle of this shocking-to-absolutely-no-one press conference, did we? Apparently, we did.

Then there’s the fact that headlines of major newspapers repeatedly referred to Tiller as an “abortionist” or “abortion doctor.” Yes, Tiller was one of the few physicians in the United States who performed late-term abortions to women whose pregnancies threatened either their own lives or those of their fetuses. And I know headlines need to pack a punch in a limited number of words. But reducing Tiller’s work to the word “abortionist” just buys into the antichoice fanaticism that equates “abortion” with “murder” and paints compassionate, humane people like Tiller as curette-wielding, manically-grinning baby killers—“doing Nazi stuff,” as self-appointed Tiller watchdog Bill O’Reilly has put it. Just substituting “abortion provider” could make all the difference in editorial tone and framing.

And finally, the reporting on the sham outrage of various pro-life figures. There’s just too much to parse here, but between Father Frank Pavone, National Director of Priests for Life (“At this point, we do not know the motives of this act, or who is behind it….whether an angry post-abortive man or woman, or a misguided activist…”) and Operation Rescue founder and capo di tutti douchebag Randall Terry (“Unless some miracle happened, [Tiller] left this life with his hands drenched with the innocent blood of tens of thousands of babies that he murdered. Surely there will be a dreadful accounting for what he has done”) we’re in for a horrible week of anti-choice blameshifting. (Don’t you just love how Pavone slips in that “angry post-abortive man or woman” comment?) Less fanatical pro-life groups have come out to condemn the murder, of course, but headlines like the Washington Post's "Pro-Life Activist: Doctor 'Reaped What He Sowed'" (you'll need to register to read all that hatey goodness) don't do much to foreground them.

Former patients of Tiller’s, whose lives were saved by his procedures—procedures that I wish the mainstream media would do more to emphasize were medically necessary, emotionally and physically awful, and not in any way the result of a woman waking up at 30 weeks of pregnancy and saying, “Huh, you know, I don’t think I want this baby after all. Let’s get abortin’, doc Tiller!”—are speaking out at blogs like A Heartbreaking Choice and in the comments sections of news and blog stories. Let’s try and make sure that they get reprinted and circulated and made as central a part of this story’s coverage as are the smarmy, faux-concerned contributions of the Pavones, Terrys, and O’Reillys.

It's Feminism's Fault!: Ross Douthat edition

Andi Zeisler — Tue, 26 May 2009 19:23:54 -0400

I almost don’t want to give the New York Times the pageviews it was obviously courting in publishing Ross Douthat’s stunningly underthought and journalistically sloppy column “Liberated and Unhappy.” But those of you who’ve read Beth Skwarecki’s article “Mad Science: Deconstructing Bunk Reporting in 5 Easy Steps” will immediately recognize the tricks Douthat uses in his “analysis” of the supposed link between the gains of feminism and the sad, benighted women it’s left in its wake.

The 2007 study on which Douthat hangs today's column is called “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” and was authored by two economists from The Wharton School of Business; reading it, it seems fair to say that, like many an interesting study, it makes a sweeping hypothesis — “By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s declining relative happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men” — and then spends much of the following 44 pages explaining that it’s not actually that simple, and exploring the many variables that may contribute to this decline. For instance, the social pressure on women of the 1960s and ‘70s to put on a happy face (even one that was chemically induced) is very likely a factor in the study’s self-reporting; so is the probability that, as revealed in a study by another economist published around the same time as “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” men have over the past several decades cut back on activities they don’t like and, as a result, have more true leisure time; women —whose leisure time, particularly if they have families, is not their own—have less.

The upshot of the Wharton study is that while the authors start with the assertion that women today may be subjectively less happy than they reported being 35 years ago, the study itself is careful to dispense with continual reminders that correlation is, once again, not causation.

Douthat, well, doubts that. (Sorry. It was either that or calling him “Douchehat,” which I still reserve the right to do.) He doubts it so much that he prefers to just interpret the study his own way, which not only involves not linking to a PDF of the document (just the abstract, with the inconvenient facts and stuff locked behind a paywall), but apparently barely skimming even enough of the study to cherry-pick from it.

Here’s Ross’s take: He is very sad for us women. We can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, etc., but our liberation is a sham. As he puts it, “All the achievements of the feminist era may have delivered women to greater unhappiness.”

(You know. The feminist era. Which happened in the ’70s, where women got everything they wanted by wailing and rioting and burning their bras and henpecking all the men until they were quiche-eating pantywaists who totally have no rights at all anymore. Oh, it was a crazy time, that feminist era!)

Well. Ross Douthat cares about our unhappiness. And furthermore, he knows why we’re sad. It’s not because we’re working more, or because those of us partnered with dudes are still doing all the housework, or even because major daily newspapers keep hiring doughy, entitled white guys to write about how unhappy all us ladies are. No, we’re unhappy because we’re all single mothers! And Ross Douthat is not happy about that.

He’d like to propose a solution: Let’s stigmatize the single mothers, because then there will be no more single mothers.

[Feminists and conservatives] should also be able to agree that the steady advance of single motherhood threatens the interests and happiness of women. Here the public-policy options are limited; some kind of social stigma is a necessity.

Oh yeah, that makes total sense. We really haven’t been doing nearly enough to stigmatize sexually active women and the single mothers that some of them become. Let’s get right on that. What’s that you say? Single mothers don’t impregnate themselves, and lots of them didn’t intend to be single mothers? Well, okay then. Douthat will concede that “serial baby-daddies and trophy-wife collectors” should also be added to the stoning pit.

In a blistering takedown, Megan at Jezebel posts the actual study, and points out the many, many convenient omissions and obfuscations in Douthat’s “analysis” — from ignoring the study’s explanation that happiness is subjective (“…it should be noted that subjective well-being is both a function of the individual's personality and his or her reaction to life events. As such, correlations between life outcomes and happiness may not be causal”) to highly selective linkage. (In making reference to a list of sexual offenders that “we” have refused to banish from the earth, Douthat links the phrase “prostitute-hiring politician” to former governer Eliot Spitzer, rather than, say, diaper-sporting, still-sitting Louisiana senator David Vitter.)

And not that the NYT asked me, but if they did, I'd be happy to tell them one way they might remedy women's unhappiness, since they really, really seem to care: If you insist on running version 3,094 on the Feminism Caused All Your Problems story, at least insist that folks like Douchehat (I'm sorry! It's too easy!) actually read the studies they report on.

The Midwest Teen Sex Show's Big Break!

Kjerstin Johnson — Wed, 20 May 2009 14:13:53 -0400

If you haven't checked out the Midwest Teen Sex Show yet, it's not too late. When it comes to frank yet funny sex talk, this video cast is so good it almost makes me wish I was a clueless, awkward teen again (say it with me now, "♪ Allllllll-most! ♪").

Created by Guy Clark and Nikol Hasler (friends since high school), the show (now in its second year) doesn't pretend to be the be-all end-all of sex education ("We like to call it sex information"), but is an alternative to abstinence-only education ("Teens and sex. It happens."), parents' birds-and-the-bees talk, misinformed locker room banter, and even the snarktastic Savage Love (it's not as mean). Susie Bright called it her "newly-discovered favorite TV show of all time," and even had her teen daughter interview Nikol in 2007.

Oh yeah--it's HILARIOUS. Produced with just a small cast (and smaller budget, I'm sure), it's packed with a perfect balance of info and humor ("Condoms may seem costly, but they're less expensive than a lifetime with AIDS"), so that even if you're left without a full understanding of say, what anal sex is, or what losing your virginity will be like, you'll at least feel more comfortable talking about it.

In other excellent news, MTSS is planning on producing a pilot to share with Comedy Central this summer. Fear not, they're not selling out. From their website, Director Guy Clark writes,

We want to assure you that we are keeping the style of the show the same. It was the style of the show that Comedy Central first noticed, and they want us to keep making it from the finest ingredients. The difference is that now those ingredients will not be bought from a guy on the street corner wearing a trench coat.

With over 25 episodes streaming free online, you'll have a hard time pulling yourself away...and picking a favorite. I mean there's "Vaginas" ("America's True Heroes!"), "Birth Control" (featuring one of Nikol's kids spouting, "That's what she said"), the noir-themed "Orgasms".... ooh but then there's the Door County Fornication License officer in "The First Time"!!

Subscribe to the Midwest Teen Sex Show video feed at their website (they'll love you for it) and keep an eye out for them on Comedy Central!

Sexual Euphemism Now in Convenient Chocolate Form: the Fling candy bar by Mars

Kjerstin Johnson — Mon, 18 May 2009 15:43:26 -0400

NPR reported on a new candy bar from Mars--its first in 20 years--called the Fling. Wrapped in a shimmery pink and silver package, it's not just its low calorie count that is catering to women.

The campaign behind it has taken an unsubtle approach to marketing the candy bar as more of a marital aid than an item from a vending machine. While "finger" may be an industry term for a thin and slender, it takes on a whole different meaning with the catchphrase "Pleasure Yourself" (Also gross and awkward: "Serving Size: 1 Finger"). Other taglines like "Naughty, but not that naughty," "Have a FLING™ in private, or wave it all around town; in the office, the bedroom, or the great outdoors," make no ambiguous implications that the Fling satisfies better than a Snickers.

If you need more proof of its creepy campaign, look no further than the Fling's official FAQ (sorry, "the Skinny") on its website (and don't worry, it's okay to be under 18 to visit it).

How are fabulous FLING™ Chocolate Fingers so miraculously made?

FLING™ is lovingly made using a meringue base (that’s the crispy layer). This is made of whipped egg whites and sugar and baked in an oven. A chocolate truffle is layered onto the bar. Then the bars are enrobed and decorated in pure chocolate. Then, using a patented system, the bars have shimmer applied to them. This gives each FLING™ its unique, sleek and shiny look.

How awesome is your application of alliteration? Not nearly nuanced as your marketing should be. While it's fun to think it's made "lovingly" and "enrobed" in chocolate, there's just no sexy way to say "baked in an oven."

What makes it shimmer?

Fairy dust. Just kidding. The shimmer is actually a FDA approved mineral called Mica, that shimmers and is used occasionally by specialty chocolatiers to add a unique and attractive sparkle to gourmet chocolate.

Yeah, you read that right. THE CHOCOLATE ITSELF ACTUALLY SPARKLES. The last time I heard about mica was in Intro to Geology, and the last place I wanted to hear about it was in the ingredients for a trumped-up Twix bar. Can this product get any weirder?

Do the different flavors have different colored shimmer?

Yes. You are not seeing things. The Milk Chocolate flavor has a pink shimmer, the Dark Chocolate has a gold shimmer, and the Hazelnut has an orange shimmer. We like variety.

....er, yes.

How should I properly care for my FLING™?

Like the women who crave it, FLING needs to be handled with care — try not to ruffle our delicate truffles and keep them in a cool, dry place. Between 65-75 degrees is ideal. Then you can pleasure yourself with this chocolate sensation time and time again.

Wait...what?! Pleasure myself time and time again with well-tempered chocolate? I'm not sure that even makes sense. Lord knows there are a lot of metaphors flying around this campaign but let's do our best to keep them straight.

Why is FLING™ only available in CA?

We are premiering FLING™ in California retail stores in 2009 before it becomes a blockbuster! If you live outside CA and want FLING™, you can buy online.

If it's anything like other pleasuring devices, I will not be seeing it anytime soon in AL, GA, KS, LA, MS, TX or VA.

The NPR stream is definitely worth a listen. Lisa Johnson, author of Don't Think Pink: What Really Makes Women Buy says that the campaign is taking a too "literal interpretation" of "'Our chocolate should be sexual' instead of coming from [the buyer's] peripheral vision and making her laugh, inspiring her around music...There's other things you can do that can hit this note without banging on it." Johnson also touches on how oftentimes marketing towards women is more than a targeted ad. "Marketing to women within most traditional companies is one of the scariest departments to be in because it's so filled with politics. You think you're talking about women consumers, but you end up talking about women in leadership in the company; you end up talking about people's spouses, their daughters, their wives, all the male and female dynamics. There's a lot of fear."

Sarah Haskins, you had it right all along.