At my home planet of Racialicious, I recently started up a True Blood roundtable, where five of us weekly go to town on the various racist-sexisms of everyone's favourite vampire show. As the grumpiest of the bunch, my opinions on True Blood are vastly more negative than positive, especially when the episode is heavy on violence against women—which increasingly seems to be the theme for True Blood's newest season. So sometimes we get commenters who ask us, why the heck do y'all watch this show anyways?
When my fellow Racializen Tami asked us all this question during our first roundtable, we didn't come up with any great reasoning. I talked about how in the past, I had quit watching the show over the persistent rape motif, only to be drawn back in. Others blamed the interesting plotlines and comparably good writing for keeping them watching.
It seems like radical, anti-racist feminist pop culture critics are not alone in this phenomenon—that is, the phenomenon of subjecting ourselves to hurtful viewings. Apart from exposing myself to regular doses of vampire sex violence, I also have a soft spot for bromances. And I've noticed a trend in bromances of late (or maybe it was always there): the rape-or-sexualised-humiliation-scene-as-comedy.
Too often, people worry that if they expose the truth about themselves, the other person won't like them or understand... so they hold the truth back until they're convinced the other person likes them enough that the reality of whatever they were convinced was unlikeable will pass by unnoticed. That's maybe not the best plan.
I hate the term "cougar." I mean, I also hate "MILF" and anything else that attempts to define older women or those that have have had children as inherently unfuckable—and thus the rare few supposedly worthy of placing a man's dick in as special—because, damn it, I have no intention of leaving my sexual self in the same dustbin as the idealism of my pre-recession twenties. But I hate cougar because there is no predatory animal to whom men that devote themselves to exclusively fucking younger women are compared: men are, of course, going to want to fuck younger women, and yet older women are supposed to content themselves with ever older men. Fuck that shit.
The first time I realized that the then-ubiquitous online personal ad banners on websites serviced real people—lots of them—was when I caught my boyfriend of two and a half years using one in 2002.
When I stopped being a "girl," and stopped dating "boys," it felt weirder and weirder to be somebody's "girlfriend" or have a "boyfriend." But, man, do people hate having to alter their vocabulary to match your relationship.
I know that there's a book called The Rules, but the real truth about dating is that there aren't any.
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