Either | Left-Handed Toons

do you ever wonder how many strangers hate you because of how someone else described you to them

If you want to discourage this behavior, it’s probably easier to talk about it in gender-neutral terms.  “In crowded spaces, it’s rude to take up more space than you need.”  I think most people can agree on that.  I think if we called it something like “seat hogging” very few people would come out of the woodwork to defend it.

But as soon as you turn it into a gender discourse–”manspreading is a symptom of toxic masculinity teaching men that it’s manly to take up more space than women”–then you find people willing to go waaaayyyy out on a limb to justify it.  What about men’s hip shapes?  What about squishing their balls?  Why are you demanding everyone sit with their kneecaps perfectly touching at all times?  You can’t prove that 100% of men do this and 0% of women do this! Suddenly “is it okay to be the human equivalent of a BMW parked across three spaces” becomes a live debate.

And I don’t really know what the answer is here.  It’s easier to not bring gender into it if you just want a damn subway seat that isn’t 50% knee.  But it’s not the whole story, and it’s letting people push you around by means of obnoxious discourse.  And if we concede ground here, does it make it harder to talk about issues that can’t be discussed without admitting some kinds of gender disparity exist?

…Aw man, now these guys have even got their metaphorical knees in women’s way.

mime owners: this is claude st. pierre, we adopted him two years ago. he’s a third generation french mime with roots in the early carnie awakening. we only feed him hand toasted vegan peanuts and paleo candy floss

fool owners: this is hoops he likes jokes

i LOVE when ur kissing someone and they start smiling mid kiss

I can’t do justice to one of the weirdest camp stories I know. My friend tells it so well, and I can offer only a pale shadow of his story.

Last summer, he was working with one of the younger units comprised of ten year old boys. They had spent the night camping on another beach and were just readying themselves to depart. “Make sure you have all your things!” called my friend. “Don’t leave anything behind!”

One small boy came up, dragging a massive tangle of decomposing seaweed behind him. “But… what about me boy?” he asked, lip trembling.

“…what is ‘me boy’?”

The child held up the stinking wad of bull kelp. “This is him. This is Me Boy.”

“Me Boy is not coming back with us,” said his counselor. “You’re going to leave Me Boy behind on the beach where he belongs.”

The campers loudly mourned the loss of Me Boy. They insisted on giving him a Viking burial at sea, which just consisted of pushing him solemnly off the back of the rowboat into the water and watching him drift away in the surf.

That was only the beginning. Me Boy would be back.

The campers, in true camp fashion, possessed some kind of cultic hive-mind and a predisposition for bizarre memes. Me Boy would not be forgotten. They started telling each other stories about Me Boy and how he would one day rise again. There were warring factions with contradicting dogmas about Me Boy. Only when the gardener allowed them to take home a zucchini she had harvested did they find their god, born anew.

Me Boy, The Zucchini That Was A God, became the whole unit’s mascot. The kids would bicker over who got to carry him. They built nests and carriers for Me Boy and brought him to different activities, fiercely defending him from those that would do him harm. One child appointed himself the Voice of Me Boy and would translate the zucchini’s divine wishes into human speech.

It got out of hand. Me Boy had become a distraction, a fixation, a violent controversy. Something had to be done.

My friend, their counselor, took it upon himself to kill Me Boy. The children wailed in despair as he chopped their God into refreshing slices. With this sudden turn of fortune, followers of Me Boy turned to theophagy. “We must eat him to preserve his power!” they cried. Boys who would otherwise never have touched a vegetable ate greedily of this sacrament, eager to let Me Boy live on within them.

For a time, it seemed that peace and order had been restored, and the religion had already faded into its silver age. But only for a time.

In the last few days of camp, the religion of Me Boy splintered into several denominations. Every meal yielded new vegetable matter said to be a reincarnation of Me Boy, only for opposing groups to dismiss these as false prophets. Some believed that Me Boy was gone. Others believed his spirit lived on, intangible, omnipresent. Some believed he had found a new vessel inside a carrot, a pear, a slice of cantaloupe… even inside a child. There was chaos, and strife, and heartbreak without the guidance of Me Boy.

Have any of your friendships ever ended because you were always the first one to talk to someone and one day you stopped to see if they would talk to you first and they never did so you just stopped talking to each other?

Watching natural-looking people engaging in sex that is consensual, mutually pleasurable, and realistic may not be harmful–heck, it might be a good idea–but the occasional feminist porn site aside, this is not what the $97 billion global porn industry is shilling. It’s producers have only one goal: to get men off hard and fast for profit. The most efficient way to do so appears to be eroticizing the degradation of women. In the study of behaviours in popular porn, nearly 90 percent of 304 random scenes contained physical aggression toward women, while close to half contained verbal humiliation. The victims nearly always responded neutrally or with pleasure. More insidiously, women would sometimes initially resist abuse, begging their partners to stop; when that didn’t happen, they acquiesced and began to enjoy the activity, regardless of how painful or debasing it was.

- Peggy Orenstein, ‘Girls & Sex’

I hate boys