Photo reblogged from Sexism & the City with 27 notes
via Sociological ImagesDude, my brother is a dancer and he could break most runner (and soccer) boys in half. Not that he ever would, he’s much more interested in designing theatrical sets than beating people up, but still.
FUCK.THIS.NOISE.
As an ex-dancer, I have first hand knowledge that male ballet dancers are some of the strongest and most bad-ass mofos around. Some of the men I’ve known could annhilate David Beckham/LeBron James/whomever the fuck with their little pinkies. AND??? They look GOOOD doing it.
I’ve fucked a ballet dancer and he was stronger than any other athlete I’ve ever known carnally. Did nobody learn anything from Billy Elliot?!
Source: kelsium
Unhidden
Lee Gainer - the conceptual artist we all love to, er, love - has brought out a new series called Unhidden. The works in this series take advertisements and paint over all but one of their elements. They end up being quite clear images of cultural stereotypes - “expert”, “mother”/”wife”, “family” …
Check out the nails on the kind of hand that would buy a Scotch Brite pad:
Now that’s glamour.
Chastity and Sex
CELEBRITY UPDATE: Chastity Bono is now Chaz Bono! Cher’s child is undergoing FTM gender transition and has announced this publicly.
Predictably, the Daily Mail have written an abusive and most likely defamatory article on him.
Referring to his client as a ‘he[‘], Chastity’s publicist Howard Bragman said …
The AP’s article (via stuff) is only a little less bad - his preferred name isn’t mentioned once in the article and the journalist insists that he’s “Cher’s daughter”, emphasis mine. Thankfully, ill-gendered pronouns are avoided in the article - but the journalist seemed to think it was important that Bragman is firmly in the male camp, referring to him (pointedly? or is that just me?) as Chaz’s “spokesman”.
Why do shitty newspapers insist on deciding for themselves what pronouns - let alone what genders - befit the subjects of their dreary articles? Most depressingly of all, Bragman
ask[s] that the media respect Chaz’s privacy during this long process as he will not be doing any interviews at this time
No dice, Bragman - and no kudos, Daily Mail. Like I say, however, predictable - this is the rag that has a section called “Femail”, articles solely concerning celebrity sex scandals and weight loss advice.
Prison unit manager on drugs charges
-Dominion Post headline
First reading this headline, I parsed it thus:
Prison unit manager, on drugs, charges.
I was imagining some sort of last straw situation where this manager person pawed at the ground, snorted, then ran at their opponents.
Then I realised the folly of my ways. Surely the article was a prison unit manager on drugs charges - talking about drugs charges, giving their opinion on such things.
But, no. Apparently this manager is “on charges of drugs”. Quite how one can be “on” charges is beyond me - but not beyond a newspaper headline.
At that moment, I spotted another headline:
The horse raced past the barn fell.
A cursory representation of everyone’s favourite European tyrants’ current presence in prefab popblogs.
I call it “Adolf vs Benito vs Josef vs Francisco Paulino Hermenegildo Teódulo Franco y Bahamonde, Salgado y Pardo de Andrade”.
Put your organ inside me, Ignacio.
Zelda Lily asks whether this is offensive or not:
I say …
- offensive? yes.
- good advertising? yes.
- trite? a little.
- makes me want to donate organs? no more than I already do (which is a lot, according to my driver’s license).
I suspect this would leave me more keen to donate my organs:
Some grammatical curiosities in the NZ Herald
First, on Melissa Lee, Mt Albert MP who thinks a pile of houses should get destroyed to create a bypass:
(1) She asked if the tunnel was so important to Labour, why didn’t they fund it and build it while in Government for nine years.
In English, we tend to invert subject-verb order when we ask questions.
(2) She is in a dirigibile.
(3) Is she in a dirigibile?
Typically we use explicit auxiliary verbs to do this:
(4) They _____ walked down to the mill.
(5) Did they walk down to the mill?
A few wiggly bits here involving HAVE, but that’s the general idea.
In indirect questions, though, we don’t invert subject-verb ordering.
(6) The orphan went to the Bolshoi Ballet.
(7) Where did the orphan go?
(8) I asked Boris where the orphan went.
The charmers at The New Zealand Herald seem to think differently. Is the sentence in (1) meant to be using an actual quote? If so, we’d expect this:
(9) She asked, “If the tunnel is so important to Labour, why didn’t they fund it and build it while in Government for nine years?”
The writer’s use of sequence of tenses, though, to show that she was asking this in the present relative to when she said it, but that she said it in the past, indicates that it is indeed an indirect question. You can’t read the original text and replace “asked” with “said”; it’s an indirect question not reported speech. Why, then, is the word order in the indirect question the same as it would be in the actual question as spoken? It’s a mystery. Here’s my improvement on it:
(10) She asked why, if the tunnel was so important to Labour, they didn’t fund it and build it while in Government for nine years.
The best bit of the article, though, is grammatically sounder:
(11) Asked by students if she regretted her comments made last Wednesday that a motorway would divert criminals from South Auckland, Ms Lee said “you guys are obviously students and do not watch television”.
It takes students not to watch television! At least the bunny ears let us know that she’s quoted this time.
Second, a monstrous list as the charges laid against Tony Veitch surface:
(12) According to the original police summary of facts, these other alleged assaults included Veitch:
- Forcing her against wall and kicking her leg several times at her Orakei home.
- Throwing Dunne-Powell onto a bed at the Stables Cottages in Northland. Veitch punched a wall, leaving a hole which needed repairs.
- Throwing her onto a bed and pinned her down in a Novotel hotel room in Rotorua after Veitch MCed an event.
- Chasing her upstairs at his St Heliers home, cornered her, then kicked her so hard she was unable to walk.
- Pinning her to the bed and punching her in the torso at his home.
- Grabbing her arms leaving bruises, then kicking her legs at his home.
Why is half of (almost) each of these subordinate clauses tensed and half untensed? Oh, Herald, you bemuse me. Also, I’m curious as to how someone “forc[es] someone against wall”. Why, too, did the hole need “repairs”? How many instances of reparation were enacted against the alleged hole? And is ‘arm-grabbing’ really an official charge? I’m reminded of this:
(13) Judge: So you say you were shot in the fracas?
Witness: No; I was shot in the chest.
Third, then. Dunne-Powell talks about being abused and spouts out this:
(14) Dunne-Powell and Veitch remained in touch after the January assault. “We spoke, text and occasionally met,” Dunne-Powell told police. “We had a history, so it wasn’t a clean cut after the incident. Even though it happened, initially I still thought I loved him.”
Now, we all know that TEXT is a verb (as well as a noun and whatnot). Now we see that it’s irregular!
(15) I text [-PAST] Brian once or twice a day.
(16) She text [+PAST] him last Wednesday.
Is this standard now? Huzzah. On a more human level, though, it’s good to get an insight into Dunne-Powell’s plight. At least she didn’t do a Rihanna and stay with the bastard then get this tattoo -
- telling everybody that - YES - domestic violence is a-okay! As is all other violence. Her message?
(17) Husbands, do try this at home.
[Michael Cullen] thanked former Prime Minister Helen Clark and his wife Anne for their support[.]
Stuffbusting I
Stuff has yet again posted a bizarre story with no analysis at all of the facts it questionably reports. There are almost limitless problems with this article. Time for a list.
A drunk woman barged into a young mother’s home and tried to grab her three-month-old baby in a random incident described by police as bizarre.
- So far so good. Still, wtf?
- On second thoughts, I’ve a bit of a problem here. The “home” and the “three-month-old baby” in question are both described in the same terms in relation to the “young mother”. That is, once we’ve established that the baby is the “young mother“‘s and not the “woman“‘s (the baby’s parent in this case being ambiguous). Both home and baby are referred to as possessions of the “mother”. Which they may well be. But a home, as opposed to a house, is surely defined by people, those who make it up. (Consider: can a home be unoccupied in the same way in which a house can be? This is contestable, though, I’m saying this as a native speaker of English not as a lexicographer.) So why is the “mother” the possessor of the “home” and her “baby” another possession, existing on the same plane as the “home” for the “mother”?
- So I thought for a third time. Why is this poor lady being referred to only by her motherhood? Surely she is a person, not just a mother.
The Asian mother in her early twenties answered a knock at the door of her and her husband’s home in Montgomery Place, Masterton, about 4pm on Friday, to be confronted by a heavily intoxicated woman.
- What exactly is an “Asian mother”? And why is her ethnicity OR her continent of origin (or if “Asian mother” means “mother of an Asian”, her child[ren]’s ethnicity or continent of origin) at issue when all that is important as far as the “woman” is concerned is her lack of sobriety? Oh, of course. Because the “woman” is white and white people don’t have ethnicities. Being white is normal, neutral. Ta, stuff.
- Why do we need to know her age? Does this impact on the story at all? This isn’t so bad as the previous point, but it still suggests that stuff would have reported the story differently if, say, the “mother” was middle-aged or, heaven forbid, post-menopausal.
- Ah, so here we have clarification at last. It’s not just “her” home, it’s “her husband’s” home too. Thank God. She might be Asian (might being the operative word; see above) but at least they subscribe to marriage. Who knows, they might even be Christian!
- Why do we want their address? I don’t know how many young Asian mothers live with husbands and three-year-old children on this street, but I’m suspecting that there are few. Maybe just one. Are stuff trying to tell the whole street just which neighbour let them down enough to have their street shamed in the Dominion Post?
Senior Sergeant Caroline Watson said the intruder pushed her way into the house and started asking questions about the woman’s baby girl.
- Oooh we have a fact! The “woman“‘s property is female. The story makes so much more sense now.
“We are lost for answers really. There doesn’t seem to be anything sinister or any obvious kidnapping attempt. Maybe she just heard the baby crying as she passed by and, in the state she was in, went to have a look.”
- Sage words, Caroline.
The intruder, who was then inside the house, asked to hold the baby then reached out to grab her, Mrs Watson said.
- If Watson were a man (and, yes, still a Senior Sergeant) we would never found out about Watson’s S.O. Why do we need her marital status - or, for that matter, her gender as defined by the Dom Post? Call her Sergeant Watson. Or just Watson. it’ll look like you did less work by having four characters fewer in your article, Tanya, but the characters that are left would be more useful.
A neighbour visiting the house shoved the drunk woman back toward the door and slammed it shut.
- Tanya, darling, in New Zealand we say (and write [and type]) “towards”. Write the way we’ll read it.
- Am I the only one concerned at this point that the “drunk woman” is STILL INSIDE THE HOUSE?!?!??!?! If you don’t want me stressed, Tanya, please confirm that she wasn’t just “toward [sic] the door” but outside of it when the slamming occurred.
Police are still searching for the woman, described as short, with short hair and last seen wearing dark clothing.
- C’mon, what are they really going to do to her?
General trends, then.
- Irrelevance. Lots and lots of information that’s useless in the context of the story. In fact, the whole story’s only very tenuously news. Not that I don’t like gossip.
- The implications these irrelevancies give to the article. Ethnicity, race, marital status … how much do we judge these chaps because of this extra information? Those figuring in news stories move from agent to object - the homeowner is an “Asian” “young” “woman” “mother”, a configuration of categories. This is no
instrument in the shape
this is a cheap character divorced from humanity and reality filling a role in a story constructed by a shitty reporter. In a word, an exploitation.
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind[;]
