I recently read an article that made me feel like a bratty, treasonous, ignoble woman, so naturally, I'd like to talk about it.I'm referring to "Too ugly for TV? No, I'm too brainy for men who fear clever women", written by classicist and television host Mary Beard in response to some poisonous, unfunny comments from a British television reviewer named AA Gill. He wrote the following charming, make-you-want-to-date-him things about her after watching her show Meet the Romans:
"Mary Beard really should be kept away from cameras altogether."
"For someone who looks this closely at the past, it is strange she hasn't had a closer look at herself before stepping in front of a camera."
"...because she's this far from being the subject of a Channel 4 dating documentary" (referring, apparently, to The Undateables, a show about disabled people looking for love).
All those comments are repugnant and shallow and reveal him to be the kind of person who probably inspired the coining of the phrase "total prick". But I have managed to be bothered also by her response to these repugnant and shallow comments.
She writes: "Throughout Western history [just an aside: invariably the manner in which the very worst undergraduate essays begin] there have always been men like Gill who are frightened of smart women who speak their minds, and I guess, as a professor of Classics at Cambridge University, I'm one of them."
It is entirely possible that Gill is a disgusting misogynist. Certainly when he watches a show about the Romans, he should be more concerned about its accuracy than the hair-style and tooth-size of the presenter. But just because he doesn't think television presenters should be frowsy and unpolished (and I haven't heard that he thinks male presenters are allowed to be either of things) doesn't mean he hates women; and even if he does maintain a double-standard about the extent to which men and women on the small screen are required to look like realtors or meteorologists, that just means he has issues with women and attractiveness, not necessarily with bright women and attractiveness.
When I was in high school and a boy (contrary to the demands of good sense) insisted on not wanting to date me, invariably someone would say, "It's obvious - he's just intimidated by you." I don't deny that my staggering intelligence and gorgeousness were impressive and fearsome, but that explanation always bothered me. Some people just won't like me. Some people will not like me, and will make fun of me, and will not want to date me, and not because I am brilliant and gorgeous and they just can't take it.
Gill, in an article about The Undateables, described it as a "mocking freak show of grotesques and embarrassments". As far as I know, not all those featured were women, and not all of them were Classics professors at Cambridge. He seems to be an asshole who has an issue with all those who aren't conventionally attractive and conventionally presentable. It's entirely possible he made cutting and unfunny comments about Mary Beard just because he thinks she's funny-looking, not because he's secretly shamed by her intellect. I'm not saying that's any better; it's just a different crappy kind of motivation.
Beard also commented: "...maybe it's precisely because he did not go to university that he never quite learned the rigour of intellectual argument and thinks that he can pass off insults as wit" and with that she managed to bother me even more powerfully. I attended university for approximately eighty-five years, and so I can authoritatively state that anyone who thinks that everyone who goes to university has learned how to argue in an intellectually rigourous fashion and that everyone who has not attended university has not, is a) deluded, and b) almost certainly a graduate of graduate school.
Beard closes by suggesting various ways in which Gill could be punished: he should have to watch her shows - all of them - , he should have to discuss them with her...etc...etc... But as I'm not convinced he hates smart women in particular (although he might), and I am convinced he is for whatever reason extremely bothered by people who aren't conventionally attractive (or don't put the appropriate effort into trying to appear that way) I think the only truly fitting punishment for his crime would be for him to have to appear on television unshaven, unwashed, wearing unfashionable trousers and a hopelessly out-of-style sweater, and sporting a startlingly dowdy bowl cut. I'm sure that would hurt him more than watching Beard's shows or being reminded he doesn't teach at Cambridge.
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I owe my father an apology. Not because I forced him to listen to Aerosmith's Pump when I was thirteen, or because I never managed to become a sullen teenager and so talked incessantly about things like Aerosmith's Pump (although I am desperately sorry for both of those things), but because I thought he just had to be wrong about Arizona. Arizona couldn't be that crazy. He had to have misunderstood. What a fool I was to doubt both my father and the unlimited batshit craziness of Arizona!Perhaps ashamed of having a doctors-can-mislead-pregnant-women law slightly less batshit crazy than Oklahoma's, one proud Arizonan politician has decided to give all liberals an early Christmas present by telling a constituent that women who want to have abortions should first be forced to watch other women have abortions.When he told me this, I of course concluded my father must have been watching Keith Olberman while sleep-deprived and high on something that makes people think totally outrageous things about conservatives. But no. Rep. Terri Proud (R! - Tuscon) responded to a concerned citizen's email about an anti-abortion bill with the following:"Personally I'd like to make a law that mandates a woman watch an abortion being performed prior to having a 'surgical procedure'. If it's not a life it shouldn't matter, if it doesn't harm a woman then she shouldn't care, and don't we want more transparency and education in the medical profession anyway? We demand it everywhere else. Until the dead child can tell me that she/he does not feel any pain - I have no intentions of clearing the conscience of the living - I will be voting YES."This concerned citizen was not the only one to receive this response, as Proud told her staff to send it out to anyone who suggested she oppose the bill.When the concerned citizen became even more concerned as a result and sent a follow-up email indicating she was both embarrassed and frightened by Proud, Proud responded with: "You're kidding right?" I can only assume this was also a blanket response sent out to all those who'd emailed back to suggest her last blanket response had been embarrassing and frightening. So once again, Dad, I'm sorry. I should never for a second have questioned your claims. If you tell me next that a state rep (R!!!) from Oklahoma has suggested women should not be allowed to have an abortion until they have have actually performed an abortion on another woman, I will not doubt you for a second. POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough.
If you haven't read this post yet, please note that everything has now changed. If you have read it, please note that everything has now changed.
If you're like me, you approve of events like Race for the Cure (which is American and not the same thing as the Canadian "Run for the Cure") because it promotes an awareness of breast cancer and raises money to fight breast cancer, but wish it didn't also create such a showy spectacle of... togetherness... camaraderie... tolerance. All those people pulling together to fight a common enemy, drawing strength from one another, etc...etc... Nauseating. How can a sensible person combat evil while simultaneously excluding and disempowering people?
Thankfully, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation, that charitable behemoth, has once again proved that it can rustle up both funds and controversy. A few years ago, it trademarked its pink ribbon and started telling other charities they couldn't use the phrase "for the cure" in any way, ever. They set lawyers on charities with initiatives like "Kites for the Cure" and "Cupcakes for a Cure" who dared either a) raise money for a non-breast-cancer cancer cause, or b) raise money to fight breast cancer for an organization not called the Susan G. Komen for the Cure. It's also been partnered with companies that engage in "pinkwashing", a name for what happens when companies use pink packaging, announce that proceeds from their product will go to breast cancer research, and then never actually reveal how much money was involved or where, precisely, it will be going. And it's partnered with companies like KFC which (although we know they're simply a victim of "crispyfatwashing") have been associated with general unhealthiness.But Komen recently decided it had set it sights too low - that it was, in fact, possible to be more ambitious and alienate more people. It emerged yesterday that Komen will no longer be giving any money to Planned Parenthood. This money - hundreds of thousands of dollars - was primarily devoted to the subsidizing of breast exams for low-income and at-risk women. Komen claims it put a stop to the grants because Planned Parenthood is currently being investigated by the U.S. Congress. Of course, that investigation was instigated by Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla) at the behest of pro-life groups, and most Democrats claim it's stupid and senseless. Oddly enough, a woman named Karen Handel was recently appointed senior VP of public policy at Komen, and she ran as a Republican for governor of Georgia two years ago (unsuccessfully) on an anti-abortion platform and is chums with Sarah Palin.So bravo, Susan G. Komen for the Cure! You have made it possible to run for a cure, while also running away from people who as a result might not know in a timely fashion that they're in need of one. POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough.
A concerned reader brought the following concerning news item to my attention: "Moins de chasseurs à cause des mères monoparentales, dit le sénateur Boisvenu".As my French has gone the way of my regard for Tom Selleck (as a man - as Magnum I still regard him frequently) and my youthful idealism, I turned to Google Translate and discovered that that jumble of delightfully nonsensical-sounding words means something along the lines of: "Fewer hunters because single mothers, said Senator Boisvenu". As you know, I have always believed that single mothers have a lot to answer for. They threaten to unravel the moral fabric of the nation. They are obviously an affront to all decently-married people. They also often have to work really hard to raise children alone, making the more morally-upstanding and decently-married of us appear shiftless and lazy. I have to thank Conservative Quebec senator Boisvenu for alerting me to this latest threat, and to Google, for translating this alert: "Noting the presence of more and more of mothers in society who are single parents, Senator Quebec has stated that 'hunting is no longer a tradition handed down from father to son,' adding that now, 'who is 14-15-16-17-18 years no longer have the reflex to purchase a firearm.'" "'We see that the number of hunters has made dramatic,'" he concluded.Senator Quebec, though, is not simply mourning the loss of a tradition; he is bringing attention to a new menace. "He said that if the deer are not slaughtered in the Eastern Townships, there are good times and bad, between 5000 and 8000 collisions between animals and cars. 'It leads to other problems in terms of mortality,' he said." So single mothers, then, by not passing down a reflex for the purchase of firearms to their sons, are directly responsible for road fatalities in that it is through their negligent mercifulness that the deer remain alive to kill.We can only hope that single mothers, now aware of this situation, will take responsibility for it, defend tradition, and save lives by purchasing weapons for their sons and teaching them to stalk and kill. POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by axident.
 "I want you to show me a stronger biological urge to procreate!" You may already have gathered that I am fair-minded and incisive about everything, everything, with the the exception of gender essentialism. It's like an allergy: when people say things like "well, he is a man, after all" as though that explains all pernicious forms of behaviour, or "she's not just looking for a dalliance, because, after all, she is a woman and is therefore going to sabotage her birth control in order to give herself a baby" I come over all funny and have a near-uncontrollable urge to stab myself in the upper thigh with a pen.I don't care whether Primitive Man was forced to develop certain coping mechanisms in order to hunt and gather or whether Primitive Woman was forced to develop different strategies in order to safely furnish and decorate her primitive hut. I've never understood why biology is destiny, when it's obvious that human beings are able in many circumstances to adopt behaviours that seem to mitigate against the propagation and survival of the species (vehicular traffic! self-doubt! men wearing sandals!). Many things support my view, which I would continue to support myself even in the absence of such supportive things. Many neurologists, it appears, are crazy proponents of the theory that women like hugs and relationships and men like math and nuclear war, and have devised skewed experiments and/or misrepresented experiments in order to prove it. There's no evidence that girls and boys learn in different ways, or that they benefit from single-sex schooling.And yet, it's comforting, I suppose, in an age when we aren't allowed to stereotype other races quite so much, to be able to generalize wildly about large groups of people based on their private bits.Just this week, Rotten Tomatoes' Greg Dean Schmitz wrote the following annoying thing: "Marvel may be setting a pattern with Thor 2, as this week, it was revealed that Marvel's top choice is director Patty Jenkins, whose one feature film was 2003's Monster [...] and the pilot episode of AMC's series The Killing. If Marvel does indeed sign Patty Jenkins to direct Thor 2, this choice seems to suggest a story more female-centric than people generally think of when they think 'Asgardian mythology.'""Female-centric." What in God's name does that mean? Are all female directors interested in female things? And what are female things? I mean, if Marvel was kicking around the idea of signing, say, Nora Ephron, I'd concede they might be going in a softer, gentler direction (which still wouldn't make it unavoidably appealing to all women). But the woman who made Monster? That movie about the vicious lady serial killer? It certainly dealt with a woman, but it can't be said to represent any kind of "feminine" perspective. And, as far as recall, there are no 30-year-spanning female friendships punctuated by tragic cardiac conditions and songs in that film. If Patty Jenkins makes Thor 2, will she be unable to prevent herself from casting only women in all roles and turning it into a multi-generational tale of loss, perseverance, love, and casserole-making?Then there's the new movie that should star Sarah Michelle Gellar and instead stars Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz. The director describes it as "a psychological thriller with horror overtones and detective story overtones, but essentially, deep down it's a love story." "We've made the kind of movie with thriller and horror elements," he continues, desperate to ensure I'll never want to date him, "but women will like it." He's so right. If a movie has thrills and chills, but makes no attempt to represent a love relationship, my womb just refuses to sit still and pay attention. Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
While it's true that the following things created a great deal of outrage a number of weeks ago, I feel that outrage can often get richer and more potent given time to sit.
A two-year-old ad for an Edmonton hair salon was recently thrust back into the spotlight after a blogger found it obscurely offensive. The ad features a fancy prairie lady sporting a black eye presumably given her by the man standing behind their Eisenhower-era couch (I suppose that should be "St-Laurent-era", but I know more about Eisenhower because all I ever learned from those "A Part of Our Heritage" commercials was that most Canadian actors are suspect and that epileptic seizures are often heralded by the smell of burnt toast).
So the woman has been abused, but, Fluid Hair tells us, that's no reason for her to let herself go. A Fluid woman, presumably, would also take the time to gussy up during a hurricane, terrorist attack, or nuclear meltdown. Think of all the other topical and offensive print-ad possibilities!The hair-salon owner, Sarah Cameron, was, surprisingly enough, both surprised and defensive, because:“The ads were our interpretation of a particular ‘art form'. Is it cutting edge advertising? Yes. Is it intended to be a satirical look at real life situations that ignites [sic] conversation and debate? Of course. Is it to everyone’s taste? Probably not.”This leads to my first suggestion: whatever "art form" this ad is ostensibly "interpreting" should be immediately outlawed. My second suggestion is that anyone wanting to make what they believe to be satirical art should be forced to apply for a permit. They should be forced to apply for that permit to ME, so that when I rejected them, I could also say some very mean and petty things.The next distasteful images related to domestic violence bring us into the realm of inconsistent, prime-time, musical television shows. Heather Morris, who plays Brittany on Glee, was photographed by Tyler Shields with a fake black eye, and various 1950's domestic accessories.The close-up of Morris with the black eye is not the worst thing ever, and Shield's admittedly tedious claim that "even Barbie bruises" could be said to provide some theoretical underpinning for the work. But his suggestion that these shots are all about showing that attractive, blonde women can be victims of violence is undermined by the fact that the other photos look like out-takes from the cover-shoot for an unreleased Warrant album. If these photos aren't sexualizing a victim of some kind of violence, then Tyler Shields is an interesting and cutting-edge artist.Making it possible for me to hate more people involved in this situation, US Weekly kicked off its story about the photo shoot with: "She's got that boom boom pow!" Both the hair-salon ad and the Morris photos seem weirdly to nostalgically fetishize 1950s-ish, 1960-ish domestic bondage and violence against women. It's like a stupid ad exec and a stupid photographer watched an episode of Mad Men while drunk and thought, "Those dresses are awesome! Retro's really in right now!" and then made some really questionable and embarrassing creative decisions. Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
Unfortunately, circumstances have obliged me to revisit my conclusions of last week. I am often obliged to revisit my conclusions, as they are frequently wrong. Perhaps thinking about things more thoroughly or researching would help, but I avoid such activities on point of principle as they are hallmarks of Socialism.At any rate, last week I concluded that gender equality would eventually be achieved at least in part through offensive bibs. But recently, a news item reminded me that we still have a long way to go when it comes to degrading boys as much as girls.Most episodes of Toddlers and Tiaras are remarkable for their awfulness and for helping you realize that, whatever you might think, your parents were classy and your youthful fashion sense sophisticated (and - full disclosure, I occasionally watch Toddlers and Tiaras. And Hoarders: Buried Alive. There's probably a German word for how they make me feel and why I keep watching them.). The show, though, has now lowered the bar of good taste to unprecedentedly low levels. Wendy Dickey, pageant mom and self-professed Good Christian Woman, dressed her 3-year-old up as Julia Robert's Pretty Woman prostitute character, clearly in a misguided attempt to illustrate some of the more obscure teachings of Christ.
I immediately tried to figure out what the boy-child equivalent would be. A pint-sized Joe Buck would probably go unrecognized by a pageant audience; My Own Private Idaho is most likely too private for the public Idaho and a reference to it would also perplex. And I don't remember The Basketball Diaries being a heart-warming crowd-pleaser or involving snooty retail salespeople getting their comeuppance.
Really, a caring Christian mother looking for the male equivalent of Roberts' beloved movie prostitute would find herself at a loss. I guess she could always stick to the Pretty Woman theme instead, and dress her beloved Bentley or Ethan or Jayden up as a knee-high Richard Gere. My utopic vision of a future in which both and girls are equally objectified and in much the same way might never be realized, but I'm somewhat comforted by the prospect of toddler hookers and toddler johns.
Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
A recent study, which I believe is credible even though I so badly want to believe in it (I tend to be suspicious of anything that seems to support my prejudices), has found that girls raised in a matrilineal community in India have spacial reasoning skills equal to those of boys raised in a patrilineal community in India, throwing the whole "boys are naturally better at math because evolution makes them want to have sex with more than one woman and woman are naturally better at sharing and hugging because evolution makes them really sensitive" argument into doubt. According to an unattributed, but very professional-sounding, quote from a commenter on the story (who is both trustworthy and determined, as evidenced by his/her screen name: "Frodo Baggins"):
"The authors looked at some of the cultural factors that might be expected to explain the difference between the two societies. Males are likely to receive more education in the patrilineal society, and the authors found that introducing education as a factor in their analysis accounted for a third of the difference. Male ownership of the home also had a large effect; the gender gap is only a third the size in homes that are not owned solely by males."
But why would girls in the West have spacial reasoning skills less impressive than than those of the Western boys? They have access to education and are allowed to own their own homes and inherit property.
One possible explanation for the gap can be found in the t-shirt recently discontinued by J.C. Penny because of a totally unpredictable backlash from consumers: Aha! The answer is clear: Western girls can't reason spatially as well as Western boys because they're simply too pretty. If their brothers would just stop doing their homework for them, or they became even slightly less pretty, they'd develop new mental abilities. Do not despair, though. I firmly believe the gender gap will be eradicated not by helping girls develop news skills, but by taking away the ones the boys already have. Another commenter on the "The Mary Sue" website led me to the following page, which details the exciting bibs now available for both boy and girl babies. While it's true that the "high chair hottie" bib for the discriminating girl baby might seem to stress the importance of her looks, the "flirt", "hunk", and "single" bibs for boys do much the same thing for him. Soon both girls AND boys will be too pretty to do homework, and true equality between the genders will be achieved.
 And the difference is in the paycheck. I might not know very much about U.S. law, but ignorance has never before stopped me from commenting authoritatively and at length about anything, so I find myself with a number of things to say about the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision to throw out a huge sex-discrimination lawsuit against Walmart.First of all (and most importantly): is Walmart single? I know that corporations are treated as people under the law. I know that they are now allowed to make unlimited campaign contributions because of how free speech is and how much democracy flourishes, so it's not crazy to think they're entitled to a romantic life.And what upstanding, self-respecting, feminine woman would not want to go steady with Walmart? Walmart was being taking to court by seemingly billions and billions of women upset only because they were being treated like ladies. Sure, says journalist Liza Featherstone, women "earn less than their male counterparts in nearly every position at the company", and female supervisors often make less money than the male employees they're being paid not very much to supervise, but that's just because, as one store manager explained, men "are working as the heads of their households, while women are just working for the sake of working." I couldn't have put it better! Women work to have extra money to buy lipstick and decorative baubles. As another Walmart employee stated, men "are here to make a career and women aren't. Retail is for housewives who just need to earn extra money." How true, on both counts! I certainly associate Walmart with men hungry for career advancement and women not desperate for money to feed their families. So it's pretty clear that Walmart would make a good boyfriend, the kind of boyfriend who would let me work to buy myself some handbags and potted plants, but count on me mostly for my home-building, hearth-tending skills.
Antonin Scalia, though, has placed an obstacle in my romantic path. Although generally I think of him as both fair-minded and good-looking, he has made a serious misstep in this case. He claims that Walmart has not instituted any discriminatory practices, and that the company should not be blamed for allowing their managers the freedom to behave in a discriminatory fashion. So a corporation is a person, and yet it is not one bit like a person. It has the right to speak freely as though it is a person, but is suddenly not a person with agency and accountability when its employees rush about insulting and mistreating people. I mean, I'd like to hook up with Walmart because it wouldn't expect me take on unladylike responsibilities, or at least would not pay me an unladylike amount to take them on, but I wouldn't be comfortable knowing that every time we had a fight, Walmart could just say that it wasn't at fault and some semi-autonomous network of middle-managers was to blame. So I'll have to set my sights on some other promising potential beau. I'm looking at you, Scalia. I'm willing to become incorporated if that's what it will take to get your attention.
Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
Finally! I have been very concerned that repressive and reductive gender stereotypes may be losing their hold on our cultural imagination. Thankfully, two older, intellectual, inexplicably confident men have decided to prove that it's still possible to think of women as overly sentimental, funny-bone-less wombs.The novelist V.S. Naipaul has had the good sense to say what everyone is, of course, always thinking: women can't write for shit. I mean, they are physically capable of writing, but their work will inevitably deal with the fripperies and insignificant sentimental fluffinesses of a Woman's Life. As Naipaul notes: "I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me." Their writing is formed, deformed, by their "sentimentality, the narrow view of the world". And "inevitably for a woman," he continues, sensing he's on to a good thing here, "she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too."
And then there's Christopher Hitchens, whom I've made a point of disliking for many years. He has produced one of the most skin-crawlingly smug, offensive, condescending articles in recent memory. Entitled "Why Women Aren't Funny", the article asserts that women naturally aren't funny, that if they accidentally happen to be funny, they are generally "hefty, or dykey, or Jewish" (although as we all know, "Jewish humor, boiling as it is with angst and self-deprecation, is almost masculine by definition"), that "women, bless their tender hearts, would prefer that life be fair, and even sweet, rather than the sordid mess it actually is" (unlike all men), that "women do not find their own physical decay and absurdity to be [...] riotously amusing" (as, apparently all men do), that "for women, reproduction is, if not the only thing, certainly the main thing. Apart from giving them a very different attitude to filth and embarrassment, it also imbues them with the kind of seriousness and solemnity at which men can only goggle." For women, then, "the question of funniness is essentially a secondary one. They are innately aware of a higher calling that is no laughing matter." Although he claimed earlier that women (if I'm following his argument correctly and not distracted by my urge to let loose upon him a mob of hefty, dykey, infertile Jewish women) aren't funny partly because they prefer life to be sweet and not gross and depressing, he now appears to be asserting that they're unfunny for the opposite reason: because they are always aware of the fragility and tragedies of human life and are terrified of losing the tiny child that contributed to making them not funny in the first place. As he comments, "One tiny snuffle that turns into a wheeze, one little cut that goes septic, one pathetically small coffin, and the woman's universe is left in ashes and ruin. Try being funny about that, if you like. Oscar Wilde was the only person ever to make a decent joke about the death of an infant, and that infant was fictional, and Wilde was (although twice a father) a queer." I'm not entirely sure what he's getting at with the "queer" bit. Are queers more or less likely to mourn children? Are they more or less likely to be funny? Hitchens' article boasts more irresponsible, over-generalized statements and unsupported claims than...Bernie Madoff's resume (not funny)...a science class in Texas (not funny)...an interview with V.S. Naipaul (not funny, but totally true).If only I didn't have female reproductive organs and therefore see no humour in filth, embarrassment, and the increasingly pendulous folds of my aging body, I might be able to pull off of comic gem like this one from Hitchens:"Be your gender what it may, you will certainly have heard the following from a female friend who is enumerating the charms of a new (male) squeeze: 'He's really quite cute, and he's kind to my friends, and he knows all kinds of stuff, and he's so funny … ' (If you yourself are a guy, and you know the man in question, you will often have said to yourself, 'Funny? He wouldn't know a joke if it came served on a bed of lettuce with sauce béarnaise.')"Hilarious! If I didn't believe in his thesis from the very beginning, I certainly did after I clapped eyes on that sauce crack. Hitchens, while discussing well-known progressive writer Rudyard Kipling, refers to the "great masculine equivalent to childbirth, which is warfare." Which is odd, because I always thought, because so many male authors said so, that the great masculine equivalent to childbirth was the production of Great Thoughts or Great Works of Art. A man's novel is his child. A man's painting is his child. A man's philosophical musings are his children...etc...etc... And I have to say that if that is the case, both Naipaul and Hitchens have managed to produce some astonishingly unattractive, sickly, aggravating kids. I anxiously await that tiny snuffle turning into a wheeze, that tiny cut going septic, so that I can put these articles in pathetically small coffins and go off and make a whole lot of jokes about shit. Send the Catastrophizer your requests for advice and/or rationalizations using the form conveniently provided HERE. I will publish my responses on the THE CATASTROPHIZER page.POLITE DISCLAIMER: This site is intended for entertainment purposes only. If you are not entertained, fair enough. Also, I'm not very good at copy-editing, so if something looks wrong, it was put there by accident.
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