Red Hot Riding Hood

I just happened to come across this whilst searching for material for a certain other blog of mine and I thought I'd share it here. This article is about a Russian strip club that caters to het women. It raises some pretty interesting questions about "the gaze", the role of feminism and consumerism in sex culture and the essential differences (or lack thereof) between men and women.

The thing that really stands out to me is that the article constantly asserts that this whole thing 'isn't gay', which to me implies that we've come so far from being able to accept the female erotic gaze that we automatically see male nudity or male displays of sexuality in terms of homosexuality. See also this SocImages post on a related topic.

Jaws

At about 18 seconds in, a slow-motion sequence starts that shows this beast doing something that I honestly thought no real creature could actually do!

Yes, that's right, this thing shoots its own mouth outside of its head, Alien-style. I think what's so impressive about this is the scale; this is the sort of thing that I can imagine insects doing, but not notably larger animals like sharks. Eww.

Skin trade

This video from The Onion neatly captures exactly what I hate about PETA. Like the very best of satires, this sketch is only a hair's width away from the bizarre truth. Incidentally, PETA's "response" at the end of the video practically had me in tears from laughing so hard.

Advocacy Group Decries PETA's Inhumane Treatment Of Women

Really? My toaster is a power bottom too! What a coincidence!

Random thoughts on "Obsessed"

Ok, it's another Mariah Carey "what the?" moment. In her latest video (which I'm not going to embed as I can't find a decent embeddable version at the moment, but here's the link to her official site where it plays within a little widget on the left), Mariah Carey not only dresses up as a man and plays her own stalker (a nice way to get double the screen time for MC, as opposed to say, what would happen if she brought in David Boreanaz to play the part, and also giving the whole video an Austin Powers/Dr Evil vibe), but we then see him/her get run over by a bus. Now that's a surprisingly violent climax for a Mariah Carey video, no?

Incidentally, I've always been fascinated by the presentation of Mariah Carey's race in all of the media pertaining to her. Mariah Carey is mixed race, with Irish-Caucasian on the one side and Black-South-American on the other, yet was famously made to "play down" her "blackness" (as well as any explicit portrayals of adult sexuality) whilst working under husband/manager Tommy Mottola. Upon her separation - personally and professionally - from Mottola, you suddenly see a massive upswing in the amount of cultural signifiers of "blackness" in Mariah Carey media, including a great deal of collaborations with rap/hip-hop/r&b artists (and hey, Spike Lee too). I also find it telling that Mariah's "evil alter ego" - appearing in the videos for "Heartbreaker" and "Boy" - is called "Bianca", although maybe that's a bit of a stretch.

The reason I'm thinking about all of this? Simple. When watching the video for "Obsessed" I couldn't help but wonder, Mariah Carey can certainly get away with playing a white man, it seems, but if she'd been playing a black man, would she have been accused of 'blacking up', despite her own black heritage? It's all a moot point, obviously, as she's not done so, but still, it makes me wonder.

And in case you're wondering why she gets hit by a bus in the new video, well, it's all a big "fuck you and I hope you die" to Eminem, apparently.

Meet Buddy

I was wondering how long it would be before I'd come across a picture of a gender-reversed Buffy the Vampire Slayer cast on deviantart. A certain section of fandom loves to play around with cult media archetypes, amalgamating them, reimagining them as part of different genres (I've also seen pieces that show the Buffy cast as bona fide spandex-clad superheroes) and yes, gender-reversing them. Just go and search for "gender reversed Teen Titans" and you'll see that I'm not kidding. Again, all I'm saying is, I'm surprised it took me this long to find an image like this.

Incidentally, I'd be horrified if I found that someone had written gender-reversed Buffy fanfiction. The reason being that, hopefully, any amount of thought on the part of the author would make them realise that a gender-reversed version of the BtVS plot would be exactly the same, unless of course one happened to hold some bizarrely sexist beliefs about the differences between the sexes. 'Alexandra' would still be a clumsy, horny teen; 'Will' would still be a shy geek with an interest in the mystical... And yet, a part of me just knows that some idiot somewhere has written this thing, and that it features tonnes of purple prose about how the newly-female characters are just "so much more sensitive" and other puke-worthy rubbish.

So yeah, this works as a visual experiment, but please tell me there isn't crazy, sexist fanfiction about all this stuff.

Whoever wins...

I promise I'll do a more substantial post sooner or later, but this just made me laugh, so it gets posted.

Crazy Mariah Carey art

Bonus! One of my favourite weird Barack Obama images:

That Mitchell and Webb Post

This is just far too good...

...and, as one commenter on Pandagon put it, also "sadly appropriate," considering how Edward's stalkerish actions are commonly construed as so utterly romantic. Oh, thank you Rebellious Pixels for reminding me how - even though it may not have been perfect - Buffy was still head and shoulders above a lot of similar shows out there.

P.S.
Oops, sorry about the weird size of the thing.

A very 'not good' comic

Hey, remember that bit in Kill Bill where Bill (speaking of whom, let me just say "RIP, David Carradine") says "This is me at my most masochistic?" Well, for some reason that quote just kept popping up in my head while I was reading through the latest volume of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic. 'Cause yep, masochism really is the only way I can explain why I'm reading it at all, really.

It's not to be wholly unexpected. A common, if unfortunate side-effect of any fandom is that sometimes one will continue to invest in something long after one has become no longer, well, invested in it, just as a way of supporting it, or perhaps just out of habit, or some kind of anterograde amnesia-style perpetual forgetting of just how bad it's gotten. Perhaps it can just all be chalked up to a very misguided sense of what exactly 'fan loyalty' means. Maybe it's just Emotional Branding.

Anyway, to sum up, what I'm getting at here is that I really did not enjoy Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Time of Your Life. To summarise, ToYL is a story in which Buffy is brought into the future by a centuries-old and apparently evil (although in actuality, really just very confusing and seemingly confused about her own motivations) version of Willow, who, for some reason or another, opts to start a fistfight between Buffy and her far-future counterpart Fray. Buffy then kills future Willow before coming back in time, the end. Somehow this took four issues and for some more apparent reason, I felt a little ripped off. You know what's a good deal if you like both superhero-versus-superhero punch-ups and Joss Whedon? That Astonishing X-Men special he penned a short for a little while ago that also collecteda bunch of old comics in which the X-Men met, fought and then teamed up with other Marvel super-heroes like the Fantastic Four, the Avengers or Spider-Man. This new, Buffy/Fray one on the other hand, is a confusing mess that seems to ultimately lead nowhere and really perhaps is just an excuse to get people to shell out $15 for a very brief and poorly justified fist fight.

Oh, and don't even get me started on the non-entity that is the story's so-called sub-plot. Some magical monsters attack our heroes, who then fight back and win. Yes, it really is that simple, and yes, it somehow took four issues to tell. Damn you, decompression!

One interesting curiosity though is that this collection also contains a one-off story based around the Buffy animated series that never was, which is slightly weird, because surely that makes it a spin-off of essentially nothing. Sure, the unaired pilot is still floating around the internet for those who wish to find it, and yeah, I think they may have released some toys/statuettes/maquettes 'based on the series' before, but those may have just been solicited and then disappeared into the ether like that BtVS tarot deck that was solicited a while back (and I must admit, I so would have bought, in probably not my wisest of purchases), but still, I find the whole thing a little odd. So yeah, there's that little curiosity there.

Anyway, I guess that's me done until I inevitably buy the next volume of this stuff and then begrudingly review that.

Ooh, luckily I picked up the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen too to help cleanse the pallet (ThreePenny Opera references for the win!).