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.