Body shaming, misogynism, and other cheerful topics to start off the New Year

The S.O. and I have not yet seen the latest episode in the Star Wars franchise. Odds are that we're not going to see it for awhile -- the closest theater is almost an hour's drive away, it's Winter, we hate night driving, and there's no way we're going to a weekend matinee to sit through a movie in a theater filled with screaming rug rats -- so I can't comment on the film itself. I have, however, been intrigued by all the fuss being made over that fact that in the eyes of some male asshats Carrie Fisher has failed to "age well." Thirty-some years have passed since George Lucas put Carrie Fisher on a leash, and, holy wah, she's had the nerve to get old. Princess Leia no longer is a candidate for the slave bikini.

What the hell does that phrase even mean? Age well?! Is this a case of testosterone poisoning causing such serious brain damage that persons with penises don't realize that out here in the real world "aging well" consists of not dropping dead? Aging isn't a voluntary activity; it's not something where you get to have much say in the matter. You age or you die. And, as Ms. Fisher notes, what you look like as you get older is primarily a matter of genetics. Your future (at least as far as how you look) is driven by your family's past. Want to know what the future holds for you? Check out your grandparents. Was Granddad a fat old man with no hair? Congratulations. Odds are you, too, are going to be a fat old man with no hair. You can fight it -- put in many hours in the gym, watch what you eat, spend a fortune or two on plastic surgery -- but let's get real. There comes a time when it doesn't matter what you do, you're going to look (insert horrified gasp here) old.

Plus, of course, fighting the appearance of aging carries its own punishment. You go from being chastised for having the nerve to age naturally to being mocked for your botoxed wrinkle-free forehead or your obvious face lift. And if you're blessed with good genes and you manage to hit your 50s without obvious wrinkles or sagging body parts, you're treated to speculation about whether or not you've had a little work done. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. You can't win so why bother?

Of course, no one cares if men end up looking like old men, wizened close-to-mummified one foot in the grave types. At least almost no one does rants along the lines of "what the hell are they doing casting Ancient Actor as an action hero when he looks like he belongs in a nursing home?" Or, if they do, the rants don't go viral on the Internet. This bullshit about women not aging well is one of those teases that you see all the time lurking on web pages as click bait: "20 Famous Actors Who Have Not Aged Well!!" If you actually click, you find out it's not that they haven't aged well, it's that they have the nerve to look their age. Someone who was a hot James Bond girl 40 years ago is now (how dare she!) pushing 80 and looking it. The men who jacked off fantasizing about her based on her movie image are outraged that their fantasy has been shattered. She's actually human. She's gotten old. She's passed what Amy Schumer so aptly described as "The Last Fuckable Day." For actors, that day comes when they stop being cast as someone's love interest and start being cast as someone's mother or grandmother. That's also the day they start hearing "she's not aging well" or "OMG she's not a size zero anymore!"

And why should she? Everyone ages, men and women, so why do men get a pass on growing old and women get harassed? Why do women have an obligation to stay in shape, take good care of themselves, remain looking decorative, while men can "let themselves go" and no one cares? If you're casting a movie where some of the major characters are supposed to be in leadership roles, the type of position you get through experience or seniority, why not cast actors who look like they actually match up with reality? One of my pet peeves with movies and television in general is the unrealistic casting. You have male actors cast in roles where they're patently too old to be playing that part -- Mark Harmon is 64 years old; the last time I checked the mandatory retirement age for federal law enforcement officers was 57. Why is LeRoy Jethro Gibbs still toting a gun and running around out in the field getting shot at? -- and female actors in roles where they're much too young. On a regular basis, we see women barely out of puberty being cast as senior government officials or some other role that's totally out of sync with where someone that age could hope to be out in the real world. Of course, no one bitches when someone young and hot gets cast in a role that could appropriately be filled by an older actor. It's when the casting turns realistic that people get annoyed.

I need to stop asking how stupid people are

Way too many folks are taking that question as a challenge. Apparently there's some sort of competition to demonstrate just who the most ignorant persons on the planet are, and at this point Texas is winning.

One of the more discouraging things to result from the most recent Election Day was voters in Houston shooting down an anti-discrimination ordinance because bigots and haters managed to convince them that treating transgender persons like actual human beings would result in hordes of male perverts invading women's restrooms. It was a variation on the same line of fear mongering used back in the 1970s to make people panic over the possibility of the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Just how fracking stupid are people?

I say this because it's pretty obvious that no one who succumbs to this particular line of bovine fecal matter is doing much thinking. First, has it ever occurred to anyone that no one does a genitalia check when you enter a rest room now? If someone looks even superficially female, that person is going to be able to use any ladies' room she wants. There isn't a security guard posted at the door looking up skirts or asking people to drop their pants and prove they don't have a penis. Ergo, if there are male perverts out there who want to dress like women and can do a sufficiently good job with hair and make-up that it isn't obvious they're men, no one is going to stop them. There is an exception to this, which I'll get to in a minute, but it doesn't apply to the average public restroom.

Public latrine 2000 years ago

And you know why no one is going to be doing double takes and strong arming would-be perverts at the door? Because ladies rooms are not one big open area where we women-folk indulge in some sort of group bladder and bowel relief. We don't sit cheek to cheek on an open bench similar to the public latrines of ancient Rome. A ladies room consists of multiple stalls, each with its own lock and plenty of privacy. Unlike men, who stand shoulder to shoulder in front of urinals with plenty of opportunity to glance at a neighbor's equipment (or, as a male friend mentioned, get splashed by some drunk with poor aim), women relieve themselves in solitary splendor. We step into the stall, lock the door behind us, proceed to hike up the skirt (or drop the jeans), pull down the unmentionables, and then take care of business. We are, in fact, so accustomed to stall doors locking that if the door doesn't want to lock, we will usually discover that we don't have to go that badly after all.

The big exception to the anonymity of public restrooms is, of course, elementary and high schools. That's the one place where people are doing genitalia checks, at least on paper, and it's also the one place were trans persons are experiencing the worst problems. School administrators have a really hard time dealing with teenagers who are listed on school records as being one gender but who have realized they are actually the other. Then again, school administrators have a hard time dealing with anything that falls outside the extremely narrow lines they've drawn for what is and is not acceptable in a lot of categories. They also have a bad habit of treating victims of harassment and bullying as though the victims were the perpetrators. Which means, naturally, that if a teen is already having a rough time coming to grips with his or her identity, with a few rare exceptions school administrators are going to do their best to make life for that kid even harder. That in turn leads to the reality that if a student is still listed on the paperwork in the school office as a girl, that student is going to be forced to use the girls' rest room even if the student is now viewed by everyone (parents, fellow students, the world at large) except the school administration as a boy, and vice versa  There will be bathroom police doing the equivalent of genitalia checks.

School bathrooms, incidentally, are also one of the two places I can think of where a person does lose the privacy of the typical bathroom stall. Quite a few schools remove the doors from stalls so teachers can easily check to make sure no one is smoking or doing drugs behind the stall doors. I remember being shocked as hell when I saw that in the Ironwood High School back in the 1980s; I imagine kids have even less privacy in the loo now.

One of the more bizarre aspects of this whole controversy has been the line taken by some of the bigots that people should be required to use the restroom that corresponds with whatever was put on their original birth certificate. The stupid, it burns. Just how do they plan to enforce that little gem? Are they going to start asking women who look like Caitlyn Jenner to whip out the paperwork to prove the word "female" was typed on their birth certificates? Or are they going to simply harass the ladies who don't match up quite as nicely as Caitlyn does with American standards of femininity? Ditto the mens' rooms -- how will these men who are so eager to make women prove they're women feel if they succeed and then they get asked to show their paperwork? Except, of course, that's never occurred to them: the whole focus has been on preventing perverts from entering a ladies' room.

Which leads me to another question: just why do so many people have such an astoundingly low opinion of men? Judging by the hysteria over some of the stuff men are imagined to be waiting with bated breath for the opportunity to do, apparently most men are low life perverted swine that can't be trusted around anyone, let alone women and small children. They're incapable of restraining themselves from indulging in all sorts of depraved acts.

Then again, "projection" is a fairly well known phenomenon in psychology. I can't help but wonder if the reason some of these people are foaming about hypothetical perverted situations is that they spend so much time fantasizing about accosting little kids in public restrooms that they assume everyone else is as sick as they are.  

Blogging while female

Comrade PhysioProf has a great discussion going on about misogynistic behavior, the cluelessness of some males, and the hazards of blogging while female. No real surprises -- everyone knows the world is full of jerks whose only criterion for if a woman is worth having around is whether they'd want to fuck her.

It is one of the reasons, though, that quite a few women who blog use gender-neutral pseudonyms. As long as the asshats think the blogger might be male, they'll focus on the ideas -- as soon as they realize the writer has a vagina, however, the comments immediately shift into objectifying her. Doesn't matter if the comments are supposedly compliments (e.g., "Wow, you're hot") or insulting ("Fat ass"), either one is actually an insult because it's saying a cunt is more important than a brain. Very, very strange. I've never been able to figure out why some guys insist on wearing the figurative equivalent of an "I'm with Stupid" shirt with the arrow pointing at themselves.