An open letter to men who yell things at women on the street

March 30, 2007

Dear men who yell things at women on the street,

Obviously, it is not okay to say “Nice tits!” or “Nice ass!” or “Come over here and get raped now!” Sometimes you say those things anyway, but you and I both know they are wrong.

However, I would like to discuss some of your comments that fall into the gray area.

“That is a very nice dress, ma’am.” Assuming you are saying this in any normal tone of voice and not, you know, inching closer with a knife, this is fine by me. For real. Sometimes it is in fact okay to say things to strangers.

“Hey, are you married?” This is an East Harlem special. The implication that, if I am not married, I would want to go out with you, is a prime example of The Fallacy of False Dichotomy.

“You’re pretty — why don’t you smile more often?” This is the one I really want to talk about. For real? I should’ve been smiling … just now? While walking down the street by myself? Carrying groceries? On my way home? WHO THE FUCK SMILES ALL THE TIME FOR NO FUCKING REASON? Bipolar people in their manic phases? Seriously, most women, much like you, maintain a fairly neutral facial expression while walking down the street and not talking to anyone. Were you just smiling at the air in the moments before you saw me and suggested that I should be smiling? No? Among people and animals, a smile is often a sign of submission. Why don’t you smile more often?

In closing, I would like to say that I am aware that you, men who yell things at women on the street, don’t read my blog. Yes, I know.

-Jen

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dreaming people are dumb

March 29, 2007

So, I had a dream in which a young man I know killed himself and mailed me his own head in a box.

It wasn’t until I woke up that I had my Law and Order moment and brilliantly deduced that foul play must have been involved, because a person cannot commit suicide and then subsequently pack up his own head and mail it to you.

The box was beautifully decorated with poetry (dark poetry, of course) and had several heavy, turnable “pages” of art before one got to the head. Like a really nice CD or something. But with a head for a CD.

How fucking weird is that?

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that is my tiny head in this magazine

March 29, 2007

The spelling bee is in the April 2007 issue of Budget Travel magazine, which is much sexier than it sounds.




Update: Come to the Williamsburg Spelling Bee on April 2, 16th, or 30th. Signup at 7, bee at 7:30. Free and open to all.

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inc*st is best, hmmn?

March 29, 2007

Dear Spammers,

I know you’ve had to get very clever in order to get past my spam filters to try to sell me penis hardeners and enlargers. I appreciate your diligent circumvention that has ensured that we preserve this daily bond we have. You have offered to sell me V*&gra to better “schtup” my “broad”, and you have promised to enhance my “member” to please “dames.” I especially admire your retro sex-talk — how demure, how quaint!

But today’s missive offering me the chance to “add three inches to your little brother” was just wrong. Wrong.

Thank you,
Jen

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lamest celebrity sighting ever

March 29, 2007

I saw Matthew Lesko at the corner of 34th and Park. He was dragging a wheeled suitcase with a big dollar sign attached to it. He had dollar signs on other parts of his clothes as well. I’m not sure what they were attached with.


I’d rather have seen Kate Hudson jogging or something.

Lesko was wearing the dreaded … purple gardening clogs.

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treating women like children who can’t handle advertising (again)

March 28, 2007

The Spanish government is making fatter mannequins for the purpose of socially engineering its populace to stop thinking that thin women are fashionable. They’re bringing in some Homeland-Security-type technology to determine the mannequins’ proportions:

Using laser-fitted booths that can take 130 measurements of a body in 30 seconds, the Health Ministry is fanning out across the country to assess the sizes of Spanish women…. The manufacturers’ garments will then reflect the dimensions of real women, not catwalk waifs.

Bear in mind that this is not a STORE doing this. It’s the Socialist government.

(Incidentally, fashion in larger sizes doesn’t have to be government-mandated. Torrid is doing just fine in a laissez-faire economy, because their clothes are hot, and people like their advertising).

Now, Spain is not a particularly obese country, but imagine if you did this body-imaging and averaging business in the U.S.? Simply because something is “average” does not make it “normal” or “good” or “healthy.” I’m not sure whether to call this a Fallacy of Middle Ground or just, you know, paternalistic government.

And may I add: can you even imagine any government thinking it has a responsibility to initiate a feelings-changing campaign regarding men’s self-esteem?

Isn’t is a little infantilizing that the state would need to protect women’s oh-so-delicate feelings from advertising? Do we have campaigns to make men who can’t afford big manly offroad-terrain-demolishing SUVs feel better about that? Maybe a campaign picturing “real men” of average incomes driving average cars. Lay off the advertising, people: we’re destroying our nation’s men! Um, no. We can all handle it. It’s a free market; if you don’t like the advertising, don’t buy the product. If lots of other people do seem to like the advertising, well, that’s why it’s there. And we’re done!

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comedian contest: wildcard spot at Pete’s

March 27, 2007

Henceforth, when I have an available spot at the comedy show at Pete’s, I’m going to give it away in a contest on the blog.

The fine print: While many of the readers of this blog are quite funny, this is a contest for (New York-based) stand-up comedians. You must have a website or MySpace page that clearly indicates that you have performed comedy before. You also cannot have performed at Pete’s in the last three months or already be booked for an upcoming spot. By entering, you give permission for your entry and name to be published on this blog. The winner of this challenge wins a spot in the April 23rd show.

Now that that’s settled, here’s the challenge!

Compose a short story of at least three sentences in which a child is admonished to stop eating an inedible object, and instead turns to a life of philosophy and self-abnegation.

Deadline is Tuesday, April 3rd. Email to jen – at – jenisfamous.com

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she must be Irish

March 26, 2007

Being fashionably thin is one thing, but this model in the New York Times fashion spread is so hungry, she is about to eat a baby.

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Momisfamous Part II

March 26, 2007

My mom loves panda bears, so I sent her a link to this page of baby panda photos. Look how tiny a newborn panda is! Now think about this — a 120 lb. woman has to give birth to, say, an 8 lb. baby, while a 600 lb. panda only has to give birth to a 5 oz. baby! Unfair! Childbirth must be a walk in the park! Mom wrote:

Dear Jen,
They don’t really have it that easy. I’ve seen two films showing pandas giving birth. They get no human assistance, but they can lick the part that hurts. There are always tradeoffs.
Love Mom

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Maude

March 23, 2007

I sent my Mom <a HREF=”http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/entertainment/16911865.htm”>this article (thanks, Feministing) about Bea Arthur’s 1970s sitcom Maude, which, according to the Kansas City Star, is far too liberal to have made it on TV today. (Maude actually had an abortion on the series, whereas today, even on Sex and the City, characters boldly contemplate abortion, and then, every time, decide to have the baby, or else have conveniently-timed miscarriages). My mom wrote back:

I love the article about Maude. Maude and Archie Bunker were two of the most socially relevant, ground breaking shows of their time. Maude was introduced as Edith’s cousin in season 2 on Archie. She was on more than once and of course, Archie HATED her. I remember the shows because they were different than anything else on tv and they were hilarious. The show Maude was a spinoff.

Maude actually influenced how girls dressed when I was in jr high and high school. In a time when girls wore their mini skirts one day and their maxi skirts the next, Maude made a statement of her own. If you wanted to look confident you wore a midi vest over your white shirt and pants. I had one.

It was discussed, that the Maude character was perhaps less than feminine, a secret lesbian, and/or a symbol of a liberal agenda. It was the “powerful women are always evil” mindset. Maude always said it straight and Archie always made you see your prejudices for what they were. They did it first and they did it well. These were the shows that made lasting impressions on a generation…mine.

Love Mom

I’ve suggested it before, but I think it’s time for a Momisfamous.com blog.

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TV audiences can soon see what my couch looks like

March 23, 2007

Today a WNBC Today crew came to my apartment to interview me about egg donation. One question I was asked went something like, “Some critics fear that young women who maybe don’t have a lot of options will decide to donate eggs and then regret it later. Doesn’t that worry you?”

My answer was something like, “I think if we were talking about twenty-two-year-old men, no one would ask that question. Plenty of people grow up to regret decisions we made when we were younger, and there are plenty of jobs chosen by young people that are more dangerous than egg donation. Is a twenty-year-old man capable of making a decision to work in a coal mine? Seems so. Perhaps most of the people in the world work at unrewarding and potentially dangerous jobs. Questioning women’s capability to make their own choices is infantilizing and paternalistic.”

What I should have also said was “Egg donation is a lot less dangerous than going to Iraq, and our government recruits eighteen-year-old women to do this in high schools across the nation. If they’re capable of making that decision, they’re certainly capable of making this one. And no one’s ever gotten PTSD from egg donation.”

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A Modest Proposal to Anti-Choice Folks

March 22, 2007

Update: What timing! Pro-life Senator Dan Patrick said, er … much the same thing. He’s just really, really off about the price. Here’s my original post:

If anti-abortion types really just want to save fetuses, why not the most obvious solution: make it legal to sell babies?

Okay, I didn’t really mean that — what I meant was, it’s legal to pay an egg donor for her “pain and suffering” in the egg donation process, without actually paying her for the eggs themselves (uh-huh). So why not make it legal to pay women for their gestational services in “donating” a full-on baby?

I love when anti-abortion people ask abortion-seeking women, “Why not just have the baby and then give it up for adoption?” Are you kidding? You can sometimes get a guilt-riddled Christian teenager to do that. But, obviously, very few employed adult women are interested in carrying a baby, enduring childbirth, getting stretch marks and getting fat and possibly incurring other, more serious, physical consequences (urinary incontinence is way more common than most people want to discuss, and I’ll never forget the diagram I saw in a medical textbook of a “clitoral fissure”), taking time off work (those employed outside large corporations do not get maternity leave), and explaining the whole thing to people who ask questions about your obvious pregnancy. If you don’t have a religious belief in the all-out personhood of fetuses, there is simply no reason you would do this. Well, no reason you would do it for free. (I wouldn’t have donated eggs for free, and that doesn’t even cause stretch marks).

As you undoubtedly have noticed, we live in an increasingly commoditized world, one in which we have already put a price on this service: surrogate mothers receive about $20,000, plus medical expenses and sometimes payment for lost income, for carrying and giving birth to a child.

As per current law, surrogate mothers are always carrying babies made with someone else’s eggs, that way they cannot be said to be “selling their babies.”

But if you’re really against abortion, and perhaps you’d like a baby for less than the $50,000-$100,000 you might spend on a combo of egg donor fees, surrogate fees, IVF, legal and medical expenses, why not legalize one-stop baby production and delivery?

Or, more specifically, why not make it legal to pay women for gestational services they provide in offering babies for adoption? Someone could found a matching agency. Pro-lifers: if you believe abortion is murder, certainly this is better, no? Pro-choicers: if you believe abortion is a human right, then perhaps you might also get behind the idea that women deserve to be compensated in a market economy for tasks traditionally considered “women’s work,” just as various feminist thinkers (mostly in Europe’s socialist nations) have proposed compensating women for domestic labor, and just as women are sometimes compensated for domestic labor (after the fact) in U.S. divorce cases.

Now everyone’s offended! By a comedy blog! Discuss.

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today’s grammar post

March 21, 2007

In response to the previous post, my mother asked:

Does “Now I lay me down to sleep” make you cringe? 

I actually use this one as a sort of trick question when teaching grammar. “Now I lay me” is weirdly archaic, but the verb isn’t wrong, because in this case, “me” is being used as the object. For example, both of these are correct:Now I lie down.Now I lay myself down.(But “Now I lay down” is just wrong. If you “lay,” you need to lay something).That being said, “Now I lay me” should actually be “Now I lay MYSELF.”Which sounds awfully dirty for a children’s prayer.

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grammar bitchfest of the day

March 20, 2007

No, my dear. Despite having been selected from the hoi-polloi of the single-and-looking-in-the-Onion-personals, you can’t even fill in two short blanks in an online form in a grammatically correct manner.You meant “lying” by the beach is, not “laying” by it. In the present tense, people “lie” down. “Lay” is what people to do objects: “Now I am laying the donor heart on the operating table.” (And, incidentally, most people would simply lie directly on the beach, but we’ll excuse your choice of preposition. Also, isn’t “skinny dipping in the water” a tad redundant?)If you meant to say that you were, in fact, “laying” on the beach (as in “I’m laying your mom right now”), that’s fine, although it’s a little weird to think that “laying” in that sense is less sexy than skinny dipping.However, if that is your intended meaning, you can’t simply say you were laying; you need to tell us whom or what you were laying.I don’t need you to name names, young lady, but your verb requires a direct object.

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syllogistic logic for five-year-olds

March 20, 2007

Funniest thing I’ve read all day (totally non-funny things I’ve looked at today include a the Egyptian girl who died after surgery to remove a parasitic twin head, and the horrifying Slate piece, Buried Alive in Your Own Skull): a Babble.com article about a woman who enjoys speaking sardonically to her friends’ children.

“What’s in there?” my friend’s five-year-old once asked, pointing to my plastic cup. (Glass is breakable, their parents will continually remind you, like you don’t know that. Like a hurled glass has never punctuated the end of a bad breakup.)

“Red wine juice,” I said.

“What’s red wine juice?” she asked.

“It’s what makes me be nice to you,” I said.

“Can I have a sip?”

“No. Your mommy brought you your own juice.”

“Can mommy can have a sip?”

“No. Mommy can’t,” I said. “Mommy has to get up early because she lives for you now.”

“What do you live for?” she asked.

I pointed to the cup.

She thought for a moment, then said, “You live to be nice to me?”

Smart kid.

Update: The author of this piece is also the author of Pretty in Penury on Nerve, a piece about social class and Pretty in Pink. Lisa Gabriele is so my new girlfriend.

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