Thursday, March 31, 2011

For Female Lawyers, It's $1.4 Million!

Today's Failbook fail: Equal Rights.

Women talk about times they have "sweet talked" their ways out of tickets. One woman says she cries to get out of tickets.

For the record, according to Traffic (which I just read), crying has a net neutral effect on whether you will get a ticket. Some cops will let you off; others will specifically give you a ticket to punish you for crying. (Others, of course, will do what they are supposed to do, regardless of how the driver reacts.) So I'm happy to ignore the woman who says she cries.

As far as "sweet talking" . . . let's be real here. Most cops are men. If women are "sweet talking" men to evade punishment, what does that actually say about our society? Perhaps that women are taught that their most valuable commodity is their sexuality? And, by the way, there's no earthly reason that most cops should be men. In fact, Traffic also covers how in Mexico (I think), they've hired all female traffic cops, because they were shown to be less susceptible to corruption. Is that a model I think we should follow? Absolutely not. But a mostly-male police squad is yet another reminder of how the patriarchy affects our daily lives.

Anyway, back to the fail. You might be wondering where it is, since all I've done so far is pontificate about traffic cops. So some dudebro busts into the thread and says, "so don't bitch when men make more than women do in the workplace, we actually have to pay our tickets."

Dude? Bro? Go fuck yourself. Over her lifetime, a college-educated woman loses $713,000 thanks to the gender wage gap. Oh, and therefore she collects less Social Security and has less in her retirement fund, so she's more likely to be an impoverished senior citizen. Unless you are routinely paying $10,000 parking tickets that come straight out of your Roth IRA, you can shove that Men's Rights Assholery right where it belongs.

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

A Woman's Place Is In Your Face

Today's Failbook fail: Kitchening.

Some jackass says because a person is a woman, she should be good at things involving the kitchen.

I don't give a flying pancake if this is supposed to be noveau hipster irony, or if this jackass genuinely believes a woman's place is in the house. You know why I don't care? Because every time a man says "make me a sandwich" (or one of its three thousand variants), it reinforces this fucked-up notion, regardless of the speaker's intent to be "ironic." Maybe we should save this joke for when women don't do like three times as much housework as men! Maybe then it will be funny! Not now! Right now, you need to shut the fuck up!!

Monday, March 28, 2011

Doubleheader

Today's Failbook fails: That Time Is Now and Roadside Assistance.

I was agonizing -- yes, dear readers, agonizing -- over which of these two piles of shit to deconstruct, and my dear fiancé said I should do a two-for-one deal, which I thought was fair, since I took the weekend off.

In the first, a father masquerades as his daughter on Facebook, saying that she has just found her boyfriend (husband?) in bed with another man, and so she is dumping him, because he is "so GAY." So, all right, it's hard to know what the father's intentions were here -- does he hate the boyfriend? Is it "good-natured ribbing"?

In any case, if a woman were to actually walk in on her significant other having sex with another man, I imagine the reaction would be more along the lines of, "You asshole! You cheated on me!" But no, the father just wanted to be like, "GAY GAY GAY, " so of course that's the faux reaction we get.

And then the daughter puts the crap cherry on this shit pie by saying her dad has "fraped" her. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. It's bad enough that this phrase makes light of rape -- must you add to it by implicating your own father?? It's as if she doesn't even see the word anymore, she uses it so casually.

The second steaming turd is all sexism, all the time. A woman expresses gratitude for the man who kindly stopped to help her change her tire. Men flock to the status to say dumb shit. "Hurr durr, it's because you have boobs. Hurr durr, if you were a man you'd change your own tire. Hurr durr, you didn't strip for him in gratitude?" A woman cannot even thank a man for his kindness without other men coming along, whipping out their dicks, and peeing all over the scene. Sexism: turning men into douchebags since THE DAWN OF TIME.

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Breaking News!!

Today's Failbook fail: Uncle Frank's Opinion.

A guy is thinking about piercing his ears. His uncle says it will make him gay, or reveal that he's gay, or some such shit.

So let's go over the things that Failbook says will make you gay (if you're a man, naturally): ear piercing, eating meat, having a baby, reposting Facebook memes, having a job, liking male vocalists, and liking female vocalists.

Holy shit, you guys, EVERY MAN IS GAY. You'd have to be an unemployed, childless, vegetarian music-hater who doesn't use social networking sites! So . . . the only straight men are hikikomori. (As long as we go by the American defintion, whereby fish is not meat, Japan is a good population to draw from here.) The rest of you dudes? You're all queermos. Hope you've got plenty of lube.

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

A Meditation on Blonde Jokes

Today's Failbook fail: Four Blondes.

What are blonde jokes "about," really? Other jokes that indict groups of people are usually pretty clearly racist, anti-Semitic, ablist, what have you. Blonde jokes are odd in that they target the most sexually desirable members of American society -- blonde women (who are presumably het/cis/thin/blah).

But I guess the message of blonde jokes is, Don't get too big for your britches, ladies. Don't let our desire of you ever distract you from the fact that you are a woman and therefore an idiot. In fact, the hotter you are, the dumber you must be. Ugly women are dyke feminists. Hot blonde women are morons who want nothing more than to trick some many into marrying and supporting them.

It's funny -- not funny ha-ha, more funny sad -- that jokes like this, which are, let us get one thing straight, written by het men, put on display the very real contempt so many men have for all women. These are people who are sexually attracted to a group of people that they loathe, fear, disdain. They believe terrible things about a group of people that they want to fuck, maybe even marry and procreate with.

This is why I never got this "battle of the sexes" shit. Most of us are attracted to people on the "other side." I do my best to believe nothing about men as a whole, and make my mind up about them individually. My father is a wonderful man. My fiancé means the world to me. I have tons of male friends at work. My mentor at work, with whom I'm very close, is a man. Some people want you to believe that feminists hate men. Nope. But plenty of men hate women. And that's just sad.

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Hope This Answers the OP's Question

Today's Failbook fail: Fact.

Someone observes that homeless people tend to be fat rather than skinny. Some jackass attributes this to "cannibalism."

Let's begin with the obvious fact that accusing the food-insecure of eating each other is simply heartless. Now let's move onto the question at hand of why homeless people are fat. Well, let's say you are living on the street. (This shouldn't be too much of a leap. First imagine your family has died. Now imagine that you have become mentally ill and thereby lost your job. Now that you have no job, you can't pay for rent or a mortgage, so you have no place to live -- and, oh, by the way, no health insurance to cover your illness, since you lost your job . . . because you're ill. Welcome to America.)

Maybe you're panhandling; maybe you're doing odd jobs; maybe you've been forced into sex work. Regardless, you're making a tiny percentage of what you used to make, say $10 a day. You don't know if you'll make $10 tomorrow. You don't want to save the money, because you have to sleep, right? You'll sleep in a parking garage or on a bench or under a bridge, and anyone could come by and take your money, maybe rough you up in the process. So there's no point in saving anything. It's too easy to lose what little you have.

What you need now is the maximum number of calories with that meager $10. Let's see -- a Big Mac is about $4, that's a good start. Maybe one for lunch and one for dinner. Now you have $2 left -- you might buy something like a box of Twinkies, high in calories, and it'll keep, too. Plus they're soft, which is nice because you don't have dental care anymore.

Now, a Big Mac is only 540 calories, so two in a day is just half your daily allowance of calories. Now, a 12-pack of 150-calorie Twinkies will put you over the 2000-calorie limit, but now it's time for us to think about what's been in our $10's worth of daily meals. Lots of saturated fat. Lots of sodium. Lots of sugar.

And finally, when it comes to surviving outside 24/7 in most of America, being skinny will get you killed, thanks to hypothermia, while being fat will stave that off somewhat.

I, as a privileged middle-class American, can afford to eat more or less whatever I want (I can't actually eat whatever I want, thanks to endocrine disorders, but I can afford to buy the food I need in any case). But because I don't have my head up my ass, I realize that this is not the case for everyone. And, therefore, I don't write Facebook statuses like that. Not having your head up your ass = not writing jackass Facebook status messages. Pretty simple, actually.

Monday, March 21, 2011

For All the Pastafarians in the House

Today's Failbook fail: 2 FAILs for the Price of 1.

It is a "FAIL" that a man's name is "Ram Amandeep."

I hope to the FSM that "John Smith" means "fondle a sheep while thinking about the Prime Minister in lacy underthings" in any number of languages that are not English. Please. speakers of English, get the fuck over yourselves. The combinations of phonemes you understand to mean certain things do not mean those things for everyone. Unless you are hopelessly ethnocentric, this shouldn't be funny so much as commonplace.

Saturday, March 19, 2011

All My Trains of Thought Go to Rapetown!

Today's Failbook fail: Untitled.

I know I've neglected this blog this week. I'm sorry, nonexistent readers. When you're full-time in a job and half-time in higher ed, sometimes other things fall by the wayside for a while. But I'm back, have no fear.

Today's fail is short and whatever the opposite of sweet is. (Shitty?) Someone names a bunch of his/her friends, and follows it up with, "Need I say more?"

If I were to see that, I might think, "Ah, someone had a good part." But the jackass "friend" who comments says that more information is necessary, or all will assume it was a "gangbang," which is a lovely colloquialism for "a bunch of people raping other people."

Some will tell me I'm wrong. "No, ma'am, it means group sex!" Maybe that's your Urban Dictionary definition (I don't know; I refuse to expose myself to that guaranteed ticket to Vomitville), but get real. Group sex is referred to as an "orgy," or maybe a "sex party," if you're a little older. "Gangbang" is rapey. It's real, real rapey, and the fact that it was someone's first thought upon seeing a bunch of names together is just sick. Welcome to rape culture!

Sunday, March 13, 2011

OMG There Are Fat People on the Internet!!

Today's Failbook fail: I'm Sure It Happens All the Time...

You know what the world needs more of? Hatred of fat people. Especially fat women. How dare they walk around with their fat, even post pictures of their fat online?!!? THE INTERNET IS FOR SKINNY PEOPLE, YOU FATTIE FAT FATSO!

And this girl has the temerity to say that people mistake her for Megan Fox! I mean, her face is blurred out of this post, so maybe there is a facial resemblance, but my stars, if you are fat you by definition cannot resemble anyone attractive!

The really sad thing is, this girl seems cool. She seems fun and funny -- I love her Simpsons shrt -- and by condemning her with no more than her own photos and one-line status update, I feel like Failbook just throws her into the garbage can without so much as a "buh-bye." Like, she's fat, so she's beneath even their assholish commentary. Oh, well, there is the title, as well as the hashtags: "facepalm," "image," and "really?"

The comments are a mix. There are some people saying, rightfully, "Don’t resort to making fun of somebody who made a self-deprecating joke and isn’t considered pretty because she’s heavy." And then there are people who are saying to man the harpoons, and furthermore, "I say we enact hunting to get the population under control." If that sounds eliminationist to you, it's because it fucking is.

Heads up, all: fat people have a right to exist. They are not a different species as thin people are. They have a right to be in the same spaces as you, whether that's Facebook, public transportation, a restaurant, or your workplace. Moreover, fat women can be pretty. Fat men can be hot. Stop acting like all these ideas are so friggin' radical. They're not. They're simple courtesy and recognition of reality.

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Win!

Had to do a win today, because it's such a perfect response to some random bashing of Hillary Clinton -- who, it must be stated, is awesome. There are probably some fail-y Failbook posts today, but this one wins more than any of them fail.

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Thelma and Louise Notwithstanding

Today's Failbook fail: Bad Example.

Some jackass makes fun of women drivers. Someone (a woman, probably) reminds him that he is himself a shitty driver.

But she does it too nicely, frankly, with a little winky face and all that shit. Next time someone pulls this shit on you, say calmly, "Have you ever thought about why men's car insurance rates are higher than women's? It's because actuaries have crunched years' worth of data and determined that men are costlier to insure. Meaning, men are bigger insurance risks than women. Meaning, women are the better drivers."

I usually don't pull this actually-the-data-say-otherwise shit out unless people espouse something that's just completely the opposite of the truth. Like when assholes spout off about gay people turning their kids gay or abusing them or whatever. Actually, it's the opposite! Gays make better parents! Shut the fuck up!

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Not Even Close

Today's Failbook fail: China = Japan.

Look, if you can't tell by looking at a Southeast Asian person which country their ancestors are from, you are not alone. And no one would fault you for not knowing.

But the damn video here is titled with the word "Chinese," and then the idiotic OP starts spouting off about Pearl Harbor. Jesus Christ Almighty. It just showcases your ignorance, pal. You really don't differentiate between those countries at all.

Also, I just have to say . . . the actual video is an ad for a torture device for women that will squeeze them in precisely the right excruciating way to give them video-game-woman-style cleavage. I'm calling sexism on this one for not even acknowledging that this ad is for something ridiculously awful for women.

Monday, March 7, 2011

The International Language of Idiots

Today's Failbook fail: English Please.

A non-white person says things in a language that is not English. An American guy, who by the looks of his blurred-out picture is probably white, demands the person speak only English. The OP tells him to shut up, and the American cracks wise.

Sweet sparkly vampires, does anyone really wonder where the stereotype of an "ugly American" comes from!?!? Dear all Americans: THE INTERNET IS NOT SOLELY AMERICAN. FACEBOOK, TOO, IS INTERNATIONAL. There will be people speaking in languages you don't speak! A person's Facebook status is not a road sign in Wichita! You have no right to see it in English! Just! Shut! Up!

Friday, March 4, 2011

Also, You're a Creeper.

Today's Failbook fail: Step 1: Befriend Several Randon [sic] LaShondas. Step 2: ...

So . . . why "LaShonda"? Why not Erica, Stacey, Michelle, Alicia, Samea, Padma, Sunee, Miharu, Marjane, Maria, Dulcinea, Claudette, Agda, or any of a million other girls' names?

Could it be because "LaShonda" is a name associated almost exclusively with African-Americans, and you specifically want to target them in your nasty little prank?

Just sayin'.

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Just STFU About Bieber, Mmkay?

Today's Failbook fail: An Unfortunate Typo.

Let me just vomit up some words about Justin Bieber, a man whom I have never met: BLARGH GAY HOMOQUEER GIRLY-GIRL FAG FUDGEPACKER GAY GAY LESBO COCKSUCKER FAGGY PRINCESS GAY WOMAN BLARGH.

There, now you have an accurate rendition of every single motherfucking Failbook entry that mentions Justin Bieber.

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Creeper Alert

Today's Failbook fail: Boundaries.

A 21-year-old wants to date a 15-year-old.

For those who are fuzzy on ability to consent and rape, it's simple: if someone cannot consent to sexual congress, then any penetration is rape. Reasons someone might not be able to consent:
  • they person has been using drugs
  • the person is not mentally able to consent (whether because of limited intellectual capacity or because of mental illness)
  • the person is a goddamned child
Please see that last item for why this post was written by a creeper who doesn't care about consent.

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

Today's Failbook fail: Russell's Mum.

Stop saying "frape."

Read this blog post if you are at all confused about my continued rage about this ridiculous portmanteau.

That is all.