News of the Restless

Y’okay. So I decided not to do a wankapedia this week; too much holidaying made it feel kind of wrong. And since it’s the end of the year, and it’s a good time to get general disgust off one’s chest before starting afresh, I decided to rechannel my bile a bit and unpack a few things, instead of individual people. The wankapedia will return next year (ha ha, geddit?). In the meantime, please enjoy this end-of-year conceptual shit-list, with my compliments.

1. Using “curate” in reference to anything outside of an actual art gallery or museum. It’s pretentious as fuck, and it’s been over-used…and not only this year, but for the past couple of years. Every two-bit dilettante now thinks they’re a fucking artiste. Now hear this: You don’t get to “curate” makeup samples, creepshots, food, or anything else that isn’t actual art, created by actual artists. Curation involves a whole lot more than just gathering a bunch of stuff together in an album, a box, or a Pinterest page. It involves research, education, and active engagement with those who come to see an exhibit. You can collect, collate, compile, whatever, but unless you actually work for a gallery and hold the job title of curator, you don’t curate a goddamn thing. You’re just throwing shit together. Capisce?

2. Twee. Another over-used word. What the fuck does it even mean, anyway? It sounds like someone trying to say tree with a speech impediment. Or is it a tweed that’s not made of good, new wool? It seems to be some kind of putdown for anything that’s cute. Or too cute for somebody’s liking. The ironic thing is, it sounds exactly like that whenever someone uses it; they get the cutesy-wootsiest widdle sneery-weerie when they utter it, and that’s undoubtedly counterproductive. I think it means cupcakes with pink icing and candied violets on top, and you know what? I would so fucking eat that, regardless. Since when is cuteness a crime? (And, that said: I’m also kind of partial to definition #3, which is cute, here.)

3. The lazy use of ironic and irony. Those words, they do not mean what you think they mean. And that IS ironic. So don’t use them when what you really mean is sarcastic or snarky, or sarcasm or snark. You want REAL irony? Read O. Henry, you dullard.

4. Drop-crotch pants. Apparently they’ve been around for a few years; the wonder is that they exist at all. They are hideous. Dropped waists were bad enough; now everything’s migrating so far south that pretty soon we’ll all be forced to trip over what essentially amounts to shorts around our ankles. Whatever happened to waistbands that sit on the natural waist, and crotches that sit on the natural crotch? I guess clothes that fit are no longer a thing. And how about that Justin Fucking Bieber wearing a pair of pants with both a dropped waist AND a dropped crotch? The waist was just barely hanging on his scrawny little hips, and the seat hit just above his knees. He looked like an oversized toddler in a loaded diaper. I felt like tossing him a box of baby wipes. (On second thought, I might need those for my eyes.)

5. Rape culture. No, not the phrase itself, but what it stands for. It is a thing, it is terrifyingly pervasive, and it is to be killed with fire. Especially after it cost two women their lives, this past week, in India alone.

6. The word “mangina”. It means absolutely nothing, because it was made up by right-wing trolls with rats up their dickholes. (See also “misandry”. Also not a real word.) I can only infer from the contexts in which I’ve seen it used that it’s supposed to be some kind of putdown for real, decent guys who treat women as friends, colleagues, comrades and equals, instead of slaves, sex toys, and chattel. In which case, putdown FAIL, because those are the guys that end up getting all the chicks the whiny misogynists are too busy sitting around hating on to actually bother trying to win. (Trying to win a woman over = “supplicating”, in their jargon. No, I’m not kidding. They have a whole ‘nother vocabulary, those guys.)

7. Constantly substituting “rock” for wear. It’s meant to make the most mundane outfit sound impressive. It doesn’t. What’s wrong with simply WEARING a potato sack? Why do you have to “rock” it? Unless you’re swaying hard from side to side or noodling away on a guitar while wearing it, you’re not rocking a goddamn thing.

8. Totes are large bags for carrying all your earthly goods, up to and including your kitchen sink. I have no idea what the fuck “amazeballs” are, and I don’t want to know.

9. In fact, sticking –balls on the end of anything is a sure way to make yourself sound fuckingballs idioticballs.

10. Pickup “artists”. Note the quotes. Especially the ones who wear douchey getups to catch women’s attention. And the ones who think rape is a kind of game. No, I’m not kidding. What they do is neither an art nor a science, although they borrow liberally from the vocabularies of both to try to advance their lucrative scam industry. They will NOT help you find a lasting relationship; in fact, their manipulative tactics are an active hindrance to finding real love, because they rely on you constantly playing head games and trying to “program” a human being like a robot. (Women HATE that. Trust me. I’ve been yoinked around by my own share of manipulative males, and not one of them will ever get me back.) They are a real scourge, and they have spawned on the Internets. Worse, they’re cross-pollinating with #11. They have already precipitated a massacre. Stop the motherfuckers before they spawn again!

11. “Men’s rights” activists. Note the quotes. As you may have guessed, rights have fuck-all to do with their mercifully puny (bowel) movement. Their entire agenda consists of misogyny and the fight for “lost” (again, note the quotes) privileges that no man should ever have had in the first place. Such as the “right” to get off with a slap on the wrist (if that!) for abusing women and children, the “right” to be a deadbeat dad, the “right” to force women to play incubator/unpaid domestic servant/sex toy/slave/what-have-you, and, oh yeah, even the “right” to kill women with impunity for any perceived infraction against proper, submissive femininity. If they were Muslims or anything else not white and Christian, they’d be called “honor criminals”, and the right-wing nutters would be baying for their blood. As it stands, they ARE right-wing nutters, full of racist and xenophobic ideas as to why they’d rather marry anything but a fellow North American. And, when their little fantasy of the submissive foreign mail-order bride goes kaplooey, as it so often does, they want the “right” to imprison her in their homes and/or dispose of her remains without the pesky authorities catching wind. May they all swim nude in piranha-infested waters as part of one of their dipshit “manhood” rituals, and may the fish eat them genitalia first.

12. Dorky chicks who play up to the dudes from either of the above categories, usually because they’re insecure and need approval in the worst way. You can usually tell them by their mating call: “I’m not a feminist, BUT…” If you recognize yourself in that, then fucking stop it, because you’re not helping anyone. Least of all yourself. Grow a spine and don’t worry so much about what the shallow end of the man-pool thinks. It’s amazing how fast your relationships improve when you realize that you’re a person, not a doormat. And when you start to act accordingly.

13. The Rules. Germane to #12: Has any relationship ever gone bust simply because a woman broke a few (or all) of these regurgitated bits of 1950s tripe on how to manipulate your man? Not a single proven instance of that exists — largely, I suspect, because all the guys worth having aren’t consulting manuals full of outdated advice on What To Look For In A Lady. Just as all the women worth having aren’t doing the same with How To Catch A Man. In fact, if there is one thing all truly happy relationships seem to have in common, it’s that they got that way WITHOUT The Rules. But guess whose didn’t do so well, in spite of several books of Rules and all? Oh yes. Oh dear!

14. That fucking “local mom” who’s discovered every $5 secret, from how to get whiter teeth to how to flatten your stomach to how to lose your wrinkles without Botox. Whoever the hell she is, why doesn’t she find a $5 cure for CANCER, instead? And, more to the point: How about you lazy ad-agency fuckers coming up with a new nonexistent “local” person to hawk snake oil? I’m not a mom, and I don’t think motherhood should be either a prerequisite to success OR an impediment to it. Also, I don’t believe in snake oil. PS: Ha, ha.

15. The NRA. For reasons all too obvious, obviously.

16. And Bushmaster, too. For playing so blatantly to male insecurity, you DESERVE to fail.

17. Saying “reach out” when you simply mean talking to someone. It implies that you’re coming across a vast canyon just to say a few lousy words. Whenever someone uses that phrase inappropriately, I imagine them hanging off a cliff, scrabbling for a grip on the nearest clump of weeds, and screaming desperately for help with one hand outstretched. Which is usually nowhere near the case. Stop trying to inject more heartfeltness into an ordinary conversation/query/interview attempt/whatever than there actually needs to be, goddamn it.

18. Nice Guys™. No, not actual nice guys, but the kind who merely style themselves as such so as never to have to get over their entitled douchebag selves. These guys can’t actually BE nice, just for niceness’s own sweet sake. Their “nice” is full of ulterior motives, and as soon as you make clear that you’re not properly impressed (by their definitions, not yours), it drops off and you’re left looking at their real, scabrous nature, which is all “Bitch slut whore, why you no sex me???” Some of these prize specimens now even have their own dedicated Tumblr, so women looking for love online know enough to stay away from them (and get a few free laffs in the process). I’m sure there will soon be others.

19. Germane to #18, any dude who bitches about getting “friendzoned”. Yo, dude? If you don’t like having women for friends, then don’t! Assuming that they owe you something just because you were kind to them (with ulterior motives) is not how a real friend behaves. And getting pissed at them for only being nice right back at you (as opposed to romantic and/or sexual) is pretty damn unfriendly, too. Be glad you have a friend, or…

…you could end up like this guy. Forever Alone and not even wondering what it is about him that frightened the ladies off, because he’s too busy ranting at them like some fucking whackjob off Craigslist or wherever.

20. And the flipside of #19: dudes who “just want to be friends”…i.e., they dump you because they don’t want to be in a serious committed relationship, but then turn around and want you to be on call for whenever they’re alone, and they’re horny, and no one else is picking up the phone. That ain’t friendship, either. It’s just more of that old demon, Entitlement. For all we know, they too are Men of the Dreaded Satanic Friendzone. You know, the ones always kvetching about how no female friend ever wants to sleep with them. (Gee, I wonder why.)

21. YOLO. Aside from the fact that it’s bullshit (ask me about those three past lives in which I got burned at the stake!), it’s also an excuse to engage in deepest, darkest stupidity…which, in turn, leads to a drastically shortened lifespan. If one life is indeed all you get to live (and, happily or not, it isn’t), why go for the Darwin Award?

22. Germane to #21: AGEISM. No, that’s not a perennially trending bullshit acronym. It’s a perennially trending bullshit concept. It sells a lot of snake oil. (And it wrecks a lot of faces, too.) I know it’s never fashionable to be glad you’re a crotchety old lady, but I am, because I’ve outgrown a lot of bullshittery, and the air up here at the top of the hill is so much better.

23. Fifty Shades of Grey. Unsexy “erotic” fanfic of terrible teen vampire series written to make abstinence look like the hottest foreplay EVER. Someone, please, drive a stake through the heart of all that.

24. Sex discrimination. It’s just been ruled legitimate grounds for firing in Iowa, at least if you’re female, attractive, younger than your male boss, and your tight pants are constantly giving him hard-ons. This means that the law, at least in Iowa, now officially recognizes that the onus is on working women to discourage unwanted sexual attentions or else lose their jobs, even if they see their boss as a father figure and have zero interest in wrecking his oh-so-Christian marriage. Fear the bulge, ladies. Fear. The. BULGE.

25. Anti-gay “conversion therapy”. Note the quotes. This is NOT therapy. It is fuckery, it does not work, and it only serves to screw up gay kids, leaving them maladjusted and often suicidal. Any other form of therapy would be stopped if patients died, so why is this one getting a free pass?

26. Stochastic terrorism. Also known as “doxing with a death threat”. It’s what cost Dr. George Tiller his life, and it’s also what some gun nuts are now trying to do to a certain newspaper editor for putting together a harmless map showing where some people with gun permits live. It’s also massively unfuckingcool, people. And here in Canada, it can get you a hate-speech trial and jail time. Not surprisingly, this shit flies mainly south of our border, where some people interpret freedom of speech to include publishing pictures of other people’s kids to intimidate the parents, and uttering hideously hyperbolic death threats with a phony “ha ha, just kidding” attached.

27. Internalized misogyny. The only thing worse than a man who hates women is a woman who agrees with him. And who furthers the misogyny by way of disinformation.

28. Amateur climatologists. It just snowed, therefore global warming isn’t happening! Hurr hurr. And what about the Little Ice Age, huh? HUH? Yeah, what the fuck about all that. Unfortunately for all these cutesy theoriettes, real climatologists have more to say than right-wing global warming deniers, and all of it just flies right over the latter’s simple little heads.

29. Antivaxxers. No, vaccines won’t weaken your immune system/cause autism in your child/turn your teenage daughter into a raging slut/etc. But believing the antivaxxer hype WILL make you stupid. Truly, madly, deeply stupid.

30. Fascism, both with swastikas and without (“libertarianism”). I trust I need not explain this one, eh?

31. Okay, one more: CAPITALISM.

And last but not least: Bucket lists. Also known as “Things to do before you die”. Or a longer-term variant on New Year’s resolutions. Or just a moronic list of irrelevant shit you might want to do right now before you die, but then totally forget about when something more interesting comes up, or real life intervenes. Some people even presume to write them for others, telling them everything from the general “how to lead an awesome life” stuff to how many kinds of sex you should have at least once. I don’t have one. I have a fucket list, and this is it.

Good night, and get fucked…until next year. Ha, ha.