Just when I thought that the worst insults that could be heaped on our private parts were reserved for those both rich and stupid (think vaginoplasty, labial reduction, and anal bleaching), there were mints to refresh our girly bits, and some women started gluing jewelsdown there in a crafting trend that would make Martha Stewart blush.
Earworms are songs that stick in your head. You hear them, hum them, and sing along with them as they rattle around in your brain. You can’t turn them off at will. There’s no known cure.
Meet a happy earworm that you can’t sing aloud in public: This is a music video for Storm Large‘s song “8 Miles Wide,” from her hit one-woman show, Crazy Enough.
Yesterday, my son and I were in San Francisco, and it seemed that every bus that passed us sported a colorful ad with three anthropomorphic cartoon penises dressed in clothes.
The “Healthy Penis” campaign, warning the public about the dangers of syphilis, has been around for several years now, on buses, in print, and on television. I’m sure few people in SF give these mobile billboards a second thought. However, to a 12-year-old, they’re absolutely hilarious.
The first one he saw was out the car window. He said, “did you see that bus? I think it had penises on it.”
“Thankfully, I missed it,” I said. (I’ve seen the bus ads before, but hoped this would be the last of the conversation. Being a parent teaches you nothing, if not how to downplay and drop a topic.)
“Maybe we’ll see it again,” he said.
“Oh my god, mom. Those ARE penises!” he said, as we sat in the window of a favorite taqueria and one of the buses stopped at the corner directly in front of us. “That’s got to be the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“When we get home, we’ve got to look that up,” he said. “I can’t wait to see what’s there.”
“Sex ed information,” I said.
I explained to him what syphilis is, and why people need to be concerned about it. He’s no stranger to hearing about sexually transmitted diseases because I used to work for an HIV/AIDS organization.
“Still,” he said. “The website’s got to be funny.”
I found myself thinking about the cultural acceptance of penises as funny and sort of friendly. They are often talked about as a “little man,” having the potential to become the third, or fourth, personality in a relationship. I’ve heard that some men name theirs. The stage show, Puppetry of the Penis – in which two men manipulate their own genitals into silly shapes on stage – is about to have a return engagement in New York.
I’ve only known one woman who named her vagina. She volunteered to me, one day over lunch, that she called hers “Brenda”. This was so much more than I wanted to know about her.
The Healthy Penis ads made me think of a film clip from my youth. In the 1970s, there was a brief trend of making movies that had no plot, they were simply a series of skits, and usually in bad taste. The Groove Tube, which made fun of American television, was released in 1974, before I was old enough to see it. But it was later rerun in a local theater in a double feature with another skit film, Kentucky Fried Movie. I probably still wasn’t old enough to see either of them, but back in the olden days, theater owners didn’t care like they do now.
I soon discovered that one of the highlights of The Groove Tube, was Safety Sam, a talking penis.
While wildly scandalous when the movie was released, I had no problem letting my son watch Safety Sam. In fact, he found the skit about Brown 25 (“another product from Uranus”) much funnier.
I’ve never run across a public ad campaign with a cartoon of female genitalia.
I’ve seen some pretty satin and velvet vulva/vagina hand puppets, but they’re mostly intended for education.
Even in this clip from The Tyra Banks Show, which made television history by dedicating an hour of national television exposure to vaginas, the puppet isn’t playful so much as way to help women be less afraid of their own parts. In fact, I found the whole conversation annoying because of how it’s predicated in an assumption of misunderstanding and mystery (with hints of shame).
Almost every person in the world born with two X chromosomes has some form of female genitalia. It’s embarrassing that an hour of daytime television would be dedicated to explaining where our parts are and how they work, in the simplest terms.
Can you imagine a similar televised discussion of penises?
Japan's Penis Day
I doubt it.
We have so much historic and cultural exposure to penises, through everything from stage shows to national days of celebration (Japan’s Penis Day is March 15), that there’s apparently nothing left to do besides turn them into cartoon characters and give them their own FaceBook pages, which HealthyPenis.org has done.
I think that we need more cultural exposure to vulvas and vaginas, and a good place to start woud be a happy, playful, talking vagina.
Lately I found myself ranting to a co-worker about a Bay Area formal-wear shop that has been running newspaper ads featuring local high school girls tarted up like Vegas showgirls.
Each ad features a little profile like this: “Sarah is the girl’s volleyball team captain, a member of the marching band, has a 4.0 GPA, and is an animal shelter volunteer. She’s hoping to go to Stanford and study law.”
It stops short of being a Playboy centerfold bio (“Likes: Angora sweaters, kittens, and strawberry sorbet. Dislikes: Pap smears, hairy chests, and rimming.”).
But, the sweet little bio accompanies a picture of a leggy, busty, smoothly tanned girl, made up like RuPaul, stuffed into a slinky floor-length dress with plunging front and a crotch-high slit, and balanced on shoes that would make the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence dizzy.
A teen girl hasn’t been this done up since my friend Babs ran for Miss Minneappolis Downtown back in the Flashdance era.
The girl in the ad is supposed to be ready to go to her prom.
Prom, folks. That means she’s either barely 18 or younger.
(I checked out the store’s website and found they’d made this video, which stops short of being soft-prom-porn.)
Yikes.
Call me old-fashioned, but I want to see prom images that make me think of corsages and slow dances and sweet kisses, balloons floating down, hearts all a-flutter.
I don’t want to see an ad that makes me think of prom as a pole-dancing competition followed by a quick scratch-and-moan with the captain of the football team and drinking until someone throws up on their shoes.
I keep thinking “What are these girls parents thinking?” followed by, “I’m so glad I have a son”.
I thought those ads were bad until I saw this prom dress, at sale at on an online company, complete with labia and a clitoris peeking out.
Can’t you see a young girl emerging from the dressing room in this number, asking her mom and dad, “I don’t know. Do you think it’s too much?”
Choke.
BTW, after a bunch of folks (not just dirty-minded me) pointed out the pussy potential of the dress, the online photo was changed to make the ruffles more discrete.
The best thing about this post by Susannah Breslin on Boing Boing wasn’t the announcement that Slate.com is morphing its women’s blog, called The XX Factor, into a new online magazine for women called Double X.
No, the best thing was her description of estrogen-laden blogs as “vaginablogs”. That’s funny.
However, I’d like GPG to be known as a “clitblog,” thank you. After all, that’s where the action is…
Or the sort of language you would use if you were making a point of being NOT reductionist and NOT exclusionary. 2 days ago
And learning to code-switch is a communication skill. To understand humor, you have to know where it separated from academic language... 2 days ago
And, I don't think of myself as particularly reductionist. I would argue that we all use some form of code-switching in casual conversation. 2 days ago
Where does this stop? If every statement didn't have some reduction and exclusion embedded, what I say before noon would take 3 days. 2 days ago
If I say "what's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?" I exclude those who don't identify girls, or don't identify as nice. 2 days ago
Let’s just chalk this stupid idea up to misogynistic stereotypes and male-perpetuated female insecurity, okay?
Call me old-fashioned, but I want to see prom images that make me think of corsages and slow dances and sweet kisses, balloons floating down, hearts all a-flutter.
