Post Punk Kitchen Forum

We love Stewart and Colbert but we can't take the commercials anymore. If there was a way to watch commercial free, we'd do it (even if we needed to pay). I guess we could really youtube a lot of it.

And you are right, they don't want a representative government, they want one that gets whoever they think should be in office, in office. Women, minorities, the poor, etc are just in their way.

We watch on Hulu and mute the commercials

I'll have to check it out because my husband thought they were no longer on Hulu and we watched on comedy central's website, it was horrid

Was it 105.9 by any chance? They use to be classic rock and at first I thought it was just an afternoon show but I've never heard anything except talk on them for a while now. It scares me that people (I personally know several regarding this specific station) tune into those stations and then just shut off their cognitive reasoning ability and let it all soak in.

Oh that might be it because I swore they used to play music. I don't know because its actually a preset in my car.

we: who is we? how often is this word used meaning "us, thus men" unexplicitely excluding women, and we don't realize? ...

Actually... probably more often than we (all?) think. The individual by default is a man - that's like one pillar of patriarchy. So it's quite common that (mostly male) people use words such as "we", "us", "people", they are reffering unconsciously to some exlusively male group.

It can be noticed when hearing (authentic) sentences like:

"everyone has a prostate!"
"All the Belgians should let grow their beards"

They came back on hulu a few months ago. If you put in Adblock on your browser during the commercials you just get a black screen that says to disable ad block.

I notice the weird "we" a lot when people are talking about white people too. That's one that really bugs me.

Well the "we" above I'm assuming is white males. So its a two-fer.

TV advertisement: "Do you need to get up several times a night to urinate?"
Me: "Yes."
TV advertisement: "You might have problems with your prostate. Take [some supplement]."

Now, what would a pharmacist think if I tried to buy this supplement?

Yes! fork the weird we!!!
I even saw a horrible video this morning with a hateful guy insulting a public employee and basically using "US" as "The Riches" against "you, the stupid useless poors" (hidden camera -scary)

Off topic, but on the "everyone has a prostate" comment... I once spoke to a guy (who clearly didn't get a very complete sex education) who was convinced everyone had a uterus.

I appreciate this comment because I think I say that sometimes. :/ I think when I say it I mean it in the way people generally discuss groups (like how "we," Americans, won a certain war even though I definitely wasn't even alive in that given time, or how "we" won a sporting event even though I am not on the team), but I might be using it in a way that is racist. I need to be more mindful of my language.

I recommend "Imagined Communities" - Benedict Anderson. He talks about the "we" in terms of national consciousness or sports fans, etc. - we imagine ourselves as part of an extended community that has the same values, needs, a shared history, etc. There's nothing wrong with that - it's actually potentially really positive for people, but it can be used to be exclusionary, racist, sexist, etc. as easily as it is used inclusively. The trick is to change what "we" means.

I co-worker of mine called a female friend of his a croissant in conversation because she decided at the last minute not to go to a concert with him. When I said "woah", I then got a lecture about how I shouldn't be offended by the word because it doesn't have meaning unless you give it meaning. So, like he meant it in the same way as jerk, therefore I shouldn't be offended. But my question is, if it didn't have meaning as a very specific and hurtful way to put down a woman, why do you choose to use it? And his response is that he's trying to normalize the word and take the sting out of it by using it frequently in conversation.

Thanks for the lecture on how words work.

I guess I challenged my own feminism today, because I wore a shorter dress than I normally do (but with opaque tights!), and I couldn't deal with the leering. I was so put off by my coworker and guests at work eyeing me up, so I went home to change. I really liked that dress. I am not proud.

I finally thought to look up their website and yeah, it's all conservative talk now: http://www.wmal.com/programschedule.asp

Everyone should totally have a uterus.

Tina Belcher: if guys has uteruses, they'd be called duderuses.

His "normalizing" it also reminds me of Clerks 2 with the "It's cool, it's cool, I'm bringin it back". Just gonna point out, that never goes well.

Who wants mine? Comes with free agony of menstruation, joy of leaking tampons in public, yearly pap test by a gynaecologist who hates her job, high pregnancy risk, and likelihood of endometrial cancer in the next decade.

Sounds like your coworker and guests challenged/obliterated your right to feel safe at work and you responded in a pretty sensible (if disappointingly necessary) way. Nothing anti-feminist about keeping yourself safe!

This is maybe a bit frivolous compared to other things people are mentioning here, but I have to see this every day and it annoys me. Sky+ have new outdoor adverts featuring celebrities. The three I've seen so far (all on my walk to work) are Jonathan Ross, some other dude I don't know, and Lily Allen (though I had to google to be sure it was her). The two for the men give their profession (presenter and actor, respectively) before mentioning the thing they like about Sky+. But for Lily Allen, she's labeled "busy mum". And the whole advert for her is about getting "me time" when the baby is asleep, so I'm pretty sure we could've gleaned from that information that she's a mother. Did they have to erase her other identity? It just plays into this whole thing about women's selves being subsumed when they become wives and mothers and makes me despair for my sister that she might become "Alex's mom" instead of Sam.

I don't think it's frivolous. All issues of sexism compound on top of each other to set a chain of larger and broader sexism. Like you said, they've watered down her identity to "busy mum" instead of all of the other things that make her who she is.