Iowahawk has coverage of the one that no one else was paying attention to. The nuptial vows will bring a tear to your eye, if you’re an anglophile.
Category Archives: Social Commentary
I Am Extremely Deviant
That is, I am so deviant, that I share virtually none of these deviancies:
Straight men enjoy a wider variety of erotica than imagined, including sites devoted to elderly women and transsexuals. Foot fetishes aren’t a deviance; men are evolutionarily wired to look for small feet, which are a sign of high estrogen production, which itself is a sign of fertility. Gay men and straight men have nearly identical brains, and their favorite body parts, in order of preference, line up exactly: chests, buttocks, feet. Straight men prefer heavy women to thin ones. Straight women enjoy reading about and watching romances between two men — it’s not about the sex, which is downplayed, but the emotion, which is the focus. (The largest audience for “Brokeback Mountain,” says the book, was straight women.) Straight men have a fascination with other men’s penises, which may be conscious or unconscious.
For the record, I am a very straight man, who has zero interest in elderly women, transs3xuals, feet, chests, and a negative degree of interest in other mens’ junk. I don’t even like to see it in porn, particularly in a woman’s mouth. Few things make me go for the fast forward faster than fell@tio. But apparently, I’m weird in that regard, judging by its prevalence. I would also note that I’ve never done a single one of the top ten searches sited in the article.
Just in case my readers had been wondering.
Trade In Your Steering Wheel
…for a toilet seat:
As we enter our collective lunch breaks, we thought this number might make you think again before eating and driving: There are nearly nine times as many potentially harmful bugs on your steering wheel as there are on an average toilet seat.
This shouldn’t really be surprising. Toilet seats get cleaned occasionally.
But replacing my steering wheel with a toilet seat probably wouldn’t work out all that well. The rim of the seat is too big to get my fingers comfortably around.
Anyway, if it’s not news you can use, it’s at least news.
Ready For The Future?
XKCD has the timeline.
“Malevolent Altruism”
An interesting discussion on the violence inherent in political correctness.
As noted there, when someone tells you how moral and upright they are, hold on to your wallet, and watch your back.
We saw Atlas Shrugged last night, and the Mouches of the world are classic examples.
[Update a while later]
Link was bad before, fixed now.
Woman With Vibr@tor
Sexy. Man with one? Pathetic.
The Truths That May Not Be Uttered
This is beyond frightening. Remember it the next time some leftist talks about the “war against science” from the “right.”
Are Productive People Mutants?
…and if so, what does it say about social welfare policies? Thoughts from Sarah Hoyt.
Go Make It A Hit
Amy Holmes interviews some folks at the Washington Atlas Shrugged premiere. I hadn’t realized that the actor who plays Rearden is British. We may go see it in Rolling Hills this weekend.
[Update a while later]
What if audiences shrug? An interview with the producer.
[Update late afternoon]
More interviews from Amy Holmes:
(Hot conservative women alert)
[Update Saturday morning]
Francis Porretto has some ruminations on the book, faith, charity and epistomology.
Fake Animal Cruelty
Jonah Goldberg has some thoughts on vegan diets and their attempts at meat simulation:
…if one is to take the arguments of the ethical vegans at face value, isn’t it a bit disgusting or immoral to make products that look like the foods they consider most evil? Fake hamburgers are really a marvel, but while they still come up short on the taste front, they certainly look like hamburgers. If meat is murder, why hawk products that look like the mutilated corpse? Consider our views on cannibalism, then imagine selling faux human flesh in, say, the form of human thumbs — “It tastes just like a missionary!” Wouldn’t that still be in poor taste?
Technology advances are going to make this even more complicated in the future. I suspect that at some point cloning technology will enable us to grow meat in a vat, and probably pretty good-tasting meat at that. What does this do to the vegan argument against animal cruelty? Or to extend Jonah’s example, if we could grow long pork without harming any sentient humans in the process, would it be wrong to eat it? Should it be illegal? For that matter, would it really be human flesh? If so, what would make it that — just the DNA content of the cells?
This seems similar to child pr0n, in that one has to separate the act of consumption from the act of production. It’s pretty clearly wrong to produce child pr0n using actual children, but if it’s computer animated, who does it hurt? Yes, I understand the argument that we should discourage the consumption as well, lest it lead to a demand for supply, though I don’t think that the Supreme Court agrees. But how many vegans would eat animal flesh if it weren’t produced from whole animals with brains and nervous systems? Judging by the repeated attempts to replicate the carnivorous experience from vegetation, quite a number, I’d imagine.