As I prepare for my flight tomorrow, I’ll throw in an audience-participation post. I am interested in celebrities that are generally considered attractive and you don’t really understand why.

For instance, I consider Angelina Jolie to be a relatively unattractive woman not just by Hollywood standards but by everyday standards. I don’t understand why so many people believe that she’s so hot. What I find particularly curious is that some of the most ardent physical admirers of hers are women. Not only the self-proclaimed bisexuals I know that use her as an example of their alleged bisexuality, but I’ve heard more than once a straight woman say something to the effect of “I’m straight, but she makes me reconsider.” I’ve actually heard more women comment on her attractiveness than men.

Another example, and I’m not sure she counts, is Paris Hilton. Never mind the helium where her brain is supposed to be and her ugly personality, I don’t think that she would be physically attractive if she were as morally gold as Mother Theresa. But I don’t know if she counts because I think that much of her celebrity is due to her atrocious personality and it may be true that most guys think she’s as physically unremarkable as I do.

As far as male actors are concerned, I’m not sure because I haven’t put as much thought into it. The only one that comes to mind is Keaunu Reeves. But I guess Reeves is a good enough looking guy I just don’t understand why he ever had heart-throb status (prior to his sexual preferences becoming public, anyhow) since by Hollywood standards he’s pretty unremarkable. I think the same of Jake Gyllenhaal.

So do y’all have anyone you feel that way about? If so, who?

Capella has a few things to say about the word “slut” and its meaning.

Specifically, she attacks the usage as a method to attack women with which the speaker has some other disagreement. It doesn’t really matter whether the speaker is male or female, it’s a mode of attack.

However, she asks the question:

A slut is someone, generally female, who has sex with a large number of people. It is supposed to mean she has sex freely or indiscriminately, although accusations of sluttishness are often made simply on the basis of the number of partners. A woman can also be called a slut on the basis of clothing or behavior that might correspond to sexually free behavior.

But what does a slut do that is bad? She engages in sex – an enjoyable activity – with consenting adult males. (Yes, I know it is possible for women to commit rape, especially statutory rape, but there is nothing in the word “slut” that implies the woman in question does that.) In other words, she does something that makes other people happy. Why is that bad?

Depending on your perspective, this alone can be perceived as bad (and yes, the behavior of the men ought to be condemned as bad as well). The implied behavior – that of seeking sex without consequences – is a short-circuiting of the societal idea that sex is something for committed relationships and that should be, well, special and with someone you care about. A “slut” is a woman who acts or by behavior is deemed uninterested in finding a permanent or semipermanent partner, which in the past would be a “bad thing.” Personally, I’d still consider that a bad thing today, but the “hook-up” culture seems to disagree.

What are the effects of this behavior? Possibly, a child (or multiple children) outside of wedlock or even put up for adoption. Is having kids bad? Depends on your point of view – I’m increasingly of the mind that there ought to be a required training class and certification before people are allowed to breed. Hey, we require that before we give people licenses to drive a car or to have a gun, and you can do a lot more damage to society with a poorly brought-up child (or worse, a gaggle thereof) than you can with either of those two mechanical devices. “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” is a lousy way to go about procreative behavior.

Possibly, the woman is being put on the spot for encouraging men to seek out like-minded women, rather than themselves seeking out relationships. The theory there goes that (somewhat like prostitution), the availability of “guilt-free” sex to men lessens the chance that the men will need to settle down into more permanent relationships. Whatever stock you put in the theory, there it is.

Possibly, there’s the worry about sexually transmitted diseases, which a somewhat randomly promiscuous person can transmit a lot faster than someone who’s got a steady partner. The old phrase “you’re not having sex just with them, but with everyone else they had sex with before you, and everyone else their former partners had sex with before them” applies. Stuff spreads fast.

Capella’s overriding point seems to have been outrage that there isn’t an equal term to use against promiscuous men, and she’s got a legitimate reason to be feministically outraged there. Still, I don’t agree with her sub-point that the “slut” is not doing anything bad, for the reasons stated above.

Dizzy over at Dizzy Does It got a letter published by an advice column in Salon regarding a problem she had with a classmate that broke her nose and was entirely unapologetic about it. Part of the question is whether or not she should have immediately gone to the cops. The consensus was that she should have, but Bob mad a very good point:

The above-the-law link features some commenters who are presumably very self-assured about their ability to do the right thing even in context. Furthermore, they can’t believe that anyone without these these skills must be lying.

Think about this in a relationship context though. If you have been in a relationship for any length of time, you have done some truly horrific-sounding things to your partner, and vice versa. However, in the context of being in the relationship, these horrific-sounding things may be very minor even though girlfriend-less armchair critics proclaim they would dump someone right there for doing that to them.

While discussing the media sexism issue with Clancy I found myself getting on my high horse about what I would definitely do if a woman did to me what was being done to the guys on the shows. Not only does my track record completely contradict my high horseriding pose, but I can’t say that it would have been any different had I met someone with less integrity and honesty than my lovely wife and if she’d jerked me around, too. The more I thought about it, if confronted with the situation in the here-and-now with the Not Clancy standing right in front of me, the surrounding circumstances would matter a great deal.

The reason for all of this is that it is really scary to take a stand. And like many scary things it is scary for a reason. If you had the perfect relationship would you throw it away because of some mistake he or she made in St. Louis in a moment of weakness? If you found out that there was a time when they weren’t sure that the two of you were going to make it and they drifted, temporarily, into the arms of another that everything you’ve done is entirely worthless? It depends on if everything else you’ve done together is worthless. Of course, once something unacceptable starts happening more than once or with more than one person, you’ve got what can be considered a more systemic problem rather than an isolated one.

And as Bob points out the same is true when it comes to calling the cops. Sometimes it can really cause more problems than it solves. Sometimes the actual punishment doled out is just enough to piss them off but not enough to really deter them. Maybe there are institutional problems in your surroundings wherein by stepping forward the social cost to you would be much higher than it would be to the person you’d be turning in. Of course, unlike a relationship the morally right and morally wrong is a little more clear, but in many cases so are the consequences!

So all of this is the long way around to agreeing with Bob that it’s really easy to say what you would and would not put up with. It’s another thing entirely to actually be in the situation and step forward and say “this is unacceptable and I will say so at great personal cost!”

Addendum: Another great example of the armchair moralizer came up last night. Though Clancy’s residency made a good faith effort to adhere to the 80-hour workweek, a lot of other residencies are not acting in such good faith and implicitly apply sanctions on employees that don’t “voluntarily” stay after they’re clocked out. The most obvious thing that these residents need to do is contact the residency board and turn their program in. But to do so, however, puts one’s career at great risk and it’s easy for those of us who wouldn’t suffer the consequences of stepping forward to tell those that would that it’s a price worth paying. We’re willing to risk their livelihood in the name of all that is good and right, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we would risk our own if it were our livelihood on the line.

Several years ago my ex-girlfriend Julie and I were watching a Freddie Prinze Jr movie when we saw a preview for another FPJ flick, Down to You. Not that we could tell what the preview was for until they told us. I mean, we had our suspicions because it starred Prinze and Julia Stiles and some of the lines seemed familiar, but there were new lines, lines were voiced over scenes that they had nothing to do with in their scene in the movie, and the two had completely different plots. In the trailer we were watching, Prinze freaks out at the site of True Love and then realizes the error of his stupid, immature boy ways. But in the movie we’d just seen, it was Stiles that freaked out and left him and Prinze is left to deal with her immaturity and waits lovingly for her to realize that they were Meant To Be Together.

I remember thinking it kind of odd that they felt the need to repackage the movie for their primarily female audience. I guess some marketing folks believed that women would want to see Freddie Prinze be the immature dufus maybe because then they could vicariously place themselves in the position of patiently waiting for the man of their dreams, saying to themselves, “I’ll wait for you, Freddie!!” Even if so you’d think that they’d have figured it out before the movie was made and had the actual movie have that plot, but I guess they decided too late what kind of movie it should have been. It was actually one of the better FPJ movies from my recollection. But it’s hard to say because I try to block those movies out of my memory.

It’s not often that I am offended on behalf of men everywhere by their portrayal in entertainment media, but it does happen from time to time. A while back (I can’t find the post) I complained about TV shows and commercials which constantly show men as id-driven, incompetent oafs whose all-knowing wives are showing him up. When I posted on it, Becky responded that she’d noticed that, too, but she was actually offended that the commercials imply that as long as he acts stupid and lazy it’s her job to pick up the slack. I hadn’t really thought about it, but she had a good, point, too. What I had previously thought was mildly sexist in one direction could easily be interpreted as mildly sexist in the other, depending on how you looked at it.

I’ve been running into that again with some television shows I’ve been watching and listening to. In at least three cases there is an instance of a woman going either crazy or completely selfish and then lashes out at her man that has the audacity to point her immature and selfish behavior out. In two cases the woman allows an ex-boyfriend to stay with her while hiding it from her boyfriend. When he gets mad, she gets indignant. In another case a woman freaks out when the man proposes and then gets upset with him for getting so upset about her refusal to answer the question or even acknowledge that it was asked.

My visceral response is actually being kind of pissed off that the man is being subjected to this mistreatment and is expected to just take it because if he doesn’t he is unreasonably trying to control her. She’s essentially hiding behind feminism in order to leave her man twisting in the wind while she regresses to… I don’t know… to something less than she should be. This may hit a little bit close to home because in at least a couple times in my life I was put in a not-dissimilar position when I was asked to accept behavior that is clearly unacceptable. Sometimes I overreact to situations where in retrospect I was being unreasonable or unfair. But sometimes, as in the cases I’m thinking of, time and distance has told me not that I overreacted but that I underreacted by simply complaining and getting mad rather than leaving them or shutting them out entirely.

Anyway, I thought about the above thing with commercials and it occurred to me that there are two sides to this common thread in the shows I’ve been consuming lately. Whereas I’m upset at how these shows seem to imply to me that a man should be a man by putting up with rotten behavior, I could easily see a woman being upset at women being portrayed as batspit crazy. I could see this dovetailing quite closely with previous complaints about how women in media are portrayed as over-emotional, erratic, and self-centered.

So I guess the lesson here for myself is to chill out. The characters names are Johnny and Sharon, not Eva and Will. Sometimes a silly plot is just a silly plot.

Scott Adams is apparently under the opinion that we have a permanent age:

I’ve observed that everyone has a permanent age that appears to be set at birth. For example, I’ve always been 42 years old. I was ill-suited for being a little kid, and didn’t enjoy most kid activities. By first grade I knew I wanted to be an adult, with an established career, car, house and a decent tennis game. I didn’t care for my awkward and unsettled twenties. And I’m not looking forward to the rocking chair. If I could be one age forever, it would be 42.

It would explain a lot of my permanent age were something like 37 or 39, which would explain the sort of “out-of-place” self-perception I’ve had since I was a kid. A more likely explanation is, of course, some sort of innate social “otherness” or something, but next to “I’m too smart for my peers” this permanent age thing sounds like the next best option!

I’m the kind of person that has always been better inside a relationship than outside of one. I make a better boyfriend than a suitor and a better husband than a boyfriend. And for most of my life I wanted kids and by that age I’d theoretically have them. Also, the older I get (ie the closer to 37-39) the less out-of-place that I feel. I was terrible socially in junior high, better in high school, better than that in college, and have taken to the whole “making money” thing better than I took to schooling.

Also, I’m not sure why, but when I was a kid I had a sort of fascination with the late 30’s. Most of the characters I came up with for my lamebrained little stories were between 37 and 39. Maybe I’ve just always known. Or I’m smarter than everyone else. I could really go either way.

-{via Dustbury}-