Thursday, March 25, 2010

U by Kotex: Twat Did You Say? I Cunt Hear You!

Rebelling Against the Commonly Evasive Feminine Care Ad - blissfully free of twirling, horseback riding and virginal white…

Merrie Harris, global business director at JWT, said that after being informed that it could not use the word vagina in advertising by three broadcast networks, it shot the ad cited above with the actress instead saying “down there,” which was rejected by two of the three networks. (Both Ms. Harris and representatives from the brand declined to specify the networks.)

“It’s very funny because the whole spot is about censorship,” Ms. Harris said. “The whole category has been very euphemistic, or paternalistic even, and we’re saying, enough with the euphemisms, and get over it. Tampon is not a dirty word, and neither is vagina.”

Finally… straight talk about twats! Can we all just be grownups now? Kudos to U by Kotex for their campaign to Break the Cycle!

Time to stop all the weirdness about periods, don’t you think? Progress is where it’s at. Every video watched, every comment made and every question asked helps change unhealthy attitudes and Break the Cycle*.

Random sidetrackage: Looking for the product that inspired a rant of mine from 2004 (Some things are worth RAGGING on!), I came across Havoc and Mayhem’s Musings on being a Woman… so glad to know I’m not the only one befuddled by the need for the “quietest wrapper” as a selling point for feminine hygiene products!

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Old Rant: Net Illiterati

Something I wrote back in the late 90s… [original here]

I need to start updating this site, so I dragged this nugget out of my old closet to build on a Tweet I made earlier:

Dear radio ad writers: URLs *never* hv a “backslash” in ‘em. VO peeps, if u see it in a script, complain! I won’t buy from proven idiots…

I think that if someone is going to build a website, especially if they plan to CHARGE for something there, they should take a few minutes to at least spell check the damned things! How in the Hell did these people manage to get out of high school, and even in some cases get college degrees without knowing the difference between the possessive word “your” and the contraction “you’re?” I’d guess that 8 out of 10 web sites that I visit have multiple instances of the confusion of the two!  Another word that is consistently misspelled is “categories.” It’s obvious to me that many people have gone through life learning everything from television, and have very little experience with the printed word.  Since I’ve read thousands of books, misspellings and grammatical errors LEAP off a page at me; but apparently the Illiterati of the Net are the rule and not the exception.  I suppose this speaks volumes for the state of our educational system.  I wonder sometimes if it isn’t a government plot - after all, the ignorant and stupid are more easily led, and if the Net is a fair representation of the American public we’ve got a disproportionately large population of morons in this country.

Yup. It’s only gotten worse in the years since my original post. Pretty sad.

Saturday, August 22, 2009

Laurie Higgins Wants Parents to Know a HS Math Teacher is an Atheist

A call to arms for the godless, for the sake of our CHILDREN!

Laurie Higgins of the Illinois Family Institute Sends an Open Letter to the Friendly Atheist - Repost of my comment on Hemant’s blog:

This makes my blood boil. Who the hell does this woman think she is? Christian busybodies injecting their views into educational settings BY COMPLAINING about things their small minds find “offensive” is a reprehensible tactic that’s proven effective more often than not.

The reason the so-called “New Atheist” movement is an absolute necessity (like yesterday), is because these fundamentalist crybabies like Laurie Higgins have enjoyed 30 years of empire-building in the media, accomodation, appeasement and outright, illegal government endorsement allowing them to manipulate public policy in their favor. They insist on their First Amendment rights while seeking to restrain everyone else’s. They’re out of control and it’s long past time to remind them of their place. In church and homeschooling, if they’re so determined to raise generations of Jesus-bots devoid of intellectual curiosity.

With the sorry state of affairs in American education – in large part due to the dumbing down of our curriculum in order to not piss off Christians – I’m thrilled to have good teachers out there, and what they say or do outside the classroom is none of my concern.

These bullshit “Family” organizations are an obstacle to our kids’ education and a threat to the First Amendment liberties of every citizen. I consider this attack upon the Friendly Atheist (a teacher, no less!) yet another call to arms for all the rest of us, from closeted to militant. Ladies and gentlemen get those arms in (ergonomically correct typing) position and fire at will. No quarter given.
BUY HEMANT’S BOOK “I SOLD MY SOUL ON EBAY”

Saturday, June 26, 2004

Some things are worth RAGGING on!

One of which is our culture’s tendency to act like human bodily functions are something shameful.  It’s bad enough that this attitude is encouraged privately among families, but when advertising and marketing is crafted to support such evil it’s disgusting and pisses me off to no end.

Consider Kotex’s quietest wrappers being touted as the best thing since sliced bread.  What the fuck?  Nothing like teaching our newest generation of female bleeders that having someone in another stall of a public bathroom hear the crinkling sound of unwrapping a rag is an embarrassment.  Y’know, pretty much any female over the age of 12 is intimately familiar with the fact that once a month we bleed, until we’re set free by menopause.  And since we’re no longer required to absent ourselves from socializing with the tribe by taking a week off to hang out in the Bleeding Hut, if we don’t want to ruin our clothes and/or leave a bloody trail, we need something to absorb the fluids of menstruation.  Having left behind the rather inconvenient practice of using actual rags, we’ve evolved into using handy-dandy things like disposable pads and tampons, with paper or plastic wrappers that ensure we don’t have to pick bits of lint or tobacco from the bottom of our purses off of our rags before we use them.  It’s just the nature of paper and plastic wrappers to make crinkly noises, and I know no woman who hears those crinkly noises in the next stall and snickers about someone else having her period—but that’s not what Kotex would have us believe.

This is just more evidence of how sick a society we’ve become.  I blame the further push toward religious views being “more moral,” when in reality what they are is more ashamed of what’s natural - what believers maintain their God created.  It’s bullshit, plain & simple, and it’s BAD for young women everywhere.

Fucksticks.