“Zac Efron and Michelle Rodriguez have finally confirmed rumours they are dating after they were pictured kissing on holiday in Sardinia. The 26-year-old hunk and the raven-haired beauty enjoyed a PDA as they cosied up to one another on a yacht.”
“Let us perform kissing. I’ll just, then — I’ll just haunch over you — like so — knee abutting your human breast, as is traditional, and cover your mouth with my mouth thusly…now.”
“Now we’re finished. The kissing is accomplished.”
“And then I touch you…where do I touch you?”
“I’m not sure. The flanks?”
“As my woman, as the woman, legally what parts of you belong to my touching? Below the carapace, or…?”
“I don’t have a carapace.”
“Oh, don’t you?”
“I don’t think so. How about here, above the pubis, one hand on each side as a sort of torsal framing device?”
“Oh, that works just fine. I could rest my hands here for hours.”
“Your leg is touching mine.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Is this better?”
“Your leg was touching mine.”
“We’re touching now, you and I.”
“Even so.”
“I’m having such a good time, I have to go away for a minute, because of the good time that I’m having.”
“Should I come with you?”
“No. No. I need…I need to crawl by myself for a little bit, okay? I just need to crawl away, into the sea.”
“Okay. Have fun. I love you.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“I HAVE CRAWLED TO THE SKY.”
“Is this normal behavior, of the human female in love?”
“Yes. People will recognize this as love.”
“Should I come up there too?”
“No. I can love you better from up here, alone.”
“I’m having so many good times all at once now. It’s hard to tell from my face, but that’s…this is good, what is happening to me now.”
“Are you all right there, in the water?”
“Don’t come into the water when I’m in the water.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. Should I — should I wait back on the boat?”
“Don’t come into the water when I am in the water.”
“This is a good relationship we have, you and I.”
“We do have one, don’t we?”
“Oh, assuredly we do.”
“Get back on the boat, now.”
“All right. Okay.”
[Images via The Daily Mail, YES THE DAILY MAIL SHUT UP]
Tags: celebrities, hell yes i’m linking from the daily mail fuck off, human love, michelle rodriguez, news, real relationships that are definitely real, zac efron
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YES. YES. YES. Hollywood, we are not stupid, we can only play along with your games SO FAR.
“Are you all right there, in the water?”
“Don’t come into the water when I’m in the water.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. Should I — should I wait back on the boat?”
“Don’t come into the water when I am in the water.”
“This is a good relationship we have, you and I.”
omg it’s every fitzgerald protagonist couple come to life
YES. My first thought upon finishing this was “oh, so it’s a modern-day Hills Like White Elephants conversation. Great.”
Mallory, never stop
Good lord, thank you for this.
Didn’t the Daily Mail promise to stop using photographers who used this super-zoom lens thing, like, six times in the last 20 years?
the daily mail makes a lot of promises
but it only keeps one
HARD-HITTING JOURNALISM
I was going to go with SERVING THE CAUSE OF EVIL.
Yes but they didn’t promise to stop using photographers with lenses that can photograph things in other dimension, like a dimension in which this is at all believable.
Look those lenses are fun as heck but once you’ve bought one you owe like a smillion dollars and the only things you can really photograph from five miles away are birds and celebrities
and screw birds
They are fun. AND I WANT ONE SO BADDDDD. But I don’t have a smillion dollars. Or even half a smillion. Meh.
Bisexuality Is Real But Michelle Rodriguez and Zac Efron Are Not: My Upcoming Scholarly Monograph
The world needs you!
oh boy.
man I don’t care who you are and I don’t care if it’s safe, sane or consensual, you use a boob as a knee-rest and you’re out of the human race. I don’t even care if she objected. Human dignity objects.
“I’m having such a good time, I have to go away for a minute, because of the good time that I’m having.”
my husband at every party
Between this and this morning’s Western Art Conversations piece, I have an urge to paint these two.
Western Art is happening all around us!
Please don’t link from/to the daily mail. I don’t think you understand quite how bad its impact is in the UK, not just for the rightly-derided “femail” section, but mostly for its constant, constant racist, anti-immigration reporting, which is only getting worse as of the recent elections.
It’s also the paper with the largest circulation in the country, so there really is nothing to joke about, and no “ironic” humour in it either for people (like me) whom they target on the daily.
Fucking off now as per tag-based orders.
lol no
Okay. It was a serious request but I get that it is a joke to you.
You get to treat the DM as an “oh my gosh isn’t it funny how terrible it is, but watch me link to it in a wink-wink don’t call me out on this guys” way. People like me feel its real world effects. Its race/immigration rhetoric has, if anything, intensified in recent times, and successfully spread throughout the country (see the recent local elections, which saw over 150 councillors of an openly racist political party get elected). So as an organisation/newspaper/website, it’s not something I can ever take lightly. In part, its reporting on Efron/Rodriguez-type issues is what helps to give it that massive readership on which to spew bigotry.
That is where I draw my Humourless Feminist line in the sand, against an organisation that spreads daily propaganda and hate against millions of people in the country where it’s based. I admire your writing and The Toast a lot, like really an immense amount, but the flippancy and flavour of hipster/ironic racism around this feels like some #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen level stuff.
I am (genuinely) curious if any other UK BME (black and minority ethnic, for non-UK people) toast readers have different or similar views.
I’m signing off now because your post and response honestly made me uncomfortable and I’d have kept on feeling that way if I hadn’t said my piece, but I hate arguing too as it brings out my anxiety a lot. Sorry if any of the above doesn’t make sense. Bye.
I’m a white, non-UK lady myself but just chiming in to say I think your comment deserved a lot more thoughtful response than a “lol no” and I’m frankly VERY disappointed that it happened.
It’s hard, I think, when a disagreement is between “this is a big deal to me” versus “this is not a very big deal to me,” but yes, the Daily Mail is a piece of shit garbage. I feel fine that once in the existence of our site I stole a bunch of Zac Efron pictures from them and made jokes about it, but you are of course free to disagree!
*scuttles up a yacht mast*
I love you Mallory. PERSONALLY I don’t have any skin in the “link to them or don’t” game but I didn’t think it was very nice of you to say “lol no” to her comment, that’s all. Still <3 you.
Isn’t this kind of like the coffee analogy from the Yellow Power Ranger thing, though? Like, you linking to the Daily Mail once is probably not that big a deal. But if every day a website or a person you love and trust links to the Mail, which is a properly racist, sexist, vile thing that has genuine harmful effects…
Good analogy. Somethings that are big deals to POCs will never be big deals to non-POCs.
This seems like a very salient comparison to me. Microaggressions feel small to the person executing them, but not to the person on the receiving end. Reading the original exchange definitely made me (as a white American reader) feel dismayed as a regular fan of The Toast.
Thank you for saying this, and I agree.
Echoing what others have said, but I just wanted to say that I appreciate and wholeheartedly agree with anna_k’s points here, and cosign that this is some #solidarityisforwhitewomen shit. As a regular reader of the Toast (/American woman of color who’s spent a lot of time in the UK), I’m honestly really disappointed at both the flippancy of the original response and at the total lack of an actual non-snarky apology here. It’s easy for a white woman to say (linking to) the Daily Mail is “not a big deal to me” when its bile and that which it fuels and validates in the UK doesn’t actually affect you, but come on, you’re the editor of a popular website with a significant platform, take some responsibility.
Yeah, I think the way you linked to the Daily Mail (making it clear that you don’t endorse that stuff) was fine, but your “lol no” sounded I think more dismissive than you meant it to.
I know you meant “Nah, I don’t think the way I credited those images promotes the Daily Mail’s agenda,” but I think she heard something more like, “Nah, I think you have a persecution complex.”
I hear that kind of tone mix-up can happen on the internet sometimes. (In case you can’t tell, this comment is supposed to be read in a pleasant voice. You’re my hero, Mallory, and it is because I think you’re all that and a bag of chips that I wrote this.)
Oh. OH! This interpretation makes sense!
Hey everyone, UK reader here and I just wanted to share this article: http://popbitch.com/articles/Profits_Of_Doom.html
It has a really unnecessarily obnoxious and condescending tone, but basically it’s saying (and I don’t know if this is actually true because I am no economist!) that increasing the DM’s page views (eg by clicking on links to it) may actually decrease the profits they can make from advertising, because advertisers pay a rate that’s based on thousands of page impressions, so more page impressions = more ad space, causing a surplus and driving their rates down.
Having said that I still don’t feel comfortable ever going near that site because it is actually sickening – misogynistic, racist, homophobic flamebait. Maybe the worst part for me is how high the circulation is for the actual paper newspaper that people pay money for, and as someone mentioned, how entrenched that bigoted mindset seems to be among a lot of the UK population. Let’s all try to educate a DM reader today?
I agree so much.
Yeah, that was a bummer response to a thoughtful comment. I don’t read the DM, but I also don’t live in the UK, so this was very informative.
(now being more serious than in my–albeit genuine–comment about stealing their pics, which is something we relish)
Our stance on the Daily Mail (or, really, if I’m linking out to anything I feel weird about, generally) is to try to make our links to the Daily Mail reasonably obvious, even if that’s done in an over-the-top jokey fashion, and people can therefore avoid them or click on them as they choose. Which is something I’m comfortable with as an editor.
Thanks for this response- I am [sort of] at peace with the obvious linking, in that this piece was great and I enjoyed it a lot, I’m just not sure that the response to measured criticism was very useful or supportive or in line with the Toast’s general stance.
Agree – I have a 100% NOPE stance on the DM as a (white) Brit, but as long as links are flagged so I can avoid them, I accept I can’t make people not link to it and each to their own.
But yeh, the lol no was lol not cool.
I’m definitely OK with your obvious linkage and straling the DM’s bandwidth. But I do have to cosign the discomfort with how the response came across.
It’s the peril of having a jokey tone that sometimes on the internet it can come across as more dismissive than you intend. And I am a passionate loather of the Daily Mail. Not a BME, but also in the groups that the Daily Mail encourage the extermination of – being bisexual and mentally ill
I know it’s often like this, ironic thing for people in America and Canada because the Daily Mail doesn’t really seem real to them, but they are huge, and actively encourage the hatred towards minorities and women.
DEAR GOD their loathing of disabled people and the unemployed. It is such a vile paper and has done so much to stir up hate. I have disabled friends who are regularly physically and verbally abused since the DM started to persecute “scroungers” – it really is serious stuff and as you say, people outside the UK don’t see it so much.
Thanks for expanding on this; I avoid clicking Daily Mail links because they seem routinely vile in just about every way, but because I don’t (and because I live in the U.S.), I didn’t understand the context and their agenda to promote an actively racist political climate.
Of course, it’s never your responsibility, or anyone else’s, to establish that context for me; I’m just grateful because I wouldn’t have known enough to go looking for it on my own.
Yes–I’m realizing just how ignorant I am of the Daily Mail’s role in UK politics. I just thought they were the tabloid version of the WSJ politically speaking, except with a focus on celebrities instead of finance. The examples Anna made are much more insidious, although now I’m starting to contemplate to what extent WSJ contributes to race/immigration discourse in the US.
More learning! I thought the WSJ was the US version of, like, The Financial Times- something that literally reports mainly on finance with occasional editorial bits, read mainly by business people in airport lounges. Not so?
That’s what they’d like you to think, but secretly they’re another Murdoch-owned sheet taking careful aim at the US social safety net.
Oooooh. Interesting. Thank you!
It’s just complicated by the fact that it’s an old masthead that wasn’t ~always~ owned by News Corp, so they’ve moved toward the hard right while trading on the reputation of the older paper. (This is wonky, so I will see myself to another thread now.)
Yeah, I remember reading about all of the anxiety by WSJ journalists during the takeover.
To add to what others have said–they definitely occupy the Republican, pro-big business side of the newspaper spectrum, but my impression of them is that they have always been a Respectable News Outlet (for the affluent and the politically well-connected.) The way the New York Times is geared towards affluent liberals.
It’s too conservative for my tastes too, and I’m long past the “I gotta read every paper of every political ilk to get a fair and balanced perspective!” It’s just that as I was thinking this over, I found myself wondering what they’ve written in the past on the US Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s and what they have generally written about race/immigration and I am generally thinking that it probably wasn’t very good.
ETA: One example is this: the day after the Hobby Lobby decision by the US Supreme Court, WSJ’s front page comment about the court decisions was something to the effect of “Supreme Court Plots Middle Path on Business.” When looking for the headline to reference here, I also found “The Problem isn’t Liberals, It’s Progressives.”
I can’t think of any particular examples atm, but I’ve definitely read WSJ in the past and thought –NOPE, too conservative for my taste. In general, the way publications can exercise so much power so subtly scares me. But alas.
It occurs to me that for the US, we shouldn’t be looking at newspapers at all and should just be circling our markers around the Fox News Channel, forever and ever.
when I walk past a copy of the mail I want to set it on fire. Newsagents everywhere are lucky I am yet to come into my powers.
This thread made me uncomfortable (in a good, challenging way), in that 1) I know a bit more about the Daily Mail now, and 2) I am seeing how humor / irony can, although maybe well-intentioned, still be dismissive. I think it’s great that you’re speaking up about a blind-spot on The-Toast.
Also, I have a number of sites (HuffPo) I refuse to visit out of principles that are much less grounded than yours, so I’m easily adding daily mail to my blacklist. A click is a small thing, but it’s something.
just chiming in with my support for your valid points, and if you feel uncomfortable about something posted you deserve a better answer than ‘lol no.’
I don’t think you’re being a humourless feminist, and I agree with you. I also find the response you received unnecessarily rude and dismissive. You’re not being unreasonable.
I thought “lol no” was pretty funny personally (and harmless)
Apart from (directly) to the commenter who had her thoughtful comment dismissed?
I just don’t think it’s any of our places to decide what’s “unToasty”. Discourse is good…but I’m glad The Toast is going to continue to link to the DM, even if it is an awful POS paper run by horrible people. No one forced anyone to click, everyone was given a heads up knew there was DM content before they read it.
On that note, I’m taking to the sea.
Okay. Right. Here’s the thing: I was using Toasty, as I think pretty much everyone understood, as shorthand for “place that is generally against racism, sexism, ageism, disablism, and other bad things”. The Toast has a reputation for being a Good Place. That’s what I meant by Toasty. You know that, I’m pretty sure. UnToasty? Not those things.
Alternatively, you can see “Toasty” as shorthand for “the usual standards of the Toast”, and “unToasty” as shorthand for “below the usual standards of the Toast”. If you genuinely didn’t understand that, I am sorry if I was unclear.
However. I cannot understand being a person who says “I’m glad The Toast is going to continue to do something absolutely and practically harmful to people, particularly PoC”. Please, take to the sea, by all means, and click the Mail all you want. Just know that what you are doing is actively harmful, not something to be flippant about.
Wasn’t sure which comment to reply to so just picked one but thank you toast commentariat for your responses. I thought I wouldn’t revisit the thread (bc anxiety) but I accidentally subscribed to emails about replies (such skills) and so ended up clicking back through a lot. a lot of you have drawn out and explained why this is such an issue for BME people/POC better than I did, so thank you for that too.
If my response to “MR&CaraDwereHotter” makes it through you’ll see that sarcasm is pretty much all I have left for this now.
Gonna have to save up my paranoid self-importance/mad arguments for the sadly large number of ex-Etonians (and similar folks) I know irl who feel the need to buy the DM/read “femail” and also get mad at me when I call out that racism. What a life for a comp school girl.
I’d end by saying something like “those microaggressions just keep piling up” but I’m not sure anymore of the usefulness of that word in these contexts.
Liberal white racists defend themselves as though they’re putting the “micro” in microaggression, so they must be pretty okay overall. Few seem willing to acknowledge that it’s the “aggression” they’re putting into that word, or able to understand why jokey, OTT, ironic/hipster responses are actually aggressive things to non-white people. I’m sort of giving up on trying to make them understand, at least online.
I read a great article a while ago from a WoC explaining why educating white people is not her job. I’ve also read similar articles from feminists on why educating men is not their job. I totally agree – give up on trying to make people understand! Those who are genuinely seeking to learn can find any number of sources.
Dude, YEAH. Seriously! Thank you – I couldn’t believe how many people think that’s a big deal. I guess I’m having a pretty vehemently negative reaction to every comment written in the vein of moral judgment (apparently their privilege to merit out) on another person’s REACTION to something – policing other’s emotions/opinions? Along those lines, the self-righteous “I like YOU, Mallory, I just didn’t appreciate your tone…” stuff kind of blows my mind too. If you wrote for a blog… and had to deal with the cuckoos’ responses to every little thing you wrote… I think you would fairly quickly realize that A) there’s a lot of nutjobs on the web who feel the need to correct your work irrationally; & B) it’s not worth your time to give them time. If a comment looked crazy you *probably* wouldn’t waste a lot of time delving into it. E.g.: a comment where the author signed off cussing and saying something (that, to a casual reader, sounded cuckoo-levels of paranoid/self-important) about how the DM targets HER, personally… . I also can’t believe someone’s getting censured HERE of all places for a humorous response to a freaked-out reader. Alrighty that’s all – I’m kinda new here and I love reading the comments; sparks thoughts – but this… irritated me enough to comment for the first time…
a few suggestions for things to say about me in your next comment:
* “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” (cr: Caro Lamb)
* “she puts the cuckoo in cloud cuckoo land” (cr: Aristophanes)
* “she puts the cuckoo in cuckoo clock, which object, as I hope you know, originated in Baden–Württemberg, not Switzerland” (cr: I want to say Terry Pratchett is how I know this, but I can’t quite remember?)
* cray cray
* a gosh-darn-tootin’ cussin’ maniac
* alternatively, a twunt
* a…reverse racist
* Delulu Lemon
* Steve “Nut” Jobs
* George Clooney.
Those are all the ones I can think of for now!
Anna –
I apologize, certainly was not calling you, yourself, cuckoo! I was actually commenting on everyone’ s reactions to the “lol no” comment. The entire point of my comment was to point out the reason I think “lol no” might be an entirely reasonable reaction, and, in that case, why anger/moral judgement does not seem itself a reasonable reaction.
My reasoning behind my negative reaction to those reactions … is that a quick read over the original comment you made *might* (it did, in my case) generate an “lol, no” reaction.
I think it is patently ridiculous for people who did understand/agree with the original comment (or were more generous/less cynical in their interpretive assumptions, i.e. took it seriously) to censure someone who did not have the same interpretation.
I would really like to make it clear that I do not think you, yourself, are a cuckoo! Not that you should care, if I did; but my choice of words was reflecting on how a person reading your comment MIGHT have interpreted it.
So anyway – was not talking about you, was talking about everyone’s anger at the “lol no,” and the reason that anger seems to ME to be misguided. I am really sorry if I offended you – it certainly appears that I did – and I think possibly you are very much misunderstanding the focus of the entire comment.
I can certainly guarantee that we will never cease stealing expensive images paid for by The Daily Mail without receiving several serious legal notices and possibly having our phones tapped.
It’d be quite something if the Daily Mail went after someone else for plagiarism. That would be time to crawl into the sea, indeed.
I loved this piece, and I am not BME, but I am deeply uncomfortable with websites I love linking to the Mail, because their rhetoric is vile, and why people think it’s alright to support UKIP. I’m even more uncomfortable with “lol no” as a response, actually. Like, Toast, I love you, and your stances are usually completely great- dismissing someone telling you you’re doing harm seems..unToasty, if I’m honest. I’m worried that by posting this I’ll never be allowed back to the Toast, but I wanted you to know you weren’t alone in being made uncomfortable by the casual support of the DM.
Wait, so, publishing question: is it the case that you can get away with stealing expensive things from shitholes like the DM if you link back? Is that…fair use? (She says, pretending to be a pirate lawyer.) as opposed to if you linked to a mirror site to deny them traffic, as I think Autostraddle did when The Baffler ran a critical piece on them.
Anyway, thanks for explaining!
…the editorial policy. Not this rando curious question I asked while you are in the middle of dealing with whatever else
I think in this particular piece, they are using parody/satire as a commentary about the subject of the photos in question, which is one element that is often ruled as allowing for “fair use” and not copyright infringement.
It’s pretty complicated, though. I’ve been listening to @copyrightlbn on twitter for YEARS talk about Fair Use and CC and stuff and I read as much as I can on the subject, and I don’t even think the lawyers really know what’s up all the time. (Actually, CopyrightLBN as good as admits that they don’t!)
It is not! Perhaps the parody loophole? Perhaps.
“Perhaps” seems like it should reach the “should we screw the DM today?” threshold.
why is that tattoo man in his underpants shackled to the boat by his ankle?
or rather, why aren’t all the men shackled to the boat????
I had to actually follow the link to the Daily Mail to find out if underpants dude was someone I should recognize or care about. (Answer: Nope!)
I didn’t notice that until you pointed it out, but it is extremely weird and– what is even weirder– is that it looks like it was photoshopped in?
why
why this
“I love you too much. That’s why I had to climb up here, into the sky, as far away as I can get from you as possible while still remaining on this same boat.”
“Oh is that love?”
“Yes. This is the love. Me, being far away and scrambling away from you. You, staying there alone. This is the love.”
But seriously, is there any chance they are actually sobriety buddies and really good for each other? In a platonic human way? FINGERS CROSSED.
I hope you are right, but I’m guessing the truth is somewhere in the opposite of sobriety.
I know, I know.
I don’t know why I care at all about this — I have no feelings about either one of these people! I just hope everyone is happy and healthy, I guess?
I’m into people getting sober and healthy if that’s what they want! I have very few shits to give about these people in particular, but to me, positive sobriety stories are always inspiring.
Wasn’t Efron’s problem cocaine? So possibly a form of non-sobriety orthogonal to the very public non-sobriety she had going on with that whole Cara Delavigne mess.
OR sobriety buddies. Really hoping for sobriety buddies. That spiral with Cara Delavigne was fucking sad to see.
(Also she’s out as bi, right? So…)
Her relationship with Cara Eyebrows was interesting to watch, kind of sad what with the very drunk-looking photos. And yeah, she’s out as bi.
They may be platonic, but given that it’s Zac Efron, I’m not sure it has much to do with “human.”
(The carapace reference was sort of a giveaway. Careful, Efron, or they’ll find out.)
seriously though, her water zen is MEGA zen. I aspire to that level of zen.
Also, Zac Efron’s BACK.
I wish I knew how she got up the mast. Are there spikes? How will she get down?
She’s in a bosun’s chair! They’re the best. It’s like a swing set on the mast!
Oh that sounds awesome 🙂
Whither Cara and her glorious eyebrows? WHITHER?
So…Zachelle? Rodzac? Mefron?
Every combination sounds like a demon from the Ars Goetia.
What are you trying to say here, Mallory?
*slowly grows a beard at you*
BEST.
Zanessa forever until the very end
I’m sort of confused, though – Michelle Rodriguez is out, right? If not, she’s been all but out for years. So — weird as this is — I can’t quite see why she’d be up for this.
Because she came out as bi? I could be wrong, but that’s what I’m remembering. I know a lot of lesbians go through a bi phase on the way to lesbian land (myself included), but that seems like a terrible reason to suppose that any bi lady in particular doesn’t really, you know, mean it. Which…I’m not sure if that’s what’s going on here (or in the original article), so sincere apologies if I just got accidentally bitchy. I will understand if you throw a shoe at me.
oh jeeze if this was you getting angry then the response i had in my head is practically MURDER WITH WORDS
I’m actually getting more uncomfortable with this piece as time goes on. Like, I laughed, but I feel kind of shitty about it upon reflection, because let’s be honest, MR’s discomfort with being out IS the joke, Nicole’s caveat notwithstanding, and it’s pretty difficult to separate that from a whole bunch of shit about bisexuality. And yet I don’t really feel like it’s my place to pull a Kool-Aid Man on issues I frankly don’t know much about. So I just feel kinda weird and shitty and like this post’s comments are full of egg shells and the whole thing is a minefield and UGH CHRIST this is a new experience at The Toast, so…I’ll just make this comment all about how awkward I feel, because that is easier.
Shit, editing is broken on my phone, so super quickly: I meant the piece as a whole, not Gen’s comment. Now I’m just gonna cringe-walk outta here.
Ooooooh shit, I didn’t read the original article as a comment on bisexuality (denial maybe because it is the toast???) but I do see what you see, now. Uncomfortable indeed!
“[her bisexuality] is the joke”.
Frig, is that the underlying message? Aw, now I’m feeling awkward and slightly bummed, too.
I don’t think the piece itself suggests the unrealness of the relationship has anything to do with MR’s bisexuality. But you can read it that way, as we have discovered!!
Context trumps the ambiguity for me. It’s the toast??? I can’t imagine we’re meant to laugh at her bisexuality.
I guess? I mean, it’s pretty clearly implied that they’re supposed to be each other’s beards, and that coupled with the context surrounding her actual coming out (which I feel like was mostly a bunch of lesbians being dismissively like “we knoooooooow” and kind of scoffing? To the point where there were articles about it (hat tip to Autostraddle again))…I dunno, are bi ladies usually assumed to be doing the beard thing when dating dudes?
I feel like I’m belaboring the point now, which I also feel weird about, so. I dunno. It is the toast, so I think we can safely assume no harm intended, but no one’s perfect about this stuff. Otoh I might be overly careful after having spent a good deal of my twenties being kind of a dick. I don’t know! It just gave me that something ain’t right feeling. Maybe it is just contextual.
Chiming in super late to say, I read this as the thing they are bearding is not their sexuality but their true existence as clusters of insects inhabiting human bodies. Mostly because of the word carapace.
yes exactly this! thank you for making smart words
“carapace” and also the strong emphasis on “human” which is not typically something a human person asserts
celebrities are alien bug clusters
Yep, when she came out, she said she liked men and women. It’s almost like there’s some word for it!
Yeeeah, that nicely articulates my feeling about this piece, too. I mean, I get it. But I don’t like it.
In other news, I cannot get over either the shackle or the crawling by myself.
Also, is a PDA still a PDA if you are on your yacht in private life and someone comes after you with a long lens? A zen koan for our times.
Is it PDA if I blow you a kiss over the Internet? Because that’s what I want to do.
Thank you.
How I know I am old: Zac Efron is 26. Jesus. I thought he would be 16 forever.
Oh! Some of my weirdness to this was that she is 35 and i thought he was 16. How do I keep forgetting that time passes?
This is really just a remake of “High School Musical,” so, we’ll see it on the big screen with all of the other intellectual offerings come December.
Dude, YEAH. Seriously! Thank you – I couldn't believe how many people think that's a big deal. I guess I'm having a pretty vehemently negative reaction to every comment written in the vein of moral judgment (apparently their privilege to merit out) on another person's REACTION to something – policing other's emotions/opinions? Along those lines, the self-righteous "I like YOU, Mallory, I just didn't appreciate your tone…" stuff kind of blows my mind too. If you wrote for a blog… and had to deal with the cuckoos' responses to every little thing you wrote… I think you would fairly quickly realize that A) there's a lot of nutjobs on the web who feel the need to correct your work irrationally; & B) it's not worth your time to give them time. If a comment looked crazy you *probably* wouldn't waste a lot of time delving into it. E.g.: a comment where the author signed off cussing and saying something (that, to a casual reader, sounded cuckoo-levels of paranoid/self-important) about how the DM targets HER, personally… . I also can't believe someone's getting censured HERE of all places for a humorous response to a freaked-out reader. Alrighty that's all – I'm kinda new here and I love reading the comments; sparks thoughts – but this… irritated me enough to comment for the first time…
Hey everyone, UK reader here and I just wanted to share this article: http://popbitch.com/articles/Profits_Of_Doom.html
It has a really unnecessarily obnoxious and condescending tone, but basically it's saying (and I don't know if this is actually true because I am no economist!) that increasing the DM's page views (eg by clicking on links to it) may actually decrease the profits they can make from advertising, because advertisers pay a rate that's based on thousands of page impressions, so more page impressions = more ad space, causing a surplus and driving their rates down.
Having said that I still don't feel comfortable ever going near that site because it is actually sickening – misogynistic, racist, homophobic flamebait. Maybe the worst part for me is how high the circulation is for the actual paper newspaper that people pay money for, and as someone mentioned, how entrenched that bigoted mindset seems to be among a lot of the UK population. Let's all try to educate a DM reader today?
Anna –
I apologize, certainly was not calling you, yourself, cuckoo! I was actually commenting on everyone' s reactions to the "lol no" comment. The entire point of my comment was to point out the reason I think "lol no" might be an entirely reasonable reaction, and, in that case, why anger/moral judgement does not seem itself a reasonable reaction.
My reasoning behind my negative reaction to those reactions … is that a quick read over the original comment you made *might* (it did, in my case) generate an "lol, no" reaction.
I think it is patently ridiculous for people who did understand/agree with the original comment (or were more generous/less cynical in their interpretive assumptions, i.e. took it seriously) to censure someone who did not have the same interpretation.
I would really like to make it clear that I do not think you, yourself, are a cuckoo! Not that you should care, if I did; but my choice of words was reflecting on how a person reading your comment MIGHT have interpreted it.
So anyway – was not talking about you, was talking about everyone's anger at the "lol no," and the reason that anger seems to ME to be misguided. I am really sorry if I offended you – it certainly appears that I did – and I think possibly you are very much misunderstanding the focus of the entire comment.
MELUSINE: “Don’t come into the water when I am in the water.”
RAYMOND DE LUSIGNAN: “This is a good relationship we have, you and I.”
Sometimes when I’m feeling blue i just come here for a giggle!