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name: will baker blogrollin' other sites: |
Aberranting
Tonight, the city will spend an estimated $180,000 on a river parade for the San Antonio Spurs. Today is an "Air Quality Alert Day" (for the second day in a row). Citizens are urged to refrain from filling their gas tanks until the sun goes down, which sounds pretty damned scientific to me. Sounds like they've got the situation firmly in hand down at City Hall. Apparently, the Ministry of Homeland Readiness or whatever has determined that Texas is radioactive. I'm packing my things. For more fun with readiness, check out airtoons. Today's random cool link: just in case you thought you were different or special, think again, biatch! Check it out:Exactitudes. And now, from the Fuck The Man Desk: Abercrombie & Fitch is in trouble again. A lawsuit filed by nine Asian and Hispanic plaintifs accuses it of cultivating and overwhelmingly white sales force. Color me shocked. Of course, they've been in trouble like this before. Cf. the "two wongs can make it white" fiasco. And then there's my all-time favorite Aberboondoggle...the children's thong!! The best part of that whole story was the temerity displayed by A+F in its response to the critics: "The underwear for young girls was created with the intent to be lighthearted and cute. Any misrepresentation of that is purely in the eye of the beholder." Naturally. What perverts we all are, to think that there might be anything amiss with the marketing of thongs to ten year old girls. Using marketing material with phrases like eye candy and wink wink. What a bunch of pedophiles, those critics! Of course, A+F's spin on the story was only aided by the fact that the major critic in the baby-thong scandal was the American Decency Association, a group of radical anti-fun activists who won't stop working until every titty in America is covered. With sackcloth and ashes. Now, what gives with this? Am I crazy to imagine that more reasonable people than the folks at the ADA might oppose the craven, money-grubbing sexualization of children by A+F (and countless other companies)? I mean, I personally am totally indecent, but that doesn't mean I favor dressing up school-girls like hookers. But I digress.... Since I am a long-standing hater of A+F, I hope they get screwed hard by the racial discrimination issue and go down in flames. I don't *believe* that will happen in a culture as comfortable with its own bigotry as our is, but one can hope... Still, I think litigation like this misses the deeper issue with A+F. The company's style is far more pernicious than any hiring practice could be. They've spent the last decade reglamorizing a white, homogenious, santized 1950's-style America. And they've done it by the crudest Pavlovian behavioral programming possible: half-dressing beefcake boys and big-breasted teenaged girls into their lame torn jeans and retro-ripoff t-shirts. Eventually, the only thing that is sexy in the public aesthetic imagination is white boys (or wannabe white boys) in torn jeans, frayed caps, pooka-shell necklaces, and flip-flops. Welcome to the sexualization of lazy frat bois....
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