"I’m glad that after 22 years you still laugh about it..."

Said Lorena Bobbitt, who cut off her husband's penis 22 years ago. She appeared recently on a TV show. It makes you wonder — doesn't it? — why we ever laughed at it.

"Do you need vulva emoji? Or do you want to keep typing ({|})?"

"Feministing has done an article on Flirtmoji's recent release of 15 vulva emoji, realistically asymmetrical and in a variety of pleasant colors. Designer Katy McCarthy did an interview on her work on these sexually explicit emoji and the necessity of inclusivity."

So says Metafilter. The linked Feministing article is "THESE NEW VAGINA EMOJIS ARE THE BEST." So you've got Metafilter subtly prodding the feminist blog to be a tad more accurate with the genitalia terminology.

Here's the interview with McCarthy, going into the depth of why people need sexy emoji:

What’s really beautiful about sex, and emoji, is that sex is really playful and also really difficult. And at the core of good sex is good communication. So to that end, I think that whatever it takes for you to be able to communicate what you want or need, or what you don’t want and don’t need is fine... I think with sex there are things that are really hard to say and hard to ask for, and that’s such a beautiful window to be able to provide someone with language....

This takes me back to something we were talking about yesterday, the "yes means yes" movement and how it privileges those who are language oriented. 

"You're carrying a gun to class? Yeah well I'm carrying a HUGE DILDO."

University of Texas student begins what she calls #CocksNotGlocks, a protest against the new Texas law permitting the licensed concealed carrying of guns on campus. The protest is accomplished by "strapping gigantic swinging dildos to our backpacks."

Unlike the guns, the dildos are not concealed. They are out there in your face, including the faces of those who — in other contexts — urge us to become sensitized to sexual aggression. How is a rape survivor supposed to feel sitting next to students with "gigantic swinging dildos" hanging from their backpacks? And what of the men who have cared about the critique of the "rape culture"? What are they to think seeing their private parts likened to weaponry and bandied about in disembodied form detached from the feeling, caring body of a human being? And why the specification that the dildos be "gigantic"? Is this not body-shaming the vast majority of men, taunting them with a thoroughly unattainable standard?

Charles P. Pierce re Bobby Jindal: "Please Punch This Man in the Dick."

Sexualized violence... it's funny because...? Exactly why is it funny to you Charles?

Multiple answers permitted: Pierce thinks this sexualized violence is funny because...

Jindal is a Republican.

Sexualized violence against men is not something that requires empathy.

Dicks are inherently funny, whatever happens to them.

Jindal asked for it.

The "please" makes it funny.

It's funny that people click and link to this, like Althouse just now.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"Holding homemade signs reading 'God Hates Renoir' and 'Treacle Harms Society,' the protesters... chanted: 'Put some fingers on those hands! Give us work by Paul Gauguin!'..."

"... and 'Other art is worth your while! Renoir paints a steaming pile!'... The [Museum of Fine Arts] hasn’t commented on the fledgling movement..."

I'm glad finally somebody cares enough to do something about this longstanding travesty. Catch up with Max Geller's Renoir Sucks at Painting, which has entries like this:

This #Renoir painting is in a museum. It is Not Beautiful. It is offensive and hurts my eyes. A nefarious act of #aestheticterrorism. I had to turn the brightness down on my phone. Then I could start noticing shit. Like, 1. the three (3!) uncircumcised fingers with which she's touching herself. 2. Instead of the usual #sharpie_eyes, she has ball-less sockets. (Please join in my #renoirsucksatpainting brethren.)

A photo posted by Renoir Sucks At Painting (@renoir_sucks_at_painting) on Sep 14, 2015 at 3:45pm PDT

ADDED: This post made me click my "Renoir" tag, and that got me to a quote from "Lady Chatterley's Lover": "Renoir said he painted his pictures with his penis... he did too, lovely pictures! I wish I did something with mine."

"Johnny is known as a 'Guevedoce,' which literally means, 'penis at twelve.'"

"And the reason he’s called that is because, like 1 in 90 of the boys in the area, he first started to grow a penis when he was going through puberty."

Guevedoces are also sometimes called “machihembras” meaning “first a woman, then a man”. When they’re born they look like girls with no testes and what appears to be a vagina. It is only when they near puberty that the penis grows and testicles descend.

Johnny, who is now in his 20s, was once known as Felicita. He was brought up as a girl and remembers going to school in a little red dress. When he was young he would happily play with other little girls, but after the age of seven he started to change. “I did not feel good, I no longer liked to wear a skirt, and I was no longer drawn to play with girls. All I wanted to do is play with toy guns and boys.”...

An endocrinologist explains that Guavadoces are "deficient in an enzyme called 5-α-reductase, which normally converts testosterone into dihydro-testosterone." At puberty, there's such a surge of testosterone that the development that should have happened in the womb finally occurs.

"In a bid to seem less stuffy... Hillary Clinton is chatting with Lena Dunham about the singer Lenny Kravitz’s penis."

Writes Frank Bruni — warring on women? — in his column in The New York Times.

The interview itself covers Clinton’s biography and some serious terrain, including feminism and the relationship between African-Americans and the police.

So why are you disrespecting these women, Frank?

But it’s in large part a Dunham-Clinton love-in, a pajama party minus the pajamas, ostensibly in keeping with the Clinton campaign’s recent pledge to roll out a warmer, funnier version of the candidate.

When women have a friendly discussion with each other, you for some reason feel compelled to picture them in pajamas — to call it a pajama party? I'm having a flashback to the 1970s (and even the 1980), when men seeing women talking to each other just had to call it a "kaffeeklatsch." You could be in a professional occupation, and a man might walk into the room, see 2 or 3 women talking to each other and say: "Oh? Is this the kaffeeklatsch?"

In the promotional video, Clinton kids that because Dunham’s newsletter and the website associated with it are called Lenny, she half expected that the person coming to question her might be Kravitz.

Dunham then mentions some viral footage of a Kravitz wardrobe malfunction: “His stuff fell out of his pants.”

Clinton feigns fascination. “I’ll look for that,” she says.

Well, now, they are making the man a sex object. So that's a problem. A bigger problem for Hillary is that talking about a man who can't keep his penis in his pants makes me think of Bill Clinton.

From the second-most-liked comment over there:

Bruni, if you want to make constructive use of your valuable column inches, instead of the kind of comments you might throw over your shoulder at a dinner party, study a specific set of issues and review with people who know about the subjects (not with the shallow partisan talking heads) what each candidate plans to do about the issue.

The reason he doesn't want to do that is the same reason I want to say valuable column inches... there's a phrase.