No, they're not related.

 

First on the agenda is today's Anthropology discussion topic, which was an article about the booming crack industry of the 70s and 80s in the Spanish Harlem, due to loss of factory jobs because of outsourced labor. So, long story short, the discussion brought up the topic of the legalization of all (or most) of the services in the "informal economy": drugs, sex, weapons, labor, etc. Because of the nature of the article, we mostly talked about the issue of legalizing drugs, including cocaine and heroin.

By legalizing drugs, they would be harder to get, taxed to all hell, regulated, and we'd be saving the billions of dollars it costs us per year to sustain the War on Drugs. Some of the kids were saying that legalizing it would cause more people to use, including the elite classes like politicians (I have no idea where this came from), and we'd end up with a coked-up country run by a bunch of drug fiends. I say that's the same as arguing that teaching sex ed will condone teenage sex; it's not permission, it's preventative. People will always use drugs, whether they're legal or not (anyone recall the prohibition?) so I don't understand why there would be any reason to treat drugs besides alcohol and tabacco any differently. Just because the proper American classes don't like to be reminded of the gritty, illegal underground economy that accounts for much of our national cash flow doesn't mean we should sacrifice the lives and well-being of those stuck in such an economy, just so we don't have to think about it. It will always exist, so why are we ignoring it when there are lives to be saved and money to be made? (Let's be practical, America loves money.)

So, what do we do? Is it better to ignore the underground drug economy altogether, let it run rampant and unregulated, for fear of "condoning" drug use, than to take it into our own (government's) hands?

 

Furthermore,

 

 

Or

 

 

This year I'm feeling lazy and I'm leaning towards buying a costume instead of producing one. Eh?

My hilarious, adorable, 2-years-and-three-months-old nephew has taken to a new habit of walking up to you, grabbing your face in his hands, and very seriously saying:

 

"I approve of this message."

 

Children are lovely.

If you're an avid reader of my humble blog (as I expect so many of you are), you may recall a long post I made a while back about how I don't like to call myself a feminist. I don't like excluding other people from my compassion, or, conversely, alienating myself with a group of people I don't necessarily get along with. However, sometimes my inner bra-burning feminist is forced to rear her make-up free, dread locked head. One of those times just happened to be today, when I opened up my Hotmail inbox to see this:

 

 

Uhm, what? I'll get to the point before I get sidetracked talking about the ridiculous body language of that couple.

 

     This articles focuses on Gary Neuman, author of The Truth About Cheating: Why Men Stray and What You Can Do To Prevent It, and his new (afformentioned) book. Oh, yes. I'll let that sink in for a bit. Feel free to re-read that, like I had to, if it isn't quite making sense. You know, sometimes the mysoginy of our "modern" culture is so near-comically blatant that it's only the rage that stifles my giggles. But I digress.

Now, before I lose my shit or anything, Gary made sure that we know what's up, saying:

    "There is clearly no blame on the woman if he's cheated. She's not responsible for stopping him. However, the fact that you're not responsible does not mean that you don't want to take an active role in your relationship to bring out the best in your husband, as he should for you."

     It may just be the English major in me, but I feel the need to pick apart his sentence a little bit. His attempt at equality in the relationship (there, at the very end, see it?) is undermined before he even gets to it by making this the responsibility of the female parter. Though he explicitly states that she isn't responsible for his cheating, he sneaks in the fact that she better feel responsible for not being proactive enough, should such a thing happen to her. The book, of course, is geared only towards heterosexual married couples, because Gary here has been a marriage counselor for 20 years. I suppose that means we're expected to listen to what he has to say, or whatever. Which is:

   "What did you find was the No. 1 reason men cheat?
I think most people ascribe to the theory that men cheat for sex. Women are being told that unless they are unbelievable sexy and have a Ph.D. in prostitution education then the husband is going to cheat. But when the results came in [from my study] only 8 percent of cheaters said that sexual dissatisfaction was a primary contributor [in cheating] and only 12 percent said the mistress was better looking or in better shape than their wives. It really started to show a completely different pattern than what most expect. In fact, the majority—48 percent—said that the cheating was about an emotional disconnection."

     Er, so, not only did he confirm the nagging suspicions of desperate, cheated-on wives that they, in fact, are not sexually attractive enough with a statistic that leaves each of them wondering if they're that small percent that isn't satisfying her straying man in the bedroom, but he THEN goes on to imply that the husbands who are cheating aren't getting enough emotional connection, as if that's the wife's problem, and not the fact that he's a narcissistic sociopath capable of going back on his lifelong vows. Right.

As I'm sure you can gather, the article goes on to subtly undermine any angry wives' right to feel absolutely furious, betrayed, injured, abandoned and lied to by insinuating that, really, she could've done a better job at that whole nurturing housewife business. Silly them.

     Long story short, Gary Nueman is a fucking idiot, and MSN can bite my angry feminist ass.

The first, a Carebear tribute for those who don't know:

 

 

And,

 

 

They'll look better soon.

New tattoos today. Pictures later. :] In the meantime, I really wish I could write something intellectual and thought provoking, or even some verbose, curse filled rant, but nothing comes to mind at the moment. Nothing that I'm willing to write several paragraphs on, anyway. It'll strike me later.