from tuesday, april 6th.
it’s 3:55am and i can’t sleep. jer and i went to bed around 10pm last night, and i woke up at midnight when i felt a strange cooling sensation on my eye. as it happened, jer had slapped on a bunch of salon pas patches on his back and neck before going to bed, and i had inadvertantly rolled over and planted my face into one of them.
talk about a rude awakening. i was in the middle of one of my typically bizarre dreams, and i did not like leaving it unresolved. i ran out of bed to the bathroom to wash my eye out, and of course i’ve been awake ever since. i spent the past three hours yelling at a friend online for being stupid with a girl, burning backups of movies on my hd, and browsing through job sites. All in all, I’d rather be sleeping.
i’ve had a lot on my mind lately, but most of it has taken the form of fleeting thoughts rather than anything particularly deep. a short list:
– jessica simpson on the cover of US weekly talking about how her marriage comes first, over fame, over anything else. where’s the cover featuring Nick talking about his marriage coming first? why the double standard in values? why is it taken for granted that it’s okay for men to be sexually liberated and not the same for women because of so-called biology? marriage and monogamy have biological benefits for men AND women — women so they have someone to care for their children and men so they can be certain offspring is theirs. it’s not simply saying women who are sluts abandoned and get what they deserve or anything stupid like that and giving men a free pass to behave as badly as they want to. it’s insulting to women to be treated that poorly and insulting to men to believe they can’t be any better. true equality isn’t about blurring men and women’s needs into indistinguishable lumps; it’s recognizing the equal responsibility each has to their society and to the opposite sex when it comes to personal behavior.
– writing off porn as sex negative is counter productive. the problem with objectifying women is, like most other controversial acts, not about the act itself but the motivation behind the act. a society that objectifies its women on a consistent basis does an injustice to both the men and women who participate within it. it does an injustice to women because it teaches people in society to overlook the non-physical assets of a woman and the associated contributions to society she can make. it does an injustice to men in that it reduces them to their sexuality and sets an example that behaving in such a base manner is all that anyone expects of him. it also limits how he learns to interact with women in any meaningful context, and may also keep him from finding happiness with a mate.
– men and women, watch what messages you take from the media, because its best interests are not your own.