Spreadin Love

~ Laura

I’m preparing a lecture on media regulation that I’m going give next week. This story of bloggers shutting down a radio station in San Francisco should make for a good anecdote.

Great review of a really bad show. Virginia Heffernan writes about “I Love New York,” a jaw-dropping reality show on VH1. Heffernan writes about how New York chooses her men ,

And finally there was New York’s praise for the hot jerk who insulted her mother. “He is a thug,” she drawled. “And he is not a fake thug. He is dangerous. He wears baggy clothes. He has a great face. And he drinks a lot. I like that.”

Jane asks, “Are there any women out there who didn’t spend a substantial portion of their youths fantasizing about being someone different?” Good Lord, not me. I hated everything about myself. Yes, Jane, I wanted to be tall. Also, I wanted a smaller nose, 20/20 vision, blond hair, breasts, a different name, and an entirely different family. I think I even wanted braces for a while, because everybody else had them. It only took 20 years to get over it.

Published by Laura

6 thoughts on “Spreadin Love”

  2. Heck, Laura, that’s easy stuff. I wanted to be Fafhrd and/or the Grey Mouser. Sadly, Baton Rouge just did not measure up to Lankhmar.

    Like

  3. I don’t know if this is weird or not in the grand scheme of adolescent daydreams, but I never wanted to be someone else or wish I was different. Instead, I wanted to be in everything I read or saw–that is, I wanted everything else to be different. I wanted to Soviets to attack so I could take command of my own survivalist unit, because I’d watched Red Dawn and knew exactly where poor Patrick Swayze had screwed up. I wanted to have James Bond have to hijack my car while fleeing some crazy villain and have to rely upon my obvious common sense–gained from having watched all the films–to save his ass. I wanted to be plopped down into Middle Earth so I could warn Lord Elrond about Boromir. Instead of me being different, I wanted pathetic old ordinary me to be mixed up in one outlandish situation after another. And I wanted to own a tricked-out, totally cool van where I could cruise around from one of these situations to another, like the Scooby-Doo kids. (Alright, so I guess that does mean I wanted to be a little bit different.)

    Like

  4. Amy — probably won’t get to campaign finance law in that class. Thank goodness.
    Doug and Russell — Excellent. At various times, I wanted to be Princess Leah, Amy Carter, and Brooke Shields.

    Like

  5. Well, for quite a while, in elemenary school, I wanted to be a girl. I was borderline dispraxic (I now know this, because I’ve had the symptoms described) and dressing and undressing were incredibly difficult for me, and I reasoned that girls had fewer clothes to deal with. I was also nervous of boys and also shy, and knew that if I were a girl more girls would be my friends. And in all the books I read (and all my experience) it was the mother who looked after the kids, and that’s what I wanted to do.
    When I got older things worked out ok — I got more coordinated, made friends with girls, and now am an equal partner in the childrearing process. But it never once occurred to me as a kid to wish for boys to be able to wear dresses, or to wish that men could be the primary rearers of children. I was, I should add, highly unimaginative as well as completely uncoordinated.

    Like

  6. Big hugs for harry b.
    Hey, harry, could you add a comment to the “making sausage” post and tell us how you and wife are juggling your jobs with the childcare?

    Like

Comments are closed.