Frank Bruni in an NYT opinion piece, “Too Much Prayer in Politics: Republicans, the Religious Right and Evolution” on February 15th:

Faith and government shouldn’t be as cozy as they are in this country. Politicians in general, and Republicans in particular, shouldn’t genuflect as slavishly as they do, not in public. They’re vying to be senators and presidents. They’re not auditioning to be ministers and missionaries.

… Mike Huckabee, who is an ordained minister in the Southern Baptist church, put God in the title of a new book that he wrote and just released on the cusp of what may be another presidential bid. He ran previously in 2008, when he won the Iowa caucuses.

The book is called “God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy.” These are a few of his favorite things.

During a recent appearance on a Christian TV program, he explained that he was mulling a 2016 campaign because America had lost sight of its identity as a “God-centered nation that understands that our laws do not come from man, they come from God.” The way he talks, the Constitution is a set of tablets hauled down from a mountaintop by a bearded prophet.

The notion that God’s law is above man’s law is widespread these days, especially among politicians. This is disturbing, especially since it comes from people who claim to know the mind of God. Certainly it wasn’t what the Founding Fathers had in mind.

Digression: from Wikipedia on law:

Law is a system of rules that are enforced through social institutions to govern behaviour. Laws can be made by legislatures through legislation (resulting in statutes), the executive through decrees and regulations, or judges through binding precedent (normally in common law jurisdictions). Private individuals can create legally binding contracts, including (in some jurisdictions) arbitration agreements that may elect to accept alternative arbitration to the normal court process. The formation of laws themselves may be influenced by a constitution (written or unwritten) and the rights encoded therein. The law shapes politics, economics, and society in various ways and serves as a mediator of relations between people.

… Historically, religious laws played a significant role even in settling of secular matters, which is still the case in some religious communities, particularly Jewish, and some countries, particularly Islamic. Islamic Sharia law is the world’s most widely used religious law.

But this is not the U.S. as currently governed.

Back to Bruni:

We should listen hard to what’s being said in Alabama, where opponents of gay marriage aren’t merely asserting that it runs counter to what Alabamians want. They’re declaring that it perverts God’s will, which was the position that some racists took about integration.

Last week, the chairman of the Alabama Republican Party wrote that the state would “reap God’s wrath if we embrace and condone things that are abhorrent to God, such as redefining marriage.”

And in an interview with the CNN anchor Chris Cuomo, Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore — the man who once put up a granite monument to the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial System building — said, “Our rights, contained in the Bill of Rights, do not come from the Constitution, they come from God.”

“That’s your faith,” Cuomo replied. “But that’s not our country.”

Beautiful response from Chris Cuomo.

Forwarded to me by Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, this posting on tumblr, with:

She: What’s the boy word for slut?

He: hey still haven’t come up with one yet. But I’m sure they’re working on it.

The issue has often been taken up by feminist critics.

Here’s the problem: English has several terms to refer to a sexually promiscuous woman — of which slut is the primary one — and they are all condemnatory, but terms for sexually promiscuous men (Don Juan, hound dog) are generally either neutral or even celebratory in tone.

Check my posting of 5/29/11 on “sluts”, about the phenomenon of SlutWalks, which are both demonstrations against sexual violence and attempts to reclaim the label slut.

Today’s Dilbert has Alice exploding at the mansplainers in her department:

The pointy-headed boss can’t help mansplaining mansplaining.

On this blog, mansplaining and straightsplaining on 9/20/14.

Yesterday’s Dilbert was also about mainsplaining. We learn that mansplaining and failure in dating indicate “awesome technical skills”:

A full-stack programmer or developer seems to be one who can do everything.

Just went past me on television: an ad for Magnum Ice Cream Bars:

(#1)

(from the Magnum Ice Cream site; “Magnum Ice Cream Bars are made with creamy Ice Cream and Belgian Chocolate”). The bars are big in size and big in flavor. The ads tend to feature (female) models with bars in their mouths: both oral and phallic. Here’s model Lucy Wolfert in one ad:

(#2)

Magnum things are all about size and masculinity.

Magnum ice cream bars. A magnum of champagne. Magnum condoms by Trojan. Magnum cars and trucks. Magnum cartridges and firearms. And of course Thomas Magnum of Magnum, P.I., as played by Tom Selleck.

It starts with the Latin magnum (neuter nominative singular of the magn- stem) ‘great, big’.

On the ice cream bars. From Wikipedia:

Magnum is an ice cream brand owned by the British/Dutch Unilever company and sold as part of the Heartbrand line of products in most countries.

… In 2011, Magnum ice cream was launched in the US and Canada with six varieties: Double Caramel, Double Chocolate, Classic, Almond, White and Dark.

The magnum bottle. A magnum is a wine bottle of twice the standard size, normally 1.5 liters, especially of champagne. Sizes, in number of standard bottles (750 ml):

(#3)

So a magnum is definitely big, though not as big as they come.

Magnum condoms. A condom brand manufactured by Trojan. From the Trojan site, where of course the name is in all caps:

MAGNUM™ Lubricated Condoms
Larger than standard latex condoms for extra comfort
Tapered at the base for a secure fit
Silky smooth lubricant for comfort and sensitivity
Special reservoir end for extra safety

In silhouette:

(#4)

Now from the Date Report site, “Why Are So Many Men Suddenly Buying Magnum Condoms?” by Regina Bresler on 3/26/13:

Given the heavy social pressure to be well-endowed, not to mention the status and ego-boost that come with it, what man wouldn’t want to sport a condom that announces to the world that he’s bigger than the rest? Even if the condom itself really isn’t that big?

Head to head, as it were, the Magnum vs. the standard Trojan ENZ:

(#5)

Not a big difference, but the Magnum is flattering.

On penis size, see this 1/12/13 posting.

Vehicles. Various models of cars and trucks have been labeled Magnum to highlight their size and/or power: Dodge Magnum, a car; Renault Magnum, a truck; Vauxhall Magnum, a car; Chrysler LA engine line, several of which are named Magnum; Chevrolet Optra Magnum, a car.

Men and their vehicles!

Cartridges and firearms. In the world of weaponry, a magnum firearms cartridge is one larger or more powerful than the standard for a given caliber, or a firearm that uses such a cartridge: a .357 Magnum pistol.

Magnum, P.I. No doubt from the firearms usage, the title character in this show has the surame Magnum. From Wikipedia:

Magnum, P.I. is an American television series starring Tom Selleck as Thomas Magnum [Thomas Sullivan Magnum IV], a private investigator living on Oahu, Hawaii. The series ran from 1980 to 1988 in first-run broadcast on the American CBS television network.

Selleck in character:

(#6)

And displaying his body:

(#7)

In the NYT Sunday Review 5/3/15, in “What Black Moms Know” by Yvonda Gault Caviness:

Thankfully, I am a black mom. Like many of my fellow sisters, I don’t have time for all that foolishness [about child-rearing].

I stumbled a bit on fellow sisters, though I understood that it was in no way contradictory; fellow here does not refer to a man or men, but to someone “sharing a particular activity, quality, or condition with someone or something: they urged the troops not to fire on their fellow citizens” (NOAD2). Still, the noun fellow is surely most frequently used for informal reference to a man or boy (there’s a fellow at the door), and this use can interfere with the (gender-neutral) ‘someone sharing an attribute’ use.

Fellow has an interesting history. From NOAD2:

ORIGIN late Old English fēolaga ‘a partner or colleague’ (literally ‘one who lays down money in a joint enterprise’), from Old Norse félagi, from félag ‘partnership’ from fé ‘cattle, property, money’ + lag ‘a laying down,’ from the Germanic base of lay.

The word quickly radiated from this to an assortment of ‘sharing’ uses, including ‘partner, colleague, co-worker’ from about 1200 on; OED2 notes that this was “less frequently said of women” — something that would follow from the sociability patterns of the sexes.

(In a separate radiation, the word developed a set of uses in a college or university context.)

Patterns of male sociabillity probably account for the development of fellow for use with reference specifically to a man or boy — via uses comparable to buddy, pal, [British slang] mate, [French] compagnon, and the like. According to OED2, such uses begin around 1440 “with qualifying adj., as good, bad, brave, clever, foolish, old, young, etc.” fellow, then “used in familiar address in phrases, my dear fellow, my good fellow …, old fellow” (from 1836 on), and eventually “in some dialects, and in unceremonious colloquial speech (esp. among young men), used without adj. as the ordinary equivalent for ‘man’” (from 1861 on).

The ‘sharing’ uses and the college/university uses continue throughout these developments. It would now not be unreasonable to posit at least three lexical items here. We can now say things like all my fellow Fellows are fellows ‘all those who are Fellows with me are men’.

Yesterday’s Dinosaur Comics, on remembering names:

(#1)

The feminine counterpart to the name Peter is Petra, both ultimately from Greek πέτρος (petros) ‘stone, rock’, but there are also women called Pete — and some called Peter.

(Bonus: the verbing of the noun pop quiz.)

A famous (though fictional) Petra:

(#2)

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (German: Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant) is a 1972 German film directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, based on his own play. This film has an all-female cast and is set in the home of the protagonist, Petra von Kant. It follows the changing dynamics in her relationships with the other women. (Wikipedia link)

Then there are girls called Pete as a nickname, for instance in the book A Girl Named Pete by Lori Perkins Karpe (2014):

[It’s] 1934 in Oklahoma, and Freeda June Washburn, a girl named Pete, and her four sisters are having the best summer ever down on the Deep Red. (Amazon books)

And in a Topeka Courier-Journal piece, “A Story of a Girl Named Pete”:

This is the story of a girl whose nickname was Pete. Her real name was Emily Gail but her father had started calling her Pete when she was a toddler and it stuck.

As for Peter as a girl’s name, there are a fair number of reports on the net of the name being given by parents to a girl, as part of a larger fashion for boy’s names for girls: Barry, Darryl, Garrett, Dylan, Gary, etc.

And I have known a woman called Peter, but as a nickname: the Romance philologist Angelina Pietrangeli, known as Peter. (Pietrangeli is a patronymic for Pietro, the Italian version of Peter.)

Now, on memory for names: people do differ considerably in their ability to take in and recall proper names. I am myself not very good with “ordinary” names, like Mary Anderson (for a woman) or Peter Smith (for a man). But the first time I met Ilse Lehiste, I got her name down perfectly. Same for Peter Pietrangeli. These are memorable names.

(Gay porn stars tend to choose stage names that are strongly masculine but otherwise bland: Tom Chase, Brad King, Ken Scott. I have a great deal of trouble recalling these guys’ names. So I’m thankful for Trenton Ducati, Aymeric DeVille, Reese Rideout, etc.)

A while back, a friend complained about people who referred to a man as a blonde: blonde is a French word, my friend said, and in French it can be used only for women. So He’s a blonde is a vulgar error. (Similarly for brunette.)

But we’re talking about English here, not quoting from French, so there’s no reason why English has to be used as if it were French. And there are good reasons not to use it that way, though the matter is very complex indeed.

1. Spelling. In English, the issue is entirely a matter of spelling, which is not the case in French. In English, the spellings BLOND and BLONDE are homophones; ditto for BRUNET and BRUNETTE. But in French the paired spellings represent distinct pronunciations.

2. Grammatical gender vs. sex. The system my friend recommends for English — one that’s also prescribed in some dictionaries — is one based on the sex of the referent: BLONDE used for reference to a woman, BLOND for reference to a man. That would make it like ACTRESS vs. ACTOR in English (with the complication that there are contexts in which ACTOR is sex-neutral).

But French is different. The difference is a matter of the grammatical gender of linguistic units, lexical items or word-forms. Confusingly, the technical terms used for grammatical gender are feminine and masculine, though the association with sex is complex and indirect. Lexical items referring to inanimate objects have a grammatical gender: table ‘table’ is feminine (une table), avion ‘plane’ is masculine (un avion). Some lexical items referring to human beings also have an intrinsic grammatical gender, regardless of the sex of the referent: personne ‘person’ is feminine (une personne), even referring to male persons, bébé ‘baby’ is masculine (un bébé), even referring to female babies. (Other elements in sentences — articles, modifying adjectives, predicates — change their form to agree in grammatical gender.)

So, in French, it’s

Cette / *Ce  personne est blonde / *blond ‘That/This person is blond-haired’ (even if the person is a man)

*Cette / Ce  bébé est *blonde / blond ‘That/This baby is blond-haired’ (even if the baby is a girl)

It’s hard to imagine such a system being carried over into English.

3. Some history and usage. From OED2 under blonde | blond (the dictionary treats the spellings as equal variants):

In English used by Caxton (in form blounde); reintroduced from modern French in 17th cent., and still sometimes treated as French, as to be written without final e when applied to a man, especially substantively, a blonde; in North America commonly written blond like the French masculine, but in Britain the form blonde is now preferred in all senses.

On the semantics, with a few examples:

adj. Properly (of the hair): Of a light golden brown, light auburn; but commonly used in sense of light-coloured, ‘fair’, as opposed to ‘dark’, or ‘brunette’, and extended to the complexion of those who have hair of this colour.

[first cite] 1481   Myrrour of Worlde (Caxton) ii. xvii. 103   The rayes of the sonne make the heer of a man abourne or blounde.

[note later cite] 1683   J. Evelyn Mem. (1857) II. 192   Prince George of Denmark..had the Danish countenance, blonde.

noun A person with blond hair; one with light or ‘fair’ hair and the corresponding complexion; esp. a woman, in which case spelt blonde. [first cite 1822]

The hair color, from Wikipedia:

Blond or blonde (see below), or fair hair, is a hair color characterized by low levels of the dark pigment eumelanin. The resultant visible hue depends on various factors, but always has some sort of yellowish color. The color can be from the very pale blond (caused by a patchy, scarce distribution of pigment) to reddish “strawberry” blond colors or golden-brownish (“sandy”) blond colors (the latter with more eumelanin).

4. The NOAD2 story. A dictionary treatment more recent than OED2, with more complexity. NOAD2 treats blond as the default spelling, but lists blonde as a variant:

adjective  (of hair) fair or pale yellow: short-cropped blond hair | her hair was dyed blond.

– (of a person) having hair of a fair or pale yellow color: a slim blond woman.

– (of a person) having fair hair and a light complexion (especially when regarded as a racial characteristic).

– (of wood or another substance) light in color or tone: a New York office full of blond wood. [AMZ: also used for lager beer]

noun  a person with fair hair and skin.

5. Actual usage shows considerable variation. There appears to be some pressure to adopt a single spelling for all purposes. If you do this on the basis of the frequency of the spellings in your experience, you’ll probably go for blonde: references to women’s hair color seem to be more frequent than references to men’s, and there’s also the common blonde used for reference to a color of wood. (On the other hand, blond is shorter and looks “less foreign”.)

The tendency shows up in (raw) ghits: for blonde wood vs. blond wood, 308k over 208k (no surprise), and even for He’s a blonde over He’s a blond, 298k over 125k.

(And usage for the rarer brunette and brunet seems not to parallel blonde vs. blond in detail.)

Sexy Friday continues, with the war between the sexes in today’s Scenes From a Multiverse:

First, misogynoids launched against the women, then misandroids launched in retaliation, sowing the boner-destroying deathsterone.

The first two portmanteaus build on android ‘(in science fiction) a robot with a human appearance’ (NOAD2): misogyny + android, misandry + android. Then we get deathsterone, death + testosterone. And then there’s boner, bone +-er, here in sense 2 from NOAD2:

1 N. Amer. informal a stupid mistake.

2 N. Amer. vulgar slang an erection of the penis.

Sense 2 is a straightforward metaphor: an erect penis is hard like a bone. For sense 1, compare boneheaded ‘stupid’ (another metaphor: with a head (hard) like bone).

A note from cartoonist Jon Rosenberg:

Keep your boners safe, people. Keep them under your mattress while you sleep.

From the NYT Book Review of last Sunday (May 10th), bits from two reviews that caught my eye: Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts reviewed by Jennifer Szalai; and Speak Now by Kenji Yoshino (a memoir combined with analysis of the same-sex marriage case) reviewed by Lincoln Caplan. I haven’t read either book (though I’ve read and posted about other things by Yoshino). But I was intrigued by the reviewers’ comments.

Szalai on Nelson:

To become a mother is to learn, among many other things, that mothers are treated as both central and peripheral to American culture. “The most important job in the world” is such a sentimental truism that even women who don’t want to have children report having to explain themselves to incredulous busybodies. Yet actual mothering is accorded little social or economic value beyond hazy reverence and pious declarations. Mothers are allowed some authority when it comes to their homes, their children and their bodies; their domain is one of domestic necessity, which is supposed to stand in mute contrast to the wider world of work, of ideas, of rationality, of free will.

That, at least, is the traditional binary, though the assumptions behind it are pervasive even among those who otherwise stand in opposition to the traditional and the mainstream.

Caplan on Yoshino:

At weddings these days, it’s rare to hear the warning “Speak now or forever hold your peace” directed at anyone who can show “just cause” why the couple shouldn’t be married. When [legal scholar] Kenji Yoshino and his husband were married in 2009, however, they asked the judge who officiated to include the line in the ceremony. It was a reminder, Yoshino says in his new book, that many Americans feel they have just cause to object to any marriage between two people of the same sex.

The overarching point of “Speak Now” is that they don’t. The evidence is in the transcript of Hollingsworth v. Perry, what Yoshino calls “one of the most powerful civil rights trials in American history.” That’s the case in which, two years ago, the Supreme Court chose not to decide whether states must allow same-sex couples to marry. The trial phase gave objectors the chance to say why states must not. To the trial judge, none of the causes they presented — “moral disapproval, animus or merely that opposite-sex relationships are ‘inherently better’ ” — was “a proper basis” for a ban by law.

You can pick up a lot of random information in popular genres, like detective fiction and police procedural television shows. Murder mysteries are typically set in some small special world, so that you can learn a lot about that world: English change-ringing, say, in Dorothy Sayers’s The Nine Tailors. Similarly for episodes of cop shows (understood broadly). So yesterday I was treated to an hour’s drama on CSI: NY about the Lingerie Football League (as it was then), in season 6, episode 13 “Flag on the Play” (first broadcast on 1/20/10). Some LFL players in action, in real life:

An odd cross between sexualized display of the female body and athletic contest.

Highlights from the Wikipedia article:

The concept of the LFL originated from an alternative Super Bowl halftime television special called the Lingerie Bowl, a pay-per-view event broadcast opposite the Super Bowl halftime show.

The league was founded in 2009 as the Lingerie Football League and was rebranded as the Legends Football League in 2013.

[The LFL] is a women’s 7-on-7 tackle American football league [played indoors], with games played in the spring and summer at NBA, NFL, NHL and MLS arenas and stadiums.

There are in fact, three leagues: in the US (with 6 teams), in Canada (with 4), and in Australia (with 5), plus teams in 4 other countries and 2 more in development.

When the name changed,

The league announced that the athletes would wear “performance apparel” instead of lingerie, but the uniforms look very much the same as before. In addition to the new uniforms, redesigned shoulder pads were introduced to provide more protection for players. Other league changes included eliminating images of sexy women from team logos and changing the league tagline from “True Fantasy Football” to “Women of the Gridiron”.

There’s an obvious conflict between the drive for sexiness and the need for protection; the league has received many complaints from players about safety. The players think of themselves as serious athletes and seem to put up with the costumes as the cost they have to pay to get into competition,

(Then there’s Australian rules football, primarily played by men but with a significant number of women participants, with no protective gear at all.)

A recent Key and Peele segment has pirates singing chanteys.”Pirates trade swashbuckling stories about how they’ve treated the women in their lives.” No, it’s not what you think.

(Hat tip to Gregory Ward.)

From Colin Gorenstein on Salon yesterday:

This “Key & Peele” pirate sketch is an absolutely brilliant send-up of rape culture

“Key & Peele” asks: What if aggressively alpha male pirates chanted about sexual consent and respecting women?

In the “Key & Peele” universe, pirates don’t ever say the word “ho,” because “ ‘ho’ is disrespectful, yo.”

Meet the new wave of socially conscious, consent-advocating pirates from season five’s debut episode. Much in the same way the comedy duo once fantasized about a world without trigger-happy cops with “Negrotown,” “Pirate Chantey” presents another utopia — for pirates. In it, the aggressively alpha-male archetype is exchanged for a much more empathetic portrait.

These pirates get that “no means no,” and they chant about it, too.

On the show, from Wikipedia:

Key & Peele is an American sketch comedy television show. It stars Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, both former cast members of MADtv. Each episode of the show consists mainly of several pre-taped sketches starring the two actors. The sketches cover a variety of societal topics, often with a focus on African-American culture and race relations.

And on the noun chantey, from NOAD2:

chantey (also chanty, shanty, or sea chantey)  a song with alternating solo and chorus, of a kind originally sung by sailors while performing physical labor together. ORIGIN mid 19th. cent.: probably from French chantez! ‘sing!,’ imperative plural of chanter.

Today’s Zippy, which leads in several directions:

(#1)

Zippy at the Bluebonnet Diner in Northampton MA, trading warning signs at the counter with an icon representing a (generic) person.

Stuff here: the diner; broasted chicken; warning signs; icons (for a man, for a person); punchline.

The Bluebonnet Diner. From the VisitNoho site (“the best places to dine, shop and visit in Northampton, Massachusetts”), with some puffery from the diner:

Built by the Worcester Lunch Car Company in 1950, the historic Bluebonnet Diner [324 King St.] stands as a familiar Northampton landmark. The name “Bluebonnet” is derived from the Texas state flower of the same name.

Seeing many additions over the years, yet sparing the original craftsmanship, the diner takes on a character all its own.

The dining room was added in 1960, with the later additions of a lounge and banquet all in 1967. Since its beginning, the Bluebonnet has seen a ten-fold increase in seating; with a present capacity of 110 in the restaurant, and 240 in the banquet hall.

Good food, prepared by competent people is standard fare here. Many recipes have earned us the reputation for good home-style cooking. We are most famous for our home-made puddings and cream pies.

(The diner’s own website is here.)

Outside:

(#2)

And inside, but without Zippy and the Icon:

(#3)

Broasting. The Bluebonnet specializes in broasted chicken. From NOAD2 on the portmanteau verb broast, with part of the story:

verb N. Amer.: prepare food using a cooking process that combines broiling and roasting [as adj.]: broasted chicken.

Now, from Wikipedia, with more of the story:

Broasting is a method of cooking chicken and other foods using a pressure fryer and condiments. The technique was invented by L.A.M. Phelan in the early 1950s and is marketed by the Broaster Company of Beloit, Wisconsin, which Phelan founded.

Broasting equipment and ingredients are marketed only to food service and institutional customers, including supermarkets and fast food restaurants. They are not available to the general public. The method essentially combines pressure cooking with deep frying chicken that has been marinated and breaded.

Broasted chicken at the Golden Basket Restaurant in Green Bay WI:

(#4)

Broasted chicken is popular in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and is served at Middle Eastern and Filipino restaurants in the US, as well as at non-ethnic places like the Golden Basket.

There are recipes for “broasting” chicken at home (without the brand-name equipment), by oven-roasting prepared chicken parts, turning them periodically; this is like pan-frying, but in the oven, and with very little oil.

Warning signs. Zippy and the Icon trade the texts on warning signs (serving a number of purposes). These tend to be formulaic, using conventionalized abbreviated wording (THIS WAY OUT, for instance). Zippy’s final contribution, as the Icon leaves, whistling, is a variant of

(A) IN CASE OF FIRE, USE STAIRWAY

as here:

(#5)

Icons.Notice that the ‘(generic) person’ icon appears in #5. Here it is in a “pedestrian crossing” sign:

(#6)

And a “litter container” sign:

(#7)

Note that this particular icon is used, in other contexts, to refer specifically to men; toilets specifically for men are marked with this icon, even if the sign is wordless:

(#8)

This double usage is obviously akin to the use of he and man to refer specifically to men in certain contexts, but (for some people, at any rate) to refer generically in others.

Punchlines. What Zippy says in the last panel of #1, as the Icon strolls away, is not

(A) IN CASE OF FIRE, USE STAIRWAY

but

(B) IN CASE OF PUNCHLINE, USE STAIRWAY

suggesting, perhaps, that this the end of their exchange. On punchline, NOAD2 says:

the final phrase or sentence of a joke or story, providing the humor or some other crucial element

OED3 (Sept. 2007) says the compound noun was originally U.S. (but it has clearly spread); its first cite is from 1916 (spelled punch line); then it has the spelling punch-line in 1921 and punchline in 1993 and thereafter.

And that’s the end of the story.

In today’s Dilbert, Alice complains about a sexual double standard on language use, with women held to a stricter standard than men:

Alice refers to, and rejects, two expectations of women: that they be supportive and cooperative (while men are expected to be competitive and challenging), and that they be the guardians of deceny (while men have licence to break the social rules of niceness). Both fair objections.

Of course, men with these expectations might be affronted and pained by women who flagrantly fail to respect them.

On Law & Order: Criminal Intent on cable this morning, an episode with a very familiar face that I couldn’t put a name to. The man turned out to be named Geoffrey Nauffts, but I still couldn’t place him. He’s a veteran actor on tv, in the movies, and on stage, as well as an award-winning playwright. And he’s openly gay. Here’s the playwright at his desk:

(#1)

Very brief career notes from IMDb:

Geoffrey Nauffts was born on February 3, 1961. He is known for his work on The Commish (1991), A Few Good Men (1992) and Mississippi Burning (1988).

He’s been a dependable presence in the various Law & Order series, playing six different characters in Law & Order, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and Law & Order: Criminal Intent:

Jamie Cullen, L&O: s2 e2 “The Wages of Love” (9/24/91)
Monica Johnson’s Defense Attorney, L&O: s8 e21 “Bad Girl” (4/29/98)
Frank Martin, SVU: s1 e9 “Stocks & Bondage” (11/29/99)
*Dale Van Acker, CI: s1 e3 “Smothered” (10/14/01)
Steve Abrutso, SVU: s5 e15 “Families” (2/10/04)
Brendan Keele, CI: s6 e4 “Maltese Cross” (10/10/06)

The asterisk marks the episode I saw this morning.

On to Next Fall, from its Wikipedia entry:

Next Fall is a play written by Geoffrey Nauffts. The play is about two gay men in a committed relationship with a twist, with one, Luke, being devoutly religious and the other, Adam, an atheist. The play revolves around their five-year relationship and how they make it work despite their differences. However, when an accident changes everything, Adam must turn to Luke’s family for support and answers. This play opened off-Broadway in 2009 before transferring to the Helen Hayes Theater in February, 2010… It closed on July 4, 2010

It got very fabulous reviews and was nominated for a 2010 Tony Award. And then moved to the Geffen Playhouse in L.A. in 2011, in a production in which Nauffts himself took one of the lead roles. Here he his with co-star James Wolk:

(#2)

From an L.A. Times interview of 10/30/11, on the occasion of the Geffen opening:

For the West Coast premiere of his play at the Geffen Playhouse, the writer-actor takes on a lead role to which he bears a suspicious resemblance

… Nauffts knew he was gay from an early age but says he tried “to sort of will it away. When I was growing up there were no images to hold on to. No ‘Will & Grace,’ no Tim Gunn. I didn’t broach the subject with my family until I fell in love with another man.”

He’s pleased to be visible now. And it doesn’t seem to have hurt his employability.

Recently run across by accident, a reference to a Kindle “book” (apparently a self-published manuscript) entitled “How to cowboy up and stop being such a pussy” by “Max Powerz”. The author’s description:

A much needed guide for many men who have evolved into being unable to change a tire, cook a steak, kill a rodent, or God forbid, say a naughty word..

And the cover:

(#1)

Note the pink panties, a symbol of what happens to the man who doesn’t cowboy up. The dreaded specter of feminization.

The idiom cowboy up here seems to be man up on steroids. (On man up, see this posting of 8/11/13.)

In the same vein, this t-shirt:

(#2)

And a Jerry England site on cowboy movie-making in southern California glosses the idiom as:

tuff-up, get back on yer horse, don’t back down, don’t give up, do the best you can with the hand you’re dealt, give it all you’ve got

— all manifestations of cowboy culture, both in fiction and in real life. (On cowboy culture, England recommends David Dary’s Cowboy Culture: A Saga of Five Centuries (1989).)

Any number of movies about the cowboy life, ranging from the mythical to the more realistic.  Even one with the title Cowboy Up. From Wikipedia:

Cowboy Up is a 2001 film directed by Xavier Koller. It stars Kiefer Sutherland and Marcus Thomas.

(#3)

The central characters are rising rodeo star Ely Braxton (Thomas) and his older brother Hank (Sutherland) a champion bullfighter and stock contractor, with a family ranch in Santa Maria CA.

The uses of cowboy up then tail off into references to playing at being a cowboy, on dude ranches and the like. And to businesses, of many types, that advertise cowboy associations. Three examples:

(1) the Cowboy Up Saloon in Fort Myers FL (link)

(2) The Cowboy Up restaurant in Dover DE (link), whose food doesn’t look particularly cowboyish, though the website approvingly cites the definition: “verb. To adopt a tough approach or course of action; to get back on one’s horse with courage and determination.”

(3) (my favorite) the Cowboy Up Men’s Salon in Frisco and Dallas TX (link), which invites real men to its services:

Y’all come on into Cowboy Up Men’s Salon. Kick up your boots, grab a cold one, and escape into the simple country life. Enjoy our boot stomping country music while our professional team of stylists fix your hair and relax your mind. Cowboy Up is about the experience, yet you’re gonna leave looking Cowboy cool.

I’ll be posting mostly about a family of snowclonelet composites of the form X queen, in which the queen component is a word going back to Old English, with the meaning ‘woman, wife’, though a lot of history has intervened. Eventually we get to things like

the gay partner-preference snowclonelet X queen, denoting ‘gay man who prefers Y men as romantic or sexual partners’, where Y is a class of people and where X refers to something, typically a food, associated with Y

— for example, rice queen, denoting a man, typically white, with a preference for partners who are East Asians or of East Asian descent (given that rice is a characteristic food of East Asians).

What gets us to gay snowclonelets like this one is the use of queen for gay men, which I wrote about in a 6/27/14 posting. The connection is through the attribution of femininity to (some or all) gay men. From NOAD2, in its 6th sense for queen:

informal   a male homosexual, typically one regarded as ostentatiously effeminate

There’s a slur use here, but also a more neutral one, and even a gay-affirming in-your-face use (“I’m a big ol’ queen who likes to play rugby”). In any case, gay X queen uses have the neutral sense of queen; a rice queen, for example, can be as butch as you want, as unidentifiably gay as you want, so long as he’s in the market for an East Asian man. (If his preference is for a specific nationality in East Asia, he’s a sushi queen (Japanese), a kimchee queen (Korean), or a chow mein queen (Chinese).)

But now backtrack to the first set of senses for queen in NOAD2:

[1a] the female ruler of an independent state, especially one who inherits the position by right of birth.

[1b] (also Queen Consort) a king’s wife.

[1c] a woman or thing regarded as excellent or outstanding of its kind: the queen of romance novelists | Venice: Queen of the Adriatic.

[1d] a woman or girl chosen to hold the most important position in a festival or event: football stars and homecoming queens.

All four subsenses — except for the ‘thing’ subsubsense in [1c] — are for females, and all of them have a component of superiority in them, a component that doesn’t seem to carry over to gay uses of the word.

X queen: female referent. The examples for sense [1d], with a metaphorical extension of the ‘ruler’ sense in [1a], shade from those where a festival or event is clearly involved:

[1di] homecoming queen, prom queen, pageant queen or beauty queen, rodeo queen, football queen, carnival queen

to those that merely involve display, not involving a festival or event:

[1dii] pinup queen, burlesque queen

There are also extensions of the [1a] sense to rulers of domains other than independent states:

[1a’] gypsy queen ‘queen of the gypsies’, ice queen ‘ruler of the land of ice and snow’ (but then extended to ‘cold-hearted, emotionless woman’)

The senses in [1c] (involving roughly ‘excellence’, ‘pre-eminence’, or ‘expertise’) are another metaphorical extension of [1a], to women [1ci] and then to things [1cii]:

[1ci] [an open-ended list] film queen (e.g. Joan Crawford, Bette Davis), disco queen (e.g. Donna Summer); pastry queen, cake queen, pie queen, dessert queen, soba queen [as in Tampopo],…

(to which we can add welfare queen, a woman reputedly expert at extracting money from the U.S. welfare system).

As for [1cii], there’s a rich range of examples, many of them proper names — for instance Dairy Queen, the soft serve ice cream shops I discussed in a 12/21/12 posting; Speed Queen, the washing machines; and many restaurants and fast-food places with names in which X refers to a foodstuff.

On Speed Queen, from Wikipedia:

Speed Queen is a laundry machine manufacturer headquartered in Ripon, Wisconsin, USA. Speed Queen is a subsidiary of Alliance Laundry Systems LLC, which bills itself as the world’s largest manufacturer of commercial laundry equipment. It makes a large variety of residential and commercial products, from 25-pound-capacity tumblers to 250-pound washer-extractors, as well as dryers. Its commercial machines are a popular brand for laundromats, apartment buildings, and hotels.

  (#1)

(It’s likely that the machines are Speed Queen rather than Speed King because doing the laundry is traditionally considered to be “women’s work”.)

For the eating places, X Queen is an alternative to X King, and I have no idea why Queen was chosen over King in particular cases. I’ll start with two Steak Queen places, a fast-food place in Ontario that was a favorite of Toronto ex-mayor Rob Ford and a food truck (now gone) in the University City district of Philadelphia (by the University of Pennsylvania), which used to serve breakfast and lunch and specialized in subs and cheesesteak sandwiches.

The very popular Steak Queen in Etobicoke ON provides burgers, steak, and souvlaki:

  (#2)

On to Philadelphia, the home of the Philly cheesesteak. Here’s a typical menu:

  (#3)

That’s “on an Amoroso roll”:

Amoroso’s Baking Company is a family-owned company that specializes in hearth baked breads and rolls. Over the years the Amoroso sandwich roll has become synonymous with those Philadelphia culinary institutions, the hoagie and the cheesesteak. (link to the company site)

A Philly cheesesteak from Phat Philly:

  (#4)

Regular 7″ cheesesteak made with Masami Farms American kobe beef with fried onions, white American cheese, and hot peppers on an Amoroso roll.

(I am something of a cheesesteak queen. I grew up close enough to Philadelphia to be able to get cheesesteak sandwiches locally — not the same thing as ones from Philly itself, but still very tasty.)

Meanwhile, there are Sushi Queen restaurants in several places, including San Francisco, and Falafel Queen restaurants too, and Pho Queen restaurants as well.

X queen: enthusiasm. Now we come to uses of X queen not covered in NOAD2’s entry for queen, conveying ‘inclination’ or ‘enthusiasm’; these provide an obvious pathway to the gay preference uses.

The first of these is drama queen, used originally for women, then also for gay men (seen as men resembling women), and then also for men in general. NOAD2’s entry for the compound, which is gender-neutral:

informal   a person who habitually responds to situations in a melodramatic way

Other X queen examples have started on this route: for instance, lipstick queen for a woman with a passionate interest in lipsticks. For some, the ‘enthusiast’ use has extended to take in gay men as well as women:

[sports] ‘fan’ or ‘enthusiastic participant’: baseball queen, soccer queen,…

[food] ‘enthusiast’: sushi queen, sashimi queen, wasabi queen, soy queen, tamale queen,…

(I have gay friends who are baseball queens in the ‘fan sense’, and some who are rugby queens in the ‘enthusiastic participant’ sense, and I am myself something of a sushi queen.)

Some of these may have picked up uses for straight men as well as gay men.

In many cases, gay-enthusiast X queen examples seem to have developed directly:

[another open-ended list] gossip queen, theatre/theater queen, movie queen, show queen, opera queen, ballet queen, circuit queen [circuit parties], crystal [meth] queen, scream queen [horror movies], label queen [clothing labels], underwear queen,…

(I suppose I could be labeled a (gay)porn queen.)

In addition to these enthusiasms, there’s a X queen example that almost everybody knows: drag queen. In NOAD2:

a man who dresses up in women’s clothes, typically for the purposes of entertainment

Drag queens can be gay, bisexual, or straight. The expression combines queen as an allusion to the hyperfemininity of drag queens with queen as an allusion to the their customary manic enthusiasm for their roles. (Many people would like to make a terminological distinction between men who “do drag”, drag queens, and men who intend to “pass” as women or prefer to dress as women in private, transvestites. And of course both are to be distinguished from M2F transgender people.)

X queen: gay preferences. Three categories here: partner preferences based on race, ethnicity, or nationality (ethnic preferences, for short); other partner preferences; and preferences for particular sexual practices. I’ll take these up in reverse order, leaving the gigantic collection of examples in the first set for last.

3: Preference in sexual practices. Two examples I already knew (piss queen, for a gay man who seeks out piss play; and scat queen, for a gay man who who seeks out shit play), five I could have predicted but don’t recall having heard until I started a search for examples (cock queen, for a gay man who loves to fellate other men; toe queen, for a foot-fetishist gay man who loves to suck toes; rim queen, for a gay man who especially enjoys rimming his partner, licking and tonguing his anus;  fist queen, for a gay man who especially enjoys being fisted, having another man’s fist and some forearm inserted into his lubricated anus; and dildo queen, a gay man who enjoys having sex toys inserted into his lubricated anus), and one that was an entertaining surprise (mitten queen, for a gay man who prefers to masturbate his partners). No doubt there are more.

For a gay man who prefers to play the receptive role in anal intercourse, the usual slang term is not of the form X queen, but is instead pussy boy ‘boy who is a pussy, offers his pussy for sex’.

2: Non-ethnic partner preferences. The top compound here is size queen, for a gay man (or sometimes a woman) who prefers men with large penises. Then chicken queen, a gay man who prefers chicken (young men, that is, teenagers or youths), also known as a chicken hawk; and wrinkle queen, a gay man who prefers seniors.

And tub queen [from tubby], chub queen [from chubby], or flab queen, aka chubby chaser, for a gay man who prefers fat men; muscle queen, for a gay man who prefers muscular men (this one is ambiguous, since the compound can also refer to a gay man who is muscular; compare the enthusiasm compound gym queen, and predicative compounds like muscle twink ‘twink who is muscular’, muscle boy, muscle bottom, etc.); and my personal favorite in this category, cherry queen, a gay man who prefers partners who are cherry, that is, men who have never experienced receptive anal intercourse.

Again, there are probably more.

Some partner-preference compounds that you might have expected, like twink queen and bear queen, seem to occur only rarely, if at all; apparently they are pre-empted by the predicative compounds meaning ‘queen who is a twink/bear’.

There are several partner-preference compounds I was hoping to find (since they describe fairly common partner preferences) but have not: fur queen, for a gay man who prefers hairy partners; ink queen or tat queen, for a gay man who prefers tattooed partners; and danseur queen or ballerino queen, for a gay man who prefers, or at least seeks out, male ballet dancers as partners.

Then there is the pretty common phenomenon of the gay man who seeks out, or is attracted only to, straight guys: straight queen looks oxymoronic, but het queen, hetero queen, and breeder queen don’t seem to occur either.

1: Ethnic partner preferences. An impossibly rich field. Probably the most common of these compounds is the ugly dinge queen (from dingy ‘dirty, dark’), for a gay man (typically, white) who prefers black partners. In this case there are attested alternatives: coal queen (based on the color of coal) and the much more satisfying chocolate queen (a food compound, based on the color of chocolate).

For the reverse preference, for white men, especially by blacks, the top entry is snow queen (based on color), with dairy queen (a food compound, with dairy products taken to be the characteristic food of lactose-tolerant white people) as runner-up.

On to Hispanics/Latinos and the gay men (typically, white) who love them: a taco queen or bean queen (more food compounds) seeks out such men as partners. In the other direction, for a Hispanic/Latino gay man with a preference for white partners, we have potato queen (another food compound) or, again, dairy queen.

Moving to East Asians, we have rice queen for a gay man (typically, white) with a preference for East Asian men (again a food compound, as explained at the beginning of this posting). In the other direction, once again potato queen or dairy queen.

As I noted early in this posting, preferences for more nation-specific partners in East Asian have names too, all based on food: sushi queen, kimchee queen, chow mein queen.

Then to South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh). A gay man (typically, white) who seeks out South Asian men as partners is a curry queen or spice queen. With the usual alternatives in the other direction.

Now I note that there are special terms (though rare ones) for at least two exclusive preferences: mashed potato queen for white only for white, sticky rice queen for Asian only for Asian. I don’t know of any term specifically for black strictly for black, a preference that is actually pretty common.

Then some entertaining food-based terms: poutine queen (an Anglo Canadian gay man with a preference for French Canadian partners), matzoh queen (with a preference for Jewish men), and hummus queen or falafel queen (with a preference for Arab/Middle Eastern men).

And a couple very specific terms, provided to me by a correspondent whose website and e-address no longer work: nasi lemak queen (with a preference for Malay men) and tom yum queen (with a preference for Thai men). Both terms are based on characteristic regional food:

Nasi lemak is a Malay fragrant rice dish cooked in coconut milk and pandan leaf. It is commonly found in Malaysia, where it is considered the national dish, and also popular in neighbouring countries (Wikipedia link)

Tom yum … is a Lao and Thai clear, spicy and sour soup. Tom yum is widely served in neighbouring countries (Wikipedia link)

There are surely a great many more examples. For one thing, the list so far is very much oriented towards North America, with no attention to the usages of English-speaking gay men in the U.K., Ireland, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, etc.

And there are notable gaps. For example, I haven’t found pho queen for a gay man who prefers Vietnamese partners or adobo queen for a gay man who prefers Filipino partners, though such gay men do exist.

From the 8th, featuring Alice:

  (#1)

and from the 20th, featuring Wally and the pointy-haired boss:

  (#2)

On #1, note that “good communication skills” involve both the way you speak and use your body while speaking and the way you listen to others and monitor their body language. Dilbert seems not to have gotten the second part: he affects to listen, but he’s not really attending to what Alice is saying, probably because she’s a woman (and men know that what women say is of little consequence).

In #2, the pointy-haired boss and Wally collaborate in a display of jargon-dense talk that goes beyong bullshit into some ethereal realm of nonsense.

(This posting is packed with pretty direct talk about bodies (women’s and men’s) and sexual practices (mostly, but not entirely, straight, and some kinky). While NSFW, the images are technically not X-rated. Still, definitely not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Another spin-off from my urinals postings, this time specifically taking off from image #1 in my New Year’s Day posting on “Urinals and the conventions of the men’s room”: a urinal in the shape of a mouth, probably from the Rolling Stones Museum in Germany — where it appears not as an artwork in a gallery of the museum, but as a functioning urinal in the museum’s men’s room.

(Note: the museum was founded, in a tiny German town, by a Stones-mad couple, Birgit and Ulrich “Ulli” Schröder; it has no official connection to the Stones. Meanwhile,  Mick Jagger is considering opening a Stones museum in London.)

Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky then sent me a link to a 3/18/12 piece on the Sociological Images site, “Women’s Parts as Urinals and Sinks” by Gwen Sharp, which begins:

Stephanie Medley-Rath sent in a new example of urinals shaped like women’s mouths. We’ve taken the submission as an opportunity to re-post our collection

She adds also other women’s parts used as urinals: vaginas and perhaps buttocks as well. And to branch out into fixtures for a men’s room that incorporate women’s bodies presented from behind (thus offering their vaginas and/or buttocks) incorporated into urinals and sinks. Some, if not all, of this is clearly misogynistic.

The problematic feature of these fixtures is that they’re fully functioning items in a men’s room, often the only ones available there, so that a man who needs a urinal or a sink is obliged to engage his body interactively with a representation of a woman’s body parts, not merely to appreciate the way these representations are crafted; he becomes an active participant in urinating in or having intercourse (vaginal or anal) with a simulacrum of a woman.

Hold off on those oral urinals for a bit. From Sharp’s collection, we get a female-frontal urinal:

(#1)

and a bank of femae-posterior urinals:

(#2)

and then a bank of female-posterior sinks (in a notably well-appointed men’s room):

(#3)

The user of one of those urinals is put in the position of symbolically humiliating a woman by urinating on or in her body, and the user of one of those sinks is put in the position of symbolically imposing himself on a (passive) woman via frottage or intercourse. That seems uncomplicatedly misogynistic to me. A decent man’s only recourse is to refuse to play, to opt out: find a more conventional urinal somewhere else or use a toilet, find a more conventional sink somewhere else or go without washing his hands.

Now back to those oral urinals in Germany, image repeated here:

(#4)

Here’s a 1/31/12 piece on the Ultimate Classic Rock site, “Rolling Stones Urinals Causing Controversy in Germany” by Billy Dukes:

German women wouldn’t have an issue with the lip shaped urinals at the recently opened Rolling Stones museum in Lüchow, Germany if they came installed with tongues. That way, the toilet would more accurately resemble the famous lips logo the band has long used in promotional material.

(#5)

The mouth, with or without the tongue, has very red (and hence feminine) lips, mirroring Mick Jagger’s frequent presentation of himself in the Stones’ early days as androgynous (while being simultaneously quite nastily homophobic). So I’m not sure adding a tongue would have helped. To convey that the mouth belongs to a man with lipstick on, you’d need to see more of the face: a square jaw, a cleft chin, maybe some facial scruff, or even an adam’s apple. That would require re-doing the bottom part of #2 in flesh-tone porcelain, and making it longer. That’s certainly possible, and it would give the user something to brace himself against white he’s pissing.

But wait a minute? Would men accept the notion of (symbolically) pissing in another man’s mouth? Most, I think, would not, though some might enjoy the sense of dominating, humiliating another man. (There’s a reason why urinals with mouths that are clearly male — belonging to men or boys — are so hard to find. And why urinals with apparently female mouths seem to be powerful for many men; we’re back to misogyny.) And some men might have other motives for fancying a urinal with a male mouth: gay men who are into piss play, for example.

And then there’s the protagonist of Nick Baker’s wonderful and highly original first novel, The Mezzanine, who is entirely straight. This character could use a male-mouth urinal for the technique he employs to overcome his pee-shyness in men’s rooms: he imagines pissing in another man’s mouth (dominance and humiliation again). I’m somewhat pee-shy myself, also kinky about piss, and I’ve found the Baker technique, as I think of it, quite effective.

Back to the Billy Dukes article:

The L.A. Times reports that critics of the bathroom art say it conveys a “misogynistic message.” “It’s discrimination against women,” local feminist Roda Armbruster tells Hamburg based broadcast network NDR, explaining that without the tongue it’s just a woman’s mouth a man is relieving himself into.

It seems unlikely that the outcry will change the decor of the museum’s mens room. Founder Ulli Schroder says they’re art, not a man’s mouth or a woman’s mouth. [They could, of course, be both art and a person’s mouth; that’s what I think they are, in fact.] “They were damned expensive and they’re staying where they are,” he said, according to the International Business Times. “That’s final.”

Dutch artist Meike van Schijndel [a woman] designed the toilets, which have been decorating bathrooms worldwide since the early 2000’s. This isn’t the first time controversy has dogged the manufacture. TMZ reports that in 2004, Virgin Airlines flushed plans to install a pair of these toilets at JFK Airport. These controversial items are marketed as “Kisses!” urinals on Bathroom Mania’s website, and at last check sold for over $900.

As I said earlier, if the urinals were on display in a gallery, as art, I would have no problem; in fact, I’d find them intriguing and entertaining. And there’s a long tradition of treating urinals as art objects, going back at least to Marcel Duchamp’s Dada urinal of 1917, Fountain. More recently, there have been Clark Sorenson’s beautiful and clever flower and shell urinals, which have had at least one exhibition of their own; they are fully functional as urinals, but are sold only to individuals, never (as far as I know) installed in a men’s room (though I’d have no problem pissing into a calla lily or a seashell, objects that, even symbolically, have no consciousness or social identity). For similar reasons, I’d have no problem pissing into a playing card urinal (I’d probably avoid the club one, though, because it requires really careful aim) or a musical urinal, like the ones in my “News for urinals” posting yesterday. And some photographers have shot urinals and presented them as aesthetic objects; these fixtures were, or are, functional in real life, but not of course in a photograph.

As I said earlier, the problem comes when apparently feminine-mouth urinals are actually employed as receptacles for piss. I myself would shrink from using them, no matter how much I might appreciate them as art objects.

Bonus note. The Rolling Stones continue to tour, though all four in the current band are around 70. Here they are in 2015, looking amiable and unthreatening:

(#6)

Charle Watts, Keith Richards, Mick Jagger (all in their early 70s), and the kid of the band, Ronnie Wood, in his late 60s

It started with a cartoon by New Yorker cartoonist Charles Barsotti (from 1/18/10) in my doctor’s examining room yesterday:

(#1)

Angry doctor upbraids a smugly smiling patient (hugely obese, cocktail in hand, cigar in mouth).

Barsotti is a great favorite of mine, and he has his own Page on this blog.

So: four more Barsottis that tickle me and haven’t been blogged on here before.

On relations between the sexes, from 4/10/95:

(#2)

Male corkscrew, female cork. He has just screwed her and is now walking away. Plaintively, she hopes he will call her. But probably not: he looks like a 3Fs, or FFF, guy: Find ’em, Fuck ’em, Forget ’em. There’s a lot of that going around.

Now on female friendships, and talk between women, from 11/7/94:

(#3)

Conventions: the heels and lashes tell you that, though they are both forks, they’re also both female. The spaghetti wrapped in #2’s tines represents her hair — apparently, a brand-new hairdo, which #1 greatly admires.

More social customs, with a fish in a dog bar (from 11/13/14):

(#4)

The compound dog bar is an instance of one prominent type of X bar snowclonelet, where bar denotes an “establishment where alcohol and sometimes other refreshments are served” (link to my X bar posting of 10/18/14), and X characterizes its patrons (gay bar, biker bar, etc.). The idea of a dog bar is charming, and a fish pretending to be a dog to get in makes the whole scene really goofy.

And finally, a clown seeking help, from 1/9/95:

(#5)

Apparently laughter is not the best medicine for this clown, whose business it is to make people laugh. The word on the net is that Xanax is the next best thing, almost as good as laughter itself.

“Laughter is the best medicine” is something of a trial for quote detectives. The general idea has been formulated in a variety of ways over millennia, but this particular wording, which has become a fixed formula in popular culture, hasn’t been traced to its source.

I’ll probably assemble another set of Barsotti cartoons in a while. The corpus at the New Yorker archives is immense.

The Zits from the 21st takes up a recurrent theme in the strip:

Over the years, Mark Liberman and I have posted about the Chatty Girls trope on the strip, retailing the (basically false) stereotype that women, and especially teenage girls, chatter on ceaselessly, overwhelming guys (with their laconic ways). One guy sandwiched between two girls doesn’t have a chance.