The Vagina Monologues Makes People Angry.

I love words. I thank you for hearing my words.
I want to tell you something about words that I think is important.
They're my work, they're my play, they're my passion.
Words are all we have, really. We have thoughts but thoughts are fluid.
then we assign a word to a thought and we're stuck with that word for
that thought, so be careful with words. I like to think that the same
words that hurt can heal, it is a matter of how you pick them.
There are some people that are not into all the words.
There are some that would have you not use certain words.

George Carlin^^^

Source

Imagine your daughter, junior in high school, active drama student, takes honors classes comes home one day and tells you that she and 2 other friends auditioned a reading of the vagina monologues for an event sponsored by the literary magazine at John Jay High School in Cross River, a New York City suburb. Among the other readings was a student's original work and the football coach quoting Shakespeare.

Now lets say that the teachers asked your daughter specifically not to read what she auditioned because small children could be present and let's say that your daughter agreed not to.

On the day of the event your daughter performs the forbidden monologue and the community goes into an uproar over free speech. What do you do?

A. Join the community and fight for your daughters right to say the word vagina in front of small children.

B. Punish your daughter for disobeying an adult...

C. Praise your daughter for being strong willed and fighting for what she believes in?

D. Don't give a shit cause you have to be at your second job because we can't all live in New York City suburbs?

I believe in free speech, but in a school type forum, you should keep things g rated. If you want to perform the vagina monologues, set up your own event and warn people so they know what they are getting into. What do I know? They probably sucked anyways...

Here is a video of part of the show(not the performance from the news story but someone else doing a completely different part).

Geez...

Freakin creepy pedophile...

A little something I found on myspace...

Last summer I watched Ira Glass from "This American Life" speak at Willamette University. He played part of an audiobook by David Sedaris and then read the FCC law and then the fines. Then he played the David Sedaris story again and counted on his fingers the number of FCC violations. Then he took out a calculator and multiplied that number the number of stations This American Life played on and explained how easy it is for the government to censor people.

The story contained not a single cuss word, drug reference, sex reference or really anything offensive. It was about using the bathroom at a friends house and someone before him didn't flush.

Anyways, I kinda liked this essay thingy...

Date: Mar 12, 2007 9:09 AM
Subject On Nudity
Body: On Nudity by Ryan Rogers (www.myspace.com/ryanrogersrizzo)

It was not too long ago that our country was gripped in panic and fear over something they saw on television. Something that happened accidentally (or perhaps purposefully) that gripped our country in fear. Congressional hearings were called. Massive fines were handed down. People were fired. It was bedlam. Parents were forced to contend with a horrible, overwhelming moral collapse of everything they had worked so hard to create. We were on the verge of anarchy.

Janet Jackson showed a nipple.

Yes, my friends, Janet Jackson, pop star and general gyrating flesh factory was performing with Justin Timberlake, and as if this were not embarrassing enough, had a part of her bodice removed during a choreographed dance number, exposing her right breast and nipple (I should say that she exposed her nipple, considering the bodice was already showing off a large portion of her breast already), not to mention perhaps the most tasteful and sexy nipple ring I have ever seen.

Of course, most of us know the rest of the story. Congressional hearings were, indeed, held, and massive fines were levied against the networks. Massive restructuring of the “allowed” images and words on the radio were put into law. Heck, even Howard Stern quit amid the turmoil. Parents were outraged. Family groups were outraged. Church leaders were outraged. And all this because of…a nipple.

Let’s put this in perspective. This was something that happened during the half-time show of the Super Bowl, a sport akin to Roman Gladiator bloodsports (but with padding), complete with perhaps the most violence allowed to be seen on Sunday afternoon television. Because after all, the violence is ok. But when the darkened nipple of a woman’s breast is exposed (the very same nipple which, if exposed on Justin Timberlake, would have been considered part of the act) the country is an uproar. Something tells me that our priorities are a little askew.

We live in a very unsafe and frightening time. People we know are getting killed, murdered, shot, tortured, or more. We fear for our lives. We fear for our children’s lives. We are afraid. So why is it that a film can be simply lauded with blood, gore, and violence, and television watchers seem to not balk at all (and perhaps enjoy it) but if a sexual, sensual or (good heavens) humanly anatomical image is on screen, we decry the decaying morality of our society.

It’s just a breast people. Many cultures seem to have very little issue with exposing the female breast. After all, it is beautiful. It is soft, sensual and aesthetically pleasing. It is part of the beautiful addition that gives a woman their heavenly curvaceous shape. Artists of the highest (and most religious) order have captured these breasts for centuries. They are not to be feared. And in a time of great turmoil in the world, shouldn’t we be far more sensitive to the violence that we constantly see, and far more lax and welcoming to the images of love and sensuality and beauty.
We are human beings. Just because we have chosen to drape ourselves in clothing does not mean that underneath this clothing we don’t all have the same beautiful parts (just in different colors, shapes, and proportions). So what’s to fear. Clearly Michelangelo did not fear the male penis when sculpting David. And heaven forbid I start to detail the famous authors that have paid great reverence for the human female form. It would take me all day.

I realize that we are the descendants of a puritanical legacy brought forward by our great ancestors, but perhaps it is time that she shake off the shackles of our ancestors and realize that our even greater human ancestors were not afraid of the human form. I am surrounded by art, sculpture, drawings, photography, all detailing this human form. The nipple, the breast, the penis, the vagina…these are not things to be feared, but celebrated. When a film tastefully presents these body parts, it is not obscenity, it is art. Heck, even if a film untastefully shows the female breast or the male penis, it is still not obscene. It’s just a body part. People do far more terrible, horrible, nightmarish things with their hands than they do with their sexual organs, yet we do not cover those up.

I am tired of the demonization of human body parts. Breasts are beautiful, and should be appreciated as such. Bodies in all their forms are poetry. The poetry of nature, and we should respect them as such. Nudity is not to be feared or frightened of. It is to be celebrated. And perhaps we would be in a far, far better place as humans if we spent more time worrying about the violence, hatred, and anger that is presented to us daily than the occasional viewing of a bare breast.

It's funny because it's true.

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/02/22/wwgwbd_flow_chart.html

Children need to know what scrotums are...

"The New York Times" alerted me to this interesting little news story. The Newberry Medal winning book this yeah has the word scrotum on the first page.

there it is on the first page of “The Higher Power of Lucky,” by Susan Patron, this year’s winner of the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children’s literature. The book’s heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.

“Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much,” the book continues. “It sounded medical and secret, but also important.”

I don't see what the big deal is, except I'm sure parents and teachers don't really want to go through explaining what a scrotum is. If I had a kid I wouldn't care. I think children should be informed of body parts and know what they are so that they aren't scarred for life when they see 
them for the  first time. 

Suicidegirls News had a pretty funny article about the whole debacle.

Ha Ha Fox News Has It's Own Version of the "Daily Show"

New show coming up called the half hour news hour or something like that. It looks just like the Daily Show only with a conservative slant instead. I personally am conservative in the economic fashion and liberal in the social aspects, so it would be nice to see a comedy show that doesn't have a huge liberal slant on some stuff. But this show looks pretty bad...

War Sucks.

I don't know who to credit for this but my friend Nate posted this as a myspace bulliten. Don't let that downplay the seriousness of this post. I won't come out and say what kind of politics I subscribe to, that isn't the purpose of my blog. I feel more people should hear this voice.

Words from the 172nd Stryker Brigade.

Right now we are living in big warehouses, sleeping about 150-200 guys in each warehouse. We have one trailer with 8 showers, 5 toilets, and 5 urinals. That's for the 150-200 guys living in your building. Not to mention we are living on the other side of the FOB -- away from any other living human being, phone center or internet café.

Did they mean to keep us away from everyone for a reason?

We don't bite, although some might think so. The females on this FOB were all given whistles before we arrived on this FOB. Bet that's something they didn't want us to find out, yet we were approached by the same females you gave them to.

We were called on to come here and take care of business. We were called on to come here and take of what I read on the internet as the most important mission of this war, the mission that will make or break this war, but we seem more like the black eye that no one wants around.

So be it, we will be the black eye of this FOB as long as they want to look at us like that, but with our backs against the wall we will never quit. We will fight tooth and nail as hard as we have to, to get home to what we deserve.

As our brothers in arms fall in Baghdad to save this city for a people we will most likely never see again, we will grit our teeth and do the job we were asked without any armchair quarterbacks losing sleep at night.

As everyone knows we were extended with some of us already home in Alaska, some in Kuwait and some of us living out of our bags with a matter of days to go before we were to fly home. It was about the biggest low blow we could have got. The morale of this unit was definitely 6 feet underground after that, yet we were being called on for the big game.

One of the arm chair quarterbacks at the top fell asleep playing his game of chess and now we have to pay the price and pick up the slack. We were in Mosul when Baghdad took its turn for the worst after the February bombing of the shrine that sent the country into a downward spiral.

Like it or not this country is in the middle of a civil war. When there are more civilian casualties from each other than there are deaths of soldiers involved in this war, what do you call that? When the morgue in Baghdad alone reports of 1800 plus bodies in the month of July alone. We may have been put in the middle of this civil war but theres only one way to referee it and thats to take care of every kidnapper, death squad and terrorist until only the deserving walk the streets of Baghdad.

When that bomb went off at the Golden Mosque they knew then that the units here in Baghdad didnt have the mobility of the Strykers but they sat on their hands hoping the problem would go away on its own. Well it didnt. It got worse and worse as the months went by and we watched it all over the news from our northern FOB. Why not call on us 3 or 4 months ago and move us to Baghdad and move another unit up to Mosul, a city that we made a hell of a lot safer.

We could have come to Baghdad for the last 3 to 4 months of our year long tour and still been able to go back stateside like we deserve after our performance over here. I know many of us had vacations planned and paid for, many of us had flown our families up to Alaska already and now are having to fly them right back home. Whos dishing out that refund? Wheres the money going to come from for my trip to the white sand beaches of Hawaii? Right out of our pockets.

Some had paid first and last months rent on a new apartment or starting buying new vehicles. They knew before they extended us that it was going to happen. Maybe a little heads up could have saved a lot of HARD EARNED money. We made that with blood, sweat and tears.

One other thing that people might not have thought about was our leave situation. We got 15 days of leave back to the states for being over here and well Ill just put it like this we went on leave 2 months after being here. Do the math and you will figure out that time was no where close to the middle of our tour and many of us will be here for over a year straight.

Now I know at the start of this war that happened to many veterans and I have to give it to you for that but how many years are we into this war now. We went on leave early and were held from leave in other months so this country could hold elections with all of us here.

Where did those so called 4 day passes go that we were told we would get since we went on leave so early? Ill tell you where they went, to non-combat MOSs that never left the wire. Do you have any idea what its like to hear someone talk about how they hated going to Qatar when they got there 15 days of leave also yet never left the wire. They went to Qatar and had a two beer limit, got to drop their flak vest that they never wore and had some free time in a green zone.

We worked our knuckles to the bone and held one of the safest elections in Iraq working 27 to 35 hours straight. Sometimes all we did was come back in to refuel and go back out in hostile territory. We had been promised those over and over again and have yet to see a single soldier in our unit go on a 4 day pass.

We have done everything from tower guard, gate guard, and chow hall guard. Not where the infantry should be used but our so-called down days were spent pulling 8 to 10 hour guard shifts on the FOB. When the non combat MOSs were talking about how they had days off. Thats ok we will continue to pull our weight and others' weight as long as the sky remains blue.

When we go back home each of us will know what we did over here. When we see you with your dirty M16 in the chow hall and hear you complain about how hard your day was, just remember standing right behind you is the man you keeps you safe while you sleep. Take a look around at the men that surround you before you decide to open your mouth about a job you had to do on the FOB.

Whens the last time the PX took small arms fire or had an RPG fired at it while you were pulling guard with no flak vest on. When you hear that firefight going on outside the FOB just remember who is out there fighting for their next meal, fighting for the next time the get to hear a loved ones voice on the phone. We go to the chow hall and they tell us we have to have a magazine full of ammo to get into the chow hall.

Ill tell you nothing makes me more nervous than being around a bunch of people who probably havent fired their weapon the entire time we have been over here and I can already see plenty of ammo laying around if something were to break out inside the wire.

I love my job as an Infantryman and I wouldnt trade it for any other MOS. I will do the dirty work that others pray to never see, I will be the red headed stepchild of the army, I will be the chosen one, just remember who we are cause the FOB you walk on has been secured with blood, sweat and tears.

One last thing I would like to put out is the next time some big wig wants to come to Camp Taji you make sure to show your face around the guys you called on for the fight of all fights, cause every time a V.I.P. showed up at our FOB for our year long tour we were always mysteriously out on patrols. We are like guard dogs at a rich mans house, whenever company comes over they put us in the garage and tell us not to bark, but when its dark outside they let us out to hunt and kill what goes bump in the night.

Make sure Mr. Rumsfeild the next time you serve dinner up at a chow hall like you did in Mosul a few months back you make sure your serving it to the men who are fighting the good fight as their time is due. Also I wont forget about you Mrs. Rice who has made many trips to the Middle East and yet to pay dues to the Artic Warriors. Its not the higher ups who search house after house and fight day and night in the streets that need to hear from you. Its not the higher ups who risk everything they have out there trying to track down the next suicide bomber who need you to pat them on the back.

Its the men who fight and die for a cause only some of us may understand. We have been told we are not the main effort of this mission down here we are simply the muscle behind this operation, but every thing I have been told and everything posted on the news and internet puts us front and center to turn Baghdad on its head. Maybe all these Generals and armchair quarterbacks should show their face to the men they signed off on with only days, hours and minutes to go.

We stood up a Police and Army that were decimated in 2004 in Mosul and we will do it again here if we have to. As we sit here talking of children and wives that we may never see again we will push on with our backs against the wall. We may be the black eye now but we will have our time in this life or the next. We will not go quietly, we will accomplish this mission. We may be a unit once forgotten after the Vietnam War, we may be a unit you have never heard of until they extended us, but we will be a unit you will never forget. Mark my word!