Double Standards

Since I do not have to go to the office at all on Mondays and Fridays, I generally tend to put in extra time working out on those days.  I am able to get through 90 + minutes of cardio for one reason and one reason only: On Demand television.  Tom's youngest JT gave us an enormous big screen TV last year, and we installed cable in the basement for our home gym.  Don't be impressed, our home gym consists of one recumbant stationary bicycle and our washer and dryer.

Today, I indulged in some good old-fashioned ethnic stereotyping-through-television by watching not only an episode of The Sopranos, but also The Jersey Shore, MTV's latest attempt to prove that civilization as we know it is indeed coming to an end.  Behold, the heroine of The Jersey Shore, Snookie:

Snookie may be little (4 foot 9 inches) but she has got a real mouth on her.  In episode 4, Snookie persisted in berating a drunk fellow bar patron (male, and quite large) when he appeared to be stealing her drinks from the counter.  He rewarded this scolding by punching her right in her cute little chipmunk face.  Of course, she completely fell apart, and all the boys in the house were ready to kick some major ass, except the perp got hauled off to jail before they could assault him with their grotesquely large muscles.  By the way, if you think steroids are no longer in fashion, I suggest you watch this show and take another look at the issue.

MTV has decided that the incident is too offensive to show on television, so they blacked out the screen during the moments when she actually got smacked and landed on the ground.  Luckilly for you, I have provided a link!

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I agree that the scene is hard to watch, and I agree that men should not hit women.  But then again, I don't think anyone should hit anyone.  What is interesting to me is that on the very next episode, another housemate (Jenny, also known for some inexplicable reason as "J-Wow") throws quite a few punches at a woman in a bar who calls Snookie fat.  Remarking on the BMI of her housemate is apparently the ultimate offense to J-Wow, and she went after this girl like a divorce lawyer after your 401k.  MTV did NOT choose to excise this footage from the show.

What's also interesting is that after the episode in which poor Snookie takes one on the chin, MTV posted information at the end of the show denouncing violence against women BY MEN, and posting information about public resources for battered women.  This was a bar fight, not a domestic violence situation.  No such announcement ran at the end of the show when J-Wow apparently went psycho during a major episode of PMS.

My brain has been occupied lately with society's strange expectations of men and women.  Even though women have made enormous strides in the past few decades, we still are often held to a different standard then men.  We are not more fragile than men.  We should not be physically assaulted by men, and at the same we should not be abused by other women either.  Or transgendered folks, for that matter.  By the same token, we should not raise our fists to anyone of any gender.

I just want to live in a world where we are all responsible for our own choices, regardless of sex or color or race or sexual preference or whatthehellever.  We should all be responsible for our own choices.  We should all be nice to each other.  We should all be allowed to make a living and be recognized for our achievments whether we have a hoo hoo or a ding dong.  I believe one thing holding us back from living in true gender equality is the coddling of our womenfolk, as illustrated by the story above.  As a society, we should abhor all violence, and not be more offended when perpetrators and victims have a particular set of genitals.

And finally, for your veiwing pleasure, I hereby present my first entry in my new feature I am calling "Dirty Food."  From time to time, I will be posting photos of pornographic food.  It's weird, I know.

That's mozarella, in case you were wondering.