The Oldest Profession

There's a story that's been bouncing around a lot lately, mostly on Drudge. I finally read it on the New York Daily News. Here's a Link.

A new study from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that when you exclude kids shows, news, and sports, there's a lot of sex on TV. I know, I know, there's a lot of sex on the news and on the news about sports too. (Way to go, Kobe!) "The Kaiser researchers also cited depictions of intercourse on Fox's "The OC," oral sex on NBC's "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit," and extremely frank sex talk between the mother and daughter heroines of WB's "Gilmore Girls.""

Says Kaiser Vice President Vicky Rideout, "They're finding ways to get the message across in a way that is entertaining and doesn't cost them in the ratings," she said. "We know it makes a real difference with the kids in the audience."

Let me get this straight. In a world with cable television devoting entire channels to 24 hour kids shows, oral sex on Law and Order is a threat to our kids.

What?

What responsible parent lets their child watch Law and Order anyway? Especially Special Victims Unit, which focuses on sex crimes? And while I don't watch Gilmore Girls, I don't see how a mother/daughter talk about sex is anything to be afraid of. In fact, compared to the ridiculous "my precious daughter will be a virgin until her wedding day and abstinence is the only option" bullshit, I love the idea of a raunchy, funny, and honest discussion.

The fact of the matter is that Gilmore Girls, Law and Order, and the OC are not kids shows. The fact of the matter is that these shows have ratings on them. The fact of the matter is that if you want to block inappropriate shows from little Johnny, there's a variety of products you can buy to help you do it. The fact of the matter is that if you don't want your kids to watch it, you can turn the damn TV off, send them out of the room, or record it and watch it later.

I'm an adult. I can drink, vote, drive, smoke, go to tittie bars, gamble, rent porn and make porn. I don't have kids but I have little sisters, and I don't think they're ready to do all of these things. I don't think that they're necessarily ready to watch them either. But since I'm a thinking human being, I can get my fill of titillating television, and they can get their fill of whatever it is they watch. Furthermore, I want to watch sex on television. Sex and death are two of the most exciting subjects out there. They're the reason I pay over a hundred dollars a month for digital cable, a DVR box, and a few hundred channels.

Oh, and before we freak out about the "70% of the shows included some sexual content - double what the figure was in 1998," let's examine where Kaiser was looking for sexual content.

"The Kaiser researchers sampled a week's worth of programming on ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, WB, PBS, Lifetime, TNT, HBO and USA Network. "

*sigh*

1. What's Lifetime even doing on this list? I looked at their programming today. Unsolved Mysteries, Golden Girls re-runs, Will and Grace re-runs, and made for TV movies about women who were wronged by men they trusted. Not really pulling in the kiddies. Not really the world's most popular channel. Not really relevant to any study examining sex on television and it's affect on children.

2. Um, as far I as know, Lifetime, TNT, HBO and USA are cable channels you have to pay for the privilege of watching. This means the consumer makes purchasing decisions and the network at some extent reacts to the desires of the consumer. The consumer, being an adult, can choose to pay for raunchy programming. The network provides what the adult wants to watch. See? No children involved, unless you're a bad parent!

3. It's HBO. If you buy it, you know what you're getting. If you don't, and decide you don't like it, you can cancel it.

4. I don't see any "family oriented" channels here. Not kids channels, but material the whole family can enjoy. Why not Nick-at-Night? Why not Food Network, Animal Planet, Discovery Channel, or Hallmark Channel? Could it be that by picking channels aimed at mature audiences instead of channels aimed at family friendly programming, you're purposely skewing your results so you can run around screaming about the decline of the moral fiber of America? Americans like sex. People like sex. I like sex. And if your parents didn't like sex, you wouldn't be here. So relax, Kaiser, Drudge, America. We all know that you're getting it on. And one day the kiddies will too.

"New Classics"

One of my favorite daytime TV background noises is TNT. "Drama...is on TNT" I love it. Listening to Law and Order as I patter in, out and around the house is comforting.

This exposes me to a lot of TNT brand positioning. Days when they have Nascar and they're trying to pass it off with the same branding as Judging Amy has always made me giggle. "Drama is..." waiting to see a redneck crash into a wall and "Next there's nothing but drama when Amy hears a child abuse case". Hee hee. Right. The same branding for the soccer moms glued to early morning ER reruns as the golf tournaments. One size fits all branding.

The other recurring branding message from the "We Know Drama people" is for their prime time movie series, the "New Classics". Okay, so I get the "Saving Private Ryan" could be considered a new classic. I get that it's a movie that in twenty years people will need to know for tokens in Trivial Pursuit. I get that my kids or grandkids might have to watch it for credit some day. New classic? Sure.

What's tripped my out is how much they are willing to dilute their branding. I can see how car crashes and child abuse cases are dramatic. I could sort of see how the same brand can be streched to cover both cases. I even see how marketing prime time airings of movies that influenced pop culture is a good idea. But it has to be real influence.

TNT is showing Blade 2 soon.
Apperantly it's a "new classic".

Did anyone actually see Blade 2? Or, god forbid, Blade Trinity? I suffered through both of them, cause I love vampire movies. I love cheesy hero zingers and pretty people in leather breaking shit and making things blow up. But that movie was shit! Not only was it shit, but from what I remember no one really busted their ass to see it. Unlike Saving Private Ryan, it wasn't a movie people were chatting about around the water cooler. Blade 2 is a new classic like Van Wilder is a new classic. It was a movie. Some people saw it. Some people liked it. Most people didn't do either.

My Favorite Peice of Marketing

I fucking love Halloween. I love it. I like New Years, enjoy Christmas, and don't completely hate Easter, but I absolutely love Halloween.

Halloween is the one holiday without this "love thy fellow man" bullshit.
It's the one holiday that can never "sell out", or become "too commercial."
It's one of the few holidays that doesn't have prayer, or special services.
Unlike Thanksgiving or Columbus day, it doesn't venerate the historical rape of an innocent group of people.
Unlike President's day or Kwanzaa, it's a holiday people actually participate in.

It had candy, booze, dress up...

What's not to like? Putting on fake lashes and getting drunk on badly made mixed drinks served in plastic skeleton goblets with dry ice in the bottom? Dressing hapless children in embarrassing/macabre homemade outfits and having them collect candy from strangers? Community center haunted houses and Vincent Price marathons? Wearing fairy wings to the office?

How about the day after, when the stores try to clear their supply of neon wigs and black eyeliner? (A girl can never have enough black eyeliner.)

It sucks that the US doesn't take carnival seriously. It really sucks that the one thing we have like it, Mardi Gras, may never be the same. What's left is DragonCon, local bacchanals, and Halloween.

Oh, and after this week, it'll also be my anniversary.

Day of the Rant

So I'm not the only one's who's reaching her breaking point.

There are two deliciously elegant rants I'd like to point out today. The first concerns video games, the second concerns sex. yay. sex.

As for video games, there's apparently some douche bag named Jack Thompson trying to step into Jonathan Swift's buckle shoes. He has a modest proposal for the video game industry. Anyone who makes his game about killing a video game publisher gets $10,000 donated to charity. Whee. There's more to the story, look here.
Essentially, the game involves Osaki Kim, a father whose son was beaten to death with a baseball bat by a 14-year-old gamer. The guilty party was only sentenced to life, even after finding a connection to video games and the murder, so O.K. (as Thompson abbreviates) goes on a killing spree to avenge his son he kills the publisher (Take This, a not-so-subtle reference to San Andreas publisher Take Two), followed by all parties involved in the trial, merchants of GameStop-like store and arcades and, of course, any cops that get in his way.

Clever, huh? No ordinary monkey with a keyword could ever come out with an idea like that, right?

I love Tim Buckley's from Ctrl Alt Del, a webcomic I adore, has a response. There's a comic version I really recommend here. And when you're done with that, read some more of his words. Look here.

An excerpt:
Ten-thousand dollars is a lot of money, and would really benefit some charities. But why would a video game company spend the millions of dollars it takes to design, develop, produce and market a video game, when they could just donate the ten grand themselves and be done with it? Why don't you offer something that would actually motivate these companies, such as offering to throw yourself off a cliff.

Anyway, for the record, I agree with keeping violent video games out of the hands of children under 18. Make it illegal for a minor to buy M-rated video games. That seems perfectly reasonable to me. However that is where the line is drawn.

I'm an adult, and if I want to play a video game that contains violence or sex, that's my constitutional right. And it's the right of the developers to create these games.

Don't start trying to fuck with the choices of adults, Jack, unless you're prepared to take on pornography, alcohol, cigarettes and gambling. And booze, cigs and poker have been proven to have negative mental and physical effects on people. You can't say that about video games.

And pornography... well porn is just great. Everyone loves porn.

Which brings me to rant number two, most of which I haven't finished reading yet. I found it on BoingBoing
You can have the whole cheerleading squad,
I want the girl in the tweed skirt and the horn-rimmed glasses:
Betty Finnebowski, the valedictorian.
Oh yes.
First I want to copy her Trig homework,
and then I want to make mad, passionate love to her
for hours and hours
until she reluctantly asks if we can stop
because she doesn't want to miss Battlestar Galactica.
Suma cum laude, baby!
That is what I call erotic.

The rest is here. Read it!

i *heart* porn.

Oh, and I saw an episode of Battlestar the other day with C, and while I liked it, Richard Hatch is so much the suck that I don't know if I'll be able to watch more. I'll complain more about him later.

Actors. It's like they think they're people or something.

Can't Stop the Signal...

...motherfuckers.

I've been drinking and watching the O'Reilly Factor. I've tried watching it sober, but it does bad things to my blood pressure. Things have been that way ever since my irony broke.

So I'm drinking and watching O'Reilly. He has some talking heads bitching about bloggers. Apparently, some bid bad meanines who disagree with the American Spectator's presidential ass-licking. These evil, mean, bad guys published an editor's email address on their website. His poor inbox was flooded with disapproving emails! Oh no! Lions and Tigers and Giant Fucking Bears, oh my!


But it's okay, the people who bloc about politics are creepy fiends hiding in basements wearing tinfoil hats, or long haired granola eating freaks posting from their sidekick while they march to save the whales. And it's all slander, anyway. Icky poo nasty hearsay and hyperbole. Unlike O'Reilly's show!

This kinda shit makes me pull clumps of hair out by the root.

Let's hear it for the blog. Let's hear it for the livejournal. Let's hear it for the Geocities page. Let's hear it loud for Wikipedia. Let's hear it for freedom of the press. Finally.

You know who O'Reilly fears? Who he paints as a rumor-monger? The Smoking Gun. You know, those rumor mongers who publish legal documents Who back up their rumors with evidence. That's what O'Reilly fears, the free flow of information. But my Lord and Master Joss Whedon told me, "can't stop the signal". Fuck you, O'Reilly.

Bloggers, wearing their biases openly on their sleeves and not answering to corporate masters are the greatest example of democracy in action. And you can't stop our signal.

Can we see that again?

I'm getting spoiled. The comcast DVR doo-hicky is completely ruining me. I've become so used to rewinding to catch line's I didn't quite hear, or neat special effects, the while watching Firefly Friday night I tried to rewind it.

Sitting in the theatre, I reached for the non-existent remote to rewind the movie.

How fucked up is that?

I don't know how I lived before my "not-a-Tivo". I record all my favorite shows, watch them when I want...It's pretty cool. I now I sound like I've sold out to them, but it's really changing my relationship with TV. It's hard to say "there's nothing on TV", cause there's always a few shows I've recorded but not watched yet.

God bless cable television.

Bless you, Unreasonable Standard of Beauty

Every once is a while virulent marketing campaigns accidentally do something useful or good. (By virulent, I mean having the same redeeming social qualities as AIDS only harder to get rid of.) For example, balancing unreasonable standards of beauty against one another, so they balance out. Let's take a look at Mauritania, an Islamic republic on the western edge of the Sahara. The standard of beauty for the nomadic people who make a living in the middle of this giant desert has been on the heavy end of the scale. It stands to reason that in a place with limited resources, signs of overindulgence would seem a desirable trait in a mate. This leads to the force feeding of female children, from about the ages of 12 to 15. Some die during the process. Most have serious health problems as a result.

It's what happens next that makes me giggle. It's East meets West in a truly wonderful way.

Western standards of beauty, by which I mean the American and European "I've been up all week doing heroin backstage and coke off the guitar player's dick" super thin and raggedy looks, are making headway in Mauritania. The result? People are starting to no longer force feed their children like ducks for fois gras. Obese women are starting to work out and get healthy. The standard of living for women is increasing. Because of western standards of beauty. The same one that results in "pro-ana" websites and ten year old girls with fatal eating disorders. Jesus Christ.

But as LaVare Burton says, "you don't have to take my word for it!" Check it out here.

Seasonale

Newsflash: There may, after all, be a god.

I just saw the coolest product ever on TV. It's someone responding for once to what consumers want from a product and how they actually use it.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you Seasonale. Link.

It's birth control. It's the pill. Now, I can't take the pill, the estrogen level's too high and I don't have a regular enough schedule. I'm on the patch, which is cool, but a pink colored patch on my black ass looks stupid. I'm wandering. Back to the topic.

What's special about this pill is that it comes with a three month supply. That's three months on the pill, one week off. That means four periods a year. A year!


Like I said, coolest product ever.