With beliefs like these floating around, we have to remind ourselves that it’s 2012.

Welcome back everyone! Bad news, they did not cancel sexism this year so we’ve got a full list of horrific quotes about women made in 2012 to look forward to. All of last year’s rules apply, with this notable exception: you will find no Republican politicians here. They are Professionals and we’re dealing strictly with amateurs who play for the love of the game.

10. Licensed comedy expert Nikki Finke at Deadline Hollywood: “Beautiful actresses are not funny. They don’t know how to do comedy…Only women who grew up ugly and stayed ugly, or through plastic surgery became beautiful, can pull off sitcoms or standups [sic].” Women who were born beautiful but were mauled or otherwise mutilated can sometimes become funny but only after they have been disfigured for a period of time equal to or greater than the duration of their attractive years.

9. Justice Bhaktavatsala, an Indian judge on single female lawyers: “[F]amily matters should be argued only by married people, not spinsters.” Which, speaking of, how good is The Good Wife this season? So good, right? I would say “surprisingly good.” Anything that keeps Christine Baranski working, you know.

8. Gallus Strobel, German mayor who recently marked “difficult” male and “easy” female parking spaces in his small town of Triberg: “It’s been a great marketing gimmick. Women can come here and prove me wrong, and while they’re at it they can see the town’s attractions.” They will probably not do either of these things, but if all you’ve got on your resume at this point in your life is “Mayor of Triberg” and “the parking space guy,” I’m inclined to give you a pass on this one.

7. Douglas Brinkely, of the New York Times, on Jodi Kantor’s White House biography The Obamas: “chick nonfiction” (in his defense, her book is just a series of pencil drawings of Michelle Obama’s clothes with heart-shaped doodles scrawled in randomly around the margins). More importantly, this distinction opens up so many new categories of literature, like “chick war correspondence,” “chick magical realism,” and “chick large print.”

6. Chilean president Sebastian Pinera: “When a politician says ‘Yes,’ he means ‘Maybe,’ when he says ‘Maybe,’ he means ‘No,’ and if he says ‘No,’ he’s not a politician. When a lady says ‘No,’ she means ‘Maybe,’ when she says ‘Maybe,’ she means ‘Yes,’ and if she says ‘Yes,’ she’s not a lady.” Sebastian! There has got to be a quicker way to make that point.

5. Hong Kong billionaire Cecil Chao Sze-tsung on his £40 million pound bounty to any man who successfully courts his recently-married lesbian daughter: “[the money is] an inducement to attract someone who has the talent but not the capital to start his own business.” Awww, buddy. That’s not how love or money works.

4. Safeway Senior VP and General Counsel Robert Gordon opened this year’s shareholder meeting with a little joke: “The president flew into the White House lawn and an agent greeted him at the helicopter. The president was carrying two pigs under his arms and the Secret Service agent said, ‘Nice pigs, sir.’ ‘These are not ordinary pigs, these are genuine Arkansas razorback hogs. I got one for former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and one for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.’ And the Secret Service agent said, ‘Excellent trade, sir.'” I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that kind of bush-league dad joke at a Piggly Wiggly meeting, but I expected a little better from the people who brought us O Organics. Also why is the President carrying the pigs himself in this scenario? Wouldn’t there be a special pig handler nearby, or travel carriers at the least? This story is full of holes.

3. Fox anchor Brian Kilmeade, upon learning that the United States Navy Band was admitting female musicians: “Women are everywhere. We’re letting them play golf and tennis now. It’s out of control.” Just wait until the misandrist bloodbath that gets started once we break through the glass ceiling in badminton.

2. Masked commenter The Toronto Programmer on sexism within the tech community: “‘Brogrammer’ isn’t an exclusionary term…the female equivalent is called a ‘hogrammer’ and I have big respect for women that wear that badge proudly.” Yeah, there is going to be sexism all over Mars and in spaceships and just everywhere in the future thanks to this kind of tech-world sexism (Also I would totally wear a badge that said “hogrammer” on it).

1. Dom and James, creators of Facebook’s Twelve-Year-Old Slut Memes, on their raison d’être: “As long as there are sluts, we will put them in their place.”

This year’s Honorable Mention goes to Aaron Sorkin for his latest HBO series, Normally Capable Women Falling Into Fountains While Wearing Business Suits.

All quotes were calibrated and weighted scientifically in order of sexism and have been arranged accordingly. This list, as always, is comprehensive and exhaustive; nothing has been forgotten or excluded so if you heard anything else sexist this year that’s not here you probably just didn’t understand what they meant to say.

Image: adactio

The post Most Ridiculous Quotes About Women (2012 Edition) appeared first on EcoSalon.

Hummus and other foods as quintessential nut busters.

One thing we can all agree on is that for the most part, human existence is life in a grotesque series of soul-crushing indignities punctuated by intermittent, alternating bouts of boredom and suffering. All this yet you refuse to make things a little bit easier on yourself, instead insisting upon mediocrity at every turn.

With that, please stop eating protein bars; you’re going to die someday and that will be the end of you. Try to snatch a moment of pleasure in between the twin blacknesses of the cradle and the grave. You are a human being and the entire universe is an unending frozen scream; don’t make things harder than they already are. You can do better than this – you will do better. Keep some of the following precepts in mind and throw a wrench in the Machine.

Assuming you still have a job, and assuming said job takes place in an office building – please stop eating microwaveable oatmeal at your desk every morning. It’s hard enough watching someone make breakfast at the office, but the fact that it’s oatmeal somehow makes it worse. You already have to eat lunch here, you’re actually going to deprive yourself of the few moments of peace breakfast affords you by heating up a packet of oatmeal in a ceramic mug? You don’t even put it in a bowl! It’s the same mug you use for your coffee. I can see you giving up on joy before my very eyes.

Greek yogurt. Remember when everyone was still mad at yogurt for being bland and watery and marketed in a weirdly sexist fashion? Women rose up en masse and declared that nobody was going to confuse a picture of a slice of Boston Cream Pie with decadence.

But now yogurt is back, and that’s awful. Every company is selling their own version of Greek yogurt (it tastes the same, but thicker! Mmm) and touting the increased protein content. Did you know that no one ever in the history of anything has ever gotten enough protein? It’s true. If you are a woman, your mother has asked you this question at least once a week for the entirety of your adult life (“You know, I’ve been feeling kind of tired latel–” “ARE YOU EATING ENOUGH PROTEIN? I’M SENDING YOU A ROAST CHICKEN MADE OF STEAK EGGS AND TURKEY WRAPS!”). If you are a vegetarian or a vegan, it gets even worse. Complete strangers will dash across the street, flinging themselves at you, screaming, “But your protein, where do you get your protein from!”

Sorry, John Stamos, but I’m not buying it. Yogurt isn’t a naughty, sensual treat I get for being a woman and you have dead eyes.

Coconut water. You didn’t listen when I tried to warn you about kombucha, so I have no idea why I think you’ll listen now. All I’ll say is it’s utterly mystifying that you would shell out $4 for a Tetra-Pak of cloying and vapid coconut water when coconut milk is both cheaper and more delicious (you can put it in both coffee and curry; can you do that with your precious coconut water?). Fine; do what you want; it’s your life.

The discrepancy between hummus‘ perceived value and its actual value is staggering. It’s a bunch of chickpeas that have been mushed together with extruded, viscous sesame juice and oil to form a mucilaginous paste. “Oooh,” you protest, “it’s got little hunks of dried-out garlic mixed in, I must be having fun.”

You are already dead and in Hell, though you do not know it.

By rights it is no better than spinach and artichoke dip, and yet many people – people who, under ordinary circumstances, appear to possess a fully functioning sense of aesthetics – accord it the enthusiasm ordinarily reserved for V-E Day. Try this little experiment sometime: throw a party and tell half your guests you’ll be serving “dip” (no need to get specific). Watch them show moderate enthusiasm and say something along the lines of, “I’ll try to make it.”

Now for the other half of your guests – tell them they can expect homemade hummus. The men will start to weep unashamedly; the women will spontaneously turn into brightly colored songbirds. Everyone will lose their minds. It’s as if you promised them a personal benediction from Alice Waters. But by what rights does hummus hold such a claim on the human imagination?

“But,” you equivocate, “you haven’t tried my hummus. I like to use white beans and a little bit of–” No. Shh. “There’s this wonderful Mediterranean market on 34th that does–” Hush now. Stop talking. I’m sure your method of whirling beans together is both glorious and unique, but hummus can never become anything better than itself.

Hummus is grey and tan and dull; it is the color of hopelessness. Dip your pre-sliced carrot sticks in something – anything – else. It is a lie designed to convince you that you are having fun; it is not an adequate substitute for joy.

Now go outside, if it’s nice out where you are, and eat something wonderful.

The post You Are Better Than Hummus appeared first on EcoSalon.

Hey ladies look! This is really just a fun game!

Listen, you would hardly consider blaming modern-day Civil War reenactors for the massive casualties sustained at the Battle of Shiloh. So there’s no need to get upset with Republican officials for trying to recreate the state of women’s rights in 1860. They’re propelled by curiosity – what it must have been like to live in a world where women weren’t allowed to control their own bodies? They’re living historians committed to total immersion in the past. Last time I checked there’s no law against caring too much.

Yes, they actually blocked a bill called the Violence Against Women Act in the House last week, after which they presumably twirled their mustaches and tied a few female congressional aides to the nearest railroad tracks.

And it’s also true that Republicans in the House are trying to eliminate funding for programs that provide cancer screenings and birth control to low-income women. But you know what? It’s easier and less terrifying if you just think of modern-day Republicans as extremely committed Handmaid’s Tale LARPers. LARPers who are using the national political landscape as their tabletop and women as their player characters.

“I cast a freezing spell that eliminates subsidized access to reproductive care under Medicaid!”

“I counter with an abortion-ban charm!”

“I move that we declare Colorado a men-only state!”

“My ice hammer smashes every STD screening clinic in the American Northwest!”

“I don’t think your character would do that, dude.”

“What do you mean?”

“I feel like that’s really branching out from your range of abilities. What wood-elf has an ice hammer?”

“This wood-elf has an ice hammer, Kevin, because this wood elf was paying attention during the Battle of the Seven Fields and collected the gear of the fallen, which is totally protected under the Treaty of the Ford, which you would remember if you had actually participated that day instead of changing your costume like seven times. Kevin.”

“I’m just saying I -”

“My ice hammer smashes Kevin.”

“Dude, that’s shitty. That’s so shitty.”

“Do you defend?”

“You know I don’t have anything that can counter an ice ha -”

“Then I guess you should probably get off the field and join the Womb Monitors.”

“All I said was -”

“Those wombs aren’t going to monitor themselves, Kevin.”

See? It’s fun now. Nothing terrifying going on here.

The post Republicans Huge Into Sexual Role-Playing appeared first on EcoSalon.

In a perfect world, all restaurants would serve these.

10. Someone at this table has bedbugs.

9. This Christmas you are going to get four separate copies of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild from various acquaintances and your mother. This is inevitable; you cannot change it.

8. When the Mommy Wars draw to a bloody close in 2044, the few surviving men will be chained in the natal mines. Only one woman will be able to bring them back. That woman is you.

7. You will be an active part of a future movement to disenfranchise voters who refer to champagne as “champers.”

6. Right at this very moment, an actress is preparing herself to accept a moderately prestigious award for playing a complicated prostitute. In the future, awards for portraying complicated prostitutes will become not only the highest honor a female civilian can achieve but the statuettes will become a form of currency.

5. Your ankle, which feels kind of weird right now – it doesn’t hurt, exactly, but there’s kind of a twinge when you point your toes or walk in a certain way – is going to feel like that for the rest of your life.

4. When your waiter asks you to sign the credit card receipt, she’s going to refer to it as “getting your autograph;” a portion of each of your immortal souls will die instantly.

3. If life brings you tears, use the salt from those tears to make salted caramel macaroons, open a very expensive dessert shop, and charge $4 a piece. Later charge $6 apiece. People will pay it.

2. You were put here on this earth to design a line of artisan-style pizzas for a mid-range casual dining chain; for this purpose and no other were you formed out of nothingness.

1. Due to a series of odd and unrelated coincidences, you will never watch an episode of “Maude” again for the rest of your life.

The post 10 Fortunes You Never Got In Your Cookie appeared first on EcoSalon.

A weekly look at sex and culture, by the numbers.

What better way to celebrate SCOTUS’ preservation of Obamacare than a new installment of Sex by Numbers?

35: Percentage of survey respondents who believed more than a quarter of Americans are LGBT

<5: Percentage of Americans who are actually LGBT

28: Witnesses for officials at St. Mary’s Church in Birmingham who testified that public sex in the churchyard occurs frequently enough to issue an ordinance banning visitors after dark

500: defendants in a New Orleans sex-solicitation whose names have been stricken from the record to preserve anonymity

3: Number of Louisiana government officials listed in the ruling

1: Number of Zynga games in which participants can engage in simulated sex (The Ville, available tomorrow – no word yet on FarmVille)

3: Number of legs on the dog a Florida man is currently facing criminal charges for having engaged in sexual acts with

Image: bdearth

The post Sex by Numbers: The Big Easy appeared first on EcoSalon.

A weekly look at sex and culture, by the numbers.

9: Fossils of turtle couples that apparently died while mating that were recently discovered in an ancient lake bed in Germany

19cm: Length of a double-headed sex toy that Chinese reporter Ye Yunfeng identified as a “rare mushroom” on national television

$100: Ticket price for a members-only sex party at the Mondrian Hotel in SoHo that was shut down by hotel staff

60 minutes: Length of time a Norwegian sexual health nonprofit has asked local men to spend having protected sex instead of watching the Euro 2012 final in order to raise awareness of STI rates in the region

$1.99: Cost of the newly launched Chec-Mate app, a service that allows users to compare sexual health, recent screening dates and results with partners instantly

$15,400: amount awarded to a 62-year-old man who was fired from his job as a nude artist’s model at Weston College in southern England, while female models were kept on

The post Sex by Numbers: An App A Day appeared first on EcoSalon.

A weekly look at sex and culture, by the numbers.

1 minute: Length of the first Magic Mike trailer to feature full male nudity, released this week

112: Age of recently discovered notes from a failed Antarctic expedition describing the “depraved” behavior of Adelie penguins, including apparent acts of necrophilia

$413: Difference in amount earned per hour by one American stripper in a single month last year

1200: Wedding licenses pulled by Hawaiian wedding planner Maui’d Forever since a recent ruling requires all weddings taking place on Hawaii’s beaches to purchase state permits

13: Same-sex unions & weddings taking place in comic book stores nationwide next week to celebrate the release of Astonishing X-Men #51, in which Northstar marries boyfriend Kyle

100: Participants in a brawl that broke out at a Glendale wedding last weekend that ended in multiple arrests

1000: Signatures amassed overnight on a bill attempting to block the creation of domain names .porn, .adult and .sex

4%: Proportion of text messages sent by teenagers that contains sexual content (an average of 77 per month per teen), according to data gathered by TxtWatcher

Image: Ricymar Fine Art Photography

The post Sex by Numbers: A Very Blue Hawaii appeared first on EcoSalon.

A weekly look at sex and culture, by the numbers.

$900k: Amount awarded to a woman in Oregon after suing her partner for lying about condom use and giving her a case of genital herpes

$29: Cost of a 50 Shades of Grey book-and-bondage set at Babeland in NYC

1: Number of “love days” allotted to Germany’s national soccer team players during this month’s Euro 2012 competition, a non-practice day in which players are allowed to spend time with their wives and partners

7: Years between Wade Davis’ retirement from the NFL and his coming out

4: Years a group of translators spent checking IKEA product names for sexual innuendo before the furniture chain opened a store in Bangkok

6: Countries that have reported cases of newly drug-resistant gonorrhea in the last few years

2006: Year Sister Margaret Farley’s Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics was published; it was condemned by the Vatican this week as causing “grave harm” to readers for discussing masturbation and homosexuality in a positive light

16: Age of Aparna Bhola, a teenage sex educator who works with former sex workers in Mumbai

The post Sex by Numbers: An Ounce of Prevention appeared first on EcoSalon.

A weekly look at sex and culture, by the numbers.

246-168: House vote on the Prenatal Nondiscrimination Act (PRENDA), which would have banned sex-selective abortions in the U.S.

40: Minutes of footage for a porn shoot filmed on the field of the famed USC Coliseum in 2001

0: Number of federal judges who upheld the constitutionality of the Defense Of Marriage Act in a recent appeals ruling

6%: Alcohol content in a new wine label developed by sex therapist Dr. Ruth in the interest of promoting relaxed, not drunken intimacy between couples

$8-10: Retail value of one bottle of Dr. Ruth’s wine

$5000: Gift money stolen during the wedding of a couple in Florida this week

29: Age of Olympian Lori Jones when she announced she had never had sex on HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel

6 million: Hits garnered by Isaac Lamb’s choreographed proposal to his girlfriend on YouTube

Image: Chris Breikss

The post Sex by Numbers: Pop Culture appeared first on EcoSalon.

A weekly look at sex and culture, by the numbers.

40%: Decrease in fertility rates from mice kept on a normal sleep/wake schedule and those whose sleep patterns were disrupted in a recent Northwestern study

4700: Age of a Chalcolithic man found buried in the dress and manner of a woman in a Bronze Age settlement near Prague

90: Minutes a night the average penis becomes erect during sleep

13: Anniversary of “Courage,” a Catholic sports camp for celibate gay men in Philadelphia

15 years: Maximum sentence faced by a 43-year-old New York superintendent accused of having sex with a tenant’s Labrador

Image: woodleywonderworks

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