Tag Archives: Articles

An article via Julianna on Twitter: “Prude or Professional? by Courtney Remes”

This is disappointing. I’m no prude by a long shot. Hell, in other contexts, I would’ve been laughing. But really. Time and place, kids. A professional convention — unless maybe it’s a pro-BDSM convention — is not that place. Browsing through the comments, I think this echoes my thoughts on a lot of things beautifully:

Matt Gray :
If you have to resort to the sexual equivalent of fart jokes to get your audience’s attention, you should work harder on your content.

(On the positive side, Dave Schroeder, the producer of Flashbelt (which I’m not familiar with) has apologized, and been supportive of the people who’ve spoken up about the incident. Link

Changing tacts just a bit, this comment is not just applicable to the general attitude of the world’s boys’ clubs toward women. Advertising, movies, tv, music — and apparently, now I can add the occasional professional presentation to the list — frequently seem to think the attention of the viewing public can only be gotten by crude humor and idiocy. Even more sad is how often people prove them right. It’s frustrating what kind of junk becomes rabidly popular these days. Shows like Jackass, almost every Will Farrell movie (he’s done how many films?, and there has been one, count it ONE movie of his that I’ve seen that was intelligent as well as funny), dumb commercials (oh, Axe, what happened?). And the list just keeps growing.

It’s a form of laziness, in a way. It’s easy to play dumb, and laugh at stupid jokes; it’s all animal-brain. It takes work to think think intelligently. I can see the appeal of catering to the lowest common denomenator. People are smart, the mob is dumb. Dumb sells because it’s more accessible to everyone. I get it. But when you treat everyone like they’re dumb all the time…? Keep telling someone something enough, and they’ll eventually start to believe it. Or in this case, act it. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy some senseless or silly fun every now and then, but when nearly everything is geared toward that lowest common denomenator, people’s animal brain becomes used to running rampant, while the thinking brain gets flabby and lazy. Because when you call to the inanity in society, intelligence is probably not going to be the one to answer.

You can observe it happening all around you, every day. Idiocracy, here we come.

Edit for a random side note: This is Tabard’s in! 100th entry :D It may be cheating a little, since I’ve backposted some stuff from LiveJournal and other media so they’d all be in the same place, but whatever :)