Archive for December, 2012
|Designer Vaginas: Vajazzling for the Jet Set?
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on December 28, 2012 by admin in Health & Wellness
Friday, December 28th, 2012Why are cosmetic surgeons so eager to get their hands on your hoo hoo? Also, a categorized list of lady part slang.
Why are cosmetic surgeons so eager to get their hands on your vagina? |
I’ve never actually had one myself, so maybe I’m not really qualified to talk about them, but you know what I like about vaginas? Pretty much everything. I mean, I think it’s pretty fair to say I never met a vagina I didn’t like. In fact, when I fill out forms that ask for my religion, I write in “Vagitarian”. Still reading? IMPRESSIVE! I thought this would be a cakewalk, but as I sat down to say the things I meant to say about the terrifying beast sometimes referred to as “vaginasaurous rex”, I was finding it hard, and finally decided to jump right in, rather than trying to ease slowly into it. We’ve touched on penises before here, and pointed out the odd societal discomfort with the topic, so I thought it was time to give some equal airtime to vaginas. The first hump in this process seems to be the use of the very word vagina, so we’re going to desensitize you a little more. Vagina vagina vagina. There! You should be ready now. But before I go on, I have to ask once again – what IS it about our nethers that makes them so unspeakable? People will talk comfortably about nearly any other body part, both internal and external, usually hesitating only when mention of human waste or mucous seems imminent. That kind of makes sense; both of those things are kind of gross, right? But our genitals? This is an area of the body that otherwise is practically worshipped in many contexts. Perhaps that’s it. It’s sacred somehow. Weird.
Anyway, my interest in doing a spread on vaginas was originally aroused by an article on LiveScience.com called Designer Vagina Websites Need Makeover, Study Suggests. Whoa Nellie! What the hell is a “Designer Vagina”?, I wondered. I’m sure by now we’ve all heard of vajazzling; was it some kind of vajayjay bejeweling for the jet set? I honestly was astounded to learn that not only was cosmetic surgery for vaginas a booming business, it was rife with deceit and exploitation, offering scientifically unsubstantiated promises of not only visual redesign – like a nose job for your no-no – but procedures to enhance your satisfaction, and claims about how a labioplasty will boost personal hygiene and curb infection risk, both claims completely unsubstantiated by research. I wondered to myself what kind of quack doctor would make it their life’s work to focus on such procedures. Medical school is quite a rigorous and expensive pursuit. One hopes that as well as wanting to make piles of money, another part of the motivation would be to make people HEALTHY. I don’t have issues with reconstructive cosmetic surgery, but the vanity-driven variety is something I generally find literally offensive in a number of ways. And to extend the exploitation of poor self-esteem to someone’s rarely-revealed personal parts seemed to me especially creepy and opportunistic.
I figured the leaders of the field would be men, and for some reason I imagined them with creepy smirks on their faces. Well, “the internet, it do not disappoint“, as pretty much no-one says. A quick Google search for “Designer Vaginas” turns up the Designer Vagina’s page (misplaced apostrophe and all) of “Dr. G’s Cosmetic Surgery”. If you don’t find the pose of the doctor with his elbow on the female patient’s back creepy (screenshot below), I don’t think I want to be your friend. And sure enough, this and other Designer Vagina clinics seem to be based mostly on selling women into the idea that their hoo hoo is a horrible thing to behold, and should at least bring them more sexual pleasure than it does. Not that their sexual partner has anything to do with the latter, of course.
Look, I’m all in favor of a woman hacking her vagina as she sees fit, but can’t we otherwise just LEAVE THE VAGINAS ALONE? Aside from a few peripherally-related complaints – which I’ll get to in a minute – a woman’s “promised land” is generally a wonderful thing, in its varied splendor of form. And that use of the silly euphemism “promised land” was intentional, as a segue into my main complaints about vaginas. First of all, about nomenclature – can we PLEASE find a better term for the entire area “down there”? A vagina is a vagina, and it’s only one part of a woman’s “private parts”. As flip as I can be to make a topic more amusing and palatable, I do my research, and especially when the topic is something I have such a natural passion for, I’m thorough. After an extensive search of both “polite” and “dirty” terms for a woman’s genital area, the list was pretty sad. The less-offensive “cute” terms like “cupcake”, “hoohoo”, “kitty”, and “coochie” seemed to have been conceived by three year olds, and the supposedly “polite” terms like “lady garden”, “girly bits”, and “honey pot” aren’t much of an improvement. And you can always tell when the term was created by a man; it usually refers to animals, meat, odor, or hair. Of all the nasty manwords for the girly bits, even the amusing ones – like “panty hamster” – conjure a rather disturbing image. And my other complaint? WHY MUST WOMEN PERSIST IN MAINTAINING THE MYSTERY??? It took me the first several years of my sexually active life to get even a basic grasp of what’s going on with the “bald man in a boat” (who came up with THAT one, by the way?) and I have many times talked to men in their 30′s or 40′s who – once they open their mouth and say anything not humor and fear based – are clearly clueless.
It’s like women WANT it to be a mystery, so they can complain about how inept the man is. Granted, it’s a little unfair that the man parts give away their function at the slightest touch, so there’s little need for a manual explaining how to “raise the crane”. But seriously. Even that vagina hacking engineer – in a 4,000 word article about modifying her sex toy – failed to mention even ONCE any details of the Mysterious Mechanics of Pleasure Down There, and what was really going on in the Lady Garden. Not to excuse the nasty manwords listed below, but they’re probably largely born of ignorance that our society perpetuates. Ah well. I guess these are meant to be the eternal mysteries of the Tunnel of Love. Bonus vagina slang list below. Read the rest of this entry »
Pregnant with an Idea: Swiss Researchers to Give Birth to Roboy in 2013
[ Comments Off ]Posted on December 26, 2012 by admin in Technology
Wednesday, December 26th, 2012A human-like robot child? What could possibly go wrong? Apparently they don’t watch Sci-fi movies in Switzerland.
Dear Lord. Didn’t the folks at the University of Zurich see Artificial Intelligence or the Spanish film EVA? Apparently not, or they wouldn’t have embarked on a nine month journey to give birth to one of the world’s most advanced humanoid robots, a tendon-driven “service robot” modeled on human beings. Hopefully Roboy’s similarities to humans end at the gestation period and tendon-driven movement (most humanoid robots have motors in the joints, giving them that, er, robotic movement) and he won’t be imbued with the sentience that makes all the best movie robots go nuts. We’ve been poking fun at robots since we first went online back in 2008, mostly to point out how much your robot sucks , even if it’s sucking less all the time. But this University of Zurich project is intriguing in a number of ways that set it apart from other robot projects of the last few years. For one, although the actual production of the robot is supported by corporate sponsors, the overall development is being open-sourced. As much progress as companies like Honda have made with their proprietary corporate approach, it seems somehow reasonable to expect that the final leaps toward a robot human enough to be truly creepy will come from collective “parenting” of crowdsourced human inspiration. Second, the group developing Roboy is intentionally placing considerable emphasis on the “human-ness” of robotic design, as is evident in their ECCE project (video below). Those of us who have seen enough dystopian robot sci-fi movies will find little comfort in the words that create the acronym for the ECCEROBOT, i.e.: “Embodied Cognition in a Compliantly Engineered Robot”. I for one like to start with the assumption that a robot is “compliantly engineered”, not be reassured of the fact in the robot’s very name! But enough poking fun. The truth is that the reality of human-like robots is probably approaching faster than we think. The U of Z projects are being built largely with almost “off the shelf” components; imagine what a bunch of financing and design-specific parts could do. You can still support the Roboy project HERE, and maybe we should. Maybe we can get a head start on the inevitable Oppressionbots the US Military is probably working on in secret. See the ECCE video below. Read the rest of this entry »
Last minute WTF Christmas Ideas
[ Comments Off ]Posted on December 20, 2012 by admin in Holidays
Thursday, December 20th, 2012Actually, the most “WTF” thing about this all is the article thumbnail and its caption. HAPPY HOLIDAYS!
The other day a friend of mine caught her eight year old daughter using “WTF” all over her Facebook comments. “Do you even know what that means honey?”, she asked. “Of course I do mom. It means ‘wow that’s funny’”, her daughter replied. Of course this didn’t actually happen, at least not in my life; that little story has been kicking around the web since at least 2008. But it’s perfect for filling in the word count on fluff pieces based on “WTF Christmas Presents”, so there you have it. We’ve done plenty of roundups of offbeat Christmas gift ideas before, in fact, we did one just the other day. And although some of the stuff we’ve found was seriously weird, somehow we’ve never gotten around to doing a straight-up “WTF gifts” piece. So we figured with the end of the world (which scenario will it be?) just a couple of days away, we’d better squeeze one in. If you happen to be reading this after December 21, 2012, go ahead and bask in the cocky assuredness that the world didn’t end after all. But then ponder something my friend Nick pointed out to me today, which is that maybe the world DID end. I’ll leave it to you to decide what that would mean about your existence, but for now, HAPPY HOLIDAYS!
We Wish You a Fiscal Cliffmas
[ Comments Off ]Posted on December 14, 2012 by admin in Holidays
Friday, December 14th, 2012Don’t let the government have ALL the fun. Spend yourself into oblivion this Christmas with these great gift ideas for the brokeass masses and their overlords to be.
We thought our job was done. In past years, we had pretty much covered the whole “Christmas Gift Ideas as Linkbait” idea, having touched on everything from insanely expensive gifts you might hope to get, to disturbing and perverse gifts you hope you DON’T get. Last year we were so desperate for a new gift theme that we resorted to Christmas Gifts for Occupiers. What could possibly be left? Well, thanks to those clowns in Washington who will gleefully spend 3 billion dollars to get elected but can’t balance a US budget to save their lives, we’re back! While most of us drive off our OWN fiscal cliff just about every Christmas and wake up in the wreckage in January, this is the first time in a while that the government has paused for a moment and said “Holy crap! We’re broke!” Never mind the fact that this has pretty much ALWAYS been the case. This is different! It’s a FISCAL CLIFF for chrissakes. WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE ‘CAUSE THERE’S NO MONEY. Or so some politicians would like us to believe. It’s especially ironic that the GOP was the source of the term “Fiscal Cliff”; somewhere in their clever plan to slap the label on Obama, things backfired. Probably because they overlooked the fact that we’re too smart to ignore the fact that you don’t have to be in a particular party to be a greedy, self-serving, irresponsible twit. “It takes a pillage” as they say. One thing’s for sure. No politician who spent his whole life engineering the kind of pay, perks, and health insurance that congressman enjoy will ever fail to keep the honey flowing. Which – as usual – will have no bearing on OUR lot in life. As the global economy continues its gyrations, the average American will be more brokeass than ever, and “middle class” will become a meaningless phrase as we spiral into a Dickensian world of poverty for the many, and king-like riches for the few. So this year’s roundup focuses on gift ideas for the brokeass and classless, i.e.: you and me, our rich overlords to be, and a couple for the filthy commies who voted Obama back in office so he could finish single-handledly destroying our economy and way of life with his evil socialist agenda. Gift ideas below. Most of them are free or under ten bucks on Amazon. Read the rest of this entry »