Sometimes I Just Feel So Tired

So today I was thinking about posting a brief compare-and-contrast of Debbie Harry Sings In French with Barbara Wersba's Tunes for a Small Harmonica, to make the point that good YA fiction about sexuality and gender identity was being written back in the 70s and 80s, so all this hoo-hah about how ground-breaking and innovative the queer books of today are is a wilful forgetting of YA history. But instead I am posting about three things I came across within five minutes of going on the Internet, and the exhaustion that comes over me at the thought of living in a world where this kind of thing happens, and where critiquing them so often gets you read as a Humourless Feminist (tm).

So, in order...

1) Today's 'Daily Poll' on imdb was about who you would get to narrate your life: it listed seven actors, all men. I guess there are no women with voices good enough to narrate the life of any random internet-surfer who reads imdb.

2) Then someone linked me to this blog, Cake Wrecks, and the third cake down was a (pretty funny, I thought) baby-shower cake with a marzipan figure of a woman giving birth on top (here): the blogger comments that the, er, "mom" here... is completely nekkid (is that a new trend in delivery rooms?), and is anatomically correct where you wouldn't expect her to be (ergo the censor bars - sorry, fellas!) Well, yes, quite a lot of people are naked when they give birth. And why on earth would I not expect a figure of a woman in childbirth to be 'anatomically correct' in the places where babies come from and are fed?

3) And then someone else linked me to this blog post with a brief critique of a Snickers ad in which, in order to sell a chocolate bar, Mr T pursues a man who is speed-walking (and thus coded as effeminate) down the street, firing Snickers bars at him from a giant machine-gun mounted on a big truck, and exhorting him to 'run like a man' and 'get some nuts'.

I am too tired to critique these. Do them yourselves.

(The post title is the caption of a Judy Horacek cartoon, showing one of her women slumped over a desk: up on the wall behind her are the statistics from the 1980 UN report on the status of women.)