Go suck a dick, media.

It offends me that when I typed 'm' into a search box, the first suggestion was 'Magaluf girl'. I can assume with a fair amount of confidence that I don't need to explain what I mean by the story about the Magaluf girl. I don't care about the Magaluf girl. So she sucked some dick. It wasn't classy, but it also wasn't news.

I don't care how much dick she sucked. She - you - I - everyone - has the right to suck as much or as little dick as they like, for their own or others' pleasure, in exchange for goods, services, money, whatever, as long as they do it of their own free will, and they have the right not to be judged for doing so. She can suck all of the dick in the world and it won't make a difference to my life. Fact is, if I want to know about people sucking dicks, I'll go out of my way to find people sucking dicks. There is plenty of it out there without it also being in the news. So maybe, by society's current standards, it was tacky to exchange twenty blowies for one alcopop, or whatever it was, but if she thought it was a fair trade then that's her call to make.

Personally, I resent the fact that the media has insisted that I have to hear about it, when there are much more important things happening in the world. I've been reading recently about scientists finding the part of the brain that switches on consciousness. I've been reading about secret paedophiles in our government. I've been reading about disabled and mentally ill people protesting because they can't afford to live because of the meagre benefits they get from our twisted government. These are all far more important than the fact that some girl sucked a few dicks, but all have been ignored by the general public because all they are about is that a girl sucked a few dicks. 

This is why I loathe humanity. There are more interesting things to read about, things which are more valuable to humans in general, than "lol at the slut", which is effectively what we've been given here in place of actual news.

What people choose to do with their own and other peoples' bodies is their business and no one else's. If they choose to tell their friends or tweet about it or post videos of it online, that's their decision. Sex between consenting adults is not and never should be in the news. News about rape cases, fine, people need to know how to deal with predators and abusive people, to know that the law and the government won't tolerate people treating each other like that, et cetera, et cetera. But this is just gossip, and it's clogging up the social consciousness to the extent that it is pushing out things that actually qualify as news. 


And because it is apparently far more interesting than anything that actually matters, here is a dick (from Wikipedia):

See the non-effect it has on your life?
Now go do something useful.

Why would you pick on Disney?

When I was about fifteen, I overheard one of my classmates announce to her friends that, although she loved Disney films when she little and they never had any negative effects on her, she would never let her kids watch them. Ever. She hated it, she said, when her parents let her little brother watch them. Because of all the subliminal dick messages.

Face was firmly planted in palm for much of the remaining day.

Disney has had some unwanted publicity regarding penises, mostly from the kind of fundie nutbags that also have a problem with Harry Potter and Pokémon because they encourage devil worship or some other bullshit. Apparently, the priest in The Little Mermaid has bellends for knees and Aladdin thinks that good teenagers take off their clothes (the actual line is “Good kitty, just take off and go”).

Frankly, this kid deserves a better parent.

I never cared enough to do more than Google for thirty seconds and then shrug half-heartedly. I am still not all that bothered.

But soon I will have a goddaughter, so I have started thinking about responsibility. A little bit. Not an awful lot. But enough. Admittedly, I will be the kind of godmother who purposely teaches her that ‘clitoris’ is a good word to ask daddy to define at the dinner table. But I also want to be the kind of godmother who introduces her to things that she can fall in love with and keep hold of forever. I’m thinking Pokémon and Harry Potter. I’m thinking Adam Ant and Amanda Palmer.

I’m also thinking Disney.

Excuse for a moment that I do not think that Disney peppers its films with dicks.  I actually think that the people who see dicks in Disney films are very sexually frustrated (most of them were teenagers) or in denial about something (a lot of them were fundies) or both. Certainly, they are reminiscent of that do-gooding douche from Donnie Darko who turned out to be into kiddie porn. Or this bitch; she seems like the kind of scumbag who wouldn’t let her poor girl watch Disney films.

Suppose for a moment that it does say ‘SEX’ right here in Simba’s dust.

Well … so the fuck what?

At least it was subtle. That doesn’t even look that much like ‘sex’.

And who is even thinking about sex during such a heart-rending moment in the film?

Kids’ shows get away with a hell of a lot more than most people ever notice. Definitely more than kids ever do. More than I ever did, and I was quite an observant and vulgar-minded child.

 

Penelope Pitstop had a vibrator in her car.

Frankly, I don’t care that I saw those things. I will happily show them to my goddaughter. And when she asks why I think it so much funnier than she does, I will answer her honestly. Dick jokes are hilarious, no matter what age you are. The countless hours of my childhood that I spent watching The Young Ones and Blackadder with my dad is testament to that.

Fuck. If I’m going to worry about what will be a bad influence on a child, I am going to worry about pretty much every other thing in the world before I get anywhere near Disney. I am going to worry about bitchy magazines that make women feel perpetually fat and ugly. I am going to worry about the fact that we live in a society in which Samantha Brick is allowed to voice her hideous little opinion on a nationwide forum. I am going to worry about the fact that people exist who give a fuck about Katie Shitting Price. I am going to worry about people who think it is appropriate to dress babies in shirts that read “Daddy’s Little Porn Star”. I am going to worry that Rihanna is considered a fucking role model.

I have written a list of things I will buy for my goddaughter. At the top of the list is Aladdin on DVD, partly because the list is in alphabetical order, but mostly because that film is fucking ace. Dicks or no.

And I just can’t deny her this pretty face!

No one this cute would corrupt anyone, surely?

The Creepy Sex-Death of the Male Anglerfish

The term 'anglerfish' can be applied to over 300 different kinds of animal, spanning almost twenty species, named for their method of hunting prey with a fleshy lure dangling off its head which can be wriggled in such a way that prey believe it is food. This development of the anglerfish is an ingenious twist of nature; it is not only practical, but has made it somewhat famous in the animal kingdom, not only for its scarily accurate portrayal in Finding Nemo.

The first thing you notice about the anglerfish is that it is fuck ugly. In every species. It is hideous. It has protruding teeth and bulging eyes and some species are covered in spiny hairs and others look like they are already decaying so that they fit in with the scum on the ocean floor. Most of them live at the bottom of the sea where it is so dark that everything is ugly, but the ones that glow have no excuse. The bioluminescence has evolved to attract prey, but it would seem only sensible to avoid something with a face like this...

And that's the female.

Actually, all of the big, scary ones are female. The males are rather more puny and not half as repulsive. They aren't as worried about feeding, so they don't have to be as predatory as the females. They don't need the big teeth, distending jaw, expanding stomach or light-proof gut lining (so they don't get caught having eaten something luminescent). They are a hell of a lot smaller than the females and their eyes and teeth aren't half as daunting. The male Photocorynus spiniceps is only a quarter of an inch long, one of the smallest vertebrate in the animal kingdom; it is near enough half a million times smaller than its female counterpart.

Some of them are even quite cute.

Sort of.

All that matters with the males is their testicles and their primary concern is mating.

They have very sensitive eyes to seek out their mates in the gloom of the ocean. They also have an amazing sense of smell with which they can sniff out the pheromones of females through the water. Once they have sought out a mate, they latch onto her with their sharp little teeth. He bites into her skin and releases an enzyme that digests the skin of his mouth and her side so that they fuse together. Over the next couple of weeks, his whole body is absorbed into her until all that remains of him is a pair of testicles attached to her side.

In response to the to hormones in the female's bloodstream, the testicles release sperm into her system so that she has an available mate whenever she is ready to breed. Many males can latch onto any given female. A female was once discovered with eight pairs of testicles hanging off her.

In most species, if the male does not find a female with which to mate, he dies. In some species, however, the males are able to swim away into a dark and private part of the ocean where they grow massively and turn into a female in place of their missing mate.

It really puts it into perspective how great it is to be a creature that doesn't die just because it can't get laid...

A Failing of Human Evolution; One of Many

Animals generally have cool things that a lot of people wish had stuck around a bit longer in the evolutionary path. Take, for instance, Batman and Spiderman, who may have taken their desire for animal abilities a bit too far. But I would bet that most people would gladly take wings if they were offered them, or gills, or the ability to leap between trees like squirrels and other cool stuff that just feels like it would be nice. We put far too much importance on things like sporting events for it not to be an obvious remnant of the physical prowess necessary for summoning mates in the animal kingdom.

Generally, we can live without these things. We have the intelligence to design transport so we don't need to be as proficient and travelling long distances, for example, and we've invented shoes so we don't need to have the protection animals get from paws. In fact, we have the intelligence to design machines to deal with pretty much everything that our increasingly lazy species can't be bothered to do with our own bodies, so these advantages that animals have over us aren't all that important.

And then this spider comes along and says, "Fuck you, mankind, bet you wish you had THIS..."

This is a giant wood spider called Nephila pilipes and in this species many tiny males compete for the attention of huge females, which can grow to between seven and ten times the size of the males. During copulation, males are known to sever their own genitals in order to plug the female stop other males breeding with their chosen mate. This is common, particularly among insects, and biologists with far too much time on their hands have documented it extensively.

This is a crafty technique - and the girls have caught on.

A team of researchers found that, when many males were converging on one female, the female can produce an amorphous plug to fill her genitals for the period during which she is laying eggs to prevent being impregnated again. The researchers came to the conclusion that this mechanism is a way of preventing "unwanted or excessive copulation".

Essentially, these spiders have developed a way to avoid being raped when they're busy doing other things.

Now, people may not always be busy doing other things, but no one wants to get raped. Even people who fantasise about getting raped, don't really want to be raped. By definition, rape is sex without consent.

Of all the things that evolution has kept in the human body - take, say, the appendix, which has lost all of its function in the evolutionary process aside from one day exploding and killing you from within - why not this one? This seems pretty damn useful, especially considering the closest we, as a species, have come to preventing "unwanted copulation" is this nasty-looking bastard: