so i watched the movie last night.  got the entire theater to ourselves (me, family, cousins from hawaii), thoroughly enjoyed the books, movie was incredible until the end, when they apparently cut off the most pivotal part of the first book, the cliffhanger ending -_-

since i haven't read the books in too long, i sparknoted the themes in golden compass, which led to sparknoting paradise lost, to googling misogyny in the bible.

what i found:

1. the dark materials trilogy isn't actually as anti-religious as it seems.  it ties in unmistakably with paradise lost, but pullman isn't obviously saying either free will or religion (innocence and grace) is better.  he actually did show the pros and cons of both.  though lyra and will did "save the world" through their fall from grace, this "saving the world" is still subjective depending on who's being affected.  it doesn't mean the world is all for the better now, and the ending isn't exactly without ambivalence. 

2. the bible is more misogynist than the qur'an
http://godisimaginary.com/i30.htm

doesn't compare the qur'an though. though i have a book about "women in islam" and the quotes from the qur'an there at least try to be more equal.  it mentions more of women's virtue and grace, and how women should uphold that grace, as opposed to the bible's "women suck, therefore they suck".  the qur'an's tone is more like "women have virtue, don't waste yourself".  hooray american women who hate on true islam, and buy their 16 year old daughters stripper dancing lessons so she can sexually objectify herself, and encourage each other to devour fashion magazines and starve themselves to death.

3. eve/ lyra was the one who caused the fall of grace, by daring to become conscious and learn the ways of the universe.  there is nothing inherently evil in consciousness, unless god, like the machines in the matrix, wanted to keep humans in the comatose state for eternity to keep himself in power for fear of people nagging him with too many questions (a.k.a. for "humans' own good".  also like human's fears of machines eventually becoming conscious and overpowering us.   actually this desire for wisdom means humans want to play god, because only gods can have such knowledge of the universe, and that means the all-powerful and all-loving god is actually threatened by this.  if he were that kind in sharing his love with us he would want to share such knowledge, so we can all become cosmic citizens, and not dolls stuck in his playhouse.  if he was all-knowing, he should have found a way around that.

there have been claims that god hates women.  in accordance with the above, he would of course feel threatened by the WOMAN, since she was the one who initiated this threat against him, and poor blundering adamwhocouldn'tthinkforhimself is rewarded by god for not thinking for himself, while eve:

To the woman He said, “I will greatly multiply Your pain in childbirth, In pain you shall bring forth children; Yet your desire shall be for your husband, And he shall rule over you.”

 17 Then to Adam He said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat from it’; Cursed is the ground because of you; In toil you shall eat of it All the days of your life.  18 “Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; And you shall eat the plants of the field; 19 By the sweat of your face You shall eat bread, Till you return to the ground, Because from it you were taken; For you are dust, And to dust you shall return.” [NASB]

so, all the sexism in the world that is going on today, if it is caused by a god who fears his creations overpowering him and gaining knowledge he deems forbidden (this fear inherently indicates that this god is not supreme. the utmost superior god would not have any such fear) is it ALL based on satan's ARBITRARY choice to choose EVE and not ADAM to eat the fruit.  they say, eve was SEDUCED by satan. but she can't possibly be seduced since at that time, she was not sexually aware. she was seduced by the idea of KNOWLEDGE. inherently, when god created eve, he created a machine that had the desire to think for itself. by accident. while adam was in the bushes in ignorant bliss gathering flowers for eve. 

if satan chose adam, "hey man, you're a man like me, let's be buddy buddy. men are superior right? shouldn't men be the ones desiring knowledge? conquering all the native distant indigenous lands? deciphering the meaning of the universe down to the last atom in scientific achievement", MEN would be the ones getting pregnant today and getting whipped around by women, who get to use the excuse of "i get to do this because satan chose you arbitrarily, and god punishes those who defy him out of fear, and not love."

ironically, men are supposed to represent rationality, logic, science-- what we culturally perceive as consciousness-- while women are stuck in emotion, feeling, the mystical, dreams, the "unconscious".  yang for clarity, yin for chaos and the unknown.

yet eve was the one who brought both of them to consciousness.  like the red pill. 


oh yeah  . . . I'M ON BREAK!

makes my heart melt, even though they're both looking at something other than each other (probably at porn)


that's right, i'm advertising for insomniac and goventures.  "spend new years getting wasted with a loved one!" i should get fucking paid.


jk

love is a trip.  i'm trying to stop being a hater. in the meantime i have giddyness overload.  which is more productive than being a hater, but not productive in the sense that i am any more motivated for finals.  ok, i didn't mean to sound so sarcastic.  i'm really emo right now, i have been, and all of you would die of my emo-ness if i didn't try to lace whatever i'm saying with an unhealthy and gratuitous dose of self deprecating sarcasm that actually isn't really funny.

<3  teehee :)

ok now correct me if i'm wrong, since i don't usually listen to songs with coherent words in them.  except for vocal trance, which is slightly coherent. and then there is drum n bass, with the rapping stoners yelling, and that is absolutely incohrerent.

but anyway, if you recall, my gender dilemma has to do with not being able to find examples and representations of male beauty in artistic imagery, which will serve as reference for me to create my artworks of hot guys dancing.

===

a few days ago, i was procrastinating on my flash animation project @ 3-5am in the morning.  i wasn't trying to procrastinate, my mind just wandered. what happened was that i was listening to karen overton- my loving arms, among some other trance songs, and that remix was just so cool and dark and powerful and seductive and the lyrics were just so sensual.  "put your loving arms around me . ..  inside your arms i'm burning."  so that got me incredibly aroused . .. sensually, the way girls like it :) and all i could think of was, damn i would love to have sex (while rolling) on this song.

that was slightly off topic.  what i mean to say is, in addition to there being no visual representations of hot males (that aren't pretty male models who look like pretty girlboys), THERE ARE NO REPRESENTATIONS OF MALE ATTRACTIVENESS IN MUSIC EITHER!

all the time on the radio, which is the only source of "people singing music/ non trance" for me, it's ALWAYS about the pretty/hot/beautiful/fly/supermodel girl the guy likes.  how nice or big her ass and tits are, how pretty she is, how nice she smells, what a nice body she has, how much he wants to bang her, etc

so everyone and their mom gets both a visual and audio understanding of female beauty.

BUT WHERE ARE ALL THE SONGS ABOUT HOW PRETTY/HOT/BEAUTIFUL/FLY guys are?! or the equivalent? where are the songs going "man his chest is so chiseled i wanna lick it" or osmething. i dunno, i dunno what kind of lyrics describe male hotness. i do'nt know what male hotness is period.

all the songs of girls singing are usually bitching about something.  about the guy who cheated on her, about the stupid guy, about other stupid girls, about "i'm so strong i don't need any of this shit", about "i am beautiful despite everything" kinda thing.

even the ones with girls singing about stuff to do with male hotness, like the horny vocals in trance songs, all go along the lines of "oooh... touch me .. . oh that feels good, oh baby you feel so good." even the "arms around me" song is still  .. . nothing at all to do with the guy. for all we know the person who's putting their arms around her is another girl. or some creature. or some robot O_O  so . . . in all the billboards and musical songs of beuaty and love and sex .. . it's always this hot girl in the spotlight, and some shadowy male lurking in the background who looks awkwardly out of place, like he might as well not be there.

can you see how hard it is for me, therefore, to have any reference of how to understand male hotness at all, let alone to the point of undrestanding where i can DRAW them out?

to write is to have mastery over thought. to draw and create art is to have mastery over thought as well, in a different way.

I HAVE NO MASTERY OVER THE IDEA OF WHAT MALE HOTNESS IS!!!!! HELP!

</end gender dilemma part II>

today's random thought: who's more likely to cheat? the guy or the girl?

based on stereotypes i used to think it was always the guy who would be first to cheat on the girl, since when nature calls and there is only enough blood for one head, gravity pulls it all to the lower head.  for all the head-turning girls out there, for all the porn and golddiggers, and all the guys who make excuses to their girlfriend that it's "natural" to check out other girls and watch porn all the time, it would seem logical that one of these days the head-turning look will go just a step further, right?

as opposed to girls who don't check out other guys and watch as much porn. if she doesn't even look around, how's she gonna find an opportunity to shag?

now that i'm slightly older and have talked to more people, it seems like girls have plenty of opportunity and reasoning to go after other guys, for various reasons. 

when i was younger, in a tiny asian high school and just starting out on my feminist quest, i had the convenient notion that all guys were just pigs.  now i know that's just one part of the spectrum :) anyway, the first time people told me stories, 1st or 2nd hand, of guys who were upset that their girlfriends left them for something new, i was honestly completely surprised that guys would care that much.  i would think, well, there are plenty of hot girls out there, and that's more important and easily satisfied for guys than for girls right?

and then there's the fact that guys complain WAAAYYY more than girls about not having a sigifnicant other, wehther it be because of loneliness or that unfulfilled sexual need.  since now i do know that guys really do get emotionally attached to girls, and seem to care more about finding one and keeping one, then it would make sense that if a guy finally finds one, he'll be more inclined to want to keep her. it's a sense of security that way.

also, there is the issue of how well each party satisfies the other.
guys are more easily satisfied right?
and it's a common complaint that girls have ridiculous demands and are impossible to satisfy? and expect guys to read their mind and make them happy?




in that case, wouldn't it be more likely that a guy is happy with his girl, but his girl demands way more than he can realistically provide?  from personal and 2ndhand experience, we girls can be incredibly picky and expect our guys to play more roles and satisfy in all these ways that even we can't request verbally, because we may not even know. and for so many of the times we girls are upset, but can't voice it, it's because we're thinking of issues that are too subtle to grasp and put into literal words.

naturally this would lead to the girl feeling dissatisfied by her guy, wehther or not she is being reasonable. 
there are tons of scenarios, such as the neglected housewives who hook up with their personal trainers because they feel like they lack the personal support, encouragement, and physical closeness and trust that normally should be provided by the partner, while it's not relaly teh guy's fault because he's at work all the time and is tired when he gets home.

and then there are cases where the girl really doesn't like the guy she's with, but she doesn't know how to get rid of him. maybe she's too needy, she needs the security, etc.

maybe she doesn't know how to work it out with the guy, she's not capable enough of doing that, or doesn't want to, and her dissatisfaction with her current guy leads to a search for some other guy to fulfill that gap. this search could be conscious or unconscious.  like, after a fight when he says "what's wrong" and she says "nothing," even though she's pissed as hell, but doesn't know how to explain it, or if she explains it and he thinks it's trivial, she gets pissed and thinks, maybe i'll find someone else who does care.

in the past, men had way more mobility because of cultural and financial reasons. he had the money and could go anywhere the hell he wanted, while the woman needed to find financial stability in the form of a husband.  if a man fools around, he's ok. if a woman fools around, even if she had legitimate reasons (her husband beat her, etc), she'd be a whore.

now women are way more independent (even though we sitll don't get paid as much for the same amount of work), and it's more acceptable at least for this generation to be sexually open. at least in the financial sense girls feel every right to put career first and go wherever the hell she wants whenever she wants.*

i don't think guys go through this.  so in conclusion, men are easily satisfied, and women are impossible to satisfy, so maybe that would lead to girls having more reason to cheat because she is looking for satisfaction? that is all :)

*on a related but not really related note:
guys complain that girls use up all their money. "money is the root of all evil, girls = money, therefore girls = evil" kind of shit.  if you want a girl who's financially independent, she's probably intelligent, a hardworker, independent, a go-getter, won't stay with you for your money, expects to be satisfied, puts self and career first, and is therefore 10x more likely to leave you :)

i need to stop procrastinating.

but before we get to that issue i must present to you what i spent the last 10 min of my entire night of procrastination:



this idea is MINE, and i am quite proud of it!

so naturally, i would say, the next step would be for me to find some way to asset my ownership over my creative genius.

but then, this image originally belonged to someone else.  despite how i would like to copyright this genius as mine, someone somewhere owns the rights to the original genius. correct?

ANYWAY, for the first time in my life, someone has stolen my artwork, and is using it on some promotional party flyer in NYC.  i won't post details yet, because i want to keep my game plan secret. but all i know is that i am excited about the possibility of major damage. 

all i know is that for THIS artpiece i DO own the copyright, though it might be a little hard to prove.

BUT, i am determined to screw this person over, and the rival community that the flyer was posted in.

ALSO, i tried to start background checking on any leads, and i think the designer CALLS HIMSELF A PHOTOSHOP RETOUCHING/ PHOTOMANIP EXPERT ON CRAIGSLIST.

AN EXPERT PHOTOSHOPPER?! WHO CAN'T EVEN OBSERVE BASIC GRAPHIC-UTILIZATION LAWS?

AND FINALLY,  . .. the flyer isn't even that good.

so what 'im gonna do, after i screw these poeple over, since the flyer is used to promote a party that can potentially make money and i can say you're using my artwork to make money, after i say "YOU STOLE MY ARTWORK BITCH," i'll say, p.s. you suck btw.

WISH ME LUCK MY FRIENDS.  man i have so much shitload of work to do.


on a final note: all creative rights of hte original "Huge Manatee" creation belongs to its rightful owner, and i have no fucking clue who it is.