I usually don’t care about the dumb shit that oozes out the mouths of celebrities, but this vomit needs to be cleaned.
It’s not typically men who buy all the imbecilic fashion magazines and it’s not men who typically obsess about shoes. I couldn’t (and neither do most men) give a damn about such things. It wasn’t typically men who watched (or gave a damn whatsoever about) that vapid show describing the entrails of women who live in the city—“Sex and the City.” And neither is it typically men who buy and read the “50 Shades” trilogy that infantilizes women and is literally about binding women.
By Duchovny’s vomit-logic, I suppose it is the fault of men for shoving food down the throats of obese women. By this logic, these poor and helpless women are at the mercy of and bound to the food industry. As such, men are to blame for women who suffer with all sorts of eating disorders because men also rule the fashion industry. Clearly, this must be true because men care so much about fashion.
The truth? The fashion industry is a way for masochistic women to bind themselves. If women want to spank themselves by wearing the latest imbecilic fashions and shoes, don’t blame men. That’s women’s own materialistic behavior, if they choose it.
Nobody, especially men, “forces” that on them. All I (and most men) ask of women is that they get reasonable exercise and exercise some self-control over their carbohydrate intake. Nothing about that entails imbecilic fashion or ridiculous shoes or absurdist expectations about beauty. The expectation is that women be humans, moral agents in charge of making their own decisions about their health, diet, and physical fitness.
Men, on the other hand, are expected to not only do all the cardio work, but they are also expected to do all the anaerobic weight-lifting so they build mass and look like a physically useful G.I.Joe/human-tool. On top of that, men also are expected to regulate their diet and look ripped with no fashion at all—just their shirtless chest protruding out from their human-body-tool, being a symbol of their alpha-male virility and utility. “Yeah, I’m your man ‘cause I can lift heavy shit for you and ‘cause I can beat up other beta-males, baby.”
It doesn’t end there. Oh no. Men are also expected to earn a living and have a well-developed mind—a mind that is marked with a science degree that earns him at least 6 figures of income. Even more, that income is expected to bring security to a wife and kids because that income is expected to be rendered to a wife and kids—without which, he is not really a man, probably just a loser or a homo or a child-man who refuses to “grow-up.”
So who exactly is “bound” here, asshat?
Editor’s note: feature image by Alan Levine. –PW
