The air warms; snow melts,
revealing a winter’s worth
of unclaimed dog shit.

If you’re familiar with basic feminist theories, or possess any amount of media criticism or literacy, you’ll see right through these ads: they transform people into objects by focusing singularly on mere body parts; portray feminine passivity as normative behaviour for women; convince you that Product X will get you the man; shame women into believing their bodies are inferior (and that the product can fix that); sell the notion that you CAN remake yourself into the perfect woman if only you buy this.

Partway through her speech (regretfully I didn’t take down the timestamp, but if I watch it again I’ll amend this post), Kilbourne shows an ad for flavoured douches that she remembers from her youth in the ’70s. The utter ridiculousness and garishness of the ad, seen today, seems more appropriate for The Onion than a teen mag, but I felt comfortable knowing that an ad like this wouldn’t fly in the year 2010 — that we had created a safe distance from the insanity of 1970.

That must have been a premature thought, however, since today I see Women’s Day magazine has run an ad for douche-hawker Summer’s Eve. In the year 2010.

(Click to enlarge.)

Maybe I shouldn’t expect so much — that really, advertisers will continue to use the same, 40-year-old messages to coerce women into accepting these harmful products, under the pretense that they’re healthy, and can have a transformative effect on one’s self-esteem or professional/personal life. They’re the same tropes, again and again and again.

Even women who should know better still perpetuate these ideas. Last year, an ayurvedic spa opened up inside my hot yoga studio. The spa owner set up a display case selling various facial creams, cleansers and cosmetics — and a line of vaginal washes and wipes for $20 a pop.

Now, yoga to me is interesting, because as much as yoga as an industry commercializes the female form (Lululemon selling stretchy pants to transform one’s ass into a globular marvel is another post altogether), yoga as a practice encourages people to accept their body and its limitations. You learn to be and accept how far you can stretch and for how long you can hold poses, but in an indirect way, yoga also teaches you to love your body. You stare at yourself in a mirror for 90 minutes, after all. And though yoga is dismissed as a pansy’s activity, I’ve seen hockey players (as in, Toronto Maple Leafs) and MMA fighters crumble in warrior pose long before I even began to trembled. So you learn you body has strength, more than you know. It’s quite empowering.

When a yoga studio teaches its students to love their bodies, but its spa partner sells douches, people like me get mad. After a few weeks of staring at the glass case, I finally brought it up with one of the studio’s employees. I explained the incongruity of selling self-acceptance and vaginal insecurity under the same roof, and that vaginas are actually self-cleaning, and that in the relatively uncommon event that one’s vagina needed an intervention, its owner is better off consulting a doctor, not an ayurvedic spa technician. She got quite offended, and huffed, “Well, if women want to buy them, they can. You don’t have to.” Of course! Because it’s a free market, baby!

The studio has since done away with the display case (though presumably the spa still sells them from behind closed doors), but the point is, even women who should and do know better sometimes fall into these traps. Which is why women’s magazines and hawkers of beauty (e.g. spas) have a responsibility not to encourage these myths, and yet they do.

Hat tip to dailykos.com and to @repo_mandy for this.

‘Cause I’m beating this horse good and dead before I move onto another topic to rage about, I wrote about hockey again, this time for my Metro column:

Both our hockey teams struck Olympic gold in Vancouver. The next day, hockey fever raged on for the NHL. But whither the women after the podium is packed away? Is there support for women’s hockey beyond the Games?

I polled a few hockey-obsessed friends: The answer was no. For one, there’s no high-profile league; even if there were, the game lacks speed and finesse, one said. Another said women don’t excite the way pugilistic NHLers do. Wait, where did that fuzzy feeling go? I thought we were proud of our golden girls.

Despite limited interest in the game itself, I love women’s hockey. The players push the envelope of what’s seen as acceptable for “the fairer sex.” Look no further than the constant chortling about lesbian players and coaches, and about Team Canada’s cigar-and-beer-fuelled celebration (which I maintain was a tongue-in-cheek jab at how male players celebrate) to understand its place in our social fabric.

Female hockey players have always been a bit subversive. The sport began with men, and as a result, fans have come to see the boys’ version as the way it ought to be played. Now, women are adopting it, but with a style that’s all their own. I must be among a minority of those who would welcome that kind of play — if this wasn’t the case, a North American league like the NHL would exist by now.

There are some examples of women in men’s hockey: Hayley Wickenheiser in European leagues; Manon Rheaume in NHL exhibition games — but one league said Wickenheiser shouldn’t play with men, while Rheaume was dismissed as a publicity stunt. Still, everyone rubbernecked — eager to see if these gals could overcome that unspoken notion that men always outclass women, and actually beat a guy.

It’s a difficult pill to swallow, acknowledging that some spectators will never be inspired by women for their sheer athleticism; that she will always be good … but only for a girl.

Add to that the talk that women’s hockey ought to be removed from the Olympics. Supporters cried foul, citing limited opportunities and underfunding, maintaining that it will just take time to establish the sport and develop a deep talent pool. I hope that’s the case. That would be golden.

What I didn’t have room to add was an observation that when it comes to women’s sports — not just hockey — we tend to love it with our minds, in a cerebral, affirmative sort of way that says, ‘Yes! We support your right to play any game you please (but I don’t have to watch it, right?)’ while we will always love men’s sports more intensely, elementally, and we will feel that love with our hearts — from the very core to the tips of our raggedy-ass, blue and white Maple Leafs clown wigs. No one ever sits on the edge of their couch in double overtime, hands locked in prayer and brow furrowed, fervently in prayer to the hockey gods, waiting and hoping their bunch of breathless and exuberant women to hoist a silver-plated cup, y’know?

I suppose you can’t force anyone to feel a pure sense of joy and passion for something if it doesn’t strike you that way, but I wonder how much of it is manufactured by a celebrity-driven, money-soaked, extremely powerful league and sponsor system, and how much is rooted in the athletes themselves and their willful determination. I don’t believe female players feel their love for their sport any less than male players do, nor that they are limited in passing on that sentiment to their audience. If you do, you should read Roy McGregor’s first hand account of the cigar-and-booze celebration, which made me love the women’s team all that much more.

Any sport that requires such a money sink is self-stratifying. It’s a terrible social phenomenon happening not just in amateur sports, but also in skyrocketing university tuition, extra fees required even in public school, laptops and other technological gadgets that are now virtually mandatory in academic and professional spheres. It also means at the highest level, the NHL, as in many other places in life, those that succeed are the ones that can afford it. It’s disheartening that all these opportunities are moving further and further out of reach of low-earning Canadians families.

…

When [hockey is] put on a cultural pedestal, it demands a fairness and accessibility that befits the morals of the country it represents. I think most Canadians believe we are a fair, free and equal country. Hockey, if it ever did represent that, doesn’t anymore.

The spirit of a nation comes from its people, emblematic of their shared experience, ethnicity, history or culture. Our spirit is that we lack all these, and instead take polite pride in them all. We are not one dish, one national dress, one language, one music (I would defect if Anne Murray or Celine Dion were our national chanteuses). How, then, can Canada reduce its sport to just one?

Read the whole thing here. I plan on elaborating a bit more on growing up in Hockeyville Richmond Hill later on this blog.

Crocs plummeted 44% premarket after the footware maker slashed its second-quarter guidance and offered a disappointing outlook for the year, reflecting a “challenging” U.S. marketplace and slower-than-expected growth internationally.

Take that, NAS:CROX. Your time is up.

I don’t get it, but I LOL’ed:

Whenever I get a package of plain M&Ms, I make it my duty to continue the strength and robustness of the candy as a species. To this end, I hold M&M duels.

Taking two candies between my thumb and forefinger, I apply pressure, squeezing them together until one of them breaks and splinters. That is the “loser,” and I eat the inferior one immediately. The winner gets to go another round.

I have found that, in general, the brown and red M&Ms are tougher, and the newer blue ones are genetically inferior. I have hypothesized that the blue M&Ms as a race cannot survive long in the intense theater of competition that is the modern candy and snack-food world.

Occasionally I will get a mutation, a candy that is misshapen, or pointier, or flatter than the rest. Almost invariably this proves to be a weakness, but on very rare occasions it gives the candy extra strength. In this way, the species continues to adapt to its environment.

When I reach the end of the pack, I am left with one M&M, the strongest of the herd. Since it would make no sense to eat this one as well, I pack it neatly in an envelope and send it to M&M Mars, A Division of Mars, Inc., Hackettstown, NJ 17840-1503 U.S.A., along with a 3×5 card reading, “Please use this M&M for breeding purposes.”

This week they wrote back to thank me, and sent me a coupon for a free 1/2 pound bag of plain M&Ms. I consider this “grant money.” I have set aside the weekend for a grand tournament. From a field of hundreds, we will discover the True Champion.

There can be only one.

By this logic, I guess plain chocolate M&M’s really are the superior product. Take that, peanut eaters! From Roger Ebert’s blog.

Aside from Superbowl Sunday, I had a very surreal experience in a certain sports bar in downtown Toronto on Saturday, when I went with Mike to go watch UFC with a bunch of bro-dudes and miscellaneous jocks (Lesnar v. Mir, Noriega v. Sylvia). While I can handle a bit of blood sport, I definitely maxed on on football and jiu-jitsu submissions this weekend. Men are such strange creatures.

PS: The real bloodsport comes Tuesday. Hilary is going down.