Thursday, April 29, 2010

Thursday roundup

Jay e-mailed me with the following new term: "Teletubby: your mom's ability to tell you you're fat from a distance..."

Hat tip to Chad for WTF, CNN?, an unfortunately spot-on website.

Last week's New Yorker has a piece on Animal, a meat restaurant in LA (entrees run about 3,000 calories, and they put bacon in the dessert). The article mentions, in passing, that the restaurant owners sometimes have women review the menu to ensure it's not too off-putting to them. Because, apparently, women are intimidated by lots of meat (seriously). This is especially interesting because two Grist posts talk about meat as manly, both centering on KFC's double-down sandwich. It gets interesting here, because a commenter accuses Tyler Falk of being too hard on meat-eaters and says that carnivorism isn't manly; it's human. To which TF replies that it's KFC that's playing on the meat-masculinity link.

On a quasi-related note, Hilton Als parses Tyler Perry's idea of what makes a real (black) man, or woman. And it's not, in the case of the latter, professional success or financial independence. Quite the contrary.

1 comment:

Ernessa T. Carter said...

So I make it a policy not to comment on Tyler Perry items these days, but I did find this New Yorker theory interesting, just because I've only seen two of his movies, and in the case of WHY DID I GET MARRIED TOO -- his latest, the men were neither light-skinned or saviors. I also found it interesting that the women were all considered beautiful, even though they ranged in size from super-skinny to overweight. A white friend and I were talking about how a white director would have cast that with only skinny, rich women. So instead of hearing yet another takedown of the most successful black director in Hollywood, I would like to see an article about what he's doing that white movies aren't, especially when it comes to size and income issues. I mean when's the last time you saw a white rom-com featuring four women of different classes, backgrounds, and sizes who were all depicted as gorgeous?