Allow me to Rant a minute here …

So, it’s been gloomy, drizzly, chilly and foggy here for at least a week. It poured last night and there were flood warnings every where.  That means it’s one of those weeks where you tend to spend too much time indoors; and that, of course, means the TV is on way too much.   Most of the time I’ve got TV news in the background or the Weather Channel given the right mix of severe weather conditions anyway.  We had that outbreak of tornadoes a few weeks ago.   I keep telling myself to pull out my videos and books but I also have to do some paper grading and such so it’s not always a good idea for me to get all that distracted.

It’s also been a month of dreary news.  We’ve seen some of the worst puffery coming from congress.   Many of these old white dudes have decided to take a stand on excessive spending. Our so-called leaders pride themselves on denying victims of Hurricane Sandy a pittance of our vast national wealth.  Then, there’s the national “debate” on what kind of arsenals crazy white men are allowed to have and if we have to turn our grade schools into army bases while denying our children other things like computers, school lunches, and well paid and respected teachers.  Add a heaping shit load of rape culture and predatory, pampered, and protected athletes from universities and high schools and just the regular news is enough to let you know that there’s so much rampant male bravado and privilege in this damned country gone amok that you wouldn’t think you’d need many more reminders. But, there are many more reminders that our culture is penis obsessed.  It’s all over the damned TV these days.

Again, I’ve had the TV on way too much and I’m served up not only these real things but a big ol’ helping of men who need pills, potions, ointments, and contraptions for erections.  There are these TV commercials where ugly, nasty looking trolls like, say, Mitch McConnell, talk about how happy their wives are now because they are real mean again.  Some how, I can’t imagine their wives being all that happy but maybe it’s just me.

I’m regaled with yucky details about how they have to lead seal team-like searches for bathroom locations because of poorly functioning prostates.  How they still really find their wives charming–complete with flirty, child behaving adult women as props–so they just simply have to have ointments, pumps, and pills to pork them at will. The new, big affront is some kind of testosterone cream that evidently has horrible side effects for any child or women who comes near it.  All of this is necessary because they might ‘fade’ into the background because their penises just don’t do things they used to do and which–by the way–is perfectly natural for their age.

You’re old, your whiteness isn’t that special, and your damned leaky, flaccid, penises shouldn’t be the continual obsession of drug companies and Madison Avenue.  WTF is wrong with you?  The worst of the ads come on late at night and involve some kind of suction contraption where some of the worst looking men in the world go on about being the best they can be.

These never ending assaults of televised white penis obsession are gross and rather traumatizing. It brings back all those icky moments in my life when I realized that a lot of my life was going to be defined around having to deal with them and deal with the fact that a portion of the planet was so obsessed with theirs that the fact I didn’t have one was going to be an issue for all kinds of things. It also reminds me that I have two daughters that still have to deal with this kind of crap.

First, and foremost it brings me back to a first date I had in my freshmen year of college who took me to see the movie Carnal Knowledge showing at one of those Midnight Movie extravaganzas that was so popular back in the day.  He ended our date with the pitch “Wanna ball?”  That should’ve been a warning to me right there.  For those of you that want a reminder of that movie, here’s the last scenes that really stuck in my teenage mind.  That would be the Ball Busters on parade slide show and the hooker scene where the male erection seems to be the center of everything.

Anyway, I’ve turned off the TV.  I feel like it’s an all out assault.  It reminds me of another one of those movies that I saw with that same guy at that same midnight movie series about a month later.   Flesh Gordan is a movie not worth seeing but I do want to mention the attack of the penisaurus scene because, wow they’re back, they’re flaccid and mad and they evidently need all kinds of pumps, attention, creams, pills, and air time. Oh, and did I mention they come attached to a lot of dudes that need some serious psychotherapy?