Springhole.net Blog

Well, what do you expect when you eat all that bread?

I hate makeup. I hate it with a deep hatey hate.

A few weeks ago I found myself tricked into listening to a Mary Kaybot tout the importance of makeup and hair straighteners. It was all I could do to keep myself from getting loud and obnoxious – and in fact, I failed. Twice.

I had some rather interesting discourses. I pointed out that many jobs required women to wear makeup, but didn’t hold the same standards for men. The Mary Kaybot responded that men are starting to wear makeup. Sorry guys, this is NOT progress. This is GOING BACKWARD, in fact.

The Privilege Denying Dude at the so-called “party” blurped out that it’s just like wearing a tie. No, it’s not. Ties take a lot less effort than makeup to put on. They don’t go stale after a few months. They don’t put neurotoxins and hormone disruptors and who knows what else near mucous membranes. It also takes a lot less time and effort to get a tie on than it does makeup. Ties even come in handy-dandy clip-on form for those who don’t want to fuss with the manual model; makeup has no such analog.

The Privilege Denying Gal blurped out that it’s just part of “looking professional.” Oh, good gravy. If wearing a dead hamster on your head made you “look professional,” would you do it? Heck, the rules of what it takes for a woman to “look professional” change so often you’d think they’d catch on and say, “screw this; I’m wearing a black tie and getting a buzzcut; those have been in style for years and aren’t going anywhere.”

PDG admonished me for being such a meanie-pants because the nice lady was sacrificing her time. NO. SHE. WASN’T. She’s a Mary Kaybot, and that means she has ulterior motives: motives to get people to buy her lousy products and motives to turn more young girls into Mary Kaybots. Mary Kay is a commercial cult with some pseudo-Christian dogma thrown in for good measure. Don’t believe me? Visit Pink Truth to learn more.

So why do I hate makeup?

Basically, it cramps my style, man.

I touch my face. A lot. Yeah, a lot of people tell you “OH DON’T DO THAT YOU’LL GET TEH ZITZORS!” but I don’t care. My face gets itchy, and I don’t have the patience to sit around feeling like I have insects crawling across my skin for the sake of my make-up – or rather, make-believe.

It starts looking crappy within hours. I have better things to do than “freshen up.”

It takes time. Five minutes of putting on makeup is five minutes I could be using to study or play a game or something else I actually want to do.

Oh, and most makeup CONTAINS HARMFUL CHEMICALS. Carcinogens. Hormone disruptors. Neurotoxins. When I brought this up, something beautifully lulzy happened – another Mary Kaybot piped up with “Mary Kay does not test on animals, nor do we get results from laboratories that do!”

I knew I had that Mary Kaybots over a barrel right then, because the only way they could hope to defeat me was to distract their future victims with an entirely different issue. (Yes, your babies might be born with horrible defects or you might get breast cancer, but at least the BUNNIES are safe! Think of the CUTE LITTLE BUNNIES!)

I have a better idea, Mary Kaybots – quit your cult and start teaching girls how to be confident WITHOUT MAKEUP AND HAIRSPRAY AND HAIR STRAIGHTENERS. Teach them to fight the idea that a woman has to wear pancake to “look professional” and has to put spray-on glue into her hair to force it into an unnatural keratin formation. No, you won’t make money, but then again you’re probably not going to make any money selling Mary Kay products, either – because Mary Kay is a pyramid scheme, and pyramid schemes are DESIGNED to keep most of their followers poor and at the bottom.

If you’ve never seen it before, I recommend watching the Consuming Kids documentary, which examines the history of advertising aimed at children, as well as the disturbing methods marketers use to determine the best ways to get children to buy (or ask their parents to buy) their products, be it toys, gadgets, or junk food.

The documentary has been uploaded by several people on YouTube. I’ve arranged one set into a playlist, which you can watch here.

This is an actual bumper sticker.

Something about it feels very familiar.

While perusing Treehugger, I checked out the Fashion & Beauty section for a bit of eyecandy. Now, rake-thin models I’ve come to expect, disgusting as they are. What really struck me today was that not only were the models stick-thin, they looked like corpses.

Check it out for yourself: 1, 2, 3

Thanks, fashion industry, for letting us know that the starved-to-death look is IN!

In a city nearby, they’ve already put up at least part of the city’s Christmas decorations – shiny lights, sparkly garlands, the usual.

While in town, I saw a type of decoration that struck me as… well, wrong.

The type of decoration was the banner they hang from poles. The banner was blue with red and white swishes that suggested the shape of a conifer, with stars sprinkled around including a star at the top.

What are they saying? Are they saying it’s patriotic to celebrate Christmas? Are they saying Christmas is an American thing? What?

Either way, I can’t see how this doesn’t violate the spirit of Separation of Church and State, as the very nature of the design links Christmas (and therefore Christianity) with America and patriotism.

Today me, my sister, and brother went to Halloween Express, and… wow, were we ever disappointed. The merchandise was essentially the same junky crap you find on Wal*Mart’s Halloween isle; the only difference was that there was more of it.

The costumes were flimsy and overpriced, and if you’re a woman, your only option is to dress like a skank unless you’re overweight. Now, I don’t mind if a gal wants to dress up as a sexy policewoman; but the fact that every costume for women of average-to-below-average body weight are sexualized is appalling.

There were a sickening amount of “Indian” and “Native American” costumes – one even called “Pocahottie” – a trifecta of cultural appropriation, sexism, and racism. You can see this abomination for yourself here. (This costume, or one almost identical to it, made Huffington Post’s list of most here.) Aside from the fact that the costume isn’t a very good representation of Egyptian couture, why the “da?”

There was also a selection of costumes which I was rather glad my mother didn’t see, such as a costume to dress up as a “giant boob” – and yes, this product was marketed to men. The package suggested getting someone else to wear one, too, so you could go as a pair.

Also, they were selling fake cigars which weren’t supposed to be sold to children under 14. My 12-year-old brother purchased one and nobody batted an eye. Go figure.

There’s nothing quite so annoying as when you’re trying to the comment on the less-than-stellar aspects of a show as when someone pops up and whines, “can’t you just enjoy it for what it is?” or “ugh, why do you have to analyze it?” (If you have to ask, the answer is obvious: I’m smarter than you. Deal with it and take your anti-intellectualism elsewhere, or better yet, grow a few braincells of your own.)

This form of gormless wharrgarbl has now been given its own name: Moff’s Law.

And I shall call it when it happens.

High Blood Pressure? 10 Food Swaps to Bring it Down

Great article. Everyone should follow its advice, and not just because of the salt.

Moar TS3 Exchange Fail – Stereotype & Sexism Edition

Let’s take another exciting trip to the TS3 Exchange!

It turns out there is a way to find relevant results – the Advanced Search actually pulls up results based on what you entered, rather than… honestly, I don’t know how the non-advanced search works. All I know is that it really doesn’t work.

So using this Advanced search, I decided to take a look-see and find out how many uploads of particular races and such were comprised of various stereotypes. I searched for various ethnic sims.

Sims depicting Native Americans were among the most stereotyped. As often as not, you would see them with at least two out Loves The Outdoors, Angler, and Green Thumb. One sim’s description even went so far as to say that the Sim was brave and had a green thumb because of her Native American blood. Another one had an entire wardrobe of leather because she was Native America, including her swimsuit.

Latinas (there were remarkably few Latinos) tended to be Athletic, Great Kissers, and/or Hopeless Romantics.

Japanese Sims tended to be workaholic if male, and an inordinate number of Japanese females had personality traits that seemed to be taken from anime characters. A goodly number of them also had the Computer Whiz trait.

The majority of Irish sims had red and occasionally garish orange hair. (In reality, only 10% of the population has red or reddish hair – and there are more redheads in Scotland, with 13% of the population having red or reddish hair.) Lucky, Green Thumb, and Great Kisser were favored traits.

Exchange member Walpurgis creates Sims out of missing people or victims of unsolved murders. Many of Walpurgis’s Native American sims have Loves The Outdoors as a trait, and a large number of her black sims are endowed with Party Animal. An Asian sim (the only one I saw) was given the Computer Whiz trait. When I looked up the person to see if Walpurgis had based her traits on a description somewhere, I could find nothing.

Another member, Xylander, is working on a “Women of the World” series. As you can see for yourself, each woman is horribly stereotyped:

Canada
France
Ireland
Brazil
Japan

Another thing I noticed was that many female sims had descriptions that went something along the lines of:

“This sim isn’t just gorgeous, she also has the brains to match!”
“Who says you can’t have beauty AND brains?”
“Can this sim prove that she can use both her beauty and brains to succeed?”

Wording like this implies that an attractive woman with intelligence is something we should be surprised about. But when it comes to men, a mention of brains is seldom treated as something we should find shocking. When it comes to female sims, statements about their brains often are ended in exclamation marks. Statements about the brains of male sims are ended in blase periods.

Also, sim descriptions that assure us that the sim does indeed have brains are plentiful among female sims, but uncommon among males. The word “brains” brought up 123 results (duplicates omitted) for females. Two of them were pointing out a lack of brains, four were brain eaters, and one refused to eat brains, leaving us a total of 114 female sims advertised for their brains. On the other hand, there were only 26 results for males, seven of them being zombies and one of them being the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz – leaving us fewer than 20 males using brains as an advertising point.

There are, at the time of writing, approximately 47870 male Sims on the Exchange, and 136206 female sims, which means that approximately .039% male sims are being advertised for their brains compared to .083% female sims. While you might think that this would be good because women should be appreciated for their brains, I believe it indicates that people feel they must point out that a woman (especially an attractive woman) has brains because she she is so often expected not to.

I could go on for ages with this post, but I think I’ll end it here. In closing, I hope it’ll make you think a little harder about the sims you’re creating.