Archive for the ‘Fag Up!’ Category

Someone on twitter this week was talking about how she tried to explain to her Dad the ‘homoerotic subtexts’ in the 1980s Hollywood film, The Lost Boys. But he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) see it, and thought it was just a movie about vampires. This led me to introduce her to the work of Mark MetroDad Simpson. [...]

This is another version of my review of  Mark McCormack s new book on Declining Homophobia. ——————————————– The Declining Significance of Homophobia, by Mark McCormack, is, according to its author, a ‘good news story’. The good news being that homophobia amongst young people is on the wane. His research with mainly young men students in three English [...]

I have critiqued the feminist concept of hegemonic masculinity before. The idea that there is a ‘masculine ideal’ that some men achieve and exploit, and others are oppressed by does not work for me. Also if there is a ‘hegemonic masculinity’ why is there not a ‘hegemonic femininity’. The concept relies on the idea that patriarchy exists, [...]

http://www.queerty.com/in-your-face-ad-addresses-issue-of-male-rape-and-sexual-abuse-20120208/ On seeing this promo poster for a rape survivors campaign, my initial reaction was: Fag UP! But that seems to be my reaction to everything to do with masculinity these days. So I thought I’d put this one to you, dear QRG readers, and ask you what you think of the ‘real men get raped’ [...]

Unilad, a website that became notorious this week and has now been taken down. I don’t know who spotted it first, but it quickly entered the social network sphere via women who were outraged by it. I didn’t get to see a great deal of it before it was taken down after a deluge of [...]

In a very recent article in the UK paper, The Telegraph, we were told that David Miliband has been railing at the Labour Party. His brother continues to bumble and fumble his way through running the opposition, whilst David follows in his true Big Brother, Tony Blair’s footsteps, and makes oodles of cash for doing not [...]

This is the latest post from www.marksimpson.com It relates to my post on ‘Masculinity isn’t good – it’s great!’ in some ways. http://quietgirlriot.wordpress.com/2012/01/05/masculinity-isnt-good-its-grrreat/ It doesn’t reference my ace piece about Geordie Shore, a programme that he hasn’t written about hardly at all: http://quietgirlriot.wordpress.com/2011/06/07/death-on-the-tyne/ But it  is an interesting exploration of the wonderful world of men’s body image [...]

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/12/20/reasserting-the-priesthood-as-masculine/ The frankly annoyingly feminist Sociological Images referred to a recruitment video for the priesthood featured at NYPriest website. The gender studies academics at S.I. said: ‘Usually, a male-dominated occupation wouldn’t be in need of having its masculinized character stressed so openly. However, the child sex abuse scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church in the U.S. [...]

Sociological Images have found a marketing campaign by a household decorating company, which aims to attract men to more ‘girly’ colours, by giving them ‘manly’ names. So this ‘plum escape’ becomes ‘sucker punch’ and ‘bone white’ becomes ‘beer foam’. The saleswoman in the video shows men and women the same colours but with the contrasting ‘masculine’ [...]

Mark Simpson is fighting the good fight against machismo and mendacious marketing, and calling once again, for America to Fag UP! You know the drill by now. His idea was to take all those ‘manly strap-ons’ used to sell products to men whilst reassuring them of their red-blooded (heterosexual) masculinity like manbags and manscara and [...]