WWJWD?

Maybe I'll just make this a monthly blog. :)

So last weekend Mr. Man and I went to Honfest with a couple of friends. For those of you who are unfamiliar, Honfest is a marketing scheme for Cafe Hon a celebration of Baltimore's "hons," those bygone, beehived queens of kitsch who peer through cat-eye glasses and say stuff like "how you doin' hon?" Actually, everybody in Baltimore says that.

Anyway, in spite of the wicked heat, Honfest was a-buzz with hons and non-hons alike, enjoying crab cakes, pit beef, smoothies and beer, and treating themselves to summer dresses, t-shirts and kitschy souvenirs. For those who were inspired but lacked the know-how to rat up their own hair, there was an on-site, open-air salon serving up beehives on the fly.

One Bawlmer resident was quite noticeably absent. Mr. John Waters, arguably Charm City's most famous living resident (Mama Cass was also from here, Cal Ripken probably still enjoys greater fame in most circles) thinks Honfest is bullshit. Waters thinks the festival is a place for middle-class suburbanites to come and make fun of this working-class stereotype.

You know, the stereotype he's been exploiting for years.

The stereotype that he sold to New Line Cinemas so that they could dress John Travolta up like a fat drag queen, because I guess there aren't enough fat drag queens out there that they could find one to play Mama Turnblatt--oh wait, maybe Mama Turnblatt could have just been played by a fat woman--there are lots of those, too, but I guess that wouldn't have insinuated that fat women are as attractive as drag queens, an insinuation that is totally fucked up and offensive to fat women, trans women, and the people who care about them.

It kind of reminds me of how Perez Hilton likes to lambast Sherri Shephard or whatever her name is and people like her who air their uneducated opinions on trans issues, even though he himself makes fun of trannies incessantly (at least he did when I quit reading him). I'm not saying that all white gay men are hypocrites--they're not--but these are two relatively high-profile cases of the big fat (or creepy skinny) pot calling the kettle black.

Whatever, bitches.

Eat this

In spite of my strong ethical concerns around food (and my belief that not eating your veggies might make you crazy--look to Britney Spears for evidence of that bit of wisdom) and the fact that I've been an on-again-off-again vegetarian for years (I eat meat now, but hardly ever, and only when I've met the farmer, or really trust the restaurant) I generally think that Peta is a pretty fucking stupid organization, a belief that was recently strengthened when they bought my mailing address from some other group and sent me a plea for donations, thinly veiled as a questionaire, which included two pages of address labels. Now, my background in psychology and media theory makes me privy to the knowledge that groups like Peta give people those kinds of freebies in order to guilt us into making donations--studies have shown that when people don't donate, they don't use the labels. Now, I don't want to use about a 1/3 of the labels they sent me, because they say "Peta" on them, and I don't want anybody to think that I'm a blood-hurling hater. (Disclaimer: I would never buy a real, new fur, but I do own a fake one, as well as a vintage wool cape w/a fur-lined hood that my gramma gave me. I also hate factory farms, pet factory farms, and stuff like that.) I'm gonna snip the Peta logo off and use them anyway--take that, Peta!

I hope a) that you're still with me after that long intro and b) that you'll forgive my long-windedness (I named this blog Mouthy Femme for a reason) but anyway, Peta redeemed themselves by a smidge when I ran across this little bit of brilliance while I was pretending to work today. I can say for Peta that they are pretty brilliant promoters--they've got star power galore--but teaming up with Free Range Studios, the geniuses that produced Store Wars and this little Garth Brooks/Walmart video, may have been their smartest move yet.

I'm not all that keen on the impotence argument, but it beats shaming a marginally chubby do-gooder for not taking on the meat industry (to be fair, Al Gore did deserve to be shamed for failing to mention the meat industry's substantial contribution to Global Warming, but "characture-izing" him as a sloppy chickenshit was unfair, in my opinion). And of course, this video was like some kind of weird dream where political candidates actually discuss food, which is a hope I hold near to my heart.

Speaking of shaming fatties, have any of you seen this bit of fascist insanity? I got it from a food listserv and thought that maybe it was some kind of sick joke but I poked around and see that it's true: Mississippi lawmakers are trying to bar restaurants from serving food to people with a BMI over 30. For those of you who may not know, Mississippi is the fattest state in the country (you can see how fat your state is here) and has been for at least the last two years--I guess they think that publicly shaming and starving fatties into submission might knock them down in the rankings. Aside from stating the obvious by calling this idea fascist and insane, I'm pretty much speechless on this one. (I can hear your collective sigh of relief from here.) Ok. You can go now.