Fig. 13. Hot castaway-on-castaway axxxion!!!
Part I: The Gathering Storm
Who doesn’t enjoy Burnt Orange Report, the popular Texas politics blog run by a handful of plucky, knowledgeable, articulate UT student Democrats? They are very serious about it, which is admirable, considering that Texas has the most dreadfully comical politics of any state in the union.
Recently they even got themselves one of those controversial chick bloggers! You go!
Anyway, as yesterday dawned I was the picture of spinster aunt contentment, reading a horrifying Burnt Orange speculation on John Cornyn as a possible candidate for Supreme Court, when I noticed one of those pie fight ads in the sidebar.
I allude to an ad for the Gilligan’s Island reality show depicting Ginger and Mary Ann in flagrante delicto with a bunch of meringue (see Fig. 13, above). I had been dimly aware of these pie fight ads showing up on various lefty blogs for a week or so, but at the time had registered only a faint pique. A gal’s gotta filter out the bulk of the day’s relentless sexist assaults if she’s gonna make it out of bed in the morning.
But for some reason, seeing the thing on the good old Burnt Orange Report disturbed me. You know how you feel when you find out your sensitive artist boyfriend has been keeping an issue of “Hot Teen Butts” under the mattress? It was kind of like that. I mean, I know these kids aren’t exactly radicals, and that most of them are male, but one comes to expect from one’s liberal bloggers a modicum of fluency in standard feminist thought. So I sent an email to Burnt Orange’s Karl-Thomas Musselman, who I’d read was the new Orange-In-Chief, asking “WTF?”
Karl-Thomas politely explained that the ads aren’t his department, and provided me with a link to a June 5th DailyKos post on this very subject. Whether he meant the DKos piece to clarify the Burnt Orange position on demeaning sexist ads, or he just wished to assist in my general pie-fight edification, as of this writing I know not. But click the link I did, and boy was I ever astonished.
For unbeknownst to me, the pie fight ads had already achieved a brilliant notoriety.
To be continued…
If you haven’t seen these already, check out Amanda’s take on this, http://www.pandagon.net/archives/2005/06/unavoidable.html#more
and Echidne’s (my favorite blogger) http://haloscan.com/tb/echidne/111807886295399468
Hey thanks, Deja Pseu! I’ve added your links to the second half of this post.
and here i thought i was a hopeless nerd for not only using the firefox browser and its adblock plug-in, but enthusiastically writing regular-expression filter files for that latter one.
i haven’t seen a web ad in weeks; on the sites i regularly frequent, not in months. and judging from the pic you posted, i haven’t been missing anything. thank goodness i’m such a hopeless nerd!