SFWeekly creates an equation to determine “the difference between girls and guys”

HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHah…….wait, this isn’t funny. Do charts like this really say anything? Because it’s equally sexist then that should make it ok? Thanks a lot for not really helping the problem at all.

*It is important to note that a guy can score a 4 whereas a woman can only score at 2…wtf?

Equation: The Difference Between Girls and Guys

Back from Vegas…whoowhee.

I don’t know if it was the oxygen pumped in the air of the casinos, the non stop smell of cigarette/cigar smoke or perhaps the men both young and old yelling out “yum yum, cut me a slice!” but it’s good to be home.

If you are anything like me (a New Yorker sometimes lookin for an escape) I do recommend leaving the Strip and seeing the Red Rock Canyon or Mount Charleston which is not only an incredible sight but some snow amongst the Nevada desert! However, one thing that was NOT a sight to see (and I actually decided to leave early in order to miss) was Rush Limbaugh judging the Miss America pageant literally across the street from my hotel…um thanks but HELL no thanks.

Apparently downloading sexually explicit pictures of characters from The Power Puff Girls and The Simpsons can get you in trouble with the law in Australia.  That’s what twenty-eight-year old Kurt James Milner recently found out.

According to a post by Jacqui Cheng on Ars Technica, “the Australian Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that sexually explicit illustrations of children qualify as child pornography. Law enforcement agreed that Milner’s images fell into that category, and he eventually pleaded guilty to possession of child exploitation material and using the Internet to get it. As a result, he was sentenced to a year in jail, but was wholly suspended for five years with a $1,000 bond for good behavior. He is also registered as a sex offender.”

One may say this is a harsh sentence, although in the case of Milner, there is more to the story as he had already been sentenced to two years probation in 2003 for having in his possession 59 real child porn images.  However, the fact remains that in Australia, possession of cartoon porn leads to probation, fines, and even jail, as the prosecution of other such cases showed.

Milner’s is not the first case of cartoon porn conviction in Australia. In 2008, Australian Alan John McEwan had been convicted of possessing child pornography for also having sexually explicit photos of the Simpsons characters. Although this was a first offense, he could have been sentenced up to 10 years of jail time but was only fined $3000 and required to enter into a two-year good behavior bond in respect to each of the charges.

So, what do you think? Should there be a difference between fictional cartoon characters and real children when it comes to punishing child pornography? Should a person go to jail for downloading sexually explicit cartoon images of children?

Ars Technica: Simpsons, Powerpuff Girls porn nets jail time for Australian

Ashley M. Sullivan was only seventeen when she was put in Niagara County Jail. She pleaded guilty on Nov. 18 to driving while intoxicated and crashing her car killing her boyfriend.

However, the story gets worse.

Apparently the move that threw the minor in jail was when Sullivan went to Florida a month after the crash  and posted a photo on her Facebook profile captioned, “Drunk in Florida.” The Buffalo News reports, “I’m troubled by your conduct since the crash,” County Judge Matthew J. Murphy III told Sullivan, “and that’s the reason for the jail sentence.”

While social media has clearly become this word vomiting mechanism that even catches celebrities like Bow Wow in the act for posting their drunk driving idiocy, it is unbearable to know that someone would actually drive drunk just weeks after killing a person in a drunken car crash. One thing is for sure, whether it is playing hooky from work, cheating on your partner, or driving drunk,  people are looking all over the internet to find anything slightly incriminating about you and I am not only baffled but deeply angered by the sheer stupidity of these posts.

Sullivan is very lucky that partially because of her youth, the judge ordered that she gets out of jail and will be under electronic home monitoring for a year with a revoked driver’s license. Do you think she deserves such a sentence?

Buffalo News: Drunk driver gets into more trouble after posting Facebook photo

When it comes to sexual harassment, Emily May’s motto has always been “If you can’t slap ‘em, snap ‘em!” The twenty-eight year-old co-founder of HollabackNYC explains why a cell phone is a women’s best weapon.

Age? 28

Where have you lived? Richmond, VA and London, England.  And of course NYC.

Where do you want to live? I have fallen in love with Brooklyn. I’m pretty sure Brooklyn and I are in it for the long haul.

What do you do? I work at a nonprofit helping to develop creative programming that helps untapped youth obtain jobs and GEDs.

For those who don’t know your site, can you please explain it and why it is an important cause?

Comments like ”Hey Baby, mmm…,” unwanted attention like groping, public lewdness, and assault are a demeaning and demoralizing everyday occurrence for women and LGBT individuals. Most of these behaviors are illegal, yet they are often socially accepted and the laws that protect against them often go unenforced. Women and LGBT individuals frequently choose to internalize the violence rather than report it and risk stigma. Hollaback! targets harassment at its source, not with brawn but with brains: we encourage women to submit cell phones pictures of their harassers and stories to our site.  Each story is read by over 1, 000 people and this ultimately leads to breaking the silence.

Was there a specific event or situation that inspired you to create this site?

HollabackNYC started in 2005 the way a lot of good revolutions must begin – as conversations with friends over a couple of drinks. The seven of us were commiserating over being whistled at, cat-called, and propositioned, with each story earning a chorus of “uggg” “ewww” and “gross!”  The trouble was that we felt there was nothing we could do. If we walked on, we felt victimized. If we yelled, we further endangered ourselves. Witty comebacks had their charm, but they always came late, and street harassment was more or less protected under laws of free speech. Then we realized – why not take pictures of these street harassers and post them on a blog? And so, with the clink of our cocktail glasses, we launched HollabackNYC, a blog dedicated to giving women an empowered response to street harassment.  The blog has since expanded to over 20 cities worldwide.

Can you share a story from your site that is particularly heart breaking?

There are so many.  One young woman who was only 15 was masturbated on, in a crowded train.  We had another young women who was assaulted, and when she reported it to the police they told her there is nothing they can do – and to “get a gun.”

Why is it that women rarely heckle people on the street?

Street harassment is about power.  During street harassment, men oftentimes have the physical advantage.  What makes it so scary is that you never know if a comment is just a comment, or if it is going to escalate into stalking, groping, or even rape.  If a woman harassed a man, the only person’s safety she might be jeopardizing would be her own.

I noticed that there are no straight men’s harassment stories posted on your site, can you explain why this is the case?

Like I said, street harassment is about power and straight, white, men are the top dogs when it comes to power.  I would post a story of a straight, minority male who was harassed by a straight white male however.

Do you get a lot of backlash for your site?

When we first started we got some funny hate mail like “hey Carpetmunchers!” which was funny because three of

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Suzanne Valadon, “La Chambre Bleue, 1923″

How bad ass is that painting? Recasting the female nude, a favorite subject for many famous and not so famous male painters, this Valedon’s piece makes me want to see more pieces that are this daring and funny! Well, for those of you who haven’t heard, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the largest museum of modern art in Europe is showcasing works (including Valadon’s piece) by women artists from the permanent collection in a two-floor-exhibit for an entire year (May 2009-10). Titled “elles” (the feminine plural pronoun for they or them), the exhibit features 500 works by more than 200 artists, from the beginning of the 20th century up to the present day and casts a new look at women’s creativity. Themes include women artists as witnesses to major events of the century as well as their relationship to private and public spaces, their bodies, and time. On display, side by side, we can see works by key figures of the Art world such as Sonia Delaunay, Frida Kahlo, Dorothea Tanning, Joan Mitchell and Maria-Elena Vieira da Silva as well as pieces by some of today’s women artists. The best part is that the exhibit looks at women’s artistic creation in a comprehensive way encompassing all forms, the visual arts but also literature, history of thought, dance, architecture, design and film.

Those of you, who can catch a plane for Paris before the end of May (soooo lucky!), go see this unprecedented exhibit. For the rest of us, I recommend the  video introduction (below) or checking out the interactive map of the exhibit. Speaking French is a plus to view these pieces, but even if you don’t you’ll enjoy it.

I can only applaud The Centre Pompidou for such an initiative and hope that MoMA and other great museums throughout the world will follow suite soon.  Art is not and has never been an exclusively masculine endeavor and it’s about time we start incorporating a stronger female representation in the permanent collection galleries.

Perhaps that Forbes only highlights one woman? According to Forbes’ site these celebrities  “rated the highest in for trustworthiness, awareness and appeal” and Forbes enlisted E-poll, a company that  determines the marketability of hundreds of celebrities, politicians and other public figures for advertisers.

Do we not trust female celebrities? While I am not expecting Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan to grace the list, what told Forbes that women like Meryl Streep, Helen Mirren, and Glenn Close would not be deserving candidates? I guess this is why ’serious’ brands like Accenture,  Allstate,  and AT&T don’t feature female celebrities in their ads. But then again, many of these companies chose Tiger Woods and we all know how that turned out.

Forbes: The 10 Most Trusted Celebrities