Marvel Movie Music Mashup

Marvel Mashup (with Music) from Shawn Ravenfire on Vimeo.

Four Religions

I have a hypothesis that every person has four religions.  These four may be the same or they may overlap, or they may be four completely different labels.

The first is your background religion.  This is important, because it sets up a cultural foundation.  Suppose you're raised Catholic, but no longer practice.  You're going to identify more easily with other people of Catholic backgrounds.  The terminology and traditions are more than just trivia to you.  They represent a part of your childhood, the same as a house you no longer live in or a school you no longer attend.

The second is your identified religion.  This is the one you practice today, and you can connect with others in the community on that basis.  Whatever your actual beliefs or practices may be, if you call yourself Wiccan, you immediately give a shorthand identifier to others as to what you are, or at least, what it the closest possible description to what you are.

The third is your intellectual religion.  This is probably unique to you and always evolving.  It is the cosmology and moral worldview you hold at any given moment, based on reason, and it may not be limited to only religious traditions, but political or socio-economic beliefs as well.  You may believe in the supernatural and in paranormal phenomena, but not in any way that can be classified.  You may be asking complex questions, but not enough to truly call yourself agnostic.  You may be largely libertarian, but open to limited socialist ideas.  You may be constantly weighing the question of whether the ends justify the means.  You're never satisfied enough, though, to pin down a specific label.

The fourth is your subconscious religion.  This was instilled in you, maybe on purpose, maybe by accident, that makes you feel good or bad about certain behaviors or positions.  It is, in short, your superego.  It is the thing that you feel you're "supposed to" say or do, regardless of what makes sense, in order to be accepted by the tribe, even if that tribe only exists in your mind.  For example, you may logically work out how a free market system can work, but still feel obligated to support communist ideals, because of all the times that someone insinuated that not doing so would make you a bad person.

The intersection of these four religions is where your true religious identity lies.

Halloween Music Videos

Halloween Music (but not video):
Monster Mash - Bobby Boris Picket
Samhain - Inkubus Sukkubus
Spooky - Classics IV
Witchy Woman - Eagles
I Put a Spell on You - Screamin' Jay Hawkins
Witchcraft - Frank Sinatra
Witches in Bikinis - Witches in Bikinis
Frankenstein - Edgar Winter Group
Don't Fear the Reaper - Blue Oyster Cult
Old Black Magic - Louis Prima and Keely Smith
Rockabilly Vampire - Ralph Rebel
Hallow's Eve - Type O Negative
Vampires Mummies and the Holy Ghost - Jimmy Buffett
Spellbound - Siouxsie and the Banshees
I Walked with a Zombie - R.E.M.
Dead Man's Party - Oingo Boingo
Dear Dr. Frankenstein - Witches in Bikinis
Psycho Killer - Talking Heads
Halloween - Siouxsie and the Banshees
Season of the Witch - Donovan
Takiti - Midnight Action
American Witch - Rob Zombie
Mr. Crowley - Black Sabbath
Vampire Bat - Wesley Willis
Devil Inside - INXS
Scary Monsters - David Bowie
Godzilla - Blue Oyster Cult
Boogie Man - KC and the Sunshine Band
Ghost Riders in the Sky - Johnny Cash
Twilight Tone - Manhatten Transfer
Horror Flick Chicks - Witches in Bikinis
A Gorey Demise - Creature Feature
Aim for the Head - Creature Feature
The Raven - Alan Parons Project
My Son the Vampire - Allan Sherman
All Hallow's Eve - Inkubus Sukkubus
Bound and Gagged - Creature Feature
Corpse in my Bed - Creature Feature
Danse Vampyr - Inkubus Sukkubus
Ghost Town - The Specials
Ghouls Night Out - Misfits
Dead Man's Party - Rebel Rockers
If I Was Your Vampire - Marilyn Manson
I'm a Vampire - Future Bible Heroes
Kiss of Hades - Inkubus Sukkubus
Look to the Skies - Creature Feature
Nature Trail to Hell in 3-D - Weird Al Yankovic
Place of the Dead - Vampire Division
Rock and Roll Zombies - Rebel Rockers
Spell on Me - Reverend Horton Heat
The Greatest Show Unearthed - Creature Feature
Underworld - Inkubus Sukkubus
Tokkata - Johannes Sebastian Bach
Vampire Blues - Neil Young
Vampire Girl - Anna Robinson
Vampire Girl - Misfits
Vampire Girl - Jonathan Richman
Vampire Girl - Shandon
Vampire Punk Rockers from Hell - Inkubus Sukkubus
Who's That Creepin' - Big Bad Voodoo Daddy
Witch Queen - Inkubus Sukkubus
Haunted Mansion - Witches in Bikinis

Halloween Videos (but not music):
Emperor's New Clothes - Panic! at the Disco
Mother - Blondie
The Creeps - Freaks
Love Song for a Vampire - Annie Lennox
Wall to Wall - Chris Brown
Doin' it All for my Baby - Huey Lewis
Breakaway - ZZ Top
Everybody - Backstreet Boys
Dream Warriors - Dokken
Venus - Bananarama
What is Love - Hadaway
Voodoo - Godsmack
Ghosts - Michael Jackson

Halloween Music AND Videos:
Buried Alive - Creature Feature
Dragula - Rob Zombie
Werewolves of London - Warren Zevon
Trick or Treat - Elvira
Bloodletting - Concrete Blonde
Belladonna and Aconite - Inkubus Sukkubus
Black Magic - Little Mix
Monster Man - Devo
Monster High Fright Song
This Halloween - Nikki Lynn Katt
Ghostbusters - Ray Parker Jr.
Wytches - Inkubus Sukkubus
Thriller - Michael Jackson
Mistress of the Dark - Ghoultown
Heart of Lilith - Inkubus Sukkubus
Halloween - Trick or Treat - MTV original
Living Dead Girl - Rob Zombie
I Always Feel Like Somebody's Watching Me - Rockwell
Scream - Misfits
Saxana - Petra Cernocka
Dracula's Tango - Toto Coelo
Hellraiser - Motorhead
Heads Will Roll - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Welcome to my Nightmare - Alice Cooper
Addams Family Groove - MC Hammer
I'm in Love with a Monster - Fifth Harmony
Purple People Eater - Sheb Wooley
Dance in the Graveyard - Delta Rae

Halloween-ish Clips:
Phantom of the Opera Theme
Munsters Theme
Addams Family Theme
Time Warp (Rocky Horror Picture Show)
Anything Can Happen on Halloween - Tim Curry (The Worst Witch)
This is Halloween (Nightmare Before Christmas)
Twilight Zone Theme
Ballad of Sweeny Todd
Little Shop of Horrors Theme
Bewitched Theme

Sex and Romance Universes

There are four alternate realities depicted in mainstream movies and television:

The 80s Teen Comedy/Horror Universe:

In this universe, everyone starts having sex instantly at the onset of puberty, and becomes officially a "virgin" due to either being such a loveable loser as to have missed his/her chance, or to being an uptight prude.  Teen virgins are, if boys, dorky, and must overcome the embarrassing stigma of virginity prior to graduation from high school.  If girls, however, they are waiting for both the perfect guy AND the perfect moment, but again, prior to graduation.  (This is due to the fact that no character development can take place after graduation.)  There are, however, certain advantages to virginity, such as the ability to fulfill prophecies and immunity to horror slasher attacks.  Sex can be missionary, cowgirl, or off-screen somewhere involving made-up position names.

The 90s Lifetime Original Universe:

In this "based on true stories" universe, all adult males are bad.  The most bad are typically rapists, child-molesters, kidnappers, murderers, drunken wife-beaters, or domineering control freaks.  The least bad are the unemotional macho oblivious-to-everything-important husbands who are way too into sports, cars and guns.  The only good males are little boys.  Women in this universe fall into one of three categories.  A woman can be a shy, quiet, weakling who is afraid to speak out and needs someone to rescue her (this is the most common type).  A woman can be an older stuck-up rich bitch who is very old-fashioned and usually religious (though she can be convinced the error of her ways).  And the rarest type, a woman can be a super strong protagonist, who is both a dedicated super-mom as well as a driven career woman, and has the ability to solve almost any problem in the third act by the power of dramatic speeches.  All sex is off-screen and results in pregnancy.

The Porno Universe:

In this universe, everyone is horny for everyone else all the time.  Everyone is either actively bisexual or at least bi-curious, and all relationships are assumed to be open ones.  Rape cannot exist in this universe, because literally not one person every says no to sex.  Sex can be traded for better grades, promotions, free pizza, or just about anything else that anyone has to offer.  All people look approximately between the ages of twenty and forty, including those supposedly in high school.  Women's breast implants are very common.  All clothing is loose and can come off easily.  Since the turn of the millennium, zero men and very few women have pubic hair.  Most penises are very large, and all women prefer larger to smaller penises.  Transwomen are fairly common, and are fully respected as women.  However, derogatory terms are used freely, because absolutely no one finds anything offensive.  The rules are slightly different if hentai is thrown into the mix, but basically, anything and everything goes.  Sex can occur in any combination of positions imaginable, but the most popular is a sequence of blow-job, followed by either missionary or cowgirl, then switching to doggy, followed by anal, and ending with a facial.

The Everything Else Universe:

This is the universe of the romantic comedy, the action movie, the adult farce, the sit-com, the television commercial, or any other type of story that doesn't fit into one of the above three realities.  In this universe, everyone is a monogamist in search of their one and only true love.  Couples are literally made for each other (by destiny).  Their first meeting can go one of three ways.  The first way is mutual love at first sight, which after overcoming some contrived obstacle such as disagreeing families or overheard out-of-context dialog leading to misunderstanding, they eventually profess love for each other and live happily ever after.  The second way is one-sided love, in which one person (usually the man) falls instantly in love, but the other (usually the woman) needs to be convinced by some dramatic gesture, such as nobly stepping aside, interrupting a wedding to profess his love, rescuing her from a supervillain, taking a bullet for her, or writing a beautiful song or poem about her (because artistic ability can only come out of true love).  The third way is instant mutual and unmotivated dislike for each other in order to mask their true feelings, which leads to a long period of will-they-won't-they full of playful insults gradually shifting to light teasing, and eventually a sudden profession of true love.  In all cases, the power of true love is so strong that even divorced couples eventually reconnect, usually after the man has become more mature in some way.  Because everyone has only one true love, being in a relationship with anyone other than "the one" leads to a revelation that the wrong partner was either secretly in love with someone else, or was a downright bad person only pretending to be in love.  These pretenders are rich snobs who have no concept of true love, serial cheating men with lots of side whores, or slightly troubled women cheating with the man's best friend, boss or brother.  (Since gay couples are typically more sidelined, it's hard to pin down exactly what the rules are, but they should be roughly similar.  Also note that because love is only between two people, bisexuality can only exist temporarily.  In the end, everyone is either 100% gay or 100% straight.)  As for some additional notes, long-term married couples are boring, men who play the field are jerks, women who play the field are funny, and virgins are people who have basically been living extremely sheltered lives up until this point, however, their virginity also allows them to be better at giving pleasure than those who started having sex at a younger age.  At the same time, there is an underlying tendency that men are more sex-driven, while women are rarely sex-driven, if not outright anti-sex, and this truth can manifest itself at any time with little or no warning, even if it contradicts the person's motives up until this point.  Fortunately, such an occurrence rarely lasts long.  Sex, if not off-screen, is often accompanied by soft lighting, candles, fireplace, etc., and begins with passionate kissing, followed by a sort of against-the-wall dry-humping, then usually a cut-away to another shot, but occasionally a sort of rolling back and forth between missionary and cowgirl, ending with a simultaneous mutual orgasm, and then followed by pillow talk under a diagonal sheet that covers the woman's chest but not the man's.  They also used to smoke cigarettes, but not so much anymore.

Why it matters:

The reason these four universes are significant is because people watching these types of movies are subliminally affected by them.  Their expectations for REAL LIFE sex and romance changes to include these types of scenarios.  (This makes sense, since human brains evolved before movies existed, so we tend to process them in the same way as if a tribal elder were telling us stories which reflect the culture.)  People, once affected in this way, then go on to make even more movies, reflecting the same ideas and mythologies, which influences more people, and the cycle continues.  While it's true that most people don't watch Lifetime movies anymore, and 80s comedies are niche and seem dated, and while it's true that most people who watch porn are well-aware that the situations are unrealistic, the fact that these things exist at all demonstrates that the ideas behind them must exist within the culture in some form already.  There are people who have never seen an 80s teen comedy or a Lifetime original movie, and yet, their view of reality clearly shows similar ideas.  In other words, these movies aren't CREATING the mythologies, but are simply REINFORCING them.

People will tend to believe in the existence of one of these four versions of reality, at least some of the time.  Even those of us who see through the veil of illusion to the underlying actual reality will, from time to time, lapse into acting as if living in one of these four universes.  What is the actual reality?  Apparently, it's that most people are mostly straight, except when they're not, that most people are mostly serial monogamists, except when they're not, that most people are sexually active, except when they're not, and that most people most of the time are mostly boring, again, except when they're not.  Some people are assholes, some people are decent, and the majority fall somewhere in between.  Most importantly, the reality (unlike anything you've seen in the movies) is that NO ONE IS THE PROTAGONIST.  This means that nothing is guaranteed to work out for you or anyone else in the end, because there is no "the end."

The end.

Gender Identifiers

Whenever the topic of gender identity (as separate from physical sex) comes up, people seem either completely confused as to what traits identify a person as a particular gender, or they seem genuinely convinced that this or that is a gender identifier despite the fact that the next person is absolutely convinced of the opposite.  Nevertheless, a few specific items have popped up as standards.  Let's take a look at them:

High Heels:  Clearly feminine, as only women and transvestites wear them.  But did you ever ask WHY women wear them?  Historically, they caught on with women attempting to look more masculine, and have become the standard for upper-class women since the 1980s, around the same time as shoulder pads.  The shoes to make women look taller, combined with the artificially broadened shoulders, was an attempt to make women more man-like, and thus, more professional.  Meanwhile, women who AREN'T professional or upper-class or office types generally don't wear high heels except for super-formal occasions.  Strange, that such a staple of feminine presentation should only be present in women attempting to exude power, which is generally considered masculine.  And I'm not even going to get into cowboy boots.

Long Hair:  This is the go-to identifier for every educator who tries to explain that gender presentation is different from sex, yet for some reason, no one seems to follow this rule.  Men with long hair, such as bikers, surfers, rock stars, metal-heads, mountaineers, etc. are all considered super-masculine.  Whenever we want to say that women with short hair are more man-like, we tend to point toward short-haired lesbians, but we overlook the often larger number of young women with pixie cuts, which make them look more cutesy, and the even larger numbers of old ladies with short hair, simply because it's easier to maintain.  In fact, when was the last time you saw a woman over forty who had long hair?  I think this idea of short-haired men and long-haired women comes from 80s and 90s cartoons, where some character comically mistakes a man for a woman or vice-versa because of hair length, but it just doesn't reflect real life.  If anything, long hair is an identifier of youth, and short hair is an identifier of maturity.  And even that has exceptions.

Glasses:  Have you ever noticed that when a man puts on glasses, he looks less masculine, but when a woman puts on glasses, she looks less feminine?  That's because glasses are basically neuter.  Unfortunately, neuter is a concept that doesn't exist in our modern gender-categorization culture.  People need for everything to be either masculine or feminine, so as to identify whether the presence of that particular thing makes a person more cis or more trans.  Glasses are the bane of gender-identity systems, because they defy all gender.

Pink:  Whenever people list masculine colors, they basically list every color except pink.  While it is true that women, on average, are better at detecting color differences than men, and as such, a woman is more likely to identify a particular color by a specific hue or shade (fuchsia, chartreuse, mauve, aqua, periwinkle, etc.), while men are more likely to describe a color in broader terms (red, blue, green, yellow, etc.).  Strangely, this gets pushed aside for the all-powerful and all-important women-like-pink rule.  This rule has become so invasive that I've seen stereotypically male products (specifically, a tool kit and a toy machine gun) listed on the package as "for ladies" or in the girls' section of the toy store, simply because it was pink.  Now, we all (hopefully) know that pink used to be considered masculine over a hundred years ago, and fashion simply changed, but how few of us remember that even as early as the 1980s, men would often wear pink outfits.  The blue-for-boys-and-pink-for-girls rule was applied only to small children in the 80s, not adults or teens, and by the 1990s, the PC backlash was in full swing, so teens were actively rebelling against the feminizing pink rule.  Has there ever been a time when the color pink was associated with adult women?  Except for a small handful of rich west coasters, and even then, only some of the time, I don't think so.  Ironically, the pink breast cancer awareness ribbons seem to be the only thing currently following this rule, in defiance of years of anti-pink women's empowerment, under the name of fighting against a predominantly female disease.

Sports:  This seems like it should be the obvious one.  Everyone knows that men love sports and women love shoe sales at the mall, or at least, everyone who has ever been to an 80s comedy club, where they were told this repeatedly by coked-up attention-seekers who stood in front of brick walls wearing loud oversized suit jackets, just before going into a bad Jack Nicholson impression.  But I digress.  There are two fundamental problems with the sports-are-for-men rule.  First, all high schools have boys AND girls teams for every sport (except for cheerleading, which is usually exclusively girls... and just a couple of generations ago used to be exclusively boys.).  If boys are playing sports and girls are not, then how does every school in the country fill out both teams?  Second, there are some sports such as roller derby and field hockey, which are mostly associated with women.  Here's a thought experiment.  Picture a very feminine women suddenly taking up roller derby as a sport.  You might think she seems manlier now.  Then picture a man playing the same sport.  He ought to seem even more manly because of this, but the opposite happens, because he is now playing a woman's sport.  How can a thing exist that is for masculine women but not for men?

Science and mathematics:  For people over the age of thirty, this should be a no-brainer.  The jock is masculine, the cheerleader is feminine, and the science nerd is none of the above.  We've all seen the trope in movies and television, and those of us of a certain age have almost certainly seen it in real life, where the dumb jock beats up the weak brainy boy, the hot girls make fun of the shy bookworm, and boy nerds and girl nerds end up with each other.  Yet in recent years, people have been talking about science and math as if it were predominantly a masculine interest.  Even more so, all forms of bullying are being ret-conned into the cis-gendered bullying the trans or gender-fluid.  This would mean that the jocks were bullying the nerds for not being athletic, but would have to have equal or greater knowledge of math and science, in defiance of the nerd stereotype that is the basis for the bullying.  Does this mean that the science nerds were accepted by the bullies all along?  Does this mean that the bookish girl was masculine?  Does this mean that the football team also plays chess or else they're non-gender-conforming?  And to whom are they conforming, if almost nobody fits both the jock and the nerd stereotype?  It all makes no sense.  Furthermore, I'm always hearing about how there aren't enough women in STEM fields compared to men, but this is silly.  There are plenty of women scientists and doctors, and none of them seem very masculine.  In fact, nursing used by be a female stereotype, and that's a medical profession.  Even in the early days when most professional jobs were held by men, women already had a foot in the door.  Explain to me how a woman invented the first computer language, a woman wrote the first science fiction novel, a woman became the first two-time Nobel Prize winner, and now, in an age when so many other jobs are clearly male-dominated (finance, law-enforcement, etc.), the one field where the male-female ratio is only slightly off, is the one that is used as a gender-identifier?  (And at the same time, the one we should be trying to balance out, apparently.)

Cooking and sewing:  This stereotype that cooking and sewing are women's work comes from a time when most chefs and tailors were men.  So, good luck figuring that one out.

Mansplaining:  This buzz word keeps popping up, but there seems to be some confusion as to what it means.  One definition says that it's when a man (always using a board meeting as an example, despite the fact that most people have never been to a board meeting in their lives) repeats something a woman just explained in order to take credit for the idea.  I've seen this done as a joke in movies a couple of times, but I have never seen this happen in real life.  In fact, if anyone actually did do this in real life, I'm sure people would not give the man credit for the idea.  They would just look at him as if he were weird, or possibly feel insulted, as if the man were suggesting that the OTHER men were so stupid that they needed it explained to them twice.  The second definition says that it's when men explain something assuming that a woman doesn't already know the thing.  Now, I've seen a lot of people tend to over-explain or under-explain an idea, but I've never noticed any division along gender lines.  A third definition is that it's when men throw out extraneous information as if to show off how smart they are.  This relates back to the previous listing.  The "um, actually" type of explanations tend to be mostly associated with nerds, and as I said before, nerd stuff is not masculine.

Comic Books:  If you've seen the show The Big Bang Theory, then you know that comics, sci-fi and fantasy are guy things, and women, even nerdy women, have simply no interest or understanding of it.  If you've ever been to an actual comic or sci-fi convention, then you know that that's bullshit.  Seriously, most of Doctor Who's fan base these days is women, and whole families go to Marvel movies together.  I think some of us might still be hung up on the old days of the 80s chick flick and the 80s dick flick, but movies have changed.

Video Games:  If we're counting ALL games, then this is pretty gender-neutral, and according to some studies, more women play games than men.  But when we say "video game," most of us tend to think specifically of shoot-em-up games, which tend to be mostly men.  Again, this is a mostly recent development, because before home consoles, young people would hang out at the arcade and meet people, presumably of the opposite sex.  I guess we can chalk this up to another one of those "mid-90s-only" rules that for some reason, stuck around.

Pubic Hair:  Speaking of mid-90s rules, remember when shaving off your pubic hair was considered strange?  From the evolution of the first mammals up to about the mid-90s, everyone, and I mean EVERYONE had a full bush of pubic hair.  The first people most of us ever even heard of shaving their pubes off were the Heaven's Gate cult, which shaved them off as preparation to commit suicide and spiritually ride a spaceship behind a comet.  The general consensus was that that was insanity.  Then in the mid-90s, Brazilian waxing became trendy for models, after which the porn industry quickly adopted the shaved-women look.  Shortly thereafter, free homemade internet porn overtook paid professional porn for online popularity, and the trend these days seems to be that most of the men are shaved, and the women are at about a fifty-fifty split on whether or not to shave or even trim.  Yet for some bizarre reason, some people (some of whom write for Buzzfeed) have decided that it's just expected that women shave their pubes and men do not.  Even more bizarre, a woman with a full bush is often referred to as having a "70s bush," as if that was the only time in history when women didn't shave.  I'm genuinely confused by this.  How have these people managed to rewrite history, including the present, with the exception of one seemingly random decade?  And on the topic of body hair, why is it that the most physically fit guys (body-builders and swimmers) aren't considered "feminine" for shaving their chests, backs and legs?

Manspreading:  This is a paradox.  For some reason, we've been making tables lower and lower, forcing adjustable chairs to have to be lower and lower, meaning that people with longer legs cannot place them together.  Supposedly men keeping their legs apart is a show of dominance, but imagine the opposite.  Imagine that a man deliberately made his chair higher than everyone else's chair in the room, so that only he could have his calves vertical and his thighs parallel.  This would be far more of a dominating position that sitting in a lower chair with his legs falling outward.  The fact is that no man who is aware of this behavior does this deliberately.  He is either completely unaware, or he tries to avoid it.  Yet the mythology states that this is some sort of a power play.  Even Buzzfeed videos on the subject can't seem to make it stick without noticing how gender-neutral a behavior this tends to be in practice.  (I'm not picking on Buzzfeed, but they are a prime example.)  And another thing.  What about women who put both legs to one side?  That's taking up more room than manspreading, but it's considered feminine, like riding a horse side-saddle.  (And did anyone ever actually ride side-saddle?  That sounds very impractical.)

Suits / Dresses:  Most people, most of the time, wear t-shirts or sweatshirts with jeans.  Suits and dresses only seem to show up for "fancy" occasions or top office executives.  But okay, let's talk about clothing.  If suits are masculine and skirts are feminine, then what is a ladies' pants suit?  What if I'm wearing a Scottish kilt?  What if someone buys a pair of women's boy-cut briefs?  What about made-for-women "boyfriend" jeans?  It seems to me that just about every men's article of clothing has a women's counterpart, and vice-versa, and that that counterpart has a counter-counterpart, and vice-versa again.  The only thing that is consistently designed for men or women specifically in terms of clothing is button-down shirts which have the buttons on the right side for men, and on the left side for women.  Unfortunately, no one can seem to remember exactly why we do this.  Some say it was because of women being dressed by servants, others say it was because of men being dressed by servants, and yet others say it's simply so that the shopkeepers know which section of the store to put the shirts in.  I've even heard one person say that it was to prevent sword handles from getting caught on fabric.  No one knows.  On top of that, most people don't notice a small detail like which way another person's shirt is buttoned without close inspection.  It's not much of a gender identifier if you can't even identify it on sight.  So unless you want everyone to walk around all day every day in tuxedos and prom dresses, then we're all going to end up clothing-wise looking pretty much neutral.

Fashion:  Speaking of fashion, can someone explain this paradox to me?  Women supposedly dress to impress other women.  Yet all the specifics on women's fashion are dictated by what men supposedly want.  However, we also stereotype men as being oblivious to what women are wearing, as being completely ignorant of fashion, and of being more concerned with saving money than looking attractive.  Standards of women's beauty are determined why what men are supposed to find attractive, yet what men are supposed to find attractive is dictated by other women.  By this logic, if you removed all the men from existence, women would be brutally oppressed by the men who would exist if they didn't not exist.  Supposedly, this comes from the magazines, where they tell all the women what they have to do to impress a man, but then also tell the women that they should dump a man if he is too stupid to know that she must do all these things to impress him (these things usually involving spending money on the magazine's sponsors).  But to make things even more ridiculous, the magazines are struggling, because not enough people are reading or buying them.  How can society be so influenced by a dying medium?  Have you ever read sex tips from a magazine?  The spiciest suggestions they have are downright vanilla compared to what's on the internet, and not even on the niche websites.  Somehow, these things are still having the impact of a pre-internet society, not on the society as a whole, but upon the way we discuss the people who discuss the society, as if it's not affecting perception, but rather the perception of the perception of the perception of the perception of society.  (Go ahead and make a perception inception joke if you want.)

Makeup:  This is a big one.  Unless you're a clown or a mime or some other type of performer, men generally don't wear makeup.  I will grant you that this is a good solid one with a fairly long history attached to it.  (And by long history, I mean over a century.  Not something that was changed in my lifetime.)  A man who wears women's make-up is clearly attempting to be feminine.  However, a woman who DOESN'T wear makeup is not necessarily masculine.  She's just not AS feminine as a women who does wear it.  So many women make a statement about not wearing makeup, as if they had just bravely stood against some massive social convention.  The thing that these women need to understand is that men generally don't notice the difference.  Women notice these things because they have a lifetime of experience making small adjustments to makeup, just as an auto mechanic is going to notice a change in the sound your car's engine makes way before you do.

Auto-Repair:  Speaking of mechanics.  In the old days, cars were simple and easy to fix, and most men knew the basics of making small repairs.  In the modern age, cars have gotten so extremely high-tech, than no one who isn't a trained mechanic is qualified to make repairs to the engine, and tires have become so resistant to damage that most people can go years or even a lifetime without ever having to change a tire.  Old people like to complain that young people don't know how to change a tire, but I can't blame them, since it's not likely to come up.  (To be fair, old people like to complain about pretty much everything about young people, probably because it was done to them just the same.)  Yet for some reason, there's a sort of running gag in movies and television that a man who doesn't know how to fix a car is supposed to feel somehow emasculated, especially if a women knows more about cars than him.  This doesn't make sense.  If a woman speaks French and a man does not, the man doesn't feel emasculated.  So why is this one particular skill different from another?  Apparently, we're still acting like it's the 1950s, and men had to fix their own cars.  But these days, nobody is expected to fix their own cars.  Hell, I can't even remember the last time I saw a car with a manual transmission, and yet this also is considered a "man thing."  How is a thing that doesn't even exist anymore considered a masculine gender identifier?

Logical-Thinking / Emotional Thinking:  Men are from Mars, women are from Venus...  Bullshit, we're all both.  Next.

Maternal Instincts:  Supposedly, the big thing that makes women women and not men is that women are natural mothers.  Of course, if you ask a first-time mother, she'll be completely overwhelmed, so where does this "natural" instinct come in?  I think it must come from all those hackneyed sit-coms and movies where a man has to do housework and doesn't know what he's doing.  To put this in perspective, the Dick Van Dyke Show even made a joke about how old and hackneyed this joke was, and that was back in the 1960s.  Of course, these days, the joke has changed a bit.  The 90s version of the joke was that men can't change diapers, so a woman has to come to the rescue.  The 2000s version of the joke is that YOUNG people can't change diapers, so an old person has to come to the rescue.  (Once again, the conversation about gender roles has not been updated since the 90s.)  The truth is that taking care of children is something learned through practice.  There is no magical moment when a new mother suddenly switches form neophyte to expert, because her maternal instincts just kicked in.  Being a parent is learned over time, just like anything else.

Sex:  Here's another bit of hackneyed 1980s stand-up comedy.  Women are looking for their "one true love," but men just want to get laid and get out of there.  This is just plain silly.  If men are supposed to be afraid of commitment, then why is it just expected that the men do the proposing?  If men want one-night stands, then why do men are also just as likely as women to be characterized as being jealous?  Here's another one.  The trope of the men going to a strip club.  I've personally never been to a strip club, but everyone who has been says pretty much the same thing.  The men are there just to have a casual night out, but the women are borderline sexual predators.  Then there's porn.  This is another supposedly a guy thing, but women apparently watch porn all the time.  Plus, because of the amateur porn online, there are obviously a lot of women who are exhibitionists, which wouldn't make sense in a version of reality where women are all sexually reserved hopeless romantics.  There's also this notion of the "friendzone," which came from a line in a 90s sit-com (Friends), which means that a man perceives a woman as bad if she doesn't have sex in exchange for kindness.  This is odd because the episode that coined the tern used it to mean that a man misses his opportunity for a romantic relationship if he acts platonic for too long.  How did that transformation happen?  Then there's the old often-quoted statistic that men think about sex every X-number of seconds, but there's no additional information to give context.  A one-second sexual thought over a lifetime can be broken down into an infinite number of infinitely short sexual thoughts, which when averaged out over the length of a day, can work out to zero time between sexual thoughts, and thus appear to be nonstop over all time.  Unless these people literally think that men think about sex at regular intervals, which would mean that during the act of sex, the man STOPPED thinking about sex for that same number of seconds.  Either way, it's just a bullshit statistic, like how people say we only use 10% of our brains.  Still, the men-are-always-horny-and-women-are-never-horny trope was so prevalent in 90s sit-coms and commercials that many people didn't even notice when show would break their own established character rules for a quick non-contextual joke.

Aggression:  Supposedly, men are more prone to be violent than women (except, of course, for PMS).  Okay, statistics do back this one up.  Violent crimes are more often committed by men than by women.  However, men also statistically tend to be taller than women, and we don't consider height to be a gender identifier.  If a tall woman isn't considered more manly than a short man, then why would a violent woman be considered more manly than a non-violent man?  And besides, shouldn't we ALL strive to be non-violent?  It seems a little silly that we would respect someone's masculine identity while at the same time, labelling an objectively bad behavior as part of being masculine.

What it all means:

In conclusion, a small group of upper-class people were born into the 80s, learned about the world in the 90s through movies and television only, and then somehow got stuck, never advancing with the rest of the world, evolving independently inside a bubble society, and now those same people are leading the discussion on gender politics.

History of the World in Music and Movie Clips

History in Music from Shawn Ravenfire on Vimeo.