We all do drag everyday. I see a bio woman who's fluffed and flounced and besparkled every inch of her womanscape and I think, "Drag queen." Likewise with butchy boys who walk as if they've got a couple of basketballs wedged between their thighs. We all pretend to be men and women and I toast to those who do both!

who wrote: "I admire how you can be judgmental and not think twice about that."

Et tu, Anonymouse 12:17. Et tu.

So, now you can admire yourself too!

"ho the party line"?

Is that a malapropism or a double entendre? Whatever it is, there's no need to yell. Save that energy and apply it to a careful rereading of what I wrote, which was that someone who circumlocutes isn't silenced and believing that one is silenced is as apt a naming of "Demure" for Rush. I didn't say she's Rush. I said she's ill-named.

I advise you, Anonymouse 12:14, to get thee to the Springer Show, where superfluous drama is the daily deal. It'll feel like home.

SB4609.

There's also the irony of Silenced's bombast in these threads. There's no silence in all that feminism-is-bad-mantra. The moniker is as apt as Limbaugh calling himself "Demure."

...the assumption that someone somewhere doesn't support the troops, thus necessitating the ubiquitous, "I support the troops."

Everyone supports the troops. Everyone. Asserting that you do means nothing.

But not everyone supports the war and that fact gets obscured by the jostling in the "Who Loves the Troops, Baby?" line.

He begged Rumsfeld to let him beat the drum of war in Iraq.

"Let me be the big drummer boy," Rush pleaded. "Let me lead the charge, as drummer boys once did. To Hell with catching flack for criticizing real soldiers. Let me catch some real flack in the field. I've fought this Galactic Eternal mega-ultra-turbo-reely-reely-big-WWIII on Terror long enough from afar!"

But Rumsfeld said, "Rush, you're the bravest of the brave. Your bombast gives us more blast than any bomb. Keep sucking on your cigar so that America's flag-waving old farts can keep sucking on your teets. Your man milk sustains so many."

God bless America. Well, God bless red America.

As for the phenomenon and Ms. Lloyd's reaction, I stand with Ms. Lloyd. We're a consumption based culture and nothing sells like fear. However, one can't sell youth. Too many of Hollywood's richest and most famous actresses and actors try to purchase youth from Hollywood's richest and most famous plastic surgeons. Sure, Cher looks good, but she can't move a facial muscle. She's a facioplegic.

I sometimes think that some women just want to earn this epitaph on their tombstone: "She was smokin' hawt!"

Hell, we were all smokin' hawt when we were 18. Youth is smokin' hawt. Smokin' hawt is youth. Vonnegut noted this when looking at photos from his youth.

He said, "We were all beautiful back then."

But smokin' hawt doesn't mean shit. It's just a figment of time. It's a pimple of chance. What matters is what you choose to do with your life beyond the beastiness of being "smokin' hawt," which is simply procreative positioning, which beetles do too, but without all the hullabaloo.

Wanna know what's smokin' hawt to me? Courage. Achievement. Decency. I'll ride those ponies all day.

Witness: "She IS HAWWT!"

Do you wear baseball caps backwards?

Wear cargo shirts so baggy they look like cargo skirts?

Have some tribal tat on your pasty skin, as if you'd undergone some manhood ritual?

I no longer want to clobber you. I just want to muss your hair and bake you some cookies.

You're brainy, funny, and best of all, you're at home, home on the range of wide-open thinking.

"These beliefs are all bullshit to prop up people's egos and make them feel they are something else than shitting, copulating, ovulating beasts with highly developed frontal lobes and a surfeit of cortical tissue."

"At the same time, if I know I respond a certain way to certain environments, I have more control over whether and how I enter those environments, so I'm all for knowing."

Yep, that's how I feel too. The critter in me tugs at me, always and forever. I want to be cognizant of that tugging in case I want to resist.

As regards the inveterate and expected resistance to ev psych and the comparisons that a couple have posters have made to fundy ideology, I think of the political spectrum not as a straight line, but as a loop, with the far right and the far left often reaching the same conclusions, albeit via different conduits. For example, can one truly tease apart the bombast and desires of a fundy Christian or a fundy Muslim? They both hate gays and they whereas one wants to kill for the Christ, the other kills for Allah. So, they're ideological lovers, forever twined and needing the other.

Likewise, fundies believe that we're special snowflakes and rad fems believe that we're blank slates, ready to receive our special, self-originating code.

I don't think we're special snowflakes and IF we want to be, denying our critterness gives us a double dip of it, since we won't take countermeasures for that which we deny.

I think people hate to be known, unless they control the rate at which they're known. Partly because I majored in human behavior and partly because people are my material and I'm paid to pay attention, I can usually descry the clockworks of folks and predict what makes them tick, but I keep my thoughts to myself nowadays, because people hate to psychologically naked. It makes them angry. They want to believe they're special snowflakes, but most of us ride the rails of evolution, pretending as we scoot about that we're going exactly where we want to go.

As far as her being "not cute enough" to warrant harassment, anyone who alleges that is "not decent enough" to opine.