The Premiership Is Upon Us

How did a Dynamo Kyiv freak like me get roped into caring about the Premiership? Oh, I know, it’s because of a man. When the Master died on the season finale of “Doctor Who” this year, he wiggled his eyebrows and said “always the women.”

In my case, it’s always the men.

The problem with the Premiership is that it’s an addiction. It’s also, as your snobbish friends will tell you, so very unbecoming. Football is all about sweaty sexists and their WAGs (themselves a sexist phenomenon – although whether or not WAGs are victims or villains is continuously up for debate). And the beauty of it is, supposedly, a shallow and sexualized kind of beauty (Ahmadinejad and the indefatigable Ann Althouse can do a roundtable on whether or not the curved trajectory of the ball resembles the curve of a woman’s breast, yummmmm). And sexualized is bad, bad, bad – only girls with frilly knickers and equally frilly brains go for sexualized, or so I’m constantly told.

Every year, I have to “come out” as a football fan. Specifically as a Premiership fan, since no one expects it. Ukrainian football often gets a free pass for being poor and exotic and, for some bizarre reason, well-meaning people think it has to be vaguely political as well. But rooting for Chelsea means rooting for the oppressor. Not to mention the fact that fellow fans treat Chelsea like the Yankees (I did have a Manchester fan admit to me once, in a pub and after a copious amount of drinks, no less, that “Chelsea deserved it after all these years” – although perhaps I was getting another free pass, this time because I’m female).

Eh.

My main problem this year has to do with the fact that Lampard suddenly looks way too much than my boyfriend’s younger brother, making me feel like a total creep.

Everyone’s a moron. Except for the pasty, shirtless dude.

I recently had the displeasure of watching something called Burning Burqa Challenge Idea. I suppose the entire thing was supposed to be witty and provocative. As weirded out as I am by women veiling their faces in Western countries (you get used to niqab in all of five minutes in the UAE), I found the video condescending and crass. And dumb. My brain cells would have been better off getting washed away by the lethal mixture of Satan’s urine and gasoline otherwise known as Absolut.

Then, I read the comments to the video. The few intelligent ones are predictably drowned out by, you guessed it, people tossing around words and phrases like “whore,” “slut,” and “piece of meat” against the woman in the video. Don’t not challenge her opinions, challenge her cleavage instead (something she probably wants you to do in the first place, going by the smirk on her face)! How reassuring and profound.

All of this just goes to show that the culture-wars are mostly being waged and won by people whose homo sapiens grandmas and grandpas made the terrible and foolish choice of breeding with the Neanderthals (science keeps going on and on about how they all went extinct ages ago, but I say there’s a cover-up) they kept in their basements for cheap labour.

Although, then again, one video response does allow hope for humanity.

Blog-stroll from the sidelines

Can’t blog. After a month and a half of drinking good vodka, I forgot about the existence of bad vodka. I have now been rudely reminded that yes, it does exist, and no, you can’t have more than a couple of shots without ruining the next 24-hours. Damn you, Absolut.

“I know it looked like I was trolling for sex, officer, but I feared for my life!” – Best headline on Feministe in recent memory. And the story that accompanies has that distinct, only-in-the-U.S. flavour. Not that I can’t imagine this happening in Saudi (I have a good imagination), but whatever.

LitLove is, among other things, into the wonderfully weird Andrei Makine. I surprised myself recently when I realized that I rather agree with Tatiana Tolstaya (you can purchase the article for $3 bucks, and it’s worth it if you’re ridiculously into literature) on most things Makine – this is considering the fact that if Tolstaya told me that the sky is blue, I’d probably punch myself in the face before nodding my head. So go figure.

As I’m into promotional art for movies (“300,” anyone?), this post by Sean T. Collins has me drooling and excited.

Ali Eteraz has started a very interesting new series: Praying in Other’s Houses of Worship. Poke him if you want to contribute.

In other religious news, Umar Lee recently wrote an interesting and passionate post on marital rape in Islam. A number of fucked-up comments followed. I was glad to see that a good portion of Umar’s Muslim readers responded quite sharply to certain statements that amounted to “rape is a husband’s prerogative if the dumb bitch won’t give in ’cause she’s got a stupid headache or something.” This was encouraging. I don’t agree with Umar on everything, but he inspires a lot of dialogue, and is one of those fun Muslim guys you’d love to have a beer with… if beer were halal.

And, on the home front (well, the semi-home front, since I’m not actually, you know, Russian – even though, as I have to keep reminding people, my mother is Russian and my first language is Russian, and that does mean a lot, even for a Ukrainian who happens to also be American who happens to live in… You know what, whatever) – Vilhelm Konnander asks: Sochi 2014: Burden or Blessing?

Allow me to spell a few things out

This interview with a famous pick-up artist who goes by “Mystery” (as much as I like original thinkers, something is clearly amiss here) on Salon has drawn many interesting responses, a number of them coming from self-described “nice guys” who got tired of jerking off while women referred to them as “good listeners,” patted them on the arm, and ran off to be with other dudes. The embittered “nice guys” in question claim that they eventually became so-called badasses, and got laid.

What the former “nice guys” clearly aren’t getting is that first of all, yes, some women are into men who act like jerks. Especially the women who hang out in bars all the time (nothing against bars, which collective comprise my home away from home) – a number of them are out there representing for the masochist contingent. That’s the ugly reality of our ugly world.

The other thing is, when “nice guys” think they’re being nice, half the time they’re merely being shy. You go on a couple of dates with a “nice guy,” and when he refuses to make a single move and barely holds eye contact for five seconds straight, you decide that he doesn’t really like you all that much and is seeing you out of a sense of profound boredom, or else is a latent homosexual still coming to grips with his identity, or else is a weirdo who doesn’t know what he wants. And then you move on.

A “nice guy” doesn’t need to turn into a raging prick in order to get play. How about something as mundane and obvious as developing a sense of confidence? Prickdom and confidence can be mutually exclusive. You don’t need to pay for a seminar to unravel this particular, ah, mystery. Prickdom, meanwhile, is a great way to attract the afore-mentioned masochists, the ones who need to see a counselor instead of seeing you. It’s a pathetic way of preying on other people’s insecurities, and while it may get you laid, it won’t make you happy, not in the long run.

I’m willing to bet my favourite pair of stilettos (OK, my only pair of stilettos, but who’s counting?) that the “nice guys” siding with Mystery simply learned to get the hell out of their shell. They didn’t fork over their hard-earned cash for the purpose of this realization, and good for them.

Having said that, I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong or offensive with the pick-up artist’s shtick. People go to therapists to help them with their numerous issues, so why not to some guy in a weird hat?

For more on Mystery, see someone far wittier than I.