Search:

.


Lesbian and Feminist T-Shirts, Art and More!

lesbian music tshirt melissa etheridge, kd lang, indigo girls, holly near, tracy chapman butch femme boi girl seeking each other
laugh. dance. lesbian like ellen degeneres
the truth will set you free but first it will piss you off out and proud lesbian

I found a book at Goodwill, Bright Lights Big Ass, by Jen Lancaster. I never read books like this, except, well except it says “Carrie Bradshaw meets Barbara Ehrenreich,” right on the front cover.

I love Barbara Ehrenreich’s work. She’s an astute, brilliant feminist writer whose works are groundbreaking in their theories. Yes, I read feminist theory and like it.

So I thought, hey, why not? With the word Ass in the title so it’s probably irreverent. All I had to lose was the $1.50 it cost, so I took a chance.

I laughed and laughed and laughed. I actually laughed out loud. Which I never ever do (the books I read just aren’t laugh-out-loud funny). The problem with humour is that usually, it isn’t funny. People pretend it’s funny, and they laugh, but I don’t.

Then they insult me for not laughing, but that’s not funny either and no one laughs. Now don’t get me wrong, I laugh all the time, but I don’t like racist, sexist, ethnic or homophobic humour. I swear, it really does leave you a lot of things to laugh at, but the people who tell these kinds of stories or jokes swear that if you don’t laugh at an AIDS joke well then you have no sense of humour.

If you have AIDS, telling AIDS jokes can help you survive, you can laugh at it. If you hate gays, telling AIDS jokes isn’t funny, it’s hatred. To me, it’s a pretty clear distinction.

So, if Jen Lancaster is likened to Ehrenreich, I figure, she’s going to make me laugh. And she does. Lots of heterosexual humour here, about her husband, her life, her friend, and mostly of course it’s her own antics. Or take this snippet from the book, about her elderly father. I made me laugh out loud and share the story with friends saying what a great book it was.

But then I started to see another side of her humour and it started with her story of reading an Ann Coulter book. Coulter is a right-wing American, uh, personality. I am a Canadian, and I am proud to say that our right wing is central, and our left wing is central-left. We pretend like there’s a difference, but there isn’t really. The left gave us gay marriage, the right wing vowed to take it away, and when they got voted into power, they didn’t. That would have been a nightmare, and nobody wants to give Canadian people nightmares. Only the really really right-wing nutjobs here in Canada can even start to compare with the right wing Americans (and not the ones who think computers are homosexual and thus to be avoided). We stop Phelps and his ilk at the border and don’t allow him into the country.

I think we let Ann in, because she doesn’t actually suggest killing anyone.

So, here I am reading about Jen reading Ann Coulter, and describing the off-the-wall anti-Ann person beside her, whom she describes as monkey-like. She doesn’t in any way imply a race for this anti-Ann woman, but I’m not laughing.

And it just goes bad from there. That moment in the book is the turning point. Next thing I know, she’s insulting ethnic this and immigrant that, and now, now it feels like just holding this book is making my hands slimy.

She admits her own doubts (is she xenophobic and jerky or just super-vigilant when she notices a couple of Middle Eastern men on a bus) but, well, it isn’t funny anymore. And without the humour, that self-effacing self-questioning style that makes us laugh at our own foibles, well, you look xenophobic and jerky. And I don’t want to read that.

If I ripped the book in half and tossed out the post-Colter work, and kept the pre-Coulter stories, I’d have a great new author to idolize. If I keep the book intact, it either remains on a shelf gathering dust or gets sent right back to Goodwill (now I know why it was there in the first place).

I was first dazzled by the bright lights, but it turns out, she’s just a big ass.
Listen

Here is the playlist, or just tune in to LesbianFunWorld Radio now! 



The Silver Fox is on Wiccan Radio! Listen to magickal music, wyse words and inspiring invocations online any time at www.live365.com/ the_silver_fox


  
Sign up for our monthly e-newsletter. Enter your email address and click SEND:

 

No, we won't spam you, we won't sell your email  address to any company, we won't  give the address to any of our business partners. We will use it to notify you regularly about updates to LesbianFunWorld, including new t-shirt designs. Questions or concerns? Email us. © 1999-2010. All Rights Reserved. This website material may not be copied, reproduced, published, broadcast, rewritten or distributed in any way.