Friday, April 10, 2009

Nobody Is This Clueless

2m4m, nom, gallagher, maggie, beaver, teabag, teabagging, homophobia, traditional, gay, marriage,
Okay, first we had conservatives everywhere protesting . . . something with "teabagging", seemingly oblivious to the sexual reference. I say "seemingly", because once they switched from mailing actual teabags to the White House to mailing pictures of teabags, they had to have noticed what comes up in a google image search for "teabag". But, no, they're sticking with "teabagging".

Now we have Maggie Gallagher's latest NOM campaign: 2M4M. Uh, yeah.

Wtf is up with conservatives' use of sexual slang? Nobody could possibly be this clueless. Nobody. This is like McCain bitching about "beaver management": you know damn well he picked that earmark because it allowed him to use a slang term for vagina on national TV.

For a bunch of people trying shove "family values" and "morals" down our throats, conservatives sure are obsessed with slightly-off-the-norm sexual practices.

13 comments:

  1. I'm not sure they entirely agree with social consies being clueless. After all, they are obsessed with controlling other people's sex lives and punishing women, er sluts for having sex. Obviously, if they're so knowledgable about other people's sex lives they must be experienced with it, right?

    Then again, maybe they are clueless. I guess that they either have horrible sex lives or are so deathly afraid of it that they have to feel better by making other people miserable too.

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  2. I'd go with clueless. Religious people are famous for not wanting to learn the dirty signs in ASL class. So we were at a picnic and this woman starts telling about her kids. She didn't know the sign for 'kite' so she just made up a word, which looked exactly like the sign for 'vagina', and went on about how happy the kids were to be in the park, playing with their, uhh, kites? All the deaf people were cracking up.

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  3. Okay what does the sign for vagina? And if you dont know a word in asl, can't you just spell it out?

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  4. Word for 'vagina' is here. Yeah, you can always spell out an English word. It's slow and awkward, but saves googling to keep from making an ass of yourself.

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  5. now i can see why she managed to make up a word for kite that ended up being vagina- which i couldn't figure out.

    really, though, when did "vagina" become a dirty word? i mean, at some point, deaf women are going to have to discuss their vaginas, at the very least with an ob/gyn. if she doesn't know the word, what's she going to do, point?

    wait, does ASL have slang for vagina like english does? does ASL have slang at all? gee, i'm ignorant, aren't I?

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  6. Sure it has slang. It's a language; it has everything every other language has.

    Don't feel bad, cuz everybody's ignorant about signed langauges. It's a different thing to hold up your own ignorance as a sign of holiness, the way these religiots do.

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  7. thank you. i know a little basic ASL because i live near a school for the deaf, and they used to use the library at the college i went to, and i worked in the library, so mostly my knowledge of ASL extends to being able to tell someone where in the library different collections are. this never extended itself to conversational ASL beyond "hello" or "how are you?".

    does every language have an equivalent sign language? by that i mean, is there frenchSL and germanSL, etc.?

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  8. Equivalent...mmm.... The only connection French SL has with French is that both are used in France. Whenever you get a community of deaf people, they ignore what hearing people say (natch) and evolve their own visual language, which might start a family tree, regardless of spoken languages.

    e.g. FSL has a daughter language, LSQ, that is used in Quebec, otherwise all of North America uses ASL, which is indirectly related to both, but not at all to British SL or its daughter Australian SL. These are all separate, mutually unintelligble languages. To show how that can work, Nicaraguan Sign indicates a question with a nose wrinkle; we do it in ASL with a frown—so then they think we are mad at them!

    But don't be scared, ASL users are bilingual in English, so you can code English. We use the sign in the link for 'vagina', and there's another word for it that is less formal, so for that other English word we'd use that sign, or spell it: pea you ess ess why. But ZOMG, dirty words!!

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  9. PF,

    I expect so, because even the UK has its own sign language, completely different from ASL. Seems a little cruel, making life harder for the deaf.

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  10. Uzza is (mostly) correct. ASL is just as much a language as any spoken one. Anything that can be discussed in English can just as easily be discussed in ASL. The same applies to any other sign language; ie, sign languages are fully fledged languages in their own right; they are not gestural forms of spoken ones.

    And as your your question, PF? No. It is entirely possible for places with the same spoken language to have different sign languages, or for places with different spoken languages to have the same sign language. For example, fingerspelling in British Sign Language uses two hands, while ASL uses only one.

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  11. I was talking about this with a friend of mine who speaks ASL, who apparently had a similarly funny experience with someone who speaks AussieSL. I guess AussieSL for soccer looks a lot like the ASL for sex, so my friend was pretty confused as to exactly what a group of elementary kids were doing until she thought to ask him to spell out the word.

    That's it, does anyone have a link to a website where I could pick up conversational ASL?

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  12. Two quibbles; you don't speak a sign language, you sign. Second, the proper term for AussieSL is Auslan.

    This website has a video dictionary of common signs. There are also some lessons. Note that some websites teach Signed English, which is not the same as ASL.

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  13. thank you! the unthinking prejudices of the hearing, i guess, but i was just adding "SL" to things to avoid typing it all out. that's just laziness.

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