Social networking is now less of a way to keep track of your friends, and more of a platform for communication that very strictly resembles junior high. And almost everybody acts like this at some point or another, it’s sort of the disappointing side effect of the medium. Unfortunately, status updates exacerbate the issue by only allowing users to express small pieces of what is essentially a way of getting attention. And here are the worst.

I’m going to KILL MYSELF if nobody likes this status.

One of the worst parts of being in a bad mood is that it’s typically lonely as fuck. Technology gives the impression that this issue can be eradicated, chiefly through Facebook. Part one in the obnoxious circle of attention-getting status updates, this one is reserved strictly for those who like to cry wolf. They post worrisome status updates about their health, mental status and social situations, all designed to make you want to pick up the phone and call so-and-so and make sure they don’t hurl themselves off the 22nd of their apartment building, when in reality, the situation at hand is not dire nor does it require any immediate attention.

You suck. Yeah, I’m talkin’ to you.

Over the last week, I’ve seen about three status updates from people in which the user complained voraciously about their friends, usually going as far as to sarcastically refer to them as such in quotation marks. Before that, I’d see several a week that were obvious blind-item statuses that were obviously about their lover, best friend, roommates, what have you. You look like a fucking six-year old when the best course of action for solving an interpersonal issue is to GO OUT OF YOUR WAY to talk about it with everyone but them.

I’m preeeeegggggnnnaaaaaaant.

Fucking NOBODY CARES. Yeah, we were all stoked when we found out that you were going to be dropping some crotchfruit in a couple of months. But honest to God, nobody gives a fuck about your swollen ankles, false labour, and we sure as fuck don’t want to see what exploded in your baby’s diaper. Get a fucking hobby.

[User] likes penis. (12:54 PM) Hahahaha, [Other User] hacked my account! Jerrrrk! Hahahahah! (1:27 PM)

Okay, I’m sort of guessing not everybody was there for the inception of the internet. Hell, I know people right now who aren’t even old enough to remember milk in a bag, let alone a time when it took 10 minutes to download a picture of a lynx cat off Netscape on a dial-up connection. But didn’t anyone tell you that “password” is not an acceptable password, and that if someone is continually hacking your account, maybe you could change it to something a little harder to crack? No? Jesus.

Eeek! Pubcrawl at [shitty dimly-lit overpriced club filled with guys who say 'yo' unironically]! Juss’ me and muh gurllsss! ♥

Okay, we get it. You’re lonely. Lonely and kind of stupid. But I’m going to say right now that pubcrawls were NEVER cool for anyone over the age of 20 (yay, Canada) and more brain cells than a dinner plate. Also, you’re not on Sex & The City.

Okay, what CAN I do, you fucking smartass?

Woah, there, cowboy. Someone’s snippy. Okay, I’m going to venture a guess and say not everybody is going to agree with me, but being on Facebook means that you kind of have an obligation to entertain people. Seriously. If I went to a party and just sat there telling people what I ate for dinner, and what kind of shit my son puked up onto my shirt the other night, people would very swiftly begin to gravitate to the other side of the room and ignore me. Facebook is like being at a really big, never-ending party that you can’t ever leave. And considering you signed up to Facebook for social validation (yes, you did) it’s really only natural that you try to actually give people a reason to respond to the shit you post. Two-way street, man.

You’re a fucking failure because you didn’t get married.

Real quote: “If you’ve not walked down the aisle in [three years] time, something may well be wrong with your relationship.” And the article gets much worse. It delves into possibly apocryphal anecdotes about women with vague names like Emma. Emma, evidently, made the mistake of deluding herself into thinking her then-boyfriend loved her, and was not dating her purely out of convenience.

I can’t even wrap my head around the point of this article. I seriously feel like the only reason it was written was to make women feel even more grossly insecure about their relationships, like there aren’t enough avenues for that already.

Intelligent, logical women will read this and not completely disregard its message, because the way it’s crafted exquisitely implies that no matter what, if you are not married, you have failed and your significant other does not love you. Marriage equals love here, and there’s no leeway. Reading it, I fell instantly into this hazy mood where the only thing I could think was, “My boyfriend doesn’t love me.” That was all I took away from that article. That was all anyone could take away from that article.

Three years, to me, seems like a pretty small window of time, and frankly, I can think of a million reasons why any couple would elect to delay or even eschew marriage. They don’t have the money, they’re too young, they don’t see the point, etc. It seems a little insane to assume that the logical progression of any relationship leads to marriage, and I think one of the reasons people fear commitment in the first place is because of this fallacy.

I guess I’m one of those people who doesn’t regard marriage as a “success”, in the same way I don’t regard the lack or dissolution of marriage as a failure. But a lot of people aren’t like that, and enjoy the idea of marriage. To people like this, the idea that they have failed somehow by not getting married is going to naturally be a source of insecurity. What I don’t get is why it’s so important for the bullshit “relationship experts” over at the Daily Fail to make sure that insecurity continues and deepens.

So, while I was watching that movie, I spent a bit of time on Facebook taunting some idiot hippies about the G20 riots. Calling them idiots hippies and so forth. So, anyway, someone drew attention to the fact that I have a link to my band on my Facebook page. Someone attempted to defend me rather clumsily by saying, “… and her boyfriend’s band is alright.” My stomach fell. I didn’t care that the conclusion he reached was that we were alright. The conclusion was that it was my boyfriend’s band, and that I had nothing to do with it. I shook it off, though.

Then someone else made a reference to my “rock-star boyfriend” and it just made me seethe with rage. Believe me when I say I’m trying to keep my ego in check here, but it’s MY FUCKING BAND, TOO, YOU INSIPID SEXIST ASSHOLES. I wrote all the fucking lyrics, I sing all the songs. How the FUCK does that make it my ROCK STAR BOYFRIEND’S FUCKINGBANDANDWHOEVENSAYSROCKSTARANYMOREFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU-

So, anyway, I find it weirdly comforting that music is still almost exclusively a man’s game. No matter what I do, no one is ever going to take me seriously. There is always going to be snickers, there’s always going to be people telling me that what I am doing is cute. It’s like the fucking 1970s all over again!

I remembered about three pages in why I hate this magazine. Waste of $5? You tell me.

Psychobabble/The Caveman Principle

One thing I really despise is armchair psychology, and no other women’s magazine abuses it more than Cosmo. I’m not even talking about people who assume that the subconscious is an irrefutable fact of the human psyche, and who also don’t understand what the term subconscious even means. There’s an article on page 28 of this issue that claims that, “… choosing the wrong guys signals that you may have been driven to re-create the drama you had with your father or first boyfriend.”

Oh, okay. So, if I continually select mates who I do not get along with, or who continually display poor behavior that affects me negatively, it’s my dad’s fault. It’s not because I make shitty fucking choices and don’t think about the future. It’s my dad’s fault.

Whereas psychology is both a useful and fascinating discipline, a lot of people like to misinterpret basic principles in order to excuse shitty behavior or manipulate others. Again, Cosmo‘s forte. Almost every article about relationships, whether romantic or otherwise, seek to manipulate basic psychological principles or sociological studies (most of which were never intended to be pared down to cute little “satisfy your man” soundbites) and are usually done in the most fantastically misguided ways I’ve ever seen. There’s an article about “fun things to do in the dark” (no, really) in which they quote Francesca Gino, PhD, assistant professor of organizational behavior at North Carolina. “When lights are dim, people feel more anonymous and are more likely to try daring things.” Okay. Shit. I have to go sit down for a bit.

Okay, I’m back. First of all, Dr. Gino: NO FUCKING SHIT. Second, this was (and I’m really reaching here) probably based on studies in which they found correlations between light levels and risk-taking behavior. Either that, or they called her and asked what the most obvious thing she could think of was, and this little gem was a couple of spots below “water is wet” and “bears poop in the woods”. But of course, it’s quoted in an article that suggest to readers that they, “Go skinny dipping”. No matter what fascinating articles on human behavior get published, Cosmo is going to find a way to tie it into being a vapid shit.

Speaking of human behavior, Cosmo loves evolutionary psychology. There’s a lot of controversy about how widely applicable evolutionary psychology is, but let’s not trust the magazine to get that complex about it. It uses evolution to explain almost everything, namely male behavior, gleefully ignoring the impact of years of social conditioning, perspectives in individual cultures and personal experience to explain away a plethora of human behaviors. Why are men less likely to forgive their mates for cheating? Likely unrelated to the social conditioning of men, any personal attitudes about sex and fidelity, or any shit like that. It’s ’cause in like, caveman times, men didn’t want to raise another dude’s crotch goblins. And whereas I think that evolutionary psychology could be really interesting to help explain a lot of human behavior, I’m kind of insulted that they almost always use to it explain MALE behavior, as if men are not complex enough to afford further explanation.

I dress myself now

Let me make it pretty fucking clear right now that I am no expert on fashion. All of my underwear comes from Wal-mart, and I don’t actually own a jacket. But Cosmo‘s fashion sense is much worse, for far less self-aware reasons.

It wouldn’t be so bad if they just published articles that gave you instructions on how to apply certain products, or how to do your hair a certain way. That’d actually be kind of helpful, if women’s magazines weren’t famous for giving some of the worst fucking instructions on the planet (“To put on eyeliner, draw a line over your eyelashes! You won’t look like a lice-infested crackwhore at all! Just do it! Smoosh it with your finger for a sexy rocker look!”) But instead all their articles are a mishmash of “legitimate” advice, and poorly-veiled middle-school type judgments on anyone who dare color outside the lines a little. Shanna Moakler looks like “Circus Barbie” and black nail-polish in summer is “dirty-looking”. It’s like that snotty bitch who sat behind you in remedial math in the 8th grade got a job in the fashion department and spends her whole day gleefully shitting on anyone who doesn’t think beige eyeshadow is a Godsend.

What’sa matter, don’t wanna hear your old man talk about SEEEEEEEEEEEX?

Okay, we all know the people who write their male-perspective articles aren’t actually men. We all know that, right? Well, you should know that. I can prove it, too. Ask any man what his reaction would be if you lightly grazed your front teeth on the shaft of his penis. Your responses would be something like this:

“Absolute horror, swiftly followed by deleting her number from my phone.”

“I’d probably shit on her face.”

If there’s one completely true stereotype about men, it’s that they love their penises. And why not? It’s like a floppy little friend who just chills out in their pants and throws up a lot. The last thing they want on that friend is your fucking teeth. But I’ve seen that helpful little pointer at least three times. Basically, your rule of thumb is this: if Cosmo says it’ll “drive your man wild”, do the exact opposite. If they tell you to strap on some latex gloves and root around in his poop-shoot, then never touch his butt, ever. Road head? Take the bus.

YOU GON’ GET RAPED

According to the July issue, I have the following things to worry about:

• Doctors morbidly fascinated with the appearance of my labia, who will somehow manipulate me into spending thousands of dollars to surgically alter it, which might also mean these particular doctors are also Jedis and can somehow convince me let them hack up my junk without my consent. “This is the vulva you are looking for.”
• Creepy men watching me from outside my window in the middle of suburbia, possibly masturbating feverishly to what is apparently a very-misshapen labia.

Most women’s magazines have a “serious” article buried around the latter 2/3rds of the magazine so no-one can accuse them of being insipid, shallow bibles of materialistic bullshit. They’re usually not very well-researched and they include a lot of bold, red-colored typeface on black backgrounds to imply a sense of danger, plus a helpful little side-bar of “could it happen to YOU?” to which the answer is usually, “statistically speaking, no”.

Cosmo tries to be a little more well-rounded about it, peppering the entire magazine with alarmist bullshit about insane plastic surgeons and the implied dangers of bottled water, but one thing you can always count on is an article about a remarkably novel situation in which you can get raped. All sorts of real, indisputable anecdotal evidence is used to back up these kinds of stories. It happened to some fat girl in Wisconsin? It’s obviously a real threat to me, too.

Rape happens in a really wide variety of situations, and a lot of the time, there was little indication to the person who was raped that the situation was one of danger; ex: going to a friend’s house for a beer. What Cosmo does is paint scenarios in which a rape actually happened and twists it to make it seem as if it was the circumstances that caused the rape, not the rapist. The reason I say this is because rape articles are so fucking commonplace to this magazine, it almost seems like they’re implying that there’s always something you can do to avoid getting raped. Do you walk home by yourself? Probably going to get raped. Have your own house? Get ready for rape! Do you have some sort of orifice capable of being penetrated? Bad news.

Going for a tinkle

You know what rocks? Words. You know what rocks significantly less? When people who have only the weakest command of the English language are instructed to invent new synonyms for these words in order to communicate with a very large group of people and are thus granted a very powerful influence over speech.

The people who write for Cosmo don’t so much “write” as they mash their orange-stained faces onto the keyboards so thoughtlessly gifted to their possession. They use words like “ridic”, ostensibly a contraction of “ridiculous”, in situations in which it’s just not funny, appropriate, or interesting. That’s why it pisses me off. I know most people see me as this insanely haughty, pretentious fuck who scoffs wildly into their priceless brandy whenever somebody employs words less cultured than “macro-perspective”, but I’m all for butt-fucking the English language for hilarity’s sake. For reals.

The thing is, the articles all look like a transcribed impromptu read-through by a sixteen year-old high school dropout who works at Fabutan. “Lavender lipstick is so fab for summer, I could just like, ralph, hahaha.” This is the same magazine that brought you va-jay-jay as a legitimate synonym for a body part most people feel uncomfortable naming in the first place.

And I think what pisses me off most is that they seem to have this approved list of words they can use for common things. Your boyfriend (you don’t have a girlfriend in CosmoLand, sorry) is always your “man”, your hair is now your “tresses”, your mouth is officially dubbed your “pout”. And I think they’re being cute, but it actually just makes me want to fucking gouge my eyes out. Not my lids, not my peepers. My fucking EYES.

Cosmo always talks about being a “fun, fearless female”, and I think they have an idea about what they want this girl to be like. This girl is vapid, confused, misguided and shallow, and I hate her fucking guts. For a mere five dollars, you too can find out how to avoid being this stupid bitch.

Is throwing yourself a birthday party rude?

I never thought so. Apparently, I am full of shit. According to Etiquette Hell throwing yourself a party is the epitome of classlessness, self-absorption and rudeness.

We’ll just kinda whisper here that persons who host their own birthday parties are a desperate and pitiable sort of people. Imagine the pathetic situation of having friends and family that couldn’t be bothered to honor their loved ones with a party every once in a while so the birthday “boy/girl” has to organize it themselves.  Or maybe it’s that they have but the honoree is a greedy sucker who wants a party every. single. year.

Uhm, really? She also claims that sending gifts of money is enormously tacky. One particularly articulate reader sent her a letter explaining that while in Jeanne’s (the site owner) part of the world (Southern United States), gifts of cash are considered tacky, many other parts of the world consider it anywhere from acceptable (Sweden, Canada) to very gracious (Japan). She responded in a very sweet, condescending manner, though I won’t quote her here. The basic translation from Southern to Canadian English is thus:

“WAH, WAH, WAH. YOU’RE WRONG.”

But again, I digress. What exactly about organizing your own birthday party is considered tacky? Perhaps if you send an invitation that explicitly demands gifts upon entry to the party. Maybe even if you invite a small circle of friends to a potluck dinner in your honor, and said friends are so bitterly rueful at the idea of having to GOD FORBID fucking cook something and carry this enormous load of food to your house, maybe in some places, perhaps this is tacky. I don’t know. As someone who is obviously really at a loss as to what is considered polite, I cannot say for sure.

Oh, wow. Okay, this woman has been arrested once it was discovered that her apartment held six dead babies, all of which she had birthed. And while a lot of the reactions were of the following:

“Oh, Jeebus, how tragic/weird/I wonder if she’s crazy, since France doesn’t have particularly rigid abortion laws,” and then there was this gem.

Dear Conservatives,

You want to overturn Roe? Welcome to your future.

The US is now under a Democratic party, meaning that it’s even less likely Roe vs. Wade will be overturned. I say less likely because individual states varied on their own laws, but this was not a country-wide thing and was more likely to occur in states and counties that are heavily conservative to begin with. And hey, again; this happened in France.

I think it’s not the fact that this comment was made by someone who either dramatically failed geography, or who had only been introduced to the concept of Roe vs. Wade sometime last Tuesday that bothers me. I think it’s because it was made by someone who had their mind in a logical place; i.e.: women’s reproductive rights, but then went onto a fallacy that assumed that if women could not legally obtain abortions, that this kind of shit would happen enough that its impact would outweigh the reversal of the law in the first place.

Let’s go on a time travelling adventure, shall we? Okay, so I take say… Noelle. Me and Noelle go back to 1953, and me and her go out to a party. And (I’m sorry Noelle, I have no idea why I needed to involve you in this) after a little rough and drunken tumble with say, James Dean, falls pregnant. Noelle comes to me, and asks what she should do.

What is the more likely scenario?

(1) Me: “Well, Noelle. I think it’s pretty obvious that you should conceal the pregnancy, give birth in your own bathtub, smother your baby and then hide it in your house somewhere.”

Noelle: “Hmm. I was just going to hurl myself down the stairs, but okay.”

(2) Me: “SHOTGUN WEDDING!”

Noelle: “This is the happiest day of my life!”

If you said (2), ding ding! You win some sort of prize.

If you’ve ever met me (likely, since you’re reading this) you’ve probably been privy to my maddening treatises on why I don’t understand marriage. I was sucked into a very long internet fight with a friend of a friend who argued that one of the chief reasons behind marriage was the symbolism. I didn’t feel like metaphor was a convincing reason to perpetuate centuries of misogyny and misandry* and to spend great flopping wodges of cash in the process to grow a useless industry that revolves around manipulating people’s emotions. But whatever, he was all into it.

So, engagement rings. Most of us know the PR angle and we’ve all been taught about blood diamonds, so why the fuck are we still trading these things? The symbolism angle keeps coming up. Otherwise logical women defend the acquisition of diamond rings as a natural declaration of love and integral to the whole gettin’ hitched idea. “It’s a symbol of love,” they say.

That seems really fucked up to me. Does your partner not love you if he proposes sans ring? To be honest, I don’t feel like engagements mean anything, period. All it means is that someone asked you to do something and you said you would. If anything, the ring is a monetary investment that shows how serious you are about still wanting to do this thing. Is their promise less serious if they don’t ply you with gifts?

This seems really sterile and not that affectionate at all, because in a way, you’re paying so you can telegraph your ownership of someone. I say ownership because only one party is expected to wear the ring, and so it’s not really a declaration of your love for each other inasmuch is it’s a way of branding one of the people involved, especially if you’re defending it from the symbolism angle. If it’s really just a way of making a promise, why does there have to be a monetary investment involved, and why does only one party really benefit from this investment? Why is this investment attached to what amounts to no more than a promise, and why isn’t the money put into the actual act of getting married instead?

I guess what I don’t understand is why people feel compelled to put so much money into weddings, especially before the actual ceremony. Check out this Tiffany & Co. ring, one I know for a fact that at least one woman I know owns. Sure, it’s pretty. If you asked me to attach a monetary value, I’d be all, “Durr, $150?” Nope, this fucker is $10, 600. That’s more than 880 hamsters. That’s 2650 loaves of really fancy bread. That’s 42400 of those really huge gummy frogs you can buy at the 7-11. What the fuck? You could buy SEVERAL used cars with that kind of money. Basically, what this ring amounts to is the acquistion of the most expensive and least efficient prostitute ever.

Yeah, I fucking said it. By giving someone an engagement ring, you’re buying them. You give someone something and in exchange, you fuse your rights and personal belongings with them of your own volition.

Engagements rings are literally the least romantic thing I could ever think of.

*: The foil for misogyny. Invoked so infrequently that Chrome’s spellcheck insisted it was not a real word and instead suggested that I meant “misanthropy”. I didn’t.

On a message board (I live in the mainframe! Whee hee hee!) I got into an argument wherein I explained that our only local gay bar habitually discriminated against straights. If the coat check doesn’t think you’re queer, you have to pay cover, though it’s never explicitly stated. It’s just sort of an unspoken rule. The argument is that you’re discriminating against people based on appearance AND sexual orientation.

So fucking what?

I live in Calgary, which most people will tell you is stringently conservative. I’ve had scores of people tell me they “just plain don’t like faggots”, amongst other minorities. I feel a twinge of fear when I see a gay couple hand-in-hand down the street, fearing they might be verbally abused, or worse, physically assaulted for their displays of affection. Again, there is ONE gay bar in the whole million-plus population city. There’s about 50 bars that I can think of right now that do not explicitly state their patronage as straight, but don’t exactly come off as gay-friendly spaces; Tantra, The Roadhouse, The Back Alley, etc. (“The shit bars, then,” cries the peanut gallery. Well, yeah. But they’re popular shit bars, so shut the fuck up.)

Put another way, there’s really only one place queers can get together and be themselves. And the coat check doesn’t turn you away if you look a little too butch or femme, they just charge you $7 cover. That’s it. You’re still allowed in. The bar is attempting to telegraph a particular preference for patrons.

“But I don’t even look gay,” you cry, “What then?”

Okay, it’s kind of unfair to people who don’t habitually telegraph their “gay-ness” by dressing a particular way. This bar would get their asses sued if they asked every patron if they were gay or not, so to maintain a particular patronage, they have to sort of pick and choose based on appearance. Which, again: unfair.

To be frank, it’s kind of a drag (no pun) to have a lot of straight people in there. It’s not that anyone’s like, “Oh, shit. Breeders at three o’clock.” Okay, for instance; a few months ago, my friend Becky and I went there for karaoke night*. There was a guy walking around asking everybody “what they were”. Later on, he regaled us with such witty rejoinders as “faggot” and “dyke”, but just sneered at me when I said I was bi. And this wasn’t an isolated case; this happens all the time.

So, yeah, it’s unfair and discriminatory. But frankly, gay people have to put up with a lot of discrimination and unfairness in every day life (not to mention other bars). In a city like Calgary, gays sort of need their own space, and to make sure it stays that way without outright asking every person who comes in what junk they prefer, they kind of have to guess based on your clothes, hair and demeanor. And if you are gay, and still get charged cover, just accept that they’re not trying to hurt your feelings, they just maybe guessed wrong on your orientation. The bar has absolutely no obligation to be fair and balanced when it comes to an unspoken dress code.

*: Which totally sucks at a gay bar, because when people go up to sing, they’re usually really fucking good and impossible to make fun of. “Oh, look at this jerk, this is going to be hilari – Oh. Shit.”

I will concede that animals, by and large, are sentient. Do I think they should be granted special moral rights? In a way. I don’t think it’s your right to strap down a rabbit and poke it in the eye with a needle. This is different from, say, eating a rabbit. Why? Nature is obviously pro-eating stuff. Hamsters eat their own young in addition to grains and seeds. I don’t understand why I, as a sentient being, don’t have the right to eat whatever the fuck I want, but Tibbles the hamster can eat her first-born son. Is it because Tibbles doesn’t understand the implications of eating her babies? So, why grant her special rights if she can’t adhere to certain responsibilities? Her babies obviously have feelings, but Tibbles is still allowed personal autonomy just because she doesn’t understand that killing her family is a little immoral (especially since she doesn’t HAVE to eat her babies, she just elects to). Because I’m capable of anthropomorphizing things (inasmuch as that’s a capability rather than a fucking handicap) I no longer have the right to eat things that had a mom.

There’s a quote by Harvey Diamond that makes me want to slay infants.

“You put a baby in a crib with an apple and a rabbit. If it eats the rabbit and plays with the apple, I’ll buy you a new car.”

FUCK YOU. You know what else babies will do when left to their own devices? Shit their pants, eat inedible objects and ram toy soldiers up their own fucking nostrils. Babies are idiots and you shouldn’t be using them as a barometer for moral standards.

Vegans also believe that any exploitation of animals is cruel. Shearing a sheep and then wearing the fur it wasn’t really using for any good purpose makes you cruel. Latching onto an elephant and eating the bugs off it is cruel. Weaseling your way into a hermit crab’s brain and melting its brain so that it rises to the surface and gets eaten by a duck so you can live in the duck is CRUEL. Oh, shit. Sorry. Those last two things are stuff that animals do. My bad.

There’s a maddening argument that goes along these lines: How can you draw a line on what is animal cruelty? Why is it okay to eat them, but not okay to say, poke needles into their eyes? People draw arbitrary lines on morals all the fucking time. For instance, it’s not illegal to masturbate in your own house, but it’s a crime when you’re on the bus, even though it’s essentially the same activity. Doing in both these places does the same amount of ACTUAL harm to the people in your general vicinity, but we all got together and said jerking it on the bus is wack. End of story. We all got together and said eating Peter Rabbit is okay, because we need to eat animals to survive, but let’s not say, rape Peter, because we don’t need to do that. Morals are really just a matter of convenience vs. the effect on other parties, when you get right down to it.

Oh, but then I’m told we DON’T need to eat animals. We can all survive off vegan diets (except, you know, babies). This gets me to my last  argument about vegans: They’re fucking elitist, purity-driven, self-important assholes. Do you know who has the time, money and energy to make an elaborate menu free of animal products? Pricks with fucking trust-funds. Poor people and the middle class do not have the several hours a day required to research and subsequently prepare vegan meals that provide them with all the nutrients required to support life. To spend that kind of effort to consume all your calories in the most smug way humanly imaginable is impossible, insane and the worst kind of self-absorption. Vegans eat their morals, and don’t understand that there’s a shitload of people out there who simply don’t want the limited diet that they can afford to be dwindled down by the exclusion of carmine, gelatin, fish, diary, eggs, honey, etc. Being a vegan means sacrificing huge amounts of time, money, effort and freedom so that you can masturbate about how incredibly NICE you’re being.

The only reason that most modern people don’t make a habit out of eating people is because we don’t typically farm and consume predators, and being a self-interested species (which is what guarantees our survival) we don’t want to dwindle our own numbers. So, in the name of convenience, we eat other animals in order to get fat and protein, which we need to survive. Vegan diets simply don’t provide enough of either and unfortunately for them, Nature made us obsessed with these things because she wanted us to eat them. Probably by eating other animals. That Nature sure is a mean cunt, isn’t she?

The reason we don’t exploit other people for our own self-interest — OH SHIT, WE TOTALLY DO. We do it all the time. Aside from slavery, we also hire other people (animals) to do jobs we don’t want to do (we call it “delegation”) because it’s really fucking hard to survive without exploiting something, and exploitation of animals and each other makes life easier. By the way, some things that exploit human beings: chocolate, sneakers, tires, bricks, and the Gap. People are dicks.

And this is why I don’t hate on vegetarians, even though the principle is basically the same. Moderation. Vegetarianism isn’t associated heavily with elitism and misguided morals because these days, it’s pretty much just a bunch of people who don’t eat animals for their own reasons. By virtue of the fact that the very basic principles of their philosophy are not rooted in extremism, they are less likely to expect other people to adhere to these rigid rules. Vegans are trying to make morals black and white, and their whole philosophy disregards human interest and pretends like animals are fucking better than us by virtue of their moral ignorance even though we’re supposed to ACT better than them because we understand the principle of pain and suffering.

*: Obviously invented with the Addams Family in mind. Lumpy cheese in milk plasma? Go home.