How to Talk to Anyone (Junior Talker #5) by DeYtH Banger (old books to read .TXT) 📕

high heels, sneakers, hair products, jewelry, makeup, hair spray, nail polish, perfumes, Bobbi pins, hair ties, straighteners, blow-dryers, curling irons, other various girl products… IT JUST NEVER ENDS. Every time I go to the mall and am reminded of all of these things I am supposed to buy, I’m at risk of a brain aneurysm (shout out to spell check).

 

11. We shed.

 

I lose at least 20 strands of hair every time I blow-dry or straighten it. Between my roommate and me, there are legit tumbleweeds of hair currently blowing around my apartment floor. It’s like the desert in there minus the cacti.

 

12. We’d be lost without our mom.

 

Whether we are crying over skinned knees at 5, dealing with backstabbing friends at 15 or getting our hearts broken at 25, we never stop needing our mom. No one cares about you or understands your problems quite like your mom. I recently called my mom asking how to make scrambled eggs, solidifying the fact that I would actually die without her. If we have a good relationship with our mom, we take her opinion very seriously. Make a good impression on a girl’s mother, and you’ll be set.

 

13. Our boobs and backs constantly hurt.

 

Our backs hurt from carrying our boobs around all day and our boobs hurt for no goddamn reason at all.

 

14. We probably enjoy food more than you.

 

Girls are always being pegged as birdlike eaters, ordering something low in calories like a salad or sushi. The Hunger Games is nothing compared to a table of five hungry girls trying to share nachos or a Dominos pizza.

 

15. If we are single, we are supposed to feel bad about it.

 

If we are in a relationship, we are persistently asked when we might get married or have babies.

Somewhere in the fucked up course of history, society decided that a woman’s happiness is determined by whether or not she is in a relationship with a man. When I tell someone I am single, they act like I just told them I’m HIV positive. Being single does not mean you are sad and lonely, it just means you haven’t found the right person yet. The only times I feel bad about being single are when I feel the societal pressure to be in a relationship, when I have to kill a spider or when my groceries are too heavy. I’m confident that the right guy will come along, and when he does, he will have been worth the wait.

If you ARE in a relationship, everyone asks you when he’s going to pop the question. Once you’re engaged, all people can talk to you about is the wedding. When you’re married, everyone wants to know when you will be having babies. It’s a merry go round of personal invasive questions that women can’t seem to get off of. BRIEF GUIDE for the people who feel the need to inquire about these personal topics on the reg. When she has a ring on her finger, he popped the question. The wedding planning is going great and when you notice a large bump has grown where her flat stomach used to be, it’s probably because there’s a baby in there. No irritating questioning necessary.

 

16. The overwhelming consensus of the male population is that girls are “crazy.”

 

This is a difficult stigma to break. I will start out by saying yes; some women are completely bat shit crazy but you can’t let a few bad eggs (unintentional pun) ruin it for the rest of us. Whenever a guy tells me his “ex is crazy,” I always see this as a red flag. They throw the term around so frequently, I can’t determine whether they are full of shit or not. If she is so crazy, why would you date her for so long? Maybe you’re a little crazy, too. What exactly constitutes one as being crazy anyway? Did she slash your tires or did she just express a human feeling? Did she try to burn your house to the ground or simply ask you where the relationship was headed?

Guys send mixed signals then stamp a girl with the title of “crazy” when she just did something as insane as trust that you meant the things you said or did. I have held my feelings back in several relationships in an attempt to not appear crazy, and looking back, I regret it. The problems you’ve had with a girl in the past shouldn’t carry over to another person. I do believe women should learn to take things slow, back off when necessary and get control over their feelings, but it isn’t right to decide an entire gender is insane.

 

17. Girls are quick to turn on each other.

 

I have lost count how many times I’ve heard a girl rip apart another woman for getting in between her and her boyfriend, when he’s the actual one to blame. Unless that other woman is your friend or relative, it’s really a waste of energy to be angry with a complete stranger. 90% of the time, she isn’t even aware of your existence. Place the blame where it belongs. And girls, just stop sleeping with other people’s boyfriends, it’s tacky.

 

18. We are judged based on our appearance.

 

“You can’t be a history teacher. You’re blonde.” – a real thing a real person actually said to me one time

 

19. We can barely make it through a day without being sexually harassed.

 

The next man in a coffee shop or grocery store who tells me I should smile, is walking out of there with a broken limb. I’ll smile when I feel like it, DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO.

 

20. We are not nearly as complicated as men think we are.

 

Women have earned the reputation of being complicated and in reality, we are simpler than one might realize. We want what everyone wants: to be loved and appreciated, to be treated with respect, to be told the truth, to have a solid group of friends, to have good hair days and to not get roofied and murdered in a back alley somewhere. It’s really that simple.

Beyoncé said it best, “Who runs the world? GIRLS.” We work, we raise babies, we take care of our families, we arrange all vacation plans, and we make the time to look good doing it. Women are often underestimated but one time Mia Hamm told me in a Nike commercial that anything men can do, we can do better, so that’s how I know it’s true. We have way more on our minds than pumpkin spice lattes, Ryan Gosling without a shirt on and the Kardashians. As Cyndi Lauper once said in a song, “Girls just wanna have equal pay, a decent man to love, a boss that doesn’t sexually harass her, not to get abducted by a stranger while on a jog and then maybe some fun, too” or something like that. Girl Powah. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Should anything be ‘beyond a joke’?

 

 

 

The new comedy code of intolerant conformism is no laughing matter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comedy, it seems, is no laughing matter these days, caught up in one controversy after another over the acceptable limits of humour.

Last week it was the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo that was in the firing line again, accused of racism by everybody from the Queen of Jordan to radical US cartoonists for publishing jokes involving dead refugees. This week another serial offender, British comedian Jimmy Carr, is back in the headlines after being found guilty by the UK’s broadcasting watchdog, Ofcom, of causing ‘considerable offence’ after he cracked a joke about dwarves on BBC TV last November.

 

Comedy is suffering under a stifling atmosphere of conformism and intolerance. It appears that any joke judged to have crossed a line must be not just ignored, but condemned, censured and, if possible, censored. That, in turn, has given rise to a pathetic backlash of comedians and provocateurs trying to be offensive for the sake of it. The rest of us risk being left with the worst of both unfunny worlds.

Good jokes are generally in bad taste. They tend to mock the respectable rules and morals of society. By its nature comedy is always controversial, pushing as it must at the limits of what passes for taste and decency in any era. It is hard to think of a good joke that would not offend somebody. That is why there have long been attempts to control what is deemed ‘acceptable’ humour and to censor what is not. And why many writers and comedians have tried to subvert the rules.

 

However, as with other issues in the free-speech wars, the terrain has shifted. Once the complaints were about blasphemous and indecent comedy, and the censors were conservative politicians, policemen and priests. Now the protests are more often against comedians accused of breaking the new taboos – racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and the other usual suspects. And the demands to shut them down tend to be led not by old-fashioned prudes but by radical online activists, the liberal media and even other comedians. Backed up in the UK by broadcast regulators, politicians and the newly PC police.

 

We have come a long way since the upsurge of modern radical comedy in the 1960s, when the Jewish comedian Lenny Bruce could be arrested in the US and barred from Britain for using the word ‘cocksucker’ on stage. In 1964 in New York, Bruce was found guilty of performing a routine that was ‘obscene, indecent, immoral and impure’, in which ‘words such as “ass”, “balls”, “cocksucker”, “cunt”, “fuck”, “motherfucker”, “piss”, “screw”, “shit” and “tits” were used about one hundred times in utter obscenity’.

 

Three New York judges sentenced him, in what now sounds like a bad Dickensian joke, to four months in the workhouse. Bruce was released on bail pending appeals, but died before the legal process was complete. He was posthumously pardoned in 2003 by Republican New York governor George Pataki. ‘Freedom of speech is one of the greatest American liberties’, Pataki said, ‘and I hope this pardon serves as a reminder of the precious freedoms we are fighting to preserve’.

 

These days Lenny Bruce is revered as a pioneering comedy hero. Yet if the young Lenny were magically to appear on the New York stage today, what reception might he get?

 

His routine about a psychopathic rapist meeting up with a nymphomaniac after they each escape from their respective institutions, or his suggestion that he enjoyed sex with a chicken, or description of his audience as ‘seven niggers, six spics, five micks, four kykes, three guineas and one wop’, might not get him arrested for obscenity in the US or barred from entering Britain. But it surely would see him accused of racism and sexism and possibly the abuse of animals and the mentally ill by the outraged illiberal-liberal lobby, who would try to have him banned from campuses.

 

Nor would Bruce’s insistence that he used the n-word and other offensive epithets ‘just to make a point’, that ‘it’s the suppression of the word that gives it the power, the violence, the viciousness’, wash with the new comedy censors, who claim the right to decide what jokes others should be allowed to tell or to laugh at, what points they should be permitted to make.

The ‘alternative’ comedy scene of the 1980s in the UK and the US began partly as a punkish reaction against the older school of what was seen as one-note racist, sexist and homophobic humour. These alternative comedians soon became the new establishment, creating an alternative comedic conformism of their own. This fresh generation of comedians, including feminist stars, broke many old taboos about sex, sexuality or race. They were also, however, helping to create new taboos.

 

Today the shrillest voices condemning Charlie Hebdo or Jimmy Carr are not simply objecting to a comedian’s shtick or saying that it’s not funny – which anybody has the right to do. They are denying the offensive performer’s right to say it. This sort of censoriousness can only have severe consequences both for comedy and wider