Iconic cupcakes and other irrelevancies

This is the greatest mystery of the human mind—the inductive leap. Everything falls into place, irrelevancies relate, dissonance becomes harmony, and nonsense wears a crown of meaning.

John Steinbeck

This WILL make sense: itwillitwillitwillitwillitwill. . . and if it doesn't, it's cuzzadafact that I just got up and am not yet fully awake and have many other things to do.

I've been compiling a list of things that belong together, mainly because they annoy the shit out of me. If they seem dissonant, irrelevant, etc. (I almost said "whatever"!), then bear with me. Soon all this nonsense will wear a crown of meaning.

 

The cupcake theme leads the way, more or less, because cupcakes have become ubiquitous since that moment some time in the '90s when Carrie and Miranda sat there on a park bench cramming their faces with cake and talking about (what else?) "crushes".

Cupcakes might've become Big (to coin a phrase, an awful one) anyway, but somehow-or-other, perhaps because of Carrie spitting out little pieces of cake while she waxed all giggly like someone in high school,  they blew into the stratosphere - imagine  little multi-colored sparkly-icinged projectiles raining down on us all - and still dominate kids' birthday parties, baby showers and even WEDDINGS.

No more does the bride-to-be fuss and twitter (I mean "twitter", not "tweet") about that dire necessity of marriage, the wedding cake. She won't have one anyway. It'll be a cement-frosted edifice made oout f styrofoam and it will cost $1550.99.

No, she will fuss and twitter about importing "special" cupcakes like the ones Carrie and Miranda ate 18 years ago on Sex and the City. From the Magnolia Bakery in New York.

This is how cupcakes become. . .(and here is my point - yes, there is one - ) iconic. And if cupcakes can become iconic, so can everything else.

The word is thrown around so casually these days that no one notices any more. James Bond has his iconic martini. The Kardashians have their iconic stupidity. Justin Bieber has his iconic stupid haircut. Simon Cowell has his iconic nastiness.  And I'd think of more, but I don't have to: just listen for it for one day and you'll see.

So what is an icon? It's a symbol so culturally significant that it comes to stand for a whole world of meaning. I think it even has religious importance, a focus for prayer or worship. It hardly relates to cupcakes. But in this air-puffed, sugar-spun world, maybe it does.

 

Let's get the next one out of the way now because it nauseates me so much:  "awesome". In the course of a day, I hear this 29,000 times, to the point that it means nothing at all. In fact, its empty-headed non-meaning is worming its way into the dictionary, as so many non-words eventually do.

"Here's your change."

"Awesome."

"I had my shoe fixed."

"Awesome."

"My AIDS test came out negative."

"Awesome."

And so on, and on, and on.

If something really is "awesome", such as whatever-that-American-thingie-is-called, Mount Rushmore, or Old Faithful, or the Sistene Chapel or something, I don't know what the response would be because you've already used up "awesome" on all those stupid, empty-headed, meaningless things.

I saw a book not long ago: 500 Things that are  Awesome, or some-such. I flipped through it and, as my Jewish brethren say, plotzed. One of the things they listed as "awesome" was your colon. It described in detail its role in processing human shit as it made its way out your - I won't go any further, but hey, it's "awesome", isn't it?

Another one I'm hearing every day: "surreal". Maybe it's because our whole world is surreal now. But it's being applied to everything, i. e. the plumbing failing or having to take your cat to the vet. "He was throwing up furballs. It was surreal." Why do these words catch on? Is it a disease, and how soon before we all start scratching?

I will add to this "no problem" in place of "you're welcome".

"Thanks for loaning me $5,000,000.00 till payday."

"No problem."

What does this mean exactly? "This is not a problem." " There is no problem here." Why say that instead of the courteous non-phrase "you're welcome" (which doesn't mean very much either)?

People say it BECAUSE EVERYONE ELSE IS SAYING IT. Mooooooooo!

But the lowing herds of humanity don't stop there. "You betcha" sometimes stands in for "No problem," and means even less.

I don't know if this is a catch-phrase or just a stupidity, but whenever something disastrous happens, a fire or a shooting or 9-11 or anything on a traumatic, unexpected scale, everyone says, "I thought I was in a movie."

No one seems fully present in reality any more. It's all watched on some sort of vast screen in 3D, and we're just spectators with no active role. "It looked like a movie." "I heard some sort of popping noise."

That popping noise is GUNFIRE, you fucking idiots, and that is what it really sounds like, not the "BLAMMMMM!"  that has stood in for decades on TV and in movies. It's a sound that comes out of some sort of central sound effects bank, and it's the only way movie directors can convince people that a gun has actually been fired. It's kind of like cars exploding into fireballs when someone lights a match. It doesn't happen that way, but it has nevertheless become our collective reality.

So when someone fires a real gun, it sounds kind of like a muted firecracker, a puh-puh sound, and no one dives for cover but just stands there stupidly waiting to be shot because THIS MUST BE A MOVIE. Which might be followed by another statement (if such a thing were possible):

"This must be dead."

What rhymes with vulva?

Measures: 5" L x 3-1/4" W x 1" D

Wt: 3.5 oz.

Valentine's Day
Give someone special a delicious chocolate Vagina wrapped in our red hearts gift bag! Click on image thumbnail below to see gift preview.

A delectable and lovely creation that's sure to please!

Our large chocolate vagina will give the lucky recipients enough chocolate to enjoy for as long as they want. Very life like in design and size.

Great for bachelor/bachelorette parties!

Packaged in clear bag and tied with curling ribbon in your choice of colors.

Well, OK, and I'm sorry about that title. Sorry to use such a "dirty" word, but the original was worse, a word that nowadays is only heard when someone wants to talk about "tweet" and has a slip of the tongue.

Not that tongue has anything to do with it.

OK, I have a beef (I can't seem to use neutral terms here!). Sometimes at night, I have a habit. It's a very bad habit and I am deeply ashamed of it.

I watch old reruns of Sex and the City.

This is when I'm really desperate and my PVR recordings of  those wonderful History Channel and National Geographic shows have run out. When I can no longer stand to watch, for the 17th time, Adolf and Eva: A Love Story or When Aliens Attacked the Pharaohs.

I just want something to help me make it through the night, or make it from 9:30 to 10:15 (for the unedited version runs something like 29 minutes sans ads, a very awkward length).

It's like an archaelogical dig, in a way, seeing people with cell phones the size of a loaf of bread, talking about Y2K (and by the way, what was that anyway?) and pondering whether to start using some strange new invention called email.

The sexual stuff now seems rather silly, though I guess it did break some ground and shatter some taboos. But seeing Samantha endlessly groaning and shouting as a series of nearly-identical men pound on her in the missionary position gets old in a hurry.

None of this is about eroticism. It's about screwing. But never mind, that's not what I'm here to tell you.

I'm here to tell you that I'm a little tired of hearing women refer to their genitalia in the WRONG WAY.

There's just one word for everything below the belt: vagina.

Maybe it started with The Vagina Monologues, some sort of bizarre harpy-fest in which a whole lot of fading celebrity women, eager to prove themselves hip like actors making guest appearances on Batman, sat around and dished and jived about their VAGINAS.

Yes, women have them. But in a funny sort of way, a vagina "isn't". It's a hole, a tunnel, a non-thing. What women do have, the part of them that most often responds sexually, is a vulva.

Vulva.

You heard me.

Vulva!

A lot of women do not even know what a vulva IS, because no one ever tells them, but what it IS, is (are?) the external genitalia that includes the labia majora, labia minora, and that pearl beyond price, the clitoris.

But we don't talk about any of those things because, let's face it, they're "dirty", and besides they don't exist anyway. We have vaginas, and that's it.

The one word does for everything, doesn't it?

But does it?

If men talked about their prostates, and only their prostates, as describing their entire sexual paraphernalia, would it be accurate? Uh.

My feeling is that all this external stuff, which for many women is the locus for most of their sexual pleasure and release, is still considered dirty, smelly and secret.

It's "down there", the same "down there" we learned as children and later deodorized and shaved and ignored.

But hey! We've come a long way, baby, because now we have VAGINAS. Which are tunnels. Yes, it goes in, but it also comes out (though we won't go there). 

I have never once, in my life, even on Sex and the City, heard a woman refer to her vulva, her labia or her clitoris, either on TV or in a movie. Not even in a book (except for my novel Mallory - buy a copy now on Amazon! - in which a girl struggles with the social implications of her "abnormal" genitalia).

These words, the names of perfectly respectable body parts, body parts that are known to have given limitless pleasure to countless women, are considered so deeply taboo that most people don't even acknowledge their existence.

You may have heard of female circumcision, a barbaric rite practiced in parts of the Muslim world (and it really is, so please don't call me anti-Muslim, though I am definitely anti-female-circumcision). In its most extreme form, a young girl, a prepubescent girl, is attacked with a dull instrument which removes every trace of external female genitalia: vulva, labia, clitoris. All those things. They don't remove her vagina because they can't, though they do sew the ravaged opening shut so tightly that only a tiny hole remains.

On her wedding night, the girl (probably only a teenager) is cut open so that her husband may be admitted to the bridal chamber. One can only imagine what childbirth must be like.

So her "?" is mutilated, even removed. Her "?", which she doesn't need anyway, because she still has a vagina, right?

Heard on a news story when a woman was humilated during an airport pat-down: "He touched my vagina." OK. He must have done more than touch to penetrate a physiological tunnel. "My vagina is depressed" (Charlotte on Sex and the City, having been diagnosed with a condition called vulvodynia, an unexplained pain in the VULVA NOT VAGINA).

There was a time, and maybe that time isn't over yet, when you could say "penis" on TV, but you could not say "vagina". Why not? It made people squirm to say "vagina". It reminded them of gynecological exams and speculae and tampons and feminine deodorant spray and all that swampy stuff. 

Then suddenly, after the taboo-shattering celebrity girl friend sit-around called The Vagina Monologues, you suddenly could say vagina, it was suddenly cool and hip and funny-in-a-good-way to say vagina,  and in fact you were expected to say vagina any time you referred to anything that lived between a woman's legs.

Vagina, vagina, vagina! Say it loud, say it proud.

But what about that other language, which is far more accurate? Let's try it on. "He touched my vulva." (Excuse me while I run for the bathroom!) "My vulva is depressed." (Excuse me while I run for the police!)

I'm not saying anything unseemly here. At all. Can't I name body parts? Can't I say "liver", "colon", "upper respiratory system" or anything else?

"He touched my body." "My body is depressed." Oh, but "body" may be just too squirmy and uncomfortable and taboo. It's got all that mushy wet stuff inside it, you know. So let's just say my "you know". My "mm-mm".

"My whoozis hurts." "He touched my snickerdoodle." "My jimjam is depressed."

THAT is how we empower ourselves, girls. By telling it like it is.

  Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA