Is the film Cuties (Migonnes) the reason why so many people are canceling their Netflix subscriptions? Why don't they just remove the film?

 

I finally watched Cuties! I say that with a level of pride because I don’t watch TV—-I generally see about 1–2 hours of TV a week, generally on Mondays—-Love It or List It; I also watch My Dream Lottery House; AND this week I went crazy and actually watched an episode of Love After Lockup (which was literally a pro-incarceration TV ad. All of the ex-cons——immediately got out and acted physically or emotionally like ex-cons. lol It explained why my cousin Eric has been in the recidivism cycle of prison for 30+ years.)

I’d heard some hullabaloo about Cuties so I actually looked it up on Netflix because the algorithm and My List, that I provide to them (you do know that’s how the recommendations work, right? Also you’re pushed “like-minded fare” on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc. based upon your past history—-literally your own mentality because text and video are essentially broken down into their descriptive components—-words, ideas, political ideologies, etc..)

My cookie (the codename for the digital attachment in your computer that creates the connections) based algorithm is a little wacky because my choices are heavily foreign language, documentaries and one or two odd TV show picks but I tend to watch chunks then turn to reality projects (it took me years upon years to actually watch Breaking Bad. And by the end I thought it was meh, you know. But again not just algorithms but also TV shows and movies reflect aspects of the viewers psychology.

I’m getting to my Cuties point. I promise.

I was doing some work late one night and in my double screen—-laptop and giant screen TV converted to a monitor ala below………

…much as I sit typing this up now, I put it on the big screen.

I will first say that most of the reviews and ad hoc opinions of the film miss huge chunks of points and exposition and storyline.

• One, the immigrant experience.
• Two, the culture clash experience.
• Three, generational expectations from the grandmother to the mother to the daughter based upon largely invisible men and religion.
• Fours, the deep desire to be accepted by Amy the little Senegalese girl.
• Five, childish immaturity even shown when the young girls try to attract the attention of older teenagers and are shunned as too immature.
• Six, the point of group/peer pressure and mentality and points of maturity or self-censorship within the fictitious group of girls. Which I think is deeply illustrated in Amy’s immediate obsession with social media and garnering Likes. In order to garner them she has to do more and more outrageous things that eventually cross social and even sexually appropriate lines..
• Seven, the consciousness and self-consciousness that the character comes to understand.
• Eight, the statement on the things and ways that women are expected to tolerate male—-her father’s decisions—- because of sex-gender, and not equality.
• Nine, the intense role modeling from an older male who tries to correct the girls’ behavior.
• Ten, the shift, the trajectory of maturity levels that Amy, the 11 year old Senegalese girl, goes through.

I thought going in, that one, it was American, it’s not it’s French-”Migonnes “ the title really—-made and that two, it was solely about the young girls being hypersexualized.

There’s actually a deep, substantive film here about many issues—-but a lot of them have to do with the least valuable, equality bearing folk on Earth—-women/girls and an African (read: Black) to Americanized perceptions.

It’s a very, very good film.

To the point of the sexualization of the girls and their dance routines—-that’s what your girl children are exposed to as a suggestive reality.

But, I’ve worked in schools for quite a few years and seen and counseled about what children, girls are experiencing and reflecting back.

Jane, The Non-Virgin

At one school, a girl, we’ll call her Jane to save all involved—-Jane was brought to the office for some mess in class and I was alone in the office. I tell Jane to sit down in the corner at a table, the Principal is in a meeting and will talk to her in a minute. I’m sitting there typing away and Jane comes over to my desk, leans suggestively over the short wall and starts trying to chat ,me up. No, not as a child being friendly—-but as a young woman trying to get a man’s attention with her mid-sized bosom, long hair and blinking eyes.

Now to contextualize this further, a few weeks prior Jane’s mother had come to school searching for her one Monday morning. Jane at 13, had been gone the whole weekend. Her mother thought she might be at the school and when questioned about a level of control over her daughter disappearing for weekends at a time with older guys, over 30, her mother demurred that she didn’t want to anger Jane and risk getting her ass kicked.

Jane at 13, held back a grade, so she was still in Middle school was very pretty yes, with long luxurious hair and a faraway look in her eyes. As I told Jane to pull her little fast self together and immediately took her into the female principals office—I recognized a child/teen who was literally bored with the retinue of girl’s who paid attention to her because she’d been sexualized earlier than normal and therefore had a pseudo-maturity and older boyfriends. But I also didn’t feel safe, professionally, alone with Jane as a hypersexualized girl.

Don't’ LGBTSGL despair, there was a young boy there too, gay as a $3 bill, who too had older boyfriends and eventually married an older man when he came of age.

But before you think they were isolated fast kids I’ll tell you how the City got involved. Turns out several of the kids are latchkey kids—-going home by themselves or with siblings until their parents got home. The middle school kids devise who has free apartments and dozens of them at a time would take over a house and have full fledged sex parties in the home.

Reality Check, everyone: your kids are fucking.

When confronted with this, the parents refused to believe it and further refused the school’s advice on teaching about safe sex. In an effort to insure some level of knowledge and safety, the school invited in the Department of Health for Science Week. And the entire week the kids were taught about HIV (Read: Safe Sex and STIs.)

Later that year I got the overall pleasure of teaching advanced test taking strategies and sitting at a table of middle schoolers asking them if they had any questions, a little boy, 11, puts a condom in the middle of the table and innocently asks me what it is. Some at the table knew, some didn’t. I had to generally explain it.

I offer those fun slices of reality at the same time that I’ll point out that Cuties is fiction.

You know this—-dancing, gyrating, twerking, is a level of trickle down from Adult World? It’s not like kids are sitting around with bananas and debating sex techniques. No, it is twofold—-exposure to information on the internet—-which I don’t think is bad BUT what makes it problematic are adults assuming that children aren’t curious, confused, knowledgeable or little mimics.

Indoctrination, Misogyny and Sexualization of Girls/Women

Cuties is really about the indoctrination girls get as they move towards womanhood in not just the society of the past 25 (internet) years but also in older traditions and religions like Christianity and Islam represented in the film by Amy’s family—-and the expectation of women to be submissive and pleasing towards men no matter their feeling. The mother is forced into a multiple wife marriage by her husband and that woman moves in and is shrouded, therefore without identity. And Amy watches all of this, questions it but is rejected from a sensible explanation because the grandmother and mother have none, and are dependent upon the father.

Therefore independent, questioning thinking about men, sex, sexuality is shunned and shamed by her female role models. And her father considers her behavior more of faulty parenting and childhood insanity and disobedience than female rebellion to such intense structures.

Even her odd neighbor friend and classmate is physically and emotionally manhandled by the girl’s older brother. Not in a directly harmful way but in a way that clearly shows male dominance is occurring in her household too. There are reasons both childish and emotionally starved and misogynistically warped as to why the girls are acting out like this. It’s only at the end of the film that Amy’s mother sees the effects and corrects it which allows Amy to then correct herself. Her mother realizes she’s spent so much time disciplining Amy, as the grandmother does both of them, to conform to this male control system, and that’s why she’s acting out so extremely.

Girls to women are taught to do all of this for the Male Gaze, for reward of attention to their self esteem (how one feels about one’s self internally) and self worth (how one feels about how the world feels about one’s self), whether they are aware of it or not.

The Female Gaze As Creator

The film was directed by a woman Maïmouna Doucouré and as a film isn’t just made in someone’s den—-there’s producers, writers, studio executives involved—-I trust that it was made thoughtfully. And in watching it, I could see how it was made thoughtfully and with restraint about Jane level realities that some young girls are crossing the lines in emulation of.

Also, and this might come as a big shock, it’s fiction.

Now it depicts yes, a reality I can testify does exist but there has to come a point where adults can discern and not be triggered by fiction——because it’s—-wait for it…wait for it——fiction.

Reality Check, everyone: you watch people being killed.

You know what would be fantastic?

If there were as much protest about say the Fast & the Furious or Avengers Endgame depicting mass genocide (by a non-White skinned dude. Yeah, Disney, subtle racism, hmm? Was I triggered by that? lol) Or maybe Wolverine? How about any film Liam Neeson is in? How about all the dead women in Law & Order and SVU?

TV/films are literally a graduate school on how to kill women and how to stay desensitized to it as an audience. It is no coincidence that during the emergence of a BLM movement about the lives of people of color there is a co-movement about #MeToo and women as valuable, existing, still being grossly marginalized and abused in spite of the progress of you know in the past century getting the right to vote. And own property. And not need a man’s written permission to travel.

Therefore to be upset at Cuties is hypocritical. How about all of the cops killed in—-every action film, the security guards, etc.? Sometimes when I see an action film and the hero is shooting folk, I think about how we edit that those are victims and “bad guys” or simple flesh barriers in the way of the goal and not as people begin simulated murdered. I’ll take it farther and deeper—-how many people have watched Arnold Schwarzenegger simulate killing? And then elected him to be a Governor?

Oh, that you can separate as fiction vs. reality?

And what about Kids? Remember this diddy of a film?

Again a fictional account of the sexualization or hypersexualized activities of young children and teens.

This is not a Netflix issue—-they are simply a platform that shows materials created by artists. Some of this yes, has to do with society and big butts (hey, JLO!) and Brittany Spears and Madonna and Janet Jackson and Beyoncé and all of the artistic things they do for adults to garner attention and at the same time young girls see and emulate.

Perhaps a better way to construct what so much entertainment that is sex and violence focused does is to perhaps look at concepts of excessive images and ides of violence and dominations leads to actions of hypermasculinity or toxic masculinity being fed and replayed-exampled by and to boys resulting in school violence, bullying, etc... The parallel of feminine destruction/violence and oversexualization becomes hypersexuality manifestation from girls?

This is the cost, in reality of 500+ channels, streaming everywhere, YouTube, Justin Bieber, K Pop—-those acts being sexually suggestive—-and deeper magazines like Vogue and Elle and the fashion business being designed for pre and pubescent bodies. To be alluring (in Allure magazine) and seductive but not fully, obviously adults. I’m not even going to touch on the body sizes and dimensions forced upon women to be i entertainment, when the average normal woman size is 16. Not a Callista Flockhart ). Which isn’t her fault but the system, fashion and entertainment gravitates towards her as an ideal and sends that message out with millions of dollars of advertising and more detrimentally—-repeats it with a dozen more TV shows of size 2s. Do any action heroes like normal sized or plus sized women? Is Rebel Wilson anything but the comedy girl and not the serious romantic lead—-because of her weight. gain, female reduction in equality.

What A Guy Wants

There's a controversial idea that such films and magazines and TV and music videos being targeted to present pre/pubescent girls is because male biological sexuality is geared to seek out females (if you’re not LGBTSGL, don’t get triggered gays!) who are within that age range as sexually available. More importantly, the theory proves out because of the heavy male control of these visual/presentational forms, which have made it the norm for decades upon decades.

So then, Kyle, is Cuties a form of propaganda manipulation?

I think it’s spotlighting the propaganda/manipulation and how it seeps into the minds of young girls and how some, for a variety of home and social reasons, buy into it wholesale and get out of control. Losing self control to forms of exploitation like the real Jane I knew or like Amy in the film. But Amy realizes the connection of her self-exploitation and her mother and grandmother’s oppression and as maturity warrants, changes her mind about herself and her interests and actions.

It wasn’t hard to watch for several reasons for me—-young girls nor boys don’t fall into my sexuality spectrum (perhaps some upset men and women are unconsciously upset because when they look at the film and see all the dipping and gyrating and pumping—-they can’t help but sexualize the children's doing it.) I don’t sexualize children or even teens because I know and understand them even if they’re being sexually flagrant.

Bugs Bunny nd Daffy Duck and Their Fetishitic Sexual Relationship

Yes, children can be sexual towards me and it will fall flat because I completely don’t see sex there, male or female. But I think the upset folks watching Cuties SEE sex in the movements, the gyrations because one it’s sexually provocative in its context. But those same viewers miss the overarching reality.

It’s fiction.

I can see Bugs Bunny kick Daffy Duck in the butt, a hundred times. It takes my internal mentality to sexualize that Bugs has a violent ass fetish or that Daffy’s getting off from it. Because I recognize the action AND the overarching context, make the action a representation of perhaps sexualization, but NOT actual sexualization.

There’s an internal differentiation that the VIEWER must do, the art form cannot be resposnible for yoru internalized projections upon it.

Did I just explain how the human brain and fiction works? lol

Back To Jane the Non-Virgin

An interesting side point about us discussing Jane in the school—-one teacher, with a 12 year old daughter said that he was talking to his male friends about Jane and they agreed that if a 12 year old girl came onto them and was physically developed as Jane was, they might hit it. Because Jane had proposed it. Jane’s actions and disappearing with older men was acceptable because she was complicit.

The women in the office suggested that even if Jane proposed sex with an older man, she’s not mature enough to be consensual in such an affair. The male teacher shrugged.

I then pointed out that his friends were also telling him that if his 12 year old daughter flirted, purposefully or accidentally, that they would hit it. It was bit like a rape gang telling a friend that his daughter was on the menu too. Creepy. But male honest.

Adults and Sex and Children's and Sex and Adults Sexualizing's Children

I think not only do adults find the pressure to think about what children are doing and emulating uncomfortable but I think adults, as proven by our news cycle, also have sexual thoughts and actins about children, that the vast majority aren’t discussing because it’s a social taboo.. So when it comes through Netflix into one’s home, it’s like being caught in a form of cognitive dissonance.

Yet, you watch things where women are killed and mutilated thousands of times a year (I dare you to sit with a pad for the next month and simply mark off a check when a woman is abused or killed in your regular entertainment fare); or simulated romance and sex is often depicted as some sort of passionate “struggle” or angry emotions before consummation—-or someone you vote for makes movie after movie, simulating killing people.

No, hold that thought.

Video of FDR or JFK or MLK shooting a variety of people in the head, in the chest, blowing them up. And then on the news asking for your vote/allegiance.

We literally masturbate as a society to fiction that is so close to the line of reality that it triggers some people as if it is reality but then they watch other far more horrible stuff and that they’re desensitized to.

Which makes me question who and why it set them off?

What are THOSE people going through in their heads that immediately kids, children, little girls fully clothed, ridiculously acting out—-becomes both sexualized in the fiction AND then in the external reality, to the point of objection?

I found the scenes slightly ridiculous and almost humorous at children acting so unself--consciously in ludicrous ways.

Because I view them first as children, outside of an aware adult performance to be sexually enticing, not as adult sexual objects.

The Earth Orgy

We're all complicit in this orgy circle jerk of sex-violence. I’m not even going to go near videogames where you’re video armed and directly shoot simulated people. That’s just low hanging fruit.

Netflix is just the GrubHub delivery system. You and I are the willing, never satiated gang, we just have to defend our barbarity by occasionally pointing at something as “too far”. Like hypocrites. We can’t delineate fiction and reality and then be upset that the non-reality art is problematic. If it’s unreal, it’s unreal.

But maybe that’s the bigger underlying psychological problem?

People are starting to not have a filter internally between what is fiction/unreal and what isn’t? I have written fiction for 30+ years——all manner of stuff and I’m very, very clear on what is real and what isn’t. I even go so far as to not engage fiction (TV) on a deeper basis because of how it bypasses the prefrontal cortex (your filter machine) and goes directly into the amygdala—-your core center.

Maybe Cuties is so upsetting because your filter has been ripped so thoroughly that your core reacts to it as if it were reality?

Huh.

Don’t hate the player, hate the Game.

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Kyle Phoenix is a teacher, certified adult educator, sexologist, sex coach and sexuality educator with over two decades of intensive experience. He studied at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, New York University, and Columbia University. He has worked, consulted and taught individuals and focused professional developments for the CDC, Department of Education, Gay Men's Health Crisis, New York City Department of Health, non-profits, Fortune 500 companies and unions. He began his career facilitating on-campus workshops addressing a wide range of sexuality and sexual health issues and then moved on to teaching at universities, non-profits, private groups and clients, hosting The Kyle Phoenix Show on television and multiple online webinars, including YouTube and Sclipo and writing extensively through his blog, Special Reports, articles and other print and E books in the Kyle Phoenix Series on relationships, finance, education, spirituality and culture. He lives in New York with his family.

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Kyle Phoenix Answers: Sexism: Are beauty pageants sexist, objectifying of, or otherwise demeaning to women?

I recently saw a documentary on Netflix about Venezuelan beauty pageants and how they have a political and social growth origin. I think humans, even relatively poor ones have to focus on something. Men have muscle contests, martial arts cage matches and rodeos where the physicality is what we're looking at. One could even argue the Olympics are a form of athletic pageants .

What I find fascinating are how many women are part of oppressive, demeaning systems towards women. Men don't turn a blind eye to diminution of men in the same way that women do. Perhaps anon-female president is evidence of this reduction on the part of women? Or participation in pageants is like being a rapists assistant in a preferred way? You're playing out beauty stuff but also passively harm in and controlling other women. I'm very interested in the undercurrent of social actions and reasoning.

Smile, Kyle
KylePhoenixShow@Gmail.com

The Kyle Phoenix Show 

 LIVE STREAMING on MNN.org 1130pm, Spectrum Cable Manhattan, NY 

Channel 56 & 1996, also FIOS 34 and RCN 83. 

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Education: Women, Limited To Motherhood By Poverty, Part 1 by Kyle Phoenix

 Awhile back, while pursuing my first degree, I moved in with a female roommate.  At first I thought she was around the same age as me as she was also a student according to the real estate agent.  Turns out she was well into her fifties, Dominican and very religious.  Like, no, no, I'll pray for you, you don't have to worry about your relationship with God, I'll handle it---yeah, she actually said that to me.  My silent staring wasn't a signal to her about what I thought of her or the comment but I kept it moving.  I really didn't think much about, or, of her, in the sense that I was so intensely focused on my academic work and internships and work that other than the envelope for bills and hearing her in her end of the apartment or a hi and bye in passing, I didn't give her much thought.

But one day, as one is want to do, during school breaks, I replayed my mental clips of her and really gave her some thought.  At first I thought we went to the same university, a conversation or two nixed that idea and I realized that when I assumed when she said she was studying religion, she meant a degree in theology.  In fact I think she sort of meant a lot of church services and some typings for whatever positional honors occur in churches.  Then she started babysitting a little girl, which I didn't really care about because by then I was back into my routine.  Other than hi and bye, she really didn't register until I started doing projects and essentially clinical work around poverty and race.  Suddenly my "academic lenses" were dropped in front of my eyes in a social situation.  This has happened to me once before in the past few years---I was with a friend visiting his family for Christmas.  And we went to The Projects.  No, the real New York Projects.  And I realized two things:

1. All Black people, particularly me, didn't grow up the same way.  (I knew this of course but it really, really hit me how different I was as an educated man of color in a mixed race neighborhood.)
2. There were books, articles and studies on poverty that my friend's family fit into to the point where I was sitting in a chair admiring how Ruby Payne, a noted educational expert on poverty was right about the lack of pictures on the walls and why.

This pushed me to consider that roommate and how her babysitting eventually turned into her explaining to me that she was helping out her daughter.  At first I thought the little girl was her daughter then I realized that no, it was her granddaughter.  But wait---she couldn't be that old, could she?  Then I was staring at her closer, paying attention to the hair dyes and the attempts at modern woman blouses, skirts and jackets.  I realized she either had 20 years on me or scarily, maybe she only had 10 years on me.  Then I thought about my friends' family visit, there were only women present in The Projects.   In most of his family stories, single mothers raising children, and I started thinking (and writing/teaching) about women and their relationship to education and poverty.

I then really started to think about the difference between generational and situational poverty.

Generational poverty is an unbroken cycle where the family, grandparents to parents to grandchildren, barring severe positive intervention will remain in financial, social, educational poverty---marked by Welfare, low wage jobs, never higher than a high school level degree in the family.

Situational poverty occurs when one is in school/college, or unemployed temporarily or when a child is born and then one of the parents stays home for a couple of years before returning to work.

I couldn't help but to reference the women in my family---my grandmother, Dorothy born in 1910, graduate of high school in 1928 and then a young woman on her own who moved from Providence, Rhode Island to Washington, D.C. to work for an aunt before years later making her way to New York.  My grandmother was a very patrician woman, extremely refined.  She would tell us of her father's surprise gift to her of a grand piano when she was 16; she came around the corner with her best friend Shirley Bolden and they saw a group of men raising a piano through the window into her family's brownstone third floor window.  She bathed every day and wore simple house coats over a dress and fine slips through the day and her outside finery of a fur coat and pearls to see the doctor once a month.  One had dinner on Sundays and supper the other days.  The table was always basically set with silverware, flatware and a table cloth.

She had 5 children with my grandfather, the first, Jeannette, dying of sudden crib death,  My grandmother would tell me the story of how she dreamt the night before that Jeannette would die but with her stiff iron lip, she soldiered on to bear and raise 4 more, my mother, her last surprise child, 10 years after she thought her childbearing years were done.  My grandmother was a voracious reader---about 5 to 6 books a week and after her heart surgery I would come back from movies and tell them to her, scene by scene. (We only saw two movies in a theater together, we accidentally got locked out while she was visiting and had to wait for my mother at a movie theater.)  She would share March of The Wooden Soldiers with me every Christmas and then books, hundreds of books from when she thought I was ready for my first adult book when I was 10, a thriller named Entangled, until she died when I was 15.

It wasn't until I studied education for a Masters that I thought seriously about these different kinds of women.  My grandmother was stymied by her time, when she was born, even to some degree by marrying in her early twenties before she got a chance to explore who and what her rapacious intelligence could've taken her to be.  A sharp discordant point: my grandmother wasn't Black, she looked it but was White, Narragansett Indian and only a 1/16 Black.  She was raised in an upper middle class Protestant family, her father full Narragansett and her mother   1/8 Black from her mother, whose mother was half Black.  Marrying my extremely dark skinned West Indian grandfather is what racialized her to Black in New York's Harlem.  The tangled web of ludicrous sub-divisional racial designation and miscegenation at the roots of my family tree.

Just being able to discern how she was different suddenly explained why she was different.  She didn't particularly care for soul food, spoke proper English always, had the manners of someone used to a high class level, and would make fun of the first time she heard a Black woman order pork chops in a butcher "Gimme sum of dem dere po' chops!" she would imitate.  It never occurred to me until later, that my grandmother wasn't completely racially nor socially (nor socioeconomically) Black like the women surrounding her in Harlem.  Her hair had been straight and waist length until in her fifties her eldest daughter cut it for her because it was so heavy and ungainly.  But the time had regulated her to being a mother, a housewife for forty years until she tired of my grandfather's abusive temper and threw him out, a year later he died, and the next year I was born.  She was the inverse of Nella Larsen's Passing.

I looked at my roommate, a woman, a mother, a grandmother before fifty, the same as my grandmother but not my mother, and then back into the cycle of caring for a child all day with a few hours of church at night.  I began to think about her clothing all being polyester  the effort of a woman from poverty trying on a meager budget to look as sharp as the university professionals swirling around the neighborhood.  The way she often mentioned she was going to school or class but never asked me what I was studying.  (Social Note: Educated people ask what you're studying and when  I mention I'm a teacher the next question is, what do you teach?)  She never asked what I was studying nor what I taught.  I thought it was just polite distance but in fact the thousand of books I had spilling from my bedroom into the living room, probably seemed alien.

I then started thinking about what it must be like to be a woman of a certain age in a world that had based on ethnicity, education, socioeconomic status and gender, assigned her an iron cast role: mother.  And when she had raised her daughter to adulthood she was cast back into that role.  She would continue babysitting her granddaughter even as the younger went off to school and the cycle of mother beget daughter to only a minimal level of education would continue.  I used to watch my roommate and the little girl watch TV for eight hours, stopping only for the bathroom and canned, clock work meals.  No books, no trips out, just sitting and being without advancement, looking at women on television who had made familiar negative choices on daytime talk shows or vastly amazing positive strides that are beyond recognition.  I often wonder what people who are so far away from worlds---lifetime mothers see when they see a Kathryn Bigelow get an Oscar or a PBS special on Madame Curie or Robin Roberts interview a President.

I thought about my grandmother who carved out her intellectual cavern but never rode on an airplane.  I thought about my friends' female relatives who were literally textbook examples of women in poverty. I thought about my old roommate who was literally a generational cycle of mental and social poverty because a misogynistic culture got to her in the Dominican Republic before she could stop breeding and blossom into........into.......someone's cheaply fancy clothes that weren't an effort to appear more than costumes on her.

Conversely my mother, named Patrica, by her patrician mother, Dorothy and one of my mentors Carlene Hatcher Polite, exampled to me women who perhaps didn't try to equal themselves to men but lived as freely as any.  Yes, they had children but they traveled the world; educated themselves; taught at universities and started businesses.  In Polite's case, she was the first Black woman nominated for a Pulitzer for Fiction   When I looked at these other women, even my grandmother I couldn't help but see how women, mainly women of color were limited by poverty in ways that made it generational.  I often think about the little girl,  my former roommate's grandchild who is in a repeated cycle that I expect won't end in high school graduation, as neither her mother nor grandmother graduated.  And she'll have children and find herself cast aside, perhaps caught by a church for a time until she's called back on deck to be a mother figure again.

But I wonder, as brown women stand at stoves across a planet where it is more normal for them to be in poverty than not, stirring the same meals on Wednesday as they did a year ago on a Tuesday, for a child only slightly bigger, what are they thinking?  What do they want?  Are they thinking this is good enough?  How did I get here?  How do I get out of here?

Or, if the child is male, are they thinking that they were but a conduit for one man to come into, another to come out of and then a third to be begat from him---but why do the males get to be free?  Why are the boys going to leave, to roam, to become and she, whose literally given her life, will just go from standing to huddled as she gets older.

Coming Soon: Part Two: How Women Can Get Out/Why Women Are The Vanguards of Socioeconomic Change In Families

Thank you,
Kyle Phoenix
Email: kylephoenixshow@aol.com
Website: http://kylephoenixsite.com/
Blog: http://kylephoenixshow.blogspot.com/2012
Thanks and enjoy! You can Like Us on FaceBook or Follow Us on Twitter! Don't forget to watch The Kyle Phoenix Show on Channel 56 (Time Warner), 83 (RCN), 34 (Verizon) and the Thursday/Friday 12am/midnight simulcast on http://kylephoenixsite.com/

No Fats, No Fems, No Strings, No Imperfections

Men can be beautiful to behold.  Women too.  Children as well.  And animals.  In fact, all the sentient humanoids on Earth I'm going to give a thumbs up to.  

Except for the fat asses.

And them fem ass faggots.

Don't forget them triflin' no accountability fools.

In fact, if I catch you doing something wrong---eating a Twinkie, humming a Bette Midler tune or treating me with some intimacy or interest, I'm gonna jettison your ass.

Does this sound like the soundtrack you feel like the male world is playing at you? Are you even sometimes harmonizing with it?  Have you looked in the mirror, while tapping your foot to Beyonce, and realized that you're being rejected for being........well, you, seemingly anytime you're with a group of MSM?  

Are you perhaps one of the men who has religiously gone to the gym, kept the bass in your voice, maintained your masculinity to the point of being "unclockable" (I'm always fascinated by the inherent paranoia in that thought---I wonder if our media/technology observant culture has translated to MSM this whole fear of being seen/outed in this way) and you're comfortable with No Strings Attached..........but........you're still alone?  I often wonder, as I wander around the gym---okay, I don't wander---I tend to work out while reading or listening to my IPod at what happens when two Perfect 10s get into a room.  Then I wonder what happens when they hook up maybe from online.  Then I wonder what they do when there's nothing imperfect about the other or do they cancel each other out like bottoms of batteries?

Say you have a 6 pack or maybe an 8 pack............ummmm, okay then what?  It really only matters to two sectors---Those Who Have Them and Those WHo Think They're Attractive.  But you can't show a 6 pack every minute of the day, right?  It's not really useful for anything other than modelling underwear and, go go dancing or escorting in the gay community and if you're heterosexual, it might get you onto a reality show or two.  But is there any real usage or value beyond the obvious and the suggestive of someone either not eating or exercising a lot?  

When I'm at events it's the designers and teachers and lawyers and doctors and coordinators and such making the real world go around.  Some of them have 6 packs.  Most don't.  In fact most of the MSM I notice with educations, degrees, status, money----really aren't 8 packed out.  So does that mean that MSM who are average, chubby, fluffy, thick and chunky are really more of the norm and in fact suggest a greater possibility of stability and success?

Wait, wait, wait what about the light footed tinkerbells? The sugar footed candy lickers? The dudes with more feather than rock in their shoes? Surely they're----well, less than. In order to not have value or for there to be so much negative value portrayed and projected at them, there has to be a loss from being effeminate, right? That's logical, right? James Baldwin?  Lisping, sugar footed and honestly speaking, no Billy Dee in the mug department.  But valuable, right?  RuPaul.  Cheekbones like glass and a wig for every day of the month no matter the season but not manly, right?  Luther Vandross?  (Oh, come on, let's not play Unclockable Closet Games here.)  Women, including my mother, swore by Luther.  Prayed to Luther.  Swayed to Luther.  In fact a few of you were made to Luther because his crooning represented a velvety, sensuous seductive femininity.  The sequined jackets.  Enough said.

Yet there is such a terror at the feminine.  In fatness, chubbiness---perhaps because women are soft and fluffy and chubby?  Wouldn't want to be like a woman.  I mean what could be more awful than dressing up like one or worse yet being trapped in a soft body like one.  In fact the concept of sexing like one or being sexed like one, is already a mountainous hurdle.  Effeminacy that's not masculine, not macho, not manly and therefore it is devalued.   But then why are 6 packing men still online, showing themselves on Facebook, rocking their Grindr and Adam accounts, paying Match.com because-----------well, all them sit ups ain't making love connections.  

But femininity, the emotionality of it, is an intimacy connector and following along the precept that 85% of men are Betas (more estrogen based), then all this gym action is being done by Double Closet Cases.

What's a Double Closet Cases?

A Double Closet is a man who is working like it's a second job to appear masculine, to work out and strut and swagger and repress himself into appearing hyper-masculine.  But, he, in fact is reading this while knowing all the words to Lady Gaga and Beyonce and Whitney and Janet and Mariah and Cher and Madonna but can't allow that to be known by other MSM.  And maybe it was even you who grew up, terrified and maligned for being feminine.  For being a sissy.  You ran in form and thought from anyone applying female like traits to you so that the very thought of them being attached to you is terrifying.

Wait, then---is No Fats, No Fem, No Strings (read: intimacy)---a psychological reaction to being cast as feminine or effeminate and the desire to not have your sexuality revealed?  Is it also a way of MSM exampling misogyny because being a man who might be sexual with men doesn't exclude a man from being chauvinistic?  In fact there might be some really heavy resentment at women who get to display their sexuality, vulnerability and attraction to men and are rewarded with....well, male attention, love, resources and love?  This is along the lines in the same way that being a gay White man doesn't mean that one can't still be racist.  Just because one experiences prejudice and bias doesn't mean the energy converts to sainthood, a person is as prejudiced as the next even if they're sitting in wheelchair themselves.

Maybe No Fats, No Fems, No Strings, is a way for a nigger to create other niggers?  Bare with me here...there's a theory that the oppressed have to create other oppressed people in order to feel a sense of self esteem.  Hence why Blacks and Latinos have such a tangled social history.  Or Jews and Blacks.  Or Irish and Italians.  Or Germans and..........well, everyone else.  Maybe, just maybe those MSM who have a toilet tissue tight mental rope on No Fats, No Fems, No Strings can't see that they're missing out on the imperfections---a few extra pounds, a lisp or two, an emotional delight in pampering and caring for another---because in a Double Closet Case, you've come out to one layer of your identity but stopped before you came out as an accepting human being?

I'm always amazed when people assume that homosexuals can't be criminals, fools, prejudiced, liars, abusive simply because.........well, they're homosexuals.  In a way it's like covertly suggesting or accepting homosexuals as inhuman, therefore slyly offering that they can't experience the full range of human flaws and foibles.  Perhaps we're giving the prejudiced who perpetuate these ways of thinking---ultimately no imperfections, no embracing of the feminine aspect, however that appears or demonstrates itself in a man or woman, leeway.  Pity leeway because people have a hard time telling people in wheelchairs---the chair doesn't excuse you from being an asshole, it just makes you a mobile one.  Therefore being a bigot who happens to be an MSM just makes you a bigot, who happens to be a MSM.

Thanks and enjoy! Don't forget to watch The Kyle Phoenix Show on Channel 56 (Time Warner), 83 (RCN), 34 (Verizon) and the Thursday/Friday 12am/midnight simulcast on http://kylephoenixsite.com/