And I couldn’t agree more, Hayclearing. I don’t think it matters that the essence of green is based on a stupid urban legend … or maybe it matters too much. I’d be willing to bet when the brainiac behind the idea conceived it, there was no question the gender of green had to be female.

Which suddenly astonishes me, because WHY, EVER would ANY company approve marketing which can even CONCEIVABLY be interpreted that way?

Talk about skeezy.

Oh, don’t get me started on Evangelicals. People worry about the Taliban, and I’m like, “…yeah, have you talked to some Evangelicals about their plans for when they take over the US? Might want to do that sometime.”

You and me both. Evangelicals are one of the primary reasons I avoid talking about religion with anyone I don’t know well.

Mars exploited the joke before it had the anthropomorphized characters, too. They’ve sold all-green bags of M&Ms in the past around Valentine’s Day, for instance, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen references to it in print advertising back in the 90s.

LOL, you can imagine my confusion about this, if I saw it. I’d never make the connection. AFAIK, I’ve only ever seen the red, white and pink bags of Valentine M&M’s.

So the green M&M is sexy because of the legend, I think. The question is, why does the “sexy” M&M have to be a) a woman, and b) such a Mae West-by-way-of-Bette Midler caricature?

Exactly.

Mars exploited the joke before it had the anthropomorphized characters, too. They’ve sold all-green bags of M&Ms in the past around Valentine’s Day, for instance, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen references to it in print advertising back in the 90s.

So the green M&M is sexy because of the legend, I think. The question is, why does the “sexy” M&M have to be a) a woman, and b) such a Mae West-by-way-of-Bette Midler caricature?

This is why Nice Guys(tm) run around the web spouting venom at us bitchez for not sucking them off when there are more attractive, and therefore obviously evil, guys around. We’re allowed to be discriminating as long as it’s for the purpose of retaining our sale value as virgins, but once the seal’s broken, we’re supposed to ignore the sexually attractive guys (who can get virgins because they’re so hot) and focus on servicing the unappealing who consider themselves NiceGuys and believe they are all entitled to sex with women no matter what they bring to the table.

Jennifer, there is a horrifying logic to this. It does explain the ferocious resentment of both the “Jerks” – the more attractive, outgoing, popular men – and the “Girls” who keep going out with those more attractive men; if women are property, like cookies, then Fate is unfairly allocating too many to some and not enough to other people.

What I find funny, Richard, is that this seems to have only really gotten started after WWII. Buildings all over big cities and small in this country built up to the 20s and 30s have muscular unclothed men all over them – I have some wonderful bookmarks of the Art Deco style that are full of pictures of reliefs and mosaics and sculptures that would send John Ashcroft away shrieking for MOAR BLOO CURTINZ!!! but they don’t make them big enough to cover the whole facades of skyscrapers in NYC. And there’s this crazy ad out on the net somewhere for towels from WWII that has a painting – supposedly based on a real life incident – of naked GIs doing fan dances with palm leaves in a kind of rockette’s review as they bathe on a Pacific island…

Nowdays you get all this “AAAH MY EYES!” privilegeboy screaming at the sight of a male chara even half as naked as any female character, which of course garners no sympathy from *me* but then everyone knows I’m a cast-iron bastard…

Aha, I had you pegged as raised Catholic before I read the next paragraph. The ideology was too familiar.

What’s funny, sbg – in a twisted way, of course – is that neither side of my family actually was Catholic, culturally or doctrinally, until my parents decided to “rebel” by becoming authoritarian “traditionalist” Catholics, the way other people in the ’60s and ’70s became Buddhists or Hare Krishnas. My mother’s family were respectively atheist and genteel agnostic from an Episcopalian tradition – Christmas & Easter and maybe now and then, but nothing doctrinal, nothing at all hardcore about it. My father’s family were atheists who hadn’t darkened a church door since the Depression, coming from on the one hand an old Anabaptist heritage and the German freethinker tradition colliding in my grandfather’s family, and on the other, an Irish-Catholic childhood so fiercely rejected by my grandmother so early that I have come to suspect (there are a lot of contributing points of evidence supporting this) clerical abuse and family silence. They didn’t grow up in the pre-Vatican II Church that they embraced and valorized, and thus didn’t understand why people (like my grandmother) rejected it, even those who did so less violently than she.

But in keeping with Jennifer’s point, they adopted the language of the pre-Vatican II “Morals For Youth” books because they fit so well with the mainstream, secular culture of America: my father raised by two atheist rebels (my grandmother was a rowdy hard-drinking chain-smoking and handsome woman in her younger years who had to be bailed sometimes for drunk & disorderly out by her kids, frex) nevertheless fully internalized the woman-as-temptress ethic that Hollywood of the ’60s so well portrayed, and my mother was happy to buy into the notion that by being “modest” and hiding in her home she could escape any harassment and it would be due to her superior virtue, unlike those foolish godless sluts out there in their miniskirts.

When I was harassed in high school, despite being as covered up as an Amish girl, she brushed it off uninterested, telling me “All guys do that.” I started studying books on self-defense in the library basement and carrying illegal knives, and realized that I couldn’t talk to her about a damn thing and that she had become totally out of touch with reality, and the chinks of my rift with her brand of religious politics were laid – because if they were wrong about one thing (in this case, that only women who “Asked for it” by their immodest dress would be harassed) then what else?

My father could never understand, despite all his telling us that All Men Only Want Sex and no man really cares about a woman’s personality, and warning us that we were in immanent danger of stranger rape whenever we went out by ourselves after dark, why my sisters and I began to dress more and more “like dykes” in his words – why we wore such baggy, dowdy or outre hippy/goth clothes, clompy boots, unfashionable messy short haircuts, hunched our shoulders to hide our breasts… “What’s wrong with you girls? Why can’t you be more ladylike?” right after going after one of us for our long skirts perhaps hugging a little too close to our hips…

Oh, and this is interesting, from a while back – The Modesty Survey is a good sampling of the kinds of neuroses this madonna/whore mindset will lead to, and and the young men who put it together are Evangelical Protestants, not Catholics, from the West Coast.

It’s nonsense of course. I personally think we, as men, can appreciate the male form without being gay, but that’s not how I was socialized as a boy and I still get twinges every now and then.

Your take on it is pretty accurate, I’d imagine. I just think it’s a damn shame we as a society can’t seem to progress beyond this.