This is an archived page. Images and links on this page may not work. Please visit the main page for the latest updates.

 
 
 
Read my book, TEACHING BEAUTY IN DeLILLO, WOOLF, AND MERRILL (Palgrave Macmillan; forthcoming), co-authored with Jennifer Green-Lewis. VISIT MY BRANCH CAMPUS AT INSIDE HIGHER ED





UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Saturday, February 25, 2006

Bulbous, bogus breasts


Once again, as she likes to do, UD features charming, promising prose from America’s undergraduates.

This guy’s a senior at Purdue, writing in the student newspaper.


Men are stupid. The evidence is overwhelming.

Every night after the bars close many intoxicated men can be found exercising their stupidity. Some play in the street. Others attempt to instigate as many fights as possible in an apparent display of masculinity.

There are those who would blame the alcohol, not the men. However, I believe in the reasoning of the statement, "guns don't kill people, people kill people," and I propose the theory that alcohol is merely a type of truth serum. Alcohol may intensify idiotic behavior, but it works with what was already present. Am I the only one who has noticed that the guy who always gets retarded while drunk had questionable intelligence to begin with?

At the gym male stupidity is prevalent. Many men enjoy lifting weights, but a large number are actually doing damage to their bodies. The most common problem I notice is the ABC workout: abs, bench press and curls. While I will not argue that abs are at the core of any good workout routine, many men neglect their legs. The guy with chicken legs can usually be spotted because he hides them with long pants even when the thermometer approaches triple digits.

Purdue is an engineering school, and men should realize the importance of a strong base. A well built building utilizes a sturdy foundation. The human body is no different. I can only imagine the damage to the spine that occurs when the human skeleton is forced to carry around excess torso weight without reinforced legs.

Another comical phenomenon is the guy who does too much bench press. He is easy to identify because his shoulders have rotated inward from the tension of his overdeveloped pectoral muscles. Also, instead of his thumbs pointing forward and knuckles pointing outward when his arms rest at his side, his thumbs now point inward and his knuckles point forward. He now has a rather apeish look to his upper body.

Male stupidity is also responsible for changes in the female body. I blame men for the prevalence of breast enhancement these days. Yes, it is the women who get the surgery, but it is the men who persuade them to go under the knife. Theoretically, I should not be influenced by someone else's decision to alter her body, but I am. I appreciate the female body as a work of art and enjoy looking at it. However, I cannot visit a strip club or flip through a Playboy without being bombarded by bulbous, bogus breasts.

So what if fake boobs are larger? They look alien. Following the same logic that leads men to be impressed by a fake breast, I'm willing to trade several pounds of fool's gold for one ounce of the real thing; I'm offering more for less, and more is better. The fascination with medical experiments that Dr. Frankenstein would be proud of shows the feeble nature of many male minds.

Another example of male stupidity can be found in a common place. Sometimes, between classes, I use a restroom on campus, and 99 percent of the time the stench of human excrement is overwhelming. This makes sense since it is a room devoted to defecation, but with urinal cakes and indoor plumbing the smell should be minimized. Unfortunately many men seem to not know how to flush a toilet, how sad.

With the way babies are ingrained with the belief that filling a diaper is something to be proud of, I could understand if each steaming pile of solid waste was accompanied by a note proudly taking credit for the crap. Though, I believe that a more sinister attempt to assault a stranger's olfactory sense is the actual intent.

Have we men not evolved past such tactics? Women's bathrooms have couches and smell like roses. Am I asking too much to want this for us men?

The world is facing a crisis of rampant male stupidity and needs women to help. Please, women, stop breeding with these mental midgets.