Have You Seen Taken?

In less than a month, this coffee bitch will be on a plane headed for Belgium, where I will live, and study for a year. One of my biggest pet peeves that I have dealt with for my pending exchange (besides sitting at the door like a puppy every time the mail comes in vain hopes that my visa will be wedged in-between grocery store coupons),  is the one question that is asked when I mention my exchange. I don’t know if you can handle a question this deep, coffeebitches, not to mention something this original.

The conversation goes like this:

Person: So you’re going to Belgium?

Me: Yeah, I can’t wait!

Person: Have you ever seen Taken? Watch out…

I guess I should feel special that so many strangers are concerned about my well being abroad, however, this pisses me off like no other. Part of the reason why this sly comment bothers me, is that I have never seen anyone try and use this to scare male exchange students, just us ladies. It’s almost like they expect every young woman that goes abroad to be sold into sex slavery.

I feel like people are more concerned about me going over seas because I’m a woman, and that is just fucking uncalled for. When I was going to be sent to Brazil instead of Belgium, my own father, who raised me to take care of my self, told me that it was no place for a young lady. What the hell?!

This just in world, female travelers are not porcelain dolls that spend the whole trip smothered in packing peanuts,  left to stay at the resort. There is nothing on an adventure that your gender, male or female, should inhibit you from experiencing. Life is too short to let assholes try to scare you out of an experience that may only come around once in a lifetime. What are we going to let people scare us out of doing next, going to the store, going to work, voting? I don’t think so! Stand up and live your life to the fullest.

If you’re smart, you will have a safe and fun trip abroad. Keep tabs on your passport, and wallet. Don’t take opened drinks from strangers. Most importantly, please make sure to learn key phrases in the native language, people will be more willing to help and accept you if you make an attempt at speaking their language, it shows respect for their culture.

What I’m trying to get at is, please, please, don’t let petty people try to crush your wanderlust with fear.

Shut Up Huckabee

 

There has been a lot of attention focused on Barack Obama’s cabinet this past week. Criticism was quick to arise after a photograph surfaced showing high-powered appointees in the Oval Office, which were all men.

Mike Huckabee said on his radio show, “Now a lot of those females who supported Barack Obama are scratching their heads, and they’re saying, ‘Whoa! How come there is so much testosterone in the Obama Cabinet and so little estrogen?”

However, I happen to be a female, and I supported Barack Obama during his campaign in 2012, and I am not scratching my head.

Why am I not scratching my head? Well, I don’t believe that women are ornaments that should be appointed to certain positions just for the sake of having women in your cabinet. Which, 43% of Obama’s cabinet is made up of women anyway, in case you were wondering.

Weren’t a lot of people appalled by Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women?” Wasn’t that because he shouldn’t be trying so hard to find women, he should just be looking for well qualified people, regardless of gender? Isn’t this kind of the same thing?

I’m not upset that there aren’t women featured in this photo. I don’t even care. However, I do care, that people are treating women in politics like the cherry on top of the sunday, meaningless, but great for show. Women aren’t decoration. Women are people! So what if Barack Obama picked males to be in his cabinet, maybe they were more qualified than some women. As for Hillary Clinton’s replacement, Senator John Kerry (D-Mass), he was only chosen because U.N Ambasodor Susan Rice withdrew her name from consideration. Barack Obama is not a woman-hater, so why is the media using this picture to try to make him seem like one?

If people are upset by the small fraction of Obama’s cabinet that was shown being male, then why isn’t it Michele Bachmann’s cabinet? By the system of logic that would cause someone to be outraged by this, we should have all rallied behind Michele Bachmann to make her President of the United States just so we could have a female President.

Personally, I was more offended by Mike Huckabee’s remarks than I was the “lack of estrogen” in the Oval Office. I think a great deal of us aren’t shallow enough to judge a cabinet on its genitalia rather than the work that it will do. Apparently, that is something that you need to work on, Mike.

 

Photo Credit: Theconserviativetreehouse.com

Dear God

For those of you who aren’t familiar, there is such a thing as freedom of religion in America. Unfortunately, in the Bible Belt, it is more like, “ohhhh, you’re one of those people.”

Being a social liberal, in a conservative area, pissing off bible beaters happens sometimes…regularly. It also means that I get pissed off almost daily.

Today, a couple of girls were talking about how cute it would be to be pregnant at the same time while waiting to donate blood. I chimed in and told them that I would rather die than be pregnant. The fact that I didn’t want to help to push the overpopulation of the Earth over the edge, seemed blow their minds more than an atomic bomb.

“You don’t want kids?”

“No.”

“So you don’t want to get married.”

“Dear god no, what need is there to marry someone?”

“Well I don’t know about your book, but according to mine, unless I want to die a virgin, I have to get married.”

Boom, there’s the kicker. Whenever someone brings up “the book” as if it has legal power over all of us, I raise my eyebrow in disbelief. People that resort to this tactic already think you hold a ticket straight to Hell (in order to get there you have to catch the train on Platform 9 3/4). Anything that you say from this point on is just further verification that Jesus hates you. If they were to say, “well I believe that, yaddah, yaddah, yah,” okay, cool, but, news flash there is more than just one bible. Also, this might be really shocking to people, there is more than just Christianity. Buddha was a real person, not some fat guy that the slanty people have hanging around their restaurants. The lady wearing a scarf on her head probably didn’t plan the bombings on 9/11. Oh, and just because someone’s a jew, doesn’t mean that they are cheap.

Just thought you should know. You’re welcome small town America.

P.S, if you want to get married, just to have sex, that is a horrible idea. Do you understand that it’s “until death do us part,” or overwhelming legal fees separate us? It’s not something to jump into just because you want to get laid. Jesus Christ people!

Please Study

While unwinding this Christmas break (Happy Holidays everyone) I was drawn to my television to watch the trash that has overthrown The Learning Channel much like how the  Nazis invaded Poland. In other words my eyes were binging  and purging on “My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding.” Even though shows like this make me no longer want to associate myself with mankind, I suppose that there are lessons to learn. Well, in the form of study hard so you do not end up like these people, kind of way.

This particular episode of my cringe worthy guilty pleasure followed a pregnant 17-year-old, “gorger” named Amber, as she married Tommy, a Romany gypsy in West Virginia. I have two wishes after watching this episode. First, I hope that people abroad do not watch this only to ask, “what the fuck happened to America?” Secondly, I hope that young girls watch this and decide to focus on school work so that they do not grow up to have elaborate weddings that are followed by pushing out babies and an endless cycle cleaning of campers.

Everything about this episode appalled me.

First of all, why are you seventeen and pregnant? There are so many ways to not get pregnant, that teen pregnancy is just ridiculous. For teens who choose to be sexually active, there is the holy trinity of condoms, birth control, and the morning after pill. Then there are the less popular, and slightly revolting sponges, and female condoms. For god sake, they have apps for your smart phone that will tell  you your peak days of fertility so you can be extra careful. And of course there is abortion. I get that not everybody likes it, but a baby at seventeen, while not impossible, would make it incredibly difficult for someone to get an education that would lead to a lucrative career,
and self-sufficiency.

What I’m saying is, if you do get pregnant as a child, because I don’t care how much life experience you have, you’re not an adult at seventeen, you don’t have to get married. In my experience as a child of divorce, and whose friends are almost exclusively children of divorce, young marriages almost never work. What happens is you get married before you get to really know the person, because you took Romeo and Juliet from your freshman English class to the extreme and insisted that Shakespeare wrote it with your love life in mind. This leads to a wedding that is “like the funnest time ever, like everyone got sooooo wasted! Did you see my dress? Fab right?” Have a fun few years because you are young and so very in love. Next you turn to hobbies because you are miserable and act like a normal fifty year old would before you turn thirty. Before you know it, you’re in divorce court and both people try to reinvent themselves. In words that a seventeen year old can understand, it’s like leaving a party before it even gets started.  Just save yourself the stress and put on a damn condom. It’s the cheaper, less tiring option.

I have such a problem with the way that women are treated on this show. There whole lives they are being prepped to be the perfect housewife, nothing more. Tommy, Amber’s fiance, told her that, “we’re always gonna do what I want to do,” after she expressed her desires for a more stable family life down the road. I’m sorry, Tommy, but did you buy her at a slave auction, did you purchase Amber off of eBay, or Amazon perhaps? No you didn’t. You are about to enter a partnership with this girl, note I said girl, because she is a child. Important life decisions need to be made together, not by some punk who thinks he is God’s gift to women. Also, the men on this show fear that if they even touch a broom, they will spend some time in jail in the near future. That is the worst cop out I have ever heard to get out of cleaning. I would say they are children, but I’m pretty sure it would be redundant to say so.

What I want you to take away from this, is to know the importance of being able to be self-sufficient. It is important to be able to take care of your self. Work hard and you won’t have to worry about cleaning a camper everyday for the rest of your life, and living by the rules of a man. However, if you slack of and can’t take care of yourself, you are going to get trapped into a situation like this.

Photo Credits: tvlistings.zap2it.com

channelguidemagblog.com

And a special thank you to TLC for airing such gems on television. Keep up the good work.

Fifty Shades of I Don’t Even Know, Crap Perhaps?

This weekend, I felt a burden lift off of my shoulder. That burden was EL Jame’s Fifty Shades of Grey, after a solid month of reading, I finally finished the entire trilogy. You can not look at television screen or open up a news paper without seeing some reference to the novels, so I decided to give it a go. The book that is comfortably perched upon the top of the New York Times Bestsellers List, is everywhere and it is about time that it found its way onto NotYourCoffeeBitch, for better or worse.

Personally, I had a weird love/hate feeling for the books, namely the reason why it took me a month to get through. Honestly, I only read the books, because I heard it was so taboo. For the same reason, I also read Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D.H Lawrence over the summer, and I would say that it is much more exciting, the writing is five million times better, it is philosophically intriguing and it is not nearly as sexist. The only thing that they did have in common was the fact that neither of the novels were as naughty as they were made out to be by society. Needless to say I was disappointed with the trilogy, and shocked that women are eating this up. I am not referring women enjoying the use of BDSM in the book’s sex scenes, I am referring to the way that Christian Grey treats Anastasia Steel like a child, and a material possession.

In the first book we meet Anastasia Steele, who is 22, has never been in a relationship and has never been touched, not even by herself. Which, come on, is not realistic at all. Oh and she says “geeze,” “crap,” and when she feels a little risky, she might drop a “double crap.” So really, Anastasia Steele acts 12 when she is supposed to be 22. She also has the spine of a jelly fish, and probably couldn’t define assertive if her life depended on it.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of Kristen Stewart while reading the…um novels (should I even call them that?). Anastasia was just dull, and uninteresting. I felt awkward just reading about her. Ana was one of those girls that tried to be awkward because she thought it was cute. I’m starting to notice a trend, instead of girls dumbing themselves down to seek attention, they pretend to be painfully awkward. CAN’T YOU JUST BE YOUR SMART UN-AKWARD SELF LADIES!?

The love of her life is the weirdest fictional character that I have ever read about. He is… A DOUCHE BAG! WHY DO YOU LOVE HIM MOMS OF SUBERBIA, WHY? Since I don’t want to ruin the book for anyone who is reading this and saying, “I just want to find out for myself,” I’m going to try my hardest not to rant too much about why I HATED Christian Grey, and to leave it as vague as I can.

First of all, he keeps warning Ana to stay away from him because he is a vampire sexist douche BDSM loving millionaire. The first time they kiss, he tells her that he wont go any further without the paperwork. WHAT? Upon hearing this I would think he is a weird egotistical psycho, but not Ana. The list of demands that he gives to her is just absurd, and I wanted to punch myself in the face for reading it. If you ever are in a situation where someone has to say, they aren’t into doing stuff with animals and children, you should just leave. I would think that is an obvious no, but apparently not in Christian Grey’s world.

All throughout the book, Christian has a problem recognizing that Ana is not a blow up doll, but a human. He has trackers in her phone, hardly ever lets her drive her car, and bought the company that she works for all to “protect” her. Honestly, he treats her like a child. The one time that she wore a skimpy dress to a club, he made sure that she knew her body was not hers, but his. Not to mention the fact that Ana was always worried about the mood that Christian would be in. Not because she cared about him, but because she didn’t want to be yelled at/have the shit beat out of her again. This is why, at no point in this book did I think, “I’ll have what she’s having.”

I guess that the biggest problem that I had with the book, was that Ana was not a person, but a possession. But past that, I don’t know why women liked that. I don’t think that women have fought this hard, to want to go back to square one. I felt that the books were a complete slap in the face of the equal rights movement.

Before I read Fifty Shades of Grey, I thought that the novels would be empowering to women. I thought that this would be a piece that embraced female sexuality. After, I was shocked that a woman would fantasize about such a thing. We haven’t worked this hard to be treated like children. We haven’t worked this hard to have people view us as indecisive pieces of property.

Simply put, I don’t understand it. Women of today are strong, powerful, and independent, nothing like Ana Steele. This is refered to as “mommy porn,” but would any parent want their child to be treated like Ana? Certainly no parent would want their child to treat people how Christian treats them. With this sort of abuse being called fantasy, I fear the direction in which we are headed as a society.

If you want a more in-depth view of this crap, please visit this blog, http://bizzybiz.blogspot.com/2012/06/50-screams-of-hate.html. I loved it as much as I hated Fifty Shades of Grey.

Photo Credit: Salon.com

If You Want a Seat in the Senate, Don’t Defend Rape

I think that most of us can agree that it is a “gift from God” that Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock will not be serving in the Senate this year. If you are not familiar because you have been busy refurnishing the rock that you live under, Todd Akin was convinced that “legitimate rape” hardly ever causes pregnancy, and Richard Mourdock believed that babies produced by rape and incest are gifts from god and should not be allowed to be aborted. I’m shocked that they couldn’t win with that progressive attitude. I mean, I know that I love having zero control over my own body, and if I got pregnant from a rape, it would be my fault if my uterus didn’t kick it into high gear and fight off the rapist’s sperm. Kidding!

Honestly, I am so very thankful for the people of Missouri and Indiana for electing Claire McCaskill and Joe Donnelly instead of the Akin-Mourdock duo, which were endorsed by the Romney Ryan ticket. Though McCaskill and Donnelly won by a margin that I though was narrow for these races: McCaskill 55-49, and Donnelly 50-44. I find it shocking that, even in 2012, a sizable amount of voters agreed with Akin and Mourdock. Maybe we shouldn’t be as surprised by the margin in Missouri, since they are one of the most conservative states in the union, but I still find it to be unbelievable.

These margins mean that while this battle on the war on women has been won, there are many more battles to come. The only thing that stands between a free America for all sexes, and a trip down memory lane is us. The people of Missouri and Indiana were not about to let this happen and they spoke their minds. We need to stand together and make the most out of this fourth wave of feminism. If we do a good enough job, it might be the last push we need to make a truly equal world for both sexes! I wish that this blog, and other publications like it were unnecessary. Until that day comes, the writers of NotYourCoffeeBitch will be here doing our best to make equality a tangible thing instead of an idea, for people all across the globe.

Photo Credits:

politicalhumor.about.com

salon.com

Bible Beaters Turn Their Attention to the Beaded Vaginas of Sinners, and So Much More

Please, whatever you might be doing, however important it might be, go to http://www.ChristWire.org. I have About.com’s page on Brazil to thank for leading me to this charlie-fox trot of a website. It covers everything from vajjazzling to steal your sons away from God, and why you should keep your husband away from black women. My right palm is having a hard time leaving my forehead (is face-palming a sin too?). Honestly, the more I read, the harder I laugh.

Let us start with christwire’s take on a sequined vagina,  “…college female students are now ‘vajazzling” their private areas. They are adorning their erogenous suprapubic area with jewels, and then trying to tempt men to follow the sparkles right to a place where only the married belong.” The rest of the article displays the “whore antics” of women who nature intended to stay at home.

My personal favorite post was related to the post “How Did Harry Potter Turn Emma Watson into a Devilwhore.” apparently Emma is taking her devilwhordum into a film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey, which is a “women’s lesbian film.” The article can be summed up into one direct quote, “we have just learned that Emma Watson has agreed to not only do all her scenes nude, but also let Anderson Cooper stick his Satan Scepter into her fertile sin hole, live on the movie screen.” I’m speechless.

Thankfully, ChristWire.org is much like  “A Modest Proposal” because at face value it is horrific and repulsive, until the moment that you find out the whole thing was sarcastic. Then you feel like an ass for becoming so enraged.  I praise the writers of ChristWire.org for exposing bigotry by agreeing with the bigots themselves. It is an interesting way to get your view-point across, but trust me when I say this satirical website is not for the faint of heart. The only reason that you have to become enraged with ChristWire.org is that some people will take these articles as a continuation of the Bible. If you find that person start running, especially if you hear banjos.

Photo Credits:

Disinfo.com

Giantbomb.com

Debate 2012

If you are human, chances are that you tend to be very busy. Here at NotYourCoffeeBitch, we understand that. This is why, during the final eight days before the election, voters need each bit of information that they can get.

In my opinion, the debates act as tie breakers to the undecided voter. You can see their views on important issues, how they carry themselves, and how they handle intense situations. I am fully aware that the debates are over, but that doesn’t mean you can’t re-watch them, or catch up on what you missed (ie. horses and bayonets, and binders full of women).

If you follow this link: http://www.2012presidentialelectionnews.com/2012-debate-schedule/2012-presidential-debate-schedule/ you not only have a chance to watch the debates, but you can choose to read the transcripts. Hopefully, this might help out people living in Ohio, Florida. No pressure though.

Photo Credit: CollegeNews.com

Dr. Cinderella

While passing out candy to trick-or-treaters I saw the typical array of costumes, ninjas, zombies, mobsters, and I think I even saw a hipster. Then I saw costumes that made me want to yell at parents. These include, but are not limited to, slutty Alice and Wonderland, bride and princess. My distaste for the Alice costume isn’t slut-bashing by any means. If you are comfortable enough with your body, go out and have fun. But, if you are going door to door trick-or-treating like a child, don’t dress like you are twenty.

As for the bride, I don’t understand why someone would allow their child to dress as one. It is like looking at young girls that are forced into marriage and saying “sorry you are raped and beaten and your childhood was lost. I’m going to glamorize this serious issue and get more candy than you can ever dream of.” Marriage is something between consenting adults, not a Halloween costume for children who don’t understand the basics of a relationship yet.

I don’t blame the girls for this, they are too young to know. I blame Disney and the adults in their lives for brainwashing them. Halloween is supposed to be a time to dress as someone you idolize, or something that you’ve always wanted to be. You could be a superhero, an actress, a doctor, president, seriously, anything you have ever wanted to be you can be. I don’t see why you would want to dress as something that anyone can do, and that most people will do. This most likely stems form my hatred of baby dolls. See my article, “Baby Dolls Kind of Really Piss Me Off” for further understanding.

This brings me to my dislike for the princess costume. The stream of Disney Princesses seemed to never end. It’s not like a Disney Princes ever accomplished anything. They had a problem, were helpless to fix it on their own, had a prince save them and got married. Seriously, nothing too hard there. Obviously Mulan is an exception, because she is the Hillary Clinton grade bad-ass of the cartoon world. But, besides Mulan, Disney teaches girls that it is okay not to help themselves, as long as they are pretty, a man will save them. What happens to the princess when she gets wrinkles and isn’t so pretty. She has no job training and nice try finding a divorce attorney that can beat a prince. She would be lucky if she gets anything from the divorce and no prince is going to want to save her. Then the princes is going to be homeless because she relied on men her entire life. Is this the kind of life that we want for our future generation?

It’s not even like these girls dress like Princes Diana, she was a super hero. She was President of the Royal Marsden Hospital and of the Hospital for Sick Children, and she headed dozens of charities. The awareness that Princes Diana raised for homeless people and people living with HIV/AIDS was priceless. She truly made a difference in the world, with and without her prince.

Like Princess Diana, Pam, from the office, is amazing. She and Jim noticed that their daughter was obsessed with princesses, so in “Here Comes Treble” they decided to turn princesses into positive female role models by creating Dr. Cinderella. They showed their daughter that it is okay to be pretty like a princes, but you also need to be smart and have a career. I say hooray to Dr. Cinderella and I hope to be seeing more of them in the future.

Photo Credit: Calitreview.com

Further Reading on Princes Diana: http://www.royal.gov.uk/HistoryoftheMonarchy/The%20House%20of%20Windsor%20from%201952/DianaPrincessofWales/CharitiesandPatronage.aspx

Church and State

Paul Ryan, I respect your views on abortion. Surely, not everyone believes in abortion, it is controversial, that is why not everyone gets an abortion. There are other options available to pregnant women, besides abortion. I, as an American, respect your catholic faith.

However, I am not catholic, not all of America is Catholic. Likewise not all Americans are Buddhists, Baptists, Jewish, Muslim, Christian or atheists. That is why the founding fathers made it crystal clear that there is to be a separation of church and state. Also, one of the reasons that colonist came to America was because of zero separation of church and state in England, therefore, a need to practice religion freely and to escape religious persecution.

That is why Paul Ryan is, in my opinion, not fit to hold high office. He is clearly incapable of putting the needs of the people above his own faith. If he is so against abortion, then why doesn’t he put a focus on sexual education in public schools so abortions are not needed?

To take a pro-life stance that is also pro-American, you can not repeal Roe v. Wade. There are other ways of pushing your agenda without taking away a woman’s right to her body. After all, not everyone believes that life begins at conception.

I applaud Biden’s stance during the debate. Even though he has a strong catholic faith, he believes that you can’t take away a women’s right to choose. He understands that there is a separation of church and state. Also, he reminded people that for the same reasoning, you can not force catholic run health intuitions to provide contraceptives and perform abortions.

Can we trust someone who puts their personal beliefs ahead of the needs of the people? I don’t think that we can. We need leaders that govern based on the needs and wants of the people, not the leader. After all, what is right is not always the easiest.

Photo Credit: salon.com