Rough Women and Sex in Advertising

One of the most popular brands of denim and leather clothing for women in my world is Leigh, and their "Rough Women" advertising slogan has been in use for several decades. In fact, the phrase Rough Woman is as iconic in my world as Marlboro Man is in yours. While their older ads emphasized a rugged and individualistic woman against the elements, in their more recent years, their ads have become much more focused on sex. The first ad above is from a billboard, with enough hints of the fun stuff for women, yet safe enough for the averted eyes of sensitive men.

The ad below, meanwhile, has been running in the pages of women's lifestyle magazines.

Night in the City of Lights

An Afternoon at the Courts

I'd been down to the basketball courts just once before. My sister Tara plays ball there regularly, but that time I went, just to hang out and see what it's like you know, she was out of town for a state championship game. She's out of town often, see. She plays both basketball and baseball for her school, and this year she's gonna make All-State. She's always going out of town for games. So I went just once, cos I know if she caught me there, she'd belt me so hard I wouldn't be able to sit for a month. I didn't tell any of my brothers either, especially not Doug, cos he'd snitch on me for sure. There's always one in every family.

Timo goes though, pretty regularly. He goes he says, to flirt with the girls. It's a scene there, he says. If you wanna get with girls, he says, that's the best place to go.

What She Wants

In my world, when it comes to relations between the sexes, the female is the aggressor. Men send signals of availability, and women make the choice of whether they are interested in them or not. Sometimes, women make unwelcome advances, and it is impossible for men, being so much weaker physically, to resist them. Furthermore, the legal and economic framework in my world doesn't make it easy for men to refuse. Men have few legal rights even in relatively progressive cultures here. To press a case, they require a female representative, usually a family member or a wife, in court to represent them, and cases of rape and harassment are civil, not criminal, matters. Furthermore, the court testimony of a male requires the backing of a female.

In other respects, the economic situation of most unmarried men is also quite unstable, and the prospect of having a regular female lover who may provide some financial support, even if she already has husbands, can be quite hard to turn down. For men in my world, choices are sometimes very easy to make, but very hard to live with.

Incidentally, the usage of language in my world is not exactly the same as in yours. Words that exist in your English may have a completely different significance in mine. One such word, in this context, is mistress. In my world, it can be used to describe the usually already-married woman in an extra-marital relationship with a single male, usually much younger than she is. Many words exist in my world to signify the male in such a relationship, many of them diminutive and condescending, such as boy, toyboy, hobby horse and side dish.

In the future, whenever appropriate, I will write more about how languages differ between my world and yours.

Update: Made some small modifications to the text, but not the image. Feb 8, 2009

At the Beach II

Update: Fixed some small errors that I had overlooked. Feb 1, 2009

Ecstasy

Venus Needs Men

Last month, Blog Buddy Matty Boy at Lotsa Splainin' contacted me and Blog Buddy Undersquid with an idea for one of his regular Giant Women posts. He wanted to feature collages inspired by several verses in four of Elvis Costello's songs which allude to either giantesses or shrunken men. The verse I eventually worked with was from his song My Science Fiction Twin.

He's trapped in his own parallel dimension,
That's why I'm so forgiving,
But how can I possibly forget to mention those fifty foot women
Who put the fascination back into my science fiction twin?

You can see the final results of all four collages and verses at this post here. Featured are two collages by Undersquid, another by TheShrinkee, and one by yours truly, which is also posted below.

I'd never made a fifty-foot-woman style image before, nor any other size difference other than what fit within the confines of My Own Parallel Dimension. However, I was also loath to depart from the rest of my collages and do a one-off piece that I couldn't really post here as this blog is, really, only about my world. This led me to come up with the concept of a poster for a science-fiction movie or TV series from my world which features your classic 1950s-style giantesses, but updated for modern times. This is what I ended up with.

Here's to the New Year

The women in my world raise their glasses in wishing you the best in the coming year.

The men in my world don't really get to hold glasses of champagne or wine, since a glass of the stuff is about equivalent to a small soup tureen in volume. Sometimes the women let us have a sip, but even when they don't, most of us still have a pretty good time.

Joy to the World

I'd originally wanted to post this two days ago, but real life, of course, intervened, albeit in a good way.  Wishing all of you a slightly-belated but still wonderful holiday season.

All She Wants For Christmas.....