Thursday, April 6, 2017

OK, I'm sorry. Let me explain.


A couple of days ago I posted a tweet in response to something tweeted by pretty actress Jewel Staite.  Staite is most noted for playing the highly sexual (and sexy) spaceship engineer Kaylee Frye on the TV show Firefly and the wrap-it-up nicely movie Serenity, which I've watched at least 10 times.

Here's the tweet by Ms. Staite:

"While wearing a white turtleneck and complaining about my hydrangea dying too fast, I realized it had happened: I had become a suburban mom."

Now, I replied to Ms. Staite with a quote from Serenity, which is quite funny and made even more funny by Captain Mal's (Nathan Fillion) reaction, which is that he shouldn't know that.   Kaylee was basically saying that she'd like to have sex because she's tired of using a vibrator (for a year), but the both innocent and straightforward and forlorn way she says it, perfectly in line with the character's love of life and love of men and love of sex (which is an important plot element late in the movie, leading to yet another funny and sexy moment) makes it charmingly inappropriate.

Now, I used the quote in response to Ms. Staite's tweet above.  Some people think I was just waiting to do that. No, actually I was going to ask if she had a minivan, but others beat me to it.  Some people think I don't respect Ms. Staite as a woman.  Some people think that using the quote the way I did it was offensive.

I'm surprised anybody finds anything on the Internet offensive anymore.  And I was surprised by the attention.  I can battle with idiot climate skeptics for 100s of tweets and get no secondary support at all, but I use a quote from a movie I love in response to something humorous said by an actress in the movie I love, and I get tweeted tomatoes lobbed at me from the balcony.  OK, maybe it wasn't the funniest thing.  It was not meant with bad intent.

In fact, what I was trying to do was to react to the expressed bored-with-life attitude expressed by Jewel that is implicit in being a stereotypical "suburban mom".  City life, being young, being hot, being sexually active and liking it -- all that is about a phase of life that has passed.  Jewel's tweet is about becoming staid, plain, a stereotyped less hot, more mature, more concerned with the details of home life than sex life, woman.  A mother, housekeeper, caregiver, etc.  And some of the stereotypical aspects of that life is that rather than having sex daily, you're lucky to have it monthly.  And also, that being a "suburban mom" and wearing a white turtleneck instead of a black lace teddy or a low-cut halter top with Daisy Duke shorts is representative of that new role in life.  And a stereotypical behavior of bored suburban moms is that occasionally they have a little personal escape with a glass of wine, a couple chapters of Fifty Shades of Grey, and something that runs on batteries.  Especially if the stereotypical suburban hubby is working late, commuting longer, and is too tired to do anything but watch Firefly reruns when he gets home at night. So my lewd suggestion was that maybe she should take some advice from her beloved Kaylee character and maybe she should rev the engines, feel hot, feel sexy, get with the hubby -- and not feel like a bored suburban housewife so much.  All meant in humor, and not meant to offend.

I know, if you have to explain it, it's not funny.  Sorry, it wasn't funny.  It was juvenile, wink-wink, Beavis and Butthead humor.  And I would like to deeply apologize to Ms. Staite if she was offended.  And I'm sorry if I repeated a line that makes me laugh every time I hear her deliver it.

And everybody managed to miss my followup tweet too, apparently.








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