Funny Friday: Please Don’t Promise Me Forever August 21, 2009
Posted by Onely in "Against Love"...?, As If!, Dating, Food for Thought.Tags: cheesy hallmark card, Laura Kipnis, please don't promise me forever, rotating corpse, single hallmark
6 comments
Welcome to the first intallment of our new Funny Friday series. Today we are looking at a 1976 Hallmark booklet, “Please Don’t Promise Me Forever“. The Rotating Corpse discovered and posted this gem, which explains how to have a happy relationship by following a series of directives beginning with “Please don’t. . .” Rotating Corpse commenters seem divided on whether the text of the booklet is dickish or loving. I think either way it’s hilarious. What do our Copious Readers think?
The booklet shows a series of pictures of a couple wearing vests, elaborately knotted scarves, or poofy sleeves. The blond woman and mustachioed man are shot in various states of fun couple activities, such as wading in a stream, playing Monopoly, and staring soulfully over the side of a bridge, as if looking for their Pooh Sticks. Some of the advice is actually quite sensible. But mostly the reader–after she stops laughing–comes away feeling as if the pair has a somewhat sickly, passive-aggressive love. Some key lines in the text are:
Please don’t promise me forever./ I want us to love each other one day at a time / Instead of trying too hard and promising too much. (more…)
Pop Culture, Scourge of the Onelys (Twice in a Week!): “I Vow” Commercials April 1, 2009
Posted by Onely in "Against Love"...?, As If!, Dating, Heteronormativity, Pop Culture: Scourge of the Onelys, Singled Out.Tags: "i vow", chemistry.com, Laura Kipnis, rhetoric of work, what's wrong with flannel nightgowns?!, zyrtec, zyrtec commercial
19 comments
OK. So I understand that Chemistry.com’s whole business revolves around assuming and promoting couple-dom as the most desirable relationship status. In order to do this, it’s no surprise that the company (and others like it) tends to promote stereotypes about and simultaneously degrade single people (see, for example, this offensive commercial).
But — as if that’s not enough — the newest series of Chemistry.com commercials, dubbed on YouTube as “Chemistry.com Vows,” presents two people mimicking wedding-ceremony protocol and normalizes the matrimaniacal tendencies of American culture. (more…)
Book Review: Against Love June 29, 2008
Posted by Onely in "Against Love"...?, book review, Food for Thought, Reviews.Tags: jerry maguire, Laura Kipnis, love, polemic, subversive thinking
41 comments
Kipnis, Laura. Against Love: A Polemic. New York: Pantheon, 2003.
As the title suggests, the book Against Love is meant to piss readers off, raise their hackles, question the previously unquestionable; Kipnis daringly tackles what she believes is the problem of our modern conceptions and (perhaps more importantly) expectations of love. In the pre-prologue (humorously entitled “Reader Advisory”), Kipnis asks, “To begin with, who would dream of being against love?” (3). (more…)
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