Author: Merritt K

Categories
FUCKING DAY

Fucking Day: Man2Man Alliance 🌭

Younger readers might not know this, but there used to be more than six or seven websites. People owned their own domains, and when I say “people,” I mean human beings with names like “Steve” and “darklady89,” rather than demented flesh golems named “Elon” or “Mark.” They would open up Notepad, write some crude HTML, and put their unfiltered thoughts about Hostess Fruit Pies or bad children’s art online, and then they would go outside without a combination GPS/game console/internet browser/insanity inducer on their person. Some of these sites experienced an early version of what we would call “going viral.” At the time, that meant that they talked about them on the radio or you got an email about them from your uncle who worked in IT.

Today, it’s exhausting and soul-draining how the internet provides us constant information about the innermost thoughts and beliefs of strangers around the world, but in the early 2000s, it was novel and exciting. We craved these windows into the unfamiliar and could subsist on a single page of text and images for several months before moving onto the next Hampsterdance, Hello My Future Girlfriend, or what have you. Meanwhile, a modern user of social media is exposed to over a dozen Time Cube-level events in an hour of scrolling. Well, today I’d like to talk to you about a site that can more or less be described as “a Time Cube full of dicks.” Welcome to Bill Weintraub’s Man2Man Alliance.

The first thing I need to tell you is that all of the title text on this site is actually made up of images. That’s fine, people used all kinds of hacks like this in late ’90s web design. We were making it up as we went along, papering over our little failures with animated GIFs advising visitors that our pages were “under construction.”

Another example: Bill Weintraub either didn’t know how to use padding or thought of it as an effeminate, anti-masculine practice, so the actual non-image text runs all the way from one side of the page to the other. Ironically, this makes the site more readable on modern mobile devices than on desktop computers, because monitors have gotten a lot wider since 1999. Looking at the Man2Man Alliance on my 1920×1080, my eyes are bouncing back and forth across three good-sized phalluses worth of visual real estate. It feels like I’m doing EMDR, but the D stands for dicks. In the Man2Man Alliance, the D always stands for dicks.

Two dicks rubbing together. The banana tango. Sword fighting. A hyper-exclusive sausage party. Yeah. We’re building a coalition on the strong foundation of genital mashing for the mutual satisfaction of both participants, or a 1980’s third grader’s idea of what gay sex is.

But you don’t build an entire worldview — much less a website — simply because you’re into slapping meat. You do it because you believe that hog on hog action is the only responsible, ethical, and masculine way for two dudes to fuck.

We’re celebrating stuff now! We’re exalting things! Goddamn, I feel like I’m playing Magic: The Gathering. How about Frot: The Stiffening. Is that anything?

There are a lot of quotes, scare and otherwise, in that block of text. Bill’s rejection of sexual identity labels is one of many ways, as we’ll see, that he was ahead of his time. But lest you think he’s some live-and-let-live, easygoing kind of guy who just wants people to break out of the boxes that society puts them in, he is very much not that. He hates that.

Can you imagine Thor getting fucked up the ass? Iron Man? Captain America? Spider-Man? The Hulk? The Vision? Imagine it. Imagine it now.

If you imagined it, you have failed the first test. Anal sex is wrong, and The Vision would never take part in it. It is unclean, unpleasurable, and would reduce the masculine and vital The Vision to the role of a wretched and pathetic woman.

Bill Weintraub is not a conservative Christian commentator hollering about “the gays.” He is a man who has openly had sex with other men, who at times seems to have considered himself to be gay, and who created and maintained an entire website about gay sex for over three decades. That said, he does agree with the right-wing maniacs who are obsessed with the concept of anal sex.

The problem is, these guys think that all man-on-man action is anal, thus unwittingly bolstering the might of the gay power brokers who compel all men attracted to men to do butt stuff. To this, Bill Weintraub responds, “show me where in the Bible it says you can’t jack off two dicks at the same time!”

See, technically, lying with a man as a man lies with a woman means fucking him in the ass, because that’s the analogous act to penis in vagina sex. Playing word games with the Bible was a pretty popular pastime in the 2000s, when terms like “abomination” got thrown around on Fox News left and right and smirking atheists responded with passages about shellfish and mixed fiber clothing. Bill has intrigued me and I would like to learn more about his sexual and religious philosophy. Let’s check out the article “What Sex Is” to learn more.

Hold on, we’ve got to scroll past some unlicensed erotic art from 1996 first. Unlicensed, beautiful erotic art from 1996.

After an introduction in which Bill talks about how young boys think gay sex is wrestling and roughhousing and then are disappointed when, you know, sex enters the picture, he gets to an extended analogy between “heterosexual” and “homosexual” sex.

Ok, so the key thing about sex between a man and a woman isn’t the penetration at all, it’s the fact that they’re rubbing their genitals together. The equivalent form of physical intimacy for two men, then, isn’t anal sex, but frot — a term which, by the way, Bill Weintraub claims to have invented, distinct from the French-derived “frottage.”

Phalluses! You know, cocks! Dicks! Cranks, like the guy who wrote this article! Because, wait a minute, if bumping hogs is more like male-female sex than anal, then wouldn’t frotting be the real definition of lying with a man as one lies with a woman? Argh, my entire fetish-based worldview is crumbling! We need to find a rhetorical escape hatch!

There it is! I need to learn everything I can about Sensei Patrick, the man who calls pussies “squirrels” and dicks “cranks.” I’m clicking that link.

Holy shit, oh my God, I’m so happy I clicked that link! Each of these lines feels like a powerful blow from Sensei Patrick’s toned legs. “A black belt from the Bible belt.” “A dedicated beaver-banger” (text made red for emphasis). A kickboxing, dick-grinding champion of masculinity.

It’s fucking crazy that we were still doing this in the late 2000s or whenever this was added to the site. There were still men who felt like they needed to prove that just because they fucked other guys, didn’t mean they couldn’t beat ass. And besides, they didn’t do the really gay stuff. Just two members rubbing against each other, which is, again, the truest form of intimacy two warrior men can share!

There is a lot of combat sports stuff on the site. Bill Weintraub was either into MMA himself or else just realized that a lot of the guys who were fans were probably also into no-holds barred penile sparring. And evidently, at some point in the 2010s, he discovered SEO. I’m so glad he did, because it gave us pages like this:

It’s fantastic. This page was seemingly written to pull in hot young martial artists and convince them of the masculine fun and enjoyable masculinity of frotting, but it sounds like the demented porno fantasy of a middle-aged man.

Combat dude cum! I feel like I’ve heard that before


Lawrence v. Texas ruled that state laws criminalizing sodomy were unconstitutional in 2003. That would put Bill Weintraub in his mid-50s when he wrote this desperate attempt to seem hip and cool to all of the kickboxers and BJJ young guns who typed “rubbing dicks illegal yes or no i am a karate guy” into Yahoo search twenty years ago. It sounds like Pauly Shore trying to explain sexuality to Brendan Fraser’s character in Encino Man. Major penickular grindage, buu-uuddy.

Back to Sensei Patrick, who has a fifty/fifty shot of being a figment of Bill Weintraub’s imagination like a gay Tyler Durden, which is the most redundant series of three words I’ve ever written. Patrick has a column answering a number of questions from men who would today be on Grindr insisting that they aren’t gay, just “open-minded,” but back in the dark ages were forced to send their timid inquiries to an MMA-fighting, pussy-slaying “straight” man because they were afraid that sending an email to Dan Savage would get them placed on a government list of sexual inverts.

This guy Rick wants to whet his wang against that of his friend, whom he has known for nine months. They get drunk together frequently, but Rick doesn’t know how to close the deal. Patrick opens with some sensible advice about trying to gauge his friend’s interest. Then he gets into the real, erm, meat of his advice.

Let’s recap: you want to maneuver the situation such that the two of you are alone on a sleepover, you’re wearing a nice button-up shirt (italicized and underlined because this is crucial), and play some previously-recorded WWE events to get in the mood. Once Steve Austin delivers the Stone Cold Stunner to Vince McMahon at Madison Square Garden and the object of your desire is hyped out of his mind, trick him into wrestling with you — but only after you take your shirt off because you’ve jacked the thermostat and, also, because you don’t want to wreck your nice button-up shirt.

This is a lonely and repressed gay man’s erotic daydream. If Rick followed any of Sensei Patrick’s advice, he was almost certainly murdered by a guy who escaped legal consequences via the gay panic defense. Shit, that got dark. Let’s liven things up a bit with some primo superhero frottage, buuuddy.

The tone of the Man2Man Alliance bounces back and forth more than a semi-hard penis ricocheting off another half-chub. It careens from early 2000s Maddox-esque celebrations of manliness to a burning desperation to seem normal, not like those assfucking gays. And again, the creator of this site is a man that most people who use everyday language and live in consensus reality would describe as homosexual.

But in Bill Weintraub’s mind, the fact that he never wanted to have a dick inside of him transformed him into a new form of True Man, one who had transcended the stultifying binaries of gay and straight, an inheritor of the masculine traditions of the ancients. And I know I’m saying this a lot, but I think it’s important to keep perspective here — this was all because he really liked the idea of two guys achieving climax through prick friction.

One of the big themes of the Man2Man Alliance is that frotting is something guys have been doing since time immemorial. There’s a lot of Greek and Roman statuary all over the page, the kinds of imagery you mostly see these days on verified Twitter profiles who post a lot about why don’t we build classically beautiful architecture anymore and also where did all of these brown people come from.

This is not mere advocacy for a sexual practice. It is a movement, a resounding cry across time. Also, I defy you not to hear this in the voice of the Soulcalibur announcer:

Bill’s warrior obsession puts him in fine company with men around the world and throughout history who have believed that contemporary masculinity has become corrupted due to the nefarious influence of feminism/non-white people/the Jews/woke/porno. As far as I see it, the main difference between him and a guy like Andrew Tate is merely that Bill Weintraub says the quiet part (about wanting to genital joust) out loud.

Actually, there’s something else that sets Bill Weintraub apart from his fellows: he believes that there is not only a vast, cultural conspiracy to rob men of their power as men, but that there is an equally insidious cabal plotting to force gay men to have anal sex with one another. Why? It’s not totally clear. Possibly to make gays seem more normal, because they have penetrative sex just like straight people? Psychiatry may be partly to blame here, as is so often the case.

I don’t know if your social circles include many gay men. Personally, I have known a number of them over the years, and none has ever complained of being belittled for not being into anal sex. I’m not saying it’s never happened, but I doubt that it occurs with the frequency that Bill Weintraub seems to believe it does. What I’m saying is, I don’t necessarily believe in the existence of a tyrannical Buttfuck Dictatorship.

Bill does, naturally. He has constructed an entire persecution complex with the Buttfuck Dictatorship at its core. Men are induced to have anal sex by pornography, social judgment, and disapproval at every turn, a pressure analogous and equivalent to the pressure to be heterosexual. He explains this in “The Story of Bill and Brett,” which is partly about how his lover died of AIDS-related illness in the 90s.

Please don’t go. Please don’t go. I’m not a monster. I wouldn’t drop that on you most of the way through an article making fun of Bill Weintraub if I wasn’t going to follow it up by pointing out that there are several articles on the Man2Man Alliance claiming that condoms don’t work and urging anyone who donates to AIDS organizations to donate to Bill Weintraub’s sexual holy war instead.

If you know anything about developments in HIV treatment and prevention over the last couple of decades, you might be wondering what Bill thinks of PrEP, a combination of drugs people can take to dramatically reduce their risk of seroconversion from HIV- to HIV+. Presumably he’d be happy about it, right? Well, here’s what Bill had to say in 2006:

PrEP is, you see, merely the latest ploy of the Buttfuck Dictatorship. Against this analist cultural juggernaut stand the Frot Men, the Cockrub Warriors, the practitioners of Heroic Homosex. Because if there’s one thing Bill likes as much as the idea of two dudes smackin’ salamis, it’s inventing six different terms for the same thing.

Bill Weintraub has spent thirty years constructing an elaborate sociolinguistic edifice around his unique sexual interests, time that could have been better spent doing almost anything else. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fine to have your own little kinks — maybe you read some adventure stories as a boy that made an impact on you and now you associate sex with manly wrestling, or maybe you were startled by a clown at your seventh birthday party and you can only get hard when you hear a balloon popping. Hell, maybe you saw Ferngully: The Last Rainforest when you were five years old and you have a persistent fantasy of being shrunken down and devoured by Tone Lƍc. Just as an example, I mean.

The point is, it’s not a big deal. Everyone’s got their thing, and as long as it’s not interfering with your life or Tone Lƍc’s life then there’s really no problem. If it was just that Bill Weintraub was really into python pounding, then it would be pretty cruel of me to write several thousand words mocking the Man2Man Alliance. But crucially, it is not just that. Bill Weintraub does not believe he even has a fetish. Nay, it is you who has the fetish, buttfuckers!

Remember, this is a guy who talks about anal sex the way homophobic pre-teens do. This is a guy who took the iconic ACT UP “Silence=Death” and turned it into this:

This sucks, man. Oh, and in case you were wondering, Bill Weintraub’s official position on sucking dick is that it’s not as bad as the dreaded practice of the analists, but it isn’t as honorable as frotting. I mean, if you’re sucking a dick, what are you, a woman? A pathetic, UFC-despising woman?

“Typical vaginized 20-somethings” is a hell of a phrase from this letter writer, who identifies himself as the “Naked Wrestler.” Let’s see how Bill Weintraub responded.

Um, notice how if his “man-hating” boss had said something completely different, say, a racial slur, rather than expressing her feelings about combat sports, there would have been consequences? CHECKMATE, VAGINIZED ANALISTS!

The Man2Man Alliance is the kind of site you could spend hours on, depending on your taste for Bill Weintraub’s manic alternation between furious masturbatory fantasies and angry rhetoric about anal “sex.” Hell, I didn’t even talk about the fiction — I mean the writing Bill intended to be fictional, like “Cockrub Warriors of Mars,” rather than all the stuff about the Buttfuck Dictatorship.

When you realize that this stuff sits right next to diatribes about how he’s being persecuted for engaging in shaft on shaft combat, you start to wonder whether maybe it’s all the same thing for Bill. Talk to any sex worker and they’ll tell you the same thing: there are countless men out there into something they’ve convinced themselves is the weirdest sexual interest in the world and nine times out of ten it turns out to be a garden variety foot fetish. But a lot of these guys don’t want to be open about their whole deal: the shame is part of the excitement. Maybe that’s why Bill Weintraub invented the Buttfuck Dictatorship. Maybe he was never an angry, fearful, judgmental man at all — maybe the entire Man2Man Alliance was just a sexual prop for him, a way to convince himself that what he was doing was nasty and awful and wrong so as to generate the frisson he needed to achieve satisfaction.

Or maybe he’s just an asshole, which according to his worldview, is the absolute worst thing I can call him.

Sadly (?), the Man2Man Alliance closed in November 2023. Bill Weintraub has made himself unavailable for correspondence, is no longer accepting donations, and will not update the site with new articles. But does this mean the battle of the righteous Frot Men against the insidious Buttfucking Dictatorship has been lost? No, says Bill Weintraub. The struggle has only just begun.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Good Satan and His Hot Witches, whose spinning frottledriver takes off 65% of any cockrub warrior’s ejaculation bar.

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Tenko and the Guardians of The Magic 🌭

“Play the hits,” they say. Nobody wants to hear your new material — they want the stuff they grew up on. So be it, I say to my trio of muscular, younger men as I begrudgingly rise from the bed we all sleep in together. It’s been eight weeks since mama wrote about some forgotten ’90s bullshit, so go crank some ’90s in Fortnite for a couple of hours while I crank out a few thousand words about, sorry, this says “an American cartoon based on a real-life famous Japanese magician?”

Well, in the words of my close personal associate Super Mario, “here we go.”

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a Saban Entertainment in possession of a Power Rangers, must be in want of two dozen more. We know that Haim Saban and Shuki Levy went fucking nuts in the 90s. We have the proof. Creating the next Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles went to their heads. It was a simple formula: intersperse existing Japanese action show footage with scenes of badly-paid and worse-treated American actors talking to a robot with an anxiety disorder. It was perfect. It defined a decade. You might even say it was a kind… of magic. Mightn’t you? For the sake of the premise of this article, please visualize the words “I agree” in the 1-900 HOT DOG Psychic Terms of Service before continuing.

“Hi, I’m Amy Jo Johnson, but most of you guys probably know me as Kimberly, the Pink Power Ranger,” Amy Jo tells the camera with a little shrug.

Watching this now, thirty years later, is it a Zen-like acceptance we detect in that statement, or else bitter resignation? There’s no way of knowing. Does it matter? The entity that is Saban Entertainment has already claimed her life for its own dark purposes. It is no longer enough that she fly around in a pterodactyl Zord, or shoot a bow on the rare occasions the Power Rangers use their weapons, or turn all evil and sexy and… sorry, what was I saying?

Oh, right. Amy Jo Johnson is introducing Tenko and the Guardians of the Magic.

Released in 1995 just as the original Power Rangers series was winding down, Tenko and the Guardians of the Magic — and yes, it’s “the” magic, I checked — is located firmly in Saban’s “sicko phase.” See, latter day Haim Saban spends his time penning drunken emails to the President urging him to send Israel more guns pls, but ’90s Haim Saban was busy greenlighting literally every idea anyone brought in front of him that had anything to do with Japan, monsters, or teens. Thank whatever god you send military weaponry abroad in the name of that we never got a western adaptation of Legend of the Overfiend.

Here’s one of the emails, by the way:

Because seriously, Saban Entertainment was just doing whatever at this point: VR Troopers, Big Bad Beetleborgs, a co-production of a Creepy Crawlers cartoon with my longtime favorites Abrams/Gentile. Hell, they put Ryan Gosling on a fucking boat that was also his high school in a show called Breaker High and you can trace a direct line from that series to Kenergy.

Rather than being a cheaply-produced live action series, Tenko and the Guardians of the Magic was a cheaply-produced cartoon. It is, however, based on a real-life pop idol turned stage magician named Princess Tenko.

You’ll sometimes see the show called “Princess Tenko and the Guardians of the Magic,” but crucially the word “princess” is not in there, to avoid tainting what could be a perfectly good franchise about ancient wizards that just happens to be led by a female character with the stink of girlhood. The ’90s were not well.

In any case, it’s a deeply weird concept. Would it not have been enough to just have a cartoon about a magician and her gang of handsome boy-toys fighting mystical antagonists? Was the addition of the Princess Tenko branding and her appearance in closing segments where she performs stage magic really what pushed the premise over the top? To me, there’s only one possible explanation: someone — possibly Haim Saban himself, possibly series creator and Yu-Gi-Oh! card namesake Roger “The Executive Producer” Slifer — was desperately trying to flatter/sleep with a famous Japanese magician.

They pulled out all the stops — this introduction with Amy Jo is a full half-hour special, also featuring appearances by magicians Max Maven and Earl Nelson.

Were kids in the ’90s familiar with them, these men who appeared to be the Platonic Form of a stage magician and the oldest man alive, respectively?

Presumably, but can we get back to the whole “Guardians of THE Magic” thing? Every time I hear the announcer say that I feel an itch in the back of my brain. “The” magic? Like this is the only magic there is, and they’re the ones responsible for guarding it? I’ve never been so baffled by a definite article. It’s Izzy and The Torchworld all over again.

Amy Jo is at the Magic Castle in Hollywood. She talks up Princess Tenko as one of the most famous and mysterious magicians in the world, then tells us that if we watch carefully, we might pick up some magic tricks we can use to impress our friends. We immediately cut to Tenko on stage, a dubbed voice telling us “remember kids, I trained many years to perform this magical trick. Please, do not try this at home.”

Ok, so which is it? Am I supposed to learn how to crawl inside a folding box while flamboyant samurai dance around and shove swords into it in a clear representation of group sex or not? For a company that created the Power Rangers, one of the biggest flashpoints around violence in children’s media in recorded history, Saban is giving the pre-teen set an awful lot of credit regarding their ability to tell fantasy from reality. To make matters worse, after she completes the illusion, Tenko steps out, gestures towards the camera, and the same voiceover says “remember kids, the magic is within you.”

It feels like they wanted to get sued. It’s as if at the peak of his influence, Haim Saban was daring the powers that be to challenge him. How else do you explain the fact that each episode of Tenko ends with either a dangerous, complex stage illusion involving bladed weapons or a segment where she teaches viewers the equivalent of the old removable thumb trick? Any court would see this as de facto child endangerment. It would be like if G.I. Joe episodes only sometimes ended with a PSA about messing around with the stove, then the rest of the time demonstrated the proper technique for pistol whipping an unarmed civilian.

Back to Amy Jo, who is talking with Max Maven and Earl Nelson, the former flubbing the title and calling it, sensibly, “Tenko and the Guardians of Magic.” They try to paint Tenko as a real-life magical superhero, setting up her role in the cartoon, but they’re acting like this is all stuff that actually happened. Max tells us Tenko learned real magic from her master Hikita, and that his two other students Jana and Jason were pissed when she was named his successor, leading them to attempt to steal the powerful Starfire Gems. They got a couple of them, allowing them to merge into a giant two-headed dragon, but the rest were flung across the Earth.

Watching this man with Vegeta’s hairline casually talk about the magical powers of the Starfire Gems to summon animals and turn people into dragon monsters is the quickest way to understand the insanity of an entire decade. But it gets better: Earl Nelson then claims to have some gems “from the same region of Japan” as those bestowed on Princess Tenko. Is he about to summon an ancient demon?

Yes, if by “summon an ancient demon” you mean “perform some basic sleight of hand.” So is magic real, dangerous, and awesome, or is it all about trickery and showmanship? This special comes down firmly on the side of “yes.”

Finally, long after most kids have changed the channel to an episode of The Mask: The Animated Series, we learn something about the upcoming cartoon itself — presumably the reason we’re here in the first place. Princess Tenko has three friends, an ethnically diverse crew of hunks who obey her in all things. All things? I mean, probably. In the vernacular of anime, Tenko is essentially a reverse harem magical girl series, complete with spinning transformation sequences.

We’ve got the white dude, Bolt, who Amy Jo describes as “brave and handsome.” He’s voiced by Neal McDonough, a man famous for losing work because he refused to do kisses on-screen.

Then there’s the brilliant Steel, a black guy who — hey, hold on! You put a black superhero named “Steel” in your show? And he isn’t this guy?

Wild. That brings us to the Native American character, Hawk.

One guess as to how Amy Jo describes him. It’s “street-smart” and “fast-talking,” naturally. Oops, sorry — I got my ’90s racial clichĂ©s mixed up. It’s “wise and mystical,” forcing even the Wikipedia entry for Tenko and the Guardians of the Magic, one of those really long ones that was clearly written by fans who imprinted on the show at a young age, to admit that a Native American man named Hawk Windwalker has a “somewhat stereotypical” connection to nature.

“Princess Tenko descended from a ninja and a samurai, which explains where she gets her bravery from,” Amy Jo just casually mentions. Look, I know it’s the ’90s and we’re just naming random Japanese stuff because it sounds cool, but fucking what? Like, Tenko seems pretty cool and all, but can we get a show about her great-grandparents teaming up to kick ass and discovering that the greatest magic of all
 is love? No, we can’t. We have to go back to Max Maven showing us an optical illusion for babies.

Oh, the gray squares are actually the same shade? Great. Maybe this counted as entertainment on a summer afternoon in 1995, I don’t know. But it fucking sucks, man. Tell me more about the ninja/samurai romance.

No dice. Tenko shows us how to lift an ice cube out of a glass of water with a loop of string. You use salt. Cool. I was learning better magic than this in the ’90s from drunk uncles at family dinners. Sure, they’d swing me around the kitchen by my ankles sometimes, but there was always a sawbuck in it for me when they sobered up and felt guilty at the end of the night.

Speaking of, we’re out of time. But before we go, the eerie, disembodied voice of Tenko addresses itself directly to Amy Jo. “The magic is within you,” she repeats, a statement that Amy Jo doesn’t seem quite sure how to react to. “Gee, I sure wish the ‘getting paid more than $600 a week was within me,” she’s probably thinking.

Were there toys? Sure there were toys. But despite the show’s gestures towards gender equality, with Tenko leading her testosterone-heavy crew into battle each week, none of the male characters got figures. Instead, we got a bunch of different Tenko dolls that were actually just altered designs from an unproduced Wonder Woman line.

As for the show itself, there were only thirteen episodes. Tenko and her guys go on adventures, collect various Magic Starfire Gems and combat ancient demons. You might expect there to be some kind of romantic tension between Tenko and the various boys, but actually, the show positions her rival Jason as her main love interest, going so far as to suggest they get married in the future. It’s true what they say: women love tormented bad boys with period-appropriate hairstyles who wield mind-controlling magic disks.

In any case, it certainly wasn’t the next Power Rangers. Do you know what was the next Power Rangers?

It was Power Rangers, a series that has run so long that a few years ago it got its own gritty comic series and video game about trauma for millennials who can’t let go, in which the Green Ranger goes mad with power and fucking kills Rita Repulsa then tries to murder all rangers across all possible dimensions. It’s kind of like Jet Li’s The One except it ends up with a guy with a ponytail banging two different versions of the Pink Ranger. Probably. Man, what was it with the ’90s and bad boys with ponytails?

Regardless, I kind of forget what I was talking about and I’m sure as hell not watching all thirteen episodes of Tenko and the Guardians of the Magic, so cue the Animal House wrap-up!

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme:Michael Dillon, whose parents were a ninja and a samurai, making him a ninjurai and the victim of much discrimination.

Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: The Slayer’s Guide to Female Gamers

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Categories
NERDING DAY

Nerding Day: Star Crystal 🌭

In the 1980s, Alien ripoffs were a genre in their own right. The Italians, having honed their budget genre chops with westerns, cranked out flicks like Contamination and Alien 2: On Earth, the latter being an extremely unofficial sequel to Alien made before 20th Century Fox could register the trademark. The Japanese, protected by loose copyright law, created anime and games “inspired” by Alien like Lily C.A.T. and Contra. And plenty of Americans got in on the action, too, with, of course, Roger Corman, Charles Band, and Fred Olen Ray’s names figuring prominently.

Among these was Star Crystal, a film written and directed by a man named Lance Lindsay, whose IMDB page is as brief as that shot in Aliens that says that Lambert was a “Despin Convert at birth.” (Look it up.) Other than Star Crystal, he wrote a film called Real Bullets and appeared in Quiet Fire, a straight-to-video action movie from 1991 that was one of twenty-seven such pictures Robert Z’Dar appeared in during that year.

As best I can tell, Lance Lindsay got out of the movie business in the early ’90s, opened a shipping business in Colorado, and vanished, much like Robert Z’Dar’s pronounced jaw disappearing behind his handsome beard in Quiet Fire.

But let us not judge Lance Lindsay — and we must always refer to him by his full, alliterative, porn star-esque name — based on his dearth of artistic output. After all, Charles Laughton only directed one film and it was Night of the Hunter. Herk Harvey’s solo directorial effort was the classic Carnival of Souls. Meanwhile, Uwe Boll was allowed to direct over 20 different films and also roam the earth unmolested after the release of Alone in the Dark.

The universe is not a fair place and success frequently has no relationship whatsoever to talent. And hey, it’s bad luck to release your Alien ripoff the same year that Aliens came out. Maybe Star Crystal is a hidden gem. In space. Because it’s a star crystal. STAR CRYSTAL!

Alien opened with a journey into a surreal landscape filled with eerie architecture, a gigantic alien corpse, and a field of mysterious eggs which provide the inciting action of the film. Star Crystal runs with the egg idea but leaves everything else, instead going with the red action of the red planet. Mars is red, right? So red you can’t really see anything?

Alien took place in 2186. Anyone watching it when it was released would have been long dead by the time that date actually rolled around. Star Crystal, meanwhile, opts for 2032, a date that was only 46 years away when it came out. It’s like the movie is daring you to remember it exists fifty years later. And, well, I guess I’m the asshole here because 2032 isn’t that far off anymore and here I am, writing about Star Crystal.

Two astronauts find a rock on Mars that they bring back onto their ship with them. They talk about being the first people to play football on Mars ever, which clearly means a lot to them.

This is a great detail, because it sets up the bleakness of the cinematic world we’re entering into. These guys are so indebted to Star Crystal‘s equivalent of Weyland-Yutani that they can only find joy by goofing off during routine missions. They’ll tell their grandchildren that they were the first people to play football on Mars and, hold on — is that a futuristic Coca-Cola bottle?

It fucking is! Did Coca-Cola give them money for that shot or was this a freebie? Did Coke even know they were going to show up in Star Crystal? And what’s the deal with those bottles? Will people eight years from now drink soda out of violent shape accidents? This looks like a year 2032 Pepsi attack ad. “Stop drinking cola like you’re a fucking hamster glitching out of reality. Pepsi.”

There’s no time for the hijinks of these space jocks, though. An ’80s Italian space babe informs them the captain wants to speak to them immediately. I can’t wait to see how these characters are going to deal with the threat they’ve inadvertently brought aboard their spacecraft in the form of an apparently innocuous rock, which begins leaking semen as soon as they leave the room.

Again, Alien had an egg splitting open to disgorge a monster that grabbed onto someone’s face then eventually had a little guy burst out of his stomach. Star Crystal has an egg that starts dripping sperm and then plops out a glowing crystal and what looks like an alien abortion.

Not exactly a menacing start, but maybe it’ll grow into something horrific. I bet that Italian lady is going to be the final girl, and maybe she’ll get semi-naked like Ripley while fighting the horrible thing that pile of mucus grows into. It’s the ’80s, right?

Or, we could just have everyone we’ve met so far die off-screen because their ship’s oxygen supply shut down. That works too, I guess. See, Lance Lindsay is a crafty guy. He’ll zag on you. That crew we spend the first ten minutes of the movie with? They’re not our guys. They don’t even get names. They’re all dead, and two months later the shuttle is docking with a space station where a meeting is being held regarding the malfunction of the “nuetron reactors.”

Why bother briefly introducing a crew just to kill them off and make the rest of the movie have nothing to do with them? Maybe to create tension and mystery, or the sense that anyone could die at any time in this movie — just like in real life! But it’s already a fucking horror movie. We know that 90% of the named characters are going to be killed off by alien afterbirth.

So here’s my theory: Lance Lindsay was working backward from the conditions he needed later in the script. “Well, I have the crew stuck on a shuttlecraft making a long trip without enough supplies
 but it doesn’t make sense that a short-range ship would be traveling such a long distance. So what if I have the first crew die, send the shuttle to dock with a space station where they’re going to discuss what happened, then have the space station explode and a handful of people escape aboard the shuttle!”

It’s convoluted nonsense and none of it was necessary. It’s not like we’re going to solve the mystery of what happened to the first crew — we know the alien turned the oxygen off and they died peacefully in their sleep. Sometimes, I wish an alien would do that to me. Whoa, that came out of nowhere.

So here’s our actual crew, the only five people who made it off the space station and onto the shuttle that still holds the eponymous star crystal and the alien sludge. We’ve got technician Roger “Rog” Campbell, stand-in captain by dint of being white, male, and present.

There’s “Cal”, his buddy who does not receive a last name and is not what we might today call “good representation.”

And then there are the womenfolk: Sherrie Stevens, your classic blonde space ditz:

Dr. Adrian Kimberly, your classic level-headed brunette space doctor:

And Lt. Billi Lynn, who looks like a cross between Liz Lemon and Carla from Cheers, spends all of her screen time acting like appearing in this movie was a huge favor for a not particularly close friend, and is implied to be a lesbian. She is my favorite character in Star Crystal and also the first to die.

The five of them have narrowly avoided exploding, but now they’re stuck on a short-haul spaceship without much food, and it’ll take them over a year to get to Earth. But hold on — this is the same shuttle that went from Mars to the space station in two months, right? We launched an unmanned spacecraft that did a flyby of Mars in 1964, which took about eight months to get there. Even if the exploded space station was on the other side of Mars from Earth, we should have been able to make that trip in less than a year twenty years before Star Crystal came out. This isn’t getting a prediction about the future cutely wrong, it’s plain old sloppy screenwriting, Lance Lindsay!

Regardless, being stranded in space is the least of this crew’s worries. They soon discover that their “captain” is an incompetent asshole who immediately begins tearing into the ship’s liquor supplies and telling everybody to take it easy despite the fact that they all just narrowly escaped death and likely lost a number of friends and family — or at least co-workers — in the station explosion. He’s even reprogrammed the ship’s computer to respond to his voice alone, which we learn when Cal tries to talk to it and it doesn’t answer.

“Racist,” Cal says. “No, she just has good taste,” Campbell replies. “Master, do you wish to continue our erotic Centurions roleplay Y/N?” Bernice the computer asks.

On top of Campbell’s hijinks, the crew is being stalked by an alien creature that’s pulsating wetly and killing them off one by one. The first to go, as I mentioned before, is Billi. That’s fine by her. She’s had enough of being in this movie anyway.

Her death, and those that come after, are all shot really vaguely. The alien’s M.O. seems to be:

1. Trip clumsy hu-man legs with tentacles.

2. ???

3. They’re dead now!

I guess it’s maybe like, squeezing all of their blood out, or something? Again, it’s all pretty vague. Lance Lindsay somehow discovered the secret space between “don’t show the monster” and “gory kills” where we see parts of the monster killing people but it’s not at all clear exactly how.

Sherrie is the next to go, immediately after Campbell and Cal tell her they’re not going to let anything happen to her, leaving off the part about how it’s because she’s the only female crew member who seems receptive to their advances, in that she isn’t actively hostile, only oblivious. Sherrie was just too dumb to live — she finds some mysterious goop and sticks her hand directly in it.

Even if there wasn’t a killer alien around, this is just bad workplace safety. You don’t know what that is, Sherrie! Why is your first instinct to reach out and grab a handful? Alas, after discovering Billi’s desiccated corpse, Sherrie suffers the same fate despite a heroic attempt to defend herself with a vial of acid.

They’re dropping like flies now. Cal runs off to try and save the already-melted Sherrie with the world’s most pathetic laser gun, and we all know how that’s going to go.

Actually, “runs” isn’t quite right. See, while the rooms on board the shuttle are sensibly human-sized, they’re all connected by tunnels that require getting down on your hands and knees to crawl through.

You can see the thought process at work here: Lance Lindsay saw the part of Alien where Dallas is wriggling around in the air ducts and thought, hey, that’s pretty neat, but what if we made the whole ship out of air ducts? STAR CRYSTAL!

And while we’re doing things from Alien but more, let’s have Campbell and Adrian watch the whole scene on a version of the motion tracker from Alien that seems to be built into the ship’s computer for some reason.

If nothing else, this sets Campbell up for the incredible line “that’s not Cal’s dot” when the alien kills him.

And then there were two. We finally get a look at the alien here and it’s utterly disgusting, but not how you’re picturing. No, it looks like you cracked an egg open and there was a glistening, half-developed baby chicken inside.

In an effort to learn more about the monster, Campbell and Adrienne find and review the old crew’s recordings. They’re awestruck by their findings — that a couple of months ago, two men played football on Mars.

You didn’t think that was coming back, did you?

The alien tries to kill them some more by cutting off the oxygen, they turn it back on. They’re hailed by another ship, the alien prevents them from responding. They run into a meteor storm, and the alien throws up a force field around the ship to protect itself. Campbell comes across the blackened skull of his dead friend Cal and later does an overly long bit about being related to the Campbells of Campbell’s Soup.

But wait a second, Cal wasn’t burned to death! Why is his skull black? Oh no, did Lance Lindsay believe that black people also have black bones? It doesn’t matter, Campbell — just leave his corpse in the tube where you found it.

Thus far, Star Crystal has merely been an incompetently made science fiction movie with bad acting and middling special effects for the time. That would have been enough for some cheap laughs, but surely not for this level of scrutiny. It’s a shitty Alien ripoff from the ’80s — what do you expect, right? But here, Lance Lindsay’s script makes a hard turn off the highway of predictable sci-fi horror, swerving across three lanes of traffic to take the exit marked “insane twist ending.”

The alien uses its magic crystal to review the ship’s archives. It pulls up files labeled “Evolution of Human Race Parts 1-20.” So this shuttle is slower than the spacecraft we had at the time Star Crystal came out, but it at least has a full download of Wikipedia in case anyone gets bored on those long trips to and from Mars.

What does the alien glean from these files? It zeroes in on “Mid-East,” “Religion,” and then “Christianity.” Notice something strange about the list of major human religions in the Middle East there?

No, not the fact that they spelled it “Judisum” or “Buddism,” forgivable errors in the late ’80s where it would have taken a team of computer programmers several days to correct the issue. I’m talking about the total absence of Islam. Sorry, Muslims, you’re lumped into “Others” along with Scientology, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, and Nuwaubianism.

What happens next is so staggeringly stupid that I’m impressed by Lance Lindsay’s audacity. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a serial killer sitting in an interrogation room, wearing his most recent victim’s skin and telling the cops that he couldn’t have done it because he was doing an unrelated murder at the time. Lance Lindsay has the alien read the Bible and learn about loving your enemies while it pulsates wetly, this time in a Christ-respecting manner.

 

Gosh, it’s lucky it hit on those particular verses! Not to get all euphoric atheist on you, but even in the New Testament (the ship doesn’t seem to carry the OT) there’s a lot of weird stuff. How about Galatians 5:12, “Would that those who are upsetting you might also castrate themselves!” That would be a hell of a thing for a telekinetic goop monster to read out of context.

Meanwhile, Campbell is crawling towards the engine room with Baby’s First Flamethrower. Alien had a flamethrower, so Star Crystal is duty bound by the law of movie ripoffs to have one as well, even if they could only afford one that looks like a piece of dental equipment.

To recap, things this ship has: flamethrower, dot-based movement tracker, entire history of human civilization. Things this ship doesn’t have: security cameras, human-sized corridors. It’s almost like the whole thing was built by an incompetent designer to get the crew killed off by a space monster and then allow said space monster to learn about humanity’s beliefs and history!

Campbell makes it to the engine room and sees the alien for the first time. The acting up to this point has more or less been what you’d expect from a cast best known for a movie called Star Crystal, but I think this is the perfect expression for encountering a melting, inside-out E.T.

The alien, whose name is inexplicably “GAR” moves and speaks like its existence is agony. Imagine encountering this thing, this rotten bird fetus of an alien, and knowing that it was what killed your friends. If GAR was what got you, you’d be looking down from heaven thinking, “I hope they tell my family and friends I was killed by a threateningly phallic insectoid monster designed by a Swiss maniac.” Then you’d have to ask God if all or indeed any GARs go to Heaven.

GAR needs the ship to go back to his home planet. Campbell demands to know if it’s going to kill him and Adrian like it killed the rest of the crew. In a masterful display of “no u,” GAR tells them that they would have done the same in its position. “You try to kill anything that is unfamiliar… like you, I was afraid,” GAR says. “Fuck off,” I say. “BACKSTAB SURPRISE!” Adrian says.

GAR defuses the situation with its mind powers. It gives a big speech about how it didn’t know what killing was until its magic crystal computer accessed the ship’s files on the subject. It’s been acting in self-defense the whole time! Humanity is the real monster!

Only, hold on. Sure, Sherrie threw acid at it, Cal tried to shoot it, and Billi kind of hit it with a wrench or something, but it also blew up that entire space station. This is the Bush doctrine of first contact. But like nominally liberal pundits in the wake of 9/11, Campbell and Adrian immediately accept GAR’s logic.

What’s more, GAR has cucked Campbell in his relationship with the computer Bernice. The movie’s made a point thus far of repeating that Bernice only responds to Campbell’s voice, but now it’s answering to GAR. Adrian, too, makes nice with the glowing freak with extreme negative canthal tilt far quicker than she did with Campbell, immediately disproving incel bone law. “I feel that I can trust you,” she says to the mutant sludge creature who brutally murdered three of her crew mates in the very recent past.

The remaining cast then skips straight past uneasy alliance to BFF status. Campbell asks GAR if it is ever afraid, and GAR, whose voice is becoming more like an impression of Frank Oz as dying Yoda in Return of the Jedi by the second, responds, “yes, but the crystal helps me understand.” Coincidentally, I once had a conversation just like this with someone smoking meth at a party in a vacant Brooklyn apartment.

We have left the sci-fi horror movie called Star Crystal behind. Lance Lindsay is now directing the pilot for Star Crystal, a sitcom starring an odd couple and their friend, a wacky space alien who learned about the concept of violent death from humanity. We get a full-on montage with uplifting music and scenes like “Campbell, Adrian, and GAR have a little space picnic together.”

And who could forget “Campbell looks for a wrench and GAR levitates it to him with his powers, then Campbell gives him a look like ‘GAR, you rascal!'”

The sequence culminates in GAR and Campbell playing what could be Go or is possibly some kind of space version of Go. GAR starts to make a move and Campbell protests that he hasn’t placed his piece yet. Gar responds that he released his hand, and Campbell argues that he didn’t.

They probably haven’t even jettisoned the carcasses of their fellow space station explosion survivors into space and their relationship with the space monster that killed them as well as everyone aboard said station has become that of a long-time married couple. “Why is he such a jerk,” GAR asks. Adrian laughs. The souls of hundreds or thousands of pointlessly-exploded space station crew members look on in disbelief.

And then Star Crystal just kind of ends. You weren’t expecting this to go anywhere after that twist, were you? GAR leaves on another ship to go back to his home planet, telling Campbell and Adrian “I value your friendship more than you know.” Roll the haunting Star Crystal theme over the credits, sung by the first, but not the iconic, voice actor of Daphne from Scooby-Doo, and let’s get the fuck out of here.

Alright Lance Lindsay, you won me back with Don Weed. Hold on, filmed entirely where?

Fuck you, pal. I’m glad Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs exploded you in Quiet Fire.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Moexu, the savage alien from beyond the stars who converted to Mormonism.

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Foreskin Man 🌭

One of my favorite kinds of fiction is the world where everyone only cares about one specific thing. In Road House, bouncers are celebrities known across the land. In the universe of Duets, all that matters is how good you are at karaoke. And in Foreskin Man, the entire population is locked in an endless war over the practice of circumcision.

Created by madman Matthew Hess to promote a proposed 2010 California bill that would have banned medically unnecessary circumcisions of minors, Foreskin Man is so deranged that upon release it was immediately condemned by anti-circumcision groups themselves. Even the leader of the group that Hess was a part of disowned it, calling Foreskin Man “inflammatory and 180 degrees different from the direction we want to go in,” adding “I can understand why people would be offended.”

But what’s to be offended about? I mean, it’s pretty straightforward. Miles Hastwick, ex-research scientist, has somehow accumulated enough wealth to open a “Museum of Genital Integrity” which he uses to expose the evils of circumcision through commissioning lifelike sculptures of baby dicks. But as so many Twitter activists have shown us, awareness of social issues is not enough. Sometimes Miles has to take things a step further as Foreskin Man, the defender of the innocent (baby genitals).

What are Foreskin Man’s powers? They are plasma flight boots and no second thing, unless you want to count powers that aren’t explicitly called out in the narrative, like how Superman would have to project some kind of force field to lift a plane without it collapsing around him. For instance, Miles has a superhuman ability to be on the scene wherever circumcisions are taking place. Maybe it’s a Night Man-type situation and he can hear foreskin crime?

But seriously, aside from all the weird stuff we’re going to get to, that’s one of the strangest aspects of Foreskin Man. His only power is that he built some boots that let him fly.

Hess was clearly going for a Batman-type technology-powered hero, but what makes Batman fun is he has a million different bat-themed toys. Foreskin Man just has the boots, and they don’t even flop around festively as he flies through the air. The only foreskin-themed thing about him is the emblem on his chest, which I didn’t realize was supposed to be the head and foreskin of a penis until I’d read every Foreskin Man comic multiple times.

Is he strong? Listen, bub: he routinely gets the shit kicked out of him by a handful of random goons.

The whole thing seems like the author wanted to create an anti-circumcision superhero, but then didn’t want to make him seem too powerful, so he overcorrected and made him suck ass instead.

Foreskin Man doesn’t even have any lore, one of the things that people love about superheroes. He isn’t an alien whose foreskin gives him superhuman powers under Earth’s yellow sun. He didn’t see his parents get circumcised in an alley behind a movie theater when he was young. He’s just Miles Hastwick, a guy who hates circumcision. We don’t even know if he’s circumcised! But the answer is almost certainly not, based on what this comic thinks that does to you — more on that later.

In issue one, Miles Hastwick throws a party for the opening of the Museum of Genital Integrity. It’s not enough, he bemoans. The pro-circumcision lobby is simply too strong.

This is a line that would probably hit harder if the character thinking it weren’t walking into his futuristic Foreskincave complete with giant electrical orb and speedboat. I mean, the museum seems to be getting a lot of funding, and Miles isn’t independently wealthy. He’s absolutely spending donor money on foreskin-themed speedboats, right?

But there’s no time to contemplate that — somewhere, a circumcision is about to occur!

I know that getting into comic art criticism in a series called Foreskin Man is like critiquing the lighting in a snuff film, but I want you to take a look at Amber Young and her son, Orlando. Literally every woman in Foreskin Man has a huge rack and a terrible case of porno face, and literally every child looks like an adult man who was cursed to be a baby by a spiteful witch. Did I mention that there are Foreskin Man trading cards? In a just world, that would be nothing more than the random utterance of a lunatic to a competent and caring medical team.

No stats? I need to know baby Orlando’s Energy Projection rating! How strong is he compared to Nameless Goon With Knife? These are the questions that trading cards are supposed to answer!

Anyway, Doctor Edric Griswold wants to cut that baby’s foreskin. And here Hess betrays his own view of the people who perform the procedure he despises so much.

Yes, this doctor — a mouthpiece for the practice of circumcision — doesn’t actually believe in anything he’s telling this young, sexy, fully made-up new mother. He just loves cutting foreskins, ok? He loves it so much, in fact, that seeing an intact foreskin is his trigger to morph into a monstrous, animalistic form. That’s right: he’s a Foreskin Hulk.

It’s like we’re watching someone create the concept of superhero comics from the ground up. Our villain has no motivation and doesn’t even believe in his own stated goal. We don’t even know what made him a Foreskin Hulk! Did a nuclear bomb go off while he was being circumcised, or was he the product of a Weapon X-type program to create the ultimate circumciser? Who cares? Let’s get to the really important stuff: Foreskin Man having sexual tension with every woman he meets.

You might have noticed something by now, which is that mild-mannered Miles Hastwick and Foreskin Man are identical save for one feature. Did you spot it?

Yes, instead of Clark Kent-esque glasses to conceal his identity, Foreskin Man wears a fake goatee at all times that he isn’t flying around to prevent the culling of foreskins. It looks idiotic, but wouldn’t it be easier to wear it only when he transforms? That spirit gum has gotta itch, right? I guess it’s probably pretty hard to apply fake facial hair in a dramatic fashion.

So far I’m not seeing what’s offensive about Foreskin Man. Sure, it’s offensive on a technical level, but— oh. Oh no.

That’s “Monster Mohel.” Yeah. Full-on Nazis probably read this comic and were like, cool it with the antisemitism, pal.

But Monster Mohel isn’t just some roaming, foreskin-obsessed lunatic like Doctor Mutilator. He was called here by Jethro, a rich, Jewish— oh, come on.

Evidently, Foreskin Man is hamstrung by a Batman-like unwillingness to kill. He has his foe at his mercy, when the father of the child points out that it’s not really any of his business what happens to this baby’s foreskin. At least, it wouldn’t be, if the villains hadn’t knocked out and possibly killed the baby’s mother, who nobly and boobily attempted to prevent the ritual from taking place.

I’m sure we can all see that there’s only one reasonable solution here.

Right, illegally kidnap the man-faced baby, that’s the easy part. But did you guess what happens next?

If you had “give the baby to the Intactivist Underground to be raised as one of their own,” then it’s legally a hate crime for you to come within 200 feet of a bris.

The IU celebrates their new addition by burning an enormous sculpture made from hundreds of stolen circumstraints. Two notes here: one, circumstraints are used for a lot of infant procedures, not just circumcisions. These assholes just made it that much harder for hospitals in the area to X-ray babies. Second, those things are made of plastic, so these hot, sexy babes just exposed that infant to a cloud of toxic fumes. Does that count as irony, if baby Glick gets health problems from burning stolen circumcision apparatuses? Does fucking anything count as anything anymore?

The first two issues of Foreskin Man take place in the Bay Area, but circumcision is a global problem. Issue three sees him going to Kenya to confront Githinji, a circumciser so prolific that Foreskin Man has already heard of him when a woman tells her that he has kidnapped her son and taken him on a trans-Atlantic flight solely for the purpose of circumcising him.

This is a world in which there are famous circumcisers. And there are also famous anti-circumcision heroes, and tales of their exploits resonate across the globe. When Foreskin Man is rescued from three men with one knife between them by Vulva Girl, she is not meeting a strange, goatee-less white man in a vaguely-themed costume. She is meeting a legend.

Vulva Girl, sorry yeah her name is Vulva Girl, can fly like Foreskin Man, but she can also project beams of energy. Her power source is the Siri Amulet, about which we learn less than nothing. She is a much better superhero than Foreskin Man in literally every way, from her powers to her emblem.

Foreskin Man and Vulva Girl work together to save some girls and boys from a globally-renowned husband and wife team of genital mutilators. And just to remind us that this is Africa, it all goes down not in a hospital but in tribal huts protected by blow dart-wielding warriors.

To get real for a moment here, anti-circumcision advocates often try to connect their cause to that of female genital mutilation. The bill that Foreskin Man’s author helped write was even called the “Male Genital Mutilation” bill. And look: should we be cutting any baby’s genitals? Probably not. But to make foreskin removal and clitoral excision equivalent requires some pretty advanced mental gymnastics. You’d have to depict circumcised men as broken, unlovable freaks who—

Holy shit! In issue seven of Foreskin Man, we get an opening narration by a victim of Doctor Mutilator. This is what I meant when I said that Foreskin Man himself probably wasn’t circumcised. In the world of this comic, circumcision is extremely common and the pro-circumcision lobby is an immensely powerful force. At the same time, being circumcised makes you a bitter sexual mutant who, uh, can’t cum? Can’t make a woman cum? It’s kind of unclear.

But there is hope for the circ’d: the love of a good woman who talks loudly in bars about the arrests of famous circumcisers.

It’s a truism that men care far, far more about their penises than the vast majority of women do. But Foreskin Man stretches this reality to comical extremes. Seriously, if you showed the last panel of this comic to most normal people without any context, they would assume it was about virgins or men who’d had their dicks exploded in the wars.

In case you were wondering, yes, the circumcised dick whisperer does have a trading card. It says that she “has a gift for soothing the pain that is trapped within so many circumcised men. She is naturally drawn to those who need her affection the most.” You thought I was kidding about the dick whisperer thing!

Alas, Doctor Mutilator is released from prison thanks to liberal soft on dick crime policies. The system has failed our gritty protagonist, Donovan Tracer. Foreskin Man has failed him. There’s only one thing left to do.

He becomes a Foreskin Punisher! He wears a Mardi Gras mask as a disguise, because New Orleans! I take back everything bad I’ve said about this comic, this kicks ass. My only note here is that “Blowback” is too generic a name for a dark genital revenge antihero. How about “The Prepucinator?” Or “The Sheath?” Or, I don’t know, “The Frenulum Avenger?” We’ll workshop it.

Foreskin Man arrives on the scene just in time to stop Foreskin Punisher from gunning down the Foreskin Hulk. What a world. It turns out that Donovan’s dick whisperer girlfriend is pregnant. “Don’t throw your life away for revenge,” Foreskin Man pleads. “I’m torn up inside by my roiling emotions!” Foreskin Punisher replies. “Excuse me, but I need to tear a baby from a woman’s body so that I can circumcise it,” Foreskin Hulk interjects.

Our hero saves the day and Blowback decides to become an intactivist dad instead of a dark counterpart to the clean-cut (crucially, not like that) Foreskin Man.

God, I’m already up to 2000 words and I haven’t even covered the sadistic, pedophilic Filipino nurse, the attempted circumcision on a thrill ride atop The Strat in Las Vegas, or the anti-circumcision newscaster whose job is continually threatened by her pro-circumcision boss.

I haven’t even covered Foreskin Music, which exists in-universe as one character’s ringtone.

Taken as an intact whole, Foreskin Man fails not just as a superhero comic, but as propaganda. Rather than actually trying to convince anyone that circumcision is a problem, it just assumes that the reader is already on board with its worldview, in which a blond, blue-eyed superhero is one of the few brave warriors to stand up to a motley crew of mostly ethnic minorities who crave the separation of infant boys from their precious foreskins for reasons of profit, religion, or possession by an ancient, malefic foreskin-hating blade.

Foreskin Man is the Road House of genitals. It’s the Cocktail of
 cocks. If it has any enduring value, it is in posing one question to its readers, a question that we’ve all asked at one time or another in our lives, a question that cuts into the fleshy, protective sheath of our society:

Special thanks to Thrillho for the hotdog tip.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: SpottyReception, who expressly does not have any strong opinions about baby foreskins.

 

Categories
UPSETTING DAY

Upsetting Day: Baby Follies 🌭

At some point, society decided that babies hold the secrets of the cosmos within their tiny, still-developing brains. Countless pieces of media have explored this truth, from Baby Geniuses to Rugrats to Boss Baby. But only one such effort suggests babies live in a heavenly city controlled by a baby mafia. Also there’s a baby Sigmund Freud diagnosing baby psychosexual issues. Actually maybe Boss Baby did that too? I never saw Boss Baby.

Welcome to 1993’s Baby Follies. Before you ask, yes, it’s French. This might be the most French cartoon ever created.

The babies live in the sky in a cloud kingdom. They have jobs like shop manager, game show host, and bartender. Yes, there’s a bar in Baby City, or Baby Land, as it’s sometimes rendered. Babies go there to drink bottles of milk. Where does the milk come from in a land populated exclusively by babies? “Existence precedes and rules essence,” existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said. Maybe this is what he was talking about.

As premises go it’s a little bleak, projecting as it does mid 20th-century capitalist living onto an all-baby fantasy land, but it’s not outlandish in itself, right? Evidently the creators of Baby Follies thought so too, because most of the show isn’t about babies going about their daily lives. No, Baby Follies is primarily about a baby Humphrey Bogart attempting to foil the plots of the Galopin gang, led by the evil Scrogneugneu, who hovers menacing above Baby City in his blimp.

Is Scrogneugneu a baby? No, that would be absurd. There are no evil babies. Sure, there are babies who can be lured into working for an evil entity through coercion or bribery, but Baby Follies is careful not to make an argument about the existence of essential, inborn evil by depicting a baby criminal mastermind.

Anyway, how could a baby fly a blimp? Scrogneugneu is an elf who used to work for Santa Claus until he was kicked out for hoarding toys. I thought that would be obvious.

See, he put so much love and care into his craft, but then Santa always took them away to give to the children. So now he wants to usurp Santa and I guess shut down Christmas? We don’t really get too deep into that.

Throughout the series, Scrogneugneu and the Galopins try out various schemes, like getting the babies addicted to a game show or robbing the baby bar. Bogey, our noir baby protagonist, stops them from getting away with it. Occasionally he’s helped by a Superbaby.

It’s possible that you’re thinking that noir and babies, as concepts, don’t mix together so well. A world-weary detective baby is kind of funny on its face, but there’s not much you can do with it considering how violent and gritty noir tends to be by definition. You, my friend, lack vision.

The only limitations that exist in this world are those we place on ourselves. Again, in the words of Sartre, “Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.”

In other words, there is no god to stop us from depicting a baby Humphrey Bogart sucking pacifiers to approximate the chain-smoking, alcohol abusing noir detectives of yore.

Haha, great bit, good work everybody. But regardless of what the luminaries of mid-20th century continental philosophy might tell you, we live in a society. By accepting the benefits of communal living, e.g. grocery stores and not being stabbed for taking the last ripe avocado in the grocery store, we have agreed to certain rules and regulations, even if only tacitly. Those rules include: don’t stab people, don’t take other people’s stuff, and don’t put a Lauren Bacall baby in a cartoon, even if it does complete the famous Bogie/Bacall duo.

Wait a goddamn minute, the character is named Lauren, but that’s a parody of a scene from The Seven Year Itch with Marilyn Monroe, arguably one of the most famous images of the 20th century! You’re mixing your goddamn golden age of Hollywood references!

And what’s maybe the worst thing about this scene is that there isn’t even a vent on the sidewalk. Where is that updraft coming from?

Sorry, no, the baby upskirt with bedroom eyes is the worst thing about it. And now the animators, me, and everyone who reads this is going to jail. Fantastic.

But we needn’t stop there. Should we? Yes, absolutely. But “man is continually transcending himself,” Gabriel Marcel once said. And we wouldn’t want to make him look like a jackass, would we? Surely not. Can we get uhhhhhhhhhh Lauren the baby dancing in pasties and singing, “they’re blind to all else except Lauren’s charm / and they dream of holding this gorgeous girl in their arms.”

Sure we can! Nothing means anything.

That’s the one named black baby on Baby Follies, by the way. His name is Baby Crooner. He’s the star of an episode where he’s trying to figure out how to make money off of being the Baby Crooner after he gets fired from the bar. Some people hate this. I don’t know what it is, but they fuckin’ hate it. There’s people that wanna kill him.

Anyway, Simone de Beauvoir, in her landmark work of feminist philosophy The Second Sex, said “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” Clearly she didn’t know of the existence of a pre-birth dimension populated by sultry dancing she-babies.

But back to our noir detective, who after all is the nominal lead of Baby Follies. He’s your typical hard-bitten protagonist. He has an on again off again thing with a dangerous dame and he spends too much time drinking. These things, in my experience, lead to dark places.

“There is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide,” Camus said. He was talking about how in a world of absurdity, all that truly matters is whether or not you get up every day and decide to keep going or just kill yourself. So why not? Let’s do a storyline where a baby noir detective becomes so disillusioned with his life as a baby in a city in the clouds that after a night of binge drinking he decides to be born and the whole thing is played as suicidal depression.

Let’s even show him writing a suicide note where he says “I can’t stand this darkness anymore!”

Ultimately, though, the writers of Baby Follies were cowards. They faltered at the finish line of actually showing a hard-drinking baby detective jumping onto a cabbage and letting a stork take him away from Baby City forever. Instead, Lauren and his friends show up and convince him not to kill himself be born.

Of course, this raises a lot of questions about the nature of Baby City. If being born is like suicide in that you can choose to do it whenever you want, is it like death more broadly in that it eventually comes for us all? Storks seem to run the baby delivery system in this world — are old babies taken away by them to be born against their will? Are seemingly young and healthy babies occasionally snatched up off the street by the birds, leaving their remaining friends to wonder at the random senselessness of it all? Let’s go with yes.

We’ve done baby burlesque, we’ve done baby existential crises. Where do you go from there? Uh, a Star Wars parody? A baby trial of Scrogneugneu? I can only guess based on the episode titles, because Baby Follies is a very difficult show to find. It aired in the US and UK during the ’90s, but I couldn’t find any English-language episodes online, and only found a few of the original 52-episode run in French and Spanish on YouTube. However, Baby Follies aired in a lot of countries. In Poland, it was called “Bobaskowo”, or “Baby Doll.” In Sri Lanka, viewers knew it as තොත්ත බබාගා, which Google Translate tells me means “Totta Babies.” And in China, it was titled ć©Žć„żćŸŽ (pronounced yÄ«ng’Ă©r chĂ©ng), which means, simply, “Baby City.”

And that brings us to our diabolical twist. See, I’ve been working on you throughout this whole article, building on your deeply-held biases to convince you that Baby Follies was a uniquely French show. But it was, in fact, the result of an international collaboration between French studios and the Shanghai Animation Film Studio.

I want to be absolutely clear here: people grew up watching Baby Follies in China. Go into the comments sections on the Chinese language episodes on YouTube and there are the typical comments you see on any children’s series from thirty to forty years ago. “I watched this when I was in primary school,” “the best memory of my childhood,” “my father left home when an episode of this was playing and now I can’t achieve climax unless my lover calls me ‘Bogey’,” that sort of thing.

The Chinese government controls the vast majority of mass media in the country, and children’s cartoons are and were no exception. Other ’80s and ’90s series like Black Cat Detective featured morally upstanding characters banishing crime, while Journey to the West: Legends of the Monkey King drew on historical Chinese fiction, retelling beloved stories in the medium of animation.

Meanwhile, there was Baby Follies, which promoted
 well, I guess not killing yourself, so that’s something. But you have to imagine that the guy whose job it was to read through the scripts for this show and approve or reject them just wasn’t paying much attention that day.

I mean, we’re talking about a market where foreign media companies have self-censored everything from skeletons to homosexuality to reduce the likelihood that their cultural products will be tied up in red tape. But somehow sexy baby pasties are ok? Suicidal babies are fine? This is fine?

I guess!

“There is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics,” Mao Zedong told us. Well, perhaps Baby Follies indeed represents the proletarian struggle in some manner that I, with my limited knowledge of the Chinese language, can’t fully grasp. Maybe Bogey is meant to represent the worker, kept in toil by the gangster capitalism whose schemes hold Baby City in their evil grasp? Maybe Lauren is actually a satirical figure, calling attention to the ways in which the capitalist mode of production demeans women and distracts them from revolutionary fervor with the meaningless pursuit of beauty through consumption. Maybe we’re meant to see Baby Crooner’s struggles as emblematic of the ways in which the owner class divides and conquers the workers using the tool of race, much like Paul Schrader’s Blue Collar?

Nope, it’s an international crime. Please call Interpol and have them arrest those responsible for Baby Follies, me, and everyone who made this article possible.

This article was thanks to a hot Hot Dog tip from Yeyo.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Max Baroi, a loose cannon baby cop and the only one who can save Baby City from rampant corruption.