Yankee Candle has Man Candles now. So, you know, now you can buy candles that smell like ball sweat or something.
As a bonus, I invented some new Man Candles scents that I think Yankee should totally make.
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Marriage Equality Avatar Efficacy
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Mail Bag Wednesday – “Cheerleader”
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What Every Man Should Know
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Mail Bag Sick Day + Bonus Puppy Footage
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The “Gray Area” of Rape Culture
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The R-Word
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Misogyny’s Impact On Health
5 Comments
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Frogking
May 18, 2012 at 8:58 am
As a gay man, I plan to use man candles as bait.
Oh, and the pigtails totally rock, BTW.
neretex
May 23, 2012 at 8:02 pm
I found most of this funny- except for the “accidentally killed a hooker” thing.
I know if we get hung up on what other people might think, or be offended by, we can trip over our thoughts and become insipidly banal in trying to make “safe” jokes.
But… I stopped laughing at the hooker part. I know people who are family (including children) of disappeared sex trade workers (yes, more than one).
As I said, if we start trying to over-anticipate reactions to our humour we can become too middle-of-the-road. But there are all sorts of weird hangups in this culture about sex, sex that is paid for, and the death of someone who has sex for money (particularly if the death is caused by someone who paid for that sex)… and these hangups lead to weird ideas of why things like “accidentally” killing someone you’ve bought sex from are funny.
And I’m not implicating that you think killing someone who sells sex is funny. It seems to me the joke was to bring up out of nowhere two horrible things (war, and killing someone) in the middle of a more lighthearted discussion (horrible-out-of-nowhere, a kind of humour I’ve laughed at before).
I just think that wording like this may subtly reinforce attitudes of the culture around us (that it could just happen that you’d “accidentally” kill someone who’d just bought sex from, intertwining sex with violence, things which needn’t go together). If the trauma brought up had been, say, the horror of seeing a friend drown, something like that wouldn’t be something I’d comment on (and a friend of mine watched a mutual friend of ours drown when we were all in our teens).
This is because there aren’t weird ideas like swimming is shameful, or swimmers lack morality, or anyone who swims is inviting a drowning and deserves anything they get.
Most of what I’ve seen you write seems to indicate you’re aware of various -isms in general, and I do understand the whole point of this video is to poke fun at the very hangups about societal attitudes that products like this seem to be perpetuating, but I just felt I had to say something.
And I did laugh at most of it.
Anyway, the hair is nice!
Chris Menning
May 25, 2012 at 8:25 pm
Hey Neretex,
I appreciate that this offends you. That was the point. The purpose of the joke wasn’t to simply bring up something horrible out of nowhere, but to draw a connection between the way this distorted view of masculinity generally excuses all kinds of reprehensible behavior under the excuse of “boys will be boys.” It might seem extreme, but the “dead hooker for comedic effect” is actually present in much of our culture. One that comes to mind is the 1998 comedy “Very Bad Things.” You can also search “dead hooker” on Reddit.com and you’ll find many more examples much more offensive than my own. Again, in my video, I was drawing the connection between the inherent homophobia in Man Candles and the more extreme, much worse things that are excused by our culture already.
Zenfields
January 11, 2013 at 3:47 am
Hey Chris,
I have to second neretex on this one. Dude, I sincerely love your videos and your humor. I’ve been passing them around the internet like a madwoman, and gotten a lot of other people to do it through my various audiences. But the dead hooker joke is the equivalent of a rape joke.
I understand your argument, that it’s drawing a connection between the distorted view of masculinity that separates out “men’s” products from women’s and the larger issue of male violence and misogyny. That is a valid point. But that doesn’t even slightly negate the fact that it’s not funny–in fact it’s humor killing–for a lot of people I think you want to show solidarity with for the same reason a rape joke would be. Because it’s not a thing that’s so distant from our experience that we can laugh about it. I went to post it in my online feminist group because I was feeling shitty about how shitty and misogynistic the world was and I wanted to say, here’s the kind of funny, awesome thing I watch when I feel this shitty, because *this guy* gets it–he’s cool and funny and kind and freakin’ smart and he’s on our team YAY. I wanted to say, “Watch this and you’ll feel better about the universe just like I did. Whew.”
And then I watched it again and there was the dead hooker joke… that I had just posted right above the long conversation I’ve been having with my sex worker friend about how terrifying and dangerous it can be to be a sex worker these days, how likely women like her are to be murdered, and all the social issues that contribute to women like her being killed, or beaten, or treated like garbage, or just treated like a joke–like their lives and even their deaths are jokes.
So I took it down. Not because most of your video wasn’t AWESOME. But because I wasn’t going to break my friend’s heart, and my heart, a little bit more. That’s why it wasn’t funny.