Jokes to tell over the act four card game?

What is the difference between a drug dealer and a hooker?
A hooker can wash her crack and sell it again.

What do a woman and a condom have in common?
They're both either in your wallet or on your d!ck.

What's the best thing about a blow job?
Ten minutes silence.

How is a woman different from a toilet?
A toilet doesn't follow you around once you've used it.

Why do women fake their orgasms?
Because they think we care.

Why do men have penises?
So we'd always have a way to shut women up.

More here, here and here.

Our characters are at least as awful as these people.

Any woman writing on the internet, especially if she writes as a feminist, will get disgusting/rapey/terrifying/nonsensical/hateful comments from dudes like the ones I've linked to below (ask me about mine!). They're out there. I've dredged the bottom of the barrel and found some disturbing stuff. Here's a sample:

This article was written by a man but published in a women's magazine, about why men prefer "innocent girls" to "bad girls." He literally compares women who aren't virgins to dirty black snow on the side of the road. That's definitely what Shwarz thinks sex does to people (especially women). It's also why Shöning would rather marry the Baron's pretty schoolgirl daughter than "whore" Lulu (though he doesn't mind fucking her). They put women into "buckets" of good girl you can take home to mom and bad girl you can fuck but not really care about. He also doesn't like women who know more than he does. Yikes.

This guy hates women so much, when he sees a hot girl, he starts to look at her as if she's a dangerous animal in the zoo to stop himself from wanting to have sex with her. (There's also a weird furry porn image of a tiger in a dress at that link.)

"When saying that you want to rape and cut up a woman with a band saw is met with the exact same reaction as saying you want to want to buy them a drink, what ... is the incentive to not be hateful and violent?" (Yeah, that's a direct quote.) This article links to a thread on a Men's Rights forum in which men just rant about their misogyny. One guy seriously traces his ladyrage to a time in the 7th grade when a girl said he had cooties. 

Here's an email some douchebro in a frat at USC sent out to his brothers. In it he talks about  "how to be an effective 'cocksman'" and says that "females are targets, not actual people like us." I get total frat-boy vibes from Rodrigo, maybe this guy is him.

I've posted all this here to show that there are people at least as awful as the Lulu characters in the real world today. All of the posts I've linked are only about a month old. Seriously! The anonymous message board is the place these creeps feel free to let their freak flags fly. Maybe treat the Lulu space like it's your internet. Lose your pants and drop a proverbial dump all over the damn place.

Charlie Sheen's "Disposable Women"

Here's a New York Times op-ed putting forth a theory as to why Charlie Sheen has been able to get away with all the scary violence he's done to women in his long career and is only just now feeling any flak for it. Anna Holmes thinks that the women Sheen has chosen to spend his time with, the women he's chosen to victimize, are what our culture deems "disposable women." Some are sex workers, but all are young, attractive women who trade on their sexuality. Golddiggers, sluts, whores. The thought is that women who use their sexuality for financial gain deserve violence, that violence against this kind of woman is inevitable, the women are just collateral damage when a rich white guy wants to have some "boys will be boys"-style fun.

Read the article!

"Who knows, you might even be cured."

In South Africa, lesbians live in fear of "corrective" rape. Groups of men gang-rape and murder lesbians to "cure" them and the government largely ignores the hate crimes.

Video and news article here. And it's from 2009, so this is really recent and relevent.

Everyone's so mean to Geschwitz! And in the real world, lesbians do face quite a lot of harassment.

Lara Logan

Lara Logan is a reporter for "60 Minutes." She was reporting from Tahrir Square in Cairo when Mubarak announced he would step down. In the ensuing chaos, she was separated from her camera crew and sexually assaulted by a group of men.

The news coverage of her assault has been, well, problematic. The news stories tend to take the angle "Muslims are terrible" or "Rape is sexy/she deserved it."

If you're improvising small talk in Act I, it might be fun to get really, really racist and sexist.

Read up on the coverage here.

Fear. Sexy, Sexy Fear.

This is a sidebar ad I found on a porn site.

This ad presumes that men are comparing themselves to the unrealistic, manufactured images they see in pornography. That’s also how Lulu comes to be idolized by the men in our play- they worship the image of her that each of them has in his own head.

But that’s not the best reason why this ad is so relevant. The selling point for a bigger dick isn’t to please your partner, but to make her afraid. Women’s fear is sexy. Unless you can threaten a woman with your penis, you need a scarier penis.

This ad suggests that despite how afraid women supposedly are of his penis, Ron Jeremy has a ton of sex with a ton of women. It suggests to whomever is consuming the ad that women like sex that is violent. Violence is sexy.

An ad like this works because men have a lot of unrealistic expectations and preconceived notions to deal with, and it's tough to navigate the world with a unique identity when society is telling you there's only one "correct" way for you to be. There is a lot of pressure on men as well as women to look and behave in a certain way- women are supposed to be skinny and passive while men are supposed to be big, muscular and active.  Men are "supposed" to be the persuers, not the persued. Men are supposed to be the one who humiliates, not the humiliated and not an equal. They're supposed to be the provider, not the provided-for, the keeper not the kept, the one penetrating his partner and never the penetrated. Men can tolerate it (but not actually care) when women get emotional but men should never express their own emotions to their female partners.

When someone takes all of those messages to heart, the final product is the aggressive, violent, horny guy with terrifying genitals. No one can live up to that, and really, who wants to? Mainstream porny culture shoves men and women into certain roles that people can enjoy, but no one really picks for themselves. 

Guy Bourdin

Speaking of the Male Gaze, these are some photos from Guy Bourdin. He was a French photographer who shot for Vogue as well as Charles Joudan's shoes. Notice how the legs are completely disembodied. I believe that these two are from his shoe campaigns, which would seem to strip these female appendages of even more meaning. The legs are simply exhibited so to sell the comodity which they display. I love the bright colors.

And this one below is a very interesting take on the question of blood. Highly styalized - almost cosmetic.

Glee's Lea Michele in Marie Claire UK

http://www.marieclaire.co.uk/celebrity/pictures/29545/14/lea-michele-glee-marie-claire-november-cover-shoot.html#stop

This photo in particular:

Is a little bit of what I imagine the painting of Lulu could be. Dr Goll is into Lulu's dancing and also likes the little girl thing- just flatten the boots and make them, the tutu and the hot pants pink. The whole spread reads, to me, uncomfortably little-girl-playing-at-sexy. Maybe that's me putting my "Rachel from Glee" baggage on the adult actress? I'm also a little distressed at how thin she looks. She lost a lot of weight between the first and second season of Glee, presumably to fit in in Hollywood. It's just another way women- real actual human women- need to work really hard to appear as the idealized image of woman.

The 4th image in the slide show also strikes me. Her face, the high angle, the rope in the background, and her pose all put us, the viewer, in a position of power. We, the viewer, are about to do violence to her. Sexy, sexy violence. It plays into the old tropes of sex as something that harms women, how hot it is to degrade women and "take" them sexually, and that penetration = domination.