Jane says…

At least eleven two times a day, I get an email forwarded by someone’s cousin to someone’s sister to someone’s coworker to everybody on someone else’s email list and then to my mother. Who then forwards said email to me. Inevitably, it’s something like this:

or these:

How are husbands like lawn mowers?
They’re hard to get started, they emit noxious odors, and half the time they don’t work.

What do men and pantyhose have in common?
They either cling, run, or don’t fit right in the crotch!

How many men does it take to screw in a light bulb?
One-He just holds it up there and waits for the world to revolve around him.

How many men does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Three. One to screw in the bulb, and two to listen to him brag about the screwing part.

My very formal research which included asking a few guys at lunch what kinds of jokes they send each other indicates that men do not get the same volume of “wife” jokes as women do about husbands.

Most jokes at wives’ expense go something like this:

“Whenever I go home after we’ve been out drinking, I turn the headlights off before I get to the driveway. I shut off the engine and coast into the garage. I take my shoes off before I go into the house, I sneak up the stairs, I get undressed in the bathroom. I ease into bed and my wife STILL wakes up and yells at me for staying out so late!”

His buddy looks at him and says, “Well, you’re obviously taking the wrong approach. I screech into the driveway, slam the door, storm up the steps, throw my shoes into the closet, jump into bed, rub my hands on my wife’s ass and say, ‘How about a blowjob?’ … and she’s always sound asleep.”

Or this:

“My husband is a fill-in-the-blank” jokes are way more socially acceptable than “my wife is a fill-in-the-blank” jokes. I’m not saying that this is necessarily how it should be, I’m just saying this is how it is. And why is it? Why is it OK to bash the husbands, but not so cool to bash the wives?

1) The content of the jokes is key. In general, jokes about wives are gripes about sex lives or nagging. The recurring “sex life” joke theme is that men aren’t getting it enough. Why is this not OK? We only need to look at the jokes women make about sex for our answer: you are lazy, hairy, beery, and we are tired of cleaning up after you so we’d rather just sleep.

2) Other types of jokes are about nagging wives. Jokes about nagging wives are stupid. Like the sex jokes, they only point back to your own shortcomings. Life imitates art, right? Are you surprised we nag? If you would do the shit that you are supposed to do, that you say you’re going to do, that we need you to do then we won’t nag. Furthermore, when you actually do all that stuff – try to do it the way we said to. Why do we get to say you should do things? Because women run the household. We keep the big calendar and message board in our heads. You don’t. This is why you call us to ask where the Advil is while we’re out enjoying our first family-free night out with the girls in months or you have to check in with us while we’re driving home from the grocery store because you have to know immediately how much the 7 year old weighs because some form needs the info. It’s not that you aren’t necessary and important, it’s that you aren’t as necessary and important as we are.

3) It’s OK to husband bash because we need the solidarity and the validation. Plus we need the laughs. Because some days, it comes down to two choices: laugh or pack a bag.

…but Dan thinks…

You know, I kinda get the need for the husband jokes. It’s like why everyone hates the United States. We own everything. We run everything. We know how everything works. We know how to fix everything.

And we can pee standing up. It’s natural to be jealous.

But I’m pretty sure that holding the title “cruise director” does not make women queens of all they survey.

The household you run? You’re welcome for providing that for you. The long hours we spent separating clients from their money, constructing their constructions, meeting with fart-breathing bosses and filling out TPS reports? Because you didn’t see it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, and that it wasn’t every bit as grueling as plopping the children in front of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse while you run down the Energizers on your favorite toy. Oh, right. That actually ISN’T that grueling, is it.

You know what Rachel Rae does to prevent every calorie from going to her ass because you have the time. Time to watch television. Time to read gossip blogs. Hell, time to write your own damn blogs.

We’re just too busy to spend all our free time bitching to any other man that’ll listen about how unfair life is.

And the reason we can’t find the Advil? You keep fucking moving it. I get wanting to feel like you control your surroundings, but do you have to do it by constantly shuffling everything around in the house? The answer to “Where’s the Advil” should NOT be “Billy had soccer that one time and he hurt his knee and so we were sitting on the floor and I gave him the Advil while I held ice on his knee and then Miranda came in and distracted me and I needed to put away the Advil so it was out of reach of the kids and so I think I put it with the spices so check there.”

Um, no. The answer should be “It’s in the medicine drawer, where it always is.”

Ok, now I feel the need to wipe away the piggish veneer and be serious for a minute. In general I don’t think men mind that much that women get together and privately dish dirt on their spouses. Some men dish, too. But the thing that I feel is wholly unacceptable? Airing dirty laundry to the world. Like on a blog. I’m not going to name names here, only because Jane has been screaming and pleading that I don’t, for fear that it’ll mean disaster for this blog. But there are women with high profile blogs who write really insulting things about their husbands and family on a regular basis. Husband jokes, but in real life.

Maybe it’s a lack of maturity that makes these women do this. Or maybe it’s a lack of intelligence or foresight. Or lack of respect.

But one of the first rules you ever learn about interpersonal relations, even as a child, is that if you have an issue with someone, you take it up with that person, not everyone EXCEPT that person. Maybe those women who blog nasty on their husbands are really, deep down, unhappy and hoping for a divorce and this is how they subconsciously make that happen. Or maybe they have mice for men (at which point those men should get together for some chest-bumping bro-lidarity, or go buy a t-shirt that says “she may be the woman, but I’m the pussy”). Whatever the reason, it’s pretty much indefensible, and all the harm that gets rained down on that relationship because of that behavior is justified.

Husband jokes? Fine in moderation. Wife jokes? Assume the position more often and they’ll go away.

And? We help out quite a bit around the house. We just don’t fly a biplane dragging a message each time we empty the trash.

Dan says…

As is becoming routine lately, Jane’s dragging me into some of the darker corners of the internet. And then regretting doing it when I run off and play with all the new, slightly sketchy friends I make.

Like Twitter.

And two days ago?

Chat Roulette.

If you’ve never been to this website, here’s how it works:

It’s a live video and text chat site. You hook up your web cam (a cam isn’t required to use the site, but people with cams rarely want to spend time with people without cams), agree to some terms, then click “Play.”

Within a few seconds a live video feed pops up of someone, somewhere in the world. It’s roulette, so you have no idea who it’ll be and no idea where they’ll be from. With that person or people you can text chat while you watch them on video, or talk to them with live audio, and it’s all in real-time. The site originated in Russia and is just now climaxing in popularity in the United States.

And in this web-fueled era of HEY! LOOKIT ME! you can almost guess what you’d find on a site like this. Or maybe you can’t.
Penises, Jane readers. For as far as you can throw a Johnsonville.

Ladies’ Night exists at bars for a reason. Frugal men led by profligately spendy cocks will fill corrugated steel buildings and drop a small fortune on overpriced alcohol in the hopes of securing the affections of a woman for the night (or possibly longer). And this phenomena, this lottery odds’ worth of disproportion of women who are looking for piggish men and the piggish men volunteering themselves to women is played out in disgusting, hilarious detail on chatroulette.com.

I don’t want to bore you with this here, but I’ve created a page describing all the weird shit I’ve seen on Chat Roulette. It is staggering.  Click here to see most of it.

Now I know Jane’s seen a bit of what Chat Roulette has to offer and I know she’s going to come out against it.

Me? I’m totally in favor of it. The tropical rain forest vaginas, the completely naked and flexing men, the talking golden retrievers. All of it. And here’s why:

1) Often it’s disgusting. Sometimes it’s polite and friendly. But it’s personal expression. You know, 1st amendment stuff? Do we really want to invite Big Brother in to start squashing personal freedoms because of one little website that is easily blocked from a browser? Should we start burning books again?

2) It’s superficial and harmless. Nobody is actually hooking up. Nobody is obligated to anything. You don’t like what you’re seeing, you click “Next” and get connected with the next random person. Like flipping through cable channels.

3) You can meet normal people from all over the world, too. I had a nice chat with a person in Chile. Right – where the earthquake happened. Do you know how to say “earthquake” in Spanish? “Terremoto.”

4) There’s nothing on this site that you can’t already find in a million other places on the web.

5) The site is extremely dangerous for kids. Wait. That’s not why I’m in favor of it. Please see above. The thing is, it’s called parenting, people. Last night I briefly chatted about former New York Rangers goalie Ed Richter (I’m a Red Wings fan) with what appeared to be a young man of about 14. In his room. Alone. On Chat Roulette. For a scant few seconds I saw a boy of about 10 with his little sister (5? 6 years old?) at a kitchen table, flipping through rotations of chatters. If you’re on the site for more than 3 minutes, there’s no way you don’t see at least one guy masturbating. And these kids are seeing that. But they can see that anywhere. I mean check Wikipedia for fuck’s sake. Chatroulette isn’t bringing anything new to the table. As parents, we have to do our jobs and limit our kids’ opportunities to see this.

6) It’s hilarious. It gives me an avenue to poke fun at people without consequence. Or be a parent when some other kid’s parents have abdicated that role. Or be a voice of reason TO a parent when they clearly have trouble exercising good judgement. (see the page of weird shit I’ve seen)

7) All of it is easily fixable. That’s the most interesting part to me, and I would be surprised if this DOESN’T happen in the next 60 days. I run multiple discussion forum websites and they all require registration to participate. Chatroulette.com does not. Got webcam? Got internetz? Then you’ve got freakdom. Something as simple as requiring registration/login with IP address logging, following all COPPA rules, and the problem goes away. Better yet, do all that, and then provide a place within the site that’s set aside for a freak-for-all, for the shaved, masturbating men and the very large, untrimmed, masturbating women.

This is nothing new. Just a new variant of the same old.

Tosh.1, maybe. Now with more penis!

…but Jane thinks…

You have taken complete leave of your senses.  Aren’t you supposed to be the conservative in this relationship?  Or have you merely been been so scarred by what you’ve seen on ChatRoulette that you are no longer lucid.

1)Your first amendment argument is absurd.  Yeah.  Blocking ChatRoulette is akin to burning books.  On what planet, other than Planet I’ll Scroll Through Forty Naked Dudes Abusing Themselves Just For The Chance I’ll See Some Naked Hooters??  Kids are on the internet the same way kids watch TV.  Would you be making the same argument if, interspersed between SpongeBob and Hannah Montana was footage of naked old men getting their groove on?   You can’t even compare Chat Roulette to CABLE television, because Cable television represents a choice, a selection, an opt-in.  Your kids can’t get to cable if you haven’t provided it to them.  But if your kids go on a computer, they can end up at Chat Roulette.

2)  It’s not even little kids that concern me the most, because, ohdeargodsweetjjesusIhope, most parents aren’t letting their young kids hang out in front of the computer unsupervised.  It’s adolescents.  Adolescents aren’t developmentally or emotionally sophisticated enough to process an unfiltered stream of society’s worst doing its worst.  Ask any person over the age of 30 what ChatRoulette is and, unless they saw Jon Stewart last night, most of them will say, “Chatwha?”  Ask any kid under the age of 19 and chances are they’ll giggle and say, “Oh my god!  So gross but so funny!”

3)  It’s only a matter of time before some creepo on Chat Roulette identifies the location or affiliation with some young, giggling girl via sweatshirt, background, recognition of surroundings, SOMETHING.  And then what?  In addition to raising up a generation of young adults with confused and complicated and distorted impressions of sexuality we are now willfully saying, “Yep…it’s all out there…go find it!  Anything goes!  Hope the weirdos don’t find you first!”

4)  Dan, you’re a husband and a father and a brother and a son.  From what I know, although I may at another time and in a different situation claim otherwise for the purpose of winning an argument, a pretty terrific one of all those.  As a man, aren’t you remotely concerned that ChatRoulette is yet another way that men are revealed to be base, corrupt, and scary?  Obviously, not all men.  But out of the woodwork the creepers creep when the opportunity presents, and so far, by  my research all three minutes of it before I started to feel unclean and threw up in my  mouth  a little bit, a hefty percentage of those creepers are men.   As a mother of a person who will one day be a man, and as a wife of a man, and as a sister of a man, and as a teacher of young men, I am worried that men aren’t working overtime to protect their image on the internet.  Popular culture is working overtime to hammer home this disturbing and fundamentally untrue message: men are porn-addicted, violent-game playing, virtual affair having skankbuckets.   It’s in none of our best interests to let that happen.

5)  If you want to have a conversation with a person in Chile about the earthquake, go on Facebook.  Find a pen pal.  Call the Chilean embassy.  The anonymity coupled with the ability to dismiss someone based on a fleeting glimpse is a recipe for disaster.  If you should actually proceed far enough in one of these “chats” to have a “conversation” with someone, what was it that made that person the one you stuck with to try to converse?  What made them decide to try to converse with you?   Whatever it is, it’s not enough.

6)  What else?  Other than, GROSS GROSS GROSS, which is a pretty compelling argument, frankly.  Here’s what else:  it’s a time suck.  For people with addictive tendencies and bad computer habits, I ask you this:  Isn’t there something more productive you could do with your time?  Something that advances us as a culture instead of catering to and manipulating our baser instincts?
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Jane says…

I feel a little bit like that stand-up comedian who carries on about why you park in the driveway and you drive on a parkway, but I’m plowing through the cliché anyway.

IT WAS A KILLER WHALE. WHAT THE HELL DID YOU EXPECT??

Anyone who has ever tried to contain a screaming toddler in an enclosed time-out space knows that attempting to keep wild things in captivity is a bad plan. Mother Nature is not a huge fan of the Zoo, or the Wild Animal Park, or the Sea World or Sea World derivative.

My dog is so utterly domesticated that she’s tried to sit in an easy chair and join in conversation during dinner parties. On more than one occasion. Nevertheless, that bitch still tries to bite my arm off if I make the foolhardy error of trying to take a hunk of rawhide away from her. Would you expect anything less from a tiger or lion or bear or predatory sea-dwelling mammal?

“But how do kids learn about animals if they can’t see them in zoos?” I’ve heard this before, and to those of you who would ask the question I say this, “Go away. You aren’t smart enough for me to talk to you.” PBS? The Discovery Channel? The Internet? Wait…wait…I got it…ready? Ready? Brace yourself…Books!!

Wild animals in captivity are entertainment, not education. Pretending otherwise is ludicrous. Zoos and the like exist for profit, not education. Certainly, there are conservation efforts that are supported by zoos, but I refuse to believe that kids wouldn’t be introduced to animals in such a way that they should grow up to care about their welfare if wild animals weren’t trapped and caged.

These animals don’t act like animals in the wild, and often they don’t even look like animals in the wild. They pace and develop other nervous tics, some dangerous to their physical health. They are often subject to changes in the environment to which they are unsuited – their cycles and rhythms are off. Without the opportunity to hunt, or be hunted, they aren’t fulfilling any evolutionary destiny or purpose either. They are bored. Taking another page from the toddler playbook, if you try to keep a bored toddler subdued for too long, you will end up maimed, or at least emotionally scarred.

Mother Nature will put up with a lot from us. But when she has something to say, she says it loud.

Note: I take my kids to the zoo. I’ve taken them to Sea World (boring and expensive). So, mommy’s a bit of a hypocrite. Mommy’s also a bit of a buzz kill, because the whole time we’re at the zoo, I’m pointing out how miserable the animals look, especially the elephants.

…but Dan thinks…

It’s funny. When we discussed our angles on this post, I was certain that for the first time, Jane and I were going to be on the same page. We were actually. going. to agree. I was considering calling The Guinness Book. But maybe that’s premature.

It’s not called a Snuggling Whale. A Happygoodtime Whale. It’s a killer. For prey like seals, they swim up from underneath them, wheel and swat them out of the water, into the air with their massive tails, knocking the seals unconscious; sometimes killing them with that single stroke. Then it’s lunchtime.

And they know how to hunt in groups. They are organized killers.

I love zoos. We have an annual membership to our local zoo and still find time to attend one or two others. For those that think that you can learn about the visceral experiences of life by reading about them or watching television, I’d suggest that they live pretty sheltered lives, and that thrown out into nature, those books will do little to help a person cope with dangerous encounters without real-life experience to back it up. Unless it’s a really heavy book and you have perfect aim.

In my basement I have a beautiful bearskin rug I got from my father, a bear he killed while out in the woods, hunting. He hadn’t been planning on it. Wasn’t even hunting for bear. But he was in the woods, saw a 250 pound black bear and tried his best to stay out of it’s way. And he did, right up until it smelled him, or smelled his prospective next meal, turned and charged at my father.

Tiny black eyes, enormous head, mouth agape, slobber dripping in anticipation as he lumbered toward my father.

Kill or be killed. Right there. My father raised his rifle, drew a bead and placed a slug between the bear’s eyes, dropping his would-be killer. There’s absolutely no way a book or a made-for-television movie can convey that pants-filling experience. But being able to see a live animal in a less-than-natural habitat can at least expose us, our kids, to the size and majesty and strength and potential danger of these animals.

I want to make sure this stays focused – this post isn’t about how terrible it is that animals are in captivity. At least that’s not what Jane and I discussed before we started writing. This post is about the arrogance, naivete and even stupidity of intentionally courting danger with animals that can kill.

Like the actor who thought he he could show the world how humane and lovable wild bears are, by embedding himself in their habitat, talking in falsetto to them, and then oops. Getting too close when food was scarce. Turns out that B-list actors are delicious.

Or Seigfried and Roy. “She was just trying to protect him.” Right. From not getting his head bitten off?

Or the three drunk guys in the Siberian zoo who decided to taunt the bears. And then one fell into the bear pit. Did you know whiskey makes an excellent marinade?

You can’t get the feel for rapelling down the side of a cliff, your stomach leaping into your throat, your bladder almost emptying as you look down, without actually strapping on the harness, leaning over that cliff, then jumping. But you do so knowing that if the rope is frayed, the harness unsecure or your technique is poor, you might plunge straight down to the rocks below.

So yes, it’s sad that that trainer lost her life to that killer whale. But as Jane and I said to each other in our post-planning meeting, “What’d you expect?”