(x)This is NOT about the evils of straight, white, men, BUT, it is about the reality of one gay man.

[Warren DeMontague]

4. In all honesty, I'm more like a sort of light olive.

It's nice. It ages well.

But seriously, I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't feel "under attack". I just don't take DU seriously enough; certainly not the never-ending 'gendercratic underwar' part of it, anymore- to honestly give it that much mental energy.

My main takeaway from all that has gone down in GD is to step back and say "um, at the end of the day, remember, you are talking about a picture of 3 smiling young women in bathing suits on a sun-dappled beach. THAT is the source, the casus belli, of your week-long torrent of white-hot outrage."

And yes, it is. Whatever people want to read into it, or spin it up into additional layers of meaning, that's what the kerfluffle is at its core, about- women in bikinis on a beach.

I'm sorry, there's an upper limit to how serious I can take that shizzz. I don't pass the true progressive test, or the really-serious-about-doing-something-about-the-bikinification-of-society test, or whatever. So sue me.

But, crap --- I would never in a million years compare any of the shit I've dealt with (and I've dealt with some, but I fully admit I've been very fortunate in many areas) to the struggles of growing up Gay in the US--- or living in a particularly red area of it. You know me, I've been a consistent voice for LGBT rights my whole time on DU... I support you guys and stand with you 100%.

And women face issues and discrimination in our society too. The war on women is real. However, bikinis and models who choose to pose for beach pictures are NOT, IMNSHO, part of it. The people who want to outlaw birth control and abortion are the SAME people who would scrub the bikini pictures from the magazine covers. It's not a question of the two things surreptitiously working together- the sexual revolution, as despised as it apparently still is in some corners, is AT ODDS with the war on women, not part of it. The freedom for men and women to pose scantily clad for pictures is the SAME freedom that is gradually bringing this country up to speed on matters of LGBT equality.

The disconnect, the REFUSAL to grok that, is what gets me, at times.