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RantDoes anyone else feel like they're the only sane person in the asylum?
I was watching Khelif's latest interview, in this one he's wearing makeup and acting very demure and "feminine", unlike every other time we've seen him flexing his muscles and every other video or picture of him where he's barefaced and strutting around and posing like a "cool guy".
So now, you'd expect anyone with eyes to see that he's putting on a performance, right? No, suddenly it's "See! She was a woman all along. Look how feminine she is here!"
I mean, this a joke, surely? Are people really buying this bullshit? It's like watching the world's worst confidence man dressing up as a woman to scam idiot aristocrats in a 60s screwball comedy. To the audience, it's obvious the conman is a man dressed as a woman, and we all laugh as the dumb aristocrat fawns over them and calls them a beautiful woman. I mean, as a society, we used to understand the joke, we used to see this for what it was. What's happened?
This episode was great, the only unbelievable part is that the women don't know he's a man lol.
That one episode about men in womens sports is another classic that unfortunately became more accurate as time went on.
I wish they'd go after this group more often tbh, South Park is one show that seems to have gotten away with a lot of stuff other shows wouldn't get away with.
I would be genuinely very curious to know what Stone and Parker’s opinions are on the current ID politics. I mean obviously they’re willing to criticize it, but that’s also what their show is famous for, critiquing “all sides.” I would guess based on interviews and things I’ve watched with them that they tend to lean more anti, but I feel like with Hollywood stuff it’s kind of impossible to escape a certain degree of indoctrination.
They did an entire special mini-season on woke BS. They are not down with identity politics. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2023/10/south-park-takes-aim-at-the-woke-disney-culture-wars
Also, they have consistently gone after Caitlin Jenner and the TRA aggression. They constantly remind us that Bruce Jenner killed awoman while drunk driving too.
I love, love, love South Park. For a lot of reasons, not the least of which being that I do kind of have that same off-kilter and juvenile sense of humor. They don’t always hit the mark entirely (for instance, the ep where Cartman pretends to be trans so he can use the girls’ restroom also finishes the Lorde arc and culminates with the women in his office tearfully accepting Randy into their bathroom 🙄) but it’s obvious that they really try to humanize the female characters and make their concerns/motivations into something worthy of being taken seriously.
Some of my favorites:
-Wendy being encouraged by Principal Victoria to beat Cartman into submission in front of their whole class for making fun of her mom’s breast cancer.
-Sharon and Shelly laughing amongst themselves about women on tv queefing because they enjoy being allowed to make jokes that upset males for once.
-Wendy facing down the school’s trend of girls photoshopping and distributing pictures of themselves to make the boys like them more, being called a jealous prude, and standing up for herself because she just wants the girls around her to feel okay in their own natural bodies.
-Bebe developing breasts before the other girls in her class and becoming extremely uncomfortable when the boys start behaving like animals around her, then when she starts covering up to avoid drawing attention it becomes clear to her that the only reason they were accepting her was because of her body.
Some of the messages get a little garbled at times but I have mad respect for Matt and Trey because at least they TRY you know?
This aged very gracefully. He’s even inappropriately oversharing to a captive audience of 4th graders (which, in fairness, he does even when he’s not Mrs. Garrison. Mr. Slave is a great example of taking “don’t say gay” to the point where parents actually have a problem with it.)
South Park was always pretty on-point about these issues and amazing at staying topical. I stopped watching regularly in 2016 after the election went very much not the way anyone expected, including the show runners. But I love revisiting its extremely sharp satire during what was really a fast-and-loose era where comedy was allowed to actually do its job.