Posts Tagged ‘weed’
Which Maine Potheads Hate Gays?
A friend* pointed me to an interesting divide in the Maine election results: While only 47 percent of Maine voters opted to keep same-sex marriage legal, a full 59 percent voted to legalize medicinal marijuana. By my expert analysis, that means that a significant percentage of Maine’s voters are raging potheads who hate gay people.
Sexist Comments of the Week: Counter-Culture, Misogyny, and Weed
In “Weed Culture Is Boob Culture,” I argued that women feel alienated from the pot advocacy movement because female stoners are marketed as objects (above) instead of heroes (every pot movie ever). Yes, boobs are used to sell everything from beer to hamburgers, but it’s particularly depressing when misogyny rears its ugly head in the counter-culture.
Even as a woman, I don’t need any special badge to drink beer or eat a hamburger—these consumption habits are, in fact, difficult to avoid in mainstream America. But if there’s one thing America likes more than beer and burgers, it’s boobs. Boobs are used to sell beer and hamburgers because mainstream America’s ideal subject—the person those advertisements are speaking to—is a red-meat-eatin’, six-pack-guzzlin’, butt-rock-blastin’ heterosexual male. Now, people who don’t fit that ideal American subject—women, gays, vegans, people who reject pandering, etc.—turn to the counter-culture, where they can be given space to create their own subjective experiences.
Theoretically. Because time and again, women have knocked on the door of the counter-culture—the comic book authors, the emo kids, and yes, the marijuana users—only to be shut out of the conversation. And so, even in pot culture, an effective ad shows a woman laying naked, covered in marijuana, staring coyly back at you and not smoking. Again, the ideal smoker is a heterosexual male.
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Weed Culture Is Boob Culture
Why aren’t there more female marijuana activists, Marijuana Policy Project employee Laura Greenback asks in High Times. Ooh! Pick me! I know the answer!
It’s not that women don’t like smoking weed. We do. And it’s not that we don’t care about the ass-backwards war on drugs—despite Greenback’s fears, half of the MPP’s top staff are women. It’s not that there are too few pop-culture stoner females, as Double X suggests—though we’re getting warmer!
