Warm Delights!

One of my pet peeves/obsessions is with food escapism advertising directed at women. Biting into a _____ [whatever] = escaping your life!, your little bit of relief from the everyday, your flight, your alone time, blah. International coffees, Dove chocolates, sweets. (Women are never escaping with a nice pork roast.) I'm obsessed with this kind of advertising, I hate it, hate the implications, feh. Anyhow, Betty Crocker Warm Delights has hit a new low, albeit using the same spoon-fellating imagery these ads often use (nobody ever just EATS). This particular ad is missing the rhetoric another one of their ads has about licks needed to get to the center of it all, but it's basically an advertisement for an orgasm. Look at the woman on her back waving her feet in the air, or the pregnant woman (post coitum..apparently eating chocolate can make you pregnant). "You're just 3 minutes from heaven." Yah. Right. Thanks for clearing that up.
(click on porny photo for video link)

Lane Bryant shooting

I don't want to be too lugubrious, but my heart continues to break hearing the details of the Lane Bryant shooting in the Chicago south suburbs. Now it appears that one of the women was sexually assaulted (fondled), in addition to being herded into the back with the others. This still doesn't feel like just a robbery, for many reasons, and continues to hit very close to home for me. There is a very particular atmosphere in LBs, common to any place that serves a specific customer base, I guess, but with its own big girl flavor. There's some commonly-shared intent that gets you there, and the mood reflects that--it can be strangely intimate and communal. It's also just a store too, but still--LBs by definition already in many ways feel like havens from the rest of the world. To have someone barge in this kind of safe place I've been in a million times and create trauma...

I have not watched TV news coverage of the event since the story first broke. I did see enough at the beginning to watch a local woman being interviewed who was worried about her daughter's safety but already knew she had not been there: "She lives at Lane Bryant...she's overweight...she's there all the time." Thanks for clearing that up. Really wish the local news had not let that one through; I will continue to be watchin this story.