Photo by Flickr user E-Dubya. Used under a Creative Commons license.

So via Jessica at Jezebel we learn that the The London Daily Mail was all in a snit about women who not only get drunk, and not only brag about it, but actually post photos on Facebook. And, presumably, other social network sites.

Imagine! Women! Drinking too much demon rum! And thinking it’s funny! Which, I’m sure it does at the time but even so.

Ok, ok, so that’s a predictable reaction. Turns out Jessica is soliciting links to Facebook photos of similarly shift-aced men which, somehow, the Daily Mail managed to overlook.

Funny how we do stuff like that — like “expecting better” of women than men, or perhaps expecting nothing at all of men. (Because, otherwise, what would moralists have to tut-tut and otherwise blame women for?)

Along the same lines, well, in sort of a backwards way, Juliet Lapidos of Slate.com’s Explainer column mentions that the Motion Picture Association of America rates not only movies but movie posters. Now as you might imagine of the same twerps who clog the first 20 minutes of every DVD with messages saying watching with a friend is piracy, it turns out they permit ads with violence against men but not against women.

Before the good people of the advertising administration approve a poster, they make sure it’s suitable for all viewers. Ads can’t depict nudity or sexual activity, violence toward women, cruelty to animals, or rape.

...

In May 2006, the advertising administration rejected a poster for the documentary film The Road to Guantanamo, which featured a man hanging by his handcuffed wrists with a burlap sack over his head. Apparently, the MPAA objected specifically to the burlap “hooding,” presumably because it was too frightening for young viewers. So the film’s distributors created a new poster, which showed only a pair of shackled hands and arms.

The whole lame story, that’s actually mostly about misconceptions about human anatomy, here.

I’m… not exactly sure why depictions of drunkenness or violence against one gender are to decried but not the other. If I were a knee-jerk MRA I’d make the very correct point that men are considered expendable in patriarchy. And if I were a considerably more clever feminist I might point out that pretending to protect women on paper (literally on paper in this case as the MPAA was originally most concerned about movie posters) grossly overlooks the reality that most female victims of violence are victims of domestic violence.

Instead I’m a prudish libertine and so in addition to scowling at those who, regardess of gender, brag about drinking themselves unconscious I’m also trying to get over why any kind of violence gets a nod. While nudity and sexual activity doesn’t.