The Cheese Grates It: 30 Days of De-Objectification: Day 1: Angus Young

Note: Yes, you have seen this before. I rescheduled it to fit the format of the A to Z blogging challenge and Camp NaNoWriMo. Other than that, the song remains the same. Which is a song by a different band.

The so-called “classic rock fandom” loves to objectify this man.

Let’s just get this out of the way first. The ones grossly drooling over him and other older musicians are not real fans in any way, shape, or form. They are soulless assholes who don’t really give one single fuck about the music or the people creating it, and they have no business calling themselves fans. They are a small but vocal minority of assholes, and they probably really don’t exist outside of Tumblr. But they piss me off, and I want to offer a counterpoint to their obnoxious fuckery by humanizing the people they so love to objectify.

I’ve been a fan of AC/DC since 1977, and have always felt extremely protective towards Angus. He’s kind of a vulnerable person, particularly these days. He’s experienced a great deal of loss. He had to watch the person he was closest to deteriorate over the course of ten years and then die.

For those who don’t know, Angus’ older brother Malcolm was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2008 at the age of 55. He died November 18, 2017 at the age of 64. At the time of his death, he did not remember how to play the songs he wrote, he did not know the people he had been closest to in life, he didn’t remember how to speak, he couldn’t walk, and he couldn’t take care of his own basic needs, such as going to the bathroom or bathing himself.

I do know from personal experience what Angus went through watching this, and it is fucking horrible. It leaves you with a hole in your heart that can never be filled. Losing someone to dementia is like losing them multiple times. Glen Campbell’s wife said that it’s better to die some other way, and she is 1000% right.

A few weeks prior to losing Malcolm, Angus also lost his brother George.

My dear friend and fellow blogger @kamidiox created this sweet image in honor of the three Young brothers. I’ve been reluctant to share it because I wouldn’t want the gross creepers to get their hands on it, but I’d like to share it now because it deserves to be seen.

When I think of Angus these days, I also tend to think of these images of him carrying Malcolm’s guitar at Malcolm’s funeral. My heart breaks for him.

I’m not saying that people can’t think Angus is attractive. I think he’s cute as can be. I’m not saying it isn’t possible to have feelings for a person you haven’t met. That does happen. I understand that. However, it’s completely possible to have such feelings without objectifying the person.

My problem with what these young women are doing is not that they find a person who is actually even older than me appealing. It’s the fact that they completely erase the humanity of the people they’re objectifying. Just because Angus looked like this in a picture from close to 40 years ago does not mean it’s okay to objectify him.

Angus Young is a performer and people are multi-faceted. The performance persona is not the same as the actual flesh and blood person who has complex feelings and thoughts.

Angus is a brother, a husband, an uncle, a great-uncle, possibly even a great-great uncle. He didn’t have any children of his own, but he and his wife have children of the furry and feathered variety that they dote on. He is an interesting, intelligent, compassionate, sensitive, creative person. He is not a piece of ass. It is fine to acknowledge finding him attractive. It is not fine to objectify him or anybody else.

~The Cheese Hath Grated It~

Hilarious Signs of the Apocalypse: A Wee Scotsman on a Talking Horse

If you were a teenager in the 1980's like I was, and you grew up in the United States, you remember this shit. Come remember this shit with me, or, if you're too young to remember, you can read about this shit and wonder how anyone could possibly be so stupid.

http://www.vh1.com/news/54726/remembering-the-80s-heavy-metal-satanic-panic/

Taking this little stroll down Ridiculous Memory Lane has brought me to a startling conclusion about the end of the world.

Are you ready?

After reading (and laughing at) the aforementioned shit, I have come to the conclusion that the Apocalypse will be marked not by four horsemen, but by a single horseman: Angus Young, riding on Mr. Ed, while carrying a cache of Dungeons and Dragons manuals in his backpack. 

You see, The Apocalypse will be ludicrous rather than terrifying. I, for one, have my 20 sided dice ready to roll. Who's bringing snacks?

~Cie~

Not exactly a replacement for Nostradamus, but probably funnier

Here is like a for real top seekrit AC/DC Devil Worshiping Ceremony caught live on tape and stuff by our super spy team. Look at this wickedness. Just look at it! 

Angus Young's RED guitar and hat.

Malcolm Young's RED tank top.

Hordes of RED capped minions!

Giant iguanas!

Pterodactyls!

The only thing that could make it more wicked and diabolical would be Mr. Ed!

You'll have to read the article.

The Cheese Grates It: The Hate that Hate Breeds

I was replying to a post by the wonderful Russell Duffy, when I realized that my reply had  morphed into a post. It is necessary to read Russell's post to fully understand why I was inspired to write what I have here, so here's the link:

http://openmindedsearchfortruth.blogspot.com/2016/09/no-room.html

I try not to let hate in. For instance, although I dislike Donald Trump with a fair intensity, if I were to allow myself to hate him, it would hurt me a lot more than it does him. Hate is an emotion with a lot of energy invested in it. It is a poor investment, and we should avoid it.

It wasn't always this way. I've mellowed with age and with the proper diagnosis of my mental illnesses. Taking Lithium turns down the intensity of my more extreme emotions.

Whenever I have felt hate, it's because I feel threatened by the person I'm feeling hate for.

I remember in my late teens on up into my thirties, I felt ire towards women that I perceived as "slutty." Having been brought up in a misogynistic society, I perceived "slutty" women as both threatening and entirely responsible for their presentation. I feared that these "easy" women who put their wares on display so readily would "steal my man." I was disgusted by "skanky" actresses making men put all the more pressure on ordinary women like me to transform into some sort of perfectly proportioned and ever available nymph there for the taking.

I was never the "there for the taking" kind, and I was anything but sexy. I really did not even want to be sexy. I hated these women for "making" me hate myself more than I already did.

Years later, I learned that most of the women I felt threatened by also suffered because of these perceptions, and that they aren't "perfect" either.

Britney Spears is attractive. She's pretty and can certainly present as sexy. More importantly, she's genuinely beautiful, as in she's a good and kind person. Britney insisted on releasing the unretouched photos from her Candies Shoes photo shoot to show that she does not actually have the impossibly perfect body that so many women are led to believe we should have, not only to our own detriment, but, I believe, to the detriment of society as a whole, to the detriment of the entire human collective consciousness, if I may be so bold.
Personally, on a purely aesthetic level, I think that Real Britney is very lovely and nothing needed to be done to "correct" her physique. I wonder if a day will ever come when we don't erase what people actually look like. For my own part, I like real people.
When I was younger, I would never have said something so kind about Britney Spears. In my view, she was a skank who was putting herself on display and making life more difficult for women like me. I didn't want to put myself on display. Doing so makes me very uncomfortable. Unless I'm posing for art classes, which is something I did in order to help myself get over the mindset that only "slutty" people allowed themselves to be seen nude. More on that in a minute.
I learned over time that Britney Spears was a nice young lady who wore sexy costumes while performing. She wasn't a "slutty man stealer." Like many of us, she was looking for The One. She was disturbed by all the focus on her breasts, particularly when she was still a teenager. She was struggling with untreated bipolar disorder. She is a good person, and I was wrong to judge her the way I did. My prejudices clouded my true intuition.

Angus Young has taught me so much, even though I was never fortunate enough to meet him in this life. I don't know why that is, considering that I feel like we would be friends if we had been allowed to know each other, but that's a post for another time. Unfortunately, he didn't teach me how to play the guitar. Musically, I have all the talent of a hammer. I bash on instruments and hurt them, or at least hurt anyone listening to the cacophony I produce.
One day while watching Angus strip off and drop trou, it came to me that here is a person who does not think of himself as attractive, who has, in fact, referred to himself as "that ugly little man," and yet he's baring it all for the world to see. Now, I realize that what Angus does is not art school modeling, it's burlesque. However, I was inspired to take my body, such as it is, stretch marks, scars, fat rolls and saggy breasts, and put it on display for pay at art schools in my area.
I started seeing myself as less ugly when I was modeling. Also, it's a different culture. Modeling for art schools is not sexy. Yes, I had idiots saying I was an "exhibitionist" for doing this. I'm not. I had people praising me for being so "uninhibited." I'm really not.
Being a man, Angus does not have the added fuckery of people thinking he's "slutty" for taking his clothes off. A naked man is not "slutty," he's just naked. A naked woman is seen as a "skank" who is "asking for it." More on this another time.
This realization made me very angry, both at myself for having bought into it and having wasted my energies on hate for others because of it, and at the society which teaches it.
I have a million reasons for wanting to find Angus in the spirit world after my body boots me out for good and give him a big hug. This is one of them. And then, maybe we can be friends. It's something I like to think is possible.

My uncontrolled borderline personality disorder certainly played a part in my hateful thinking. People with borderline personality disorder tend to see the world in shades of black and white. People are either wonderful or they're terrible. This extreme love/hate dichotomy is very disconcerting, especially considering that people are terribly flawed creatures who inevitably fuck up.
However, I place more of the blame for my hateful attitudes on a society that views women in terms of being virgins or whores. You can't tell how promiscuous a person is by the way they're dressed or whether they've ever appeared nude in a movie or even if they've appeared in porn. You can't tell what that person's morals are when it comes to having sex with a person who's in a committed relationship.
Hate is a strong and destructive emotion. There are rational reasons for disliking a person, but rational reasons for hating someone are few and far between, and are of a catastrophic nature such as when hate is directed at someone who murdered a loved one.
Beating yourself up for irrational feelings won't help. Try to get to the root of the feeling. It generally boils down to learned prejudices and/or personal insecurity.

~The Cheese Hath Grated It~