User Comments - Grambers

Posted on: A Creepy Guy

Wow, thanks for a pretty thoroughly considered contribution Rachel (may I call you that, or would I be being a little too 猥琐?) Safer to stick with Ms SF, perhaps?).

Now, gazes. Let's face it. We all have 'em. We all 'do it'. And there's nothing like an globally televised Olympic Games to make us confront this fact. Diving, Triathalon, Beach Volleyball, Football - doesn't matter. The sight of taut muscle tone and a stomach rippled like ripened corn is appealing, surely, to both men and women? We gaze, and minds wander. How did RJ describe it yesterday....that's right. "Nature's prime directive". Sad, but true.

However, in discussing the right of one party or another to look, I don't think it's quite right to describe Weiwei's attitude towards the male gaze as 'permissive' (or, indeed, 'unpermissive'). The fact that she has bothered putting on a nice frock and make-up is surely indicative of the fact that she desires the male gaze. Now, it's a reasonable assumption to make that she primarily desires the gaze of Jay Chow/Johnny Depp-types, but in doing that she is inevitably having to draw the gaze of less well-cut specimens too. It seems to be the attitude on display here is that it's wrong for 'bad' men (read: unattractive, fat, balding, poor) to gaze at me because of the way I look (made-up, well dressed) but quite acceptable for handsome guys to look at me with an overtly sexual gaze because it is those guys I seek to attract (and ultimately mate with, after a certain vetting period).

If women like Weiwei did not desire the male gaze, I can't help but think the multi-billion dollar global make-up industry would be finding these alleged 'straiten times' tough. As it is, those dollars keep on rolling, rolling, rolling in.

Posted on: A Creepy Guy

So, when I said, 'ANY money', what I of course meant was 'NO money whatsoever'. So, now that we have established that John is involved before, during AND after lesson recordings (as opposed to just rocking up, hungover and bleary eyed, at 5 minutes past the hour, taking a disdainful look at the script which is handed to him by a trembling intern, before screaming at a passing underling, 'If I am gonna have to read this sh*t out loud, somebody needs to get me some Goddam coffee - NOW!"), we can safely lay to rest fears about editorial slippage. However, sadly, we seem not to have quite resolved the initial debate about whether the line was knowing humour:)

And, as for your ignorance of Bar Rouge, well, for shame, young man! FOR SHAME! Any hopes you may have had about 1) joining the tres pretentious jetset, or 2) becoming a high-class hooker, have just been shredded.

Posted on: A Creepy Guy

Wot, so no Chhattisgarh wage slaves at all!?! Not even one?

Thanks for the input John. Nice to have an bit of authority interjected into a conversation that had been hitherto 100% supposition and speculation (even if there was enough left unsaid in your comment for the debate to go as to whether Weiwei's alleged 'hypocrisy' was carefully fashioned for the purposes of humour, or more pedagogical opportunism!) . And good to know the CPod editorial process is duly rigorous. Now, get that writer of yours back to his/her desk and let's have no more slacking!

Posted on: A Creepy Guy

Gotcha. Brilliant. Many thanks John.

Posted on: A Creepy Guy

Yeah, C'mon CPod - tell us how these snappy dialogues of yours get produced? (I bet you any money/beer they get written by some wage slave in a shed in Chhattisgarh, India, then translated by a monkey using Google Translate into Mandarin, before being polished up by a 18.75 year-old gap year intern who's 'experiencing the world' (but mainly Bar Rouge) before going off to study Ancient Chinese at Hertford College, Oxford. ANY money!)

Posted on: A Creepy Guy

Hahaha. Nailed it. Definitely the last one. Guilty, guilty, guilty.

And many thanks for thinking me too young to be cynical. I've recently had an appropriate sentence pattern in my Flashcard cycle, so I shall attempt to employ it here:

我的年纪不算小，但也不至于太老。

你懂的:)

And now, on with some much overdue non-Chinese related work!:)

Posted on: A Creepy Guy

I know we're know on a different thread, but I couldn't resist pointing at the above to show that, I've once again written something so unwittingly stupid that it almost pains me to read it. But in the interests of science and world peace, I shall leave it there to be read for all of eternity.

WHY WOULD SOMEONE NEED A WIG AND BLACK HAIR DYE?

Now, I'm not sure this proves anything other than my sloppiness, and I'm sure a half-decent editor would have noted the sloppiness, but it just goes to show that people can be idiots, even when they are trying not to be:)

Posted on: A Creepy Guy

Ah, but, you see, making the assumption that fat and bald = loyal is a very dangerous move, especially in China. It's the fat bald ones you gotta watch out for the most. Even more dangerous are the fat bald ones with wigs and black hair dye.

Posted on: A Creepy Guy

Good points, well made, as always Baba. But isn't there a very good chance that the girl in this equation will at some point in the dating process do or say something which she absolutely does not believe ("You are a wonderful human being", or "I love you", for example), and, at this point, does she not become 'dishonest' too. And therefore, are we not comparing oranges with oranges?

Posted on: A Creepy Guy

Fair enough. Shanghai did not write the joke. But it was written by at least one member of the CPod staff who, presumably, lives in Shanghai and is immersed in the culture of that great city (I love Shanghai, I should point out. It took me a long time to learn to love it, but I do, genuinely, love it. There are few more interesting places on earth). Now, the dynamic of male-female relations in Shanghai, I think, is very, very interesting. The battle of the sexes, though common to all communities, all cities, is played out a little differently in Shanghai. For my money, female sexuality has, um, a more aggressive edge (though, granted, the ladies of my hometown can also be a little fierce, particularly when alcohol is involved) and men tend to the 'Blue Steel', somewhat-emasculated end of the spectrum, for want of a better expression. These are obviously vast simplifications. There are as many KINDS of women in Shanghai as there are women, and the same goes for men. But I think there is a discernible culture in the field of sexual relations which, in my limited experience of such matters, is definitely a little different.

"to suggest it was not a deliberate joke would be to suggest that whoever wrote the dialogue was blind to the hypocrisy of it"....

I guess that is exactly what I am saying. I agree with you in that I think it is far more likely that the line was penned knowingly. However, some of the comments by presenters over the years have given me the slight sense that writing is in the hands of individuals and though there is almost certain some kind of editorialising, it's not necessarily highly rigorous (though it might well be...I just don't know). Given this, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that it was included unknowingly. I certainly have said, or written, things which were unwittingly funny, or unwittingly stupid, before. It happens. Hypocrisy wouldn't exist as a concept if the people who did it were not blind to it, right?

CPod is great, and the people who work there are, I'm sure, very good people. Moreover, I don't wanna sound like a hater. However, I do get a little uncomfortable when praise and flattery is the default setting - be it for John and Jenny, or Olympic champion Lin Dan. Perhaps I'm being a prick, but I regard my relationship with CPod as a customer-purveyor relationship. Just as I reserve the right to slag off the cynical placement of chocolate products in my local Tesco supermarket, I reserve the right to say critical (or words that may be perceived as critical) things about CPod, as long as I remember not to get too personal or too nasty. I think CPod is great. But it sure ain't perfect. And being less than perfect, I think it follows that it MIGHT be possible that that line was penned unknowingly (....but probably not).

I've spent an awfully long time writing about something which 1) is pretty unimportant, and, 2) I know nothing about. Told you I am capable of being unwittingly idiotic.