Happy Friday. It’s that time again, for our weekly Menstration, our highly subjective weekly roundup of the BAD and RAD from this week…It’s the Men’s Trait’s Raddest Person of the Week award.
We’re going back Raddest person/thing of the week. There’s so much negativity in the world that, while it’s fun to hate on things, we wanted to highlight things that were awesome instead of putting the focus things that are not awesome.
Before I get into the nominees, how about a breakdown of our process? I typically get three or four nominees a week from readers. If you want to nominate someone, there are about 3 ways to reach us:
- You can submit nominees to our Facebook page.
- You can tweet us your nonimations at @MensTraitOnline or @johnpsousa using the hashtag #MTRaddestPersonOftheWeek or #MTDBagOfTheWeek.
- You can email us at “editorial at 301digitalmedia dot com” with “MT D-Bag Of The Week Nominee” or “MT Raddest Thing of the Week” in the subject line.
Depending on the nominee, we’ll publish a post, and then we’ll keep track of them all week. Our staff then votes (sometimes after a vigorous Slack debate). So, you can submit items on people/things that were RAD or people/things that are BAD and we will break them down.
Sorry about not publishing one of these last week. I was out of the office and had a house full of Hurricane Matthew evacuees. Also, I know that last time we switched back to D-Bag of the Week because there was more Douchebaggery than Radness, but, as I said, we’re back on Rad this time.
Anyway, let’s get to it.
Raddest of the Week #1: Trump Tower Pussy Protest
Unless you live under a rock you probably saw the video of Donald Trump bragging to Billy Bush about how he likes to walk up to women and “grab them by the pussy.” My favorite part of this story is the defenses of Trump where people mistake the righteous indignation many 0f us feel toward Trump’s bragging about sexually assaulting people for self-righteous indignation about “lewd language.” In other words, what I’m getting at here, is that people are mad about the “grab” part, not the “pussy” part. Because, if he had said, “grab them by the vagina” or “grab them by the vulva” or even, “give them a tantric yoni massage without asking,” people would still be pissed. Because it’s the “without asking” part that is what is offensive.
Anyway, so, a bunch of ladies gathered outside of Trump Tower and held a rally to protest him. And now a bunch of women have come forward and said that Trump has done the exact thing he claimed to be doing in his “locker room talk.” So good job, protesters.
D-bag of the Week Nominee: Wikipedia hackers
Somebody hacked both of the Clinton’s Wikipedia pages yesterday, replacing it with a borderline pornographic image with some non-borderline racist text. There was some discussion in the office yesterday about whether the trolls who did this were trolling the Clintons and/or liberal SJWs and/or cuckservatives or if they were trolling the type of people who troll people with pornographic, racist, homophobic messages. I’m not sure there is a practical difference, because, like Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Mother Night, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.”
Men’s Trait’s Raddest Thing of the Week: Trump/Arrested Development mashups
Mitchell Hurwitz, AKA creator of the best TV comedy of all time, Arrested Development, Tweeted out this video from #nevercaesar that gives the first Trump v Hillary debate in which Ron Howard’s narrator fact checks the debate:
This is so perfect I can’t fucking even. Just the other day, when Trump put out that ad featuring Hillary Clinton coughing over ISIS fighters doing ISIS things and then her stumbling to her car because of pneumonia and heat exhaustion, I said to myself, “Wow, Trump has basically turned into Gob Bluth when he made that ad for George-Michael’s student body president campaign.”
Because seriously, Trump’s stump speech now consists of basically calling Hillary Clinton a bastard and saying lecherous things about the women he swears he never groped, and oh Poor me I don’t have to be doing this, I’m doing it for you, you better vote for me or our country will cease to exist. Also every time he mentions “The Blacks” or, as in the debate clip, “The African-Americans,” he sounds like Gob talking about Franklin.
Men’s Trait’s Raddest Person of the Week: Ken Bone
Ken Bone stole the nation’s heart on Sunday night when he stood up in his Red Sweater and asked, “What steps will your energy policy take to meet our energy needs while at the same time remaining environmentally friendly and minimizing job layoffs?”
The internet took it from there.
There’s Ken Bone Thugs-n-Harmony:
There’s the Ken Bone Sex pun:
There are others but you get the idea. Of course, whenever anyone gets internet famous there’s always a backlash. Some people pointed out that his question, while it was the only question even tangentially related to climate change, was really about how he could keep his job at a coal-fired power plant. Other’s did some digging into his Reddit history, where he appears to enjoy porn and once made a comment about Trayvon Martin that has some people kinda pissed. The full quote: “From what I read about the case the shooting of Trayvon Martin was justified, but from what I’ve learned of Zimmerman through statements, interview and behavior he’s a big ole shitbird. Bad guy legally kills kid in self defense. Sucks for everybody, including us due to the media fuckery.”
I know that nuance is not exactly prized on the Internets, but here goes. It seems to me that our man Ken Bone is trying to finesse the situation, to see both sides, as it were. Technically, according to the State of Florida and their fucked up laws, George Zimmerman did shoot Trayvon martin in self defense. In a case of actual self defense, shooting someone is justified. We can argue about whether or not the law is correct, and of course, in a just society Trayvon would still be alive and Zimmerman would be in prison for beating his wife and girlfriends and molesting his cousin. Because he is, in fact, a big ole shit bird. He’s a giant fucking shit bird.
And props to Ken Bone for using “shit bird,” which is hands down one of my favorite things to call anyone.
So, okay, I still think Ken Bone is rad, but I get it if you think he’s less rad now. People are complicated and we forget that sometimes, especially on the Internets. Also, someone hacked his Wikipedia page earlier this week, too:
But in addition to working at a power plant, he was a drummer in a Christian Rock band (Lame) where he “got all the chicks” (Cool). He’s for marriage equality (Rad).
So Ken Bone, Men’s Trait’s Raddest person of the Week. Congratulations and stay cuddly, buddy.
