Ebert and Asshole

It seems to be lets-indulge-in-sexist-jocularity week over at Richard Roeper's Chicago Sun-Times column. First, he goes off on a jaunty little anecdotal riff about how exasperating us daffy girls are:

How come women can't get the message: Listen!
You call a friend's cell phone and you get her voice mail, so you leave her a message containing all the information she needs for the evening. What time you're coming by, the dress code at the event, who else will be there -- the whole game plan. She calls back and says, "So what's the game plan for tonight?"
"Didn't you get the message?" you say. "I just called you and gave you all the details."
"I didn't listen to the message," she says. "I saw that you called and figured I'd just call you back. Do you want me to hang up and listen to the message? I'll call you right back! Or you can just tell me everything that's on the message."

Argh. Why is this happening all the time? And why is it only women who do call back instead of listening to the message first?

I hope my friend Matt does not mind me porting this to the blogisphere, but his response to the above is too good not to preserve for posterity.

Anyone who starts a sentence, written or spoken, with the phrase "How come women can't..." should be kicked in the shins, after his shins have been pried off and stuffed up his anus like an apple in a Christmas pig's mouth. There should be a small, elite unit of the armed forces to rove the streets in civilian clothing and perform this procedure. We will be a nation of shinless bigotry, and we will be better for it.

Amen to that. But the overgeneralization is just the appetizer. Next, Roeper really gets into the heavy-duty bigotry sandwich, with a side of entitlement hiding under the limp parsley of "being anti-PC":

Chunky women in their underwear have surrounded my house.

Billboards of chunky women, that is. If you've been downtown lately, you've no doubt noticed the ads for Dove soap, featuring regular-sized women in bras and panties. It's part of a nationwide "Campaign for Real Beauty," and it's drawing waves of attention from the media. [snip] There's no doubt the ads are attention-getting. Let's put it this way: this is the first time in 3,000-plus columns that I've ever mentioned Dove soap.

Now here's where I'm supposed to say that I find it refreshing to see "real people" on billboards, given that our culture is so obsessed with youth and beauty, and that most billboards feature impossibly gorgeous, ridiculously thin women who have been airbrushed to a level of perfection that 99.9 percent of the population can never reach.

But the raw truth is, I find these Dove ads a little unsettling. If I want to see plump gals baring too much skin, I'll go to Taste of Chicago, OK? I'll walk down Michigan Avenue or go to Navy Pier. When we're talking women in their underwear on billboards outside my living room windows, give me the fantasy babes, please. If that makes me sound superficial, shallow and sexist -- well yes, I'm a man. And I'll have to point out that most of the men who appear on billboards and in magazines and on TV commercials are just as genetically blessed as their female counterparts.

Of course. Adverts selling soap to women should be designed with Mr. Roeper's viewing pleasure in mind. We wouldn't want him to choke on his kibbles by confronting him with this hideous sight first thing in the morning.