Cambridge Citi 1: California Proposition 8 [A Bug's Life]

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I'm so sorry that Proposition 8 looks like passing - it's horrifying that such a small split in vote, just 52:48, potentially has the power to ban people's marriages.

But: my local buses have been featuring a series of lifestyle ads to illustrate the fun one can have with a day's bus ticket. I was surprised to see one which suggests young gay women, amongst the young straight women and young families and young professionals. A few people said they'd be interested to see a photo, and here it is:

So what's going on with her and Suzie?

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There are 46 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

And what's going on with her amazing light-up right boob, there?

It looks rather like a Tony Stark/Iron Man style nuclear fusion power supply artificial heart thingy.

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I want one! *has thoughts of a cross between Iron Man and Barbarella*

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I think Samus Aran is the closest you'll get.

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[grin] Yes, I saw that. It made me smile.

Hee hee. They're twins!

You may not be able to see this, but for the benefit of Facebook-enabled comment readers: Like We Give A Toss About Your Day In The City.

Also T-shirts.

Woohoo! Twincest!

I hang out with too many slashers, don't I?

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Hey, I wrote this post in a spirit of support and respect and hope for a better future. I don't like to see objectifying comments here, however jocularly meant. I've heard enough of them in my life, and am fed up. Men saying "Lesbians! Phwoar!" particularly wind me up because it's so not appropriate. They're just nice girls, having a nice day out in the city with their reasonably-priced bus tickets.

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Sorry. I thought I was making more of an observation about slashers than anything else, TBH.

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Thanks. I don't hang out with enough slashers, so I didn't recognise what I assume must be a fairly standard kneejerk response. I still don't like it though (grr to them).

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The main thing that was not usual about this reponse is that in the slash community it would almost always be het fangirls saying it about purportedly gay men, so I didn't really think of it as about about women at all, even though it was, if that makes sense.

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Oh, that's a whole different set of contexts from my default, but I see how it could be an expected quip in those circumstances. But I still don't like it and will growl at people if I hear it again :-)

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Look at the age breakdown of the votes. Eventually the older ones will die off. Things will work out over time even if they don't right now.

Yes, that looks reassuring. It's always possible that people become less tolerant with age though, and their vote will shift from No to Yes. Possible, but unlikely.

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I have it on good authority - my sprog who lives in Berkeley - that a court challenge is being prepared. I don't believe this issue is over by any means.

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Being a Californian, I hope things will work out well (i.e., as I wish them to), but now being an Official Octogenarian, I kinda hope "the older ones" won't die off _too_ soon. Actually, many of the Persons Of Advanced Age I know -- even those who enjoy creebing about different/scandalous LifeStyles -- have a pretty much a "live and let live" attitude. It's the remarkably large young (up through 30-something) group who've Found Religion and want to impose it (&/or their ideas) upon everyone that I worry about.

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I feel proud to have bought the Cambridge dayrider lots and lots of times when

rysmiel lived there! Go Cambridge, go "GLBT people are normal people" ads.

Strange that it's Stagecoach, a company run by Brian Souter, a scary evangelical who spent so much time and money campaigning to keep Section 28.

I know! I came across that when searching for existing references to "gay stagecoach bus". There are plenty of other ways to read the ad if one really doesn't want to confront the idea of women who might possibly like women.

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I was somewhat amazed to see a Citi bus plastered with a Stonewall employment rights poster (caption: "You don't have to be homphobic to work here, but it helps"). Wonder if there's some kind of internal anti-Souter backlash going on in middle management?

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Incest!

Um. Ew.

I don't read incest there. One of the women pictured is the one who's telling the story, maybe they're related, maybe they're flatmates; she likes Suzie who is not pictured?

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That's what I thought it was. The two in the photo look so alike I reckoned they were at least sisters, maybe twins, and Fran and Suzie are the friends they're meeting up with. And there's arguably subtext there if you want it, and not if you don't.

There were some American Nike ads recently which were much edgier. A bit of a Benetton-style manufactured controversy, admittedly, but I wonder if you can "get away" with implied lesbianism more easily? Would Stagecoach get flak from social conservatives if it were Frank and Stephen rather than Fran or Suzie?

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If it were Stephen in this ad rather than Suzie, but still with the same woman telling the story, the implied love interest would not be subtext.

That Nike ad is more complicated (thanks for the link). To me, the picture and the words conflict with each other; whenever I try to pin an interpretation on it, one of them or my (limited) knowledge of the context of basketball and US competitiveness and attitudes to homosexuality and physical dominance hierarchy tips it off.
For example: one bloke is jumping on another bloke's head (crotch in face, but that's incidental). Hurrah, jumper is strong and successful and wearing trainers and is better than the jumpee, who looks rather uncomfortable. I want to wear trainers and be successful like that, it's the American Dream! But hang on, the text says "That ain't right" Why? What's wrong with it?
and two or three other inconsistent interpretations.

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Part of it is that the Nike ads are playing with commentatorese and street slang/trash-talk too. That might be part of the problem with them; different signifiers jump out to different people, and some of the attitudes signified might be in morally sketchy territory. Some kids think it's wicked, and some people think it's just wicked.

Anyway, about the Stagecoach ad, I totally agree, but what I was really trying to ask, clumsily as it turned out, was "what if all the characters in the Stagecoach ad were male?". Would a gay subtext be more controversial than a lesbian one? Instinctively, I think it would...

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I agree, I think a gay subtext would be more controversial. Perhaps because it's harder to ignore, she says, noting that in our culture Queen Victoria was happy to believe that lesbianism didn't exist and presumably the women were just friends. At least, that's the popular but probably over-simplified view of her position.

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I saw it first as a twin lusting after her sister... then I thought maybe it was someone wanting the pair of them, which would be less icky I suppose. Not to worry!

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You know, I've never read the text on those. Normally I'm a compulsive reader, but I'm distracted by the alarming angle of the photos. There's no time to ponder equality issues when giant people are about to topple onto your bike.

I'm all for GLBTQ adverts, but I totally despise those bus adverts - my least favourite being the blonde woman who wants a new kitchen. It's demoralising, vapid consumerism and I haaaate it. Ugh.

Yeah, I hate that one too.

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Oh yes, but I think the whole middle-of-the-road clichés of the other ads made me more surprised to see this one. She's still wet though, and Suzie should maybe hold out for someone who can be more decisive about tattoos and talk about more than jeans and bus tickets. She says, after making a whole exciting LJ post about bus tickets :-)

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Oh, absolutely. Suzie can do sooo much better...

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She could start off by looking for someone who can spell 'panini'... and who doesn't advertise their latest crush on the back of a bus...

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Much better we should advertise them on LJ. (OK, I don't talk about mine here unless they're actual relationships, not just crushes.)

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Quite. All these people ever do is buy shoes and go back to each other's places.

Amusingly they have the same adverts in Bracknell, where a bus is about as useful for getting round the town centre's boring clothes shops as a chocolate fireguard, since they are all in a hideous concrete wee-smelling pedestrian area.

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One of them goes to the Rosie to meet her grandspawn. But she's very annoying too.

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I wonder if they've done anything about the gender bias, where the women's dayrider things are all about shopping, and the men's megarider ones are about going to work and football.

Not that I've seen. As other commenters have stated, they're all pretty bland: I don't envy the men particularly.

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Finally, someone agrees with me :) That dayrider ad's been on for years, and I said they were lesbians, and people said they weren't.

Maybe they aren't, but they probably are. It's the last line that tips the balance for me, it mirrors the "wonder if BlokeName will be there!" from an ad featuring a presumed-heterosexual woman where it's implied she hopes to pull Bloke at the club after a day getting clothes and makeup.

It's not the sort of thing you can prove mathematically, and that takes some of my friends out of their comfort zone.

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I haven't seen one saying "wonder if BlokeName will be there". There's one saying something like "go clubbing with Tom" and then "go home (his?)"

I guess the lesbian one could have been more blatant by saying "Wonder if Suzie will be there / Go home (hers?)"

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Hmm, I'll have to keep a look out to see if I'm misremembering. *turns into a bus-spotter*

I expect they wanted to keep the Suzie bus ambiguous.

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Yeah :(

As someone said, wtf is with a constitution that can be amended by a majority vote? It sort of makes sense, if, eg. you want the electorate to propose a constitution the legislature can't arbitrarily break, but surely the purpose is to provide some sort of inertia to prevent knee-jerk actions.

> some sort of inertia to prevent knee-jerk actions

Concrete overshoes :-)

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Yesterday's solutions are today's problems.

In this case, the legislation-by-referendum approach was a way to break a railroad company's control over the state government, back in the 1930s.

Just to complicate things, there are two kinds of change to the California constitution, "amendments" (which can be passed by the process we've just seen) and more substantive "revisions" which have to go through a more complicated process, starting with passage by the state legislature. So it is entirely possible—our side is working on the lawsuits now—that the state constitution cannot be amended to this extent by majority vote.

(That said, all numerical requirements are arbitrary: I can imagine someone wondering what kind of constitution can be amended by a mere 3/4 vote, and someone else asking how you can have a constitution that nobody voted on.)

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Ooh, thank you, that's really interesting. I hadn't expected genuine answers :)

The idea of commonly holding referenda at all is fascinating; it's something people often talk about in principle, yet until recently I wasn't aware was common anywhere. There are obvious drawbacks for votes with tradeoffs (referendums on lower/higher taxes, without specifying what the spending would be on, for instance), and of knee-jerk responses, but you do get some control from citizens more specifically than "party A" or "party B".

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September