Quote from: meekon5 on February 25, 2011, 05:47:18 PM

Quote from: cckeiser on February 25, 2011, 12:37:24 PM

And dudes, it has been proven....I mean according to statistics...within the forum limits....there are actually more  vagina dudes then there are johnson dudes!

I was going to say that we should publish those stats, but thinking about it that would take the whole purpose of "Dude" not being gender specific away. The point (for me) is that it shouldn't matter.

I agree. I say ignore this bum who hasn't got a clue and simply don't give him any more extra balls to help light up his pin ball machine.

Dudes! Dudes! The Stats are open for anyone to read. They are right at the bottom of the forum on the right hand side listed under....are you ready for this?...Stats!!!

Dudes! Dudes! The Stats are open for anyone to read. They are right at the bottom of the forum on the right hand side listed under....are you ready for this?...Stats!!!

I never noticed the male to female ratio before.

Probably too engrossed in trying to beat DB's stats (Yeh like that will ever happen ).

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The Dude just can't have a job. Unless this is his job!

I've been meditating on this since I saw the article on facebook. Eventually, I've come to this. Bear with me since I tend to write stream-of-consciousness.

Dude, capital D, refers to all Dudeists; how we refer to ourselves. The name being of course taken from The Dude, which is also capitalized but includes "The".  Using dude - lower case d, refers to comrades, amigos, bruddas and assorted other nomenclatures for the male of the species. As in "Some dude asked me for spare change I didn't have so I shared my lunch instead." Dude in this case means "fellow human being."

It is unfair to call Dudeism a phallocentric religion since we don't venerate a male deity or male prophet. Sure there's The Dude, but unlike say, a Lebowski-ist, to us The Dude represents a philosophy, a path, a dharma, not an end in and of himself. If Walter espoused the traits of The Dude, we'd call ourselves Sobchaks. It's all just a name, the gender has piss all to do with anything. We certainly don't promote oppression.

To even hint that we're somehow anti- female is feral and preposterous. I know I for one, refer to all people as "dude".  Hell my boss is a woman, and about my age. I begin most emails that aren't work related with "Dude..." because it establishes a tone, a sense of kinship, a level of connection that is separate from the bullshit argot of business speak - you dig?

Thinking back to the movie itself, I meditated on the female characters. There's Bunny, who can represent a gold digging whore archetype, but is she really anything but an unfettered id?  "Our Special Lady" Maude is certainly not a negative stereotype. She's in control, smart, sentimental, confident, artistic, well spoken, as well as lovely to look at.  There's the unseen ex-wife of Walter's. All we know of her is via Walter, who is an unreliable narrator.

There's an entirely different tangent I want to go on where we can view The Dude and the rest of the crew through the lens of "emptiness" and "inter-connectivity" but that's a different thing alltogether.

My point being: this guy who gives a cursory once over of an article and starts making broad proclamations about us being some sort of He Man Woman Hater's Club can go piss on someone else's rug. 

I am fairly sure no lady Dude would come in here and say, "what a bunch of sexist pigs!". But I also don't see a lot of lady Dudes saying, "oh yeah, this mancave is for me".

I think this is the crux of the matter. As far as The Dude symbolizing higher principles that go beyond gender, yes, that's true, and it is true of any gendered god-figure. One big problem is that this figure is usually male in our day and times, so it's women who have to do the work of that kind of conversion in their minds and psyches if they are to apply the principles to themselves as women. And even though TBL can be viewed as validating strong and independent or unabashedly hedonistic women, it still has a male protagonist. The story is about The Dude and how he experiences women, as well as others in his life, not about a particular woman and how she experiences the people in her life.

Women have been and still are being denied spiritual equality in religions that conceive of their gods as male. This is where I think the patriarchal accusation comes from, and I think it has a high degree of validity in regard to religions that hold a lot of societal power. Dudeism is not a major religion, nor does it have a history of having been born and developed when there was much more extreme discrimination against women than there is now. I don't think Dudeism, as it stands, can influence gender issues to any great degree, but because gender equality has not yet been reached, I think that a bit of the patriarchy is probably contained in its message and its adherents. We are all a product of our times.

im no product of my time, i am a product of my own instincts and i am, vagina and all, a DUDE.
notonly that, my best friend, who doesnt even know about TBL has called me, and everyone else 'dude' her entire adult life.
some of us just ARE, man.

Testify dude! Testify!!

I just found the excellent Dudepaper article by Rev. Stella Quinn, "Dudeism for Chicks" (http://dudespaper.com/dudeism-for-chicks.html/). I'm totally with that.

"Excellent"? Really? Didn't think much of it myself - agreed with a couple of her points - the rest I found to be an article by numbers. Shallow reading of the material she used but I guess it was a timely piece. More forum Dudes need to venture forth into the Dudespaper article game, perhaps. There is an open invitation to bloggers everywhere to write about Dudeism to buff up their profiles. Nothing wrong with that, I guess, as they say 'there is no such thing as bad publicity" (although I am not too sure about that now I've used the quote). When all is said and done I am kinda done with that particular issue.