Everyone loves cupcakes, right? Sweet, portable, frosted cupcakes. Good for childhood birthday parties and swish grown-up ones too, after that minute or two when they were apparently A Thing for hipsters and foodies and foodsters and people who never got over Sex & the City. Whether Red velvet or devil’s food, or just a plain iced cupcake, a cupcake is the perfect treat.
Pinky Pie certainly loves cupcakes. Sing it, Pinky!
[a song by the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic character Pinky Pie, sung while she bakes cupcakes:
“All you have to do is take a cup of flour,
Add it to the mix!
Now just take a little something sweet, not sour,
A bit of salt–just a pinch!
Baking these treats is such a cinch,
Add a teaspoon of vanilla.
Add a little more, and you count to four
And you never get your fill-a~
Cupcakes, so sweet and tasty~
Cupcakes–don’t be too hasty,
Cupcakes~ cupcakes, cupcakes, CUPCAKES!”]
It’s hard to imagine the universally beloved cupcake being used for evil. But that’s just what conservatives have been doing lately.
EXHIBIT A:
Pro life cupcakes.
October 9th is National Pro Life Cupcake Day (google it, I dare you). Here’s how it’s “celebrated”:
“once a year, on October 9th, we would bake as many birthday cupcakes as humanly possible and hand them out for free wherever we can. When people asked whose birthday it is, we tell them these cupcakes are for celebrating the birthdays of every person who never gets to have a birthday. People respond in all ways – from refusing the cupcake, to sharing about abortions they’ve had in the past and the regret they carry, to just wanting to know more.”
Mm tasty. I love the taste of genocidal guilt in the morning.
EXHIBIT B:
Racist cupcakes
College Republicans at UC Berkeley recently held an “affirmative action” bake sale where they charged different amounts for race – the most for whites, the least for Native Americans, with women of all races getting a 25c discount.
A piece of cutting-edge satire that puts the likes of Voltaire and Johnathan Swift to shame. Whites pay more! Cos the system’s fixed against them! Hilarious and totally true, as all the employment and poverty statistics ever will back up.
EXHIBIT C:
Homophobic cupcakes
Last year in Indianapolis, a bakery refused to make rainbow coloured cupcakes to celebrate National Coming Out. When asked why, the baker replied that “cupcakes are only for good heterosexual Christians. You don’t know where those people might put a cupcake” (note: quote entirely fictional).
IN CLOSING
Do not be fooled by the sweet and tasty cupcake. As I write this, somewhere in North Dakota a Republican-run warehouse is hoarding cupcakes, hardening them up for use as weapons to throw against the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators. It’s the next generation of riot control, used in conjunction with the infamous “kettling” technique. So much for afternoon tea.
And even if you’re the type to avoid political protests, you’re still in the firing lines. Just when you think you’re safe, one will be used against you–maybe at a bridal shower, or a friend’s birthday party. And then they’ll have got you in their icing-fingered grasp, and you’ll become smug and empathy-free, thumbing through your copy of Atlas Shrugged as you complain to anyone who’ll listen that “y’all don’t know what it’s like, being male middle-class and white.”
I would like to leave you with some alternative treats besides the evil cupcake, but all I could find was more evidence of baked perfidy. I think we’ve all seen the footage of Wall Street bankers drinking champagne eating macaroons as they look down on the protesters in scorn. Cookies? Contain razor blades. Danish? Hitler loved danish, probably.
And cake? The cake is a lie.
h/t for pro-life cupcakes to Chloe Angyal, purveyor of the one, true biscuit: Tim Tams.
23 Comments
I’m tempted to walk up to those College Republicans and thank them for giving me a discount comparable to the wage gap between me and my alternate-universe male double. Maybe see if they’ll thrown in something extra for the fact that in some parts of the country I still have no legal recourse if I lose my job because I’m an out lesbian.
Ahahah yes! Friendship is Magic!
I don’t get the Republican cupcake sale…
…because I remember a progressive group on my Alma mater campus doing the same thing, with reverse motivations. Charge races & sexes different amounts, to illustrate the wage gaps.
Does the Republican group not know about this? Do the students there not know that what they’re doing is actually a good illustration of pay discrimination – to individuals, not to the campus.
October 9th? Pro-Life Cupcakes are ruining Lennonalia!
Also, that store owner seriously thought their daughters would be scarred by rainbow cupcakes? Seriously?
But, but, but cupcakes are made of SUGAR. And FAT. Something something Obesity Epidemic!
Well, I for one have made top surgery cupcakes, blood-oozing cupcakes for the series finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and cupcakes for a friend’s queer commitment ceremony. So there, anti-choice cupcakes! I’m taking cupcakes back! One moist crumb at a time…
Thank you! I laughed in several places. This was the sentence that made me laugh out loud: “And then they’ll have got you in their icing-fingered grasp, and you’ll become smug and empathy-free, thumbing through your copy of Atlas Shrugged as you complain to anyone who’ll listen that “y’all don’t know what it’s like, being male middle-class and white.””
HOW TO MAKE RAINBOW CUPCAKES
1. Make white cake batter. Either use your favorite recipe or use a box. Boxes are fine. There’s no judgement here.
2. Put it in 6 bowls.
3. Add dye to the bowls. Rainbow dye. Different color in each bowl. Use food coloring or gel or some other edible dye please.
4. Put it in the cakes with little glops of each rainbow color in order. Or just do it glopily and they’ll be super colorful and still pretty gay. Whatever.
5. Bake. Eat.
Okay so I haven’t actually done this but these cakes have like taken over every community I’m on for some reason so I feel like I know what I’m doing even though I don’t.
Alternately, I HAVE made gay jello, which is super easy: get 6 colors of Jello. Make the purple. Put it in your container. Let it harden, at least mostly. Make blue. Add it. Keep doing this in rainbow order until you have gay jello. I did this in high school for the Laramie Project cast party and it was great because a) it was awesome and delicious and b) I was not the only person who thought of it and someone else made one too (though his was layered with whipped cream).
EVERYBODY
QUEER YOUR DESSERTS
So, you’re into the intersection of cupcakes and evil… and you like Pinkie Pie…
THE INTERNET HAS SOMETHING FOR YOU
But, is it okay to eat the fetus cupcakes??? Because the cupcakes have me in their addictive grasp, and also I can’t really turn down free food (it’s a grad student thing). Obviously, I can’t eat the racist cupcakes because I trust them with my money less than I’d trust my three-year-old cousin, but . . . free cupcakes? Yummy yummy fetus cupcakes? I promise not to cry inside.
Apropos of evil cupcakes, I presume we’re all familiar with Man Boobz’s cupcake files?
http://manboobz.com/search/label/cupcake
Man Boobz chronicals some of the lowlights of the men’s rights activists online ramblings. One such lowlight included a rather comical statement about how feminists/women are like cupcakes: all sweet and delicious looking on the on the outside, but pure evil inside.
@Brennan: you can totally take the fetus cupcake and eat it too, as long as you tell them with great solemnity you plan to enjoy the eating, then take a laxative to help you abort it later, with no regrets about getting on with your life afterwards and eating cupcakes again when you’re ready.
also, nothing but love for TimTams <3
Cakes and pro-life protests were in the news this week in the U.K too! I love this story:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/the-womens-blog-with-jane-martinson/2011/sep/29/cakes-and-right-to-choose
Pro-life protesters tend to be a little less combative over here. I work for a charity that counsels and refers teens for termination referrals, and our protesters are pretty polite, usually stood outside in silent protest holding a fake foetus.
It’s an odd thing when they come in asking to use the loo, leaving you holding their foetus for them.
Ditto what KJ said at #11. This insane MRA rant blames feminist and cupcakes for world poverty and hunger.
@ Becca –
We actually did a Wage-Gap bake sale as part of a sociology-project in college. And yeah, white dudes paid more than everyone else. The discounts applied to everyone else accounted for the appropriate wage gap.
Most of the white guys didn’t mind all that much – they said the price difference wasn’t big enough to bitch about. Apparently these dudes couldn’t handle the complex math presented by percentages….
“The cake is a lie” Have I spotted a Portal reference? If so, props! Great piece.
If I may plug my city: The bakery in Indianapolis that refused an order for a Pride event was housed in the public City Market. Their lease was pulled by the city because discrimination against gays was prohibited by the contract for public space.
And another bakery gave the Pride event lots and lots of cookies for free, and the local news stations covered it fairly appropriately.
Not always a bastion of hope and equality here in the middle of the middle of the US, but in this case, both our city and our community did it right.
I read the first chunk of this and thought it was amusing, then read the second half and realized both the Pinkie Pie and Portal references actually made sense in context with some relatively important news. Props!
@Tree, #5:
http://jezebel.com/5844802/too-fat-to-have-an-abortion
Not sure how this works with fat-shaming, PP, and choice?
Those MRAs just need to get some of these super masculine cupcakes into them.
There’s a bonus fucked up element to the pro-life cupcake thing; if ‘handing them out wherever we can’ includes outside of actual clinics to people seeking procedures, it can fuck up someone’s appointment/procedure since they generally recommend you not eat immediately before (if memory serves).
Also a bonus screwed up element to the racist cupcakes: the College Republicans’ racism is such that they default to the assumption that affirmative action is always most “costly” to white men. In 2011 reality, many colleges are now giving extra points to male applicants (because they’re becoming the minority gender at schools not focused on science/math/engineering). Also, California universities in particular have been worrying about over-representation of Asians and are now alleged to be putting quotas on them (but no quotas on the number of whites).
But just try to find a College Republican who can recognize a world in which a white man gets more affirmative action benefit than an Asian woman…
http://m.cbsnews.com/blogsstorysynopsis.rbml?feed_id=71&catid=20111646&videofeed=null
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30393117/ns/us_news-life/t/asian-americans-blast-uc-admissions-policy/
I teach a Women’s Studies class where my students have to read blogs to stay updated on current events while learning the basics of feminism, and one of my students talked about this article in class. Unfortunately, she had read it a little while ago and was kind of vague, talking about how cupcakes are bad without much backing behind it. It was hilarious, but fortunately she finally remembered enough to talk cohesively on the subject! Really interesting post!