I Blame The Patriarchy

Speaking of film, here’s the latest release from Spinster Studios 24-Hour Emergency Art-O-Mat, iPhone Cinema Department. It’s a dilly.

Remember how there was an adorable puppy gonna show up here at El Rancho Deluxe? Well, she showed up. A yella lab. Call her Fran. The credit for this excellent name belongs entirely to my pal Erin, who once had a cantankerous old American Eskimo named Fran, a tragically noble animal I always pretended to dislike.

Although now that I think about it, I actually did dislike that dog. She was a senile old bite machine.

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An “old movie” thread has been requested. Ask and ye shall receive.

Longtime blamers are well aware that, while recuperating from gory ankle reconstruction surgery a couple years ago — remember? Bert dug a hole, and I fell in it? — I became strangely fascinated by the Turner Classic Movie channel.

The Turner Classic Movie channel, in case you never heard of it, runs old movies 24 hours a day. Talkies, silents, the odd foreign film. The movies are given shallow introductions by an avuncular presenter who focuses primarily on the personalities of the film’s personnel, rather than offering any really useful critique. Initially I started watching TCM while I lay imprisoned on the living room couch because it is more or less commercial-free. It is more commercial-free than PBS, which, in addition to shilling for the megatheocorporatocracy, tends to run really long, tiresome commercials for itself featuring handsome, well-groomed children of all colors leaping through the air in slow-motion waving “PBS” signs, showing public broadcasting’s affluent honky audience how diverse they are. TCM, though not even remotely patriarchy-free, at least refrains from overt messages that purport to demonstrate Exxon-Mobil’s deep concern for the environment.

When I say that TCM is not even remotely patriarchy-free, I am not fucking kidding. I have yet to see a single film in their catalog that doesn’t throw a yacht party celebrating the mores of the culture of oppression. War movies, romantic comedies, films noir — even the iconoclastic films and the beloved classics — revolve around either a) the White Dude Experience or (somewhat less often), b) women who fail to conform to the mandates of White Dude Experience and get an educational smackdown. Turner Classic Movies is a great repository of stylized, idealized, heroifized patriarchy in action.

Recently on Kubrick night I watched (for the millionth time) “Dr Strangelove,” a gorgeous and funny film it is impossible not to admire despite the fact that the only woman in the whole thing is a Playboy centerfold. There are many reasons to admire it, such as the the opening sequence where war planes refuel in midair to a cheesy soundtrack, Peter Sellers in 3 roles, the verite-style battle sequence, and the fact that it is one of the few non-indie films ever made which does not contain the line “I don’t know what to believe anymore!” But it’s also one of the most phallo-centric things going, and at the end — after Slim Pickens has ridden the giant nuclear bomb penis that will destroy the earth — when Dr Strangelove describes a post-apocalyptic paradise involving a shit-ton of hot babes at the ready to service the survivors through the nuclear winter, I was primed to throw a boot at the movie delivery device.

My thesis is this: that the entire canon of 20th century cinema is misogynist, classist, racist, and is therefore impossible for the radical feminist to appreciate without cringing, throwing stuff, and blowing a lobe.

Here’s my favorite beef: the scene where a dude and a woman are running, running, and the virile dude is yanking the woman’s hand, dragging her pathetic terrified person along, and she falls because she’s wearing fucking high heels, and he picks her up and they continue running, running, him dragging her along like a wagonload of screaming mimis.

I also can’t stand it when actors yank horses’ mouths, which they all, without exception, do.

What chaps your hide, cinematically speaking?

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Speaking of human trafficking and modern slavery, check out this podcast of a recent “To The Best of Our Knowledge” program entitled “The New Abolitionists.”

The first segment of the podcast features Maria Suarez, who at the age of 16 was lured away from her family by the promise of a domestic position with an elderly couple. She was instead sold for $200 to a psychopath who abused her for 5 years. The psychopath then murdered a guy and pinned it on Suarez, who ended up doing more than 20 years in prison for a murder she didn’t commit.

Despite piles of sex-slavery anecdotes, there exists controversy over whether or not human trafficking really is the human rights crisis it’s made out to be by activists and do-gooders. At this moment I hold in my hand a book called Sex at the Margins by Laura María Agustín, in which the author argues, based on a shit-ton of research and field work, that the aforementioned activists and do-gooders have ulterior, non-altruistic motives, that “trafficked” as a descriptor isn’t doing anyone any favors, that thousands of women freely “migrate” and take up “sex work” as a result of completely autonomous decisions, and that efforts to “rescue” them just fuck them up.

Agustín takes a pretty non-judgmental view, which is cool, except she extends it, unpalatably, to the “clients” who buy women. In fact, she avers that the number of men who pay to rape women is so enormous that it actually disproves the radfem hypothesis that engaging in rape culture is perverse. By which logic, pay-to-rape is the norm, making the few dudes who don’t exploit women into psychos.

Agustín proposes a theoretical framework of sexploitation based, not on male violence, but on the idea that many women have concluded, through the independent personal sovereignty available to marginalized females in such superabundance today, that “sex work” is preferable to other occupations.

I don’t disagree that “rescue” efforts might often fall into the category of ham-fisted feminist theorists gone mad, that the feminists who know what’s best for everybody often silence the injured parties, or that “helpers [...] become ventriloquists occupying the main stage while the helped sit mutely in the wings.” But dang it, in a patriarchy, where women are the sex class, and sexploitation is considered by anyone to be a dignified, violence-free occupation, something’s really fucking wrong.

If only there were time for an analysis! But it’s 105 in the shade here in Cottonmouth County, and I have to find a veranda, recline, and fan myself.

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As promised: the well pump repair documentary, cinematographed with my iPhone. Five minutes of pure torture.

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Today’s “Hugs, Twisty” letter comes from Adrienne, who endears herself by quoting me in an excellent essay in which she reports on a demonstration in Boston against Exodus Ministries. You remember those Exodus knobs? They’re the ones who think they can convert homos through “the power” of the ghost of a dead Nazarene on a stick.

In the essay to which I allude — which essay, she says, “turned up on every radical/anarchist/queer website on the planet” — Adrienne uses, probably for the first time anywhere, the phrase “gratuitous homoerotic canoodling.”

But Adrienne’s most recent email leaves all that fluffy shit behind to concentrate on matters much more dire. That’s right. Phonology.

Dear Jill [ Note: Adrienne didn't actually begin with "Dear Jill," but I know she felt it in her heart of hearts ]

Yay! I can never get over how awesome you are.

Meanwhile, I don’t read the comments on your blog, but the posts you’ve made about people trying to call you out all the time sound awful. So awful, in fact, that I kinda feel bad about bringing this up, but it has to do with phonology, rather than philosophical unsoundness!

You write ‘enbooben’ when it oughta be ‘embooben.’ b is a bilabial phoneme and n is a velar nasal one and English affixes match the phonological traits of the roots, e.g. enact, embody, invariable, impatient, illogical, irrespective, ensure, embalm, enact, emulate, innocent, immature, irredeemable, illegitimate, envious, empathy, and so forth.

Please don’t hate me!
Adrienne

P.S. good luck with that well.
P.P.S. many a year ago, you caused me to reconsider my uses of ellipses. Thank you.

Dear Adrienne,

Oh, you! I could never hate anyone who knows what a bilabial phoneme is.

Of course I can feel but a pale twinge of the pain you must have experienced upon perceiving my coarse phonological gaffe, but if it’s anything like the tiny razor blades that slash my eyeballs whenever some commenter considers it a matter of personal style to eschew the shift key, I can sympathize and how.

But I must tell you: It is part of the daily programme here at Spinster HQ to destroy the institutionalized discrimination governing the deployment of certain affixes in our language. Furthermore, as a spinster aunt I am professionally and morally obligated, for the sake of the revolution, to misspell made-up words describing or denoting the dominant culture’s crimes against humanity. Into which category falls the made-up word currently under review.

Thank you for taking the time to ponder the human rights crisis that is enboobenationalism, as well as for giving ellipses a second thought. And for becoming a feminist in 2005, and most especially for calling me “awesome.”

Hugs,
Jill

P.S. We will soon have some crappy video of the ag well pump repair; a more sweeping epic will have rarely been seen on YouTube.

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Yeah, I got the new video iPhone. I am a pathetic early adopter.

The video is of my giant horse Stanley. He is wishing I would just let him go out and eat some grass already.

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Once in a great while — by which I mean several times a day — I Blame the Patriarchy’s moderation queue produces a true classic. If I weren’t so dedicated a spinster aunt, whose duty it is to excise antifeminist commentary before it scathes the delicate retinas of the Blametariat and triggers massive thread derailings and pestilences, I would leave them all in so we could all have a nice chuckle. But then we’d be overrun with teenage boys and godbags, and my blogular life would become complicated. Still, sometimes I can’t resist sharing with the Blametariat.

Today’s example endears itself to me because right out of the chute there’s a completely pointless ellipsis, then it goes straight for the old this-blog-must-be-a-parody chestnut. Then it diagnoses us as paranoids and lapses into Mr Rogersism before denying the existence of patriarchy. Of course it then explains what a real feminist is, and finally, because the author cares for our health, it prescribes “relaxation” as an antidote to our senseless obstreperism. And it thinks it’s being zingy! Textbook!

This one is in response to a recent post on how our misogynist culture pathologizes unwanted pregnancy.

…Please tell me this whole blog is a parody. Say it with me: PA RA NOI A. Oh, no, the evil patriarchs are out to get me! Maybe some people just don’t want to be pregnant. It’s a pretty big deal. It has nothing to do with some mass conspiracy against women and everything to do with a major life change coming unexpectedly. The people who help women with unplanned pregnancies are the REAL feminists. People like you just have soapboxes permanently implanted in your feet and seriously need to take a few deep breaths and relax. Maybe get an aquarium.

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Ever since the Lightning Strike of Aught Nine took out my radio tower and my satellite and the computer running the missile silos I have aimed at various undisclosed megatheocorporatocratic installations, I’ve been out of the loop.

I just heard that David Letterman told a tasteless joke about Willow Palin getting knocked up. I don’t know what the joke was. But it has inspired a blotz-ton of Internetian (rhymes with “Venetian”) backlashing. Some people are in a lather, demanding that Letterman be fired. Some people are saying, “Letterman was nice to that crazy stalker lady, so obviously he’s a good guy and didn’t mean anything by it.” Some people are saying, “So what if his joke was a little sexist? Don’t tell me what jokes are off-limits, you handwringing old cunt.”

This woman, Jan Tessier, observes some feminist outrage, takes exception to the radicalism, and declares that David Letterman is the real feminist. That’s right: sensitive, compassionate David Letterman is late-nite TV’s Lone Voice of the Feminist Revolution. He apparently embodies the principles of Tessier’s personal feminist heroes Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinam [sic].

Tessier, who — I bet you didn’t know this — has been put in charge of awarding True Feminist Badges to male talk show hosts — is reacting to the remarks of Amy Siskind.

Siskind, writing at HuffPo, has justifiably had it up to here with sex-based joke buttism and the culturally-embedded misogyny that inspires it.

Jan Tessier has read Siskind’s piece, which piece basically says “Hey, media knobs! Critique public figures on the issues, not on their Receptacle2K-compliance.”

Based on Siskind’s assertion that misogyny directed at icky antifeminist women is still misogyny, Tessier has no choice but to designate Amy Siskind a fake feminist. According to this reasoning, women who have been most severely compromised by oppressive patriarchal mores — the collaboratrices — are just asking for it. Tessier feels that it’s perfectly decent of Letterman to make jokes about teen sluts because — and this statement is remarkable in its stark raving lunacy — “there is absolutely no evidence that he hates women.”

Siskind, Tessier avers, is full of shit for maintaining that the media ought to put a sock in it already with the antifeminist one-liners about public women, even when the women in question are themselves antifeminists, like California beauty queen Carrie Prejean. According to Tessier, an “empty-headed” homophobic beauty queen is fair game for boob-job jokes. “That isn’t sexism,” she writes. “That’s comedy.”

What Tessier fails to grasp is that mocking members of oppressed classes simply because they exhibit the characteristics of their oppression is pretty fucking vulgar. Why did Prejean get her despised boob-job in the first place, Jan Tessier? For her health? No, Jan Tessier. The poor deluded kid enboobified herself in order to appease her oppressor, and absorbed homophobic messages for the same reason. The whole fucking system is homophobic and loves huge tits. What’s the big surprise? Mocking women for getting boob jobs is juvenile and unsophisticated. What needs mocking is the system that requires the boob jobs.

As to whether Letterman should be fired, well hell yeah. Of course, I say that about all the old white dudes.

Letterman has apologized, and naturally it’s a classic celebrity non-apology. He claims that when he told the joke he thought he was telling it about the 18-year-old Palin daughter, not the 14-year-old, which apparently makes all the difference.

I smell a Ditwuss!

Well, one thing’s for sure. Whenever an old influential white dude like Letterman cracks wise on national TV about the sluttiness of a teenage girl, no discourse gets enbiggened. No disconsolate soul grasping for Truth and Beauty in the dank subumbra of oppression is enlightened. No tacos are garnished with fresh pico de gallo, and no lobes are bathed in fancy, bubbly happiness.

I mention the bathing of lobes because the permutations of what may and may not be considered feminism, regarding this Letterman/Palin business, are truly lobe-blowing, and I don’t have to tell you, the veteran Blamer, how messy the post-lobe-blow wreckage can be, with its waxy yellow build-up, broken glass, and mountains of empty Cool Whip tubs.

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No time to post! The ag well at El Rancho Deluxe has has blown or something, and my ranch hand Chuck and I have to fix it.

What’s an ag well? It’s a long, skinny hole in the ground reaching to a subterranean pond that, when you attach a windmill to it, pumps out water for your agricultural needs. Watering sunflowers, bathing snakes, etc. Only my ag well doesn’t have a windmill. It has a stupid electrical pump that always blows out whenever a cow breathes on it or lightning strikes it or it’s Tuesday.

But before I go, allow me to set off your gag reflex with this: Che Guevara’s granddaughter posing “semi-nude” for a PETA ad.

PETA has long been on my shit list for its freewheelin’ exploitation of our culture’s obsession with women’s oppression even as it supposedly advocates for animal liberation. Want some attention? Just pornulate some female celebrity!

Like all antifeminist activist groups — pretty much any activist or political group that isn’t specifically feminist — PETA takes particular pleasure in throwing women under the bus for The Cause. Marxist revolutionaries, the Black Panthers, the free love movement, Hamid Karzai, white liberal dudes trying to get other liberal dudes elected to public office: these guys have always counted among their most prized principles an endless capacity to endure the suffering of women.

In the ad, Lydia Guevara wears camouflage pants, a red beret, and bandoliers of baby carrots while standing with one fist on her hip and the other outstretched.

That Guevara is described titillatingly as “semi-nude” even though she is fully clothed pushes my lobe to the semi-boiling point. The ad positions PETA as edgy and with-it, but it degrades Guevara, women, revolution, carrots, vegetarianism, and the entire human species. Ditwuss!

Non-windmill-equipped ag wells are this week’s runners-up.

This more or less explains the Ditwuss Award.

[Thanks, Stellatex]

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Hugs Twisty! Whaa?

Well, Twisty may be orbiting some distant star in a talking robot ship that makes her margaritas and tacos, but her fan mail continues to pour in here in Cottonmouth County. The post office at Rattlesnake is swamped, and are thinking of giving her her own zip code. This would be a symbolic gesture, of course, since Rattlesnake’s only settlement is Spinster Aunt HQ at El Rancho Deluxe, and we already have our own zip code.

However, there is neither snail mail nor Internet on Obstreperon (it became obsolete once the natives evolved giant, throbbing omniscient brains), so Twisty is obliged to correspond via subspace vacuum tubes. One such tube arrived this morning. To wit:

“It is a pleasure to reprint this communiqué from blamer T. Daniels, who steeled up her huevos and took blaming from Internet Feminist Theory to real-life praxis.

Greetings Twisty

I would just like to write you a quick note of appreciation and thanks for inadvertently pushing me to stand up for myself against my heathen bloke-manager. I’m 23 years old, I work at an NHS a nursing home in the UK and have recently reported one of my senior colleagues for indecent behaviour towards me. He has made remarks about my appearance (and other members of female staff) and I decided I could no longer stand his low level harassment. Whereas previously I would’ve just brushed his comments off and dealt with my humiliation and embarrassment in silence I know now how important it is to not feel like I’m suffering from delusions of persecution and get this guy done. I feel that without the ammunition your writing has given me I would never have had the confidence to report this arsehole.

Thanks awfully and long live IBTP!

T.Daniels

Dear T.Daniels,

Several years ago, while I was taking a shower, I listened to cult figurine Sarah Vowell on the radio. That I was taking a shower at the time has no bearing on the story, but I am compelled to include this detail because it amazes and infuriates me that I can remember such a trivial minutia ten years later, but that really consequential stuff — what were my father’s last words to me? What is the recipe for that stuffed summer squash thing I used to make all the time in the 90’s? How many liters in a hectare? — these memories and so many more, all dusky ephemera that fluttered briefly in my glistening lobe and are no more. The aging spinster’s mind, once a vigorous, shining, athletic muscle, is now a soupy sponge that someone has thrown into a colander to drain.

So Sarah Vowell — who, despite her “concessions” to Beauty2K-Compliance (lipstick and high heeled shoes) has been called a “curmudgeon” by Bitch magazine — was on the radio in my bathroom in 1998, doing that humorous piece on her Goth makeover. You know the piece: she adopts the Goth name “Becky” and is celebrated by her Goth tutors as having “skipped a couple of levels and gone straight to pink.”

T.Daniels, you remind me of this. You have skipped a couple of blaming levels — i.e. hanging around on the blog, describing your unique relationship with your Nigel, correcting other blamers, engaging in call-out-pile-on mania — and gone straight to actual Feminism: fucking doin’ sommat what actually means sommat.

They might try to beat you into submission, demand concessions, minimize the harassment. Stay burly, T.Daniels. Letters like yours are what keep me from ripping my own head off. Thank you. I hope you apprise me of the outcome of your action. And if you know a recipe for stuffed summer squash, by all means lay it on me.

Hugs,
Twisty

P.S. On behalf of Jill, thanks to the Blametariat for all the kind internet condoling re: Zippy. She was indeed that once-in-a-lifetime dog.”

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