Spinster takes a holiday

prickly pear

Dang it. My obstreperatrician has diagnosed me with LLD (Lounging and Loafing Deficit). It looks like I’m going to be forced to retire deep into the Texas Hill Country for a couple of days. The prickly pears are in bloom. You haven’t loafed until you’ve spent an afternoon sitting under a post oak tree in a field of cactuses covered with pyschedelic yellow flowers.

I think there’s internet out there, but it’s dial-up, which won’t do me any good since there’s no phone. My gist is that I’ll most likely be incommunicado over the weekend, which I mention because I don’t want anyone thinking I’m dead.

Not that I couldn’t die over the weekend anyway, eaten alive by fire ants, chomped by a rattler, prickly pear impalement. But this contingency would be unexpected.

Anyway, while I’m out looking at scenery, for the sake of our mutual amusement, let’s do one of those open threads. I suggest, if you link to something, that you give a brief critical analysis along with it, so people will have something to argue about.

Happy blaming.

The Spinster Repore

Because I am the world’s leading authority on world news, I am uniquely qualified to bring you world news from around the world. Let’s go!

Malaysia: The Foreign Minister has proposed that grown women traveling abroad must produce notes from their mommies before being allowed to leave the country alone. This is because drug smugglers like to trick women into totin’ dope to the E.U., whereupon the women are arrested on drug charges and chucked into prison. The Malaysian Foreign Minister feels strongly that responsible adults should take charge of these jet-setting women.

What impeccable logic. Criminals use women to further their own evil ends, innocent women end up in jail, government responds by depriving women of rights. What’s missing from this brilliant jurisprudential scenario? The actual traffickers.

Happily, cooler heads have prevailed. Women’s groups raised a stink, and an hour ago I received word that the Prime Minister has put the kibosh on the Foreign Minister’s scheme. Sadly, one gets the sense that it’s not because of the patronizing inconvenience to women, but rather because the note-from-mommy plan would have been impossible for immigration authorities to implement. However, the episode did offer the Home Minister the opportunity to publicly declare, “We do not discriminate against women.”

I’ll bet you don’t.

Ecuador: Legislator Marie Soledad Vela demands that “a woman’s right to enjoy sexual happiness” be written into Ecuador’s constitution.

What she means, of course, is that women should own their own uteruses, and that the Constitution should support their right to reproductive health and freedom. Dudely politicos have responded with predictable outrage, as they always do when someone makes the outlandish claim that women ought to be regarded as human beings with full agency. Because men have such a hard time conceptualizing women as anything but meat socks, one of the opposing legislators has naturally accused Vela of attempting “to decree orgasm by law.”

Note that the BBC headline says “Sex on Ecuador’s political agenda,” when the actual issue is women’s rights. Sex = women 4ever!

UK: “Research” conducted by More Magazine concludes that “modern young Brit women” want their lives to be (as Germaine Greer puts it) transfigured by love. Moreover, they expect that (heterosexual) marriage to a “soulmate” will bring about this electrifying event. This apparent blind faith in the panacea effects of love-and-marriage with Prince Charming is unsurprising, since women are conditioned from the cradle to believe that lifelong, monogamous, God-approved marriage is “natural,” and that somewhere out there their special someone awaits.

Marriage is actually the elemental unit of patriarchy.

Spinster aunt continues to tiptoe through the treacherous tulips of student newspapers

Today’s selection: The Brandeis Hoot, “Shopping for Truth: Feminist and proud” by Chrissy Callahan, May 2, 2008

I kind of envy Chrissy Callahan, who has carved out something of a college journalism career chronicling the eye-opening revelations she’s experienced simply by paying attention in class. When I was her age all I did was lie around the quad hootin’ a fattie. Maybe I would have done better in college if there had hung over my head the threat of hundreds of critical eyes squinting at my newspaper summary of Women and Gender in Culture and Society Studies 5a with Professor Sue Lanser.

Then again, maybe not.

Anyway. Callahan, her exposure to feminism in the above-mentioned course having somewhat enbiggened her obstreperal lobe, gamely imparts a sort of pre-feminism primer to the readers of the Hoot.

As our readings and discussions in 5a have proven, feminism doesn’t mean what you might think it does. To be a feminist does not mean you are a man-hater or a crazy person.

Ah.

Callahan knows what time it is. She grasps that her peers are neck-deep in Dude Nation. She is aware that even now, in 2008, the average person believes that women have already achieved “equality.” She is familiar with feminism’s “negative connotations.” Thus she is obliged to start at square one and explain, to what she clearly assumes is an openly hostile audience, that fighting women’s oppression isn’t tantamount to insanity.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: because of Dude Nation’s successful propaganda campaign, most women wouldn’t be feminists with a 10 foot pole, and the few who buck this trend are required to spend 83.7% of their time begging the citizenry to believe that they don’t hate men and aren’t crazy.

Callahan is young, and hasn’t yet looked into the abyss. She’s merrily unaware of the inexpressible enormity of white male supremacy. While she isn’t fooled by “prejudice […] openly advertised under the guise of a beauty campaign,” and is “absolutely disgusted” at surgically-enhanced sexbots in the media, her grasp of feminist issues remains sketchy and pop-culture oriented. I nitpick here, not to rip young Callahan a new one, but to spotlight the excellent job Dude Nation is doing if this is what passes for a “feminist and proud” diatribe at an American university in 2008.

It’s like this. Callahan differentiates between “women” and “women of color” in the annoying the way journalists do when separating the “other” from the default: “[B]oth women and women of color have made gains in the workplace.” She is trying to illustrate her grasp of the “intersectional” quality of feminism — you can almost see her looking up that lecture in her notes — but omits to conclude that “women” is not a synonym for “white women.”

When she asks, in all earnestness, “Did you ever think about who takes care of those rich career women’s children?” the spinster aunt cringes particularly. Not only does Callahan neglect to challenge the antifeminist assumption that children are strictly the mother’s — not the father’s — problem; it clearly is Callahan’s expectation — unrealistic, given that persons of color populate 20% of Brandeis’ student body — that her audience has never given a moment’s thought to the minority experience, or to the untoward effects of an oppressive class structure.

It’s a novice move to appease the oppressor in your argument, and this is what Callahan does, more or less out the wazoo. She appeals to dudely authority in her discussion of domestic violence, agreeing that women sure can be bitchy sometimes by disclaiming “No one is about to deny that women too are capable of and do abuse men.” She shrugs off stuff like pay disparity and the “glass ceiling” with the mollifying acknowledgment that “baby steps have been taken.” And for her parting shot, she asks why we must differentiate between male and female, and wonders why we all just can’t get along.

Sure, those are mostly bush-league mistakes. It’s the stuff that Callahan doesn’t address that freaks me the fuck out. Where’s abortion? Where’s pornography? Where’s prostitution? Poverty? Lesbians? The disabled? Rape culture? Health care? Human trafficking? Undocumented immigrants? The virgin/whore dichotomy? Female genital mutilation? Honor killings? The megatheocorporatocracy? The middle-class myth of love and marriage?* Did Callahan neglect this stuff because they spent so much class time on nannies and plastic surgery that they didn’t get that far on the syllabus?

Or is it because these are the real issues, the controversial issues, the issues that actually challenge dudely rights to a submissive sex class, the issues of which you must not speak lest people think you hate men and are crazy?

Of course, as some of our high school blamers have recently reported, being a young feminist is no picnic. Maybe Callahan just doesn’t feel like alienating herself from the known universe by taking a stand on anything more controversial than Barbie dolls.

Score another one for the culture of domination. The idea that feminism is about “equal pay” will never die.
____________________
* See Germaine Greer. The Female Eunuch.

Spinster aunt reads blog, cracks sad smile

If it’s education people need, school must go.

Check out hellonhairylegs’ synopsis of a day spent imprisoned in a modern institution of patriarchal indoctrination.

Of course, it is astonishing to discover that there are any feminists in high school at all. This kid may well survive the dread junior English major year without looking like an ass.

[Via Lauredhel]

Junior English major pooh-poohs anti-violence campaign

When I finally slogged to the end of this essay (on how “average” men are deeply injured by activists who enjoin them to stop raping people), a cold, mirthless laugh erupted from the Twisty obstreperal lobe. The essay was signed “A.J. Cooke, junior English major.” Now it made sense.

I was a junior English major myself once. Which is how I know that junior English majors are not, perhaps, a species from which one might reasonably expect the most sophisticated arguments. They have not yet grasped that theirs is not the defining human experience. They cannot imagine a worldview more enlightened than their own. And they use phrases like “semantically speaking” and “the crux revolves,” often with “syntax so horrifically flawed in so many ways.”

But the callowosity of the author will not deter me from using him as an example of the lengths to which the college-educated young blots of today will go to defend rape culture.

The gist of the situation that led A.J. Cooke to emote in his student newspaper is this: U of Maryland’s campus health service spearheads Men’s Anti-Violence Project. Flyers appear. They say “Man up. Get consent.” The idea, see, is to get rapists to cut it the fuck out, already.

On the subject of the slogan itself I will say this: its patriarchonormativity makes my lip curl. A member of an oppressed class is not at liberty to consent to anything. “Consent” in the context of bumpin’ uglies is nothing but a binding contract the terms and conditions of which exclusively describe male use of women as receptacles. As we have seen, the tactics that may be used to obtain this contract do not exclude coercion, drugs, or fraud, and, once obtained, it is non-revocable. “Getting consent” doesn’t prevent rape, it just lets rapists sleep at night, and lets’em off the hook if the victim has the temerity to press charges.

However, it will surprise no one when I reveal that the power differential inherent in patriarchy which precludes true “consent” is not what’s got A.J. Cooke’s eggs in a scramble. No, A.J. Cooke is sorely discomfited by the flyers’ unflattering innuendo. The “get consent” slogan, he says, rudely implies that all men are potential rapists, and that’s not fair. It is “staggeringly insensitive” to treat all men as “monsters.” As a junior English major, A.J. Cooke knows, even if the campus health service doesn’t, that only sociopaths rape women.

A.J. Cooke’s thesis is this: “to question whether a person is acting ethically is to insult their integrity.”

Apparently, insulting someone’s integrity is just about the worst thing ever. A.J. Cooke might be surprised to know that this is precisely what cops, journalists, judges, and defense lawyers do to rape victims all day long.

But a man’s character should be understood as unassailable, and to cast a suspicious eye upon it is an outrage. Thus, as the morally spotless A.J. Cooke saunters through the quad, assaulted by messages telling him to “man up,” he feels his own humanity called into question merely by dint of his being a dude. The health center has failed “to acknowledge men as thinking, feeling human beings.”

The horror!

If you think the junior English major doth protest too much, you’re exactly right. It turns out that young A.J.’s crux revolves around a dude’s right to porn. If, he reasons, the man-hating U of M health service thinks it can reprogram the campus studs with an ad campaign, it must also believe the reverse: that media images can cause violent male behavior. And that’s just wack.

A.J. Cooke, like so many dudely patriarchy-deniers before him, asserts that pornography — the name Dude Nation gives to photographic evidence of rapes reproduced for the purpose of relieving male incontinence — is “free speech.”

If rape is free speech, it is also a right, and rights are things that entitled cowards are always willing to sacrifice other people for. This explains A.J. Cooke’s eagerness to make rape the responsibility of women, and his insistence on placing more importance on the preservation of his purported dudely “integrity” than on preventing violent crime.

So instead of trying to get men to change their rapin’ ways — an idea that, according to A.J., is “fundamentally flawed” — we should stick to what works: women’s self defense classes, admonitions to carry pepper spray and never walk alone at night, and other such tried-and-true rape deterrents. Oh, and women should carry roofie-testing kits on their person at all times, so they can perform chemical analyses on every drink they raise to their lips. Seriously.

Whatever it takes, so long as nobody’s impugning A.J. Cooke’s porn-lovin’, rape-enablin’ character.

[Thanks, Jeanette]

The vital mission of intimate apparel

cervixsellsthongs.jpg

As a spinster aunt whose monthly cancer drug bill could put a kid through Harvard, I always enjoy getting emails from people named Andrew at the National Boob Job Awareness Foundation who love my blog and are certain that my readers would equally love hearing about the Lap Dance For the Cure event or whatever. For every boner raised they’ll donate 10 cents to the Global Disease Awareness Educational Research Outreach Fund.

Why do I get the feeling that Andrew is not so avid a patriarchy-blamer as he suggests?

We have the Komen Foundation to thank for this crap. Ever since they figured out how to make people equate buying stuff with “curing” sentimental women’s diseases, doing-pointless-shit-for-the-cure is now America’s second-most-popular weekend activity. And Andrew, with his list of women bloggers, has job security for life.

Lately I’ve been getting spammed by some pretty persistent internet marketing flacks. They’re trying to leverage cervical cancer into big retail underwear bucks.

“Only one day left for Cancer Awareness Opportunity!” warns Andrew. Ah, if only I could believe that after tomorrow people wold stop trying to sell me more cancer awareness.

But this underwear thing, jayzus. Never has the commodification of fatal disease been so transparent. The pitch is something called “The Annual Undie Awards.” You log onto some site that sells underwear, input a bunch of information about the dimensions of your ass, and “vote” for your fave rave knickers. The retail underwear site will donate a quarter for every vote. They’ll also sell you your sexy animal-print thong after you vote for it.

“We all know someone who has been touched by this deadly disease,” eulogizes the sexy animal-print thong-marketing flack. “Please let your readers know about [the retail underwear site], and how their vote will also generate a contribution to this vital mission.”

Well, readers, now you know. Underwear, cervixes, voting. It’s “fun”!

Still, although cervixes are located down there, they aren’t quite as sexy as boobs, so I can appreciate that selling anything with this particular cancer is a tough slog. Here are the guys sitting around Starbucks, trying to figure out how to drive traffic to their site.

Underwearpreneur A: How about a Paris Hilton look-alike contest?

Underwearpreneur B: Dude, she doesn’t even wear underwear.

Underwearpreneur C: Hey. Let’s jump on that pink cancer bandwagon!

A: C’s right. You tell women how down you are with breast cancer and they throw cash at you AND go jogging in pink hot pants. Cha-ching!

B: Are you kidding me? We can’t afford breast cancer. Do you have any idea how much Komen charges for that logo?

C: Well, aren’t there some cheaper cancerous ladyparts?

A: Hymens?

B: Dude, hymens are too cheap.

A: Cervical cancer, then.

B: What is a cervix, anyway?

C: Nobody knows. That’s why we can get it for cheap.

B: I’ll text Andrew right now.

The underwear website is full of helpful pointers to assist women in navigating the mysterious and treacherous currents of feminine behavior. It’s not easy being a girl. Putting on a pair of underwear is apparently rocket science.

Step both legs into your panty, then pull it up until the waistband is at the desired location. Check and make sure your crotch is centered and pulled forward. Now, starting at the sides, run your fingers along and under the elastic of the leg openings towards the back to make sure the back panel is properly cupping your buttocks. Finally, run your fingers around the inside of the waistband to set it evenly at the waist.

Somebody actually got paid to write that.

________________________

Cervix photo link
Thong photo link

Obnoxious Female Feminist Korner

This guy, writing at the Guardian, is under the impression that, not only is feminism about “equality,” but that he should be awarded “full membership” in the “feminist movement.” Why? Because of, apparently, his “remarkable imagination and sense of empathy.”

Yeah, and I’ll be a woman of color blogger, too.

Opinionator Khaled Diab purports to speak for all nice guys who don’t go around raping their sisters, but the tone of his essay suggests that his personal feelings are deeply hurt. The resistance shown by what must be the all of 17 or 18 diehards worldwide who still turn a skeptical eye toward “feminist” men has cut him to the quick, and he means to put a stop to it.

He drags out all the usual patronizing arguments in favor of his election to the Global Feminist Cabal.

To exclude him is “sexist.” Which is so “paradoxical.”

“Outsiders,” Diab points out helpfully, often “become the iconic embodiment of certain struggles, such as the privileged young doctor turned poor man’s revolutionary.”

Apparently there is a long tradition, in class struggle, of privileged young doctors bailing out poor men. Feminists are just shooting themselves in the foot if they deny one of these privileged young doctors the opportunity to fulfill his destiny and defeat sexism on their behalf, thereafter to erect a statue of this iconic embodiment in the town square.

Moreover, chides the sentimental Diab, chicks can be chauvinist pigs, too! Men “don’t have a monopoly on being domineering.” Seriously. Men wouldn’t dominate “the movement” any more than “obnoxious female feminists” do; remember, men are so remarkably imaginative and empathetic (hey, I know! The men could protect the nice feminists from the obnoxious ones.).

Diab complains that having “direct experience” of sex-based oppression shouldn’t really be the deal-breaker that those 17 or 18 feminists make it out to be. But. If we insist: it turns out men do have direct experience! Which Diab defines as the impact on the dominant class when people of lower status get screwed over. Clearly the male experience of “anger and frustration” on his wife’s behalf is qualitatively identical to enduring the persistent threat of violence that every woman suffers whenever she leaves the house (and often even when she doesn’t), or the fact that white dudes own several of her internal organs, or living in poverty with 3 kids and no healthcare.

His direct experience of women’s oppression so sorely chaps his hide that — although he allows that he doesn’t go to rallies or “shout from the rooftops” — Diab demands to “fight shoulder to shoulder” with women as a “fully-fledged feminist.” I suppose we can take that to mean that he won’t be kicking the shit out of Mrs. Diab. How iconic.

“You don’t,” he opines, by way of proving his progressiveness, “need to be […] a member of a minority to appreciate the suffering caused by racism.” Well. You can “appreciate” it all you like, but that doesn’t mean you get to learn the secret handshake or come to the potlucks. For all Diab’s “direct experience,” the defining aspect of oppression appears to have eluded him. That is, the oppressed don’t trust him. What did he expect, the big whiner? He enjoys supremacy over them every day.

So appreciate away, dude. With the emphasis on “away.”

Fetuslove, Canadian-style

As a Texan lesbo spinster aunt, I am the world’s leading authority on Canadian abortion law, so when I got an mass email from Bonnie Gembey at LEAF Manitoba that said, “Ladies, the Harper government is up to its usual shenanigans again,” I knew just what to do.

I went straight to Google and looked up LEAF Manitoba and “Harper government.”

It turns out that Canada has a Prime Minister named Stephen Harper, and has had since 2006! I must’ve slept through that election.

Like all Prime Ministers, Stephen Harper is a peach of a guy. He is an AC/DC fan, belongs to an evangelical church in Ottawa, bribes MPs to change their votes, and opposes spousal benefits for same-sex couples.

No, it’s true! I read it in Wikipedia.

LEAF Manitoba, on the other hand, is not only not favored with a Wikipedia blurb, it doesn’t seem to have a website at all. I finally found what I believe is their parent organization, though, the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund. Here is their mission statement:

* To ensure the rights of women and girls in Canada, as guaranteed in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, are upheld in our courts, human rights commissions and government agencies; and

* To take actions to reveal how factors such as race, class, Aboriginal status, sexual orientation, ability, and religion compound discrimination against women.

LEAF doesn’t mention anything about overthrowing the social order per se, but it appears that they grasp the general idea that women are human. In fact, the second part of their statement, wherein they vow to “reveal” how the social order facilitates women’s oppression, sounds suspiciously similar to patriarchy-blaming. Can I get a hell-yeah!

Anyway, what’s got LEAFer Bonnie Gembey’s oysters in a pot is a bill working its way through Parliament, Bill C-484. This bill would grant legal personhood to — say it with me — fetuses. The sentimentally-titled “Unborn Victims of Crime Act” would allow authorities to press additional, more bad-ass charges if a fetus (the “unborn child”) is aborted concurrent with a violent crime perpetrated against a woman (the “mother”).

Jiminy crickets! you are undoubtedly thinking. Where the fuck does a profoundly fucked up idea like fetal personhood come from?

It comes, O young onion, from a cabal of dudes indoctrinated from the cradle with magical misogynist thinking. This cabal of dudes arbitrarily decides, based on their self-identification as patriarchs, on their fucked-up interpretation of a 2000-year-old text written by fucked-up barbarians, and on their insensibly passionate love for their own sperm (which they appear to believe are mini-men), that a clot of cells is precisely, qualitatively, philosophically, even phenotypically the equivalent of any old autonomous being sauntering through the town square.

But why? Why ignore science and common sense and one’s ethical obligation to half the human race to perpetuate this quaint but destructive fiction?

As poetical blogger Richard Jeffrey Newman (whose excellent essay on the godbag origins of the anti-choice movement I recommend, not least because it reminded me of the hilarious little homunculus idea) sez:

If I am […] essentially no different from the bundles of cells that result from the coming together of egg and sperm, then protecting the children-to-be growing in the wombs of pregnant women from the “capricious” choices of free-willed women is a kind of retroactive self-preservation.

That’s right. It’s male ego, male fear of death. Fetal personhood places the status of women right where it belongs: firmly in the cytoplasm of a parasitic growth containing dudely mini-me DNA.

Fetal personhood is fucked in many ways, but relevant to Bill C-484, it is fucked because whereas it purports to remedy violent crime against pregnant women, it does nothing to address the factors that actually contribute to violence against women, and will certainly erode abortion rights (which, I think I can say without fear of contradiction, is the bill’s real purpose).

The LEAF press release suggests all manner of proposals that could help achieve the purported purpose of Bill C-484, without quite so much of the antifeminist fetus-loving godbagism. Such as

adequate financial security for women and children trying to leave abusive situations, more stable funding and education opportunities for women with children, and better training for police, lawyers and judges and better [funding] for transition houses and women’s groups serving the needs of abused women.*

LEAF goes on to call out the government for what it is: the above-described cabal:

If this or any other Canadian government was serious about addressing violence against women, including pregnant women, it would look to the wealth of recommendations made over the years by a range of community-based organizations with expertise in assisting women and children victims of violence.*

And maybe it wouldn’t endeavor write into law the psychopathic notion that women are nothing but fetus-incubating meat bags. Jesus tap-dancing Christ. If a fetus is a person, a woman isn’t.

_____________________________
* Sorry, no link; I quoted this text from Bonnie Gembey’s email, and was unable to find it anywhere on the LEAF website.

I sprained my ankle

I know, I know, who gives a tub of Cool Whip about anyone’s orthopedic problems? But you should give a tub of Cool Whip about this orthopedic problem, because had I not spent the afternoon immobilized with an ice pack and a laptop in my lime green recliner, I might never have found this incredible video, which has forever changed the way I look at a cappella renditions of popular TV themes, and which I now share with you, my most intimate and valued invisible internet friend. Prepare to have your mind blown.

Note: Because it is not readily apparent from the video — even though the title of the video is “Battlestar Galactica Theme” — I will clue you in: it’s the Battlestar Galactica theme.

I had to quit watching “Battlestar Galactica” because that yell-o-headed Cylon in the red fuck-me dress was just too sexy for my shirt.

[Via Wired]

Good morning, patriarchy!

There were a couple of tornadoes swirling around the Texas Hill Country last night, so this morning, upon springing from the TempurPedic like Morning-bright Apollo, I fire up the Weather Channel to assess the probability that I will find my horse Stanley stuck in a tree when I nip off to the barn later today.

But the teevee isn’t tuned to the Weather Channel. Instead, the first image to contract the Twisty irises this morning is a guy in a puffy shirt with a canine overbite embracing a statuesque blonde supermodel.

“To hell with foreplay!” he snarls. His fake dental prostheses clamp onto her throat. Blood spurts. Woman screams.

That’s right. It’s a gothsploitation film called “Way of the Vampire.” At 8 in the morning.

Vampires. What a load of misogynist BDSM catholicbag cornball crap that is.




What is this?

You are reading I Blame The Patriarchy, the patriarchy-blaming blog that advances the radical feminist views of Twisty Faster, a gentleman farmer and spinster aunt eating dinner in Austin, Texas.

I Blame The Patriarchy is intended for advanced patriarchy-blamers. It is not a feminist primer. See Patriarchy-Blaming the Twisty Way for details.

"I couldn't get Twisty's point. It was so longwinded." -- The Blogosphere

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