She’s been arrested, she’s been freed, she’s been arrested again, she’s been freed again, she’s been denied a passport, she’s been interviewed by Lisa Mullins but couldn’t speak freely–it’s like the government of Pakistan is the drunkest guy at the fucktard’s frat party. Fortunately for confused supporters, Tom Watson has compiled the definitive Mukhtaran Bibi fansite collecting all the latest news and developments. The idea, of course, is to somehow pressure Musharraf into letting Mukhtaran Bibi continue with plans for a US speaking tour. Watson is extremely sanguine about the results that blogger awareness might generate. You go, girl.
Monthly Archive for June, 2005
Page 2 of 4
Salvador Dali "Self-Portrait as Mona Lisa" (1954)
American women, and I suppose some American men, too, if they are pretending to be progressive, view the Veiled Woman as a grim symbol of Muslim paternalism run amok. In the US, the veil is the logo of terrible oppression.
I’m not saying veiled women aren’t oppressed. In certain parts of the world, girls who saunter through the public square in a pair of hot pants and a tube top get acid thrown on them. That’s no trifle. Still, I wonder how much of the American distaste for the veil is rooted in the conviction that pre-menopausal women ought to pretty much wear hot pants all the time?
But I digress.
To those Americans who gaze about the landscape, observing satisfying amounts of cleavage and sighing the relieved sigh of American entitlement because, although women here may earn less than men and are more likely than men to die in poverty, at least they can run around in hot pants, I have this to say: Pause a moment. Reflect.
Your liberty is not what it seems.
For although the consequences of an appearance infraction are not often, for the busy Western gal-on-the-go, immediately life-threatening (although they certainly can be), the pressure on her to cave in to patriarchal mandate, looks-wise, is every bit as strong as it is for a Pakistani woman. Western women may run little risk of acid attacks, but are nevertheless very strongly compelled to conform to standards which are, when viewed objectively, just as soul-suckingly asinine as the veil. I have recently held forth on the relationship of women’s clothing to patriarchal horndoggitude. Today I allude to — that’s right — facial hair.
In a recent issue of Bitch magazine is an article* containing this statement: “These days, women’s removal of their facial hair is just another concession in the militarized zones of masculine and feminine, where women must still conform or confront considerable judgment and ridicule.”
The most common reaction to a chick with chin hair is, according to a study cited in the Bitch article, “disgust.” Avoidance of which is a motivating factor in the idiotic daily shavings and pluckings to which American women subject themselves, so thoroughly has this patriarchally-induced bit of the feminine ideal gotten itself lodged in our cultural consciousness. A woman who is old, or who has not gotten a boob job, or who wears no makeup can be tolerated in certain situations, but a five-o’clock shadow is beyond the pale on any occasion.
Just how facial hair came to be the exclusive purview of men — since, believe you me, there are legions of fuckin’ hairy chicks out there — I know not, but it would not surprise me to learn that it is the result of the ever-increasing compulsion to exaggerate the physical differences between the sexes. The greater the perceived difference, the greater the ease with which the lies of patriarchy can be foisted off as truth. I drop no bombshells when I remind you what happens when one group of people perceives differences in another group: the differences are seen first as threats, and then as rationalization for hatred, and finally as carte blanche for the dominant group to kick the other group’s ass.
Ass-kicking: the cornerstone of patriarchy.
But dang it, I digressed again. Here, you will be relieved to know, is my point: as the Pakistani woman obscureth her identity with fabric, so doth the Western woman obscure hers with Nair. Neither is particularly allowed not to. Regardless of the idiosyncrasies of local custom, patriarchy will not suffer a woman who does not strive with her every fiber to achieve success in the mastery of feminine drag.
________________________________
* Dowl, Aimée. “Beyond The Bearded Lady: Outgrowing the Shame of Female Facial Hair.” Bitch No. 28, Spring 2005: 54-59.
Longjawed orbweaver, Leucauge venusta, female I think, weaving, you know, an orb. Photographed by Twisty in North South Austin, June 2005
We get it, you’re saying. Patriarchy sucks. Great. But we really came for the spiders.
OK, fine, get off my case already; here’s an orchard orbweaver. Orbweavers are the builders of the classic wheel-shaped webs made famous by Charlotte. If you live in the Eastern half of the United States, you have L. venusta in your own shrubbery. For christ’s sake don’t kill it! It’s not poisonous! The outrageous neon iridescence of this specimen is somewhat obscured by my failings as a spider portraitist. But you can take it from me; she’s the gaudiest thing in the bush, bar none.
Like feckless chumps the world over, I might have gone all day yesterday without contemplating the monstrous obscenity that is the Mukhtaran Bibi case. Fortunately blogger Jim McCulloch, one of the more sentient beings in Texas, alerted me to the most recent turn of events in the wrenching story of this remarkable Pakistani woman. If you are unacquainted with the case, you must read this synopsis.
In a nutshell: Mukhtaran is imprisoned by men because she was gang raped by men, by order of men, on account of a man. It had been expected that she then commit suicide out of shame, but instead she got the rapists thrown in jail. A couple of months ago her attackers were acquitted. A few days ago, just as she was preparing to speak in the US, she was placed under house arrest. No phone. No lawyer. Apparently that douchebag Musharraf didn’t want her sprinting around the globe badmouthing Pakistani patriarchy.
What has happened to Mukhtaran Bibi is unthinkable, but unsurprising. It is the logical consequence of patriarchy. Patriarchy is just organized depravity.
Mukhtaran Bibi’s story is different from any other woman’s story only in degree. For instance, it is perhaps illegal in the US to gang rape a woman, but it is not uncommon. In fact, it happens all the time. You know what else happens all the time? Blaming the woman who has been raped, and freeing her rapist.
In fact, in the US, like in Pakistan, it is not uncommon to think of a woman as something other than human. In the US, a woman is a thing to be degraded, a thing to be mocked, a thing to smear with food for the pleasure of the jeering crowd.
It is not uncommon to seize control of a woman’s body, to fetishize it, to turn it into a thing that needs to be fucked, to deprive her of birth control, and to punish her for pregnancy. It’s all in a day’s work for male supremacists to cede ownership of her uterus to courts and legislators, to tell her that an unthinking, non-viable fetus has rights that supersede her own, to abandon her and and the baby as soon as it is born, and fuck you if you can’t take a joke.
It is de rigeur for progressive male thinkers to tell her that of course they care about these inequities, but what’s really important is that they focus on themselves right now.
A woman who cannot get an abortion lives in no less a prison than Mukhtaran Bibi. Her prison may be more comfortable, it may even mimic a sort of freedom. But I repeat. A woman who cannot get an abortion is not free.
A few years ago, when I quit the glamorous whirl of local rock stardom to begin my life of taco-based seclusion, topping my list of Things I Definitely Never Want To Have To Look At Again, Let Alone Smell was “drunk guys.†Oh sure, they’re cute when they’re young, but experience shows that their bitter self-hatred soon develops a galloping bad odor. Even if you’ve never spent years of your life onstage in rock clubs being exhorted to show us your tits, chances are that at some point you have been close enough to a drunk guy to catch a whiff. Possibly when he was shoving you into a wall.
So I can well understand why, according to The Independent (link via Feministing), young Russian women are flocking in apparent droves to marry foreign men, particularly Chinese, who “tend to drink far less†than the locals. Of course, the shitfaced Russian male isn’t the thrust of the article, which chiefly concerns itself with a spectacular bit of misogyny currently making its way through the Duma. You guessed it! It’s a bill designed to put an end to marriage-related hot Russian chick attrition. How? By punishing women!
It’s nice to see that misogyny in post-Soviet Russia is unimpeded by any pesky aversion to Stalin’s Greatest Hits. Invoking the fine old tradition of the pedestal-prison, Russian fucktard MP Nikolai Kuryanovich says “Our wonderful women are the best in the world. Wherever I have been, I have rarely seen beautiful girls, only in Russia…†Then he freaks out about how their marriage to non-Russians “squanders†the “gene pool.†Citing the always-popular “purity of the race†argument, his asinine bill would strip women marriage-traitors of their citizenship and assets.
Homelessness, marginalization, and penury: making drunk asshole husbands indispensable since 44000 BCE.
Now this is my kinda pie porn
Wacky news! It turns out that patriarchy-blaming is not at all the reclusive, obsolete, oddball hobby I thought it was! That is, if the slew of veteran patriarchy-blamers who stopped in over the weekend to give my pie fight post the once-over is any indication. Thanks to links from about 4317 muy fabuloso feminist blogs, several of which I never knew existed, I have had the opportunity to make the internettical acquaintance of quite a few like-minded girls and boys. So, howdy from Austin, all yall new patriarchy-blamers!
In other news: I find listening to The Mars Volta intensely distressing. Sue me.
[In this spot there used to be a photo of the so-called Green Turkey Sandwich from Marye's in Westlake, which was a ball of wadded-up turkey roll, avocado, and bacon between two slices of white bread, but it didn't make it when I converted to WordPress. Sorry.]
My views on turkey sandwiches in general are already on record, so I won’t go into all that.
Why? Why must you wad up the meat into a fat little puck? Nobody wants that fat little puck. It creates an inferior sandwich, that meat puck surrounded by a vast desert of bread. Nothing elicits a wheeze of despair at lunch like a sandwich registering impossible bread-to-meat ratios at every cross-section. Do you see what I’m driving at? Do you grasp the big picture? When we are presented with the puck, we have no recourse but to go in there and manually depuckify, essentially re-making the entire sandwich. It defeats the whole purpose of paying somebody else to make it. In addition, we get mayonnaise on our hands.
Where will it end?
Honeymoon at Jesus Beach
What can the motive be behind Godbag Nation’s hysterical love affair with the non-viable second-trimester fetus? Our governor-mullahs claim they are “protecting the unborn†because they “love life.†I am sorry to say that this is a lie. Their behavior toward most organisms more accurately suggests the moral development of something that crawled out of a rotten log after a hot rain. Although this perhaps does log-dwelling invertebrates everywhere a disservice.
It cannot have escaped your notice that the minions of patriarchy rarely exhibit the slightest interest in living things, except insofar as they can be exploited. They torture their food before they eat it. They mow down forests to make Victoria’s Secret catalogs. They are happy to propel into inevitability the most catastrophic multi-species die-off in the history of the planet (which die-off, incidentally, ensures the eventual extinction of their own species).
When one considers the behavior of these ideologues toward other humans, this nonchalance makes perfect sense. For a group who claim to be so fond of human life, they don’t really seem to like people very much. Of their fellow man, “kill off the brown ones!†seems more or less to be the motto. The ones they don’t kill, they enslave. Their predecessors were brilliantly successful in depriving of life the brown people inhabiting North America before Columbus showed up with the words “rape and pillage†tingling on his lips. The current regime are conducting a stunning massacre of brown people in Iraq, and are blissfully ignoring another one in Darfur. How they must chuckle about it as they breakfast on pesticide-flavored strawberries, picked by indentured Mexican slaves in California.
But I digress.
Since it can be established that what most fundamentalists actually love is saying that they love life, and that they will not hesitate at oppression, environmental cataclysm, or mass-murder to prove it, it follows that the fascination for fetuses somehow advances their scorched-earth agenda. But how? We already know that they don’t care a fig for fetuses that become fully realized human infants, for the Bush administration is, among other things, calling for cuts to programs that would keep many of them from starving. We also know that fetuses, with their rudimentary brains and callous disregard for politics, don’t vote. We also know that once they become people, the government thinks nothing of abusing them, discriminating against them, allowing them to go hungry, or sending them off to be killed in some war. Thus, the secret of the fetus’ allure must lie, not in its brilliant post-natal future, but in its current fetusness, and in its relationship to its host.
Recall that a patriarchy cannot endure women running around loose, deciding for themselves whether they want to host fetuses. They haven’t the authority; a woman’s uterus belongs to the state, to be disposed of according to its interpretation of ancient texts written by misogynist barbarians.
Enter that charismatic glob of cells, the fetus. Its wild popularity as an indispensable tool of male supremacy is no accident! Here are just a few of its handy features:
• It’s easy to make, as it results from the implementation of the preferred patriarchal hobby
• It costs next to nothing, since it can be abandoned into poverty with its whore of a mother after it has been brought to term
• It conveniently reduces the status of the woman carrying it to that of a warming drawer
• Since it is an unthinking blob and is in no position to object, it can be marketed as needed, as “a baby,†or the manifestation of God’s Will, or the Fulfillment of Woman’s Destiny, or The Miracle Of Life, or Absolute Love, or Evidence of Wanton Sluttiness, the better to control women’s sexuality.
You know, it’s funny you don’t see more Hummel figurines shaped like non-viable second-trimester fetuses.
Thanks to Feministe for the link to the Majikthese post that got me thinking about the NVSTF.
In a country where their government pays their teachers to lie to them about basic scientific fact, it is no great surprise that so many of the American townsfolk persist in confusing zygotic organisms with babies. The preservation of their ignorance has made it easier for them to resurrect a favorite notion: that where the reproductive organs of the sex class are concerned, Science = Satan.
The Midwestern proletariat appears to suffer from a species of Stockholm syndrome; the ruling class believes it can, through sheer force of evangelical will, recalibrate the physical laws of the universe into positions more favorable to its political goals (viz. the Earth was created 6000 years ago by a human-loving superhero who invented the USA as a playground for white people; male humans are genetically hardwired to come unglued at the sight of a pair of boobs; greenhouse gases are not only good for you, they give you bullet-proof erections; That 70’s Show is funny, et. al), and the proles, lobotomized by groupthink and desperate to please their oppressors, fall into flag-worshiping lockstep.
Fortunately, Majikthese, the most articulate writer on the whole wide web, is on the case with a dispassionate, breath-of-fresh-essay in which she clarifies the moral standing of a clot of embyronic material. I hope I’m not spoiling the ending by revealing one of her most delicious arguments: that a piglet, with its “much richer mental life,” has “a stronger claim to be left alone” than a non-viable second-trimester fetus.
Alas, I am called away on urgent spinster aunt business, but don’t imagine for a second that this is all I have to say on the subject of non-viable second-trimester fetuses!
Part II: The Hinge of Fate | Read Part I
I rarely read DailyKos; its fratboy zeitgeist is too circle-jerky for my taste, and the commenters’ obsession with ratings, as well as their deep conviction that they and the Republicans are somehow worlds apart, is more than a little sad. And anyway, if anything crucial to the fate of humanity ever shows up on it, somebody or other links to it eventually.
Such as when Karl-Thomas Musselman of Burnt Orange Report alerted me to the P-FAB (Pie Fight Ad Brouhaha) that had transpired at DailyKos over the weekend.
Even though DKos has never exactly been a port in the storm for women’s issues (viz. this) and even though I have been aware for some time that nothing can expose a liberal male poseur’s inner douchebag like a woman who dares to reject the demeaning roles to which male culture subjects her, I was nevertheless completely disgusted to read everybody’s favorite liberal Markos Moulitsas’ attack on those of his loyal readers who object to the incursion, into their progressive oasis, of advertising showing two women smearing each other with food. The official position of DailyKos is that the “women’s studies set” can go fuck themselves; Kos invites any of his readers who are “humorless” enough to feel betrayed by his views equating feminism with neocon sanctimony to “feel free to be offended.” He smugly observes that the controversy has made the ad the most successful in the site’s history. Take that, arrogant feminists!
“Me,” he writes, “I’ll focus on the important shit.”
Apparently his own readers find this “shit” so unimportant that they posted over 1000 comments on the topic. Not surprisingly, a preponderance of these comments reveals a flabbergasting ignorance of both basic grammar and elemental feminist principle. One enterprising Kos diarist used the controversy as an excuse to post a dozen cheesecake photos. Sensational!
Aside from the usual attempts to deprecate and downplay any issue that threatens the patriarchal ethos, these supposedly liberal posters are chillingly unable to distinguish between adolescent male fantasy and women’s sexuality. A small sample of the progressive ideals of the cream of America’s liberal male crop, condensed, paraphrased (and, needless to say, spell-corrected) for the sake of brevity:
• These pie-fight women “willingly” faked a lesbian pie-pile because it “empowers” them.
• The ad is “humor,” so fuck you if you can’t take a joke.
• The ad is a portrayal of “women’s sexuality.”
• Political women don’t want women to have any sexuality at all.
• The Iraq war is what we should really be talking about.
• You hysterical “women’s studies types” should pick your battles.
• My lesbian roommate really liked the ad, so your views are obviously wrong.
• Objecting to a demeaning portrayal of women in a liberal community is “hysterical, shrill extremism.”
Women are degraded by the constant portrayal of our species as two-dimensional sexbots existing at the pleasure of the alpha-tool ruling class; it’s as simple as that. How anyone could look at an image like this pie-fight ad, or at any of a million others just like it hanging from every branch, and not see the antithesis of enlightenment, seems to me to be a symptom of deep psychosis. But the one thing you cannot fuck with in this world is a man’s right to misogyny; it transcends party lines, borders, religions. As Germaine Greer wrote in The Female Eunuch, women have no idea how much men hate them.
Addendum: Thanks to Deja Pseu for the links to the following posts. It’s great that prominent women bloggers are calling out the mighty Kos, but it’s also heartbreaking that they chide him so gently, evidently clinging to the hope that he really couldn’t have meant or understood what he was saying.
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