Monthly Archive for August, 2005

I know, I know; this one’s so gross even I can’t look at it.

I hold dual citizenship in Austin and St. Louis, but I confess that, owing to pesky laws of physics precluding my being in two places at once, my monitoring of the latter for patriarchally-motivated crimes against humanity has slacked off in recent months. If it had not, I might have noticed sooner that the St. Louis police department has been systematically "shelving" rape complaints filed by prostitutes and drug addicts, and that the review panel convened to investigate this triumph of the misogynist’s art was more or less paid off by the department to sweep it under the rug. Fortunately, my old homies Becker and Tony Patti, whom some of you may recognize from their patriarchy-blaming comments on this here blog, are on the case, and have alerted me to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s reportage on the subject.

It turns out that, in order to "lighten investigators’ load and make it appear they were solving a higher percentage of cases," [1]  the cops elected in many cases not to file actual police reports of prostitutes’ rape complaints. Instead, the Bad Lieutenants preferred to embrace the dude-affirming habit of writing "informal memos," which of course they then used to make paper airplanes. A year or so later (well in advance of the expiration of the statute of limitations), these memos would be introduced to patriarchy’s beloved instrument of history-cleansing, the paper shredder. This went on for at least twenty years "during a time in which the
city’s rape totals steadily dropped to a fraction of those in similar
cities." [2] This kept the rapes off the FBI’s radar and the rapists out on the streets. Upshot:  Manly cops look like crime-solving heroes, rapists continue exercising their male prerogative, and whores and addicts get brutalized, thereby preserving the natural order of things.

Thus far, similar police encouragement of serial rapists has been discovered in Philadelphia and Atlanta, but St. Louis is the only city where the investigation resulted in a cover-up by "independent" panelists who turned out to be on the department’s dole. Nice. Under Georgia law, the Atlanta dicksmokes responsible for "failure to uphold the law" face felony charges, but there is no corresponding law in Missouri, so the STLPD will probably just throw a gala ball to honor all parties concerned.

If anyone gives a rat’s ass about serial violence perpetrated against Midwestern women to the apparent smirking delight of law enforcement, here’s a link to the entire St. Louis Post-Dispatch oeuvre on the scandal.

Bare-breasted virgins whipped for not turning down the music at a teen-bride-choosing party for the King of Swaziland. Plot of 50’s B movie "Annette and Frankie’s African Adventure"? Nope! [Via reluctant patriarchy-blamer Dan Durchholz]

Meanwhile, you know how white male liberals are increasingly revealing their inner misogynist douchebags with astonishing neocon notions like "abortion is a fringe issue"? The excellent Winter Woods has a thought-provoking post on the white male liberal douchebag’s unconcealed contempt for radical feminism. She describes her experience with dudely politics: "I have found left-wing groups dominated by straight white men with extremely pushy, sometimes agressive, personalities. You know the type, you get them everywhere: equipped with megaphone and trestle table, enormous chip on his shoulder, thinks he’s Che Guevara."

Winter Woods goes on to note that feminists on the left often seem reluctant to voice their disapproval for fear of betraying the cause, but suggests (I paraphrase) that we need to grow a pair. "We need to demand that these men show more solidarity with women, not the other way around."

For she has astutely observed that it’s always the women who are required to shelve their petty little concerns about institutionalized violence, marginalization, and oppression for the good of the movement.

Meanwhile, my long-awaited copy of Sheila Jeffreys’ new book Beauty and Misogny has just arrived. In it she argues a point that only just occurred to me a couple of months ago: that beauty practices in the West are every bit as ghastly and oppressive as the ones in developing countries we’re always trying to get the UN to pooh-pooh. All previously scheduled spinster auntly activities are postponed. Prepare to be thrown, Misogynist Beauty Standards!

On August 24:

A man was raped in Johannesburg. A woman was raped in Doncaster.

The
man was raped by three women. They invited him into their car, went for
a drink, then drove to an abandoned field where they produced a gun.

The woman was raped the old-fashioned way, overpowered in a dark alley by a douchebag she’d met in a pub.

Google
lists fourteen news accounts from nine different sources about the
man’s case. Several of these are updates on the progress of the
investigation. One or two suggest that there must be "more to this story," implying that no rape actually occurred. The word rapist is put in quotation marks.

There are but two reports that allude to the woman’s case, both from Sheffield Today. One of those mentions the rape only in passing, ostensibly to add more shock to the real story:
the "shocking dossier" of crime associated with the pub (it is beyond
my powers of self-restraint to resist revealing that the name of the
place is The Blue Ball Pub) where the woman met her attacker. Rapist is not put in quotation marks. Sheffield Today has no doubts about the potentially fucktarded inclinations of guys walking home from pubs.

The
male victim is described as "so traumatised that he won’t speak a word
to anyone." His family is interviewed. They express concern and
confusion. The police spokesperson repeats that the victim was "very
traumatised" and explains that he was taken to a hospital and given
counseling and an HIV test.

Neither the female victim’s state of mind nor her medical treatment is discussed.

"Well duh, Twisty," you are saying to yourself, "Whaddya expect? Of course the man-raped-by-women story is getting 14 times the ink, it’s so weird. But women get raped by men every day; it’s scarcely news."

Yup.

[Cross-posted at Bitch.Ph.D.]

Need a hollow, mirthless laugh? Gendergeek reports on a recent Telegraph article explaining why men account for 96% of music downloads in the UK. The Telegraph’s conclusion? Women would rather go shopping than fiddle with these newfangled computer-thingies. Oh, and the download websites aren’t pastel enough.

The Telegraph says tech companies would like nothing better than to tap into the flustered technophobic female market. This can only be accomplished by offering pastel pink versions of the original man-gadgets, viz. the iPod Mini. As has been scientifically proven, women instinctively and automatically fling sacks of money at anything pink.

Except for phones. Women take naturally to phones of any color "because they are big talkers."

According the the Washington Post, the efficacy of pinkess is not lost on hideous consumer electronics chain Best Buy, who have profiled their customers and are now identifying clueless female shoppers as "Jills." Special employees on "the Jill team" are trained to spot a Jill by her "fashionable white sleeveless shirt and flower-patterened pants" as she "[wanders] in unsteadily, fumbling inside her purse for a scrap of paper."  These expert Jill-spotters, who wear pastel shirts instead of blue ones, hook her, reel her in, and and lead her through the store (which has been Jillified with James Taylor music, stuffed animals, and pink balloons), gently introducing her to the scary gadgets and modern miracles. If it’s raining out, they escort her to her car with a pink umbrella.

Because they have finally unlocked the secret: women vomit blood when they touch anything that isn’t the color of a cotton candy ballerina juggling birth control pills, gumballs, and "math-is-hard" Barbies at a breast cancer fundraiser for gay flamingoes.

[Thanks Deanna]

Fat Chance contestant Joanne pauses on the catwalk to allow total strangers to appraise her value as a piece of warm fuckable brisket

If you are ever in a swimming pool and feel compelled to toss your
toddler niece repeatedly up in the air in order to effect the highly
gratifying splashdown, and your shoulder breaks free of its moorings,
and you end up in physical therapy for 5 months, and your orthopedic
surgeon says “Hey, how’s about a Medrol DosePak?” take it from me. The
correct response is, “I’d rather you plunge that giant needle deep into
my rotator cuff like you did last time.”

For I am three days
into my six-day course of the aforementioned oral steroids, and I am
not myself. I am, in fact, Dave Attel combined with something that
slimed out of the Hellmouth in Sunnydale to feast on blind orphans. I
am stoned, I do not sleep, and I am pretty grouchy, even for me.

Which is how I came to watch half an hour of cognitive dissonance called “Mo’Nique’s Fat Chance”
last night on the Oxygen channel. “Mo’Nique’s Fat Chance” is The
World’s First Plus-Size Reality Beauty Pageant, or something like that.

Mo’Nique,
a flamboyant, full-figured C-list celebrity, seems like a nice girl.
She’s sick and tired of skinny chicks getting all the perks. Her young
life’s dream has been to host a beauty contest for fat girls. She
emotes warmly on the subject. “We are the majority! We’re gonna change
the WORLD!”

Cut to a commercial for, I kid you not, Weight Watchers.

In
the run-up to the pageant Mo’Nique auditions her contestants American
Idol-style. Once they get to Hollywood, they all bond, laugh, giggle
about their love for steak, hug, cry, and get makeovers. A lot.
Mo’Nique loves them all and they all love her and they all love each
other. “Fat girls are great!” is the refrain. Well, that’s swell. But
they can’t just leave it at that, because who cares about a bunch of
fat girls who aren’t desperately trying to capitulate to the
patriarchal mandate?

Nope, a beauty pageant is a beauty pageant. The thing just won’t die.

The
point of the show is the “drama” that unfolds as these completely
overwhelmed women are by turns infantilized by Mo’Nique and her team of
makeover artists, manipulated into bonding with each other, and finally
made to rend these bonds asunder as they compete for the privilege of
being crowned Miss FAT (“FAT” stands, somewhat unpoetically, for
“fabulous and thick.”).

Mo’Nique, alas, has not changed the
world. She’s just arranged for a few more women to be objectified as
sexbots on national television. I threw a book at the TV as she
announced the “lingerie competition.”

[Cross-posted at Bitch.Ph.D.]