Because if you’re smart, and you’re a woman, you’d better be fucking hot. And if you’re really smart you should totally consider posing nude for Maxim. Or else you’ll burn in the icy fires of humorless women’s studies dyke purgatory, nobody will compare you to Anna Kournikova, and you’ll die alone without any assholes smegging all over you on the internet.
I double-heart BitchPhD for this unbelievably asinine link.
One Mexican border town’s Hepatitis A export factory
My tragically unfulfilled yearning for tacos has caused my giant but somewhat chemically altered brain to fixate on the cradle of the world’s finest culinary creation. By which I mean Mexico.
Most Americans have never heard of Mexico.You might recognize it as that area just to the south of the American Southwest that supplies honkys in California with commercially exploitable brown people, such maids and gardeners and people to pick fruit for cheap, and as the place where that honky chef Rick Bayless rips off all his cooking ideas.
Not surprisingly–because as paradigms go, it’s one of the paradigmiest–patriarchy has made impressive strides in Mexico. The North American Free Trade Agreement, for example, has been a nice fat plum for The Man. Now rich foreign companies can set up cheap-crap factories along the Mexican border, where they profit lavishly from local desperation. The factories are called maquiladoras. The workers, the majority of whom are women, are paid a laughable driblet of what the rich companies would have to pay fully human male Americans. They work in hazardous conditions and live in cardboard shacks without plumbing or electricity.
It will not surprise you to hear that the women maquilas, because they are members of the sex class, suffer at work the usual extra humiliation and violence associated with being female on this planet. Their male bosses fuck with them. They get fired if they get pregnant. In Ciudad Juarez, for example, women are often murdered on the way to work, just for the hell of it. Their babies are born with lots of birth defects. That’s because, owing to lax regulatory structures, the foreign-owned maquiladoras can dump their toxic waste right into the Mexican dirt without so much as a hey-ho-how’s-your-toe.
An article in the Houston Chronicle reminds me that it’s so dangerous to be a woman in Mexico that the government has set up a special commission on "femicide," which is not when a human being is killed, but when a woman is killed. In Mexico City there are supposedly 6 or 7 rapes a day, although any chump knows, based on the degree to which Mexican tradition terrorizes women and basks in misogyny, that there really are a lot more. Mexico’s own National Institute of Women estimates that 85% of violent crimes against women go unreported. As usual, it’s the rural, indigenous women who, furthest from any kind of support systems, are the most abused.
"Some women" quoth a sympathetic Mexican government official for "women’s issues," "believe violence is their destiny."
It thoroughly chaps the Twisty hide that, although it’s men who are, you know, perpetrating it, violence is still seen as a women’s issue, as the responsibility of women. There’s a Mexican ad campaign to raise public awareness of domestic violence where famous Mexican women are shown with fake bruises. Here’s a thought. Why not show famous Mexican men with their dicks chopped off? Women’s issue my ass.
The brutalization of Mexican women is such a beloved sacrament that marital rape wasn’t even declared illegal until two weeks ago. Naturally such a sane and anti-patriarchal step has engendered a nasty backlash. The theory put forth by one male psychologist is that women will use the new law to "punish husbands." This psychopath envisions an epidemic of scenarios where the wife "roughs herself up to make it look as though her husband beat her and forced her to have sex. If there’s no witness, how will the judge know if she is lying?"
Yup. I would certainly punch myself in the face and break a few of my own ribs the second I found out marital rape was illegal, just to get back at my slob of a husband for not taking out the trash.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Want to set up your own maquiladora? Here’s how.
A Few Foreign-Owned Mexican Maquiladoras [source: CorpWatch.org]
• 3 Day Blinds
• 20th Century Plastics
• Acer Peripherals
• Bali Company, Inc.
• Bayer Corp./Medsep
• BMW
• Canon Business Machines
• Casio Manufacturing
• Chrysler
• Daewoo
• Eastman Kodak/Verbatim
• Eberhard-Faber
• Eli Lilly Corporation
• Ericsson
• Fisher Price
• Ford
• Foster Grant Corporation
• General Electric Company
• JVC
• GM
• Hasbro
• Hewlett Packard
• Hitachi Home Electronics
• Honda
• Honeywell, Inc.
• Hughes Aircraft
• Hyundai Precision America
• IBM
• Matsushita
• Mattel
• Maxell Corporation
• Mercedes Benz
• Mitsubishi Electronics Corp.
• Motorola
• Nissan
• Philips
• Pioneer Speakers
• Samsonite Corporation
• Samsung
• Sanyo North America
• Sony Electronics
• Tiffany
• Toshiba
• VW
• Xerox
• Zenith
Science Daily reports on a treatment for heart failure called CRT, an implant that enhances "quality of life" for patients with this disease. That it is overwhelmingly offered exclusively to old men can come as no surprise, for nobody who loves patriarchy–and who loves it more than the medical establishment?– gives a fig for a sick woman in her 60s. Yet once in a blue moon, when some visionary MD dares to see the human being behind the wrinkly old unfuckable crone, a woman gets this implant. When she does, she is likely to live twice as long as any dude who gets it.
In other words, there exists a therapy for heart disease that is of greater benefit to women than men, yet women aren’t getting it. Nobody wants a bunch of useless old women hanging around. Kill’em off!
It’s too bad there is no similar treatment bias against very bad writers.
I allude to dipshit columnist Lori Borgman, who has a putrid little Hummel figurine of a piece in the Indianapolis Star entitled "Yes, Maureen Dowd, men are necessary." In it she appears to mistake Dowd for a feminist, explaining how dirty women’s libbers like Dowd try to turn men in to women and "use words like herstory instead of history."
Borgman, moved to the core that men have been so tragically impeded in this girlcentric world by conniving bitch-feminists, then extracts, probably from a Frank Capra movie, a series of sentimental mauve-colored slogans, suitable for framing and sure to the the centerpiece of any rec room, as proof that men are the greatest thing since the Pill. It’s really icky writing, and I’m not even talking about the way she tries to smear Shakespeare all over it like artificially-flavored grape jelly.
"How do we need thee? Let me count the ways: The primary reason we need men is because they are not women. ("Hallelujah Chorus" should be sung here.)"
Also:
"Men protect."
"Men provide."
"Men take responsibility."
Borgman appears to suffer from some sort of romantic disease, or fugue state. She seems unaware, for instance, that one-third of all New Zealand women have been abused by men in their lifetime, or that men in Africa can’t distinguish between women and cattle, or that men overwhelmingly control the world’s uteruses.
Maybe one day Lori Borgman will find herself among those many women who are not referred for CRT treatment because men don’t think she is necessary, and she will die die die of patriarchy.
Just some of the repellent news spilling out of my Fuck The Patriarchy inbox this morning:
Melbourne parents are fattening up their four-year-old boys in order to give them an advantage in schoolyard rumbles. 4-year-old girls, however, are still required to be miniscule, in preparation for a lifetime of shrinking invisibility.
Meanwhile, in India it’s Child Brides! 15% of girls are married by the age of ten. There are programs afoot to change "the mindset" of the rural cultures who enjoy enslaving prepubescent girls. Health officials believe that the legal age ought to be 18 for girls, and 21 for boys, with no reason given for the disparity, althought we can certainly guess.
More child brides, this time in sub-Saharan Africa, where they are popularly used to repay debts. "Beatrice Kitamula, 19, was forced to marry her wealthy neighbor, now 63, five years ago because her father owed another man a cow."
Remember that "what about the men!?" dude who is all upset that more women than men are graduating from college? He can rest easy. A UNICEF report shows that, globally, girls are overwhelmingly denied access to even a primary education, thus ensuring the future of women’s illiteracy, poverty, cow-equivalence, and child-briditude.
Meanwhile, if you are a vulgar, depraved swine, you can buy a human woman for £1,400 in Romania, for use as a receptacle for your incontinence.
Mei’s sexalicious head-chandelier makes these dudes love her to death
My delightful house-guest Miss Thing Stingray, though she cannot have failed to notice that I have been a bit under the weather recently what with the cancer and the chemo and the more or less incessant nausea and everything, nevertheless turned upon me yesterday a gaze that can only be described as rueful, and chastised me for having failed to update the old blog with any kind of timeliness. Apparently boring old pukey me is no longer as amusing in real life as I am on a computer screen, so would I please get after it?
Actually, I attribute my recent shortcomings as both a hostess and a blogger not to my current infirmity, but to this absurd non-smokin, non-drinkin lifestyle I have been forced to adopt as a result. How many megawatts of fun can a person reasonably be expected to exude when the highlight of her day is a Zofran washed down with a swig of Gatorade and a Simpsons rerun?
But enough about me. What about this Amnesty International poll? The one indicating that " 34% of people in the UK believe that a woman is partially or totally responsible for being raped if she has behaved in a flirtatious manner"?
Or if she is perceived as "promiscuous"?
Or if she has been drinking?
Or if she has worn "sexy" clothing?
Because we did not just roll off the lapdance truck yesterday, this intelligence concerning the persistence of "sexist blame culture" does not boggle the mind. It is no news flash that we, as women, in traipsing about our daily lives as members of the sex class, are the irrefutable cause of massive and unrelenting boners, many of which so enrage those hapless chaps to whom they are attached that assault is the frequent and inevitable outcome.
Sexist blame culture isn’t surprising considering that its parent culture is patriarchy. You remember patriarchy, the fun-loving institution that brings you the fetishization of dominance and submission, the hatred of women, and the global reverence for I-can-kick-your-ass?
Anyway, what surprises me is that this revelation of blame culture surprises Amnesty International. They call the results of their poll "shocking." Maybe they would be less shocked, and would not have to commission expensive polls, and have more of a clue, if they rented popular movies more often.
That’s what Stingray did. Last night she brought home one of those cartoony martial arts movies called House of Flying Daggers. Released in 2004, it stars that tiny Crouching Tiger girl with the red lipstick, Zhang Ziyi, as a hottie who can chuck a flying dagger across miles with pinpoint accuracy straight into your jugular without batting an eye. Of course, this detail is of secondary significance to her overarching sexbottish delicacy. Theoretically she can kick your ass, but, as "a rare beauty," she is primarily an inflamer of boners, so she is necessarily and constantly the victim of attempted rape throughout the movie. Rape, in fact, appears to be the grandest of romantic gestures in this film. The rapists are the two romantic leads who love her. One of them finally kills her because he loves her so much, and then the two rapists try to kill each other.
Nothing in the tone of the film suggests that there is anything the slightest bit off about this. Neither is any explanation is given as to why the Zhang Ziyi character can butcher 47 enemy soldiers with a stick of bamboo but can’t fend off a single rapist. That’s because we don’t need an explanation. This is patriarchy, and whatever else Zhang may be, she is a sexbot first, and loving rape is her job.
The horror that is The City of Dreams
My pal Stingray is the only one of my old St. Louis posse to have finally come to her senses and decided to move to Austin. She’s staying here at the Twisty Bungalow until she finds an apartment.
Apartment hunting has caused Stingray no small anguish, for Austin, though excellent in nearly all other respects, will never win an Apartment Housing Beauty Contest. Unlike the palatial turn-of-the-century hardwood-stained-glass manses available for peanuts in the otherwise undesirable Midwest, Austin rental properties in Stingray’s price range tend to be stuffy little cubicles in blighted ghettos, called "complexes," which are long, low 2-story buildings inspired largely by 70’s-era cheap motel design, crammed with miniscule and identical "units." Typically these buildings sprawl over acres of landscape, converge somewhere on the horizon at the vanishing point of which is an algae-tinted swimming pool, and are built of spit and Kleenex. The inhabitants of the units are referred to as a "community." The units have 6-foot ceilings, beige carpeting, heinous galley kitchens the size of postage stamps, mold, and 70’s-era "design" details, such as fleur-de-lis-embossed particle-board cabinetry. It’s a good thing they’re only 400 square feet, because if they were any larger the sheer breadth of their hideosity would render the spinster aunt/aesthete unconscious.
The most vile apartment complex we have visited so far was in East Austin off of Oltorf, a nasty putrefaction of unfettered cheesiness percolating across a couple of the saddest acres you’ve ever seen. This complex was, and presumably still is, called The Metropolis, poetically subtitled on the brochure "City of Dreams." Some psychopath who has deeply misunderstood the "Keep Austin Weird" campaign has remodeled it to be "hip" by installing cheap light fixtures from Ikea (which they call "art deco lighting") and covering the exteriors of all the buildings in a sort of half-assed graffiti. I wept when I saw it.
There is a "clubhouse" dubbed "Club Met," of which we were given a tour by the 22-year-old apartment manager, a whiteboy jackass in flip-flops named Blaine of whom I immediately began to form a low opinion based on nothing but my aversion to jackasses named Blaine. Blaine showed us the "resort-style pool" and beach volleyball courts. Stingray, already somewhat pale, blanched visibly. "Everybody here," Blaine announced, to the tastefully introverted Stingray’s mounting horror, " knows everybody else, and when someone throws a kegger, pretty much everyone just shows up!"
"Bands practice here, we’ve got artists," he continued, "basically, we’ve got lots of diversity." Apparently, to young Blaine, a tribe of young white stoners constitutes lots of diversity.
Our ditzy big-haired apartment-hunting agent–did I forget to mention her? Probably that’s because she kept calling everybody "sweetie" and I had formed a low opinion of her, too– was clearly taken with the MTV allure of young Blaine and the Spring Break Apartments. She expressed to Blaine her keen interest in moving into The Metropolis herself. "What’s the average age of the apartment dwellers?" she enquired, although I don’t think "apartment dwellers" was the exact term she used. With blazing speed Blaine gave her the once-over, correctly assessed her age at something near 45, computed her fuckability, and said, in a discouraging tone, "well, there’s one guy who’s around 50, I guess…"
Update: Stingray, I am pleased to announce, has since found suitable digs in Central East Austin, where I am sure she will be very happy, because after all, she is finally in Texas, goddammit, and I pity anyone who isn’t.
To beautify my kitchen, I bought a new iMac. I was pleased to discover that it comes with a cheap little built-in camera that takes weird pictures of anyone dumb enough, such as bald-headed spinster aunts, to sit in front of it.
Meanwhile, apologies to regular readers of I Blame The Patriarchy who have noticed a recent plummet in the general quality of blogular disapprobation of the anti-dominant-culture variety. I’m off to chemo "therapy" again in about an hour, and I’ll try to get a decent post up before the poison kicks in and renders me blithering, but if I don’t: hold the fort, keep sending in those links and articles, and I’ll be up and blaming again in a couple of days, tops.
Cabela’s, the World’s Foremost Outfitter of Grizzly-Men, apparently unaware that mammal carcasses are not worn this season, offers, I kid you not, this extraordinary millinery in their Christmas catalog. The "hat," which consists of an entire dead coyote, is "the perfect gift for rendezvous black-powder re-enactment enthusiasts."
Whatever the heck that is.
It had been 12 days since I last delectated myself with a taco of any species. Unable to stand it another moment, I crammed myself full of puke-ye-not pills and did hie unto Vivo, whereupon I pushed this exquisite specimen, the Puffy Beef Taco, into the gaping Twisty maw. The gastrointestinal price was high, but a spinster aunt’s gotta live, goddamit.
My friend L, who remains extant as an academic somewhere in New England, home of Yankee ingenuity, maple syrup, Walden Pond, and, apparently, teen violence, files this report from the perilous and mind-blowing world of pedagogy:
I was out tonight with some friends who are teachers (I had invited them to be guest speakers in my class, so to pay them back I took them out for burritos), and one of them told us about this strange ritual that some of the 9th grade boys she teaches engage in (sorry for that dangling preposition but you know what I mean). It seems that they walk (or skulk) around and whenever they can they sneak up on each other and punch each other in the balls. None of us (women or men) could figure out why they do this; it clearly hurts as after one if them is whacked he doubles over in pain, and after a few such experiences they all run loudly from each other.
What do we make of this? Is it a learned behavior, or a mutation? Some Canadian hockey-virus? Do primates in the wild engage in the behavior? Is Mummy punching Daddy in the balls at home? Is it homoerotic? Are they doing it to impress the ladies? Is the US military conducting secret experiments on New England’s youth, perhaps poisoning the Skittles supply with chemicals that eat away at the brain’s natural ball-punch-avoidance lobe?
UPDATE: Not that we give a flip about balance or symmetry here at Twistyfaster.com, but the aforementioned friend L sends another email with this amusing addendum:
There is also
another game, this one played by girls, that my friends were calling
"the penis game" which involves saying the word penis, first very
quietly, and then louder and louder until whoever’s turn it is is too
embarrassed to say it because they will have to shout. The way to stop
this one is to yell PENIS! really loudly which really embarasses all
of them and makes them cease immediately.
It’s 2005. Do you know where your feminists are?
They’re sure as shit not at St. Mary’s College in Indiana, sister school of Notre Dame. There appears to be but inchoate appreciation for feminist theory or analysis in this institution of higher learning, not to mention an hysterical fear of female body hair, and a unusual reverence for the brassiere. By this account in the student newspaper, St. Mary’s is a patriarchy-friendly environment where “being a feminist mean[s] having hairy legs and burning bras,” two vile satanist aberrations with which the student body are definitely NOT down.
For instance, rigorous depilation and a life of dutiful servility to her master are apparently what constitute fully-realized humanity for one St. Mary’s junior, whose “image of a feminist is an extremist — someone who does not shave or believe in the institution of marriage.”
“A man,” she opines, a soft pink glow gleaming from her Jesus-kissed Catholic cheeks, “should take care of his wife and children.”
Another student remarks that feminism is about “empowering” women, but not, apparently, to the extent that she should be allowed to set fire to undergarments. She puts it this way: “Too often in our world, feminism is that dirty “F” word connoting man-hating femi-nazis and bra-burning wenches.”
Again with the bra-burning. You’d think these bras were the fucking Shroud of Turin the way these honky bitches obsess about preserving them from arson-crazy — excuse me, did you say”wenches”? yeah? — wenches. Why hasn’t anybody told these rabid femaphobic teens that nobody has actually bothered to burn a bra since, I don’t know, 1973, and even then, the women in question were pretty much the opposite of wenches?
Nowadays, if a radical feminist buys a bra, she wears it until it falls apart, because it fucking cost 50 bucks.
By the way, the erudite collegian using the epithets “femi-nazis” and “bra-burning wenches” to describe the bottom of the radical subhuman lesbo man-hating barrel was young Katie Kelly, student director of the Saint Mary’s College Women’s Resource Center. I was unable to obtain her email address for comment, but I have no doubt that Katie is deeply protective of the brassière because she equates it morally with precious human embryonic material, the sanctity of the death penalty, and the evils that medical marijuana might wreak upon bedeviled cancer patients. What a peach! Are there any more like you at home, Katie?
You are reading I Blame The Patriarchy, the patriarchy-blaming blog that has been advancing the radical feminist views of Jill Psmith and/or Twisty Faster, a gentleman farmer and/or spinster aunt doing the butt-dance in Cottonmouth County, Texas, since 2004.
I Blame The Patriarchy is intended for advanced patriarchy-blamers. It is not a feminist primer. See Patriarchy-Blaming the Twisty Way for details.
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