Monthly Archive for February, 2006

In a world of stiletto racing, mass rapes, abortion banning, Miss America, sex slavery, honor killings, “sexy” Olympic ice skaters, antenna strippers et al, the difficulty faced by the spinster aunt, who works without the benefit of the editorial staff she so richly deserves, is sometimes one of prioritization. For instance, where on the blame-o-meter does one put the case of the small-time Utah judge who got the boot for having three wives?

On the one hand, the spinster aunt takes a dim view of government interference in private domestic arrangements.

But on the other hand, this godbag muthafucka judge Steed is claiming, on the basis of “religious freedom,” the right to a fucking harem. Of three sisters. While serving in an official government capacity.

To which I say, big whoop. A moment’s reflection reveals that it’s actually standard procedure for government officials to be vile, law-breaking sexist pigs who should all be in prison. The only reason they took out this Steed guy is that he deviates somewhat sensationally in one or three minor details from the usual Christian-approved doctrine of piggery. The Christian-approved doctrine of piggery states that a guy can oppress all the women he wants, but can only marry them one at a time (which noble doctrine is democratically motivated; it prevents the richer, more charismatic dudes from hoarding all the pussy). So in the end, for purposes of patriarchy-blaming, Judge Steed is just another excuse to complain about plural marriage. Not that I need one.

These days it’s very trendy to use religion and/or pursuit of orgasm as a justification for whatever kind of patriarchal horror—from whipping your loving leather-clad wife to bombing Baghdad—gives you the biggest yippie. Old Steed here has apparently been using both.

The religion used by the priapic judge to justify his icky fetish for sister-booty is based on the delusions of Joseph Smith, a nutjob with 33 wives who claimed God contacted him through a talking hat.

Now, it’s no secret that God is a chatty motherfucker. He’s always yakking at pious priests and mullahs about ways in which they might more efficiently oppress the downtrodden; the pious priests and mullahs then translate the mumbojumbo into the local dialect for the unwashed masses in whatever way best preserves their own personal power. But in the Church of Latter Day Saints the Holy Dude is a veritable motormouthical windbag. He simply cannot put a sock in it. Misogynist edicts gush forth like blood from a sacrificed virgin. “Polygamy,” quoth God, “is a divine principle leading to the highest degree of glory. I command women to accept polygamy under threat of damnation and destruction!” Any old Mormon fella can hear these talking points straight from the Horse’s mouth; all he has to do is have a “vision.”

So did God tell Judge Steed to enslave three sisters and rape them until they had 36 kids? That’s one explanation.

Another is that he’s a fucking delusional asshole.

Polygamy—or, more precisely, polygyny, since it’s against even fake religious law for a lowly female to collect her own harem—is nasty. This isn’t because there’s anything inherently immoral about having more than one sex partner. It’s not even because we’ve been socialized to experience a visceral creepy-crawlie at the thought of 36 kids whose father is also their uncle. Polygamy is nasty because it is the ultimate fulfillment and natural conclusion of patriarchy’s hideous premise: that women are subhuman incubator-cunts. Steed’s three sister wives must have averaged a pussy-shredding twelve kids apiece. The plural wife is among the universe’s most degraded creatures.

Polygamy is practiced in the enlightened US of A pretty exclusively by thousands of misogynist pseudo-mormon godbag psychopath cultists who wield absolute control over their women. They acquire them at swap meets, and then isolate them in secret colonies away from the public eye, rape them, force them to bear children, marry them off as teenagers to other abusers, and, one surmises, lavish upon them all the usual humiliations one expects of men who own women: mind control, shame, dependency, lack of education. Tapestry Against Polygamy, an advocacy group made up of plural marriage escapees, publishes a list of common “danger signs” associated with the practice. Among them: sex on demand, arranged marriages, the admonishment that women accept abuse as “correction from the Lord,” and spousal speeches prefaced with “The Lord has told me.”

Here’s Tapestry’s take on the whole plural marriage deal:

Today’s polygamist subculture is rife with abuse, fueled by power, control and greed. Mental, emotional and religious abuse are prevalent within Mormon polygamy. Boys are ruthlessly cast out in order to create an artificial imbalance of women to men. Girls, deprived of education, are trapped in a web of underage marriage, statutory rape, incest, child-slave labor, trafficking of minors into different countries for sex, arranged marriages, marriages to close relatives, secrecy and isolation.

This is Ultimate Patriarchy, and it couldn’t flourish without the ostensible complicity of brainwashed women. Plural wifery is often fiercely, though poorly, defended by such deluded dingbats as Utah attorney Elizabeth Joseph, one of a harem of seven, who reveals that she hasn’t the faintest idea what “feminist” means when she describes polygamy as “the ultimate feminist lifestyle.” In her jarring and insipid essay, the sum total of polygamy’s benefits are a) since [her master] has a lot of wives, he is “a very skilled husband” who has “never [had to eat] a TV dinner,” and b) she gets to have nice friendships with the other concubines.

Neither could Ultimate Patriarchy flourish without government and church turning a blind eye to the rampant abuse within this cult. Utah only banned plural marriage in the first place (in1890) as a condition of statehood, and although the Mormon church supposedly excommunicates violators, the belief that harems are next to godliness persists. One Utah extendo-family of polygamists is reportedly worth in excess of $170 million (a figure some call “laughably low”). Which can buy a lot of blind eyes.

Note that the tendency to turn blind eyes toward the abuse of women is a recurring theme in the history of human “civilization.”

Interestingly, Mormon fundamentalists believe that the US government is evil and should be destroyed. So what was this Steed guy doing in as a judge in the first place?

To mark the passing of another crushingly dull rainy Saturday during the course of which my dogs, who roll in mud professionally, will enter and place highly in the Golem Look-Alike Contest just before climbing all over my nice couch—and by “Golem” I mean the scary medieval mud-dude from Prague, not the slimy skeletal Peter Lorre character from the Tolkein movie—I bring you News From Readers.

Vegankid announces Blog Against Sexism Day, which transpires on March 8 in conjunction with International Women’s Day and the Global Women’s Strike. Blogging against sexism, if I may speak from my own modest experience, is a tiptoe through the tulips. All you have to do for inspiration is turn on any TV or open any magazine or go to any movie or walk through any department store or observe through narrowed eyes any boyfriend or read any Hemingway story, then count the ways in which your oppression is fetishized. I urge everyone with a blog to give it a try. And if you don’t have a blog, you might as well start one. Anyway. March 8. Sign up at the afore-linked blog.

Several patriarchy-blamers have sent in an update of sorts on the “Nia” episode, which, you may recall, revolved around an absurd article in the UK magazine Prospect about the hot young schizophrenic girl whose “young psychiatrist” was moved to wax despondent on the subject of her drug-induced fatness. The update link leads to letters to the editor and a response from the authors of the article, who, as reader Lucy points out, pretty much miss the point of the majority of blogular complaints. Interestingly, the authors reveal that the “Nia” character is a complete invention (they call her a “composite”), which somehow pisses me off even more. This must be how poor betrayed Oprah felt!

Texans, who are used to half the male population overcompensating for their flaccidity by driving the baddest, loudest pickup trucks money can buy, will probably go “so what?” but blamer Trixie thinks the rest of the world might get a nauseated chuckle out of Nutsfortrucks.com. That’s right. Plastic scrota one dangles, if one is a fart in human shape, from the trailer hitch of one’s giant truck. Balls on your bumper! Few moves are manlier, few statements are classier. Nutsfortrucks also sell “antenna strippers,” buxom plastic pole dancers for your radio rod. Sah-weet.

To counterbalance what I must characterize as my recent spate of “eeew, look at that repulsive thing!” posts:

Feminists have a vision of women, even women, as individual human beings; and this vision annihilates the system of gender polarity in which men are superior and powerful. This is not a bourgeois notion of individuality; it is not a self-indulgent notion of individuality; it is the recognition that every human being lives a separate life in a separate body and dies alone. In proposing “the individuality of each human soul,” feminists propose that women are not their sex; nor their sex plus some other little thing—a liberal additive of personality, for instance; but that each life—including each woman’s life—must be a person’s own, not predetermined before her birth by totalitarian ideas about her nature and her function, not subject to guardianship by some more powerful class, not determined in the aggregate but worked out by herself, for herself. Frankly, no one much knows what feminists mean; the idea of women not defined by sex and reproduction is anathema or baffling. It is the simplest revolutionary idea ever conceived, and the most despised.

Andrea Dworkin. Right-Wing Women. “The Coming Gynocide.” 1983.

From the It’s Horrible, Yet I Can’t Look Away Department
Also from the I Mock Your Corny BDSM Lifestyle Department

You know how when you’re gaily traipsing along the World Wide Web, enjoying, say, a blog post about how antisocial and subversive it is to be a woman with biceps, or looking up a synonym for “crushing malaise,” when the the bell on your inbox chimes and you click over to see that someone has sent you a link to a website, and you follow the link, and what unfolds before you is so antithetical to truth and beauty that you sense it must either be a harbinger of the psychotic break you always knew would come one day, or some kind of—god forgive them—parody?

[thanks, Veronica]