We are not befuddled, here at Patriarchy-Blaming HQ, by the Glamour Stiletto Run. Chicks in high heels waddle-race through the cobbled streets of Amsterdam to win €10,000 in “shopping money.” It makes perfect sense.
[thanks, Hissycat]
Monthly Archive for February, 2006
Page 2 of 6
I can’t think of a damn thing to write about. So here’s your chance to complain about anti-porn feminists or the impending extinction of male gynecologists, or describe how BDSM saved your marriage, or celebrate male prostitutes, or even, god forbid, something that doesn’t have to do with sex, and I’ll butt out.
Next time I’ll stay home and eat this and watch whatever it is I’m supposed to be watching on DVD.
I’m no film critic, so I’ll tell you what I thought of “Capote”: it really clobbers you upside the noggin with the whole ethical dilemma angle . Ow. My subtlety lobe sustains bruising.
[spoiler warning]
I’m all for films about flamboyant egotistical prevaricating mid-century writers who claim speciously to have ghost-written To Kill A Mockingbird, and this Seymour Phineas Puffinstuff guy, for his creepy-virtuosic impersonation of the titular dude, should totally win all the awards they usually give out to guys like Dustin Hoffman for impersonating retards or to blonde sexbot actors for impersonating ugly chicks. But by the time Capote says “There wasn’t anything I could do to save them!” and Harper Lee, stunningly grasping the obvious, says “Maybe not, but the fact is, you didn’t want to,” well duh, I already got it, like an hour ago, that our protagonist is suffering a monstrous bloodsucking ethical lapse even more villainous, considering greater distance he has to fall, than that of the killers he’s exploiting, and I don’t need no second banana Pulitzer-winning chick novelist sidekick spelling it out for me.* The director might as well hold up a sign reading “This film is about the perversion of art in the service of the commodification of the human soul.”
As a matter of fact, he kind of does hold up such a sign, when he has Capote say of his new boyfriend the mass-murderer, “He’s a goldmine.”
So shut up, Harper Lee!
While I’m on the subject of movies, let me go on the record as stating that it’ll be a rape-free day in a patriarchy before I heave the Twisty corpus into the dank subumbra of another one of those wretched miniaturized theaterettes again. They are invariably populated by the worst, chattiest, wrapper-wrattlingest buttwattles the many-elbowed throng has to offer.
*And don’t tell me that Capote needed it spelled out for him, either. No. The guy had an IQ of 215.
I won’t be eating this repulsive thing
I don’t often skim Qatar newspapers for updates on fertility rates in the UK, but this morning I just couldn’t stop myself.
There’s a “baby gap” in England, and I’m not talking about a store that sells 40-dollar onesies made by slave labor in the Northern Mariana Islands. UK women are either delaying pregnancy until “too late in life” or forgoing altogether the great fulfillment of their womanly destinies, resulting in a smaller overall output of baby flesh than a capitalist country with an aging population likes to see.
Why are women declining to touch babies with a ten-foot pole? According to some report or other, if a woman has her first kid at 24, she loses out on £564,000 over her lifetime, but if she waits until she’s 28, she only forfeits £165,000. Not to mention that the 24-year-old who returns to work after doing her patriotic reproductive duty almost universally gets stuck at a crappier, lower-paying job.
So women have been hipped to the bogosity of young motherhood, and now there’s now a baby shortfall of about 92,000 a year. Women’s failure to deliver the goods at the customary rate, said some public policy guy, “would make it harder to earn our way in the world and to pay for valued public services.” In other words, the whole British infrastructure is apparently based on young women selflessly devoting themselves to years of unpaid domestic drudgery producing a race of young’uns to take care of all the old people.
Nice.
Because fertility is the exclusive purview of women, there’s no word on the financial hit men take as a result of early childbirth, but if it’s more than, say, zero, I’ll eat a Sizzling Chicken & Cheese® at TGI Friday’s®.
[see also Daily Mail]
You know how when a teenage girl isn’t a virgin, it means she’s a dirty slut? So if her stepfather forces her to give him a blowjob, the court can say, well, she was just a dirty slut, so the experience of having her mother’s husband cram his dick down her throat against her will couldn’t have been all that traumatic? So it should just be a slap on the wrist for mommy’s stud-muffin?
ITALY: NONVIRGINITY LESSENS SEX ABUSE CHARGE, COURT SAYS Sexually abusing a teenager is a less serious crime if the girl is not a virgin, Italy’s highest court said in a ruling. The court ruled in favor of a man who forced his 14-year-old stepdaughter to have oral sex with him and appealed a prison sentence of 40 months, arguing that the fact that the girl had had sex with other men should have been taken into consideration at his trial as a mitigating factor. The court agreed, saying that because of the victim’s previous sexual experiences, her “personality, from a sexual point of view,” was more developed and that therefore the damage to her was less than if she had been a virgin. The decision, which drew a barrage of criticism, opened the way for the stepfather to get a lighter sentence. (REUTERS)
[thanks Janice F]
Stingray and visiting rock star Anne T prepare to Lick
We spinster aunts, we’re the mavericks of the aunt world. We’re loners, pariahs. There’s a gonzo melancholy in our hearts and a swift roadster in our garage. Sometimes a spinster aunt just has to ramble. Sometimes she yearns for smoked meat. Sometimes both.
Recently I had no choice but to fire up the aforementioned velocipede, stuff these two other spinster aunts into it, and hie for Driftwood, TX, home of The Salt Lick Barbecue Restaurant.
To get to the Salt Lick one inserts the AC Newman CD, plunges headlong into the bottleneck of Ford trucks at Highways 290 and 71 (known poetically as “The Y At Oak Hill”), remembers in the nick of time that Hays County is dry, squeals into the Kwik E Mart for a six-pack, berates Stingray for getting Miller Genuine Draft of all things, flips off assorted SUVs encrusted with war magnets, and crawls at 2 miles an hour until the turnoff at Ranch Road 1826. Then one puts the pedal to the metal. Little gratifies a rogue aunt like the wind in her peach fuzz en route to barbecue.
Thirteen serpentine miles of Hill Country later, just past the turnoff for Buda, it rises out of the dusk, a benevolent spirit divining the spinster aunt’s boundless hankerin’.
The Salt Lick is a limestone pavilion furnished with enormous picnic tables in the midst of which a giant pit slowly, ceaselessly infuses meat with smoke. It is strange that meat infused with smoke tastes good, but there it is.
There are four things on the menu at the Salt Lick: brisket, ribs, sausage, and turkey. All smoked. The best thing to do is order one of each. Or you will always wonder.
Your barbecue is brought to you on a green plastic plate with slaw, potato salad, pinto beans, white bread of the Mrs. Baird’s school, pickles, raw onions, and extra sauce, in under five minutes. The server effervesces and gleams, burnished with joy immense at the opportunity to stuff you with smoked meat.
He will witness your gluttony, but he will not judge you.
I reveal no secrets when I say that the idea of the male ob/gyn sorely inflames the revulsion center in my obstreperal lobe. This morning, as the rosy fingers of dawn reached across the sky to chuck me under the chin, this inflammation was exacerbated by a tiptoe through an ob/gyn listserv.
The thread in the listserv to which I was directed (by one of our patriarchy-blaming MDs) begins with a male ob/gyn whining that one of his adult patients wants him to recommend a female gynecologist for her teenage daughter. The discussion turns into a celebration of (mostly) male resentment over patients who have the gall and stupidity to prefer women doctors when “chromosomal arrangement” is clearly irrelevant to medical expertise.
Of course it is! Or rather, it’s irrelevant when the chromosomal arrangement is XY. That’s because, in a patriarchy, men have a perfect right to be in charge of female reproductive organs. And since the context is “medical” rather than “sexual,” any gender preference manifested by the patient is, as one of the male ob/gyns put it, “illogical.”
Because of the lame listserv architecture, the thread is difficult to follow, and as a result I’m sure I’ve missed a few gems, but here are some of the lowlights:
Dr. A: I suspect that many men overestimate the pain of a normal birth.” [context]
Dr. B: My assertion has never been that one needs to have had a baby [...] to provide good care, but that it is not unreasonable for a person to prefer someone who at least has the same equipment to care for their sexual health.
Dr. C: Nonsense! [context]
Dr C: My mother fixed this problem when I was born and named me Lynn. Many a woman has been quite shocked when a 6′4″ male walks into the exam room. When they say they thought I was a woman, I simply respond by saying, “too late now.” [context]
Dr D: Our hospital referral line was responding to requests for a referral to an OB/GYN would you like a women [sic] doctor and until one of our male OB learned this and complained about discrimination did they stop [context]
But here is the pièce de résistance, a female ob/gyn (thanks a bunch, sistergirl!) who opines that a woman patient whose history of abuse has made her leery of the idea of a strange man cramming his hand up her vagina should, for her own good, be “desensitized” by disallowing her preference. “Going along with [a patients' preference for a female doc] is not ultimately healing.”
This patronizing arrogance is astonishing, but not surprising, given the supremely misogynistic nature of the medical establishment. Women, who their whole lives have been conditioned to exist in a perpetual state of reaction to male authority and who have justifiably found this situation unsatisfactory, clearly have no business expressing this sort of “sexist” and “discriminatory” preference. Social control of women morphs into medical control.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: in a patriarchal society — which, let me refresh your memory, is a society more or less built on the fetishization of female genitalia — any dude who springs out of bed one fine morning to declare “I will be a gynecologist, by Jove!” is precisely the sort of dude who should be confined in an asylum.
I mean, in what other profession does a man view disembodied pussy as a source of revenue?
And you thought Godly Josh was a piece of work. On the subject of this deranged buttcrack, I have this to say:
O my fucking taco salad.
Wife kidnapper and child pornographer Travis Frey, who has a single flatworm where his brain should be, is currently the object of much internet gagging and ridicule for his “Contract of Wifely Expectations,” a four-page document outlining in excruciating detail the standards of decorum he imagined himself worthy of inspiring in his wife. It is doubtful that a bigger loser has ever walked the earth, but if you know of one, please keep it to yourself. I can’t take much more of this.
A chilling excerpt:
“Shaving will be done every third day, and includes underams, legs, and pubic area (navel to anus), all areas are to be completely clean shaven. Every Saturday you are to use the Walh [sic] clippers with a guard no greater than 1/2″, and then present yourself to me for measurement checks. Above your vaginal slit you can have 1) A rectangle patch; that must be centered above your vaginal slit, it will have a length no greater than 3/4″ the length of your vaginal slit, no wider than 1 in.; 2) Any other shape or design that is centered and above your vaginal slit, with an area of no greater than that of an equilateral triangle with a height of 3/4″ the length of your vaginal slit; or 3) Completely and totally clean shaven. Regardless of which choice of shave, noncompliance is based on a #2 rate.”
Vaginal slit, my ass.
[thanks ( I think), to Jen and Lou. Via Smoking Gun]
Bert
Those of your plaintive cries emoting “Enough patriarchy-blaming, already! Show us the dog!” have not fallen on deaf ears. Here is young Bert, now a solid 8 months old, stalking one of the 1672 half-inch cricket frogs that populate the idyllic riparian milieu at El Rancho Deluxe.
As you can see, Bert is dainty, and believes that he will probably die if he gets wet above the hock. This is not ordinarily considered a virtue in a golden retriever, but I’m willing to overlook it on accounta he digs holes so well. His other hobbies include sticking his butt in your crotch, and sticking his nose in your crotch.
Not Bert
We watched Westminster together the other night, but Bert fell asleep before the golden won best in group.
In the cutthroat world of professional doggism, male dogs are called “dogs” and female dogs are called “bitches.”
The kooky sexbot website where human women flash their udders to show solidarity with milk cows is just another example of why sophomoric “ironic” porn can never be justified in a world in which beauty aspires to truth. It can’t even be justified in a world where “whipped topping” is a food group.
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