Monthly Archive for July, 2006

Irreparable damage, argues Carol Sarler in this article on the hollow promise of Girl Power, was wrought upon womandom by the Spice Girls. She connects various dots from vapid girl group worship to teen drunkenness to impoverished single motherhood:

It would be absurd, of course, to lay every teenage pregnancy, every inebriated ladette or every cheap tart sleeping with her sixth holiday ‘romance’ in a week at the feet of five barely competent girl singers. It would be fair, however, to recognise that [The Spice Girls] presided over a period that saw young womanhood spiral into a previously unimaginable decline; that they wrote its soundtrack, they sang its theme, they invited a generation to play along — and that altogether too many women sadly did.

Asserts Sarler, according to Girl Power you need only be hot and dumb to succeed as a woman.

It will come as no great shock that I concur with Sarler; women’s liberation from the Sexy’n'Stupid Mandate appears to have taken enormous, mind-blowing strides backwards. These days young women wish to emulate America’s spokes-ho Paris Hilton, whose glittering, anorexic, trust-funded blonde emptiness demonstrates the ample rewards awaiting those who agree to wear the nation’s jizz on their faces. The fellatiolution will be televised.

But uh-oh, guess what. It’s not your right to ‘choose’ to be a sexay layday. Making traditional, patriarchy-approved, feminine submissive ‘choices’ is like spitting in the eye of every woman who has ever been raped, humiliated, harassed, denied birth control, abandoned, passed over, or beaten. While you were poledancing for your patriarch in a maid’s uniform, this tragic woman was so deranged by the blunt force trauma of patriarchy she thought ditching her 6-year-old kid at a Chicago food fair was a ‘choice’.

Check it out: women—particularly educated women, the most potentially influential members of our oppressed class—do not have the luxury of ‘choice.’ Every move an oppressed class makes is a political act. And even when invoked with a saucy Paul Mitchell hair-toss, our ‘choice’ is not real, because our oppressed sex class has only limited agency. The consequences of asserting this faux choice mimic the consequences of oppression. The language and imagery of ‘choice feminism’ [see Linda Hirshman] is the language and imagery of sex, which, since it’s the only paradigm we’ve got, is simultaneously the language and imagery of patriarchy.

What if, instead of blindly asserting our ‘right’ to ‘choose’ the patriarchal sexbot model, we (and by ‘we’ I mean all the roller girls, amateur pole dancers, blow jobbists, and other ’sex-positive feminists’ I’ve managed to encrabulate over the past year or two) examined what it is, exactly, we’re supposedly choosing?

I assert that we’re choosing the path of least resistance. It’s much easier to acquiesce to a set of established conventions—social, aesthetic, political, sexual, sartorial—for which the rewards (dudely approval, other women’s satisfying jealousy) dangle brightly ahead, than it is to blaze forth in a fury of white-hot anti-feminine iconoclasm and risk ridicule, ostracism, and male reproach. Life’s rich pageant is much more accessible when you go with the flow. Patriarchy, as the Spice Girls and Paris Hilton can attest, rewards conformity. Which is why the new feminism must be sex-ay, and why the only freedom it promises is the freedom to enjoy the degradation.

[Gracias, Laurel]

Why didn’t anybody tell me that the President of the United States of America stealth-groped Angela Merkel? Oh, never mind why. It doesn’t matter. I can’t lounge around in a drugfog for a week and then cry like a baby when it turns out that I’ve completely missed one of the most beautiful and hilarious examples of your patriarchy dollars at work, ever. But then I find out that Bush has vetoed stem cell funding, like some imbecile medieval pope-king, caving in to pressure from the superstitious white male parochiae. And then I find out I got dissed in the Village Voice, and well, if I had any guts left to bust, I’d bust one.

OK. Now that I’ve got that, along with my boobs, off my chest, let us proceed to an observation I’ve made concerning the Hollywood fantasy TV hospital vs. the real thing. It goes like this.

At one point during my convalescence I was unfortunate enough to watch a few minutes of a show called “Grey’s Anatomy.” Like 50% of all American TV shows, “Grey’s Anatomy” is a hospital drama featuring attractive young doctors who divide their time between boinking each other and valiantly struggling to save the lives of patients with whom they have developed strong emotional ties. I noted that, like all TV hospitals, the Grey’s Anatomy halls are clogged like a bathtub drain with earnest MDs scurrying around macking/saving lives/vogueing/coping with white upper-middle-class issues.

What a howler! Real hospitals are desolate, filthy, harshly-lit vaults of pain and urine, almost entirely devoid of effervescent doctorial presence. You’re lucky to catch a glimpse of a nurse twice a day. One is entirely dependent for survival on the kindness of the Clinical Assistants, a class of hospital organism formerly known as ‘orderlies.’ These are the people who perform the grubby crap. They drop by every four hours to take your vitals and empty your various effluent receptacles. They notice that you were incapable of consuming even one bite of your bland diet of ‘beef tips.’ They are the authority to whom you must appeal for a clean gown when your catheter leaks and you’ve been lying in a puddle of pee for 3 hours. They’re what hospitals are really about, but of course they’re all uneducated Latinos, so they wouldn’t make a very popular TV show.