Detail of wacky foto originally uploaded at educe me.
This pretty much sums up how I feel about Halloween. And all commercial holidays in general.
Anne also has a bunch of hideous Halloween costume photos posted. Wait till you see the “free mammogram” one.
In these, the final hours of Breast Cancer Awareness Month ‘06, it is the fervent hope of thousands of retailers the world over that everyone out there has finally heard of breast cancer, and, most importantly, is willing to buy stuff to prove it.
* * * * * * * * * *
So what charitable deed of unbridled altruism am I going to rip on today? you ask. Well, how about this one: if you’re a ‘young breast cancer survivor’ belonging to a group known as the Pink Ribbon Girls, you can “marvel” over being “pampered” for free at an Ohio beauty salon (it could scarcely undermine their philanthropic selflessness to mention Anthony’s Salon, 6403 Bridgetown Road, Cincinatti, right?). For it is a well-known fact that the primary obstacle facing young women afflicted with breast cancer survivorosity is difficulty “feeling good about themselves.”
You might think it natural for spirits to flag a bit when suffering a life-threatening disease and its punishing, antediluvian ‘treatments’. But breast cancer ’survivors’, you must realize, are not like other sick people. They are Patriarchy’s Chosen Invalids. They are required by law and by commerce to feel good about themselves. Fortunately, any aberration or momentary decline in their pinkribbon enthusiasm for pluckily embracing debilitating illness has been clinically shown to respond positively to cosmetology. Hence the Cincinatti beauty salon’s emergency intervention with “hot towel stress relief treatment, paraffin dip, shampoo and finish, makeup lesson, mini-manicure, refreshments, a pink rose and goody bags.”
[That's right, I said "paraffiin dip." I dont know what it is, but it sounds like something toxic the nuclear medicine tech injects you with just before sealing you up in a PET scan tube for 2 days.]
Undoubtedly some readers will take exception to my cynical tone. They will propose that the aforementioned beauty salon owner is merely doing these poor gals a solid and what’s my fucking problem anyway.
Well, I’ll tell you.
My fucking problem is not that a few girls got a pink rose and a “mini-manicure,” or even that some well-meaning beautician thinks dipping cancer patients in paraffin is a good idea. My fucking problem is what these things represent : that breast cancer has been turned into a cult of überfemininity. My fucking problem is the popular belief that the greater the obsequiousness with which the breast cancerettes comply with the infantilizing femininity mandate, the prettier they’ll feel, and the less likely they’ll be to drop dead at any moment. My fucking problem is our cultural narrative’s reification of those women, who for some reason didn’t die, as some kind of holy coalescence of the Virgin Mary, Joan d’Arc, and a fuzzy-wuzzy teddy bear.
My fucking problem is that femininity obliterates personal sovereignty. You wanna cut a breast cancer patient a break? Let her know that the pink self-esteem injunction is a crock of shit, and that attempts to solicit approval from patriarchal authority won’t smite a single cancer cell. Then take her to the beach and buy her a pitcher of margaritas (but don’t forget the SPF 40!).
Exhibit A in the case against moron high heels. From the Walk A Mile In Her Shoes® website
If you’re one of the many fun-loving Americans who are constantly on the lookout for ‘fun’ ways to ‘raise awareness’ about stuff — usually while traversing short distances on foot with a tribe of like-minded revelers wearing identical cheap T-shirts — you might enjoy Walk A Mile In Her Shoes®. The group hands out high-heeled pumps to male participants and away they go, traipsing down a mile of pavement, in order to “inform the world of the valuable contributions men are making to stop rape, sexual assault and gender violence.”
It’s nice that somebody, somewhere has been hipped to the wild idea that men, who are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of all this raping, assaulting, and violenting, might want to contribute to stopping it. Yay. And Walk A Mile In Her Shoes® is a cute joke, since there’s nothing more hilariously butt-ugly than a guy in a pair of 3″ heels from Payless*.
Yet I cannot but wonder if the group’s claim — that sticking ridiculous footwear on a few dudes will “help men better understand and appreciate women’s experiences, thus changing perspectives, helping improve gender relationships, and decreasing the potential for violence”– though clearly well-intentioned, isn’t just a bit naïve.
Let’s face it. Subsistence as a subhuman member of the sex class has exceedingly little to do with sauntering through town in uncomfortable shoes. In fact, when one’s oppressors don a symbol of one’s oppression and parade hither and yon for an afternoon’s diversion, it’s about as ‘awareness’-raising as if a bunch of honkys went around doing watermelon jokes in blackface to send ‘urban’ kids to basketball camp.
Complains blamer Stephanie, at whose college men are being encouraged according to the aforementioned program to “protest” violence against women: “I’m a woman, and I’ve maybe walked a foot in high heels over 24 years. How about they walk a mile with a black eye, and have to tell everyone they pass, “No, everything’s okay. I just fell down the stairs.” Or they could walk down a busy street in the dark wearing fake boobs and a mini-skirt, and see how ‘aware’ that makes them.”
Better, better, but it still involves all that confounded walking. Always with the walking! I confess I remain dubious that a spurt of light physical exertion can sustain quite the philosophic oomph required to sufficiently enlighten a person who has basked in the luxury of male privilege all his life. Wouldn’t it be a hoot if men could really give enough of a crap about the gynocide to read a fucking book or something?
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* But what’s with the “®”? Are they afraid some rival drag queen troupe will steal their clever plan for world anti-violence domination?
Click the Jack Lord-lookin’ guy to read my hilarious tragic strip wherein Professor Shrike of the Study Institute sets Ted and Lon straight on internet porn.
A Tale of Two Academics
Blogger David Friedman flits along to a seminar to hear economics professor Todd D Kendall present a paper. The paper is called “Pornography, Rape, and the Internet.” Friedman reports back that the paper purports, among other unlikely novelties, to support the hypothesis that teenage boys ‘benefit’ from internet porn. This benefit seems to accrue in the shape of less jail time for rape, those lucky boys. Friedman appears to be under the impression that if you ask Todd D Kendall — whose gift to Western civilization was to analyze data concerning internet porn availability and rape arrests in specific locations — he’d tell you that increased access to internet porn decreases the number of rape complaints where the perps are between the ages of 15 and 19. Surmises Kendall, cheap and ubiquitous internet porn keeps the nation’s young ne’er-do-wells smacking off in front of their computers where they belong, rather than running the backstreets smacking bitches around.
Kendall’s paper is long and tedious and full of wobbly ‘facts’, and life is short, but before I cried uncle I did notice that he sees fit to include a paragraph wherein he wisely declines to actually endorse internet porn, since it (the porn) might have “other deleterious effects besides rape, both on the consumer and on society.”
Geeze, Todd, ya think?
Would it be very tiresome of me to complain once again that I am (a) less than devastated by the ‘deleterious effects’ on the bleary-eyed internet porn ‘consumer’, and (b) dumbstruck by the urgency with which dudes yearn to perpetuate the legitimization of porn? The latter is a goal toward which an enormous branch of patriarchal ’scholarship’, word, and deed is devoted, since it can be accomplished only when culture manages to fully dehumanize women.
Dehumanizing women may seem to us like a walk in the park, since none of us is alive who has ever met a fully actualized female human, but in actuality it is no mean feat. In fact, maintaining women’s status as the sex class requires round-the-clock surveillance, brutality, and male honky legislation, because the truth is, the case for women’s actual humanity is pretty iron-clad to even the partially enlightened mind, and every now and then one of us breaks away from the Stepford pack and shakes a humorless hairy frigid fist in support of that truth*.
One of the greasiest stains on this chicks-are-bots agenda is the tendency to gloss over the fact that the women in these porn flicks actually exist, and that they’re actually getting fucked. And by “fucked” I mean fucked. Take the second of today’s entrants from the Study Institute, Todd L Kendall, Ph.D. Todd L Kendall, Ph.D professes economics at Clemson. He has authored another paper on ‘misbehaving’ celebrity basketball stars, so I assume he enjoys men’s basketball (arguably not one of human endeavor’s less misogynist professions). Social policy that might mitigate women’s oppression is not Kendall’s field. One can expect his approach to our topic to be coolly academic, and it is: his concerns are the economics of internet porn, how demand for it drives the development of the internet to ever more dizzying heights of jizzed-out glory, how interesting are its ramifications on criminal behavior.
Where Kendall’s mind is a kind of pornonuclear winter, our first representative, the aforementioned David Friedman, appears to live in a red satin wonderland — or at least to be wholly unacquainted with the physical mechanics of videography — when he calls porn “imaginary sex.” I guess he thinks the women in those videos are chimerical illusions made of faerie duste and Astroglide, and the directors are snuggled up in bed dreaming onto videotape with tube socks on their dicks.
Porn’s relationship to rape is chicken-or-the-egg stuff, an asinine, pointless question. Because rape is rape, whether it’s on your computer or in your low-ego-emissions Jetta sedan.
Jesus.
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* Don’t nobody like to see that fist. For instance, the honky male liberals smack the fist back down, telling us to shave it, or that we’re just not getting the joke, or that they’ll get around to abortion rights just as soon as they take care of A, B, and C, or that we’re just not in touch with their — I mean our — sexuality.
[Gracias, Alexandra]
AP photo shows modern whorehouse aficionado re-purposing ancient porn for modern applications.
How I admire Redneck Mother. I don’t raise lettuce or kids, and I haven’t raised much hell since I was about 12, but it shows to go you how very little the blogular among us really need to have in common in order to have so much in common.
For example, every now and then ma chère Mère du cou rouge sends me a link to a news item that worms its way right up under the sensitive, fleshy part of my obstreperal lobe, where it wiggles and writhes like a mid-century Italian actress in peep-toe stilettos. Today La Redneck has done just that, with a link to a story about how archaeologists digging around in Pompeii have finally restored “the jewel of Pompeii’s libertines”, a brothel-full of pornographic frescoes.
This year-long rehab painstakingly restores to its ancient lavish glory — for the delight of tourists who enjoy raunchy murals and of lascivious Pompeiiologists alike — a prison where countless women, kidnaped from foreign lands, deprived of their humanity, were forced into sex slavery and made to service incontinent Roman jagoffs. This hellhole is euphemistically described by the Associated Press, as such things always are when writers desire to romanticize the quaint custom of slave-rape, as a “brothel.” See those scratches? That’s where the “prostitutes” and their “clients” engraved their names. See that picture above the door? That depicts the “specialty” of the kinky whore-of-yore inside. Fanciful, sweet stuff.
It will come as no great surprise to the reader that across the way from this $250K project, in the town of Herculaneum, funding for excavating the Villa of the Papyri — a library of priceless lost ancient texts including possibly unknown works by Sophocles, Aristotle, Livy– has thoroughly dried up. Despite the words of one classicist — “we owe it to the world to dig” — the Italian government says it can’t even afford to maintain the bits that have already been unearthed. Except, of course, when the bits in question are naughty.
From the Peekaboo website. The shirt reads “part-time pole dancer.” The rest of the time she’s licking His boots, I suppose.
Five-year-old daughters of fun-lovin’ boob-jobbed sex-positive alcoholic moron Brits can look forward to a boffo sexay surprise under the Christmas tree this year. According to the Daily Mail, Tesco — the UK’s über-Wal-Mart and the 4th largest retailer in the world — is doing what any sensitive megacorp would do at this joyous holiday time: reminding little girls that they’re pieces of shit. In order to bring warmth to the hearts of the citizenry, they’d like to point out, to the tune of £50, what modern culture values most in its women. That’s right. They’ll be marketing a L’il Stripper Kit to the youngest members of the sex class. And it is so precious. A toy sexy chrome pole, toy sexy music, and toy sex money (“Peekaboo Dance Dollars”) to stuff in a toy “sexy dance garter.” I’m not making this up. “Unleash the sex kitten inside” quoth the Tesco website, “simply extend the Peekaboo pole inside the tube, slip on the sexy tunes, and away you go!”
For Junior, there’s the Future Perv-o-Prenuers of Britain Kit: toy handcuffs, two toy kinky “lesbians” wearing torn toy negligées, a supply of toy heroin to keep his toy bitches in thrall, a toy webcam, and a toy bank account in which to deposit all the big XXX toy bucks he earns from his XXX website.
Naturally there is great ‘public outcry’ against the stripper toy, to the extent that Tesco was forced to repurpose the item as a sex-ay “health and fitness” aid. Think of the calories those burly little 5-year-olds will burn wrapping their pudgy young be-gartered knees around that health-giving chrome phallus!
Once again — and I wish this would stop happening, because it always gives people the tiresome idea that I think sex ought to be abolished or something — I find myself in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with prudey conservative family groups: yep, this toy is offensive almost beyond description. However, it is at this juncture that our ideologies mercifully diverge. I do not, as one ‘family campaigner’ suggested, believe that the toy will “destroy children’s lives.” (The only toy with that sort of power is Etch-A-Sketch; a more frustrating, soul-sucking, ungratifying, time-wasting blot upon Western civilization has never been conceived). No, I’m afraid children’s lives were deep in the crapper long before the pencil-dick pervs at the Sexy Toddler Toy Company came up with their sexbot training kit. This asinine pole-dancing game is merely the logical extension of the ideology generated by our global thermonuclear megatheocraticorporatocracy — you know, the patriarchy — which has been destroying children’s lives, and everybody else’s lives, too, for centuries now. Which it does through God and war and the nuclear family and high heels and consumerism and illiteracy and, of course, the violent misogyny that makes all of the above possible.
I will go a step further and postulate that if, in our violent patriarchal class structure, sex were anything other than an exercise in humiliation, degradation, and dissociation so taxing that only adult persons are thought to possess the emotional chops to keep from committing suicide over it, nobody would give a rat’s ass if little girls were crawling up every vertical object in the British Isles.
Addendum: our cherished level-headed Broadsheeter Page takes a whack at this.
[Gracias to the readers who sent this in; without you dedicated stringers out there combing the countryside for offences against the enlightened mind, I'd be a mere shadow of my former blaming self]
foto by Twisty
As opposed to Condoms For Here. Just in case you’re driving down Walnut Hill and are overcome with the urge to boink.
Feast your eyes upon the sink in the can at Emo’s on Red River while you contemplate today’s question.
What is “fun”?
Because of its early associations — many of which were not without their cheap French whiff of the meretricious (it’s not called ‘tomfoolery’ for nothin) — with practical jokes, cons, and hoaxes, Johnson in 1755 thought it a ‘low cant word’, but today everbody loves fun. In fact, in these days of plastic-scented anti-enlightenment, fun, especially if bouncy blonde beach babes bubble all over it, is often ordained as an end justifiable by any means. Does a truly innocent diversion exist? Does class enter into it? In what ways is fun subject, perhaps invisibly, to patriarchal dogma and assumptions made by the dominant culture?
I must know!
Uploaded by Twisty
I’m giving up feminism. In its place I propose to espouse a new dialectic of radical taco enlightenment. But first, here’s what I did this weekend: Drag kings!
On Friday I sprinted along to Emo’s, Austin’s premier dudely rock club, to document the open-mic segment of the International Drag King Expo (Stingray reported asinine “Whaa? Chicks dressed up like dudes? That’s sick!” behavior from Emo’s staff). Anyway, behold the results, wherein I inaugurate the generic Photoshop-generated slideshow. Uh-oh, some of it’s kinda Holga-esque!
Boston’s Heywood Wakefield, MC of International Drag KingCommunity Extravaganza 8’s open-mike at Emo’s last Friday, shown here not wearing a sexay French maid outfit. Photo by Twisty.
I steel myself to open my email inbox — no mean feat, as I have come to despise email even more than I despise written sentences beginning with the phrase ‘first off’ — whereupon I perceive a dire warning from my ISP. “Your inbox is overquota. The world is ending.”
I look forward to the world ending. I’ll smoke all the cigarettes I want and if anybody gives me the stinkeye I’ll just point at the white-hot death-comet hurtling toward the earth at 478,590 miles an hour and emit a hollow, mirthless laugh.
Alas, that day is not today. Today it’s just a tedious little software problem. My email client usually takes care of deleting my 1439 daily spams* from the ISP server, but now something has gone awry somewhere. Although my ISP’s threat (“Take care of this at once, or you may not receive any more email!”) is more tantalizing than it is foreboding, I reluctantly begin the laborious process of hunting down the hitch. Fortunately, when I click the email help bookmark, the mouse slips, and I accidentally click the Broadsheet bookmark instead.
I am pleased to report that Broadsheet’s Page Rockwell is on the case of the slutty Halloween costume epidemic (as reported in the Thursday’s NYTimes Style section). Several of you blamers have emailed me, outraged, about the proliferation of the Hustlerization of Halloween, manifested (complete with softcore photos of witchy hot sluts) by the Times’ “not-so-new bulletin [...] that costumes for women and girls of all ages tend to be revealingly clad caricatures of stereotypical male sexual fantasies.” The Times, like everybody else, is preoccupied with what women look like. They wonder why on earth would liberated women [women are now deemed 'liberated', see, since second-wave feminism was such a rousing success] want to costume themselves as brainless receptacles for male incontinence? Perhaps it’s because Halloween has been co-opted by today’s sassy empowerful women who want to show the world that they’ve gotten the memo from Dude Nation: non-sexy is a non-starter. Halloween is now ‘a “safe space”, a time to play with sexuality’.
As long as the sexuality being played with is male sexuality, and that said sexuality as practiced by women is acknowledged by all as “bad.” Bad, bad, bad. It is not insignificant that the title of the NYTimes slutty-Halloween article is “Good Girls Go Bad, for a Day.” Halloween or no, women rarely experience the exhilarating joys of empowerfulness when they neglect to glorify the phallus by taking a self-esteem hit. I’m not sure that dressing up as a “vixen pirate” or a “va-voom Girl Scout” exudes quite the post-patriarchal nuances the spinster aunt would like to see in a class-neutral party outfit.
In any event, negligible is the ideological distinction that can be measured between the sexay costumes of “Slut-o-ween” (Ha. Good one, Page) and the ‘normal’ (but objectively fruity) get-ups women have to wear every day to avoid ridicule.
Sex-positivity will remain a pipe dream until the patriarchy-serving construct of the equation between sex and porn gets the boot. The boot of shiny, shiny leather.
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* If there exists any body or any thing breathing air who would actually act on a stock tip derived from “a technical and fundamental perspective” from an unsolicited email titled “gasworks yourself’, I would totally pay $1.75 to meet him.
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