Monthly Archive for November, 2006

Sod off, God! Week continues

Published by Twisty on November 30, 2006. 79 Comments

foodheads17a.jpg
Delicious grilled squash sandwich and slaw at the consummately Austin-y Foodheads on 34th: deep human need or mere habit?

Yesterday’s post on my perennial pipedream of eradicating God for the good of all creatures great and small hasn’t sparked quite the controversy of, say, an essay on the feministo-ideological pitfalls of an intimate allegiance to lipstick, but the insidiosity of religion suddenly appeals to me as almost as intriguing a topic and persistent an instrument of oppression as women’s cosmetics, particularly as the time of glittery polyester holiness approacheth. So welcome to Sod Off, God! Week.

By the way, I choose the phrase ’sod off’ because ’sod’ rhymes with ‘god’, not, as is certain to be suggested, because I wish to outlaw sodomy and declare that girls who love butt sex are bad feminists.

Although, you know, eeeww.

Anyway, during yesterday’s discussion one of the veteran blamers idly wondered what would become, in the absence of organized religion, of the “apparently deep human need for ritual.”

Which got me thinkin. You’re always hearing about deep human needs. Experts promote’em, and how to fulfill’em, more or less constantly. Deep human needs are in the New York Times, they’re on Oprah, they’re on NPR; humans deeply need sex, laws, babies, boobs, guns, money, self-esteem, perfect little white cotton T-shirts to wear with absolutely everything, and foie gras. We’re up to our knees in deep human kneeds.

But do we really need all those needs?

Having just endured a profoundly anti-Twisty annus horribilis, a year notable here at the bungalow for the relentless tortures both physical and emotional visited upon my person, I am intimate with the radical notion that subsistence is entirely possible sans a veritable buttload of what are generally considered bare necessities: Estrogen. Food. Boobs. Eyelashes. Lymph nodes. Pooping. Sleep. A weight-bearing leg. A sane hypothalamus. A sunny disposition. An un-addled brain. A body that isn’t trying to kill you, etc.

Most of the aforementioned stuff falls into the category of homÅ“ostasis (the maintenance of constant bodily conditions), which stasis certain very prominent psychobabblians have declared, along with air and water, to be among the deepest of deep human needs. Yet here I am to tell the tale, homÅ“ostasis-less but bright and chipper all the same (it should be noted that throughout my assorted hair-raising surgeries and death-defying cancer treatments, I was never far from at least one dog. Draw your own conclusions). In other words, even dying hasn’t killed me yet. So one of the things I really have to find out — I’ve got a list — is how many of these “deep human needs” — such as the need to not be dying — are in fact just habits.

Take ritual, for instance. My suspicion is that ritual is no deep human need. As a concept it gives off quite the lip-wrinkling whiff of eau du primitif. And what about that trio of stinky undertones — conformity, obeisance, and orthodoxy — that comes with it? Add the collateral conditions of exclusivity and tradition, and you got yourself all the field marks of one of those bogus assumptions that status-quoticians are always trumpeting as “natural” or “instinctive” but which are really just tools of the patriarchy or opiates of the people or what have you. You know. “Big tits are sexy.” “Women’s minds are naturally less inclined toward mathematics.” “Van Morrison is a genius.” Etc.

It’s tempting to buy the argument that ritual satiates some essential human craving, because it’s so exceedingly successful at selling itself. Rituals of the godbag variety alluringly promise face-time with the Divine, of course, but even when they are secular in nature (weddings, graduations, male bonding at the strip club) they offer tantalizing rewards: they purport to protect a given parochial community against change. In exchange for promoting a cozy feeling of security in the comforting embrace of venerated dogma or cultural narrative, they demand submission to the group ideology, which submission one must publicly demonstrate by the performance of meaningless practices. The practices supposedly have symbolic value, but critical analysis of the symbol in question is gonna reveal doctrine steeped in ancient patriarchal orthodoxy wrapped in flat-out bullshit, every time.

My conclusion, after ruminating about this for a couple of hours is that (a) Hell wouldn’t freeze over if the Obstreperons sprayed the planet with a ritual-neutralizing ray, and (b) the performance of rituals seems more consistent with the practices of the hive mind than with those of the enlightened mind, because ritual doesn’t deliver. It doesn’t prevent change, and it sure as heck doesn’t bring a cultist closer to God, because, well, you know.

You’re saying, “But Twisty, I like buying a Christmas tree and putting out all the quaint figurines that were some mid-20th century sentimentalist’s idea of well-to-do Edwardian ice-skating carolers.” To which I reply, “Bring it, homeslice.” My interest here is speculation on the nature of the motivation behind ritual, not in skewering individuals for their seasonal habits. I know, I know, but I had to mention it. People get so touchy.

So anyway, in the absence of organized religion and its holy spin-off, Xmas consumerism, maybe everyone could finally quit spending the whole month of November scrambling for parking spaces as they spazz around town buying a bunch of cheap crap from China to give to relatives who irritate them, and instead they could just go about their normal lives, i.e. lying around watching Turner Classic Movies on cable and kvetching about pole dancing.

Posted in Austin and Morsel Institute. Bite me, Chad.

God: can’t live with’im; can’t seem to kill’im

Published by Twisty on November 29, 2006. 84 Comments

Writing in the Australian, Pamela Bone complains that when a bunch of Muslim feminists (Muslim feminists! What’s next, “gay Republicans”?) met in New York last week to fix an agenda for dispelling a couple of anti-Muslim rumors going around (that they’re terrorists, and that Islam oppresses women), the media gave it a big fat pass. Bone thinks it should have been front page news on accounta Muslim feminists have the solution for the war on terror. Sadly, neither Bone nor the Muslim feminists suggest that the way to make Islam (or any other religion, for that matter; they’re all a bunch of festering nightmares) safe for the world is to get rid of Islam. There is no question that Allah is here to stay, so we must rely on women’s activism from within to dilute its toxicity to a level tolerable to its female supplicants and favorable to Western economic interests.

Bone reminds the reader that the most brackish bogs of human ignorance — pockets of primordial sociopolitical muck à la Afghanistan from which anti-Western sentiment slithers ashore like honky-hatin’ lungfish to writhe in economic agony — are notable in the main for their disobliging views toward women. Where one finds women enjoying the social status of livestock, one also finds extreme godbaggery, extreme poverty, and extreme dudes who are willing to blow themselves up to preserve this colorful lifestyle.

Bone’s antidote is to “[pour] billions of dollars into the education and empowerment of women around the world.”

Education! I cry myself to sleep at night dreaming of its pungent possibilities even as I remember that it will never happen. Nobody in a position to do so could imagine for a minute that educating poor Muslim women — or any other kind of women — might have greater entertainment value than armies and bombs and Jesus. And besides, for it to do any good, the education in question would have to be of a nature that encouraged a rational critique of the collection of atavistic ghost stories that form the global instruction manual for women’s oppression.

Naturally, nobody — Bone included — will admit to an interest in ridding the world of its fundamental godbag delusions. As always, the tone is one of universal tolerance of “the beliefs of others.” This despite that there are no religious societies anywhere in which women do not ritually get the shaft. Yet Bone remains sanguine.

“If Christian women,” she writes, “have been able to argue, more or less successfully, that the misogynistic passages in the Bible are merely a reflection of the era in which they were written and have no relevance to today, there should be no reason Muslim women can’t do the same.”

Naturally the spinster aunt is pulling for the Muslim feminists and the possibility, however slender, that they might achieve some mitigating effect on the misogynist brutality their menfolk so often seem to enjoy. But alas, Bone’s core assumption, that Christian women have been “more or less successful” in combatting the ritualized misogyny prescribed by their archaic belief systems, is in error. She has overlooked that even in enlightened, babe-a-licious countries like Australia and the US, where Christian women are all the rage, the casual observer from the planet Obstreperon would be forced to conclude that the only thing women have won is the right to enbiggen the stock portfolios* of pornographers like Joe Francis by showing him their surgically-augmented tits for free while drunk on spring break. The observer’s conclusions would be confirmed after noting that the New York Times is still writing about how women who are not currently pregnant should be forever “pre-pregnant,” women’s uteruses are still owned by the megatheocorporatocracy, women still earn less than men do and get harassed while doing it, and posts on minor blogs criticizing femininity as a patriarchal construct still get over 200 comments.

in other words, though it may differ in degree of brackishness from the aforementioned bogs of human ignorance, our own culture is no limpid pool.

Women’s liberation from patriarchal oppression depends on many things, but Job One is getting this tiresome God character off the air.
___________________________________

* “Girls Gone Wild” grosses $40 million a year

[NYTimes link courtesy of blamer Paris]

Posted in Patriarchy, my patriarchy. Bite me, Chad.

Time for a wee snootchie

Published by Twisty on November 28, 2006. 35 Comments

liberaces.jpg

When Stingray and I tire of traipsing around SoCo arguing about which one of us is gayer, we like to look in at the Home Slice for a couple of Liberace cocktails. No one is gayer than Liberace.

Prosecco, black currant liqueur, lemon twist, chubby little glass.

You might think, if you were to come to Austin on a prosecco-tasting tour, that there is some kind of law or ordinance requiring that all prosecco must be Zardetto. The truth is that behind the scenes there’s a spumante gang roughing up saloon-keepers. “You’ll buy our prosecco, see, or you’ll buy none at all.” When the saloon-keeper protests, the spumante enforcer says, “Shut up, ya mug” and belts him one across the kisser.

Zardetto prosecco is the beer of champagnes.

Posted in Austin and Morsel Institute. Bite me, Chad.

Sermon

Published by Twisty on November 26, 2006. 287 Comments

dorsay-pump.jpg

I gotta clear a couple things up. I’m afraid that what follows is something in the nature of a pontification. Just so you know what you’re getting into, here’s a synopsis:

I. I reveal the true nature of the ‘bad feminist.’

II. Somewhat taken aback by the shoe-centric responses to yesterday’s post on femininity-as-humanitarian-crisis, I pronounce on high heels even as I beg for a moratorium on shoeblogging.

III. I conclude with a conclusion.

You have been warned.

I. “Does XYZ (where XYZ is “wearing lipstick” or “my job as lap-dancer-in-chief at the Bada Bing” or “eating bacon” or “pleasing my man with some humiliating sex move”) make me a bad feminist?”

Women, it seems, are anxious that feminism should be synonymous with “status quo”; lately this question has been observed springing from computer monitors across the galaxy like hookers from stag party cakes.

The answer to the question is “no”. Doing XYZ (i.e. femininity) does not make you a bad feminist. A bad feminist is someone who pulls wings off flies, promises to take the kid to Disneyland but gets drunk instead, gives LSD to the dog, bombs abortion clinics, steals from grandma to buy dope, forces men at gunpoint to put women’s underwear on their heads, etc.

Doing XYZ merely makes you a hypocrite.

Unless you were some kinda misogynist wingnut to begin with, in which case it just makes you an asshole race-traitor.

II. High heels

I am reluctant to devote much more of my rapidly waning intellect to so fluffy a topic as women’s sexbot footwear, but, dang it, I can’t take it any more.

Look, claiming to love your high heels because they appeal to you in some comprehensively objective, lofty aesthetic sense, separated by a million brilliant intellectual miles from the culture of femininity that spawned’em, is a cop out. Even if it’s the fine workmanship you admire, you must admit that the expertise — however refined or inspired — required to cobble leather into an object designed specifically to beautify oppression is merely a skill, and is altogether a separate proposition from the object itself. You may “love” your shoes — you may even defend them as art — but you do this because to your expert eye they so precisely articulate the intricate and famously elusive ideals of femininity, not because they in any way ennoble the human spirit. Your exquisite pumps may represent some pinnacle of design, but the standards by which their exquisiteness are judged can only exist within the context of patriarchy. No, no! Don’t try to deny it. You know I’m right.

Jesus, what is it about shoes? Nah, don’t answer that.

III. Conclusions

A. Women whose continued existence depends on capitulation to the feminine directive will get no argument from me. I often use “survival skill” as a synonym for femininity. The structure of patriarchy, which places anyone with a vagina in a continuum of femininity whether they like it or not, is such that the daily opportunities for self-deception and self-betrayal are mucho, relentless, and — with a frequency that depends on class, skin color, and proximity to domineering male godbags, drunks, and pervs — often unavoidable.

B. Connoisseurship of divine little black silk d’Orsay pumps is not inborn. Culture creates taste.

Posted in Patriarchy, my patriarchy. Bite me, Chad.

What I forgot to include in yesterday’s essay would fill a book

Published by Twisty on November 25, 2006. 48 Comments

femininity.jpg
Woman demonstrates loyalty to patriarchal overlords through apparent voluntary compliance with Feminine Directive (Absurd Footwear Division). Hotel San Jose, Austin TX, November 11, 2006.

[The first paragraph may express aspects of a non-sequitur unless you have read yesterday's essay on torture and feminization]

If the force required to feminize a fully-realized human man is considered torture by the Red Cross, then why isn’t the force required to feminize a fully-realized human girl also recognized as torture?

Femininity is a humanitarian emergency, but like most humanitarian emergencies, it is invisible.

Invisible, that is, to all but the insignificant nobodies it oppresses and the few agitators who make noise but are usually denounced as crackpots.

Femininity, if you’ll permit a brief review, is a humanitarian emergency because it enforces practices and behaviors (boob jobs, FGM, ‘beauty’ expenditures, the ‘veil’, the flirty head-tilt, pornaliciousness, fashion, compulsory pregnancy, marriage, et al) that are dangerous, painful, pink, or otherwise destructive; that are rooted in female subordination; that exist only to benefit Dude Nation; and that are overwhelmingly represented as inviolable cultural traditions in blind compliance with which comfort, contentment, and personal fulfillment are supposedly found and from which deviation is discouraged by ingenious punishments ranging from diminished social influence, to unemployability, to ridicule, to imprisonment, to death.

Femininity, in other words, is a bad scene.

I’m gonna write a novel where a human woman — let’s call her Jill — is abducted from her bungalow by aliens who, to her great surprise, don’t try to exploit her or probe her or make her clean toilets or insist that she reproduce even if it will bankrupt or kill her. The aliens are surprised, in turn, that Jill does not grasp how a race of sentient beings can exist that is not based on ‘civilization’, i.e. dominance and submission.

Feeling sorry for her, the aliens give her invisible technology that would never be developed on her own planet because of its patriarchy-jamming properties, and send her home. The technology is contained in a pair of really comfortable shoes from which emanates a force field that strips earthlings of their ability to discern physical and cultural differences between members of their own species. The hilarious result is that nobody knows who’s a dude and who’s a chick, or who’s hot and who’s not, or who’s a boss and who’s a slave, revealing once and for all that the pretty concept of ‘inner beauty’ is and always has been a joke. Thusly deprived of the means to properly administer fear and loathing, everybody has a nervous breakdown. They also all starve to death, since nobody can tell the impoverished Mexican immigrant farm laborers from the rich honkys.

The aliens, who had not anticipated that their comfortable force field shoes would cause the total annihilation of the human species, feel kind of bad about all this, especially since their favorites, the atheists, also snuff it, but they cheer up when it turns out that rocks eventually inherit the earth. This ending represents a departure of sorts for me; usually I have bacteria inherit the earth.

The aliens, incidentally, don’t reproduce at all; they are weird, glittery organic minerals exuded from some sort of dripping stalactite in a cave; that’s why they relate to the rocks. Also, at one point in the novel, the President of the United States wakes up from a 3-day-drunk/revival and attempts to have Jesus blow up the alien ship, but before he can stumble over to the Presidential God Hotline, the aliens turn him into a stone crucifix that weeps tears of blood, which Jill hangs on the wall in the amputee ward at the VA, where it briefly enjoys popularity among religious pilgrims as a miracle and among survivors of foreign wars as a cause for celebration.

Posted in Patriarchy, my patriarchy. Bite me, Chad.

Torture

Published by Twisty on November 24, 2006. 20 Comments

If you’re anything like me — and why wouldn’t you be? — you’ve been whipped into something a froth by reports of “Bush’s mysterious new programs” targeting “Fifth Columnists” (supposed terrorist collaborators, disloyal fraternizers, kids who refuse to say the Pledge of Allegiance, what have you), AND how Halliburton has been awarded yet more contracts to build prisons to house the inevitable influx of the aforementioned traitors, not to mention those poor sods who, once they’ve been tortured by Rummy’s patented techniques, can’t ever be released for the rest of their lives on accounta they know too much about Rummy’s patented techniques.

Anyway, I’ve been ruminating on the subject of torture, and one thing has led to another, and, as was inevitable, I’ve started stewing about women’s underwear.

I mean to say that in report after gruesome report on torture tactics sanctioned by the Secretary of Defense and employed by American sociopath-imperialist forces in hell-holes like Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, one reads ceaselessly of “snarling military dogs,” “stress positions,” “deprivation of light and auditory stimuli,” “20-hour interrogations,” “sleep deprivation,” “forced to perform tricks while tethered to dog leash,” “waterboarding, and “forced to wear women’s underwear on head.”

Every news source reports this women’s-underwear-on-head situation without batting an eye. That it counts as torture strikes nobody as odd. Salon (its gripping series “The Abu Ghraib Files” uses images from the Army’s own investigation to chronicle the enormity of prisoner abuse from October to December, 2003) reports that women’s-underwear-on-head was (and undoubtedly still is) “standard operating procedure.” According to Salon, “The Fay report [a US military internal affairs report] found that there was ‘ample evidence of detainees being forced to wear women’s underwear.’ Fay concluded that the use of women’s underwear may have been part of the military intelligence tactic called ‘ego down,’ adding that the method constitutes abuse and sexual humiliation.”

All right-thinking Americans — people who would feast for 47 days and 47 nights if Donald Rumsfeld were finally tried for war crimes — accept without comment that, although the physical duress it entails must be something on the order of “comfy chair,” panties-on-the-noggin represents an act of degradation so extreme it appears to be a breach of the Geneva Conventions.

While is true that most of the prison photos show women’s underwear used in conjunction with one or more of the other more sadistic tactics, few media reports fail to accord the undies at least equal billing. A military CID caption of this Abu Ghraib photo

abu.jpg

reads “Detainees [sic] is handcuffed in the nude to a bed and has a pair of panties covering his face.” Here the syntax reveals that “handcuffed in the nude” is deemed the equivalent of “panties covering his face.” Now consider, if you will, the caption I found accompanying this same picture at notinourname.net: “A naked prisoner, chained to his matress-less [sic] bunk, is forced to wear women’s underwear on his head.” Not “a naked prisoner, women’s underwear on his head, is shackled spread-eagle to a bare bunk.” By virtue of its position as the sentence’s predicate, the brutality of the panties is clearly the statement the caption’s author wishes to make about subject, revealing, I contend, the aspect of the photograph to which the writer has experienced the greater emotional response.

The prisoners themselves have expressed a marked sensitivity to the humiliative superpowers of women’s panties, recalling their underwearian experiences in what is to me surprisingly (given all the other godawful shit they’d endured) vivid detail. Back at Salon, detainee H—– says “They gave me woman’s underwear that was rose color with flowers on it.” Another detainee says, “[The] American police [...] he put red woman’s underwear over my head.” Taken in context, their statements suggest they actually view underwear-on-head on a par with being suspended above the floor from shackled hands for 5 hours.

I am not arguing that forcing prisoners of war to wear women’s underwear on their heads is not an act of torture. Clearly it is torture. What interests me is the reason it is torture. How is it that nobody has anything but the utmost sympathy for a fellow shown with a pair of girly skivvies on his head? By what demented code does a swatch of soft pink cotton become an instrument of torment? What makes this particular cruelty stand out from a field of persecutions so squalid they can only have proceeded from massively deranged minds crammed with snuff films and bongwater?

Duh, it’s universally and unanimously acknowledged that there is no lower life form than a human female, no bit of her more base than her cunt, and no tangible symbol of that cunt more handy than a pair of her knickers. Clearly, on this point our sadistic American military jailers and their unfortunate captives agree. When you wanna totally humiliate, degrade, and dehumanize a dude, just call him a girl.

Military intelligence sadists realized, incidentally, that putting women’s underwear on female prisoners’ heads didn’t have quite the same resonance, so it was a case of “show us your tits or we’ll rape you” for the women they arrested on suspicion of, what else, prostitution.

Posted in Patriarchy, my patriarchy. Bite me, Chad.

Thanks for nothin

Published by Twisty on November 23, 2006. 38 Comments

wheresthesmallpox.jpg
The First Thanksgiving, Dominant Culture Version, painted in 1932 by JLG Ferris. Native Americans in feathery headgear? Check. Native Americans depicted as half-naked savages even though it’s fucking November in Massachussets? Check. Native Americans depicted in positions of subservience to Whitey? Check Women depicted in positions of subservience to dudes? Check. Native Americans depicted as guests in their own country? Check. Whitey and Natives getting along like a couple of long-lost brothers? Check.

Every year when Thanksgiving Day approaches, I feel without fail a growing consternation inside me. I attribute this feeling to the inevitable emergence of the whitewashed historical record of this day and to the sudden attention that America directs toward the Native American Indians. — Robert Two Bulls

Dang. Thanksgiving. It’s one of those execrable Christian holidays, such as the 4th of July, Christmas, or a wedding, when all Americans suddenly become insensible of any guiding principle except an enormous cultural pressure to capitulate unquestioningly to the demands of patriarchal theo-consumerist tradition. In the case of Thanksgiving, blind adherence to custom requires the uncompromising conformist to binge on cloying, pedestrian “comfort” food cooked for 3 days by women, while men watch TV.

Then the women go shopping.*

Horribly, Thanksgiving’s repellent foodly intemperance is nearly always presented at some weird, un-dinner-like hour of the afternoon, then it’s back to the TV for the patriarchs, and back to the scullery for the womenfolk, where they scour off the carbonized substrate of the sugary sweet potato-marshmallow pie, wrap in foil the remains of the enhormoned, tortured Butterball, tuck into Tupperware the green been casserole made with Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup and French’s Fried Onions, and chuck out the untouched can-shaped cylinder of Ocean Spray “cranberry sauce” that nobody understands, eats, or can live without. Afterward, everybody either falls comatose or writhes, suffering varying degrees of physical and emotional distress, on such seating — usually a small needlepoint footstool or one of the dining room chairs — as has not been previously commandeered by the football-watching males.

This ritual gluttony, which spikes pretty high on the Blame-O-Meter owing to its particular dependence on sex-based apartheid, is observed ostensibly to commemorate the patriarchally-approved European god-myths surrounding the so-called First Thanksgiving. The event in question, I remind you, was the first-ever harvest festival for neither the colonials nor the Wampanoag natives upon whose ancestral lands the European godbags had incursed (neither could it have been a particularly delightful meal: to any rustic midwinter ‘feast’ consisting of eels and corn-pone I could only award maybe half a star). This much seems probable: that, such as they were, the god-blessed victuals were consumed in 1621 by godbag colonialists who but for the intervention of the melodrama’s principle supporting character Tisquantum (affectionately known by tragically gullible American schoolchildren** as “Squanto,” the affable, gentle savage sent by God to show the clueless honkys how to feed themselves), would have snuffed it in short order.

It is not generally known, however, by either the aforementioned schoolchildren or their grownup football-addled parents that good old Squanto had been repeatedly kidnaped and enslaved by English opportunists (referred to in schoolbooks as “explorers”), and that his tribe had been all but wiped out by smallpox originating from you-know-where, and that his motives in coming to the godbag Pilgrims’ aid, given the chappie’s unpleasant history with the honky gang he referred to as “seaborn savages” (Miles Standish’s first act upon coming ashore was to fire his musket into a group of Wampanoags), may have been somewhat less altruistic than today’s nostalgic honky might wish to believe.

But I digress.

It is icky enough that this mythical feast we are patriotically bound to celebrate is inextricably rooted in the bloody Christian ideology that would spawn the murderous European colonialist sweep through North America and decimate the remaining indigenous civilizations (not to mention a bunch of forests and bison). What is ickier still is that nobody but a hopeless idealist believes that modern Thanksgiving revelers give even a flickering thought to the horrors of colonialism. In reality Thanksgiving Day just marks the kick-off of the Annual Season of God and Guilt with a pre-consume-o-rama carbo-load. Tomorrow, if you have the misfortune to find yourself in any American city, you depart your home at your own peril, for the day after all the thanks have been given is called Black Friday, and life is cheap. Legions of shoppers, still bloated from canned pumpkin products and of a frenzied disposition owing to their mounting MasterCard debt, will blitz the streets to snap up as much cheap crap from China as their bingo-arms can carry against the foreordained approach of yet another Christioconsumer “holiday.”

But I digress again.

Inevitably certain male honky journalists are asked on these sentimental occasions for their lyric interpretations of beloved American rituals. They find themselves unable to resist the golden propaganda opportunities afforded by the Thomas Kincadian Thanksgiving spirit, so they throw in a shout-out to those other sterling symbols of American fortitude, the “founding fathers.”

The “founding fathers” weren’t even born when the picturesque Plymouth Pilgrims with their big square buckles and starched white bonnets were depriving the Massachusetts waterways of their tasty eels, and they were dead as dirt by the time Thanksgiving was declared by Honest Abe Lincoln a national (tacitly Christian) holiday in 1863. Nevertheless, their mythical deeds and legendary works — selectively filtered, naturally, since many of these dudes have since been revealed as mere humans, or slave-rapers, or to have embraced deism only perfunctorily and in some cases not at all — have become, like the Pilgrim narrative, a sort of liturgy for today’s White Male Christian-American Orthodoxy. Invoked interchangeably with God by politicians and other meddlers intent on stirring up patriotic obeisance on occasions of enforced national togetherness, and against the perennial threat of enlightened or independent thought, the “founding fathers,” whatever their degree of actual enlightenment might have been, have been re-branded by dudely historians as princely, one-dimensional American patriarchal deities whose commanding stentorian pronouncements echo from their marble crypts: “thou shalt have school prayer, creationism, gun-totin’, and lap dancin’.”

Newsweek’s Jon Meacham, for example, has a Thanksgiving essay devoted to “The Ultimate American Holiday” in which he namechecks all sorts of 18th century Constitution signatories. By way of apologizing to the sane for the theological roots of this supposedly secular holiday, he avers that “history teaches us that religious impulse is intrinsic” (Yeah, just like my lipstick-wearing impulse is intrinsic).

Based on the improbable premise of religious intrinsicalness, Meacham gives beloved patriarchy a little lap dance of his own: Jefferson’s fabled “separation,” he says, is “between church and state, not between religion and politics.” On this wobbly semantic tweak he hangs his argument that even atheist Americans — whom, he notes from somewhere in Dreamland, are magnanimously tolerated by the religious majority — should joyfully embrace the grotesque Thanksgiving consumerist gorge-a-thon as a show of solidarity with their delusional godly countrymen. And because no Thanksgiving essay is complete without suggestions as to what to be thankful for, he opines that we heretics and non-believers “give thanks” (to whom?) for the “freedom” that allows us the golden opportunity to be tolerant of bogus secularism and to eat its turkey, albeit as social and intellectual outcasts who are going to hell, alongside the faithful.

Yup, Thanksgiving is the ultimate American holiday, all righty: the ultimate holiday of the same White Male Christian Americanism that brings you, among other things, everlasting foreign war, the sickeningly misguided “quiverfulls”, that poor 9th-grade kid in Utah who was gang-raped by the ‘religious conviction’ of her community’s ‘prophet’, the anti-immigration wall-to-nowhere, the 46.6 million Americans without health insurance (32% of all Hispanics!), and the humanitarian crisis that is the global oppression of women.

_____________________________
* It is not known what becomes of the men; possibly they are abducted en masse by misogynist aliens, during which interim they are injected with mind-control tinctures made from photographs of porn stars in chains.

** These are the same schoolchildren who are taught that God created America, that Columbus discovered America (strange, isn’t it, that God didn’t simply plant the honkys in their American paradise in the first place; He must have really had it in for those heathen Native Americans), and who are called ‘faggots’ by school board presidents for starting Gay-Straight Alliance groups (which the school board presidents call ’sex clubs’.)

Posted in Patriarchy, my patriarchy. Bite me, Chad.

Olbermann rescues battered soul from Cool Whip purgatory

Published by Twisty on November 22, 2006. 34 Comments

Do you remember the last time you were happy? I allude, of course, to the rush of elation that washed over you the morning you heard the dulcet tones of Carl Kasell imparting the almost unbelievable news that American voters had more or less socked it to the Bush regime doggie-style. You know how you danced out into the demi-paradise of your cheery neighborhood, aglow with exultation, inspirational songs such as “Dueling Banjos” and the The Partridge Family theme rising from your quivering throat? Remember how you then reached into your fannypack, whipped out your Blackberry, and dashed off an eloquent blog post likening the event to the golden taste of gusto shining like the light at the end of a tunnel that was on but no one was home and the weight of a thousand lead luftballons lifted the monkeys off your back and you finally awoke fit-you-must-acquit as a fiddle from a Nightmare of the dark where All the dogs of Europe bark?

For the rest of the day, and maybe some of the next day, too, you had the curious sensation that you and your shining ideals were not alone. Remember? It seemed entirely likely that the entire world hadn’t gone mad after all, that there were others like you whose views on good government tend to veer away from compulsory pregnancy laws and brainwashing tots that George Bush created the universe 6000 years ago. You dared to consider the possibility that the human spirit is not, in fact, merely a snotglob of hubris, deceit, and churlishness loosely bound with stupidity and season tickets to NASCAR, but rather something intelligent and pretty, with a decent music collection. You dared to feel the dim stirrings of hope that one day your own government might give you back your uterus (if you still have one), that maybe while they were at it they’d decriminalize poverty, or even put a stop to the senseless butchery in Iraq.

Then you called your Republican brother-in-law and went “nyah-nyah!” Oh, how the two of you laughed.

But soon afterward, it pains me to remind you, the gilded tide of jubilation began receding to distant shores, taking with it the moratorium on despair that had, for a time, made it seem possible to ease up on the double Xanax-Paxil-margarita lunches. Horribly, all anyone wanted to talk about was how the Republicans are gearing up for the next assault, how the Democratic candidates only got elected because they are actually a bunch of anti-abortion pro-war turds, how America is essentially a conservative nation of white males or porn addicts, and how Britney is finally taking my advice and dumping Federline.

But it wasn’t until the fucking President flitted over to Vietnam and declared that the good old American imperialist spirit will never die — you heard him speak the words, yet how could an American president not know that we lost the Vietnam war? — that you heaved, with cognitive dissonance afresh, your joyless carcass onto your lime green recliner, bringing with you a straw and the family-size tub of Cool Whip into which you had mixed a pint of Jack Daniels. Your face broke out in zits, your eyes turned into black-and-white spirals, twirling and twirling and twirling and twirling …

But wait! Come on get somewhat happy! Keith Olbermann gives you another golden taste of gusto with this glorious bit of dignified and justifiably outraged oratory.

[found at Digby via Amanda]

Posted in Patriarchy, my patriarchy. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt takes stab at tiresome trope

Published by Twisty on November 21, 2006. 27 Comments

Before I take a whack at the essay I’ve been wanting to write on Coping With the Surprisingly Daunting Scope of Patriarchy, I’ll just make a quick note of my dissatisfaction with the language used in a report I just heard on NPR. The report was on the trial of the soldiers accused of taking part in the massacre at Haditha (there have been a lot of massacres as a result of this current manifestation of patriarchy’s territorial pissings, so let me refresh your memory; Haditha’s the one with the taxicabful of innocent Iraqi students and the housefuls of innocent Iraqi civilians, all gunned down, possibly ‘in cold blood’ by bloodthirsty American Marines but most assuredly in cold blood by bloodthirsty American politicians).

My objection to the NPR report is this: that when describing the (alleged) re-staging of the murder scene to make it look like the housefuls of civilians had fired on the Americans when in fact they had been ducking for cover, the reporter sought to give credence to the innocent civilian theory by pointing out that only one AK-47 had been found, and besides, one of the houses contained only women and children. The reporter left the listener to draw the obvious conclusion: if there’s one thing you can depend on to express an entirely null value in a wartime shooting, it’s women-and-children.

Unless the story’s light on maudlin sentimentality; then women-and-children are invoked as pitiful innocent pawns to add pathos to the melodrama.

I’m not saying that these American troops didn’t just suddenly crack up and massacre without compunction unoffending townsfolk. I’m just taking issue — and no, it’s not the first time — with this “only women and children” trope so ubiquitous in reportage. It not only equates grown women with helpless babies, it more or less evokes imagery of huddled, defenseless, barely sentient beings towards whom our feelings cannot be substantially distinguished from those we might feel for a bagful of kittens clutched by a farmer heading for the pond.

You may think this a miniscule quibble, but you know, language means stuff.

Posted in Patriarchy, my patriarchy. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt closes in on murky origins of strawfeminist fallacy

Published by Twisty on November 19, 2006. 73 Comments

JuniorLeagueSkirty.jpg
Ugly lace skirt draped with xmas lights at the even uglier Junior League Christmas Bazaar, Palmer Event Center, Austin TX, Nov. 17, 2006. Just two of the things I will outlaw when I overthrow honky dude rule.

You ever wonder how these strawfeminist things get started? No? Well, here’s a short synopsis anyway.

I have just returned from a visit to a blog whose author, LaurynX, attributes to I Blame The Patriarchy, and then condemns, a goofy sociopolitical position with which I aggressively disagree. This viewpoint is so preposterous that I can but declare it kooky and inconsistent with both the highly sensible Twistyfesto and that old-tyme radical feminist religion. I must also mention, since it is more or less central to my thesis*, that in her attribution LaurynX vacillates a tad. She might have read the goofy thing at this blog, or it might have been at some other feminist blog; she admits she can’t “quite remember” exactly what she read, where she read it, or even whether she agreed with it. Nevertheless, unencumbered by facts, she soldiers on, and another strawfeminist is born.

The kooky argument which isn’t mine — and which certainly isn’t the argument of any feminist mystery blogger, since no feminist mystery blogger with two feminist mystery ganglia to rub together would take time out of her busy schedule of lip-pursing and leg-hair cultivation to make such an asinine pronouncement — cries out for bilious ridicule. In fact, in a moment I will chuck a hunk of my own bilious ridicule its way. Unfortunately for the spectators, LaurynX doesn’t herself go in for bilious ridicule. Showing a somewhat disappointing restraint (or maybe it’s just boredom; few undertakings could be more tedious than refuting nonexistent arguments), she confines herself to calling the faux-views of the faux-feminists “absurd.”

Well, of course they’re absurd. They’re imaginary.

By now you will have worked up a pretty frothy curiousity about the argument that neither I nor the mystery blogger nor, I assert, anyone who isn’t a closeted perv godbag ever actually made, but which nevertheless is supposed by LaurynX and thousands like her to form the very foundation of radical feminist dogma. Naturally I am reluctant reopen old wounds, but damn the torpedoes. Those of you who have not already guessed will be unsurprised to learn that the viewpoint LaurynX finds so absurd concerns nothing less than the most empowerful emblem of the empowerful girl’s lifelong dream of sexual empowerfulment. That’s right.

Fellatio.

Now don’t have a cow. The subject, I must insist, is strawfeminism. If we all stay focused, maybe we won’t have to slog through 1067 more heterophiliac comments on what an empty, colorless world it would be that was unchoked by blow jobs.

So anyway, according to LaurynX, here’s the posish at I Blame The Patriarchy (or some other blog): that feminists “[want] to outlaw giving head until patriarchy [is] eradicated…then they wouldn’t feel degraded by performing it.” LaurynX, who (it never fails) turns out to be a big BDSM enthusiast, calls these outlaw-happy chimeras “erotophobic feminists.”

There, you see? You see what the spinster aunt is up against in this zany world? I merely observe that the dominant culture is a patriarchy, that patriarchy is defined by its fetishization of dominance, that in a patriarchy women are the sex class, that this sex class is sorely oppressed, that the degree of soreness to which the sex class is oppressed is of such astronomic, desperate proportion that no act committed by anyone can exist outside of it, and presto! Suddenly I’m (or maybe that other blogger is) an ‘erotophobe’ who goes around ‘outlawing’ stuff!

I ask you.

I feel like a dork for even explaining this, but the idea that I or anybody else would outlaw any behavior seen to be demeaning to women is just nutty; I (or the mystery blogger) might just as well suggest outlawing television, or walking down South Congress Ave, or grocery shopping. Ya know why? Because it’s a patriarchy, fool; everything is demeaning to women. Everything! Even blow jobs!** That’s what patriarchy is.

Man, I wish these modern girls could stop confusing feminism with patriarchy, and nature with nurture, and truth with BDSM, and me with some phantom blogger who wants to outlaw stuff.

If wishes were fishes there’d be sushi for everyone!
__________________________________

* I am a clumsy writer, and habitually bury my thesis under mounds of commas, so here’s the gist, enormous news flash that it is: Logical fallacy of the strawfeminist variety originates in an inability to imagine a social order based on any concept other than dominance.

** And what about after “patriarchy is eradicated”? My prediction is that the future of patriarchy is so bright and full of promise that, beyond the entertainment value to speculative hobbyists such as myself, any discussion of its eradication is meaningless to our species; the post-patriarchal society will also be a post-human society, and blow jobs will probably hold little fascination for the bacteria who inherit the earth.

Posted in Austin. Bite me, Chad.