I Blame the Patriarchy will be observing an Interim of Silence in memory of journalist, provocateur, character, and consummate Texan Molly Ivins, who died today of breast cancer.
Hell-raising will recommence shortly.
Monthly Archive for January, 2007
Sommer failing to gaze adoringly at husband. CBS News photo.
It’s no secret that living “like a woman set free” — as opposed to living like a proper woman, a subordinate enslaved and subdued by socioeconomic, ideological, biological and cultural forces — is an offense against human decency. Since the dawn of time, free-wheelinosity in women has been punishable by imprisonment, and it still is.
Take the case of Cynthia Sommer. Instead of clapping a delicate wrist to her pale brow and taking to her bed following the sudden death of her military husband, Sommer threw “loud parties,” got a boob job, went on “shopping sprees”, and — most heinous of all — had “casual sex with multiple partners.” In lieu of any actual evidence, San Diego prosecutors convinced a jury that La Sommer’s post-mortem laissez-les-bons-temps-roulent demeanor was as good as a signed confession that she murdered her husband with arsenic for the insurance money.
Now, I have no idea whether she dunnit or not. The point is that it turns out that ‘failure to pine’ is not just a Victorian literary device, it’s legitimate evidence in a 21st century American court of law. No joke, here’s how the DA summed up the prosecution’s case:
“We have somebody in the end who was not acting aggrieved at the death of her husband.”
Sommer had not read the manual, despite its wide availability on Oprah, the Lifetime Channel, and Court TV, entitled Socially-Mandated Stereotypical Conduct For Young Honky Wives Following Untimely Deaths of Husbands. She mighta saved herself a world-o-hurt if she had just followed this simple plan:
Prior to Husband’s Demise
– Maintain virginity until marriage
– Keep house, kids, and self spotless
– Go to church regular
– Keep husband’s drinking/gambling/sex/porn addiction a closely guarded secret
– Send casual emails to friends and family passing along latest list of Hillary jokes, adding how much you love husband and would never kill him
– Contrive to have photographs taken of self gazing piously at husband for later use on TV true crime shows; make sure they don’t make you look too slutty
Immediately After Husband’s Death
– Contrive to have local TV cameras videotape you weeping uncontrollably in front of your modest bungalow for a few seconds; then have family members help you into the car.
– At graveside either faint or collapse in a fit on top of the casket
– Wear just enough mascara so that it’ll run when you weep, but not so much that you look too slutty
From Here On Out:
– Never look too slutty
– Wear only greyish burlap sacks
– Never smile
– Never have sex
– Suck up to your in-laws: move in with them to cook and clean, and freely offer them custody of the kids
– Give the insurance money to the church
– Enter a slow decline
– After six months, get treated for depression, but be careful not to enjoy any drugs prescribed
– Attempt suicide, find religion
– Enter a nunnery, where you die of consumption
[Thanks, Sean]
Tuna on wheat: a fixed and unalterable point in the space-time continuum
What other people are saying about their lunch:
“At Bob’s urging, I just made my lunch for tomorrow.”
— Willa“I had a Pizza McPuff at MCdonald’s but did not have any fun as I has to study after that!!! :((”
— Prateek Saxena at Lunch is Fun (TM)“The tally as of tonight is carrot cake and mashed potatoes for the annual Christmas potluck, panzanella and mac & chee [...] and four loads of laundry, all folded and put away.”
— Head Nurse
Someone — someone, I should say, with piercing acumen, who evidently has seen through my intricate deceptions and perceived that as a blogger I am a but a faux poseur feigning a false front of spurious pretense — has hipped me to a how-to manual containing 100 tips for improving one’s blog. The how-to manual is called Nobody Cares What You Had For Lunch. I have not read this book, but presumably, somewhere within, its author makes the outrageous claim that nobody cares what I had for lunch.
Which would be quite the little sliver of enlightenment if it were true. But surely no such attitude is possible.
Unless — all right, I’m willing to concede the remote possibility that lunch, of all the eighteen daily meals, is perhaps of an inherently less riveting nature than, possibly, the midnight snack (with its dramatic refrigerator-lit chiaroscuro), or Happy Hour (deep-fried denouement-on-a-stick with rejuvenating tinctures at half price), or the midmorning puff-pastry break (which needs no explanation). Compared to these brilliant jewels in the crown of the epicure’s daily scavenges, what is lunch but a cramped mid-day hour whose shining monument is a tuna-on-wheat at your desk? Or worse, a dreary interim of jousting with a “chicken caesar” in a noisy joint crowded with melancholy worker drones whose futile dreams of quitting the rat race to train in the Swiss Alps for the World Stone-Skipping Championships are written in furrows upon their sallow, defeated brows?
Yes, maybe lunch, with its preternaturally deterministic overtones, is too existential crisis-y a subject for lite blogular contemplation. Nobody cares about lunch because, see, they care about it too much, and ultimately an hour just isn’t long enough to come to grips with dreary suicide-inducing conclusions about free will and how the fixed nature of tuna-on-wheat cannot change simply as a result of whether one considers a given sandwich to be past or future.
I can dig it.
So it’s dinner people care about, undoubtedly.
If no one cares what I had for dinner, is it really probable that, as the author of Nobody Cares What You Had For Lunch suggests, the reader will “gasp with delight” upon exposure to, god forbid, my “childhood memories”? And what about her call to pad blog content by conducting “unnecessary experiments”? Surely if a reasonably peckish reader cannot work up an interest in a spinster aunt’s plate of crispy Patagonian toothfish with spicy citrus compote, couscous, and roasted Brussel’s sprouts, the fault lies not with me, but with our oppressive system of how-to manuals, and the absence of rational understanding they promote.
Crispy Patagonian toothfish with spicy citrus compote
For fish:
Determine that your monger has acquired the specimen from a fishery practicing sustainable harvesting. Rub fillet with olive oil, salt, pepper. Coat lightly with panko. Roast for 10 minutes in a convection oven at 400 degrees F.
For compote:
Combine in a saucepan and simmer until fruit is mushy and liquid is syrupy:
• several glugs of white wine
• an assortment of chopped tangerine, grapefruit, mango, pineapple and yellow raisins
• a dried Thai chile pod
• a clove of garlic, smashed
• a few slices of ginger or galangal
• a couple smidges of brown sugar
Abandon hope, all ye who enter here
Speaking of PSA posters that objectify with pornulated imagery the very class of people their message purports to serve, get a load of this “consent awareness” ad from the British Home Office. The ad is intended for publication in a magazine read (or, possibly more accurately, looked at) by puerile male heterosexuals, the chief attraction of which periodical is photos of “Bedroom Babes!” and “Celebs Naked on TV!” The magazine, naturally, is called Nuts. The Home Office hopes their ad will guide the insightful readers of Nuts “to greater awareness and understanding of what consent means” and even that it will somehow “[dispel] myths about the type of people who commit rape.”
The notion that puerile male heterosexuals might wish to acquaint themselves with difficult modern concepts like “right” and “wrong” sure is ground-breaking. Never before in the history of the world have young men been called upon to assume such awesome responsibility.
And, it turns out, they still haven’t been.
A crotch-shot with a “Do Not Enter” sign, coupled with the authoritarian threat of imprisonment, appears to be the extent to which Britain’s babe-obsessed youth are expected to appreciate the concept of rape.
According to an Amnesty International report referenced by BBC News, 1/3 of the UK population believe that flirty women are to blame for their own rapes. I suppose the Home Office doesn’t want to swim against the tide of public opinion by suggesting to anyone that rape is wrong because women are human beings.
[Gracias, Judith]
Hakuo Yanagisawa, former finance minister, now Borg King
I just had to add this guy to my collection. I allude, of course, to Japan’s health minister, pronouncing on the crisis of falling birth rates:
“Because the number of birth-giving machines and devices is fixed, all we can ask for is for them to do their best per head,” he said.
He added: “Although it may not be so appropriate to call them machines.”
Obviously the world’s parliaments are crammed to the rafters with zombie politicians who sit around muttering this kind of misogyny-as-public-policy crap into each other’s hairy ears all day long. What’s unusual is when one of them escapes the protective custody of his wranglers long enough to provide the unsuspecting citizenry an unguarded glimpse of the actual dominant male agenda. Which we now see is a scheme to assimilate all female devices into the Japanese Womb-Borg.
You know, I’ve pretty much had it up to here with state-sponsored claims on private internal organs. No one will ever know a moment’s peace until uteruses become politically irrelevant.
It seems inconceivable, in this golden epoch when no reality exists for man except the limitless gratification of his sexual perversions, that there should persist, like a nagging dose of syphilis, little unpornulated pockets of the daily humdrum that afford little or no opportunity for titillation. Of course there are only three of them, but persist they do. Schlumping a load of greyish wet underwear into the dryer is one. Getting stitches in your eye is another. And of course the heaviest weight of libido-crushing unsexiness known to plague civilization’s dominant class — the dreary three minutes’ privation between the ordering of a coffee at a drive-thru and the picking up of the coffee at the drive-thru window — is a boner-wilting void made interminable by a vexing paucity of cleavage, lap dances and hottie sex-talk.
O happy day! The Seattle Times reports that the coffee-queue drought is over for those hubba-bubbas lucky enough to live within jizzin distance of the Great Northwest. Classy dudes who simply can’t make it to the strip club without a little tent-pitching pick-me-up can now wheel through any number of “commuter coffee stops” featuring “bodacious baristas, flirty service and ever more-revealing outfits.” One sterling representative of his species knows his rights: “If I’m going to pay $4 for a cup of coffee, I’m not going to get served by a guy.”
Sometimes the commuter coffee stops host “theme days”. Guess what the themes are! That’s right! “Schoolgirl” or the highly original “adding glasses for a sexy ’secretary’ look.” Now that’s bodacious!
If the expression of hatred mixed with ennui that contorts the countenances of many of the world’s baristas is any indication, making with the me-so-horny routine — on top of eking it out in a servile Mcjob requiring one to wear makeup and “do” one’s hair — is bound to lift the flagging spirits! Not just of baristas and their bodaciosity-starved customers, but of all mankind! Is there anything that porn can’t fix?
[Gracias, Kashina]
Perhaps you’ll recall the LA Times story from last summer wherein journalist Claire Hoffman recounts the physical and verbal abuse she endured while interviewing repulsive “Girls Gone Wild” slimebag pornographer Joe Francis. Hoffman’s story begins thusly:
“Joe Francis [...] has my face pressed against the hood of a car, my arms twisted hard behind my back. He’s pushing himself against me, shouting: ‘This is what they did to me in Panama City!’”
If your constitution is sound, read the whole thing for colorful background information on Francis and his roving band of camera-wielding rapist minions here.
So what’s the good news, you ask? Blamer Liz Ladd of Bloomington Indiana has, with the help of other community activists, actually succeeded in shutting down a Girls Gone Wild event in her town. Here is her report, received via email this morning at Twisty HQ :
Hi Twisty,
A week or so ago, I noticed that Girls Gone Wild, the problems I have with which I’m sure you can surmise, was coming to my town. I didn’t suppose that I could shut the event down altogether, but I thought I could at least warn some people that the folks they’d be taking off their clothes for were rapists. So I started raising awareness in my own little way: started a facebook page and a myspace group, handed out small flyers letting people know about the rape allegations, labor issues of making porn this way, and such. Lo and behold, there were other forces at work, and better activists than me succeeded in getting the whole shebang CANCELED by, in a genius move, threatening to acquire the video taped the night of the event and show it at the board meeting at which the bar’s liquor license would be up for renewal. No manager wants to go to the trouble of making sure that everything stays legal that night, and he summarily did the “right thing” and canceled the event. ANYONE can do this in any town, no? I’ve switched over my facebook and myspace pages to telling people about this strategy.
Read a student newspaper account of Liz’s triumph here.
Here is Liz’s ‘Fuck Girls Gone Wild’ MySpace page, here’s the Facebook edition, and here’s a Livejournal entry with a sample email petition and a list of upcoming Girls Gone Wild tour dates that are crying out for intervention.
This, young onions, is what blaming is all about. Can we get a hell yeah.
A little lite reading at a DC bus stop. Photographed and originally uploaded by techne, some rights reserved.
First, the bad news.
Get a load of this poster, photographed by DC blogger/photographer techne at a Washington DC bus hut. The poster features a faceless young woman’s body, its physique of porn-approved dimensions, clothed in what is popularly referred to by today’s hip young sensitivos as a ‘wifebeater’ undershirt. On the undershirt in large print are the words “PUNCH IT STRANGLE IT KICK IT SPIT ON IT CHOKE IT AND PUMMEL IT UNTIL IT’S GOOD AND DEAD.” It’s the new “Girls Gone Dead” video, right?
Wrong. It’s an ad campaign for the Komen Foundation, dum-dum! Look at the tiny, tiny print. They’re Exploiting for the Cure.
Komen, it can’t have escaped your eagle eye, is the author of those asinine, pink-visored “Race For The Cures,” as well as that most pernicious arm of the megatheocorporatocracy responsible for turning breast cancer — which used to be a vile disease that kills people but is now a sweet little personal struggle that gives middle aged white women the golden opportunity to grow — into branded “awareness.” Breast Cancer Awareness the Brand, with its army of unpaid pink volunterrorists, sells, with unprecedented success, everything from cars to football to potato chips. All, remarkably, without making the slightest dent in breast cancer deaths.
Thus it is through the narrowed eye of resigned cynicism that I view this pornalicious poster: the chest-o-centric pose, the decapitation, the mood lighting, and of course, the snuff film script. Komen stops at nothing, for hundreds of corporations rely on pinkribbonnity to wholesomize their tarnished public images every October during Breast Cancer Shill Month.
Behold the actual sexiness of unpornulated breast cancer ’survivorship’. It would sell exactly zero potato chips.
I am unenlightened as to the degree to which the excellent techne is familiar with Komen’s misogynist underpinnings; even if she is like most Americans and views Komen as benign, she’s approprately sickened by this explicitly brazen manifestation of the true status of women in American society. It is not without wry indignation that techne remarks “Gee I know! Let’s raise awareness of breast cancer research by putting a violent message on a headless female torso!”
Techne, it turns out, dropped a line to DCist to publicly proclaim her disgust. Her email was published. Like every first commenter on every pop culture City-ist blog, the first commenter on the DCist post was a dude named Todd. Todd declared — not astonishingly, since misogyny is an invisible given in pop culture — that techne has “missed the intent” of the ad, which intent, he wildly surmised in the face of some rather damning evidence to the contrary, is to “stop cancer and not advertise toothpaste so I’d cut them some slack.”
Thus we see how beautifully Komen has succeeded in twisting the tiny brains of America’s Todds into accepting that as long as one seems to be “stopping cancer,” no pink potato chip bag or misogynist image is too revolting.
I might as well point out, while reiterating that Komen does not “stop” cancer, that even if the “intent” of this ad campaign were given the benefit of the doubt, its purported attempt to focus public anger on cancer itself, as though the disease were some cunning, adversarial arch-villain rather than clumps of insensible, indifferent mutant cells, is bogus misdirection. If there is going to be anger, it really ought to be directed at the true culprit: the megatheocorporatocracy which has loosed all these mutation-causing agents into the ecosphere in the first place.
Don’t touch that dial; I’ll get to the good news right after lunch.
[Gracias r b]
It’s the craziest thing. Just yesterday I was joking around about mocking BDSM for cheep laffs, when whaddya think happened but a pro-BDSM comment came in. It was left on an ancient post consisting of two short sentences and the above-pictured ‘fetish’ shoes. Because its outrage is so feebly expressed, I decided to promote it to Perfunctory BDSM Comment of the Week.
You people amaze me. You live blindly in a world where women are all victims. Have you ever discussed fetish with anyone? Have you ever been in a dominant/submissive relationship? Doubtful. These shoes are fetish play shoes. Not worn to work or even walked in for that matter. Most of the time I’ve encountered shoes like these have been in situations where there is a female dom and another female or male submissive wearing them. It’s a game that some people are into, and it’s just that. So cease your pathetic whining and wincing and let people live the lives they want to.
Or just unite as the victims you are and wallow in your misery!!!
I couldn’t have dreamed up a more archetypal example of dorkulence if I’d been offered a year’s supply of Cool Whip as a prize. How abundantly it expresses the bland fervor for conformity so popular among a certain species of Internetians (rhymes with ‘Venetians’) notable for their dexterity in eluding the persistent taint of enlightenment! This comment’s got it all. Observe:
- The dopey belief that pantomiming the dynamics of oppression through hackneyed sex maneuvers and jokey outfits is not merely gutsily outré, but is in fact Nature’s Masterpiece.
- The bizarre implication that I Blame the Patriarchy is somehow capable of dictating lifestyle choices, comically accompanied by the issue of orders (“cease what you are doing!”).
- The use of the word ‘victim’ as a derogatory epithet, a standard ploy among unimaginative patriarchy enthusiasts who wish to imply that calling bullshit on their dumb ideology is somehow tantamount to a character flaw (the old ‘victim mentality’ insult) .
- The self-deception that one’s parting zinger is so keen and trenchant that it warrants its own paragraph and three exclamation points!!!
Of course, the aforementioned are merely the icing on the cake. The comment’s outstanding value to the rafemblocom* scholar is this:
“Have you ever been in a dominant/submissive relationship? Doubtful.”
Doubtful! I’d like to meet the person who has never been in a dominant/submissive relationship. I’d totally buy that imaginary personage a purple diamond unicorn taco. The writer appears to be acutely insensible of the scientifically proven fact (four out of five radical feminists agree) that all human relationships, regardless of the degree to which they are afflicted with latex corsetry, depend on the model of dominance and submission. All human interaction, period, depends on it to some extent. They don’t call patriarchy the global paradigm for nothin. Our little fetishist’s insouciance seems astonishing, but it turns out that this willful — or possibly wishful — disregard for our society’s defining principle is more common among readers than I had imagined.
I allude to another, more recent comment [from this thread] wherein can be found the remarkable assertion that certain aspects of femininity are somehow innate or “authentic” and are therefore beneficial, and that the lone alternative available to a female who isn’t down with the trappings of sexbottery is to “ape masculinity.” This capitulation to the patriarchal edict compelling allegiance to binary sex roles — i.e. to the authority of the rule of dominance and submission — makes my hair hurt. Femininity isn’t, as one commenter suggests, ‘an aversion to violence’. That’s merely enlightenment. Femininity is learned behavior that fucks women up.
I frequently beat this dead horse, but I can’t help noticing that, despite my repeated floggings, there abounds a great confusion concerning the constituent aspects of ‘the feminine’. So I’ll just knock off a brief review, cribbing from the world’s foremost authority on the perils of girliness, and once more explain the term as it is used on this blog.
Femininity is a set of practices and behaviors (boob jobs, FGM, beauty, the veil, the flirty head-tilt, pornaliciousness, BDSM, fashion, compulsory pregnancy, marriage, et al) that are dangerous, painful, pink, or otherwise destructive; that compel female subordination; that exist only to benefit Dude Nation; that are overwhelmingly represented by ‘girly’ feminists as a ‘choice’; and that are overwhelmingly represented by godbags and other irritating conservatives as ‘natural instincts’. In fact these practices and behaviors are nothing but inviolable cultural traditions in abject compliance with which comfort, contentment, and personal fulfillment are inextricably intertwined, and from which deviation is discouraged by the threat of ingenious punishments ranging from diminished social influence, to unemployability, to ridicule, to imprisonment, to rape, to murder, to the policing of feminist blogs.
Although the female reader’s anxiety over the above will be, I predict, directly proportional to the degree to which her identity derives from compliance with the rule of femininity,** note that my purpose is to expose the invisible, tangled patriarchal root-ball of feminine behavior. It is not, in other words, to diss anybody for ‘wearing a satin dress’ or doing ‘what feels right.’*** It’s true that I personally advocate eliminating, to the greatest extent possible, voluntary compliance with patriarchal dictates; this is because I have personally experienced stuff like not giving a shit about my sassy sex-appeal as pretty liberating. But I am well aware, believe me, that women face untold horrors in the shape of situations wherein compliance with patriarchal dictates is not voluntary. The flipside, as I often find myself repeating, of the concept of femininity as-self-policed-subordination is femininity as-survival-skill. So it may be asserted that femininity is beneficial to the individual when using it prevents her from getting beaten up.
So — not that I expect anyone to do what I say or anything — I’d sure appreciate it if readers could resist the urge to (a) conclude that I promote something so trivial as anti-stilettoism as a substitute for activism or (b) interpret any of my ultimately inconsiderable blogutorials as self-important orders from Feminist High Command.
____________________________
*Rafemblocom: Radical feminist blog commentary.
** Whereas male anxiety will correspond to his dependence on female submissiveness, porn, free household drudge service, a constant supply of pussy, and his view of his masculine self as the default human state.
*** Although it’s no wonder that femininity “feels right”; we’ve been trained for it from the cradle, and, as I mentioned, the penalties for dissent are not paltry.
It’s been semi-announced already, but for those who prefer a structured warning to subtle intimation:
It is written that there will probably transpire, at this here blog, on or about March 1, 2007, a discussion of sorts on a pre-ordained topic. While the future is, ultimately, unknowable, that topic is foreseen to be Shulamith Firestone’s gripping 1970 classic, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution.
As even the semi-conscious reader has already deduced, Firestone’s book has been no small influence on the whole Twisty dealio. In it the author suggests, to my unbounded satisfaction, that Freud and Marx may have been on to something, but that their own sexist pig dudessentialism doomed them to failure. She makes the astonishing claim that kids are human. She notes that women will never bust out of sexual slavery until the traditional method of reproduction, with its attendant “family chauvinism” and caste system, is eliminated. For the finale, she winds up with an appealing sci-fi speculation on the love-fest nature of post-revolutionary society. To wit:
“A cybernetic communism would abolish economic classes, and all forms of labour exploitation, by granting all people a livelihood based only on material needs. Eventually work (drudge jobs) would be eliminated in favour of (complex) play, activity done for its own sake, by adults as well as children. With the disappearance of motherhood, and the obstructing incest taboo, sexuality would be re-integrated, allowing love to flow unimpeded.”
A peerless confection.
For 30 years Firestone’s oeuvre consisted of this single book. In 1997 she published a work of fiction, Airless Spaces, which is also fair game for purposes of discussion. According to the lore, there also exists a 30-minute pseudo-radfemumentary, “Shulie.” I ain’t seen it, but it might add some pungency to this whole Shulathon, if it could be gotten hold of.
By the way, it has been suggested that participants in the reading party put a sock in it until the official Discussion Date. I regret it is unlikely that I will be able to go a whole month without some sort of Shulamithian allusion, reference, or pirated idea. I never have yet.
Also by the way, to those who complain that thinky stuff like utopian speculation and patriarchy-blaming don’t offer immediate gratification in terms of “a solution,” here’s a suggestion for subversive activism that will have an instantaneous and profound effect on you and everyone who encounters you: how’s about you personally eradicate your own crippling dependence on femininity from your own individual selves? Revolution begins at home!
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