Monthly Archive for February, 2007

I love the smell of a glamour-don’t in the morning

Published by Twisty on February 28, 2007. 136 Comments

A propos of the recent discussion on self-policing female tools of the patriarchy: behold NPR’s “Morning Edition” commentator Dawn Turner Trice as she condemns the practice, which has apparently proliferated wildly out of control among pregnant women in her office, of wearing spandex that accentuates their enceinteship. She finds “unsettling” the frankness with which her colleagues unapologetically saunter around their cubicles with fabric “stretched across huge bellies.”

“I’m thrilled that pregnancy is no longer an automatic ticket to the mommy track,” Trice says, revealing that NPR is now recruiting contributors from the Bellevue Department at Delusionville U, “but maybe we need a rule. If you want to get ahead, spandex has no place in the office.”

How pleasant for the preggos in her office that they have patriarchy mouthpiece/femininity rule book author Dawn Turner Trice expressing her revulsion for them on National Public Radio, and how useful of National Public Radio to broadcast this important caution against wearing such a meretricious fabric within tent-pitching distance of important men while gestating young innocents.

Posted in Femininity. Bite me, Chad.

Mission statement revitalization programme, part one

Published by Twisty on February 27, 2007. 52 Comments

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[image ©1984 Universal Studios]

The mists of time part to reveal the origins of The Blame

With the damp, colorless fog that awakened the denizens of the Twisty Bungalow this morning (instead of the expected diamantiferous fanfare of taco-eating cherubim upon which my obstreperal lobe depends for its award-nominated vim and vigor) has also dawned the realization that the FAQ is somewhat out of date. It is time once again to revise the I Blame the Patriarchy mission statement.

But before I do that, I will offer the current working definition of patriarchy as it is blamed in this oeuvre.

But before I do that, as part of my continuing program to bollix stuff up, I will dust off a wrinkly old explicative device and describe what patriarchy is not.

But even before I do that, I gotta get one other thing off my chest.

The Blames Begin

It grieves me to confess it, but I am no shining beacon of accuracy when I say that I blame the patriarchy. Nothing against blaming; recrimination, self-pity, and vengeance definitely have their place in the spinster auntly ethos. But where the blog is concerned, my high moral purpose is not so much to blame, as it is more or less to put the finger on patriarchy. Or, to borrow a quaint phrase from the golden days of yore when feminism was an actual movement, I attempt to raise consciousness by shining the Flying Flashlight of Obstreperosity on those often invisible constructs of culture, education, politics, religion, sex, and behavior that reinforce a global paradigm of dominance and submission, which global paradigm ultimately benefits like 4 guys, and which paticularly fucks over several of the classes into which I personally have been shoved against my will.

Readers new to the blog are liable to misinterpret the blaming trope as some species of whiny, responsibility-shirking self-victimization. Not so! Whereas it true that the word “blame” appears in the title, it would be more accurate to say — and it therefore should be understood within the patriarchy-blaming argot to mean — “espy, descry, and condemn.”

Normally I don’t go in for this sort of obfuscatory, misleading lingo, and in fact I rarely use the word “blame” in the essays themselves. Which makes the title somewhat unfortunate. But “I Blame the Patriarchy” became the name of the blog when it existed only as an outcast vessel, uncherished by any audience whatsoever, into which I was wont to decant my anguished soul. The entitulation occurred long before the site began to acquire readers who don’t know me from adam, and who therefore might not realize that “I blame the patriarchy” is just a puerile and not altogether apt allusion to an early 80s cult film. Of course it’s too late to change it now.

Naturally, the modern blamer will have grasped il y a longtemps that I copped the title from a scene in “Repo Man”. That scene is this: in the bloody aftermath of a comical convenience-store robbery, stick-up punk Dick Rude lies dying of a gunshot wound, whereupon he has the following conversation with his former best friend, anti-hero Emilio Estevez. [I would put this seminal video clip up on YouTube, but it is very inconveniently copyrighted material].

Dick Rude: Lights are growin’ dim … I know a life of crime led me to this sorry fate, and yet … I blame society. Society made me what I am.

Emilio Estevez: That’s bullshit. You’re a white suburban punk just like me.

Dick Rude: But it still hurts.

[repellent dying gurgle noises ensue]

Emilio Estevez: You’re gonna be all right.

Next: Mission Statement Part II: What Patriarchy Ain’t
And after that: Mission Statement Part III: What Patriarchy Means To Me

Posted in Announcements. Bite me, Chad.

Sisterhood

Published by Twisty on February 26, 2007. 152 Comments

Few things are more distasteful to the delicate feminist sense of justice than instances of women harshin’ on other women. This women-bashing-women crap happens as often within “the movement” (such as it is) as it does among the unenlightened tighty-whitey anti-feminist collaborators. It’s bad enough, feminists lament, that men feel entitled to abuse us; how will we ever liberate ourselves when so many members of our own class seem so determined to enforce our, and their own, oppression?

We are all aggrieved by feminist infighting, “infighting” being the derogatory, male-framed way of describing the inevitable result of multiple intersections of multiple class struggles — the struggles of women of color, of poor women, of middle class women, of Jewish women, of prostituted lesbian intellectual women, et al — each of which classes has been engineered, it goes without saying, by patriarchy. But that’s another essay.

Today, by way of an excursion into the exotic, cut-throat world of Greek sororities, we take a look at the self-oppressing tendencies of anti-feminist patriarchy collaborators. For it seems that the DePauw University chapter of the Delta Zeta sorority, perceiving as detrimental to its “recruitment goals” the continued inclusion of constituents whose physical and intellectual deviation from the Barbie standard makes them too unbearable to look at, gave all un-slender, un-white, un-stupid members the boot. That’s right. Because Delta Zeta had acquired an undesirable reputation as a repository for unfuckable ugly smart chicks, and since a sorority’s ostensible raison d’être is to provide suitably sex-ay receptacles for fratboys, the sorority’s national office had no choice but to purge the rolls of all who were not up to specs bodaciousness-wise.

The New York Times reports that the ethnic cleansing “left a messy aftermath of recrimination and tears” and “battered the self-esteem” of 23 women whose appearance and braininess was deemed an effrontery to the straight white American feminine fuckbot beauty ideal, to the extent that some of the rejected girls withdrew from classes.

And thus we see how patriarchy often masquerades as sisterhood in order to bite you in the ass. The message of Delta Zeta is the message of white male supremacy: a woman’s value is strictly reproductive.

It turns out that this story is Top o’ the Pops at the New York Times today. This development will hardly surprise the veteran patriarchy-blamer. Stories about women fucking each other over are irresistible, because (a) dudes love a ‘catfight’ and (b) such stories relieve male anxiety over participation in patriarchal culture by suggesting that women willingly engineer their own oppression.

But women didn’t create misogyny, and don’t benefit from it. Even so, unrelentingly they find their choices bound by it. When women hate women, it is only men hating women by proxy.

[Thanks Sue]

Posted in Men Hate You and The Beauty Ultimatum. Bite me, Chad.

Chicks-running-for-high-officewatch ‘07

Published by Twisty on February 25, 2007. 44 Comments

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Unrelated Live Music Capitol of the World photo of the day: the alley behind the Continental Club, South Austin, February 2007.

This isn’t the kind of post that drives traffic to the blog since it’s not about blow jobs, but it is nevertheless of some relevance to the patriarchy-blaming community that Mayan Quiché leftist/feminist/Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú is running for president in Guatemala.

You all read A Wrinkle in Time when you were kids. It was pretty godbaggy with all that “Let them give glory unto the Lord” crap on Uriel, and the Bible-quoting Aunt Beast, and the holy trinity aspects of the three Mrs Ws, but you gave that part a pass at the time because the Tesseract was so cool and the hero was actually a girl (although she naturally got saddled with a male bodyguard/love interest).

Anyway, remember the part where Mrs Who is telling Meg about Famous Fighters of the Black Thing Through the Ages? And she rattles off the names of a bunch of famous dudes, Einstein and Mozart and Jesus and so forth? Well, if Madeleine L’Engle had written her book some 20 years later, and if it had occurred to her to maybe put some goddam women on that list, Rigoberta Menchú would not have been a bad choice. Surviving right-wing massacres that included the murders of her parents and brother, she has been actively insurgenting for indigenous Mayans against overwhelming racist military oppression since the 70s, and won the Anti-Black-Thing Prize in 1992.

I probably don’t need to mention that in Guatemala, as in every country in the known universe, power is held by a rich, corrupt elite with drug connections and other nefarious features, and the lives of the oppressed aren’t worth a fig. A civil war which lasted over 30 years and included the genocide of over 200,000 citizens (mostly indigenous Mayans) was precipitated by — surprise — an American-engineered coup.

If Menchú were to prevail in the September election — an apparent long shot, since she represents a fledgling party (called Winaq, a word that seems to mean, depending on who you ask, “humanity,” “balance,” “integrity” or “Cool Whip”) with no electoral experience, and since anti-Mayan racism remains abundant, and since her insurgent past will make the good old boys queasy — she would be the first indigenous president of Guatemala.

It goes without saying that she’d be the first woman to hold that office. So far reports in English have failed to speculate on whether she exhibits too much unladylike “ambition,” and we still don’t know who designs her clothes.

[thanks ungoliant]

Posted in Austin and Politics. Bite me, Chad.

Ex-Harvard prez gets moment named after him

Published by Twisty on February 24, 2007. 55 Comments

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Unrelated nature photo of the day: live oak tree gives birth to bastard opuntia cactus. Blanco County TX, February, 2007.

One of the countless weapons with which the dominant male culture defends itself and its hatred of women against any real enlightenment is the moldy old established canon of male thought. The canon, which exalts an oppressive white male ideology while pretty much ignoring (except as specimens for study) the lower castes, is self-selecting, self-replenishing, and self-perpetuating. One of patriarchy’s great victories has been its success in passing its canon off as the ne plus ultra of all human intellectual and cultural endeavor. Which is of course entirely bogus, since to contribute to the canon, you have to be a dude. This bigoted class prerequisite is not seen as an impediment to the expectation that everyone, regardless of social status, assimilate this male-authored canon. And everyone does. Because history is men’s history, art is men’s art, politics is men’s politics, science is men’s science, sex is men’s sex, and even TV is men’s TV, what choice have we got?

To ensure this ubiquitous dudecentricity, at every gate to public life is stationed a pink-faced myrmidon, exquisitely schooled in the doctrine of dudely supremacy (is he also secretly afraid that his dick is too small and that he might be a homo? Probably.). He will admit through the gate to life’s rich pageant only creatures like himself.* Everyone else is obliged to stay home having pink-faced babies, or to stay out of sight slaving in some sweatshop.

The exception is when there’s a party and they need something to fuck. Fortunately for them, the supreme patriarchal hegemon has done an excellent job indoctrinating everyone. Men can rest assured that any public woman is a receptacle, if not for semen, then for disdain (e.g. ‘Amandagate’), or for absorbing one of those casual expressions of masterful primacy that helps get’em through the day. Who can forget W feeling up Angela Merkel at the G8 conference last summer?

Thus did Barry Gewen, a New York Times Book Review editor/myrmidon gatekeeper, come to have a “Larry Summers moment” while addressing The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study last week. As Ann Friedman, writing in The American Prospect Online, reports, Gewen seized the opportunity to explain that “the reason so few women reviewers appear in the NYTBR is that they just can’t write for a general audience about such topics as military history.” Like all men who have studied the canon, Barry Gewen knows “facts” about women’s “innate differences” that allow him to bask in the golden glow of his own importance, and of the importance of reviews of books on military history.

It would be nice if “Larry Summers moments” really were just moments. But they are not isolated instances of temporary insanity. They are not anomalous brain-farts specific to atypical academic wankers. They are ruptures in the facade of self-delusion that all successful men cultivate, little windows through which the subordinate castes may occasionally glimpse the gilded luxury of white dudes’ universal privilege. Which privilege is predicated on the lifelong practice of misogyny.
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* Except for a few tokens, who are let in so that dissident voices can be squelched by countering, “We let Condi Rice in, so clearly we’re not misogynist racists.”

[Thanks Joolya]

Posted in Men Hate You. Bite me, Chad.

Over 1,000,000 served

Published by Twisty on February 23, 2007. 37 Comments

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Chile con queso con rajas at El Chile in East Austin. Departing somewhat from the standard Velveeta model, the queso at El Chile appears to contain, in part, queso.

It was one of those momentous moments that, had anyone been conscious when it ensued, would not soon have been forgotten. I allude to the stately occasion of some silent, unsung hero having been the 1,000,732nd (since December 14, 2005) visitor to I Blame The Patriarchy. The majestic event slipped into the mists of time without pomp or flourish while I, no more a spinster aunt but an excrescence of the Tempur-Pedic, was fated merely to digest insensibly a big fat Tex-Mex dinner and an Inspector Appleby mystery.

Which slightly dotty peer of the realm would turn out to be the mastermind behind a series of elaborate art heists? This was, it stings my heart to admit, the question occupying my mind when by all rights I should have been throwing a yacht party in the Seychelles for brave iconoclast Number 1,000,732, whoever she was, and for all the rest of you august mavericks who doggedly persist against the mighty tide of pernicious hegemon to Blame The Patriarchy.

Although I suppose Number 1,000,732 was one of the 18 knobs who arrived via Google, searching for “15 year old girls nude.” It would be too good to be true if she turned out to be the lone searcher for “Twistolution” or (I know. As a soporific, other bloggers’ zany search strings are right up there with the classic two-Seconals-a-glass-of-armagnac-and-The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire insomnia cure, but indulge me; I don’t ask for much) “plastic gonads hanging from truck.”

Which brings me to my next point: the Shulathon is scheduled to commence in about a week, so if you haven’t finished The Dialectic of Sex yet, my gentle suggestion is to get crackin.

I leave you now with a couple of remarks from Richard Dawkins (with whom, if he actually were what he looks like, i.e. a middle-aged spinster aunt with a horse farm and a decent record collection, I might consider taking up).

Polls suggest that approximately 95 per cent of the population of the United States believe they will survive their own death. I can’t help wondering how many people who claim such belief really, in their heart of hearts, hold it. If they were truly sincere, shouldn’t they all behave like the Abbot of Ampleforth? When Cardinal Basil Hume told him that he was dying, the abbot was delighted for him: ‘Congratulations! That’s brilliant news. I wish I was coming with you.’” [1]

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1. Dawkins. The God Delusion. Houghton Mifflin, 2006 p. 356.

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

My sordid lunch

Published by Twisty on February 22, 2007. 41 Comments

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I cannot explain the longing for smoked meat on a styrofoam plate that occasionally overtakes me. Rib plate with slaw and beans ($8.73) at Jim Bob’s, February 2007.

West of Austin, on a scrubby stretch of Highway 71 that connects one zillion-dollar subdivision of McTuscan villas to the next, is the dilapidated, corndoggily cow-pokey, caliche-dust-covered shack infested by Jim Bob’s Barbeque [sic]. I can recommend stopping here if you are on your way back to town from a meeting in the creepy exurb of Lakeway that dragged on until 2 o’clock and you find yourself stricken with the kind of melancholy that seeps in through esoteric crevices carved out of your obstreperal lobe by extended lunchlessness and a goddam hot flash. But know in advance that Jim Bob’s decor runs to fly-specked photographs of assassinated rattlesnakes, and that the meat plates are sauce-free.

I never met a smoked rib I didn’t like. I am tortured by it.

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

Recognize this knob?

Published by Twisty on February 21, 2007. 150 Comments

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Let me know who he is, and I’ll send you a free Patriarchy-Blaming Kit (contents: 2 “THIS DEGRADES WOMEN” stickers).

UPDATE: Looks like his whole site is down now. Here’s the Google cache from Feb. 20.

UPDATE 2: Something from Utah called Ryan Byrd dot net announces his friend the Switchbutt MD’s blog, Google cached here (scroll down).

UPDATE 3: Pinko Punko is right (don’t get used to it, PP!). Outing him is dumb. So never mind. Sometimes ire clouds judgement.

Posted in Easy Persiflage and Men Hate You. Bite me, Chad.

Public Cans of Austin: Hotel San José

Published by Twisty on February 21, 2007. 97 Comments

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The can at the chic Hotel San José on trendy South Congress Ave: where edgy, creative people with sculpted bed-head go to pee. It’s unisex!

Once again spinster auntly pursuits interfere with today’s blaming schedule; I must take charge of my 3-year-old niece Rotel. She telephoned yesterday to inform me — in the background I heard her mother’s muffled but unmistakable chortle — that I was inviting her over for an indefinite period.

Rotel was explicit about her expectations regarding such endeavors as we might undertake, expectations which, I don’t mind telling you, seem somewhat far-fetched when you consider that extended interims in the company of 3-year-olds are not quite your line. For example, it appears I will have to forego my customary afternoon sacrament of pâté, vodka martinis, and a bracing 95-mile-an-hour drive in the country with the top down, in favor of “jumping on the big bed.” Also, the kid has ordered mac-and-cheese in a box and no carrots for dinner.

In a box! The skin crawls. Would that I were not in direct competition with my sister Tidy’s in-laws for the title of Favorite Aunt. Yes, I currently hold the lead by many furlongs (my winning strategy is this: give in to all demands for ice cream), but nothing is certain.

Blood, I suppose, is thicker than powdered cheese in a foil packet. But, damn.

Well. Since I can offer no improvement, cute kid story-wise, over the excellence routinely displayed by professional mommybloggers, I will leave it at that. Or rather, I will leave you with a link to this acrid essay on the supposed stupidity of parturient people who disdain to be medicalized, written by a surpassingly arrogant 30-something male MD who fancies himself a “compassionate person by nature” and is morbidly in love with his male privilege penis white coat.

Needless to say, if you don’t hear from me in 48 hours, start calling hospitals and police stations.

[Thanks Brianna]

Posted in Easy Persiflage, Men Hate You and Public Cans of Austin. Bite me, Chad.

Mystery solved

Published by Twisty on February 20, 2007. 46 Comments

I have discovered the source of the recent upsurge in the number of male dude visitors to this popular feminist blog. I am quoted at Wired.com on the subject of the fetish restaurants currently enjoying a proliferation in wacky Tokyo.

What’s a fetish restaurant? Read it and weep. A summary from the Wired article:

Shomuni features an all-you-can-eat, all-you-can-drink menu served by 15 costumed waitresses who start off dressed like receptionists and end up handcuffing patrons to their tables in sexy police uniforms.

Nice.

Posted in Sexploitation. Bite me, Chad.