I ripped this off from I don’t care much for that.
Monthly Archive for March, 2007
Remains of cherry creamsickle outside Toy Joy toy store, 29th & Guadalupe, March 2007.
As part of my ceaseless struggle to provide the reader with the most deluxe blaming experience on the Internet, I am pleased to announce this month’s addition to the I Blame the Patriarchy comments template: Live Comment Preview. You type your spiel in the comment box, and Live Comment Preview types the same exact thing in the space below. I’m not sure why it’s an improvement to be able to read what you just wrote in the space below the comment box; it just is.
I still recommend composing your priceless ouevres in a text editor, though. When it comes to the World Wide Web, little is certain.
Also, I know that a lot of you, through no fault of your own, are still getting hung up in the moderation queue. I plan to start work on that issue as soon as I finish lounging around doing nothing. Thanks for hanging in there and not writing to complain.
As you can see, it’s headed right for me.
I know. I recently intimated that once I’d returned from my tarriance in North Texas I would resume posting substantive radical feminist/science fiction critiques of contemporary civilization. Inconveniently, it turns out that it’s thunderstorming today, so I can’t possibly embark on any endeavor more intellectually strenuous than putting fresh batteries into the remote, clapping my wrist to my forehead, and taking to my bed.
You know, ever since Dr. Uterus separated me from my ovaries, gloomy weather seems to reduce the pressure within my obstreperal lobe, which induces in me a kind of melancholic torpor. It’s not altogether unpleasant, but it does tend to cut into what some have described as the spinster aunt’s already minimal productivity. Not to mention the national Cool Whip supply.
Anyway, what this means for the blog is that today’s patriarchy-blaming will be, unlike the Kung Pao Shrimp I intend to have delivered for lunch, lite. We begin with a query from affable reader Jane Awake, who writes:
Hi Twisty, I was wondering, what is the dish pictured on your banner? Every time I look at it, I get hungry. My grandma gave me a cookbook called Cooking with Soup, and after reading it, I started using cream soups as sauces. I assume you have a more advanced recipe. Anyway, I am curious.
Thanks,
Jane
Cooking with soup! Naturally my initial reaction to this astonishing revelation was “well, if you’re going to go to all the trouble of making cream soup, why not just make the sauce instead?” Then I realized that, duh, Jane means canned soup! The mind reels.
Anyway, Jane, the dish in the photo is chicken-fried steak with milk gravy, canned green beans, margarine, and mashed potatoes, and it was a triumph. I did not cook this particular specimen, and cannot recommend doing so yourself, because it makes your whole house smell like the bastard son of What-A-Burger and the State Fair of Texas for two days. I got mine at the Hill Country Cupboard in Johnson City, TX. In a bold and iconoclastic break with tradition, they offer it with a “homemade Mexican sauce” option, which I have never tried because I flatter myself that I am not insane. They also have a “large” version, which I believe is half a cow, breaded, deep-fried, and dunked in library paste.
Those who wish to construe this as an endorsement of butchery, and/or who object to the use of the word “bastard” to describe the lingering aroma of chicken-fried steak, are free to blame me.
Speaking of Texas and vegetarianism (both of which I do endorse), homegirl Redneck Mother, who, as part of her indispensable hell-raising service, occasionally emails me articles from the local paper (which paper I, rightly or wrongly, refuse to read on grounds that they keep sending their minions over to litter my driveway with unsolicited free samples that I then have to expend valuable energy throwing away and complaining about), sends this howler on the subject of PETA’s “Sexiest Vegetarian Alive” beauty pageant. Apparently a local “tomato” who likes spinach is in the finals. (I warn you right now that the article contains sentences like this one:
“When you get right down to it, vegetarian chicks should be pretty cute, because they have less fat content.”
If the reader wishes to imagine that by posting this link I endorse sexism, fatphobia, PETA, or beauty pageants, I wish her the best. Blaming me is every citizen’s right.)
Finally, because blaming never really takes a holiday: NARAL reports, following a Georgia woman’s run-in with a godbag pharmacist over Plan B, that American mega-grocery chain Kroger Co. is the latest on the list of corporations who permit faith-based tramplings of a woman’s right to superintend her own fucking uterus.
But there’s good news, too. The Bush-appointed anti-contraception, anti-choice director of Health and Human Services’ Office of Population Affairs, Eric Keroack, has resigned in the wake of a mysterious, unnamed “action” taken against him by Medicaid in Massachusetts. You will recall that Keroack used to work for a “Christian pregnancy counseling” outfit, which, as I pointed out in a previous post bemoaning his appointment, is godbag code for “you’re so havin’ that baby, bitch!”
You know, I was going to shut up, but the subject of compulsory pregnancy reminds me of another notable moron. This one, like so many morons before him, is a Texas State Senator, who Textriotically proposes to compensate for the loss of American lives in Iraq with a slew of state-purchased Texan babies. His brilliant idea — which he has actually filed as legislation — is to bribe women who visit abortion clinics with $500 to gestate (and ultimately give up for adoption) fetuses they might otherwise terminate. Quoth Sen. Dan Patrick:
If this incentive would give pause and change the mind of 5 percent of those woman [sic], that’s 3,000 lives. That’s almost as many people as we’ve lost in Iraq.”
State Senator Patrick knows women, all righty. Just dangle a few C-notes under their nose and they’re yours.
NOTE: Sadly — or perhaps happily, depending on the density of your feminist mettle — this video has vanished. Like things do on the World Wide Web.
Via Roxanne at Pandagon
At last! I found love in a strip mall in Dallas.
The undisguised non-subtext of the week here at I Blame the Patriarchy has been Radical Feminists Tell Femininity To Kiss Their Entire Ass. If you grow weary of the topic, be of good cheer; I am lately returned, uncharred, from the icy purgatorial fires of the Dallas-Ft. Worth Metroplex, and will soon resume my post as Austin’s premier public restroom blogger. But until then, I cannot resist this succulent morsel, recently tendered by commenter al on the Helen Mirren post:
I see a lot of defending a woman’s right to wear skirts and heels around the blogosphere lately. I’ve yet to have a hairy second-waver confiscate my lone skirt and lip balm, but I’m on the lookout.
While the chuckles die down, it seems as good a time as any to dilate the argument that femininity cannot lurk absolutely in an article of clothing. Femininity is in fact an assemblage of behaviors. No mere garment, unless it is constructed of razor blades, is objectively oppressive to the wearer [1]. I, for one — a post-menopausal hot-flashist extraordinaire facing a global-warmingly augmented Central Texas summer — expect for the next six months rarely to be seen sauntering around town in aught but a few free-flowin’ swathes of gauzy, life-preserving linen filaments [2]. This doesn’t mean I’m a collaborator; it just means I’m not suicidal. Give me an updraft or give me death.
What constitutes femininity, I assert in my skirt, is not the general architecture of the habiliments with which you drape your ass, but the practice of patriarchally defined affectations that constrain the practitioner to slobber, at the expense of her own authentic identity, all over male fantasy.
Which principle compels me to opine that the backlash against the radical feminist view of crippling sexbot footwear as a tool of the patriarchy is asinine. Wearing high heels — which, unlike (most — see below) skirts, disable the wearer and exist exclusively to titillate men — is a capitulation. Can a feminist wear stiletto heels to the Patriarchy-Blaming Convention in Bali? Sure. Can she call it a politically neutral act? Sure. Will anyone from whose eyes the scales have fallen believe her? Fuck no.
________________________
1. Which is not to say that certain duds (corsets, pencil skirts), designed specifically to impair, are not oppressive within a cultural context of misogyny. Or to assert that violent oppression of a second party is not implicit; it is almost impossible, in the US at least, to find clothes that are not manufactured by slave labor in some Asian hell-hole. It might also be noted that raiment fabricated from animal skins may hardly be construed as anything but oppressive to the entities who have been, in fact, skinned.
2. It will surprise few readers that I strenuously disagree with Wikipedia’s weird and prissy admonition that linen “must be ironed often.”
At the risk of putting the blog on fem-overload, I urge the “Yay femininity!” crowd to consider that casting Helen Mirren as an expensive sexbot for the cover of the planet’s mainstreamiest design catalog effectively reduces her from accomplished actor to whore (and overstuffed furniture salesman) in a single stroke. I know this because my mom, upon viewing Mirren’s hottt covergirl turn, remarked sadly, “I’ve lost a lot of respect for her.”
In other words, not even my mom, who wears lipstick and Manolos and believes femininity to be innate, can tolerate girly behaviors when taken to their logical pornstitutional conclusion.
By way of illustrating the absurdity of feminine affectation, I will perform the usual exercise, this time by substituting Taylor Hackford’s dudely visage for Helen Mirren’s hookerly one, whereupon the pose instantly becomes silly and the subject undignified.
Addendum: Several blamers have voiced objections to my use of the word “whore” in what appears to be a pejorative manner. I posted my response in the comments, but re-publish it here to de-confuse:
The point is valid. The post was hastily-written and poorly-worded. I allude to the ‘reduced-to-whore’ scenario in an (apparently failed) effort to convey a sense of the popular, dominant-culture disdain for prostituted women. The dominant-culture view of women is distinct from my own.
It is, of course, the position of this blog that prostituted women are human.
I sometimes forget that not everybody is a regular reader; you remind me that it is necessary to consider, when I write these things, that (a) the audience might be unfamiliar with my general worldview, and (b) I should write good.
If your nom de blog is Twisty Faster, and you are ever directed to Wikipedia to inspect an article titled “Twisty faster” [sic], a “self described Queer Gentleman Spinster Aunt” [sic], it is probable that you will, after initially feeling a bit flattered but ultimately blanking the page on grounds of painful factual inaccuracy (yup, I coined the term “godbag”– right after I invented the internet), get a wild hair up your monkeynut and type the word “femininity” into the search box.
The result is a laff a minute. Wikipedia’s nonsensical article, which was apparently edited chiefly by a hetero male godbag high schooler sent over from Christ-o-pedia, may be summarized as There is great debate over which qualities ought to be attributable to the female sex, which unfortunately makes it difficult to codify absolutely the denigration of women.
The “Femininity in the media” section, with its yearning nostalgia for Gibson girls and flappers, is a paean to 20th century feminine beauty. Then some brave Wikipedian mentions the radical feminist’s celebrated peevishness toward airbrushed photos in fashion magazines, hard upon which the aforementioned illiterate godbag schoolboy is compelled to append this:
There are also many that disagree with this viewpoint, due to the fact in an age when women hold significant sway in the fashion community, aesthetic virtue and competing for attention are still positivly [sic] connotated. They further argue that since women are the ones that are instinctually craving these beauty products, women are therefore the ones driving this yearn towards physical perfection, and not a patriarchal oppression conspiracy.”
Which remarks beautifully illustrate the unsophisticated, imperfect grasp of the subject one so often finds among godbag dudes. It gratifies them to believe that women, who universally clamor for their own oppression because it is “instinctual,” are the sole architects of femininity.
Oh, and check out this howler: “In circumstances such as prison where men are segregated from women, a fraction of the population will nevertheless divide according to persistent female principles.”
Female principles! Dear god.
I mention all this to remind the young onion that Wikipedia, the 10th most visited website in the known universe (quoth Alexa), may occasionally seem handy, but it is also infested by the fanciful and clumsily executed musings of knobs whose competence is compromised by their saturation in the dominant culture. Remember Essjay, that influential Wikipedia editor who claimed, in order to dominate other Wikipedians, to be a tenured professor of religion at a private college, but who turned out to be — what else — a godbag schoolboy?
The Vestal Virgins of North Dallas: an average nouveau-riche white guy combines the feminine ideal with life-size entoga-ed yard ornaments.
Still on my whirlwind tour of the Dallas-Ft. Worth Metroplex. This post will necessarily embrace brevity as its guiding aesthetic principle.
I’ve barely had time to duck my head into the bulging “what is femininity” comments. I did, however, notice this query:
“[...I]f girls and women choose pink equipment to play [...] sports, are they somehow reclaiming femininity in a good way?”
I despair of the idea that femininity is in any way something that can be “reclaimed.” Of course it can’t be reclaimed, because women never owned it in the first place; women’s feminine identities are universally shaped by male ideas.
Possibly the author of the question really meant “can we redefine ‘femininity’?”
To which I reply: even if, back at the dawn of time, women did wake up one fine spring morning — perhaps in the throes of a mass folie brought on by eating too much ergot — and joyfully cry “Hey, I know, let’s invent a bunch of vapid social conventions that demonstrate our endorsement of our own oppression and deprive us of full participation in life’s rich pageant,” why would any rational person wish to embrace such a thing as a basis for one’s identity? Femininity, as one commenter pointed out, does not exist in a vacuum; you can’t, as a woman or as a feminist or as anyone else, erase eons of accumulated symbolism and cultural narrative by simply lurching to your feet and proclaiming, “pink golf balls are empowerful!”
I hate to leave it at that, but duty calls. Until Austin’s gravitational pull acts sufficiently upon my person to propel me from this purgatory of strip malls and rich old helmet-headed honky dowagers, feast your eyes upon the facade, above, of a typical North Dallas house.
Why no post for days and days? Been unexpectedly called away from the bungalow to Plano Texas, the Teen Suicide Capitol of the World, on urgent auntly business.
I haven’t even had time to check the comments, so it there’s a fight breaking out, be sure to publicize it widely. This will ensure essential continuity in the Feminists Are Nutjobs narrative.
I cannot, I’m afraid, ever guarantee a post worth reading, but I may not be able to manage even a mediocre one at least until Sunday or Monday. Please turn to liquor and drugs as a substitute. Until then, sayonara.
My homey Marcia — worthy artiste, rock star, former bandmate, and all-around good egg — needs your help to finish one of those esoteric art school projects. Here’s the official plea:
Hi everybody. I’m doing a project for my “Dress and Society” class, and I’m asking you to help me if you can. This time, I’m asking you to answer the question, “What is femininity?” There are no rules – your answer can be short, long, metaphorical, literal, poetic, sarcastic, whatever. I’ll cite your first name and city/state. If you’re not comfortable with that, give me an alias to use. If you’re interested in reading the final project, let me know and I’ll be happy to email it to you.
Thank you in advance!
Marcia
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