Monthly Archive for April, 2007

R.I.P: dignity, shelf bras

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Ripped mercilessly from their tankinis, these former over-the-shoulder-boulder-holders are destined to hang limp forever more.

It’s like this: as of last July, I ain’t got no boobs. So today I initiate what is certain to become an annual ritual: the Spring Shelf-Bra Slice-Out. I expect to complain about it every year, too, so don’t be surprised when, next April 28, I begin a post with the words “Fuck the fucking Spring Shelf-Bra Slice-Out.”

See, there’s a catch if you’ve had a double mastectomy and have declined to saddle yourself with “reconstructed” encumbrances that serve no purpose other than to mollify other people’s anxieties and consign you to wearing drag 24/7. As I discovered last year, a spinster aunt occupying my position on the contittynuum no longer has boobs to demurely hide from prurient eyes, but there remains, astonishingly and absurdly, the strongest of expectations that she cover up the blank spaces where those old boobs used to be. This is because the world will literally explode if the following two conflicting conditions are met: (a) a female appears in public topless, and (b) a female in public fails to produce mammary tissue upon inspection.

You see the catch? It’s not exactly a Catch-22; that catch comes later. This is more of a Catch-23. If you have mammary tissue, you have to cover it up. If you dn’t have mammary tissue, you’re obliged to get some, then cover it up. If you don’t get some, you still have to cover it up.

To put it another way: you have to hide it in order to prove that you have it. If you can’t prove that you have it, you have to prove that you’re willing to fake having it.

It goes without saying that if you won’t fake having it by hiding what isn’t, you must be shunned.

Here’s why I give a rat’s ass about Catch-23: Apparently the delicate trophy wives at my sister Tidy’s club pool absolutely go apeshit whenever someone walks amongst them who expresses insufficient interest in capitulating to the femininity mandate by offensively exhibiting a couple of mastectomy scars. So in order to go swimming with the nieces — this is the whole point of today’s tirade — I have to pay homage to the concept of boobage by covering up the blank spaces where my boobs used to be.

Last year this bullshit pissed me off so much I refused to go to that pool. This year, although the bigotry still offends me in no small way, I have reluctantly decided to sacrifice another chunk of my dignity and wear some sort of tankini top thing. You know, for the sake of the nieces whose lives are so immeasurably enbiggened by my company in and around bodies of water (and for the club burgers on Tidy’s tab).

But here’s the other catch, the Catch-22: I must cover up the non-boobs, but the garment that would accomplish this while preserving what’s left of my dignity does not exist! That is, nobody manufactures a swim suit made for the top half of a human body that does not presuppose the existence of gazongas. Everything’s got cups and elastic and darts and shit. All this extra material just hangs there, flapping in the breeze, billowing in the water, making me feel like a clown. No offense to clowns, but, you know, sometimes you feel like a nut, and sometimes you don’t.

A Google search on ‘mastectomy swimwear’ produces results only for suits that accommodate prostheses. ‘Mastectomy swimwear’, see, doesn’t mean “no-boobs swimwear.” It means “swimwear that maintains, for the comfort of the entire community, the illusion that you never had a socially awkward deadly cancer, and could still turn dudes on if you wern’t so old and pruney.”

So today I’m cutting the shelf bras out of a few bathing suit tops that were made for women with boobs. The country club pool may succeed in getting me into a stupid-looking flappy spandex tank, but they can shove that breath-crushing elastic rib-cinch dealio up their entire ass. Fucking knobs.

And while I’m on the subject of swimwear, there can be no reason other than pornulation for any woman to put up with this crack-crawling bikini bottom crap.

Note: don’t bother writing in telling me to blow off Tidy’s club and just go au naturel at Barton Springs, where nobody gives a crap what you look like. That pool is effing cold!

Reader actually asks spinster aunt’s opinion

Today’s reader email is a dream come true. Blamer M (not her real name) actually asks for my views on porn! I may be a hungry gal in a taco-filled world, but come lunchtime or high water, I’m never too busy to bloviate on porn. My response follows. It’s nothing I haven’t spouted off a hundred times before, but as longtime readers are painfully aware, I Blame the Patriarchy is like a Tex-Mex menu: the same 4 cheap ingredients disguised as 6,793 different dishes. Which of them achieve the distinction of culinary triumphs remains a matter of individual taste.

By the way, M raises some other issues, too; readers are encouraged to enlarge on whatever of these themes falls within their personal grey areas of blaming expertise.

In the last few months I’ve become addicted to your blog. Even within the feminist blogosphere (or whatever it’s called), I find that you are the only person who cuts through all of the bullshit. I’ve been feeling very distrustful of feminists lately, because of my crazy experiences at the BUST lounge. I thought they were feminists — they say they are — but they yell at me constantly because I think porn is bad for women. I’m done posting there, because it’s just pointless. Many of them defend BDSM as “my choice!!! Whatever makes me happy!!! How dare you criticize me, you vanilla prude!!!” Many of them talk about the feminist/alternative porn that they watch.

I’m wondering what your take is on this “feminist porn?” i haven’t seen much, as I don’t like porn, but I’m wondering what you think of it? Is this truly resistance? Is it really that different? They seem to think that creating an alternative will somehow stop the mainstream degrading porn. Or something.

If you are ever bored — you can check out the thread on the BUST lounge — it’s under “The F Word” and it’s called (get ready to puke) “Porn: Is it cock-blocking feminism?” Seriously, that is the title. Anyways — I’m pretty much hated by the people in that thread. I’m not posting over there anymore, but I still just feel so ANGRY about it. I’m wondering if you can do your magical thing and explain this shit to me in the wonderful way you do.

Is it that they are too scared to admit the truth? I know it’s painful to see the truth, so maybe that’s it. Or, are they just so brainwashed by mainstream pornification that they truly believe this stuff? These are people who think that posing nude “can be empowering!” And that there is nothing wrong with sex work as long as “it’s the woman’s choice, and she’s happy about it.”

Is this just 3rd wave feminism? Is this the sex-positive crowd? Is this the backlash to radical feminism?

Also — one of my online buddies and I have been talking a lot about weight and body and attractiveness and all that crap. We’ve both noticed that even though, in our minds, we know that we don’t care what “men” think of us- but in our guts, we truly believe that men MUST find us attractive. We both have this big fear of being found unacceptable — even though we know it’s BS. I’ve been thinking though — is it that we don’t want to give up the sort of privilege that we get from being found attractive? I feel like it’s actually dangerous to go too far away from the ideal. Or to even admit that you don’t care about the ideal anymore. I don’t know if this makes any sense, but I’m a confused 30 year old, and I need help!

Signed, M

Well, M, the Twistolutionary manifesto argues that anything called “porn,” whether or not it is explicitly violent or BDSM-y or designed to titillate ‘feminists’ vs. sweaty, beer-gutted pervs, exists only to enthrobulate the fetishization of culturally-generated (and, frankly, comically hokey) constructs. It is readily apparent to the visitor from the planet Obstreperon that these constructs include arbitrary standards of physical sexihotness, arch-backed-heavy-eyelidded-ooo-baby body language, penetration worship, dominance and submission, corny fashion accessories, “the art of seduction” et al — and that they have, at their root, everything to do with a paradigm of dominance and nothing to do with actual sex between individuals with equivalent personal sovereignty.

So what’s the big whoop, the empowerful young feminist asks?

Well, in addition to pornography’s negative philosophic value, which anyone possessing even a sliver of sapience can see is reason enough to give it the old stink-eye [1], our world order is predicated on binary sex roles, one of which is privileged and dominant, the other of which is oppressed and submissive. In such a society, where a woman is a member of the oppressed sex class, her performance of sex in a film which is then consumed by paying customers to satisfy their prurience, this is not even remotely a politically neutral act. Porn — gay, straight, bi, live-action, animated, or ‘feminist’ — is the graphic representation of the oppression of the sex class. Until the sex class is liberated from male oppression, porn can be nothing else, no matter how many fun feminists claim it empowerfuls them.

Or, if you prefer, in order for porn to be politically neutral, it can’t be porn.

Merely announcing on the BUST boards that one’s participation in porn, whether as a consumer or as a prostituted woman, is voluntary does not make it so. This is because the women doing the announcing are, and have been since birth, deprived of such privilege as is necessary for them to freely make that choice.

When you’re already oppressed, it is, in fact, impossible to volunteer for oppression. A woman is a member of the sex class whether she “chooses” it or not. This pre-existing condition forms the backdrop to any fun feminist’s conclusion that her compliance with the patriarchal sexbot mandate is voluntary. She may believe otherwise, but her belief does not alter the fact that patriarchy — a social order predicated on an oppression to which she is already subject — is real and in effect and entirely beyond any unrestricted control she may wish to exert and only too glad to welcome her as a team player and sign her up for the rewards program.

The fun feminist confuses “empowerment” with the decision to acquiesce. This is understandable; it’s the one actual choice she has in this game: surrender, or stand and fight. She doesn’t have to be Candida Royalle to recognize that if she chooses the latter all she’ll get for her trouble is ridicule, hostility, suspicion, and the threat of bodily harm.

Whereas the rewards for surrender to male porn culture are not inconsiderable: social acceptance, male approval, little psuedo-privileges that accrue according to the degree of one’s conformity, and of course the enormous relief at not having to fight it anymore. The if-you-can’t-beatem-joinem gambit has enjoyed millennia of popularity for good reason. It gives the appearance of the shortest and easiest route to life’s rich pageant. Too bad that, once they get there, chicks are only eligible for the women’s auxiliary.

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1. Porn’s negative philosophic value, in addition to its general assault on T & B (Truth and Beauty) spans the whole of women’s oppression, from Maybelline to rape culture.

Big whoop of the week

I have been asked to participate in the Take Back the Blog! Blogswarm. It’s quite a decent gesture: a bunch of bloggers propose to blog en masse, on April 28, “in support of the rights of women to participate fully in all aspects of our society, including specifically online in the world of blogging but indeed everywhere and at all times, day and night, without fear of harassment, intimidation, sexual harassment, online stalking and slander, predation or violence of any sort.”

Well, I write this kind of shit every day, and so far there is precious little evidence that anybody pays the slightest attention (our little band of blamers excepted, of course!), but maybe if 10 or 20 or 50 other bloggers do it at the same time —

Oh, who am I kidding? A thousand bloggers could write “it’s not cool to oppress women” on April 28, but sooner or later it’ll be April 29, and our little pet issue will turn into a pumpkin, and it’ll be dudely business-as-usual again on the World Wide Web.

Time for a Twisty bromide: Women’s oppression is a global humanitarian crisis. Any so-called political blogger who (a) who does not explicitly, strenuously, and regularly denounce it, and (b) condones an antifeminist commentarian zeitgeist, might as well rename their stupid blog “I Defend the Conviction that Male Abuse of Women Constitutes the Natural Order, Now Where Are the Boobies?”

I am sorry to report that the number of functionally antifeminist liberal blogs is not insignificant. The spinster aunt finds, without even trying, that a gazillion examples are just a click away. It’s as easy as 1-2-3! Check out the Huffington Post. It’s the 8th most popular blog in the world! What’s the breaking news on the women’s oppression front today?

Bupkis!

Not that there’s no news about sexbots, i.e. the chick-related topic it’s cool to blog about. In fact, today’s HuffPo has got a groundbreaking post on Paris Hilton, who is facing jail time for drunk driving. According to astute columnist Chris Kelly, Hilton is a stupid skank with a 30-word vocabulary. Zounds! Not only is it thrilling to read such a refreshing and intellectually innovative viewpoint, it gives blog commenters the opportunity to do what so many blog commenters do best: reflect incisively on the female condition, i.e. “I hope [Hilton] has a horrible time in prison, and leaves as a woman.”

Oh, and they’ve got photo of Richard Gere groping a female Indian celebrity at some fundraiser in Jaipur. She’s up on obscenity charges as a result, but nobody has much to say about that.

Well, deducing that the global humanitarian crisis of women’s oppression is a non-starter in the HuffPo was a piece of cake. But how about the 9th most popular blog in the world, Daily Kos?

Like taking candy from a baby. Unsurprisingly, on the front page of Kos this morning there is some bloviating on John McCain, dissatisfaction with the bureaucracy at the CDC, helpful suggestions about what George Tenet should have done in 2002, and a poll on the burning question of the FDA’s definition of chocolate. A click back to yesterday’s posts reveals, at last, an essay on the news (news to mainstream America, anyway) that one in three Native women “will be raped.”* Like any contributor who wishes to be taken seriously on an A-list blog, the author comes out with impunity against rape, but even s/he must pay homage to the implicit liberal-dude understanding that there are always issues more pressing than violence against women:

I know there are a lot of scandals at the front of the line, but the next time someone gets Gonzales on the stand, why not stop for a moment and ask him why the FBI is so slow to respond to crime against Native Americans [...] ?

The topic of the male culture of rape recedes comfortingly into the aether as the comments section briskly veers off into a discussion on Native American “spirituality,” Wounded Knee, and reservation politics.

Kos’ commentariat generally do not disappoint patriarchy-enthusiasts. Within two clicks and without the slightest effort one may scroll across a remark like this on a post on Condoleezza Rice: “Would a redneck, beer-and-a-shot frathead like Georgie be comfortable around a good-butt honeybun like Condi, if he hadn’t porked her ???”

Even the asinine tangents reveal an appreciation for Dude Nation that pains you to ascribe to anyone on the Left. In an open thread commenter skymutt wonders what to get his 6-year-old niece for her birthday “because she already has everything … [sic].” Commenter nupstateny helpfully suggests a Barbie. “Even if she has a ton of them” quoth this cheerful supporter of abuse culture and materialism, “she’ll love another one.”

Oh, I could go on like this all day, and I would, too, except, you know, I don’t want to.

Well, big whoop, you say; it’s no news flash that political bloggers are fond of the position that women’s oppression is a special-interest fringe issue, and that anyone who says different is some kind of prunefaced hag who can’t get a good fuck.

Yeah, well, that it isn’t a news flash is the big whoop.

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* I enclose “will be raped” in quotation marks because goddammit the universality of this dude-friendly passive-voice construction is one of my Top Ten Hide-Chappers. “Women are raped” is just so sickeningly in tune with both the cultural narrative of women as passive receptacles, and the concomitant mysterious absence of any reference to a perpetrator. Truth is enbiggened by switching to active voice: “Men will rape one in three Native women.” Let’s give credit where credit is due.

Mid-century doctor drama gives spinster aunt the willies

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I am old enough to remember when nurses wore those weird white cardboard things on their heads, and when doctors smoked with impunity when groping them.

It is with total confidence in the author’s policy never to reveal publicly the majority of her flaws that the blamer can enjoy I Blame the Patriarchy. Yet, lest there emerge dangerous misapprehensions concerning my perfection of character or untarnished mental competence, I’ve made no secret of my insane Turner Classic Movie channel compulsion.

If you are one of those rare persons for whom my TV viewing habits remain a blessed mystery: it began last summer, when I was laid up for two months with nothing to do but wait for a surgically-reconstructed extremity to start looking like a foot again. Like absolutely all television, TCM is pretty much wall-to-wall misogyny, so at first I tuned in only because it is the lone commercial-free cable channel. This is my sole prerequisite for convalescent TV entertainment: I have no interest, if I happen to doze off, in being abruptly reawakened by the revolting xtreme-tits-n-ass-monster-truck pandemonium expectorated ceaselessly by commercials made to appeal to what is apparently the only demographic for which TV is produced: pornsick young knobs who say “dude.”

But eventually the black & white Hollywood Honky Parade of Patriarchy began to fascinate me, in an it’s-horrible-yet-I-can’t-look-away way. Since my days as a pathetic invalid, I’ve witnessed the birth of a thousand clichés. I’ve analyzed a thousand camera angles. I’ve developed a thousand celebrity crushes (on Charles Chaplin, Bette Davis, and — I can’t believe I’m admitting this and if you tell anyone it’ll be your word against mine — Rita Hayworth). I’ve cringed a thousand cringes as all the female sex symbols aged out of the system while ossified Cary Grants and Gene Kellys and Clark Gables continued to score taut young booty hookups.

And I’ve experienced about a million whole-body, mega-visceral gross-out shudders. These are inevitable whenever the radical feminist encounters the canon of any artsy pursuit — as the blamer is aware, all art throughout the ages has been by men, for men, to glorify men — but the sheer ostentation of mainstream cinematic misogyny is almost mesmerizing in its unabating horror.

I offer this meandering preamble to introduce what is essentially the plot summary of a spine-tinglingly men-hate-you — even for TCM — film called The Interns. The Interns was released in 1962 and stars that guy Bookem Dan-o from Hawaii Five-O as one of the up-and-coming young (white and male, of course) docs. This movie, in addition to its just being crummy, gave me one of the worst whole-body, mega-visceral gross-out shudders I’ve ever experienced watching a G-rated film, and I’ve just got to get it off my chest.

So it falls upon Bookem Dan-o, a surgery intern with whom the audience sympathizes and identifies, to deliver his first baby all by himself, assisted only by two seasoned nurses and an experienced anesthesiologist (!). In one of the truly creepiest (though it is clearly intended to be merely sentimental) scenes ever filmed, Bookem Dan-o repeatedly addresses his patient, who he only just met like 2 minutes ago, as “dear,” and constantly leans in intimately to stroke her hair.

If any of my doctors ever stroked even one of my hairs I’d have a platoon of lawyers blocking all the exits in about 6 minutes.

The movie gets even more repulsive: the patient character prattles about all the fluffy pink dresses she’s going to buy for her kid, emits a few adorable squeals, apologizes for making so much noise (although, as the script makes clear without actually using the dirty word, she has been given an episiotomy without any anaesthesia), and pops out a kid which is immediately taken away from her. Exit the woman vessel.

Cut to Bookem Dan-o; the handsome young genius is slouched in spotless scrubs, utterly exhausted from the enormous mental exertions required of a dude to say “Push! Push!” a couple of times. He stares in wonderment at his hands, his skilled, miraculous hands . A motherly nurse appears celestially at his side. “You gave life,” she confirms adoringly. Whereupon Bookem Dan-o decides to forgo his future as a surgeon to become that most noble and nearly divine of all AMA-anointed superhuman medical men, an obstetrician. And here’s the punchline: Bookem Dan-o’s character is named — I’m not even kidding — “Dr. Worship”!

Although I have developed, over the years, an iron stomach when it comes to this sort of crap, I swear I have been haunted for two days by the relentless image of Dr Worship stroking that parturient woman’s hair. Obviously the moviegoer is supposed to interpret this seemingly innocent gesture as indicative of Dr Worship’s exemplary bedside manner, but when viewed through the angst-colored glasses of patriarchy-blaming, a hair-stroking, paternalistic male obstetrician can be seen as nothing but positively sinister. I’d almost rather have watched a Porn Gone Wild commercial; at least that brand of male entitlement isn’t trying to be invisible.

Now, back to blaming.

Sticker shock

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The FDA just approved this drug for patients with mondo HER2-positive breast cancer. Lucky for Glaxo-Smith-Kline! And lucky for the 4 or 5 women on the planet who can fucking afford it! My insurance company doesn’t feel like coughing up. I’ll be on it for a year, assuming it doesn’t kill me, to the tune of 40 large, not including the creepy radioactive MUGA scans every 90 days to make sure my heart is still beating.

But that’s nothing. My father, who has pancreatic cancer, has on his bathroom vanity a bottle of pills that cost $5000 for a month’s supply. He calculates that so far it has cost him about three quarters of a million dollars to stay alive for the past 3 years.

I have yet to find a single thing about cancer that isn’t fucking inconvenient as hell, but this kill-the-poor bullshit takes the fucking cake.

Fucking megameditheocorporatocracy.

Why merry rapists are flocking to Britain

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Today’s unrelated photograph is the latest in my acclaimed series, “Ironic Plastic Nuns on Toy Store Roofs of Austin.” Toy Joy toy store, 29th and Guadalupe, April 22, 2007.

Speaking of child rapists who freely roam the countryside, have you Brits wondered why it is that every time you turn around lately, some perv in your neighborhood is throwing an acquittal party?

Because rape convictions in the UK have plummeted to Taliban-level depths, that’s why! They’ve sunk from a 1977 high of 32% to a low of just 5.6% in 2007. Why? Hold on to your hats. It’s because nobody believes the women.

That’s right. According to The Guardian, when it comes to men brutally assaulting women, there festers in Britain a certain “culture of scepticism.”* Supporters of women’s continued oppression have successfully countered small gains in the number of rapes reported by propagating the notion that women are both congenitally insatiable and naturally perfidious. Because of the success of this bogus narrative, prosecutors, cops, and the citizenry are overwhelmingly convinced that a woman’s overriding impulse is to punch herself in the face a few times, chain herself in an underground bunker, and plead with innocent male passers-by to let her service them. Gentlemen that they are, the men reluctantly comply. Once her slutty objective is accomplished, the ‘victim’s’ natural feminine depravity kicks in, whereupon she compulsively makes a false rape accusation. It’s as simple as that!

Here the faint of heart should avert their eyes, because we now allude to the repellent story of just such a case. This particular atrocity, gothically dubbed the “Dungeon Rapes” to titillate pornsick media consumers, occurred in the US, but it perfectly illustrates the juridical savagery of this “culture of scepticism.”

To wit: Convicted child rapist builds secret underground bunker. Convicted child rapist serially abducts two 17-year-old girls, duct-tapes them in the bunker, savages them, and leaves them to suffocate to death in the airless room. At the trial, convicted child rapist claims the “sex” was “consensual.” He is acquitted on insufficient evidence, and, of course, “smiled as he was escorted from the court.”

The “sex” was “consensual.” The chicks were just sluts who wanted drugs. The convicted child rapist built his sleazy underground rape room for innocent romantic getaways. Why not?

The “culture of scepticism” would have us believe that this kind of prevaricating-slut scenario takes place in all but 5.6% of the 12,000 annual reported rapes in the UK.

Quoth The Guardian:

Rape is unique because in no other crimes were victims subject to such scrutiny in court or was the defendant so likely to claim the victim had consented to the attack. Between half and two-thirds of all cases are dropped before they come to court.

How is this possible?

Naturally, I have a theory which is mine. It has two parts. Here they are. But be forewarned. In Part 1 I’m going to go slightly Dworkin on your ass and blame it on porn. Specifically BDSM. Even so, please do not write in and lecture me on how ‘liberating’ your groovy BDSM ‘lifestyle’ is. Believe me, I’ve heard all the arguments, and believe me, they are all asinine. Please, just get some help.

But I digress.

To continue, this “culture of scepticism” crap actually makes perfect sense. Why shouldn’t juries believe that women enjoy abuse? The mainstreaming of sadomasochistic porn into the everyday onslaught of media imagery — advertising, fashion, TV shows, video games, garden-variety Hollywood movies, music videos, email spam, et al — has made the improbable equation, “sex + violent dominance = pleasure,” seem perfectly accurate and perfectly reasonable.

Note, if you don’t mind, that this thinking is insane. Pornography, particularly the S&M genus, is the graphic representation of the violent oppression of half the human race. It degrades the whole species because it has normalized the fetishization of suffering to the extent that convicted child rapists may, with the blessing of a jury of their peers, routinely saunter away smiling after brutalizing teenagers in their goddam underground bunkers.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: If women were not systemically oppressed, pornography could not exist. In a post-patriarchal society, free of the degrading paradigm of dominance and submission, pictures of people fucking would have all the prurient allure of a podiatrist appointment. It is the rape-based degradation to which consumers of pornography respond, dum-dum!

But I digress.

The remaining part of my theory is that the populus is so desperately invested in patriarchy that they are unwilling, even in the interest of justice, to part with one of its primary cornerstones: the slut class. Patriarchy depends on the slut class to serve as the receptacle for its pornsick incontinence. A slut class naturally implies a good-girl class, from whose virginal ranks the privileged male selects his unpaid housekeeper/fetus incubator/childcare worker. It naturally follows that if you go around convicting rapists, you diminish the she-was-asking-for-it slut class, which in turn, as distinctions between the two become more and more nebulous, diminishes the good-girl class. See, convicting rapists has the undesirable side effect of making women a bit more human.

You know, if I were a little more on the ball this morning, I might dip a querulous toe into the argument that society will never stand for the eradication of rape. Such success as capitalism enjoys is largely based on the wide availability of unpaid domestic labor created out of the sex class. Which sex class could not exist if women were not rapeable. Can you dig it? The global economy would collapse without rape.

Have a nice day.
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* Apparently there also festers in Britain a culture of spelling skepticism without a K.

[Gracias, Perinteger]

“Culture of Domination” remix

Hey, remember a blurb I wrote a while back referencing a photo-filled post at a dormant blog? The one called “Cultures of Domination,” which illustrated, with hideous eloquence, the alarming extent to which the paradigm of dominance and submission invisibly saturates human culture? But it took forever to load? So most of you never saw it? Well, Terrance at The Republic of T. did see it, was summarily moved, and could not resist the compulsion to execute an excellent Flash remix of the material, with ominous soundtrack complete. It’s a little jumpy at first, but stick with it until the whole thing loads. It’s supercool. In an it’s-horrible-yet-I-can’t-look-away way. On accounta the ellipses, see.

Giant baseballs of Austin

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All-American.

Decaying abandoned baseball-on-a-tower, Old Glory flying at half mast (exhibiting adjacent gas station’s fulfillment of its patriotic duty to observe human death), cheery used car lot pennants. Not pictured at the other end of the pennants: crapulent army surplus store. Fruth St. and W. 29th, across from Spider House. April 22, 2007.

Just added: exciting new FAQs

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The spinster aunt expresses her views on the MRA agenda.

What’s an ‘MRA’?

Massively [W]rong Asshole. Or men’s rights activist.

Why don’ the Odd Lady want none of them in her car?

MRAs are patriarchy-deniers. The ideologies of this violent and knobbish subset of the Male Dominion spring from male fear of women’s personal sovereignty, and manifest in practice as active misogyny. Men suffer, O how they suffer, at the hands of subhuman conniving bitches who seek world domination through insane women-are-human propaganda and the misguided attempt to claim their own internal organs as private property. The MRA imagines that women’s interests control and abuse him in an ever more feminized world; he erroneously sees himself as a battered victim of women’s agency, rather than what he actually is: a moron.

The goals of the men’s rights ‘movement’ include, but are not limited to:

• supporting legislation that would give men an edge in child custody battles.
• the right to hijack another human being’s personal uterus if the MRA suspects his sacred genetic material is involved in an embryo contained therein.
• promulgating baseless claims that men are in constant danger of physical assault by legions of villainous females, and that there exists some kind of vast matriarchal conspiracy to cover this up.
• the practice of beating up women, kidnaping her kids, going on the lam, convincing family court judges that the woman is crazy, and summarily escaping jail time.

Anyone who cries “what about the men?” in a radical feminist forum is, whether he likes it or not, an MRA sympathizer.

If you’re ever bored of a rainy afternoon, and feel that an inundation of hate mail and death threats would be just the thing to break up the ennui, try dropping this factbomb at an MRA forum:

“Abusive fathers are far more likely than nonabusive parents to fight for child custody, not pay child support, and kidnap children.”[cite]

OK, but surely there can’t be anything wrong with niceguys? Why don’t the Odd Lady want them in her car?

Click here for a complete, if somewhat rambling, overview.

Did you rip off the Odd Lady’s motto from Norbizness?

I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.

Sexploiters Gone JailedWatch ‘07: Give’em Enough Rope Dept.

This isn’t breaking news — when have I ever had my finger on the pulse? — but in the interest of satisfying the blamer’s lowbrow craving for vengeance: since April 10, millionaire Girls Gone Wild total-dick/rapist Joe Francis has been in the hoosegow. He got pinched for contempt of court after he shouted obscenities at seven former underage sexploitees during civil suit settlement talks (the women apparently realized that their teen pornification was worth a bigger piece of the pornopie than a T-shirt).

En route to the Stony Lonesome, Francis cried*, and they took away his Xanax. When he tried to bribe a guard with $100 for a bottle of water, it was discovered that one of his partners-in-smut had smuggled him cash and prescription pharmaceuticals. Thus adding further charges and the tantalizing possibility of longer sentences. The P-I-S is now in jail, too.

Readers will claw through the jungles of time, back to last January, when blamer Liz Ladd was victorious in her efforts to keep Francis and his traveling band of junior rapists out of her town.
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* Note, in the Perez Hilton link, the use of the word “pussy” as an insult. Misogyny is so edgy.

[Gracias Rosie]