Monthly Archive for May, 2007

Thursday raw sewage blogging

Published by Twisty on May 31, 2007. 26 Comments

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Horrible developments in the Odonata Paddock at the Twisty Bungalow have forced me to flee for my life.

Because I’ve got flooding, a bathroom full of raw sewage, broken water pipes, irate neighbors, and a plumber named Dudly, I will be away from my desk today, enjoying the hospitality of friends who are not afflicted with the aforementioned. For your blaming convenience, the cheezy new I Blame the Patriarchy: The Message Board (Beta) is now in Day 2 of testing. It’s a laff riot over there. Some asshole has hacked it or something.

Sayonara for now, and may your shower stalls remain fecal-matter-free.

Posted in Easy Persiflage. Bite me, Chad.

Big whoop of the week

Published by Twisty on May 30, 2007. 41 Comments

Hey, you’ll never guess what I just did! Because I am always so up-to-the-minute with high technology, I have implemented I Blame the Patriarchy: The Message Board [Beta] with a cheesy Windows-looking interface! I have no idea how to work it yet, but go on over and wreck the place. Leave suggestions. Make up profiles. Start specious threads. Moderate. Et cetera. If it looks like it might catch on, we can fix it up for real.

The same rigorous standards you’ve come to expect from Blame Nation will apply, of course.

UPDATE: I just fixed it so you don’t have to register to post, but it would be nice if you did, so I can see how that works.

Posted in Announcements and Blogulation. Bite me, Chad.

XX

Published by Twisty on May 30, 2007. 105 Comments

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After the Twistolution, ‘hamburger’ will have more meaning than ‘woman’. Burger and onion rings at Phil’s Ice House, North Austin. May 2007.

Yesterday I asked yew-all what the word ‘woman’ means. Thanks to those of you who answered; it was sporting of you, considering that I had just posted a curmudgeonly amendment to the Comment-o-festo consisting of “I have not solicited your commentary, so shut the fuck up.” And considering that whenever I ask a dumb question like that, I mean only to be a smart-ass later.

The responses included some XX stuff, and some stuff about reproductive organs. A few of the de Beauvoirians said ‘woman’ is ‘the Other’. Some folks who have been reading too much I Blame the Patriarchy said ‘the sex class’. A couple of hippies dreamily opined, “A woman is whatever she wants to be.” A sweet thought, hippies. But not in this world. I’ll take a hit off that doob, though.

Several of you clever young onions hit upon what I consider to be the point of the exercise, which is that ‘woman’ is a load of crap; defining it is impossible except in terms of patriarchy, which means that sex is virtually indistinguishable from gender, socially, philosophically, and scientifically.

As I learned from the scholarly journal Newsweek, there’s no blood test for it. Furthermore, as I understand it, all sorts of ‘conditions’ — congenital adrenal hyperplasia, androgen insensitivity syndrome, mosaicism — blur the line, so ‘woman’ is essentially meaningless, biologically. So much for XX.

Physiologically there are, in some people, organs specialized for reproduction, but in ‘man’ there are organs specialized for reproduction, too, and unless ‘man’ is also ‘woman’ — ha! Man = woman! Have you ever seen anything so absurd! — you can’t really go by that. And there are all sorts of ‘conditions’ blurring the line again — intersexuality, ‘micropenis’, Klinefelter’s syndrome. One might focus on the difference between the organs, perhaps classifying as ‘woman’ one who possesses fully-developed and functional specialized egg-production and fetus-incubation apparatus. Of course, this definition lets me out, and Tidy, and our mom too.

I can be scientifically classified, neither biologically nor physiologically, as a ‘woman’, but check this out: last Sunday, three soccer moms at Phil’s Ice House [1], while waiting in line for the can marked with a dress-shaped stick figure, were startled when I busted through the gauntlet to the door marked with a human-shaped stick figure [2].

Their surprise, confusion and — if I may say so — awe illustrated that in praxis ‘woman’ has nothing to do with inherited physical traits, whether on a cellular or an anatomical level. I assert this because a soccer mom in the bathroom line at Phil’s Ice House cannot deduce, from information obtained by a quick once-over, the exact number of my X chromosomes (hell, I don’t even know the exact number of my X chromosomes). Furthermore, unless she has X-ray eyes (yes, all mothers claim this superpower, but in reality it’s extremely rare) she cannot know whether I’ve got a uterus.

Yet something about me had communicated to them, instantaneously and comprehensively, that I was not qualified to urinate where dudes urinate. I’d transgressed a vitally fundamental line of social demarcation when I elected to use the ‘wrong’ john. Was the soccer-mommal perception of this breach in the patriarchal matrix gender-based? Nah. With my hairy legs, antifemininity, and stone butch sidekick I am obviously queer as a steer, and unnaturally skirtless though we are, lesbians are still required to use the john with the skirt on the door. Nope, the palpable discomfort in the bathroom line was sex-based. They knew, receiving the vibes I subconsciously exude as a result of 48 years of male-dominated socialization, that I’m no dude. In other words, my behavior was inconsistent with my status, not my uterus.

Sex, though advertised as ‘fact’, cannot in fact be fact, since it cannot be defined or quantified or observed. Since it is not a fact, it must be a fiction. Therefore, ‘woman’ is nothing but a narrative intended to sell the idea that male abuse of the sex class is congruent with essential biological truths.

Here is what 500 years of dudely Western European painters have to say about ‘women.’ Notice that they’re all saying pretty much the same fucking thing: a ‘woman’ is a tilt-headed 18-year-old honky cipher with giant, wide-set doe eyes and a teeny weeny pink mouth.

After the Twistolution, when the world is populated by taqueaux for whom the idea of reproduction as we know it will seem vulgar and barbaric, ‘woman’ will exude the same cultural resonance as ’slave’.

Of course it is probable that our dysfunctional world order will destroy H. sapiens before the Twistolution can take place. In that case, cockroaches will inhereit the earth. Interestingly, female cockroaches have two X chromosomes, but males have only an X. No Y. No Z. Just … a void.
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1. Phil’s Ice House: burgers, foot-longs, and a giant outdoor structure, surrounded by mulch and infested with small children, called a ‘playscape’.

2. If Stingray and I ever get our wine bar off the ground, the cans are going to be labeled “People Who Sprinkle When They Tinkle” and “Everybody Else.”

Posted in Keep your bias off my gender and Morsel Institute. Bite me, Chad.

Define this

Published by Twisty on May 29, 2007. 186 Comments

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One of the juicy morsels I et yesterday while not reading the blog comments: a multi-cultivar tomato salad with fried goat cheese and about 36 different herbs, made by my sibling Tidy, who, to the undiluted satisfaction of the Faster family palates, has been watching that smarmy Napa dude on The Food Channel.

i have a question for you. But first, a slight digression.

I have entered a phase in my short and unimpressive career as the moderator of an internet discussion group. This phase is characterized by my viewing the enterprise with curled lip and narrowed eye. This morning, for example, after a weekend spent traipsing merrily about the hill country and cramming down the Twisty craw several juicy morsels that didn’t suck, I returned to my desk to perceive that about 76,932 new comments had sprouted on the blog. A sense of foreboding began to engulf my recently de-harshed mellow. Yet how could this be, I asked myself. The sun is shining, the birds are singing, the buttcracky plumbers who were supposed to dig up my yard this morning have put it off for another couple of days, and I found a live gecko in my desk drawer. Life is a bowl of Cool Whip. Why should I feel foreboded upon?

That’s when I realized that being a blogular moderator is bumming me out.

My distaste has nothing to do, obviously, with the usually brilliant commentary. It has nothing to do with drive-by teen boy-holes who misspell a few sexist epithets before biffing back home to Fark; those little dudes are like Ford F-150s with It’s A Baby Not A Choice bumper stickers; you just flip’em off and move on. It doesn’t even have to do with the antifeminists who got here Googling “Asian Pee Porn.” [1]

No, my burgeoning moderatorial angst has to do with this: I never know when (it’s not an “if”, it’s definitely a “when”) I’m going to come across something like “Twisty has not ‘moderated’ your incredibly racist/disablist/fatist/looksist remark; clearly she is in complete agreement with and wholeheartedly supports your bigoted position and is therefore herself a stinking bigot who, fatuously and from a position of priveledge [sic] insults me and my oppressed group’s legitimate but egregiously marginalized pain.”

That’s bad, but this is worse: I never know, when perusing the comments section, whether I’m going to encounter something vile like the following recent bit of rhetoric, the big kiss-off from one long-time commenter to another during an unendurably tedious squabble:

[I am] what you better live in fear of, X, if we ever meet in flesh I’ll rip yours. I have no intellect. Do not no how to argue you. So I will strike out physically. I will cut you if I ever meet you because I’ve got nothing to lose. [2]

Let me tell you a little bit about myself. I am one lazy mug. I like to take pictures of bugs, eat tacos, lounge around with a marg, and strike the occasional (and, until recently, unheeded) rhetorical blow on behalf of the revolution [3]. Also, I am middle-aged and have cancer and as a result have been forced to admit that life is short. Thus I now abide happily by a policy that entails excising from my personal sphere anything that impedes my enjoyment of these deeply fulfilling pursuits.

Reading shit like what I’ve alluded to above, this sorely impedes my enjoyment of my deeply fulfilling pursuits.

Something’s gotta give.

I know a lot of you have come to rely on this blog as a feminist-friendly haven. It has not escaped my notice that many of you have even expressed that the support you find in the discussions has helped you sort things out, or broadened your horizons, or given you a new appreciation for gifted transgender redheaded bonobos with Tourette’s, or what have you. Yet it may surprise you to learn that the phenomenon of the commentariat is a totally unexpected development; when I first started this blog a couple of years ago, it never entered my mind that in a million years anybody would ever actually read it, much less use it. But here we all are.

I am delighted that an IBTP ‘culture’ of sorts has been a generally happy consequence of the blogular manifestation of my loudmouth opinions. Yet I find, having mulled it over in the wake of recent discussions, that I am not cut out to moderate a forum that has grown to the point at which each post accumulates a couple of hundred comments and spans countless internecine disputes. I just can’t read’em all, much less remain sufficiently up-to-the-minute with the finer points of each individual sub-debate that I can intervene with intelligence.

And horribly, the more FAQs I write, the less people read’em.

Lest I go mad, I toyed with the idea of shutting down the blog altogether, or at least turning off the comments. Ultimately, however, this seemed unnecessarily baby-with-the-bathwaterish, since I enjoy writing the essays, and since generally the level of discourse is superior, illuminating, and hilarious, and since some readers seem actually to get something out of it all. In fact, it’s really only a few authors who spoil it for me, and even these only offend intermittently. They are blamers who often have provocative perspectives to add, but who, to the detriment of my enjoyment of my deeply fulfilling pursuits, occasionally get so hot under the collar that they can’t put a sock in the ad feminam attacks and idiot bickering.

In dealing with this in the past I have allowed myself to go through an absurdly exhausting, time-consuming process, wherein I go back and read the thread, and go back and re-read the thread, and weigh the effect of the bickering against the value of the commenter’s overall contributions, and wonder which comments I can delete without making all subsequent responses seem like drunken non-sequiturs, and worry about trying to be fair without hurting anyone’s feelings, and feel anxious and guilty for not intervening quickly enough to suit the wronged party, blah blah blah.

Well, no more.

The comments section will remain open, and the much-ignored and tragically unenforceable Comments Guidelines will remain in effect, and blamers will, as always, be encouraged to let fly with the first brilliant thing that comes into their heads, and I will continue to look in on the proceedings from time to time. I’m afraid, however, that the level of service you can expect will be exactly what you pay for. This means it’s inevitable that I will not catch every little slight, every instance of bigotry, every perfectly innocent comment that for some reason or other got hung up in the totally automated moderation queue.

It also means that when individual blamers get huffy or become tedious, I may or may not delete their comments. I may or may not delete whole conversations. I may or may not delete comments just because they don’t have paragraph breaks. I may or may not delete comments wherein privilege is spelled priveledge. I might not delete any offensive comments at all. Hell, I might make an offensive comment. I might not feel like messing with the blog for a few days, thus prolonging the length of time someone’s trenchant remarks are stuck in spamulational purgatory. I may resent implications. I might bandy words. I may be inconsistent. I might miss the point. I may be in a bad mood, the way certain blamers always seem to be. I might use the word “motherfucker” even though it may be considered insulting to mothers and fuckers. I may never read the comments again. Who can tell what the heck I’ll do? Life is uncertain!

In short, for my own happiness, I am taking back my blog. The following has been added to the Twistifesto:

Your comments appear on my blog at my pleasure. I have not solicited your views. You do not have a ‘right’ to be heard on this or any other blog. Neither do I owe you the slightest respect or courtesy. I may delete any of your comments I choose, for whatever reason I choose. This includes any responses to those comments, if only for the sake of clearing out the stink. I do not care how you think I should maintain this blog. I do not care if you ‘de-link’ me. I do not care if this bums you out.

But I digress. Here’s the topic of today’s post: I found this remark mouldering in the moderation queue:

“Gender is a social construct, sex is real. Removing a woman’s womb doesn’t make her not a woman, any more than removing a man’s penis and testes makes him not a man.”

This struck me as hilarious. Sex is real? That’s a hot one.

So I put it to the Blamer Brain Trust. Define “woman.”
___________________________

1. Although sometimes antifeminist trolls are funny. Recently I was accused, by someone posing as a feminist, of fabricating reader emails “in the attempt to get you all foaming at the mouth and attacking an enemy that’s not there.” The author of this comic interlude did not suggest what motive I might have for engaging in elaborate mind-control tactics designed to thwart non-existent enemies.

2. I have left this comment up because the next time somebody, in the heat of some future argument, demands to know “Why did you ban XYZ, who always spake the truth?” I can point to the time when she actually threatened to kill another blamer.

3. I also enjoy movies, sunsets, and long walks on the beach. My turnoffs include phonies, mean people, and those who argue against the dialectic of recursive transition networks from a Marxian perspective, or one which supports a Lacanian model of the neocapitalist paradigm of context used not to deconstruct society, but rather to install in the post-sexual narrative the meaninglessness of the consensus of a collective, but parallel, unconscious.

Posted in Blogulation, Keep your bias off my gender and Morsel Institute. Bite me, Chad.

Thyreocorid bug of the week

Published by Twisty on May 26, 2007. 478 Comments

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Corimelaena sp. The Twisty Hemiptera Department, May 26, 2007.

I adjourned to the bug paddock to snap this foto after throwing a copy of Newsweek across the room. It’s the May 21 issue, the one with a picture of a baby on the front. The baby is wearing a half pink, half blue wunzy. “The Mystery of GENDER,” it says. “THE NEW VISIBILITY OF TRANSGENDER AMERICA IS SHEDDING LIGHT ON THE ANCIENT RIDDLE OF IDENTITY.”

That’s why I bought the magazine. This ‘ancient riddle of identity’? What the hell is that?

Alas. Like all Newsweek articles, this one sheds no light whatsover on anything, ancient riddles of identity or otherwise. Its several thousand words could have been boiled down to “There are transgender people around.”

Here’s a howler, though: “Actively expressing the feminine in me has helped me grow closer to God,” says some godbag who has been brainwashed by patriarchy to think long hair and bras are an “identity.”

Ay yi yi.

The rest of the piece pretty much deals with how weird it is for the binary-minded when people cross over to the dark side and want to play sports. It turns out that Renee Richards, famed 70’s-era trans pro tennis player, is no exception to the “all old people are bigots” rule. A septuagenarian, Richards opines “God didn’t put us on this earth to have gender diversity.”

Whereupon I threw the magazine.

NOTE: I shouldn’t have to say this, but that’s what I thought the last time, so: I will not admit bigoted anti-trans crap into the comments section.

Posted in Keep your bias off my gender, Mass Media and Varmint Center. Bite me, Chad.

Lord of the flies

Published by Twisty on May 25, 2007. 351 Comments

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Having heard that I am the world’s foremost authority on genius 10-year-old girls attending high school, Blamer S recounts her disheartening tale:

Twisty,

I’m sending this in your direction, not so much because I expect you to break off photographing wonders of Austin wildlife to read my issues, but because even being in the cybervicinity of a brain that understands will help keep me from driving into Luby’s cafe- with high school boys attached to the bumper.

I have a daughter. That alone is enough to make the world of patriarchal peril keep me up at night.

Last year, as a nine year old, N started attending the local high school and found the honors classes to be a good fit. The child who never found a place to fit in started singing over her chemistry equations. I, having been to high school, nodded happily and sent her to karate class where she learned how a tiger’s claw to the groin can be a useful move.

Something happened this year, now that she’s 10. You caught that, right? 10? Because it seems that every creep in the school has decided that 10 year old girls are just their thing.

She was asked to prom. She was stalked in the library until the librarian set up a sign-in system to nab the cretin. She was asked out to the school dance, and had little balls of crumpled paper thrown at her until she opened one up and saw it was covered with hearts.

Guess what the counselors’ responses were. “But she’s sooo cute!” “She’s adorable.” “Wow! She’s a heartbreaker.”

No. She’s 10. She likes cats, dogs, and ponies. She does not like sausage talk, date talk, or rape videos posing as music videos. She has a prepubescent body and a heart to match. And she’s sure as hell not responsible for male reactions no matter how fucking “cute” she is. 10. Jailbait.

Yesterday one boy cornered her and spewed vile stuff during a day long classroom and field trip. While the teacher removed him from the classroom three times he did not stop the next time he came back in. We’re talking gross, sexual stuff, nonstop. He has Aspergers and didn’t pick up on the subtle cues like, “Get out of here until you control that mouth.” Oddly enough, I don’t feel that’s my problem. The idea that kids get to go to school in a harassment free environment doesn’t have an asterisk with fine print saying “except in cases of cute 10 year old girls and older guys with issues.”

Yet the upshot is that N is supposed to deal with having this kid around, because removing him would disrupt his education. Plus, he can’t help himself being a male with impulse control issues. And don’t forget, she’s so cute and all. She just needs to learn to deal with it because she’ll be getting that response all her life.

This morning the counselor asked if I wanted to talk about it some more, as though talking was supposed to relieve some feminist tension I have about her beauty. I want a restraining order.

Thanks for listening, or at least not letting me know if you just deleted this.

S

I’m confident that the Blametariat will have some trenchant remarks on this development. For my part, it seems an ideal moment to plug my highly unpopular views on the American public school system. Those views are:

Smash it!

Public education in this country is a hideous joke. The American public school system is nothing but male dominant culture’s incubation system. It is purposely designed to imbue its inmates, through equal measures of patriarchy-centric curricula and atavistic social structure, with chauvinist doctrine.

The result? An underclass of docile, barely-literate labor drones who will serve the interests of the megatheocorporatocracy. If the system, with its permanent ‘underfunding,’ inadequate instructors, politicized curricula, and perpetually ‘improving’ test scores, did not precisely meet the demands of the megatheocorporatocracy, it wouldn’t be compulsory, and it wouldn’t exist (note that for upper class elites, it doesn’t).

Unfortunately, it works perfectly as a delivery system for culture-of-dominance brainwashing. Products of this indoctrination emerge* with no thought but to replicate the insidious nuclear family model, which locks down their dependence on women’s unpaid domestic labor, on cheap crap from China (i.e. ‘Third World’ oppression), on foreign oil, on genetically-modified, drugged, tasteless, and crappy food, on bleak, depressing jobs, on religion, on ‘the government,’ on porn, on drugs, on ‘medicine’, on xenophobia, and, by happy coincidence, when their kids are old enough for it to be a godsend, on the public schools.

Not only that, but the bizarre conceit that imprisoning children in concentration camps for 6 or 8 hours a day somehow ’socializes’ them** can only proceed from insanity, and taxes to the utmost the obstreperal lobe’s highly unstable containment field.

The end.

Oh hell, I forgot to offer a solution. I’ve been told that if I don’t come up with happy-ending scenarios to counteract the dispiriting hopelessness of my depressing posts, I am nothing but a nattering nabob of negitavism. So here it is:

Home-school those kids!

Can’t home-school?

Overthrow patrirarchy! ¡Vive la revolución!
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* If they emerge; those who don’t are sucked underground, to populate the megatheocorporatocracy’s equally lucrative criminal branch.

** See post title.

Posted in The megatheocorporatocracy. Bite me, Chad.

The De Anza case: men really hate drunk teenage girls

Published by Twisty on May 24, 2007. 274 Comments

The scope of this foul ‘De Anza rape allegations case’ initially caused my obstreperal lobe to throw both its claws in the air, exclaim “That’s it!“, bundle a few provisions in a bindle, and take to the rails. This morning, unexpectedly, it came shuffling back, bruised but vociferant, clutching in its tentacles a slew of reports from San Jose MercuryNews.com. I’ve spent the last hour reviewing these, with increasing nausea.

By now you will have heard a summary of the case: in San Jose, California, at a house party on March 3 of this year, three men gang-raped a comatose teenager while ten jolly spectators whooped it up on the sidelines. On May 21, Santa Clara County DA Dolores Carr astonished the victim, the sheriff’s department, and right-thinking humans everywhere when she dismissed all charges because of ‘insufficient evidence.’

Outcry, both local and blogular, has ensued.

The media lump together the assault and its concomitant juridical circus under the moniker ‘the De Anza case’ because two of the rapists were members of the (San Jose, California) De Anza Community College baseball team. This factoid is significant because the media know a fortuitously sordid sequel to the popular ‘Duke lacrosse scandal’ when they see one, and can’t leave the sports angle alone. It is also significant because DA Dolores Carr clearly had no wish to toddle down the same thorny path as her College Sports Rape Scandal counterpart in Durham NC, old Mike Nifong, whose hubris-y personal ambitions got him busted for concealing evidence favorable to the Duke rapists.

MercuryNews reports are rife with male-dominant vernacular, both from quoted sources and in the reportage itself. This language reveals that, in the popular imagination, in adjudication of rape cases, and in media culture, there flourishes a truly despicable, antifeminist, misogynist zeitgeist. The prominent themes are alcohol-and-consent, the aforementioned irrelevant circumstance that the rapists were college athletes, and the bizarre idea that ‘insufficient evidence’ is now the equivalent of ‘it never happened.’

For your blaming convenience, here’s an overview of the case, compiled exclusively from MercuryNews articles, and viewed through Twisty-colored glasses.

March 4: Gang-rape occurs; spectators cheer; victim is taken to hospital by women from the party. Police captain Steve Angus asserts that “some sort of sexual assault occurred,” but the rape is always described as “alleged”; as we now know, if there is ‘insufficient evidence,’ suddenly there was no assault. This magical thinking omits to consider, you know, facts, as well as the views of the women who took the victim to the hospital after she’d been brutalized (they were never asked to testify before the grand jury), not to mention the victim herself.

Apparently it’s perfectly normal for incapacitated teenage girls to blithely service multiple baseball players while a shitfaced mob yuks it up. Says young eyewitness Megan Keefhaver, whose boyfriend just happens to be a De Anza baseball player, “The people in the room obviously were cheering the guys on or something like that. But I didn’t think of it as a rape situation.” Because she’s from the moon.

March 17: MercuryNews runs a story entirely devoted to the sorrowful heartbreak so unfairly inflicted on — yup, you called it — the baseball team. De Anza has suspended eight players for what reporter Elliot Almond calls ‘questionable behavior’ ; the team is suffering sorely as a result of the inconvenient rape. Laments coach Scott Hertler, “Mentally, none of us are sleeping great. We’re probably not eating right because we just don’t feel good.” He regrets that they didn’t teach him how to deal with rape-based morale-slippage in “coaching school.”

But the “team’s resilience” shines through, and they win the big game! Yay team!

Way to romanticize, via our dudely young athletes, those lofty all-American ideals of character, brotherhood and sportsmanship with which male college sports teams are commonly thought to be imbued.

They aren’t supposed to rape and pillage, though, before they turn pro.

March 19: 20-year-old Steve Rebagliati, host of the rape party and one of the ‘alleged’ rapists, executes a felony hit-and-run just hours before raping the teenager. This tidbit will disappear like magic from MercuryNews reports, but Rebagliati, whose family owns the rape house, will become the Face of the innocent baseball team.

April 9: A second woman comes forward. It turns out that she was raped by the same baseball team in the same house three months earlier. They’d given her shots of tequila and matched her with shots of beer. What sportsmanship!

Like the hit-and-run mentioned above, this allegation vanishes into the mist.

May 16: After testifying before the grand jury, the chivalrous sportsman MercuryNews calls “Freshman pitcher Ryan Kanzaki” is overheard in the hall gleefully reporting to his family that he has been granted immunity. MercuryNews implies that this human stain Kanzaki was one of the cheering crowd urging his teammates on to feats of drunken brutality. Of course! His all-American sportsmanlike team spirit naturally makes him reluctant to rat out his fellow criminals.

Two other uncharged suspects are described in terms of their wholesome sportiness: “sophomore Chris Skinner, an infielder,” and “Spencer Maltbie, who doubles as a pitcher and infielder.” Causing my obstreperal lobe to throb uncomfortably, Maltbie apparently believes that because he doesn’t “drink or smoke” he is above suspicion.

May 22: DA Dolores Carr issues brief statement re: the ‘insufficient evidence.” Mistaking this for vindication, suspect Rebagliati relates his sorrowful tale of woe at having been a “scapegoat.” A reporter actually asks what he would say to the victim if he had the chance. He would, in fact, take the opportunity to lecture the lying slut — because let’s face it; if there was no rape, but she did a baseball team, she has to be a lying slut — on the importance of developing character: “I’d ask her why she chose to put us and herself through so much. My only thought is I hope that she learned a lot, as well as about herself, in the last two months.”

In case you were wondering, he can sleep at night, knowing that “as a team, [we] are innocent and free to live normally again.”

There’s no interviewing the victim, who of course will never be “free to live normally” again, so MercuryNews reports that she’s “disappointed,” but that heavy drinking makes prosecuting sexual assaults “difficult.”

The real reason that prosecuting sexual assaults is difficult — i.e. our culture’s fucking endemic misogyny — is not mentioned.

May 21 In an opinion piece, Scott Herhold demands answers! He wants to know whether the cops flubbed the investigation, sure, but he won’t be satisfied until there has been a thorough and public recap of the actual rape. Presumably this is so he and all the other CSI-poisoned sexperts out there can judge for themselves whether or not the baseball team pronged the victim en masse because they are rapists, or because the drunken little slut just really likes “sex.” He wants details!

What harm could it do? The case isn’t just about a rape victim, he says. It’s “about how our elected law enforcement officials do their job” (no doubt the victim would consider it just peachy if MercuryNews published a play-by-play of her rape, but alas, Herhold can’t ask her to confirm; she’s already moved away to escape the horror and humiliation). And besides, he says, who’s to say there isn’t a “problem with the credibility of the victim herself?” Everybody knows that 17-year-old girls constantly rush around to hospitals and make shit up about how they were gang-raped by baseball teams.

May 22: “Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith said Tuesday she believes that ‘individuals got away with sexual assault’ at a party attended by members of the De Anza College baseball team, and that ‘at some point, someone needs to speak up for the victim.’” Well, duh.

May 23: This MercuryNews report characterizes the victim as “the girl” and her rape as a “controversy.” Also, readers who are anxious with concern for DA Dolores Carr’s conscience can rest easy. Quoth Carr, “I’m at peace with my decision.”

And once again, the right of mobs of drunken male athletes to relieve their incontinence in semi-conscious teen receptacles has been upheld by law enforcement. This sickening and egregious miscarriage of justice, my young onions, is precisely what the Twisty Consent? Schmonsent! Protocol would address.

Posted in Mass Media and Men Hate You. Bite me, Chad.

and/or random things

Published by Twisty on May 22, 2007. 116 Comments

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Sentimental blowfly photo of the week. Like so many of us, blowflies start life as carrion-gnawing maggots. Calliphora sp. May 22, North South Austin.

One of the aspects of blogging that is supposed to make the whole enterprise so revolutionary is the blogroll. This is a collection of links to other people’s blogs that you put in your blog sidebar to let your readers know what sort of cult you belong to. I am in awe of some of those bloggers with 842 blogs in their sidebars. Their intellectual lives must be enriched to the point of explosive rupturement by the assimilation of so many similar opinions.

I am much too lazy to either read more than one or two blogs a day, or to maintain such a list, but it is not beyond my scholarly inclinations to hook you up with the occasional blogular point of interest.

So here are two blogs wherein the blogger collects pictures of a certain sort of thing and writes piquant little quips about’em. They make a pleasant change from my usual routine of mouldering away about the megatheocorporatocracy.

passive-aggressive notes from roommates, neighbors, coworkers and strangers has passive-aggressive notes from roommates, neighbors, coworkers and strangers.

The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks preaches to that choir of snobs who like to mock the misuse of this popular punctuation mark.

Posted in Blogulation and Varmint Center. Bite me, Chad.

Yo, taqueau

Published by Twisty on May 22, 2007. 217 Comments

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Sentimental butterfly photo of the week: Anthanassa texana, the Texan crescent. North South Austin, May 21, 2007.

I forgot, for a few days, that I have a blog. So many bugs to photograph, so many coffee shops to haunt. And let’s face it; is there really anything I can say about patriarchy that I haven’t already said at least 6,582 times? So yesterday I lunched at the Hula Hut* with my two nieces.

The Hula Hut is a tourist trap, but you can dine on a palapa-roofed pier overlooking Lake Austin and they have fried shrimp tacos. If you have the sort of nieces whose interest in fried shrimp tacos is minimal, you can show’em how to throw tortilla chips over the side and sit back and enjoy the water show: carp the size of Volkswagens lumber to the surface and scuffle for the crumbs. Then you can chant “Question Authority!” when your sister Tidy — who at some point between her first and second kid confirmed both your worst fears by going over to the dark side and becoming your mother — points reprovingly to a sign that says “DO NOT THROW FOOD OVER THE SIDE. DO NOT FEED THE WILDLIFE. LONG-HAIRED FREAKY PEOPLE NEED NOT APPLY.”

When I bumbled home, though, there was a very nice email from reader Alice.

Dear Twisty,

I just wanted to email you and say that you have been an indirect cause of me giving a talk about feminism at my university, which went amazingly. Although I have all the ideas, it’s your ballsiness (female equivalent? ovarieness?) that made me brave enough to go and do it. So woo! I have also come up with a new feminist mantra which I submit for your approval: “men are more normal than women”. I think this sneakier more insidious sexist idea has replaced “men are superior to women”. I think this is genuinely a problem, but I haven’t read any feminism that recognises it properly. If you are bored then have a read of the attached speech.

Alice

Sa-weet! Nothing burnishes the spinster bunions like hearing that one has been an indirect cause of something that didn’t involve a S.W.A.T. team. And I’m all for feminist oratory on university campuses. There’s precious little of it these days, since so many girls have turned to pole dancing as the one true form of feminist expression.

I admit that my spirits flagged a bit when at the close of Alice’s communiqué I espied the words “attached speech,” but my fears proved unfounded. Alice, it turns out, understands a thing or two about the relationship between aunts and speeches; at two-and-a-half pages, hers was the soul of breviloquence. It was also really good.

Here is my favorite part:

In general, it does not take any reevaluation to consider a person as male- but on finding that a person is female, we are often surprised.

This general way of thinking is sexist. And there are many ways it will impact negatively on women.

Firstly, being female will always be a relevant detail about a woman in a way that being male is not a relevant detail about a man, leading to lack of attention to their more relevant qualities. This effect might be seen in the way that women’s literature is sidelined, as are women composers and women poets. A woman politician or a woman CEO qualities are less likely to be recognised as a male CEO’s are: the woman is thought of as ‘the female CEO’ while the man is thought of as ‘the confident CEO’ or the ‘the most experienced CEO’ but never as ‘the male CEO’.

Secondly, the expectation of maleness means that women violate expectation, and are seen as unusual or risky- extra effort. This effect might be seen at a job interview: if the default applicant is thought of as male, then a female applicant, merely by being female, departs from the interviewer’s model applicant. If one expects to employ a normal person, one expects to employ a male, and it requires a little extra mental extension to consider employing a female. The same applies for race. People will just tend to employ equally qualified white males over black females, because it’s the path of least resistance — employing the black female is somehow bloody-minded.

Thirdly, but perhaps most importantly, equating humanity with men, as in the term ‘mankind’, leads to women’s issues being seen as special issues. Human rights violations in SA are not taken as seriously as is warranted: there is a gender apartheid, and women are essentially enslaved, but we tolerate it.

You will have deduced by now that the topic of Alice’s speech is maleness as the default human condition. She opens with some remarks on the reasonableness of the ‘womyn’ idea, which revolutionary spelling she admits has endured a torrid career as “the ridiculous proposal of a hypersensitive man hater: a bitter woman who wants to carry on grinding her axe, and so has turn to meaningless trivialities because all the major issues have been used up.” But which she argues is pretty much a necessity if we’re ever going to slough off this women-as-variant-of-normal crap.

I would venture that nowadays, outside those insular herbal tea-infested crannies frequented by us hairy humorless women’s studyists, the word “womyn’ has almost the resonance of a rude epithet. Long have I dreamed of implementing a whole new word for “woman,” by which I mean a whole new word for “human.” I propose “taqueau.” Such a word focuses not on physiological differences that rationalize oppression, but, by invoking the pinnacle of human achievement (the taco), while remaining deliciously free of any gland-based distinctions that can be of interest only to biologists, conveys the appropriate sense of Truth and Beauty.

That’s right! Imagine if “man” and “woman” didn’t exist. The declension of the pronouns, I admit, will be problematic, particularly to those of us who doggedly cling for no good reason to what Alice calls “rules laid down by sexist eighteenth century grammarians.” But if I can cope, so can you. So check it out: what if there were only one sort of human, and reproductive organs were accorded the same cultural significance as eye color, or whether your second toe is longer than your big toe?

This condition — the one where there is only one sort of human — exists now, by the way. It’s just that patriarchy has so cleverly framed the narrative, and so assiduously enforced its assimilation, that modern humans do not possess the intellective tools to perceive it.

UPDATE: Alice provides this link to her speech.
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* Persistent readers will recall the Hula Hut as the scene of a 2006 ogling incident involving a super-gross dude equipped with entitlement-squirting Ray-Bans. I snapped his picture and he is now safely archived somewhere at HollabackNYC.

Posted in Austin, Keep your bias off my gender and Varmint Center. Bite me, Chad.

Old bag’s lament

Published by Twisty on May 19, 2007. 145 Comments

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This bag was no good because once I got a niece or two stuffed in there, there was hardly any room for a box of Altoids.

I spent a quarter of a century on a quest. That quest was for a partner in greatness. A decent shoulder bag.

“Say, this one looks pretty good,” I’d say, giving it an affectionate chuck under the buckle. “Look! It’s got gussets!”

I’d use it for a month or so, but inevitably it would reveal itself lacking some essential detail. My spirits would flag.

“Face it, ” my friends would say. “The blush is off the rose.”

But would I listen? No. We would solider on together, the bag inflicting on me its crappy design, me in denial, but eventually the fact of its mediocrity — its lack of a proper handle or its inconvenient zipper or its failure to accommodate some large necessity — would harbinge irreconcilable differences. Whereupon, as I had done a thousand times before with its legion of predecessors, I would relieve it of its contents and chuck it, deflated and tragic, onto the corpse pile in the bag-morgue.

I kept expecting that if I were dogged enough, and did not give up the hunt, that sooner or later, among so many mortal terrestrial bags, we would find each other: me, full of love’s young dream, and it, gleaming with capaciousness and convenience. When I held it aloft, assessing its weight-to-ugliness ratio, it would speak in silvery tones the promise that though I might stuff it full of camera lenses and squirt guns, it would never conceal from me my ringing cell phone until after it had gone to voicemail.

Finally I went mad. To the last bag that sang to me of special water bottle pockets and a laptop-cozy, I retorted, “But that is the promise that all bags speak, so that I will be mesmerized and take them home! But once we are together, yet I do fear their nature! For their foul design is to their perverse will mine own should crimp! You are like unto god-bags, all!”

After many years, I now realize that what I really need is a burro.

The bag that will hold my all my spinster aunt tackle, a weeks’ worth of supplies and a jet-pak, and be weightless, does not exist in this dimension. Its inside would have to be bigger than its out, and it would have to be exempt from the gravitational pull of this or any other planet, and it would have to jive aesthetically with my 80’s hair band T-shirts.

I bore you with this pathetic preamble because it mirrors my search for reasonable allusions to feminism in the mainstream media. I keep looking, looking, and sometimes I think I’ve found something, but what I get is bupkis. This morning the only thing in my inbox tagged ‘feminist’ was this:

“We’ve been taught for centuries to be glad to get the crumbs. F&%# that! I’m a feminist (and) any woman in the year 2007 who says she’s not a feminist is either a f*%$in’ moron or has been living under a rock for the past 2000 years.” — Ellen Barkin on girl power.

Nice. A celebrity suggesting that an antifeminist can survive under a rock for millennia, the editorial sanitization of “fuck” to “F&%#”, and the infantilization of feminism to ‘girl power.’

And now, I’m off to find a movie that doesn’t portray women exclusively in terms of men. That movie does not exist in this dimension, so I will have to settle for one in which the male hero doesn’t force the fragile girl, who has just stumbled in her high heels and pencil skirt, to hold his hand while they run run run across the rocky terrain.

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