Dang. Once again, no time to blame. But certainly one never tires of photos of tree trunks with galloping squirrels in the background, so here you are.
Monthly Archive for June, 2007
Checkered setwing. The Twisty Odonata Compound, Travis County, TX, June 2007.
If I seem not to have blogularly blamed the patriarchy in days and days, it is because I have been extremely diverted by blaming the patriarchy in my actual life. No cause for alarm, though. I’ll be back soon.
Please accept this dragonfly as a token of my esteem.
Also, I finally saw The Killing of Sister George. Ha! Some dude director interprets lesbo ‘drama’ for mainstream audience. In the course of my career as a spinster aunt-to-be, I watched this exact movie transpire about 876 times. You dykes know what I’m talking about.
Kick out the lady-jams, all yall. I’ll be right back.
Dude nation’s increasing enthusiasm for pornulating traditionally unfuckable women is quite the victory for marginalized groups who have never enjoyed the fulfilling opportunity to celebrate their sexuality exclusively in terms of male approval.
Now disabled women can be sexbots, too, particularly when photographed on all fours with their enthonged, airbrushed butts in the air and published in empowerful women’s magazine Sports Illustrated.
[Thanks, Charles]
UPDATE: Zippy is home, tentatively diagnosed with peripheral vestibular disease. Dog presents with puking, staggering, weird eye movement. In other words, she’s seasick. A full recovery is expected. Thanks for all the well-wishes. Looks like they may have worked.
The dog Zippy, Spinster Aunt HQ’s oldest denizen, is in the hospital again. I’ll be abandoning my post once more until she resolves it one way or the other. Meanwhile, on the way to the vet this morning, I pulled up behind a sun-bleached, blackish, dented GMC van of the sort one imagines is seen parked in front of government buildings just before bombs explode. The driver, reflected in his rear-view mirror, was wearing — that’s right — a green beret. Through the back windows of this van I could make out rifle cases, rolled up American flags, and a black velvet (I think) painting of a bald eagle. On the exterior were four stickers. One was about 2 feet square and proclaimed that the van was a Proud Member of the NATIONAL GUARD! The other three were regular bumper stickers:
“Don’t Steal; The Government Doesn’t Like Competition”
“Keep Honking … I’M RELOADING!”
and the sweetest of the sweet:
“Lost your cat? TRY LOOKING UNDER MY TIRES!”
On NPR yesterday I heard a guy telling how the cops had pulled him over because of his bumper sticker. What did it say? “Powered by 100% Vegetable Oil.”
Delusional Nebraska judge Jeffre Cheuvront has declared sex to be a synonym for rape. That’s right! In 2007, in an American court of law, a rape is not legally distinguishable from a peck on the cheek. Defense attorneys for accused rapist Pamir Safi won a motion to have the word rape banned from the courtroom on the grounds that it inflames overwrought, anti-rapist responses in jurors. Also banned are sexual assault, victim, assailant, and sexual assault kit. Says Dahlia Lithwick, writing in Slate:
[P]rosecutors upped the ante last month by seeking to have words like sex and intercourse barred from the courtroom as well. The judge denied that motion, evidently on the theory that there would be no words left to describe the sex act at all. The result is that the defense and the prosecution are both left to use the same word—sex—to describe either forcible sexual assault, or benign consensual intercourse. As for the jurors, they’ll just have to read the witnesses’ eyebrows to sort out the difference.
Lithwick points out that using the word sex instead of rape in the courtroom implies the opposite ‘legal conclusion’: that it was just an innocent, ‘consensual’ round of hide-the-salami. Which the defense wants to be true, because then the victim is a deceitful whore seeking to realize the fondest wish of all low, promiscuous women: to bring false rape charges against a sterling pillar of male society because she ‘regrets’ her ‘decision’ to ‘have intercourse’.
The state of juridical process has truly plummeted to new depths of misogyny when the victim of a rape is forced to testify that she ‘had sex’ while unconscious with a man who had removed her to his apartment against her will. As Lithwick says, what’s next? “Should the complaining witness in a mugging be forced to testify that he was merely giving his attacker a loan?”
I’ve been complaining for some time now that words officially have no meaning anymore — they are regularly stolen from the people who need’em and put’em to reasonable use by megatheocorporatocrats, who reprogram them as minions in service of their own bloated interests before releasing them back into the public sphere — and this proves my hypothesis. If one erases the word rape from courtroom vernacular, if a victim of assault has no word to describe the violent nature of the attack, rape itself ceases to exist as a crime. All that’s left is sex, which everybody knows is the right and proper use of a woman, especially a drunk woman. Rape apologists — that is to say, men who don’t see anything criminal in a little coercion — can breathe a sigh of relief. A woman in public resumes her traditional role as public property in a persistent condition of having given consent. The natural order is restored.
[Thanks, Belle O'Cosity]
Under the weather for a couple of days, and discovering that I had omitted to schedule my Netflix program to accommodate this contingency — Netflix timing is something of an art form — I turned lemons into lemonade. That’s right, I took to my bed and absorbed, with a few bowls of sesame noodles, about 6,542 20th century Hollywood movies on the Turner Classic Movie channel. So that I could kid myself that this was an appropriate use of my valuable spinster aunt time, I took notes, in the interest of patriarchy blaming, on the sexist, misogynist themes that continue to rage unchecked in popular culture today.
Imagine my delight when TCM turned out to be ‘celebrating the birthday’ of original Continental gigolover Louis Jourdan with a marathon of his most misogynist films. All the titles revolve around vulnerable women who are exploited in various rapey ways, not just by Jourdan’s stereotypical dashing rake character, but by nearly every other male who stumbles into the shot. Taken as a group, the films describe a nightmarish dystopia in which white dudes [1] roam the earth partaking of life’s sumptuous pageant while women subsist as a subclass of passive sex minions for male use and abuse. Too bad they describe the real world, too.
Spoilers, of course, ensue, so if you have been wildly anticipating your own Louis Jourdan retrospective, avert your eyes now.
My bedridden screenings commenced with Madame Bovary (Vincente Minnelli, 1949), which film reduces Flaubert’s fairly virtuosic bit of writing to a melodrama about a scheming, unfaithful wife. That this film should have completely missed the mark is evidenced by its tagline, “Whatever it is that French women have, Madame Bovary has more of it!†Oo la la! To make Emma’s infidelities appear more reprehensible, Charles Bovary is portrayed as a nice guy with a heart-o-gold rather than a stupid, bumbling clod; Minnelli even gives him a spine when he morphs the famous scene in which Bovary botches the operation on Hippolyte’s club foot to one in which he nobly refuses to perform a surgery for which he is unqualified.
Curiously, Minnelli’s Madame Bovary opens with the famous obscenity trial in a scene where James Mason as Gustav Flaubert explains to mid-century moviegoers why they should be sympathetic to such a loose-moraled heroine. He falls a bit short of a feminist statement when he argues, essentially, that he blames society (what Betty Friedan would later call ‘the feminine mystique’) for the real-life existence of thousands of Emma Bovarys, but these remarks reveal that it apparently did not elude even Judy Garland’s mascara-wearing ex-husband that women are the recipients of, on the whole, a pretty bum deal.
Next up was Julie (1956): Doris Day is a naive trophy wife stalked by her jealous psychokiller/ brilliant concert pianist husband (Jourdan). Relentlessly pursued through the streets of San Francisco by the murderously raging Jourdan, Doris is from start to finish a helpless prey animal whose fate rests entirely in the hands of an assortment of male authority figures. On the upside, the film presents an accurate picture of the minimal legal recourse available to American women who are stalked by homicidal French playboys. But this is canceled out by the final scenes, where Doris, a stewardess, has to land the plane (Louis Jourdan has shot all the pilots, naturally). The extraordinarily long ‘No no, I couldn’t possibly!’ ‘But you must!’ exchange reassures the audience that, even though she’s about to do something heroic, Doris is sufficiently possessed of womanly debility. The (male) air traffic controllers, using Doris ‘as just another instrument’, guide the phlying phallus into the airfield and call her ‘honey.’
The final shot is a close-up in which Doris emotes both shock and blandness. Also amusing is the scene where she has about 13 seconds to get away from Louis, but stops to pack a bag first.
This was a truly terrible movie, and I performed a joyous re-fluffing-of-the-pillows to celebrate its conclusion. Little did I know that the worst was yet to come.
In the utterly worthless romantic comedy The Swan (1956), Grace Kelly is a princess who has to marry royal asshole Alec Guinness (hot virgin teen paired off with experienced old dude? Check.) but uh oh she is secretly in love with Louis Jourdan, playing against type as an intellectual commoner.
I can well understand the global fascination for Grace Kelly. She is the patriarchal ideal of womanhood: a consummate cipher. She possesses the immaculate beauty of a perfume model, her depths could be plumbed with a toad’s eyelash, and her perennial limpid virginity makes her appealingly vulnerable to fantasies of conquest.
Even if you ignore its vapid, misogynist fairy tale premise, The Swan contains no philosophic value whatsoever; I bother to mention it only because of the occasional comedic contributions from 60’s TV scene-stealer Estelle Winwood as the dotty old aunt, and because of some truly hideous rococo interiors. Next!
I’d seen the mind-numbingly awful The V.I.P.s (1963) before, so you’d think I’d have had the presence of mind to switch to Wheel of Fortune or something when the titles started rolling. But an imp of the perverse compelled me to press on: a blustercluck of stars headlined by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton are stuck overnight in an airport hotel; slices of life ensue. Taylor is leaving her possessive, self-absorbed, gun-wielding zillionaire husband (Burton) for a penniless international playboy (Jourdan). In the pivotal scene, Burton smashes Taylor into a door and snarls “now you know how much I love you!†Bleeding profusely, Taylor looks gratefully into his eyes, and nods when he asks if she forgives him. Their repulsive relationship blossoms anew when Burton gets shitfaced and threatens to commit suicide; poor Louis Jourdan is left at the gate, a non-starter.
Mercifully I snoozed through most of Gigi (1958), but not, alas, before hearing pervy old gasbag Maurice Chevalier grunt through his repellent theme song “Thank Heaven for Little Girls.†Gigi, of course, is another of those stupid stories in which a worldly, handsome stud gives up his sexually lucrative, envied-by-all bachelorhood to marry a vivacious teen virgin who has blossomed before his eyes into ‘a woman’. At one point in this lighthearted musical, leering pedophile Chevalier congratulates Jourdan on having inspired, for the first time in his mackdaddy career, a woman to commit suicide. “May it be the first of many, ha ha ha!â€
Another romantic comedy, Made In Paris (1964) tickles the funnybone right off the bat when Ann-Margret fends off date-rapist Chad Everett by clocking him with a large kidney-shaped ceramic ashtray. It goes downhill from there. Despite the hilarious attempted rape, Ann-Margret loves Chad Everett — his forehead now comically adorned with a large Band-Aid — and spends the rest of the movie trying to protect her virtue, which is always in question despite her innocence, from international playboy Louis Jourdan and a really creepy Richard Crenna, who drugs her with absinthe. This is 1966, so there is much macho Hefnerizing about women’s ‘measurements’, and plenty of fashion models creeping down runways with a bizarre hunchbacked, pelvis-out, tippy-toe gait.
In the end, Ann-Margret falls for this speech by Chad: “I lose my temper and I’m jealous. All I have to offer is a station wagon, a couple of sheepdogs, and maybe a couple of kids. Apparently that’s not enough for you.†Au contraire, Chad! She instantly ditches her promising career as a Paris fashion buyer to marry him and begin her exciting new life as a domestic.
In every one of these films, the female leads are hapless pawns upon which the dudes act. The women are variously terrorized, owned, used, patronized, dominated, manipulated, and humiliated. The tone is universally unapologetic and unsympathetic; clearly, the submissive characterizations, morals, and behaviors depicted — i.e., that women exist only in terms of men — are considered to be consistent with the essential nature of women. The astonishing thing is that this shit continues, in 2007, to be presented with a straight face as perfectly acceptable expressions of popular sentiment, rather than as curious relics of bigotry and sexism. But of course Hollywood always has been, and continues to be, patriarchy’s communications department.
_______________________
1. Honkys are the default humans in Hollywood; the only people of color to be broadcast on TCM for 12 straight hours yesterday were a few grinning jazz musicians in one lone Paris nightclub scene.
I am somewhat floored by the responses to my post suggesting that marriage is the primary unit of patriarchal currency. O me of little faith, I’d sort of expected a slew of matrimonial apologists to attack me with no small vim, but from a field of over 250 starters, only a few argue that marriage is anything but a hotbed of bogosity, and I think only one or two dudes tell the feminists to get a sense of humor.
Speaking of dudes: here’s a little test you can give yourself to see if you are qualified to interrupt the ladies with your unique male perspective:
1. Fill in the blank:
Remarks such as “Keep shaking things up. I don’t want to live in a world of sheep and I like being challenged when it comes to ideas and philosophy” are considered by radical feminist bloggers to be ____________.
2. True or false:
a. Feminists are likely to be unacquainted with the male point of view.
b. Feminists benefit from the balance offered by the male point of view.
But I digress.
A few glittering baubles of consensus caught my attention when reading the comments. For instance, most of the married blamers who responded — even those who described themselves as tolerably happily married to ‘good guys’ — said that they wouldn’t have done it if they’d known then what they know now. This was a self-selected sample, of course, but at least it doesn’t disprove my hypothesis, which is that marriage is a culture virus engineered specifically to indenture women in the service of male culture.
Also, blamers really don’t like doing housework. Amen to that, sister. Unsurprisingly, housework is only an issue when cohabitation is the domestic arrangement; people who live alone either do it or they don’t, but we are unlikely to consider it a feminist issue unless a more privileged entity stands to reap the benefits. Some women seem to consider that they have made a tolerable marriage because their Nigels do some or all of the housework. But, as blamer legallyblondeez counters, “doing the housework doesn’t magically erase his male privilege.” Housework, in other words, is a bit of a pink herring in the battle of the sexes, in that the fundamental power differential between oppressor and oppressed remains firmly in place regardless of who mops the floor.
Some women suggest that a marriage may be made tolerable with the introduction of a third party to muck out the filth. This bit of feudal reasoning, with its profoundly antifeminist essence, is problematic.
The implications of hiring a menial — always a woman — to perform low-status women’s drudgery suggest an unsophisticated grasp of feminist theory. Blamer Mearl agrees; I reproduce her eloquent remarks here to save me the trouble of having to paraphrase her exact argument.
[H]ere is where I quibble: “Our house cleaner, who is a woman, has a flexible schedule, gets paid well and seems to enjoy the ability to work unsupervised, while listening to music and watching TV.”
For fuck’s sake, does no one realise that there is zero integrity, no matter how you rationalise it, for paying someone else to clean up your garbage and dirty gitch? If every overprivileged feminist in the G8 countries did this in order to balance out our leisure time and work time and have happy feminist marriages, do you realise that you’re contributing to the increase of an already-existing and growing caste system with Untouchables at the bottom, and those Untouchables are doing the shit work of society, paid or not? Garbage men make 22$/hour where I live, benefits and pension and health care included (Canada here). Cleaning women get $7, and nothing else. They clean your bigger, better house to make money for kids they barely ever see. Many are poor or immigrants. Do you really want to contribute to a growing near-slave society in the interests of the patriarchal capitalism, on the pretense that you are leveling the playing field of marriage with your hubby?
Here is a snippet from Jan Wong’s “Maid for a Month” series from the Glob:
[Note: I selected this snippet, since Mearl provided only a link. --Twisty]
“On Feb. 1, Ontario’s minimum hourly wage rose to $7.75 from $7.45. For reasons that now escape me, I thought the best way to tell the story of that 30-cent raise was to work ‘and live’ at the bottom of the food chain. I would find a low-paying job, a low-rent apartment and, single-mom-like, take my boys with me for the month and see how we survived.
“Cool, what are we going to eat? KD?” said Sam, 12, who prizes Kraft Dinner because he’s sick of triple créme French brie. His brother, Ben, 15, was the embodiment of teen irony. “So I’ll have a urine-soaked mattress?” he said. “Is the floor going to be, like, concrete?”
Before I set out on this assignment, I assumed $7.75 an hour, at 40 hours a week, was a living wage. I began crunching numbers. My monthly pre-tax income would be $1,240, or $14,880 a year. To my horror, I realized I wouldn’t even reach halfway to the so-called “low-income cut-off line” of $31,126 set by Statistics Canada for an urban family of three.”
(Unfortunately, Wong learned nothing from her privilege except that she should “treat her own Jamaican housekeeper better and appreciate her more,” not that she should give up her dominant-class privilege, downsize, take the blow, and share the housework among herself, her husband, and her lousy little kids. I don’t know how to link the whole series, but it’s on the net somewhere. Please check it out.)
Make of this what you will, but I really don’t see why everyone can’t clean up their own fucking mess. That means men and women alike. There is no reason, aside from physical ableness, that everyone, male or female, can’t do whatever work is required to run a household or community. You transform “women’s work” into “shit work” and it just goes to a different level, to the women of poorer communities. That ain’t feminism. And don’t try to tell me that you’re giving someone a job. B.S., I say!
And so we see that marriage may be made palatable to women who view housework, rather than male privilege, as the primary agitator against equality in their relationships. To maintain the illusion that she can be married without simultaneously capitulating to the megatheocorporatocratic machine, the feminist wife cannot engage in stereotypical wifey-work behavior. Instead, she hires a surrogate drudge. Unfortunately, this merely demands that she oppress, in turn, women of a lower caste than herself, while doing nothing to address the power differential in her own relationship.
Just another pernicious little method — like the nuclear family’s dependence on cheap-crap-from-China — by which marriage perpetuates male dominant culture’s primacy.
As always, my answer to the question, “so, Twisty, what’s the solution?” is: revolution.
Today’s rambling glob of an essay on marriage was inspired by two items in my inbox this morning. One, an email from one of our prominent blamers:
I’m on Feministing right now, and people are getting upset with me for saying that marriage is a sexist institution. It’s making me feel a bit insane.
And then this, an unsigned communiqué linking to an article about a “surrendered wife” named Skye Lamont. Lamont was once “a high-flying career woman” but now “much prefers being a submissive housewife” who “wears make-up, takes real good care of herself and leaps into [his] arms when [her asshole misogynist alpha-prick of a husband] come[s] home each day.”
Ay yi yi.
As a radical feminist dyke spinster aunt, I am the world’s leading authority on marriage. I have other matrimoniological credentials, too. I am the offspring of two married heterosexuals who dominated me for over 18 years. I’ve read Jane Austen. I’ve spent almost a whole year watching Turner Classic Movies on TV. I was ‘maid’ of honor at my sister Tidy’s wedding.
Not only that; some of my best friends are married!
And it’s gotta go, I tell you.
Sure, a wind has to be pretty ill to blow nobody good, and I’m not about to tell you that marriage isn’t a pretty sweet deal.
If you’re a dude.
l.
The dude-friendliness of marriage is not merely a function of the usual sexist crap you’re expecting me to list here — viz., that even among such ‘enlightened’ dual-career Western married couples as would consider Skye Lamont a mental defective, the majority of the drudgery falls upon the woman; that women who drop out of the work force to raise kids for 20 years get totally screwed financially as well as personally; that women can’t, in fact, ‘have it all’.
This marriage wind blows extremely ill for creatively stifled housewives, yes, but my main beef is with its brutal success as an organizing force of a social order predicated on violence, exploitation, and oppression. And I don’t just mean that marriage is a get-out-of-jail-free card for batterers and rapists, or that in many parts of the world a wife is a slave, or that international marriage brokerage, wherein women are trafficked as slaves, is a thriving business. I mean that marriage benefits not just individual men at the expense of individual women; it is the very foundation of global patriarchy. Wives are the unpaid labor that supports misogynist male culture.
ll.
Everyone knows a few intellectuals or hippies whose curiously enduring child-free marriages seem to be mostly about companionship and health insurance, but the reality is that marriages tend mostly to produce in droves that primary repository of patriarchal ideology known as the nuclear family, and its dutiful self-sacrificing menial, the wife-and-mother [1].
It is in the wife-and-mother’s cavernous receptacle that male society stockpiles its ideals of femininity, submission, and sex, ideals which must be passed to each new generation to ensure the ascendency of patriarchal oppression. A married woman’s value is assessed according to the success with which she assimilates and performs wife-and-mother behaviors. These behaviors are not limited to reproduction, shopping, child-rearing, husband-servicing, and toilet-scrubbing, but also encompass a woman’s fundamental sense of her own inadequacy, and of the inadequacy of women generally. This sense of defectiveness ensures that her identity is little more than a function of her service to male culture.
lll.
Even modern American marriages between progressive, trendy hipsters are, at the least, fanciful or ironic reenactments of a gruesome misogynist hegemony, and wreak some degree of megatheocorporatocratic carnage. Especially when the male hipster is a depressive artiste, and the female hipster has one of those Bettie Page haircuts.
lV.
Two heterosexual people may marry for ‘love’ but sooner or later they find their ideal subsumed by duty to bogus culturally constructed expectations. ‘Love’ as it is commonly understood — a sense of unbridled benevolence toward one of your own kind — cannot withstand the pressures wrought by the power differential between dominator and dominated. Because all of society, not to mention the global economy, turns on the difference between two classes — oppressor and oppressed, man and woman, white and black, top and bottom — love, initially an affinity between two like entities, morphs into a class struggle. Couples struggle against the world and each other for fidelity, for money, for sex, for kids, for individual happiness or fulfillment. Thus, marriage is ‘work’, as patriarchybots like Oprah will tell you, but it is the woman who has to do most of it; the dude merely has to show up at the wedding.
Your Nigel is different, of course, but unless he is a woman (and sometimes even if he is), he enjoys a privilege that you will never see for as long as you live. I allude to the privilege of personal sovereignty. Deny this truth at your peril.
V.
Every marriage is a replication of the basic unit of patriarchy [2].
__________________________
1. Before you flame me, O thou feminist wife-and-mothers, know this: I acknowledge your right to have made such choices as are commonly available to women in this male-dominated world. I do not disparage you personally, and I do not blame women generally for gettin’ hitched. I merely allude to a paradigm that generates enormous suffering for the several billions of women who aren’t as fortunate as, perhaps, you are.
2. Yes, even gay marriage. Marriage is currently heteronormative, but when gay marriage is legal, as it will undoubtedly be sooner or later, it will align itself precisely with the heteronormative model, since the primary function of marriage — yesterday, today, and forevermore — is to institutionalize the policing of penis placement.
Coryphantha sp. Cottonmouth County, May 28, 2007
Been unavoidably detained. Not by cops. Completely forgot I had blog! Will likely stage triumphal return later today. Meanwhile, I leave you with (a) this super-trippy cactus flower, and (b) this thoughtful comment I found in the moderation pile (the commenter flatters me, in the first part, with a quotation from one of my own posts!):
“Rare is the behavior the humanitarian outcome of which may be said to improve when performed by insensate mobs, and perpetual penisism is no exception; the phenomenon of internet voyeurism magnifies a zillionfold the misogyny of a single hubba. To wit:”
T.S. Eliette you aint.
And now, I must go and wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
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