Monthly Archive for February, 2008
Tell me more, John Mackey; I look forward to hearing about this new relationship with farm animals that you so compassionately chop up in cellophane packages in the butcher’s case.
A propos of the recent spate of femivegan commentary on the blog — will Meat vs The Angry Feminist become the blaming juggernaut, or should I say, the Blamernaut, of 2008? — I give you this dude Gary L Francione, who in this post adroitly outlines the ever-creepier ideological alliance between funfeminism and “conscientious” carnivorosity.
Francione is an animal exploitation abolitionist who has published extensively on the subject. His position is that funfeminists (he calls them “postmodern feminists” but you know what we both mean: pole dancing empowerfulizes women, “sex work” is groovy because women freely choose it, femininity is a gas, etc) have much in common with PETA-esque animal welfarists; both ideological postures posit scenarios which favor the perpetuation of patriarchal oppression. It’s OK to go to strip clubs because strip clubs empowerfulize women. It’s OK to eat “free range” meat because the animals were “raised by local ranchers” or were slaughtered “humanely”. And of course inveterate blamers are no strangers to PETA’s obsession with human female sexploitation. But what say I shut up and allow Gary L. Francione himself to enlarge?
[...] [P]ostmodern feminists have created a brand of “happy” commodification for women just as the welfarists have created the phenomenon of “happy” meat and animal products. The postmodern feminists often conveniently ignore the fact that women involved in the sex industry are raped, beaten, and addicted to drugs just as the welfarists conveniently ignore that animal products–including those produced under the most “humane” circumstances–involve horrible animal suffering. And both groups ignore that the commodification of women and animals, irrespective of treatment, is inherently objectionable.
Both the postmodern feminist position and the new welfarist position are steeped in the ideology of the status quo. They both reinforce the default position of animals as property and women as things whose personhood is reduced to whatever body part(s) and body images we fetishize. They both just put little smiley faces on what is in essence a very reactionary message.
He also notes that the rhetoric of funfeminism/PETA, which dismisses any criticism of their respective goals as impeding “movement unity,” mimics the vapid sloganeering of the reactionary right. This disturbing comingling of wingnut tactics with so-called “progressive” groups doesn’t surprise Francione and it doesn’t surprise me. Whenever patriarchal ideals come under fire, it’s patriarchal rhetoric that shows up to defend it. Funfeminism and PETA are both antifeminist.
[Thanks to josiemysourceofmostfrustration for the link]
Check out this clip of TV newsblob/patriarchal minion Diane Sawyer questioning Madonna’s 1st Amendment rights. Why is Sawyer trying to keep a sister down? Because 15 years ago Madonna published a saucy coffee table book depicting simulations of human sex acts, that’s why. Which of course completely invalidates whatever claim to fully human status Madonna might make now.
In this 2006* interview snippet, Sawyer accosts Madonna at a booksigning promoting her kiddie book The English Roses, accusing her of “hypocrisy.” No access to YouTube because your fucking iPhone won’t recognize the WiFi network at Starbuck’s? Allow me to transcribe the pertinent bits:
Sawyer: So what moral right do you have, after doing Sex, to write a children’s book?
Madonna: I don’t understand that question. I have the right to write any book I want. About anything.
Somebody, quick! Squirt some Astroglide in Sawyer’s face, wake her up, and let her know we’re not living in a Hawthorne novel!
Besides, her sanctimony is disingenuous. The history of “legitimate” publishing in America is inseparable from the history of porn publishing; the latter has always been used to finance the former, and more than one serious writer has paid the rent by pounding out smut. TS Eliot’s publisher funded The Waste Land with trashy pulp fiction with titles like Flaming Youths.
Madonna’s no TS Eliot, but more people, by a factor of at least 8 gajillion, have busted a move to “Material Girl” than have ever even heard of J. Alfred Prufrock. Thus she has accrued enough cash and clout to land her in that class of women who, for their failure to be sufficiently chaste, must be reviled and ridiculed on Good Morning America.**
You know what? Fuck that fucking Virgin Mary. A pox on the fucking ecclesiastical stereotype of the ideal woman, and a pox on the fucking 2000 year old Christian tradition of defining women in terms of sex which ultimately has led to “pajamagrams,” “vegan” strip clubs, and goody-goody anchorwomen spouting off on TV about “moral authority.”
For the record, Madonna’s sex book consisted of ultra-corny BDSM that these days would scarcely make a Presbyterian blush.
[Gracias, Amberbug]
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*Way to stay on top of the news cycle, Twisty!
** Women without cash and clout, who fail to be sufficiently chaste, are also reviled and ridiculed, but usually only by their close personal friends.
Great news for guilt-ridden pornsick knobs and the soy-addled hot babes who give’em lap dances: the vegan strip club. At this Portland, OR depot for human degradation, the strippers don’t wear leather, and the menu features fajitas made with fake meat. However, according to a writer who attended the grand opening, tofurkey wasn’t exactly the main attraction. In fact, nary a morsel was anywhere in sight. What a shocker.
When scandalized blamer Jo contacted me about the aforementioned strip joint, I got all fired up to make remarks like “At last! Now dudely Portland hipsters can feel sanctimonious while actively oppressing women!” And “A vegan strip club makes about as much sense as Jews for Jesus, Log Cabin Republicans, and biologists who worship an invisible cosmic concierge.” I hinted at the feminism/vegetarianism connection in a recent post on the horror that is the megameatyocracy, and I’ll restate here: I have found animal cruelty to be inconsistent with the revolution. It follows that veganism, if practiced for reasons of ethics, is inconsistent with strip clubs.
But it turns out the vegan aspect of this vegan strip club thing is kind of a non-story, by dint of the paucity of actual veganosity going on there. The women employees themselves aren’t necessarily vegans, and the customers are not scanned at the door for bacon-breath. The owner is supposedly a shunner of meat, and a local Fox News report describes him as having “ideals,” but a guy who’s quoted as saying “we put the meat on the pole, not on the plate” is no heroic activist; he’s just another fucking pimp with a smirky angle.
Next.
Even real vegans, incidentally, have nothing to feel particularly sanctimonious about. Nobody’s innocent.
[Gracias, Jo]
I note with no surprise whatsoever that homophobes in positions of authority continue to oppress teenagers in my old hood. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports today on a protest staged by a dozen high school students on the Belleville* courthouse steps. These students were protesting the bigoted tone taken by Belleville East High’s administration against the apparently terrifying spectre of a school-sponsored chapter of the Gay-Straight Alliance. The protesting students thought they might promote a human right or two on their campus, but naturally such seditious ideology cannot be tolerated in a school where (a) a student was forced to resign a position with a Christian athletic group after appearing on a radio show about gay teens, and (b) where two male students who kissed during a skit were forced to apologize.
Apologize for what, you might ask? For poor “taste,” apparently. This offensive homosexual peck on the cheek was, according to Belleville East’s principal, “an issue of appropriateness.”
Belleville East High, you see, has very high standards of taste. The floors are made of travertine marble. Picassos hang on the walls. School lunches of organic fois gras and roasted beet salad are served on Wedgwood china by obsequious Mexicans in short white jackets while a chamber orchestra plays Haydn.
Of course, claims Principal Kniepkamp, dabbing his delicate brow with a silk Hermes pocket square, the tasteful school treats all students “fairly.”
What Principal Kniepkamp means is that he, backed by centuries of oppressive tradition, considers it well within the bounds of fairness to quash any challenge to the heteronormative laws of the hive — which laws exist, you’ll recall, to carefully monitor the location of all sex organs.
‘”If you take your family to a G-rated movie, you expect to see a G-rated movie,” quoth the Neanderthal Mr. Kniepkamp, who doesn’t seem to grasp that kissing is allowed even in Disney movies these days.
What a fucking knob.
Note: Because of my poor writing skills, some busy readers seem to have misapprehended the gist of the Belleville situation. The students were protesting against gay discrimination by the school administration.
_______________________
* The hick town of Belleville is a subsidiary of St. Louis, located across the Mississippi River in Illinois
I was thumbing through the internet this afternoon when I happened across an editorial at Tallahassee.com urging support for evolution studies in Florida public schools. I’m constantly losing track of which states prefer that their school children become the laughingstocks of the modern world by teaching them mystical fairy tales in science class, but apparently Florida is one of’em. On Tuesday the FLA board of education — which, if it’s like most boards of education, is little more than a cabal of aspiring politicians with scant interest in actual knowledge — will consider whether to include evolution in future curricula. They will do this amid a flurry of county-level “resolutions” against the indisputable 150-year-old thesis.
“Suddenly,” writes the editorialist, “regular citizens are experts in entropy and in what constitutes scientific ‘theory.’”
I chuckle when s/he points out that none of science’s modern godbag critics are “too worried about gravity, despite incomplete knowledge of how that works.”
Anyway, in the sidebar of the web page upon which this editorial appears is a remark by one “jenakle” who suggests that the board of education “just add Belief as a course…not as an elective, but a needed course.” Because this will presumably promote “tolerance, acceptance, and understanding.”
My response is “hyhyhyu7u7u7u8,” which is what is produced when all I can do is slam my forehead repeatedly into my keyboard. Belief! Pah. I’ve had it up to here with “belief.” “Belief” is a set of unfounded, emotional fantasies informed by millennia of culturally codified oppression and incoherent interpretations of natural phenomena, and is by its very nature antithetical to acceptance and understanding. This ‘egalitarian’ notion that science should be ‘balanced out’ with mythical literary debris dreamed up by ancient barbarians has got to go. Good luck, Florida.
Back in the pre-blog Age of Darkness, when I was a callow young feminist in a vacuum who did not enjoy the instantaneous policing of my views by thousands of invisible critics, numerous facets of my worldview were as yet embryonic. If a facet can be said to be embryonic, which I think it probably can’t. But let’s move on.
What I’m gettin’ at is that subjecting the Twisty weltanshauung to broad public scrutiny has totally refined my ass. It’s obliged me to hone my views to an increasingly ever-sharper edge. Experts are baffled by scans that show my obstreperal lobe to have tripled in size since 2005, but I know that it’s a result of this blog.
Generally the process has been loads of laughs, such as when blamers take me to school with their horizon-broadening perspectives on such topics as white middle class privilege, human rights abuses in distant lands, or Mr T vs Andrea Dworkin. Sometimes it’s goopy and heartwarming, such as when young blamers write in to say that patriarchy-blaming has changed their lives. Sometimes it’s a little weird, like this morning, when I got a what-about-the-men communique — in which every Noun was capitalized — from a self-described MRA called Khankrumtheburglar. Khankrumtheburglar apparently felt moved to reveal that he “completely agree[s] with [me] and gasp Amanda Marcotte” on Subjects ranging from the crapulence of Valentine’s Day to the support of Gay Marriage (for the record, I myself do not “support” gay marriage, or any other kind of marriage. See this post for details.).
But life as an Internet Feminist is not always a plate of Cool Whip tacos. Often I suffer the tortures of the damned. I’m not talkin’ about the death threats or the DOS attacks or the pottymouthed teen jackasses who clog up my moderation queue. No, the deep emotional scars to which I allude obtain because sometimes the commenters are right and I am wrong. Sadly, I am still not sophisticated enough to embrace with a glad cry the public admission of Twistational ignorance, particularly when it comes after a smirky smackdown by total strangers. And dang it, it burns like hot pokers on my boob scars whenever it dawns on me that the struggle to perfect my state of spinster aunthood will require me to jettison another of my most comfortable and satisfying habits/and or assumptions. To wit:
A couple of years ago I got called on the carpet by a vegetarian blamer who was deeply grossed out by blogular photographs of my meaty lunches. At the time I demurred, not having fully worked out the connection between women’s oppression and the global megameatyocracy. But today I lounge before you in my lime green recliner and declare that there is no legitimate argument on behalf of consuming corporate meat. Convenience is not a legitimate argument. Price is not a legitimate argument. The delicious flavor of applewood smoked bacon is not a legitimate argument. Tradition is not a legitimate argument. Culture is not a legitimate argument.
Culture, as a matter of fact, is never a legitimate argument for anything. Fuck culture.
I am prompted to state the obvious by the reports of ground beef recalls and animal cruelty circulating around the media today. An undocumented immigrant meat industry worker has been arraigned for “illegal movement of a non-ambulatory animal,” which is a sanitized way of saying that he savaged sick cows with electric prods and forced them to their feet with fork lifts, among other things.
Despite the protestations of the corporate spokesperson, this slaughterhouse sadism cannot and must not be considered an anomaly. It is a documented fact that whenever human beings are given authority over lower-status beings — whether the lower status beings are cattle or women or slaves or prisoners of war — those in authority are unable to contain their vicious impulses and quickly morph into sadistic amoral assholes. This is a cornerstone of patriarchy. As is the rationalization, parroted, unsurprisingly, by the meat worker: “I was only following orders.”
Thus we can but conclude that hamburgers and radical feminism are mutually exclusive.
I’d like to thank everyone who wrote in alerting me to I Blame the Patriarchy’s having been namechecked in the New York Review of Books. I got the word while on some grim business up in North Dallas. Naturally I was interested to see upon which of my blogular morsels the reigning English-language guardians of complex sentence structure and long-winded librophiliac smartyness could possibly have fixated, so I set out on the quest. However it was a struggle, in that cultural morass, finding a copy of the publication in question.
“You mean the New York Times Book Review?” they asked me at Barnes & Noble.
“No, I mean the New York Review of —”
“Because we can get you the New York Times Book Review.”
“Thank you, but that wouldn’t be quite the same th—”
“Let me ask Pete.”
By this time there were two Barnes & Noblians working on my case. One of them got on the blower with the mysterious Pete, who after a short exchange, passed the pronouncement. Nugatory. No New York Review of Books. The Barnes & Noblians eyed me narrowly. Obviously I was just making shit up.
“It’s a fairly well-known publication,” I said defensively, “among people who read books.”
I shuffled off into the horizon with a haughty sniff. These strip mall philistines couldn’t know what rarefied aether that I, a writer featured in the exalted New York Review of Books, was currently breathing.
I never did dig up a print copy of the magazine. When I got home I looked it up online. It turns out that the fraction of my genius upon which the New York Review of Books had seen fit to seize was limited to my views on — what else? — fellatio (remember the Great Blow Job Wars of ‘06?). I am quoted as referring to the practice as “gross,” ha ha. In a longer quotation ascribed to “the feminist in Texas who writes I Blame the Patriarchy,” the author actually inserts an ellipsis. Lard help me, it’s a four-pointer! Jesus Huckleberry Christ.
The New York Review of Books piece, concisely entitled “Blogs,” is by Sarah Boxer, an editor with whom I exchanged several emails during the pre-publication phase of her book Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web (Vintage, 2008). The piece begins with this line: “Two years ago, I was given a dreadful idea for a book: create an anthology of blogs.”
That she would eventually choose, presumably because of their wild-webbiness, to anthologize several of my most asinine posts concerned me not a bit, since I was certain that far fewer people would ever actually read this lame-sounding book than had already read the actual essays. But I had not grasped the degree of condescension with which Ms Boxer viewed her task as editor of this work. It saddens me that ‘real’ writers, by which I mean the academic henchmen of the status quo, view their clunky, musty old literary culture as more legitimate than the contemporaneous, convention-flouting exhilaration exhibited by the outlaw blogger.
Because, you know, lately practically all books fucking suck.
I do not have to be asked twice to plaster all over the internet photos of my new boyfriend Stanley. I snapped this one of us with my cell phone seconds before he stuck his nose out and lipped it out of my hand. Stanley is in many respects much more interesting than patriarchy-blaming, not to mention taller and handsomer, so you can see why I was compelled to give the blog a rest for a couple of weeks.
Stanley, for those who give a crap about such things, is a 7 year old black bay quarter horse gelding of appendixy racing extraction standing 16.3. He has four white socks and enjoys Bermuda hay and French new wave cinema.
Original image, sans caption, from PajamaGram dot com.
The annual capitalist pig run-up to Valentine’s Day leaves a particularly repellent aftertaste on the Twisty palate this year, so I will take a moment out of my idyllic agrarian schedule (did I mention that I bought a horse? And that I am considering dropping out of society indefinitely?) and blame it.
Join me now, those of you with iron stomachs, as we contemplate the massive pussygrab that is Valentine’s Day. It’s a national mega-bootycall in a paper-lace heart-shaped candy coating. Dudes throw a bundle of plastic-wrapped gas station roses at the straight girls once a year, and the straight girls are supposed to go to pieces over this magnanimous declaration of ‘love’. According to cultural narrative, the macho male is supposedly hardwired to ‘forget’ Valentine’s Day; this is so that even the crappiest box of stale Russell-Stover chocolates will be received with tears of wide-open-beaver gratitude. Overwhelmed that he has actually remembered to observe the cheap valentinian conventions with such clumsy pink-and-red love pantomimes as are prescribed on the great day, the woman’s learned behavior is to obligingly turn out in the Frederick’s of Hollywood stripper drag that properly feted Valentinees are expected to wear, poised for the humpty-hump.
Maybe her “sexy & flirty PJs” arrived earlier that day in a PajamaGram, a Valentine’s Day gift with which the priapic dude may hope to “spoil her.” Lard knows it’s not every day a girl receives a “Pink Seduction Chemise” in an “organza hat box” ($65.95); naturally the only reasonable response to such a heartfelt expression of devotion is to cook him a nice dinner and afterward let him rip the chemise off you on the living room rug.
It is charming that “spoiling her” may also consist of presenting one’s beloved with an $80 teddy bear. Have you seen the commercials on TV? According to Vermont Teddy Bear.com, the anxiety of the would-be seducer at a loss for the right gesture may be entirely relieved by purchasing one of their stuffed bears. Nothing turns an adult woman into kinky-putty in your hands like the gift of a child’s toy dressed in a fig leaf that says “Let’s Get Bear Naked!”
Nothing, that is, except tacky heart-shaped diamond pendants from American department store JC Penney. Their TV ad shows one of these cheap baubles swinging slowly back and forth like a hypnotist’s pocket watch, while the male voiceover says something like “You are getting sleepy. You think I am the best-looking stud in the room. You will love me longtime. You will perform fellatio on me and 3 of my friends.” In the corner of the screen, the price of the hookup flashes: $99.99.
It’s not relevant to the antifeminist character of Valentine’s day, but damn, this is some butt-ugly jewelry.
Women’s status as a class of purchasable receptacles is never in question, of course. Valentine’s Day merely represents the dime stores’ efforts to get in on a piece of the action, the venerable exchange of shiny objects for sex. Like one purveryor of cheap crap from China says, “Walgreen’s has everything you need to express your love.”
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