Monthly Archive for August, 2008

Pakistani senator calls killing women “tribal custom”

Published by Twisty on August 30, 2008. 65 Comments

Spinster Aunt HQ was gonna be on holiday for another couple of days, but then I got an email from Apostate. Forget First Lady fashion; this pretty much defines the global humanitarian crisis that we routinely downplay as “patriarchy.”

Hold onto your hats.

Balochistan Senator Sardar Israrullah Zehri stunned the upper house on Friday when he defended the recent incident of burying alive three teenage girls and two women in his province, saying it was part of “our tribal custom.” [cite]

The justification for this appalling hate crime? The women wanted “to marry of their own will.”

The fiends perpetrating this savagery — a group that apparently included some village bigwigs — first wounded the women with gunshots, “in the name of honour.”

I will give you a moment to digest the unspeakable horror.

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To its credit, within the Pakistani senate there is apparently some outrage, including the assertion that burying independent-minded women alive is no way a Baloch tribal custom, and that the incident was a heinous anomaly. Sure, calling into question the tribal customariness of this practice is all well and good, but in so doing the senate seems to be intimating that a pre-existing woman-burying custom might, under some circumstance, be regarded as a mitigating factor.

Hey, Pakistani senate! Tribal custom or no, what’s the diff? A killing spree is a killing spree.

I recognize that a couple of brutally murdered Pakistani girls may not fascinate to the extent that, say, a Sarah Palin does, but I beseech those bloggers among you to postpone writing another Geraldine Ferraro post long enough to pass this story around. The idea that cultural tradition might even fleetingly be construed by supposedly civilized beings as an excuse for ritual murder is the direct result of the same global misogynist paradigm that brings us “harmless” Western-style femininity, Jesus, the nuclear family, street harrassment, pornography, and rape culture. I am not moron enough to suggest that Western Internet-feminists can prevent barbarism through blogging, but we can damn well get the word out.

And we can damn well crank up our own resistance a notch. This may seem like a weird place to mention this, but if you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time you know that I see patriarchal oppression as a global continuum. Furthermore, I am a firm believer in the notion that it’s possible for feminists to ripple that continuum. Well, what I wish is, I wish that Western women could see the big picture from their privileged choice-feminism aeries and actually take a step towards women’s liberation by bagging femininity as a lifestyle choice. The cost would be little compared to what these Pakistani women suffered by daring to express an interest in their own futures, and it could change the world.

The revolution will not be wearing bustiers and nail polish.

Posted in Femininity, Lobe-blowing and Men Hate You. Bite me, Chad.

A day in the life of a patriarchy blamer

Published by Twisty on August 26, 2008. 109 Comments

I can’t go 10 minutes without observing with a curled lip another of patriarchy’s grasping tentacles squeezing the life out of women’s liberation, but here are a few lowlights from my previous 24 hours:

– OK, TV blaming I can do with my obstreperal lobe tied behind my back, but this one sort of stuck out for some reason: a commercial for Pantene hair products wherein a chestnut-maned supermodel conversationally explains — you know, girl-to-girl — how easy it is to achieve her sexy hairstyle. First you buy six or seven Pantene products. You wash the hair with a few different kinds of Pantene stuff. Then you blow dry the hair “in sections.” Then you tease up the roots with, I suppose, a root-teaser. Then you put Pantene goop on it, and wind the hair around a dozen huge rollers. Then you eat 40 pounds of fudge. Then you take off the rollers and mess the hair up with your hands. Then you apply half a can of Pantene hairspray. I think there may have been another couple of Pantene-related steps in there somewhere, but who can remember all this shit without a stenographer? Still, all that, and her hair just sort of looked like hair.

Then, later, when I flipped on the tube because a hot flash had awakened me from the restless menopausal thrashing I now grudgingly accept as “sleep,” I see an infomercial hawking — get this — an airbrush for your face. It sprays a fine mist of flesh-colored slime all over your hideous wrinkles, pores, and zits, in order that you might delude yourself that you look “natural,” and thereby appease your dudely oppressors. Sure, it costs $269.95, but it comes with “eyebrow stencils” and “body shimmer.”

Oddly and unintuitively, for stuff that is so obviously fake, “natural” is a key concept in face-paint. Earlier I’d come across a copy of Real Simple magazine, which contained an article trumpeting the necessity of “glowing” skin, as well as the various species of artifice one may purchase and employ to achieve this “natural” drag queen look.

One marvels at the flaming hoops through which women are expected leap in the service of the Femininity Industrial Complex. One also marvels at the snow job. The beautyocracy has actually managed to convince women that, despite the fact that we are not bio-luminant plankton, it is natural for our epidermis to phosphoresce.

Enough with the beauty, already. I turn on the NPR, where there are occasional moments when beauty is not the central theme.

– Billie Jean King is interviewed on Morning Edition; she is perplexed that whenever a woman achieves anything, it is perceived as having an effect only on women. Since of course women — and our little hobbies — are too insignificant to have any public influence on Dude Nation. King notes that people come up to her all the time to thank her for what she’s done for “women’s tennis,” rather than for tennis in general. Her point is that women are human beings, but that still, after all this time, this niggling detail remains energetically overlooked. King has a new book and is appearing with the Geico caveman in a car insurance commercial.

On a related note, it was not until last year that women were awarded equal pay at Wimbledon.

– Terri Gross interviews some supposedly progressive dude who keeps alluding to “Obama” and “Hillary.” For some reason this particular instance of the global propensity to first-name the Vagina-American candidate drives me 7/8 of the way up the crazy-wall, and I throw the onion I’m peeling across the room.

OK, that’s depressing. How about reading a few emails?

— Blamer Jessica sends me a note about a nun beauty pageant. I’m not even kidding. The online contest is the brainchild of an Italian priest who urges his godly sisters to send him their photographs, which he will put up on his blog, purportedly to dispel the popular perception that nuns are “old, stunted, and sad,” but if you ask me it’s more likely that he just has a hot-nun fetish. There is no aspect of this repellent story that doesn’t set my lobe a-throbbin’.

[Addendum: Blamers Carrie and Cosmic Scratcher also attempted to hip me to the nun pageant, but, lumpen schlub that I am, I didn't see their emails until the day after I published this post. Mang, I've got to get a new secretary.]

– I read that young Kyle Payne — you remember the delightful Kyle Payne, the Norman Bates* of “male feminist” bloggers who became a blogular anti-celebrity when he got busted for violating an unconscious woman — has been sentenced to 6 months in stir. Due to some misogyny-loving loophole, when he gets out he won’t have to register as a sex offender, but this happy, patriarchy-affirming turn of events didn’t stop him from sobbing piteously in court. If (and only if) you want to throw up, read his après-bust blog post, which takes the current craze for delusional, navel-gazing, bullshit apologies to a new and unsurpassed zenith (thanks for the links, Monika).

The phone rings.

– My sidekick Stingray, a wine nerd who has just biffed off to Napa to intern at a winery (I could not talk her out of this, despite the well-known fact that Napa is an earthquake-ridden hell-hole full of terrorists, meth addicts, leprosy, and Libertarians. Not to mention the fact that her departure would turn her into my ex-sidekick), reports that everyone at the winery, notably her boss, is a sexist pig. She is put on wrapping-bottles-in-tissue duty because “women are better at that sort of thing.” People only deign to speak to her because she’s white; the Mexican women on the bottling line are invisible to the dewds. As she is the only woman working in the cellar, she will, she says, have to work “10 times as hard” as the men in order to be taken seriously. Furthermore, nobody seems to grasp that she’s queer — which, believe me, would astonish you if you knew her. “I can’t fucking believe I have to come out at work,” she complained. “It’s been years.”

Yipes! Stingray, come home!

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* He “just goes a little mad sometimes.”

Posted in Dear god what about the men?, Femininity, Godbagism, Mass Media and Men Hate You. Bite me, Chad.

Asinine NPR story of the week

Published by Twisty on August 23, 2008. 68 Comments

It was inevitable that, while listening to the radio during my semi-annual shower, I would hear an NPR analysis on the outfits worn by the presidential candidates’ wives. Ever on the cutting edge of popular culture, NPR hauled Jackie Kennedy’s ancient stylist out of cryogenic storage to canvass her edgy up-to-the-minute views on politics and women.

Jackie Kennedy, you’ll recall, was the last genuine hottie to inhabit the First Lady title. Among her other dainty attributes, Jackie possessed, according to the stylist, “good” arms.

Is it sexist to analyze firstladyal fashion? Not at all, says Jackie Kennedy’s stylist. Their husbands are men of action in blue-suit-red-tie uniforms, but first ladies are symbols.

Of what? Of male dominance. Of the nuclear family, of the dutiful wife, of the absolute necessity of womanly beauty practices, of the unquestionable heterosexuality of the president. First ladies must exude, in perfect balance, femininity, self-sacrifice, motherhood, a gentle, quiet respectability, and the notion that they are fairly intelligent, but not more intelligent than the president. They do this, not just by looking the other way when their husbands can’t keep it in their pants, but by selecting their fashion designers and plucking their eyebrows with utmost care. For presidential spouses, dressing symbolically is both a science and an art. It’s “walking the fashion tightrope,” says NPR.

What the NPR non-story neglected to mention is that, while first ladies get more news coverage, the fashion tightrope is not their exclusive purview. All women are symbols who are expected to prop up patriarchal myths by exuding perfect balances of impossible, degrading, bogus constructs.

Meanwhile, men are free to roam the countryside, without shaving their legs or contemplating the social implications of the plunge of their necklines, doing stuff.

Posted in Femininity, Mass Media, Politics and The Beauty Ultimatum. Bite me, Chad.

Aussie mining town seeks ugly women

Published by Twisty on August 20, 2008. 90 Comments

The seriously impaired mayor of Mount Isa is marketing a dude-heavy gender ratio disparity in his Australian outback town as an opportunity for “beauty disadvantaged women.” His idea is that female “ugly ducklings” can utilize the 5-to-1 male outnumberment to “transfer themselves with love and devotion” from hideous lesions on the face of eternity into things that somebody actually wants. Because those Mount Isa guys are desperate, man; they’ll fuck anything at this point, even ugly chicks. Which, maintains the mayor, the ugly chicks should take as a compliment.

Naturally, when some women staged a rally to protest the mayor’s Neanderthal misogynist hate speech, his response was to suggest that they were all “beauty disadvantaged” themselves and only wanted to take it out on him.

Also noteworthy, but certainly not surprising, is the outcry from Mount Isa’s male element. Sterling examples of their species all, they take great exception to the mayor’s suggestion that they would even consider settling for receptacles that did not sufficiently exhibit patriarchy-approved bodaciousness. The men of Mount Isa have their standards, dammit, and they are precisely in line with the Hollywood pornocracy’s femininity mandate. They resent the implication that they would be willing to sully their glittering, top-shelf dongs with sub-par meatsocks.

The Twisty jaw is agape.

[Thanks, Slashy]

Posted in Lobe-blowing, Men Hate You and The Beauty Ultimatum. Bite me, Chad.

Cardboard jungle causes smoking

Published by Twisty on August 19, 2008. 70 Comments

Have you ever, while you were packing into cardboard boxes all your spinster auntly accouterments (I allude to the complete Proust — in French — that you keep on the mantle, as if ; ceramic baby-smoking-a-cig figurine; giant rubber toad; 80’s vintage 4-track w/ gazillion basement recordings on cassette) run out of newspaper? Requiring an emergency run to to the U-Haul depot on Ben White Blvd? On a Saturday?

Admittedly, you are between a rock and a hard place here. If you don’t replenish your packing supplies, your whole Ambitious Plan comes to a grinding halt, at which point all you can do is fester on the lime green recliner, surrounded by cardboard chaos, emitting muffled sobs.

But if you do go the the U-Haul on Ben White Blvd on a Saturday — which U-Haul is, you will discover, held in the highest possible esteem by all other South Austin residents as the most desirable Saturday destination in Central Texas — you will be 48th in a queue of sweaty truck-renters, few of whom possess magnetic personalities, and each of whom requires an extended period of personal quality time with the U-Haulist behind the counter.

To be perfectly accurate, there are two U-Haulists behind the counter, thus two lines of sweaty truck-renters. But, as is required by rent-a-truck law, only one of the U-Haulists possesses sufficient security clearance to operate the top-secret truck-rental computer. This slows transactions down to a maddening trickle, which has the effect of escalating the anxiety amongst the clientèle, who by now are packed in cheek to jowl like hogs to the slaughter. The interminable line, the incompetence of the customer service dudes, the overwrought frenzy of movers who see their security deposits slipping away with each passing minute — you get the picture. U-Haul on a Saturday is like the IndyMac Bank on Failure Day.

If you conclude from the above that I chose, last Saturday when I ran out of wrapping paper, to go to U-Haul rather than sit weeping in my corrugated prison, you are correct. After waiting 25 minutes to spend twenty dollars on two boxes of paper, I dropped one of them in a puddle in the parking lot and was nearly creamed by a speed demon piloting a 17-footer.

Well, my obstreperal lobe blew right then and there, all over the dented hood of some poor schlub’s eggplant-colored Saturn. On the way home, with no internal regulating mechanism to prevent it, an imp of the perverse caused my car to turn in at the Bluebonnet quick shop, where I grabbed a roadie* from the handy ice bin and heard myself utter the most beautiful words in the English language: “pack of Marlboro reds, and make it snappy.”

Four-and-a-half packs later, it is Tuesday, and the self-preservational blaming gas produced by my blown lobe (obstreperone), has begun to kick back in. I have called my oncologist and renewed my date with Chantix. I love Chantix. Apparently there are six or seven people in the world who are not transformed by this anti-smoking drug into homicidal maniacs, and I am one of them.

Meanwhile, did anybody happen to hear a piece on NPR the other day about some Christian weight-loss group’s vilification of fat, and obesity as a moral issue, etc? I can’t find it anywhere on the site now, or, indeed, on the entire World Wide Web, and I’m beginning to think I imagined the whole thing.

See, I was going to tie this all together with a big tirade on the bogus notion of health as a moral issue — how people are always yelling at you to quit smoking or quit eating or quit procrastinating when you should be packing or quit doing anything the doing of which is considered a moral failure, ostensibly out of their concern for your health, but in reality because “health,” in accordance with some convoluted Christian doctrine embedded in the cultural subconscious, has become a kind of yardstick by which conformity within the social order is measured, and how shaming people who are insufficiently obsessed with their cholesterol puts these concern trolls in a morally superior position and creates an underclass of “unhealthies” who have brought it on themselves through their blatant ingestion of Cheetos — but I’m too exhausted from all the delicious smoking. Let’s just say that if you ran into me at the coffeeshop and suggested that my self-indulgent punk rocker lifestyle caused my breast cancer, you wouldn’t be the first. The idea that you, through some assiduously applied, sanctimonious personal health program, can “prevent” cancer, or death, or whatever, and that such practices should win you higher status in your tribe, is a fucking load of crap.

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* A roadie is an extra-large can of cheap beer that all Texas quick shops stock on ice right next to the door, thus simplifying the important work of driving drunk.

Posted in Austin, Crazy sexy cancer and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.

When women don’t blame

Published by Twisty on August 16, 2008. 66 Comments

To those blamers who are anxious that amateur video with sub-par production values is now the “new format,” be of good cheer. A good spinster aunt knows her strengths. I do not intend to infest the blog with my vulgar extempore prattling on a daily basis.

To those who complain that they prefer essays that take me 3-5 hours to research and write to amateur video with sub-par production values that takes me 10 minutes to toss off, I remind you of a limiting factor — in fact, it is the founding principle — of this blog: you get what you pay for at I Blame the Patriarchy.

To the blamer who inquired about the origins of my dog Zippy’s name: Probably it had something to do with the fact that she couldn’t walk when I found her, but I really can’t remember. The dog is 15 years old.

Now, before I return to my regularly-scheduled chores, let me reprint an email, which has nothing to do with dogs or amateur video, that I just received from Texan blamer Politichick. The topic is an oldie-but-goodie: when sexual harassment in the workplace and women’s poor grasp of feminist principles collide. Politichick requests a Blamer Brain-Trust intervention.

I fairly recently started working for a union, which I had hoped would be a bastion of progressiveness in this otherwise redneck town. Yesterday a colleague mentioned to me that a union member, a flag person, wanted to file a grievance about the ongoing catcalls and honks that she receives while doing her job. To her credit, my colleague did not dismiss the idea out of hand, but was concerned about providing recommendations to the employer. How could they provide a harassment-free work environment when the worksite is completely accessible to the public? While brainstorming ideas, imagining a precedent-setting case that resulted in huge fines to guys that think it’s cool to hurl drive-by verbal abuse at women, another female coworker became involved. Her first few statements included:

1. What was she wearing?
2. I don’t take it personally when people honk at me. Other women shouldn’t either.
3. I hate when women get into male-dominated industries and then complain about it later.
4. Men get honked at too, but they don’t complain about it.

I attempted to explain:

1. Who gives a fuck? But coveralls and a hard hat, as if it mattered.
2. That I take getting honked at personally, and in fact it sometimes scares me because I have no idea what the dude’s intentions are.
3. That if women had decided, back in the day, to avoid pursuing careers in male-dominated industries, there would be no industries containing women. That includes the jobs that she and I work in right now.
4. Men get honked at, but they rarely get raped.

The conversation deteriorated after she responded with “when people take offense to this there is a deeper, fear-based issue that is worth exploring and they should be referred to community agencies that can help.”

So after spending the rest of the day hiding in my office with the door closed and a huge lump of rage in my chest, I thought I thought I would ask you and the other blamers for help.

What do you do when women don’t get it? How do you present feminist information and ideas to women who are obviously heavily invested in the patriarchy and are more than willing to engage in victim-blaming? This is extremely important to me, as other women rely on my colleagues to put forward grievances that can change how women are treated in the work place, which can change how they are treated everywhere.

Please help. I need tangible coping strategies before I completely lose it.

What Politichick seems to be asking is how you turn a civilian into a blamer in a hurry. I regret that time constraints prevent me from addressing this myself, but I have every confidence that the Blametariat can handle this with ease. Women, go forth and blame.

Posted in Women hate you. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt cuts blogular corners by making another dorky video, this time about her outing to a giant Human Demoralization Center

Published by Twisty on August 13, 2008. 86 Comments

I know, I know, but these video things are way faster than writing, and these days time is of the essence for the spinster aunt. Sadly, because I did this in one take and without any script or rehearsal or talent, I perhaps failed to emphasize my main blaming point, which is my disgust at the obnoxious classist forces at work on the mind of the typical IKEA shopper.

A common misconception, one which apparently appeals to the honkys who flock there to pick up build-it-yourself orange leather entertainment centers, seems to be that all that cheapo IKEA stuff is made in Sweden by happy, well-paid blondes with excellent benefits.

It is not. By now we all know that the only time anyone can afford anything is when it was made by non-Swedish indentured workers in a part of the world far, far away from happy, blond, egalitarian Sweden.

Although everything for sale at IKEA does have a Swedish name, according to a “naming system.” From Wikipedia:

# Chairs, desks: men’s names
# Materials, curtains: women’s names

No shit.

Posted in Austin, Easy Persiflage and The megatheocorporatocracy. Bite me, Chad.

No post today

Published by Twisty on August 12, 2008. 26 Comments

Seriously.

Posted in Announcements. Bite me, Chad.

As long as we’re talking about dudes and kids

Published by Twisty on August 10, 2008. 39 Comments

This study, according to eFluxMedia, says “men really adore children.” This bizarre conclusion is apparently derived from data suggesting that more men than women adopt children. The study found that about twice as many men, in fact, adopt kids. From which information the article’s author concludes that the notion of responsibility-shirking men is a “myth,” and anyone who says otherwise is “wrong.”

I get that dude couples who are desperate to replicate the basic unit of patriarchy, the nuclear family, have little choice but to adopt. But how many of them are there, really, compared to the number of dudes who marry a woman’n'kids package and end up adopting the kids? And how many single straight dudes yearn for the pitter-patter of little adopted feet?

So what about it? Does “adopt” = “adore”? Or, as I am required by the Spinster Aunt Code to cynically suspect, are there benefits to dudely adopters that transcend the simple joys of parental bliss?

Posted in Dear god what about the men? and Junk Studies. Bite me, Chad.

Oh hell, I got vlogging software.

Published by Twisty on August 9, 2008. 132 Comments

Posted in Pre-recorded Twisty and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.