Top o the marnin, blamers. You know how I rely on you to email me with cultural bacteria I can grow in the petrie dish of blame down in the lab, but relax. You can all stop sending me the link to the $3.8 million virginity auction. I’m hip to it. And I cannot possibly improve on Amanda’s response, which is more or less that “virginity” is a bogus construct, and that the “auction” is a hoax to advertise a Nevada brothel.
Amanda, ever the optimist, also holds out hope that the hoaxer is both meta and feminist enough to be enjoying a big hearty feminist laugh over having duped a bunch of right-wing pervs into confusing an amorphous cultural construct with an object worth millions. If Amanda’s right, it’s a pretty elegant joke, but I don’t see how it can play out unless the virgin in question makes with a gotcha! statement.
Meanwhile, you can all stop sending the link to the Monstrous Women movie trailer, too. I assure you that I have a) watched it and b) guffawed at it.
This Monstrous Women vid has been bumping around the lefty blogosphere as a joke-butt for a while, so you probably already know that it advertises an antifeminist Christian propaganda film called “The Monstrous Regiment of Women.” The film purports to “prove that feminism has in fact restricted choices for all women, brought heartache to the lives of many, and perpetuated the largest holocaust since the beginning of time.”
Indeed, the filmmakers appear to have drawn inspiration from “The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women,” a 500-year-old tract written by a godbag Scotsdude who believed that women are “weak, sick, impotent, foolish, mad, and frenetic.” The Scotsdude, Protestant reformer and professional misogynist John Knox, was absolutely apoplectic that a woman (Elizabeth I) should be sovereign of England, on accounta “God, by order of his creation, has spoiled [deprived] women of authority and dominion,” which makes “the empire of a woman [...] repugnant to nature.”*
Knox was a wackjob, all right, but the filmmakers have to dumb him down for an audience of modern homeschooled Christians. Knox meant “regiment” in the sense of a “regime,” as in “the regime of Queen Elizabeth,” but the movie uses the word in the modern sense to give the hilarious impression that a veritable army of frothing feminists swarms the countryside with swords made of IUDs and shields made of paycheck stubs to blacken the souls of our innocent daughters and foment despair in the hearts of formerly happy hausfraus.
So anyway, that’s the backstory.
If you have demurred when it comes to actually watching the video — and I wouldn’t blame you if you had, as it is difficult to maintain a healthy appetite for your fluffy morning waffle while a string of misogynist women make unenlightened wackaloon remarks about how feminists want the State to rip babies from the arms of their mommies and force the unhappy women to work in salt mines (no joke!) — I’ll give you a brief synopsis of the trailer in question.
Antifeminist propaganda always sounds more realistic when it comes softly, in a wounded tone, from the delicate mouths of demure right-wing collaborators, so the film, though it was produced and directed by dudes, features exclusively women, whose talking heads “extol femininity” and “blast feminism.”
“The problem with feminism is the cultivation of an attitude of victimization,” desiccated, pink-faced old gasbag Phyllis Schlafly is dragged out of mothballs to opine. Feminists, she declares, “get out of bed with a chip on their shoulder.” Because we have completely pulled out of our asses the insane idea that the world order is based on a system of domination and submission. We just made up this patriarchy myth because we’re all too ugly to get a man.
Hillary Clinton, says one kindly old granny, alluding to the ghastliest female abomination she can think of, had the unmitigated gall to show no interest whatsoever in baking cookies. The horror.
A “former cadet” with a pixelated face and the name “Jane Doe” explains matter-of-factly that women in the military inevitably have crying “fits,” and that when they do, they are ridiculed and raped. Jane Doe confused me for a minute until I realized that she — or I should say, the filmmakers — isn’t taking a dudes-shouldn’t-rape-women stance — which would be inconsistent in an antifeminist film. Instead she — or rather, they — are suggesting that it is unnatural for women to be in the military in the first place, and that rape is their just punishment. Blaming weak, sick, impotent, foolish, mad, frenetic women makes much more sense than holding noble young warriors accountable for their uncontrollable eruptions of barbarism.
A delicate flower (and author of the gripping page-turner Raising Maidens of Virtue), dressed in virtuous white flowing robes, declaims that if you dress “loose,” you’re just asking for it, you godless slut. An oldie but goodie.
My favorite — this is where I made with the guffaw — is the woman who, during a stint as Satan’s handmaiden, says she was in “the abortion industry.” The business model of this industry, she says, is to “go into schools” and “get” teenage girls to be sexually active, with the stated goal that the newly ensluttified teens have “3 to 5 abortions between the ages of 13 and 18.” Performing abortions on sexy teenagers is just that lucrative. The carnivorous feminists who cooked up this baby-hating scheme are laughing all the way to the bank.
The ex-abortepreneur lady, you’ll be happy to know, is now a member of a group that shoves Jesus and compulsory pregnancy down the throats of indigent women.
You know, I am deeply heartened that somebody somewhere — OK, it’s just a couple of godbag wackjobs whose website actually contains the phrase “in regards to,” but they’re better than nothing — takes feminism seriously enough to bother making a cockumentary like this. It almost makes it seem like we’ve got some kind of movement goin’ on. Alas. Would that we were a monstrous regiment.
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* UPDATE: I am gently corrected by a more scholarly blamer than myself, who suggests that the object of Knox’s antipathy was not the Protestant ER 1, but the two Catholic Queen Marys (“Bloody” and “of Scots”). Although I did read that Elizabeth, who was no Knox fan on account of his misogynist ways, did kill his career forthwith.
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