Monthly Archive for May, 2009

Spinster aunt, having moulted Twisty’s skin, resumes blogging about spiders as though nothing ever happened

Published by Jill on May 31, 2009. 46 Comments

Striped bark scorpion

Does anything say “For the lovagod douse this flame of heartwarmth before I self-immolate!” like a pair of striped bark scorpions caught inadvertently in a spider trap under the frigidaire?

The great romantic tragedy of this tableau: it is likely that these two were in the throes of a heartwarming courtship ballet when their tender young lives were snuffed out by the passive but brutal intervention of the newly implemented Bunkhouse De-Sicariidization Program. Which Program sickens the spinster aunt, but dammit, my hands are tied.

It would probably have ended badly for at least one of the participants, with me or without me; scorpions are one of those orders of arachnids where the female eats the male after copulation, fanciful anthropomorphized interpretations of which perfectly reasonable behavior have been implemented by dudely poets immemorial as hackneyed metaphors describing the fictitious sinister wiles human women wield over men. A propos of a recent Blametarian discussion on PG Wodehouse’s vicious female characters: quoth Jeeves to Bertie Wooster: “The female is the deadlier of the species, sir.”

Posted in Heartwarming Nature Crap. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster auntism lives

Published by Jill on May 31, 2009. 30 Comments

Oh yeah. I forgot to mention that, for good or ill, I’ll continue publishing blogularisms until the next batch of pointless criticism drives me completely underground. I mention this because some of you have expressed an interest. To those who have not expressed an interest: I bet you’re bored as hell, reading this. You should go read some Judith Butler. That’s entertainment!

Check this out!

[...] Butler questions the extent to which we can assume that a given individual can be said to constitute him- or herself; she wonders to what extent our acts are determined for us, rather, by our place within language and convention. She follows postmodernist and poststructuralist practice in using the term “subject” (rather than “individual” or “person”) in order to underline the linguistic nature of our position within what Jacques Lacan terms the symbolic order, the system of signs and conventions that determines our perception of what we see as reality.

I’m not against being criticized, incidentally. I merely question the extent to which readers of blogs can assume that bloggists can be said to constitute themselves, as opposed to the extent to which readers of blogs can be said to constitute critics.

Another thing I want to mention is: have you ever put out spider traps? Because holy shit, you wouldn’t believe the arthropods what waltz through your hut when you’re not looking. Today I found two regular scorpions under my fridge, and two wind-scorpions in my bathroom, and another brown recluse spider in the hall. And about a bafillion unidentified gnats, small beetles, moths, and lesser spiders, in the gluey spider traps I was obliged to stick here and there around the bunkhouse.

I am sorry I had to put out those traps. There was quite a bit of unexpected collateral damage. But I can’t have the dogs getting brown reclused. And Bert has this idea that scorpions are minuscule puppies.

Posted in Blogulation and Heartwarming Nature Crap. Bite me, Chad.

Fictional character returns to home planet

Published by Jill on May 30, 2009. 62 Comments

Twisty caught the red-eye back to Obstreperon last night. Her work here, she said, was done. Before she left she implanted a Blame-U-Lator in my lobe (the device will enable her to inject feminist dogma directly into my brain from anywhere in the space-time continuum). Then she rolled up in a ball and had me and Phil bounce her up into the stratosphere. I don’t know if you’ve ever bounced a spinster aunt into a flying saucer, but it takes at least two people and a lonely stretch of highway in the middle of a cloudless night. And a six-pack.

Here’s the note she left for you guys.

Twisty's farewell note

So long, and thanks for all the tacos.

Between you and me, I’m kind of relieved. We were starting to finish each others sentences and shit.

So, yeah. Um.

Hey, I know. Some of you — no doubt in an effort to ease an awkward situation — were asking about Maypearl and Bert and the skunks an that. So what the hell, here’s the status of those characters:

My golden retriever Bert, who had an encounter with a skunk a few weeks ago, continues to stink. I don’t notice it myself anymore but visitors to Spinster HQ — there really is a Spinster HQ — can definitely sense the offending molecules. I’d say it takes at least a six weeks for the high stink to wear off of a properly skunked golden retriever, but when in a dampened state that dog’ll be malodorous for months. Unfortunately, Bert swims daily.

My pretty pony
The view from Stella.

On the equine front: Maypearl and my old mare Stella, who used to be paddockmates, had a power struggle, and Stella lost. Stella sustained some soft tissue injuries, which was crummy. So she and Maypearl got a divorce forthwith, and now everything’s hunky dory. The nasty, domineering aspect of Maypearl’s character appears to be fading since doesn’t have anyone to kick around anymore, so she’s been manifesting an ever-so-much-more-so pleasant attitude toward the humans. For example, every time I pick out her hind feet, she farts and slaps me in the face with her tail. Every time. How cute is that!

And Stella has recovered from her injuries, and we’ve been hanging out more. Trotting gaily hither and thither, etc. But I worry about a strange, intervention-resistant fungus that appears to be working its way up her foreleg, and also about this odd protrusion on her belly which the vet, who can’t diagnose it, calls “the lump-oma.”

It’s almost impossible to keep horses healthy in captivity. They’re not like dogs or sea monkeys. Their systems are astonishingly fragile. It’s a constant struggle to balance diet, fencing, shelter, society, and exercise in such a manner as to keep them from snapping their legs in half or dying from colic or their hooves rotting off or one of them killing another one or them going stir-crazy.

For instance, when Stanley, my giant gelding, crashed through a gate because the fuckwhoozle rednecks next door thought it would be a good idea to shoot off some guns, thus terrifying him, he decimated a heavy wooden fence and completely fucked up both his front legs. He was in bandages from knee to hoof for six weeks, and stuck on stall rest to boot. I would asses the level of difficulty of  keeping clean bandages on a 1300 pound stall-bound horse for six weeks, on a scale of 1-10, at about 76. It would be easier to come up with a unified field theory.

Why do I even have horses, given my views on the general wrongitude of animal domination?

Well, I admit it. I like’em. They’re nice to hang around with. But whoa, people do appalling, abusive things to horses — mang, you would seriously puke up your tacos if I told you. Since I can hardly release them into the wild to roam the open range and pose on mountaintops for PBS cameras, I can at least see to it that my three are safe from psychopaths, are getting fed, have vet care, and have a nice place to live. I rescued my two little Arabian mares from a show barn with 200 horses. They weren’t right for the farm’s new breeding program and had totally fallen through the cracks. Nobody wanted them. And the place was a dump. How can anybody have 200 horses? In order to do that right you’d need about 2000 acres, 50 full-time trainers, grooms, muckers, feeders, and people who can fix tractors, and some serious ultra-millionaire action going on.

So another of my little causes is Stop Breeding Horses, all yall fucking idiots. Stop breeding dogs, too. And humans. There are more than enough of all of those to go around.

Posted in Announcements, Blogulation, Heartwarming Nature Crap and Not Altogether Depressing. Bite me, Chad.

Pay no attention to that ghost writer behind the curtain

Published by Twisty on May 29, 2009. 29 Comments

Holy shit. I come back from a simple blown lobe, and what the hell. I observe that that grubby stinkpot Jill has gotten above herself, flyin too close to the sun an’ that. It is of paramount importance that you disregard anything she says. She’s unhinged. Teams of experts have confirmed it. I mean, she’s all right for a ghost writer, but I wouldn’t want to spend the winter with her. You probably know she wasn’t my first choice. I wanted Molly Ivins.

Posted in Blogulation. Bite me, Chad.

Cuntalinagate

Published by Twisty on May 28, 2009. 225 Comments

Just checking in to see how my “indictment” is going.

I see I have been voted off Savage Death Island. Brilliant.

Oh, looky. I’m likened to Don Imus! Ha! Good one.

And several demands for a public apology, as though I were some elected official who has trodden upon Roe v Wade in a pair of Louboutin stilettos on her way to sell a truckload of Moldovan teenagers to a sex slaver. Omigod, Twisty said “cuntalina,” she’ll probably be advocating labiaplasty next!

Ah, but wait. You know? I think I ought to clarify something. Just for the hell of it.

This is what I want to clarify: Twisty didn’t say it. I did. Twisty Faster is a work of fiction. She is a figment of the imagination of me, a real person named Jill. Twisty’s lobe is currently blown and is dripping grotesquely from the rafters down at the bunkhouse, so I, Jill, Twisty’s accommodating ghost writer, will be sitting in for her today.

Jill is a much better name than Twisty, isn’t it? When I was inventing the internet feminist I thought about letting her be Jill, too, but in the end I decided it would be too confusing if we were both named the same thing, and unlike Twisty I am Jill-centric, so I kept “Jill” for myself and gave her the goofy sobriquet. She pretends it’s cool, but has never forgiven me.

But I digress.

As I was saying — “I”, for the moment, being this Jill person of whom you are now suddenly and perhaps uncomfortably aware — Twisty and I have much in common. We are both geniuses, for example. We’re both spinster aunts. We like tacos. We both have obstreperal lobes. We’re world-famous concert violinists. We both think patriarchy sucks shit through Hefty bags. We’re both incredibly good-looking.

But alas, there the similarities end. Twisty is an alien from the planet Obstreperon. She is a superhero and pretty exclusively an internet feminist and is not real.

I, on the other hand, am an actual person. Happily, I’m no Platonic ideal. I’m not a paragon either, or an ideologue, or a charismatic cult leader, or a figment living only inside the mind of whatever philosopher-computer happens to type in my URL. I’m just some chump writer, chumping along like anybody else.

In fact, it turns out that I, Jill, have facets. Fortunately, not all of them are endearing. One of my best unendearing facets is that I drool on my pillow when I sleep. Another is a growing impatience with the rigidity with which Twisty is expected to conduct herself.

The heart bleeds for poor old Twisty; she’s constantly on the verge of being sabotaged by her crappy human ghost-writer. Twisty, a staunch dogmatist, probably wouldn’t use the word “cuntalina” to describe some antifeminist knob unless I, Jill, had had it up to here with that relentless, sanctimonious, supercilious Metrical Formula of Internet Feminist Conformity and Propriety, and had given in to the urge to let fly a deeply satisfying misdemeanor, yup, on purpose, because it blows my lobe, this impossible effort to continually accommodate every little stultifying molecule of the feminist archetype.

Another of my unendearing facets is poor impulse control. For which foible Twisty now suffers. Poor, noble Twisty, dripping from the rafters on accounta her imperfectly humble ghost writer.

So, before Twisty’s lobe regenerates and she comes back here throwing her big syllables around, let me, Jill, say the thing I came out to say: I’m damned glad you guys are taking this feminism thing seriously. Really. Nothing could be more heartwarming, except, possibly, certain heartwarming nature crap, than that there exist women who are able to grasp that “cuntalina” is an antifeminist slur.

But seriously, get off my fucking case already with this hypervigilant radfem hall monitor shit. The policey, self-righteous, gotcha bullshit around here generally is chapping my entire hide. When and if I commit some egregious ideological error that threatens the very fabric of the cosmos I’ll make Twisty fucking cop to it, as you fucking well know if you’ve been reading this blog for more than five minutes. But this cuntalina uproar is fucking absurd. Jayzus in a jetpack.

In conclusion: I’m not your fucking enemy, my dear asses, but if you like to think otherwise, I invite you to demand explanations and nominate Twisty for Misogynist of the Year to your heart’s content on some other fucking blog. The BDSMers hate Twisty, too, and will be happy to join you there.

Oh, and one last thing: to the blamer who thinks it’s OK to not like kids because kidness is a temporary condition: Your head’s up your ass, girlfriend, and I mean it in the kindest possible way. “Kids” are a class of people around the discrimination, domination, indoctrination, and abuse of whom entire cultures, industries, pathologies, and oppressive social systems flourish. Youth is temporary for the individual, yes, but a youth class persists; there is a constant supply of replacement children to keep this class well-stocked with hapless victims. Furthermore, the damage inflicted by expertly administered adult oppression techniques hardly vanishes the moment a kid turns 18.

But thanks for saying this: “I don’t know why Twisty used the term “cuntalina” but I gave her the benefit of the doubt.”

That was nice.

Posted in Blogulation, Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society, The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Yesterday and Women hate you. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt has an appointment in town, so this is all the post you get

Published by Twisty on May 27, 2009. 25 Comments

Brown recluse spider
Venomous sicariid (male) enjoying its last heartwarming moments in the Spinster Araneae Compound. May 2009.

U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice said Tuesday that North Korea is “trying to test whether they can intimidate the international community” with an underground nuclear test and launching of short-range missiles.

Well, color me intimidated, Susan. Whenever crazy dictators start blowing up Hiroshima-class nukes just for the hell of it, it is a matter of policy with me to take to my bed with a wedge of triple cream Brie and pull the blanket up over my quavering lobe. That is, after I inventory the household stores of life-saving duct-tape, plastic sheeting, and flame-thrower fuel.

Also intimidating is the long, dead arm of justice in California. Little can be added to the discourse condemning the heterocentric hate now carved in the California state constitution, but I’ll say this: Repellent hatebags voted in that anti-gay initiative, and repellent authority figure hatebags upheld it. Well, what goes around comes around, Repellent Californian Hatebags. Sooner or later your bags will pop like fermented bottles of Odwalla Superfood, and you will die of something, but not before your kid comes out in a big pile of rainbow bumperstickers, birkenstocks, and mustachioed girlfriends who are all going to Michigan together in a Subaru.

Meanwhile, here’s hoping a family of brown recluse spiders moves into your liquor cabinets. Fucking knobs.

Posted in Heartwarming Nature Crap, Lobe-blowing, Oppression Culture and Politics. Bite me, Chad.

Cringe-of-the-day

Published by Twisty on May 26, 2009. 61 Comments

Picture Obama giving this patronizing hug to a dude Supreme.

Posted in Men Hate You, Politics and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt disagrees with columnist she agreed with that one time

Published by Twisty on May 23, 2009. 168 Comments

This cuntalina opines in the Daily Mail that women who don’t have kids “lack [...] an essential humanity.” That’s why she only wants “working mothers” on her staff. Her job is something she calls a “hack.” I don’t know what a “hack” is, but it apparently requires a familiarity with the experience of child vomit running down your neck.

“Barren” workers, the author avers, are sub-par in every way, but only if they have chosen not to have kids. Naturally, women who yearn for, but cannot have, children are exempt from her contempt; the choosing is what turns child-free women into vile harridans. Such freaks of nature, for example, always lead the undesirable “office bitch-fest.” Having chosen not to reproduce, they are incapable of “selflessness, compassion, generosity, commitment, fierce loyalty and plain hard work.” The author looks down on women who wait until they’re 40 to get artificially inseminated, but in the end she cuts’em some slack, because at least they’re trying to be human.

[W]e actually need our children; they complete us as women [...]; when we meet a woman who chooses her childlessness in the belief that there is something out there worth more, we smile politely even while – once again – our guts whisper: ‘Lady, you’re weird.’

Hey, wait a minute. This article accusing women of incomplete subhumanity based on a sentimental reading of the Cultural Narrative of Western Motherhood was written by one Carol Sarler. Why does that name ring a bell?

Oh yes. A quick click through the Halls of Blame reveals that in 2006 I agreed with this Sarler on the subject of the hollow promise of “grrl power” (although, unlike Sarler, I declined to blame the Spice Girls personally for the dominant culture’s preoccupation with sexploitation). Sarler, it turns out, is merely an advocate for traditional femininity, the kind that rules out raunch-as-empowerment as well as voluntary spinsterdom. It’s nice that “working moms” should get some props, but what’s with the “lady, you’re weird” baloney? That’s just mean. So I spit in your eye, Carol Sarler, even though pole-dancing as a feminist statement leaves us both a bit cold.

It did not escape my notice that Sarler’s insulting opinion piece is part of that skeezy “Femail” section of the Daily Mail, the one with the sidebar full of vicious gossipy voyeuristical misogyny designed especially to enthrobben the schadenfreude of women readers. Holy shit, is there ever some lobe-blowing, women-as-trainwrecks stuff in that thing.

– A woman is arrested for “antisocial behavior” years after she disgraced herself by failing to successfully eject live octuplets from her uterus.

– A “curvaceous” college student/ beauty pageant contestant reclines in bikini and heels on itchy grass despite her body measurements — reproduced in the article in case the reader would like to plot them on a graph — which do not conform to those of the normal pornulated woman.

– Another constituent of “Obese Britain” has lost a bunch of weight because her therapist has hypnotized her to believe she’s had gastric bypass surgery.

– My favorite: Mariah Carey, who can “produce sounds high enough to startle a bat,” employs a full-time assistant to “monitor her cleavage.”

Dang it, I don’t have time to write the last paragraph of this post. Too bad, it was gonna be a peach.

[Thanks, miz-geek]

Posted in Femininity, Mass Media, Oppression Culture and Women hate you. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt emits guffaw at Sarah Haskins vid

Published by Twisty on May 22, 2009. 64 Comments

Troubled by that TV commercial where the laundry detergent teddy bear mascot tries to drown a woman in a giant hot tub filled with pink laundry, but instead of calling the cops or trying to kill the teddy bear, the woman is grateful, and the teddy bear puts up a Do Not Disturb sign so she can wallow in the laundry a little longer?

Posted in Femininity, Keep your bias off my gender, Mass Media, Not Altogether Depressing and The Entertainment Industrial Complex. Bite me, Chad.

Hugs, Twisty: join us as we curl our lip at whiny dads

Published by Twisty on May 22, 2009. 70 Comments

Dear Twisty,

I just read a book review, titled “From Patriarch to Patsy,” linked by Ann Bartow at feministlawprofessors.com and I’m excited to let you know that, not only has feminism succeeded in gaining us equality, we really are now oppressing the men. I am so excited about my total control of reproduction and my new ability to quietly victimize men! It’s like we’re all superheroes now! I just wanted to let you know so you don’t waste any more time blaming the patriarchy.

One of the comments made it all clear to me:

Due to our code of law that still needs a major adjustment to the modern realities, men do not nearly have the same protections and rights as women do. This coupled with reproduction being controlled by women and disinformation by the popular media, especially daytime TV that mostly caters to its female consumer, women have nearly all the leverage. In this day and age, men and husbands are really the largely quiet victim.

Well, no time to blame, I gotta head out – I have to subjugate the hubby!

Thanks,

A former blamer

Dear A former blamer,

A year or two ago I almost shut down the Blamateria. That was when about a million feminist women wrote in to explain that giving blow jobs was the most empowering thing ever invented. I figured, well heck, if they’ve found the solution to women’s oppression, what am I still doing here? But I lingered on, mostly out of habit, the way obsolete old people do, updating the blog with the occasional wackaloon theory about how perhaps the white American feminist’s devotion to fellatio had not completely eradicated global male domination.

But now? Well, I have just finished reading “From Patriarch to Patsy,” the book review to which you allude, and you know? It looks like I can fully retire after all. Feminism, apparently while I was busy shaking my head over the ratio of rapes to rape convictions, has put American mothers in the driver’s seat. These ass-kicking women don’t need anything so prosaic as fellatio to control their men. They merely have to have a couple of babies. The instant they become mothers, their husbands mutate from noble human beings into broken men, cosmic joke-butts who have to touch dirty diapers and show their faces at Gymboree.

In the WSJ, Toby Young reviews Home Game by Michael Lewis, a whataboutthemen?! compilation of Lewis’ Slate columns wherein, apparently, he whines humorously about being pussywhipped. Boy, is it ever devastating to read of the degradation of the American father at the hands of the condescending American wife. Here is an excerpt from Young’s review, which begins with an excerpt from Lewis’ book.

‘At some point in the last few decades, the American male sat down at the negotiating table with the American female and — let us be frank — got fleeced,’ [Lewis] writes.

The poor sucker agreed to take on responsibility for all sorts of menial tasks — tasks that his own father was barely aware of — and received nothing in return. If he was hoping for some gratitude, he was mistaken. According to Mr. Lewis: ‘Women may smile at a man pushing a baby stroller, but it is with the gentle condescension of a high officer of an army toward a village that surrendered without a fight.’”

Toby Young, himself a father of four, loves Lewis like a long-lost millionaire uncle. He concurs that family men are not only doing the humiliating work of women, they are doing it without sufficient compensation. Taking the kid to swimming class! With other men in bathing suits! Cripes, is his wife-mandated vasectomy showing?

Excuse me a second, I have to get a fresh hankie to wipe the tear from my eye.

I checked out this Lewis dude, by the way. The very first thing I found was one of his Slate essays on fatherhood, probably one he recycled for his book. In this essay Lewis joyfully alludes to his penis about 87 times, considers dressing his 3-year-old daughter every morning an act of heroism, calls this daughter a “vixen,” and, as a treat for his pedophile readers, actually publishes a Femininity2K-compliant photo of the tot posing in a hula skirt and bra.

What a class act.

Hugs,
Twisty

Posted in Dear god what about the men?, Hugs, Twisty, Mass Media, Men Hate You and Oppression Culture. Bite me, Chad.