It is with a tear in my duct that I announce the demise of nested comments on I Blame the Patriarchy. We had some good times, though, didn’t we, before it became an untenable mess?
I need to be alone now.
Monthly Archive for February, 2010
Over at Gizmodo, Dude Nation 2.0 is having a little tantrum. It seems Apple recently removed from its App Store something called Wobble, “an app that adds animated jiggles to photo breasts.” Since then, in a kind of Night of the Long iKnives, a veritable buttload of cheezy porn apps have been purged. Including the popular Suicide Girls Flip Strip app, which, as everyone knows, “actually empowers women.”
NOOOOOOO! Not the woman-empowering Suicide Girls Flip-Strip app! I just bought a new anti-jizz cover for my boyfriend’s iPhone!
The news, if you are a Male Aged 18-to-34, or if you are the purveyor of anti-jizz iPhone covers, is “devastating.”
[A] developer who talked to Apple says the future of iPhone titillation is bleak. Really bleak. Like no racy photos, no suggestive language, no bathing suits bleak. [cite]
This story is repellent on many levels. Because I am your Number 1 Quality Internet pal, I will share three of them with you.
Repellent Level One: Gizmodo dorks reveal without compunction that they have no idea what the fuck pornography really is.
Repellent Level Two: Apple, in an effort to assuage the jerkoffus interruptus of its reported 5 million Suicide Girls customers, is naturally blaming the ban on women who complained about “‘degrading’ and ‘objectionable’ content.”
Repellent Level Three: Blamers feel compelled to email me about it, thus forcing to me to read Gizmodo and contemplate anti-jizz iPhone protectors.
Naturally, Apple, in taking a hatchet to its greasier apps, has not actually had an attack of moral indignation or even of good taste; they haven’t, for instance, banned Playboy or the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit app. No, they’ve merely gotten hip to the fact that their rapidly swelling reputation for hawking low-rent smut is adversely affecting revenues. But instead of just copping to that, Apple has elected to scapegoat those pesky women complainers. That’s right. Humorless, Puritanical feminists supposedly whined so loudly about being offended and degraded by iBoobs that Apple just couldn’t ignore’em, and out went Wobble faster than you can snap a G-string.
Which, if it were true, would be the first time any major corporation has ever listened to feminists about anything, let alone pornography. Apple, in fact, not only doesn’t listen to feminists, it doesn’t listen to anybody. But this well-known and oft-joked-about fact doesn’t prevent the Gizmodoids from casting aspersions on killjoy women for wrecking their dudely access to mobile wanking on the iPhone platform.
So once again social conservatives ruin it for all of the normal people. [cite]
and
Degrading and objectionable? [...] How about we have some thicker fucking skin? [cite]
Looking at porn is what “normal people” do, and women just can’t take a joke.
Further aspersions are cast on Steve Jobs for pandering to an inconsequential minority of “moralistic women”; Jobs is apparently a communist, a mommy, Big Brother, someone who needs to “grow up,” and is “inspired” by Hitler, all at once.
Not unexpectedly, the Gizmodo comments section is crammed with sweaty, anguished wankers who cannot distinguish between pornography and sex, and who believe that an anti-porn viewpoint is nothing but old-fashioned knee-jerk godbag pearlclutchery.
This is all a throwback to American puritanism that was extinguished in Europe long ago, but people in the US just can’t seem to handle the human body. Violence is fine, but sex is bad. [cite]
Wait, what? People in the US just can’t seem to handle the human body? Jesus on a bed of lettuce, has this guy ever seen television?
Other commenters aver that Apple’s “censorship” is a slippery slope. They predict that once the company puts the kibosh on “titty apps,” they’ll have no compunction about banning other excellent stuff. Check out this zinger, zinged by an apparent National Geographic subscriber who shows he’s no stranger to the December 2009 issue:
The Hadza people of central Tanzania still live as hunter-gatherers, unchanged over 10,000 years, with no calendar, rules, numbers above “3,” or awareness of the outside world. If enough of them complain, will Apple remove its calendar, maps, and calculator apps? [cite]
Ouch, now that’s one bad-ass anthropology-based zinger!
And you gotta love the egalitarians:
I just never understood why a womens chest is censored in all forms of media but a man’s chest is not. [cite]
and
Women can also entertain themselves with a picture of a Banana Hammock. [cite]
Whoa, Capital Letters! That must be one Entertaining Hammock!
Other commenters are acting all supercilious and mature:
Who cares, really? Do you want to be ‘that guy’ with the softcore porn apps right there are your iPhone’s dashboard/homepage/whatever? Fucking open Safari for all your porn needs, both stills and video. [cite]
DNOCD.* An iPhone user should have standards. It’s tacky to have porn on your phone; just fucking use the Internet like a fucking normal person.
Although dudes may make fine and snobbish distinctions between the social acceptability of this or that mode of smut delivery, nobody is arguing that there’s anything wrong with pornography itself. Porn is, in fact, regarded as a dude’s birthright. It occurs to precisely zero of these petulant Gizmodo knobs that demanding 24/7 access to graphic representations of rape, whether on an iPhone app or the regular old Internet, is fundamentally atavistic, misogynist, and violent.
Thus must I agree with the Gizmodo poster who observed that the lot of them are a bunch of whiny chicken-chokers.
[Thanks, Julie. I think.]
_____________________
* Definitely not our class, dear.
Oh my fucking god, behold yet another story in a major American newspaper wherein the writer gets all verklempt about this wack new burlesque craze, just fifteen short years after the first quasi-transgressive hipsters disentombed it from its well-deserved mothball crypt in the misogynist perv-pile. Any excuse to interview a semi-nude chick with a stripper name, I guess. These Yay! Burlesque! stories seem to appear every couple of months. They always present burlesque as some kind of exciting new art form the practitioners of which are all empowered feminists who are totally in touch with their sexuality.
Here is what Miss Lily Verlaine, Seattle burlesque artist, has to say about about feminism.
“I enjoy the trappings of femininity. I enjoy wearing dresses, I like silk and I like high heels, eyelashes and big hair. It’s fun for me. I don’t think it’s un-feminist or that I’m any more or less of a woman for accentuating certain aspects of my femininity.”
I choose femininity! For me! Because what could be more feminist than choosing something?
“I find it very feminist and very exciting when a woman decides how to portray herself. Any woman being her own agent, being her own director, being her own stylist and her own voice is always feminist.”
What could be more exciting than a woman deciding to portray herself as something? Especially when she decides to portray herself as a male fantasy, am I right?
“‘For a long time, I wasn’t interested in nail-polish and makeup and all that stuff because I could be spending my time doing things in the community,’ she recalls. However, Verlaine found that once the dresses, furs, heels and makeup followed her offstage, people began to treat her better, men especially.”
Well, whaddya know. Appeasing the oppressor vs. “doing things in the community”: it’s a no-brainer!
“‘If I have my drag on, people compliment me. They say kind things. The interactions are night and day,’ she says.”
People: “We didn’t think much of you, Miss Lily Verlaine, before you started dressing like a hooker. But now that you’ve demonstrated your willingness to conform by defining yourself in terms of male desire, we think you’re awesome. Can we buy you a Scotch?”
Miss Lily Verlaine: “Gosh, thanks! This beats the shit out of trying to be taken seriously!”
Pull yourself together, woman! Not even the hipsters think burlesque is hip anymore. And even if it were, femininity is unenlightened, and also dumb. And even if it weren’t, all that makeup crap totally causes cancer! There’s mercury in mascara!
But maybe life just isn’t worth living if men don’t want to fuck you; what’s a little cancer compared to the infinite rewards of sex appeal?
Speaking of makeup, I just found out there exists a species of cosmetic called “lip plumper.” Lip plumper is an irritant that, when applied to one’s “pout,” makes it swell up, the better to affect that sexy, just-been-punched-in-the-face look that dudes love. This poor girl, apparently of her own volition, makes her own lip plumper out of cayenne and infant butt-cream.
Kill me now.
______________________
Photo: still from “How To Make Homemade Lip Plumper” by SecretLifeOfABioNerd on YouTube.
UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who sent in screen shots. They have all been most helpful, and you screen-shooters are A-Number 1 Blamers 4ever! You can stop sending them now. Thanks again.
Rootlesscosmo recently posted a recipe for butternut squash with a sweet’n’sour raisin-y, pine nutty wine/balsamic reduction (here), and I was all hot to make it, but dang! The squash in my crisper turned out to be a spaghetti instead of a butternut. Still, I soldiered on, and it was darn scrumptious. Not least because spaghetti squash is the most hilarious of all the edible squashes. As you know, hilarity is a dish best served with sweet & sour sauce.
Note: not wishing to imperil certain delicate balances in my stomach lining, I increased the wine in rootlesscosmo’s recipe, and decreased the vinegar, by half.
But this isn’t strictly a what-I-had-for-dinner post. As you may know, it’s Blog Software Upgrade Week here at I Blame the Patriarchy, and as usual, I’m in way over my head. Harken unto my desperate cry: take pity on me, O thou blamers who know how to do shit, and email me screen shots of 1) a post headline, and 2) a comments page in 1) Firefox 2) Safari 3) boutique browser of your choice. My eternagratitude will be yours.
Also, if you know from CSS, or whatever it is, how the hell to do I get the nested comments to indent more, or have boxes around them, or be numbered, or something?
I would ask my real-life friends to help me, but none of them reads the blog. I’m too much of a downer, apparently.
Speaking of real life and downers, one of my aged relatives just called to complain to me about this situation, displayed on the front page of this morning’s Dallas Morning News: Wrongfully convicted rapist gets exonerated after a 12-year hitch, and the Great State of Texas reimburses him $600,000. But along comes the IRS with jaws that bite and claws that catch, claiming non-rapist owes a third of the dough to the federal government.
Along with a sympathetic pang for the dude unjustly accused of rape, my relative harbors an abiding antipathy toward the IRS.
“Bastards!” says the aged relative, getting pretty fired up.
“Now see here,” I say, “you’d better give me the keys to the Cessna.”
No doubt the IRS are bastards, but one can’t help but note that there is no commensurate front-page public outpouring of outrage on behalf of the rape victims whose rapists are never convicted at all. Nobody’s payin’ them 50 grand a year for pain and suffering. No newspapers are running front-page articles spotlighting the government’s failure to render justice on their behalf. And for sure no relatives are callin’ me up to complain that the rape conviction rate in the UK is only 6%.
Wrongful conviction for rape strikes quite the chord of intense indignation. So melodious is this chord to the ears of patriarchy enthusiasts that there still rages, in 2010, a huge debate over whether a rape victim may be held responsible for her own rape.
!
The Spinster IT Department will be upgrading the blog software shortly. This means that the blog will undoubtedly be deleted or corrupted or otherwise enfubarred in ways that I cannot possibly anticipate, for an interim of unspecified duration. I will probably fix it, though.
Meanwhile, the damnedest thing happened. After wacking out on my nutty health kick dealio for weeks and weeks, a sudden craving for canned baked beans besieged me. Behold my hideous dinner, which I ate even after reading the label: “brown sugar” was the first ingredient after “beans.” “Sugar” was the first ingredient after “brown sugar.” Ay yi yi!
A couple of months ago I had a near-death experience.
Oh no, an autobiographical interlude! If I were some science blogger I’d probably say, “Hey, get your own fucking blog for that crap!”
But you know how it is. Everythang I do gon be funky from now on, etc.
The near-death experience was a 24-hour interlude wherein lab tests performed by a local branch of the Cancer Industrial Complex made it seem likely that my cancer had returned. Well, lemme tell you, I had about 47 kittens. When the interlude was over, and it turned out I was still what they call “cured,” I spent an hour in the can doing what you do when you have just found out you’re not going to die after all (at least not right away).
When that was over, I said, “That’s it!”
And I meant it, by gum.
Whereupon I quit pussyfooting around. First to go were the three or four cigarettes I was letting myself smoke every day after fifteen years of botched attempts at quitting, which botched attempts included hypnosis, Wellbutrin, 637 boxes of Nicoderm, chemotherapy, and three complete rounds of Chantix, the pill that makes you sui/homicidal. Who was I kidding? I had fucking cancer. I can’t smoke.
So I went back on the patch for a month and just fucking did it. Blam. The end. It turns out it is not possible to quit smoking unless you have recently been under the impression that you’re about to croak of a hideous disease but somehow you oiled out of it at the last minute.
Next, I removed from my nightstand drawer the embarrassing 471-pound bag of peanut M&Ms. Not only are M&Ms fundamentally gross, they have those creepy TV commercials where the talking M&Ms are delighted to go to their deaths as cheap human snacks.
I also removed from my freezer the embarrassing 471-pound bag of tater tots. Processed frozen fried reconstituted potato nuggets! What am I, twelve?
I hauled out of storage my old elliptical machine, therabands, balance ball, heart monitor, yoga mat, and dumbbells, and began sweatin’ to the oldies.
Next, I invented Aunt Food. Aunt Food is an organic whole wheat tortilla smeared with avocado and topped with grated carrot, grated zucchini, diced red bell pepper, steamed corn, a few sunflower seeds, cilantro, and pico de gallo. It is washed down with an ice-cold half-gallon of Liquid Sanctimony.
The result? I am now a superfatted bore with huge guns and gas bloat!
Because of its beauty and whimsical health claims (it can make you invisible), everyone’s been begging me for the recipe for Liquid Sanctimony.
Liquid Sanctimony
2 giant kale leaves
2 giant chard leaves
handful dandelion greens
fistful spinach
handful parsley
handful wheatgrass
handful broccoli florets
1/16th of a red cabbage
2 celery stalks, with leaves
1/3 cucumber
1 carrot
1/2 avocado
1/4 lemon (with rind)
1 tomato
2 of those little tangerines that come in plastic net bags
1 banana
1 apple
1″ pineapple ring
1″ ginger
handful blueberries (fresh or frozen)
handful strawberries (fresh or frozen)
handful raw cacao nibs
handful dried goji berries (Navitas brand is somewhat edible)
handful sesame seeds
handful sunflower seeds
handful almonds
handful flax seeds
1 tablespoon coconut butter
1 tablespoon bee pollen
1 maraschino cherry (optional)
1 miniature paper umbrella
Put the greens in a VitaMix with 2 cups of water.
Don goggles and protective noise-blocking earmuffs.
Set VitaMix on “stun.”
Activate.
Whirl 17.4 seconds.
De-activate Vitamix.
Wipe off goggles, kitchen cabinets.
Add remaining ingredients (except cherry, umbrella).
Re-activate Vitamix.
Whirl 28 seconds.
De-activate VitaMix.
Inspect resultant sludge with critical eye.
Dilute with water or ice to desired viscosity and re-whirl.
Serve with cherry, umbrella
Makes about 2 quarts. Drink the whole thing. Repeat daily for 2 weeks. Prance around town glowing with vitality and smug superiority.
Note 1: For maximum sanctimony, use only organic fair trade ingredients grown by weathered-looking folk living simple lives.
Note 2: Do not attempt with a lesser blender. The machine should be capable of generating a wormhole, lest the beverage come out all gritty and lumpy and insufficiently liquefied, which would impair both digestibility and your sense of sanctimony.
Note 3: if you use Liquid Sanctimony to detox after coming off a hardcore tater tots/cigarettes/peanut M&Ms habit, steel yourself for interesting gastric events.
Blamer Susan just got this postcard in the mail. She yawned.
Risk Level: HIGH!!!!!
You know these cards. “NOTICE OF HIGH-RISK SEX OFFENDER IN COMMUNITY.” The state sends’em out when a convicted perv, who for some reason isn’t in jail even though he is “high risk,” moves into your neighborhood, to frolic and molest.
The question is, what the fuck are you supposed to do with this information? Go from orange to red alert? Or, if you are already on red alert because this is, like, the 8th one of these cards you’ve gotten, escalate to infrared alert? Arm yourself at all times with a pit bull and a flamethrower? Build a cinderblock bunker and lock yourself up in it?
They should send out cards that read NOTICE OF BLOCK PARTY CELEBRATING CASTRATION OF ANOTHER SEX OFFENDER. PUBLIC SHAMING AT 9. MUSIC STARTS AT 10. BYOB.
Because, Jesus in a jetpack, these unhelpful warnings are meaningless, merely adding to the shitpile and general sense of exhaustion women perpetually experience as a result of performing our unceasing hyper-vigilance.
As Susan points out, big whoop. Another day, another perv in close proximity. As we all know, these assholes are everywhere, and the overwhelming majority don’t come with picture postcards. In fact, the only ones with postcards are the non-white, non-affluent ones.
Except this one. Ha!
Wouldn’t it be funny if, instead of sending out postcards announcing the arrival of unreconstructed violent criminals, the state would think up ways to prevent dude-based violence in the first place? Such methods would not, if I may be allowed an even more improbable dream, include advising women on how to keep from being attacked.
Patriarchy-blaming is a crappy business. The Internet feminist must beware the fine line, or slippery slope, or pot-calling-kettle-black, or hoist-on-own-petard or what have you, when aiming the Super Spinster Truth-Ray at stuff. Attention must be paid to the potential stinkiness of one’s own role in the proceeding. Care must be taken to inspect the fists for ham. Sometimes, denouncing a particular instance of exploitation produces unwanted side-effects. Ethical concerns. Knots in the lobe. Sensations of inner grubbiness. Such that, when the denunciation is completed and the sun sets on another day of blaming, instead of writing, with the usual glowing satisfaction, “Dear Diary, today I exposed some pernicious culture-of-oppression shit for what it is, goddammit!” one is obliged to say “Crap, I think I just participated in misogyny most foul.”
The blaming goal is to expose oppression without compounding it with one’s own voyeurism, but this can be pretty difficult when dealing with subject matter that is by definition dependent upon — and therefore inherently sensitive to — the public gaze. I allude, of course, to the subject-victims of pornography. How do you write, “Here is a graphic representation of our culture’s hatred of women, and this is why I think so” without re-injuring the victim during the course of your argument? Is the pornulated woman to be made a casualty of feminist analysis in addition to her primary violation? Is a woman, once pornulated, swept away into some skeezy two-dimensional purgatory to remain there forever?
These issues are looming large down at Spinster HQ at the moment, and have been ever since that dangole chump PhysioProf hipped me to the existence of an extremely disturbing website. Maybe you’ve already seen it? It’s the “crying wife” website. In summary: asshole tapes wife when she cries piteously at movies, asshole mocks and laughs at tearful wife, asshole puts videos on YouTube, asshole’s website becomes popular. It’s not pornography in the fetishy sex-smut tradition, but it is definitely the graphic representation of dudely woman-hatin’.
Just Google “crying wife.” It’s the first result.
Not realizing what I was in for, I watched one of the many videos. In this video the woman reacts to the ending of “Star Wars.” I do not exaggerate when I say that it caused my jaw to hang open quite a bit further than usual. Also, my eyes started twitching, and I experienced the nasty sensation of self-loathing that I suspect must afflict all losers when they do loser-y shit.
The woman becomes weirdly and inconsolably emotional, yeah, but my slackjaw was occasioned not by her piteous, painful sobbing, but by her grinning asshole husband goading her on. That’s right, when she actually stops sobbing, he intentionally re-exacerbates her sadness by inviting her to remember sad scenes in the film. He also makes a big fucking point of saying that it is so hilarious to pimp her on the Internet as she experiences this extended moment of private weirdness and acute vulnerability. His tone as videographer can be summarized as “I invite you to point and laugh as I proudly make the lovable simpleton I’m married to cry and cry over stupid shit.”
As PhysioProf wrote in his email, “the sheer gratuitous pointlessness of the cruelty is shocking.”
The husband-dude’s laffy obliviousness adds a whole nother layer of crapulence, but it’s obvious he knows on some level that he’s exploiting her, because he’s got a whole FAQ dedicated to explaining how he isn’t exploiting her. First he makes a hi-fucking-larious joke about how she’s insane “only 4 days out of the month ;-)” [sic]. Then he makes his argument, which can can be boiled down to three points. One, it isn’t exploitation because he just can’t help laughing at his wife. Two, his wife “thinks it’s funny” and is “able to laugh at herself afterwards.” Three, it isn’t exploitation because he says it isn’t. He “loves [her] to death and thinks she’s the cutest girl in the world!” Also, “She’s a good sport and we all love her :)”.
Well, that makes it okay, then!
I’ve wanted to complain about this for a couple of days, but the idea of my own complicity in propagating the virus and contributing to the sobsploitation has made me queasy. It still does make me queasy. I have attempted to mitigate my quease by omitting to link to the website, but I have to admit that the astonishing degree of misogyny displayed by this loving husband moron has to be seen to be believed.
While whiffling though the NPR website in search of a piece on The New Alpha Wife, which I did not find, my neural net received an even nastier jolt than expected when a story titled “New Zealand Teen Auctions Virginity To Pay Tuition” hove into view.
The story so far: “Unigirl,” an anonymous 19-year-old student advertising on a NZ auction site, supposedly proposes to exchange her “virginity” for what supposedly is the high bid of $30,000.
Since pay-to-rape is perfectly legal in New Zealand (NPR calls the NZ laws governing fair use of prostituted women “liberal,”) it is difficult to imagine why this is news, unless somebody besides the prostituted student stands to make a buck.
Wait, am I seriously suggesting that there is anything more to the story than an empowerfulized gal workin’ the system for an opportunity to go to college? Why yes. Yes I am. From the NZ Herald:
“Unigirl has claimed that more than 30,000 people have viewed her advertisement and more than 1,200 made bids. With those sorts of numbers and with the battle for ratings at seven o’clock heating up, [New Zealand TV3 personality John] Campbell is right to be chasing and questioning the virgin story.
“This is mass audience stuff, and we have to get people to watch us,” Campbell told the newspaper.”
The online auction house, reportedly a fledgling startup, stands to cash in on some free advertising. News outlets like TV3 and NPR stand to cash in on a titillating story about a shameless teen so enterprising, so driven, so sexy, that she’s willing to sacrifice her most precious, priceless asset to the highest bidder in a crass capitalist exchange that will forever sluttify her. News media can take it a bit further, as NPR did, and conceal the paucity of actual news with a rehash of other famous virginity auctions. But because there aren’t all that many of those “feminist experiments,” they can throw in the one about the woman who got busted for offering herself online in exchange for baseball tickets.
In the end, though, whether or not the Unigirl story is true, there’s nothing to see here but the usual smirking, moralizing, and prurient interest that always seems to accompany the high-class prostituted woman narrative. Stories about poor New Zealand women working the streets to support their kids or their drug habits are somewhat fewer and further between. Stories focusing on the men who pay to rape women? Non-existent.
I laugh and laugh about this virginity stuff. Virginity! Ha! Like it’s an actual thing with objective value, and not just an offensive and essentially worthless porno-patriarchocratic concept. I can think of few concepts that are more offensive, really. Because “virginity” is predicated on the notion of active, authoritative annihilation, via the indisputable power of studly peen-pronging, of a passive and oppressed naif’s purported innocence, any dude who would actually “take” it is an instaloser, a rapist, and a creep.
But come on, let’s face it; the whole story has to be bogus, because any dude living outside a Victorian porn fantasy who could afford $30 large for a single, hypothetical hymen is rich enough that he could totally get the same thing for free any day of the week.
Oh, no.
In the picturesque Texas Hill Country, where for 2 years it did nothing but not rain, it now does nothing but rain.
Remember that Ray Bradbury story where the kid lives on a planet where it only stops raining for like 10 minutes once every 80 years or whatever, and everybody looks forward to it like mad, but the kid, whose only dream is to frolic outside unmolested by condensed atmospheric moisture, is accidentally locked in a closet by feckless playmates and misses the golden 10 minutes? It’s like that here at Spinster HQ. And, if I may say so, what the fuck? I turn my gaze skyward, hoping to catch an errant rose-gold ray of sun so that my lobe might convert it into obstreperantin or chortletic acid, but no. The sky’s just a vast expanse of dirty white wetness and it’s screwing sorely with my neurotransmitters. About the only ones left in my lobe are depressulose and stupenephrine. My yippee receptors are just flappin’ in the breeze, flappin’ in the breeze.
Maybe all this water wouldn’t be so bad if I were a newt, but a newt I’m not.
I’ve been told that the rain stops occasionally. Having been driven mad by the incessant tappa-tappa on the window pane-a, I am dubious in the extreme that this is the case, but if it is true, for the lovagod call my ass up when it happens, so I can biff out to the nearest field and do the butt-dance without having to put on that clammy rubber hula skirt.
It goes without saying that cabin fever has begun to manifest itself in the shape of TV viewing. Here are some of the repellent results of this pursuit.
1. A television commercial advertising a vitamin pill called Centrum Ultra Men’s asserts that some things are made just for men. According to the commercial, three of those things, besides, presumably, Centrum Ultra Men’s vitamin pills, are:
• bobbleheads
• duct tape
• a third thing I can’t remember
I’m calling bullshit on Centrum Ultra Men’s vitamin pills. I have in my possession one bobblehead and four rolls of duct tape, of which fact I provide photographic evidence above. I submit that the gender binary narrative supported by Centrum Ultra Men’s vitamin pills is bogus, dated, and sexist. Obviously bobbleheads and duct tape are not made just for men, but for anyone who needs a bobblehead, or who has to tape shit together.
Take me, for example. Like most women, bobbleheads and duct tape are integral to my daily routine. In fact, when checking the Spinster Agenda this morning, just after “Pump Iron, Get Ripped” and just before “Corrupt the Youth of Today” I observed these items: “apply ducktape to blown-out sole on paddock boot” and “tabulate preliminary results of Shatner bobblehead/Cheez-Whiz experiment.”
2. Another instance of sexism on television what recently caught mine eye was a promo for a show on Comedy Misogyny Central called “Tosh.0″. In this promo, Tosh.0, a loud, 20-something duuude — or perhaps he is a bobblehead — hilariously and edgily tantalizes his teen male audience with a segment that promises to answer the burning question “can women parallel park?” Cut to footage of a car backing up crazily onto a sidewalk. Women, avers Tosh.0, can absolutely not parallel park! Watch his show! Because denigrating women with moth-eaten sexist stereotypes is freakin awesome!
By some sad coincidence, I was using the Internet this morning, and just happened to come across the very segment Tosh.0 was promoting in his commercial. The video does, I regret to say, entirely live up to the extremely diminished expectations I have been forced to adopt regarding Men Aged 18-34. Not only does young Tosh.0 mock a middle-aged woman for being “really old,” he makes racist remarks about “L.A. Asians,” and throws in a few superannuated “jokes” about how women sucker innocent men into relationships, thereby destroying men’s lives.
To recap, this is what passes for funny on a major TV network in 2010: women can’t drive, old women can’t drive, Vietnamese women can’t drive, and women, with their cunning stupidity, live to shatter the dreams of innocent men.
3. I sometimes watch CNN while I’m pumping iron and getting ripped, and believe me, an aunt could write a dissertation, a Broadway play, and several meaningful protest songs on the garish spectacle of patriarchal mores on parade every minute on that network. But I’ll just skip all that and proceed directly to the commercial that irritated me this morning.
A handsome, silver-haired guy tells the camera that even though he did “everything he was supposed to do” as far as fitness and “eating right,” he still had a heart attack. So now he takes aspirin every day.
This ad isn’t explicitly sexist (although when compared with the “feminine” version of the same commercial — middle-aged wife-and-mother is “lucky” her daughter gave her an aspirin during her heart attack — its genderedness is pretty glaring). What particularly chaps the hide is this obnoxious practice of marketing through fear of sudden death cardiac death arrest. Because, wait. You mean I can pump iron and get ripped and eat nothing but raw spinach smoothies and take Centrum Ultra Spinster’s vitamin pills, and I still might croak, unless I get my butt on an “aspirin regimen”? Sign me up!
4. Jesus in a jetpack! Check out the huge fucking green “germs” on that member of someone’s family! It turns out that “hundreds of bacteria” could be on my kitchen hand sanitizer dispenser! I need an electronic motion-sensor model. I’ll mount it on my fence, so that when the feral hogs trot by, it’ll kill 99.9% of their swine flu.
Photo still from Lysol commercial. Note the word “Dramatization” in the lower left corner. Good thing they put that there, because otherwise I’d have been forced to conclude that the wholesome sport of basketball is now being threatened by a race of giant carnivorous paramecia.
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