Monthly Archive for May, 2010

MRAs on parade: chumpass motherfucker declares ownership of girlfriend’s uterus

Published by Jill on May 31, 2010. 86 Comments

It’s always the way: some horndog dude decides to prong a woman, then ends up dissatisfied with the results. So he has a tantrum. The tantrum may take one, or a combination, of many interesting forms.

Sometimes the woman doesn’t want him around anymore, so he stalks her. Sometimes she makes him hate her so much that he emails naked pictures of her to the whole school. Sometimes she gets old or fat so he keeps her around to do his laundry but starts pronging a younger woman on the DL. Sometimes she stops putting out so he fires her from her job. Sometimes the woman interprets the pronging as rape, so he calls her a liar and tortures her with mental cruelty and courtroom drama and ends up doing no jail time.

And sometimes he makes the woman pregnant. In this case he can choose from many, many popular options. He might he murder her, beat her, abandon her, marry her, slut-shame her, or, as in today’s case, appeal to the patriarchal justice system to enforce his wishes as to what should be done with the contents of her personal uterus.

I allude to Greg Bruell, a dude who, having some time ago made the personal decision to father no further children, proceeded to prong his girlfriend anyway (as reported in Salon).

Here I interject some No.1 Science Information, information that, had Greg Bruell been apprised of it, might have prevented all of his piteous suffering. That information is this: heterosexual pronging ranks Number One in the World as the most efficacious method of all time for obtaining pregnancy. You might think Greg Bruell had been at least dimly aware of the consequences of heterosexual pronging, since he has already fathered two children. However, Greg Bruell has apparently failed to grasp the connection between his lusty throbbing and the pitter-patter of little feet. Men, who are born with the right to prong anything that moves, are not typically required to understand this kind of cause and effect, since, as I mentioned above, they can easily oil out of any untoward consequences of their actions merely by invoking any of the buttload of traditional exemptions: claiming ignorance, deceit, she asked for it, she cuckolded him, or — an oldie but goodie — that the burden of pregnancy is totally a chick problem.

Anyway, Greg Bruell claims that he and his girlfriend agreed that she would terminate her next pregnancy “without waffling.” So when she boldly asserted human agency, kept the kid, and sued him for child support, Bruell blew a wheel. His gambit for oiling out of his responsibility? He owns the uterus! The National Center for Men took up the cause, saying (according to Salon):

“When a man and woman have discussed what they want and have an agreement, I do not think she has a right to impose her change of mind.”

You heard that right. The “I” in the above quotation is our old pal, antifeminist knob Mel Feit, who thinks women don’t have a right to change their minds.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this crackpot ideology would turn all women’s interactions with men into legally binding contracts permitting men to use them according to their whim. The contracts can be verbal (“She didn’t say ‘no’!”), sartorial (“she dressed like a whore so my hands were tied!), alcoholical (“if she didn’t want to have sex she shouldn’t have passed out at my party”), or body-language-ical (“she winked at me. What was I supposed to do, not rape her?”).

If for some unexplained reason you acquiesce to sex with a dude, and then, after reconsidering, change your mind three minutes later, tough shit, lady. He doesn’t have to stop, because you already said yes. It won’t be rape, because you already said yes. A yes, once given, exists in perpetuity! It’s a binding contract.

How is this possible in the tiny mind of Mel Feit? Well, according to the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women, women exist in a perpetual state of “yes.” This state of “yes” extends not only to sexual availability, but to compliance with male wishes in any quarter, across the board. To wit:

Bruell’s girlfriend supposedly agreed she would have an abortion if he ever knocked her up again. At that moment of yes, according to the Feit, this woman gave up her own autonomy and ceded control of her personal sovereignty to representative of the state Greg Bruell. Because she had agreed to be an occasional receptacle for his ejaculate, her uterus actually became the property of Greg Bruell. Greg Bruell thinks his ownership of the uterus should have afforded him the opportunity to force her to abort the fetus. And now that she’s defied his authority and had the kid anyway, he’s claiming she “deceived” him.

What? No!

Hey Greg Bruell: your genetic material is under your jurisdiction only as long as you keep it locked up in your gunk box. The instant you give your sticky little wad its joyous send-off, and the two of you part company, its fate becomes the purview of another host body. It is no longer your property, and you can’t say dick about what happens to it. However, it’s only fair that you should pay a fine for littering.

Don’t want women suing you for child support? Zip it up, you fucking dipshit!

Why can’t the same argument be turned around and applied to women?

Because women are an oppressed class without fully human status. The pervasiveness and normalization of rape culture strips women of the same quality of autonomy that men enjoy. Women are not always permitted to opt out of perpetual sexual availability without suffering harmful consequences.

Because, in other words, of the patriarchy.

This Mel Feit guy, in case you’ve forgotten, is the author of much virulent misogynist MRA crap. Such as these gems:

“At a certain point during arousal, we don’t have complete control over our ability to stop. To equate that with brutal, violent rape weakens the whole concept of rape.” [cite]

Because, duh, men should define rape.

“When will public discussions about sexuality recognize that, in this culture, women already make most of the decisions about sexual intercourse?” [ibid.]

Even if this were true — a fantastical contingency is almost too ludicrous to contemplate — what would be so terrible about it? Since women are forced to bear all the consequences of “sexuality”– from self-destructive beauty practices torape, pregnancy, child-rearing, and beyond, it would make the most sense if women actually did have some power in this quarter.

Only women have the extraordinary freedom to enjoy sexual intimacy free from the fear of forced parenthood. [cite]

Whaoah! That’s a hot one! Obviously, by “women with extraordinary freedom” he means “mythical creatures whose legal right to an abortion is not obstructed at every turn by puritanical godbag misogynist legislation.”

But I am a Western, privileged internet feminist, which means that all I care about is clothes, so here is my favorite:

[...] A woman has a greater freedom when she gets dressed in the morning. She can wear what she wants to wear because she can be what she wants to be. She can wear traditionally male clothing because she can do traditionally male things, work in traditionally male jobs, assume traditionally male roles and personality traits. She can cross over into a man’s world, share men’s experiences, then return to a world where no men are allowed. You might say she can choose to wear the pants in the family. She has free choice in fashion because she has free choice in life. [cite]

Mel Feit is bummed out on accounta a supposedly feminist woman in a pair of pants told him she wouldn’t fuck him because — I do not lie — he likes to wear skirts. This unspeakable tragedy has forced Mel Feit to dream up all kinds of wacky fantasies about how liberating it is to be a woman in our society, and about how selfish women are for refusing to share our magnificent skirt-freedoms with him.

Jesus in a jetpack, like anyone really gives a shit if Mel fucking Feit wears a skirt! I will personally donate all of my skirts to Mel Feit, if he will just promise to wear them to all future christenings, bar mitzvas, weddings, business meetings, and talk show tapings.

O if only I had all day to huddle at the desk and make fun of old skirt-coveting Mel Feit who can’t get laid by women in pants. But unfortunately I’ve got to sit around and watch the grass grow.

[Thanks, Ashley]

Posted in Dear god what about the men?, Knobjectivism, Lobe-blowing, Men Hate You, Rape Culture and The Argument Against Human Reproduction. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt is only mildly inconvenienced by having to post something to her blog

Published by Jill on May 30, 2010. 91 Comments

Do I have time to write a post today? Hell, no! So I’m re-publishing an excerpt from one of Helen Huntingdon’s comments on the recent ultra-controversial science post. Do I have time to link to the specific comment? Hell, no! To read the whole thing, type “Helen Huntingdon” into the new search engine (over there on the right) and see what pops up.

The other day someone told me you can’t really get to know someone without living with them. Unsurprisingly, it was a dude who said this, since he was arguing why het couples should live together (married or un-), no matter how statistically risky this is for the woman. I said that if this was true, it must be possible to identify something of value that cannot be learned any other way, so what would that be? He couldn’t come up with anything that wasn’t obviously absurdly false. I said that the assertion that to “truly know” someone you must live together is probably nothing more than cultural myth, but that this one conversation hadn’t produced evidence warranting drawing a conclusion either way.

It’s too bad I don’t have time to enlarge on this theme, but I do have time to continue the tradition of pointing out what I great post I would have written if I didn’t have to drive 20 miles to put white gunk on a horse’s eye. It would have had something to do with widely accepted but bullshit cultural myths, such as “rabbits are rodents,” or “it is possible to boost your self-esteem by losing weight.”

Name your bullshit myths below!

UPDATE: the damn search engine is suddenly not acting right. Will fix it soon.

Posted in Dear god what about the men?, Knobjectivism and Oppression Culture. Bite me, Chad.

Spiny tree pig of the week

Published by Jill on May 29, 2010. 54 Comments

North American Porcupine
It’s a bastard Monty Python sketch around here: Spiny Norman meets the plummetin’ sheep. My Golden Retriever Bert treed this specimen. North American porcupine roosting in live oak tree, Cottonmouth County TX, April 2010.

Here’s some No. 1 Science Porcupine Information:

They’re the most longevitous of rodents, maxing out at 10 years, which is longer than some Golden Retrievers. They eat bark. They like salt. Quills are specialized hairs. Porcupines don’t shoot their quills, but they (the quills) fall right out when dogs bite’em. The ends of the quills are shaped so that they work their way inextricably into the flesh of their would-be assassins. Possibly, against the eventuality of the porcupine pronging itself, quills are coated with an antibiotic substance that prevents primary infection when your dog gets porcupined.

In closing, I’d just like to say that my lobe is entirely blown by the recent and entirely lobe-blowing spate of anti-sciencism here at I Blame the Patriarchy.

The last time my lobe was this blown by something I read on the Internet, I was instantly transformed from Jill Psmith, casual funfeminist hipster punkrock sexlesbo, to Twisty Faster, Internet Radical Feminist. I allude to the moment I discovered that all of my liberal-dude real life pals, with whom I’d been canoodling on a local listserv, were actually gross antifeminist woman-hating pornsick horndogs. The year was 2001. A conveniently passing obstreperal ray originating from a distant galaxy blew my lobe on the spot. The result was this blog.

Here on Savage Death Island, we like to think that our thirst for knowledge is what separates us from the fucking dipshits. Thus I am shocked to learn that there exists so pronounced a thirst for backwardism.

Needless to say, stand by; way more No. 1 Science Information is in the offing.

If you have any Porcupine Science Information to add, feel free to enlighten the group. As a connoisseur of hideous smells, I am particularly curious about the reputed stench of the porcupine den, which stench I have never personally nostriled.

____________________
No. 1 Science Information Notes

Schmidly, David J. The Mammals of Texas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.

Conger, Cristen. “What’s the best way to remove porcupine quills?”. 13 October 2008. HowStuffWorks.com. Retrieved 29 May 2010.
______________________

Posted in Heartwarming Nature Crap, Lobe-blowing and Number 1 Science Information. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt has nothing better to do than bloviate on the same topic as yesterday

Published by Jill on May 28, 2010. 107 Comments

The argument has been made that intuition is superior to science because it is somehow free of the oppressive misogynist entanglements that encumber its dude-dominated counterpart. A spin-off of this argument says that, because academia has traditionally given (and continues to give) women the stink-eyed bum’s rush, science is antifeminist and, presumably, must be shunned in favor of this women-centric intuition dealio.

Unfortunately, it is not possible for any concept, process, person, or cognitive function to exist outside of patriarchy. That’s what patriarchy is: a world order with firmly established and inescapable auspices. Science, like everything else on the planet, is Dude Nation’s minion, yes, but “intuition” doesn’t exist in a magical patriarchy-free zone merely because it is associated with women’s reality. In fact, it is because of patriarchy that women were assigned the supposedly unique and mystical power of hunchiness the first place.

Thus do we dispense with the first argument. Onward to Argument 2!

It is understandable and even necessary that feminist women should cast a jaundiced eye upon such facts as have been amassed by a scientific community that exists primarily to serve the megatheocorporatocracy. More than a few of these ‘facts’ have been used to smush women (and other sentient beings) over the past couple of hundred years, for the exclusive benefit of the ruling class (primarily Penis-Americans). Furthermore, nobody can argue that the science community isn’t really fucking sexist; more than a few women have contributed to scientific discovery, only to be ignored by both the Nobel committee and the PBS documentary that popularizes the breakthrough during pledge drive.

But the statement “science harms women” is not as accurate as is “the application, by misogynist knobs, of scientific method to systems of oppression harms women.”

Science is just knowledge, and scientific method is just a way of acquiring it. Because our world order is predicated on a pack of lies, it is, of course, incumbent on the individual to determine the truth and/or philosophic value in anything presented as scientific fact, but it is imprudent, backward, and self-destructive to curl a suspicious lip at knowledge itself (I will stop short of calling it irrational, since self-destruction may sometimes be seen as a reasonable solution to certain insurmountable pickles; however, such situations are generally the result of the fundamental incompatibility of fully-realized humanity and oppression culture).

Anyways, I assert that knowledge not acquired through scientific method is way more suspect than that which is acquired through scientific method, on accounta, without quantifiable, measurable evidence to which analysis has been applied and upon which the full force of one’s awesome intellective powers has been brought to bear, what you got there is unsupported assertion based on reasoning that may or may not be flawed, but you’ll never know, because you didn’t run your shit through the Number 1 Science Information Test Lab.

Another term for “unsupported assertion based on reasoning that may or may not be flawed, but you’ll never know, because you didn’t run your shit through the Number 1 Science Information Test Lab” is belief. I could give you 7,894,532 examples of goofy or uncool results obtained from the confusion of belief with fact, and maybe I will, if my secretary Phil ever gets back from Starbuck’s with my double Caffe Immenso. Until then, perhaps 2 or 3 will suffice.

One example of flawed reasoning substituted for scientific inquiry, recently mentioned by a couple of blamers, is the tragic vaccines-cause-autism movement: my kid got vaccinated, my kid developed autism, therefore vaccines cause autism.

Another imperfect grasp of causation was famously demonstrated by the cargo cults of the South Pacific: some folks in New Guinea, having observed fabulous wealth being offloaded from war planes during WW II, erroneously concluded that technology-shaped things cause cool stuff to appear, and believed that they could attract more cool stuff by building imitation landing strips and replica airplanes out of vegetation, and by marching around in homemade military uniforms carrying gun-shaped pieces of wood.

Wait, wait, here’s a hot one (also vaccine-related): the notion, put forth by godbag misogynist politicians, that vaccinating teenage girls against papillomavirus causes them to turn into sluts.

Still another term for “unsupported assertion based on reasoning that may or may not be flawed, but you’ll never know because you didn’t run your shit through the Number 1 Science Information Test Lab” is intuition.

You know? I’m gonna go ahead and assert that ‘intuition’, a psycho-clairvoyant precognitive Spidey sense, doesn’t even exist. I prefer the term ‘insight’ to denote the process of observation and deduction applied at knee-jerk light-speed by the free-flowing neurotransmitters of a well-greased lobe. Like when you invent the wheel, or when you’re strolling along, and you encounter a stick, and your lobe sends up a flare, and sure enough the stick turns out to be a snake. That sort of thing.

It is true that, as an oppressed class, women have been trained to ignore, at least in certain circumstances, this handy and useful brain function, with the untoward result that we’ve become more compliant with the mandates of rape culture than if we’d been encouraged from birth to exercise to the max our awesome lobe-powers. We are exhorted (and rewarded when we do) to place a higher premium on conformity than we do on our own safety and well-being, even when the free-flowing neurotransmitters of our well-greased lobe initially suggest “No! Stop! Don’t do it, fool!”

Suppression of lobe function is how women end up married to schmucks, wearing high heels, faking orgasms, getting boob jobs, and smiling coyly at strangers with candy.

But heck, isn’t there a baby-with-the-bathwater thing going on with this full-bore embrace of the myth of intuition at the expense of actual science? The insight-bush might bear the occasional fruit, but the lobe isn’t omniscient! The lobe can’t predict the future! The lobe simply cannot intuit which of the brown spiders, purple mushrooms, or lumps in your boob will kill you! You need actual knowledge to traverse this treacherous terrain. This kind of knowledge comes from science.

While this so-called ‘intuition’ dealio may give satisfactory results as an immediate dispenser of just prejudice in emergencies, when there’s time, why not send the old intuition around to a couple of the other lobes for some rational analysis? Why not check out what some other people have done, rational analysis-wise, with their so-called intuitions? Why cling to myth, assumption, fallacy, or belief? And what about intellectual curiosity? What about enbiggening the horizons of human endeavor?

Persistent and willful ignorance is the enemy of liberation! A life that eschews science is a life is lived entirely in the present, like that of a beetle, or a puppy. And although puppies possess several enviable attributes, a surpassing appreciation of the value of truth isn’t one of’em.

Although it can possibly be said that puppies are themselves cosmic articulations* of truth.

________________
*I anthropomorphize the cosmos in this fashion for purposes of sentimentality and poeticalness only.

Posted in Magical Mysteries from Godtown, Number 1 Science Information and Oppression Culture. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt reveals her inner Firestone

Published by Jill on May 27, 2010. 94 Comments

Holy bajoly! The discussion on one of my recent posts has taken quite an unexpected turn. It went from the idea that women’s history has been erased/co-opted by the dominant culture to the idea that — I’m not even kidding — science is bad!

Unfortunately I have to go and see a girl about a horse, so time is short, but here’s the gist of the much better post I had intended to write on this topic (it was going to have more jokes, and probably an unforgettable new coined term, so it’s too bad, but there it is):

Science is bad, apparently, because men dominate the field. Also, women are better than men because we “have an intuitive understanding of nature and the processes involved.”

Concludes this commenter:

All the paper that men need to record history that they destroy, to transmit information, that we used to tell by stories and metaphors, is just a waste. They are just inefficient. It’s annoying because I always understood how bees and flies and some birds and bats flew, intuitively and it is only in 2005 that male scientists begin to understand it, with high tech equipment. It’s annoying also because they claim we never knew it, when Nietche(sp) wrote about it, the oscillation. It’s soooo dumb.

Women’s intuition? Seriously?

Again I say it: holy bajoly!

Intuition is unproven conjecture based on this, that, or the other thing. As blamer Nails put it:

Science is about understanding that your intuition is not always right and that the way to really *know* that it was involves testing and repeatability and good structure for experiments. You can tell me you intuitively know whatever you want to, but it doesn’t prove it at all.

Science is a process by which one discovers actual truth. Have Pinkfaced Captains of Industry and their Dude Nation minions subverted the scientific method for evil? Sure. Does their having done that invalidate the method itself, to the extent that goddessy ladies should pooh-pooh the whole idea in favor of some kind of magic lady-worship cult, the centerpiece of which is faith in “feelings”?

It is unlikely that the best place to find truth-n-beauty is at a matriarchy convention in San Marcos where the subject of the keynote speech is “My Journey with Sekhmet Goddess of Power and Change” and afterward there’s a drum circle.

Patriarchy is the problem, not science. Science does not oppress women. Dude culture oppresses women. I’m not advocating “science equality,’ either. I’m advocating — as always — liberation from oppression. Is anything more liberating than truth-n-beauty? I ask you.

Scientific discovery leading to human-friendly technology is the only way we’re gonna get out of the dark ages. For example, here at the lab at Spinster HQ we’re working on an anti-patchouli ray which we fully expect will change the way we smell public spaces forever more.

Posted in Blogulation, Magical Mysteries from Godtown, Number 1 Science Information and Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society. Bite me, Chad.

Gentle reminder of the week

Published by Jill on May 26, 2010. 41 Comments

It seems there may be some confusion regarding the degree of frequency with which patriarchy blamers are expected to comment on a given post. Thus do I trot out of mothballs the relevant passage from our award-nominated manifesto, Patriarchy-Blaming the Twisty Way: Guidelines for Commenters:

If you find yourself commenting more than 2 or 3 times on a given post, please consider shutting the old piehole.

Following this simple advice will prevent the comments section from becoming a bottomless pit of dreadful stream-of-consciousness-ness. Thank you and carry on.

Posted in Announcements and Blogulation. Bite me, Chad.

Heartwarming $20 Bill of the Week

Published by Jill on May 26, 2010. 19 Comments

American money (and spider)

The picturesque Texas Hill Country is full of pleasant surprises. Take this abnormally tiny $20 bill, for example. I sure did!

Posted in El Rancho Deluxe, Heartwarming Nature Crap and Not Altogether Depressing. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt yearns for radfem wiki

Published by Jill on May 24, 2010. 133 Comments

Have you tacqueax seen this? I found it when I was researching TV tropes. It’s called TV Tropes.

TV Tropes is a charmingly nerdy, somewhat dorkily written pseudo-scholarly reference work, a wiki-style compendium of literary conventions and devices used in television and beyond. Some of the tropes are direct from the good old literary canon, some are modern coinages what may or may not stand the test of time, but it’s all so Byzantine and labyrinthine and mezzanine and infinitely recursive I just can’t stop reading it.

This wiki is nothing if not overkill. It covers the beaming up of the aforementioned conventions and devices into the 21st century media mothership, sure, but it also identifies, classifies, and documents modern media-specific conventions and devices to the point of neurosis. This thing is hilarious, especially if you are a cinquagenarian spinster aunt who has begun to feel the hot breath of future shock on her wrinkly neck, because the concepts are often specific to pop sub-cultures I know nothing about on accounta they weren’t around when I was young enough to care about pop sub-cultures to the point of identifiying, classifying and documenting their minutiae. Anime. Video games. Fanfic.

Here’s an example.

Paratext

Everything that is an element of the whole package immediately encompassing the text and not part of the text itself.

In other words, all that stuff that isn’t a part of the show/movie/story itself, but still comes with it. The stuff on the box, the stuff that comes before the show/movie, etc.

I had to meditate on that for a minute before I grasped what is meant by “the whole package” and “stuff on the box.” Whereas I might consider dustjacket blurbs as examples of something called “paratext,” it never before dawned on me that there is a whole, classifiable species of non-content “content” that envelops modern media. Bonus material, pop-ups, trailers, bloopers, closing credits, even PBS titles thanking Viewers Like You. I would quibble that some of this stuff isn’t, technically, text, but a lot of it is, so, fine.

Anyway, I mention all this because it has long been a dream of mine to do something similar with a blaming wiki. How convenient it would be! Instead of putting all this time and effort into banging out these lousy posts, I could just publish a collection of wiki links to the specific ideas and concepts I wish to drag out of mothballs to make whatever point, and call it a day! Because let’s face it; there’s not a whole lotta new under the patriarchy blaming sun.

Not My Nigel, Mansplainin, Obstreperal Lobe, She Was Asking For It, Empowerfulment, etc — they’d all be neatly collected in one spot for your blaming pleasure. Sadly, I’ve never been able to figure out how to do this wiki without having to spend 8 days a week culling out all the troll crap.

The idea for this non-post popped into my lobe when I noticed that my last two essays (“The Girl” and “The Slain Masseuse”) are actually blaming-trope classifications in disguise.

Got any favorite blaming conventions of your own? Or any idea how to pull off the wiki? Please enlighten the group.

Posted in Mass Media, Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society, The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today and Ways in Which the Internet Is a Hoot. Bite me, Chad.

Profiles in Patriarchy: “The Slain Masseuse”

Published by Jill on May 23, 2010. 31 Comments

Good lard! TV! I ask you. They should exhibit TV right next to the Old Testament in the Great Moments in Patriarchy-Replication Technology Museum.

I just watched half of a true-crime-umentary: “48 Hours | Mystery: Seven Days of Rage: The Craigslist Killer.” I would say that the subject of this true-crime-umentary was Craigslist killer Philip Markoff, except that it wasn’t. The real star of the show was Dead Hookers and Kinky Sex.

That’s right, almost the entire program was devoted to sensationalizing the killer’s victims, prostituted women described variously as “the Las Vegas escort,” “a stripper” and “the slain masseuse” who had placed “erotic services” ads on Craigslist. Here is how murder victim Julissa Brisman is portrayed:

“What we know about Julissa before this was that she was a party girl. She was living the high life in New York,” said Cramer. “She was a young, beautiful girl in New York City and she took full advantage of her youth and her beauty to, you know, live it up.”

Cut to a bunch of photographs of “aspiring model”/”slain masseuse” Brisman in various states of poutiness and undress. The pornulated photos were taken by a super-gross photographer dude who “was helping Julissa in her career.”

Let me tell you this one thing. Gross old dudes who photograph young women in lingerie to “help them in their career,” and then give the photos to “48 Hours” after the women are murdered in high-profile Beedy Ess Em cases can kiss my entire ass.

But I digress.

Just in case there were members of the viewing audience who didn’t get sufficiently off on photos of dead women in porn outfits, or who enjoy sexually-charged racist epithets, “48 Hours | Mystery” threw in Vanity Fair reporter Maureen Orth’s observations about Craigslist’s sex section:

“Craigslist has a huge number of categories – M for T, men for trannies; T for M, trannies for men; rice queens, white guys who only like Asians; burritos, white guys who only like Latinos. I mean, these are all up there, all the time.”

Nice. But shit, I digress again.

My hide is particularly chapped by an interview with victim #1, whom Markoff kidnaped, terrorized, and robbed at gunpoint. Right off the bat the focus is on her boobs, on her line of work and how “lucrative” it is, and on how she was askin’ for it by booking herself into a swanky hotel as a free agent hooker.

[TV sexploitation sexpert Joe] Moura said that by acting as her own boss, Tricia was increasing her risk.

“If there’s a street prostitute, she’s gonna have a pimp down the street or across the street on the corner who’s protecting her. Somebody using Craigslist getting a fancy hotel in Boston, she’s on her own.”

So ladies, remember; if you’re gonna work the classier hotels, you’d better get yourself a pimp to “protect” you. Otherwise you might come down with a terminal case of slain masseuse.

Posted in Mass Media, Rape Culture, Sexploitation and The Entertainment Industrial Complex. Bite me, Chad.

Profiles in Patriarchy: “The Girl”

Published by Jill on May 21, 2010. 84 Comments

No secrets will be revealed when I say that I watch television with depressing regularity, and that this habit chaps my hide a mile wide, but I can’t stop, because the carnage endlessly fascinates. Even the supposedly feminist shows (“30 Rock”) feature, not real feminism, but only bogus patriarchy-marketing TV feminism.

Bogus patriarchy-marketing TV feminism is when the lead character is a woman, but she’s doing a man’s job with a bunch of other men, only backwards, in high heels. And sexxxy.

The exception is Jada Pinkett Smith, non-threateningly depicted doing a woman’s job, but with attitude: she stars as a caring, nurturing (but sexxxy) head nurse on a mediocre hospital drama. Smith’s is a proper female minority character who lives to serve. She bosses the honky doctors around a little, but when she bucks the system it’s always for her suffering patients, and never for herself.

During the last TV season, the trend was toward saucy female leads as blonde cops with relationship problems and buttloads of sex appeal. In “The Closer,” Kyra Sedgewick — horrible South Carolina accent and comical chocolate addiction complete — simultaneously heads a homicide squad and amuses her FBI husband with endearing feminine airhead antics while dressed as June Cleaver. In “In Plain Sight” Mary Somebody plays Mary Somebody Else, a US marshall who has triple-X muchacho-on-gringa sex with her smokin hot Telemundo soap opera star boyfriend. Holly Hunter is every biker’s raunchy fantasy chick in “Saving Grace,” one of those shows where a Christian-type God is a wisecracking mentor character.

Despite featuring women in title roles, these shows all feature male knight-in-shining-armor characters, dudely authority figures, scenes wherein women are chained by the wrists in dungeons, and dialog that alludes to the female rape/murder victim as “the girl.”

The girl, the girl, the girl. It is beyond insufferable when TV cops allude to female rape/murder victims as “the girl.” “The girl” is a convention enjoying huge popularity since the invention of TV cops, and before. Why, just this morning, in another hot flash-induced state of TCM-watching insomnia, I saw 20 minutes of a godawful 1956 western called “The Last Hunt,” in which the central theme is two white guys, one “good” and one “bad,” fighting to the death over ownership of a kidnaped Native American “girl.” This character appears as a silent prop in practically every scene, has like 2 lines, and is named in the credits only as “Indian Girl” (but is played by a smokin hot honky actress). Every line of dudely dialogue includes the phrase “he stole my woman.” Dude Nation translation: questions of good and evil are questions for white men; whoever ends up with the captive mute squaw wins.

Speaking of TCM and Native Americans, currently they’re running a series called “Race and Hollywood: Native American Images On Film.”

They get a UCLA professor to say a few introductory words about how patriarchal 20th-century Hollywood portrayed Native Americans and pretty much invented the damaging stereotypes that persist to this day, then they show John Ford’s “Stagecoach” (Geronimo’s on the warpath!) to illustrate the point. That’s swell, but what drives me nuts about these things — they’ve done similar series with gays and Asians — is that they seem to think it absolves them of the crime of perpetuating racist propaganda. For a week or two they pretend to support a critical approach to these horrible, bigoted movies, but then for the rest of the year they show’em over and over again, without UCLA professors of Native American Studies introducing them, without offering the slightest critical analysis, and without compunction or apology or chagrin. In fact, if anything, the tone of the presenters toward Hollywood’s joyful immortalization of honky oppression is downright celebratory. And of course TCM completely ignores the massive sexism and misogyny that oozes out of nearly every “classic movie” ever made (see my essay on “How To Murder Your Wife.”).

Mang, I gotta get some sleep.

Posted in Mass Media, The Entertainment Industrial Complex and all old movies suck. Bite me, Chad.