Monthly Archive for July, 2010

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Horrifying frizz experiences and other stories

Published by Jill on July 10, 2010. 58 Comments

Uh-oh!

Sometimes I feel the patriarchy most of all with feminist groups, and the P leaves me alone on occasion in the real world. Hell, I turn off the TV and the patriarchy almost ceases to exist. Then I’ll be on a feminist committee and feel like women actually grouping together against the patriarchy are the most deadset against us getting anywhere.

But I refuse to believe I participate. [from a blamer comment on the Spot of Art post]

As a professional expert spinster aunt it is my sworn duty to inform you, blamer, that you are wrong-o.

What you are experiencing is Anti-Oppression Fatigue. You’re pissed at the feminists because they’re a ceaseless reminder that patriarchy does not leave you alone. You’re tasering the messenger. Ouch! It burns!

You can turn a jaundiced eye toward the arguing feminists, you can shoot your TV, you can imagine that the dominant culture “leaves you alone,” and you can refuse to believe stuff that’s actually true. But your agency is illusory. It is not possible not to participate. There are wheels within cogs around sprockets under layers of dung upon substrata of filth. To wit:

Even if — as you enjoy what you perceive to be a patriarchy-free moment — you’re lounging on the couch you made yourself from sticks you found in the woods, wearing the rough-hewn mu-mu made from cloth you spun yourself from the bamboo you grew on your roof, eating a salad of organic homegrown alfalfa you raised from heirloom seeds and gazing at this post with the computer you hand-built from scrap metal found in a dumpster — there is no way — no way — you personally have not availed yourself of the products of human oppression.

Even if nobody is molesting you, harassing you, hitting you, pimping you, judging you on the size of your ass, selling you carcinogenic wrinkle cream, working you like a dog in a strawberry field and paying you jack shit, taking naked pictures of you and posting them on the Internet, feigning interest in how you coped with your most horrifying frizz experience, sending you subtle messages through film, TV, the Internet, and other media that you’re nothing but a piece of ass, preventing you from obtaining an abortion, threatening to fire you if you don’t put out, leaving your toilet seat up, or murdering you, a gazillion women and kids actually are experiencing this shit — patriarchy — as a big, violent bummer.

The dominant culture of domination is all up inside your shit, too, like one of those 30-foot parasitic worms winding itself around your intestines. It oozes from every pore. You collude with it daily. It’s your first language. Deny this at your peril.

Patriarchy is the reason women don’t get it together and throw a feminist revolt, not feminists. The whole set-up is rigged, see?

Remember, ladies: whenever a feminist takes a day off, a penisface gets his wings.

Posted in Oppression Culture and Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society. Bite me, Chad.

No Art Week would be complete without Yoko

Published by Jill on July 4, 2010. 136 Comments

On the other hand, here is a film script excerpted from our girl Yoko Ono’s 1964 arty book Grapefruit. In Grapefruit, Yoko writes poetical instructions for arty stuff, theoretically for the reader’s own lobes to complete. Like “go sit out in the sun and eat a tuna sandwich.”

What a lazy artist. Trying to oil out of making the tuna sandwich herself.

“Burn this book after you’ve read it!” Yoko writes in the overleaf. I suppose that seemed pretty subversive in 1964.

“The best book I’ve ever burned!” witty Beatle John Lennon adds in the 1970 edition.

But back to the script. Oops! Feminism Fail. To wit:

Film No. 5 (Rape, or Chase)

Rape with camera. One and a half hours, colour, synchronized sound.

A cameraman will chase a girl on a street with a camera persistently until he corners her in an alley, and, if possible, until she is in a falling position.

The cameraman will be taking a risk of offending the girl as the girl is somebody he picks up arbitrarily on the street, but there is a way to get around this.

Depending on the budget, the chase should be made with girls of different age, etc. May chase boys and men as well.

As the film progresses, and as it goes towards the end, the chase and the running should become slower and slower like in a dream, using a high-speed camera.

I have a cameraman who’s prepared to do this successfully.*

Something’s just a tad awry with the scenario. Something churns just slightly the viscera of the Spinster Aunt of the New Millennium. It gives her auntly nostrils a wee enwrinklement. What could it be?

Gosh, I wonder if it’s that the script proposes a fucking snuff film? A dude hired by the artist to randomly select women on the street and run them to earth, filming them the whole time? And Ono thinks there’s a “risk” that the victims of this predation might be “offended” by what she has no problem calling “rape,” yet proposes there’s a “way around” it? What way would that be? After the terrified victims are cornered “in a falling position” in the alley, does the dude chirp “Smile! You’re on Candid Rape Camera!” and everybody has a good laugh? Or does Yoko simply pay her off with John’s dough?

I bet she’s got a cameraman who’s “prepared to do this successfully.” Pervy motherfuckers with cameras aimed at victimized women are never in short supply now, and I doubt it was any different in 1964. That she’s using footage of actual victims shot from the point of view of one of these predatory knobs puts this feminist statement pretty unequivocally in Bogus Town.

This film, now titled more succinctly “Rape”, actually got made in 1969, co-directed by good old John Lennon. Coincidence? I think not. It featured a young undocumented, non-English-speaking immigrant woman chased through the streets of London by Yoko’s willing camera dude. The apparent randomness of the victim’s selection by the camera dude was bogus; the woman’s own sister colluded with Yoko to set her up (nice). The 77-minute film ends, according to this essay, with the woman “curled up on the floor, shielding her face from the intruder.”

The aforementioned critique (written by a dude) excuses the Ono-Lennons from this pretty creepy ethical lapse by suggesting that the importance of the film as a fucking pomo “Truth-Event” supersedes the right of a woman not to be chased by a predator through London for the sake of an art fling or for anything else. The author alludes to the film “Rape” as a “feminist masterpiece.”

Check this fucking pomo violence-rationalizing shit out (I swear I didn’t get it from the PoMo Generator):

However, if we are to submit “Rape” to examination under Badiou’s framework of the Truth-Event, then questions of moral knowledge suddenly become less relevant (perhaps even completely irrelevant if we consider that the Truth-Event shatters the preceding positive ontological order of Being) [...] “Badiou calls the language that endeavours to name the Truth-Event the ’subject-language’. This language is meaningless from the standpoint of Knowledge, which judges propositions with regard to their referent within the domain of positive being.”

What’s one more woman sacrifice? Jesus in a jello mold, this fucking analysis is even more problematic than the film. For one thing, no “feminist masterpiece” can exist, pretty much by definition.

Furthermore, for a spot of art to be considered feminist, it should, at the very least, refrain from inflicting actual terror on actual women.

Iy yi yi.

______________________
* Excerpted from Art and Feminism by Helena Reckitt and Peggy Phelan. Yoko Ono, ‘Film No. 5 (Rape, or Chase)’, Grapefruit (Tokyo: Wunternaum Press, 1964).

Posted in Art is my LIFE and all old movies suck. Bite me, Chad.

Art week brings you a spot of art

Published by Jill on July 3, 2010. 31 Comments

Sue Williams, 1992It’s the last day of Art Week, so I thought I’d better actually squeeze in some actual art. Here’s a painting by Sue Williams.* A Funny Thing Happened, 1992. It comes with a trigger alert.

This painting, about 4′ square, sold for $61,000 in 2008.

The picture depicts three rape scenarios: the first begins with the protagonist wearing “pretty new shoes” and ends with the victim’s beheading and inner uncertainty about what just happened (“now what is it I’m feeling?” asks her disembodied head). In the second (“Funnier”) the victim fights back, but it is unclear whether she is successful. In the third (“Funniest”) a nail-polished hand fires a gun at a set of disembodied dude-organs (“Oh geez, is it really all that bad?” asks the hand. “Don’t shoot” says the dude-organ).

On the edge of the picture, a headless angel flap flap flaps, captioned “too late” and “couldn’t decide.”

What you can’t make out from my bootlegged JPEG are the tiny scribbled inscriptions that reveal, comic book-style, the woman’s inner monologue, some Greek chorus stuff, and the male figures’ (rapist, doctor) out-loud utterances.

“– and don’t forget to dress for success! the Dali Lama”

“Shut up! Can you find anything to cram in her mouth?”

“Bad panties to be caught raped in. Plan ahead.”

“– We don’t know if she enjoyed it or not. This case remains a mystery…”

“Out of my way– I’m a shit doctor. Slut.”

“Evidence too embarrassing”

Here is the Artist’s statement, 1993:

Do victims feel the kick as pain or pleasure? ‘Fuck off.’ When the object of my love and affection gives me the boot as hard as he can it hurts quite a bit. Also, a deep feeling of humiliation and rejection (harder please). Yet there is something horny about the feeling: dear old Dad. Of course I go back for more (home). This is a riot for everyone with their shit together. Well no alternatives came to mind at the time. What can I say? And all these bruises about the face and misshapen lip touching the nose (a turn-off) so everyone knows what you’ve been up to. Oh, the embarrassment, the shameful feeling of worminess. ‘Look, an untogether woman’ Even from Dad! ‘How could she let that happen?’ No gun. ‘How could she do that to herself?’ How did I kick myself in the head? I am a worm, hear me whimper mumble mumble. Fuck you all. Fifteen years of therapy, groups, twelve-step-programmes. I’ll never do it again. Then I am attacked and raped by a total stranger (I swear! O can’t he see that I am centered and working on boundary issues? That I have my shit together: Hell — I OWN my OWN SHIT. What gives? Why wasn’t I training in combat? Should I go outside again? Well, no alternatives came to mind at the time.**

Back in the 70s one of my art history professors, the curmudgeonly conservative Norris Kelly Smith (d. 1998), used to do this for the final exam: He’d project a slide of some ghastly masterpiece from the Uffizi and say “Would you hang this on your living room wall? Why or why not?”

Just so you know, if you wrote in your bluebook “I wouldn’t hang this on my wall because I don’t like it,” you’d get an F.

Because Norris K was so enamored of his Caravaggios and Parmagianinos and Cavatelli Conbroccolis, I never thought to piss him off and squander my grade point average by writing anything negative about the paintings. So I’d puke out all the crap he wanted to hear about vanishing points and contrapposto enbiggening the Glory of Man.

I get a big charge outta imagining what Norris K would have said about Sue Williams. He probably wouldn’t even have considered it art.

I wouldn’t hang A Funny Thing Happened on my wall because I wouldn’t want to have to look at the graphic though sardonic representation of rape every day over my pitcher of margs. I would certainly hang it on your wall, though, if you lived nearby, along with a printout of Williams’ artist statement, because I would like to come and see it sometimes, and enjoy the heartwarming validation of the creepy sensation of the self-doubtiness of the sex class experience, and because it is funny and horrible at the same time, a pairing I find appealing when “horrible” is unavoidable.

_________________________
* Sorry, I don’t own this painting, so the best I can do is this is crappy scan from my coffee table book. Another online image is available here, it’s smaller but sharper.

** Rickett, Helena and Peggy Phelan. Art and Feminism. New York: Phaidon Press. 2006. p 160.

Posted in Art is my LIFE and Rape Culture. Bite me, Chad.

LA Times publishes article about woman; global reserves of sexist stereotypes dangerously depleted

Published by Jill on July 2, 2010. 19 Comments

In the news: a woman known as Anna Chapman is accused of being some sort of Russian spy (Russian spy? Seriously? I didn’t realize we still had those. It’s comforting to know that at least some beloved artifacts from my idyllic Cold War childhood endure).

This LA Times story, the gist of which is gripping speculation concerning Chapman’s future as a reality show celebrity or the subject of “blockbusters”, is a real breathtaking pile of asswipe antifeminist hate speech. The authors don’t seem to know, or care, who or what she is, or isn’t, beyond the assertion that she is a “sultry red-head.” This is demonstrated by the photograph accompanying the article, which is about as sexy as a yearbook picture, and is therefore worth a thousand sexist words.

Here is a selection of the delightful metaphrasery employed in this article (some of which the authors breathlessly quote from other “news” sources). Chapman is

a “sexy antagonist”
a “red-haired beauty”
a “femme fatale”
a “Natasha”
a “secret sexpot” who “partied, shopped & schmoozed”
a “modern-day Mata Hari”
a “vivacious vixen”
a “practiced deceiver”
an “attention-seeking sensationalist bimbo”
a “beauty with a captivating tale”
a “romantic young woman”
a “billionaire or a hooker”

Because Chapman is such a red-haired sexy romantic billionaire mata vixen, her 15 minutes as a bankable piece of ass appears to be in the bag. On the subject of femmes parlaying their fataleity into fame and fortune, one interviewee was moved to recall that the woman Eliot Spitzer paid to rape now has a sex column in a newspaper. Sluts sell!

The LA Times omits to cite any evidence that Chapman is/was, in fact, a prostituted woman, but this is America, and evidence is hardly necessary. According to the authors, Chapman’s Facebook page reveals all relevant information: she is hottt, so obviously she’s a whore, which apparently renders the entire nation verklempt, and that’s all we need to know.

There are 10 other spies in the spy ring, but the LA Times doesn’t speculate about their marketing potential. A separate article reports that one of the dude spies jumped bail in Cyprus, but neglects to provide details about his sexiness, vivaciousness, wealth, hair color, or the dollar value of his “story.” Instead, the reader is forced to make do with boring minutiae such as the charges he was brought up on (failure to register as a foreign agent), and trivia regarding the diplomatic relationship between the US and Cyprus.

Thanks, PhysioProf

Posted in Bloodsport, Mass Media, Sexploitation, The Entertainment Industrial Complex, The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today and The megatheocorporatocracy. Bite me, Chad.

Blu r5rgh

Published by Jill on July 2, 2010. 25 Comments

My coffee table feminist art book

Fig. 72. Jilroy Frosting. Self-Portrait with Feminist Coffee Table Art Book. 1987. Megapixels and cellulose on mylar. 3″ x 3″.

This coffee table feminist art book has Nancy Spero’s 1971 Codex Artaud VI on the cover. If it alludes to Antonin “Jet of Blood” Artaud, it’s gotta be art.

If there’s one thing a spinster aunt can count on an Art Week to accomplish, it’s this: swollen lobes. Some Savage Death Islanders, voluntarily considering Art and Feminism, have lifted up their hearts and sung, and the chorus is this: “it’s not art if I don’t like it.”

I get it! Like, if you are unenthusiastic about 2008 Chicken Butt Viognier, and somebody hands you a glass at the taco-tasting party, you don’t say, “this damned Chicken Butt is too green and minerally to pair well with smoked avocado tacos.” You merely state that it isn’t wine. End of discussion. Talk to the hand. Well, perhaps you insinuate that wine is elitist first.

So. Certain Internet aunts might view talk-to-the-hand as a pretty self-absorbed, and not terribly compelling, argument, particularly in terms of an intellectual atmosphere conducive to feminist revolt, but maybe it’s merely indicative of the zeitgeist of 21st century feminism. Our ism has been decimated, ladies. Decimated by unceasing attacks from outside the ranks, by internecine feuds, by the Spice Girls, by knobjectivists blogging that feminism is a fucking buzzkill, by the massive popularity of recreational sexism in consumer pop culture, by spinster aunts, and by other stuff. Even spinster aunts don’t bother calling it a “movement” anymore, except with a sardonic lip-curl. Everyone has her own feminism now.

New! [Your Fantasy Feminism Here], tailored to your own unique lifestyle!

Well, we’ll see how far that takes us.

Posted in Art is my LIFE and Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society. Bite me, Chad.