Monthly Archive for February, 2011

Spinster Aunt Hiatus Diaries: I’m surrounded by invisible turkeys

Published by Jill on February 27, 2011. 41 Comments

Turkey

It’s 7:30 in the morning. I just got back from tracking a flock of wild turkeys through dense underbrush and am now plucking cactus needles out of my ankles.

I am an award-nominated spinster aunt, but my nomination was not, alas, in the field of wild turkey tracking. These turkeys were definitely in close proximity, but I never did, technically, espy one. Many people think of turkeys as stupid, goofy birds, but they are actually — for 20-pounders with brains the size of garbanzo beans — extremely accomplished in the art of not being seen.

They’re also extremely eloquent. I wish you could hear the eerie and sort of magical (but not really magical; as you know, I promote the scientific Weltanschauung) echo of their chill, burbling murmurs as it reverberates through the valley. This chill, burbling murmur is known in turkey circles as a “gobble.” It’s loud as fuck. The turkey flock wafts invisibly through the woods and the gobbling swells and seems to surge from everywhere at once and then suddenly – zippo. Like they just got beamed up.

The musical and poetical impact of this heartwarming avian nature crap experience rivals that of the celebrated lone-loon-on-a-misty-Minnesota-lake.

Posted in El Rancho Deluxe and Heartwarming Nature Crap. Bite me, Chad.

Announcement Korner

Published by Jill on February 26, 2011. 34 Comments

Red swamp crawfish

For the heartwarming nature crappists, I present the red swamp crawfish found beached at my low-water crossing the other day. No yella labs were injured during this photo shoot. Brief thoughts of étouffée, the ancestral diet of spinster aunts of yore.

Fran and red swamp crawfish

Meanwhile, there can never be a proper bloggy dustup without a mea culpa from me, and this one is no exception.

About an hour ago I started reading the comments to yesterday’s postette. Upon discovering that these were largely a perpetuation of the creepiness from the “Translucent” post commentary — despite the fact that I had expressed my disinterest in continuing this “discussion” — I blew another lobe. Whereupon I embarked on a deletion rampage. I slashed out innumerable remarks generated by the 3 or 4 commenters who had apparently mistaken I Blame the Patriarchy for their own personal blog. But something went awry, and I ended up deleting some comments that had nothing to do with that-which-we-shall-not-name. I’m sorry about that; it was a mistake, and if your remarks were among the collateral damage, I promise, it’s nothing personal.

To those of you who are inconvenienced by my sporadic attention to the moderation queue: you’re just going to have to suck it up. I am on hiatus. Hiatus means “your comment may not see the light of day for days, weeks, or ever.” I realize that you may consider this to be sub-par customer service, but remember: you always get what you pay for here at I Blame the Patriarchy!

To those of you who are considering leaving a comment on this post that has anything to do with the trans “debate”: if you do I will ban you forever.

Finally, to clarify the new-and-improved gender-identity-related commenting policy:

This blog endeavors to cultivate dude-free discourse. Therefore, any comment that expresses views proceeding from any discernible male-identified perspective, even if it is superficially pro-feminist, is not suitable for posting here.

Carry on.

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

Holy shit!

Published by Jill on February 25, 2011. 29 Comments

Phil, my assistant, just informed me that, while I was off doing the butt-dance for a couple of weeks, I Blame the Patriarchy sprouted about 1742 purulent boils and should probably be put down.

“You might want to check that blog you abandoned,” he said. “It’s full of morons.”

(Phil is only partially hip to the privilege he experiences as a non-moron.)

In actuality, the blog is not “full” of morons at all. It is only half full of morons.

My sibling Tidy has a T-shirt that says “This ain’t my first rodeo.” This blogular event could be mistaken for my first rodeo, though. Jesus in a jetpack. What was I thinking, posting wild fantasies like “transpersons are human beings” and then going off butt-dancing? I should have known that my remarks would attract a firestorm of hateshitcrapbombs. I should have known that once I got back to my desk I would feel sad and defeated, because it would turn out that I had failed the blamers who count on me to filter the ick out these polarizing discussions (even though it clearly states somewhere in the FAQ that blamers specifically shouldn’t count on me to do that. Putting a thing in a FAQ guarantees that reader expectations will veer in the opposite direction). I should have known that I would find 700 comments on the post and another 200 in the moderation queue, all incendiary in nature.

I am a dedicated spinster aunt, so naturally I only skimmed, with my jaundiced eye, in the most cursory way possible, the 900 (total) comments. Holy shit, there sure is a bunch of hatas what comment on this blog. I was invited by some of them to quit calling myself a radical feminist, since the definition of radical feminism is, apparently, “a branch of feminism based on hatred of transpersons.”

OK then. I’m a Savage Death Islandist. As a Savage Death Islandist, just let me say, “ew.”

“Ew” doesn’t even begin to express the precise nature of my disgust and disappointment, but I say it anyway because it taxes my blown lobe beyond its capacity to coin the mot juste.

In the spirit of Savage Death Islandist inclusionism, comments proceeding from the dudely hata perspective are still banned. It is likely, since I am on sabbatical, that dudes and hatas will incurse. If that happens, I urge the sensible reader to stop reading those comments immediately, and to watch cute puppy videos on YouTube.

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

Heartwarmth reaches new level

Published by Jill on February 25, 2011. 27 Comments

Posted in Dog Blogging, Horse Blogging and Not Altogether Depressing. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt gets translucent

Published by Jill on February 9, 2011. 772 Comments

EMERGENCY MOBILE PHONE UPDATE: the Andrea Dworkin post to which I allude in this post was misattributed to Renee Martin. It was actually written by Daisy Deadhead. I Blame the Patriarchy regrets the error.

Well, it’s happened again. There’s a goddam “trans debate” thing roiling in the comments of yesterday’s post. My blogging chops are obviously rustier than I thought; back in the day I would have nipped the whole thing in the bud with one of my snappy little aphorisms and a couple of judicious deletions. That’s what I get for going on sabbatical. Use it or lose it, right?

Previously, on I Blame the Patriarchy

I announced that IBTP is going dudeless. The Blametariat threw me a parade. Then somebody wondered if the dude-ban includes transwomen or not. A little red light flashed on my Patri-O-Meter, but because I am dull-witted I ignored it. All I said was that the ban only includes persons who post as dudes. And sure enough, another poster took advantage of my inattention to opine, “well, transwomen are men after all.” Whereupon the kimchi taco I had for lunch began to form a wad of napalm in the pit of my stomach. “NOOOOOOOOOO,” I wrote, even as I sensed the crushing futility of my appeal, “I’m putting my foot down, we’re not having this horrible stupid argument again!” That’s all it took. It was on.

So today I am going to — albeit briefly and somewhat abstractly, because as much as I’d like to bloot out a New Yorker-sized article on gender politics, my assistant Phil (who, by the way, is a trans man) says I gotta motor in about 15 — I’m going to splain a couple things and link a couple things and then it’s on to some nice heartwarming nature crap.

There are three aspects of this “debate” that particularly chap the spinster hide. One is that it is even considered a debate. Is there anything more demeaning than a bunch of people with higher status than you sitting around debating the degree to which they find you human? I don’t think so.

The second is the main anti-trans “argument.” It goes:

Unless you were born a woman, how can you really know what women’s oppression means? You benefited from male privilege once; how can we trust you? You mock us with your femininity. You’re not authentic.

This argument is phobic and dumb. It proceeds from, among other things like fear and internalized misogyny, the premise that there exists a standard or authentic “woman’s experience” of oppression that derives entirely from childhood indoctrination and imbues the experiencer with some kinda moral authority. The premise is false. An experience of womanhood is not the experience of womanhood. For example:

Some women have a little privilege. Some women have a shit-ton of privilege. Some women have a shit-ton of privilege and then lose it. Some women have zippo privilege and then get some later. Some women only ever have zippo, period. Some women are atheists, have short brown hair, drive red Fords, have scars where their boobs used to be, eat only vegetables and shave their mustaches.

Thus we see that there are many manifestations of womanity, both in terms of privilege and otherwise, each topped with its own unique little dollop of oppression. Of the gazillion factors that comprise female awareness, the condition of having been born female is but e pluribus unum. How do your personal woman-factors compare to, I dunno, mine? How about to Nadya Suleman (“Octomom”)? Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani? Susan Boyle? Candida Royalle? Aung San Suu Kyi? Aileen Wuornos? Carolin Berger (“Sexy Cora”)? My assistant Phil?

Not only is there no “standard” women’s experience of oppression, but a primary experience of womanhood is in fact inessential to the understanding of oppression. It is not necessary, in order for the oppressed to unite behind the common cause of liberation, that every oppressed person should share the background experiences of every other oppressed person. It is not only not necessary; it is not possible. The imposition of such jingoistic strictures precludes all possibility of revolution.

Oppression is oppression. Race, ethnicity, religion, pigmentation, sex, gender, health, education, class, caste, age, weight, ableness, mental health, marital status, employment status, diet, IQ, internet access — any combination of these or a thousand other arbitrary markers may be used by the powerful to justify oppression, but the net result is always the same: discrimination, disenfranchisement, degradation, dehumanization. It’s the Four Ds! The Four Ds make all oppressed persons identical enough.

My third point strikes a somewhat different and theoretical note. It has long been the contention of all expert spinster aunts that the notion of gender is itself a fiction promoted by the usual hegemonic patriarchal forces as an instrument of oppression. A person can only be “trans” if there are rigidly enforced gender roles from which and to which one might transition. Obviously, post-revolutionary society will not be burdened by tiresome gender constructs at all; nobody will have to become anything because everyone will just be whatever they are. Meanwhile, we gotta stop slapping the Four Ds on anyone who fails to fit the stupid misogynist gender binary.

I would love to delve into this at greater length, but the aforementioned time constraints compel me to put a sock in it. Fortunately, yesterday blamers Nails and AlienNumber were kind enough to link to Renee Martin’s excellent essay on Savage Death Island’s executive director Andrea Dworkin and her remarks on transgender politics. The remarks, excerpted by Martin from Woman Hating (1974), are sensible and kind and radical and a breath of fresh 70’s air. And they pretty precisely express the Savage Death Island doxa. Essentially, Dworkin’s saying that everyone has a right to exist on her/his own terms. Duh, right?

Transsexuality* is currently considered a gender disorder, that is, a person learns a gender role which contradicts his/her visible sex. It is a “disease” with a cure: a sex-change operation will change the person’s visible sex and make it consonant with the person’s felt identity.

Since we know very little about sex identity, and since psychiatrists are committed to the propagation of the cultural structure as it is, it would be premature and not very intelligent to accept the psychiatric judgement that transsexuality is caused by a faulty socialization. More probably, transsexuality is caused by a faulty society. Transsexuality can be defined as one particular formation of our general multisexuality which is unable to achieve its natural development because of extremely adverse social conditions.

There is no doubt that in the culture of male-female discreteness, transsexuality is a disaster for the individual transsexual. Every transsexual, white, black, man, woman, rich, poor, is in a state of primary emergency as a transsexual. There are 3 crucial points here.

One, every transsexual has the right to survival on his/her own terms. That means every transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation, and it should be provided by the community as one of its functions. This is an emergency measure for an emergency condition.

Two, by changing our premises about men and women, role-playing and polarity, the social situation of transsexuals will be transformed, and transsexuals will be integrated into community, no longer persecuted and despised.

Three, community built on androgynous identity will mean the end of transsexuality as we know it. Either the transsexual will be able to expand his/her sexuality into a fluid androgyny, or, as roles disppear, the phenomenon of transsexuality will disappear and that energy will be transformed into new modes of sexual identity and behavior.

I recommend reading Martin’s essay for a bit more context. Nails has a new post on the topic too.

______________________
* In 1974, “transsexual” was what we now call “transgender”

Posted in Keep your bias off my gender and Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt mutters in Yiddish

Published by Jill on February 7, 2011. 129 Comments

If you are anti-IBTP-on-Facebook — and no spinster aunt can blame you for that — you have been spared the recent grim ennui of a painful exchange between a dude named Alexander who fancies himself feministically enlightened, and a blamer named Ana who does not entirely concur with Alexander’s self-assessment. It’s a classic Clueless-Dude Time-Drain. Hell, you already know what went down even if you didn’t read it. You’ve probably seen 2583 of these feminist vs. feminist-dude splitsplats.

This one was especially funny, though, because of the unintentionally ironic caption the dude Alexander gave his feministical little Jezebel link. “If you were wondering whether men hate you [...]” was how he put it. I’m not even kidding. He couldn’t seem to grasp why some blamers might have a problem with a man strolling in and telling a bunch of women that men hate them.

Look, just to be clear: when a man hangs around the feminists, it’s weird enough, but when he announces “men hate you,” it strikes rather a different — some might say “menacing” — note than when, say, an award-nominated spinster aunt says it it. You’re not one of the girls, dude.

Just sayin’.

But really, it’s comical, the predictability with which dudes who fancy themselves feministically enlightened just can’t seem to shut the fuck up when they are found to be duding the joint up a little too hardcore. They all appear to have been issued the same script. The script goes like this:

Blamer: Points out that the dude himself is at this moment exercising the very male privilege he has just derided in somebody else.

Dude: Gets defensive [he is feministically enlightened, and no woman is gonna tell him otherwise]. Implies, by dint of hilarious and supercilious walk-on-eggshells-cuz-this-chick-is-touchy language, that blamer is overreacting and misunderstands him.

Spinster Aunt: Steps in and tells the guy to go back to feminist school.

Dude: Counters with a display of vast feminist knowledge, perhaps stating [as dude Alexander did] that Jill’s ideas are not original; he happens to know that Andrea Dworkin thought this stuff up already.

Spinster Aunt: Mutters “Oy vey,” and repairs to the barn to shovel horseshit of a more pleasant kind.

Blamer: [now joined by more blamers] tells dude what time it is, i.e. that merely by persisting as a dude with a dudely perspective in a dude-free feminist forum he is, in fact, an exemplar of the abhorred oppressor.

Dude: Makes disingenuous apologies because of course he never meant to step on any toes or annoy anyone in any way, but doesn’t cop to exercising privilege except in an abstract, generalized, all-men-do-it sort of way.

Blamers: Get cheesed off because dude can’t take a hint.

Dude: Gets cheesed off because blamers won’t appreciate what a learned and magnanimous fellow he is.

[This will continue until I come in for lunch. There'll be 20 or 30 replies in the pile-on, and I'll be obliged to pull the plug. Then I'll do a blog post about it, and 75% of the time the dude will email me to outline all the ways in which I am wrong about him.] The end.

It has been said about 173,942 times — including on the aforementioned Facebook thread — that feminist ally dudes who genuinely want to advance the cause can best do so by minding their own fucking beeswax. Theirs, after all, is the beeswax that most thoroughly and systematically jams women up.

There’s quite a bit of dudely beeswax that needs minding, too. Dudes might quit using porn, for example. They could quit sticking their dicks in people with lower status than them (both literally and figuratively). They could get vasectomies, or clean their own toilets, or read a bunch of feminist theory, or explain to all their buds the ways in which their boo-yah mores are violent and oppressive. If they are sensitive artistes, they could even quit mooching off their girlfriends. They could combine all this useful, proactive, pro-feminist, anti-domination behavior with — to echo a cry that has risen in many a parched feminist throat — shutting the fuck up and getting the fuck out of our way.

Hahaha! Hoooo-boy! That’s a hot one. I have to say, the notion that more than a handful of men would ever do any of that stuff makes me throw back my head and laugh, as the poet said, a hollow, mirthless laugh.

But back to the point, which is this: I’ve pretty much had it with these supposedly well-meaning dudes who try to exercise their nascent feminist chops on my personal patriarchy-blaming blog. Patriarchy blamers in general, and I in particular, in no way require the “feminist” male perspective on anything, ever. See the FAQ for more information.

So I am revising, somewhat, the blogular comment policy. I end up doing this every year or so, when the dudeliness starts getting out of hand and wearying me, which it always does because I am never enough of a hardass.

The revision is this: This blog is goin’ dudeless. If you are commenting as a dude, don’t do it here. I don’t ever want to have to read fingernail/chalkboard crap like this again:

“So let me get this straight, you are blaming the porn industry and men in general for the poor decision made by this woman? It is pretty sexist for you to assume this woman was incapable of make [sic] her own decisions. I’m pretty sure that no one was holding a gun to her head telling her to get breast enlargement or die. I really don’t understand why any women get breast enhancement. They don’t look good, except sometimes while wearing a bra. They don’t feel good. And if the woman decides to have children, breast feeding is not an option. Of the maybe 20 guys I have talked to on the matter, none of them would marry a woman who had fake breasts.” — some random asshole with a Hotmail account.

As always, dudes are welcome to both spectate and contemplate the ideas discussed in this blog and in other feminist work. But from now on, I’m inviting them to do us the courtesy of shutting the fuck up. Of course, I’ll grandmother in those guys who’ve been around for years and have shown themselves capable of human decency.

New dudes can bypass the sex restriction by going incognito. I got no problem with that as long as they complete the prerequisites, never use the personal pronoun “I,” and knock it off already with the fucking tiresome-ass male viewpoint and supercilious tone. Good luck with that, though, because you know as well as I do that sooner or later they always start mansplaining or yakking about dudesex. If we can tell they’re dudes, they’re out.

As far as IBTP on Facebook goes, effective immediately dudes are invited to stop posting status updates on the wall (“Wall”. Really? Facebook is stupid). Blamers, even on Facebook, are not interested in dude-directed discourse. For now the Facebook comments will remain open to all comers, and we’ll see how it goes.

The purpose of all this is not to censor men or punish men or hate men or do anything to men at all (although if that’s what they want to think, it’s no skin off my nose). Rather, it’s to keep the blogular discourse as free as possible from the contamination of male privilege.

End transmission.

Posted in Announcements, Blogulation, Dear god what about the men?, Mass Media, Men Hate You and Ways In Which the Internet Sucks. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt too lazy to write essay, posts blamer comment instead

Published by Jill on February 6, 2011. 35 Comments

This short essay, written by blamer TwissB in response to yesterday’s anti anti-abortion bill post, is so swell it deserves its own page. TwissB is, as the kids say, (or used to say 5 years ago), teh awesome. Wow, you say, I wish she had a feminist reference website! Well, your wish is my command. Yay!

********************

And even now another ERA silly season is in full swing as legislators in various states (e.g. Florida and Virginia) are being assured by ERA enthusiasts that a constitutional prohibition on sex discrimination against women will “NOT regulate abortion”! While they alternate these assurances on odd days with pro-choice marches on even days, one can only marvel at so much misplaced energy.

So, it’s time to offer a radical alternative.

Balkanizing primary sex discrimination into a swarm of separate issues as current Official Feminism does denies women a coherent way of rebelling against it. Primary sex discrimination is men’s invasive, subordinating attack on women’s reproductive organs through pregnancy regulation, prostitution, and pornography – the perfect target since nothing misogyny can do to hurt that organ unique to women can inflict the slightest pain on men. Consider any of those “but women are different so it would be discrimination if you treated them the same as men” bits of Aristotelian holy writ and sure enough the uterus or its related gotcha parts and functions are cited as the pretext for any acts of restriction or dehumanization men want to be free to inflict on women.

When it comes to anything men regard as “sex,” the right to treat women differently is taken for granted. Primary sex discrimination is protected by a gentlemen’s agreement. It is enough to trot out abstractions like the interest of the state, men’s natural needs, or the First Amendment to turn the cruelest attacks on women into unchallengeable institutions.

Difference arguments are more overtly made in cases of secondary sex discrimination in employment, for example, or military service assignment, or single sex schooling. Legal practitioners know that there is nothing in the Constitution to prohibit sex discrimination against women, but only Justice Scalia dares to say so.

Disparate impact is tertiary sex discrimination which can be ignored by courts and legislators or remedied as men’s advantage is perceived.

If women were to make a concerted attack on primary sex discrimination – pregnancy regulation, prostitution and pornography, I think we’d wreck the men’s game. It would tie the liberal and conservative cats’ tails together and hang them over the clothesline. But it would also challenge women on the left and the right to quit collaborating with men in reducing the most anti-women practices to political entertainment for men.

Posted in Men Hate You, Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society and Sexploitation. Bite me, Chad.

GOP: “Let us bravely endure the deaths of impregnated women who can’t afford non-misogynist healthcare.”

Published by Jill on February 5, 2011. 40 Comments

Has it been 8 degrees for the past week in your little acre of paradise, causing rolling blackouts and catastrophic bunkhouse infrastructure failures? No? Then perhaps you’ve enjoyed electricity and its lovable sidekick, Internet/cable news access, allowing you to get a load of this bullshit: H.R. 358, the so-called “Protect Life Act.” This vile piece of legislation is astonishing — even for the usual suspects who hate women professionally — in its full-on, unapologetic, violently misogynist rancor. The bill contains a provision that would permit woman-hating hospital staff to withhold life-saving abortions from critically ill patients.

Let us pause for a moment to let that sink in.*

The degree to which motherhood is reviled in our culture is generally unappreciated, thanks to cloaking devices like Mother’s Day and other patronizing practices and sentimental narratives. Putting Mother on a pedestal effectively disguises society’s contempt for her. But beneath the glib and oily layer of saccharine lip-service is an abiding sense of mother’s worthlessness except as a self-sacrificing incubator of domination culture.

Mother’s sacred duty is twofold: give birth, then imbue the offspring with the mores required to replicate patriarchy. She must perform this selfless low-status duty at all costs, including, apparently, that of her own life.

Women who fail to become mothers, as well as mothers who fuck up and deviate from the impossible standards mandated by the official patriarchal narrative,** are always punished in one way or another. With this anti-abortion bill dealio, unless she is fortunate enough to be ill in a hospital that does not receive federal funding, a woman who is insufficiently robust to carry a fetus to term may be punished by death. Just like that.

Mother’s function appears to be child-centric, but in actuality it serves domination culture at the expense of her children. As feminist analysis has shown, society has only two uses for human progeny: as pawns in the ongoing effort to control women, and as drones forced to absorb patriarchal messages that mold them into the obedient adult proles necessary to further the interests of the megatheocorporatocracy.

Fetushood is romanticized by godbags and misogynists, but as we have seen time and again, no real concern for the fetus’ well-being obtains after birth. We know this because what happens after birth is childhood, a hood that can only be described as ghastly. Any personhood conferred upon the former fetus is null and void as soon as it becomes a baby. Childhood is nostalgified by adults who perhaps recollect gaps in their own oppression training, when some little spark of joy might have erupted for a moment or two. However, because children are not recognized as fully human, and are in fact routinely abused and oppressed by nearly every adult who crosses their path, actual childhood is, at best, overwhelmingly a painful period of indoctrination, and at worst, a violent nightmare.

But back to motherhood. Crap like this “Protect Life Act” — named by one of those congressional aides who majored in Doublespeak at Dickhead & Prick University — is useful in exposing mother-hate that is normally hidden. The general public may be unaware, but it is codified in the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women, in the Dutiful Mother Provisions, that a woman’s essence consists of her uterus and the contents therein. This clause allows assholes like pink-faced, woman-hating bill sponsor Joe Pitts to seek retribution when a woman exhibits reproductive nonconformity, such as getting sick. Whereupon it naturally follows that hospital personnel may, at their whim, elect to kill an impregnated human rather than disturb any genetic material attached to her personal person.

_____________________
* Let us also pause to consider that, on top of every other level of wrong, this bill is just plain crazy. If an impregnated woman dies, so will the fetus, right? If the fetus is gonna die anyway, letting the woman die when an abortion will save her life is nothing but fuckin godbag politics.

** That is, all women.

Posted in Compulsory pregnancy, Men Hate You, Politics and The megatheocorporatocracy. Bite me, Chad.