Monthly Archive for November, 2011

Little Niggling Instances of the Redoubtable Efficacy of Patriarchal Oppression, Part II: Shit I Saw on PBS

Published by Jill on November 23, 2011. 95 Comments

God, PBS sucks. Here’s why.

PBS, though it wants you to believe that it’s above this sort of thing (which it tries to demonstrate, as I have noted elsewhere, by those promo spots wherein divers Attractive Sample Children of the World in colorful rompers leap across the screen in slow-motion), definitely shoulders its fair share of the global misogyny-load.

First, have you seen the latest feel-good PBS promo montage? Among the various images of joyous human triumph and closeups of frogs licking their own eyeballs is a clippet excerpted from a show in which Tina Fey is awarded the Mark Twain Prize for Humor.

As you know, Tina Fey approaches greatness in many respects, and comes as close to a feminist presence as is tolerable by network television. Here is one of the pithy, relevant bits she did during her acceptance speech:

And, you know, politics aside, the success of Sarah Palin and women like her is good for all women — except, of course — those who will end up, you know, like, paying for their own rape kit ‘n’ stuff, but for everybody else, it’s a win-win. Unless you’re a gay woman who wants to marry your partner of 20 years — whatever. But for most women, the success of conservative women is good for all of us. Unless you believe in evolution. You know – actually, I take it back. The whole thing’s a disaster. — [cite: HuffPo]

Her speech ran several minutes, but the clippet PBS selected for the montage depicts Fey, the closest thing we have to a TV feminist, ducking her head in an apparent curtsey. Non-ironically.

Really? Tina Fey is too threatening a personage to be represented on PBS with an unbowed head? Come on.

OK, that’s a small thing, a split second thing, but you know as well as I do how those split seconds add up to whole lifetimes.

The Palin bit, incidentally, got edited out of the final cut of the award show. Way to keep it real, PBS.

Meanwhile, a four-part series entitled “America in Primetime” uses clips from “groundbreaking” television shows to explicate the manner in which TV character archetypes supposedly reflect actual human experience. The result is a stone butch dudefest.

The series imparts this message: “TV is about dudes, it’s awesome, and it’s art” (“Primetime’s” secondary argument for the awesome artness of TV appears to be that, compared to 2-hour feature films, TV series are a lot longer. But I digress).

Each episode in this “Primetime” series takes as its subject one of four character archetypes: “The Independent Woman,” “The Man of the House,” “The Misfit.” I watched “The Crusader.” This episode, quoth the website, “delves into the increasingly grey area between right and wrong as television heroes confront internal demons while seeking their own forms of justice.”

“The Crusader” features interviews with actors and writers who keep insisting that TV “mirrors” the “human experience.” You will hardly be surprised when I reveal that, in order to be a crusading TV hero who mirrors the human experience, you have to be a white dude in the middle of a bunch of physical violence. Human experience, according to American television, is white dude experience. Examples of TV crusaders: House from “House,” Sipowicz from “NYPD Blue,” Hawkeye from “M*A*S*H”, Jack Bauer from “24.”

Of course, PBS, as I mentioned earlier, loves diversity, so the producers of “Primetime” throw in a couple of tokens. They can’t profile an Asian crusader because none exists (well, there’s Kwai Chang Caine from “Kung Fu,” but that guy was only half Chinese, and problematically David Carradine was entirely white). Undaunted, they’re lucky to be able to kill both black and gay birds with one stone via Omar from “The Wire,” the noble gayblack criminal gunslinger so beloved of edgy American audiences.

“Primetime” also includes a perfunctory chick hero. She is neither Xena nor Buffy nor Starbuck nor Sidney from “Alias” nor Max from “Dark Angel.” No, she’s Scully from “X-Files,” a choice that particularly reeks of tokenism.

Scully's baby

Sure, we love Scully, the gun-toting FBI scientist field agent with the blazing news-anchor helmet hair, but let’s face it: the only thing she crusades for is the status quo. Scully has no demons, seeks no personal brand of justice. She’s just the tame, unthreatening, adult voice of reason, who, as Gillian Anderson here laughingly notes, is always filmed physically walking several steps behind her dude partner. They never give her anything more interesting to do than foil and rebuke and be secretly in love with the vastly more compelling and demon-filled and crusadery Mulder. Naturally — because what else can you to do your female lead? — aliens abduct her and rip out her ovaries. Mulder, on the other hand, is off getting high with the Indians. And when Mulder leaves the series? Like all female leads on TV shows that have run out of steam, Scully is of course saddled with an unwieldy alien baby. She spends the entire final season whingeing “My baby! My baby!” Scully can only be considered a crusader if you define “crusader” as “baby-obsessed killjoy who plays second banana to the much more complicated dude who really is a crusader.”

Says “Primetime” interviewee Diablo Cody, woman creator of “The United States of Tara,” in an attempt to explain the dearth of TV chicks with complex interior struggles,

Not to get all women’s studies on you, but maybe the idea of a hero with a really straightforward goal is sort of particularly male.

Yeah, for the lovagod, Diablo, don’t get all women’s studies on us; the dudes for whom TV is written find that very unsexy.

UPDATE: I have since watched the “Misfit” and “Independent Woman” segments of “America in Primetime.” In the former, it’s all dudes again. Dudes, dudes, dudes. Nerdy or quirky dudes “who defied comic stereotypes and societal expectations to reflect America’s diverse personalities.” White dude personalities, that is. Dwight from “The Office,” Gomez from “The Addams Family,” Louie de Palma from “Taxi.” Etc. Again, there’s one token chick, Tara from “The United States of Tara,” a character who plays dissociative personality disorder for laffs.

Unsurprisingly, most of the (all white) women characters featured in the “Independent Woman” segment are more accurately described as either misfits or crusaders or both (Roseanne, Mary Richards, Murphy Brown, Nurse Jackie), but are lumped together in a special “strong woman” ghetto because they are Vagina-Americans.

The clips are entertaining, but I stand by my original assessment of the series’ uncritical acceptance of a certain level of misogyny in entertainment. “Independent Woman” has that brainwashed tone you always encounter whenever the discourse tries to argue that since the death of June Cleaver modern women are livin’ the life of Riley. The thesis: since women TV leads don’t have to be paragons of motherhood anymore, and in fact can even have drug habits and be clinically insane in addition to being heterosexual hotties who remain deeply concerned with their relationships, modern television is a reflection of women’s liberation from patriarchal oppression.

Such as when the affluent white gals on “Sex In the City” sit around chic Manhattan restaurants discussing blow jobs. Women on TV, says “America in Primetime,” can be anything imaginable. Except, it turns out, a crusader or a misfit.

In a patriarchy, convincing the sex class they’re not oppressed is the name of the game. Thanks, TV!

Incidentally, I didn’t bother watching the “Man of the House” segment because those doofus dad sitcoms make me want to rip my own head off.

_______________________
Scully’s baby photo here.

Posted in Mass Media, Movies and TV and Oppression Culture. Bite me, Chad.

Little Niggling Instances of the Redoubtable Efficacy of Patriarchal Oppression, Part I

Published by Jill on November 22, 2011. 41 Comments

Certainly nothing will delight you more than to be apprised of a few instances of patriarchal oppression noted in and around Spinster HQ over the last 48 hours (I originally wrote “24 hours” but I forgot to finish the post yesterday). Two are from real life, and two originated on PBS. I’ll do the PBS ones later; this here post will stick with the real life episodes. Because they are personally anecdotal in nature and contain many first person pronouns, you may wish to skip them. I know I would.

Real Life Episode #1

As you may recall, I have recently come into a buttload of feral donkeys. I am the world’s foremost expert on everything except feral donkeys, so I email a reputable donkey rescue. I ask whether they can recommend any local donkey clubs or wild burro support groups or Central Texas donksperts who can help me with my new donks.

The reply to my query comes from the chieftain of the rescue organization, a chap calling himself “Burro man.” Because patriarchy is our social order, Burro man responds, not with anything remotely resembling an answer to my simple question, but with a useless mansplaination on how to train donkeys. As if I had asked “will you please explain in six sentences or less how to train donkeys?” Because it is totally possible to explain donkey training in six sentences or less.

Burro man’s donkey training method, incidentally, is to corner the animal in a pen with a section of portable panel. Boy, I can hardly wait to get out there and try to put the squeeze on a terrified, 500-pound feral donkey with an 80-pound piece of steel tube fencing. Nobody’ll get hurt at all.

Thanks a bundle, Burro man.

Real Life Episode #2

I invite a recommended fencing contractor over to give me an estimate (so I can fence in the aforementioned donkeys). Instead of the fun conversation about fence post diameters and brace configurations I had so joyfully anticipated, the discourse immediately takes a most unpleasant turn. I am dismayed to perceive that Mr McFence is one of those white dude megabores who blabs nonstop, not about fences, but about himself. And about his even more megaboring family.

With the result that I can now assert without fear of contradiction that I rank as the world’s Number 1 expert on this McFence numbskull. If Alfred A. Knopf called and said, “Hey Twisty, how’s about you ghost-write McFence’s autobiography?” they’d have the finished manuscript on their desk in less than a week. If I took a test and the essay question was “McFence’s views on corruption and the radical Muslim agenda in the Obama presidency may be said to precisely mimic those of Fox News pundits. Discuss,” I would totally ace that test. If the amount of McFence’s daughter’s annual salary was the answer on Final Jeopardy, I would totally win the big money. I know where McFence was born, the name of his church, and the names, occupations, and geographic locations of each of his forty-seven adult children (who were expertly raised by the sainted wife who really wears the pants in the family).

Oblivious to signs of my increasingly excruciating boredom, such as my grimace, my pulsating obstreperal lobe, or my repeated attempts to discuss fencing, Mr McFence will not rest until he has revealed more tedious details of his personal life. I would spare you, but then you wouldn’t know the true extent of my pain. So: he is 67 years old, he recently lost 40 pounds, he’s a Tea Partyer, his family are holy rollers, he wants to move to Alaska, he’s “part Cherokee,” and (like all Central Texas contractors) his favorite client and best friend in the whole world is Willie Nelson, especially now that Willie has fired all the “druggies” and has accountants who pay up promptly.

It’s as though he’s been cribbing from a list entitled “The Main Things Spinster Aunts Couldn’t Care Less About.”

You are undoubtedly familiar with the version of this guy who lives in your town, so I hardly need mention that during the course of our encounter, McFence runs out of A material early on, and is obliged to recycle most of his monologue three and four times. Maybe he thinks I won’t notice because I’m just a dumb donkey farmer.

At first it is unclear to me why my presence is required at all, since he is so determined never to let me speak. I eventually catch on that my role during the delivery of this epic soliloquy is to nod each time I am informed that that he’d been a Marine sniper “in Nam” where his best buddy sniped “over 300 kills” and “the V-C” had a bounty on his head.

Finally, after a hour and a half and many failed attempts, I manage to steer his attention toward a topic that is more fascinating than his mass-murdering Army buddy by many orders of magnitude: cedar posts and wire mesh. After the stunning revelation that McFence’s LDL cholesterol is down from 188 to 130, and before suffering for the 3rd time the gripping information that his son works as a landscaper on the coast, I actually pry an estimate out of him. He is silent for about 34 seconds while he does the cipherin’ in his head. He’s so quiet I begin to wonder if his astonishing profusion of empty babbling has in fact ruptured a vocal cord. But it is not to be. Horribly, he gets a second wind. McFence goes on to tell me how honest he is, how he’s just plain folks, how the good lord is looking out for him, and — don’t pretend you didn’t see this coming –

“I treat my wetbacks like family.”

Ohhhhh yeah.

It was a most painful way to learn this lesson, but believe me, I will never again leave the house without packing my Mr T in Your Pocket Talking Keychain. The most excellent device ever invented, Mr T in Your Pocket is used to advise dipshits to shut their piehole with your choice of 6 of the beloved A-Teamer’s most colorful catchphrases, including “Don’t make me mad, grrrr!”, the succinct “Shut up, fool!”, and of course the iconic “Quitcho jibba jabba!”

Incidentally, Mr T in Your Pocket is identical to Radical Feminist in Your Pocket, except that Radical Feminist in Your Pocket does not actually exist, probably because in it “Don’t gimme no backtalk, sucka!” has been replaced by the rather more romantic phrase “Please remain still while I saw off your racist mansplaining pencil-dick with the rusty machete they issue all humorless hairy feminists in Women’s Studies, fool!”

Next time: Little Niggling Instances of the Redoubtable Efficacy of Patriarchal Oppression, Part II: Shit I Saw on PBS.

Posted in Knobjectivism, Lobe-blowing, Patriarchy, my patriarchy and The Argument Against Human Reproduction. Bite me, Chad.

The Donkey Chronicles, Part 2

Published by Jill on November 17, 2011. 52 Comments

Certainly you are on the edge of your seat awaiting some sort of resolution to the Donkey Situation. Here’s the status report:

The donkeys’ owner has finally been located, thanks to the expert sleuthing of Sgt. Jimmy of the Cottonmouth County Sheriff’s Dept.

Daphne and Liriope, Donk InvadersCrappily, it turns out that the owner is Mr Classy from seven or eight ranches over. He is the irascible lying sumbitch who hates his neighbors, beats dogs, impales babies on pitchforks, welches on bets, drinks Miller Lite, goes to church, and eats at Cracker Barrel. He wants nothing to do with the donkeys. In fact, he’s been letting them roam free for years. Reports from ranches as far as 5 miles distant attest that these donkeys are quite the jetsetters. It’s gotten even worse since the drought. The creek that traverses all the ranches in this area has run dry, leaving a creekbed that livestock on the lam use as a sort of highway that runs for miles. These 3 donkeys are among the more notorious rogues.

Mr Classy tells Sgt. Jimmy that he is sick and tired of these donkeys, and that if he is forced to come and collect them from my place, he’ll just shoot’em.

I am now totally screwed, because although the urgency with which I require three feral donkeys is immeasurably slight, I obviously can’t send them back to that redneck dicksmoke and his cheap-ass shotgun. I mean, I jumped into 60 degree water to save that drowning jenny. It was a poignant, dramatic, and heartwarming episode that would have made an excellent feel-good segment on the local evening news. I can’t just send her off to be murdered after a thing like that, right?

So I tell Sgt Jimmy that I’ll forgive all the damages if Mr Classy will just sign the donkeys over to me. This is a pretty good deal for Mr Classy, since feral donkeys are worth quite a bit less than nothing in these days of drought and hay famine, and the damage caused by Daphne’s natatory episode, which I had intended to hit him up for, will amount to quite a pile.

So Sgt. Jimmy attempts to broker the deal, occasioning a call from Mrs Classy. She wants to know what time today I can come and get the donkeys. What do you mean, I say. Don’t I already have them? No, she says, they’re at her neighbor’s place, she can see them from the road. Sure enough. Since breakfast the donkeys have apparently traversed 3 miles of rough terrain and are now completely absent from El Rancho Deluxe.

This surprises me. It hadn’t dawned on me for some reason that the donkeys would decide to go back. Why would any donkey elect to abandon swimming pools and hay for a ranch with no swimming pools and hay? But it also drives home the realization that the three donkeys are in fact afflicted with a wanderlust woven so deeply within their mettle that even so magnetic a personality as my own is powerless against it. They’re tumbleweeds in the John Ford movie of life. “Babe, I gotta ramble” is their motto. “Don’t fence me in” is the theme song that plays during their fadeouts.

Which means I gotta fence them in.

I tell Mrs Classy that I’ll have to run some new fence before I can take custody, which should take a couple of weeks. This pisses off Mrs Classy. Since no promise of a future good deed goes unpunished, she delivers a brief but colorful monologue expressing her dissatisfaction with the time line. But what can I do?

So the anticlimax is that I still have not officially adopted 3 wild donkeys, and that the fence guy is coming out next week to take a look.

To be continued.

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

To whomever is missing 3 donkeys near Rattlesnake, TX

Published by Jill on November 12, 2011. 66 Comments

Donkey in the pool[UPDATE: Donkey mistook pool cover for solid ground, fell in, got trapped in deep end under pool cover. Had a hell of a time -- about an hour and a half -- getting her out. Her best friend paced on the sidelines the whole time in a sort of worried panic, hee-hawing more or less continuously. I'm sure you heard it over in Australia. My ears are still ringing. Couldn't get the trapped donkey to climb up the steps, because she's a donkey. Tried to bite me whenever I'd get close enough to toss a rope around her girth. Eventually she saw reason and climbed out on her own. She stood still for a second, then shook the water off, pooped in the pool, gave me the atomic stink-eye and trotted off into the night to rejoin her anxious troupe. If I end up keeping her I'm naming her after one of the Naiades. Possibly Daphne, who fended off Apollo by turning into a laurel tree, or Liriope, the mother of Narcissus.]

Three donkeys

I have your donkeys (not pictured: the third donkey).

Longhorn cow

Oh, and those 12 gaudy Texas longhorn cattle you bought so you could make like Ross Perot and keep your ag exemption in style? I have those, too (not pictured: 11 other ginormous cattle with 6′ racks). I will happily return them to you once you’ve reimbursed me for the damages.

Thank you.

Posted in Announcements and El Rancho Deluxe. Bite me, Chad.

Whew, that was close

Published by Jill on November 10, 2011. 66 Comments

Wouldn’t you know it, my office was recently swallowed up by a quantum vortex-oscillation anomaly, so, obviously, I haven’t been able to get much blaming in. However, the subspace crystalline entity hasn’t yet been spontaneously generated that could prevent this professional spinster aunt from discharging two of her most cherished duties: recognizing a human rights victory, and hacking up loogey of savage death disdain for busybody godbags everywhere. It is in this spirit of consororitous obstreperosity that I step across the event horizon into this bizarro-universe to publish this post.

I know it is a bizarro-universe because I am typing the following words:

Let us mark with a glad cry the defeat of Initiative 26, the depraved attempt by delusional godbags in Mississippi — the most delusionally godbaggy state in the US — to confer “personhood” on fertilized human eggs. Hah-yee ip-ip! A heartfelt butch-ass chin-nod of appreciation goes out from Spinster HQ to everyone who worked on the successful campaign to smush that extremely crappy amendment.

I have to say, zygote worship truly is one of the freakier manifestations of modern fundamentalist misogyny. Here is a zygote (magnification 2.73 bajillion):

Zygote: Suck it, human host! I rule and you're Number 2!

How could the Lard love that dumb thing more than, for example, me?

Spinster aunt hails a TARDIS.

I’m not only a more scintillating conversationalist than a zygote, but I can type faster, I pay taxes, and I look better in plaid. Jesus! These meddling religioshitbags! Their deity is a total loser with bad taste.

As you know, whenever people go around recognizing odd bits of reproductive matter as “persons,” they simultaneously un-recognize women as persons, ceding ownership of women’s personal internal organs to the state and instituting a programme of compulsory pregnancy. If Initiative 26 had passed, those two cells up there would actually have more human rights than an actual human woman. For instance, unlike actual women, the state wouldn’t be able to dictate to the cells what they could or couldn’t do with their personal organelles. The state probably doesn’t even know what organelles are. Furthermore, zygotes would enjoy state-mandated free room and board at their human host’s expense. They wouldn’t even have to pay for cable.

But the lives of actual human women would remain subject to the whim of the Jesus-sucking mob. Raped at 14 by your mother’s meth-head boyfriend? Suck it, whore, you’re bringin’ that fetus to term. Got cancer and need chemo and radiation? Suck it, whore, you’re bringin’ that fetus to term. Aren’t feelin’ it with the compulsory pregnancy dealio, like it might be somewhat discrepant from your goal to win the Tricorder X Prize? Suck it, whore, you’re bringin’ that fetus to term! And you’d better be a good mother once it’s born — so no getting depressed, no having a glass of wine to dull the crushing pain of your hijacked life, no having any time to yourself — or we’ll put you on the evening news and throw the kid in foster care with pedophiles.

Another point on the depraved misogyny continuum is this shit in Saudi Arabia, where it is a flippin headline when a woman drives a flippin car. Saudi women, as you know, are banned from driving. Apparently if they jaunt around town behind the wheel they become sin-magnets who give God brain tumors. In Saudi Arabia, women never reach the age of majority. They are, their whole lives, wholly owned subsidiaries of male dudes, and can’t do anything without dudely permission.

So the other day some 29 Saudi women got fed up with this program. They took to the open road and drove to the grocery store. This act of defiance unleashed quite the furor.

An anti-driving group on Facebook has called on “real men” to beat up women who drive. On Twitter, activists were called “westernised whores.” Washington Post

Dudes on the Internet: so classy the world over.

Considering that last September a woman who got busted for driving while female was sentenced to 10 lashes by some Muslim putzwad whose deity is also a total loser, these 29 rogue drivers also get a heartfelt butch-ass chin-nod from Spinster HQ. May the day soon arrive when they can fire their hated chauffeurs.

(As a westernised whore, I personally think having a chauffeur would be awesome, but à chacun son gôut.)

Posted in Compulsory pregnancy, Politics and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.

And another thing I’m sick of

Published by Jill on November 7, 2011. 106 Comments

On NPR the other day some interviewer — I forget which one — was interviewing some novelist — I forget which one — about the novelist’s new novel — I forget which one. The interviewer was a woman, the novelist was a woman, and the novel was about some women.

“How difficult was it,” asked the interviewer, “to write strong women characters?”

My bitter, mirthless laugh drowned out the author’s earnest reply. Because:

“So, Mr Chaucer/Joyce/Hemingway/Virtually Any Other Male Author In The History Of English And American Literature, how difficult was it to write strong men characters?”

It’s a given, not a talk show topic, that strong male characters will inhabit any given work of regular fiction. Dude characters have their requisite flaws, but they’re fully drawn and interesting because men are popularly conceived to already be strong enough to have books written about them. In fact, the word “strong” never prepends the word “man” in American English unless the topic is circus acts. But in recent literature, film, TV, and blogs, the Strong Woman has emerged as a thing, an archetype.

What are the components of this strong woman character?

In some cases, perhaps, they are the same components as any other well-written character. But in the popular imagination, the Strong Woman is the one-dimensional composite of post-feminist megatheocorporatocratic marketing: tough but feminine, fighty, a little mouthy, indomitable in the face of adversity, but ultimately heterosexual and predominantly concerned with relationships. Always, at her core, is that reassuring lump of insecurity that ends up making her life about men. She is the latest addition to the cluster of popular stock characters infesting the literary canon: the harridan, the voluptuary, the madwoman in the attic, the girl next door, the cipher, the virgin, the nag, the mother-in-law, the mouse, the shrew, and the spinster aunt.

Because she is a femininity affirmation device, the Strong Woman is never strong in the sense that she actually seeks actual liberation. For instance, she never says, “to hell with this funfeminism crap, I’m blowing off the beauty mandate and challenging patriarchal oppression.” She just holds her head up and conquers breast cancer or earns that big promotion, and is enriched by the experience, and then has a relationship with a dude.

Enough with the “strong woman” designation, already. All women are “strong.” If we’re not strong, we’re dead.

Posted in Mass Media and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.