Monthly Archive for December, 2011

“Within 10 seconds I saw him shape-shift”

Published by Twisty on December 31, 2011. 92 Comments

Don't you just want to fuck me?

You never heard such jarring guffaws jangling through the drywall halls of Spinster HQ as when we got hipped to this Braco dude. Laughter rang out like the nightly gunfire at my neighbor’s place.

If you’ve never heard of him — and since you’re a reasonable person with normal inclinations who never, with the notable exception of IBTP, wastes valuable time reading pointless shit on the Internet, why would you have? — here’s the deal with Braco. He’s a messianic New Age con artist from Croatia. Get this:

He “gazes.” That’s it. He just drifts out on stage, looks at the audience for a couple of minutes, then scrams. The end. Fin. Fade to black. Followers flock to him and throw money. Why?

“He only offers a gift to people through his silent gaze, without words or teachings, allowing people’s own reported experiences of transformative changes – in their lives, relationships, careers, finances and health – to define his work.” — Braco’s website

His ‘work’! Do you fully comprehend the awesomeness of this Braco tool? He doesn’t do shit! He doesn’t have to learn English. He doesn’t have to memorize a bunch of polyester New Age platitudes. He doesn’t have to allude to ancient texts. He doesn’t have to do yoga. He doesn’t even have to touch any sick people. He only has to eyeball’em for 5 minutes and then float silently away. Mass hysteria does the rest.

He doesn’t have to pay a bunch of staff, either; his “gazing events” are staffed by, as Tinfoil Hattie calls’em, swooning volunteers. And he seems to hold a lot of these gaze-a-paloozas in Hawaii, so that when he’s done staring down the gullible, he can beat it back to a Mai-Tai under a palapa with an ocean view.

This scam is a work of such extraordinary beauty and criminal genius it brings a tear to my jaundiced eye. Compare it, for instance, to the overly complex, gaudy, and commercialized Osama bin Laden lookalike, Osho®.

Osho® is a popular guru dude in India. According to Osho®’s website, American author Tom Robbins says he is “the most dangerous man since Jesus Christ.” Well, Tom Robbins said it, I believe it, and that settles it!

Whereas Braco’s schtick is elegant and understated, Osho® is the Elvis of the zany cult leaders. He’s got a luxury International Meditation Resort with an olympic pool, a mediation spa, a “Multiversity,” and a buttload of programs, books, theme songs, newsletters, pay-per-view YouTube vids, therapies, horoscopes, and other assorted merch. His overhead must be considerable, so it makes sense that one of his most elite programs consists of “full immersion.” This is where followers actually pay tuition to toil at the resort as menials for 6 hours a day, 7 days a week for a 3-month stretch with no days off and no possibility of parole. They have to pay extra for food, too, at Osho®’s dining rooms and “gourmet café spots.”

Unlike Braco, Osho® never shuts the fuck up. He’s a proponent of “silence shared in words.” The universe, he says, is “certainly made of silence.” To support this claim, he’s got an Internet radio station where he yaks nonstop. When I tuned in he was using his silent words to opine that men are of the sun, women are of the moon, and the sun is aggressive and intellectual, and the moon is receptive and passive. “The woman has to flower in her moon-hood, as the man has to flower in his sun-hood.” Well, knock me over with a feather, some randy old mystic is pronouncing on the essence of women and “sex energy” using elements of the solar system as a metaphor.

I bet old Braco laughs and laughs (quietly) at this Osho® goob and his needlessly strained vocal cords. Braco’s ‘work’ consists of not doing jack, yet his disciples, such as the woman quoted below who is too cheap to take her cat to the vet, report excellent results.

I went to a Braco gazing in NJ recently. The energy that he is channeling is very real. I purchased the DVD entitled the Golden Bridge. It records Braco’s voice which transmits this high frequency energy. My cat rec’d a healing in the fact that she hasn’t vomited in 4 days [...] My cat usually throws up at least once or twice a day.

I mention all of this to complain about the modern habit of confusing “energy” with “pixie dust.” Whenever some dude with long hair starts blabbing about harmonizing your life-energy, or healing your toothache by staring at you, or purging your colon of toxins, and he’s selling tickets, you know it’s time for a Savage Death eye-roll. Energy isn’t an enchanted force field. It doesn’t “flow through” people or cats, can’t be generated by puncturing the epidermis with tiny needles, is not boundless, isn’t “positive” or “negative” with respect to human contentment, cannot be expended mentally, is not “inner,” is not subject to the alignment of stars, does not vibrate your aura, and can’t be channeled, focused, or transmitted by the gaze of mute Croatians or the DVDs of trademarked Indians for the purpose of achieving human happiness. Energy is a measurement of the capacity of a body or system to do work.*

These corny-ass hippie mystics. I ask you. Hey, I know. If you lack vim, I suggest you take a little exercise and eat some goddam kale. If you’re sick, go to a doctor. If you’re unhappy, dump your pig boyfriend. If you crave serenity, take a Xanax. If your life is meaningless, foment revolution. Bitch, pleeze.

___________________
* Dictionary.com says it, I believe it, and that settles it!

Thanks to blamer Tinfoil Hattie for clueing me in to Braco. Thanks also to blamer Keri for trumping him with Baba Dez, “one of the grossest dudes of all time.”

Braco photo from this Howard Stern “video”

Osho® photo from this web page.

Posted in Magical Mysteries from Godtown. Bite me, Chad.

Blamer starts something

Published by Twisty on December 26, 2011. 23 Comments

Breaking news: blamer Cootie Twoshoes has started a blamer book club at Goodreads. I can but endorse such an endeavor.

Apparently what you do is, you go here, create a Goodreads account, and then get jiggy with it. Feminist literary critique is practically a lost art. I urge anyone who reads stuff to give it a try.

Posted in Announcements. Bite me, Chad.

Thus spake Debbie Downer

Published by Twisty on December 26, 2011. 73 Comments

Though the life of a spinster aunt is mostly fluffy and carefree, there are certain unpleasant situations wherein the Auntly Directive explicitly calls for taking the wind out of people’s sails.

Sail de-winding has gotten a bad rap, as it has been embraced as bloodsport over the years by various do-gooders and buttinskis. Remember “tough love”?

“I hate to take the wind out of your sails, Son, but your Marilyn Manson marijuana lifestyle frightens your mother, so we’re having you arrested.”

Sail de-winding has also been wielded for the greater good — though to little avail — by dudely scientists and professional skeptics:

“I hate to take the wind out of your sails, my godly friend, but there is no scientific evidence whatsoever to support the hypothesis that when you die your disembodied consciousness will float up to the clouds to be reunited with your loved ones. Also, you’re stupid.”

It has been complained about in various Nick Lowe songs, too.

But let’s be clear: it’s spinster aunts who invented the practice of foisting truth on overstimulated people who don’t want to hear it.

That’s right. Our specialized lobes can detect a self-destructive folly at 200 yards. When our peeps’ sails have wind in them, and we perceive that this wind is perhaps a bit gusty for this time of year, and that it is composed not of wholesome breezes but of farts and sordid delusion, we cannot hold our tongue.

I recall the time my pal Solange Pettigrew called to cut me in on an exciting business proposition. This frabjous business, she effluviated in breathless tones, was going to liberate her from the daily grind and transport her to a world of more or less incessant travel to exotic lands. It could do the same for me. She explained that all I had to do was buy my own personalized ‘travel website’ from her, whereupon hordes of internet travelers would flock to it and I would make a fortune. In her mind’s eye she had already purchased a steamer trunk full of hula skirts and was getting her groove back with a hunky cabana boy. I had never seen her so happy. Clearly I needed to step in.

So I protruded the spinster proboscis and immediately detected in her sails the whiff of a wind most foul. But how? This woman has a master’s degree in common sense from Stanford, for chrissake. She couldn’t be that obliv–

Oh, but she was. Solange Pettigrew had in fact gone grossly agog. So forthwith onto my auntly shoulders fell the stinky task of informing the poor sap that this travel website deal was no gilded Jetway out of meaningless corporate drudgery, but was actually a Ponzi scheme.

Did I want to be the one who brought her life’s young dream crashing down like the housing market upon her dewy brow? Certainly not. I’d rather have been given a root canal by a sweaty dentist. But according to the Spinster Code, failure to place these person-to-person calls on the clue phone is not an option. Sail de-winding is the only ethical course.

Which brings me to my chum Sukey, who is an inveterate bargain hunter. One of her endearing qualities is that when she finds a hot deal, she cannot rest until she has alerted her entire acquaintance to the bonanza. I often get this call from Sukey:

“Get down to $aver$ immediately! Wahoo is only 99 cents a pound!”

Let us all feast like kings on wahoo, right? Wrong. I’m the one who says, “Wahoo for 99 cents? Where’d it come from, the dumpster behind Whole Foods?”

While driving around yesterday Sukey stumbled across some women on the side of the road selling “1200-thread-count Egyptian cotton king sheet sets” out of a beat-up Econoline van for 20 bucks a hit. Sukey bought a set on the spot and galloped home at breakneck speed to call everyone up. She couldn’t bear for her friends to spend another hellish night needlessly tossing and turning on nasty burlap from Bed Bath and Beyond when we could be nestled in luxury coziness from the banks of the river Nile.

“Wait a second,” I said, my wind-in-sails detector heating up. “1200 thread-count Egyptian cotton king sheet sets for 20 bucks? Yeah, and I’m Herman Cain’s baby mama.”

I hated to do it, but my hands, I tell you, were tied.

“Sukey,” I said, “read the label. Read it, and weep.”

Whereupon it was discovered that the sheets had been made in China by indentured wage slaves. Furthermore they were not cotton of Egyptian or any other origin, but microfiber, and most likely weren’t 1200 threads per inch, either.

Sukey wept.

Hey, I’m just doing my job.

It’s like when I happen to run into the occasional woman who thinks Bust is a feminist magazine. Or maybe she believes that femininity is “natural,” or that “radiant skin” is desirable. Look at her sails! Her bloomy, billowing sails, bloated with hot wind! What can I do? If I don’t take that wind outta them things she might go around the rest of her life arguing that burlesque is an empowering form of feminine self-expression.

So I cram down her neck the truth that our patriarchal social order, despite what she’s been told since the cradle, doesn’t really have her best interests at heart. I explain that she is defined in this social order solely with respect to male interests, and that she is a member of an oppressed sex class out of which she may not opt, and that her success in life is entirely a matter of the degree to which she appeases her oppressor.

She protests. She demurs. She vituperates. She calls me a sex-hating harridan prude.

And then her lobe starts to pulsate. The mascara falls from her eyes. She grasps that, yes, patriarchy is founded on oppression and suffering, that Ponzi schemes and thread-count cons are logical consequences in a world order that is itself the Mother of All Scams, and most horribly of all, that she is both complicit and a dupe in the whole set-up.

Her life is ruined, and she has me to thank for it.*

Trust no one.

_____________________
* Note: this business about her lobe beginning to pulsate and me ruining her life, it’s all a fantasy. In real life nobody ever believes me.

Debbie Downer photo nicked from Wikipedia.

Posted in Bloodsport and Oppression Culture. Bite me, Chad.

That’s a more

Published by Twisty on December 15, 2011. 125 Comments

Some day maybe I’ll write a post. Until then, two things.

First, via PhysioProf, this: after millennia of sprain-free use by Romans in sensible shoes, they’re remodeling the streets of Rome to accommodate stiletto heels. Apparently the picturesque cobblestones of old are a hazard to the ligaments of pedestrians on Via del Corso who, though insufficiently fem-proficient, must nevertheless cave in to pressure to sport pornulated footwear. Ditching the stilettos? Unthinkable.

Farrier with hoof

The second thing: this is what my dude farrier said to me yesterday, after delivering the unpleasant news that my horse has developed thrush from standing in mud: “Now don’t get all dramatic and act like a woman.”

Posted in Oppression Culture and The Beauty Ultimatum. Bite me, Chad.

The thread about Siri

Published by Twisty on December 3, 2011. 117 Comments

My phone takes rather a familiar tone.

“I’d rather talk about why Siri is sexist.” — blamer Josquin, on a thread about Rape-X.

Well, have at it, Josquin!

For my part, I haven’t been able to determine whether Siri is sexist or not, because she declines to function properly on my phone. I have come to actively dislike her. Just now I asked her if she was sexist; her answer was that she can’t answer.

“Can’t,” Siri? Or won’t? Cagey.

UPDATE: Two seconds of Googling reveals that, duh, of course Siri is sexist. Siri’s programmers are dudes, after all. Quelle surprise, Amanda Marcotte has a post addressing this very topic.

Siri behaves much like a retrograde male fantasy of the ever-compliant secretary: discreet, understanding, willing to roll with any demand a man might come up with, teasingly accepting of dirty jokes. Oh yeah, and mainly indifferent to the needs of women.

At my house, we discovered this while playing with Siri’s quickly established willingness to look up prostitutes for a straight man in need. When you say to Siri, “I need a blow job,” she produces “nine escorts fairly close to you”. You get the same result if you say, “I’m horny” into it, even with my very female voice.

So she’ll find you a prostitute but she won’t tell you where you can get birth control or an abortion? Siri’s a damned collaborator?

I’ll have to take Amanda’s word for it, since my Siri is apparently too busy blowing dudes to give me the time of day. Literally, she won’t even tell me what time it is.

UPDATE 2: Jane Martinson, who, because all other writing at the Guardian is presumed to be for dudes, writes The Women’s Blog, says that in the UK Siri is a dude, and is useful only for implementing search engines, and only if it is spoken to in an American accent. UK Siri will, however, locate reproductive health clinics on Google for you. Thus Martinson’s findings are that Siri isn’t sexist, just stupid.

She’s wrong of course.

UPDATE 3: A “writing fellow” at American Prospect wants to make it clear that s/he is not accusing Apple of misogyny when s/he concurs with Amanda about the reproductive health thing: “The problem with Siri isn’t that the programmers hate women, it’s that they [women] weren’t even on the radar.”

Hey, writing fellow! The intent of the programmers is flippin irrelevant. The point, silly fellow, is that women experience exclusion from “the radar” as misogyny. Misogyny.

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

Spinster aunt forgets what year it is, starts yammering about RapeAxe again

Published by Twisty on December 2, 2011. 60 Comments

Jayzus in a jetpack. So much has happened since last we spoke that I’m just going to ignore it all and proceed straight to the latest installment of the Anti-Rape Device Chronicles.

You know the Anti-Rape Device Chronicles, right? A long and sordid history attends the battle for dudely control over the problematic human vagina. The timeline so far:

Middle Ages: Chastity belts are implemented by jealous brutes to enforce feminine purity against other jealous brutes. Or are they?

1996: British historians debunk as myth the notion that medieval chastity belts ever existed as anything other than 19th century “curiosities for the prurient or jokes for the tasteless.”

Cheesy BDSM-wear, only 500 bucks on eBay.

This dude writes a scholarly analysis of the mythology. The chastity belt naturally finds its niche as a corny prop in the BDSM community, where it is anything but an anti-rape device.

2000: The “killer tampon” is invented by South African septuagenarian Jaap Haumann. Quoth he, “I designed a hard cylindrical plastic core which contains the spring blade, which slices when pressed against. […] When the rapist attacks the woman and penetration takes place, the point of his penis will touch the section containing the blade and it (the penis), or at least a part of it, is sliced off.” Haumann notes that South Africa is the rape capital of the world.

2005: A now-defunct website announces “FemDefense,” a spike-equipped vaginal insert reminiscent of, but slightly less disfiguring than, Haumann’s dick mutilator. The imaginary FemDefense and its faux marketing campaign turns out to be a conceptual art project by Swedish artist Leif Lindell; the “product” is never manufactured but makes the rounds on the feminist blogosphere, prompting a profusion of whataboutthemen whingeing. Photo here.

2005 again: Sonnet Ehlers, a South African activist, invents RapeX (later changed to RapeAxe). This is a hollow vaginal insert with lined with barbs. “When the attacker attempts vaginal penetration,” says Ehlers, “the barbs attach themselves to the penis, causing great discomfort. The device must be surgically removed, which will result in the positive identification of the attacker and subsequent arrest.”

2006: Production of Rapex “delayed” by squeamish dick preservationists.

2010: The newly renamed RapeAxe is in the news again when Ehlers announces plans to hand out 30,000 of them for free at South Africa’s World Cup.

Today: Blamer Sandi emails me (thanks, Sandi!) with a link to the 2010 Gizmodo story; I fail to notice the date and commence writing this post as though it were breaking news, quite forgetting that we discussed the subject last year in the comments of this post.

Well, untimely though it be, you get this post anyway, because it’s the one I wrote.

So. Consider a minor shift of focus in the wonderful world of rape culture. First there is this imaginary chastity belt, which leaves nothing to the imagination in terms of the 19th century woman’s moral status: a whole mythos erupts around the idea of medieval dudes asserting ownership of their women by literally locking up the only thing about them that matters. You can still rape, though, you just need a key.

Scroll down to the 21st century. Haumann, Lindell, and Ehlers’ devices are more victim-oriented. They don’t prevent rape, but they do suggest instantaneous unpleasant consequences for rapists. Therefore they are controversial.

But why should that be? Are we, as a society, pro-rapist?

Heck yeah we are.

Historically, society tolerates rape because it is more or less consistent with the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women, but the idea that rape might conceivably involve violence against rapists is just too shocking. Judging by the many comment threads discussing RapeAxe, a significant contingent of Internetians believe that women possess neither sufficient personal bodily sovereignty nor sufficient personal integrity to be trusted with such a device.

Concern trolls pretend to worry that dick-blood might harm the rape victim (more than a rape, apparently), or that the device might make the rapist madder than he already is, or that it’s sending the wrong message and promoting the dreaded “victim mentality” to tell women to be prepared for rape at any moment. The squeamish dick preservationists object that dick mutilation is “just wrong,” that RapeAxe is “vindictive,” and of course that women are evil and will surely be unable to resist using it to injure innocent men who prong in ignorance.

The objectionable violence is interpreted as originating, not with the rapist, but with the vengeful woman who has deployed the barbaric peen-shredding RapeAxe.

Pah. The thing that would prevent any and all peen-shredding is the thing that nobody can fathom: keeping it their pants.

I’ve commented before that this RapeAxe thing is a pretty compelling little gizmo. It can’t prevent rape, but at least it theoretically improves the chances of a conviction. And of course the agony it inflicts on the rapist is conceptually satisfying and poetically justical. And it dovetails so neatly with my wacko consent scheme. Theoretically, anyone equipped with one of these little dealios abides, unlike you or me, in a persistent state of having said “no.” Only removal of the RapeAxe can switch on consent. No ambiguity. Simple as that.

But alas, after considering it lo these many years, I can’t say I have high hopes for its efficacy. Enterprising rapists could easily game the system. For example, it would be the work of an instant for a dude with a gun to force his victim to remove it. In the end, whatever measures a woman takes to keep assholes from assaulting her, some chumpass perv will figure out how to circumvent them. Women can’t prevent rape.

Like the feminist email forward says: preventing rape is easy: just don’t rape anybody, stupid.

Posted in Rape Culture and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Yesterday. Bite me, Chad.