I offer you a love pod from my home world.
Foto by Stingray.
Author Archive for Jill
Page 2 of 29
Fig. 7. The author snaps iPhone self-portrait in a truck stop can. Italy, Texas, 2008.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that without Steve Jobs I would not have achieved my brilliant success as either a spinster aunt, an Internet feminist, a text messagist, or a public restroom documentarist. I am curiously maudlin over the news of his death. It feels like there’s a weird new void in pop culture now.
Then again I’m typing this on an Apple keyboard made in China, so there’s that.
Central Texan spinster aunts on the go are apt to become desiccated if they don’t tote around cold, life-giving liquids at all times. For this reason I once possessed a thing called Klean Kanteen, an insulated steel vacuum bottle in which I stashed my iced coffee and filtered organic free range rainwater. Wheresoever I went, so too wenteth the Klean Kanteen. Horribly, one day a dust storm snatched it out of my tentacle and blew it up to Kansas (or maybe a dingo ite it, who can remember?). Anyway, I never really got over the loss, because that Klean Kanteen was the bomb. They’re not joking around with that insulation. I’ve come back the next day and found ice cubes and half a marg still rattling around in that thing. Par-tay.
So the other day I ordered a couple of new Klean Kanteens off the internet, but when the box arrived I could but curl the spinster lip. I was obliged to create the mess pictured below that I might liberate my bottles from the packaging and proceed with my beverage-centric life.
A. Tissue paper
B. Packing material
C. Shipping carton
D. Display cards containing the “Café” (i.e. sippy cup) lids
E. Instruction cards advising the consumer that hot liquids are apt to be hot
F. Guitar case sticker, so you can advertise Klean Kanteen at Burning Man
G. Brochure for Recharge, a sort of designer Gatorade powder
H. Two samples of Recharge
I. Paper tags attached to superfluous plastic lids
J. Superfluous plastic lids
K. Ball chain attaching the superfluous tags to the superfluous lids
Who wraps a steel cylinder in tissue? It’s steel. If I’d wanted to unwrap an object encased in miles of packaging, I’d have ordered a Ming vase with a unicorn egg in it.
Crabby at the prospect of having to responsibly dispose of all this crap (can you even recycle ball chain?), I looked up Klean Kanteen’s website so I could waggle a bitter claw at their No-BPA!/pro-environment/garbage generating hypocrisy. That’s when I discovered that they make the damn things in China.
But chillax, O thou Klean Kanteen kustomer! Klean Kanteen shares “some of” your concerns about buying crap of Chinese manufacture. They devote a whole section of the site to warming your cockles with stories of exquisitely content factory workers. Take, for example, this heartwarming tableau: a Klean Kanteen “representative” visits the factory’s undisclosed location 4 times a year, not just to check quality control, but also to share tea and crumpets with a lucky menial.
Meet Yao Sheng Fu, one of the workers at our manufacturing site in China. During one of our regular visits, he sat down with Klean Kanteen® and shared a little about his life and what it’s like to work at the factory.
Yao had just finished his shift and was happy* to join Klean Kanteen co-owner Jeff Cresswell on the patio that overlooks the open quad at the factory grounds.** Over tea and some tasty Chinese pastries,*** he told us he moved from the province of Gui Zhon, known for steel production, to work at the Klean Kanteen® factory four years ago.
“Many people want to work at this factory because it has a reputation for being a good place,” he said, explaining that the factory’s reputation is part of the reason he moved here. He hopes it will continue to grow.
He travels home to see his family about twice a year and always goes during Chinese New Year.
When Jeff asked him where he’d go if he could travel anywhere in the world, Yao said he’d love to visit New York City.
Yeah, and when Jeff asked him what he’d do if he could have any job in the world, Yao said that after he gets back from his fabulous New York vacation (he’s staying at the Waldorf), he’d love to remain here at the unnamed factory, churning out metal bottles for sanctimonious American yuppies for all time.
Zhang family in jeans factory: not too chipper. From Last Train Home by Lixin Fan.
I mention this film because that’s the backdrop: the annual migration of hundreds of millions of Chinese factory workers (“the single largest migrant work force in the world”) as they all throng their way home to rural villages for Chinese New Year. It takes the Zhangs days, in mobbed trains and buses, to traverse 1300 miles. When they finally arrive, they discover that the kid for whom they’ve sacrificed a decade and a half of their lives in meaningless drudgery has gone rogue. At 17 she blows off school, moves to a big city and gets a job in a nightclub, and well, you know where that’s going. Before she scrams, her father beats the crap out of her. Which beating, incidentally, the filmmaker records with a cool, unflinching detachment, making the violence seem like a sane and logical outcome of Zhang’s pact with the devil.
Klean Kanteens make pretty girls smile, despite prune-hands from latex gloves. From Klean Kanteen website.
You may flatter yerself that you’re doing no harm — such as when you buy a reusable steel canteen so you can stop littering the world with those endless plastic Ozarka bottles — but no matter what, you’re always reaming someone. That’s the main sucky thing about the whole patriarchy set-up, it turns everybody into a fucking asshole. Me, Mr Zhang, Mr Kanteen: what a bunch of schmucks.
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* Yeah, I’ll bet old Yao Sheng Fu was happy as a clam to hang around the sweatshop with some rich gringo suit after slaving over the steel bottle machine for 12 or 16 hours.
** No doubt the pampered Klean Kanteen workers lounge around on this picturesque patio sipping cosmos during their numerous breaks.
*** Quaint indigenous local foods are awesome.
A murdered teen isn’t lurid enough; better make her a prostitute with HIV.
Any moron knows not to kick someone in the head while wearing open-toed shoes.
But here’s a sweet little movie you won’t want to miss. Girl Fight airs on Lifetime this Monday. “Inspired” by a “true story” about mean girls who beat up one of their own and post it on YouTube for internet fame and revenge, it’s super on-trend. Although Lifetime says “Girl Fight” is about “peer pressure, media scrutiny and forgiveness” its actual purpose would appear be 1) to deliver titillating footage of a teenage girl kicking the shit out of a teenage girl, and 2) to intone another cautionary tale about the dire consequences that can go down whenever a teenage girl steps out of line (or, in an unguarded moment, posts something juvenile on Twitter).
The Lifetime Channel, as has been noted by larger brains than mine, is the TV authority of record when it comes to documenting the People magazine experience of Vagina-Americans. Violence, betrayal, insanity, torment, and murder. The Entertainment Industrial Complex has a vested interest in the defeat of feminist revolt, since a victory would rob them of all their most lurid plot devices.
It’s 69 degrees! It’s 69 degrees! My dendrites are free from waxy yellow build-up!
So I thought I might as well enlarge on a point that seems to have sprouted some ambiguity of late, regarding my views on intersectionality.
Here’s what Bushfire said:
Twisty does focus on women’s oppression but she also makes it clear that other oppressions are at work and she doesn’t use broad generalizations about women.
And here’s what AlienNumber said:
Really? Funny, we’re reading the same thing and I don’t get this.
AlienNumber went on:
Twisty, the way I’ve been reading/understanding her – and maybe I am projecting, which is entirely plausible – connects ‘other oppressions’ to the one underlying, fundamental oppression of women. I’m putting ‘other oppressions’ in quotation marks because there are no such things. Racism/classism/colonialism/homophobia etc ARE sexism.
Apparently I have not been entirely clear. What else is new.
1. While I do perceive a connection between the “other oppressions” to which AlienNumber alludes, in my view the connective tissue is not Women’s Oppression, but rather the megatheocorporatocratic ideology of domination to which it is my somewhat lazy habit to refer as patriarchy. Domination ideology is predicated on the notion that social hierarchies are rooted in and validated by Divine Truth. All oppression — such as “women are whores” and “let’s enslave some Africans”– proceeds from this idea.
In other words, a universal oppression paradigm makes the world go round. As a result, all non-white, non-straight, non-abled, non-affluent, non-dude, non-godbag, non-Western [etc] persons are forced into subclasses in order that they may enjoy their own customized versions of tyranny. Women — the sex class — are but one of these many subclasses. It’s a pretty big and significant one, to be sure, hence the whole women’s liberation movement dealio (and this blog), but it’s not the whole bollawax.
Obviously, membership in one subclass does not preclude membership in others, hence the whole intersectionality dealio. Racism, classism, colonialism, homophobia — these are not equivalent to sexism. These isms share common components (see “domination ideology,” above), yes, and I speculate that a feminist revolt would go a long way toward fixing all that shit, on accounta most (not all) oppressed subclasses have women in’em, too — meaning that, for instance, racism cannot be eliminated without women’s liberation because you can’t say “racism is over!” if you’re still oppressing women of color — but the experiences and narratives and motives of all these subclasses, though similar in that they proceed from the same primary ideology, are demonstrably not identical.
To recap: women’s oppression is not the armature upon which all other oppression is hung. However, because sexism has been so comprehensively assimilated across the board, the elimination of racism, classism, ableism, homophobia et al cannot obtain without the simultaneous liberation of women from patriarchal tyranny.
2. This blog focuses primarily on the gruesome effects of patriarchy on the sex class because it particularly pleases me that it should. This focus should not be construed as an endorsement of the view that white feminists know what’s best for everybody or some shit.
Blamer Service Announcement: Spinster HQ will be shutting down until the fucking temperature drops below 103F for a minimum of 2 days in a row. The heat from the computer monitor is melting my face. Which is neither here nor there, because I can’t write or speak anyway; as soon as a thought is formed in my brain it congeals into a puck of greasy guck that must be manually dislodged with forceps. If you are fortunate enough to be in possession of freely-surging grey matter, consider this an invitation to vituperate forthwith on the pet subject of your choice.
Photo: Hydration instructions on a sidewalk in East Austin.
By now — since it is my custom to lollygag, dawdle, and often even dilly-dally until steamy breaking news has developed an unappealing crust on top before I set about wrinkling my lip at it — you have already heard of and perhaps even forgotten all about the irritating information that PETA intends to launch a porn site. Reportedly the site will lure porn enthusiasts with XXX naked sex ladies, then sock it to’em with explicit animal torture vids. This will supposedly encourage the ethical treatment of animals by … who, exactly? Dickheads who look at porn?
It’s pretty optimistic to imagine that dickheads who look at porn are capable of appreciating what is meant by “ethical.” So I guess the intended audience for this site is dudes who can’t bear to contemplate saving the whales without jerking off at the same time.
In fact, it has been suggested that the only possible result of the juxtaposition of human and animal exploitation on a porn site is the eroticization of animal torture. To be sure, this contingency is considerably less remote than the screwy idea that pornography, which is itself abuse, can actually stop abuse. Pornography, in fact, is the antithesis of “ethical treatment”. It relies for its existence on violence against women. As such it appeals directly to its consumer’s abusiveness. Fetishized abuse is the whole point of pornography.
On the face of it, the ethical treatment of animals sounds like a cause anyone could get behind. Unfortunately, that ship sailed for PETA long ago. They haul in $30 million a year, but they won’t spend a dime on a no-kill shelter. Crossing over to the Dark Side, they’ve all but abandoned useful discourse in order to mutate into a churlish Offensive Themes Theater troupe that seems to exist only for the sake of its softcore self. Their sexist, racist, anti-Semitic, full frontal shock campaigns — featuring Nazis, KKKlansmen, and of course copious amounts of female celebrity skin — are more juvenile, narcissistic performance art than revolution. PETA, Grande Douchebagge of the animal rights movement, has long been in the human exploitation business; this new .xxx site is merely a formality.
Knobs.
For a longer and more amusing article on the crapulence of PETA, see “Ingrid Newkirk Is The Worst Person In The World,” a January 2010 post by Jenna Sauers at Jezebel.
By the way. Carved in one of the many stones in the ancient city of Obstrepopolis, Savage Death Island, is the slogan “Go vegan, chump!”
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“Ditwuss” = DTWS = “degrades the whole species”
Rest easy, outraged blamer. I have indeed heard of the PETA porn site and will be dashing off the usual bromides and choir-preaches as soon as time permits. In the meantime feel free to compose your own and post it here. Back in a flash (and by “flash” I mean “day or two”).
What hotel maid wouldn't wannna get pronged by this sexy grandpa?
The hotel maid’s lawyer had predicted prosecutors would tell her Monday they were dropping the case. The attorney, Kenneth Thompson, told France’s RTL radio on Sunday that the woman, Nafissatou Diallo, “feels abandoned by the Manhattan District Attorney.” The questions raised about her credibility have made her feel “that she’s being investigated more than Strauss-Kahn,” he said. [AP]
That’s right, ladies. In the United States of America, in 2011, if you’re a woman with a “past,” it’s open season. If some old white perv violently attacks you, your bad reputation simply cancels out his criminal behavior.
Oh, and your looks are totally relevant.
“Nafi” Diallo is not glamorous. Her light-brown skin is pitted with what look like faint acne scars, and her dark hair is hennaed, straightened, and worn flat to her head, but she has a womanly, statuesque figure. When her face is in repose, there is an opaque melancholy to it. [Daily Beast]
In other words, a rich white guy wouldn’t have to rape such an unattractive menial, but he might want to fuck your melancholy, statuesque figure. He was merely using you as the toilet you are, which is perfectly legal and consistent with Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women (under the Bitches Who Aren’t Virgin Saints Are Just Asking For It clause). So he flits back to France to resume his career as a nationally beloved dashing rake, while you get to spend the rest of your life as the gold-digging liar who cried rape, or simply the “DSK Maid.”
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Photo: AP
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