Archive for the 'Mass Media' Category

Molting garden spider of the week

Published by Jill on August 11, 2010. 54 Comments

Argiope aurantia

Phil, my secretary, has declined to ghost-write my essay today. He called in claiming writer’s block. What a load. He just wanted to lie around on the couch eating sour cream ‘n’ onion potato chips. I could hear Hair Battle Spectacular in the background when he called.

What’s Hair Battle Spectacular? A TV hair-do competition reality show. Stylists with fake nicknames affix scaffolding, found objects, and neon hair extensions onto models’ heads, whereupon they back-comb mile-high “fantasy” hair-dos that nobody could ever actually wear because if you lifted your chin even a couple of degrees to swig a marg, the earth’s gravitational pull on the hair-mass would snap your neck in half. The show is mesmerizingly asinine. I’m begging you not to watch it without hootin’ a doob first.

On a patriarchy-blaming note, the hair models are all beautiful women, presumably because, owing to the gender-binary component of the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women, similarly attractive men wouldn’t be caught dead looking that ridiculous. In our photo, stylist “Malibu” pours an actual cocktail into her model’s coiffure to demonstrate its ability to hold its liquor. It’s about time somebody invented a watertight beehive.

Anyway, with Phil on the lam and me without a minute to spare, you’re stuck with heartwarming nature crap again in lieu of a post. Luckily, it’s a molting Argiope aurantia, everybody’s second-favorite orbweaver.

________________________
Hair Battle Spectacular photo swiped from the Oxygen website. Oxygen, Oprah’s purportedly woman-centric cable channel, is also responsible for Bad Girls Club, a stultifyingly dull reality show consisting mostly of catfights between hot babes, Tori & Dean, a stultifyingly dull reality show featuring a privileged white celebrity heterosexual married couple living their uninteresting lives, and Snapped, the it’s-horrible-yet-I-can’t-look-away documentary series about ‘normal’ women who turn without warning into homicidal maniacs.

Posted in Heartwarming Nature Crap, Mass Media and The Entertainment Industrial Complex. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt casts jaundiced eye at popular television show

Published by Jill on August 4, 2010. 74 Comments

Hollywood has long been recognized by the Global Cabal of Spinster Aunts as Ground Zero for American misogyny. Like everything that gurgles forth from that foul city, this Mad Men sensation that’s sweeping the nation has many sicko antifeminist repercussions.

Never heard of Mad Men? It’s a “critically acclaimed” — which means that edgy dudes like it — American TV show set in the early pre-feminist 60’s, about handsome dudes in an ad agency and the hot women they screw. Its chief appeal is the sex they have in painstakingly authentic sets and period costumes.

Aside from the obvious thrill of enjoying without compunction a throwback fantasy Man’s World untainted by the unseemly Women’s Lib movement, Mad Men is problematic for another reason. Unsurprisingly, actual women are now being encouraged to emulate the “lovely ladies” of the show, on the subject of whose “kicking silhouettes” much ink has been spilled. From sheknows.com:

“January Jones told the British magazine Tatler, ‘[Series creator Matthew Weiner] would prefer we didn’t work out and that we eat really well, so we look like healthy women.’

Mad Men producers allegedly felt January Jones was too thin last year and it helped her embrace the healthy side of being fit. ‘It’s okay to have curves and be a woman,’ Jones advocated. ‘I wish more women would realize that’s what men like.’

Because what men like should always be at the heart of a woman’s personal health regimen. Particularly when those men are Hollywood producers.

And this:

“Kudos to Matthew Weiner for using the rocking bodies of January Jones, Christina Hendricks and Elisabeth Moss as an example for looking good the right way.”

Whoa there, Trigger. Did the author just say “kudos to some dude for using the bodies of some women”? Hey, author! The 60’s just called and they want their moron misogynist copywriter back!

How charming, this menacing admonition:

“Weiner isn’t suggesting the vivacious beauties go hog wild, so don’t get any ideas.”

Yes, ladies. Don’t get any ideas. The Flying Fickle Finger of Fashion will fuck you up. It may be “okay to be a woman,” but January Jones neglects to emphasize that this is true only if you stay within strict parameters of horndog dude prongability as described by the male creator of a Hollywood TV show. That’s right, the standards have shifted again! You can gain 15 pounds, but not an ounce more, and you must now find a way to be hot and healthy but without muscle tone. Good luck!

Horribly, women who are not walking skeletons will hail this as some kind of victory for “real” women, now that a meatier body shape is putatively in style, and the holy grail of femininity — sexaliciousity — is within their reach. But see, it doesn’t matter whether the fashion is thin or “curvy”; the horror is that the beauty standard, whatever it is, is so fleeting as to be unattainable, period.

Why, in 2010, is a woman’s body is considered a fashion accessory at all? Men’s bodies don’t go in and out of fashion. Nobody is telling the dudes of Mad Men to eat more ice cream and stop working out so their kicking silhouettes will be more curvy. As if!

Posted in Femininity, Mass Media, The Beauty Ultimatum, The Entertainment Industrial Complex and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt has no time for you

Published by Jill on July 26, 2010. 58 Comments

This spinster aunt has no time for you people right now. So let us all praise blamer Phio Gistic, who sent in a link to some jaw-dropping shit that just went down in St. Louis Missouri, the mattress-stain of a town where, coincidentally, I spent the 25 worst years of my life.

Naturally, what happened is this: a woman was dancing in a St Louis club in 2004, and naturally “Girls Gone Wild” was there exploiting people, and naturally a third party exposed the woman’s breasts as she said, “no, no.”

Same-ole, same-ole.

But then the video came out and the woman sued, claiming she never gave consent and that the video represented an actual assault. The jaw-dropping shit is that a jury of my former homies actually ruled in favor of the “Girls Gone Wild” porn franchise. Consent is irrelevant when cameras are present!

St. Louis. Always classy.

Here’s the link to the post at Jezebel.

Yikes. And when I saw the addendum, wherein it is revealed that a fucking dick writer at the crap news weekly I used to work for nominated the victim in his “Ass-Clown of the Week” column, I was rendered speechless. And then, when I read the fucking dick’s managing editor’s apology, wherein she excuses the fucking dick with a “boys will be boys” and describes the subjects of “Girls Gone Wild” as “stupid,” I was rendered even speechlesser.

Southern leopard frogs

Meanwhile, everyone’s favorite photo subject: Southern leopard frogs in flagrante delicto. Tomorrow: the fruit of their loins!

P.S. All the comments stuck in moderation for the past week have been freed, except for the extremely long ones, which I don’t have time to read. Go start your own blog, long comment writers!

Posted in Heartwarming Nature Crap, Mass Media, Men Hate You, Rape Culture and Sexploitation. Bite me, Chad.

Do you mind if I stalk you up close instead of from across the room?

Published by Jill on July 11, 2010. 50 Comments

Sure, I’ll smile, if you take this match and light your fucking mustache on fire.

This week’s Sunday Morning Hurl comes from misogynist dude site Askmen.com.

Askmen.com runs a recurring feature dedicated to “pickup lines.” A pickup line is a phrase used by suave movie bachelors and doofus TV sitcom knobs (and, apparently, by dorks who read Askmen. com) to turn unsuspecting women with whom they are not acquainted into hot, wet, pliable meatsocks.

The concept is predicated on the notion that women are morons.

The pickup line is a staple theme in the narrative of male sexual domination culture, where it is believed that, when properly worded and expertly delivered, it has the magical power to completely disarm a woman, flip her “on” switch, and guaran-fucking-tee her compliance. The concept of “the pickup” itself has competetive, jokey, pervy, and, of course, rapey components.

Askmen.com publishes a new pickup line every week. Some are labeled “Funny Pickup Line,” others “Cocky Pickup Line.” Oddly, none are called “Hokey Dipshit Pickup Line.” The editors add a little introductory remark to each one. These remarks support my hypothesis: that to qualify as a pickup line a phrase must contain lies, flattery, bullshit, and cheesiness, which qualities are intended to obscure the utterer’s actual meaning, which is “I want to use you as a receptacle. Open sesame.” Subterfuge, in other words, is seen as a quite normal and integral component of the venerable dudely tradition of sexual conquest.

Here’s a selection of the Askmen introductory remarks, followed by my editorial remarks, followed by the pickup lines themselves, which stand alone as monuments of heteronormative sexist farce:

Whether it’s true or not, you can still give this pickup line a try. We dare you.

Well, the guys have gone and dared you. What choice do you have?
A woman as beautiful as you deserves a man as rich as me.

“This pickup line is virtually guaranteed to make her giggle.”

And lard knows, once a chick giggles, she is legally bound to have sex with you.
“Excuse me, is your name Mickey? ‘Cause you’re so fine you blow my mind.”

“This pickup line is best used in the wee hours of the morning, when she’s less likely to think you’re a creep.”

Being tired and drunk will lower her resistance to your natural creepiness.
“You know, good girls get presents this time of year, but naughty girls get to have fun.”

“Why not try a little kindness the next time you’re trying to pick up a woman?”

Instead of your usual method of roofies and duct tape.
“I’ve had a terrible day, and it always makes me happy to see a gorgeous woman smile. Would you smile for me? “

“Once you’re fortified with liquid courage, try this pickup line on the hottest woman at the bar.”

It is common knowledge that the hottest women at the bar instantaneously give blow jobs to drunk assholes who stumble over and say
“you look like you could use a good one-night stand.”

The denizens of Spinster HQ have a hard time believing that any live dude who isn’t Disco Stu would even consider saying any of this stupid shit to an actual woman. However, whether or not men really use pickup lines is of secondary importance to the perpetuation, on the Askmen website and elsewhere, of the atavistic idea that women are essentially just sex troves, ripe for pillaging once unlocked by a few magic syllables.

Posted in Mass Media, Men Hate You, Rape Culture and Ways In Which the Internet Sucks. Bite me, Chad.

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

Published by Jill on July 2, 2010. 19 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks, PhysioProf

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

Spinster aunt pukes on Jeff Koons (but it’s not Art Week yet)

Published by Jill on June 25, 2010. 81 Comments

Tit tape

Figure 7a. Are your boobs affected by gravity? Tit-tape ad promises product will banish unsightly boob saggage for 10 bucks. Product is an adhesive used to tape the top of your boob directly to your chest. TV commercial shown during Jeff Koons bio on the Ovation channel.

I wasn’t expecting to discuss this dick during Art Week, but because I still haven’t had time to sit down and compose myself, using meaningful words to express my innermost feelings on the topic, I may as well take this moment to blurt that I accidentally just saw 10 minutes of an artumentary on American artist Jeff Koons, wherein the self-promoting plastic-coated hack expresses surprise at “the reaction” to that super tacky 1991 series of sculptures and paintings depicting him pronging his wife. The reaction was that the series was more porn than art.

Koons! His work is fuckin ugly and his clever little joke is played. He is so 20 years ago! What is this crap doing on television? Where are The Real Housewives of New Jersey?

Koons to self: “What ugly-ass piece of dime store garbage can I immortalize in chrome and sell to rich morons as a monument to their own vulgarity? Hey, I know! How about this fuckin ugly inflatable toy rabbit?”

Never heard of Jeff Koons?

Arts journalist Arifa Akbar reported for The Independent that in “an era when artists were not regarded as ‘stars’, Koons went to great lengths to cultivate his public persona by employing an image consultant.” Featuring photographs by Matt Chedgey, Koons placed “advertisements in international art magazines of himself surrounded by the trappings of success” and gave interviews “referring to himself in the third person.”

Koons then moved on to Statuary, the large stainless-steel blowups of toys, followed by the Banality series that culminated in 1988 with Michael Jackson and Bubbles, a series of three life-size gold-leaf plated porcelain statues of the sitting singer cuddling Bubbles, his pet chimpanzee. Three years later, one of these sold at Sotheby’s New York for $5.6 million and was in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. [From Wikipedia. Sue me; no time for real research]

A dudely voice avers in the artumentary that in the wife-pronging works Koons purports to give the viewer the opportunity to revel in the beauty of the human boink while relieving us of any embarrassment we might feel. Koons relieves this embarrassment, quoth the voice, by magnanimously taking on the task of fucking the sexxxy woman himself, I guess so we don’t get any smut on the rest of our art collection. What a gentleman.

Koons claims with a straight face that there no similarity whatsoever between his work and pornography. Even though the wife is, in real life, Ilona “Cicciolina” Staller, one of the most famous porn star/parliamentarians in the world, and he has dressed her in regulation pornwear, and has positioned her submissively in regulation porn poses, and has reproduced the images and pimped’em out. There can be little doubt how Koons feels about his own role in the business; his wife is a passive receptacle, but he depicts himself as that buff and noble Adam character from the Sistine ceiling, the one created by God in His Own Image. Only with his hand on Cicciolina’s ass.

Koons calls this series “Made in Heaven” but a more appropriate title would have been “Check Me Out, I’m Screwing a Hot Porn Chick”.

In the artumentary, Koons says the depictions of himself pronging his famous porn star wife — pimped to the public as art — are an expression of his, and by extension, all human, “sexuality.” This is unsurprising, as men typically lack the ability to distinguish between oppression/exploitation/porn and actual sex. Celebrity art dicks, in particular, appear to be sorely afflicted in this regard, what with their polyurethaned narcissism running amok and spilling out of televisions into spinster bunkhouses without the slightest provocation.

Koons is a smug, smooth, depraved asshole. It’s small wonder that he lists, both as his influences and as the artists with whom he expects to be grouped in art history books, the usual bunch of misogynist asshole dudes from the 20th century canon.

Staller is reportedly suing him for unpaid child support.

It is impossible to look at this crap and not feel like a voyeur, a degraded perv complicit in another woman’s sexploitation, and an agent of the debasement of the entire human species. Is it art? Sure, why not! But it stinks!

Posted in Art is my LIFE, Mass Media, Men Hate You and Sexploitation. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt yearns for radfem wiki

Published by Jill on May 24, 2010. 133 Comments

Have you tacqueax seen this? I found it when I was researching TV tropes. It’s called TV Tropes.

TV Tropes is a charmingly nerdy, somewhat dorkily written pseudo-scholarly reference work, a wiki-style compendium of literary conventions and devices used in television and beyond. Some of the tropes are direct from the good old literary canon, some are modern coinages what may or may not stand the test of time, but it’s all so Byzantine and labyrinthine and mezzanine and infinitely recursive I just can’t stop reading it.

This wiki is nothing if not overkill. It covers the beaming up of the aforementioned conventions and devices into the 21st century media mothership, sure, but it also identifies, classifies, and documents modern media-specific conventions and devices to the point of neurosis. This thing is hilarious, especially if you are a cinquagenarian spinster aunt who has begun to feel the hot breath of future shock on her wrinkly neck, because the concepts are often specific to pop sub-cultures I know nothing about on accounta they weren’t around when I was young enough to care about pop sub-cultures to the point of identifiying, classifying and documenting their minutiae. Anime. Video games. Fanfic.

Here’s an example.

Paratext

Everything that is an element of the whole package immediately encompassing the text and not part of the text itself.

In other words, all that stuff that isn’t a part of the show/movie/story itself, but still comes with it. The stuff on the box, the stuff that comes before the show/movie, etc.

I had to meditate on that for a minute before I grasped what is meant by “the whole package” and “stuff on the box.” Whereas I might consider dustjacket blurbs as examples of something called “paratext,” it never before dawned on me that there is a whole, classifiable species of non-content “content” that envelops modern media. Bonus material, pop-ups, trailers, bloopers, closing credits, even PBS titles thanking Viewers Like You. I would quibble that some of this stuff isn’t, technically, text, but a lot of it is, so, fine.

Anyway, I mention all this because it has long been a dream of mine to do something similar with a blaming wiki. How convenient it would be! Instead of putting all this time and effort into banging out these lousy posts, I could just publish a collection of wiki links to the specific ideas and concepts I wish to drag out of mothballs to make whatever point, and call it a day! Because let’s face it; there’s not a whole lotta new under the patriarchy blaming sun.

Not My Nigel, Mansplainin, Obstreperal Lobe, She Was Asking For It, Empowerfulment, etc — they’d all be neatly collected in one spot for your blaming pleasure. Sadly, I’ve never been able to figure out how to do this wiki without having to spend 8 days a week culling out all the troll crap.

The idea for this non-post popped into my lobe when I noticed that my last two essays (“The Girl” and “The Slain Masseuse”) are actually blaming-trope classifications in disguise.

Got any favorite blaming conventions of your own? Or any idea how to pull off the wiki? Please enlighten the group.

Posted in Mass Media, Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society, The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today and Ways in Which the Internet Is a Hoot. Bite me, Chad.

Profiles in Patriarchy: “The Slain Masseuse”

Published by Jill on May 23, 2010. 31 Comments

Good lard! TV! I ask you. They should exhibit TV right next to the Old Testament in the Great Moments in Patriarchy-Replication Technology Museum.

I just watched half of a true-crime-umentary: “48 Hours | Mystery: Seven Days of Rage: The Craigslist Killer.” I would say that the subject of this true-crime-umentary was Craigslist killer Philip Markoff, except that it wasn’t. The real star of the show was Dead Hookers and Kinky Sex.

That’s right, almost the entire program was devoted to sensationalizing the killer’s victims, prostituted women described variously as “the Las Vegas escort,” “a stripper” and “the slain masseuse” who had placed “erotic services” ads on Craigslist. Here is how murder victim Julissa Brisman is portrayed:

“What we know about Julissa before this was that she was a party girl. She was living the high life in New York,” said Cramer. “She was a young, beautiful girl in New York City and she took full advantage of her youth and her beauty to, you know, live it up.”

Cut to a bunch of photographs of “aspiring model”/”slain masseuse” Brisman in various states of poutiness and undress. The pornulated photos were taken by a super-gross photographer dude who “was helping Julissa in her career.”

Let me tell you this one thing. Gross old dudes who photograph young women in lingerie to “help them in their career,” and then give the photos to “48 Hours” after the women are murdered in high-profile Beedy Ess Em cases can kiss my entire ass.

But I digress.

Just in case there were members of the viewing audience who didn’t get sufficiently off on photos of dead women in porn outfits, or who enjoy sexually-charged racist epithets, “48 Hours | Mystery” threw in Vanity Fair reporter Maureen Orth’s observations about Craigslist’s sex section:

“Craigslist has a huge number of categories – M for T, men for trannies; T for M, trannies for men; rice queens, white guys who only like Asians; burritos, white guys who only like Latinos. I mean, these are all up there, all the time.”

Nice. But shit, I digress again.

My hide is particularly chapped by an interview with victim #1, whom Markoff kidnaped, terrorized, and robbed at gunpoint. Right off the bat the focus is on her boobs, on her line of work and how “lucrative” it is, and on how she was askin’ for it by booking herself into a swanky hotel as a free agent hooker.

[TV sexploitation sexpert Joe] Moura said that by acting as her own boss, Tricia was increasing her risk.

“If there’s a street prostitute, she’s gonna have a pimp down the street or across the street on the corner who’s protecting her. Somebody using Craigslist getting a fancy hotel in Boston, she’s on her own.”

So ladies, remember; if you’re gonna work the classier hotels, you’d better get yourself a pimp to “protect” you. Otherwise you might come down with a terminal case of slain masseuse.

Posted in Mass Media, Rape Culture, Sexploitation and The Entertainment Industrial Complex. Bite me, Chad.

Profiles in Patriarchy: “The Girl”

Published by Jill on May 21, 2010. 84 Comments

No secrets will be revealed when I say that I watch television with depressing regularity, and that this habit chaps my hide a mile wide, but I can’t stop, because the carnage endlessly fascinates. Even the supposedly feminist shows (“30 Rock”) feature, not real feminism, but only bogus patriarchy-marketing TV feminism.

Bogus patriarchy-marketing TV feminism is when the lead character is a woman, but she’s doing a man’s job with a bunch of other men, only backwards, in high heels. And sexxxy.

The exception is Jada Pinkett Smith, non-threateningly depicted doing a woman’s job, but with attitude: she stars as a caring, nurturing (but sexxxy) head nurse on a mediocre hospital drama. Smith’s is a proper female minority character who lives to serve. She bosses the honky doctors around a little, but when she bucks the system it’s always for her suffering patients, and never for herself.

During the last TV season, the trend was toward saucy female leads as blonde cops with relationship problems and buttloads of sex appeal. In “The Closer,” Kyra Sedgewick — horrible South Carolina accent and comical chocolate addiction complete — simultaneously heads a homicide squad and amuses her FBI husband with endearing feminine airhead antics while dressed as June Cleaver. In “In Plain Sight” Mary Somebody plays Mary Somebody Else, a US marshall who has triple-X muchacho-on-gringa sex with her smokin hot Telemundo soap opera star boyfriend. Holly Hunter is every biker’s raunchy fantasy chick in “Saving Grace,” one of those shows where a Christian-type God is a wisecracking mentor character.

Despite featuring women in title roles, these shows all feature male knight-in-shining-armor characters, dudely authority figures, scenes wherein women are chained by the wrists in dungeons, and dialog that alludes to the female rape/murder victim as “the girl.”

The girl, the girl, the girl. It is beyond insufferable when TV cops allude to female rape/murder victims as “the girl.” “The girl” is a convention enjoying huge popularity since the invention of TV cops, and before. Why, just this morning, in another hot flash-induced state of TCM-watching insomnia, I saw 20 minutes of a godawful 1956 western called “The Last Hunt,” in which the central theme is two white guys, one “good” and one “bad,” fighting to the death over ownership of a kidnaped Native American “girl.” This character appears as a silent prop in practically every scene, has like 2 lines, and is named in the credits only as “Indian Girl” (but is played by a smokin hot honky actress). Every line of dudely dialogue includes the phrase “he stole my woman.” Dude Nation translation: questions of good and evil are questions for white men; whoever ends up with the captive mute squaw wins.

Speaking of TCM and Native Americans, currently they’re running a series called “Race and Hollywood: Native American Images On Film.”

They get a UCLA professor to say a few introductory words about how patriarchal 20th-century Hollywood portrayed Native Americans and pretty much invented the damaging stereotypes that persist to this day, then they show John Ford’s “Stagecoach” (Geronimo’s on the warpath!) to illustrate the point. That’s swell, but what drives me nuts about these things — they’ve done similar series with gays and Asians — is that they seem to think it absolves them of the crime of perpetuating racist propaganda. For a week or two they pretend to support a critical approach to these horrible, bigoted movies, but then for the rest of the year they show’em over and over again, without UCLA professors of Native American Studies introducing them, without offering the slightest critical analysis, and without compunction or apology or chagrin. In fact, if anything, the tone of the presenters toward Hollywood’s joyful immortalization of honky oppression is downright celebratory. And of course TCM completely ignores the massive sexism and misogyny that oozes out of nearly every “classic movie” ever made (see my essay on “How To Murder Your Wife.”).

Mang, I gotta get some sleep.

Posted in Mass Media, The Entertainment Industrial Complex and all old movies suck. Bite me, Chad.

Scum: not the real enemy

Published by Jill on March 30, 2010. 166 Comments

Sick of beauty? Dang it, me too. That’s why I’m posting on it more or less nonstop.

Blamer Magriff, reading yesterday’s post on how beauty is dumb, suggested that for crying out loud, people, shut the fuck up about beauty. She based her suggestion on the notion that writing about beauty merely perpetuates its evil power, like unto dropping delicious little nuggets of our splintered selves into its gaping maw.

The less attention we pay to how women look, one way or another, the better, at least for a while. And that goes for everyone. Stop talking about it already, it’s the ultimate sore subject, and everyone knows sores don’t heal if you insist on picking and picking at them.

Lard knows I love Magriff like fish sauce loves a spring roll, but I cannot get behind this thesis. To enlarge on the diseased skin metaphor: just as the treatment for a festering carbuncle is unlikely to include ignoring the carbuncle, so too might ignoring the hideous consequences of a critical aspect of women’s subjugation be unlikely to make it go away. I remind the Blametariat that, because women are an oppressed class, we don’t have the luxury of simply existing and lounging on the Lido Deck and traipsing around town as though our appearance were totally a politically neutral dealio and there was no global humanitarian crisis afflicting our entire population. That perk is reserved for the dominant class. We are an oppressed class, so everything women do, voluntary or no, is a political act. Is this tiresome? Painful? Exhausting? It sure is! That’s why I advocate immediate feminist revolt. Maybe then we could take a fucking load off, for crissake.

Anyway, I was motivated to complain about beauty for the second day in a row by a soap commercial on television. The soap commercial to which I allude is one of that insidious species of soap commercials that plays into women’s insecurities concerning our level of commitment to beauty and beauty products. In this ad, a group of women confront the horror of “soap scum.”

That’s right! You called it! It’s our old friend Dove!

Dear old Dove! Who can forget 2004’s surreal Campaign for Real Beauty? This devious advertising gimmick paraded conventionally pretty women and posed them crouching awkwardly in their underwear, rebranding soap model hotness to include a few more fat cells than previously allowed on TV. Dove called the models “real women.” They were meant to appeal to potential Dove butt-cream customers because the women were not the typical pubescent Slavic speedfreak toothpicks.

Internet feminists laughed and laughed. We were well used to this kind of schizoid women’s marketing. We cut our vagina dentatas on glossy women’s magazines where one page contains an article on the dangers of dieting but on the facing page is a giant ad for Lean Cuisine Bacon Alfredo Pizza (320 calories). Those 2004 Dove models might have had a little meat on their bones, but the message was same shit, different day: “Hotness is king! Buy yours here!”

The creepiest thing about it all was the camaraderiffic tone. The Dove company pretending to be your best friend and trusted confidante and professional life coach all rolled into a single “beauty bar,” existing solely for the purpose of helping you and your precious self-esteem be more beautiful than ever. Six years later, I’m still shuddering.

The Dove website is a fucking scream, by the way. Dork city! Check this out:

“As part of the launch campaign, DOVE invited women to rediscover the beauty in their own hair.”

Invited by an altruistic cosmetics company who cared for nothing so much as her self-esteem, Twisty discovered the Taj Mahal, a sunset on the beach, and a monarch chrysalis deep within the tangled web of her own hair.

Rediscovered beauty hair

And there’s actually a link titled “Real women react to soap scum.” No shit.

“So, Daphne, whatcha been up to lately?”

“Oh, not much. I got an internet video gig.”

“Doing what? Tickling kittens? Weeping piteously over Star Wars?”

“Nah. Reacting to soap scum.”

“Soap scum? Sweet!”

But back to the commercial. It’s set up like some kind of bizarro-world scientific study, which for some reason is being conducted outside using wacky equipment: life-sized woman-shaped mirrors with shower heads attached to their tops. The mirrors have cute flip hairdos. A bunch of women are “invited” — Dove is constantly inviting women to do moronic shit — to take part in the demonstration, which will reveal “the truth” about soap scum.

Dove puts the women test subjects to work right away. Cleaning, of course. What else?

“Every woman washed mirrors,” the narrator says, introducing the unlikely premise.

Cut to women diligently soaping up their weird woman-shaped mirrors. Cue the showers for a rinse.

Uh-oh. There’s unsightly white shit left on the mirrors! But why?

“Soap leaves soap scum behind every time you wash.”

Oh, no!

Yet, “you can’t see [the soap scum] on your skin …” admits the narrator.

So technically, what they’ve shown is that a substance purported to be soap can leave white shit on woman-shaped mirrors with shower heads stuck to them, and that actors can be paid to look horrified by this.

Happily for consumers who loathe and despise white shit on woman-shaped mirrors, Dove is “different.” As is demonstrated by a pretty, naked, decidedly non-scummy woman in a towel who caresses her cleavage with a sensual hand, Dove leaves skin “soft, smooth, and always soap-scum-free.”

Can you imagine being that towel model?

“So Miriam, whatcha been doin lately?”

“Oh, I got a job wearing a towel and feeling myself up on soap commercials.”

“You do this with a straight face?”

“It puts food on the table, OK?”

“But towel modeling? At your age?”

“Lucky for me Dove is an equal opportunity exploiter. As long as you’re really, really photogenic, towel models can be as old as 35, 36!”

The Campaign for Real Beauty has now morphed into the Dove Self-Esteem Fund, which “was developed to help free the next generation from self-limiting beauty stereotypes [and] promot[e] a wider definition of beauty.”

Notice that, in promoting this supposedly “wider” definition of beauty, Dove is tacitly promoting an all-important corollary: that there will always be those hopeless unfortunates in the margins for whom the definition still isn’t wide enough. Meaning that this new fake commodified Dove beauty will continue to retain exclusivity and unattainability, while injecting a new dose of guilt: if you can’t manage to be beautiful even under these new, lowered standards, you can’t be trying hard enough, or spending enough money.

Here’s a little taste of some of the shitty shit that beauty does:

• It creates and reinforces the notion of the sex class.

• It creates and reinforces the notion of social status.

• It promotes pointless adversarial relationships between women, effectively isolating them from each other (divide and conquer).

• It promotes physically and emotionally damaging, dangerous practices.

• It genericizes women, transforming them from humans into interchangeable fleshbots.

• It infantilizes women, transforming them from humans into morons who seek baby-soft skin.

• It publicly communicates private information which may be used against a woman, including her caste, sexual availability, and degree of personal investment in patriarchal mores.

• It diverts women’s financial resources from things like health care and organic margaritas to the beauty industrial complex, to the tune of billions a year.

• It diverts women’s attention from stuff that actually matters, like global women’s oppression, to superficial, meaningless, neurotic rituals. One of which is that you must endeavor to be free of scum at all times.

So that’s why I’m writing about beauty again. If it doesn’t get some bad press once in a while, people might forget how bad it sucks. It sucks way worse than soap scum.

Posted in Femininity, Mass Media, Oppression Culture, The Beauty Ultimatum and Women hate you. Bite me, Chad.