I Blame The Patriarchy

An “old movie” thread has been requested. Ask and ye shall receive.

Longtime blamers are well aware that, while recuperating from gory ankle reconstruction surgery a couple years ago — remember? Bert dug a hole, and I fell in it? — I became strangely fascinated by the Turner Classic Movie channel.

The Turner Classic Movie channel, in case you never heard of it, runs old movies 24 hours a day. Talkies, silents, the odd foreign film. The movies are given shallow introductions by an avuncular presenter who focuses primarily on the personalities of the film’s personnel, rather than offering any really useful critique. Initially I started watching TCM while I lay imprisoned on the living room couch because it is more or less commercial-free. It is more commercial-free than PBS, which, in addition to shilling for the megatheocorporatocracy, tends to run really long, tiresome commercials for itself featuring handsome, well-groomed children of all colors leaping through the air in slow-motion waving “PBS” signs, showing public broadcasting’s affluent honky audience how diverse they are. TCM, though not even remotely patriarchy-free, at least refrains from overt messages that purport to demonstrate Exxon-Mobil’s deep concern for the environment.

When I say that TCM is not even remotely patriarchy-free, I am not fucking kidding. I have yet to see a single film in their catalog that doesn’t throw a yacht party celebrating the mores of the culture of oppression. War movies, romantic comedies, films noir — even the iconoclastic films and the beloved classics — revolve around either a) the White Dude Experience or (somewhat less often), b) women who fail to conform to the mandates of White Dude Experience and get an educational smackdown. Turner Classic Movies is a great repository of stylized, idealized, heroifized patriarchy in action.

Recently on Kubrick night I watched (for the millionth time) “Dr Strangelove,” a gorgeous and funny film it is impossible not to admire despite the fact that the only woman in the whole thing is a Playboy centerfold. There are many reasons to admire it, such as the the opening sequence where war planes refuel in midair to a cheesy soundtrack, Peter Sellers in 3 roles, the verite-style battle sequence, and the fact that it is one of the few non-indie films ever made which does not contain the line “I don’t know what to believe anymore!” But it’s also one of the most phallo-centric things going, and at the end — after Slim Pickens has ridden the giant nuclear bomb penis that will destroy the earth — when Dr Strangelove describes a post-apocalyptic paradise involving a shit-ton of hot babes at the ready to service the survivors through the nuclear winter, I was primed to throw a boot at the movie delivery device.

My thesis is this: that the entire canon of 20th century cinema is misogynist, classist, racist, and is therefore impossible for the radical feminist to appreciate without cringing, throwing stuff, and blowing a lobe.

Here’s my favorite beef: the scene where a dude and a woman are running, running, and the virile dude is yanking the woman’s hand, dragging her pathetic terrified person along, and she falls because she’s wearing fucking high heels, and he picks her up and they continue running, running, him dragging her along like a wagonload of screaming mimis.

I also can’t stand it when actors yank horses’ mouths, which they all, without exception, do.

What chaps your hide, cinematically speaking?

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Ever since the Lightning Strike of Aught Nine took out my radio tower and my satellite and the computer running the missile silos I have aimed at various undisclosed megatheocorporatocratic installations, I’ve been out of the loop.

I just heard that David Letterman told a tasteless joke about Willow Palin getting knocked up. I don’t know what the joke was. But it has inspired a blotz-ton of Internetian (rhymes with “Venetian”) backlashing. Some people are in a lather, demanding that Letterman be fired. Some people are saying, “Letterman was nice to that crazy stalker lady, so obviously he’s a good guy and didn’t mean anything by it.” Some people are saying, “So what if his joke was a little sexist? Don’t tell me what jokes are off-limits, you handwringing old cunt.”

This woman, Jan Tessier, observes some feminist outrage, takes exception to the radicalism, and declares that David Letterman is the real feminist. That’s right: sensitive, compassionate David Letterman is late-nite TV’s Lone Voice of the Feminist Revolution. He apparently embodies the principles of Tessier’s personal feminist heroes Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinam [sic].

Tessier, who — I bet you didn’t know this — has been put in charge of awarding True Feminist Badges to male talk show hosts — is reacting to the remarks of Amy Siskind.

Siskind, writing at HuffPo, has justifiably had it up to here with sex-based joke buttism and the culturally-embedded misogyny that inspires it.

Jan Tessier has read Siskind’s piece, which piece basically says “Hey, media knobs! Critique public figures on the issues, not on their Receptacle2K-compliance.”

Based on Siskind’s assertion that misogyny directed at icky antifeminist women is still misogyny, Tessier has no choice but to designate Amy Siskind a fake feminist. According to this reasoning, women who have been most severely compromised by oppressive patriarchal mores — the collaboratrices — are just asking for it. Tessier feels that it’s perfectly decent of Letterman to make jokes about teen sluts because — and this statement is remarkable in its stark raving lunacy — “there is absolutely no evidence that he hates women.”

Siskind, Tessier avers, is full of shit for maintaining that the media ought to put a sock in it already with the antifeminist one-liners about public women, even when the women in question are themselves antifeminists, like California beauty queen Carrie Prejean. According to Tessier, an “empty-headed” homophobic beauty queen is fair game for boob-job jokes. “That isn’t sexism,” she writes. “That’s comedy.”

What Tessier fails to grasp is that mocking members of oppressed classes simply because they exhibit the characteristics of their oppression is pretty fucking vulgar. Why did Prejean get her despised boob-job in the first place, Jan Tessier? For her health? No, Jan Tessier. The poor deluded kid enboobified herself in order to appease her oppressor, and absorbed homophobic messages for the same reason. The whole fucking system is homophobic and loves huge tits. What’s the big surprise? Mocking women for getting boob jobs is juvenile and unsophisticated. What needs mocking is the system that requires the boob jobs.

As to whether Letterman should be fired, well hell yeah. Of course, I say that about all the old white dudes.

Letterman has apologized, and naturally it’s a classic celebrity non-apology. He claims that when he told the joke he thought he was telling it about the 18-year-old Palin daughter, not the 14-year-old, which apparently makes all the difference.

I smell a Ditwuss!

Well, one thing’s for sure. Whenever an old influential white dude like Letterman cracks wise on national TV about the sluttiness of a teenage girl, no discourse gets enbiggened. No disconsolate soul grasping for Truth and Beauty in the dank subumbra of oppression is enlightened. No tacos are garnished with fresh pico de gallo, and no lobes are bathed in fancy, bubbly happiness.

I mention the bathing of lobes because the permutations of what may and may not be considered feminism, regarding this Letterman/Palin business, are truly lobe-blowing, and I don’t have to tell you, the veteran Blamer, how messy the post-lobe-blow wreckage can be, with its waxy yellow build-up, broken glass, and mountains of empty Cool Whip tubs.

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No time to post! The ag well at El Rancho Deluxe has has blown or something, and my ranch hand Chuck and I have to fix it.

What’s an ag well? It’s a long, skinny hole in the ground reaching to a subterranean pond that, when you attach a windmill to it, pumps out water for your agricultural needs. Watering sunflowers, bathing snakes, etc. Only my ag well doesn’t have a windmill. It has a stupid electrical pump that always blows out whenever a cow breathes on it or lightning strikes it or it’s Tuesday.

But before I go, allow me to set off your gag reflex with this: Che Guevara’s granddaughter posing “semi-nude” for a PETA ad.

PETA has long been on my shit list for its freewheelin’ exploitation of our culture’s obsession with women’s oppression even as it supposedly advocates for animal liberation. Want some attention? Just pornulate some female celebrity!

Like all antifeminist activist groups — pretty much any activist or political group that isn’t specifically feminist — PETA takes particular pleasure in throwing women under the bus for The Cause. Marxist revolutionaries, the Black Panthers, the free love movement, Hamid Karzai, white liberal dudes trying to get other liberal dudes elected to public office: these guys have always counted among their most prized principles an endless capacity to endure the suffering of women.

In the ad, Lydia Guevara wears camouflage pants, a red beret, and bandoliers of baby carrots while standing with one fist on her hip and the other outstretched.

That Guevara is described titillatingly as “semi-nude” even though she is fully clothed pushes my lobe to the semi-boiling point. The ad positions PETA as edgy and with-it, but it degrades Guevara, women, revolution, carrots, vegetarianism, and the entire human species. Ditwuss!

Non-windmill-equipped ag wells are this week’s runners-up.

This more or less explains the Ditwuss Award.

[Thanks, Stellatex]

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This cuntalina opines in the Daily Mail that women who don’t have kids “lack [...] an essential humanity.” That’s why she only wants “working mothers” on her staff. Her job is something she calls a “hack.” I don’t know what a “hack” is, but it apparently requires a familiarity with the experience of child vomit running down your neck.

“Barren” workers, the author avers, are sub-par in every way, but only if they have chosen not to have kids. Naturally, women who yearn for, but cannot have, children are exempt from her contempt; the choosing is what turns child-free women into vile harridans. Such freaks of nature, for example, always lead the undesirable “office bitch-fest.” Having chosen not to reproduce, they are incapable of “selflessness, compassion, generosity, commitment, fierce loyalty and plain hard work.” The author looks down on women who wait until they’re 40 to get artificially inseminated, but in the end she cuts’em some slack, because at least they’re trying to be human.

[W]e actually need our children; they complete us as women [...]; when we meet a woman who chooses her childlessness in the belief that there is something out there worth more, we smile politely even while - once again - our guts whisper: ‘Lady, you’re weird.’

Hey, wait a minute. This article accusing women of incomplete subhumanity based on a sentimental reading of the Cultural Narrative of Western Motherhood was written by one Carol Sarler. Why does that name ring a bell?

Oh yes. A quick click through the Halls of Blame reveals that in 2006 I agreed with this Sarler on the subject of the hollow promise of “grrl power” (although, unlike Sarler, I declined to blame the Spice Girls personally for the dominant culture’s preoccupation with sexploitation). Sarler, it turns out, is merely an advocate for traditional femininity, the kind that rules out raunch-as-empowerment as well as voluntary spinsterdom. It’s nice that “working moms” should get some props, but what’s with the “lady, you’re weird” baloney? That’s just mean. So I spit in your eye, Carol Sarler, even though pole-dancing as a feminist statement leaves us both a bit cold.

It did not escape my notice that Sarler’s insulting opinion piece is part of that skeezy “Femail” section of the Daily Mail, the one with the sidebar full of vicious gossipy voyeuristical misogyny designed especially to enthrobben the schadenfreude of women readers. Holy shit, is there ever some lobe-blowing, women-as-trainwrecks stuff in that thing.

– A woman is arrested for “antisocial behavior” years after she disgraced herself by failing to successfully eject live octuplets from her uterus.

– A “curvaceous” college student/ beauty pageant contestant reclines in bikini and heels on itchy grass despite her body measurements — reproduced in the article in case the reader would like to plot them on a graph — which do not conform to those of the normal pornulated woman.

– Another constituent of “Obese Britain” has lost a bunch of weight because her therapist has hypnotized her to believe she’s had gastric bypass surgery.

– My favorite: Mariah Carey, who can “produce sounds high enough to startle a bat,” employs a full-time assistant to “monitor her cleavage.”

Dang it, I don’t have time to write the last paragraph of this post. Too bad, it was gonna be a peach.

[Thanks, miz-geek]

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Troubled by that TV commercial where the laundry detergent teddy bear mascot tries to drown a woman in a giant hot tub filled with pink laundry, but instead of calling the cops or trying to kill the teddy bear, the woman is grateful, and the teddy bear puts up a Do Not Disturb sign so she can wallow in the laundry a little longer?

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Dear Twisty,

I just read a book review, titled “From Patriarch to Patsy,” linked by Ann Bartow at feministlawprofessors.com and I’m excited to let you know that, not only has feminism succeeded in gaining us equality, we really are now oppressing the men. I am so excited about my total control of reproduction and my new ability to quietly victimize men! It’s like we’re all superheroes now! I just wanted to let you know so you don’t waste any more time blaming the patriarchy.

One of the comments made it all clear to me:

Due to our code of law that still needs a major adjustment to the modern realities, men do not nearly have the same protections and rights as women do. This coupled with reproduction being controlled by women and disinformation by the popular media, especially daytime TV that mostly caters to its female consumer, women have nearly all the leverage. In this day and age, men and husbands are really the largely quiet victim.

Well, no time to blame, I gotta head out – I have to subjugate the hubby!

Thanks,

A former blamer

Dear A former blamer,

A year or two ago I almost shut down the Blamateria. That was when about a million feminist women wrote in to explain that giving blow jobs was the most empowering thing ever invented. I figured, well heck, if they’ve found the solution to women’s oppression, what am I still doing here? But I lingered on, mostly out of habit, the way obsolete old people do, updating the blog with the occasional wackaloon theory about how perhaps the white American feminist’s devotion to fellatio had not completely eradicated global male domination.

But now? Well, I have just finished reading “From Patriarch to Patsy,” the book review to which you allude, and you know? It looks like I can fully retire after all. Feminism, apparently while I was busy shaking my head over the ratio of rapes to rape convictions, has put American mothers in the driver’s seat. These ass-kicking women don’t need anything so prosaic as fellatio to control their men. They merely have to have a couple of babies. The instant they become mothers, their husbands mutate from noble human beings into broken men, cosmic joke-butts who have to touch dirty diapers and show their faces at Gymboree.

In the WSJ, Toby Young reviews Home Game by Michael Lewis, a whataboutthemen?! compilation of Lewis’ Slate columns wherein, apparently, he whines humorously about being pussywhipped. Boy, is it ever devastating to read of the degradation of the American father at the hands of the condescending American wife. Here is an excerpt from Young’s review, which begins with an excerpt from Lewis’ book.

‘At some point in the last few decades, the American male sat down at the negotiating table with the American female and — let us be frank — got fleeced,’ [Lewis] writes.

The poor sucker agreed to take on responsibility for all sorts of menial tasks — tasks that his own father was barely aware of — and received nothing in return. If he was hoping for some gratitude, he was mistaken. According to Mr. Lewis: ‘Women may smile at a man pushing a baby stroller, but it is with the gentle condescension of a high officer of an army toward a village that surrendered without a fight.’”

Toby Young, himself a father of four, loves Lewis like a long-lost millionaire uncle. He concurs that family men are not only doing the humiliating work of women, they are doing it without sufficient compensation. Taking the kid to swimming class! With other men in bathing suits! Cripes, is his wife-mandated vasectomy showing?

Excuse me a second, I have to get a fresh hankie to wipe the tear from my eye.

I checked out this Lewis dude, by the way. The very first thing I found was one of his Slate essays on fatherhood, probably one he recycled for his book. In this essay Lewis joyfully alludes to his penis about 87 times, considers dressing his 3-year-old daughter every morning an act of heroism, calls this daughter a “vixen,” and, as a treat for his pedophile readers, actually publishes a Femininity2K-compliant photo of the tot posing in a hula skirt and bra.

What a class act.

Hugs,
Twisty

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Plucked (!) from yesterday’s comments: Saturday Night Live parodies the myth of Nature’s devout commitment to the satisfaction of vulgar human appetites. Thanks, moodygirl.

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Sexy pig stripper spreads its trotters for your dining pleasure. From super-gross White Castle ad (link below).

Hi Twisty,

Remembering your post about the SuicideFood blog I thought you might be interested in this super-gross ad, featuring a stripper pig.

Also, I really enjoy your blog!

Melanie

Dear Melanie,

It was extremely thoughtful of you to send in a super-gross ad, for indeed, super-gross ads always interest me, particularly when they’re savage and deathy. And what could be more savage and deathy than an actor in a pig suit doing a porny dance and getting doused with “a come-hither barbecue sauce” to promote a fast food pork sandwich?

This pig so desperately craves to be consumed, it’ll dance for pervy strip club vermin, get’em drunk, and get’em off, too!

In case you missed it, the excellent Suicide Food blog skewers marketing gimmicks, ads, and logos that portray food animals as eager, grateful recipients of that highest honor a human can bestow: their own slaughter.

It is with an icy shiver that I recall the cold sweats I incurred once upon a time at the White Castle on Manchester and Big Bend in Maplewood, Missouri. A stifling hell-hole of boozy despair, that place. There wasn’t any air in there, just a miasma of grease, steam, and PCP. We’d go there at 3 in the morning after some vulgar binge, when we were so blotto we thought nothing of eating rotting garbage. The hamburgers were like lukewarm reconstituted scabs.

Anyway, for its super-gross conflation of pornography, misogyny, antiswine-ism, and fast-foodularity, as well as for the putrescent food fouls it perpetrated upon my drunken person in the early 80’s, White Castle wins today’s Ditwuss Award.

Hugs,
Twisty

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It doesn’t understand “golden retriever” but orange juice and cheese, hell yeah. Would I like to supersize that?

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Blamer Kate reports via Blackberry from the West Coast:

Dear Twisty,

A laughably obnoxious ad cluster I spotted at the intersection of 6th and Anza in San Francisco while doing my very dudely pizza delivery work:

[For those of you who can't make out the slogans in the photo:

"Save the calories for bacon."
"0 calories. Great taste. Welded together."
"No gut. All glory."]

Dear Blamer Kate,

Thank you for sharing the stupid ad for this stupid soda. You may or may not be acquainted with an even stupider TV commercial for this stupid soda wherein the product is described as consisting of wolverine spit and scorpion venom, packaged in a macho black can made from the hull of a nukular [sic] submarine. Dudes crush the “submarine” with their bare hands. “Pepsi Max. The first diet cola for men.” You can watch it here.

What’s the big whoop? Well, you can’t have a “soda for men” unless “men” are considered a class unto themselves, defined in terms of the bacon-eating, welding, glorious nukular submarine-squashing aspirations that separate them from dainty vulnerable “women.” These ads are jokey, depicting average-looking dudes, but they tacitly allude to the noxious he-man/fragile damsel dichotomy that’s been chapping actual women’s hides lo these many millennia.

So Pepsi wins I Blame the Patriarchy’s first-ever Ditwuss (DTWS, or “Degrades the Whole Species”) Award.

Hugs,
Twisty

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