Archive for the 'Mass Media' Category

Is your pout plump enough?

Published by Jill on February 22, 2010. 113 Comments

Oh my fucking god, behold yet another story in a major American newspaper wherein the writer gets all verklempt about this wack new burlesque craze, just fifteen short years after the first quasi-transgressive hipsters disentombed it from its well-deserved mothball crypt in the misogynist perv-pile. Any excuse to interview a semi-nude chick with a stripper name, I guess. These Yay! Burlesque! stories seem to appear every couple of months. They always present burlesque as some kind of exciting new art form the practitioners of which are all empowered feminists who are totally in touch with their sexuality.

Here is what Miss Lily Verlaine, Seattle burlesque artist, has to say about about feminism.

“I enjoy the trappings of femininity. I enjoy wearing dresses, I like silk and I like high heels, eyelashes and big hair. It’s fun for me. I don’t think it’s un-feminist or that I’m any more or less of a woman for accentuating certain aspects of my femininity.”

I choose femininity! For me! Because what could be more feminist than choosing something?

“I find it very feminist and very exciting when a woman decides how to portray herself. Any woman being her own agent, being her own director, being her own stylist and her own voice is always feminist.”

What could be more exciting than a woman deciding to portray herself as something? Especially when she decides to portray herself as a male fantasy, am I right?

“‘For a long time, I wasn’t interested in nail-polish and makeup and all that stuff because I could be spending my time doing things in the community,’ she recalls. However, Verlaine found that once the dresses, furs, heels and makeup followed her offstage, people began to treat her better, men especially.”

Well, whaddya know. Appeasing the oppressor vs. “doing things in the community”: it’s a no-brainer!

“‘If I have my drag on, people compliment me. They say kind things. The interactions are night and day,’ she says.”

People: “We didn’t think much of you, Miss Lily Verlaine, before you started dressing like a hooker. But now that you’ve demonstrated your willingness to conform by defining yourself in terms of male desire, we think you’re awesome. Can we buy you a Scotch?”

Miss Lily Verlaine: “Gosh, thanks! This beats the shit out of trying to be taken seriously!”

Pull yourself together, woman! Not even the hipsters think burlesque is hip anymore. And even if it were, femininity is unenlightened, and also dumb. And even if it weren’t, all that makeup crap totally causes cancer! There’s mercury in mascara!

But maybe life just isn’t worth living if men don’t want to fuck you; what’s a little cancer compared to the infinite rewards of sex appeal?

Speaking of makeup, I just found out there exists a species of cosmetic called “lip plumper.” Lip plumper is an irritant that, when applied to one’s “pout,” makes it swell up, the better to affect that sexy, just-been-punched-in-the-face look that dudes love. This poor girl, apparently of her own volition, makes her own lip plumper out of cayenne and infant butt-cream.

Kill me now.

______________________
Photo: still from “How To Make Homemade Lip Plumper” by SecretLifeOfABioNerd on YouTube.

Posted in Art is my LIFE, Femininity, Mass Media, Sexploitation, The Beauty Ultimatum, The Entertainment Industrial Complex and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Yesterday. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt smells hoax

Published by Jill on February 4, 2010. 30 Comments

While whiffling though the NPR website in search of a piece on The New Alpha Wife, which I did not find, my neural net received an even nastier jolt than expected when a story titled “New Zealand Teen Auctions Virginity To Pay Tuition” hove into view.

The story so far: “Unigirl,” an anonymous 19-year-old student advertising on a NZ auction site, supposedly proposes to exchange her “virginity” for what supposedly is the high bid of $30,000.

Since pay-to-rape is perfectly legal in New Zealand (NPR calls the NZ laws governing fair use of prostituted women “liberal,”) it is difficult to imagine why this is news, unless somebody besides the prostituted student stands to make a buck.

Wait, am I seriously suggesting that there is anything more to the story than an empowerfulized gal workin’ the system for an opportunity to go to college? Why yes. Yes I am. From the NZ Herald:

“Unigirl has claimed that more than 30,000 people have viewed her advertisement and more than 1,200 made bids. With those sorts of numbers and with the battle for ratings at seven o’clock heating up, [New Zealand TV3 personality John] Campbell is right to be chasing and questioning the virgin story.

“This is mass audience stuff, and we have to get people to watch us,” Campbell told the newspaper.”

The online auction house, reportedly a fledgling startup, stands to cash in on some free advertising. News outlets like TV3 and NPR stand to cash in on a titillating story about a shameless teen so enterprising, so driven, so sexy, that she’s willing to sacrifice her most precious, priceless asset to the highest bidder in a crass capitalist exchange that will forever sluttify her. News media can take it a bit further, as NPR did, and conceal the paucity of actual news with a rehash of other famous virginity auctions. But because there aren’t all that many of those “feminist experiments,” they can throw in the one about the woman who got busted for offering herself online in exchange for baseball tickets.

In the end, though, whether or not the Unigirl story is true, there’s nothing to see here but the usual smirking, moralizing, and prurient interest that always seems to accompany the high-class prostituted woman narrative. Stories about poor New Zealand women working the streets to support their kids or their drug habits are somewhat fewer and further between. Stories focusing on the men who pay to rape women? Non-existent.

I laugh and laugh about this virginity stuff. Virginity! Ha! Like it’s an actual thing with objective value, and not just an offensive and essentially worthless porno-patriarchocratic concept. I can think of few concepts that are more offensive, really. Because “virginity” is predicated on the notion of active, authoritative annihilation, via the indisputable power of studly peen-pronging, of a passive and oppressed naif’s purported innocence, any dude who would actually “take” it is an instaloser, a rapist, and a creep.

But come on, let’s face it; the whole story has to be bogus, because any dude living outside a Victorian porn fantasy who could afford $30 large for a single, hypothetical hymen is rich enough that he could totally get the same thing for free any day of the week.

Posted in Mass Media, Men Hate You and Sexploitation. Bite me, Chad.

Still Life with Shatner Bobblehead and Duct Tape

Published by Jill on February 4, 2010. 36 Comments

Still Life with Shatner Bobblehead and Duct Tape

Oh, no.

In the picturesque Texas Hill Country, where for 2 years it did nothing but not rain, it now does nothing but rain.

Remember that Ray Bradbury story where the kid lives on a planet where it only stops raining for like 10 minutes once every 80 years or whatever, and everybody looks forward to it like mad, but the kid, whose only dream is to frolic outside unmolested by condensed atmospheric moisture, is accidentally locked in a closet by feckless playmates and misses the golden 10 minutes? It’s like that here at Spinster HQ. And, if I may say so, what the fuck? I turn my gaze skyward, hoping to catch an errant rose-gold ray of sun so that my lobe might convert it into obstreperantin or chortletic acid, but no. The sky’s just a vast expanse of dirty white wetness and it’s screwing sorely with my neurotransmitters. About the only ones left in my lobe are depressulose and stupenephrine. My yippee receptors are just flappin’ in the breeze, flappin’ in the breeze.

Maybe all this water wouldn’t be so bad if I were a newt, but a newt I’m not.

I’ve been told that the rain stops occasionally. Having been driven mad by the incessant tappa-tappa on the window pane-a, I am dubious in the extreme that this is the case, but if it is true, for the lovagod call my ass up when it happens, so I can biff out to the nearest field and do the butt-dance without having to put on that clammy rubber hula skirt.

It goes without saying that cabin fever has begun to manifest itself in the shape of TV viewing. Here are some of the repellent results of this pursuit.

1. A television commercial advertising a vitamin pill called Centrum Ultra Men’s asserts that some things are made just for men. According to the commercial, three of those things, besides, presumably, Centrum Ultra Men’s vitamin pills, are:

• bobbleheads

• duct tape

• a third thing I can’t remember

I’m calling bullshit on Centrum Ultra Men’s vitamin pills. I have in my possession one bobblehead and four rolls of duct tape, of which fact I provide photographic evidence above. I submit that the gender binary narrative supported by Centrum Ultra Men’s vitamin pills is bogus, dated, and sexist. Obviously bobbleheads and duct tape are not made just for men, but for anyone who needs a bobblehead, or who has to tape shit together.

Take me, for example. Like most women, bobbleheads and duct tape are integral to my daily routine. In fact, when checking the Spinster Agenda this morning, just after “Pump Iron, Get Ripped” and just before “Corrupt the Youth of Today” I observed these items: “apply ducktape to blown-out sole on paddock boot” and “tabulate preliminary results of Shatner bobblehead/Cheez-Whiz experiment.”

2. Another instance of sexism on television what recently caught mine eye was a promo for a show on Comedy Misogyny Central called “Tosh.0″. In this promo, Tosh.0, a loud, 20-something duuude — or perhaps he is a bobblehead — hilariously and edgily tantalizes his teen male audience with a segment that promises to answer the burning question “can women parallel park?” Cut to footage of a car backing up crazily onto a sidewalk. Women, avers Tosh.0, can absolutely not parallel park! Watch his show! Because denigrating women with moth-eaten sexist stereotypes is freakin awesome!

By some sad coincidence, I was using the Internet this morning, and just happened to come across the very segment Tosh.0 was promoting in his commercial. The video does, I regret to say, entirely live up to the extremely diminished expectations I have been forced to adopt regarding Men Aged 18-34. Not only does young Tosh.0 mock a middle-aged woman for being “really old,” he makes racist remarks about “L.A. Asians,” and throws in a few superannuated “jokes” about how women sucker innocent men into relationships, thereby destroying men’s lives.

To recap, this is what passes for funny on a major TV network in 2010: women can’t drive, old women can’t drive, Vietnamese women can’t drive, and women, with their cunning stupidity, live to shatter the dreams of innocent men.

3. I sometimes watch CNN while I’m pumping iron and getting ripped, and believe me, an aunt could write a dissertation, a Broadway play, and several meaningful protest songs on the garish spectacle of patriarchal mores on parade every minute on that network. But I’ll just skip all that and proceed directly to the commercial that irritated me this morning.

A handsome, silver-haired guy tells the camera that even though he did “everything he was supposed to do” as far as fitness and “eating right,” he still had a heart attack. So now he takes aspirin every day.

This ad isn’t explicitly sexist (although when compared with the “feminine” version of the same commercial — middle-aged wife-and-mother is “lucky” her daughter gave her an aspirin during her heart attack — its genderedness is pretty glaring). What particularly chaps the hide is this obnoxious practice of marketing through fear of sudden death cardiac death arrest. Because, wait. You mean I can pump iron and get ripped and eat nothing but raw spinach smoothies and take Centrum Ultra Spinster’s vitamin pills, and I still might croak, unless I get my butt on an “aspirin regimen”? Sign me up!

"Dramatization" of germs on Your Family

4. Jesus in a jetpack! Check out the huge fucking green “germs” on that member of someone’s family! It turns out that “hundreds of bacteria” could be on my kitchen hand sanitizer dispenser! I need an electronic motion-sensor model. I’ll mount it on my fence, so that when the feral hogs trot by, it’ll kill 99.9% of their swine flu.

Photo still from Lysol commercial. Note the word “Dramatization” in the lower left corner. Good thing they put that there, because otherwise I’d have been forced to conclude that the wholesome sport of basketball is now being threatened by a race of giant carnivorous paramecia.

Posted in Keep your bias off my gender, Mass Media and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt goes to pieces

Published by Jill on January 30, 2010. 46 Comments

Oh no! A 40-second video of a dancing cartoon butt wreaks havoc with my neurotransmitters!

Below, sent in by blamer Katie — thanks, Katie! — is the video that generated my paroxysm. According to my secretary Phil, the video is funny, but not as funny as I think it is.

Posted in Art is my LIFE, Mass Media, Not Altogether Depressing, Pre-recorded Twisty and Ways in Which the Internet Is a Hoot. Bite me, Chad.

Pre-abortion ultrasound laws generate amusing Onion vid

Published by Jill on January 19, 2010. 48 Comments


New Law Requires Women To Name Baby, Paint Nursery Before Getting Abortion

Remember this, from last summer?

Oklahoma is the only state in the nation that mandated a physician to both conduct an ultrasound and describe the images to the patient.

“The ultrasound provision takes away a patient’s choice about whether or not to view an ultrasound, and it requires physicians to provide information to their patients that the physicians do not believe is medically necessary,” Toti said.

“It’s an affront to women’s autonomy and decision-making power, and it’s also an intrusion to the physician-patient relationship.”

And this?

“One [Oklahoma] law would require women to fill out a lengthy survey that asks, among other things, about their race, education and reason for seeking an abortion. It asks women whether they’re having relationship problems, whether they can’t afford to raise a child or whether having a baby would dramatically change their lives.

Another section requires doctors to provide detailed information about complications that arise as a result of the procedure.”

The mind reels.

[Thanks, Wiggles]

Posted in Compulsory pregnancy, Mass Media, The Argument Against Human Reproduction and Ways in Which the Internet Is a Hoot. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt publishes post on godly football player without titling it first

Published by Jill on January 18, 2010. 72 Comments

Redneck beer coozy

According to the Internet, a celebrity football player and his mother are making a pro-compulsory pregnancy Super Bowl commercial for noted hysterical antifeminist group Focus on the Family. Reportedly the gist of the commercial is the heartwarming tale of the pre-parturient football mother, who experienced life-threatening issues while pregnant and was advised by doctors to abort the fetus. Well, Football Mom begged to differ. Since abortions invalidate and indecentuate women, she brought her fetus to term, whereupon it matured into a dude who made a shit-ton of money throwing a ball around in a stylized form of organized combat. She raised herself a star quarterback who loves Jesus! Her gamble paid off, says Focus on the Family; yours will, too!

I love the hyperreactive, emotionally unstable “argument” supporting the premise that abortions “kill babies” that would otherwise grow up to become influential celebrities. If you have an abortion you’re murdering the future winner of the Nobel Prize for Selflessness, etc.

Oy.

Try this simple experiment. If you are in a public place, such as the Super S “grocery” store in Dripping Springs, Texas, this unborn-fetuses-are-the-Mother-Teresas-of-tomorrow thesis can be disproved in about 47 seconds. A quick glance around this shrine to Creme Filling will confirm that your fellow shoppers — all former fetuses brought to term as per God’s Plan, then abandoned by that same God to forage for sustenance in this forsaken hellhole of wilted iceberg lettuce and plastic-wrapped genetically modified snack foods — count no Mother Teresas among their number. No Presidents of the United States, no Nobel laureates, no celebrities, no astronauts, not even any local TV news anchors. It turns out that the vast majority of fetuses brought to term are just regular chumps the existence of whom is a matter of extreme inconsequentiality to the cosmos. They don’t cure cancer or negotiate peace settlements in the Middle East. They eat sliced baloney, wear beige Easy Spirit shoes, and sheathe their Miller Lites in beer coozies that say “I don’t need the INTERNET, my wife knows EVERYTHING!”

This same experiment can be performed anywhere — in urban sidewalks, rock clubs, trendy coffee huts, taco stands, and upscale shopping malls –with homogeneous results. Which results are: exceedingly few non-aborted fetuses become saintly millionaire football players.

What Focus on the Family conveniently omits to consider is the proposition diametric to their Heroic Fetus thesis. That is: applying their own loony reasoning to the problem of the existence of Bad Dudes — it follows that an abortion today could unburden the world of tomorrow’s rapist, suicide bomber, or genocidal maniac. Why wouldn’t that be a good idea?

Focus on the Family blames evildoers on crummy families where there is too much MTV and not enough “attuning to God’s presence and calling.”

O for the simpler days of yore, when you could just take your “snippy” teen “out to the back 40 acres” and “get his mind straight” (apparently, back in the days of yore, everybody had 40 acres in the back. This area was called “The Whuppin’ 40″). But now, instead of compliant teens who shape up the minute Paw kicks the shit out of’em, MTV has created a race of headstrong youths who are, inconveniently, able to “articulate their anger,” thus “compound[ing] the difficulties of growing up.”

Here’s an excerpt from the Super Bowl commercial story that’s creepy in ways I just can’t put my finger on.

“Tebow, one of the most esteemed college football players ever, has been very vocal about his Christian faith and his love for Jesus Christ.”

A college football player loves the ghost of a dead Nazarene on a stick, so he’s qualified to compel pregnancy? That doesn’t even make sense in a world gone mad!

It’s not Tebow so much as this recent Haiti-spawned spate of vocality about love for Jesus Christ, I suppose, that sticks in the spinster craw. On CNN yesterday there were countless videos of traumatized Haitians stumbling around in rubble, alluding to God in fearful, reverent and favorable terms. It blows the lobe. This earthquake and subsequent torments visited randomly upon the survivors is a pretty good argument of in favor of an indifferent, deity-free universe, but apparently other, more fanciful conclusions have been drawn. The heart bleeds.

Posted in Compulsory pregnancy, Godbagism, Magical Mysteries from Godtown, Mass Media and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.

Cheap frills: spinster aunt views child beauty pageant on TV

Published by Jill on January 13, 2010. 74 Comments
Remind you of anyone?

Remind you of anyone?

This dude is charged with murdering a woman unfortunate enough to have married him — she documented his violent episodes in her diary — and the Beeb reports that she had a “volatile personality”?

!

* * * * * * * * * *

In other antifeminist news, yesterday the satellite dish at Spinster HQ received a program called “Little Miss Perfect.” This turned out to be a reality show about women who have internalized the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women to the extent that they embrace an astonishing hobby. The hobby is the competitive display of their female children, whom they trick out in the most extreme, sexualized feminine drag imaginable, at an event called the Little Miss Perfect Pageant. Cameras follow around two young hopefuls and their mothers as they practice “wow-wear” dance routines, rent cheezy dresses, and glam up for the competition. Like all reality shows, the subtext of “Little Miss Perfect” is “Get a load of these weirdos!”

Of passing interest: the Little Miss Perfect Pageant is governed by a feminine male emcee. He is the only male character in the show. He sings a song about dreams coming true to the tots as they contort themselves into the celebrated “pretty feet” pose. I experience a momentary pang of prurient curiosity about this slightly sinister dude, whose degraded circumstances I perceive as dangling somewhere between bathos and pathos. What bizarre fusion of the tragic and the mundane might lead a girlyman to wind up singing syrupy ballads to creepy-looking kids at Little Miss Perfect pageants in meeting-rooms at Marriott hotels in red states? I guess I’ll never know.

Of course, now he’s on national satellite TV in stunning high-def, so I suppose it’s a moot point.

Meanwhile, the kids are on stage, gleaming in “eveningwear”: yards of gem-studded organza, full makeup, false eyelashes, spray tans, giant wigs, acrylic nails, and fake teeth. They look like they were dipped in a mixture of glucose and polyurethane, polished with an orbital waxer, and finished off with a couple of cans of Aquanet. They are 8-year-old proto-pole-dancing virgins with unceasingly bared teeth who shake their moneymakers and wink come-hitherly at the judges.

Fortunately, the gaudy spectacle did not blow my entire tiny mind, for I am acquainted with the child pageant phenomenon. The library at Spinster HQ contains a pink coffeetable book entitled High Glitz: The Extravagant World of Child Beauty Pageants. It’s full-o Susan Anderson’s lurid photographs of teensy beauty queens. In the foreword to High Glitz a chappie named Robert Greene makes a statement with which I cannot quibble:

“We are not used to treating the inner lives of young girls with the proper seriousness — as a subject worthy of study and analysis.”

This is certainly true of the producers of “Little Miss Perfect.” They depict the mothers as slightly batshit and the inner lives of the young girls as non-existent. The resulting pseudo-documentary smells, predictably, of burnt polyester.

Greene, however, chides horrified and nay-saying spectators for what he perceives as an outdated unwillingness to accord basic human agency to pageant contestants. He argues that everything about humans is “artificial” whether it is obvious to adults or not; therefore these junior artifice-junkies are cutting-edge visionaries and artistes, and their unsparingly spangled exaltation of fembottery is the authentic pre-pubescent girl fantasy. In other words, cheap frills is their culture, it has legitimacy, and you’re unevolved if you imagine that these kids are nothing more than victims of their batty stage mothers’ frustrated longings.

Thus far Greene and I are two hearts beating as, perhaps, one-and-a-half, but we part company altogether when he launches into a paean to the supposedly extraordinary insights of Victorian pedophile Lewis Carroll, whom Greene lauds as the lone personage in all of recorded history who has given the inner lives of young girls their due.* And when he as good as declares that child beauty pageants are the greatest thing since high-speed GPS internet iphone video chat blog shopping, I clench up; the desire to magnify femininity by a factor of about 6 million and put it on public display may be genuine, but, since femininity is the practice of obeisance to oppressive mores, pageants don’t exactly amount to the pinnacle of human endeavor, or even a minor victory for Truth and Beauty.

However, Greene gets no argument from me when he asserts that, unlike boys, who are applauded for their active inventiveness, little girls are universally and sexistly seen as “essentially passive and weak” and incapable of inventing a meaningful culture. There can be no doubt that human society generally smirks condescendingly at female children, dismissing them as vapid impotents-in-training, and that this treatment is totally bogus.

I further agree that, as far as the participants themselves are concerned, this kiddie burlesque has at least the same (if not greater) philosophic value as playing soccer or performing at a piano recital. An adult spectator may not credit it, but, given the porn-dominated zeitgeist, competing for rhinestone crowns by transforming into idealized miniature sexbots is a perfectly valid and fulfilling pursuit that has, from the perspective of the kid, nothing to do with seduction or titillation, and everything to do with plain old human creative impulses. What does a 7-year-old know from titillation? If a spray-tanned tap-dancing kindergardener in a wiglet and off-the-shoulder cupcake dress evokes spasms of horror in the onlooker, it’s certainly not the kid’s fault; she’s merely coloring with the available crayons, and plainly having pretty high time doing it. It’s not the stage mother’s fault, either; she indulges the kid’s young dream with thousand-dollar gowns, rhinestone corsetry, professional coaches, and bionic dentures, not because she’s a psycho abuser, but because she just wants her kid to excel at something.

But won’t they be scarred for life? Undoubtedly, but not because of the tawdry nature of the Little Miss Perfect contest. Beauty pageants don’t fuck kids up. Growing up in a culture that despises them fucks them up, and no little girl is immune from that.

I submit that anyone who is uncomfortable with Little Miss Perfect is ethically obliged to be just as uncomfortable with femininity in general. Little Miss Perfect is merely one of a gazillion equally nauseating points on the Porno-Feminine Continuum within which all female citizens of the globe are confined by a culture of oppression.

________________________
* Mr Greene apparently feels that Charles Dodgson’s hobby as a child pornographer uniquely qualified him as an expert on girl culture. Forget The Secret Garden, Mrs Basil E Frankweiler, Go Ask Alice, It’s Me, Margaret, A Wrinkle in Time, Diary of Anne Frank, etc.

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

Spinster aunt emerges from self-help section with inferior selection

Published by Jill on December 11, 2009. 67 Comments

It is considered “self-improvement” to “uncover the truth about men.” I know this because I have just read a paperback purporting to enlarge on this “men, revealed at last!” theme, and the words “self-improvement” are printed right on the jacket.

I have to confess that, in reading this book, Little White Whys: A Woman’s Guide through the Lies Men Tell and Why by I.P. Freely MD, my self has not been improved in any way whatsoever. Unless it can be construed as a sort of character-building exercise to endure a lot of very bad writing on the tedious What Makes Dudes Tick theme.

Here is an example of the enlightenment the book offers women: that when a straight dude puts you “on the back burner,” it means you are “fuckable,” although not to the degree of his “1st string” hotties. Apparently I.P. Freely MD and his publisher feel that a grasp of this vital information about men will improve the heck out of you.

I.P. Freely MD isn’t really the author’s name, incidentally; as a humane gesture, I thought I would spare him the embarrassment of reproducing his name in conjunction with this awful book, as he obviously dashed the thing off as a parody in about eleven minutes because he lost a bet, and it was sent to the publisher without his knowledge. I mean, look at the title. No editor ever laid eyes on it. The only thing even remotely writerly about it is that it contains words.

Also, I.P. Freely MD writes, horribly, in the second person plural, addressing the reader as “ladies.” As you know, the only persons qualified to address a person as “ladies” are lesbian gym teachers. I.P. Freely MD inserts the word into nearly every sentence, as though he were giving the keynote speech at the Clueless Ladies in Need of Dudely Advice Symposium. As in

“Ladies, the key here for you is patience. You have to handle us no differently than you would a toddler approaching the terrible twos.”

See what I mean about parody? Hey, I.P. Freely MD! 1972 called and they want their Care and Feeding of the Man-Child crap back, right?

However, if we were to play along and assume that I.P. Freely MD is in earnest, we might best paraphrase his thesis as “all men are liars and that’s the truth.” Avers IPF MD in the riveting introduction to his oeuvre,

“This is a precise reference book of men’s lies [...] Ladies, what I will attempt to do is give you an intimate tour of the workings of the male mind. Ladies, prepare; this may ’sting a little’ … (sorry, it’s the MD in me) [...] Ladies, if I offend you, I do apologize beforehand.”

Freely’s deepest wish — aside from banking the spare change he’s picking up from sales of this crappy book — is to spare women everywhere the anguish they will suffer as a result of believing a single word that comes out of any dude’s mouth. How will he do this? By revealing all the lies men tell women, and recommending what course of action women should take.

I will spare you the anguish of spending $14.95 to find out. Freely’s recommendation, based on his professional medical knowledge of the inherent foulness of masculine behavior, is a universal “suck it up, babe.”

The approach is twofold. After asserting what a lot of degenerate louses men are, I.P Freely MD suggests that lovelorn babes should ask their prospects a lot of questions to determine the extent of their degenerate lousiness, e.g. has he ever been married? Does he have any kids? Has he ever had legal problems? Does he own that car? Has he ever had sex with a man?

However, once a woman has found a dude who isn’t an unemployed crackhead jailbird homo pedestrian, I.P. Freely MD explains how she should navigate his web of lies in order to have a “loving, lasting relationship” with him.

How should she do this? By not asking questions. Seriously. After you’ve hooked him, questions merely irk a degenerate louse, for he cannot reasonably be expected to answer truthfully. Questions such as how many girlfriends he has had, whether he loves you, whether he slept with your best friend, and — seriously — whether these jeans make your ass look fat: cut this shit the fuck out, ladies. Men would rather watch ESPN than deal with your whiney insecurities.

Also, ladies, “be really careful here of what you demand that he do with you or for you on Saturday mornings.” If you dare to exist on Saturday mornings, ladies, do it somewhere far away from him. Go to a white sale or something.

Also, do everything it says in this book, otherwise your man will leave you for someone hotter and downgrade you to the booty call list.

It’s 2009, and medical men are still giving ladies the same moth-eaten pointers on how to more perfectly suck up to them. Here’s the self-improvement book I wanna see: Fuck the Dominant Paradigm: Stop Viewing Yourself in Terms of Dudes, Politics, Religion, Culture, Celebrities, Porn, and Internet Feminists, and Just Do Whatever Funky Shit You Like.

Posted in Dear god what about the men?, Femininity, Mass Media, Men Hate You and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.

I got yer rape prevention email forward right here

Published by Jill on December 6, 2009. 94 Comments

Gas Pumper

It was on a recent comment thread that the subject of racial bias in abduction reportage popped up. I allude to the phenomenon where a white woman and a black woman may be kidnaped on the same day, but the news media only get overwrought about the white girl. The socio-pathology underlying the phenomenon is said to be that, for a given kidnap/murder, the depth of responding media prurience correlates precisely with the abductee’s sex and social status.

As an aside, let us please observe a moment of silence for how fucking educational this blog is. I had always informally thought of the aforementioned phenomenon as Natalee Hollowayism. Come to find out it’s an official syndrome. It’s called, in fact, Missing White Woman Syndrome. I read all about it in Wikipedia. Speaking of Wikipedia, here’s a kind of funny example of Wikipedian copy-editing gone awry:

“Described as ‘bright and beautiful,’ Huston’s remains were found more than a year later.”

But I digress.

No, wait, I feel another digression coming on. While I’m on the subject of race bias, an anecdote:

Austin’s swankiest second-hand store is a joint called Uncommon Objects. This shop, located on trendy South Congress on the event horizon of an irony wormhole, is jammed to the joists with quirky, overpriced mid-20th century bric-a-brac and weird-ass shit running the gamut from cheezy to creepy: huge pink vulvateen ceramic ashtrays, disfigured and disembodied rubber baby-doll heads, rusty old dental instruments, frayed Masonic tapestries embroidered with sinister symbols, etc. I go a-rummaging there whenever I’m in the market for a Mason jar full of petrified sugar cubes ca. 1953, or a disintegrating antique leather baby shoe, or, as was the case yesterday when I adjourned thither for a quick rootle, a heartwarming gift for my sidekick Stingray (see the chic and elegant plastic brooch pictured above; although for some reason, she failed to warm to it in the enthusiastic manner I had anticipated).

Anyway, I had just finished examining a disturbing, moldy-looking object labeled “FAKE HAM $45″ when I espied a faded 8 x 10 portrait of a young couple in love. The label said, “PHOTO OF BLACK COUPLE $16.50.”

Because I am an advanced patriarchy-blamer and world-famous sleuth, I immediately looked for, and detected, a similar photo of a white couple. You’ll never believe it! The sticker on this photograph did not say “PHOTO OF WHITE COUPLE $16.50.” It said “ROMANTIC PHOTO, $30.”

So there ya go.

Onward. In the comments thread to which I allude above, blamer Speedbudget observes, with respect to the idea that media coverage of women’s abductions reflects what blamer Isabel sneeringly refers to as “a public outpouring of concern:”

“In my neck of the woods, the public outpouring is one of, you guessed it, disdain for the women who get themselves kidnapped, raped, and murdered. You know. Cause she should have been doing whatever it is women should do to avoid getting kidnapped, raped, and tortured by the perpetrators of crimes everywhere.

The media tends to use these stories as object lessons for us ladybrain holders. The commentary on news programs is all about how to keep yourself safe, not about the perpetrators and how men have some [I would say "all" -- Ed.] responsibility for the violence.”

Coincidentally, I recently received, from blamer frootloopz, an email on a totally related subject. The email contained a satiric regendering of one of those “scaremongering emails that people forward to me from ‘An Othershire Police Constabulary’ about how I shouldn’t go out at night, shouldn’t drink alcohol, shouldn’t do this, shouldn’t do that etc.” For the edification of the cosmos, I reproduce (a slightly modified version of) it here.

___________________________________________

Sexual Assault Prevention Tips Guaranteed to Work

1. Don’t put drugs in women’s drinks.

2. When you see a woman walking by herself, leave her alone.

3. If you pull over to help a woman whose car has broken down, remember not to assault her.

4. If you are in a lift and a woman gets in, don’t assault her. You know what? Don’t even ogle her.

5. When you encounter a woman who is asleep, the safest course of action is to not assault her.

6. Never creep into a woman’s home through an unlocked door or window, or spring out at her from between parked cars, or assault her.

7. When you lurk in bushes and doorways with criminal intentions, always wear bright clothing, wave a flashlight, or play “Boys Who Rape (Should All Be Destroyed)” by the Raveonettes on a boombox really loud, so women in the vicinity will know where to aim their flamethrowers.

8. USE THE BUDDY SYSTEM! If it is inconvenient for you to stop yourself from assaulting women, ask a trusted friend to accompany you when in public.

9. Carry a rape whistle. If you find that you are about to assault a woman, you can hand the whistle to your buddy, so s/he can blow it to call for help.

10. Give your buddy a revolver, so that when indifferent passers-by either ignore the rape whistle, or gather round to enjoy the spectacle, s/he can pistol-whip you.

Don’t forget: Honesty is the best policy. When asking a woman out on a date, don’t pretend that you are interested in her as a person; tell her straight up that you expect to be assaulting her later. If you don’t communicate your intentions, the woman may take it as a sign that you do not plan to rape her.

______________________________

Forward this, along with $1, to everyone you know, and soon you will be a millionaire!

Posted in Austin, Blogulation, Mass Media, Men Hate You, Oppression Culture and Rape Culture. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt reads amateur op-ed piece

Published by Jill on November 28, 2009. 49 Comments

Every morning Google sends urgent feminist alerts to my inbox. It’s hilarious, the contexts in which writers of Internet crap chuck that word “feminist” around.

– Rihanna has a new album; she left her abusive boyfriend, so she’s a feminist icon now.
– You can wear false eyelashes and still be a feminist.
– What should we do if feminists try to take over the world?

Here’s a dude who says he became a feminist because his daughter has “big brown eyes.” Those dreamboat peepers of hers caused Walter Backstrom, writing in the Tacoma, Washington News Tribune, to look into the whole global women’s rights dealio, that he might gain some insight on what the future has in store for his little princess. What Daddy finds is patriarchal oppression out the wazoo, but sadly he ignores the obvious conclusions, preferring instead to recite a predictable and xenophobic list of injustices of which everyone on earth is already well aware and, as has been well-documented, doesn’t give a flying fuck about.

In some African countries, sexual slavery and sexual mutilation are still the norm. In some Arabic countries, young girls can’t go to school and woman [sic] can’t drive a car.

The bad men, they’re all over there.

“Doing my research, I discovered myself becoming a feminist.”

Hello, God? It’s me, Walter.

Too bad Walter didn’t research “feminism”; if he had, he might not have written this knucklehead crap:

“A feminist is a person who believes in equal rights for men and women.”

Oh, Walter. Walter, Walter. That’s not a feminist, that’s a marketing gimmick. A feminist is an activist who seeks liberation from sex-based oppression.

[Omigod, Jill did not just define feminism! Who died and left her in charge of gurgling out feminist ideology on her own website! Feminism is about whatever ya want it to be about, such as the right to make your husband do laundry, in return for which emasculating sacrifice you agree to wear porn drag in bed.]

Walter continues:

“[...] I realized that women are not paid at the same rate as men, that domestic violence is still a fact of life in the U.S. and the rap music that young people listen to on the radio denigrates women by using the “B” word.”

Well, stop the presses, Walter!

It kind of turbulates the innards to contemplate that old Walter claims he is just now noticing this shit for the first time. What kind of “research” did he have to do before coming into possession of these tired old pop culture factoids? The village idiot could write a 1000-word essay on this with one lobe tied behind his back. The sex-based pay disparity is, and has been for 40 years, the single most highly publicized “feminist” talking point; “domestic violence” is the central theme of about 47 popular TV cop dramas, 47 more popular TV true crime shows, all local newspapers, and Oprah; and no godbag honky dude who has drawn a breath over the past 3 decades has failed to get bent about rap music (“rap music” means “all black dudes;” rampant misogyny in other pop music genres never sparked the same outrage). Where has Walter been lo these many years? Maybe he spends all his spare time, when he’s not gazing raptly into his daughter’s limpid pools, in church.

“When I started researching the status of women, especially in the Third World, I felt the tears of angels on my shoulders.”

How does that work, exactly? Are the angels teeny-tiny, perching on him like parrots? If so, why wouldn’t Walter say “I felt the feet of angels on my shoulders”? I aver that the effluvia of such tiny shoulder-perching entities would be unlikely to stream out in quantities observable by a human shoulder. Or are these angels very large, floating above him, so that when they weep over Walter’s research, it sort of rains? If so, what physical properties do angels possess such that everything about them except their tears is immune to the Earth’s gravitational pull? And why would Walter feel these tears only on his shoulders? Does he wear an angel-tear-repellent hat? Do the angels have spray bottles that they aim at whatever body part they think might make the most sentimental impact?

Walter, with his touched soul, aching heart, and moist shoulders, doesn’t make much sense in this weird essay, particularly when he appears to sort of fleetingly comprehend that women’s oppression is a humanitarian crisis, but only, apparently, in the “third world,” and although we need to “help” those miserable third world women, he himself, most assuredly, “won’t be joining any feminist group such as the National Organization for Women, and certainly [not] Planned Parenthood, since I am a conservative and pro-life.”

Well, now it all falls into place. Walter hates women after all. The idea of helpless foreign sex slaves makes him sort of sad, but if they get knocked up old Walter doesn’t mind laying claim to their personal bodily sovereignty. No wonder Walter’s essay is irrational. No argument in favor of feminism can make sense if its author can observe irrefutable evidence of patriarchy while simultaneously maintaining that godbag asshole dudes should be able to string women up by the uterus with this churchy compulsory pregnancy crap.

O Walter! Walter, Walter. Those aren’t angel tears on your shoulders! It’s spinster aunt spit!

Posted in Compulsory pregnancy, Godbagism, Knobjectivism, Magical Mysteries from Godtown, Mass Media, Men Hate You, Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society and Ways in Which the Internet Is a Hoot. Bite me, Chad.