Archive for the 'Mass Media' Category

Spinster aunt has a past

Published by Twisty on January 27, 2012. 88 Comments

A propos of asexuality, which, devoted readers will recall, was discussed on this blog as recently as 2005, is the revelation — currently taking the nation by storm! — that Tim Gunn hasn’t had sex in 29 years.

Who the hell is Tim Gunn, you ask?

To answer that question, I must reveal something horrible about myself. But I want you to know that I have navel-gazed my way down the noble path of self-help, and of 12-step platitudes, and have graciously decided to forgive myself for it. Besides, my lawyers have advised me that it’s unlikely I’ll have to do hard time. So what is it already?

I used to watch “Project Runway.”

“Project Runway” is a horrible reality show hosted by supermodel Heidi Klum wherein aspiring fashion designers compete for the opportunity to pimp their line at New York Fashion Week. They all live together, sewing ugly clothes and backstabbing each other as they present a new look for the judges each week. Of course everything about the show endorses femininity, so watching it is like little knives shooting out of the TV into my eyes.

Tim Gunn is the “style guru” who mentors the designers. His prim but lovable ass is the reason I watched this stupid show.

Aside from virginal 40’s film star Loretta Young, Tim Gunn has possibly the most correct posture I have ever seen on a human being. I marvel at his relaxed yet anal-retentive bearing. His internal organs must be marvelously well aligned. His suit is meticulously tailored, his skin cells buffed and radiant, his albino hair just so. When he lovingly enunciates every syllable — “holler at your boy” — a tear springs to my eye. He is truly a freak of nature, the whitest dude on the planet. I’m only human, dammit! I can’t look away!

Anyway, Tim Gunn says he hasn’t done it in 29 years because he hasn’t felt like it, but don’t worry about him, his life is perfectly fine and he feels perfectly fine. He’s fine. Despite his fineness, today there appear in major newspapers pieces on whether or not it is “weird” to feel fine about not fucking everything that moves.

USA Today plays it for laughs — that zany homo! I suspect this is because there isn’t any real data to support the view that Tim Gunn is crazy. USA Today’s expert hasn’t ever heard of anything like his decades-long “dry spell” but agrees that if Gunn is happy, what’s the big whoop? Lack of data, however, doesn’t stop the LA Times from trying to pump up anxiety over some anti-American sexual deviance requiring the intervention of experts. Their shrink diagnoses Gunn as mentally ill because

“It’s not a natural sort of decision, nor is it biological or physiological — we are not wired that way,”

If she were treating him for this “illness,” she says, she would get to the bottom of his debilitating trust issues, for Man Must Boink!

But naturally the burning question is, what does all this mean for straight people?

Good news, heteros!

Gunn’s refreshing honesty nonetheless might come as a relief to many, especially for the 15% to 20% of American couples who are reportedly in “no-sex relationships.”

So I guess one out of five straight people is mentally ill, wired wrong, and unnatural. Or maybe it just dawned on them, as their pubescent hormones began to evaporate into the aether, that sex is overrated, has nothing to do with good health, is annoying or sort of ludicrous, and they’d rather read a book about mushrooms.

In closing, I’d like to thank my supporters for supporting me as I self-accept myself and courageously salute my bravery in fessing up to my “Project Runway” past. I rock.

Posted in Keep your bias off my gender, Mass Media and Movies and TV. Bite me, Chad.

Pinkness ensures replication of patriarchal ideals

Published by Twisty on January 21, 2012. 114 Comments

How delightful to follow a link on the US birth control coverage benefit to HuffPo’s “Women” page. Everything is baby-pink!

What a relief, all that pink, because the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women clearly state that if the fairer sex go longer than 16 minutes without girlification, ghettoization, infantilization, and condescension, they’re liable to start acting like unfuckable men. From there, as you can well imagine, it’s but a short, slippery hop to the cosmos-rocking vortex of horror that would be the dissolution of the gender binary, followed closely by the total destruction of oppression culture as we know it.

In short, to save the galaxy, public institutions need to keep women’s shit pink. So kudos to the internet’s most popular blog for doing its part to ensure the ongoing safety of the status quo.

The reassuring baby-pinkness sets the “Women” section apart from the regular Huffington Post. The regular Huffington Post color scheme is a non-giggly, trustworthy forest green. This green HuffPo, of course, is not for women, but rather for normal people, people who dig porn and don’t dream of weddings 18 hours a day. Replete with gravitas, it’s got stories about Newt Gingrich’s horndog open marriage, a girl getting eaten by a crocodile, a severed head found in Hollywood Park, and a photo of that slut Snooki without her slut makeup.

But the pink women of America don’t give a shit about that crap. What we want is a list of the Top 10 cities where “sensitive men” can be found. We want horoscopes, because astrology is totally fun. And when we read about Newt Gingrich, we don’t want to think about the South Carolina primary, we want to ponder the weighty question of whether you should let your husband screw other women. We want articles explaining why booty calls (“comfort sex”) are awesome. We want about 257 other articles on relationship management and self-loathing. In short, as long as it has to do with sex, it has to do with women. Women equal sex!

The birth control coverage benefit, by the way, is one of the few not altogether depressing things to come down the women’s health pike in quite some time. If you missed it: it ensures (with the usual godbaggy caveats) that health insurance will now cover prescription birth control. For years misogynist jacknuts who adhere to the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women have concluded that any sexual use of women, such as compulsory pregnancy, is perfectly awesome, and that the whole concept of reproductive health is just a feminist, America-hating scam, and that legislation ought to reflect the sacredness of the dudely seed over the health and well-being of us second-class glory holes.

For a second, over at the Huffington Post, while reporting on a rare government platform that appears to quasi-validate the human status of women, the natural order was out of whack. But luckily the aforementioned blog post on the victory for women’s reproductive health appears on a “liberal” forum in a pink ghetto surrounded by infinite messages that women are sex toilets. Whew! Natural order restored!

Posted in Compulsory pregnancy, Mass Media, Not Altogether Depressing and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.

Little Niggling Instances of the Redoubtable Efficacy of Patriarchal Oppression, Part II: Shit I Saw on PBS

Published by Jill on November 23, 2011. 95 Comments

God, PBS sucks. Here’s why.

PBS, though it wants you to believe that it’s above this sort of thing (which it tries to demonstrate, as I have noted elsewhere, by those promo spots wherein divers Attractive Sample Children of the World in colorful rompers leap across the screen in slow-motion), definitely shoulders its fair share of the global misogyny-load.

First, have you seen the latest feel-good PBS promo montage? Among the various images of joyous human triumph and closeups of frogs licking their own eyeballs is a clippet excerpted from a show in which Tina Fey is awarded the Mark Twain Prize for Humor.

As you know, Tina Fey approaches greatness in many respects, and comes as close to a feminist presence as is tolerable by network television. Here is one of the pithy, relevant bits she did during her acceptance speech:

And, you know, politics aside, the success of Sarah Palin and women like her is good for all women — except, of course — those who will end up, you know, like, paying for their own rape kit ‘n’ stuff, but for everybody else, it’s a win-win. Unless you’re a gay woman who wants to marry your partner of 20 years — whatever. But for most women, the success of conservative women is good for all of us. Unless you believe in evolution. You know – actually, I take it back. The whole thing’s a disaster. — [cite: HuffPo]

Her speech ran several minutes, but the clippet PBS selected for the montage depicts Fey, the closest thing we have to a TV feminist, ducking her head in an apparent curtsey. Non-ironically.

Really? Tina Fey is too threatening a personage to be represented on PBS with an unbowed head? Come on.

OK, that’s a small thing, a split second thing, but you know as well as I do how those split seconds add up to whole lifetimes.

The Palin bit, incidentally, got edited out of the final cut of the award show. Way to keep it real, PBS.

Meanwhile, a four-part series entitled “America in Primetime” uses clips from “groundbreaking” television shows to explicate the manner in which TV character archetypes supposedly reflect actual human experience. The result is a stone butch dudefest.

The series imparts this message: “TV is about dudes, it’s awesome, and it’s art” (“Primetime’s” secondary argument for the awesome artness of TV appears to be that, compared to 2-hour feature films, TV series are a lot longer. But I digress).

Each episode in this “Primetime” series takes as its subject one of four character archetypes: “The Independent Woman,” “The Man of the House,” “The Misfit.” I watched “The Crusader.” This episode, quoth the website, “delves into the increasingly grey area between right and wrong as television heroes confront internal demons while seeking their own forms of justice.”

“The Crusader” features interviews with actors and writers who keep insisting that TV “mirrors” the “human experience.” You will hardly be surprised when I reveal that, in order to be a crusading TV hero who mirrors the human experience, you have to be a white dude in the middle of a bunch of physical violence. Human experience, according to American television, is white dude experience. Examples of TV crusaders: House from “House,” Sipowicz from “NYPD Blue,” Hawkeye from “M*A*S*H”, Jack Bauer from “24.”

Of course, PBS, as I mentioned earlier, loves diversity, so the producers of “Primetime” throw in a couple of tokens. They can’t profile an Asian crusader because none exists (well, there’s Kwai Chang Caine from “Kung Fu,” but that guy was only half Chinese, and problematically David Carradine was entirely white). Undaunted, they’re lucky to be able to kill both black and gay birds with one stone via Omar from “The Wire,” the noble gayblack criminal gunslinger so beloved of edgy American audiences.

“Primetime” also includes a perfunctory chick hero. She is neither Xena nor Buffy nor Starbuck nor Sidney from “Alias” nor Max from “Dark Angel.” No, she’s Scully from “X-Files,” a choice that particularly reeks of tokenism.

Scully's baby

Sure, we love Scully, the gun-toting FBI scientist field agent with the blazing news-anchor helmet hair, but let’s face it: the only thing she crusades for is the status quo. Scully has no demons, seeks no personal brand of justice. She’s just the tame, unthreatening, adult voice of reason, who, as Gillian Anderson here laughingly notes, is always filmed physically walking several steps behind her dude partner. They never give her anything more interesting to do than foil and rebuke and be secretly in love with the vastly more compelling and demon-filled and crusadery Mulder. Naturally — because what else can you to do your female lead? — aliens abduct her and rip out her ovaries. Mulder, on the other hand, is off getting high with the Indians. And when Mulder leaves the series? Like all female leads on TV shows that have run out of steam, Scully is of course saddled with an unwieldy alien baby. She spends the entire final season whingeing “My baby! My baby!” Scully can only be considered a crusader if you define “crusader” as “baby-obsessed killjoy who plays second banana to the much more complicated dude who really is a crusader.”

Says “Primetime” interviewee Diablo Cody, woman creator of “The United States of Tara,” in an attempt to explain the dearth of TV chicks with complex interior struggles,

Not to get all women’s studies on you, but maybe the idea of a hero with a really straightforward goal is sort of particularly male.

Yeah, for the lovagod, Diablo, don’t get all women’s studies on us; the dudes for whom TV is written find that very unsexy.

UPDATE: I have since watched the “Misfit” and “Independent Woman” segments of “America in Primetime.” In the former, it’s all dudes again. Dudes, dudes, dudes. Nerdy or quirky dudes “who defied comic stereotypes and societal expectations to reflect America’s diverse personalities.” White dude personalities, that is. Dwight from “The Office,” Gomez from “The Addams Family,” Louie de Palma from “Taxi.” Etc. Again, there’s one token chick, Tara from “The United States of Tara,” a character who plays dissociative personality disorder for laffs.

Unsurprisingly, most of the (all white) women characters featured in the “Independent Woman” segment are more accurately described as either misfits or crusaders or both (Roseanne, Mary Richards, Murphy Brown, Nurse Jackie), but are lumped together in a special “strong woman” ghetto because they are Vagina-Americans.

The clips are entertaining, but I stand by my original assessment of the series’ uncritical acceptance of a certain level of misogyny in entertainment. “Independent Woman” has that brainwashed tone you always encounter whenever the discourse tries to argue that since the death of June Cleaver modern women are livin’ the life of Riley. The thesis: since women TV leads don’t have to be paragons of motherhood anymore, and in fact can even have drug habits and be clinically insane in addition to being heterosexual hotties who remain deeply concerned with their relationships, modern television is a reflection of women’s liberation from patriarchal oppression.

Such as when the affluent white gals on “Sex In the City” sit around chic Manhattan restaurants discussing blow jobs. Women on TV, says “America in Primetime,” can be anything imaginable. Except, it turns out, a crusader or a misfit.

In a patriarchy, convincing the sex class they’re not oppressed is the name of the game. Thanks, TV!

Incidentally, I didn’t bother watching the “Man of the House” segment because those doofus dad sitcoms make me want to rip my own head off.

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Scully’s baby photo here.

Posted in Mass Media, Movies and TV and Oppression Culture. Bite me, Chad.

And another thing I’m sick of

Published by Jill on November 7, 2011. 106 Comments

On NPR the other day some interviewer — I forget which one — was interviewing some novelist — I forget which one — about the novelist’s new novel — I forget which one. The interviewer was a woman, the novelist was a woman, and the novel was about some women.

“How difficult was it,” asked the interviewer, “to write strong women characters?”

My bitter, mirthless laugh drowned out the author’s earnest reply. Because:

“So, Mr Chaucer/Joyce/Hemingway/Virtually Any Other Male Author In The History Of English And American Literature, how difficult was it to write strong men characters?”

It’s a given, not a talk show topic, that strong male characters will inhabit any given work of regular fiction. Dude characters have their requisite flaws, but they’re fully drawn and interesting because men are popularly conceived to already be strong enough to have books written about them. In fact, the word “strong” never prepends the word “man” in American English unless the topic is circus acts. But in recent literature, film, TV, and blogs, the Strong Woman has emerged as a thing, an archetype.

What are the components of this strong woman character?

In some cases, perhaps, they are the same components as any other well-written character. But in the popular imagination, the Strong Woman is the one-dimensional composite of post-feminist megatheocorporatocratic marketing: tough but feminine, fighty, a little mouthy, indomitable in the face of adversity, but ultimately heterosexual and predominantly concerned with relationships. Always, at her core, is that reassuring lump of insecurity that ends up making her life about men. She is the latest addition to the cluster of popular stock characters infesting the literary canon: the harridan, the voluptuary, the madwoman in the attic, the girl next door, the cipher, the virgin, the nag, the mother-in-law, the mouse, the shrew, and the spinster aunt.

Because she is a femininity affirmation device, the Strong Woman is never strong in the sense that she actually seeks actual liberation. For instance, she never says, “to hell with this funfeminism crap, I’m blowing off the beauty mandate and challenging patriarchal oppression.” She just holds her head up and conquers breast cancer or earns that big promotion, and is enriched by the experience, and then has a relationship with a dude.

Enough with the “strong woman” designation, already. All women are “strong.” If we’re not strong, we’re dead.

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

Whoops

Published by Jill on October 1, 2011. 30 Comments

Any moron knows not to kick someone in the head while wearing open-toed shoes.

Forgot I had a blog. Sorry about that.

But here’s a sweet little movie you won’t want to miss. Girl Fight airs on Lifetime this Monday. “Inspired” by a “true story” about mean girls who beat up one of their own and post it on YouTube for internet fame and revenge, it’s super on-trend. Although Lifetime says “Girl Fight” is about “peer pressure, media scrutiny and forgiveness” its actual purpose would appear be 1) to deliver titillating footage of a teenage girl kicking the shit out of a teenage girl, and 2) to intone another cautionary tale about the dire consequences that can go down whenever a teenage girl steps out of line (or, in an unguarded moment, posts something juvenile on Twitter).

The Lifetime Channel, as has been noted by larger brains than mine, is the TV authority of record when it comes to documenting the People magazine experience of Vagina-Americans. Violence, betrayal, insanity, torment, and murder. The Entertainment Industrial Complex has a vested interest in the defeat of feminist revolt, since a victory would rob them of all their most lurid plot devices.

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

Spinster aunt casts jaundiced eye at scepter of passion

Published by Jill on August 10, 2011. 200 Comments

When Kubrick was making the film “Lolita” he was crabbed out that the prudey production code wouldn’t allow him to enfilthen 13-year-old actress Sue Lyon with all the dude-pleasin “eroticism” in Nabokov’s icky novel. He intimated that the godbag-enforced lack of explicit child porn is what caused the film’s initial lukewarm reception and prevented it from soaring on wings of dudely prurience to the pinnacle of cinematic greatness for which Kubrick yearned. Naturally, because — thanks, Internet! — modern audiences know exactly what to fill in the blanks with, the film eventually became the iconic classic of noble ephebophilia we know and love today!

That’s right, I said ephebophilia. You know how when a practice becomes widespread and established, one of the first things its aficionados do is codify it and quantify it and describe it and assign its variations to categories and invent endless sub-categories for the more subtle variations that increasingly are meaningful only to the experts? Like with wine. Most people can just have a glass of wine, but oenophiles are deeply sensitive to nuancy variables, like the varietal, the region, the chemical composition of the vineyard’s dirt, the amount of rainfall during the spring of its production year, the color, which of 12,687 potential aromas it expresses, and, of course, the vintage.

It’s the same thing with raping children. Because raping children is such an established and widespread practice, PsychiatryNation has devised handy categories describing the various spins its practitioners can put on their “sexual preference”.

When a preference is based on a specific child vintage, it is called a chronophilia. One such chronophilia is crowd favorite pedophilia — raping prepubescent children. Then there’s hebephilia, which is a preference for raping pubescents. Ephebophilia describes a preference for raping post-pubescents. Girls must be 14-16, but for boys it’s 14-19. Spinster HQ concludes that this age disparity obtains because after 16, girls age out into common slutdom (the default state for all women). Once they’re sluts, the desire to screw them is no longer considered a special psychiatric disorder, but rather a normal dudely activity consistent with the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women (see Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, and one of humanity’s finest hours: when the entire dudernet participated in that pervy countdown to the Olsen twins’ 18th birthday).

To explain male preoccupation with teen rape, I found this guy on the Internet. He is Frederick S. Berlin, M.D.,PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine; Founder of the Sexual Disorders Clinic at the Johns Hopkins Hospital; Director of the National Institute for the Study, Prevention and Treatment of Sexual Trauma; Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Foundation for the Study, Prevention and Treatment of Sexual Trauma; and Consultant to the National Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee on Sexual Abuse. This eminent upholder of dudelionormativity notes that ephebophilia is the default dudelionormative state.

“Most men can find adolescents attractive sexually, although, of course, that doesn’t mean they’re going to act on it. Some men who become involved with teenagers may not have a particular disorder. Opportunity and other factors may have contributed to their behaving in the way they do.”

Opportunity and other factors? Opportunity, such as when adolescent girls are permitted out in public? Other factors? Such as that fucking Lolita narrative, which has seeped into patriarchal consciousness, been transformed into internet porn and Thylane Blondeau’s fashion spreads, and tells everyone that female children are sexual cyphers just waiting for men to use them as toilets?

Nabokov apologists, do your worst, but this novel isn’t some kind of veiled anti-perv cautionary tale about what can happen when a dude thinks with his dick, or the consequences of acting on desire. Nabokov was totally a perv or he couldn’t have written this huge and convincing paean to pervy desire. He would have made Lolita a person rather than a voiceless toilet, and he would have skipped the gratuitous erotica. The novel is merely an attempt to make art out of kiddie porn. The hero is himself a child molester and murderer who kidnaps, drugs, imprisons, and serially rapes a 12 year old child for chrissake, and then writes a dreamy, poetical memoir about it. Check this shit out (but do it on an empty stomach):

“Her legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half pleasure, half-pain, came over those childish features. She sat a little higher than I, and whenever in her solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss me her head would bend with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement that was almost woeful, and her bare knees caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again; and her quivering mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion, with a sibilant intake of breath came near to my face. She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion.”

The scepter of his passion? Gag-a-mag, it makes your boob scars shrivel.

Even though Humbert Humbert may be tormented and an unreliable narrator, and even if Nabokov was himself a paragon who completely pulled this Humbert character and his criminal obsession with “nymphets” from thin air (hah!), Lolita is just an articulate excuse to dudelionormatize the same infatuation with female children that our sexpert Dr Berlin, above, asserts is common to most men.

Is it art? Sure, why not? But it stinks.

Posted in Art is my LIFE, Mass Media, Rape Culture, The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Yesterday and all old movies suck. Bite me, Chad.

Bad mothers get paid

Published by Jill on July 29, 2011. 62 Comments

Every so often the Internet at Spinster HQ gets stuck. Right now it’s stuck on the CNN website. Note the woman-free character of today’s “Top stories.”

However, the public appetite for shaming women-gone-wrong is like my appetite for ceviche tacos: ravenous! So, although women are only rarely “Top”, they are always — what else? — “Entertainment.” In today’s CNN entertainment stories, bad mothers figure pretty prominently. They figure prominently because they’re broke on accounta they’re such bad mothers, and CNN is willing either to pay them to perform their bad motherhood on TV, or to pay somebody else to pimp their bad motherhood on TV.

• One of the all-time greatest Bad Mothers is Nadya Suleman, the so-called “Octomom” who controversially gave birth to octuplets in 2009 as the result of fertility treatments. Suleman was reviled — whereas someone like serial preggster Michelle Duggar, who has about 157 children, is celebrated with her own reality show — because she was single, broke, perhaps a bit unstable, and already had six kids.

With no steady income and expenses of over $18,000 a month, Suleman has struggled to get by raising her children. She has previously hosted a yard sale at her La Habra, California, home to deal with the hardship, and had reportedly signed on to be on the HDNet reality TV show “Celebridate.”

And now, Suleman said she is grateful for money she gets from media interviews, especially with overseas outlets.

She also claims to have received “hundreds of death threats,” some targeting her children, as well as a few female stalkers.

“I am hated in my hometown,” she said.

Suleman is still in the news because she recently appeared on TV to denounce her fertility doctor. The doctor has apparently lost his license for perpetrating “gross negligence” against Suleman when he implanted buttloads of embryos in her. This sterling character allegedly drugged her prior to her signing the buttload-of-embryos consent forms.

The State of California knows how many embryos may be implanted in a poor, unmarried, perhaps a bit unstable woman who already has six kids: less than eight. How many kids can a devoted Christian wife with a non-Arab-sounding name can give birth to? Let’s just let God decide.

• Acquitted Bad Mother Casey Anthony is still in the news, this time because icky mofo pornographer Larry Flynt has offered her half a million bucks to pose nude in his icky mofo pornography magazine. Apparently, “there are men who wanna see her in her birthday suit.”

In “droves.”

CNN would like it to be as controversial as possible for Anthony to accept TV and publishing money. She’s a name brand baby killer, and there are big, if fleeting, bucks to be made in exploiting her, sexploiting her, and sensationalizing her.

“Do you think Casey Anthony should take one of these offers? Should these offers have been made in the first place? “

Well why the heck not? She’s broke, right? Even acquitted bad mothers with personality disorders need to eat. Compensating her for sensationalizing her shame is the least the media can do, since they turned her into Public Spectacle Number 1 for three years.

Shit like this is why I laugh and laugh every Mother’s Day.

Posted in Mass Media. Bite me, Chad.

This TV ad is also puke

Published by Jill on July 24, 2011. 120 Comments

Summer’s Eve — the douche subsidiary of Fleet Laboratories, the company that makes enemas and other crap you stick up your ass — has a new spokesfist. According to this fist, which talks by thumb-synching to a voiceover, it can “perform the miracle of birth” and “make men drop to their knees in about 2.1 seconds”. It’s time, says the fist, that “we all celebrate and hail to the V!”

That’s right. The fist is a humorous stand-in for a vulva, which collection of organs is, as we all know, too flippin ugly to show on the internet unless it is being violently penetrated by something. “V” doesn’t stand for “vulva,” though. Its stands for “stinky ladypart.” Just as “hail” means “spray cheap perfume on that rank shit.”

You know what, thank the lard for advertising. They’ve got our back. They’re not afraid to light a fire under our complacent ass and foment revolution whenever it’s finally “time” for stuff. A while back, you might remember, it was “time” to get real about toilet paper. Now it’s “time” to “hail the V,” which we only know thanks to Summer’s Eve. Without this consciousness-raising ad campaign, we probably would have continued walking around like a bunch of hairy primates, not spraying any shit-o on our vulva at all. But I digress.

I was not expecting the spokesfist when I looked up the Summer’s Eve website. I was trying to find their current TV commercial. Though spokesfist-free, the commercial is nevertheless a fairly vile tableau in which the concept “woman” is reduced entirely to the concept “vagina” in a series of expensively produced cinematic spectacles designed to sell vulva deodorant. This woman-to-sex-organ reduction is no harmless synecdoche. The message, in no uncertain terms, is that your “V” — because it is the “center of civilization” and “men have died for it” — belongs to the world, that you are essentially nothing more than the guardian of this “V”, and that it is your obligation to keep it perfumed for the greater good.

Yeah, this ad is bad, but the website is several orders of magnitude more abhorrent. It is, in fact, so profoundly patronizing, insulting, and absurd, we here at Spinster HQ blew several lobes in succession within 4 clicks. I mean, there’s a spokesfist, for crissake. Which, although it is more closely analogous to a vulva, they keep referring to as a “vagina.” Or “The V.” Which they want you to “hail” by purchasing carcinogenic products to squirt all over it.

So I took the “V 101 Quiz,” where the spokesfist reassured me not to feel bad if I got any answers wrong, because “even I [the spokesfist] got one wrong the first time, and I’m a vagina!”. What a stupid fucking spokesfist.

When I got to the “Vagina Owner’s Manual”, wherein the spokesfist explains to the dimwitted human how to shop for feminine hygiene products, I read this:

March right down that aisle, head held high, grab whatever product you’re looking for (there’s plenty from Summer’s Eve to choose from), and place it on top of everything else in your cart. Don’t hide it! Heck, choose the checkout lane where the hottie is working and get your flirt on.

Yeah, “I’m buying coochie spray, doesn’t it just make you wanna fuck me?”

You understand that I can no longer form coherent sentences on the subject.

Posted in Femininity, Mass Media and The Beauty Ultimatum. Bite me, Chad.

TV ad is puke

Published by Jill on July 24, 2011. 24 Comments

Whenever I accidentally ingest poison and need to induce vomiting in a hurry, I watch a TV commercial for a beauty product. Recently, none* has been as efficient in producing instapuke as this ad for Mederma stretch mark remover.

Navel-gazing as beauty ritual

The commercial features attractive young women in underwear and fuzzy socks. Light, fluffy “la la la” soundtrack. The women childishly, gigglingly give us a quick peek at their young thighs and tum-tums. Their body movements, expressions of wide-eyed innocence, and fascination with their own navels recall very young children. Not regular children, though. These are young, sexy children performing a peep show. Seriously, these women’s relationship to the camera is precisely that of a 5-year-old to whom creepy Uncle Ernie has said “show Uncle Ernie your wee-wee,” where the 5-year-old is not a real 5-year-old, but a pedophile’s fantasy 5-year-old who likes to seduce grown men.

I urge you to watch the vid (embedded in the afore-linked-to page) and do the regender thing in your head. Imagine a straight dude in fetching spandex hip-huggers lifting up his shirt, bending over, and giggling like mad at the sight of his own adorable stomach.

The childified woman is a prominent archetype in the Beauty Industrial Complex. Infantilization is a major component of femininity. See leg-shaving, head-tilting, sexy schoolgirl porn, pinkification, the dumb blonde, the ubiquity of the phrase “women and children” (American version). See driving ban, ownership by male family members, arranged marriage, hardcore restrictions on education, employment, and legal rights (“Over There” versions).

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* Well, almost none. Next: an even more horrible commercial for a douche product. You aren’t gonna believe this shit!

Photo from Mederma website

Note to blamers contemplating using annoying baby talk (e.g. “widdle”) in their comments: you will be spamulated.

Posted in Femininity, Mass Media and The Beauty Ultimatum. Bite me, Chad.

The intersectionality of menopause and male enhancement

Published by Jill on July 11, 2011. 114 Comments

Daily hot flash laundry pile

2:46 A.M. Sudden, overwhelming sense of despair. Blast furnace embedded under skin cranks up to eleven. Hot sweats. Uncontrollable shivers. Cold sweats. Drenched and freezing. Yelling “Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Toweling off, changing clothes, changing sheets. Back to the Tempurpedic for two hours of sleepless ceiling-staring/channel-flipping.

6:30 A.M. Alarm goes off. Discombobulation commences.

[Open appeal to architects: when designing bedrooms for people who will be turning 50 or coming down with lady-cancer, kindly install an automatic espresso machine within reach of the bed. Otherwise, your client's hapless, lurching feet will become entangled, every morning when the alarm goes off at 6:30, in the giant pile of hot-flash laundry that has accumulated on the bedroom floor.]

That’s menopause!

The above has been my nightly ritual for five-and-a-half years, ever since the Cancer Industrial Complex cut out, among other organs to which I had become rather attached over the years, those dear little estrogen-generators, my ovaries. Because of the estrogen-loving nature of the cancer that occasioned my many amputations and toxic therapies, hormone replacement is not an option. This is too bad, because spinster aunts, it turns out, actually need a little estrogen, if only to prevent their going absolutely batshit from hot-flash-induced sleep deprivation.

I blame surgically-induced menopausical insomnia for my having seen an infomercial last night to which no eyes as delicate as those of a fuzz-brained spinster aunt should ever have been exposed. The producers of this infomercial might just as well have been throwing acid alien blood right in my grimacing face.

The infomercial was selling a dick-enbiggener pill. The thing that was so grippingly, vomitationally absurd about it, besides everything about it, was the slew of giggling 22-year-old pornulated chiquitas who purported to speak for all of womankind on the subject of dicks. They revealed — in “candid confessions” consisting almost entirely of the phrase “like, why even have sex if it’s, like, so small you, like, won’t even feel it?” — women’s general disgust with any dick that isn’t the size of a Mexican Coke bottle.* They all agreed that the only sorts of dudes they’ll ever want to pork are “confident” and “aggressive” men who have “grown some balls.”

Also grippingly, vomitationally absurd were the “Men’s Minute” segments, wherein a porn actor named Dr. Victoria Zdrok, speaking in an unearthly-yet-strangely-familiar accent, urges the viewer to buy the product because it was made in America out of time-tested ingredients you can trust. “Over 88% of women admit that size does matter,” quoth the good doctor heteronormatively, “and the other 12% are lying.” In the background is footage of a rocket launching.

Now, I’m not going to argue either that “size” does or doesn’t matter, as this is simply personal preference and is therefore irrelevant to the revolution and shit, and because thinking about actual you-know-whats (Dr Zdrok’s clinical term for “penis”) makes me retch. But I am going to propose two hypotheses.

One: that the idea that women universally yearn to be impaled by tireless, oversized bratwursts-of-iron attached to “aggressive” men is a myth. This myth portrays women as insatiable sex maniacs*, which in turn informs the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women, which in turn enslaves women as the sex class. The women-as-sex-maniac myth adversely affects women in many ways, not least of which is the interference of “male enhancement” drugs with the natural attrition of the invincible peen. How many women were looking forward to a mid-life reprieve from prong-duty, only to have it snatched away by ViagraNation’s aggressive marketing of the “cure” for “erectile dysfunction”?

Two: that, even if I were a straight woman who, despite the fact that our social order has co-opted my sexuality to turn me into a receptacle for my oppressor’s incontinence, still wanted to do dudes, and even if I were one of those women whose preference for you-know-whats leaned toward something in the Macho Combo Burrito range, I would find other ways of scratching this itch than by boinking the kind of dude who would buy pills from porn stars on TV infomercials as crappy as this one was.

Not to denigrate dear old Dr Zdrok, though! After carefully analyzing her accent, I believe that, like me, she is formerly of the planet Obstreperon. Sadly, it appears that Dr Zdrok has been rather more extensively assimilated by the dude-borg than I. The obstreperal lobe bleeds for her.

______________________

* Mexican Coke bottles are really big. I thought about using the Washington Monument as my metaphor, since it’s even bigger than a Mexican Coke bottle, but Phil says that shit’s pretty played.

** “Sex maniac” is a quaint phrase I hadn’t heard in a while, until yesterday’s TCM broadcast of the 1967 misogyny farce “Divorce American Style,” starring Debbie Reynolds and Dick Van Dyke as a star-crossed married couple. This sexist romp through mid-century marriage angst features a scene where D.V.D. and his best bud get snockered at a lingerie bar populated by models in marabou peignoirs. The best bud convinces Dick he should cheat on his wife, whereupon Dick — comically! — pays to rape a prostitute.

Photo 1: collected from this part of the Internet.

Photo 2: collected from this part of the Internet.

Posted in Crazy sexy cancer, Mass Media and all old movies suck. Bite me, Chad.