Archive for the 'Men Hate You' Category

Page 2 of 15

Grinning moron hates wife

Published by Jill on February 6, 2010. 175 Comments

Patriarchy-blaming is a crappy business. The Internet feminist must beware the fine line, or slippery slope, or pot-calling-kettle-black, or hoist-on-own-petard or what have you, when aiming the Super Spinster Truth-Ray at stuff. Attention must be paid to the potential stinkiness of one’s own role in the proceeding. Care must be taken to inspect the fists for ham. Sometimes, denouncing a particular instance of exploitation produces unwanted side-effects. Ethical concerns. Knots in the lobe. Sensations of inner grubbiness. Such that, when the denunciation is completed and the sun sets on another day of blaming, instead of writing, with the usual glowing satisfaction, “Dear Diary, today I exposed some pernicious culture-of-oppression shit for what it is, goddammit!” one is obliged to say “Crap, I think I just participated in misogyny most foul.”

The blaming goal is to expose oppression without compounding it with one’s own voyeurism, but this can be pretty difficult when dealing with subject matter that is by definition dependent upon — and therefore inherently sensitive to — the public gaze. I allude, of course, to the subject-victims of pornography. How do you write, “Here is a graphic representation of our culture’s hatred of women, and this is why I think so” without re-injuring the victim during the course of your argument? Is the pornulated woman to be made a casualty of feminist analysis in addition to her primary violation? Is a woman, once pornulated, swept away into some skeezy two-dimensional purgatory to remain there forever?

These issues are looming large down at Spinster HQ at the moment, and have been ever since that dangole chump PhysioProf hipped me to the existence of an extremely disturbing website. Maybe you’ve already seen it? It’s the “crying wife” website. In summary: asshole tapes wife when she cries piteously at movies, asshole mocks and laughs at tearful wife, asshole puts videos on YouTube, asshole’s website becomes popular. It’s not pornography in the fetishy sex-smut tradition, but it is definitely the graphic representation of dudely woman-hatin’.

Just Google “crying wife.” It’s the first result.

Not realizing what I was in for, I watched one of the many videos. In this video the woman reacts to the ending of “Star Wars.” I do not exaggerate when I say that it caused my jaw to hang open quite a bit further than usual. Also, my eyes started twitching, and I experienced the nasty sensation of self-loathing that I suspect must afflict all losers when they do loser-y shit.

The woman becomes weirdly and inconsolably emotional, yeah, but my slackjaw was occasioned not by her piteous, painful sobbing, but by her grinning asshole husband goading her on. That’s right, when she actually stops sobbing, he intentionally re-exacerbates her sadness by inviting her to remember sad scenes in the film. He also makes a big fucking point of saying that it is so hilarious to pimp her on the Internet as she experiences this extended moment of private weirdness and acute vulnerability. His tone as videographer can be summarized as “I invite you to point and laugh as I proudly make the lovable simpleton I’m married to cry and cry over stupid shit.”

As PhysioProf wrote in his email, “the sheer gratuitous pointlessness of the cruelty is shocking.”

The husband-dude’s laffy obliviousness adds a whole nother layer of crapulence, but it’s obvious he knows on some level that he’s exploiting her, because he’s got a whole FAQ dedicated to explaining how he isn’t exploiting her. First he makes a hi-fucking-larious joke about how she’s insane “only 4 days out of the month ;-)” [sic]. Then he makes his argument, which can can be boiled down to three points. One, it isn’t exploitation because he just can’t help laughing at his wife. Two, his wife “thinks it’s funny” and is “able to laugh at herself afterwards.” Three, it isn’t exploitation because he says it isn’t. He “loves [her] to death and thinks she’s the cutest girl in the world!” Also, “She’s a good sport and we all love her :)”.

Well, that makes it okay, then!

I’ve wanted to complain about this for a couple of days, but the idea of my own complicity in propagating the virus and contributing to the sobsploitation has made me queasy. It still does make me queasy. I have attempted to mitigate my quease by omitting to link to the website, but I have to admit that the astonishing degree of misogyny displayed by this loving husband moron has to be seen to be believed.

Posted in Lobe-blowing, Men Hate You, The Entertainment Industrial Complex and Ways In Which the Internet Sucks. 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.

There are molecules in the brain called “neurotransmitters”

Published by Jill on January 29, 2010. 105 Comments

Because of my award-nominated, it-is-highly-unlikely-that-you-are-qualified-to-post-here moderation policy — “Old Iron-Fist” is what they call me down at Spinster HQ — readers of I Blame the Patriarchy aren’t always exposed to mansplaining at standard Internet concentrations. I sometimes wonder if this is really all to the good, since mansplaining can be so goddam hilarious, and who doesn’t enjoy a hearty guffaw after a hard day of gossiping or neurosurgery or trench-digging or whatever it is that you do all day?

But then I come to my senses.

Mansplaining — you know mansplaining, right? It’s that loud, annoying, repetitive alarm call that men emit whenever they perceive a lower-status person challenging their authority — isn’t really so goddam hilarious in and of itself. This is because it is a hallmark of domination culture, because it is comprised primarily of meaningless noise (whether taken in or out of context), and because it is obfuscatory, oppressive, denigrating, sexist, and rude. It can only achieve comic status when openly mocked. Preferably by an angry mob.

My thoughts turned briefly to mansplanation mockery this morning when I found myself deleting a something of a dilly. The author in question was, as is typical, correcting me on this point and that, explaining that my views (but not his) are “sexist,” yadda yadda, in a tone that suggested so deep a reverence for his own intellect that he’d expect the solar system to explode if he failed to execute this very important takedown on my blog. His brilliant denouement? The assertion that if I “honestly” disagree with him — apparently this contingency should be all but impossible — then “what [I] practice isn’t feminism.”

Aww yiah. It’s my very favorite species of mansplaining, the species where some dim bulb with a feeble and unsophisticated grasp of the principles — instead of kissing my ass and begging me brokenly for a few words of enlightenment that might ultimately prevent him from going through life known to the ladies as Chad, the Purulent Lump of Gonorrhea — purports to know — better than the actual feminist — what feminism is or isn’t.

How appropriate that veteran blamer Ron Sullivan should have chosen this point to alert me to an excellent mansplaining-mockery post at Zuska’s entitled “You May Be A Mansplainer If …”. This post is the greatest thing ever published on either this Internet or that one. Zuska invites readers to give examples of, and to ridicule, mansplaining. It’s the angry mob of which I spoke so yearningly just a moment ago! As of this writing there are over 200 comments. Like this one by Zuskateer mightydoll, a classic in the Men Literally Cannot Hear Women Speaking Division.

my ex used to do this:

ex: something’s wrong with my computer.

me: Oh, looks like there’s a phrenicle in the stubert zone

ex: something’s wrong with my computer

me: Why not check the stubert zone for phrenicles?

ex: something’s wrong with my computer – - I’ll ask Dick at work about it.

A WEEK PASSES IN WHICH I MENTION THE STUBERT PHRENICLES A FEW MORE TIMES

ex: Hey, I spoke to Dick at work about my computer. Turns out, (begins speaking really slowly) there are these things called phrenicles which SPEAK … TO… the molydimes. The molydimes can reside in the jiminy zone, or they can reside in the stubert zone, but WHEN they reside in the stubert zone, sometimes there’s a problem with them communicating with the loovarths, so it’s best to keep phrenicles out of the stubert zone. All I have to do is move these phrenicles back to the jiminy zone and it’s solved. Isn’t Dick at work a computer god?

me: …

Or this, from SKM:

You might be a mansplainer if you begin a sentence addressed to a woman whom you know holds a degree in neuroscience with “there are molecules in the brain called neurotransmitters”.

This You May Be A Mansplainer post is not without its bittersweet moments. For instance, there is the introduction into English of the exquisite and apparently Brazilian phrase “rule crapper” ( as in “There, he did it again, he just crapped a rule”), but tragically, the author of this revelatory comment simultaneously mansplains that mansplaining “is not necessarily sexist” because men crap rules at other men all the time.

Even if it happens to dudes, it can still be sexist, yo.

Poop, I just crapped a rule!

Poop!

In fact, quite the buttload of Zuska’s mansplaining commenters are apparently authoritative experts on mansplaining. This is surprising and kind of meta, since it is a well-known fact that men who claim to know what the fuck mansplaining is cannot resist mansplaining that it doesn’t, at least for them, exist. More than a few of them mansplain that theirs is a truly lofty and nuanced apprehension of mansplaining, which is why when they do it they aren’t really doing it, so it isn’t the same as when actual mansplainers mansplain.

Then the outraged feminist shows up with the news that this awful manhating post has — get ready for a shock – made feminism the laughingstock of the whole internet. Oh no.

“Stop helping” is this outraged feminist’s refrain. Women should steer clear of critical analyses of male privilege because it makes us unpopular with the Chads of the world.

This is all outrageous and very maddening!

God, the whole thing is just swell.

Posted in Blogulation, Dear god what about the men?, Men Hate You, Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society and Ways in Which the Internet Is a Hoot. Bite me, Chad.

Husband and wife blog team on board with antifeminist backlash even though it’s so 20 years ago

Published by Jill on December 25, 2009. 101 Comments

Wait. I have a blog? Shitfire!

But wow, check out this dumb blog. It’s one of those blogs that has “book deal” written all over it.

It’s supposedly a husband-and-wife joint coaching the reader on the successful pursuit of traditional manliness. Traditional manliness isn’t just a lifestyle, it’s a movement! It agitates in support of the appreciation of “classic cocktails,” of knowing how to “set the agenda” at “meetings,” and, as in the example below, of navigating the perilous waters of dating incomprehensible women.

Women are suckers for a man with a plan because it shows you have initiative, can think ahead, and aren’t shy about taking the lead. Don’t punt and ask her what she wants to do. Be a man! You’re the one doing the asking, so it’s your duty to come up with something that she’ll enjoy. When a woman is with a man that has a plan, they feel they can relax and really enjoy themselves. [Cite]

The husband/wife blog uses terms like on board to mean “having drunk the pre-feminist nostalgia Kool-Aid” and man up to mean — well, the precise definition of man up remains indeterminate, but I believe that on manliness blogs it concerns embracing with vigor a set of supposedly lost upper-middle-class honky patriarchal affectations, like the moral necessity of wearing suits to class, of criticizing women who think femininity is stupid, and of growing handlebar mustaches.

Here’s a post in which the manliness-loving duo expose the egregious double standard imposed upon manliness-seeking men by scruffy feminists in sweatpants. Apparently scruffy feminists in sweatpants want men to eschew their natural barbarism*, but are not sufficiently on board with their own feminine role in this business of manning up.

“[T]he new movement towards a return to traditional manliness needs women to be on board to be successful. After all, if you have men opening doors and asking women on real dates, and they’re just laughing in your face, that’s clearly not going to work out too well. And if you have men striving to be their best, but they feel like women aren’t even trying, you’ve got a recipe for creating strained relations between the sexes and bitter and disillusioned men who think all women are an unappealing mess who are not worth the trouble of dealing with. [...] [T]hese days a new double standard has emerged where it’s okay to celebrate men manning up, but telling women they need to recover some of their femininity is offensive.”

Ladies, if you desire your interactions with the nattily-dressed oppressor to be as painless as possible, you will do your nails and makeup.

_________________________
* “[Y]our car probably smells. Leaving sweaty gym bags or Saturday morning’s fish catch in a car causes odor to build up in the upholstery. Spare your date the olfactory torture by airing out your car and spraying it down with Febreeze.”

[Gracias, Rebecca]

Posted in Blogulation, Dear god what about the men?, Femininity, Knobjectivism, Men Hate You, Oppression Culture, Strawfeminism, The Beauty Ultimatum 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. 68 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. 96 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.

Hugs, Twisty: “I just need to commandeer your uterus for a sec.”

Published by Jill on December 4, 2009. 55 Comments

Rejected comment from reader bilbertson on an August, 2007 post entitled UterusWatch 2007, in which I discuss a couple of legislative efforts to restrict women’s access to abortion, one of which required written consent of the “father”:

[Dear Twisty]

I know I’m commenting on this much later than it was posted but I hope readers will still consider my perspective

I very much think men should have a say in the future of their embryo/baby but not a say in the future of a woman’s own uterus

I think that women who don’t want to use their uteri to carry a particular pregnancy be allowed to terminate the pregnacny. Then the man could still have the embryo at said point. If he wants a baby, it should be his responsibility to nurture and develop the embryo into a fetus and viable child.

This is all outrageous and very maddening.

_______________________________________

Dear bilbertson,

As you know, bilbertson, from having read the FAQ twice — for certainly you did not omit to complete this small patriarchy-blaming prerequisite — it is not merely the stated goal of I Blame the Patriarchy, but also my own highest moral imperative to personally consider your personal perspective, particularly if it is antifeminist, and if you begin every sentence with “I,” and if you decline to punctuate.

I am happy to inform you that your perspective is worthless.

According to the Twistifesto, once a man has shot his wad, the wad becomes a waste product the sovereign control over which the wad-shooter has no expectation to exert. Men who wish, as you say, to “nurture” their wads — collected, perhaps, in a tube sock or family-sized block of Velveeta? — are of course at liberty to do so, although if you don’t mind my saying so it would probably start to smell a little funky after a while. Still, chacun à son goût, as long as you leave me out of it.

The notion of male entitlement to embryos implanted in women runs afoul of a woman’s right to personal bodily sovereignty and as such proposes criminal violence. As I just explained, ownership of the wad terminates when it departs the chute. While there’s nothing to prevent a woman who is so inclined from chucking her discarded embryo at you, or even, I suppose, to prevent you from fishing it out of the biohazard bin, I predict some difficulty on your part in developing such a thing into a “viable child,” as it is my understanding that this process always requires a uterus, to which organ a woman is infallibly attached. In other words, the scenario you describe involves a compulsory pregnancy. Compulsory pregnancy, it turns out, is a crime against humanity.

I Blame the Patriarchy encourages Dude Nation to abandon the Earth-dooming folly of human reproduction and “wanting a baby” altogether.

Hugs,
Twisty

Posted in Compulsory pregnancy, Dear god what about the men?, Hugs, Twisty, Men Hate You and The Argument Against Human Reproduction. Bite me, Chad.

OzWatch ‘09: Misogyny on Parade

Published by Jill on November 29, 2009. 46 Comments

Displaying an astonishing capacity for patriarchy-blaming, somebody in charge of public education in Victoria AU wishes to implement anti-violence-against-women training in a couple of schools. It’s called “Respectful Relationship Education.”

Possible classroom activities include students acting out scenes of sexual coercion after which students would suggest more appropriate behaviour. [...] They would combat common attitudes among boys such as young women are either “good girls or sluts”, the report said. [...] It said feminist theories were best at explaining the link between gender power relations and violence against women, and must underpin the programs.

You go, Victoria! Sounds great, right?

Wrong! Because it’s “shoving capital ‘F’ feminism down their throats.” It’s — brace yourself — “compulsory feminism.”

Compulsory feminism, unlike the heartwarming compulsory capital ‘M’ misogyny the shoving down of which our throats are all accustomed to, is apparently nothing short of child abuse. One nervous misogynist, Australian Family Association spokesman John Morrissey, blurts with swaggering bravado that “strident feminist propaganda won’t wash with boys,” but he nevertheless vigorously opposes the program; apparently his confidence in the red-blooded Australian boy’s natural aversion to strident feminist propaganda is not 100%. He is anxious that some strident feminism might work its way in through the chinks. The “feminisation” of boys is already a Number 1 red-alert crisis situation, given the declining population of male teachers in schools.

The fear that oppression-sensitivity training will pussywhip boys into a class of oppressed autobot pansies is not confined to Australian Family Association spokesman John Morrissey. This knob at misogynist dudesite Mensnewsdaily puts it this way: “Beware boys! The female Taliban is coming for you!”

And then he says — I’m not even kidding — “Don’t such programs send the grossly incorrect message that all boys need to be ‘educated’ about how to treat women?”

That’s right. Apparently men spring from the womb fully enlightened. It insults them sorely to insinuate that they are in any way responsible for violence against women. Any attempt to suggest otherwise merely represents another diabolical tactic in the feminists’ bid for “global dominance.” Educating boys about the culture of domination will strip them of their ability to form “a single original thought on any subject.”

And then he says — I’m still not even kidding — “Who made feminists the experts on explaining violence in relationships?”

Seriously! Apparently misogynist schmuckwads, not women whose lives are devoted to the study of oppression dynamics, are the only persons capable of such intellectual nuance.

Fucking moron.

Posted in Dear god what about the men?, Knobjectivism, Lobe-blowing, Men Hate You, Strawfeminism, The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today and The megatheocorporatocracy. 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.

Funny sexism: harms outweigh benefits

Published by Jill on November 21, 2009. 43 Comments

The No Shit! Department at Spinster HQ brings you breaking news from 2007: Study shows that sexist jokes induce actual sexism!

Two long years ago psychology researcher Thomas E Ford et al authored a paper revealing that when dudes sit around guffawing at dumb blonde jokes, they are more likely to cut funding to women’s organizations than are dudes who are forced to listen to non-jokey statements that depict women neutrally.

The research indicates that people should be aware of the prevalence of disparaging humor in popular culture, and that the guise of benign amusement or “it’s just a joke” gives it the potential to be a powerful and widespread force that can legitimize prejudice in our society.”

You know what else Ford found? Dudes who bust a gut over sexist jokes create cultures of misogyny with other dudes who bust a gut over sexist jokes.

We believe this shows that humorous disparagement creates the perception of a shared standard of tolerance of discrimination that may guide behavior when people believe others feel the same way.

The paper was published way back in 2008. Yet, astoundingly, despite these scientific findings, joke-based sexism — to say nothing of bigotry, violence, and hatred — remain! No government task force has stepped up to recommend that sexist jokes, which clearly cause women to experience anxiety, degradation, and unnecessary funding cuts, be phased out of pop culture.

Where’s that task force?

[Thanks, Susan]

Posted in Men Hate You, Number 1 Science Information, Oppression Culture and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Yesterday. Bite me, Chad.