Archive for the 'Men Hate You' Category

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

Published by Jill on July 11, 2010. 51 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Published by Jill on June 25, 2010. 81 Comments

Tit tape

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

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

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

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

Never heard of Jeff Koons?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Staller is reportedly suing him for unpaid child support.

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

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

“Women withhold sex because men let them get away with it”

Published by Jill on June 12, 2010. 93 Comments

Feel like puking? Check out this crusty scab of human hatred from the Fox News website, a men’s advice column entitled “Reasons Women Withhold Sex.”

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “why would I feel like puking?” Or possibly, “why would anyone bother writing a men’s advice column entitled ‘Reasons Women Withhold Sex’ when the answer, so obvious to anyone with half a grip, is ‘because sex with you sucks’?”

But apparently men need to hear something other than the truth. Enter men’s advice-ist Sarah Stefanson. Rarely has so puke-a-riffic an example of the acculturation of sexist male entitlement been seen in this, or any other, galaxy.

I would call Sarah Stefanson a lousy turncoat collaborating suck-up shitbag, but I don’t want to jump to conclusions. There’s always the possibility that she was forced against her will to scrawl this feces-stain on the knickers of human achievement. Forced, perhaps, by some asshole who literally held a gun to her head, threatening to kneecap her 80-year-old grandma and foreclose on her 9-acre dirt farm, send a shipment of tainted vaccines to blind orphans in Bangladesh, and drown a sackful of kittens in a pond of toxic run-off. That has to be the scenario, because otherwise I’d be forced to contemplate that there actually exists a woman so degraded, so corrupt, so sociopathic, or so desperate that she would willingly turn out this kind of unremitting, lobe-scorching dudebro misogyny for the pitiful sum of 10 cents a word.

But I digress.

Sarah Stefanson’s hate speech addresses a dudely audience, and begins, I am sorry to say, like this:

One of the benefits of being in a long-term relationship is that you have someone that you can readily depend on for regular sex.

But uh-oh. Dude’s dependable meatsock may not be feelin’ it. She may even be “withholding” it. This suggests that the benefits of which Sarah Stefanson speaks so glowingly might be experienced by the party of the second part as unpleasantness. Hence her tips on how to manipulate your sex-woman and “get the carnal door open again” (Jaysus, 10 cents a word for that? Kill me now).

Observes Stefanson, “if there’s one area of a relationship women think they have control over, it’s sex.” But don’t buy it, men!

In the wild world of men’s advice columny, “purposefully withholding” sex is universally understood as a wholly nefarious, cruel, and mystifying method of female retribution. That’s because sex is a commodity to which men are entitled by the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women. Women are the sex class. If the flow of access is interrupted, the natural order is out of whack, and your sex-woman needs to be reset. But hey, chillax, bra! Stefanson’s column addresses the painful question “what can a suffering dude do when his receptacle is ‘purposefully withholding’ sex?”

In answering the question, Sarah Stefanson, with whom I begin to grow increasingly annoyed, leaves no tired old war-between-the-sexes cliché unturned. Women who “close up shop” (yes, really) are manipulative, out to prove who’s boss, cheating, or “playing games.” If they’re too tired to fuck, men are urged to poke them with sticks. If none of the tactics listed sufficiently cajoles them, “you might have to wait it out and service yourself until she comes to her senses.” But ultimately, Sarah Stefanson opines, women withhold sex “because men let them get away with it.” So man up, you spineless fairy, and take what’s yours.

Stefanson’s article is a stupid lowbrow clump of oppression-culture condensation, and doesn’t really merit a full-on paragraph-by-paragraph analysis, but it’s worth pointing out that it was filed on a major news website under “Men’s Health,” where it is accepted, uncritically and without analysis, that women are an underclass with so little agency that sexual manipulation is their only recourse.

Puke.

[Thanks, PhioGistic]

Posted in Dear god what about the men?, Men Hate You, Oppression Culture and Women hate you. Bite me, Chad.

Citizens of the Poconos, unite against slutty teen rape victims!

Published by Jill on June 9, 2010. 68 Comments

It’s heartwarming, our pretty society’s outpouring of love for little girls. Behold the sugarplum fairytale of this 13-year old Pennsylvania girl:

According to a marginally informative article in the Lehigh Valley Morning Call, Douchebag Supreme Michael J Lisk raped the girl repeatedly for over a year, made her pregnant, then furtively buried the fetus after she induced her own abortion with a “lead pencil” (a process lasting three days).

The article is lousy with rape culture and fetus-fetish language, probably pulled verbatim from the police report. Patriarchy-favorable language like this is used all the time in police reports and the media, where it is instrumental in perpetuating the normalization of violent misogyny. In this case, the lingo portrays the kid as an active participant in deviant baby-killing.

– She “threw” the plastic bag containing the fetus she had “delivered.”
– The article describes a tender birth scene wherein the rapist exhorts the girl to “push hard.”
– The girl “gave birth” to a “stillborn baby.”
– As though they ought to be considered a couple, “the two” had a long-standing “sexual relationship” from the time she was 12.

Translation: clearly this little Lolita was no innocent virgin naif.

Small wonder, then, that the comments from imperfectly educated denizens of the Pennsylvania Poconos identify the girl as a dirty slut and call for her head. They’re all worked up about this baby-killer slut they read about in the paper.

I know when I was 13, I knew what sex was and that is caused pregnacy [sic] and that we have babies in hosipitals [sic]. If we dont [sic] know anything by that age, then the education system in america [sic] is a joke. she should be charged because she knows that wasnt [sic] right, bottom line.

Well, the author is herself irrefutable evidence of at least one of her points: the “education system in america” is a joke.

[T]hose of you who think a thirteen year old doesn’t know about sex, you need to enter the real world. I am also curious to know how she knew how to give herself an abortion.

Obviously a teenage girl who knows enough to abort a fetus with a Number 2 Ticonderoga, after “having sex” with a 30-year-old perv, deserves nothing but contempt from the self-righteous townsfolk.

Why isn’t the girl being charged with anything? [...] She did the abortion herself and she put the baby in a bag and left it at the base of a tree, so she is just as guilty.

Teenage girls simply cannot usurp control of their own uteruses from 30-year-old serial rapists, goddammit, and expect to get away with it. Not on our watch! They are just as guilty as serial pedophile rapists who bury the evidence of their criminal activity to evade prosecution.

The angry mob wants that kid punished, goddammit, because if she’s old enough to “have sex,” she’s old enough to know that inducing an abortion with a pencil is “wrong.”

Well, except that she wasn’t “having sex,” she was raped, and it isn’t “wrong” — or even illegal — to have an abortion.

It is astonishing, the ease with which an angry mob can convene an ad hoc tribunal to ostracize the most damaged victims of their own diseased culture. They would deny the existence of rape culture, even if it means imprisoning a 13-year-old child for trying to exert some pitiful influence over her own body and her own future, even after she had been violated — by the serial rapist’s own admission, “countless times” — for over a year, only to endure a home-made abortion.

Yeah, a year of rapes and a three-day self-inflicted abortion. I bet that was a cakewalk.

Nobody on the planet is as despised as teenage girls.

Posted in Bloodsport, Lobe-blowing, Men Hate You, Rape Culture, The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today and Women hate you. Bite me, Chad.

As is her wont, spinster aunt continues writing about yesterday’s post

Published by Jill on June 8, 2010. 53 Comments

No time to post this morning, so I thought to mildly amuse by publishing a selection of reject-pile comments from the post I wrote yesterday. These were all authored, if you can believe it, by people who did not read the Guidelines for Commenters!

Yesterday’s little fillip of blaming rapture, you may recall, concerned an essay written by Scienceblogger Jason G Goldman in which he summarized, without “taking sides,” some studies on pornography. According to Goldman, the studies found that porn’s effects on its consumers isn’t really so bad.

That’s right. Dudes have actually conducted studies that show how oppressors don’t really seem to suffer too much from consuming the “product” (Goldman’s term for the graphic representation of women’s subjugation) of their oppression. No way, really? Privilege is totally awesome? Who knew?

Combining my analysis of the tone of Goldman’s essay (if it walks like an endorsement and talks like an endorsement …)* with the fact that he’d cherry-picked only “porn is pretty benign” studies, I concluded that this was yet another blob of misogynist science-prattle demonstrating the distressing degree of obliviousness that even educated men present when it comes to the meaning of ordinary patriarchy, men’s role in the oppression hierarchy, and their deficit of empathy with the oppressed classes. I also took the opportunity to openly mock one of Goldman’s commenters, a dick who exemplifies total dickness with his stated conviction that, because he likes consuming the graphic representation of rapes, there simply cannot be anything wrong with porn.

Meanwhile, other bloggers agreed. Goldman has since cracked under pressure and removed the post, which is too bad, since many of us have put an effort into making an example of it, pointing at it and laughing, focusing the rage of an angry mob upon it, etc. Goldman has since suggested, here and at Zuska’s (and maybe elsewhere, but how should I know; what am I, Google?), that his post was just an off-the-cuff little tiptoe down Sexology Lane, that he was completely unaware that pornography is a “divisive issue,” that he never intended to offend anyone, and he’s sorry.

“I haven’t yet – anywhere – stated what my opinions are, until now: I think that any normalization of the objectification of women or violence against women – even if the women portrayed are doing so ostensibly consensually – is not okay.

I, further, thought that it was reasonable to ask questions about the effects of a certain product, separately from the whether or not that product should be made in the first place. And I thought I could do so objectively. But, as Pal says, perhaps that is naive.

This is an incredibly divisive issue, for many reasons, and I unwittingly walked into a major battlefield without, as Pal says, the proper flashlight. And in doing so, I (unintentionally) offended a handful of people I care about, as well as many others, and for that, I apologize.”

Imagine inhabiting a universe where you are oblivious to the fact that pornography is controversial! Wait, is that it, up there? There, in the clouds! If I squint through my bile-colored trifocals, I think I can glimpse that happy world’s champagne waterslides and gumdrop toadstools and rainbow tacos and rape-free society! Scotty, beam me up! What’s that? It’s dudes-only? Blarg!

By the way, this blogger (who you can tell has been reading PZ Myers, because she uses the word “woo,” and also because she links to PZ Myers) thinks that, because I outed the deeply embedded antifeminist mores demonstrated by a dudely science blogger, that I am anti-science! Me! And after all I just went through to try to sell a skeptical faction of the Blametariat on the superior number one-ness of the scientific method! Some days it just doesn’t pay to turn off the Ab-Fab DVDs and get out of bed.

Anyway, I promised deleted comments, and deliver them I shall. And yes, I realize that when you publish deleted comments, they aren’t technically deleted anymore. So, without further ado, check out these psychotic remarks from “James,” some self-styled science-knob inquisitor:

I’m curious about this sentence: “There is a difference between banning porn and eradicating the demand for porn, a delicate nuance that no dude ever seems able to contemplate.” I assume you’re working from an assumption that the desire to see porn in men is largely, if not completely, fabricated by society? So then your objective would be weaning males of porn or the desire for visual sexual stimulation, which is a very invasive course of action regarding a group you don’t belong to. Obviously predicated on the idea that porn is entirely negative towards women, even when representing acts of consensual sex.

So I suppose my ultimate questions would be: what evidence you have that porn is negative? How you would design future double blind studies (longitudinal if you wish) that could demonstrate whether porn was ultimately good, bad, or neutral?

I fly into transports over the notion that redesigning the social order so that males no longer frolick unchecked in a culture of rape is “a very invasive course of action regarding a group you don’t belong to.” Like porn exists in a vacuum. Dude is oblivious that rape culture depends on the oppression of the group I do belong to. And then he demands scientific proof that oppression is bad! God, is there anything sexier than a domineering science-knob? I’ve got your longitudinal study right here, douchebag!

I had to chuck out this next comment from “Pearl” for its tragic antifeminist naivete.

Ok, Let me just say that as a woman, I love porn. It helps me get off. And I’m not going to lie, I don’t see it as an exploitation of women. I respect that most women have an opinion, and I’m not any authority to have much of one. All I’m saying is that you can’t tell a person that their opinion is wrong.

If a woman tells a man that his opinion is wrong she’s a feminist. If a man tells a woman that her opinion is wrong, he’s sexist. See the hypocrisy there? If we’re going to play the blame game here, I will openly say that feminists fucked it up for women. I love that we should be equal to men, but god damnit, I love a man who opens doors for me and pays for dinner. In fact, sometimes I expect it. Mr. Goldman here is simply stating a point. I don’t have the expertise to squash or agree with his argument. So women, Love y’all but get off your high horses. You are constantly bitching about how men are sexist, but what about you? You are also pretty fucking sexist.

I know I’m probably going to get bitched out and yelled at for having an opinion, but honestly I’m only stating an opinion. I think being overly feminist can also repress. Just keep it in mind ladies.

Newsflash, ladies! It is no longer permissible to tell a person that their opinion is wrong! I guess the Internet will be shutting down now.

Here’s an oldie but goodie:

Good luck finding a man.

Right back atcha, heteronormative moron dick!

Let us close with a sentiment popular among fucking douchebags, fetchingly and incomprehensibly encased in gratuitious ellipses.

… Well, I see we have the crazy feminist who thinks all men are evil over here, best to disregard…

This shit just writes itself.

Well, hold the fort, crazy feminist sexist ladies! I’ll be back soon with more No. 1 Science Information!

UPDATE: In an interesting gambit, Goldman has put his post back up, but it is not the original; this version is, he says, “stripped of speculation and editorializing” and begins with a soul-searching intro in which the author reflects on whether “the effects of a product can be separated from the question of the ethics of whether or not that product should be made in the first place.”

Referring to the spoils of human oppression as a “product” is a remarkable manifestation of patriarchotoxicity, and sorely chomps the chaps of all of us here at Savage Death Island.

_________________
* Q: Hey Twisty, what’s up with the ellipsis?
A: Trailing off into ’silence’ — i.e. leaving the end of the sentence up to the reader’s imagination — is called aposiopesis, and may be indicated legitimately by an ellipsis. Like any rhetorical device, the use of aposiopesis is restricted to professionals who are trained in its judicious and sparing application.

Posted in Blogulation, Knobjectivism, Men Hate You, Rape Culture and Sexploitation. Bite me, Chad.

Science dudes declare porn good, support claim with Danish graphs, flawed reasoning

Published by Jill on June 7, 2010. 177 Comments

The extent to which dudes just don’t get it fucking blows my lobe.

While readin’ along over at the Scienceblogs, I encountered an essay entitled Just How Bad Is Porn, Anyway? Try to contain your surprise; it was authored by a dude.

Whenever I see a science dude begin to muse on the philosophic value of pornography, my lobe starts to tingle. What are the odds the guy can stop himself from making with the wink-wink/nudge-nudge? I immediately begin shuffling through my desk drawer for the blamehammer. It’s a foregone conclusion that I’ll be needing it in short order.

In the afore-referenced essay, Scienceblogger Jason G Goldman of The Thoughtful Animal, who files the piece under “Sexual Behavior and Mating,” takes it upon himself to summarize the findings of a few studies on the effects of pornography on human happiness. He does this in response to troubling news that an anti-porn group is convening in Boston to discuss an action plan for dismantling porn culture.

Weeeelll, it isn’t long before Goldman says

So clearly this is a complicated issue. What’s a responsible scientist to do? An experiment, of course. I know: I’ll watch a TON of porn, and then see if I become sexist or racist, or feel any more aggressive than baseline.

Hahaha! An experiment where you have to watch tons of porn! That’s a funny joke! It reminds me of real sexology experiments. Like the ones where subjects are naked and “invasive probes and electrodes” are inserted into their vaginas. Those researchers are, of course, totally objective professionals when it comes to getting grant money to make porn right in their own labs.

But back to Goldman and his objective overview of porn studies:

Let’s make a few things clear: I am not taking sides in the issue of whether or not pornography should be censored or restricted (but most forms of censorship make me very uncomfortable). This is meant to review some of the research that’s been conducted on whether or not there is a reliable causal relationship between pornography and various Bad Things. [boldface Goldman's]

Translation: “I totally think pornography should not be censored or restricted. Let’s look at some studies that don’t prove anything bad about porn.”

Goldman presents some Danish research showing that there are more Danes who love porn than Danes who don’t love porn, and some research showing that porn has a positive impact on sexual satisfaction with Croatian vanillas but not on that of kinky Croatians, and some American research showing that dudes who use a lot of porn aren’t necessarily all that violent, unless they were fucked up already.

You know, the usual. Pornography is “free speech.” Pornography is only harmful to the user when he is a deviant perv to begin with. Male aggression is associated with buttloads of porn use only in a select few previously-messed-up douchebags. ‘Normal’ porn consumers, i.e. ‘most’ men (fully 98% of all men, apparently, and 80% of all women), are happy, healthy, well-adjusted, and brimming with contentment. It’s the kook-and-psychopath minority out there who get all compulsive on your ass, or who act out all rapey, giving well-adjusted exploiters a bad name.

Goldman cites no research on the effects of pornography on the pornulated women themselves, or of porn culture on women’s status within the sexbot continuum.

In fact, he seems to suggest that there are but two possible stances on porn. You’re either for it, or you’re for banning it. He omits to consider other, more elegant schemes. Such as the solution we advocate here on Savage Death Island, wherein pornography is made, not illegal, but obsolete, via elimination of the sex class, which may be accomplished by feminist revolt. There is a difference between banning porn and eradicating the demand for porn, a delicate nuance that no dude ever seems able to contemplate. A life without porn is not to be borne! Any feminist who suggests otherwise is an irrational kook.

Like all men who claim to have a bunch of sex-poz feminist BFFs and who consider that access to porn is guaranteed under the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women, Goldman doesn’t appear to grasp that patriarchy — a social order predicated on the oppression of women as a sex class — is actually real, and that as such, ours is a culture of domination wherein the ‘art form’ known as pornography is the graphic representation of rape.

The comments on Goldman’s post, proceeding from enlightened science-minds, exhibit the usual unsophisticated grasp of women’s oppression.*

– Why all the fuss about porn? Anti-porn activists should redirect their anti-porn energy to fixing the BP oil leak.
– Porn is noble “sex work.”
– Sex work isn’t exploitation because women make a shit-ton of money doing it.
– Porn stars are famous, and famous is good.
– If porn is so bad, how do you explain Celebrity Porn Star X, who has her own production company and is rich?
– Porn is an important “safety valve” that allows everyman’s inner rapist to get off, no harm no foul, thus preventing real rapes.
– If we de-stigmatized “sex work,” we could keep porn available
– If we regulated prostitution, we could keep hookers available

These are all textbook patriarchy-denier dillies, to be sure (I look forward to reading the counter-arguments in the Blame-a-teria). However, my favorite comments in the series are by one cs shelton. Here is a mansplainer of the first water. How breathtakingly predictable, how automatically autocratic he is when he informs feminist commenter Skeptifem that she is “emotional” and therefore “doesn’t reflect reality or practicality or human rights or even feminism in a reasonable way.” What did Skeptifem say to incur this scolding?

Often pornography IS violence against women, so asking if porn causes that is a silly question. Normalizing that situation is horrible. Paying for a luxury item with such an immense human cost is deplorable. No porn is worth it, and I don’t think people should be free to buy something that causes the rape of women. What is crazy is that the rape of a woman can become speech if someone takes a picture. People act like the rape of women in porn isn’t enough, that it has to spread to other women for it to matter.

Yup, that Skeptifem sure is in denial about reality and human rights and feminism, there. Good thing old cs shelton, feminism expert and pornoisseur, is on hand to set her straight. But it gets even better. Dude goes on to categorically assert, based exclusively on his personal experience as a pornsick horndog teen, that “the paleolithic venus was NOT a goddess figure. She was a masturbation aid.”

He alludes, apparently, to the Venus of Willendorf, the XXX-rated statuette believed to have once adorned the dashboard of Fred Flintstone’s Rockmobile.

cs shelton, who lives furtively in his mom’s basement on Norman Rockwell Street in a TV version of 1953, goes on to make the astonishing assertion that “porn is barely tolerated in the USA.”

Whaaa?

But the best is yet to come. Behold cs shelton’s final arguments in support of the Pornography Preservationists of America. They are the old moldy classics.

– he is a feminist, so he is exempt from accusations of sexism
– anti-porn is the same as “sex negative”, and sex-negativity is a “subjugator of women”
– because the demand for porn is “so overpowering,” any attempt to eradicate it would be “insane” and also “BAD FOR WOMEN”
– his girlfriend likes porn

and, finally, I kid you not,

I invented porn with no outside influence (same as masturbation) when I was 11. I drew naked people. I figured out what felt good. It came to me naturally, and to trash porn as inherently evil or anti-woman is to say that a natural part of who I am sexually is bad and horrible. So no, I ain’t having it.

Oh dear; cs shelton’s reasoning is an unfortunate mis-application of a No. 1 Math Property, the dear old Transitive Property of Equality.** It works great when you’re talking conditionally about objective values represented by letters of the alphabet, but not so much when applied to questions of ethics, human oppression, and male entitlement. To wit:

Porn is who he is, and who he is is good, therefore porn is good.

Also, he personally and spontaneously created porn, and anything he crapped out at the age of 11 is natural and holy, therefore porn is natural and holy.

You can’t make this shit up.

Kill me now.

_________________
*Except for one or two comments like Zuska’s, who excellently remarks with a curled lip,

“Oh, porn is awesome. Soooooo empowerful! I’ll bet every d00d dreams of being the hot chick lying there on the floor/desk/couch/bed/whatever, waiting for the money shot to splatter all over one’s face. No?”

** Join me as I harken back to 4th grade: If a=b, and b=c, then a=c

Venus of Willendorf photo: Wikipedia. < http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/VenusWillendorf.jpg >

Posted in Blogulation, Junk Studies, Knobjectivism, Lobe-blowing, Men Hate You, Number 1 Science Information, Rape Culture and Sexploitation. Bite me, Chad.

Hugs, Twisty: Woman’s sex appeal is unbearable to knob coworkers

Published by Jill on June 5, 2010. 62 Comments

To: Twisty Faster
From: maria m. miranda
Subject: Jezebel: woman fired for being too sexy at job
Message: I know Jezebel covered this, but I want YOU to write about it.

Dear maria m. miranda,

Nothing gives me greater pleasure than catering to the whims of complete strangers!

Here’s my synopsis [pieced together from the original story at Village Voice and Anna North's essay on same at Jezebel]: Debrahlee Lorenzana is fired from Citibank for bankering while female. She’s suing the chumpass motherfuckers for discrimination.

Lorenzana’s story is older than a spinster’s bunions: because of the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women, wherein is codified the equation of “women” with “sex,” Lorenzana’s Beauty2K-compliance, which is considerable, was deemed “too distracting” for her dude coworkers “to bear.” Citibank managers criticized her for looking too sexy, for not wearing makeup, for wearing high heels, for not wearing high heels, for wearing pencil skirts, for wearing sweaters, for wearing “fitted” business suits, for not straightening her hair, etc. They also performed an office-neuter on her: omitted to give her essential training which forced her to rely on male coworkers for favors.

It was further speculated in the Jezebel comments that Lorenzana’s female colleagues experienced her as a source of acute agony and contrived to “cut her off at the knees” forthwith.

In other words, Lorenzana was hectored, harassed, and discriminated against.

And then, when the Village Voice reports on her lawsuit, they include a weird 26-photo online slideshow of the “amihotornot” variety, asking readers to more or less rate Lorenzana’s sex appeal, this in addition to the patriarchy-affirming, porn-is-great language and tone of the article generally. As of this writing, the slideshow has nearly 300 comments. I stopped reading after the first 10 or so, which all voiced the same sentiment: she ain’t all that, she should “get over” herself, she must have deep character flaws that caused her female manager to give her the axe, obviously she is looking to parlay this frivolous lawsuit into celebrity.

Poor Debrahlee Lorenzana. Possessing a physique and — according to the Village Voice, which lovingly devotes a whole paragraph to her five closets of designer clothes — a sense of fashion that mirror precisely the sort of physique and sense of fashion most highly prized by dicks who consume pornography and prostituted women, Lorenzana was perceived to emit porn-rays too hot for Citibank.

Here is what is irrelevant to the case:

Lorenzana’s Christian Louboutin heels
Lorenzana’s point on the sexbot continuum
Lorenzana’s aspirations to fame and fortune
That Lorenzana unlikeably tried to save herself by ratting out some women tellers for wearing hooker outfits
Whether Lorenzana chooses to emit porn rays, or whether her natural self merely happens to conform precisely to pornulated beauty ideals.

What is relevant:

That Lorenzana is being punished for porn culture.

There’s a femininity tightrope that all public women are forced to walk, and she got bounced off, into the vat of boiling misogyny below. Whenever a public woman fails to balance the following factors just right, the some dick jounces the rope, and splat she goes. To wit:

Public women should be X amount feminine, X amount motherly, X amount hot, X amount beautiful, X amount young, X amount confident, X amount helpless, X amount exotic, X amount educated, X amount intelligent (required: the last two values < the men in the office), X amount gay (the last value almost always = 0). The ratios are fluid, shifting from day to day at the whim of public sentiment, so that a woman may think she’s got it pretty well sewed up, only to wake up one fine spring morn to discover that the parade being thrown in her honor has suddenly vanished. Later she finds out it’s because she stupidly forgot she was a member of the sex class, and had dared to imagine that she would be judged on merit rather than her ability to do femininity right.

Eventually we all fall off the rope.

Hugs,
Twisty

Posted in Femininity, Hugs, Twisty, Keep your bias off my gender, Men Hate You, Oppression Culture, The Beauty Ultimatum and Women hate you. Bite me, Chad.

MRAs on parade: chumpass motherfucker declares ownership of girlfriend’s uterus

Published by Jill on May 31, 2010. 86 Comments

It’s always the way: some horndog dude decides to prong a woman, then ends up dissatisfied with the results. So he has a tantrum. The tantrum may take one, or a combination, of many interesting forms.

Sometimes the woman doesn’t want him around anymore, so he stalks her. Sometimes she makes him hate her so much that he emails naked pictures of her to the whole school. Sometimes she gets old or fat so he keeps her around to do his laundry but starts pronging a younger woman on the DL. Sometimes she stops putting out so he fires her from her job. Sometimes the woman interprets the pronging as rape, so he calls her a liar and tortures her with mental cruelty and courtroom drama and ends up doing no jail time.

And sometimes he makes the woman pregnant. In this case he can choose from many, many popular options. He might he murder her, beat her, abandon her, marry her, slut-shame her, or, as in today’s case, appeal to the patriarchal justice system to enforce his wishes as to what should be done with the contents of her personal uterus.

I allude to Greg Bruell, a dude who, having some time ago made the personal decision to father no further children, proceeded to prong his girlfriend anyway (as reported in Salon).

Here I interject some No.1 Science Information, information that, had Greg Bruell been apprised of it, might have prevented all of his piteous suffering. That information is this: heterosexual pronging ranks Number One in the World as the most efficacious method of all time for obtaining pregnancy. You might think Greg Bruell had been at least dimly aware of the consequences of heterosexual pronging, since he has already fathered two children. However, Greg Bruell has apparently failed to grasp the connection between his lusty throbbing and the pitter-patter of little feet. Men, who are born with the right to prong anything that moves, are not typically required to understand this kind of cause and effect, since, as I mentioned above, they can easily oil out of any untoward consequences of their actions merely by invoking any of the buttload of traditional exemptions: claiming ignorance, deceit, she asked for it, she cuckolded him, or — an oldie but goodie — that the burden of pregnancy is totally a chick problem.

Anyway, Greg Bruell claims that he and his girlfriend agreed that she would terminate her next pregnancy “without waffling.” So when she boldly asserted human agency, kept the kid, and sued him for child support, Bruell blew a wheel. His gambit for oiling out of his responsibility? He owns the uterus! The National Center for Men took up the cause, saying (according to Salon):

“When a man and woman have discussed what they want and have an agreement, I do not think she has a right to impose her change of mind.”

You heard that right. The “I” in the above quotation is our old pal, antifeminist knob Mel Feit, who thinks women don’t have a right to change their minds.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this crackpot ideology would turn all women’s interactions with men into legally binding contracts permitting men to use them according to their whim. The contracts can be verbal (“She didn’t say ‘no’!”), sartorial (“she dressed like a whore so my hands were tied!), alcoholical (“if she didn’t want to have sex she shouldn’t have passed out at my party”), or body-language-ical (“she winked at me. What was I supposed to do, not rape her?”).

If for some unexplained reason you acquiesce to sex with a dude, and then, after reconsidering, change your mind three minutes later, tough shit, lady. He doesn’t have to stop, because you already said yes. It won’t be rape, because you already said yes. A yes, once given, exists in perpetuity! It’s a binding contract.

How is this possible in the tiny mind of Mel Feit? Well, according to the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women, women exist in a perpetual state of “yes.” This state of “yes” extends not only to sexual availability, but to compliance with male wishes in any quarter, across the board. To wit:

Bruell’s girlfriend supposedly agreed she would have an abortion if he ever knocked her up again. At that moment of yes, according to the Feit, this woman gave up her own autonomy and ceded control of her personal sovereignty to representative of the state Greg Bruell. Because she had agreed to be an occasional receptacle for his ejaculate, her uterus actually became the property of Greg Bruell. Greg Bruell thinks his ownership of the uterus should have afforded him the opportunity to force her to abort the fetus. And now that she’s defied his authority and had the kid anyway, he’s claiming she “deceived” him.

What? No!

Hey Greg Bruell: your genetic material is under your jurisdiction only as long as you keep it locked up in your gunk box. The instant you give your sticky little wad its joyous send-off, and the two of you part company, its fate becomes the purview of another host body. It is no longer your property, and you can’t say dick about what happens to it. However, it’s only fair that you should pay a fine for littering.

Don’t want women suing you for child support? Zip it up, you fucking dipshit!

Why can’t the same argument be turned around and applied to women?

Because women are an oppressed class without fully human status. The pervasiveness and normalization of rape culture strips women of the same quality of autonomy that men enjoy. Women are not always permitted to opt out of perpetual sexual availability without suffering harmful consequences.

Because, in other words, of the patriarchy.

This Mel Feit guy, in case you’ve forgotten, is the author of much virulent misogynist MRA crap. Such as these gems:

“At a certain point during arousal, we don’t have complete control over our ability to stop. To equate that with brutal, violent rape weakens the whole concept of rape.” [cite]

Because, duh, men should define rape.

“When will public discussions about sexuality recognize that, in this culture, women already make most of the decisions about sexual intercourse?” [ibid.]

Even if this were true — a fantastical contingency is almost too ludicrous to contemplate — what would be so terrible about it? Since women are forced to bear all the consequences of “sexuality”– from self-destructive beauty practices torape, pregnancy, child-rearing, and beyond, it would make the most sense if women actually did have some power in this quarter.

Only women have the extraordinary freedom to enjoy sexual intimacy free from the fear of forced parenthood. [cite]

Whaoah! That’s a hot one! Obviously, by “women with extraordinary freedom” he means “mythical creatures whose legal right to an abortion is not obstructed at every turn by puritanical godbag misogynist legislation.”

But I am a Western, privileged internet feminist, which means that all I care about is clothes, so here is my favorite:

[...] A woman has a greater freedom when she gets dressed in the morning. She can wear what she wants to wear because she can be what she wants to be. She can wear traditionally male clothing because she can do traditionally male things, work in traditionally male jobs, assume traditionally male roles and personality traits. She can cross over into a man’s world, share men’s experiences, then return to a world where no men are allowed. You might say she can choose to wear the pants in the family. She has free choice in fashion because she has free choice in life. [cite]

Mel Feit is bummed out on accounta a supposedly feminist woman in a pair of pants told him she wouldn’t fuck him because — I do not lie — he likes to wear skirts. This unspeakable tragedy has forced Mel Feit to dream up all kinds of wacky fantasies about how liberating it is to be a woman in our society, and about how selfish women are for refusing to share our magnificent skirt-freedoms with him.

Jesus in a jetpack, like anyone really gives a shit if Mel fucking Feit wears a skirt! I will personally donate all of my skirts to Mel Feit, if he will just promise to wear them to all future christenings, bar mitzvas, weddings, business meetings, and talk show tapings.

O if only I had all day to huddle at the desk and make fun of old skirt-coveting Mel Feit who can’t get laid by women in pants. But unfortunately I’ve got to sit around and watch the grass grow.

[Thanks, Ashley]

Posted in Dear god what about the men?, Knobjectivism, Lobe-blowing, Men Hate You, Rape Culture and The Argument Against Human Reproduction. Bite me, Chad.

More Adventures with the Antithesis of Enlightenment

Published by Jill on February 23, 2010. 148 Comments

Over at Gizmodo, Dude Nation 2.0 is having a little tantrum. It seems Apple recently removed from its App Store something called Wobble, “an app that adds animated jiggles to photo breasts.” Since then, in a kind of Night of the Long iKnives, a veritable buttload of cheezy porn apps have been purged. Including the popular Suicide Girls Flip Strip app, which, as everyone knows, “actually empowers women.”

NOOOOOOO! Not the woman-empowering Suicide Girls Flip-Strip app! I just bought a new anti-jizz cover for my boyfriend’s iPhone!

The news, if you are a Male Aged 18-to-34, or if you are the purveyor of anti-jizz iPhone covers, is “devastating.”

[A] developer who talked to Apple says the future of iPhone titillation is bleak. Really bleak. Like no racy photos, no suggestive language, no bathing suits bleak. [cite]

This story is repellent on many levels. Because I am your Number 1 Quality Internet pal, I will share three of them with you.

Repellent Level One: Gizmodo dorks reveal without compunction that they have no idea what the fuck pornography really is.

Repellent Level Two: Apple, in an effort to assuage the jerkoffus interruptus of its reported 5 million Suicide Girls customers, is naturally blaming the ban on women who complained about “‘degrading’ and ‘objectionable’ content.”

Repellent Level Three: Blamers feel compelled to email me about it, thus forcing to me to read Gizmodo and contemplate anti-jizz iPhone protectors.

Naturally, Apple, in taking a hatchet to its greasier apps, has not actually had an attack of moral indignation or even of good taste; they haven’t, for instance, banned Playboy or the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit app. No, they’ve merely gotten hip to the fact that their rapidly swelling reputation for hawking low-rent smut is adversely affecting revenues. But instead of just copping to that, Apple has elected to scapegoat those pesky women complainers. That’s right. Humorless, Puritanical feminists supposedly whined so loudly about being offended and degraded by iBoobs that Apple just couldn’t ignore’em, and out went Wobble faster than you can snap a G-string.

Which, if it were true, would be the first time any major corporation has ever listened to feminists about anything, let alone pornography. Apple, in fact, not only doesn’t listen to feminists, it doesn’t listen to anybody. But this well-known and oft-joked-about fact doesn’t prevent the Gizmodoids from casting aspersions on killjoy women for wrecking their dudely access to mobile wanking on the iPhone platform.

So once again social conservatives ruin it for all of the normal people. [cite]

and

Degrading and objectionable? [...] How about we have some thicker fucking skin? [cite]

Looking at porn is what “normal people” do, and women just can’t take a joke.

Further aspersions are cast on Steve Jobs for pandering to an inconsequential minority of “moralistic women”; Jobs is apparently a communist, a mommy, Big Brother, someone who needs to “grow up,” and is “inspired” by Hitler, all at once.

Not unexpectedly, the Gizmodo comments section is crammed with sweaty, anguished wankers who cannot distinguish between pornography and sex, and who believe that an anti-porn viewpoint is nothing but old-fashioned knee-jerk godbag pearlclutchery.

This is all a throwback to American puritanism that was extinguished in Europe long ago, but people in the US just can’t seem to handle the human body. Violence is fine, but sex is bad. [cite]

Wait, what? People in the US just can’t seem to handle the human body? Jesus on a bed of lettuce, has this guy ever seen television?

Other commenters aver that Apple’s “censorship” is a slippery slope. They predict that once the company puts the kibosh on “titty apps,” they’ll have no compunction about banning other excellent stuff. Check out this zinger, zinged by an apparent National Geographic subscriber who shows he’s no stranger to the December 2009 issue:

The Hadza people of central Tanzania still live as hunter-gatherers, unchanged over 10,000 years, with no calendar, rules, numbers above “3,” or awareness of the outside world. If enough of them complain, will Apple remove its calendar, maps, and calculator apps? [cite]

Ouch, now that’s one bad-ass anthropology-based zinger!

And you gotta love the egalitarians:

I just never understood why a womens chest is censored in all forms of media but a man’s chest is not. [cite]

and

Women can also entertain themselves with a picture of a Banana Hammock. [cite]

Whoa, Capital Letters! That must be one Entertaining Hammock!

Other commenters are acting all supercilious and mature:

Who cares, really? Do you want to be ‘that guy’ with the softcore porn apps right there are your iPhone’s dashboard/homepage/whatever? Fucking open Safari for all your porn needs, both stills and video. [cite]

DNOCD.* An iPhone user should have standards. It’s tacky to have porn on your phone; just fucking use the Internet like a fucking normal person.

Although dudes may make fine and snobbish distinctions between the social acceptability of this or that mode of smut delivery, nobody is arguing that there’s anything wrong with pornography itself. Porn is, in fact, regarded as a dude’s birthright. It occurs to precisely zero of these petulant Gizmodo knobs that demanding 24/7 access to graphic representations of rape, whether on an iPhone app or the regular old Internet, is fundamentally atavistic, misogynist, and violent.

Thus must I agree with the Gizmodo poster who observed that the lot of them are a bunch of whiny chicken-chokers.

[Thanks, Julie. I think.]

_____________________
* Definitely not our class, dear.

Posted in Dear god what about the men?, Men Hate You, Rape Culture, Sexploitation, The Entertainment Industrial Complex and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.

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.