Archive for the 'The Beauty Ultimatum' Category

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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.

Liveblogging my busy morning

Published by Jill on April 28, 2010. 88 Comments

Listening to NPR. Piece on Depression photographer Dorothea Lange. Lange expert describes the so-called “Destitute Mother” photograph as iconic in that the woman pictured clearly exhibits anxiety about being dirt-poor, but is also “a very beautiful woman.”

The subject’s actual identity (Florence Thompson, age 32; had just sold the tires off her car to buy food so her kids wouldn’t have to eat frozen dead birds) is obscured by time and the American Artocracy’s mandate to de-dimensionalize women. Thanks to the universal plucky American spirit Thompson still managed to be hot enough enough to become the face of the Great Depression.

Posted in Art is my LIFE, The Beauty Ultimatum and Women hate you. Bite me, Chad.

The case for flip-flops and flowing robes

Published by Jill on April 4, 2010. 107 Comments

When I got a spam for “men in wedding dresses” this morning I thought, hell yeah! I sure do wanna see some men in wedding dresses. I bet men look even more asinine in wedding dresses than women do. And who doesn’t want to look at something asinine first thing on Sunday morning?

Men universally look asinine in women’s clothes, yeah? The reason for this, and for mild funniness in other low forms of humor, is incongruity. Nothing says “I submit to my species’ disdain and surrender forthwith any claims to my own humanity” quite like a wedding dress. Women’s clothes are designed, according to a rigorous standard of misogyny, to communicate that the wearer is totally up for self-abasement. Men, on the other hand, are required by law not to be totally up for self-abasement. Therefore, in accordance with the laws of patriarchy, comedy and gender, a dude in a wedding dress is improbable and unnatural, thus causing the observer to laugh or retch or curl a cynical lip.

A propos of stupid shit women have to do to conform to stringent sex-class requirements: the other day I was sprawling around Jo’s, quaffing (as is consistent with my nature, ego, and nationality) a single, iced Americano in a double-sized cup, when I witnessed a particularly painful women’s-clothing-related tableau. Staggering up the sidewalk came a young woman, about 6 months pregnant, whose ugly, feminine raiment suggested that she had attired herself to appease an employer. Her get-up’s distinguishing feature was the pair of 3-inch heels strapped to her feet. The gait was lurching, the ankles were wobbling, and every step looked to be her last. Any passing student of abnormal kinesiology who happened to be conducting a study on the effects of the slope of South Congress Ave on pregnant ladies wearing high heels would have signed her up on the spot. I could almost hear the bunions sprouting.

The scene was grim. But will it astonish you to learn that nobody, including this internet feminist, thought anything of it? Even though the woman bore an uncanny resemblance to a flapping, oil-drenched gull tangled in plastic six-pack rings? Nobody sprang to her aid. Nobody handed her a helpful copy of The Dialectic of Sex. Nobody alerted Amnesty International. Nobody so much as wiped a tear from the eye.

I mention this because the spectacle of any other creature so deformed by man-made encumbrances would have generated a swirling vortex of soft-hearted do-gooders offering to drive it to the vet, foster it, nurse it back to health, release it back into the wild, and document the whole enterprise on YouTube.

However, people sitting around in coffee shacks, and elsewhere, are conditioned not to see the humanitarian crisis unfolding before them whenever women totter past enmeshed in plastic six-pack rings. It is a universally agreed-upon fact that suffering indignity is consistent with women’s essential nature. Women look natural in stupid clothes because women, as is stated in the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women, are biologically and culturally constrained to subsist as degraded masochists.

If you want to gauge the stupidity quotient of a given article of women’s clothing, just picture it on a dude. Picture it on Barack Obama, or Obi Wan Kenobi.

Obi Wan in a pencil skirt with a Birkin bag and Louboutin pumps, some pout-plumper, and a spritz of Beyoncé’s new perfume “Heat.” Stupid?

_________________________
The turtle in the video, deformed by a plastic milk-jug ring, was named for film star Mae West, whose artificially-induced hourglass shape was totallay hottt!!!

Speaking of corsets, here is one of those odd niche/historical/tribute websites, this one documenting corsetieres, women who came to your door selling Spirella corsets. And here is a little Wikipedia (i.e. unverified) history of the practice of using undergarments to squish the crap out of your torso.

Bride-man photo pilfered from this website.

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

Scum: not the real enemy

Published by Jill on March 30, 2010. 167 Comments

Sick of beauty? Dang it, me too. That’s why I’m posting on it more or less nonstop.

Blamer Magriff, reading yesterday’s post on how beauty is dumb, suggested that for crying out loud, people, shut the fuck up about beauty. She based her suggestion on the notion that writing about beauty merely perpetuates its evil power, like unto dropping delicious little nuggets of our splintered selves into its gaping maw.

The less attention we pay to how women look, one way or another, the better, at least for a while. And that goes for everyone. Stop talking about it already, it’s the ultimate sore subject, and everyone knows sores don’t heal if you insist on picking and picking at them.

Lard knows I love Magriff like fish sauce loves a spring roll, but I cannot get behind this thesis. To enlarge on the diseased skin metaphor: just as the treatment for a festering carbuncle is unlikely to include ignoring the carbuncle, so too might ignoring the hideous consequences of a critical aspect of women’s subjugation be unlikely to make it go away. I remind the Blametariat that, because women are an oppressed class, we don’t have the luxury of simply existing and lounging on the Lido Deck and traipsing around town as though our appearance were totally a politically neutral dealio and there was no global humanitarian crisis afflicting our entire population. That perk is reserved for the dominant class. We are an oppressed class, so everything women do, voluntary or no, is a political act. Is this tiresome? Painful? Exhausting? It sure is! That’s why I advocate immediate feminist revolt. Maybe then we could take a fucking load off, for crissake.

Anyway, I was motivated to complain about beauty for the second day in a row by a soap commercial on television. The soap commercial to which I allude is one of that insidious species of soap commercials that plays into women’s insecurities concerning our level of commitment to beauty and beauty products. In this ad, a group of women confront the horror of “soap scum.”

That’s right! You called it! It’s our old friend Dove!

Dear old Dove! Who can forget 2004’s surreal Campaign for Real Beauty? This devious advertising gimmick paraded conventionally pretty women and posed them crouching awkwardly in their underwear, rebranding soap model hotness to include a few more fat cells than previously allowed on TV. Dove called the models “real women.” They were meant to appeal to potential Dove butt-cream customers because the women were not the typical pubescent Slavic speedfreak toothpicks.

Internet feminists laughed and laughed. We were well used to this kind of schizoid women’s marketing. We cut our vagina dentatas on glossy women’s magazines where one page contains an article on the dangers of dieting but on the facing page is a giant ad for Lean Cuisine Bacon Alfredo Pizza (320 calories). Those 2004 Dove models might have had a little meat on their bones, but the message was same shit, different day: “Hotness is king! Buy yours here!”

The creepiest thing about it all was the camaraderiffic tone. The Dove company pretending to be your best friend and trusted confidante and professional life coach all rolled into a single “beauty bar,” existing solely for the purpose of helping you and your precious self-esteem be more beautiful than ever. Six years later, I’m still shuddering.

The Dove website is a fucking scream, by the way. Dork city! Check this out:

“As part of the launch campaign, DOVE invited women to rediscover the beauty in their own hair.”

Invited by an altruistic cosmetics company who cared for nothing so much as her self-esteem, Twisty discovered the Taj Mahal, a sunset on the beach, and a monarch chrysalis deep within the tangled web of her own hair.

Rediscovered beauty hair

And there’s actually a link titled “Real women react to soap scum.” No shit.

“So, Daphne, whatcha been up to lately?”

“Oh, not much. I got an internet video gig.”

“Doing what? Tickling kittens? Weeping piteously over Star Wars?”

“Nah. Reacting to soap scum.”

“Soap scum? Sweet!”

But back to the commercial. It’s set up like some kind of bizarro-world scientific study, which for some reason is being conducted outside using wacky equipment: life-sized woman-shaped mirrors with shower heads attached to their tops. The mirrors have cute flip hairdos. A bunch of women are “invited” — Dove is constantly inviting women to do moronic shit — to take part in the demonstration, which will reveal “the truth” about soap scum.

Dove puts the women test subjects to work right away. Cleaning, of course. What else?

“Every woman washed mirrors,” the narrator says, introducing the unlikely premise.

Cut to women diligently soaping up their weird woman-shaped mirrors. Cue the showers for a rinse.

Uh-oh. There’s unsightly white shit left on the mirrors! But why?

“Soap leaves soap scum behind every time you wash.”

Oh, no!

Yet, “you can’t see [the soap scum] on your skin …” admits the narrator.

So technically, what they’ve shown is that a substance purported to be soap can leave white shit on woman-shaped mirrors with shower heads stuck to them, and that actors can be paid to look horrified by this.

Happily for consumers who loathe and despise white shit on woman-shaped mirrors, Dove is “different.” As is demonstrated by a pretty, naked, decidedly non-scummy woman in a towel who caresses her cleavage with a sensual hand, Dove leaves skin “soft, smooth, and always soap-scum-free.”

Can you imagine being that towel model?

“So Miriam, whatcha been doin lately?”

“Oh, I got a job wearing a towel and feeling myself up on soap commercials.”

“You do this with a straight face?”

“It puts food on the table, OK?”

“But towel modeling? At your age?”

“Lucky for me Dove is an equal opportunity exploiter. As long as you’re really, really photogenic, towel models can be as old as 35, 36!”

The Campaign for Real Beauty has now morphed into the Dove Self-Esteem Fund, which “was developed to help free the next generation from self-limiting beauty stereotypes [and] promot[e] a wider definition of beauty.”

Notice that, in promoting this supposedly “wider” definition of beauty, Dove is tacitly promoting an all-important corollary: that there will always be those hopeless unfortunates in the margins for whom the definition still isn’t wide enough. Meaning that this new fake commodified Dove beauty will continue to retain exclusivity and unattainability, while injecting a new dose of guilt: if you can’t manage to be beautiful even under these new, lowered standards, you can’t be trying hard enough, or spending enough money.

Here’s a little taste of some of the shitty shit that beauty does:

• It creates and reinforces the notion of the sex class.

• It creates and reinforces the notion of social status.

• It promotes pointless adversarial relationships between women, effectively isolating them from each other (divide and conquer).

• It promotes physically and emotionally damaging, dangerous practices.

• It genericizes women, transforming them from humans into interchangeable fleshbots.

• It infantilizes women, transforming them from humans into morons who seek baby-soft skin.

• It publicly communicates private information which may be used against a woman, including her caste, sexual availability, and degree of personal investment in patriarchal mores.

• It diverts women’s financial resources from things like health care and organic margaritas to the beauty industrial complex, to the tune of billions a year.

• It diverts women’s attention from stuff that actually matters, like global women’s oppression, to superficial, meaningless, neurotic rituals. One of which is that you must endeavor to be free of scum at all times.

So that’s why I’m writing about beauty again. If it doesn’t get some bad press once in a while, people might forget how bad it sucks. It sucks way worse than soap scum.

Posted in Femininity, Mass Media, Oppression Culture, The Beauty Ultimatum and Women hate you. Bite me, Chad.

I like pie

Published by Jill on March 29, 2010. 160 Comments

Feminists always have to go around explaining that they don’t hate men. The man-hater accusation is the standard response to anything a feminist might say.

Feminist: One in five women will be sexually assaulted on campus by the time she graduates.

Antifeminist: You’re just a man-hater!

Feminist: But I’m quoting a report from the Department of Ju –

Antifeminist: Man-hater! Man-hater!

Feminist: One in seven women will get breast cancer.

Antifeminist: Man-hater!

Feminist: Pornography oppresses women.

Antifeminist: Man-hater!

Feminist: I like pie.

Antifeminist: Man-hater!

Man-hating apparently, invalidates the entirety of feminism; women are, by universal agreement, expected to love their oppressors unconditionally. Hating women, however, is de rigueur for the modern gal on the go. I was listening to World Have Your Say on Radio Beeb a few weeks ago, when they were talking about women’s issues because it was International Women’s Day (you know International Women’s Day? It’s that sad, lonely day once a year when folks on the radio talk about women’s issues and the people telling them to shut the fuck up are given marginally less airtime than all the rest of the year). So anyway, on World Have Your Say a woman was telling the story of her Mexican grandmother who was able to “have it all” by running a successful company and raising about 37 kids. Well, one of the feminist panelists said, yeah, that’s right, successful women “don’t have to be men.” Women can be empowerfulized and still do things that are ‘natural’ for women to do.

“It’s okay to have a family” she insisted. “It’s okay to be pretty.”

No, it isn’t, my dear old feminist panelist. It isn’t okay to be pretty. Not if smashing patriarchy is on your to-do list. Pretty is merely a semantic variant of feminine, which is itself a code word meaning ’subjugated, degraded, and controllable.’

Or beautiful, sexy, or fuckable — it’s all the same thing: a set of behaviors indicating that the woman in question is dominant-culture-compliant. The degree of compliance is judged according to standards based on a system of male appeasement (compliance should be full and discernible at a glance).

If a woman is unable or unwilling to capitulate to male desire by cute-ing herself up according to the standards of the day, and is resistant enough to broadcast this unwillingness by eschewing beauty, boy is she in for it. The Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women state that a woman will internalize the beauty mandate to the greatest possible extent, lest Dude Nation kick her non-compliant ass.

Fear of retribution (ridicule, ostracism, harassment, abuse in the workplace) — and by extension, guilt and the imperative of self-sacrifice — is why the overwhelming majority of Vagina-Americans own mirrors and buy carcinogenic products that supposedly make them “shiny,” “radiant,” “glowing,” “pouty,” “smoky,” or “baby-fresh.” Fear of retribution is why even those women who identify as feminists cling with Revlon-coated claws to the “right” that us man-hating feminazis would take away from them: the right to be pretty (or sexy or fuckable).

And no wonder the right-to-prettiness feminists despise us anti-femininity feminists; what we propose is that women’s liberation is impossible as long as women fail to recognize that the practice of beauty is an expression of internalized oppression. We’re just mean and hateful when we suggest that women, especially youngish ones with phenotypes that make them likely to score cash, good tables in restaurants, and public approval, might consider knocking it off already with the prettiness. Those perks are pretty good, but they sort of undermine the feminist revolt.

But when that feminist panelist on World Have Your Say tells the audience that it’s okay to be pretty, what she actually means is that it’s not antifeminist to engage in physically and emotionally demeaning practices in an effort to be sexually manipulative and to communicate one’s submission.

Holy shit! That chick is just wrong.

Internet feminists, by the way, who cast a jaundiced eye upon the cult of beauty are man-haters because we would deprive default humans of their right to pretty girls.

Posted in Femininity, Mass Media, Oppression Culture, The Beauty Ultimatum and Women hate you. Bite me, Chad.

Is your pout plump enough?

Published by Jill on February 22, 2010. 116 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kill me now.

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

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

Cheap frills: spinster aunt views child beauty pageant on TV

Published by Jill on January 13, 2010. 75 Comments
Remind you of anyone?

Remind you of anyone?

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

!

* * * * * * * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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* “[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.

CrotchWatch ‘09

Published by Jill on September 17, 2009. 102 Comments

Today Spinster HQ kicks off our much-anticipated new feature, CrotchWatch ‘09. Through CrotchWatch ‘09 we’ll keep careful tabs on global genitalia. Because the state of being female is a medical condition, we’ll start with NetDoctor.

NetDoctor is a UK-based health tip website. It contains “all you need to know about the prevention, treatment and management of more than 500 diseases and conditions.”

That’s a fuckton of diseases and conditions!

Today’s post represents an effort to quell the incessant clamor for an in-depth analysis of NetDoctor Dr David Delvin MB BS LRCP MRCS DObst RCOG DCH FPA Cert MRCGP Dip Ven MFFPRCOG’s views on hetero women’s sexuality. His views are important because they appear on “more than 800 radio and TV programmes” as well as on the Internet, and because Dr David Delvin MB BS LRCP MRCS DObst RCOG DCH FPA Cert MRCGP Dip Ven MFFPRCOG is not just a dude, he’s a dude with pink skin, white hair, a stethoscope around his neck, and a serious alphabetical APU (authoritay-pile-up) appended to his name.

But on to CrotchWatch, and Dr David Delvin MB BS LRCP MRCS DObst RCOG DCH FPA Cert MRCGP Dip Ven MFFPRCOG’s pronouncements on the health problems associated with the dimensions of women’s junk.

Worries about vaginal and vulval size are extremely common among women. This is scarcely surprising, because a woman’s feelings about her own vagina and vulva are central to her sexuality.

I’m sure we’d all like to congratulate him on not using the word “junk,” and on grasping the difference between “vulva” and “vagina,” but this is clearly a misstatement of the facts. What Dr David Delvin MB BS LRCP MRCS DObst RCOG DCH FPA Cert MRCGP Dip Ven MFFPRCOG really means is, a woman’s crotchal insecurities are scarcely surprising because Porn Nation’s feelings about her own vagina and vulva are central to her sexuality. But this mistake is understandable. The difference between “woman” and “porn” is negligible. And anyway, the doctor is correct in identifying women’s “feelings” as a medical matter.

But what of this “size” stuff? Well, Dr David Delvin MB BS LRCP MRCS DObst RCOG DCH FPA Cert MRCGP Dip Ven MFFPRCOG postulates that the post-partum vagina really can be “too big,” pointing out that a vacuous vadge is prone to “fanny-farting” as well as the dreaded bath-water vacuum effect. News you can use!

Speaking of pornography, here are Dr David Delvin MB BS LRCP MRCS DObst RCOG DCH FPA Cert MRCGP Dip Ven MFFPRCOG’s remarks on that zesty topic.

There has always been a difference between men and women where porn is concerned.

Not true! Back in the Lower Paleolithic, Homo habilis chicks kicked it old skool, enjoying violent rape flicks on VHS as much as the next caveman. It wasn’t until the Mesolithic and the rise of the art critic that the female response to cinematic sex-based violence began to diverge from the established norm.

Men tend to be turned on by things they can see, while women seem to prefer the images and fantasies they have in their heads.

Which is why all blind guys are universally impotent, and all women are nuts. See how it all begins to make sense?

For this reason, women often don’t enjoy the sort of porn that men like. If the people on the screen don’t appeal to them, they don’t get turned on.

Is it possible that Today’s Woman finds the graphic representation of her own oppression less palatable than the myth of romance? I was rather under the impression that porn empowerfulizes women.

Also, women tell us they do not find sitting in front of a desktop very conducive to arousal.

Well, this is spot-on; it is a well-known fact that women have to be surrounded by piles of pink velvet laundry in order to visualize Fabio flexing his lovedong on a tropical beach.

Women can also feel uneasy and inferior about the bodily ‘perfection’ of the women in porn. This can put them off sex, rather than turn them on to it.

Pah. The Porn Beauty Standard has absolutely nothing to do with “a woman’s feelings about her own vagina and vulva being central to her sexuality.” Sometimes we just have a goddam headache, you know?

They can feel threatened by their man’s enjoyment of these images and quickly feel that if a man is enthusiastic about porn, he must be losing interest in her. We would say this is often not the case at all.

Yeah, rest easy, straight girls. Your man’s obsession with the graphic representation of rape is no reason to fret. Men can consume an infinite number of two-dimensional women while simultaneously remaining capable of keeping a 3-D version (i.e. you!) around to wash his socks.

Whether women like it or not, because porn is so available, most men are going to view it.

Suck it up, ladies. Porn’s not goin’ anywhere. And remember: while Nigel is furtively jacking off on his laptop, you can always have an affair with your Swiffer mop. But use birth control!

Posted in Mass Media, Patriarchy, my patriarchy, Sexploitation and The Beauty Ultimatum. Bite me, Chad.

Hugs, Twisty: The color of womanhood, plus I suck all the fun out of a Bette Davis classic

Published by Jill on September 11, 2009. 49 Comments

Staffers at Spinster HQ (namely, me and my secretary Phil) are always delighted when an incoming email is brief. We’re even more delighted when it does not contain some variation on the “your head is up your ass” theme. We’re even more delighted still when its author more or less desperately confides that s/he is in deep agony — and, indeed, will probably have to be hospitalized — unless my views on “Now, Voyager” are revealed at once.

Pinko Punko hits the trifecta with the following communiqué.

[Dear Jill,]

I feel like maybe [this site] had already come down the barf slide, but the floral utility knife was nice.

Also, I would love to add “Now, Voyager” to the list of classic films I’d like to see in the IBTP film guide.

I hope you aren’t being inundated with plastic army dudes.

PP

Dear PP,

Let us first address the website to which you link, LadiesToolsOnline. At this pinkinated shopping site, Ladies can purchase pink hammers, pink slip-joint pliers, and pink utility belts, as well as non-pink products that nevertheless preserve a lady’s surrendered-womanhood, such as the “Family Glue Gun and Stapler Set” or the “3-Piece Cutting Tool Kit-RED FLORAL” (which actually has 4 pieces, but you know, math is hard).

You may not know this, Pinko, but women — or, as LadiesToolsOnline calls us, “Diva’s” — are often physically and psychologically incapable of prolonged separation from the color pink. This is the main reason we get ourselves entangled with men and have babies. It’s so we can surround ourselves with mountains of pink laundry.

For centuries, power tools and utility knives have not been pink. This is the main reason women of yore traditionally spent all their time shopping and getting their nails done, instead of doing shit around the house with implements the non-pink color of which threatens their emotional health. Fortunately for today’s woman-on-the-go, whose sacred duty is to be empowerful and feminine at the same time, purse-sized 26-piece mini-tool sets now come in pink, for $6.99.

The LadiesToolsOnline FAQ explains why their website exists: like doing math, it’s hard “to pick the right hammer.” It is often better, they suggest, to do-it-yourself than to “cash in the spa vacation fund” to hire somebody who knows what they’re doing. But here’s a handy trick if you get in over your head: call the fire department and rescue is on the way! “Every firehouse seems to have a plumber, carpenter, painter, etc. ready to help on their days off.” Who knew?

That there is a whole section devoted to “security” on a hardware site might have baffled you. Allow me to splain. This is a site purveying pink tools of indeterminate manufacture to women who cannot choose a hammer on their own. It is common knowledge that women live in a perpetual state of fear, and that crap like hammers may be more easily sold to them when their fear is excited and exploited. Thus does LadiesToolsOnline suggest helpfully that women whose home security has been compromised should “call the police and hope they catch the bad guys.” Furthermore, the site devotes a whole paragraph to the heretofore nebulous concept that, for “piece-of-mind,” you should lock your house.

Sound advice for imbecilic ladies and people who may be visiting from some other planet where they don’t have doors! I just can’t understand, Pinko, why you find this site barf-worthy, when it’s just trying to preserve women’s spa vacation funds and keep us safely locked in our homes.

But “Now, Voyager“! Dude, you know I love Bette Davis like an old pair of jeans, but this flick is just a big fat advertisement for patriarchal pukeology. Not only is it profoundly anti-Spinster (the horror), it actually pathologizes non-compliance with the Feminine Beauty Mandate.* Charlotte, the Bette Davis character, is sent to the loony bin because she is having a psychotic break as a result of her frumpiness and lack of personality-sparkle. Other misogynist markers:

– Motherhood demonized: Charlotte’s villainous mother eats her own young; the kid Tina’s mother’s similar occupation is to prevent the happiness of her family at all costs.

– The ugly-duckling-into-swan/unattractiveness-as-mental-illness theme appears in a second iteration; the kid Tina, who wears glasses to signify that she is a horrific spinster-in-training, is a mini-Bette similarly in need of psychiatry. Incidentally, although it is of little patriarchy-blaming relevance, that mega-annoying kid character makes me want to tear my own face off.

– Psychiatry (as practiced by wise white dudes who wield absolute power over the hysterical nutjobs) is portrayed as the One True Path to womanly fulfillment. Davis’ character is so fucked up that it takes Paul Henreid and Claude Rains — not one but two handsome, dudely, sympathetic leading men — to fix her. Aack!

– Charlotte can’t get a boyfriend until she loses weight, gets a makeover, slips into some haute couture, and sails into Rio, one of the most phallic ports on Earth.

– Her married lover Jerry is an asshole disguised as a romantic. He supposedly loves Charlotte but won’t divorce his wife; he abandons his kid, whom he also claims to love, in an asylum; and at the end he ditches’em both, leaving Charlotte stuck raising his goddam kid. But Charlotte’s practically giddy with selfless gratefulosity. And we’re supposed to like this chump Jerry?

– Famous line at the end makes no sense: “Oh Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon; we have the stars!” What, their love is so cosmic that she doesn’t need happiness to be happy? Pah!

– Although Charlotte appears to be somewhat transformed and empowerful at the end, she remains emotionally tethered to Jerry, and we know that she will never have a life of her own, and that all she has found is the ability to wear designer clothes. To borrow a deeply satisfying quip from Shakesville: Fail!

The film’s only redeeming features are dapper little Claude Rains, who is just adorable in every film he ever did, and of course Davis herself, who easily mesmerizes even when stuck slurping out ghastly sentimental material like “Now, Voyager.”

Meanwhile, the plastic army man incursion appears to have abated entirely; a security sweep of Sectors 3 and 9 revealed no plastic paratrooping activity. Looks like the little fuckers have declared a ceasefire.

Hugs,
Twisty

(P.S. Twisty’s still on Opstreperon, but “Hugs, Jill” just doesn’t have the right ring.)

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*The Feminine Beauty Mandate states that all members of the sex class, i.e. all women, should endeavor to preserve themselves perpetually in a condition that the casual male ogler can easily describe as “fuckable.”

Posted in Femininity, Hugs, Twisty, The Beauty Ultimatum, The Entertainment Industrial Complex, The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Yesterday and The megatheocorporatocracy. Bite me, Chad.