Archive for the 'The Beauty Ultimatum' Category

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Tyra wants you

Published by Jill on September 2, 2009. 52 Comments

tyra
Airbrushed TV hottie seeks mother with “feminist viewpoint.” Photo from tyrabanks.com

Howdy blamers. You know how I am constantly getting emails from people who have no idea what I Blame the Patriarchy is but tell me it’s “great” and hope to use it for their own patriarchy-affirming ends, usually by selling stuff?

Here’s an appeal from a Tyra Banks flack that showed up in today’s mail pile. She searcheth for a “feminist mom” to appear on the supermodel’s talk show. I know I don’t need to mention that the only reason for the existence of the Tyra Banks Show is that it makes money, on the backs of the sex class, for commercial purveyors of femininity.

Hi,

My name is Erika Wasser and I am reaching out from the Tyra Banks show. We are looking into doing a show on raising young girls/tweens in today’s world and were hoping to feature someone with a feminist viewpoint on the show. Ideally, this woman would be a feminist mom. I was hoping that maybe you could point me in the direction of someone to contact or a place to look. Great site, and thanks so much for any and all help in advanced [sic]. Feel free to contact me anytime via email or phone xxx.xxx.xxxx.

Best,
Erika Wasser

Erika, it seems, wishes to locate a woman with female “tween” spawn who will

a) actually cop to being a feminist, and
b) consent to the exploitation of self and kid on national TV, presumably inclusive of frank revelations about sexting and other “shocking teen trends.”

This I’d like to see. Part B is a piece of cake, all righty, but Part A? These days anybody who is allowed on TV and publicly claims to be a feminist isn’t one. She’s straight, conventionally attractive, takes pole dancing lessons, and espouses the belief that femininity empowerfulizes her. If any “feminist” should accidentally let it out that being sexually manipulative has not a high moral purpose, or that patriarchy even exists, let the ridicule fly.

Well, good luck anyway, Erika! I suggest you check out Jezebel. And thanks for reaching out with the nice compliment on my blog. Even though you have obviously never read it, perhaps you were able to divine its excellence from its quality banner, or from the fact that it doesn’t turn up anywhere on Google Blog search .

Incidentally, Tyra Banks also emcees a production called “America’s Next Top Model.” This show is a dilly. Skeletal, swaybacked young women compete in a rigorous, season-long beauty pageant during the course of which all of their visible body parts, the professionality of their catwalk strut, and the cut-throatness of their drive to be Beauty2K-compliant, are painstakingly evaluated on national television. If they aren’t photogenic enough, or if they don’t exhibit sufficient guile, they get eliminated by mean judges. A not wholly unrealistic encapsulate version of everywoman’s life within the patriarchal hegemon. Nice.

Anyway, if any of you blamers want to audition for the role of feminist mom on the Tyra Banks Show, I’ll be happy to put you in touch with Ms Wasser. It could be your ticket outta Savage Death Island once and for all!

Posted in Announcements, Femininity, Mass Media, The Beauty Ultimatum, The Entertainment Industrial Complex and Women hate you. Bite me, Chad.

Just when you thought it was safe

Published by Jill on September 2, 2009. 64 Comments
<small>Julia's surgeons break out the barbecue forks.</small>

Julia's surgeons break out the barbecue forks.

The Blogulation Department here at Spinster HQ has been on sabbatical due to auntly apathy and writer’s block.

The deadly apathy/writer’s block combo, which results from intermittently spasmodic crystalline antimatter anomalies in the obstreperal lobe — brought on, no doubt, by extended megatheocorporatocratic interference — is also responsible for my having chucked college, all my rock bands, my juicy restaurant critic gig, and of course, my science fiction novel.

But today I crawl out of my lair to present something for you fans of pictorial cancer blogs. Reader Julia emailed me recently with a link to her mastectomy website. Quoth Julia:

When I was going to have my mastectomy I tried to look up surgery photos online and couldn’t find any. This is understandable; women don’t often want to be photographed topless and especially not when they’re frightened and vulnerable. There’s also a very small window of opportunity to decide whether or not to photograph something like that and figure out how to make it happen. Since I couldn’t find photos when I wanted them, however, I decided to figure out how to make it happen. I had my entire mastectomy photographed as well as my hysterectomy and my port installation and a bunch of other things.

Julia does not lie; there are no mastectomy photos online. Veteran blamers may recall that I (and I’m sure I’m not the only one who has done this) uploaded a few gross post-operative pix featuring my staples and blood-bags and bruises and scars and so forth (see below), but it never occurred to me to document the actual surgeries, on accounta I’m stupid, and besides that shit makes me hurl.

<small/>;What’s left of my left side, feat. MC Gruesome Drain Tube. Yes, it was sewn directly to my skin with black thread. Yes, it hurt.<small>” title=”Boobalectomy '06, part 2″ width=”400″ height=”266″ class=”size-full wp-image-683″ /><p class=What’s left of my left side, feat. MC Gruesome Drain Tube. Yes, it was sewn directly to my skin with black thread. Yes, it hurt.

Julia’s hypothesis — that women don’t feel like flaunting their chests on the internet when they’re sick with a fatal disease — is right on the money, but I submit that there’s more to this dearth of mastectomy documentation than that.

I allude, as so I often do, to repellent social mores oozing forth from the Cult of Breast Cancer Survivorism: the brutality of treatment must be hidden from view if the cancer-industrial complex is to continue flourishing (at the expense of sick women) in the opulent manner to which it is accustomed. As per the Global Accords Governing Breast Cancer Patient Behavior, the breast cancer patient doesn’t photograph her surgery. The breast cancer patient (unless she has the effrontery to die from her disease) is a Survivor ™, a dainty little pink teddy-bear-lovin’ non-feminist who has bravely put all that unpleasantness behind her, who purports to have experienced immeasurable personal growth as a result of her illness. Meanwhile, as an ambassador for The Cure, she wears a pink scarf to protect the world from her scary chemo baldness. Her amputated breasts are “reconstructed” so the boob-lovin’ public won’t have to confront the horror of her amputations.* She’s a fighter, but not an activist. She’s plucky, but doesn’t challenge the status quo. As Samantha King writes in the enlightening Pink Ribbons, Inc:

[Women] are discouraged from questioning the underlying structures and guiding assumptions of the cancer-industrial complex. The culture of breast cancer survivorship does not, in other words, embrace patient-empowerment as a way to mobilize critical engagement with biomedical research, anger at governmental inactionk or resistance to social discrimination and inequality, even if its history is bound up with attempts to do just this.”

People can’t find out how really fucking gross treatment is, because if they did they might start thinking, hey, maybe preventing breast cancer — as opposed to waiting for women to get sick and then slamming them with a series of debilitating, barbaric procedures — is a good idea. But prevention is not in the interests of the megatheocorporatocracy. There is just too much filthy lucre to be made from selling the romantic notion of “cure.”

So, thanks, Julia, for pioneering the field of Internetian (rhymes with “Venetian”) breast amputation documentarism.

Also, fucking nice tattoo, girlfriend!

_____________________
* I never miss a golden opportunity to poop on the concept of breast reconstruction. This surgery serves no purpose except to appease the patriarchal demand for femininity by preserving the appearance of funbags. It’s not like the procedure actually reconstructs a breast (a breast is not a lump of abdominal fat relocated to the chest. A breast contains a functional mammary gland to nurse infants.). What this reconstruction procedure does is, it constructs a totally useless, cumbersome protuberance. The only reconstruction going on is the reconstruction of the patient’s feminine compliance. Nobody’s telling dude breast cancer patients to reconstruct their manboobs.

Pah.

Inevitably, women who have opted for reconstruction will take offense at these remarks. Don’t be silly, reconstructed women. Patriarchy, not you personally, is to blame for the expectation that you endure more surgeries than are necessary for your health. Post-operative fancy-free flat-chestiness is a luxury enjoyed only by a fortunate few who can afford to spit in the eye of the Beauty Ultimatum.

Posted in Crazy sexy cancer, Femininity, Oppression Culture, The Beauty Ultimatum and The megatheocorporatocracy. Bite me, Chad.

Another amateur pornographer deludes self he’s an artiste

Published by Jill on August 16, 2009. 65 Comments

This amateur pornographer, known on the website Deviantart.com as “Pelicanh,” snaps photos of naked ladies, stands back, basks in it, and calls it art. Furthermore, he puts it on the World Wide Web and gets thousands of hits a day. Furthermore, he is eager to demonstrate to his followers his superiority in the field of female genital identification (though he obviously can make no claims in the ellipsis or the ALL CAPS or the insertion-of-too-many-letters-in-the-word-way departments). To wit:

“Anyone taking even a casual stroll through my gallery will see a lot of pussy photos. Let’s just call them what they are, OK? NO….they are NOT photos of “vaginas” – learn your anatomy, people.

I’d LOVE it if there was a sweet and endearing name for them, ya know. “Pussy” sounds pretty “Playboy-ish” to me but it is the best I can do because it ISN’T a vagina photo and that sounds waaaaayyy too medical to me anyway. There are at least a billion names for that part of a woman’s anatomy but that’s not what this journal is about. SO – get over it, I’m gonna call it a pussy.”

Well, sure, you’re a pornographer. This means you think “pussy” is “anatomy.” But even if you didn’t, obviously you’d have to call it “pussy,” since degrading women and telling them to “get over it” is one of the Inalienable Rights of Man.

However, were you not a wart on the corn-hole of Dude Nation, you might know the difference between a pejorative slur and actual nomenclature, or possibly even that vagina is not a “medical” term. It might also dawn on you that a “sweet, endearing name for them” would be useful only to you and your efforts to distract their owners, through some kind of phony sympathetic display, from the fact that you are a dehumanizing, exploitative prick. “That part of a woman’s anatomy” has already got a name, pencil-dick.

Anyway, this Pelican guy, in an essay titled, apparently without irony, “Pussies – Art or Porn!!??”, reveals that his life’s most cherished dream is to release nude models from their self-imposed prison of vulvular self-doubt. See, he has taken a poll on the subject. He is “saddened” to find that nude models invariably aver that they consider to be ugly the body part to which he alludes as “pussy.” Their views on the matter have apparently induced in these models a certain reluctance to flip him the wide open beaver on demand.

Unacceptable! Pelicanh vows magnanimously to take matters into his own hands, to educate these tragically deluded women on the subject of the “beauty” of their “pussies,” presumably for the betterment of all womankind, but in reality so he can persuade more of them to give it up for the camera.

I set myself a small mission to MAKE people look at them, accept them, see the beauty.

Make people look at pussy! What a noble mission! Because men usually experience such difficulty looking at pictures of naked women on the internet. Pelicanh has undoubtedly secured himself a spot on the short list for the Nobel Peace Prize for his dedicated work in this field.

A vulva, according to Pelicanh, can be one of two things:

1. Beautiful art, or
2. Porn.

It doesn’t occur to old Pelicanh that a vulva might have aspirations that rise above being photographed by some perv for public display on his perv web page, where viewers are “made” to look at “beauty.” Aspirations, for example, that do not involve complicity in dudely “art” projects, dudely perceptions of “beauty,” or perpetual availability for pornsick voyeurism. A vulva might want to just hang around. Hit the links. Go to a museum. Menstruate. Enjoy a taco. Chillax on the chaise with a marg and a copy of I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew.

The “It’s beautiful so it’s art, not porn” argument always hilarifies me. Haw!

What could it be about a vulva that makes it the universal Holy Grail of a certain species of male shutterbug? Why must these vulgar specimens insist on its unique “beauty” when, in fact, a vulva is precisely as “beautiful” as an elbow or a nostril? Why do they so vociferously declaim that they are not pornographers even though their “work” depends entirely on the gross imbalance of power between dudes and women, specifically on flattening women into 2-dimensional sex graphics?

I’ll tell you. When a dude photographer snags a beaver shot, he snags a trophy. Boo-ya. A photograph of a disembodied vulva is not, as is one of an elbow or a nostril, a politically or socially neutral concept. It is the graphic representation of the universal belief that women = sex, and a symbol of male dominance in a rape culture. And naturally it is customary, in the world of oppressive human endeavor, to imagine that beauty attends that endeavor, so that one may justify the oppression.

In the continuum of pervy sexist tools, dude photographers stand alone at the pinnacle of sleaze.

[Thanks, Windswept. I think.]

Posted in Art is my LIFE, Men Hate You, Oppression Culture, Rape Culture, Sexploitation and The Beauty Ultimatum. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt watches CNN so you don’t have to

Published by Jill on August 15, 2009. 58 Comments

CNN has a “Health for Her” segment. “Health for Her” is represented by one of those Venus female symbols in the background, to differentiate it from regular health.

Today’s women’s health segment isn’t about boring old breast cancer or vaginas or about how generally unhealthy it is to be female on this planet, though. It’s about high heels.

Women sure love shoes, says CNN.

CNN reveal no secrets when they aver that, according to their women’s experts, “most” women — by which is always meant heterosexual Western women — buy shoes for style (by which is meant “pornulation”) rather than for comfort (by which is meant “humorless hairy ugly unfuckable”). Strippers, for example, or Beauty2K-Compliant women in the media, don’t wear Clark’s Comfort Walkers. Lady detectives on TV cop shows don’t chase down perps in Uggs.

But newsflash! High heels can cause health problems, warns CNN. The report claims that “most” women have no idea that their foot pain, bunions, broken ankles, osteoarthritis, and back aches are related to their sexay Manolos. Women are just that dumb. CNN, though, they got women’s backs. They interview one of the dumb women, for the edification of all.

“They hurt, but I wear’em anyway,” says the interviewee, chuckling at the hilarity inherent in her personal pain and disfigurement.

I am the only honky alive who thinks a human foot looks really fucking asinine stuffed into a pointy-toed shoe with a 5-inch stiletto heel.

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

Psychologists conduct studies, or, The Boothroyd Show

Published by Twisty on March 30, 2009. 80 Comments

It strains the lobe to contemplate what passes, in mainstream media, for women’s health reportage. BBC News, for example, has a passel of crap in the “Health” section on how women attract men, how women select men, and how women’s behavior is a function of our essential receptacality with respect to men. Check this sexist, heteronormative shit out [*]:

Everybody knows women are crazy. We constantly run amok on psycho shopping sprees. Do we stock up on wool socks or books of poetry? Hell no! We buy buttloads of “jewellery, make-up and high heels.” Well, you know why? Because it’s that time of the month! Just ask some psychologists who did a study. Menstruation is a health problem causing unbridled extravagance.

Psychologists believe shopping could be a way for premenstrual women to deal with the negative emotions created by their hormonal changes.

Blowing dough on makeup has nothing to do with the Femininity Industrial Complex.

The menstruation shopping spree article linked to this one, which reveals a handy tip for getting men to pry open the old money clip for you. Obviously, anyone interested in blaming reproductive functions for their credit card debt would probably also be interested in “boosting [their] attractiveness” to men. So guess what. Psychologists did a study. It turns out that the color red totally unlocks the dudely wallet. “[M]en said they would spend more money on a woman pictured in red, compared with the same woman wearing a blue shirt.” It’s easy to guess why. That’s right:

[A] lot of female monkeys have bright red sexual swellings, which show that they are around the time of ovulation.

Ergo, human men are hardwired to spend more cash on a woman who resembles a monkey butt. Duh!

But wait, there’s plenty more where that came from. Psychologists — ever eager to unlock the secrets swelling in the luscious red subconscious of Unknowable Woman — did another study. This one, which I consider to be particularly relevant to women’s health, showed that women with high testosterone levels want to bone a movie star named Daniel Craig.

But wait, there’s even more. Psychologists — they just can’t help themselves — did another study. Women select men who look like their fathers. This is because [gross-out warning] Daddy “imprints” his sexual attractiveness on Baby-Girl. Step off, Freud! “[S]imilarity makes people more fertile” is today’s hep psychosexual mantra. Or so saith Dr Lynda Boothroyd of the University of Durham.

Dr Lynda Boothroyd of the University of Durham really has her finger on the pulse of the Feminine Subconscious of Today, because here she is again in 2008 with another momentous piece of health information. This time it’s “the secret to successful flirting.” Stop wasting your valuable time macking on dudes who wouldn’t fuck you with some other guy’s dick; it is crucial, for the sake of dating efficiency, that you learn your “level of attractiveness.” In other words, if you’re butt-ugly, don’t bother hitting on Daniel Craig.

Oh, and “smile.”

Dating efficiency is apparently a most exigent health issue. It was discussed in 2007 as well, when another study with almost precisely the same findings as the above appeared in the health section of the BBC website. Do not, cautions the article, avert your eyes when you’re trying to hook up with some dude, according to this other bunch of studying psychologists. Also, have a symmetrical face and “healthy” skin. Taking these steps will prevent you “wasting energy on pointless courtships.”

Mating effort is a finite resource that should be allocated judiciously, and preferences for direct gaze in opposite-sex faces would increase the likelihood of allocating mating effort to potential mates who are most likely to reciprocate.”

Good to know!

It may not surprise you to learn that psychologists did another study. I admire their tenacity, but shit, don’t these people have jobs? And once again, our old pal Dr Lynda Boothroyd appears to be the instigator. It turns out that you can tell from a person’s face whether they are “promiscuous.”

Boothroyd said it, I believe it, and that settles it!

______________________
* Note that I have not read any of the studies. For all I know their actual findings concern the nesting habits of the red-bellied woodpecker. I critique only what appears on the BBC website.

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

Spinster aunt conducts own damn survey

Published by Twisty on March 4, 2009. 76 Comments

The Twisty Institute for the Study of Heterofemininity (TISH) invites women with boyfriends, husbands, and/or fathers to answer the following questions as honestly as possible. The raw data will be tabulated, collated, analyzed, duplicated, dipilated, notated, submitted, cited, misinterpreted, misquoted, and thrown away next week.

On special occasions, or when he’s seeking your approval, does your boyfriend or husband dance provocatively in lacy satin lingerie and a pair of Christian Louboutin pumps, the price of which would shock you?

In school, were most of the assigned books written by poor women of color?

Does your boyfriend, husband, or father spend a lot of time and money on beauty?

Are some women sluts?

When you go deer hunting, does your boyfriend or husband visit the spa for an herbal wrap, a facial, and a pedi?

Is your boyfriend, husband, or father afraid to walk alone at night?

Does your boyfriend, husband, or father yearn for shiny hair with “luscious volume”?

Would your boyfriend or husband continue to raise your kids and keep house for you if you stopped putting out?

After the presidential inauguration, when your boyfriend, husband, or father had a light lunch with the girls, did the subject of Michelle Obama’s outfit come up?

Is there a fair representation of women in authoritative positions in government, organized religion, media, or business?

When you see a professional sports event, are the athletes usually women?

Does your boyfriend, husband, or father take steps to eliminate his “feminine odor”?

Does your boyfriend, husband, or father ever try to appease you by tilting his head and giggling?

Is your boyfriend, husband, or father expected to wear makeup and heels to work?

Are the bosses at your job mostly women?

Does your boyfriend, husband, or father think it would be good to have “glowing skin”?

Does your boyfriend or husband constantly nag you to leave the seat down?

When it’s time to buy a new car, are you the one who negotiates with the salesman because you’ll get a better deal?

Does your boyfriend, husband, or father carry a can of pepper spray in his purse?

Does your husband thank you for babysitting?

When your boyfriend or husband buys a cute new bag, is he crestfallen when you fail to notice?

Do your fiance and his father eagerly look forward to planning your wedding?

For Valentine’s Day, do you give your boyfriend or husband a sexy nightie and a box of chocolates? Or, if you forget, does he feel hurt?

Has your boyfriend, husband, or father undergone breast augmentation surgery? Tummy tuck? Liposuction?

Does your boyfriend, husband, or father accept with a resigned sigh that the women in his office are usually given higher salaries and better promotions than the men?

Does your boyfriend, husband, or father wait tables at Hooters?

Are you OK with it if your boyfriend or husband gains a little weight, because curvy men turn you on?

When your boyfriend or husband would rather just cuddle, do you pick a fight?

Does your boyfriend, husband, or father clean the toilets with harsh chemicals?

Do you love the way heels make his legs look longer and sexier?

When dudes on the street whistle or make suggestive comments to your boyfriend, husband, or father, does he photograph them and send the pictures to HollaBack?

Is your boyfriend, husband, or father a primary school teacher, a nanny, a maid, or a stay-at-home mom because he finds it so gratifying to make personal sacrifices for others that he doesn’t mind the low or non-existent pay?

Do you send your boyfriend, husband, or father email forwards describing rape avoidance techniques?

Does lipstick scientifically formulated with ginkgo biloba, licorice, and tea tree oil give your boyfriend’s or husband’s lips a fuller, plumper, more kissable look?

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

I feel so dirty

Published by Twisty on February 26, 2009. 61 Comments

Blamer Belenen sent in a video clip the other day with the note “check out this animated tribute to sexism.” It was a cartoon called “Only in a Woman’s World.” Four young female characters obsess about femininity, particularly body image and food, in that glib, self-depracating-but-psuedo-edgy way that hot young empowerfulized women are popularly imagined to talk.

“Sex and the City with lower-paid actors,” I wrote back. “Pah.”

I thought it was a trailer for an actual TV series to be aired on the Oprah Lady Channel or something. But it turns out it’s a new ad campaign ad for Frito-Lay. Blamer feral hipped me to this piece in the New York Times outing the thing. The characters are “fab, funny, fearlessly female,” and, sure enough, the obvious rip-off of “Sex and the City” does not elude the Times.

The gist of the article is not a cartoon review, though. It explains how advertising is using “pop neurology” and “neuromarketing” to get inside women’s brains in order to sell us shit snacks that taste like shit, i.e. Baked Lays.

They’re analyzing anterior cingulate corteces and hippocampuses and making women test subjects keep self-hatred journals, all of which reveals the astonishing scientific conclusion that women feel guiltier than men about, well, everything. Frito-Lay’s new ad campaign, featuring “characters [women] could empathize with,” is designed not to “trip” women’s guilt.

They do this by packaging everything in beige bags with pictures of herbs on them.

I consider myself pretty media-savvy, but the fact that I couldn’t tell the difference between a stupid TV show and a stupid advertising campaign makes me fairly queasy. But of course, every single thing on television sells something nasty, whether it’s Baked Lays or boob jobs.

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

“New” feminism: plump, luscious, and kissable

Published by Twisty on December 25, 2008. 79 Comments

An acute reader once informed me that “the ideas on this blog are not new,” which remark I was apparently expected to interpret as a real take-me-down-a-peg zinger. Old ideas? Bo-ring. Entertain me with some new analysis. Preferably something more fun.

This sentiment is echoed by a bunch of “new” feminists profiled in the lifestyle section of the December 21 Sunday Times.

Screw political activism. “New” feminism is a lifestyle.

The “new” feminists are embarrassed by the old-school feminist protesters at a beauty pageant; those old bats “looked a bit silly, a bit like a stereotypical idea of what a feminist should be.” The beauty pageant in question, a new feminist maintained, was not about men. It was for “girls.” I mean, what were those protesters thinking, pointing out that sexist bullshit? Those “girls” were in the pageant of their own free will.

You’re hardly gonna fall off your chair when I aver unto you that the feminists in this article don’t, alas, live up to the hype. They’re not “new.” They’re old, so old, so painfully, oldly old. They were old when they were Tallulah Bankhead, and when they were Madonna, and when they were Suicide Girls, and when they were on “Sex and the City,” and they’re not getting any younger.

That’s right. They’re choice feminists, the gals who say “I choose it, and I decided I’m empowerful, so it’s feminist!” They’re fun feminists, the gals who say (and I quote from the article) “As a woman, you can’t not buy shoes and wear dresses. Plus all of that stuff is fun — it doesn’t take away from your power as a woman.” They’re 12-step feminists, the gals who say “Take what you want and leave the rest.”

Seriously! It’s all there in the soon-to-be-published The Noughtie Girl’s Guide to Feminism. Quoth author Ellie Levenson, “In the past, you had to subscribe to a whole set of beliefs to be a feminist, including how you should look and behave. But Noughties women have made it their own. It’s like a pick-and-mix feminism, where you can choose the bits you care about yourself.”

Like when you choose an outfit! For yourself!

Scratch a “new” feminist, and you’ll find an empowerful girl whose lipstickin’, shoe-buyin’ ideology springs fully-formed from her immaculate, politically-neutral, sexyfun, patriarchy-free choice-lobes. Her “choices” are her very own brilliant ideas. Her behavior proceeds from her own empowerful personal desires. Her rights, including the right not to call herself a feminist because it’s too embarrasing, revolve chiefly around her right to resemble a male fuckfantasy to whatever degree she “chooses.” The “new” feminist weltanshauung seems a little light on political theory, a little insouciant about the global ramifications of femininity, but you know what? Us old radfem prunes should just respect that and quit being so judgmental already.

Hence the sub-headline: “Yes, you can wear lipstick and be a feminist. The F word is being rebranded.”

Rebranded, apparently, as a cosmetics marketing gambit (again). If it doesn’t involve lipstick, you can count these hipster chicks out. Because lard knows a political movement should have glowing skin if it wants to maintain its market-share in this day and age.

I wish they would rebrand funfeminism as “I Heart Patriarchyism” and be done with it.

Posted in Femininity, Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society, The Beauty Ultimatum and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.

Asinine NPR story of the week

Published by Twisty on August 23, 2008. 68 Comments

It was inevitable that, while listening to the radio during my semi-annual shower, I would hear an NPR analysis on the outfits worn by the presidential candidates’ wives. Ever on the cutting edge of popular culture, NPR hauled Jackie Kennedy’s ancient stylist out of cryogenic storage to canvass her edgy up-to-the-minute views on politics and women.

Jackie Kennedy, you’ll recall, was the last genuine hottie to inhabit the First Lady title. Among her other dainty attributes, Jackie possessed, according to the stylist, “good” arms.

Is it sexist to analyze firstladyal fashion? Not at all, says Jackie Kennedy’s stylist. Their husbands are men of action in blue-suit-red-tie uniforms, but first ladies are symbols.

Of what? Of male dominance. Of the nuclear family, of the dutiful wife, of the absolute necessity of womanly beauty practices, of the unquestionable heterosexuality of the president. First ladies must exude, in perfect balance, femininity, self-sacrifice, motherhood, a gentle, quiet respectability, and the notion that they are fairly intelligent, but not more intelligent than the president. They do this, not just by looking the other way when their husbands can’t keep it in their pants, but by selecting their fashion designers and plucking their eyebrows with utmost care. For presidential spouses, dressing symbolically is both a science and an art. It’s “walking the fashion tightrope,” says NPR.

What the NPR non-story neglected to mention is that, while first ladies get more news coverage, the fashion tightrope is not their exclusive purview. All women are symbols who are expected to prop up patriarchal myths by exuding perfect balances of impossible, degrading, bogus constructs.

Meanwhile, men are free to roam the countryside, without shaving their legs or contemplating the social implications of the plunge of their necklines, doing stuff.

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

Aussie mining town seeks ugly women

Published by Twisty on August 20, 2008. 90 Comments

The seriously impaired mayor of Mount Isa is marketing a dude-heavy gender ratio disparity in his Australian outback town as an opportunity for “beauty disadvantaged women.” His idea is that female “ugly ducklings” can utilize the 5-to-1 male outnumberment to “transfer themselves with love and devotion” from hideous lesions on the face of eternity into things that somebody actually wants. Because those Mount Isa guys are desperate, man; they’ll fuck anything at this point, even ugly chicks. Which, maintains the mayor, the ugly chicks should take as a compliment.

Naturally, when some women staged a rally to protest the mayor’s Neanderthal misogynist hate speech, his response was to suggest that they were all “beauty disadvantaged” themselves and only wanted to take it out on him.

Also noteworthy, but certainly not surprising, is the outcry from Mount Isa’s male element. Sterling examples of their species all, they take great exception to the mayor’s suggestion that they would even consider settling for receptacles that did not sufficiently exhibit patriarchy-approved bodaciousness. The men of Mount Isa have their standards, dammit, and they are precisely in line with the Hollywood pornocracy’s femininity mandate. They resent the implication that they would be willing to sully their glittering, top-shelf dongs with sub-par meatsocks.

The Twisty jaw is agape.

[Thanks, Slashy]

Posted in Lobe-blowing, Men Hate You and The Beauty Ultimatum. Bite me, Chad.