Archive for the 'The Beauty Ultimatum' Category

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Spinster aunt wipes tear from eye

Published by Twisty on July 24, 2008. 60 Comments

Over this morning’s coffee I had the pleasure of reading about the arrest of a Nova Scotia groper. And by “pleasure” I mean “blechy feeling.”

Oh, this groper isn’t any different from all the other gropers I’ve read about during my long career of groper-blaming: young Doug Schrader flits about the countryside feeling up women and jerking off in public. Gross, yeah, but what really curled the Twisty lip was this comment by prosecutor Christine Driscoll, who is apparently crippled with ambivalence on the subject of what to do with the little perv:

“We really want to see what’s going on with him, what’s leading to this behaviour.”

I’ll help you out, lady. Here’s what’s leading to his behavior: Schrader merely acts on the patriarchal mandate to view all public women as receptacles for his dudeliness. He is the logical result of rape culture.

Taking his cue from the slew of public Spitzeresque figures who’ve been busted for antisocial pervitude and are surprised to discover that they don’t live in a personal rape-is-OK bubble, Schrader has “apologized,” claiming, despite some rather damning evidence to the contrary, that he’s “not that type of person.”

Apologies have nothing to do with actual remorse anymore. Nowadays, when criminals apologize, what they mean is, “Fine. I got caught. Please don’t put me in prison.”

It’s the systemic misogyny exemplified by douchebags like Schrader that makes me weep brokenly for the tragic earnestness of women such as these, who are desperate to convince themselves that “all women’s bodies are beautiful and richly fantastic no matter what shape, size, age, race, or background.”

The 100 Idaho women to whom I allude have organized an exhibit of women’s self-esteem “art.” The project consists of plaster casts of their torsos, which they have decorated and put on public display “in celebration of all who choose to express their own unique selves through art.”

The heart bleeds for these women. Their task — like that of all who struggle against monolithic oppression — is of Sisyphean proportions. They may yearn to demonstrate that, with their painted boob-casts, they are “the subject, rather than the object of art,” but in our porn-based society — where the behavior of a common groper mystifies authorities — they haven’t got a spinster aunt’s chance at a Suicide Girls convention.

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

Yeah, I watched TV again

Published by Twisty on July 5, 2008. 51 Comments

You know how spinster aunts love to lounge around on or about the TempurPedic eating Cool Whip and watching TV. Today I saw a series of programs on the E! channel. The E! channel, for those blamers who obstinately decline to monitor world misogyny via American television, consists, even more transparently than most other channels, entirely of antifeminist celebrity idolatry/hatred. Whose dress is ugly, who drove her celebrity man into the arms of another celebrity woman, that mouthy slut Amy Winehouse in rehab, etc.

This morning there was a show called “Soup” where a smirking motherfucker cuts famous people down to size by screening embarrassing video clips of them attacking their fans or being fat.

This was followed by a show starring a young hottt woman named Denise Richards. In this show, a camera crew follows Denise Richards around while she goes about the grueling business of being hottt. What? You’ve never heard of Denise Richards either? I looked her up, and here’s the summary: she was married to and divorced from a couple of other famous people, and appears to be made almost entirely of flowing hair. In today’s episode, Denise explains to her 13-year-old nephew why she did a spread in Playboy and starred in some patriarchy-affirming pornographical films. She did not do it for the money, apparently. No. She did it to prove that a hottt young woman who was married to and divorced from a couple of famous people can still be sexy, dammit. Any 13-year-old boy ought to be able to respect that.

Then there was a show where a camera crew follows Lindsay Lohan’s mother and teen sister around while they go about the grueling business of being related to a famous person with a drug problem. The sister is 14 and is recording a CD in Las Vegas. The skin crawls when the words “Vegas! All right!” squirt like Astroglide from the teenager’s mouth as she plops into a limo. Her entourage tells her what a genius she is and how she’s going to be the next big thing. She has a lot of eyeliner on.

I need not describe the stomach-churning details of the show entitled “The Girls Next Door,” where a camera crew follows around a few of Hugh Hefner’s interchangable 19-year-old blonde bikini “girlfriends” as they go about the grueling business of being prostituted in a brothel built to glorify a famous septuagenarian perv’s exceptional sexploitational success.

What all this programming has in common is the combined fascination/abhorrence that afflicts all modern media characterizations of women. Particularly of women who have bought into the patriarchal myth to the extent that it has rewarded them with the only thing that counts in this world: attention from men with money. It blows the Twisty mind that the subjects of these “reality” shows never seem to get that the whole point is to make them look like morons so their insatiable public can more devoutly despise them. Why this obvious truth universally fails to expose Hollywood as ground-zero for American misogyny I cannot say, but watching Hef protrude his grotesque liverlips at his teenage girls certainly seems to generate a lot of ad revenue from cosmetics corporations who have convinced a nation that female skin can and should “glow.”

Posted in Femininity, Mass Media, Men Hate You, Sexploitation and The Beauty Ultimatum. Bite me, Chad.

Manure

Published by Twisty on April 9, 2008. 45 Comments

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“Actress and humanitarian” Eva Longoria philosophizes, in return for money, on how great it is to be beautiful.

Seen the commercial celebrating the heartwarming accomplishments of that woman who hooks up disabled people with service dogs? It’s so nice, because service dogs are expensive, and although it may surprise you, not all disabled people are millionaires who can afford them. So the dog lady wins an award. A Woman of WorthTM award.

That’s right. Women of WorthTM. Most women aren’t worth anything; that’s what makes this award, just for women who are worth something, so distinguished. Guess who hands it out? Nope, not the California domestic violence crisis center of the same name. I allude to L’Oreal Paris, of course, the cosmetics multinational whose slogan is “It costs a little more, but I’m worth it.”

The slogan was written in 1973 to cash in on a “social revolution and a new spirit of feminism.” Clearly, the phenomenon of “pinkification” — by which I mean the corporate co-opting, commodification, and misogynist repurposing of women’s social and political issues — is nothing new. The slogan “Because I’m worth it,” L’Oreal Paris says with a straight face, has “become part of our social fabric” because it proceeds “strictly from a woman’s point of view.”

Which point of view, thanks in part to a femininity industry that preys on women’s fears of worthlessness, bypasses all “social revolution” and “spirit of feminism” to revert straight to equating self-esteem with lipstick-caked self-loathing.

“Worth” is an interesting word choice. Among those words which indicate meaningfulness or merit, “worth” stands out with some pretty strong connotations of pecuniary value. “Worth it” is an idiom describing the satisfactory outcome of a personal sacrifice, often monetary, given in trade for some improving circumstance. Like when you save up to buy a new toilet. Objects, like toilets and, apparently, women, have worth, but they rarely have merit.

Here is the de-patriarchalized translation of L’Oreal’s slogan: “My value is equivalent to the financial commitment I am willing to make to the performance of submissive femininity behaviors which benefit me materially only insofar as they enhance my ability to appease my oppressor.”

Or, “I recognize that it’s better to be high-priced than cheap.”

When L’Oreal, a corporate entity which exists solely to profit from women’s oppression, isn’t doing everything in its power to leverage women’s self-hatred into a preoccupation with drugstore wrinkle cream, it’s “celebrating” women who are “worth it” with, what else, philanthropy.

L’Oreal’s philanthropy involves getting do-gooders — the Women of Worth TM — to perform in print and TV ads in exchange for national exposure and $5000 charitable contributions. To further cleanse its blackened soul, L’Oreal donates another 5 grand each to the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund.

I don’t know anything about the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund, but if their website is any indication, they appear to subscribe to a Crunch For the Cure/Komen style of product placement/nebulous “awareness”/plucky volunterrorism that really rankles the Twisty lobes. How transparent is it when corporations glom onto chick-cancer? They can look pro-woman without having to look pro-feminist.

Anyway. You might be wondering what it takes to have “worth” in this world. According to L’Oreal a Woman of Worth TM is “a beautiful person” whose “devotion” to stuff like “children’s initiatives” is “endless.” She sounds just like one of those plucky Komen cancer survivors.

L’Oreal, by the way, tests their unnecessary beauty products on animals. They don’t come right out and admit that animal testing is bad, but they do explain, somewhat defensively, that they are pretty much forced to do it, because beauty is that important, and, remember, you’re worth it. In other words, the magnanimous beauty industrial complex is willing to endure the suffering of untold thousands of sentient beings on your worthy behalf in order to protect its own even worthier bottom line. But buy that lipstick with a clean conscience: L’Oreal is “contributing significantly” to a European cosmetics “directive” that will end animal testing “for the complex tests” by 2013. Meanwhile, they’re working on “Refining” the torture so that it doesn’t cause the animals to spontaneously combust in clots of cancerous bloody gore. As often.

By the way, when I said that the word “worth” means “pecuniary value” I wasn’t being entirely forthcoming. In 17th century usage it meant “manure.”

Note: I got all the L’Oreal info from their own website.

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

Pose of the week

Published by Twisty on June 8, 2007. 190 Comments

A mainstream music magazine has put a naked chick on the cover. This stunningly unremarkable event in the pornulational continuum induced not the slightest blip on my obstreperometer. Magazines put naked chicks on their covers roughly 82,697 times a day; it’s all part of the general background noise created in pop culture by the constant crushing of women’s dignity in the giant trash compactor of oppression.

But wait! The naked chick on the mainstream music magazine cover is Beth Ditto, who is fat! Suddenly everyone’s talking about this cover (and by ‘everyone’ I mean here and at Big Fat Blog). It’s so transgressive to pornulate a fat chick instead of a skinny one! It’s so empowering for fat women to be able to look up to a pornulated role model! It’s an act of feminist rebellion; way to go, Beth, for daring to show Dude Nation that fat women exist!

Oy gevalt.

1. Porn isn’t transgressive; it’s de rigueur. No one in Western culture has drawn a porn-free breath in decades. This means it’s the norm.

2. Pictures of naked women empower nobody but the men who pimp’em out and the voyeurs who consume’em. A woman may elect to reap the benefits of her capitulation to her oppressor, and she can even call it “empowerment” when she does it, but that doesn’t mean she’s not full of shit, and it certainly doesn’t mean that it’s doing any other women the least bit of good.

3. Dude Nation is already well aware that fat women exist. And I guaran-fucking-tee that they’ll continue to hate fat women just as much as they hate skinny ones, no matter which pop star shows up weighing how much on what magazine cover.

Girls, the dominant pornsick culture is crapping on you. Get hip to this: the ability to titillate men is not a high moral purpose. Being sexually manipulative is not a high moral purpose. Posing naked on the cover of NME isn’t empowering, its emposeuring.

[Thanks, Frumious B]

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

A geek’s story

Published by Twisty on March 13, 2007. 214 Comments

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According to blamer Metamanda, somebody commenting on a recent thread, perhaps swept up in the frenzy of the moment, typed this:

Is there anything about being a geek that makes a person more attractive?

There were apparently other unfortunate statements, such as “no social skills” and “can’t get dates.”

“Those are low blows,” responds self-identified geek Metamanda, “of exactly the same sort that reactionary men use against feminists.” [Read her entire post here.]

[Because the spinster aunt's eyesight ain't what it used to be, I am unable to locate the comment in which is nestled the anti-geek remarks quoted by Metamanda, but I will proceed on the assumption that it exists.]

This is not really a personal blog, but in the interest of subsequently enbiggening a broader point, I might as well reveal unto you a little something about myself: I am a geek/nerd/spazz. Or, more accurately, I can be said to possess traits in common with other persons so categorized by the cold, cruel world.

For one thing, I am, when observed through the encrapulated lens of patriarchy, funny-looking; I walk with a limp, and sport a pair of 8-inch scars where my tits used to be. I have stringy, greasy hair, zits, glasses, and a Frinkian overbite. I am said to be “bird-like,” probably because of my emaciated physique and prominent honker.

For another thing, I am uncool. I own a visor and a fanny pack. Just the other day I said “nee” several times. I then translated it into Latin and said it again. I possess the DVD boxed set of Star Trek TOS (actually, the one I have is more ‘encapsulated in plastic space-pods’ than ‘boxed’). I look at bugs through microscopes. I have a fascination for a species of amphibian called cricket frogs. I watch those corny “British Comedies” on PBS every Saturday night (I fall asleep before “Monty Python” comes on, but that’s OK; I’ve got that boxed set, too). I would read science fiction all the time if it weren’t, alas, so incompetently written. While still a child, a freak accident with a subset of negative integers left me almost entirely differentiated by derivatives, and thereafter I lost all mathematical ability. I was in denial at first, but if those math teachers told me (n) times, they told me {(n) + 1} times: I was doomed to infinite regress.

The other nerds cast me out. I was a geek without a gang.

Thus, my own “social skills” developed such that I have been variously diagnosed as afflicted with Tourette’s, with extreme eccentricity, with some sort of as-yet-undiscovered high-functioning autism, with charismatic narcissism, and/or with a low-ish high IQ. I have not matured emotionally or intellectually beyond the age of 17 (some experts disagree, and put the figure closer to 14). On an average of twice a week, fair weather or foul, I am compelled to run across the lawn waving my arms as though I intend to take flight, or to take a stroll on tiptoe with my ass sticking way out. I am physically awkward and have been known to tip over without cause, straining the plausibility of Newton’s Third Law. Sometimes I involuntarily utter strings of meaningless syllables ending in “P”: bup bup bup bup pip pip pip pip. I stutter on telephones. Quite often I am incapable of communicating to people behind counters at coffee bars or pharmacies in anything but preverbal grunts or twitters. Sometimes, when I hear myself make a particularly funny noise, I involuntarily collapse into a state of violent merriment or lunacy, perhaps best described as hysterics, that can span half an hour. If this happens while I am driving, look out, Austin!

Thus am I considered odd by most and rude by many. Often I am taken for an imbecile.

Unlike most of the Brotherhood of Man, however, I find many of my aforementioned deviations from the norm to be pretty agreeable, or at least comical. Like, until you’ve tried it, you have no idea how liberating it is to do the butt-walk in the $700 Extra Virgin Olive Oil aisle at Whole Foods. And that episodic convulsive laughter, from which accrues all the benefits of the conventional orgasm without all the inconvenient effluents, stickiness, appliances, legal restrictions and political issues, is fucking awesome.

It is an asset, not to mention a joy and a relief, to be unencumbered by social skills. What are they, after all, but a set of arbitrarily-conceived customs meant to sort people into classes, the more conveniently to be dominated by those whose mastery of the arbitrary customs is superior? I’m sure I need not point out to you, O my fellow blamers, that the stability of patriarchy as a system of social control relies on the mass assimilation of these customs. Customs are the currency of culture; the more you absorb, the greater your rewards. But closer examination reveals them to be nothing but taboos and commandments designed to restrict human conduct to a finite set of ritualized mannerisms constrained by foul ideals of deference, appeasement, and conformity.

“Attractiveness” is one of those mannerisms. You know what? Fuck attractiveness and the establishmentarian horse it rode in on.

So, back to the question posed by Person X, “is there anything about being a geek that makes a person more attractive?”

I am happy to say, no there isn’t, and isn’t that nice.

By the way, using my highly advanced scientific method, I have determined that 73.4% of the readers of this blog are geek/nerd/spazzes. The sci-fi thread of last week has broken all attendance records.

Posted in Easy Persiflage and The Beauty Ultimatum. Bite me, Chad.

Sisterhood

Published by Twisty on February 26, 2007. 152 Comments

Few things are more distasteful to the delicate feminist sense of justice than instances of women harshin’ on other women. This women-bashing-women crap happens as often within “the movement” (such as it is) as it does among the unenlightened tighty-whitey anti-feminist collaborators. It’s bad enough, feminists lament, that men feel entitled to abuse us; how will we ever liberate ourselves when so many members of our own class seem so determined to enforce our, and their own, oppression?

We are all aggrieved by feminist infighting, “infighting” being the derogatory, male-framed way of describing the inevitable result of multiple intersections of multiple class struggles — the struggles of women of color, of poor women, of middle class women, of Jewish women, of prostituted lesbian intellectual women, et al — each of which classes has been engineered, it goes without saying, by patriarchy. But that’s another essay.

Today, by way of an excursion into the exotic, cut-throat world of Greek sororities, we take a look at the self-oppressing tendencies of anti-feminist patriarchy collaborators. For it seems that the DePauw University chapter of the Delta Zeta sorority, perceiving as detrimental to its “recruitment goals” the continued inclusion of constituents whose physical and intellectual deviation from the Barbie standard makes them too unbearable to look at, gave all un-slender, un-white, un-stupid members the boot. That’s right. Because Delta Zeta had acquired an undesirable reputation as a repository for unfuckable ugly smart chicks, and since a sorority’s ostensible raison d’être is to provide suitably sex-ay receptacles for fratboys, the sorority’s national office had no choice but to purge the rolls of all who were not up to specs bodaciousness-wise.

The New York Times reports that the ethnic cleansing “left a messy aftermath of recrimination and tears” and “battered the self-esteem” of 23 women whose appearance and braininess was deemed an effrontery to the straight white American feminine fuckbot beauty ideal, to the extent that some of the rejected girls withdrew from classes.

And thus we see how patriarchy often masquerades as sisterhood in order to bite you in the ass. The message of Delta Zeta is the message of white male supremacy: a woman’s value is strictly reproductive.

It turns out that this story is Top o’ the Pops at the New York Times today. This development will hardly surprise the veteran patriarchy-blamer. Stories about women fucking each other over are irresistible, because (a) dudes love a ‘catfight’ and (b) such stories relieve male anxiety over participation in patriarchal culture by suggesting that women willingly engineer their own oppression.

But women didn’t create misogyny, and don’t benefit from it. Even so, unrelentingly they find their choices bound by it. When women hate women, it is only men hating women by proxy.

[Thanks Sue]

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

Ladies: “Say ‘no’ to having uneven and teeth like lips”

Published by Twisty on February 10, 2007. 126 Comments

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Man, I’ve seen some utterly disgusting full-on misogynist shit since starting this blog — generous and/or sadistic readers just can’t stop sending it in — but this has got to be up there in the Top 5.

Take, if you are able to keep your food down, the so-called Vagina Institute, a “global research centre” presenting “everything you ever wanted to know about vaginas.” Of course it is nothing of the sort. In fact — I know, knock you over with a feather — the specious Vagina Institute is a subscription hetero softcore fetish site. Normally I don’t mess with these; if you’ve lost your lunch over one porn site you’ve lost your lunch over’em all. But this one stands out from the pack for the extra-creepy way in which it seeks to normalize pornographic ideals. Jagoffs who wish to transform their girlfriends into pornified toilets can show them this site and shame’em into comparing their normal “ugly” vulvae to “pretty” airbrushed Hustler pussy.

Easily unseating the vile Dr. Jason — our previous reigning Champion Misogynist in the field of Pussy Refurbishing — the Vagina Institute takes commodopornification of the vulva to the next level by ingeniously killing 3 woman-hating birds with one stone: addressing itself to the ladies, it foments a delicious blend of fear, loathing, and insecurity by purporting to medicalize labial “deformity”; it codifies the porn-approved vulvalicious “neat and trim” beauty standard,* and it collects $17.95 a month from pervs who get off on pseudo-clinical photos of breasts and smooth-waxed pussy, both “pretty” and “deformed,” solicited from readers. In a case of what could be considered gilding the the lily, $18.95 more per month gets you access to an “electronic book” called Labia Enhancement, which promises that you will “experience life at its fullest by having a pretty vagina.”

Every word of this site is so taco-souringly repellent, I am hard-pressed to select a representative sample, but here goes nothin.

The Vagina Institute “specializes in collecting and processing, data and information about [...] the overall appearance of the vulva, statistics of vagina size and defining what is feminine and what is not! [...] We can state with assertion that a vulva is ugly or pretty once we have the core data and statistical invormation available. [...] Send us a photo of your vagina for it’s classification.”

The non-subscription areas of the “online research” site are composed of wide-open beaver shots, unremitting iterations of the phrase “be more feminine ‘down there’,” and ungodly descriptions of “labial disorders”, among which are “ugliness,” “assymetry,” “over grown clitoris [sic]” and “flat lips.” There are quizzes (“how well does my vagina measure up?” and “should women be allowed to go topless?”); an image of a chiding woman brandishing a tape measure (!?!?); assorted vagina “facts” (“women with large vaginal cavities will tend to produce more odor [...] when vaginal funk arises.”); lists of insecurites women might want to consider adopting (such as “worry” over “wrinkles and ‘overly-used’ appearance”), places to submit pictures of your “urine stream” and stories of your “most embarrassing vaginal moment”. One section is astonishingly subtitled “Very seldom** do we hear men’s opinion about their preference towards female genitals due to censorship of taboo’s, so what do they really want when it comes to vaginas?”

Wait. Let me guess. They want ugly assymetrical flat-lipped overly-used drooping funk.

Here is one supposed message from a supposed subscriber: “She can’t be all bitchin’ at me just ’cause she’s got a garbage bag for a vagina. I mean, I’m only one soup-can thick. She’s got to help me out a little too.”

This message has been brought to you by the Twisty Institute for Gross Crap Over the Weekend, just in case you’d forgotten how much men hate you.

______________________________________

* Alas, there’s more to beauty than bouncin’ and behavin’ hair.

** Very seldom eh? Sure, if by ‘very seldom’ you mean ‘all the fucking time.’

[Thanks, Joolya. A whole heck of a lot]

Posted in Men Hate You, Sexploitation and The Beauty Ultimatum. Bite me, Chad.

Fashion Week: The Corset Tightens

Published by Twisty on September 27, 2005. 160 Comments

I know I promised to complain about tiny handbags today, but something’s come up. Specifically, a nice comment left by Nassoid on yesterday’s Intro To Fashion Week post. So we’ll just clear up this little matter, shall we, and then it’s on to the fluff!

Yep, I was anticipating the argument that, by offering a critique of the influences of patriarchal hegemony on the behavior of women, I am “patronizing” them. What took you so long, Nassoid?

Nassoid, correctly deducing that I take a dim view of the corset-piercing depicted in the post (a photo so disturbing it made at least two commenters cry, so click at your own risk), wonders if I am not doing women a disservice by suggesting that patriarchy denies them “agency.” Women, asserts Nassoid (I paraphrase), are not dumb-bunnies. They are perfectly able to choose what they do with their bodies without any condescension from the spinster aunt camp. “It feels,” she says, “like you’re characterising a vast group of women as mindless consumer drones, rather than people capable of making their own choices, on the basis that you purport to understand their choices better than they themselves do.”

To which I reply, I sympathize, but don’t shoot the messenger. Within a system where males dominate a subordinate female sex class,  women’s agency is extremely limited. Without full human status, “choice” is an illusion.

A brief review: male dominant culture wouldn’t be the superstar it is today without its closely regulated sex class, a class that is rewarded most lavishly when costumed for convenient male titillation. Feminine drag — high heels, corsets, “one-size-slimmer-tummy-technology,” tight jeans, tube tops, push-up bras, miniskirts, pantyhose, handbags et al, as the uniform of the subordinate sex class, identifies (a) a woman’s subordinate status and (b) her degree of sexual availability. To facilitate male titillation, minute variations within this rigidly enforced dress code — say, a pair of red Candies vs. a pair of alligator Manolos — conveniently locate the individual within her particular sexbot caste (in this case, redneck ho vs. summer house in the Hamptons). Thus a horndog can tell at a glance whether his object is easy or expensive or chaste or kinky or straight or hard-to-get or an indie rocker or, I suppose, even a spinster aunt.

In male dominant culture, “kinky” is the most prized of all the sexbot sub-classes. Kinky women express the greatest and most dude-affirming allegiance to male supremacy by their willingness to endure the most pain for the dubious pleasure of gratifying male horndoggitude. The better a woman titillates, the better her fortunes are likely to be, and no woman titillates more successfully than one who enthusiastically embraces sadistic male fetishes. I am aware that the body-mod gang are convinced of the supposed transgressive and rebellious nature of their lifestyle, but corset-piercing — a masochistic riff on a primitive misogynist torture device — can only be construed by this spinster aunt as an example of extreme conformity and obeisance to patriarchal oppression.

Clothing — and I mean all clothing, not just the get-ups people use for sexin’ it up — clothing itself is invested with highly symbolic, connotative qualities that reach vastly beyond its primary function as protection from the elements. These connotations inevitably point to some popular fantasy (damsel, hippie, 18th century poet) or widely recognized caste (art student, small-town Wal-Mart granny). Because every outfit comes preloaded with cultural narrative, clothes cannot possibly proclaim “individuality.” I assert that, because every human specimen who is not an identical twin is already phenotypically and genetically unique right out of the box, clothing serves only to mask one’s natural differences with a display of allegiance, homage, and conformity to the group with which the putative rugged individualist wishes to identify. This is as true of soccer moms as it is of bod-mod chicks. A tattoo doesn’t make you an iconoclast, it makes you one of those people with a tattoo.

I further assert that sadomasochism, which glorifies like no other ism the dominance/submission dynamic, represents the absolute zenithical epitome of patriarchal ideology. Which would be no big whoop if patriarchy were the bee’s knees, but  I further further assert that S&M is a totally bogus practice because patriarchal ideology sucks the bag.

A few of you have wondered what I suggest in terms of the patriarchy-blamer’s value-neutral wardrobe. Sadly, if my hypothesis is correct, such duds do not exist. Feminism cannot seem to counteract the intoxicating effects of male domination. In our culture it is the moral duty of every woman to be “sexy”, and her value remains tied to her success in this painful endeavor. You’re either “sexy” or you’re a schlub. Fucking patriarchy. I blame it, I do.

Posted in Bloodsport, Oppression Culture, Rape Culture and The Beauty Ultimatum. Bite me, Chad.

Tail, Part II

Published by Twisty on August 2, 2005. 68 Comments

Dovegirls

[Today's essay rapidly outgrew its original incarnation as a response to the many excellent comments on yesterday's post about the so-called "real" women in the current Dove ad campaign. It doesn't say anything new, but it's a marginally better essay. Cuz it's longer!]

When strolling down the avenue–which avenue, by capitalist mandate, is entirely papered over like some sadistic Cristo installation with glossy hot young airbrushed babes humping whatever it is they’re trying to sell you (or humping each other; check out that one on the right) — it’s all right, I guess, to see a different girl once in a while, just to break up the monotony. But it is rash to assume that because the girl doesn’t look like a junkie skeleton with tits that the ad agency has landed some momentous blow for women’s empowerfulment

Or even a trifling blow. These Dove girls are still sex objects. That they are not professional models only magnifies the pathos. I invite you to inspect the photos in closer detail. Observe the body language. In their attempts to project empowerment they all look self-conscious and awkward. And why shouldn’t they? They’ve been posed in their fucking underwear by some fashion choreographer as though they are each wearing a single invisible stiletto pump on one cocked foot. Ouch.

As radical as it seems that they have used images of awkward pretty girls rather than of sophisticated, haggard drug addicts with lips like raw liver, Dove has not dismantled patriarchy. No. What they’ve done is, they’ve sold butt cream.

Check it out: in our society, a chick in her underwear, regardless of body mass, exists for one of two purposes: to make money for some male-dominated butt-cream entity, or for the pleasure of the male voyeur. Cosmetics companies can set themselves up as dispensers of self-esteem, they can even tell you that pictures of size 10 women in underwear are empowerfulling you, but they are fucking lying in order to sell you stuff. That’s because in our society all women are sex objects, whether they agree to it or not, until they are too old to make money or excite boners when shown in their underwear, and then god help’em.

What commonly-sized women–by whom I mean those gals whose weight-dot on the bell curve falls somewhere northeast of anorexic– what they appear to be responding to in these ads is the slender possibility, the faint flicker of hope, that at last the beauty standard might actually relax sufficiently to include them.

On the surface, a move toward a more inclusive, ‘healthy’ beauty standard seems a reasonable request. But gaze, if you dare, below the surface, where patriarchy’s greasy gears are relentlessly churning out their ever more sadistic tools of oppression. On the wall, carved in stone lo these past few millennia, is the company motto. It says “Normal Can Never Be Beautiful.” Beauty, by definition, is extraordinary, rare, and conspicuous.

The desperate desire to be beautiful, based on the lie that beauty is attainable, is the result of patriarchal mind-control. Here’s what the mind-control says: the only way a woman can really attain power is through her ability to stimulate desire and/or envy in total strangers, traits that are commonly thought of as”beauty.” Beauty makes people hire you and love you and invite you and it gets you more stuff. Beauty = power. And how do we measure beauty?

You are beautiful if you look like someone who sells butt cream.

But a size 10 can’t sell butt cream unless she’s Oprah, so naturally she is anxious that the rules change so she can get a piece of the action. But even if she succeeds, and size 10 becomes the new size 2, all she will have won is the opportunity to be even more grossly objectified. And the opportunity to buy more butt-cream. She will not be a fully-realized human being. She will not have achieved personal sovereignty. She will not be unrapeable. She will not escape pressure to !smile! or be feminine or have cosmetic surgery or buy softcore porn costumes from Victoria’s Secret. And for damn sure she’ll still be cleaning 8 out of 10 of the nation’s toilets.

Beauty standards come and beauty standards go, but one thing is constant: women are the sex class.

Rise up! Reject the beauty mandate!

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

Dove’s Tail

Published by Twisty on August 1, 2005. 22 Comments

Photo not available

Dove Girl Gina displays her intellectual depth with a shake of the old moneymaker. She feels beautiful whenever she poses in her underwear for money.

I can be silent no longer!

This Dove-is-so-great crap must cease! Dove is not so great! Dove’s “real” women are, like, 22, and they’re conventionally pretty, and they’re in their fucking underwear. They are given insipid slogans, like “I felt absolutely beautiful on my wedding day!” Mouse over’em and they morph into bent-kneed playboy sexbots. They’re selling beauty crack. On the website there’s even a section where you can vote on the hotness of more “real” models, à la amihot.com. The message: Dove products will give you the only thing that patriarchy actually values in a woman: a tight ass.

Real women my eye. What does real even mean anymore? It means fake, that’s what. Media reality is universally fake. Reality TV is fake. Dr Phil “getting real” is fake. This “celebration” of fat girls is fake. In Dove-land, “real” is just a bogus marketing euphemism for Kate Moss + 15 pounds. Only under the auspices of a toxic patriarchy would women to look to a fucking cosmetic company’s ad campaign for permission to “have curves.” This is just fucked up to the max.

I repeat: hot young babes in underwear selling beauty products is not radical.

Because everybody likes big butts, and they cannot lie.

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