I Blame The Patriarchy

I recently blew out a lobe laughing a cold, ulcerated laugh. It happened yesterday, when my sibling Tidy told me a sad tale of Christian insanity, which tale I now relate to you, right after I bore you with some background details.

For reasons that, to my surprise, turned out to be none of my goddam business, Tidy has started sending my niece Rotel to one of those honky upper-middle-class god-affiliated schools where the kids wear uniforms and attend mandatory “chapel” sessions. For the past few months I have been nervously eyeballing the child, ever alert for signs that the faithy godbag indoctrination has begun to take, so that I might countermand that moron crap with an auntly intervention of Question Authority-ism. So far it’s been all clear, which is why it was quite a jolt when, during a recent babysitting gig, young Rotel broke into song, and the song she broke into was not “Fried Ham, Fried Ham, Cheese and Baloney,” but a horrifying ditty about dewdrops of mercy and Jesus and how he is the “light of the world.” The goopy dewdroppy Jesosity blew my mind. There was only one possible response.

“Holy shit!” I said.

Both of the nieces busted out laughing. They know I am prohibited by Tidy from saying “holy shit” in their presence. They don’t know it’s because Tidy is afraid they might repeat it in front of nice people, nice people who will form the opinion that Tidy is a self-absorbed loose-moraled alcoholic for permitting her daughters’ exposure to anyone low-class enough to say “holy shit” in front of little kids. The nice people will have no choice but to call CFS. The nieces will be thrown into foster care, Tidy will be sentenced to lousy-mother prison, and I, corrupter of youth, will face a firing squad.

I’ll get a cigarette out of the deal, though, so it won’t be a total loss.

But I digress. The sad tale of Christian insanity I mentioned at the beginning of this post starts here:

The other day Tidy hears that a public school on the poor side of town has raised over $4000 for Haitian relief. She thinks this is awesome, so she calls up Rotel’s affluent god-based school to suggest that they get a sort of break-the-piggy-bank-for-Haiti initiative going. So the kids might broaden their philanthropical horizons or whatever. To Tidy’s surprise, the god school wasn’t down, not in the slightest.

Not that they are totally ignoring Haiti! Au contraire! They’re “keeping Haiti in front of the students” with “prayer.”

That’s when the laugh erupted and lobe blew out.

It was already pulsating a bit from the smelliness of the idea of repurposing the earthquake as a sort of social studies unit to teach young WASPs, not about human suffering and its root causes, but about compulsory altruism and the duty to allocate a small percentage of one’s white privilege loot to indigent brown foreigners. Totally screwed Haitians = golden opportunity to introduce noblesse oblige to Richie Rich.

Gross, yeah, and a poor substitute for the new world order that would really put things right, but at least it generates a little cash for immediate relief efforts. If you haven’t eaten in 4 days, and you manage to scrounge one of those fabled energy biscuits, do you really give a crap about the motives of the sanctimonious chump who texted 10 bucks to the Red Cross?

This prayer gambit on the other hand. It is difficult to imagine an emptier, worthlesser, time-wastinger, efficaciouslesser gesture. In fact, organized prayer has been proven to be 137 times worse than doing nothing at all. This is because compulsory group participation in phony appeals to a fake benevolent American deity is a political behavior that not only fosters intolerable levels of community sanctimony, but reinforces a culture of oppression through repetition of patriarchal doctrine. So not only do marginalized groups get the immediate shaft in the form of material non-support during a crisis; not only are little kids duped into thinking that muttering a few words in chapel is good for earthquake victims; but organized prayer replicates the deleterious effects of godbagism by storing them in the common consciousness to ensure ignorance and obfuscation of truth for future generations.

The starving, sick, homeless Haitians should really be luxuriating in all that prayer right about now. Who needs food, water, and antibiotics when little rich kids in Texas are, on your behalf, being forced by deluded authority figures to mutter nonsensical crap to an impotent made-up figment?

Need cash? Got any Jewish eggs? Sell’em on Craigslist for 8 large! No Methodist, Buddhist, or Secular Humanist eggs, please. God can tell the difference.

True story: when my ovaries were amputated, biopsied, and interviewed by clerics, it was found that my eggs did not subscribe to any supernatural fantasies whatsoever (except one, which claimed to have Unitarian leanings). Experts were baffled. I was somewhat bummed, since this precluded their lucrative sale to desperate eggless godbags. The ova of spinster aunts, alas, do not command top dollar, no matter how “qualified and extraordinary” we are. It’s discrimination, pure and simple.

___________________

[Full text of egg ad, for posterity:

JEWISH EGG DONORS URGENTLY NEEDED $8,000
Date: 2009-11-20, 7:28AM CST
Reply to: jewishbaby3@yahoo.com

WE WOULD FEEL INCREDIBLY BLESSED TO HAVE YOUR HELP!

A Jewish Blessing, LLC was founded in response to the growing number of requests from infertile Jewish families for help in finding qualified and extraordinary young Jewish women to be their egg donors.

We are currently working with several wonderful couples, with more families reaching out to us every day and we are truly in need of your help.
If you are a Jewish woman age 20-32, very responsible, kind and sincere, with a great personality and would consider helping one of these families achieve their dream of becoming parents please email us at jewishbaby3@yahoo.com …. and please pass this forward to friends who might also want to help.

________________________

UPDATE: Screw that low-rent $8000 egg gig; I just found some discriminating egg shoppers who’ll pay 20 grand!

JEWISH EGG DONOR NEEDED by LOVING JEWISH COUPLE $20,000+ not an agency
Date: 2009-11-15, 5:44AM CST
Reply to: lovingjewishcouple@yahoo.com

JEWISH EGG DONOR NEEDED by LOVING JEWISH COUPLE $20,000+ ALL EXPENSES PAID not an agency

Reply to: lovingjewishcouple@yahoo.com

“We would love you to be part of our miracle”

We are a loving, caring, Jewish couple who are accomplished, secure and happy. It would mean the world to us to share our love with a child and make our lives truly complete.

We appreciate intelligence, education and learning. If you are a student it would be our pleasure to assist with your tuition and related expenses.

You are an ideal donor if you are:

* Jewish with a biological mother who was born Jewish
* (prefer if your biological father was also born Jewish)
* A woman between 18 and 33 years old
* Between 5′1″ and 5′11″
* Warm, caring, responsible, reliable
* Motivated and passionate about what you do
* An individual with high self esteem
* Highly intelligent with high IQ, SAT Scores & GPA (Please Include Scores)
* Attractive
* At healthy body weight
* A non smoker and drug free
* Free of genetic diseases (such as Tay-Sachs) in your primary blood line
* Able to make about 5 visits to a highly respected Fertility Doctor.

You will not need to carry a pregnancy.

Please e-mail us in confidence, addressing the *points above including your age, SAT Scores verbal/math etc., highlighting what you feel is special about you and whatever other information you feel comfortable sharing, with a recent photo if possible to lovingjewishcouple@yahoo.com

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

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

You go, Victoria! Sounds great, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fucking moron.

Regular readers know that, news-wise, CNN confuses me, and that I have all but kicked the NPR habit (it seems fantastic, but El Rancho Deluxe gets only one radio station, and it only plays one song: that Red Hot Chili Peppers slow dance where the dude yodels in that weird accent about how he doesn’t ever wanna feel like he did that day), with the happy result that pop culture’s gnarly substrate — urgently breaking news — rarely filters down to the lab here at Spinster HQ until a week or two after everyone else has moved on to the next closeted gay Republican outing. This programming suits me and my eccentric recluse lifestyle perfectly. Seriously, must I know about every deranged serial killer’s murderous rampage? One deranged serial killer is very like another. Once a person has apprehended that serial killers serially kill, the philosophical implications may be considered grasped; reviewing a continuous stream evidence of the phenomenon is not only unnecessary, it’s prurient.

But, out of the loop though I be, even I have heard about this no-mammograms-until-you’re-fifty malarkey, and it probably won’t blow your lobe to hear that it blew my lobe. The report made particularly gikky reading in view of the recent Stupak craptacity. America just feels like taking a big old televised crap on women’s basic health care this week, I guess. If, after reviewing the stunning and sweeping misogynist antics our government has pulled over the past couple of weeks, a person could stand up and announce with a straight face that patriarchy doesn’t exist, he’d have to be a complete imbecile.

I allude to the absurd recommendations, released Monday by the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force, concerning the age at which women should begin queuing up at the old mammogram machine. They used to say 40. But now they say 50, and only every other year.

Check this out: the “harms outweigh the benefits.” Not just for under-fifty mammograms, but for over 75 mammograms, and — this one really kills me — breast self-examinations!

Wha?

That’s right, the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force says women shouldn’t be taught to touch their own boobs. The harm outweighs the benefits!

The dreadful harm from which they seek to protect us?

Anxiety.

Anxiety is bad for ladies. Worse, apparently, than blowing off the timely diagnosis of life-threatening illness.

Anxiety! Are they fucking kidding me? Does the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force think women pass their days carefree, lounging on puffy clouds of pink velvet laundry eating Boston cream pie-flavored Yoplait? For fuck’s sake, I don’t know a single woman whose lobes aren’t fucking soaking in anxiety just as a matter of course. I slurp down a couple of Ativans every morning with my Bloody Mary or I can’t leave the house. Anxiety is pie for women. It’s death that tends to slow us down a little.

Here’s an anecdote. One time I came down with breast cancer myself. I had the impertinence to come down with it at the age of 46. How did I know I had cancer? I happened to be giving myself one of those harmful self-exams and found a tumor the size of Guam up in that mug, that’s how. Did I subsequently experience anxiety? Hell yeah, I did. Do I prefer anxiety to death? Hell yeah, I do.

Of course, nobody really gives a crap whether women suffer anxiety. That’s just a lot of smoke up your ass. If they did give a crap, they’d make rape illegal or something. What they’re really so concerned about is that mammography can have false positives, which means expensive biopsies that insurance doesn’t want to pay for. But for crying out loud. Wouldn’t you rather have a biopsy that turned out to be unnecessary, than not have a biopsy that turned out to be necessary?

If I’d followed the U.S. Preventative Services Task Force Recommendations, I would be dead. Dead, dead, dead. As it was, I was pretty fucking sick.

So I’d like to shove my entire 46-year-old malignant tumor up the U.S Preventative Services Task Force’s entire ass.

Note: mammography is stunningly imperfect. It’s only useful in detecting cancer that’s already there. Which is to say, it’s a cure-based tactic. This makes it vastly inferior to preventative measures — vaccines, elimination of environmental carcinogens, etc — that might preclude cancer in the first place. Also, mammography is, as are all cure-based measures, useless for women who can’t afford subsequent treatment.

You know what else? Everyone should have access to free genetic testing to determine whether they have the breast cancer mutation. If you’ve got the mutation, your chances of tumoring out before age 50 are, like, 80%. Currently that test costs like 4 grand, and good luck getting your insurance company to cough up for it.

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.)

–––––––––––––––
*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.”

One of the reasons this spinster devotes fewer and fewer aunt-hours to reading blogs these days is the increasing likelihood that I will encounter something along the lines of “You call yourself a feminist? Shame on you for not writing about blahblahblah.” Whereupon the blogger in question writes sanctimoniously about blahblahblah. I fucking hate that shame-on-you tone. Who died and made you king of the blog topic deciders, Sanctimonious Blogger?

This week the cause celebre and object of feminist indifference is Mary Jo Kopechne, who, in 1969, famously suffocated to death after having been abandoned in a submerged car by the recent Senator Ted Kennedy, who was perhaps a bit tipsy at the time.

“[E]ven the feminist blogs are not mentioning her. Yes, as if she never existed indeed!” says DaisyDeadhead, giving herself a little pat on the head.

DaisyDeadhead is pissed about how popular Ted Kennedy is lately, now that he’s dead. He’s so nationally beloved and so perfectly deceased that it is, she says, “considered ‘rude’ to mention [Kopechne's] suspicious and untimely death.”

DaisyDeadhead is right about me, at least. I have completely omitted to write about Mary Jo Kopechne’s suspicious and untimely death. I haven’t even thought about Kopechne in years and years. Hell, I had already tuned out the incessant chatter covering Kennedy’s princely week of national mourning and state funeralizing and sentimental eulogizing (if I hear the phrase “uncanny ability to reach across the aisle” one more time I’m gonna set fire to my own head). Another pink-faced old bloviating honky patriarch biting the dust is but a blip on the obstreperometer here at Spinster HQ. But Daisy’s got a point. When public figures croak around here the tendency to canonize’em and whitewash their not inconsiderable personal failings, especially when those failings are so perfectly in line with the evils we particularly abhor, can really chap the old hide.

It dawns on me, though, that the focus on Kopechne’s death has the untoward effect of historically footnoting her in terms of a dude. I know, I know, whaddya do? The dude in whose terms she is historically footnoted is a fucking dead Kennedy, bona fide American royalty whose considerable influence casts a fairly jumbo and luminous shadow. And had he not killed her, it is likely that nobody, not even DaisyDeadhead, would be writing about her now. One doesn’t write “Kopechne” without writing “Kennedy.” Peas and carrots.

Joyce Carol Oates authors a remarkable speculation in a recent Guardian article. It’s currently being bandied about in Femtown:

“[I]f one weighs the life of a single young woman against the accomplishments of the man President Obama has called the greatest Democratic senator in history, what is one to think?”

Unless one is insane, one is to think that that dude should have been tried for homicide, that’s what. Oates isn’t boostering for the guy, or suggesting that Kopechne’s murder was justified by her murderer’s subsequent good deeds. She’s just pointing out the unpleasant fact that patriarchal hegemony trumps justice, even as it pretends that justice is its highest moral purpose.

She kisses the master’s ass, though, by whitewashing this phenomenon as a “paradox” rather than calling it what it is: the logical conclusion of oppression culture.

Oh, those wacky men, and their lively tradition of perpetrating unspeakable criminal shit in private while simultaneously basking in the glory of their larger-than-life public service.

It is impossible to speculate what Mary Jo Kopechne, a woman with a promising career in politics, might have accomplished had she not been sacrificed for the political career of an ethically challenged, privileged white asshole. One thing’s for sure, though. She’s but one of millions of women whose invitation to life’s rich pageant turned out to be bogus.

I’m not one of those dorks who thinks that women should run the world and that if we did there would be peace and harmony and vegan tacos for everyone (No one should run the world. But that’s another post). I can barely imagine what human society would look like if women were merely accorded human status, but I tell you what. It sure as shit couldn’t be worse than this.

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.

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.

Spinster aunts, at midnight after a half a bot of rosé, are often inclined to sluice out to the back porch, wearing attractive headlamps, to find Western diamondback rattlesnakes hanging out by the door. The serpents wait like patience on a statue, apparently imagining that mice or hunks of filet mignon are about to come flying out of the house.

The situation is perturbing in the extreme, since the Western diamondback is, according to Texas Snakes, a Field Guide, responsible for “the majority of serious envenomations and most of the fatalities” incurred by snake-encountering Texans. Its status as the most frakkin dangerous snake in the state results from its vigorously high self-esteem, giant fangs, and gargantuan venom capacity.

I gazed about me, giving the air a hopeful sniff. Nope, just my luck. Why the snake-handling Pentecostals should have chosen this of all moments to make themselves scarce, I’ll never know.

Faced with an inconvenient paucity of deluded Christians, it was clear that I was on my own. So I enjoined the 3 1/2-foot specimen to move along by menacing it with a broom. I believe I also yelled, “Hey. Git along, now.”

The Western diamondback rattlesnake just laughed and cranked up the rattling to eleven.

I then got the bright idea of turning a water hose on it. When this tactic merely induced the snake to slither a few feet thither, then to coil up against a drainpipe from which tactically advantageous position it adamantly refused to budge, I gave up and went to bed. It appears that reptiles, unlike cats and forest fires, like water.

Speaking of brooms, have you seen that repellent TV commercial where the smiling blonde hottie dances around her sparkling kitchen making love to her Swiffer mop, while her old mop, cast in the role of jilted lover, mopes around stalking her? Women and their romantic, intimate relationships with cleaning supplies!

Excuse me, I’ve got a hot date with an old dishrag.

A blamer has sent in a link to the Daily Mail. I hate it when blamers send in links to the Daily Mail. Links to the Daily Mail contain a neurotoxin. The next thing I know I’m reading paragraph after asinine paragraph, each with less philosophic value than the last, until I am saved by some merciful interruption, like a puppy dashing through my lab with a dead egret, or a phone call from a telemarketer. But wait, did you know about Michael Jackson’s “secret son”?

I am especially mesmerized by a blurb describing a brand of torso-squishing underwear with “bio-crystals” that “melt” cellulite. It has UK shoppers in a panic. I bet these are really comfortable. Just the thing to slip on under your Utilikilt on a 105-degree day. All that melting cellulite will ooze out and form a crust which will attract flies and small mammalian carnivores. You’ll be the envy of the subdivision.

But wait, do they even have subdivisions in the UK?

I have now lost the original link, which of course had nothing to do with Michael Jackson’s secret son or spandex cellulite-melters, and so am forced to change the subject entirely.

So I’m all, right on Sotomayor! But as refreshing as it is to see an Hispanic woman take the oath of any high office, the Supremes are still one of most penis-ridden enterprises going. At the present moment, their own website doesn’t even list old Sonia as a member. Yeah, yeah, baby steps, whatever. “Dent” in the glass ceiling, whatever.

You can’t dent glass, I realize. Tell it to this guy. Honestly, does nobody think for five seconds anymore before they butcher a hackneyed metaphor and throw it into a headline?

Crap, look at the time. I was gonna drone on and on about abortion — RU486 in Australia, the panic over whether Your Tax Dollars will pay for abortions come the new health care bills, etc, but I must hie. Meanwhile, behold the heartwarming cuteness of Fran, my yella lab puppy.

Any nerd, geek, dork, or other-type-genius of a certain age who suffered no pang of nostalgia this week during the wah-hoo over the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission might want to have her obstreperal lobe checked for leaks.

I offer a few unconnected remarks on the subject. The remarks are unconnected because in these grim days of round-the-clock puppy-raising and mandatory commutes to Austin, I am a blogger in name only. If you have not come to expect this sort of crappy slipshod essay from me yet, please do so from now on. It’s gonna get worse before it gets better around here, prose-wise.

Anyway, The Apostate says her blood is boiling over these blogular remarks by Paul Campos at Lawyers Guns and Money.

Agreed. If I read one more sentimental recollection of the lunar landing beginning with the word “I” and invoking a grandparent — Prez Obama is one notable perp — I’m gonna yak.

Apostate’s beef, however, is not with the painful tedium of Campos’ opening reminiscence. She is crabbed because of this paragraph:

Considered as an incredibly expensive and complex exercise in practical engineering, the Apollo program was indeed a stunning achievement. In many ways it was a paradigmatically American achievement, and specifically of American men, or rather boys as men (think of the most impressive neighborhood treehouse, times ten million). Aside from putting the Russians in their place, the most important motivation was probably the sheer desire to figure out how to actually make the thing work. And it was an intensely and peculiarly male project: I don’t recall ever seeing a single woman in that huge Houston control center, where hundreds of guys in short-sleeved white shirts and crewcuts ran the show.

That Campos goes on to observe that

“One measure of how much has changed in the last 40 years is that the very idea of a woman astronaut in the 1960s would have seemed outlandish to most Americans”

does not appease Apostate one whit. I’m down, Apostate! Campos’ tone in this summary is peculiarly male. He’s almost giddy about the good old days of dudely science, of the pissing contest with the Russians, of boys building rockets in the clubhouse. And he seems to be suggesting that women astronauts is no longer an outlandish concept.

That’s a hot one. How many women astronauts can he name, I wonder?

That the entirety of this week’s “I was wee lad watching the lunar landing with my grandpa” memoirpalooza is likewise peculiarly male is not lost on Susan Niebur, blogging at Women in Planetary Science (”Women make up half the bodies in the solar system. Why not half the scientists?”). She is “bothered” that dudes talking about Apollo invariably say things like “I remember every time an Apollo mission would take place that, like a lot of little boys, I’d gather in front of the TV for hours and hours and hours with my little brother.”

“What was it like to be a little girl at the time?” Niebur muses. “Was it the same kind of experience, or was there really a difference?”

In 1969, the difference between being a little boy and a little girl was like the difference between being a little boy and a little girl in 2009, except that in 1969, it was still believed by a stalwart few that feminism might fix some of that shit.

In 1969 some of us “little girls” didn’t yet realize that identifying with Captain Kirk instead of the green alien belly dancer chick was a crime against the binary gender mandate. We watched Apollo 11 on TV (I can’t remember who I watched it with, you’ll be happy to know, or whether, upon viewing the spectacle, they pronounced unto me any trenchant remarks concerning the magnificence of the human race) and thought, “cool.” But soon enough we figured out what time it was. Dudes were astronauts, women raised babies. Any ideas we had of chasing around the universe in space ships died a smelly, pirulent death. We would grow up to write patriarchy-blaming blogs and read nostalgic “when I was a boy” crap about Apollo on the internet.

It turns out that there were four women engineers working on Apollo 11, but apparently Walter Cronkite was too choked up about the magnificence of mankind’s giant leap to interview them. There’s a book about them, though. The Women of Apollo, it’s called, The Stories of Judith Cohen, Ann Dickson, Ann Maybury, and Bobbie Johnson, Four Remarkable Women Who Helped Put the First Man on the Moon. The book is crappy and written for children. Children who, apparently, need to be shown how women can help men do cool shit.

After pondering all this, it was with some delight that I watched a sensational “documentary” on TruTV (originally produced by Fox, naturally) explaining that the Apollo lunar landings were all a hoax. This show is great. It presents about 468 pieces of tantalizingly plausible anti-scientific evidence demonstrating that the moon missions were faked: doctored photos, inconsistencies and lack of verisimilitude in the video, how come there’s no blast crater under the LEM, etc. There are science guys saying, “It had to be fake because the challenges were just fucking insurmountable, otherwise the Russians would have done it, too.” And of course the obligatory roster of mysterious untimely deaths of people who knew too much, and an invocation of Area 51. Then there’s a guy from NASA who just keeps saying “no, the conspiracy theorists are wrong because they’re just wrong.”

Hahahaha. I laughed and laughed.

As cool as moon landings used to be, and as integral to my childhood narrative, it would totally lube my lobe if it turned out that the “intensely and peculiarly male” Apollo project really was a hoax. Just so I could say nyah nyah.

One last thing. How come the Americans were “astronauts” and the Russians were “cosmonauts”?