Archive for the 'The megatheocorporatocracy' Category

Sunday Morning Hurl: Mama Grizzlies

Published by Jill on July 18, 2010. 408 Comments


What the Mama Grizzly is wearing this season. From SarahPAC video.

Whenever a right-wing woman — any right-wing woman — claims to be a feminist, she doesn’t do it in a vacuum. She isn’t just hurting herself. Her antifeminist feminism has violent repercussions and broad implications. It spreads like a contagion from patriotically-attired partisan church lady to Fox news to housewife to housedaughter, cutting a swath of intellectual death in its wake. Research conducted here at the Spinstitute for the Intellectual Lifespan of Female Children shows that for each right-wing woman who performs in the capacity of an empowerful flag-waving heterosexual, 107.6 little girls can kiss their future human agency goodbye as it flutters off into the aether. Like their mothers before them, these little girls will have to pay for their own rape kits, be denied access to abortions, shop for pink lipstick at Wal-Mart, and be judged on their compliance with male desire until they ultimately become wife-slaves in nuclear families of their own, dedicated to consumerism and the replication of patriarchy.

Because the right-wing woman’s real agenda is compulsory compliance with megatheocorporatocratic mandates governing fair use of women, it’s bad enough when specimens from the rank and file pretend to give a fuck about other women. But when celebrity airhead Sarah Palin, with cameras running, gets all feisty and empowerful, the number of doomed girls vomitosially increases to 2,320,917, rising exponentially each time somebody watches her “Mama Grizzlies” SarahPAC vid on YouTube.

Mama Grizzlies! It’s a “mom awakening.” They’re gonna “get things done!” What things? Who the hell knows? Who the hell cares? Sarah Palin loves America, and that’s good enough for moms!

“Moms kinda just know when somethin’s wrong,” asserts Palin, addressing her back-to-basics, anti-intellectual female fan base, all of whom “just know” that ‘women’s intuition’ is a sound basis for vague social policy. Palin’s video blames “these policies comin’ out of DC right now,” this “fundamental transformation of America” for the existence of all this stuff that moms just kinda know is wrong.

But what wrong stuff, exactly, do the moms kinda just know? What, precisely, is the Mama Grizzly banding together against? To what — if it isn’t too much to ask — is she saying “no”?

Apparently, Mama Grizzlies are against whatever they kinda just want to be against, because Palin doesn’t mention a single issue in her video. It features a few quick cuts to protesters waving issue-ish but ultimately vacuous posters (“ANNOY LIBERAL WORK HARD & PAY YOUR OWN BILLS”), but what this charming little fillip of issue-less propaganda actually does is give uninformed right-wing women an anti-Obama political identity, a white ladies’ tribe to join. It’s the Mama Grizzlies Tribe, where you can be against stuff without even knowing what it is, where you all you have to grasp about politics is that something’s kinda just wrong, and that Sarah Palin’s gonna get it fixed because, even though she doesn’t hold public office and isn’t running for one, she loves America, so vote for her candidates in November.

Mama Grizzlies may not have a specific cause, but they are just as tough and fighty as Sarah! To wit:

The Mama Grizzlies are “gonna turn this thing around” and “get our country back on the right track.” They’re “banding together, rising up, and saying ‘no this isn’t right’. For our kids and for our grandkids. [...] Lookout Washington! Cuz there’s a whole stampede of pink elephants crossin’ the line and the ETA is November 2nd 2010!”

Lookout Washington! A pack of Mama Grizzlies have just morphed into a herd of pink elephants! Either way, you’re gonna have a sanitation problem on your hands.

Posted in The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today, The megatheocorporatocracy and Women hate you. Bite me, Chad.

LA Times publishes article about woman; global reserves of sexist stereotypes dangerously depleted

Published by Jill on July 2, 2010. 19 Comments

In the news: a woman known as Anna Chapman is accused of being some sort of Russian spy (Russian spy? Seriously? I didn’t realize we still had those. It’s comforting to know that at least some beloved artifacts from my idyllic Cold War childhood endure).

This LA Times story, the gist of which is gripping speculation concerning Chapman’s future as a reality show celebrity or the subject of “blockbusters”, is a real breathtaking pile of asswipe antifeminist hate speech. The authors don’t seem to know, or care, who or what she is, or isn’t, beyond the assertion that she is a “sultry red-head.” This is demonstrated by the photograph accompanying the article, which is about as sexy as a yearbook picture, and is therefore worth a thousand sexist words.

Here is a selection of the delightful metaphrasery employed in this article (some of which the authors breathlessly quote from other “news” sources). Chapman is

a “sexy antagonist”
a “red-haired beauty”
a “femme fatale”
a “Natasha”
a “secret sexpot” who “partied, shopped & schmoozed”
a “modern-day Mata Hari”
a “vivacious vixen”
a “practiced deceiver”
an “attention-seeking sensationalist bimbo”
a “beauty with a captivating tale”
a “romantic young woman”
a “billionaire or a hooker”

Because Chapman is such a red-haired sexy romantic billionaire mata vixen, her 15 minutes as a bankable piece of ass appears to be in the bag. On the subject of femmes parlaying their fataleity into fame and fortune, one interviewee was moved to recall that the woman Eliot Spitzer paid to rape now has a sex column in a newspaper. Sluts sell!

The LA Times omits to cite any evidence that Chapman is/was, in fact, a prostituted woman, but this is America, and evidence is hardly necessary. According to the authors, Chapman’s Facebook page reveals all relevant information: she is hottt, so obviously she’s a whore, which apparently renders the entire nation verklempt, and that’s all we need to know.

There are 10 other spies in the spy ring, but the LA Times doesn’t speculate about their marketing potential. A separate article reports that one of the dude spies jumped bail in Cyprus, but neglects to provide details about his sexiness, vivaciousness, wealth, hair color, or the dollar value of his “story.” Instead, the reader is forced to make do with boring minutiae such as the charges he was brought up on (failure to register as a foreign agent), and trivia regarding the diplomatic relationship between the US and Cyprus.

Thanks, PhysioProf

Posted in Bloodsport, Mass Media, Sexploitation, The Entertainment Industrial Complex, The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today and The megatheocorporatocracy. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt beats dead horse

Published by Jill on June 17, 2010. 52 Comments

Stinkhorn
This lone stinkhorn mushroom is the only entity anywhere in Cottonmouth County that doesn’t have a katydid stuck to it.

Unsurprisingly, my award-nominated (I personally nominate all my work for awards, to compensate for the fact that, incomprehensibly, I am so often overlooked by committees) vid lampooning the anti-science lifestyle choice, has generated some jaundice.

It occurs to some of us here at Spinster HQ that the only way to avoid hurting anybody’s feelings ever is to shut down the entire obstreperal lobe and become a pillow.

Not that empillowment is without its own controversies, because what do you stuff the pillow with? Not feathers, surely, or wool, or silk, but aren’t synthetics their own special sort of politically incorrect scourge? Which leaves grass clippings, but what with all the katydid poop and raccoon dander lying around, questions of hygiene are raised.

Anyway, you’re all good sports, especially those of you who joked that I drive away my loyal “followers” with elitism. Unless — hey, wait, what? Were you serious? Because that hurts my feelings.

Mang, this science vs intuition “debate” has gotten completely ridic. Awesome! I will speak of nothing else for the foreseeable future!

I think we can all agree that when you define science as a method for acquiring knowledge, and intuition as the spark of intelligence that ignites inquiry (although maybe a better word would be genius), we’re all pretty much on the same page.

Is there a magical form of feminine insta-knowledge what spontaneously erupts on unicorn rays in the unseen 5th dimension of the human metaspirit? Why not? Just show me the data and we’ll be cool.

See? We’re getting along great now.

But oy, elitism. It’s always the way when knowledge becomes specialized. Subcultures bubble out of the general magma, standards and practices become codified, skills get required, expertise becomes venerated, a canon is established, as well as a hierarchy, practitioners become eccentric egomaniacs, gatekeepers show up to protect them from the rabble, and the subculture becomes more and more detached from the teeming throng from which it spranged even as its influence spreads like I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter on a frozen toaster waffle. And then someone from the throng says, “Hey, bite me you elitist asswipes, we don’t need you, we’re going back to the way we were before your delusions turned you into a megalomaniac, because those were the good old days.” And then some spinster aunt says, “Hey, yerself! As the world’s leading expert on expertise, I think you’re throwing the baby out with the other babies!”

What am I saying? Just this:

You don’t have to be Martina Navratilova to play a game of tennis.

And I should know, because I’m not Martina Navratilova.

There are other things you don’t have to be in order to do things. You don’t have to be a professional 70’s pop star-cum-tragic figure to crank up “Close To You” and go “wah-ah-ah-ah-ah, close to yew!” after the tacet interlude. You don’t have to have ironed Jean-Paul Sartre’s shirts to nod in vigorous agreement when you read in The Second Sex that all oppression creates a state of war. You don’t have to be the Weatherman to blow up the Pentagon. And you don’t have to be a tenured science knob to appreciate the process of scientific inquiry.

As VinaigretteGirl points out, you can (and should) do experiments in your closet for fun. I’m doing one right now where I’m testing the structural integrity of a typical household wicker laundry basket, primarily by never unloading it into the washing machine. What a gas! More complicated endeavors, like collecting soil samples from Pluto’s surface to analyze for Crystalline Entity droppings, can be admired from afar as a spectator sport.

The purpose of scientifical pursuit, in the pure form most admired by middle-aged spinster aunts, has less to do with being published in Nature, or using jargon on dude science blogs to shut up the people who didn’t go to college, or advancing the megatheocorporatocratic agenda, than it does with simply enbiggening human enlightenment. The enbiggenment of human enlightenment is always conducted on the individual level. Whenever a glob of comprehension supplants a glob of incomprehension in a human brain, the Dark Side (or the Tyranny of Ignorance, if you like, or the Black Thing) gets bent. Whenever that happens, the whole species is collectively that much better off. Consult any 6-year-old for further information; globs of knowledge supplant globs of ignorance in their brains on an hourly basis, and they really seem to dig it.

Anyway, am I saying “Yay Big Pharma! Keep inventing cancer drugs and charging $40,000 a year for’em!”? No. Am I saying, “Yay, the Women’s Oppression League has just endowed a foundation for the advancement of evolutionary psychology!”? No. Am I saying “When a thing does a thing and you don’t know why, would it kill you to find out?” Yes. And it doesn’t even matter if somebody has already answered the question you’re asking. Check out this inspirational personal anecdote:

The other day I realized that I’m 50 years old already and I still don’t know how katydids make that deafening racket like unto 876,932 small pulsating dentist drills that keeps me awake all night. So I hoisted my ass up out of the lime green recliner and nabbed a specimen for the lab.

Minuscule katydid

It wasn’t hard. All I had to do was stick my hand out the window, since there is no square inch of El Rancho Deluxe that is not populated by a katydid. Every tree, shrub, cactus, rock, tractor, and blade of grass is literally crawling with katydids. The bunkhouse itself appears to have been dipped in a vat of katydids. A lady from another planet, upon observing the tableau, would conclude that a large, fleshy pink entity is being held captive in a limestone nest by a race of screaming green rattly leaves.

But I digress.

Back in the lab, I inspected my katydid with a magnifying glass and poked it with the eraser of my Ticonderoga #2 pencil, whereupon I was able to determine that my specimen had no intention of making any noise of any kind whatsoever. Several katydids later, I finally figured out how they make the racket. It was pretty satisfying. Now I’m telling everyone I know about the katydids. Nobody cares, unfortunately.

_______________________
Katydid nymph photo [above] taken May 2009. Adult katydids (the ones around here, at least) look like leaves:

Katydid

Posted in Heartwarming Nature Crap, Number 1 Science Information, The megatheocorporatocracy and Varmint Center. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt begins post with “I,” tells anecdote

Published by Jill on January 28, 2010. 43 Comments

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?

Posted in Godbagism, Magical Mysteries from Godtown, Oppression Culture, The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today and The megatheocorporatocracy. Bite me, Chad.

Godbaggianism originates at cellular level

Published by Jill on December 2, 2009. 92 Comments

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

Posted in Magical Mysteries from Godtown, The Argument Against Human Reproduction, The megatheocorporatocracy and Ways in Which the Internet Is a Hoot. Bite me, Chad.

OzWatch ‘09: Misogyny on Parade

Published by Jill on November 29, 2009. 46 Comments

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.

Posted in Dear god what about the men?, Knobjectivism, Lobe-blowing, Men Hate You, Strawfeminism, The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today and The megatheocorporatocracy. Bite me, Chad.

American boobs used as political football, part 472

Published by Jill on November 19, 2009. 92 Comments

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.

Posted in Crazy sexy cancer, Men Hate You, Politics, The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today and The megatheocorporatocracy. Bite me, Chad.

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

Published by Jill on September 11, 2009. 49 Comments

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

Pinko Punko hits the trifecta with the following communiqué.

[Dear Jill,]

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

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

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

PP

Dear PP,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hugs,
Twisty

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

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

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

Spinster aunt complains about Ted Kennedy

Published by Jill on September 3, 2009. 60 Comments

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.

Posted in Bloodsport, Mass Media, Men Hate You, Oppression Culture, Politics, The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Yesterday and The megatheocorporatocracy. 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.