Archive for the 'Blogulation' Category

Fan mail from another flounder saddens spinster aunt

Published by Jill on July 28, 2010. 40 Comments

I am so sad about this guy! Apparently I’ve been deleting his comments, which comments — I’m just guessing of course — might not have precisely represented the apex of human achievement, since I don’t remember them or him.

Matthew
mattstefanson@gmail.com
207.47.241.108
Submitted on 2010/07/27 at 11:13pm

Post my comments. Don’t be afraid of open discourse, you wanker. Is this how Neo-Feminist nutbags run their websites? with censorship? You suck.

“You suck.” Seriously? That’s the insult?

See, this is why I’m sad. Stupid, uninteresting people keep saying things.

Posted in Blogulation. Bite me, Chad.

My unique style self-expresses who I personally am

Published by Jill on July 17, 2010. 53 Comments

Me!
Jilroy Silliphant. Me! 1963. Pixels on ectoplasm.

The inbox at Spinster HQ this morning contained several urgent communiqués from an entity calling itself “How do I remove my tampon without it hitting something?”.

Yeah, this is a little embarrassing, but whenever I try to remove my tampon, it either hits my fingers or the rim of the toilet. I’m trying to take it out slowly so that it doesn’t swing around, but it’s a huge ordeal. Any tips?

As I read these words — which seemed to me not like everyday, earthly words, but like diamantine droplets of sublime Internet perfection leaping from the screen to encrust my optic nerves in tiny, piercing embraces — a little tear of happiness (the sort of happiness that fills the void left by the pain of defeat after an arduous struggle) welled up in my jaundiced eye. Suddenly all those pent-up, anti-Internet feelings I’ve been having lately melted away into the aether. I gathered some rose petals in a basket the color of sunshine and went skipping down the lane, strewing the petals and singing my Number One Jam, “Top of the World” by the Carpenters. After I got done singing that, I started in on my other Number One Jam, Madonna’s seminal feminist anthem for social change, “Holiday.”

Upon my return to the bunkhouse it became apparent that a small point, lately arisen on the blog, required a clarification. As you know, a roiling controversy attends certain of my views regarding the practice of beginning arguments with the word “I.” My lobe — having recently been blown by the fact that the afore-referenced zenith of tamponish prosody and crystalline subsense had been achieved, by some miracle, without my vigilant intervention — now compels me to rethink my position.

Let me be perfectly clear.

Begin remarks however you like. Use whatever words you want, to convey whatever tone you desire, to express whatever thought pops into your head. If you manage to achieve even a fraction of the exquisite pithiness of “How do I remove my tampon without it hitting something?”, no greater contribution to human enlightenment could be expected of you.

Meanwhile, because I have shown myself to be incapable of explaining to anybody’s satisfaction why it is advantageous for women to disseminate their views on social and political issues as bona fide ideas rather than as qualified, localized, personal opinions, or of illustrating the ways in which this rhetorical style differs from “telling my story,” I am retiring from (but not conceding) the fight. I reckon I’m just too old and beat up.

But before I go, I urge the blametariat to consider this: an idea is infinite and infectious and evolving. Some ideas: Elvis, birth control, the Internet. An opinion, on the other hand, is small and finite and, ultimately, irrelevant. An opinion is “I like pie.”

Posted in Announcements, Art is my LIFE and Blogulation. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt executes close reading of seemingly benign remark, exposes hidden meanings!

Published by Jill on July 13, 2010. 121 Comments

Thanks to yesterday’s involuntary contributors, Valerie, Dr Sarah Tonin, and Saphire. You kids are all right. Today I’ll be picking a few more nits on the same theme. If a theme may be said to possess nits.

Queries blamer JenniferRuth on the subject of feminists gettin’ after other feminists for perceived infractions of the Unwritten Feminist Code:

[...] Is the tone of the message more important than the message?

In other words, if you see some patriarchy goin’ down, and it falls upon you to blame it, need you really mince words just to spare the feelings of the alleged perp? Shouldn’t the perp grow a pair, and learn from your expertise?

It can be argued (and is argued, by me, albeit somewhat obliquely, a bit further down) that the tone of the message is the message. Furthermore, when the tone may be construed as hostile or passive-aggressive or supercilious, “learning” cannot reasonably be expected to transpire.

Continues JenniferRuth (echoing the opinion of several other blamers):

I think that often a “gotcha” tone is inferred rather than intended. I see none of it in Dr Sarah Tonin’s comment. [Dr Sarah Tonin's comment is reproduced below -- Jill].

Alas, the intent of a remark is ultimately irrelevant to its audience; the net effect on the balance of the cosmos is what must be considered when assessing the gotchaness of any given remark delivered on a small-time blog. We have seen this intent-vs-effect scenario time and time again. For example:

When some progressive liberal dude drops anchor at Savage Death Island to take field notes on the wild feminist population, he might say something like “You ladies have really educated me, keep up the good work!” The dude imagines that he’s being supportive, but what he’s actually done is reinforce the dude-supremacist hierarchy by placing himself in a lofty position above the fray from which he may passively benefit from the ladies’ work while simultaneously condescending to bestow upon them the high honor of dudely approbation.

Privilege exercised by A is oppression experienced by B. Whether the A “means” it or not.

Back to Dr Sarah Tonin’s remark:

@Valerie, I agree with the basic sentiment of your comment, but druther you’d pick a less classist analogy than “trailer park”. Cheers.

It is well observed that Dr Sarah Tonin is not, in this example, mean. She opens with something conciliatory, briefly administers the correction, attempts to diffuse any potential sting with a breezy “cheers!” and gets the heck out. A case of the surgeon’s knife.

There are other, more extreme, more entertaining examples I might have used, but alas, you get what you pay for here at I Blame the Patriarchy.

However. As for whether, as JenniferRuth wonders, the “gotcha” tone is real or imagined: if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck …

Read it again:

@Valerie, I agree with the basic sentiment of your comment, but druther you’d pick a less classist analogy than “trailer park”. Cheers.

Observe that Dr Sarah Tonin speaks directly to Valerie using the first person “I.” She alludes to Valerie’s infraction as distasteful to Dr Sarah Tonin personally. In so doing, she introduces a “j’accuse” dynamic, establishing a mini-hierarchy wherein she confers upon herself hall monitor status. She’s a pleasant hall monitor, but a hall monitor nonetheless. This dynamic makes the “cheers” feel a bit disingenuous.

It should also be noted that Dr Sarah Tonin’s humorous Internet moniker contains the quasi-honorific “Dr,” which, whether or not Sarah Tonin is an actual doctor, adds to her remarks a subliminal and somewhat presumptuous dollop of authoritative clout. The subtext might be read as “As your superior officer, I deem you in violation of the unwritten code.”

A more enbiggening, albeit more time-consuming, approach would have been for Dr Sarah Tonin to eliminate both her personal preferences and Valerie from her remarks altogether, and to compose her argument from a more universal point of view. Perhaps something like:

“Although trailer parks have enjoyed a colorful history as joke-butts among the upper classes and other denizens of site-built homes, these jokes are considered by many feminists to contain classist slurs that a) unjustly portray low socio-economic status as a character flaw, and b) bolster the jokester’s own status as someone privileged enough to make such pronouncements.”

Such a statement might still have offended the charmingly implacable Saphire (Valerie herself, it should be noted, has, as of this writing, yet to weigh in on the subject), but at least it would have met most of the criteria upon which the Blametariat appears to agree are necessary for successful consciousness-raising: it’s neutral in tone; it’s addressed to a general audience rather than to a specific blamer; it describes a widely-held philosophical position re: trailer parks rather than a statement of personal opinion; it’s an introductory explication of the problem with trailer-park jokes; and possibly it might even serve as a template from which a less-experienced feminist might extrapolate for future instances of self-privilege-awareness.

I Blame the Patriarchy’s superfatted Guidelines For Commenters already contains a plea for the excision of the first person singular from the Blametarium; it should, at least for purposes of Internecine Nit-Picking, also include a moratorium on the pronoun “you.”

These pronouns, they’re really something!

In closing, let us remember that, although this blog originated as a light entertainment delivery device for the amusement of its author, today its primary function is patriarchy-blaming. So, if you see some patriarchy in progress, and think you can blame it, bring it, girlfriend! The less culture-of-domination shit you throw around while doing it, the better.

Fun fact: I used to work in a manufactured housing factory, where I was the lowliest form of life, the girl who swept out the houses when they rolled off the assembly line. I will always be grateful to that job for hipping me to the existence of the Hokey, an inexpensive, human-powered housekeeping implement I use to this day to remove golden retriever hair from a blue paisley rug.

By the way, as somebody pointed out yesterday, the actual term for the type of dwelling under discussion is “manufactured home.” It may be “PC” (as the commenter suggested), but it’s also the official industry designation, for the simple reason that, once delivered, these houses are affixed to the ground with concrete pylons and don’t go anywhere. I know what I’m talkin’ about when I say that manufactured housing often exceeds, in terms of eco-friendliness, energy efficiency, price, maintenance costs, and general quality, comparable site-built homes. See photo, above.

A “trailer” is something you hitch to your Ford F-250 to transport livestock, hay, landscaping equipment, or an Emergency Mobile Margarita Bar.

___________________
Photo: Adorable “trailer” is (surprisingly?) un-trashy. 475 sq ft “Eco-Cottage” by Nationwide Homes.

Posted in Blogulation, Oppression Culture and Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society. Bite me, Chad.

We’ve all done it, but maybe it’s time to cut it the fuck out

Published by Jill on July 12, 2010. 142 Comments

More excerpts from the comments!

#
Valerie
July 11, 2010 at 4:05 pm

[...] They make trailer parks look classy and nuanced.

#
Dr. Sarah Tonin
July 11, 2010 at 10:48 pm

@Valerie, I agree with the basic sentiment of your comment, but druther you’d pick a less classist analogy than “trailer park”. Cheers.

#
Saphire
July 11, 2010 at 11:16 pm

^ Lest Valerie forget that impossible high standard the internet feminist is held to!

#
Saphire
July 11, 2010 at 11:19 pm

Grrr think I too am giving feminism a break. I’ll come back when we have anything resembling something where ‘feminists’ don’t tear each other down at the first chance. ‘Patriarchy handmaidens’, spot on.

Don’t I know it. When your blogular practice of Internet feminism gets corrected by total strangers, it’s about as appealing as when some nattering nabob of a poindexter corrects your grammar. As a professional Internet feminist, my ass is hangin’ there on both lines pretty much around the clock. Smarty pantses (or is it smarties pants?) and finger-waggers line up around the block all the live-long day, just waiting for a chance to correct some little infraction. I’d be lying if I said this didn’t completely chafe the spinster butt-cheeks.

I remember one time I typed “morays”, like the eels, instead of “mores,” like the normative conventions and attitudes embodying the fundamental moral values of a particular society, the contravention or rejection of which by individuals or subgroups is liable to be perceived as a threat to stability. I can’t say why I wrote “morays” instead of “mores”; if anyone knows the difference between an eel and a normative convention, ’tis I. But I did it all the same. And sure enough, though it was perfectly clear from the context of my post that eels were not among the topical considerations of the essay, a lurking poindexter lost no time. She leaped from the bushes and executed a “gotcha!” in the comments, exposing my dreadful usage mishap for the entire world to see. She performed this gotcha, not with a simple “hey, you typed the wrong word,” or a pleasantry about eels and their social fishiologies, but with an unnecessarily (I thought) elaborate explication of my error, including definitions, pronunciations, Latin origins of both words, and a goddam supercilious (I thought) tone. The cheeks were chafed.

I have complained about this before. Remember dear old Cuntalinagate? No? Well, here’s what happened. Last year — I forget exactly when — I used the word “cuntalina” as a pejorative to describe — I forget exactly who — and lo! The Feminist Secret Service was deployed toot sweet to fishslap me into compliance with the relentless, sanctimonious, supercilious metrical Formula of Internet Feminist Conformity and Propriety. Demands for an explanation were conferred. I became Misogynist of the Year. I got voted off my own island. I got compared to Mengele. It was all “oh my god, Twisty, you called a woman a cunt! You’ve set women’s rights back 50 years! All my hopes and dreams just went down the crapper and you suck shit through Hefty bags! The kids and I are burning the computer we used to read your posts!”

Here’s what I said then, so I don’t have to think up a new paragraph to say it again now.

I’m damned glad you guys are taking this feminism thing seriously. Really. Nothing could be more heartwarming, except, possibly, certain heartwarming nature crap, than that there exist women who are able to grasp that “cuntalina” is an antifeminist slur.

But seriously, get off my fucking case already with this hypervigilant radfem hall monitor shit. The policey, self-righteous, gotcha bullshit around here generally is chapping my entire hide. When and if I commit some egregious ideological error that threatens the very fabric of the cosmos I’ll make Twisty fucking cop to it, as you fucking well know if you’ve been reading this blog for more than five minutes. But this cuntalina uproar is fucking absurd. Jayzus in a jetpack.

Good times.

Anyway, far be it from me to tell anyone what to do! So I’m not demanding that interested parties should check their annoying habit of going for the jugular whenever they perceive the slightest opportunity to cut some hapless fellow Internetian (rhymes with “Venetian”) off at the knees and feast on her imperfect brains. I’m just saying, maybe you’re being a jerk to act all offended and self-righteous when your victims, weary of the constant prissy-ass doctrinairian hectoring, go a little postal.

Nobody likes a rat-fink.

But on the other hand, what to do about insouciant, stereotype-perpetuating remarks concerning the philosophic depth of trailer parks? Haven’t we a moral imperative to nip this shit in the bud? Because if we don’t check call out these heinous anti-trailerite lapses, pretty soon feminism itself will be torn completely asunder and polar bears will go extinct.

It is a fine line we walk, you and I. It may be suggested, in the interest of peace and harmony, that when confronted with one of these intolerable slurs, the slurrer herself be recused from any subsequent critique. Also that the zingy take-down, popular though it is, be relinquished, and that the focus of the critique be ideological rather than personal. Perhaps affording the slurrer an opportunity to broaden her horizons rather than force her to defend herself from an angry mob of Trailer Park Rightsists. One might strive to be educationy, rather than imperious.

This is suggested, of course, despite the high probability that nobody will pay it the slightest attention. Why won’t they? Because it is the Way of the Internet — yes, even the Feminist Internet — to self-aggrandize by any means necessary. Usually the means is dominating anyone who shows the slightest weakness. In the end, the lone chumps left standing will be those few who can withstand the longest the Internet’s Death by a Thousand Cuts (or Venomous Morays).

But blowing off feminism because couple of amateur feminists make stupid remarks on a small-time blog? Aw.

Posted in Blogulation. Bite me, Chad.

Make that Friday. Or possibly Sunday.

Published by Jill on June 23, 2010. 33 Comments

Eastern phoebe chick

I am not bailing on Art Week. Not me, mang. But I must emerge from Denial Town to announce that its official commencement has to be postponed again. I am experiencing more events, circumstances, and — I’m serious — hooplas — than I had anticipated when I announced the original postponement. Did I say Saturday? Factor in the high probability that there will be outcomes, consequences, and aftermaths, all of which will require heedfulness at the very least, if not full-on activity, and we’re looking at Monday or even Wednesday before I’ll be able to maneuver a grateful keister back into the lime green recliner.

It’ll at least be sometime before August. Of 2011.

Meanwhile, enjoy one of the 2010 Eastern phoebe chicks from the Spinster HQ Motor Pool nest. They were flappin wings all day today, and packing bindles, and one of’em was singing “babe I gotta ramble”; they’ll be hitting the trail tomorrow, I guess.

UPDATE, 7AM: Only two out of four phoebes left. So it looks like I’ll be dealing with Empty Nest Syndrome on top of everything else!

Posted in Announcements, Art is my LIFE, Blogulation and Heartwarming Nature Crap. Bite me, Chad.

Hanging Chads of Savage Death Island bore the shit out of spinster aunt

Published by Jill on June 10, 2010. 153 Comments

Wow, I nip out to town for a couple of mahi tacos (diet cops, shut your yaps), stumble back to my desk, and discover that some dude named Jack has parachuted down to Savage Death Island, peered at the curious natives through a 2X magnifying glass, and pronounced (some of) us “smart.” Despite the fact that we don’t care for his “vague” antifeminist remarks. He then attempts to reinforce his superior status with an unflattering lampoon of the Blametariat, and to enlighten us with his unique male viewpoint. There’s also some other guy (“Flotsam”? “Fosdick”?) on another thread who’s really taking up some space with his unique male perspective.

Henceforth such dudes will be known as hanging chads.

These hanging chads, they really never get it. Because women generally, and radical Internet Feminists in particular, are to them some mystical, unfathomable alien species, they think we don’t understand them! It is hilarious, the predictability with which they all, without exception, every single time, enduringly and persistently, are compelled to lecture the ignorant Savage Death Islanders on the finer points of the superior dude civilization back on the mainland. Because if we just understood them, we would see how wrong we are to experience Chadly privilege as oppression.

“Don’t you see? When you attack our porn, it makes us insecure, because we love porn, wee wee wee!”

Yeah, yeah, feminism makes you insecure so you have to post insults, death threats, and boring lectures on feminist blogs. What a revelation. Knock me over with a feather. Ça alors, c’est une big surprise.

But here’s the thing.

Now, I don’t speak for all the feminists, or for the readers of this blog, but this spinster aunt doesn’t care about dudes at all. In fact, I have acute dude fatigue. The topic of Dudes In Society excites me about as much as expressing the dog’s anal sacs. Educational anecdotes concerning the Dude Experience monotonize me to the max. The rarefied and incomparable Heterosexual Male Perspective bores the living lobe lubricant out of me.

Why?

Because I’ve heard it all about 174.8 million times before, and hearing it again doesn’t do a fucking thing for me. It doesn’t make the world a better place, it doesn’t cut through waxy yellow build-up, it doesn’t clean toilets, and it for sure doesn’t enlighten me.

What all chads fail to grasp is that, as members of an oppressed class, we have always considered it a matter of survival and our No. 1 priority to grok the fullness of the oppressor. In fact, we’ve been grokking the oppressor’s fullness since the cradle, mostly without even realizing it. It hasn’t been too difficult, since we were all raised in the smelly nutsack of Dude Nation, and continue to be engulfed by and to marinate in dudelionormative swampwater all day, every day. If there is ever some little dudecentric point here or there that eludes us, not to worry; dudelionormative socialization protocols are in place to take us back to school and whip us into shape.

The result?

There is nothing about men that Savage Death Islanders don’t know. Nothing. We know all about your dicks and your glands and what gets you off and how you were socialized and the terrible strain of male privilege. We get all your dude-jokes. We know all your antifeminist arguments. We know all your porn-is-necessary justifications. We know how you behave when you perceive that someone of a lower caste has challenged your authori-tay. No need to explain to us that we are doing feminism wrong, because we’ve already heard it from the 495,312 dudes who thought of it before you were born. We know that you are not conscious of your own privilege. And we get that, because your invisible privilege derives from the oppression of women, you hate women.

It turns out that after a lifetime of prophylactic acquiescence to Dude Culture gavage, I no longer give a crap. I don’t give a crap if dudes like me, or if dudes like feminists, or if dudes understand basic elements of feminism, or if dudes support the feminist fucking agenda, or if dudes sincerely ask me to educate them about feminism when all they really need is a swift kick in the grill with the boot of basic human decency. I’d rather have a root canal than spend even 3 seconds trying to convince some dude that patriarchy exists and that I’m not just making it up because I’m ugly and can’t get laid. The only thing that interests me less than educating lazy-ass dudes about their male fucking privilege is explaining to fucking lazy-ass privileged dudes why I am not interested in educating them. And Jesus Christ, the ennui! The crushing, stultifying, soporific ennui! The ennui of writing “Chad, you seem like a nice enough guy, but you should really check out the Feminism 101 blog before calling me ‘irrational’ and alluding to the power of femininity.” The ennui of reading “your a bitch thats why feminism will fail.” The ennui of sifting through gibberish like “Our female ruling class & their collaborators are biggest criminals in history.”

God, the ennui! It’s like living in the goddam Twilight Zone episode where the train keeps pulling into the same station over and over and over.

Nothing wastes my time like a dude. And at age 51, I ain’t got all that much time left.

In other words, the less I see of dudes, and of the gruesome products of their corny-ass fetishes, and of their boring-ass pronouncements on my blog, the more pleasant my day will be.

Look, mang, sometimes a spinster aunt just wants to shoot the shit with interested parties about some stuff, without having to endure douchebags splurting out boring douchebag shit that means nothing to anyone except other douchebags who are trying to out-douchebag each other. She wants to shoot the shit about stuff like this:

That a world order predicated on domination’n’submission oppresses entire classes of people. That oppression is experienced by these classes of people as discrimination, violence, and hatred. That discrimination, violence and hatred are unhealthy and injurious. That a social revolution that obviates the domination’n’submission model will have the concomitant effects of liberating the oppressed classes and, it so happens, of neutralizing the arousal quotient of domination, rendering pornography obsolete.

That’s right. After the revolution, pornography will have all the allure of cleaning a lint trap. No dreaded “censorship” or “banning” required. It will resolve itself.

Posted in Announcements, Blogulation, Dear god what about the men?, Oppression Culture and Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society. Bite me, Chad.

As is her wont, spinster aunt continues writing about yesterday’s post

Published by Jill on June 8, 2010. 53 Comments

No time to post this morning, so I thought to mildly amuse by publishing a selection of reject-pile comments from the post I wrote yesterday. These were all authored, if you can believe it, by people who did not read the Guidelines for Commenters!

Yesterday’s little fillip of blaming rapture, you may recall, concerned an essay written by Scienceblogger Jason G Goldman in which he summarized, without “taking sides,” some studies on pornography. According to Goldman, the studies found that porn’s effects on its consumers isn’t really so bad.

That’s right. Dudes have actually conducted studies that show how oppressors don’t really seem to suffer too much from consuming the “product” (Goldman’s term for the graphic representation of women’s subjugation) of their oppression. No way, really? Privilege is totally awesome? Who knew?

Combining my analysis of the tone of Goldman’s essay (if it walks like an endorsement and talks like an endorsement …)* with the fact that he’d cherry-picked only “porn is pretty benign” studies, I concluded that this was yet another blob of misogynist science-prattle demonstrating the distressing degree of obliviousness that even educated men present when it comes to the meaning of ordinary patriarchy, men’s role in the oppression hierarchy, and their deficit of empathy with the oppressed classes. I also took the opportunity to openly mock one of Goldman’s commenters, a dick who exemplifies total dickness with his stated conviction that, because he likes consuming the graphic representation of rapes, there simply cannot be anything wrong with porn.

Meanwhile, other bloggers agreed. Goldman has since cracked under pressure and removed the post, which is too bad, since many of us have put an effort into making an example of it, pointing at it and laughing, focusing the rage of an angry mob upon it, etc. Goldman has since suggested, here and at Zuska’s (and maybe elsewhere, but how should I know; what am I, Google?), that his post was just an off-the-cuff little tiptoe down Sexology Lane, that he was completely unaware that pornography is a “divisive issue,” that he never intended to offend anyone, and he’s sorry.

“I haven’t yet – anywhere – stated what my opinions are, until now: I think that any normalization of the objectification of women or violence against women – even if the women portrayed are doing so ostensibly consensually – is not okay.

I, further, thought that it was reasonable to ask questions about the effects of a certain product, separately from the whether or not that product should be made in the first place. And I thought I could do so objectively. But, as Pal says, perhaps that is naive.

This is an incredibly divisive issue, for many reasons, and I unwittingly walked into a major battlefield without, as Pal says, the proper flashlight. And in doing so, I (unintentionally) offended a handful of people I care about, as well as many others, and for that, I apologize.”

Imagine inhabiting a universe where you are oblivious to the fact that pornography is controversial! Wait, is that it, up there? There, in the clouds! If I squint through my bile-colored trifocals, I think I can glimpse that happy world’s champagne waterslides and gumdrop toadstools and rainbow tacos and rape-free society! Scotty, beam me up! What’s that? It’s dudes-only? Blarg!

By the way, this blogger (who you can tell has been reading PZ Myers, because she uses the word “woo,” and also because she links to PZ Myers) thinks that, because I outed the deeply embedded antifeminist mores demonstrated by a dudely science blogger, that I am anti-science! Me! And after all I just went through to try to sell a skeptical faction of the Blametariat on the superior number one-ness of the scientific method! Some days it just doesn’t pay to turn off the Ab-Fab DVDs and get out of bed.

Anyway, I promised deleted comments, and deliver them I shall. And yes, I realize that when you publish deleted comments, they aren’t technically deleted anymore. So, without further ado, check out these psychotic remarks from “James,” some self-styled science-knob inquisitor:

I’m curious about this sentence: “There is a difference between banning porn and eradicating the demand for porn, a delicate nuance that no dude ever seems able to contemplate.” I assume you’re working from an assumption that the desire to see porn in men is largely, if not completely, fabricated by society? So then your objective would be weaning males of porn or the desire for visual sexual stimulation, which is a very invasive course of action regarding a group you don’t belong to. Obviously predicated on the idea that porn is entirely negative towards women, even when representing acts of consensual sex.

So I suppose my ultimate questions would be: what evidence you have that porn is negative? How you would design future double blind studies (longitudinal if you wish) that could demonstrate whether porn was ultimately good, bad, or neutral?

I fly into transports over the notion that redesigning the social order so that males no longer frolick unchecked in a culture of rape is “a very invasive course of action regarding a group you don’t belong to.” Like porn exists in a vacuum. Dude is oblivious that rape culture depends on the oppression of the group I do belong to. And then he demands scientific proof that oppression is bad! God, is there anything sexier than a domineering science-knob? I’ve got your longitudinal study right here, douchebag!

I had to chuck out this next comment from “Pearl” for its tragic antifeminist naivete.

Ok, Let me just say that as a woman, I love porn. It helps me get off. And I’m not going to lie, I don’t see it as an exploitation of women. I respect that most women have an opinion, and I’m not any authority to have much of one. All I’m saying is that you can’t tell a person that their opinion is wrong.

If a woman tells a man that his opinion is wrong she’s a feminist. If a man tells a woman that her opinion is wrong, he’s sexist. See the hypocrisy there? If we’re going to play the blame game here, I will openly say that feminists fucked it up for women. I love that we should be equal to men, but god damnit, I love a man who opens doors for me and pays for dinner. In fact, sometimes I expect it. Mr. Goldman here is simply stating a point. I don’t have the expertise to squash or agree with his argument. So women, Love y’all but get off your high horses. You are constantly bitching about how men are sexist, but what about you? You are also pretty fucking sexist.

I know I’m probably going to get bitched out and yelled at for having an opinion, but honestly I’m only stating an opinion. I think being overly feminist can also repress. Just keep it in mind ladies.

Newsflash, ladies! It is no longer permissible to tell a person that their opinion is wrong! I guess the Internet will be shutting down now.

Here’s an oldie but goodie:

Good luck finding a man.

Right back atcha, heteronormative moron dick!

Let us close with a sentiment popular among fucking douchebags, fetchingly and incomprehensibly encased in gratuitious ellipses.

… Well, I see we have the crazy feminist who thinks all men are evil over here, best to disregard…

This shit just writes itself.

Well, hold the fort, crazy feminist sexist ladies! I’ll be back soon with more No. 1 Science Information!

UPDATE: In an interesting gambit, Goldman has put his post back up, but it is not the original; this version is, he says, “stripped of speculation and editorializing” and begins with a soul-searching intro in which the author reflects on whether “the effects of a product can be separated from the question of the ethics of whether or not that product should be made in the first place.”

Referring to the spoils of human oppression as a “product” is a remarkable manifestation of patriarchotoxicity, and sorely chomps the chaps of all of us here at Savage Death Island.

_________________
* Q: Hey Twisty, what’s up with the ellipsis?
A: Trailing off into ’silence’ — i.e. leaving the end of the sentence up to the reader’s imagination — is called aposiopesis, and may be indicated legitimately by an ellipsis. Like any rhetorical device, the use of aposiopesis is restricted to professionals who are trained in its judicious and sparing application.

Posted in Blogulation, Knobjectivism, Men Hate You, Rape Culture and Sexploitation. Bite me, Chad.

Science dudes declare porn good, support claim with Danish graphs, flawed reasoning

Published by Jill on June 7, 2010. 177 Comments

The extent to which dudes just don’t get it fucking blows my lobe.

While readin’ along over at the Scienceblogs, I encountered an essay entitled Just How Bad Is Porn, Anyway? Try to contain your surprise; it was authored by a dude.

Whenever I see a science dude begin to muse on the philosophic value of pornography, my lobe starts to tingle. What are the odds the guy can stop himself from making with the wink-wink/nudge-nudge? I immediately begin shuffling through my desk drawer for the blamehammer. It’s a foregone conclusion that I’ll be needing it in short order.

In the afore-referenced essay, Scienceblogger Jason G Goldman of The Thoughtful Animal, who files the piece under “Sexual Behavior and Mating,” takes it upon himself to summarize the findings of a few studies on the effects of pornography on human happiness. He does this in response to troubling news that an anti-porn group is convening in Boston to discuss an action plan for dismantling porn culture.

Weeeelll, it isn’t long before Goldman says

So clearly this is a complicated issue. What’s a responsible scientist to do? An experiment, of course. I know: I’ll watch a TON of porn, and then see if I become sexist or racist, or feel any more aggressive than baseline.

Hahaha! An experiment where you have to watch tons of porn! That’s a funny joke! It reminds me of real sexology experiments. Like the ones where subjects are naked and “invasive probes and electrodes” are inserted into their vaginas. Those researchers are, of course, totally objective professionals when it comes to getting grant money to make porn right in their own labs.

But back to Goldman and his objective overview of porn studies:

Let’s make a few things clear: I am not taking sides in the issue of whether or not pornography should be censored or restricted (but most forms of censorship make me very uncomfortable). This is meant to review some of the research that’s been conducted on whether or not there is a reliable causal relationship between pornography and various Bad Things. [boldface Goldman's]

Translation: “I totally think pornography should not be censored or restricted. Let’s look at some studies that don’t prove anything bad about porn.”

Goldman presents some Danish research showing that there are more Danes who love porn than Danes who don’t love porn, and some research showing that porn has a positive impact on sexual satisfaction with Croatian vanillas but not on that of kinky Croatians, and some American research showing that dudes who use a lot of porn aren’t necessarily all that violent, unless they were fucked up already.

You know, the usual. Pornography is “free speech.” Pornography is only harmful to the user when he is a deviant perv to begin with. Male aggression is associated with buttloads of porn use only in a select few previously-messed-up douchebags. ‘Normal’ porn consumers, i.e. ‘most’ men (fully 98% of all men, apparently, and 80% of all women), are happy, healthy, well-adjusted, and brimming with contentment. It’s the kook-and-psychopath minority out there who get all compulsive on your ass, or who act out all rapey, giving well-adjusted exploiters a bad name.

Goldman cites no research on the effects of pornography on the pornulated women themselves, or of porn culture on women’s status within the sexbot continuum.

In fact, he seems to suggest that there are but two possible stances on porn. You’re either for it, or you’re for banning it. He omits to consider other, more elegant schemes. Such as the solution we advocate here on Savage Death Island, wherein pornography is made, not illegal, but obsolete, via elimination of the sex class, which may be accomplished by feminist revolt. There is a difference between banning porn and eradicating the demand for porn, a delicate nuance that no dude ever seems able to contemplate. A life without porn is not to be borne! Any feminist who suggests otherwise is an irrational kook.

Like all men who claim to have a bunch of sex-poz feminist BFFs and who consider that access to porn is guaranteed under the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women, Goldman doesn’t appear to grasp that patriarchy — a social order predicated on the oppression of women as a sex class — is actually real, and that as such, ours is a culture of domination wherein the ‘art form’ known as pornography is the graphic representation of rape.

The comments on Goldman’s post, proceeding from enlightened science-minds, exhibit the usual unsophisticated grasp of women’s oppression.*

– Why all the fuss about porn? Anti-porn activists should redirect their anti-porn energy to fixing the BP oil leak.
– Porn is noble “sex work.”
– Sex work isn’t exploitation because women make a shit-ton of money doing it.
– Porn stars are famous, and famous is good.
– If porn is so bad, how do you explain Celebrity Porn Star X, who has her own production company and is rich?
– Porn is an important “safety valve” that allows everyman’s inner rapist to get off, no harm no foul, thus preventing real rapes.
– If we de-stigmatized “sex work,” we could keep porn available
– If we regulated prostitution, we could keep hookers available

These are all textbook patriarchy-denier dillies, to be sure (I look forward to reading the counter-arguments in the Blame-a-teria). However, my favorite comments in the series are by one cs shelton. Here is a mansplainer of the first water. How breathtakingly predictable, how automatically autocratic he is when he informs feminist commenter Skeptifem that she is “emotional” and therefore “doesn’t reflect reality or practicality or human rights or even feminism in a reasonable way.” What did Skeptifem say to incur this scolding?

Often pornography IS violence against women, so asking if porn causes that is a silly question. Normalizing that situation is horrible. Paying for a luxury item with such an immense human cost is deplorable. No porn is worth it, and I don’t think people should be free to buy something that causes the rape of women. What is crazy is that the rape of a woman can become speech if someone takes a picture. People act like the rape of women in porn isn’t enough, that it has to spread to other women for it to matter.

Yup, that Skeptifem sure is in denial about reality and human rights and feminism, there. Good thing old cs shelton, feminism expert and pornoisseur, is on hand to set her straight. But it gets even better. Dude goes on to categorically assert, based exclusively on his personal experience as a pornsick horndog teen, that “the paleolithic venus was NOT a goddess figure. She was a masturbation aid.”

He alludes, apparently, to the Venus of Willendorf, the XXX-rated statuette believed to have once adorned the dashboard of Fred Flintstone’s Rockmobile.

cs shelton, who lives furtively in his mom’s basement on Norman Rockwell Street in a TV version of 1953, goes on to make the astonishing assertion that “porn is barely tolerated in the USA.”

Whaaa?

But the best is yet to come. Behold cs shelton’s final arguments in support of the Pornography Preservationists of America. They are the old moldy classics.

– he is a feminist, so he is exempt from accusations of sexism
– anti-porn is the same as “sex negative”, and sex-negativity is a “subjugator of women”
– because the demand for porn is “so overpowering,” any attempt to eradicate it would be “insane” and also “BAD FOR WOMEN”
– his girlfriend likes porn

and, finally, I kid you not,

I invented porn with no outside influence (same as masturbation) when I was 11. I drew naked people. I figured out what felt good. It came to me naturally, and to trash porn as inherently evil or anti-woman is to say that a natural part of who I am sexually is bad and horrible. So no, I ain’t having it.

Oh dear; cs shelton’s reasoning is an unfortunate mis-application of a No. 1 Math Property, the dear old Transitive Property of Equality.** It works great when you’re talking conditionally about objective values represented by letters of the alphabet, but not so much when applied to questions of ethics, human oppression, and male entitlement. To wit:

Porn is who he is, and who he is is good, therefore porn is good.

Also, he personally and spontaneously created porn, and anything he crapped out at the age of 11 is natural and holy, therefore porn is natural and holy.

You can’t make this shit up.

Kill me now.

_________________
*Except for one or two comments like Zuska’s, who excellently remarks with a curled lip,

“Oh, porn is awesome. Soooooo empowerful! I’ll bet every d00d dreams of being the hot chick lying there on the floor/desk/couch/bed/whatever, waiting for the money shot to splatter all over one’s face. No?”

** Join me as I harken back to 4th grade: If a=b, and b=c, then a=c

Venus of Willendorf photo: Wikipedia. < http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/VenusWillendorf.jpg >

Posted in Blogulation, Junk Studies, Knobjectivism, Lobe-blowing, Men Hate You, Number 1 Science Information, Rape Culture and Sexploitation. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt reveals her inner Firestone

Published by Jill on May 27, 2010. 93 Comments

Holy bajoly! The discussion on one of my recent posts has taken quite an unexpected turn. It went from the idea that women’s history has been erased/co-opted by the dominant culture to the idea that — I’m not even kidding — science is bad!

Unfortunately I have to go and see a girl about a horse, so time is short, but here’s the gist of the much better post I had intended to write on this topic (it was going to have more jokes, and probably an unforgettable new coined term, so it’s too bad, but there it is):

Science is bad, apparently, because men dominate the field. Also, women are better than men because we “have an intuitive understanding of nature and the processes involved.”

Concludes this commenter:

All the paper that men need to record history that they destroy, to transmit information, that we used to tell by stories and metaphors, is just a waste. They are just inefficient. It’s annoying because I always understood how bees and flies and some birds and bats flew, intuitively and it is only in 2005 that male scientists begin to understand it, with high tech equipment. It’s annoying also because they claim we never knew it, when Nietche(sp) wrote about it, the oscillation. It’s soooo dumb.

Women’s intuition? Seriously?

Again I say it: holy bajoly!

Intuition is unproven conjecture based on this, that, or the other thing. As blamer Nails put it:

Science is about understanding that your intuition is not always right and that the way to really *know* that it was involves testing and repeatability and good structure for experiments. You can tell me you intuitively know whatever you want to, but it doesn’t prove it at all.

Science is a process by which one discovers actual truth. Have Pinkfaced Captains of Industry and their Dude Nation minions subverted the scientific method for evil? Sure. Does their having done that invalidate the method itself, to the extent that goddessy ladies should pooh-pooh the whole idea in favor of some kind of magic lady-worship cult, the centerpiece of which is faith in “feelings”?

It is unlikely that the best place to find truth-n-beauty is at a matriarchy convention in San Marcos where the subject of the keynote speech is “My Journey with Sekhmet Goddess of Power and Change” and afterward there’s a drum circle.

Patriarchy is the problem, not science. Science does not oppress women. Dude culture oppresses women. I’m not advocating “science equality,’ either. I’m advocating — as always — liberation from oppression. Is anything more liberating than truth-n-beauty? I ask you.

Scientific discovery leading to human-friendly technology is the only way we’re gonna get out of the dark ages. For example, here at the lab at Spinster HQ we’re working on an anti-patchouli ray which we fully expect will change the way we smell public spaces forever more.

Posted in Blogulation, Magical Mysteries from Godtown, Number 1 Science Information and Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society. Bite me, Chad.

Gentle reminder of the week

Published by Jill on May 26, 2010. 41 Comments

It seems there may be some confusion regarding the degree of frequency with which patriarchy blamers are expected to comment on a given post. Thus do I trot out of mothballs the relevant passage from our award-nominated manifesto, Patriarchy-Blaming the Twisty Way: Guidelines for Commenters:

If you find yourself commenting more than 2 or 3 times on a given post, please consider shutting the old piehole.

Following this simple advice will prevent the comments section from becoming a bottomless pit of dreadful stream-of-consciousness-ness. Thank you and carry on.

Posted in Announcements and Blogulation. Bite me, Chad.