Archive for the 'The Entertainment Industrial Complex' Category

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.

Profiles in Patriarchy: “The Slain Masseuse”

Published by Jill on May 23, 2010. 31 Comments

Good lard! TV! I ask you. They should exhibit TV right next to the Old Testament in the Great Moments in Patriarchy-Replication Technology Museum.

I just watched half of a true-crime-umentary: “48 Hours | Mystery: Seven Days of Rage: The Craigslist Killer.” I would say that the subject of this true-crime-umentary was Craigslist killer Philip Markoff, except that it wasn’t. The real star of the show was Dead Hookers and Kinky Sex.

That’s right, almost the entire program was devoted to sensationalizing the killer’s victims, prostituted women described variously as “the Las Vegas escort,” “a stripper” and “the slain masseuse” who had placed “erotic services” ads on Craigslist. Here is how murder victim Julissa Brisman is portrayed:

“What we know about Julissa before this was that she was a party girl. She was living the high life in New York,” said Cramer. “She was a young, beautiful girl in New York City and she took full advantage of her youth and her beauty to, you know, live it up.”

Cut to a bunch of photographs of “aspiring model”/”slain masseuse” Brisman in various states of poutiness and undress. The pornulated photos were taken by a super-gross photographer dude who “was helping Julissa in her career.”

Let me tell you this one thing. Gross old dudes who photograph young women in lingerie to “help them in their career,” and then give the photos to “48 Hours” after the women are murdered in high-profile Beedy Ess Em cases can kiss my entire ass.

But I digress.

Just in case there were members of the viewing audience who didn’t get sufficiently off on photos of dead women in porn outfits, or who enjoy sexually-charged racist epithets, “48 Hours | Mystery” threw in Vanity Fair reporter Maureen Orth’s observations about Craigslist’s sex section:

“Craigslist has a huge number of categories – M for T, men for trannies; T for M, trannies for men; rice queens, white guys who only like Asians; burritos, white guys who only like Latinos. I mean, these are all up there, all the time.”

Nice. But shit, I digress again.

My hide is particularly chapped by an interview with victim #1, whom Markoff kidnaped, terrorized, and robbed at gunpoint. Right off the bat the focus is on her boobs, on her line of work and how “lucrative” it is, and on how she was askin’ for it by booking herself into a swanky hotel as a free agent hooker.

[TV sexploitation sexpert Joe] Moura said that by acting as her own boss, Tricia was increasing her risk.

“If there’s a street prostitute, she’s gonna have a pimp down the street or across the street on the corner who’s protecting her. Somebody using Craigslist getting a fancy hotel in Boston, she’s on her own.”

So ladies, remember; if you’re gonna work the classier hotels, you’d better get yourself a pimp to “protect” you. Otherwise you might come down with a terminal case of slain masseuse.

Posted in Mass Media, Rape Culture, Sexploitation and The Entertainment Industrial Complex. Bite me, Chad.

Profiles in Patriarchy: “The Girl”

Published by Jill on May 21, 2010. 84 Comments

No secrets will be revealed when I say that I watch television with depressing regularity, and that this habit chaps my hide a mile wide, but I can’t stop, because the carnage endlessly fascinates. Even the supposedly feminist shows (“30 Rock”) feature, not real feminism, but only bogus patriarchy-marketing TV feminism.

Bogus patriarchy-marketing TV feminism is when the lead character is a woman, but she’s doing a man’s job with a bunch of other men, only backwards, in high heels. And sexxxy.

The exception is Jada Pinkett Smith, non-threateningly depicted doing a woman’s job, but with attitude: she stars as a caring, nurturing (but sexxxy) head nurse on a mediocre hospital drama. Smith’s is a proper female minority character who lives to serve. She bosses the honky doctors around a little, but when she bucks the system it’s always for her suffering patients, and never for herself.

During the last TV season, the trend was toward saucy female leads as blonde cops with relationship problems and buttloads of sex appeal. In “The Closer,” Kyra Sedgewick — horrible South Carolina accent and comical chocolate addiction complete — simultaneously heads a homicide squad and amuses her FBI husband with endearing feminine airhead antics while dressed as June Cleaver. In “In Plain Sight” Mary Somebody plays Mary Somebody Else, a US marshall who has triple-X muchacho-on-gringa sex with her smokin hot Telemundo soap opera star boyfriend. Holly Hunter is every biker’s raunchy fantasy chick in “Saving Grace,” one of those shows where a Christian-type God is a wisecracking mentor character.

Despite featuring women in title roles, these shows all feature male knight-in-shining-armor characters, dudely authority figures, scenes wherein women are chained by the wrists in dungeons, and dialog that alludes to the female rape/murder victim as “the girl.”

The girl, the girl, the girl. It is beyond insufferable when TV cops allude to female rape/murder victims as “the girl.” “The girl” is a convention enjoying huge popularity since the invention of TV cops, and before. Why, just this morning, in another hot flash-induced state of TCM-watching insomnia, I saw 20 minutes of a godawful 1956 western called “The Last Hunt,” in which the central theme is two white guys, one “good” and one “bad,” fighting to the death over ownership of a kidnaped Native American “girl.” This character appears as a silent prop in practically every scene, has like 2 lines, and is named in the credits only as “Indian Girl” (but is played by a smokin hot honky actress). Every line of dudely dialogue includes the phrase “he stole my woman.” Dude Nation translation: questions of good and evil are questions for white men; whoever ends up with the captive mute squaw wins.

Speaking of TCM and Native Americans, currently they’re running a series called “Race and Hollywood: Native American Images On Film.”

They get a UCLA professor to say a few introductory words about how patriarchal 20th-century Hollywood portrayed Native Americans and pretty much invented the damaging stereotypes that persist to this day, then they show John Ford’s “Stagecoach” (Geronimo’s on the warpath!) to illustrate the point. That’s swell, but what drives me nuts about these things — they’ve done similar series with gays and Asians — is that they seem to think it absolves them of the crime of perpetuating racist propaganda. For a week or two they pretend to support a critical approach to these horrible, bigoted movies, but then for the rest of the year they show’em over and over again, without UCLA professors of Native American Studies introducing them, without offering the slightest critical analysis, and without compunction or apology or chagrin. In fact, if anything, the tone of the presenters toward Hollywood’s joyful immortalization of honky oppression is downright celebratory. And of course TCM completely ignores the massive sexism and misogyny that oozes out of nearly every “classic movie” ever made (see my essay on “How To Murder Your Wife.”).

Mang, I gotta get some sleep.

Posted in Mass Media, The Entertainment Industrial Complex and all old movies suck. Bite me, Chad.

“The Czech-born supermodel teamed her Dolce and Gabbana LBD with bondage heels.”

Published by Jill on May 17, 2010. 100 Comments

Images In Modern Patriarchy Quiz

Match the following captions to the celebrity red carpet collages below (or suggest your own):

Caption 1. “The world is my oyster.”

Caption 2. “I am paid to be your fantasy but nevertheless I feel violated by your relentless, prurient gaze.” (Alternately: “Fine, take the boobs, but you’re not getting anywhere near the pussy.”)

Collage A

Collage B

____________________________

[Photos nicked from the following websites:

http://dimp-thegossipboy.blogspot.com/2009_06_01_archive.html

http://www.popsugar.co.uk/Photos-2009-Brit-Awards-Red-Carpet-Including-Fearne-Cotton-Alexa-Chung-Alexandra-Burke-Holly-Willoughby-2829300

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1277819/Cannes-Film-Festival-2010-Robin-Hood-stars-Russell-Crowe-Cate-Blancett-jet-in.html

http://profashionelle.com/clive-davis-pre-grammy-party-2008-celebrity-red-carpet-fashion/

http://www.insidesocal.com/outinhollywood/2008/09/emmy-odds-and-ends.html

http://www.thehothits.com/news/13568/guy-googles-'i-hate-guy-sebastian',-shocked-at-results!!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1278893/Cannes-Film-Festival-2010-Eva-Herzigova-plays-sultry-lead-role-lace-dress.html#ixzz0oCA3ZHIe

http://www.popsugar.com.au/tag/nicholas+hoult

http://images.eonline.com/eol_images/Entire_Site/20080812/425.cruise.downey.mcconaughey2.081208.jpg

http://lounge.cwtv.com/showthread.php?t=558132&page=3]

Posted in Femininity, Oppression Culture, Rape Culture, Sexploitation and The Entertainment Industrial Complex. Bite me, Chad.

The Hot Flash Chronicles

Published by Jill on April 18, 2010. 47 Comments

Big sky
View, from a 40-foot crane, of a crane operator, and of my fascinating roof.

Bizarre hot flash anecdote of the day:

The time: 3:30 in the morning. Spinster aunt was awakened from moist and fitful sleep by hot flash accompanied by usual aura of hopelessness and impending doom (by the way, the Spinstitute for Post-Hysterectomy and Oophalectomy Studies is researching this fucking doom-aura: please contact the department if you, too, have been rudely separated from your reproductive organs and regularly experience the Despondent Melancholic Aura along with your hot flashes).

Anyway. Unable to go back to sleep, I flipped on the TV. The show was PBS workhorse “This Old House.” Some strawberry blonde dude was converting a purlin into a hex-jig, or installing a new blart box in an old neffit; I don’t really remember on accounta I was in a stupor at the time. All I know is, I watched through swollen, sleep-deprived eyes as the strawberry dude effortlessly pulled heat-sensitive galvanized conduit through a wooden alloy breezeway and had the new helicopter landing pad or low-voltage window-washer all up and running in about three minutes flat. Impressive!

The next thing I knew, the phone was ringing. It was my mom, who thinks nothing of calling me at 7 in the morning with results from “Dancing With the Stars.” However, this morning her news was even less dire: some shady ‘collection agency’ was threatening to kneecap her unless she could convince me to call’em up and give’em a blank check. My mom did not grasp the scamminess of this dealio. So would I please call them?

“Chin up, Mom!” I said. “Don’t let’em take ya without a fight!”

The next thing I knew, there was a young assistant TV producer named Tristyn on my doorstep.* This was fairly unusual. I have erected fences and laid land mines and taken other antisocial measures specifically to keep assistant Tristyns off my doorstep. But still, here she was. Having sprinted the mile or so from my front gate, she was moist. Would I mind giving her the gate code so the rest of the crew could get in?

It all came rushing back. It turns out that last month, in a moment of weakness, I foolishly agreed to let some home improvement show come around to videotape footage of my rainwater collection system, which system is apparently endlessly fascinating. I had forgotten all about it, because along with hot flashes and fucking auras of doom, my memory banks have been battered, deep-fried, and served with blueberry mustard on accounta all the chemo and radiation. But the zero hour had arrived, and here, of a bright spring morn, were a bunch of TV-people, infesting the Spinster Compound with cameras, lights, on-air talent, and, yes, a 40-foot crane.

Tristyn introduced me to the crew. They were were all very pleasant (Tristyn had even brought me a coffee), which immediately made me suspicious. I found myself giving one of’em the old eyeball with particular intensity. He was handsome and outgoing. He was genial and sparkly. He had strawberry blonde hai– hey, wait a minute! Things had taken a sinister turn indeed. This was, in fact, the same exact dude from the PBS hot flash incident a scant 4 hours before!

Now that television personalities have begun squirting out of the TV into my living room to exude good-lookingness, congeniality, and a convincing interest in my roof gutters, I am going to have to take security up a notch around here. I have instructed Phil to install a robotic machine gun, and of course, to double up on the Gilligan’s Island-style camouflaged spring-loaded net traps. The gate sentries have orders to shoot to kill any 40-foot cranes.

Well, that’s the end of the anecdote.

____________________________
*As a patriarchy-blaming side-note: young Tristyn was the only woman in the production crew. It was her job to run herd on 5 adult males, and to mediate between them and the outside world. Naturally it was she who had been sent on foot to traverse the mile of rough terrain between the gate and my front door, and who later was dispatched to the nearest town to pick up lunch, a hour’s drive away. While she was gone everyone stopped working and lapsed into a coma. She schlepped a giant notebook full of production and travel-related paperwork and intimated to me that her head was about to explode.

Posted in El Rancho Deluxe and The Entertainment Industrial Complex. Bite me, Chad.

More Adventures with the Antithesis of Enlightenment

Published by Jill on February 23, 2010. 148 Comments

Over at Gizmodo, Dude Nation 2.0 is having a little tantrum. It seems Apple recently removed from its App Store something called Wobble, “an app that adds animated jiggles to photo breasts.” Since then, in a kind of Night of the Long iKnives, a veritable buttload of cheezy porn apps have been purged. Including the popular Suicide Girls Flip Strip app, which, as everyone knows, “actually empowers women.”

NOOOOOOO! Not the woman-empowering Suicide Girls Flip-Strip app! I just bought a new anti-jizz cover for my boyfriend’s iPhone!

The news, if you are a Male Aged 18-to-34, or if you are the purveyor of anti-jizz iPhone covers, is “devastating.”

[A] developer who talked to Apple says the future of iPhone titillation is bleak. Really bleak. Like no racy photos, no suggestive language, no bathing suits bleak. [cite]

This story is repellent on many levels. Because I am your Number 1 Quality Internet pal, I will share three of them with you.

Repellent Level One: Gizmodo dorks reveal without compunction that they have no idea what the fuck pornography really is.

Repellent Level Two: Apple, in an effort to assuage the jerkoffus interruptus of its reported 5 million Suicide Girls customers, is naturally blaming the ban on women who complained about “‘degrading’ and ‘objectionable’ content.”

Repellent Level Three: Blamers feel compelled to email me about it, thus forcing to me to read Gizmodo and contemplate anti-jizz iPhone protectors.

Naturally, Apple, in taking a hatchet to its greasier apps, has not actually had an attack of moral indignation or even of good taste; they haven’t, for instance, banned Playboy or the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit app. No, they’ve merely gotten hip to the fact that their rapidly swelling reputation for hawking low-rent smut is adversely affecting revenues. But instead of just copping to that, Apple has elected to scapegoat those pesky women complainers. That’s right. Humorless, Puritanical feminists supposedly whined so loudly about being offended and degraded by iBoobs that Apple just couldn’t ignore’em, and out went Wobble faster than you can snap a G-string.

Which, if it were true, would be the first time any major corporation has ever listened to feminists about anything, let alone pornography. Apple, in fact, not only doesn’t listen to feminists, it doesn’t listen to anybody. But this well-known and oft-joked-about fact doesn’t prevent the Gizmodoids from casting aspersions on killjoy women for wrecking their dudely access to mobile wanking on the iPhone platform.

So once again social conservatives ruin it for all of the normal people. [cite]

and

Degrading and objectionable? [...] How about we have some thicker fucking skin? [cite]

Looking at porn is what “normal people” do, and women just can’t take a joke.

Further aspersions are cast on Steve Jobs for pandering to an inconsequential minority of “moralistic women”; Jobs is apparently a communist, a mommy, Big Brother, someone who needs to “grow up,” and is “inspired” by Hitler, all at once.

Not unexpectedly, the Gizmodo comments section is crammed with sweaty, anguished wankers who cannot distinguish between pornography and sex, and who believe that an anti-porn viewpoint is nothing but old-fashioned knee-jerk godbag pearlclutchery.

This is all a throwback to American puritanism that was extinguished in Europe long ago, but people in the US just can’t seem to handle the human body. Violence is fine, but sex is bad. [cite]

Wait, what? People in the US just can’t seem to handle the human body? Jesus on a bed of lettuce, has this guy ever seen television?

Other commenters aver that Apple’s “censorship” is a slippery slope. They predict that once the company puts the kibosh on “titty apps,” they’ll have no compunction about banning other excellent stuff. Check out this zinger, zinged by an apparent National Geographic subscriber who shows he’s no stranger to the December 2009 issue:

The Hadza people of central Tanzania still live as hunter-gatherers, unchanged over 10,000 years, with no calendar, rules, numbers above “3,” or awareness of the outside world. If enough of them complain, will Apple remove its calendar, maps, and calculator apps? [cite]

Ouch, now that’s one bad-ass anthropology-based zinger!

And you gotta love the egalitarians:

I just never understood why a womens chest is censored in all forms of media but a man’s chest is not. [cite]

and

Women can also entertain themselves with a picture of a Banana Hammock. [cite]

Whoa, Capital Letters! That must be one Entertaining Hammock!

Other commenters are acting all supercilious and mature:

Who cares, really? Do you want to be ‘that guy’ with the softcore porn apps right there are your iPhone’s dashboard/homepage/whatever? Fucking open Safari for all your porn needs, both stills and video. [cite]

DNOCD.* An iPhone user should have standards. It’s tacky to have porn on your phone; just fucking use the Internet like a fucking normal person.

Although dudes may make fine and snobbish distinctions between the social acceptability of this or that mode of smut delivery, nobody is arguing that there’s anything wrong with pornography itself. Porn is, in fact, regarded as a dude’s birthright. It occurs to precisely zero of these petulant Gizmodo knobs that demanding 24/7 access to graphic representations of rape, whether on an iPhone app or the regular old Internet, is fundamentally atavistic, misogynist, and violent.

Thus must I agree with the Gizmodo poster who observed that the lot of them are a bunch of whiny chicken-chokers.

[Thanks, Julie. I think.]

_____________________
* Definitely not our class, dear.

Posted in Dear god what about the men?, Men Hate You, Rape Culture, Sexploitation, The Entertainment Industrial Complex and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.

Is your pout plump enough?

Published by Jill on February 22, 2010. 115 Comments

Oh my fucking god, behold yet another story in a major American newspaper wherein the writer gets all verklempt about this wack new burlesque craze, just fifteen short years after the first quasi-transgressive hipsters disentombed it from its well-deserved mothball crypt in the misogynist perv-pile. Any excuse to interview a semi-nude chick with a stripper name, I guess. These Yay! Burlesque! stories seem to appear every couple of months. They always present burlesque as some kind of exciting new art form the practitioners of which are all empowered feminists who are totally in touch with their sexuality.

Here is what Miss Lily Verlaine, Seattle burlesque artist, has to say about about feminism.

“I enjoy the trappings of femininity. I enjoy wearing dresses, I like silk and I like high heels, eyelashes and big hair. It’s fun for me. I don’t think it’s un-feminist or that I’m any more or less of a woman for accentuating certain aspects of my femininity.”

I choose femininity! For me! Because what could be more feminist than choosing something?

“I find it very feminist and very exciting when a woman decides how to portray herself. Any woman being her own agent, being her own director, being her own stylist and her own voice is always feminist.”

What could be more exciting than a woman deciding to portray herself as something? Especially when she decides to portray herself as a male fantasy, am I right?

“‘For a long time, I wasn’t interested in nail-polish and makeup and all that stuff because I could be spending my time doing things in the community,’ she recalls. However, Verlaine found that once the dresses, furs, heels and makeup followed her offstage, people began to treat her better, men especially.”

Well, whaddya know. Appeasing the oppressor vs. “doing things in the community”: it’s a no-brainer!

“‘If I have my drag on, people compliment me. They say kind things. The interactions are night and day,’ she says.”

People: “We didn’t think much of you, Miss Lily Verlaine, before you started dressing like a hooker. But now that you’ve demonstrated your willingness to conform by defining yourself in terms of male desire, we think you’re awesome. Can we buy you a Scotch?”

Miss Lily Verlaine: “Gosh, thanks! This beats the shit out of trying to be taken seriously!”

Pull yourself together, woman! Not even the hipsters think burlesque is hip anymore. And even if it were, femininity is unenlightened, and also dumb. And even if it weren’t, all that makeup crap totally causes cancer! There’s mercury in mascara!

But maybe life just isn’t worth living if men don’t want to fuck you; what’s a little cancer compared to the infinite rewards of sex appeal?

Speaking of makeup, I just found out there exists a species of cosmetic called “lip plumper.” Lip plumper is an irritant that, when applied to one’s “pout,” makes it swell up, the better to affect that sexy, just-been-punched-in-the-face look that dudes love. This poor girl, apparently of her own volition, makes her own lip plumper out of cayenne and infant butt-cream.

Kill me now.

______________________
Photo: still from “How To Make Homemade Lip Plumper” by SecretLifeOfABioNerd on YouTube.

Posted in Art is my LIFE, Femininity, Mass Media, Sexploitation, The Beauty Ultimatum, The Entertainment Industrial Complex and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Yesterday. Bite me, Chad.

Grinning moron hates wife

Published by Jill on February 6, 2010. 175 Comments

Patriarchy-blaming is a crappy business. The Internet feminist must beware the fine line, or slippery slope, or pot-calling-kettle-black, or hoist-on-own-petard or what have you, when aiming the Super Spinster Truth-Ray at stuff. Attention must be paid to the potential stinkiness of one’s own role in the proceeding. Care must be taken to inspect the fists for ham. Sometimes, denouncing a particular instance of exploitation produces unwanted side-effects. Ethical concerns. Knots in the lobe. Sensations of inner grubbiness. Such that, when the denunciation is completed and the sun sets on another day of blaming, instead of writing, with the usual glowing satisfaction, “Dear Diary, today I exposed some pernicious culture-of-oppression shit for what it is, goddammit!” one is obliged to say “Crap, I think I just participated in misogyny most foul.”

The blaming goal is to expose oppression without compounding it with one’s own voyeurism, but this can be pretty difficult when dealing with subject matter that is by definition dependent upon — and therefore inherently sensitive to — the public gaze. I allude, of course, to the subject-victims of pornography. How do you write, “Here is a graphic representation of our culture’s hatred of women, and this is why I think so” without re-injuring the victim during the course of your argument? Is the pornulated woman to be made a casualty of feminist analysis in addition to her primary violation? Is a woman, once pornulated, swept away into some skeezy two-dimensional purgatory to remain there forever?

These issues are looming large down at Spinster HQ at the moment, and have been ever since that dangole chump PhysioProf hipped me to the existence of an extremely disturbing website. Maybe you’ve already seen it? It’s the “crying wife” website. In summary: asshole tapes wife when she cries piteously at movies, asshole mocks and laughs at tearful wife, asshole puts videos on YouTube, asshole’s website becomes popular. It’s not pornography in the fetishy sex-smut tradition, but it is definitely the graphic representation of dudely woman-hatin’.

Just Google “crying wife.” It’s the first result.

Not realizing what I was in for, I watched one of the many videos. In this video the woman reacts to the ending of “Star Wars.” I do not exaggerate when I say that it caused my jaw to hang open quite a bit further than usual. Also, my eyes started twitching, and I experienced the nasty sensation of self-loathing that I suspect must afflict all losers when they do loser-y shit.

The woman becomes weirdly and inconsolably emotional, yeah, but my slackjaw was occasioned not by her piteous, painful sobbing, but by her grinning asshole husband goading her on. That’s right, when she actually stops sobbing, he intentionally re-exacerbates her sadness by inviting her to remember sad scenes in the film. He also makes a big fucking point of saying that it is so hilarious to pimp her on the Internet as she experiences this extended moment of private weirdness and acute vulnerability. His tone as videographer can be summarized as “I invite you to point and laugh as I proudly make the lovable simpleton I’m married to cry and cry over stupid shit.”

As PhysioProf wrote in his email, “the sheer gratuitous pointlessness of the cruelty is shocking.”

The husband-dude’s laffy obliviousness adds a whole nother layer of crapulence, but it’s obvious he knows on some level that he’s exploiting her, because he’s got a whole FAQ dedicated to explaining how he isn’t exploiting her. First he makes a hi-fucking-larious joke about how she’s insane “only 4 days out of the month ;-)” [sic]. Then he makes his argument, which can can be boiled down to three points. One, it isn’t exploitation because he just can’t help laughing at his wife. Two, his wife “thinks it’s funny” and is “able to laugh at herself afterwards.” Three, it isn’t exploitation because he says it isn’t. He “loves [her] to death and thinks she’s the cutest girl in the world!” Also, “She’s a good sport and we all love her :)”.

Well, that makes it okay, then!

I’ve wanted to complain about this for a couple of days, but the idea of my own complicity in propagating the virus and contributing to the sobsploitation has made me queasy. It still does make me queasy. I have attempted to mitigate my quease by omitting to link to the website, but I have to admit that the astonishing degree of misogyny displayed by this loving husband moron has to be seen to be believed.

Posted in Lobe-blowing, Men Hate You, The Entertainment Industrial Complex and Ways In Which the Internet Sucks. Bite me, Chad.

Original iPad joke

Published by Jill on January 28, 2010. 29 Comments

Remember this vid from the Jerktassic Epoch?

Jokes about menstruation are hilarious because menstruation is gross and alluding to it is fucking transgressive.

Posted in Oppression Culture, The Entertainment Industrial Complex, The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Yesterday and Ways in Which the Internet Is a Hoot. Bite me, Chad.

Cheap frills: spinster aunt views child beauty pageant on TV

Published by Jill on January 13, 2010. 75 Comments
Remind you of anyone?

Remind you of anyone?

This dude is charged with murdering a woman unfortunate enough to have married him — she documented his violent episodes in her diary — and the Beeb reports that she had a “volatile personality”?

!

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In other antifeminist news, yesterday the satellite dish at Spinster HQ received a program called “Little Miss Perfect.” This turned out to be a reality show about women who have internalized the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women to the extent that they embrace an astonishing hobby. The hobby is the competitive display of their female children, whom they trick out in the most extreme, sexualized feminine drag imaginable, at an event called the Little Miss Perfect Pageant. Cameras follow around two young hopefuls and their mothers as they practice “wow-wear” dance routines, rent cheezy dresses, and glam up for the competition. Like all reality shows, the subtext of “Little Miss Perfect” is “Get a load of these weirdos!”

Of passing interest: the Little Miss Perfect Pageant is governed by a feminine male emcee. He is the only male character in the show. He sings a song about dreams coming true to the tots as they contort themselves into the celebrated “pretty feet” pose. I experience a momentary pang of prurient curiosity about this slightly sinister dude, whose degraded circumstances I perceive as dangling somewhere between bathos and pathos. What bizarre fusion of the tragic and the mundane might lead a girlyman to wind up singing syrupy ballads to creepy-looking kids at Little Miss Perfect pageants in meeting-rooms at Marriott hotels in red states? I guess I’ll never know.

Of course, now he’s on national satellite TV in stunning high-def, so I suppose it’s a moot point.

Meanwhile, the kids are on stage, gleaming in “eveningwear”: yards of gem-studded organza, full makeup, false eyelashes, spray tans, giant wigs, acrylic nails, and fake teeth. They look like they were dipped in a mixture of glucose and polyurethane, polished with an orbital waxer, and finished off with a couple of cans of Aquanet. They are 8-year-old proto-pole-dancing virgins with unceasingly bared teeth who shake their moneymakers and wink come-hitherly at the judges.

Fortunately, the gaudy spectacle did not blow my entire tiny mind, for I am acquainted with the child pageant phenomenon. The library at Spinster HQ contains a pink coffeetable book entitled High Glitz: The Extravagant World of Child Beauty Pageants. It’s full-o Susan Anderson’s lurid photographs of teensy beauty queens. In the foreword to High Glitz a chappie named Robert Greene makes a statement with which I cannot quibble:

“We are not used to treating the inner lives of young girls with the proper seriousness — as a subject worthy of study and analysis.”

This is certainly true of the producers of “Little Miss Perfect.” They depict the mothers as slightly batshit and the inner lives of the young girls as non-existent. The resulting pseudo-documentary smells, predictably, of burnt polyester.

Greene, however, chides horrified and nay-saying spectators for what he perceives as an outdated unwillingness to accord basic human agency to pageant contestants. He argues that everything about humans is “artificial” whether it is obvious to adults or not; therefore these junior artifice-junkies are cutting-edge visionaries and artistes, and their unsparingly spangled exaltation of fembottery is the authentic pre-pubescent girl fantasy. In other words, cheap frills is their culture, it has legitimacy, and you’re unevolved if you imagine that these kids are nothing more than victims of their batty stage mothers’ frustrated longings.

Thus far Greene and I are two hearts beating as, perhaps, one-and-a-half, but we part company altogether when he launches into a paean to the supposedly extraordinary insights of Victorian pedophile Lewis Carroll, whom Greene lauds as the lone personage in all of recorded history who has given the inner lives of young girls their due.* And when he as good as declares that child beauty pageants are the greatest thing since high-speed GPS internet iphone video chat blog shopping, I clench up; the desire to magnify femininity by a factor of about 6 million and put it on public display may be genuine, but, since femininity is the practice of obeisance to oppressive mores, pageants don’t exactly amount to the pinnacle of human endeavor, or even a minor victory for Truth and Beauty.

However, Greene gets no argument from me when he asserts that, unlike boys, who are applauded for their active inventiveness, little girls are universally and sexistly seen as “essentially passive and weak” and incapable of inventing a meaningful culture. There can be no doubt that human society generally smirks condescendingly at female children, dismissing them as vapid impotents-in-training, and that this treatment is totally bogus.

I further agree that, as far as the participants themselves are concerned, this kiddie burlesque has at least the same (if not greater) philosophic value as playing soccer or performing at a piano recital. An adult spectator may not credit it, but, given the porn-dominated zeitgeist, competing for rhinestone crowns by transforming into idealized miniature sexbots is a perfectly valid and fulfilling pursuit that has, from the perspective of the kid, nothing to do with seduction or titillation, and everything to do with plain old human creative impulses. What does a 7-year-old know from titillation? If a spray-tanned tap-dancing kindergardener in a wiglet and off-the-shoulder cupcake dress evokes spasms of horror in the onlooker, it’s certainly not the kid’s fault; she’s merely coloring with the available crayons, and plainly having pretty high time doing it. It’s not the stage mother’s fault, either; she indulges the kid’s young dream with thousand-dollar gowns, rhinestone corsetry, professional coaches, and bionic dentures, not because she’s a psycho abuser, but because she just wants her kid to excel at something.

But won’t they be scarred for life? Undoubtedly, but not because of the tawdry nature of the Little Miss Perfect contest. Beauty pageants don’t fuck kids up. Growing up in a culture that despises them fucks them up, and no little girl is immune from that.

I submit that anyone who is uncomfortable with Little Miss Perfect is ethically obliged to be just as uncomfortable with femininity in general. Little Miss Perfect is merely one of a gazillion equally nauseating points on the Porno-Feminine Continuum within which all female citizens of the globe are confined by a culture of oppression.

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* Mr Greene apparently feels that Charles Dodgson’s hobby as a child pornographer uniquely qualified him as an expert on girl culture. Forget The Secret Garden, Mrs Basil E Frankweiler, Go Ask Alice, It’s Me, Margaret, A Wrinkle in Time, Diary of Anne Frank, etc.

Posted in Femininity, Lobe-blowing, Mass Media, Oppression Culture, Sexploitation, The Beauty Ultimatum, The Entertainment Industrial Complex and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.