Remember this vid from the Jerktassic Epoch?
Jokes about menstruation are hilarious because menstruation is gross and alluding to it is fucking transgressive.
Archive for the 'The Entertainment Industrial Complex' Category
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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.
Heather Havrilesky has a quasi-jokey column that precisely illustrates the reasons for my long-held view that Oprah is the opiate of the (white middle class female) people.
Yesterday, when word got out that Oprah will be wrapping up “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” which has been on the air since 1986, so that she can focus on her new cable television channel, the Oprah Winfrey Network (or OWN), a nation full of women collapsed into the fetal position. Our husbands or roommates or dogs found us in a crumpled heap on the rug, mumbling through tears, “I want my imaginary black mommy! I want my imaginary black mommy!” Will we be like this for almost two years, until Oprah is really gone? Probably.
I predict that, without a daily national TV audience to monitor her, as Oprah continues to marinate in Oprahnality (a proprietary blend of gold, frankincense, myrrh, Hawaiian real estate, and empowerfulized consumerous tabloidism), she will become increasingly weird. We have seen this in Howard Hughes, Elvis, Michael Jackson; the descent into eccentricity is an immutable rule of megacelebrity.
I look forward, after she cracks up, to the collapse of American femin-o-capitalism predicted by Havrilesky as the only possible outcome of Oprah’s abdication from the National Women’s Moral Compass throne.
Of all the classic film genres I love to hate, I love to hate none more fervently than the mid-century sex farce. Mid-century sex farces suck.
As you know, by “mid-century sex farce,” I of course mean “bogus fucking misogynist fantasy crap.” And no classic film is more mid-century-sex-farcical than the one I watched the other day on the Turner Classic Movie channel. The flick to which I allude is so bogusly fucking misogynistical, they might as well have called it “How To Murder Your Wife.”
Oh wait, they did call it “How To Murder Your Wife.”
“Bring The Little Woman…Maybe She’ll Die Laughing!” The tagline was apparently written by somebody who thinks women should just get a sense of humor, already, about wife-murdering. Quoth an IMDB commenter who accurately articulates the enduring popularity of this fantasy:
A friend of a friend is one of those femi-nutzis. She hates this movie with a passion & proceeded to tell me why in a lengthy boring diatribe. After I woke from my slumber, (as femi-nutzis are prone to lull one to sleep with their “blah blah blahs”) I took it upon myself to get the movie as soon as possible. I was never offended by the alleged “sexism”: Why shouldn’t women be capable to take a men’s joke with humor?
The premise of this mind-bogglingly sexist 1965 Jack Lemmon comedy: the hero, a louche, martini-drinking playboy whose fabulous Manhattan bachelor pad comes equipped with Terry-Thomas as one of those droll and doting English valet sidekicks, wakes up to find that he got shitfaced and married Virna Lisi, the Italian beauty queen who jumped out of a cake at last night’s debauch. Lemmon is horrified by this fuck-up, since matrimony means an abrupt end to his with-it Hefneriffic swingertopia. Lemmon and Terry-Thomas spend the rest of the movie enmeshed in unfunny comedic hijinx related to springing Lemmon from the disastrous legal contract requiring him to be waited on hand and foot by a non-English-speaking sex goddess who worships him, cooks for him, and puts out 24/7. The hijinx include, it will not surprise you to learn, a plot to murder Virna Lisi.
Note: filmmakers who want to get maximum gyrations out of their non-English-speaking Italian bombshell actresses should take a hint from this movie: whatever you do, don’t write a translator into the script, or add subtitles, or your bitch won’t be able to wigglingly pantomime everything, such as how her clothes got stolen at the International Miss Jugs pageant. Having her clothes get stolen is pretty ingenious, too, since it means she can spend the rest of the first act naked under a shiny black plastic raincoat.
A waxy yellow build-up of sexist clichés — the battle-axe mother-in-law, the hen-pecked husband best friend — culminates in a courtroom scene in which Lemmon’s character beats the titular murder rap by postulating to the court that the essential emasculating nature of women justifies killing them, and that if they let him off the hook they’ll be striking a blow for American Male Justice everywhere. Lemmon’s speech:
Too long has the American man allowed himself to be bullied, coddled, and mothered, and tyrannized, and in general meant to feel like a feeble-minded idiot by the female of the species. Do you realize the power that you have in your hand here today? If one man – just one man – can stick his wife in the goop from the gloppitta-gloppitta machine, and get away with it! Whoa-ho-ho, boy, we’ve got it made. We have got it made. All of us.
Then, of course, Virna Lisi turns out not to have been murdered after all. They live, if you can stand it, happily ever after, because Virna Lisi is a bimbo, and still adores Jack Lemmon, even though he has humiliated her, drugged her, and spent a whole movie trying to get rid of her.
How this movie could pass for comedy, even in 1965, is beyond any sane person’s comprehension. “How To Murder Your Wife” is too ugly to pass for satire, and too mean-spirited and vulgar to rise even to the level of curious sociological artifact. It’s just a tarnished, tasteless old relic from that pervy rumpus-room interlude in honky dude American history — the period just after June Cleaver’s heyday and just before 2nd wave feminism — when stylish boozing, accessorizing, and womanizing was considered a sophisticated art form. It is unlikely that this glittering Rat Packian lifestyle actually existed anywhere but in movies and the pages of Playboy, but it nevertheless foreshadowed today’s mainstream Porn Nation.
This picture is so over-the-top hateful that even TCM’s host was moved to remark, in a sad and wistful tone, that it’s the kind of film that just wouldn’t get made today. Normally these TCM hosts are matter-of-fact about the female sexprops that parade with perfect cadence through the dude movies they show. Their idea of a feminist film is “The Women,” in which a bunch of rich white housewives sit around gossiping in a beauty parlor about their husbands’ mistresses. So it’s really saying something when a TCM dude actually quasi-acknowledges that one of their beloved classics might fail to delight women audiences today. That “How To Murder Your Wife” is 128 minutes of uninterrupted hate speech, however, does not prevent TCM from airing it. And on a Saturday afternoon, too, guaranteeing maximum exposure to two groups who can least tolerate it: invalids, who are already sick enough, and impressionable youths, whom it will scar for life.
In other words, blah blah blah.
Hey! Roger Ebert!
A Hollywood movie with a plot device involving a female assault victim “turning the tables in an extended sequence of graphic violence” is not a “feminist revenge picture.” It’s merely a revenge picture.
1975 Women-in-prison flick directed by Jonathan Demme. Tagline reads “WHITE HOT DESIRES MELTING COLD PRISON STEEL!” Originally uploaded at IMDB
Kate Harding thinks — and who but an asshole could disagree? — that it would be “superfun” to play a game called “Don’t Give Money To People Who Think Rapists Deserve Absolution, Sympathy, Freedom and Regular Public Tongue Baths.”
Harding alludes to a hypothetical boycott of the products blurped out by the burgeoning collective of rape-apologist celebrities who’ve lately been infesting the public square sporting “Free Roman Polanski” buttons. To the dismay of some of their more evolved fans, the gang includes pop-culture darlings whose public personae may have previously conveyed, when observed by the casual end-user, the [false] impression that they don’t support child rapists.
Who, you might ask, would be barbarian enough to form a chastity belt of solidarity around fugitive child rapist Roman Polanski?
A whole bunch of famous movie people, it turns out. Including Whoopi Goldberg, Jonathan Demme, Wim Wenders, David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, and Woody Allen. Oh, and Natalie Portman.
Wait! No! Not Whoopi, the affable Center Square who’s black enough to be hep, but not so black that she scares the honkys? Not Jonathan Demme, writer/director of Caged Heat (“Rape Riot and Revenge! White Hot Desires Melting Cold Prison Steel!”)? Not David Lynch, director of Eraserhead, beloved fanboy 16mm art-house ode to infanticide and male anxiety about jizz? Not Martin Scorsese, glamorizer of macho thugs, whose second most memorable character is a wise-cracking pre-teen hooker-with-a-heart-o-gold? Not Woody Allen, the sexullectual nebbish who likes to get bizzy with his step-children?
God, not Natalie Portman, photogenic girl?
It blows the lobe that total strangers (film stars, directors, “media personalities,” TV actors, et al) should transcend their 2-dimensional products to play active roles — enjoying varying degrees of symbololotry (no really, it’s a word!) — in the real lives of pop culture consumers. It blows the lobe, but the phenomenon (wherein civilians believe they have a sympathetic, unique rapport with their celebrities) supports a multi-zillion-dollar industry, a tragedy equal in scope only to the recent discovery that there is no more Cool Whip in the spinster fridge.
So, should a media personality’s insane views on bail-jumpin’ rapist Roman Polanski be a deal-breaker? Fuck yeah, they should. “Rape? It’s less important than Chinatown” is now part of their official pop narratives. Please. Like Chinatown is a sacred pile of Jesus-bones, or vital to the biosphere, or the cure for cancer or something. And even if it were, sending Polanski to the hoosegow would hardly eradicate his fucking beloved movie from the planet.
Dump the bastards!
What’s the deal with celebrities, anyway? Do they imagine the public are just maxi-pads with spending power, stuck to Hollywood’s underpants and happy to soak up what ever oozes out? Are they so bloated with self-regard that, when they aren’t giving each other awards on televised red carpets, they actually confuse their tight-knit cabal of overpaid ingenues, perverts, and 2-bit hams with a sort of Privy Council of the Divine? One that is imbued with sufficient power to override in their fans such ethical and just prejudices as “rape is a crime”? Or to subvert the justice system with their keen and considered legal analysis that Polanski, forced to live comfortably in Paris and make Oscar-winning films all these years, has “suffered enough”? Whoopi, a noted legal scholar, has famously observed that what Polanski did — i.e. drugging and sexually assaulting a pre-pubescent girl — wasn’t “rape rape.”
Possibly Whoopi views Polanski’s violent crime in this seriously fucked-up way because in Hollywood — patriarchy’s primary misogyny propaganda unit — rape is nothing but a plot device. An extremely popular plot device. In fact, it’s the principal motif in about 97.3% of films and TV shows. Ya gotta love the Hollywood “love-rape,” wherein the starlet demurs, so the hero gives her what she really wants (see Gone With the Wind for an Oscar-winning archetypal example). The love-rape is so popular that Hollywoodists apparently think nothing of its practice in real life. It’s completely normal for directors to invite “sophisticated” 13-year-old “Lolitas” into their homes by promising to photograph them for Vogue, but instead they dope’em up with liquor and ludes to facilitate “consensual sex.” That’s not rape. That’s entertainment!
Disappointed fans of rape-apologist celebrities might consider, once they’ve worked through their shock and bereavement, precisely what, in terms of philosophic value, is really offered by these people. I hypothesize that it is possible to live a stunningly adequate life without buying any Woody Allen at all, either Allen-as-concept (see “sexullectual nebbish,” above) or his sexist-ass films. Likewise, it shouldn’t be too difficult to eliminate both the essence and the filmography of Natalie Portman from the intellectual environment; few, if any, spinster aunts in good standing could even pick her out of an identity parade. Ditto all those other artistes. And if playing Kate Harding’s “Fuck You, Rape-Apologist Celebrities!” game means crossing Whoopi’s Sister Act II off my Netflix queue, well, that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
Celebrities are just mercenary pukers of pop culture artifacts.
That’s right, it’s the recent David Carradine in drag, cradling the future enfant terrible and leaving little to the imagination, junk-wise, in the film’s most tender scene.
For two days and two nights it has been raining — raining! — in Rattlesnake, TX. The Spinster HQ yella Lab puppy, Francine, is young enough that she has never seen rain before, on accounta the relentless drought which has been droughting since before she was born early this summer. Rain, however, has quickly ascended her Top Ten Fave Raves list. She lost no time in locating the one spot outside where the gutter leaks. She stations herself thereunder, digging frantic holes in the wet gravel. When the novelty of digging wears off — and who among us has not, when digging, thought to herself, “This digging project isn’t quite living up to the hype”? — she tears inside and throws muddy skidmarks all over the clinical white accouterments of the laboratory. Nobody has figured out how she contrives to get them on the ceiling.
But this isn’tt a cute puppy post.
OK, yes it is! I don’t wanna blame today; the rain is pretty exquisite.
No, wait, I’ll pull myself together. For the children. Here goes.
The pleasure of pointing the Auntly Digit of Doom at “Now, Voyager” yesterday has put me in a kind of a film-critic mood. You’ll never guess in a million years what I watched last night. Go ahead. Guess.
Hint: it stars David Carradine as a transvestite named Pearl, and the guy who played Bluto in “Popeye” as Pearl’s redneck sociopath thug significant other Slue. Together they raise a kidnapped baby, chained in a grain silo, upon whom Slue visits unspeakable tortures in order to turn him into a feral “secret weapon” whom he looses on townsfolk who bum him out.
Did you guess obscure 1989 gonzo-cult-horror-comedy “Sonny Boy”? Ding ding ding!
“Sonny Boy” aired in the wee hours of the night under the auspices of TCM’s “Underground” series. As far as I can make out, “Underground” is a synonym for cheezy softcore exploitation films suitable only for males suffering from arrested development and the occasional spinster aunt plagued by hot flash-induced insomnia. I deduce this having noted that everyone else would either be out infesting clubs and bars like normal people, or snoozin’ (those cows aren’t gonna milk themselves tomorrow morning.).
Interested parties may find a plot synopsis of sorts here, and a clip here.
Whereas males with arrested development will undoubtedly find (and actually have found) “Sonny Boy” to be a unique work of demented genius, perhaps even a sensitive-yet-disturbing commentary on child abuse, or an argument for regular dental checkups, the hot-flashing spinster aunt can only guffaw wordlessly at its surreal dystopic camp.
– angry mob à la Frankenstein led by a hot babe with black nubs for teeth
– Slue shooting at’em with a cannon
– Sonny Boy clinging to a giant crucifix like a stuffed animal after he has murdered a priest for no apparent reason
– Carradine slipping the hungry feral kid some kind of roasted roadkill through a hole in the silo
– Conrad Janis, the soused MD who lost his license for transplanting monkey parts onto humans, sewing a new tongue onto Sonny Boy (Slue has cut out his original tongue, of course), etc.
Except to point out the obvious (that the dominance/submission motif is pretty persistent), this flick is so bizarre, so nightmarishly hilarious, that it’s beyond my superpowers to radfeministically critique it. I can only scrawl that, despite “Sonny Boy’s” unrelenting brutality, surprisingly there’s not a single rape scene. Such a freakish synergy erupts between the various cinematic elements that I can actually recommend this appalling sicko-romp to fellow 2 AM hot-flash sufferers if they’ve a sense of humor, or if they’re tired of infomercials selling fishface exercisers. Spinster aunts have fishfacets, but there are limits.
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.)
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*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.”
Airbrushed TV hottie seeks mother with “feminist viewpoint.” Photo from tyrabanks.com
Howdy blamers. You know how I am constantly getting emails from people who have no idea what I Blame the Patriarchy is but tell me it’s “great” and hope to use it for their own patriarchy-affirming ends, usually by selling stuff?
Here’s an appeal from a Tyra Banks flack that showed up in today’s mail pile. She searcheth for a “feminist mom” to appear on the supermodel’s talk show. I know I don’t need to mention that the only reason for the existence of the Tyra Banks Show is that it makes money, on the backs of the sex class, for commercial purveyors of femininity.
Hi,
My name is Erika Wasser and I am reaching out from the Tyra Banks show. We are looking into doing a show on raising young girls/tweens in today’s world and were hoping to feature someone with a feminist viewpoint on the show. Ideally, this woman would be a feminist mom. I was hoping that maybe you could point me in the direction of someone to contact or a place to look. Great site, and thanks so much for any and all help in advanced [sic]. Feel free to contact me anytime via email or phone xxx.xxx.xxxx.
Best,
Erika Wasser
Erika, it seems, wishes to locate a woman with female “tween” spawn who will
a) actually cop to being a feminist, and
b) consent to the exploitation of self and kid on national TV, presumably inclusive of frank revelations about sexting and other “shocking teen trends.”
This I’d like to see. Part B is a piece of cake, all righty, but Part A? These days anybody who is allowed on TV and publicly claims to be a feminist isn’t one. She’s straight, conventionally attractive, takes pole dancing lessons, and espouses the belief that femininity empowerfulizes her. If any “feminist” should accidentally let it out that being sexually manipulative has not a high moral purpose, or that patriarchy even exists, let the ridicule fly.
Well, good luck anyway, Erika! I suggest you check out Jezebel. And thanks for reaching out with the nice compliment on my blog. Even though you have obviously never read it, perhaps you were able to divine its excellence from its quality banner, or from the fact that it doesn’t turn up anywhere on Google Blog search .
Incidentally, Tyra Banks also emcees a production called “America’s Next Top Model.” This show is a dilly. Skeletal, swaybacked young women compete in a rigorous, season-long beauty pageant during the course of which all of their visible body parts, the professionality of their catwalk strut, and the cut-throatness of their drive to be Beauty2K-compliant, are painstakingly evaluated on national television. If they aren’t photogenic enough, or if they don’t exhibit sufficient guile, they get eliminated by mean judges. A not wholly unrealistic encapsulate version of everywoman’s life within the patriarchal hegemon. Nice.
Anyway, if any of you blamers want to audition for the role of feminist mom on the Tyra Banks Show, I’ll be happy to put you in touch with Ms Wasser. It could be your ticket outta Savage Death Island once and for all!
Drunk chick interviews snake assassin as he changes his socks
It’s Tuesday, and that means it’s time for another installment of Unrelated Spinster Pronouncements.
1. Poor pit vipers. My last post on the Western diamondback rattler revealed that, herpetologically speaking, many of us have something of a gaping void where our common sense and interspecies empathy ought to be. Although I am no snakespert, it is generally acknowledged that a snake’s deepest desire to get the fuck away from humans; given the opportunity to exit your midst, any sane snake will take it. Only when a specimen, such as the diamondback on my porch, is cornered does it resort to self-defense. And even then, there seems to be some reluctance to part with the venom. My rattlesnake rattled like mad, but it never even tried to strike, even though I was but a few feet away and prodding it with a broom.
You can just beetle off, have a marg, and the snake’ll be gone when you get back.
Because of the dread “related videos” feature on YouTube, I found myself watching a portion of a vid wherein some drunk chick named Diane goes around interviewing male snake-hatin’ sickfucks at a “rattlesnake roundup.”
A rattlesnake roundup, in case you have never heard of this sickfuck shit, is a ritual gathering where a bunch of bloodthirsty barbarians catch a bunch of snakes, throw’em into pits, and invite the paying public to enjoy animal cruelty, American-style. The roundup-goers gleefully observe the slaughter and thereafter purchase rattlesnakeskin underwear, rattlesnake meat burritos, rattlesnake fang funnel cake, and rattlesnakeskin assault weapon holsters. Bring the kids! In the aforementioned video one of the macho snake assassins tells Diane, “God has blessed me with a talent.” For rousting innocent rattlesnakes out of their natural habitat, chucking them into death camps, and making F-150 seat covers out of them, apparently.
2. The endless capacity for self-delusion (e.g. slaughtering sentient beings for entertainment is a God-given talent, above) with which patriarchy has imbued the American dude is striking, as in this comment I found in the blog’s moderation queue. I laugh and laugh.
“Men have always been known for their chivalry,” asserts the commenter (affiliated, apparently, with this nutty website).
Well, men have always told everybody about their chivalry, at least.
“If [men] are treated well by women,” the comment continues, “they get treated better in return. If women want to be taken good care of by their men, they need to respect and treat their men with dignity.”
In other words, kiss my ass, bitch, or I’ll make your life a living hell.
The internet fucking cracks me up. Why the fuck would anybody bother to leave these idiotic remarks on a radical heartwarming funky savage death blog?
3. On NPR yesterday I heard some blowhard Pentagon dude allude, I kid you not, to a “thirty-thousand pound penetrator.” His tone was reverent. He appeared to be unaware that his phrasery stood alone at the apex of ridiculousness.
“Penetrator” is apparently what bombs are called down in the old War Room, which Room has always been, as you know, Penetrator Central. The USA, led by handsome, saintly Barack Obama, is, in its benevolence, contemplating penetrating Iran with a bunch of these thirty-thousand pound penetrators. Supposedly all this penetration will prevent Iranian scientists from figuring out how to make atomic penetrators of their own with which to penetrate us.
You know how politicos revere history, pretending that they study it so “we” can avoid the mistakes of the past and glide bloodlessly into a glorious future of peace among the snakes and the women? Bullshit. Men study history so they can avoid the mistakes of the losers and the defeated and the surrendered prison bitches of yore; they only do it so they can figure out how to be King of the Penetrators themselves.
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