Archive for the 'Femininity' Category

PBS: Profiles in sexiness

Published by Twisty on February 7, 2012. 24 Comments

Longtime readers are aware that hot flashes at 2 AM often oblige spinster aunts to engage in feverish channel-flipping. Last night, in the grip this plague, I encountered on PBS a riveting episode of “American Experience,” which series documentarizes and dramatizes the lives of iconic figures in American history. The subject of last night’s re-run was that Gay Nineties sweetheart of the Wild West, sharpshooter Annie Oakley.

The talking heads interviewed for “American Experience” were unanimous: Annie Oakley was awesome because even though she performed — shooting cigars out of people’s mouths and splitting playing cards in half at 30 paces — covered head to toe in buckskin, she was still one sexay laday!

Annie Oakley managed to combine both demureness and voluptuousness in her costume… She never showed any skin. Her ankles were never bare. But her costumes were form-fitting. She wore leggings under short skirts, so people could see the shape of her legs as she ran out into the arena… She was, in that sense, appealing to the best instincts in the men in her audience, men who were attracted to her sexuality while still not having to feel guilty about being attracted, because at the same time she was ladylike and she was demure… ” –[Paul Fees, American Experience website (originally misattributed to Joy Kasson, oops)]

It’s a good thing “American Experience” is on the case, guarding against the chance that sweaty midnight spinster aunts might accidentally think of Annie Oakley in terms other than that of dudely boners.

Posted in Femininity and Movies and TV. Bite me, Chad.

Whoops

Published by Jill on October 1, 2011. 30 Comments

Any moron knows not to kick someone in the head while wearing open-toed shoes.

Forgot I had a blog. Sorry about that.

But here’s a sweet little movie you won’t want to miss. Girl Fight airs on Lifetime this Monday. “Inspired” by a “true story” about mean girls who beat up one of their own and post it on YouTube for internet fame and revenge, it’s super on-trend. Although Lifetime says “Girl Fight” is about “peer pressure, media scrutiny and forgiveness” its actual purpose would appear be 1) to deliver titillating footage of a teenage girl kicking the shit out of a teenage girl, and 2) to intone another cautionary tale about the dire consequences that can go down whenever a teenage girl steps out of line (or, in an unguarded moment, posts something juvenile on Twitter).

The Lifetime Channel, as has been noted by larger brains than mine, is the TV authority of record when it comes to documenting the People magazine experience of Vagina-Americans. Violence, betrayal, insanity, torment, and murder. The Entertainment Industrial Complex has a vested interest in the defeat of feminist revolt, since a victory would rob them of all their most lurid plot devices.

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

This TV ad is also puke

Published by Jill on July 24, 2011. 120 Comments

Summer’s Eve — the douche subsidiary of Fleet Laboratories, the company that makes enemas and other crap you stick up your ass — has a new spokesfist. According to this fist, which talks by thumb-synching to a voiceover, it can “perform the miracle of birth” and “make men drop to their knees in about 2.1 seconds”. It’s time, says the fist, that “we all celebrate and hail to the V!”

That’s right. The fist is a humorous stand-in for a vulva, which collection of organs is, as we all know, too flippin ugly to show on the internet unless it is being violently penetrated by something. “V” doesn’t stand for “vulva,” though. Its stands for “stinky ladypart.” Just as “hail” means “spray cheap perfume on that rank shit.”

You know what, thank the lard for advertising. They’ve got our back. They’re not afraid to light a fire under our complacent ass and foment revolution whenever it’s finally “time” for stuff. A while back, you might remember, it was “time” to get real about toilet paper. Now it’s “time” to “hail the V,” which we only know thanks to Summer’s Eve. Without this consciousness-raising ad campaign, we probably would have continued walking around like a bunch of hairy primates, not spraying any shit-o on our vulva at all. But I digress.

I was not expecting the spokesfist when I looked up the Summer’s Eve website. I was trying to find their current TV commercial. Though spokesfist-free, the commercial is nevertheless a fairly vile tableau in which the concept “woman” is reduced entirely to the concept “vagina” in a series of expensively produced cinematic spectacles designed to sell vulva deodorant. This woman-to-sex-organ reduction is no harmless synecdoche. The message, in no uncertain terms, is that your “V” — because it is the “center of civilization” and “men have died for it” — belongs to the world, that you are essentially nothing more than the guardian of this “V”, and that it is your obligation to keep it perfumed for the greater good.

Yeah, this ad is bad, but the website is several orders of magnitude more abhorrent. It is, in fact, so profoundly patronizing, insulting, and absurd, we here at Spinster HQ blew several lobes in succession within 4 clicks. I mean, there’s a spokesfist, for crissake. Which, although it is more closely analogous to a vulva, they keep referring to as a “vagina.” Or “The V.” Which they want you to “hail” by purchasing carcinogenic products to squirt all over it.

So I took the “V 101 Quiz,” where the spokesfist reassured me not to feel bad if I got any answers wrong, because “even I [the spokesfist] got one wrong the first time, and I’m a vagina!”. What a stupid fucking spokesfist.

When I got to the “Vagina Owner’s Manual”, wherein the spokesfist explains to the dimwitted human how to shop for feminine hygiene products, I read this:

March right down that aisle, head held high, grab whatever product you’re looking for (there’s plenty from Summer’s Eve to choose from), and place it on top of everything else in your cart. Don’t hide it! Heck, choose the checkout lane where the hottie is working and get your flirt on.

Yeah, “I’m buying coochie spray, doesn’t it just make you wanna fuck me?”

You understand that I can no longer form coherent sentences on the subject.

Posted in Femininity, Mass Media and The Beauty Ultimatum. Bite me, Chad.

TV ad is puke

Published by Jill on July 24, 2011. 24 Comments

Whenever I accidentally ingest poison and need to induce vomiting in a hurry, I watch a TV commercial for a beauty product. Recently, none* has been as efficient in producing instapuke as this ad for Mederma stretch mark remover.

Navel-gazing as beauty ritual

The commercial features attractive young women in underwear and fuzzy socks. Light, fluffy “la la la” soundtrack. The women childishly, gigglingly give us a quick peek at their young thighs and tum-tums. Their body movements, expressions of wide-eyed innocence, and fascination with their own navels recall very young children. Not regular children, though. These are young, sexy children performing a peep show. Seriously, these women’s relationship to the camera is precisely that of a 5-year-old to whom creepy Uncle Ernie has said “show Uncle Ernie your wee-wee,” where the 5-year-old is not a real 5-year-old, but a pedophile’s fantasy 5-year-old who likes to seduce grown men.

I urge you to watch the vid (embedded in the afore-linked-to page) and do the regender thing in your head. Imagine a straight dude in fetching spandex hip-huggers lifting up his shirt, bending over, and giggling like mad at the sight of his own adorable stomach.

The childified woman is a prominent archetype in the Beauty Industrial Complex. Infantilization is a major component of femininity. See leg-shaving, head-tilting, sexy schoolgirl porn, pinkification, the dumb blonde, the ubiquity of the phrase “women and children” (American version). See driving ban, ownership by male family members, arranged marriage, hardcore restrictions on education, employment, and legal rights (“Over There” versions).

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* Well, almost none. Next: an even more horrible commercial for a douche product. You aren’t gonna believe this shit!

Photo from Mederma website

Note to blamers contemplating using annoying baby talk (e.g. “widdle”) in their comments: you will be spamulated.

Posted in Femininity, Mass Media and The Beauty Ultimatum. Bite me, Chad.

Anecdote mania!

Published by Jill on June 13, 2011. 175 Comments

The author as funfeminist rocker

Why no post today? I’ve been in church. So in the fine old tradition where spinster aunts rely on blamers to supply content while they (the spinster aunts) are otherwise ocupadas, I declare Reader Anecdote Day.

I know I’m always urging everyone to make with the analysis rather than the anecdote, but I read this

“Alas, it took me many funfem years to figure this out.”

in the comments the other day and thought, mang, so many of the radical feminist types say the same thing, that they came gradually to the radical position after misspending their youth as empowerfulized funfeminist collaborators.

For example, years ago, when performing in my rock band, I myself used to dress in negligees and combat boots to play such feminist anthems as “My Baby Won’t Go Down On Me” and “Don’t Fuck With the Straight Girls Downtown” while crowds of dudes hooted their approval. I thought I was being super fucking transgressive, banging on a Les Paul and snarling through lipstick “you’ve got the second-biggest dick I’ve ever seen.”

Good times.

So, what’s your take? Did you slog through an embarrassing funfeminist phase? What turned you around? Is funfeminism a necessary step on the road to truth, beauty, and militancy? Give us your anecdote.

Posted in Femininity and Oppression Culture. Bite me, Chad.

There’s not enough femininity on the internet, so I wrote this

Published by Jill on March 16, 2011. 127 Comments

It separates the men from the sex class. It’s the cornerstone of the megatheocorporatocratic oppression of women. It’s a global humanitarian crisis.

It’s femininity! It sure gets a lot of ink around here! We were just talking about it day before yesterday. At which point blamer Ashley raised a swell issue.

Short of wearing a clown suit and speaking through a mechanized voicebox, I can’t think of how one could avoid being perceived as performing either masculinity or femininity. The meaning of your performance is imposed by the audience.

This precise quandary has long plagued spinster aunts the world over. We do not advocate clown suits, however; polyester satin makes us perspire, and the bright colors seem to attract bees. Our solution? Flowing robes. Too biblical for ya? Well, then, grey sweats and Tom’s shoes for everyone! Who’s with me?

Continues Ashley:

Not to say that all performances are equally feminist, or that personal performance doesn’t matter at all. Just, doesn’t it make more sense to focus activism on institutional change and resource reallocation?

If Ashley is suggesting that that the onus is on us (the onus is on-us, the onus is on-us) to change the way women are perceived, I couldn’t agree more. That’s why I advocate personal repudiation of femininity on as broad a spectrum as possible. The less femininity there is to perceive, the better for all women everywhere.

But if I read it wrong, and Ashley is actually saying “enough with this anti-femininityism, already; there are more important feminist matters afoot,” I reply:

Fear not, Ashley, for feminist rage is not a finite substance. There’s enough for all the doomed rebellions.

In fact, it makes sense to challenge patriarchy at every level. If I haven’t made that clear by now I’m a crapulent failure as an Internet feminist. Harshin’ on femininity is just one aspect of the fight. At the annual Obstreperal Awards on Savage Death Island, they pin silver medals on everyone who focuses activism on institutional change and resource reallocation (you should come next year; the afterparties are awesome).

But they enjoin feminists to think small as well, because knocking it off already with the feminine wiles and beauty treatments and self-enstupefication are acts of resistance that anyone can do on her own, in the privacy of her own boudoir, boat, or den. It’s simple to do, and unlike big, slow institutional changes that take decades, ditching femininity can have an immediate impact. The anti-femininityite merely quits shaving her pits, or burns her 5″ platforms or whatever, and presto! Newly liberated from another shackle, she gets to snarl a gratifying “fuck you, Establishment!” at the Establishment, and to feel a little bit more like an actual sovereign entity.

But isn’t it hard? Blamer Claire K, who, in her preamble to an inspirational tale that she accurately describes as a “long anecdote about my own personal body hair. Really.”, has this to say to those who aren’t too sure about going native.

Many of the comments on [the most recent anti-femininity] thread seem to be about how difficult it is to stop performing femininity and how not everyone will be able to do it, as if the commentators are worried some radical feminists have it easy and need to be reminded of how hard it is for other people. I think, though, that everyone is already too aware that revolution is hard, and that we will get farther if we encourage each other instead of holding each other back by responding to every incitement to even the slightest revolutionary act with criticism of the inciter for not thinking of how hard it is, how some women won’t be able to do this, and so on.

She goes on to reveal the liberating effects she experienced by giving one little femininity dealio the heave-ho.

Awesomely, everyone she knows will get hit with some anti-femininity fallout, too. Women who resist are so rare, an anti-femininityist action is unlikely go unnoticed (or in some cases, unpunished) for long. Perhaps you’ll tolerate another personal anecdote, this time on the subject of the repercussions of resistance:

A pal of mine from the cancer trenches just had a double mastectomy. After agonizing about it for months, she decided not to undergo the painful and oppressor-appeasing “reconstruction” surgery.* She’s no radical feminist, either, she’s a straight, white, Republican country clubber, and she really liked having boobs. But ultimately she determined that she’d be sending the wrong message to her daughters if she capitulated to the patriarchal boobal mandate by having plastic funbags stapled to her chest. Her act of resistance cannot fail to ripple (ha ha, it rhymes with “nipple”!). Not just with her kids, but with her whole WASPy social circle. I pinned a gold medal on her.

So do you get kicked off the Island if you perform femininity? Dang, whaddya take me for, some kinda radical feminist? That would be messed up. I’m a spinster aunt, goddammit, and we fucking love everybody. I merely urge women to engage in the intellectual exercise of examining femininity: how much of the gottadoo** is really gotta, and how much is actually wanna. The femininity-bagging suggestion is not, as this blamer surmised, that women endanger the lives of their sick children by appearing so unfeminine that their boss fires them and they lose their health insurance.*** The suggestion is that women pause in their daily sashay through Mansworld to evaluate their feminine personae. You know, really give it the old analytical eye. Which appeasements really are literally necessary for literal survival, and which are maybe just gratuitous expressions of internalized misogyny? The idea is to ditch as much of it as is possible without getting anyone killed. That this might trespass a bit on your personal comfort is sort of the point. No pain, no gain. The revolution begins at home. Etc.

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* Why do I put “reconstruction” in quotation marks? Because this surgery doesn’t actually re-construct a breast at all; the resulting appurtenance contains no breast tissue, cannot nurse a baby, and is in fact actually just a prop designed to alleviate societal anxiety over women who might not otherwise present as sufficiently sexual. To those who have had reconstructive surgery, I do not vilify you. À votre santé!

** Gottadoo: Savage Death Islandish for femininity performed under the heading “I gotta do what I gotta do to survive.”

*** Irish Up, we are so sorry for your daughter’s illness. As a sicko myself, I know how it fucking sucks.

Posted in Femininity and Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society. Bite me, Chad.

Only sub-human

Published by Jill on March 13, 2011. 229 Comments

UPDATE: As commenters are probably aware, the So-Called Trans Debate (SCTD) is officially over. I may have mentioned it in passing in this essay, but please be advised that henceforth at I Blame the Patriarchy it will be necessary to discuss femininity without holding another painful referendum on transgenderism. On this post, as is my prerogative, I have allowed two or three stray comments on the topic for the purpose of clarifying my own views, but the party is over. If transphobic comments appear while I am away from my desk, they will be deleted when I get back; the commenters will be banned. It is written.

It has been suggested (by this blogger QueerCoup) that recently, when I eschewed femininity in the context of the so-called “trans debate” (yes, I know we’re done with the good old SCTD, but I mention it only in passing and as a springboard to a gripping pontification on a weighty subject, so prithee bear with), I was taking “a dig” at trans women. According to QueerCoup, “[a]t it’s heart, the rejection of femininity is a male-centred way of thinking. The assumption that femininity is for attracting men.” [sic]

Before anyone blows a lobe, allow me to assure the Blametariat that I make no such assumption. Quite the opposite. No spinster aunt who isn’t trippin on acid would ever reject femininity on the grounds that it is “for attracting men.” Spinster aunts know that femininity is not for attracting men. We reject it, of course, because we know it is actually for smushing women.

That’s right. Femininity is not a natural expression of femaleness. It is not an hereditary, hormone-based fascination for fashion, submissiveness, mani-peddies, baby-soft skin, or catfighting. It is not a fun-loving lifestyle choice. Femininity is a rigid system of behaviors imposed on us by the Global Accords Governing the Fair Use of Women as a means to control, subjugate, and marginalize us, entirely at our expense, for the benefit of the male-controlled megatheocorporatocracy.

Thus does the spinster aunt aver that the practice of femininity — whether by cis women, trans women, celebrities, lawyers, pastry chefs, people who work at Kinko’s, internet feminists, or anyone else — impedes the revolution. Here, I’ll say it again.

The practice of femininity impedes the revolution.

This idea often chaps the hide of novice blamers. This is because they don’t fully appreciate the hideous essence of femininity. Some of them believe that the practice of femininity is but one facet of an exciting smorgasbord (if a smorgasbord can be said to have facets, or to be exciting) of lifestyle choices available to today’s busy autonomous gal-on-the-go. They feel that “choosing” feminine conduct is an act of feminist rebellion, on the grounds that the choicing is entirely the chooser’s own personal idea. They aver that femininity can be an expression of a woman’s personal personality, and that it is “fun.” It is irrelevant, apparently, that femininity just happens to align precisely with the pornified desires, yucky fetishes, and vulgar business interests of the entire dudely culture of domination. Sadly, the novice blamer omits to consider this greater whole, and that in “choosing” femininity she is merely making conspicuous her compliance with dudely authori-tay.

New blamers cannot, however, be blamed for these unsophisticated views. The bogus feminine/masculine dichotomy is the ur-cornerstone of patriarchy. We’ve all been living it since the cradle. Rare is the Savage Death Islandist who springs from the womb with a fully-formed grasp of the pernicious nature of this most icky of patriarchal doctrines. We endure years, maybe decades, of brainwashing and oppression before managing to scrape the scales from our eyes.

Because, let’s face it; the truth about femininity is so repellent, so foul, so depraved, that we don’t want to know it. We’d rather believe the funfeminists when they insist that it’s empowerfulizing to be pink and girlie or stilettoey and porny. It’s so much easier to go with the flow and comfy up with the familiar old gender stereotypes than it is to come to grips with the fact that our woman-hating world order enforces femininity with a rigorous system of hollow, joyless rewards and uncompromising, murderous punishments, and that the enforcement of feminine behavior is a global humanitarian crisis.

Have you seen that commercial for Dove chocolates? No, of course you haven’t, because like all blamers you don’t own a television. Well, that commercial is a lulu. It’s got one of those confidential, just between you-and-me tones. We girls sure do some wacky things. We’re girls, we’re just so screwy. Like, we “pretend high heels are comfortable” and we wax our legs, and — silly us — we imagine that we can handle anything. But uh-oh! We can’t handle everything. But it’s OK. If we fuck up, it’s only because some things are just too hard (cut to a sexy leg with, uh-oh, a big hole in the stocking. Looks like someone couldn’t hack it in the cut-throat world of pantyhosiery! Tough break!). We’re just girls after all, but luckily we can offset the psychological damage of pantyhose failure by shoving a Dove chocolate down our craw. Femininity is really hard, so treat yourself to this cheap crap candy as a booby prize; being a screw-up is cute and we’re “only [sub] human.”

Does this icy stare make my butt look big?

Watch the commercial on YouTube, and then do that regendering thing I’m so fond of, where you imagine all the adorable femininity-women replaced by Steve McQueen or Laurence Fishburne or Franklin D Roosevelt or male dudes of similar gravitas. Can you see Fishburne going “whoopsie!” over a run in his pantyhose, and then having an orgasm over a crummy piece of mass-produced candy? I know, right? This tells you how fucking stupid femininity is; any member of the dominant class would look like a fucking idiot if he did it.

In a global humanitarian crisis, there’s nothing tackier than “choosing” to reinforce dangerous and degrading stereotypes for “fun.” There can be no real choice anyway, because nobody — and this means you — can freely opt out without consequences.

Here are some of the consequences likely to be suffered by women who try to opt out, or who perform femininity imperfectly (that is, all women):

sexism
misogyny
marriage
objectification
falling into the clutches of the Beauty Industrial Complex
self-mutilation
eating disorders
pornography
depression
infantilization
domestic violence
suicide
self-hatred
rape
marginalization
prostitution
being murdered

And most sucky of all:

no invitation — such as the ones sent to Laurence Fishburne, Steve McQueen, and Franklin D Roosevelt — to life’s rich pageant.

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Hole-in-pantyhose photo from this stupid TV commercial.

Laurence Fishburne photo from this website.

Posted in Femininity and Mass Media. Bite me, Chad.

Death by femininity, again

Published by Jill on January 26, 2011. 32 Comments

If only pornography was just dirty pictures. That would still be bad, but not as bad as the real actual truth. Pornography — that is, the graphic representation of violence against women — is in fact like unto a thick, noxious gas percolating through every conceivable stratum of human culture.

Take this example of multi-tiered pornography from the Huffington Post: a blurb noting the death of a 23-year-old woman named Carolin Berger.

The headline:

“Carolin ‘Sexy Cora’ Berger Dead: Porn Star Dies After Sixth Breast Enlargement Surgery (PHOTOS)”

[Arguably, one may even perceive an element of perpetration in the very act of critiquing this article. That's because pornography leaves a putrid grease on everything and everyone it touches, including spinster aunts who clamor for its eradication. But, onward.]

On one hand, this HuffPo item supports the anti-porn mores of Savage Death Island: Young Berger has died of extreme femininity. Her heart stopped during her 6th breast augmentation surgery and she never regained consciousness. The patriarchy blamer naturally recognizes a familiar narrative: desperate to appease the oppressor through rigorous adherence to deeply internalized pornographic beauty standards, Berger undertook multiple self-mutilations, and paid the ultimate price. Femininity kills.

But … that headline! It is the spinster aunt’s duty to expose what at first blush appears to be the announcement of a tragic accident for what it is: a titillating squirt of micro-porn to whet the insatiable appetites of typical prog-liber-o-prurient HuffPo readers.

This headline’s got it all. “Sexy.” “Dead.” “Porn Star.” “Breast Enlargement” “PHOTOS.” Who wouldn’t click on that? It’s an opportunity — one of the hundreds, or perhaps thousands, presented daily to the average media consumer — to ingest sex, to taste the greasy juxtaposition of sex, mutilation, and death, to check out some hottt pixxx, and to pass smug judgement on another blonde bimbo — Marilyn Monroe, Anna Nicole Smith — who failed to get it just right.

As the story progresses, we discover that Berger’s porn star name was “Sexy Cora.” Naturally, the sex name is the one used throughout the remainder of the article. Porn stars are not human beings, they are a brand of consumer sex receptacle. Thus are the dimensions of Berger’s breasts, both pre- and post-op, more germane to the announcement of her death than, apparently, the detail (omitted by Huffpo) that her surgeon-butchers are now up on negligent homicide charges. To find out about that, you have to go to CBS News’ lurid true crime website, where Berger’s humanity is of little importance compared to her value as a sensationalized dead TV slut. If you doubt this, you have only to observe the 38-page wealth of “Sexy Cora” images available in a CBS online photo gallery, and compare it to the amount of CBS discourse relating to Berger as a human person (barely any), or to the instances of broader CBS discussion of the murderous effects of institutionalized misogyny on the quest for human enlightenment (zilch-o).

[Thanks, Jessica]

Posted in Femininity, Mass Media, Sexploitation, The Entertainment Industrial Complex, The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today and Ways In Which the Internet Sucks. Bite me, Chad.

A lil bit of twerking and lifting

Published by Jill on December 18, 2010. 39 Comments

Patriarchy blamers are world renowned for their (professed) eschewment of cable television, so it is possible that you have not heard of the most misogynist TV show ever conceived. As an award-nominated professional bearer of bad news, I am here to correct this situation.

The history of women’s degradation is long and colorful, but this “Bridalplasty” show takes the wedding cake. Once it has taken the wedding cake, it smushes it in the face of the last little shred of simple human dignity to which the sex class has been desperately clinging for the past 8000 years.

Wait, did I say “Bridalplasty”?

I’m afraid so, and yup, it’s exactly the gross-out you think it is. The hideous mutant clone of “Bridezillas” and “The Swan,” “Bridalplasty” is a tour de force of exploitation megalotainment such as the world has never known. The laughably sicko “plot”? Says the website: “Brides-to-be compete in challenges to earn plastic-surgery procedures in a quest to win their ultimate dream wedding.”

Is there anything about that sentence that fails to induce dry heaves?

Still, you almost have to admire the show’s creators for managing to clabber together into a single pulsating, inspissated lump of banality not one, not two, but three really top-tier femininity behaviors: catfighting, weddings, and self-mutilation. A typical scene depicts one contestant visiting another in her hospital bed as she convalesces from a nosejob; their conversation is about forming an “alliance” to thwart the evil bitch Jessica (“You better sleep with one eye open, bitch, ‘cuz I’m after you.”). Promos include a conventionally pretty contestant stabbing at her own head with pointed fingers, declaiming “I want this butt-face fixed!” Of the humiliating “challenges” let me say this: brides-to-be are given two glasses of sparkling wine and instructed to determine which one cost only $3.98; apparently this test reveals whether they possess sufficient taste to pull off a classy wedding reception. So it’s classist on top of everything else. Awesome! The prize for guessing correctly is a surgery to implant cadaver meat in their lips or some shit.

The lobe-blowing thing is that the show’s audience can drink in all this misogyny week after week and not take to the streets demanding immediate liberation from patriarchal tyranny.

Or can they? Has “Bridalplasty’s” corporate-sponsored hate and scorn finally pushed devoted E! channel viewers too far? A glance at the E! discussion board reveals this glittering jewel of feminist outrage:

“Personally I think this is a disgustingly misogynistic show! The very idea that a woman is incapable of being a ‘perfect bride’ without undergoing radical, dangerous surgery to be more aesthetically pleasing to the general public is obscene.”

I regret to say that this commenter’s future as a patriarchy blamer is not, perhaps, so bright as it initially appears. She knows what “misogyny” means, and she gets that plastic surgery is an extreme form of it, but doesn’t seem to grasp the inherent misogyny in the concepts of either bride-dom or feminine perfection. Sadly, although a few other detractors add their rancor to the comments, their unanimous refrain suggest that beauty, dudely validation, and marriage remain undisputed life goals:

“These women [don't need surgery; they] were obviously proposed to because their husbands think that they are [already] beautiful.”

That is, they’ve got it made in the shade; their dudes have pre-approved their degree of conformity to the patriarchal beauty mandate or they never would have popped the question in the first place.

Unsurprisingly, most of the remaining comments are quite the little tiptoe down Self-Loathing Lane:

There is nothing wrong with wanting to enter marriage a lil more perfect/ sexier than you did when you were just a “girlfriend”….what better gift to give urself and hubby than to be than a (better) “trophy wife”, even if it takes a lil bit of twerking and lifting.

The E! channel, for those saintly readers who don’t own televisions, is also responsible for such life-affirming programming as “The Girls Next Door,” a reality show about the enpornulated women who make a living draping themselves like silk bathrobes over septuagenarian perv Hugh Hefner’s living corpse, and “True Hollywood Story,” which produces incisive documentaries revealing such “insider secrets” as Katy Perry’s having once eaten at Taco Bell, and interviews with prostituted women who have been used by Charlie Sheen.

Yeah, it burns.

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Photo nicked from the “Bridalplasty” website.

Posted in Femininity, Mass Media, Oppression Culture, The Beauty Ultimatum, The Entertainment Industrial Complex and Women hate you. Bite me, Chad.

P.S.

Published by Jill on October 26, 2010. 18 Comments

Sexy Chilean miner costume.


Photo from purveyors of Patriarchy2K-compliant dudefantasy receptaclewear yandy dot com.

Posted in Femininity, Rape Culture and Sexploitation. Bite me, Chad.