Archive for the 'Knobjectivism' Category

Little Niggling Instances of the Redoubtable Efficacy of Patriarchal Oppression, Part I

Published by Jill on November 22, 2011. 41 Comments

Certainly nothing will delight you more than to be apprised of a few instances of patriarchal oppression noted in and around Spinster HQ over the last 48 hours (I originally wrote “24 hours” but I forgot to finish the post yesterday). Two are from real life, and two originated on PBS. I’ll do the PBS ones later; this here post will stick with the real life episodes. Because they are personally anecdotal in nature and contain many first person pronouns, you may wish to skip them. I know I would.

Real Life Episode #1

As you may recall, I have recently come into a buttload of feral donkeys. I am the world’s foremost expert on everything except feral donkeys, so I email a reputable donkey rescue. I ask whether they can recommend any local donkey clubs or wild burro support groups or Central Texas donksperts who can help me with my new donks.

The reply to my query comes from the chieftain of the rescue organization, a chap calling himself “Burro man.” Because patriarchy is our social order, Burro man responds, not with anything remotely resembling an answer to my simple question, but with a useless mansplaination on how to train donkeys. As if I had asked “will you please explain in six sentences or less how to train donkeys?” Because it is totally possible to explain donkey training in six sentences or less.

Burro man’s donkey training method, incidentally, is to corner the animal in a pen with a section of portable panel. Boy, I can hardly wait to get out there and try to put the squeeze on a terrified, 500-pound feral donkey with an 80-pound piece of steel tube fencing. Nobody’ll get hurt at all.

Thanks a bundle, Burro man.

Real Life Episode #2

I invite a recommended fencing contractor over to give me an estimate (so I can fence in the aforementioned donkeys). Instead of the fun conversation about fence post diameters and brace configurations I had so joyfully anticipated, the discourse immediately takes a most unpleasant turn. I am dismayed to perceive that Mr McFence is one of those white dude megabores who blabs nonstop, not about fences, but about himself. And about his even more megaboring family.

With the result that I can now assert without fear of contradiction that I rank as the world’s Number 1 expert on this McFence numbskull. If Alfred A. Knopf called and said, “Hey Twisty, how’s about you ghost-write McFence’s autobiography?” they’d have the finished manuscript on their desk in less than a week. If I took a test and the essay question was “McFence’s views on corruption and the radical Muslim agenda in the Obama presidency may be said to precisely mimic those of Fox News pundits. Discuss,” I would totally ace that test. If the amount of McFence’s daughter’s annual salary was the answer on Final Jeopardy, I would totally win the big money. I know where McFence was born, the name of his church, and the names, occupations, and geographic locations of each of his forty-seven adult children (who were expertly raised by the sainted wife who really wears the pants in the family).

Oblivious to signs of my increasingly excruciating boredom, such as my grimace, my pulsating obstreperal lobe, or my repeated attempts to discuss fencing, Mr McFence will not rest until he has revealed more tedious details of his personal life. I would spare you, but then you wouldn’t know the true extent of my pain. So: he is 67 years old, he recently lost 40 pounds, he’s a Tea Partyer, his family are holy rollers, he wants to move to Alaska, he’s “part Cherokee,” and (like all Central Texas contractors) his favorite client and best friend in the whole world is Willie Nelson, especially now that Willie has fired all the “druggies” and has accountants who pay up promptly.

It’s as though he’s been cribbing from a list entitled “The Main Things Spinster Aunts Couldn’t Care Less About.”

You are undoubtedly familiar with the version of this guy who lives in your town, so I hardly need mention that during the course of our encounter, McFence runs out of A material early on, and is obliged to recycle most of his monologue three and four times. Maybe he thinks I won’t notice because I’m just a dumb donkey farmer.

At first it is unclear to me why my presence is required at all, since he is so determined never to let me speak. I eventually catch on that my role during the delivery of this epic soliloquy is to nod each time I am informed that that he’d been a Marine sniper “in Nam” where his best buddy sniped “over 300 kills” and “the V-C” had a bounty on his head.

Finally, after a hour and a half and many failed attempts, I manage to steer his attention toward a topic that is more fascinating than his mass-murdering Army buddy by many orders of magnitude: cedar posts and wire mesh. After the stunning revelation that McFence’s LDL cholesterol is down from 188 to 130, and before suffering for the 3rd time the gripping information that his son works as a landscaper on the coast, I actually pry an estimate out of him. He is silent for about 34 seconds while he does the cipherin’ in his head. He’s so quiet I begin to wonder if his astonishing profusion of empty babbling has in fact ruptured a vocal cord. But it is not to be. Horribly, he gets a second wind. McFence goes on to tell me how honest he is, how he’s just plain folks, how the good lord is looking out for him, and — don’t pretend you didn’t see this coming –

“I treat my wetbacks like family.”

Ohhhhh yeah.

It was a most painful way to learn this lesson, but believe me, I will never again leave the house without packing my Mr T in Your Pocket Talking Keychain. The most excellent device ever invented, Mr T in Your Pocket is used to advise dipshits to shut their piehole with your choice of 6 of the beloved A-Teamer’s most colorful catchphrases, including “Don’t make me mad, grrrr!”, the succinct “Shut up, fool!”, and of course the iconic “Quitcho jibba jabba!”

Incidentally, Mr T in Your Pocket is identical to Radical Feminist in Your Pocket, except that Radical Feminist in Your Pocket does not actually exist, probably because in it “Don’t gimme no backtalk, sucka!” has been replaced by the rather more romantic phrase “Please remain still while I saw off your racist mansplaining pencil-dick with the rusty machete they issue all humorless hairy feminists in Women’s Studies, fool!”

Next time: Little Niggling Instances of the Redoubtable Efficacy of Patriarchal Oppression, Part II: Shit I Saw on PBS.

Posted in Knobjectivism, Lobe-blowing, Patriarchy, my patriarchy and The Argument Against Human Reproduction. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt temporarily icked out by stupid Geraldo Rivera column

Published by Jill on May 19, 2011. 13 Comments

Holy shit, remember that dude Geraldo Rivera? The edgy, muck-raking journalist from 40 years ago? But then he kind of turned into a supremely annoying one-man tabloid? I hadn’t seen him around lately, so I’d assumed he’d been sent off to Joke-Butt Island, where guys with 70s porn mustaches go to die, but no, he popped up in my news reader this morning with a column in Fox News Latino on professional throbbing-gristelian (rhymes with “Aristotelian”) Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Rivera writes like a third-rate blogger. As a second-rate blogger, I ought to know.

His column is titled “Geraldo Rivera: Arnold’s Telenovela.” In it he enumerates the “three stereotypes [that] color her story.” By ‘her’ he means Mildred Baena, the woman who Schwarzenegger — who as you know is now at the center of a so-called “love child” scandal — exploited, pronged, and impregnated. Rivera calls Baena “Patty” or “The Mexican Maid!”

The “three stereotypes” involve Baena’s status as an immigrant menial whose sex appeal was irresistible to the powerful robot governor. Rivera fills in the narrative with colorful speculation.

Rivera’s main objective in the piece appears to be a takedown of Schwarzenegger (flecked, of course, with the admiration all dudes feel for other dudes who demonstrate in their sexploits “chutzpah, arrogance, narcissism, and cosmic balls”). He does, in fact, suggest that, if the title weren’t already held by John Edwards, Schwarzenegger would be “the creep of all time.” However, no journalist — and certainly no “journalist” — was ever able to resist depicting the victim of a famous sexual harasser as anything other than the essence of sex itself, and Rivera is no exception.

Using a writing style that is both lumpen and pulsating with tabloid idioms (“honey trap,” “uncontrolled sex machine”), he wastes no time in insulting Baena. I give you the first two sentences of the article:

Mildred Patricia Baena [...] would never be mistaken for Salma Hayek; yet she has now become the country’s most prominent Latina, temporarily eclipsing even Shakira and JLo. Like Latina Raquel Welsh or Rita Hayworth in their time, she was irresistible, attracting the affection, loyalty and generosity of a big man, larger than life.

He then flips the misogyny switch from pornulation to sentimental maudlin mode. Not just a woman with “classic smoldering appeal,” Baena is also the essence of fantasy wifeliness: long-suffering, patient, self-sacrificing, loyal, will put out and do laundry, etc.

“To raise her son in the literal shadow of that swaggering man, keeping the truth of their child’s parentage secret for a time even from Arnold, required world-class love and trust.”

That’s right, Geraldo. She was his toilet; that always breeds world-class love and trust.

Kill me now.

Posted in Knobjectivism, Mass Media, Sexploitation and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.

Pop psych mag cites evolutionary evidence for female fickleness

Published by Jill on December 9, 2010. 137 Comments

Few pseudo-entities spook the spinster butt-boils like pseudoscience, and few pseudosciences are as a hot spork in a spinster’s obstreperal lobe like evolutionary psychology.

Evolutionary psychology rests on the shaky (often enpornulated) hypothesis that modern human social behaviors are actually species-preserving adaptations. Because evolutionary psychology, like all psuedoscience, is administered by jackasses who are heavily invested in patriarchy, the behaviors in question just happen to be the very same behaviors commonly observed to be beloved of patriarchyists. And also of sexists, misogynists, horndogs, militarists, straight people, politicians, consumers of pornography, consumers of “beauty,” racists, godbags, liberal men, Hollywoodists, homophobes, matrimonialists, and other cogs in the megatheocorporatocratic machine. Everybody who loves the current world order loves the romantic myth that it is the result of the random interaction of mindless genes, or biological “design.” Sadly, the world order is actually the result of something way more sinister: the completely arbitrary social construct of the culture of domination and submission.

Here are some of the modern human social behaviors explained by evolutionary psychology as the result of natural impulses that apparently evolved around the ancestral campfire: rape, heterosexuality, shooting innocent Texas Hill Country deer with crossbows and consuming the meat at tailgate parties conducted in parking lots at football games, femininity, etc.

By invoking no less an indomitable and popular force of nature than evolution itself, evolutionary psychology confers upon itself the gravitas of scientific holy writ. And for sheer gravitas, you can’t beat the American periodical Psychology Today.* Check out this illustration accompanying a Psychology Today article on the effects of women’s menstrual cycles on their hotness:

Nothing says “take this research seriously” like photos of pornulated women gettin it on with giant plushies.

Like many articles in popular magazines, the aforementioned “The Double Life of Women” by Annie Murphy Paul** unlocks for the pornsick psychology buff the sexy mysteries of those ineffable bizarros, women. Annie Murphy Paul uses revelations facilitated by evolutionary psychology to make the (tired old) case that women are pretty much prisoners of biology, or, more specifically, of the menstrual cycle. Her apparent thesis: ovulating women are constrained by biological impulse to go to bars, wear tight dresses, and emit musical, magical laughter, whereupon they become attracted to male lantern-jawed superheroes. Non-ovulating women, on the other hand, are practically a different species. They are drab and dull and fail to effervesce or mate, and prefer pansy-ass dudes.***

Paul cites research conducted, unfortunately, by psychologists and “dating advisers,” since who else would know from this shit? One researcher dude juxtaposed menstrual cycle data with the nightly revenues of (a whopping) 18 lap dancers. Awesome.

Research dude: Hmm. I wonder where we could conduct some research on ovulating women?

Grad student dude: How about a strip club? We can totally multitask by working and abusing the sex class at the same time.

Research dude: It’s pure genius! I’ll take full credit.

In this case research dude concluded that not only do strip club clientele discern whether lap dancers are ovulating, but that pervs lavish more cash on ovulating lap dancers than they do on dull old non-ovulating ones. Paul calls this “one of the most arresting studies of male responses to female fertility cues.”

Female fertility cues! Apparently women who work in strip clubs are not, contrary to what spinster aunts have maintained through the ages, just trying to make the best of their fucked-up sex class status by working themselves through law school or a drug habit or a musician boyfriend. These hotsy-totsy babes are in fact sending their slavering clients “female fertility cues.” Furthermore, strippers who take birth control pills are “’shooting [themselves] in the foot,’ since [they'll] miss out on the bountiful tips garnered by women in estrus.” That’s right. Sexploitation isn’t about male domination, it’s about human reproduction. Human reproduction is natural. Natural is good. Therefore sexploitation is good.

And that, young onions, is how ev-psych shills for patriarchy.

Meanwhile, so strong is the ovulating human female’s instinct for total sexiness, it turns out, that its expression is involuntary and entirely automated by evolutionary design. Even if she does not wish to advertise her ovulational status, apparently the truth will out. Ovulating women sparkle, they physically morph into hotter versions of themselves, and they take “social risks.”

“It’s difficult for women to fully conceal all signs of fertility — some of them inevitably leak out. [...] We call this ‘leaky cues hypothesis’.”

Ovulating women are not in control of their cues! They simply cannot resist the primal urge to exude pornulated dudefantasy. They are hardwired for hustling! That’s why you see so many drunk women in bars, their fertility cues puddling up at their feet.

“With her tight clothes, alluring scent, and seductive waist-hip ratio, a woman in estrus is sending out a signal not unlike the chimp or the cat in heat.”

It will amuse the patriarchy blamer to note that Paul here reprises one of her earlier remarks, wherein she alluded to the “genitalia of female chimps” which “swell and turn a dramatic shade of pink”. It is a fact — documented by the Spinstitute for the Study of EvPsych Clichés — that no author contriving an antifeminist paean to evolutionary psychology can ever resist comparing sexxed-up women to the dramatically pink butts of chimpanzees. The yowling feline trope, tired and moldy though it is, is a pure bonus track.

So, to recap: women are completely at the mercy of the menstrual cycle, which makes them awesome sexbots one day, and spineless mice the next.

But isn’t this just a reiteration of the hysterical women stereotype? Not at all, says one of the kindly dude researchers.

“The traditional and rather patronizing male view was that women are fickle, that their preferences are random and arbitrary. Now it turns out that what looks like fickleness is actually deeply adaptive and is shared with the females of most animal species.”

OK, let’s get this out of the way first: does Dude even realize that ‘most animal species’ are either arthropods or nematodes, depending on which geek you’re talking to? Together they number in the millions. As in, millions of species. Here at Spinster HQ we were unable to locate any research on, for example, the fickleness of female flatworms. Maybe they like to sport around in spandex when it’s that time of the month, but published studies omit to mention it. So this guy, in his attempt to science-ize an enormously detrimental sexist stereotype, grossly mischaracterizes the scope of the planet’s animalian diversity to further his own anthrocentric worldview.

And also, do not speak to me, dude, of “the rather patronizing male view.” How fucking patronizing is it to argue that ‘fickleness’ is a fucking adaptation shared by all females everywhere? That women’s behavior is, in fact, irrational, only now this irrationality has scientifically proven reasons? This dude is killin’ me!

Oh, and you’ll love this: the helpful suggestion that women can keep themselves out of harm’s way by not “drinking too much at a bar or party at that time of the month.” I’m not even kidding. Dudes cannot resist violating fertile females, so lock yourself away from life’s rich pageant when you’re ovulating or you’re just askin’ for it.

Thus we see that evolutionary psychology attempts to rationalize the worst aspects of humanity by asserting, essentially, this:

Boys will be boys.

______________________
* I found my copy of Psychology Today in the checkout lane at Whole Foods. Pop psychology is apparently a good fit with $27 apples and biohealthy yeast-o-matic colon-cleansing pills. The instances of heteronormative dudecentricity exhibited by this magazine cover are too numerous to list. Help me out!

** Paul, Annie Murphy. “The Double Life of Women.” Psychology Today Dec. 2010: 72-79. Print.

***Naturally, because evolutionary psychology cannot satisfactorily explain homosexuality, no mention is made of the randy double lives of ovulating lesbians, even though they are women. After a fashion.

Photo: Miller, Greg. “The Double Life of Women.” Psychology Today Dec. 2010: 77. Detail. Print.

Posted in Junk Studies, Knobjectivism, Mass Media, Men Hate You, Number 1 Science Information, Sexploitation and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.

Little Miss Muffet

Published by Jill on October 19, 2010. 31 Comments

“Here is my question,” announces blamer JenniferRuth. “Can arachnophobia be blamed on the patriarchy?”

The answer is yes! Patriarchy is the gnarly firmament of dominant culture, and nothing may exist outside it; therefore absolutely everything can be blamed on it.

This, friends, is the beauty of patriarchy-blaming. Whenever one encounters, in the course of her daily flailings, anything untoward, unjust, illogical, wrong, asinine, violent, destructive, or mediocre, there can be no doubt that patriarchy is at the root of it. Got bunions? Blame patriarchy for misogynist shoe designers. Stuck in a Chilean coal mine? Blame patriarchy for the megatheocorporatocratic greed that exploits you. Suffering from irrational fear of spiders? Point your claw at the institutionalized English-speaking anti-spiderism commencing in 1805 with the first edition of “Little Miss Muffet,” jut out your chin, and cry out “j’accuse!”

Chads and other antifeminist fuckbags often flip out when they hear an Internet feminist aver that patriarchy — that is, the culture of domination — is responsible for much of the world’s unpleasantness. Their flip-outs are funny and sad; the Chad never lived who understood even roughly what patriarchy even is. But this is the Internet, where ignorance fuels passion, and where a Chad’s job is to strenuously object to the blamer’s irrefutable evidence that patriarchy exists. Often he attempts this by denouncing the patriarchy blamer as a paranoid nutjob.

Consider this remark from Ralph, recently submitted to an old post on Shulamith Firestone.

Someone wrote, ‘Patriarchy is the problem.’ Isn’t this just a convenient scapegoat. Blame everything on some abstract concept called ‘The Patriarchy.’ Who is in this group anyway: the gentleman sitting behind you, the young man in the suit, the guy on the bus? All men. All evil.

But, women can be members too. Those poor, foolish, misguided creatures.

‘The Patriarchy’ is in control right? We’d better identify its members and take care of them immediately.

What I love about this idea is it’s perfect for conspiracy theorists.

Ralph has gotten it into his head that patriarchy is both an “abstract concept” and a secret cabal of evil dudes the existence of which lies entirely in the imaginations of delusional loonies like, presumably, me. Like so many Chads before him, Ralph appears to be unaware that patriarchy isn’t an imaginary Mean Man Guild, but a global social order based on the fetishization of domination and submission, to which he himself is unwittingly subject. Ralph, in fact, demonstrates perfect assimilation by attempting to exercise dudely dominance on this very blog. Unfortunately for Ralph, this is a patriarchy-blaming blog, so he only ends up looking silly, but the point is, he is a shining example of patriarchy’s exquisite self-perpetuating design. By invoking the power of dudeliness with which it has invested him, he simultaneously denies its existence and defends it. “Patriarchy is a crock and I’m here to dominate you, stupid Internet feminist!”

Ralph, if you have the good sense to be reading this, I urge you to cast your status-quo-lovin’ eye around the putrid abattoir that passes for human civilization and ponder, just for 3 minutes, whether domination and submission is, in fact, the most desirable model for a world order.

In this charming illustration of arachnophobia, a little boy is shown inflicting terror on a little girl, just, apparently, for the hell of it. In the pornulated illustration at the top of the post, a big boy depicts a big girl upon whom terror is also inflicted for his amusement. “Boys will be boys” is one of the three cornerstones of patriarchy. The other two are “terrified chicks are hot,” “no means yes,” and “lighten up, can’t you take a joke?”

_______________________________
Illustrations: Pornulated Miss Muffet: jeremeyes.wordpress.com ; Creepy boy with spider: Wikipedia Commons

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

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

Published by Jill on June 8, 2010. 53 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s an oldie but goodie:

Good luck finding a man.

Right back atcha, heteronormative moron dick!

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

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

This shit just writes itself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Published by Jill on June 7, 2010. 177 Comments

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

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

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

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

Weeeelll, it isn’t long before Goldman says

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whaaa?

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

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

and, finally, I kid you not,

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

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

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

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

You can’t make this shit up.

Kill me now.

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

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

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

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

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

MRAs on parade: chumpass motherfucker declares ownership of girlfriend’s uterus

Published by Jill on May 31, 2010. 86 Comments

It’s always the way: some horndog dude decides to prong a woman, then ends up dissatisfied with the results. So he has a tantrum. The tantrum may take one, or a combination, of many interesting forms.

Sometimes the woman doesn’t want him around anymore, so he stalks her. Sometimes she makes him hate her so much that he emails naked pictures of her to the whole school. Sometimes she gets old or fat so he keeps her around to do his laundry but starts pronging a younger woman on the DL. Sometimes she stops putting out so he fires her from her job. Sometimes the woman interprets the pronging as rape, so he calls her a liar and tortures her with mental cruelty and courtroom drama and ends up doing no jail time.

And sometimes he makes the woman pregnant. In this case he can choose from many, many popular options. He might he murder her, beat her, abandon her, marry her, slut-shame her, or, as in today’s case, appeal to the patriarchal justice system to enforce his wishes as to what should be done with the contents of her personal uterus.

I allude to Greg Bruell, a dude who, having some time ago made the personal decision to father no further children, proceeded to prong his girlfriend anyway (as reported in Salon).

Here I interject some No.1 Science Information, information that, had Greg Bruell been apprised of it, might have prevented all of his piteous suffering. That information is this: heterosexual pronging ranks Number One in the World as the most efficacious method of all time for obtaining pregnancy. You might think Greg Bruell had been at least dimly aware of the consequences of heterosexual pronging, since he has already fathered two children. However, Greg Bruell has apparently failed to grasp the connection between his lusty throbbing and the pitter-patter of little feet. Men, who are born with the right to prong anything that moves, are not typically required to understand this kind of cause and effect, since, as I mentioned above, they can easily oil out of any untoward consequences of their actions merely by invoking any of the buttload of traditional exemptions: claiming ignorance, deceit, she asked for it, she cuckolded him, or — an oldie but goodie — that the burden of pregnancy is totally a chick problem.

Anyway, Greg Bruell claims that he and his girlfriend agreed that she would terminate her next pregnancy “without waffling.” So when she boldly asserted human agency, kept the kid, and sued him for child support, Bruell blew a wheel. His gambit for oiling out of his responsibility? He owns the uterus! The National Center for Men took up the cause, saying (according to Salon):

“When a man and woman have discussed what they want and have an agreement, I do not think she has a right to impose her change of mind.”

You heard that right. The “I” in the above quotation is our old pal, antifeminist knob Mel Feit, who thinks women don’t have a right to change their minds.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this crackpot ideology would turn all women’s interactions with men into legally binding contracts permitting men to use them according to their whim. The contracts can be verbal (“She didn’t say ‘no’!”), sartorial (“she dressed like a whore so my hands were tied!), alcoholical (“if she didn’t want to have sex she shouldn’t have passed out at my party”), or body-language-ical (“she winked at me. What was I supposed to do, not rape her?”).

If for some unexplained reason you acquiesce to sex with a dude, and then, after reconsidering, change your mind three minutes later, tough shit, lady. He doesn’t have to stop, because you already said yes. It won’t be rape, because you already said yes. A yes, once given, exists in perpetuity! It’s a binding contract.

How is this possible in the tiny mind of Mel Feit? Well, according to the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women, women exist in a perpetual state of “yes.” This state of “yes” extends not only to sexual availability, but to compliance with male wishes in any quarter, across the board. To wit:

Bruell’s girlfriend supposedly agreed she would have an abortion if he ever knocked her up again. At that moment of yes, according to the Feit, this woman gave up her own autonomy and ceded control of her personal sovereignty to representative of the state Greg Bruell. Because she had agreed to be an occasional receptacle for his ejaculate, her uterus actually became the property of Greg Bruell. Greg Bruell thinks his ownership of the uterus should have afforded him the opportunity to force her to abort the fetus. And now that she’s defied his authority and had the kid anyway, he’s claiming she “deceived” him.

What? No!

Hey Greg Bruell: your genetic material is under your jurisdiction only as long as you keep it locked up in your gunk box. The instant you give your sticky little wad its joyous send-off, and the two of you part company, its fate becomes the purview of another host body. It is no longer your property, and you can’t say dick about what happens to it. However, it’s only fair that you should pay a fine for littering.

Don’t want women suing you for child support? Zip it up, you fucking dipshit!

Why can’t the same argument be turned around and applied to women?

Because women are an oppressed class without fully human status. The pervasiveness and normalization of rape culture strips women of the same quality of autonomy that men enjoy. Women are not always permitted to opt out of perpetual sexual availability without suffering harmful consequences.

Because, in other words, of the patriarchy.

This Mel Feit guy, in case you’ve forgotten, is the author of much virulent misogynist MRA crap. Such as these gems:

“At a certain point during arousal, we don’t have complete control over our ability to stop. To equate that with brutal, violent rape weakens the whole concept of rape.” [cite]

Because, duh, men should define rape.

“When will public discussions about sexuality recognize that, in this culture, women already make most of the decisions about sexual intercourse?” [ibid.]

Even if this were true — a fantastical contingency is almost too ludicrous to contemplate — what would be so terrible about it? Since women are forced to bear all the consequences of “sexuality”– from self-destructive beauty practices torape, pregnancy, child-rearing, and beyond, it would make the most sense if women actually did have some power in this quarter.

Only women have the extraordinary freedom to enjoy sexual intimacy free from the fear of forced parenthood. [cite]

Whaoah! That’s a hot one! Obviously, by “women with extraordinary freedom” he means “mythical creatures whose legal right to an abortion is not obstructed at every turn by puritanical godbag misogynist legislation.”

But I am a Western, privileged internet feminist, which means that all I care about is clothes, so here is my favorite:

[...] A woman has a greater freedom when she gets dressed in the morning. She can wear what she wants to wear because she can be what she wants to be. She can wear traditionally male clothing because she can do traditionally male things, work in traditionally male jobs, assume traditionally male roles and personality traits. She can cross over into a man’s world, share men’s experiences, then return to a world where no men are allowed. You might say she can choose to wear the pants in the family. She has free choice in fashion because she has free choice in life. [cite]

Mel Feit is bummed out on accounta a supposedly feminist woman in a pair of pants told him she wouldn’t fuck him because — I do not lie — he likes to wear skirts. This unspeakable tragedy has forced Mel Feit to dream up all kinds of wacky fantasies about how liberating it is to be a woman in our society, and about how selfish women are for refusing to share our magnificent skirt-freedoms with him.

Jesus in a jetpack, like anyone really gives a shit if Mel fucking Feit wears a skirt! I will personally donate all of my skirts to Mel Feit, if he will just promise to wear them to all future christenings, bar mitzvas, weddings, business meetings, and talk show tapings.

O if only I had all day to huddle at the desk and make fun of old skirt-coveting Mel Feit who can’t get laid by women in pants. But unfortunately I’ve got to sit around and watch the grass grow.

[Thanks, Ashley]

Posted in Dear god what about the men?, Knobjectivism, Lobe-blowing, Men Hate You, Rape Culture and The Argument Against Human Reproduction. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt is only mildly inconvenienced by having to post something to her blog

Published by Jill on May 30, 2010. 91 Comments

Do I have time to write a post today? Hell, no! So I’m re-publishing an excerpt from one of Helen Huntingdon’s comments on the recent ultra-controversial science post. Do I have time to link to the specific comment? Hell, no! To read the whole thing, type “Helen Huntingdon” into the new search engine (over there on the right) and see what pops up.

The other day someone told me you can’t really get to know someone without living with them. Unsurprisingly, it was a dude who said this, since he was arguing why het couples should live together (married or un-), no matter how statistically risky this is for the woman. I said that if this was true, it must be possible to identify something of value that cannot be learned any other way, so what would that be? He couldn’t come up with anything that wasn’t obviously absurdly false. I said that the assertion that to “truly know” someone you must live together is probably nothing more than cultural myth, but that this one conversation hadn’t produced evidence warranting drawing a conclusion either way.

It’s too bad I don’t have time to enlarge on this theme, but I do have time to continue the tradition of pointing out what I great post I would have written if I didn’t have to drive 20 miles to put white gunk on a horse’s eye. It would have had something to do with widely accepted but bullshit cultural myths, such as “rabbits are rodents,” or “it is possible to boost your self-esteem by losing weight.”

Name your bullshit myths below!

UPDATE: the damn search engine is suddenly not acting right. Will fix it soon.

Posted in Dear god what about the men?, Knobjectivism and Oppression Culture. Bite me, Chad.

Husband and wife blog team on board with antifeminist backlash even though it’s so 20 years ago

Published by Jill on December 25, 2009. 101 Comments

Wait. I have a blog? Shitfire!

But wow, check out this dumb blog. It’s one of those blogs that has “book deal” written all over it.

It’s supposedly a husband-and-wife joint coaching the reader on the successful pursuit of traditional manliness. Traditional manliness isn’t just a lifestyle, it’s a movement! It agitates in support of the appreciation of “classic cocktails,” of knowing how to “set the agenda” at “meetings,” and, as in the example below, of navigating the perilous waters of dating incomprehensible women.

Women are suckers for a man with a plan because it shows you have initiative, can think ahead, and aren’t shy about taking the lead. Don’t punt and ask her what she wants to do. Be a man! You’re the one doing the asking, so it’s your duty to come up with something that she’ll enjoy. When a woman is with a man that has a plan, they feel they can relax and really enjoy themselves. [Cite]

The husband/wife blog uses terms like on board to mean “having drunk the pre-feminist nostalgia Kool-Aid” and man up to mean — well, the precise definition of man up remains indeterminate, but I believe that on manliness blogs it concerns embracing with vigor a set of supposedly lost upper-middle-class honky patriarchal affectations, like the moral necessity of wearing suits to class, of criticizing women who think femininity is stupid, and of growing handlebar mustaches.

Here’s a post in which the manliness-loving duo expose the egregious double standard imposed upon manliness-seeking men by scruffy feminists in sweatpants. Apparently scruffy feminists in sweatpants want men to eschew their natural barbarism*, but are not sufficiently on board with their own feminine role in this business of manning up.

“[T]he new movement towards a return to traditional manliness needs women to be on board to be successful. After all, if you have men opening doors and asking women on real dates, and they’re just laughing in your face, that’s clearly not going to work out too well. And if you have men striving to be their best, but they feel like women aren’t even trying, you’ve got a recipe for creating strained relations between the sexes and bitter and disillusioned men who think all women are an unappealing mess who are not worth the trouble of dealing with. [...] [T]hese days a new double standard has emerged where it’s okay to celebrate men manning up, but telling women they need to recover some of their femininity is offensive.”

Ladies, if you desire your interactions with the nattily-dressed oppressor to be as painless as possible, you will do your nails and makeup.

_________________________
* “[Y]our car probably smells. Leaving sweaty gym bags or Saturday morning’s fish catch in a car causes odor to build up in the upholstery. Spare your date the olfactory torture by airing out your car and spraying it down with Febreeze.”

[Gracias, Rebecca]

Posted in Blogulation, Dear god what about the men?, Femininity, Knobjectivism, Men Hate You, Oppression Culture, Strawfeminism, The Beauty Ultimatum and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.

Hey, bilbertson!

Published by Jill on December 4, 2009. 17 Comments

Only you can settle the drastically important argument roiling in the comments section. So which is it? Are you an incredibly gifted satirist, or a college sophomore?

Posted in Blogulation and Knobjectivism. Bite me, Chad.