Archive for the 'Men Hate You' Category

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Hugs, Twisty: rapist is asshole

Published by Jill on May 17, 2011. 69 Comments

Dear Twisty,

Please Jill! Cast the jaundiced spinster eye apon the recent IMF rapist? I need your unique perspective.

redpeachmoon

Dear redpeachmoon,

What luck! I just happen to have handy just such a perspective on the IMF rapist. However, you might not interpret it as particularly unique. It goes like this:

That guy is a fucken tool.

Sure, I’ve got a little more, but that’s pretty much the gist. So if you’ve got something else to do, go on ahead. I won’t mind.

Meanwhile, if, unlike blamer redpeachmoon, you serenely abide in your cloister under a self-imposed news blackout, you may not have heard of the IMF rapist. No great loss. If you’ve heard of one IMF rapist, you’ve heard of’em all.

This particular IMF rapist is Dominique Strauss-Kahn, 62, pink-faced captain of industry and managing director of the International Monetary Fund. Dominique Strauss-Kahn went on a little spree in Manhattan last weekend and assaulted a hotel employee. According to the first link I clicked on Google, this is how it went down: Strauss-Kahn “emerged from the bathroom naked and dragged [the hotel employee] through the suite from room to room in a violent sex attack.” He then high-tailed it to JFK, licketty-split, but was yanked off his flight to Paris just before takeoff, brought back to “a police cell in Harlem,” and denied bail as a flight risk. [cite]

The woman Strauss-Kahn attacked is being referred to as a “maid” or “chambermaid.”

Maid is a creepy-ass word. No matter what, a maid is not a good thing to be. In days of yore the term was used to denote a mythical female who had so far escaped — but would soon be forced into — getting pronged by some entitled prick. Denoting females thusly was of vital importance back in yore; owing to a lot of macho-religious nonsense that equated women with sex, as-yet-unpronged ladies were worth more than pronged ones. Intact virtue could make or break your career.

Nowadays maid still refers most commonly to a member of the sex class, but with less emphasis on purity, and more emphasis on the flipside of the misogyny nickel — suitability for interaction with other people’s filth. It means “low-status servant who cleans up after high-status assholes.”

Some high-status assholes make themselves feel like magnanimous benefactors by calling their maids “housekeepers,” paying them “more” than the maids would make back in the Dominican Republic, and treating them “like” family. Oh please. The job is fucking cruddy. It’s so cruddy that dudes are never, ever maids. If maids were actually paid what the work is actually worth, dudes would get all the maid jobs.

Also, your maid already has a family, Your Highness.

Anyway, in the narrative of IMF rapist Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the victim’s status as a sub-human hotel cleaner is an important detail. Apparently this Strauss-Kahn shitsack is a celebrated rapscallion, rake, and ladies’ man. Boys will be boys! His nickname in the classy world of international finance is reportedly “the great seducer.” So it makes titillating how-the-mighty-have-fallen news copy to depict him, not as a suave Casanova jetsetting around with supermodel heiresses, but as a privileged fiend predating a powerless, lower-caste menial. In a world where it’s generally considered OK to use women according to their universally-acknowledged purpose (sex), it is sometimes permissible to use them, as long as patriarchal prurience is served, for other stuff, such as, in this case, leverage in toppling a poobah. As for the actual woman herself, nobody gives a rat’s ass about her. She is merely a symbol of a towering potentate’s descent into ignominy, frothily recounted by patriarchal media. Like the virginal maids of yore, hotel maids are also receptacles for male disdain.

Anyone who goes around calling himself “the great seducer” is undoubtedly a serial rapist, so naturally other women are beginning to turn up with accounts of Strauss-Kahn’s abuses. One of them, a young journalist who had previously publicly recounted her assault (with Strauss-Kahn’s name redacted), now describes his behavior during her attempted rape as that of a “rutting chimp.” Not surprisingly, the woman didn’t press charges at the time. She didn’t want her career to be permanently stained with “she’s the girl who accused Strauss-Kahn of rape.” Which is exactly how rapists get away with it: fear, humiliation, and shame are superb silencers.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn will undoubtedly get away with it, too. He has retained Michael Jackson’s lawyer.

Speaking of entitled white patriarchs who use domestic employees as toilets, California ex-governator Arnold Schwarzenegger has apparently fathered a child with “a longtime member of their household staff.” Wife Maria Shriver, an original member of the long-suffering-stand-by-your-political-man wives’ club back in aught-three while candidate Arnie was at the center of a groping scandal, has finally left the schmuck.

Internationally powerful, white, rich, successful, married to heiresses they famously cheat on at every opportunity — these dudes are patriarchy’s poster-boys. You don’t become a global financier or a steroid-poppin’ muscleman California grope-ulator by being an enlightened sweetheart of a guy who doesn’t rape the maid.

Hugs,
Twisty

Posted in Hugs, Twisty, Men Hate You and Rape Culture. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt reads comment on Dawkins website, wrinkles lip

Published by Jill on March 19, 2011. 117 Comments

Liberal dudes (and that boobquake chick) just love celebrity biologist Richard Dawkins. Even some Internet feminists may be said not to vomit blood at the mention of his name. Because no greater proponent of atheism than yours truly ever camera-stalked a Rio Grand turkey in the Texas Hill Country, even the Spinster Library contains a couple of Dawkins’ popular, well-written books. They are enjoyable if one is charmed by that mellifluous English public school manner of expression, and if human penis-based arguments against godbagism typically convey buoyancy to your ocean-going vessel.

As an added precaution, the Great Council of the Dieri would also keep a stockpile of boys’ foreskins in constant readiness, because of their homeopathic power to produce rain.*

Despite his admirable enthusiasm for some of the richer morsels of history’s bounty, Dawkins is, as I have always maintained, no feminist. This is a disappointment but hardly surprising, since rare indeed is the intellectual Western motherfucker who is not enamored of the glorious myth that he and his ilk, in their educated and progressive magnanimity, have liberated their women.

It’s a disappointment, not just because it blows whenever a superstar brainiac turns out to be a knob about the global humanitarian crisis of patriarchal oppression, but also because of this: if otherwise rational, right-thinking, internationally worshiped dudes of Dawkins’ stature can remain deluded about the tyranny of male privilege, the chance in hell that feminist revolution might be said to stand is like unto that of a snowball. Particularly when women themselves, in the shape of self-described “equity feminists,” saunter through the town square declaring that patriarchal oppression in America does not exist. Even more particularly when the Dawkinses openly admire the  self-described feminists’ declarations.

The specific Dawkins-approved, self-described feminist to whom I allude is, of course, the notorious Christina Hoff Sommers, professional turncoat and author of several “Dudes Rule!”-themed books, such as the hatespeechy Who Stole Feminism, and that modern MRA classic The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men.

Sommers thinks American feminists should put a sock in it and take it easy. Why? Because Americans have got patriarchy licked. Women are officially free. La di da da, free. She invents an enemy of American women’s freedom: “gender feminists,” mythical creatures who hate men but for some reason nevertheless maintain that men and women are “essentially the same.”

“Gender feminists” are probably more accurately described as “feminists who think Sommers is full of shit.”

So anyway, some commenter on the Richard Dawkins fanboy site suggested that Dawkins take a gander at one of Sommers’ antifeminist lectures. Here is the link to the lecture. Its gist is that “eccentric gender feminists” have staged a coup and taken over the women’s movement. Whereupon the eccentrics instituted a disinformation campaign, spreading foul lies about — I kid you not — ancient Roman emperors, while leaving a trail of bloodied, quivering equity feminists and the men they love in their wake. Sommers even takes a couple of shots at Eve Ensler for — get this — failing to sufficiently praise dudes in the Vagina Monologues.

This excerpt from Sommers’ lecture states her premise.

[I]n 1994 [...] I published a book entitled Who Stole Feminism? The book was strongly feminist, but it rejected the idea that American women were oppressed. For the most part, feminism had succeeded, I said. By the nineties, I argued, American women were among the freest and most liberated in the world. It was no longer reasonable to say that as a group women were far worse off than men. Yes, there were still inequities, but to speak of American society as a “patriarchy” or to refer to American women as second class citizens was frankly absurd.

Hey, Christina Hoff Sommers, what about that pesky 75 cents-on-the-dollar pay disparity, or the fact that only 15% of American political offices are held by women? Sommers, it turns out, isn’t even sure that these “factoids” are true (given the opposition’s proven propensity for lying about ancient Roman history), but even if they are, they can be easily explained by that handy psuedoscience mainstay, evolutionary psychology. You see, men and women are neither physically nor cognitively “the same,” therefore it is irrational to expect men and women to excel equally. Men are simply hardwired to win more political campaigns than women. Apparently men are also hardwired to make more money than women. So feminists should accept their biological destiny, “tone down the rhetoric against men,” and bask in our sexism-free utopia.

No advanced blamer requires a refutation of that ludicrous argument, so we’ll just press on to Sommers’ views on the “eccentric” idea that some menacing entity called “patriarchy” goes around victimizing women.

The dominant philosophy of today’s women’s movement is not equity feminism–but “victim feminism.” “Victim” feminists don’t want to hear about the ways in which women have succeeded. They want to focus on and often invent new ways and perspectives in which women can be regarded as oppressed and subordinated to men.

A few words on this women-as-victims stuff:

Largely because of the success of the funfeminist movement, which argues that women do too have agency, dammit! (as long as their choiciness stays perfectly aligned with male interests), to view women as victims has become passé and unpopular. Women aren’t victims anymore now that we can own property, vote, and have the right to pole-dance in our boyfriends’ apartments. Furthermore, the argument goes, if we traipse about the countryside exaggerating the sorry plight of women (when in fact the plight of women, though admittedly not quite as awesome as men’s, is at least not as sorry as it was), we’re just buying into that unattractive, unempowerfulized, hysterical “victim mentality.” We freely choose to wear 6-inch heels, and if we author this choice, we cannot therefore be victims of it. If we don’t think we are victims, we won’t be victims.

You know; only sick people take pills; therefore, if I don’t take pills, I won’t be sick.

What this argument fails to consider, regardless of a few funfeminists’ purported choice to choose choices, is that, hourly, billions of women worldwide suffer everything from discrimination to murder exclusively because of their sex. Women cannot choose the “I’m-not-a-victim” choice. Not even the funfeminists can choose it, not really, because when stuff like “you cannot rape me” or “my appearance is meaningless” or “the state cannot interfere with the contents of my own personal uterus” is not on the menu of choices, no real agency exists. But apparently, claiming that patriarchy victimizes women is just whiney.

So why in the world would scores of radical feminists, both Internetian (rhymes with “Venetian”) and regular, devote their public lives to exposing the violence perpetrated by the dominant culture if there were nothing to expose? What possible motivation could we have for supposedly “inventing new ways in which women can be regarded as oppressed”?

Sommers offers a helpful explanation: “There are a lot of homely women in women’s studies. Preaching these anti-male, anti-sex sermons is a way for them to compensate for various heartaches–they’re just mad at the beautiful girls.”**

Meanwhile, upon reading the Sommers speech, Dawkins was moved to comment: “Thank you for this. I have now read the lecture you recommend, and it is indeed excellent.”

The anointed one has spoken.
______________________
* Dawkins, Richard. Unweaving the Rainbow. Mariner Books, 2000. p.182.

** Sommers has denied ever making this remark.

Thanks, Stella Tex.

Posted in Dear god what about the men?, Men Hate You, Oppression Culture, Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society, Strawfeminism, The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Yesterday and Women hate you. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt mutters in Yiddish

Published by Jill on February 7, 2011. 129 Comments

If you are anti-IBTP-on-Facebook — and no spinster aunt can blame you for that — you have been spared the recent grim ennui of a painful exchange between a dude named Alexander who fancies himself feministically enlightened, and a blamer named Ana who does not entirely concur with Alexander’s self-assessment. It’s a classic Clueless-Dude Time-Drain. Hell, you already know what went down even if you didn’t read it. You’ve probably seen 2583 of these feminist vs. feminist-dude splitsplats.

This one was especially funny, though, because of the unintentionally ironic caption the dude Alexander gave his feministical little Jezebel link. “If you were wondering whether men hate you [...]” was how he put it. I’m not even kidding. He couldn’t seem to grasp why some blamers might have a problem with a man strolling in and telling a bunch of women that men hate them.

Look, just to be clear: when a man hangs around the feminists, it’s weird enough, but when he announces “men hate you,” it strikes rather a different — some might say “menacing” — note than when, say, an award-nominated spinster aunt says it it. You’re not one of the girls, dude.

Just sayin’.

But really, it’s comical, the predictability with which dudes who fancy themselves feministically enlightened just can’t seem to shut the fuck up when they are found to be duding the joint up a little too hardcore. They all appear to have been issued the same script. The script goes like this:

Blamer: Points out that the dude himself is at this moment exercising the very male privilege he has just derided in somebody else.

Dude: Gets defensive [he is feministically enlightened, and no woman is gonna tell him otherwise]. Implies, by dint of hilarious and supercilious walk-on-eggshells-cuz-this-chick-is-touchy language, that blamer is overreacting and misunderstands him.

Spinster Aunt: Steps in and tells the guy to go back to feminist school.

Dude: Counters with a display of vast feminist knowledge, perhaps stating [as dude Alexander did] that Jill’s ideas are not original; he happens to know that Andrea Dworkin thought this stuff up already.

Spinster Aunt: Mutters “Oy vey,” and repairs to the barn to shovel horseshit of a more pleasant kind.

Blamer: [now joined by more blamers] tells dude what time it is, i.e. that merely by persisting as a dude with a dudely perspective in a dude-free feminist forum he is, in fact, an exemplar of the abhorred oppressor.

Dude: Makes disingenuous apologies because of course he never meant to step on any toes or annoy anyone in any way, but doesn’t cop to exercising privilege except in an abstract, generalized, all-men-do-it sort of way.

Blamers: Get cheesed off because dude can’t take a hint.

Dude: Gets cheesed off because blamers won’t appreciate what a learned and magnanimous fellow he is.

[This will continue until I come in for lunch. There'll be 20 or 30 replies in the pile-on, and I'll be obliged to pull the plug. Then I'll do a blog post about it, and 75% of the time the dude will email me to outline all the ways in which I am wrong about him.] The end.

It has been said about 173,942 times — including on the aforementioned Facebook thread — that feminist ally dudes who genuinely want to advance the cause can best do so by minding their own fucking beeswax. Theirs, after all, is the beeswax that most thoroughly and systematically jams women up.

There’s quite a bit of dudely beeswax that needs minding, too. Dudes might quit using porn, for example. They could quit sticking their dicks in people with lower status than them (both literally and figuratively). They could get vasectomies, or clean their own toilets, or read a bunch of feminist theory, or explain to all their buds the ways in which their boo-yah mores are violent and oppressive. If they are sensitive artistes, they could even quit mooching off their girlfriends. They could combine all this useful, proactive, pro-feminist, anti-domination behavior with — to echo a cry that has risen in many a parched feminist throat — shutting the fuck up and getting the fuck out of our way.

Hahaha! Hoooo-boy! That’s a hot one. I have to say, the notion that more than a handful of men would ever do any of that stuff makes me throw back my head and laugh, as the poet said, a hollow, mirthless laugh.

But back to the point, which is this: I’ve pretty much had it with these supposedly well-meaning dudes who try to exercise their nascent feminist chops on my personal patriarchy-blaming blog. Patriarchy blamers in general, and I in particular, in no way require the “feminist” male perspective on anything, ever. See the FAQ for more information.

So I am revising, somewhat, the blogular comment policy. I end up doing this every year or so, when the dudeliness starts getting out of hand and wearying me, which it always does because I am never enough of a hardass.

The revision is this: This blog is goin’ dudeless. If you are commenting as a dude, don’t do it here. I don’t ever want to have to read fingernail/chalkboard crap like this again:

“So let me get this straight, you are blaming the porn industry and men in general for the poor decision made by this woman? It is pretty sexist for you to assume this woman was incapable of make [sic] her own decisions. I’m pretty sure that no one was holding a gun to her head telling her to get breast enlargement or die. I really don’t understand why any women get breast enhancement. They don’t look good, except sometimes while wearing a bra. They don’t feel good. And if the woman decides to have children, breast feeding is not an option. Of the maybe 20 guys I have talked to on the matter, none of them would marry a woman who had fake breasts.” — some random asshole with a Hotmail account.

As always, dudes are welcome to both spectate and contemplate the ideas discussed in this blog and in other feminist work. But from now on, I’m inviting them to do us the courtesy of shutting the fuck up. Of course, I’ll grandmother in those guys who’ve been around for years and have shown themselves capable of human decency.

New dudes can bypass the sex restriction by going incognito. I got no problem with that as long as they complete the prerequisites, never use the personal pronoun “I,” and knock it off already with the fucking tiresome-ass male viewpoint and supercilious tone. Good luck with that, though, because you know as well as I do that sooner or later they always start mansplaining or yakking about dudesex. If we can tell they’re dudes, they’re out.

As far as IBTP on Facebook goes, effective immediately dudes are invited to stop posting status updates on the wall (“Wall”. Really? Facebook is stupid). Blamers, even on Facebook, are not interested in dude-directed discourse. For now the Facebook comments will remain open to all comers, and we’ll see how it goes.

The purpose of all this is not to censor men or punish men or hate men or do anything to men at all (although if that’s what they want to think, it’s no skin off my nose). Rather, it’s to keep the blogular discourse as free as possible from the contamination of male privilege.

End transmission.

Posted in Announcements, Blogulation, Dear god what about the men?, Mass Media, Men Hate You and Ways In Which the Internet Sucks. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt too lazy to write essay, posts blamer comment instead

Published by Jill on February 6, 2011. 35 Comments

This short essay, written by blamer TwissB in response to yesterday’s anti anti-abortion bill post, is so swell it deserves its own page. TwissB is, as the kids say, (or used to say 5 years ago), teh awesome. Wow, you say, I wish she had a feminist reference website! Well, your wish is my command. Yay!

********************

And even now another ERA silly season is in full swing as legislators in various states (e.g. Florida and Virginia) are being assured by ERA enthusiasts that a constitutional prohibition on sex discrimination against women will “NOT regulate abortion”! While they alternate these assurances on odd days with pro-choice marches on even days, one can only marvel at so much misplaced energy.

So, it’s time to offer a radical alternative.

Balkanizing primary sex discrimination into a swarm of separate issues as current Official Feminism does denies women a coherent way of rebelling against it. Primary sex discrimination is men’s invasive, subordinating attack on women’s reproductive organs through pregnancy regulation, prostitution, and pornography – the perfect target since nothing misogyny can do to hurt that organ unique to women can inflict the slightest pain on men. Consider any of those “but women are different so it would be discrimination if you treated them the same as men” bits of Aristotelian holy writ and sure enough the uterus or its related gotcha parts and functions are cited as the pretext for any acts of restriction or dehumanization men want to be free to inflict on women.

When it comes to anything men regard as “sex,” the right to treat women differently is taken for granted. Primary sex discrimination is protected by a gentlemen’s agreement. It is enough to trot out abstractions like the interest of the state, men’s natural needs, or the First Amendment to turn the cruelest attacks on women into unchallengeable institutions.

Difference arguments are more overtly made in cases of secondary sex discrimination in employment, for example, or military service assignment, or single sex schooling. Legal practitioners know that there is nothing in the Constitution to prohibit sex discrimination against women, but only Justice Scalia dares to say so.

Disparate impact is tertiary sex discrimination which can be ignored by courts and legislators or remedied as men’s advantage is perceived.

If women were to make a concerted attack on primary sex discrimination – pregnancy regulation, prostitution and pornography, I think we’d wreck the men’s game. It would tie the liberal and conservative cats’ tails together and hang them over the clothesline. But it would also challenge women on the left and the right to quit collaborating with men in reducing the most anti-women practices to political entertainment for men.

Posted in Men Hate You, Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society and Sexploitation. Bite me, Chad.

GOP: “Let us bravely endure the deaths of impregnated women who can’t afford non-misogynist healthcare.”

Published by Jill on February 5, 2011. 40 Comments

Has it been 8 degrees for the past week in your little acre of paradise, causing rolling blackouts and catastrophic bunkhouse infrastructure failures? No? Then perhaps you’ve enjoyed electricity and its lovable sidekick, Internet/cable news access, allowing you to get a load of this bullshit: H.R. 358, the so-called “Protect Life Act.” This vile piece of legislation is astonishing — even for the usual suspects who hate women professionally — in its full-on, unapologetic, violently misogynist rancor. The bill contains a provision that would permit woman-hating hospital staff to withhold life-saving abortions from critically ill patients.

Let us pause for a moment to let that sink in.*

The degree to which motherhood is reviled in our culture is generally unappreciated, thanks to cloaking devices like Mother’s Day and other patronizing practices and sentimental narratives. Putting Mother on a pedestal effectively disguises society’s contempt for her. But beneath the glib and oily layer of saccharine lip-service is an abiding sense of mother’s worthlessness except as a self-sacrificing incubator of domination culture.

Mother’s sacred duty is twofold: give birth, then imbue the offspring with the mores required to replicate patriarchy. She must perform this selfless low-status duty at all costs, including, apparently, that of her own life.

Women who fail to become mothers, as well as mothers who fuck up and deviate from the impossible standards mandated by the official patriarchal narrative,** are always punished in one way or another. With this anti-abortion bill dealio, unless she is fortunate enough to be ill in a hospital that does not receive federal funding, a woman who is insufficiently robust to carry a fetus to term may be punished by death. Just like that.

Mother’s function appears to be child-centric, but in actuality it serves domination culture at the expense of her children. As feminist analysis has shown, society has only two uses for human progeny: as pawns in the ongoing effort to control women, and as drones forced to absorb patriarchal messages that mold them into the obedient adult proles necessary to further the interests of the megatheocorporatocracy.

Fetushood is romanticized by godbags and misogynists, but as we have seen time and again, no real concern for the fetus’ well-being obtains after birth. We know this because what happens after birth is childhood, a hood that can only be described as ghastly. Any personhood conferred upon the former fetus is null and void as soon as it becomes a baby. Childhood is nostalgified by adults who perhaps recollect gaps in their own oppression training, when some little spark of joy might have erupted for a moment or two. However, because children are not recognized as fully human, and are in fact routinely abused and oppressed by nearly every adult who crosses their path, actual childhood is, at best, overwhelmingly a painful period of indoctrination, and at worst, a violent nightmare.

But back to motherhood. Crap like this “Protect Life Act” — named by one of those congressional aides who majored in Doublespeak at Dickhead & Prick University — is useful in exposing mother-hate that is normally hidden. The general public may be unaware, but it is codified in the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women, in the Dutiful Mother Provisions, that a woman’s essence consists of her uterus and the contents therein. This clause allows assholes like pink-faced, woman-hating bill sponsor Joe Pitts to seek retribution when a woman exhibits reproductive nonconformity, such as getting sick. Whereupon it naturally follows that hospital personnel may, at their whim, elect to kill an impregnated human rather than disturb any genetic material attached to her personal person.

_____________________
* Let us also pause to consider that, on top of every other level of wrong, this bill is just plain crazy. If an impregnated woman dies, so will the fetus, right? If the fetus is gonna die anyway, letting the woman die when an abortion will save her life is nothing but fuckin godbag politics.

** That is, all women.

Posted in Compulsory pregnancy, Men Hate You, Politics and The megatheocorporatocracy. Bite me, Chad.

Hugs, Twisty: Pornsick dudes give blamer the screamin’ mimis

Published by Jill on January 16, 2011. 158 Comments

Blamers, blamers, blamers! Though my blogularity has been in remission lo these past weeks, I have missed you. The blog will return, I swear. Until then, allow me to resurrect one of my favorite recurring features. I allude to the “Hugs, Twisty” feature. You remember “Hugs, Twisty,” right? It’s where I publish a blamer email instead of writing my own essay. I scrawl a few platitudes at the end and sign it “Hugs, Twisty.” The idea being that the wise and mightly blametariat take up the cause in the comments.

Today’s “Hugs, Twisty” comes from blamer B. It appears that B is newly awakened to the horrors inherent in feminist awareness — especially those relating to the dreaded Male Gaze — and is struggling to keep it together.

Dear Twisty,

I’m just so confused and depressed about things and I really want to get your thoughts. I am having so much trouble with all the images and portrayals of women everywhere I look and with all of the male views on fantasy (even without porn) and I don’t know if I’m taking it all too far, or if other women really do feel as affected by these things as I am. When I mention how I feel to other people they tell me that I need to lighten up and that I just have a low self-esteem (which I know I do, so I start to believe them even more), or they use the lines on me about it all being normal for guys to do this or that, and I’m just losing confidence in what I think (or at least thought I believed) and I feel completely alone. To try and find support, I started looking at blogs, but I was feeling even worse because I see so many where the minute a woman makes the slightest indication that something makes her feel bad about herself or insecure, everyone (including women) beat her up with the same things others have told me. I’m new to your site and with what I’ve been reading the last few weeks, I’m finding some reassurance, and wanted to see what your views were on:

1) ads and commercials like Victoria’s Secret, GoDaddy, and Hardees? – Am I overreacting that these bother me?

2) magazine covers like Maxim, Cosmo, Sports Illustrated, Wired (did you see Wired’s December issue cover?)

2) movies like American Pie?

3) does it bother you at all that almost every movie has at least one female topless scene?…even movies like 21 Grams or Open Water…it just seems like it is beginning to be a given thing in every movie. Technically, these movies don’t have to have it in there…I can’t help feeling that it’s just a given to cater to men

4) masturbation? – I hope it doesn’t sound silly … that’s how insecure I am … but when men are blogging out there, or men you know or are in a relationship with, are saying that they are fantasizing or masturbating daily about attractive women they work with or that they see in public or in movies or commercials, and they say that it’s no big deal, but then in the same breath, they tell you that you are the most beautiful woman to them and that they love you more than anything, I just can’t get my brain to think that’s true. Am I overreacting to feel that way? I just see it that men are “consuming” women around them and fantasizing to these “ideal” and “unrealistic” pictures of women that are EVERYWHERE, and I just can’t see how they aren’t possibly considering how “real” women are not measuring up. But again, I just keep being told that I have a low self-esteem, and I have to admit, that because of all of this, I really do. And I’m not finding other women who feel hurt by this.

I have found women who are against porn, which I was happy to find validation on my views of that. But these other topics, especially the fantasizing have me so distraught. It’s difficult for me because it is a private issue, but when you know that all men are doing this all the time and you know that they are looking at women so as to “consume” their looks, I just don’t know how to cope with those feelings, so I am worried that I’ve taken it too far.

I really wish I could find a group of women in my area who feel similarly on some of this stuff as I do and would want to meet maybe once a month to just talk about how they handle all this in their workplace, in relationships and just in their minds. I almost feel like I can’t watch a movie or read a magazine without it all affecting me, and I’m wondering if most women are just “coping” by ignoring it since it’s too ingrained in our society, or if they all feel the same way I do and are finding relationships where others support them.

Thanks for your thoughts on this

B

Dear B,

Dang. I feel ya. Oppression fucking sucks.

You’re not overreacting. You’re trusting your perceptions. This is essential for anyone who wants to function as a sentient being with personal sovereignty. You have observed that our social order is profoundly misogynistical, and you have chosen truth over complaisance. Well done. Unfortunately, this path, though liberating in a bunch of important ways, can often be pretty difficult and painful in practice.

As a matter of survival, most people — men and women — have a huge personal investment in preserving the social order. This is why they tell you to lighten up when you question the legitimacy of the culture of domination. They don’t want to face the painful truth. Even self-identified feminists do this. Don’t be too hard on’em. The indoctrination is strong within us all.

Pornography is not, as you suggest, a “private issue.” It is the graphic representation of violence against women, packaged as public entertainment. The masturbators you describe are porn addicts. Porn addiction is richly rewarded in our culture, so naturally there are about 12,786 of these knobs on every bar stool, street corner, and yacht.

Quick fix: if some dude makes you uncomfortable, do whatever you can to just stay the hell away from him. If you’re up for a little activism-lite, tell your friends who use pornography why it’s not OK. Boyfriends who use pornography should be dumped without delay. Without delay!

Obviously you can’t stay away from all men all the time, and you can’t change the rotten way men think about women, so the best long-term defense is to develop a real awareness and deep sense of your own humanity, so the withering gaze of dudely pornsickness can’t turn you into a commodity in your own mind.

One way to gain a sense of your own — and all women’s — humanity is to bone up on feminist theory. It’s a disorganized mess, but there’s a reading list link on this here blog of which you might avail yourself, to start with. You might also click on the blamers’ blogs. Many of them share basic feminist views on pornography and other stuff, and reading their blogs might help you feel less isolated.

I wish I could offer a formula that would eliminate the patriarchy for you, but there isn’t one. Well, that’s not exactly true. There is one little scheme, which, if implemented even half-assedly, would pretty much take care of the problem. Of course I allude to feminist revolt. Alas, it’s an idea that never seems to get much traction. As previously noted, antifeminist indoctrination is strong, even among feminists.

We all just have to scrumble by as best we can. The main thing is to keep a sense of humor.

Chin up!

Hugs,
Twisty

P.S. You’re not alone. This blog, for instance, has like 3 or 4 thousand readers. Or at least it did back when I could be bothered to post.

Posted in Hugs, Twisty, Men Hate You and Sexploitation. 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.

Mantid of the week

Published by Jill on October 26, 2010. 69 Comments

Praying mantid

Greetings from Spinster HQ, O ye commenters and readers of comments! The “Latest Blamer Invective” sidebar function upon which you have come to dote so warmly has experienced a warp core breach. Two female characters with names are discussing it, and should have it back online before the third act. Meanwhile, please bask in the awesomeness that is the praying mantis. But not before taking a moment to contemplate the anti-female implications of an old bit of dudescience.

The lore related to female mantids eating the heads of males in order for them to successfully copulate has more recently been questioned. Apparently, the original research was conducted with starved specimens.” – Drees & Jackman, A Field Guide to Common Texas Insects

In other words, the storied stone-cold bloodthirstiness of oversexed killer mantid females has turned out to be bogus.

“In nature, mating usually takes place under cover, so rather than leaning over the tank studying their every move, we left them alone and videotaped what happened. We were amazed at what we saw. Out of thirty matings, we didn’t record one instance of cannibalism, and instead we saw an elaborate courtship display, with both sexes performing a ritual dance, stroking each other with their antennae before finally mating. It really was a lovely display”.[cite]

Stressed by unnatural laboratory conditions, mantid females go into survival mode and may eat the odd male or two. Who wouldn’t? Yet mantid researchers of yore obtained the result they wanted (female mantids are super-kinky brain-eating zombie bitches) by manipulating the subjects (starving them) until they exhibited the desired aberrant behavior (encephalophagia) that they could then characterize as abnormal compared to the default (male) subject. Thus was the time-honored Pyschotic Sexual Predator Sexpot narrative transubstantiated by dudescience into Mantistown. Where it’s become the bug world equivalent of “Snapped.”

Undoubtedly a capillary-wave or two of disappointment will ripple across Lake Savage Death when it becomes more widely known that unstarved female mantids don’t, as a rule, eat the heads off males during copulation. This disappointment is understandable. Because let’s face it, it tickles a feminist’s fancy, however fleetingly, whenever a female socks it to the Man, especially when she (the female) deploys grisly, antisocial methods likely to produce copious amounts of blood, even if she (the female) is an insect. But after the initial frisson of excitement dissipates, the feminist recalls that, as pleasant as it is to contemplate a world in which all men are dead, such a utopia could not be realized without violence, and that violence — i.e. domination — equals patriarchy.

What have we learned? That the dominant culture will unfairly characterize females as villains whenever possible, and that men are just going to have to figure how not to be fucking asshole schoolgirl rapist barbarians on their own. Their unwillingness to do this is the root of all human, and quite a lot of non-human, suffering.

__________________
Praying mantis, Cottonmouth County, TX. October 2010.

Posted in Announcements, Heartwarming Nature Crap, Men Hate You and Number 1 Science Information. Bite me, Chad.

UAE , US pretty much sympatico re: domestic violence

Published by Jill on October 19, 2010. 33 Comments

Hey, patriarchy-deniers! Sit ‘n’ spin on this:

Dr Ahmed al Kubaisi, the head of Sharia Studies at UAE University and Baghdad University, told the National that beating one’s wife is at times necessary to preserve family bonds.

“If a wife committed something wrong, a husband can report her to police,” Dr al Kubaisi told the newspaper. “But sometimes she does not do a serious thing or he does not want to let others know; when it is not good for the family. In this case, hitting is a better option.”

What’s old Ahmed al Kubaisi talking about? Why, the recent ruling of the highest court in the whole United Arab Emirates, that’s what. Those fucking fucks have decided that it’s A-OK for a dude to slap his bitches and his tiny tots around, as long as he doesn’t leave marks. Just like here in the US!

I’m not even kidding. I saw it on the Internet.

Incidentally, governments of the USA, UK, Germany, and Japan are all big pals with the UAE. They sell us oil, and we look the other way on the whole human rights abuses dealio. Awesome.

[via Pam Spaulding]

Posted in Men Hate You, Oppression Culture and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt has no time for you

Published by Jill on July 26, 2010. 58 Comments

This spinster aunt has no time for you people right now. So let us all praise blamer Phio Gistic, who sent in a link to some jaw-dropping shit that just went down in St. Louis Missouri, the mattress-stain of a town where, coincidentally, I spent the 25 worst years of my life.

Naturally, what happened is this: a woman was dancing in a St Louis club in 2004, and naturally “Girls Gone Wild” was there exploiting people, and naturally a third party exposed the woman’s breasts as she said, “no, no.”

Same-ole, same-ole.

But then the video came out and the woman sued, claiming she never gave consent and that the video represented an actual assault. The jaw-dropping shit is that a jury of my former homies actually ruled in favor of the “Girls Gone Wild” porn franchise. Consent is irrelevant when cameras are present!

St. Louis. Always classy.

Here’s the link to the post at Jezebel.

Yikes. And when I saw the addendum, wherein it is revealed that a fucking dick writer at the crap news weekly I used to work for nominated the victim in his “Ass-Clown of the Week” column, I was rendered speechless. And then, when I read the fucking dick’s managing editor’s apology, wherein she excuses the fucking dick with a “boys will be boys” and describes the subjects of “Girls Gone Wild” as “stupid,” I was rendered even speechlesser.

Southern leopard frogs

Meanwhile, everyone’s favorite photo subject: Southern leopard frogs in flagrante delicto. Tomorrow: the fruit of their loins!

P.S. All the comments stuck in moderation for the past week have been freed, except for the extremely long ones, which I don’t have time to read. Go start your own blog, long comment writers!

Posted in Heartwarming Nature Crap, Mass Media, Men Hate You, Rape Culture and Sexploitation. Bite me, Chad.