Archive for the 'Lobe-blowing' Category

Citizens of the Poconos, unite against slutty teen rape victims!

Published by Jill on June 9, 2010. 68 Comments

It’s heartwarming, our pretty society’s outpouring of love for little girls. Behold the sugarplum fairytale of this 13-year old Pennsylvania girl:

According to a marginally informative article in the Lehigh Valley Morning Call, Douchebag Supreme Michael J Lisk raped the girl repeatedly for over a year, made her pregnant, then furtively buried the fetus after she induced her own abortion with a “lead pencil” (a process lasting three days).

The article is lousy with rape culture and fetus-fetish language, probably pulled verbatim from the police report. Patriarchy-favorable language like this is used all the time in police reports and the media, where it is instrumental in perpetuating the normalization of violent misogyny. In this case, the lingo portrays the kid as an active participant in deviant baby-killing.

– She “threw” the plastic bag containing the fetus she had “delivered.”
– The article describes a tender birth scene wherein the rapist exhorts the girl to “push hard.”
– The girl “gave birth” to a “stillborn baby.”
– As though they ought to be considered a couple, “the two” had a long-standing “sexual relationship” from the time she was 12.

Translation: clearly this little Lolita was no innocent virgin naif.

Small wonder, then, that the comments from imperfectly educated denizens of the Pennsylvania Poconos identify the girl as a dirty slut and call for her head. They’re all worked up about this baby-killer slut they read about in the paper.

I know when I was 13, I knew what sex was and that is caused pregnacy [sic] and that we have babies in hosipitals [sic]. If we dont [sic] know anything by that age, then the education system in america [sic] is a joke. she should be charged because she knows that wasnt [sic] right, bottom line.

Well, the author is herself irrefutable evidence of at least one of her points: the “education system in america” is a joke.

[T]hose of you who think a thirteen year old doesn’t know about sex, you need to enter the real world. I am also curious to know how she knew how to give herself an abortion.

Obviously a teenage girl who knows enough to abort a fetus with a Number 2 Ticonderoga, after “having sex” with a 30-year-old perv, deserves nothing but contempt from the self-righteous townsfolk.

Why isn’t the girl being charged with anything? [...] She did the abortion herself and she put the baby in a bag and left it at the base of a tree, so she is just as guilty.

Teenage girls simply cannot usurp control of their own uteruses from 30-year-old serial rapists, goddammit, and expect to get away with it. Not on our watch! They are just as guilty as serial pedophile rapists who bury the evidence of their criminal activity to evade prosecution.

The angry mob wants that kid punished, goddammit, because if she’s old enough to “have sex,” she’s old enough to know that inducing an abortion with a pencil is “wrong.”

Well, except that she wasn’t “having sex,” she was raped, and it isn’t “wrong” — or even illegal — to have an abortion.

It is astonishing, the ease with which an angry mob can convene an ad hoc tribunal to ostracize the most damaged victims of their own diseased culture. They would deny the existence of rape culture, even if it means imprisoning a 13-year-old child for trying to exert some pitiful influence over her own body and her own future, even after she had been violated — by the serial rapist’s own admission, “countless times” — for over a year, only to endure a home-made abortion.

Yeah, a year of rapes and a three-day self-inflicted abortion. I bet that was a cakewalk.

Nobody on the planet is as despised as teenage girls.

Posted in Bloodsport, Lobe-blowing, Men Hate You, Rape Culture, The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today and Women hate you. 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.

Spiny tree pig of the week

Published by Jill on May 29, 2010. 54 Comments

North American Porcupine
It’s a bastard Monty Python sketch around here: Spiny Norman meets the plummetin’ sheep. My Golden Retriever Bert treed this specimen. North American porcupine roosting in live oak tree, Cottonmouth County TX, April 2010.

Here’s some No. 1 Science Porcupine Information:

They’re the most longevitous of rodents, maxing out at 10 years, which is longer than some Golden Retrievers. They eat bark. They like salt. Quills are specialized hairs. Porcupines don’t shoot their quills, but they (the quills) fall right out when dogs bite’em. The ends of the quills are shaped so that they work their way inextricably into the flesh of their would-be assassins. Possibly, against the eventuality of the porcupine pronging itself, quills are coated with an antibiotic substance that prevents primary infection when your dog gets porcupined.

In closing, I’d just like to say that my lobe is entirely blown by the recent and entirely lobe-blowing spate of anti-sciencism here at I Blame the Patriarchy.

The last time my lobe was this blown by something I read on the Internet, I was instantly transformed from Jill Psmith, casual funfeminist hipster punkrock sexlesbo, to Twisty Faster, Internet Radical Feminist. I allude to the moment I discovered that all of my liberal-dude real life pals, with whom I’d been canoodling on a local listserv, were actually gross antifeminist woman-hating pornsick horndogs. The year was 2001. A conveniently passing obstreperal ray originating from a distant galaxy blew my lobe on the spot. The result was this blog.

Here on Savage Death Island, we like to think that our thirst for knowledge is what separates us from the fucking dipshits. Thus I am shocked to learn that there exists so pronounced a thirst for backwardism.

Needless to say, stand by; way more No. 1 Science Information is in the offing.

If you have any Porcupine Science Information to add, feel free to enlighten the group. As a connoisseur of hideous smells, I am particularly curious about the reputed stench of the porcupine den, which stench I have never personally nostriled.

____________________
No. 1 Science Information Notes

Schmidly, David J. The Mammals of Texas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.

Conger, Cristen. “What’s the best way to remove porcupine quills?”. 13 October 2008. HowStuffWorks.com. Retrieved 29 May 2010.
______________________

Posted in Heartwarming Nature Crap, Lobe-blowing and Number 1 Science Information. Bite me, Chad.

And they moved to Stars Hollow and lived happily ever after

Published by Jill on May 16, 2010. 95 Comments

Blessed Virgin hates you

This post would have appeared earlier, but I only just now got the gore and debris cleaned up. I allude to the obstreperal lobe tissue dripping from the bunkhouse rafters. That’s right, I blew another lobe, and no doubt you did, too, when you heard about the insane bill that just passed in Missouri.

Missouri’s state legislature, like that of many states, has invaded the personal bodies of its citizenry and enslaved their uteruses. Without compunction of any kind, this cruel and bloated governing body swaggers around the countryside, snapping its fingers, yelling “jump,” and smirking when the captive uteruses ask “how high?”.

There was already an extremely obnoxious law in Missouri forcing women seeking abortions — 24 hours in advance of the procedure — to sit through a lecture (bring a book) on the supposed mental and physical devastation that abortions supposedly cause. The idea being that, after a heartstring-tugging indoctrination with patriarchy-replicating, godsick disinformation about the certainty of a post-abortion lifetime of regret, cancer, depression, infertility, desperate yearning and insanity, women would voluntarily abdicate their personal bodily sovereignty in order to incubate fetuses for the state, which state would then abandon all parties concerned at the conclusion of gestation.

So things were bad enough in Missouri before, but with this new law they’re even worse. Instead of being forced to endure this patronizing abortion-is-bad-for-you crap via telephone, women are now required to audit in person. Providers must also describe the adorable little fingers and toes, the teensy little heartbeat, the precious little turned-up nose of the “unborn child.” Then they have to offer the woman an ultrasound and a chance to hear for herself how adorable the teensy heartbeat is. Then — no shit — they have to hand over “a state-produced brochure proclaiming: ‘The life of each human being begins at conception. Abortion will terminate the life of a separate, unique, living human being.’” If the woman is pretty young, they have to show her a couple of seasons’ worth of “Gilmore Girls,” because that’s such a realistic portrayal of the long-term results of teen pregnancy. Then they lock her in a room for an hour or two with a statue of the Blessed Virgin who weeps tears of blood.

This in-person ‘consultation’ means double the trips to the clinic, more time off the job, and, in the case of women who have to travel for their procedures (that is, everyone in Missouri who doesn’t live in Kansas City, Columbia, or the CWE), the time and expense of putting up in a Motel 6 and eating Grand Slam Fried Polyester Combos at Denny’s while they do their 24-hour stretch of state-mandated limbo. In other words, it merely throws more asinine obstacles in the path of any Missouri citizen who wishes to exercise her fucking legal right to an abortion. Not to mention her human right to personal autonomy.

As far as I know, there is no collateral provision in the law requiring abortion providers to detail the risks inherent in not terminating an unwanted pregnancy. For example, which women are most likely to be murdered? Pregnant women, that’s who! Neither is there a requirement that women be apprised of other unpleasant pregnancy-related crap, such as the public monitoring of their personal habits (no smoking! no drinking!); the insipid, infantilizing culture of American “moms-to-be”; life-threatening conditions such as preeclampsia and postpartum depression; 18 years of financial hardship; 18 years of unpaid domestic labor; empty-nest syndrome; and, naturally, the deleterious impact of human reproduction on the environment. Not to mention that women who don’t have children are free from a lifetime of public shaming for their bad mothering skills and from having to incorporate the word “piddle” into their vocabulary. You’d think that people might find all that information at least as useful as the “fact” that parasitic clumps of cells are Jesus’s Mini-Me. But the State of Missouri couldn’t give a flip about actual facts.

It’s just another dastardly case of institutionalized misogyny and oppression disguised as a romantic fascination with adorable fetuses. I puke on the Missouri state legislature. “The life of each human being begins with conception?” Shoot me now. Every time a politician utters this meaningless godsick hate speech he lands another kick in the teeth of Truth and Beauty’s rotting corpse.

Posted in Compulsory pregnancy, Godbagism, Lobe-blowing, Oppression Culture and Politics. Bite me, Chad.

Grinning moron hates wife

Published by Jill on February 6, 2010. 175 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, that makes it okay, then!

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

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

Cheap frills: spinster aunt views child beauty pageant on TV

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

Remind you of anyone?

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

!

* * * * * * * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OzWatch ‘09: Misogyny on Parade

Published by Jill on November 29, 2009. 46 Comments

Displaying an astonishing capacity for patriarchy-blaming, somebody in charge of public education in Victoria AU wishes to implement anti-violence-against-women training in a couple of schools. It’s called “Respectful Relationship Education.”

Possible classroom activities include students acting out scenes of sexual coercion after which students would suggest more appropriate behaviour. [...] They would combat common attitudes among boys such as young women are either “good girls or sluts”, the report said. [...] It said feminist theories were best at explaining the link between gender power relations and violence against women, and must underpin the programs.

You go, Victoria! Sounds great, right?

Wrong! Because it’s “shoving capital ‘F’ feminism down their throats.” It’s — brace yourself — “compulsory feminism.”

Compulsory feminism, unlike the heartwarming compulsory capital ‘M’ misogyny the shoving down of which our throats are all accustomed to, is apparently nothing short of child abuse. One nervous misogynist, Australian Family Association spokesman John Morrissey, blurts with swaggering bravado that “strident feminist propaganda won’t wash with boys,” but he nevertheless vigorously opposes the program; apparently his confidence in the red-blooded Australian boy’s natural aversion to strident feminist propaganda is not 100%. He is anxious that some strident feminism might work its way in through the chinks. The “feminisation” of boys is already a Number 1 red-alert crisis situation, given the declining population of male teachers in schools.

The fear that oppression-sensitivity training will pussywhip boys into a class of oppressed autobot pansies is not confined to Australian Family Association spokesman John Morrissey. This knob at misogynist dudesite Mensnewsdaily puts it this way: “Beware boys! The female Taliban is coming for you!”

And then he says — I’m not even kidding — “Don’t such programs send the grossly incorrect message that all boys need to be ‘educated’ about how to treat women?”

That’s right. Apparently men spring from the womb fully enlightened. It insults them sorely to insinuate that they are in any way responsible for violence against women. Any attempt to suggest otherwise merely represents another diabolical tactic in the feminists’ bid for “global dominance.” Educating boys about the culture of domination will strip them of their ability to form “a single original thought on any subject.”

And then he says — I’m still not even kidding — “Who made feminists the experts on explaining violence in relationships?”

Seriously! Apparently misogynist schmuckwads, not women whose lives are devoted to the study of oppression dynamics, are the only persons capable of such intellectual nuance.

Fucking moron.

Posted in Dear god what about the men?, Knobjectivism, Lobe-blowing, Men Hate You, Strawfeminism, The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today and The megatheocorporatocracy. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt has puerile episode

Published by Jill on November 16, 2009. 77 Comments
Attic black figure wine stompers, ca. 600 BCE

Attic black figure wine stompers, ca. 600 BCE

My sidekick Stingray is a professional wino. She can tell you the names of about 87 different species of fungus that grow on grapes. She speaks reverently of the Moldavian terroir. She goes around telling people what wine to drink with their fire-roasted frisée frittatas.

Lately she’s been on this kick where she quits her job, shoves a few necessaries into a bumbag, and biffs off to some distant vineyard or other to toil in a cellar for months on end. I’m not sure what, exactly, this cellar work entails, but I get the impression that it more or less involves attaching lots of hoses to lots of tanks for about 12 hours a day in an ultra-misogynist environment for next to no pay. Stingray stresses that it absolutely does not involve picking or stomping grapes. Stomping grapes, she says, has fallen out of vogue. She thinks it maybe isn’t even legal in the U.S.

Anyway, Stingray is lately returned from one of these indentured servitude binges, this time in the Douro River Valley in Portugal. The winery was apparently picturesque in every respect. Rolling hills, winding river, ancient vineyards, and yes, human grape treaders.

I got pretty excited about this last feature. Grape stomping, as anyone who has watched I Love Lucy can tell you, is an iconic motif in the ancient European rustic narrative. It’s Bacchanalian. It’s bucolic. It’s barefooted. How soothing to know that, persisting through the mists of untold millennia, in some faraway Arcadian paradise, human feet yet aspire to this high moral purpose, squishing the crap out of grapes for the enbiggenment of all humankind.

Naturally I subjected Stingray to an extended debriefing on this foot treading theme.

“I can’t believe they still do that!” I said. “Did you stomp grapes?”

“Uh, no. Why does everybody ask me that?”

“What! How come?”

“Well,” said Stingray, adopting the weary tone of an evolutionary biologist addressing an audience of feeble-minded Intelligent Designers on the meaning of the word theory, “they asked me once if I wanted to, but I didn’t feel like taking off my –”

“Are you mad? How could you pass up a primo local color experience like that?”

“I don’t know, I was like up to my elbows in wine all day, and I just didn’t feel –”

“This is a travesty.” I was sorely disappointed by this bloodless disinterest in grape-stomping. “Who goes all the way to Portugal, works in an idyllic ancient vineyard where idyllic ancient rituals flourish, and suddenly declines to stomp grapes? Grape stomping’s a fucking archetypal theme!”

We went back and forth like this for a while. Eventually the facts emerged.

Fig. 2b. Photo by Stingray, 2009.

Fig. 2b. Photo by Stingray, 2009.

Apparently, as a wine professional, Stingray is immune to the romantic lure of the grape stomping mythos. A further, even more shocking revelation: grape stomping is actually considered lowly. It turns out that the most popular insult around the cellar was “Why don’t you go stomp some grapes, you miserable grape stomper!” In Portuguese this colorful sentiment is expressed somewhat more poetically by the phrase peez ah pee. Or possibly pizza pie.*

Stingray produced some photos of the Douro Valley grape treaders. They didn’t look miserable to me. But the longer I contemplated the pictures, the less nostalgic I began to feel toward stomping. I began to formulate in my lobe a hypothesis I’d never considered before. You will observe in Fig. 2b that the treaders are not wearing sterile disposable latex long-johns.

They’re wearing Speedos.

“Sometimes,” noted Stingray, “these people are up to their crotches in grapes.”

Coincidentally, my fridge happened at that moment to be full of Portuguese wine, so my next question was exactly what you think it was.

Stingray delivered a detailed speech on the subject of filtering practices, albumin, the antibacterial properties of alcohol, and other hygiene-related crap. Unsoothed by this, I pressed her for more. She mentioned the alcohol thing again, and something about a sort of screen on a spigot somewhere. I remained dubious. Finally she admitted the truth: that although the odds are pretty well stacked against it, it’s not 100% impossible that a bottle of wine might contain a pube.

A bottle of wine could contain a pube! A bottle of wine could contain a pube!

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* Portuguese speakers are invited to improve my phonetic treatment of the phrase with actual spelling.

Posted in Easy Persiflage, Lobe-blowing and Morsel Institute. Bite me, Chad.

Raper’s Delight, Part 3

Published by Jill on November 14, 2009. 24 Comments

Remember back in December of 2005, when Canadian rapist Jan Luedecke got a free pass because his lawyers had successfully argued that their client’s “sexsomnia” is a legitimate medical disorder that renders the “sufferer” incapable of refraining from assaulting women in his sleep?

Nothing, it will not surprise you to learn, has changed over the past four years.

A review board convening this week to consider Luedecke’s future has declared that he should run free, free, free to float on the ocean breeze, because he has apparently not sexsomnulated anyone but his official partner in 6 years.

That they know of. I don’t suppose that old Jan Luedecke would exactly pipe up about it if he had fallen off the ex-rapist wagon, and it goes without saying that his subsequent victims would have seen clearly the futility of trying to press charges against the poster boy for institutionalized juridical misogyny.

Naturally, nobody calls this bullshit “rare sleep disorder” what it really is, i.e., drunken blotto rape.

[Via Feministing]

Posted in Lobe-blowing, Men Hate You and Rape Culture. Bite me, Chad.