Archive for the 'Lobe-blowing' Category

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All Old Movies Still Suck

Published by Jill on November 4, 2009. 94 Comments Tags: .

Of all the classic film genres I love to hate, I love to hate none more fervently than the mid-century sex farce. Mid-century sex farces suck.

As you know, by “mid-century sex farce,” I of course mean “bogus fucking misogynist fantasy crap.” And no classic film is more mid-century-sex-farcical than the one I watched the other day on the Turner Classic Movie channel. The flick to which I allude is so bogusly fucking misogynistical, they might as well have called it “How To Murder Your Wife.”

Oh wait, they did call it “How To Murder Your Wife.”

“Bring The Little Woman…Maybe She’ll Die Laughing!” The tagline was apparently written by somebody who thinks women should just get a sense of humor, already, about wife-murdering. Quoth an IMDB commenter who accurately articulates the enduring popularity of this fantasy:

A friend of a friend is one of those femi-nutzis. She hates this movie with a passion & proceeded to tell me why in a lengthy boring diatribe. After I woke from my slumber, (as femi-nutzis are prone to lull one to sleep with their “blah blah blahs”) I took it upon myself to get the movie as soon as possible. I was never offended by the alleged “sexism”: Why shouldn’t women be capable to take a men’s joke with humor?

The premise of this mind-bogglingly sexist 1965 Jack Lemmon comedy: the hero, a louche, martini-drinking playboy whose fabulous Manhattan bachelor pad comes equipped with Terry-Thomas as one of those droll and doting English valet sidekicks, wakes up to find that he got shitfaced and married Virna Lisi, the Italian beauty queen who jumped out of a cake at last night’s debauch. Lemmon is horrified by this fuck-up, since matrimony means an abrupt end to his with-it Hefneriffic swingertopia. Lemmon and Terry-Thomas spend the rest of the movie enmeshed in unfunny comedic hijinx related to springing Lemmon from the disastrous legal contract requiring him to be waited on hand and foot by a non-English-speaking sex goddess who worships him, cooks for him, and puts out 24/7. The hijinx include, it will not surprise you to learn, a plot to murder Virna Lisi.

Note: filmmakers who want to get maximum gyrations out of their non-English-speaking Italian bombshell actresses should take a hint from this movie: whatever you do, don’t write a translator into the script, or add subtitles, or your bitch won’t be able to wigglingly pantomime everything, such as how her clothes got stolen at the International Miss Jugs pageant. Having her clothes get stolen is pretty ingenious, too, since it means she can spend the rest of the first act naked under a shiny black plastic raincoat.

A waxy yellow build-up of sexist clichés — the battle-axe mother-in-law, the hen-pecked husband best friend — culminates in a courtroom scene in which Lemmon’s character beats the titular murder rap by postulating to the court that the essential emasculating nature of women justifies killing them, and that if they let him off the hook they’ll be striking a blow for American Male Justice everywhere. Lemmon’s speech:

Too long has the American man allowed himself to be bullied, coddled, and mothered, and tyrannized, and in general meant to feel like a feeble-minded idiot by the female of the species. Do you realize the power that you have in your hand here today? If one man – just one man – can stick his wife in the goop from the gloppitta-gloppitta machine, and get away with it! Whoa-ho-ho, boy, we’ve got it made. We have got it made. All of us.

Then, of course, Virna Lisi turns out not to have been murdered after all. They live, if you can stand it, happily ever after, because Virna Lisi is a bimbo, and still adores Jack Lemmon, even though he has humiliated her, drugged her, and spent a whole movie trying to get rid of her.

How this movie could pass for comedy, even in 1965, is beyond any sane person’s comprehension. “How To Murder Your Wife” is too ugly to pass for satire, and too mean-spirited and vulgar to rise even to the level of curious sociological artifact. It’s just a tarnished, tasteless old relic from that pervy rumpus-room interlude in honky dude American history — the period just after June Cleaver’s heyday and just before 2nd wave feminism — when stylish boozing, accessorizing, and womanizing was considered a sophisticated art form. It is unlikely that this glittering Rat Packian lifestyle actually existed anywhere but in movies and the pages of Playboy, but it nevertheless foreshadowed today’s mainstream Porn Nation.

This picture is so over-the-top hateful that even TCM’s host was moved to remark, in a sad and wistful tone, that it’s the kind of film that just wouldn’t get made today. Normally these TCM hosts are matter-of-fact about the female sexprops that parade with perfect cadence through the dude movies they show. Their idea of a feminist film is “The Women,” in which a bunch of rich white housewives sit around gossiping in a beauty parlor about their husbands’ mistresses. So it’s really saying something when a TCM dude actually quasi-acknowledges that one of their beloved classics might fail to delight women audiences today. That “How To Murder Your Wife” is 128 minutes of uninterrupted hate speech, however, does not prevent TCM from airing it. And on a Saturday afternoon, too, guaranteeing maximum exposure to two groups who can least tolerate it: invalids, who are already sick enough, and impressionable youths, whom it will scar for life.

In other words, blah blah blah.

Posted in Lobe-blowing, Men Hate You, Sexploitation and The Entertainment Industrial Complex. Bite me, Chad.

Ways In Which the Internet Sucks

Published by Jill on October 16, 2009. 193 Comments

meghanmcc Savage Death Island is happy to launch a new feature. It’s the greatly anticipated Ways In Which the Internet Sucks feature!

We begin with a charming instance of Whataboutthemen?! appearing this morning on the Atlantic’s website. But first, the backstory:

Meghan McCain — Young Republican, internet columnist, “Colbert Report” guest, and daughter of John — posts a self-portrait on Twitpic.

A “twitpic,” I have discovered, is a photo with a short URL, suitable for tweeting.

McCain tweets this URL.

Uh-oh! In the self-twitpic, McCain has failed to completely disguise the fact that she has breasts. Her “tens of thousands of followers” retaliate for her public femaleness by loosing a torrent of abuse, a Public Shaming Action consistent with the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women. According to WSJ blog Dijits, McCain responds to the beatdown thusly:

“So I took a fun picture not thinking anything about what I was wearing but apparently anything other than a pantsuit I am a slut. [...] When I am alone in my apartment, I wear tank tops and sweat pants, I had no idea this makes me a ’slut’, I can’t even tell you how hurt I am.”

I will touch on the tragickal patriarchy-blaming implications of that statement in a moment. But first, the whataboutthemen Atlantic piece.

Appearing in a column called “Spatwatch,” with the classy and original headline “Meghan McCain’s Breasts Launch 1000 Ships,” is an account of two dudes who get into it on Twitter over McCain’s photograph. The dudes, if anyone gives a crap, are ABC correspondent Jake Tepper and some knob described as “conservative blogger Allahpundit.”

I don’t know about you, but whenever I see a blog with the word “pundit” in the title, I say to myself, “Jill, that’s one blog you can safely omit from your reading list with every expectation that your life will continue to be fun-filled and carefree.”

The substance — I use the term loosely — of the Tepper/Allahpundit tweetbroglio: Tepper chivalrously attempts to buck up the wounded McCain by instructing her on the intricacies of mob psychology, describing her detractors as “mean 9-year-olds.” Whereupon this Allahpundit dude goes apeshit, his temper flaring because he apparently interprets Tepper’s defense of McCain as a personal affront. The exchange progresses until both dudes have kissed and made up and are stroking each other’s pundits.

I mention this because, instead of discussing the sorry state of affairs that has compelled hordes of dickwads to deride McCain for having boobs, instead of deconstructing the larger, ultra-misogynist zeitgeist of the Internet, the “Spatwatch” piece completely ignores the actual story (i.e. “Woman punished by fans for appearing in public as human being”) in favor of showcasing the egos of a couple of Dude Nation losers.

Same shit, different day.

Meanwhile, observe McCain’s own rhetoric. She clearly knows the rules. Here she is after the shitstorm, commenting the double-standard that just slapped her upside the head.

[W]hen Rep. Aaron Schock or Rep. Jeff Flake post pictures of themselves without their suits on—and their shirts, for that matter—they are proclaimed “hotties.” But put me in a tank top and I am suddenly an embarrassment to the Republican Party and women everywhere.

She grasps that, as a member of the sex class, she exists continuously in a state of pre-porn. She understands that she is only allowed to wear tank tops when she is “alone in [her] apartment.” That’s because, in public, she will be judged by Dude Nation’s occupying forces and their collaborators, all of whom have exacting (but ever-fluctuating) standards with which members of the sex class, who ceaselessly walk a fine line between virgin and whore, must comply.

McCain’s mistake is in momentarily forgetting this detail and imagining herself to enjoy fully-human status.

When her scandalous tank top photo — you’d think it was a shot of a wide-open beaver with a crack pipe hanging out of it for all the attention it’s getting — makes national news, she quickly realizes her error, and — here the spinster butt sprouts a boil — issues an apology to her Twitter fans. She takes down the twitpic and contemplates deleting her Twitter account. She’s sorry if she “offended” anyone by publishing a likeness of her personal self in non-regulation Young Republican-wear.

She has, she says, “learned a valuable lesson about the Internet and the boundaries between personal and public use with social media.”

The lesson? Men don’t have boundaries.

Beatdown successful! Congratulations, Dudes!

Posted in Dear god what about the men?, Femininity, Lobe-blowing, Mass Media, Men Hate You, Oppression Culture, The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today and Ways In Which the Internet Sucks. Bite me, Chad.

Breaking: patriarchy is actually real

Published by Jill on September 29, 2009. 128 Comments

Blamer maidden writes:

While I understand Jill’s position on the badness of a member of the sex class performing a submissive role in the bedroom (or dungeon, as the case may be), I haven’t been able to find her opinion on the opposite situation: dominant women. Could somebody point me to the appropriate posts and/or comments? Or perhaps she herself could clarify.

She herself could clarify! With pleasure.

What maidden refers to as “the opposite situation” isn’t opposite at all. Any practice that furthers the interests of patriarchal oppression, regardless of the sex, gender, race, diet, type of refrigerator, underwear, or political affiliation of the practitioner, is crappy and antifeminist. This includes sexay domination practiced by women; these behaviors are dictated by male fetish. As are all feminine behaviors.

Then maybe somebody could explain to me how it’s possible for a woman to participate in any (heterosexual) sexual activity without subjecting herself to fulfilling a dude-centric fantasy of some kind.

It isn’t. Sorry.*

Is it down to a choice between lesbianism and asexuality?

Not even lesbians and asexuals are 100% patriarchy-free. Its ubiquity, see, is what makes patriarchy the dominant paradigm. The invisible, indefeasible pervasiveness of the culture of domination is the key concept of this blog. Sadly, I fear that many readers are reluctant to fully embrace the horrific truth that patriarchy isn’t just some abstract academic conceit. The don’t wanna face that they themselves, as members of an honest-to-fuck sex class, are well and truly screwed.

This reluctance is completely understandable. The enormity of domination culture is physically sickening when confronted for the first time. It is physically sickening when confronted for the 435,647th time, too.
______________________
* Yes, I know. You have a deeply fulfilling sex life with your Nigel. That’s nice. Please refrain from describing it in detail in the comments section. Also, consider this: whether he likes it or not, when Nigel hoists up his Dockers and saunters out of your dungeon into the public square, he’s enjoying the privileged status he has had the pleasure of internalizing all his life. You are not.

Posted in Lobe-blowing, Oppression Culture and Patriarchy, my patriarchy. Bite me, Chad.

Yay and boo

Published by Jill on September 26, 2009. 43 Comments

Punctuation pain

From the perspective of the cinquagenarian spinster aunt-on-the-go (a dying breed, literally), this screen grab (from the iTunes store comments section; the commenter is bitter because s/he is not getting something for nothing in an iPhone internet radio application) illustrates practically everything that is both right and wrong with the Internet and the world. iPhones: yay! Capitalism: boo! Internet radio: yay! Whiny iPhone user entitlement: boo!

Etc.

But damn (and certainly you’ll agree one hundred and ten percent); an ellipsis — a fucking five-dotter — followed by an exclamation point? It can but harbinge what we all knew was coming: the evolution of H. sapiens into a non-cerebral, plant-like species. Only an insouciant stalk of kelp could type those characters and not feel obligated to commit sepukku afterward.

Update: I mean seppuku. Dorkwad’s Law: any blog post critiquing the slackening standards of today’s written English, even when the written English is Japanese, must contain an error.

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

Atomic penetrators, and more!

Published by Jill on August 25, 2009. 61 Comments
Drunk chick interviews snake assassin as he changes his socks

Drunk chick interviews snake assassin as he changes his socks

It’s Tuesday, and that means it’s time for another installment of Unrelated Spinster Pronouncements.

1. Poor pit vipers. My last post on the Western diamondback rattler revealed that, herpetologically speaking, many of us have something of a gaping void where our common sense and interspecies empathy ought to be. Although I am no snakespert, it is generally acknowledged that a snake’s deepest desire to get the fuck away from humans; given the opportunity to exit your midst, any sane snake will take it. Only when a specimen, such as the diamondback on my porch, is cornered does it resort to self-defense. And even then, there seems to be some reluctance to part with the venom. My rattlesnake rattled like mad, but it never even tried to strike, even though I was but a few feet away and prodding it with a broom.

You can just beetle off, have a marg, and the snake’ll be gone when you get back.

Because of the dread “related videos” feature on YouTube, I found myself watching a portion of a vid wherein some drunk chick named Diane goes around interviewing male snake-hatin’ sickfucks at a “rattlesnake roundup.”

A rattlesnake roundup, in case you have never heard of this sickfuck shit, is a ritual gathering where a bunch of bloodthirsty barbarians catch a bunch of snakes, throw’em into pits, and invite the paying public to enjoy animal cruelty, American-style. The roundup-goers gleefully observe the slaughter and thereafter purchase rattlesnakeskin underwear, rattlesnake meat burritos, rattlesnake fang funnel cake, and rattlesnakeskin assault weapon holsters. Bring the kids! In the aforementioned video one of the macho snake assassins tells Diane, “God has blessed me with a talent.” For rousting innocent rattlesnakes out of their natural habitat, chucking them into death camps, and making F-150 seat covers out of them, apparently.

2. The endless capacity for self-delusion (e.g. slaughtering sentient beings for entertainment is a God-given talent, above) with which patriarchy has imbued the American dude is striking, as in this comment I found in the blog’s moderation queue. I laugh and laugh.

“Men have always been known for their chivalry,” asserts the commenter (affiliated, apparently, with this nutty website).

Well, men have always told everybody about their chivalry, at least.

“If [men] are treated well by women,” the comment continues, “they get treated better in return. If women want to be taken good care of by their men, they need to respect and treat their men with dignity.”

In other words, kiss my ass, bitch, or I’ll make your life a living hell.

The internet fucking cracks me up. Why the fuck would anybody bother to leave these idiotic remarks on a radical heartwarming funky savage death blog?

3. On NPR yesterday I heard some blowhard Pentagon dude allude, I kid you not, to a “thirty-thousand pound penetrator.” His tone was reverent. He appeared to be unaware that his phrasery stood alone at the apex of ridiculousness.

“Penetrator” is apparently what bombs are called down in the old War Room, which Room has always been, as you know, Penetrator Central. The USA, led by handsome, saintly Barack Obama, is, in its benevolence, contemplating penetrating Iran with a bunch of these thirty-thousand pound penetrators. Supposedly all this penetration will prevent Iranian scientists from figuring out how to make atomic penetrators of their own with which to penetrate us.

You know how politicos revere history, pretending that they study it so “we” can avoid the mistakes of the past and glide bloodlessly into a glorious future of peace among the snakes and the women? Bullshit. Men study history so they can avoid the mistakes of the losers and the defeated and the surrendered prison bitches of yore; they only do it so they can figure out how to be King of the Penetrators themselves.

Posted in Blogulation, Bloodsport, Dear god what about the men?, Heartwarming Nature Crap, Lobe-blowing, Oppression Culture and The Entertainment Industrial Complex. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt has an appointment in town, so this is all the post you get

Published by Twisty on May 27, 2009. 25 Comments

Brown recluse spider
Venomous sicariid (male) enjoying its last heartwarming moments in the Spinster Araneae Compound. May 2009.

U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice said Tuesday that North Korea is “trying to test whether they can intimidate the international community” with an underground nuclear test and launching of short-range missiles.

Well, color me intimidated, Susan. Whenever crazy dictators start blowing up Hiroshima-class nukes just for the hell of it, it is a matter of policy with me to take to my bed with a wedge of triple cream Brie and pull the blanket up over my quavering lobe. That is, after I inventory the household stores of life-saving duct-tape, plastic sheeting, and flame-thrower fuel.

Also intimidating is the long, dead arm of justice in California. Little can be added to the discourse condemning the heterocentric hate now carved in the California state constitution, but I’ll say this: Repellent hatebags voted in that anti-gay initiative, and repellent authority figure hatebags upheld it. Well, what goes around comes around, Repellent Californian Hatebags. Sooner or later your bags will pop like fermented bottles of Odwalla Superfood, and you will die of something, but not before your kid comes out in a big pile of rainbow bumperstickers, birkenstocks, and mustachioed girlfriends who are all going to Michigan together in a Subaru.

Meanwhile, here’s hoping a family of brown recluse spiders moves into your liquor cabinets. Fucking knobs.

Posted in Heartwarming Nature Crap, Lobe-blowing, Oppression Culture and Politics. Bite me, Chad.

Texas state rep needs reprogramming

Published by Twisty on April 13, 2009. 72 Comments

Texas State Rep. Betty Brown, racist tool

Texas State Rep. Betty Brown, racist tool

Not all Texans, I regret to say, are easygoing, progressive thinkers. State Representative Betty Brown, for example, is a tool.

Betty Brown just can’t wrap her brain around the fact that some certified 100% Texans have Asian names. This is because her brain has the philosophical sophistication of a Thomas Kinkade painting. Texans should have names like “Betty” or “Brown,” good, solid American names she can spell and pronounce. Asian names freak her out. People with these wacked-out foreign monikers should “make [them] more accessible.” Or so she told Ramey Ko, a representative of the Organization of Chinese Americans giving testimony at the Lege on voter ID legislation.

Ramey Ko. That’s one crazy fucking inaccessible name.

“Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?” Brown said.

Ko’s “citizens” should make an effort to grasp how “difficult” their language is, and what an inconvenience they present to the real Americans here who are trying to run good, old-fashioned, discriminatory Caucasian elections. They should lose those bizarro names and get ones that Betty Brown can feel more comfortable with. Because, seriously, it’s bad enough that she has to put up with all these damned Spanish people speaking Mexican.

If it’s hard to imagine a white lady with pink lipstick and helmet hair uttering anything more bigoted and condescending than that, you don’t know Betty Brown!

Brown later told Ko: “Can’t you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could adopt a name just for identification purposes that’s easier for Americans to deal with?”

Listen, Ko, you and your kind are trouble. Can’t you see that if you just knuckle under to honky bigotry everyone will be happy?

[Xie xie, B.R.]

Posted in Austin, Lobe-blowing and Politics. Bite me, Chad.

Internet gasbag dedicated to ending discrimination against honkys

Published by Twisty on April 11, 2009. 49 Comments

Things are really hoppin here at Spinster HQ, and there is absolutely zero time for blogging today. For example, I have to slouch in the lime green recliner with a cup of Fair Trade half-caf and contemplate whether to adopt a Great Pyrenees from a rescue. There are some bluebonnets that need photographing. And that’s not all. I have to bait a bunch of mouse traps in the VIP quarters down at the bunkhouse; my sibling Tidy informs me that she’s punting the visiting Faster family matriarch my way, and the joint is fucking infested.

Did I tell you that I took my car in to the shop to remedy a clunking AC fan, and they actually extracted a mouse corpse from it? That’ll be $120, please, thanks for choosing Austin Rip-Off Car Repair!

Oh, and I can’t miss this: my zany mare Maypearl, who pulled a butt muscle last week, is getting a massage this afternoon.

A massage for a horse? Are you effing kidding me?

Nope. Maypearl’s trainer Cristina is a California flower child, and doesn’t hold with the centuries-old cowboy’s “give’er some Bute* and lope it out!” method of equine physical therapy. Cristina has put her foot down. If Maypearl does not receive a 3-hour massage toot sweet it’s animal cruelty and I’m going to hell.

I’ll post pictures.

Meanwhile, you know that Amy Alkon person from yesterday, the one whose views on human copulation and eating fried dough intersect? Well, I was sitting down to write about not writing today, and lard help me, her website was still open in my browser. As you know, the imp of the perverse afflicts me from time to time. So of course I read Alkon’s latest blog post, knowing full well that it would be like unto 47 toothpicks jabbing me in the corneas. As it turned out, it was more like 48 toothpicks.

The Alkon! It’s indescribable. She is outraged over racial discrimination. Discrimination against white dudes, that is.

What’s got her lipstick in a smear is this: back in 2003, 77 applicants took a promotion-qualifying test at the New Haven, Connecticut fire department. 19 African-American firefighters were among the hopefuls. None of the 19 scored high enough to win a promotion, so New Haven threw out the test. Naturally the high-scoring-yet-unpromoted white guys filed suit against the city. “Racial discrimination!” was their embittered cry. The District Court judge said, no, since nobody was promoted, there was no harm. Now the Supremes are on the case.

So Alkon does what any deluded self-promoting misogynist right-wing gasbag would do: she sides with the white dudes and backs herself up by quoting Martin Luther King!

It’s always hilarious when racists defend the Master Race against “reverse discrimination,” and simultaneously attempt to present themselves as non-racists, by trotting out Martin Luther King on judging people not “by the color of their skin by by the content of their character.” It appears to elude these patriarchy-denying chumps that, when the social order privileges a ruling class over a subordinate one based on skin color, there can be no such thing as true discrimination against the ruling class. That’s what makes them the ruling class, dumbshit! Discrimination, like all putrefied shit, can only flow in both directions if the classes in question are of equal status, which, obviously, they fucking well aren’t.

“I’m with him,” says Alkon. She means that she and Martin Luther King are two hearts that beat as one. Yeah, she’s with him, because when King said “I have a dream” what he actually meant was not “End racism,” but “Reward the deserving white guys who skunked the stupid black guys on the test.”

Look, if none — not a single one — of the black guys scored high enough for a promotion, something ain’t right. Something that looks suspiciously like racism. Maybe the test was fucked up. Maybe the white dudes cheated. Or maybe, you know, the black dudes, as members of an oppressed class, were marginalized from the git-go. Ya think?

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* Bute is horse aspirin.

Posted in Lobe-blowing and Women hate you. Bite me, Chad.

A couple of stinky stains declare love for patriarchy, MRA-style

Published by Twisty on April 10, 2009. 64 Comments

Somebody just sent me an email with this subject line:

“Newsflash: Dr. Helen (Instapundit’s spouse) is retarded.”

I.

OK. Even though Liberal Dude role model Jon Stewart delights legions of adolescent boys when he uses it, spinster aunts consider the word ‘retarded’ — once a medical diagnosis used clinically to debase a class of people, and now an insult used pejoratively to ridicule that class of people and to annoy everyone else — to be more or less a slur.*

Instead of relying on bigoted schoolboy epithets to indicate our disdain for the dipshit antifeminist views of dipshit antifeminists, we advocate exercising the flaccid portions of our vast and glistening lobes to compose a more sophisticated and poetical zingerology.

Dr Helen is a stinky stain.

II.

It is not often that we endorse the concept of reason according to just prejudice. However, research conducted at our Department of Sobriquet Studies has conclusively determined that one is in fact wholly justified, a priori, in dismissing as irrelevant, unenlightened, or asinine any opinion proceeding from the mouth, pen, or IP address of anyone calling him/herself “Dr First-name-only.”

III.

Dr Helen, a “forensic psychologist” who plays a talk show host on amateur internet TV, has a funny video up at a funny right-wing website. The video commences with pompous TV news report intro music. That’s funny right off the bat.

Dr Helen’s topic is also a howler: “Gotcha Pregnancies & Men’s Rights.” You know this “gotcha pregnancy” phenomenon? It threatens the very atomic structure of the universe. Here’s how it works: devious women lie to their dudes about using birth control in order to get pregnant without dudely consent. Then they have the unmitigated gall to ask for child support. Men shouldn’t have to pay when the fruit of their loins is obtained fraudulently by deceitful bitches. It’s an affront to Truth & Beauty.

To help endorse the view that males are supreme beings, Dr Helen interviews someone named Amy Alkon, a woman whose professional expertise in the field of sneaky bitches tricking innocent dudes into knocking them up flows from her brilliant career as an AdviceGoddess (Alkon’s bio lists “evolutionary psychology” as one of her fave raves; need I say more?).

The interview is funny because it depicts two women of average intellect demonstrating their Patriarchy2K-compliance by vilifying other women, by crying through pinkulated lips “what about the men?!” and by invoking a phony “phenomenon” as phony evidence that male privilege is just and natural.

Wait. I guess that’s not so funny.

Behold a short transcription. It was all I was able to get before the Pajama TV player went on the fritz. Although I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t pretty relieved when the browser crashed, so painful to my lobes was watching even 37 seconds of these two tools.

Dr Helen: What do you think about women getting pregnant accidentally on purpose?

Amy Alkon: I think this is just horrible. I mean it’s just so amazing. If you’re a woman it’s totally your responsibility to take care of birth control.

Dr Helen: Don’t you think men should be responsible for birth control at all?

Amy Alkon: Well yes, but you know I think that’s sort of like asking a donut baker to be responsible for whether or not I gain weight.

Dr Helen, trying out the cable TV pundit shit-disturber gambit with an endearing feminine coyness, wonders if the vast hordes of unscrupulous whores who trick men into impregnating them should be held criminally negligent. The AdviceGoddess, though she would hesitate to chuck’em in the hoosegow, nevertheless thinks it is so amazing that these “bilkers” feel entitled to child support.**

Allow me to translate: As a woman you are a member of the sex class and don’t you forget it. Your purpose, as ordained by the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women, is as a receptacle for male incontinence. Sex class duties entail making life as comfortable and uncomplicated as possible for men. This extends to complying with their wishes at all times, especially when it comes to the contents of your personal uterus.

For extra credit, you might post videos on the internet declaring your full support for your own oppression.

According to syndicated misogynist Amy Alkon, who takes the rather eccentric view that submitting to the heteronormal peen-pronging imperative is like eating donuts, it is irrelevant that you are highly unlikely to become pregnant unless some dude — an autonomous member of the privileged class — has enjoyed using you for your natural purpose. Remember, the dude’s natural purpose — which always supersedes yours in terms of philosophic value — is to ejaculate and then biff off to a football game, not to concern himself in any way with the method by which he obtains, or the consequences of, his gratification. Unless he feels like it.

IV.

As a spinster aunt, I am one of the world’s leading experts on the causes of male angst, and I know how men can liberate themselves from the scourge of global female oppression. The method follows a rather intricate and convoluted logic, which may account for its failure to have caught on, but I’ll try, for the sake of beleaguered dudes the world over, to put it in layman’s terms: men wishing to thwart the evil schemes of even the most determined sperm-swindling pregnancy tricksters can simply decline to force-feed their donuts to any women. Et voilà!

Now that — like all imaginary absurdities — would be funny, like when the grizzled cowboy asks the grizzled drill sergeant if these Hello Kitty jeans make his butt look big. Dudes must prong. Bearing the consequences of male penetration behavior is strictly girly shit.

______________________
* Other words that may be similarly turned into insults: gay, feminist, and blogger. And gay feminist blogger. As in “Chad isn’t going to Gazonga’s Topless Sports Bar and Foie Gras Grill with us; he’s such a gay feminist blogger.”

** A commenter on Dr Helen’s blog describes child support as “a profitable incentive for deceit.” Churn’em out and rake it in, ladies! Everybody knows that men have a proven track record of stepping up and providing the mothers of their unwanted children with a life of luxury. Thanks to a steady child-based income, most of these lying sluts live on the French Riviera and have chauffeurs. That’s probably why the US Department of Health and Human Services doesn’t bother dedicating a whole department to child support enforcement.

Oh, wait. Yes they do.

Posted in Dear god what about the men?, Lobe-blowing and Women hate you. Bite me, Chad.

That’s some catch, that Catch 22

Published by Twisty on April 1, 2009. 64 Comments

You think “enemy combatants” are the only people who can be denied access to an attorney and thrown in prison without having been convicted of any crime? Wrong-o. In Delta County, Michigan, USA, they’re doing it to homeless single mothers.

I allude to the egregious tale of Edwina Nowlin, who earlier this month was jailed for being poor. Behold a summary of the case, which I filched from the ACLU’s press release and legal brief. Recall that I am a spinster aunt, not a lawyer, so if my taking poetic license with some of the finer legal points chaps your hide, kindly kiss my entire monkey butt.

It’s like this. Nowlin’s teenage son is in juvenile detention. The court, skipping the nuisance of assessing Nowlin’s financial situation beforehand, has ordered her to cough up $104 per month to reimburse the state for imprisoning her kid. But Nowlin hasn’t got a pot to piss in. She lost her house after being laid off. She’s scrapping by on occasional part-time gigs and crashing on friends’ couches. Like all Americans, she’s already $17,000 in debt, and whatever wages she earns are being garnished. All this, while trying to support another teenage son.

When she can’t produce the dough, the judge holds Nowlin in contempt. Sentence: 30 days.

The 30-day sentence is fixed, by the way. Even if she had paid the $104 on Day 1, the judgment would have kept Nowlin imprisoned for the full month. Thus does Nowlin’s civil contempt sentence morph seamlessly and unconstitutionally into a criminal one. At which juncture Nowlin requests the court-appointed lawyer to which all persons accused of crimes are entitled. But apparently the judge has never heard of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel. Nowlin is dee-nied.

A few days later, they let her out of jail long enough to pick up a paycheck from one of her odd jobs. The check is for $178.53, more than enough to cover her son’s bill at juvy. Things are looking up. But wait! The Delta County Sheriff makes Nowlin sign the check over to the jail to cover her own “room and board”! Plus 22 bucks for a drug test and booking fee!

To recap: Nowlin’s got to pay $104 a month for her son’s imprisonment, but since she’s in jail for being poor she couldn’t earn the money even if she had a job, which she doesn’t, so next month she’ll be in contempt again, beginning the cycle anew. The situation is ludicrous. It’s as though a civil rights-era black-and-white courtroom drama crash-landed into a Dickens novel.* A white-haired, pink-faced judge in a pale linen suit, a sheriff in Ray-Bans and beer-gut, one child jailed, a second left motherless, a beleaguered pauper doomed to languish in debtor’s prison with no hope of release, the untenable and insane condition that a destitute person must finance her own incarceration.

I’m a spinster aunt, not a mentalist, so I will never know precisely what caused this judge’s justice lobes to malfunction to such an astonishing degree, but it would not be pushing the limits of reason too far to speculate that a lifelong immersion in unexamined patriarchal privilege has caused a toxic buildup of the chemical compound assholamine. Studies conducted at the Twisty Institute for the Study of Lobal Instability have shown that this compound is found exclusively in the lobes of people who have power over other people. Assholamine produces quite the buzz.

In any event, there can be little doubt that this Voice of Authority, drawing on his** professional familiarity with the Global Accords Governing the Fair Use of Women, seeks, with his ruling, to appease the gods/ restore the natural order/ satisfy public demand for the state control of the sex class. He punishes Nowlin for daring to exist in a condition of poverty while demonstrating, through the son in juvy, an unconscionable inadequacy as a mother.

It blows all available lobes in rapid succession to contemplate that people in positions of power are capable of justifying this kind of bogus shit, but you see it over and over again: Americans hate poor people, especially if those poor people are single women with kids. Impoverished single women with kids in juvy are a special kind of abomination. That’s your patriarchy at work.

UPDATE: Happily I am informed that the ACLU got Nowlin sprung yesterday. But damn, somebody needs to get that judge off the bench and into some sort of grim state institution for the incarceration of persons too mean to roam free.

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* This post at 2 Political Junkies also makes the observation that Nowlin’s situation is Dickensian. I read that post before I wrote mine, so it is possible that I cribbed the allusion, although I didn’t realize it at the time. Which I reveal now in the interest of transparency in the blogular process, attribution, and good manners.

** Yes, I am perfectly aware that patriarchy can similarly infect women judges, but we’ll just assume that this one’s a dude so I don’t have to keep typing “he/she.”

Posted in Lobe-blowing, Patriarchy, my patriarchy and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Yesterday. Bite me, Chad.