I Blame The Patriarchy

No time to post! The ag well at El Rancho Deluxe has has blown or something, and my ranch hand Chuck and I have to fix it.

What’s an ag well? It’s a long, skinny hole in the ground reaching to a subterranean pond that, when you attach a windmill to it, pumps out water for your agricultural needs. Watering sunflowers, bathing snakes, etc. Only my ag well doesn’t have a windmill. It has a stupid electrical pump that always blows out whenever a cow breathes on it or lightning strikes it or it’s Tuesday.

But before I go, allow me to set off your gag reflex with this: Che Guevara’s granddaughter posing “semi-nude” for a PETA ad.

PETA has long been on my shit list for its freewheelin’ exploitation of our culture’s obsession with women’s oppression even as it supposedly advocates for animal liberation. Want some attention? Just pornulate some female celebrity!

Like all antifeminist activist groups — pretty much any activist or political group that isn’t specifically feminist — PETA takes particular pleasure in throwing women under the bus for The Cause. Marxist revolutionaries, the Black Panthers, the free love movement, Hamid Karzai, white liberal dudes trying to get other liberal dudes elected to public office: these guys have always counted among their most prized principles an endless capacity to endure the suffering of women.

In the ad, Lydia Guevara wears camouflage pants, a red beret, and bandoliers of baby carrots while standing with one fist on her hip and the other outstretched.

That Guevara is described titillatingly as “semi-nude” even though she is fully clothed pushes my lobe to the semi-boiling point. The ad positions PETA as edgy and with-it, but it degrades Guevara, women, revolution, carrots, vegetarianism, and the entire human species. Ditwuss!

Non-windmill-equipped ag wells are this week’s runners-up.

This more or less explains the Ditwuss Award.

[Thanks, Stellatex]

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The White Zinfandel Scare of the 1980’s produced lingering aftershocks of dumbassness of which I was heretofore unaware. It’s 2009, and men are terrified of rosé wines. So quoth Stingray, reporting from the Spinster Sommelier Department. Apparently, when non-oenophile men and women attend her wine tastings, men eschew the rosé without fail, but women, of course, slurp it up like sponges. Stingray has to talk these chump dudes down from their anti-rosé panic attacks, explaining that pink wine is red wine, and that, although it made her gay, drinking it will probably not make them gay.

Homphobia. Is there anything it can’t explain? Such as the dumbest wine label I’ve seen in a while: Vinum Cellars “It’s OK” Rose. Apparently when people are reassured by hipster marketing that it won’t turn them into pansies, even mediocre rosé flies off the shelves. Vinum is sold out of the 2007 vintage.

It is always wise, Stingray says, to avoid wines with stupid, pronounceable names such as “It’s OK,” “Zen,” or “Kung Fu Girl.”

I say, let the rubes skip the rosé if they want to. Especially if it’s this rosé. Leaves more for me.

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Sexy pig stripper spreads its trotters for your dining pleasure. From super-gross White Castle ad (link below).

Hi Twisty,

Remembering your post about the SuicideFood blog I thought you might be interested in this super-gross ad, featuring a stripper pig.

Also, I really enjoy your blog!

Melanie

Dear Melanie,

It was extremely thoughtful of you to send in a super-gross ad, for indeed, super-gross ads always interest me, particularly when they’re savage and deathy. And what could be more savage and deathy than an actor in a pig suit doing a porny dance and getting doused with “a come-hither barbecue sauce” to promote a fast food pork sandwich?

This pig so desperately craves to be consumed, it’ll dance for pervy strip club vermin, get’em drunk, and get’em off, too!

In case you missed it, the excellent Suicide Food blog skewers marketing gimmicks, ads, and logos that portray food animals as eager, grateful recipients of that highest honor a human can bestow: their own slaughter.

It is with an icy shiver that I recall the cold sweats I incurred once upon a time at the White Castle on Manchester and Big Bend in Maplewood, Missouri. A stifling hell-hole of boozy despair, that place. There wasn’t any air in there, just a miasma of grease, steam, and PCP. We’d go there at 3 in the morning after some vulgar binge, when we were so blotto we thought nothing of eating rotting garbage. The hamburgers were like lukewarm reconstituted scabs.

Anyway, for its super-gross conflation of pornography, misogyny, antiswine-ism, and fast-foodularity, as well as for the putrescent food fouls it perpetrated upon my drunken person in the early 80’s, White Castle wins today’s Ditwuss Award.

Hugs,
Twisty

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It doesn’t understand “golden retriever” but orange juice and cheese, hell yeah. Would I like to supersize that?

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What a cow in a pasture looks like. Texas longhorn, Cottonmouth County, TX, 2008.

Stingray — you remember Stingray, my sidekick? — remarked the other day that Horizon organic dairy products aren’t really organic, but that Organic Valley products are.

“What!” I said. “Misleading labeling practices? Here in America? What’s next? Will President Obama fail to sufficiently disguise his elitist proclivities by putting Dijon mustard on his photo-op hamburger?”

Stingray’s findings were more or less substantiated by the Morsel Institute’s Half-Assed Research Dept. We encountered factoids like these: you know that phrase “produced without added growth hormones”? Guess what! It’s a red herring! Not even non-organic milk producers add growth hormones to milk (they add’em to cows). And antibiotics? Of course they don’t use’em. They just ship sick animals off to slaughter.

One account has it that as recently as 2007, Horizon Organic, which is owned by Ft. Worth dairyglomerate Dean Foods, was confining their dairy cows, feeding them slaughterhouse offal and chicken shit, weaning the calves on animal blood, and trucking the non-milk-producing animals from drylots to distant pastures for media photo ops. They trucked feed in, too, instead of using local organic hay producers, thus substantially enbiggening their carbon footprint. In other words, quoth the Organic Consumers Association, at least half the happy Horizon cows were, and possibly still are, languishing in prison factories, and Horizon is up for a Ditwuss Award.

Dean Foods, it turns out, have been pushing to lower standards for organic labeling. They also produce Silk organic soy milk. With, apparently, dubiously “organic” soybeans grown by indentured serfs in China.

There was a boycott, of course. It appears not to have eliminated factory farming, however. Or serfdom.

Efforts by the Half-Assed Research Dept to determine, independently of the Dean Foods website, the current status of Horizon dairy cattle and Silk’s Chinese serfs have been unsuccessful. But one point is clear. “Organic” doesn’t mean what we think it means. Especially if farmers are feeding dead animal blood to cute little calves.

It seems like a good idea — in light of this little reminder that the megatheocorporatocracy is nothing but a stinkbag of lies, LIES, LIES — to just knock it off already with the dairy products and commercially-manufactured processed crap, whether it says “organic” on the label or not. These things are unquestionably the product of someone’s oppression, and they’re fucking not very good for you, either.

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I’ve just found organic aerosol waffle batter, and I’m telling everyone! Just heat up the old waffle iron, point, and squirt! Try it with a glob of organic aerosol whipped cream for a virtuous-yet-space-age breakfast experience that can’t be beat. Waffle-hatas in your breakfast nook? Let’em do the whippet!

While I absorb my organic aerosol waffle, my thoughts drift ahead, as they always do at breakfast, to dinner. There is asparagus in my fridge. A brilliant plan begins to erupt in my brain’s molten core: organic aerosol Hollandaise sauce. Why has nobody thought of this?

Because I cannot focus on anything for more than 42 seconds, my thoughts also drift back to yesterday. Yesterday I found myself on the receiving end of a few media broadcasts, all of which caused my obstreperal lobe to sort of seize up. Fortunately, owing to the merciful proto-dementia of chemo-brain, today I remember only two of them vividly enough to recap them for the blametariat.

One was an episode of “Leave It To Beaver.” The other was a story on the public radio show All Things Considered By Honky Liberal Intellectuals. Just as the horrible specter of aerosol Hollandaise dawned on me, it has dawned on climate scientist Susan Solomon, writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that global warming is irreversible.

That’s right. Irreversible.

Quoth Solomon:

“People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide that the climate would go back to normal in 100 years or 200 years. What we’re showing here is that’s not right. It’s essentially an irreversible change that will last for more than a thousand years,”

Guilty! I’m one of those people who has imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide that the climate would go back to normal. But no, it turns out that in a few decades the Texas Hill Country will be permanently transformed into a fucking dustbowl.

Already Central Texas is in the middle of the worst drought in about 568 years. Everywhere you look are skeletor cattle standing on barren dirt. They just fall down and die (this has a lot to do with the stupid beef industry pressuring ranchers to plant non-native GMO hybrid grasses that fatten cattle up fast but can’t survive a drought, and it’s fucking criminal that people are just letting these animals keel over, but that’s another story, as well as an excellent argument for vegetarianism).

Everyone likes to blame global warming on those stupid urban Texans driving Hummers, but shockingly, it’s not entirely their fault. Auto emissions, not to mention emissions from organic aerosol waffle batter, are a drop in the bucket when compared to, say, Asian industrial pollution.

Well, I guess that’s it, then. So long, world as we know it.

Wait a minute. The world as we know it has been preserved on film, and, horribly, is broadcast daily on cable! The episode of “Leave It To Beaver” to which I allude above well and truly made my skin crawl, but in a totally different direction than did the NPR report. Synopsis:

Beaver is invited to a girl’s birthday party. He refuses to go. Ward and June force him to attend against his will. We know what they don’t know: that the Beave is the only boy invited to the party. Our hearts bleed for poor Beaver, being made to socialize with icky girls.

Cut to Beaver sitting in a chair looking miserable while little girls in crinolines scream hysterically. Beaver wins a prize: it’s a dolly. He couldn’t be any more horrified.

Meanwhile, back home, Wally hips Ward and June to the godawful emasculation to which they have unwittingly subjected their kid. Ward and June couldn’t be any more horrified.

Meanwhile, back at the party, Beaver sneaks away and ends up in Mr. Man’s study. Mr Man lowers his newspaper. He has been expecting Beaver. The kid is safe in here. Mr Man always hides here when there are too many women in the house. No squealing harpies would dare cross the line of demarcation into his private sanctum. Sensing that Beaver is suffering dangerously high levels of nellification, Mr Man shows Beaver his gun collection. The day is saved, the natural order restored; the masculine act of fondling weaponry has reversed Beaver’s impotence, as is made clear when he happily raises a rifle to his shoulder and goes “Pow! Pow!” Back at home, Ward makes some homophobic joke about Beaver’s having enjoyed himself at a girl-party.

I could write a doctoral thesis on this one episode. I won’t, though, because I’m not in graduate school. But Jesus in a jetpack, the whole of honky American civilization could be recreated by aliens using this one 22-minute show; it’s an effing blueprint for mid-century American patriarchy.

It blows my mind that shit like this — and by “shit like this” I mean pretty much every goddam thing on TV — is still being broadcast with a straight face. I’m not saying “Leave It To Beaver” should be taken off the air. I’m saying that every episode should have subtitles, like that newsflash thing at the bottom of the screen on CNN, pointing out each instance of hate speech, sexism, racism, stereotyping, misogyny, homophobia, honky dudelionormativity, and child abuse. There should also be a sound effect — say, the “blast of a trumpet”? — to accompany each infraction.

Radical Feminist Closed Captioning and Descriptive Video Service for everything! Who’s with me?

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With all the patriarchy I’ve been blaming over the past few years, I’ve somehow drifted away from my roots. That is, it’s been quite a while since I’ve posted a photograph of my lunch.

Who among us right-thinking honky Americans is not conflicted (”conflicted” meaning the discomfiture experienced when it becomes necessary to juggle opposing concepts in order to avoid rocking the boat. It is a funny word the use of which I cannot advocate, but which has nevertheless crept via some sinister psychotic impulse into the spinster vernacular. But what preposition to use? Is one conflicted with, by, or over a thing? Stupid ungrammatical word) on accounta Thanksgiving? Like all holidays, it is riddled with horrors. Smallpox blankets. The spurious Squanto mythology. Genocide. The expectation that one manifest a hearty, convivial mood in the bosom of the fam despite the fact that the whole binge is (a) quasi-godbagious, (b) a shitload of extra work for the womenfolk, and (c) poultry-based.

Regale me not with sanctimonious tales of your tofurkey, by the way. It’s not like the soybean industrial complex isn’t a major player in the megatheocorporatocracy.

And you know? All the vegan Thanksgiving feasts the details of which many of you will not be able to resist posting in the comments section? Still no good. That’s right. Because feasting of any kind, while fun-filled on the surface of it, cannot, in this culture, be accomplished without guilt.

I don’t mean pop-psychology “white” guilt; without question millions of Americans are perfectly capable of greasing their colons with the traditional 37.8 pounds of fat without giving the the American honky’s role in world hunger the flicker of a thought. I also don’t mean the self-imposed I-shouldn’t-be-eating-this-delicious-fatty-meal-
because-of-social-pressures-to-be-thin-and-”healthy”- type guilt. Maybe gluttony isn’t of the highest philosophic importance, but capitulation to patriarchal beauty mandates is the worst possible reason to modify your relationship with the feed-trough.

When I say you can’t feast without guilt, I mean actual guiltiness. It’s the privilege principle. When the stuffing of the maw at Thanksgiving is experienced as oppression by Native Americans and atheists and factory turkeys and the millions of humans globally who are screwed by honky American excess, it is irrelevant that your intent is innocent, or that you are a “good” person, or that a nice dinner party with good food and good friends is what makes life worth living and who am I to cast aspersions, or that if you’d blown off Thanksgiving dinner your mom would’ve been pissed. None of this shit matters. The reason we are able to exist the way we do is that somebody else isn’t able to.

Not that anything will fix it.

Well, revolution maybe.

This complaint is not specific to Thanksgiving feasts, of course. Guilt obtains twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. It’s like the Eyes of Texas. You cannot get away.* I blame the patriarchy for the whole lousy set-up.

Thus, my leftover stuffing and ativan lunch.

_____________________
* The University of Texas fight song is a creepy stalker’s anthem.

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I admit it. I am a blogger in name only, at least for a while longer. The move to the Faster country seat is taking longer than previously anticipated, and further complications have complicated things. I dislike complication, and am not taking it well. At this juncture, no tub of Cool Whip is safe from me.

I did watch a few minutes of an old movie on TCM last night, though, and was repelled enough by its Yay Patriarchyness to embark on a series of contemplations on how Western literature would scarcely exist if plots did not so consistently revolve around the purity of the female lead’s vagina, puritanical conceits concerning marriage and divorce, and whose-baby-is-it. Seriously, if you take away bastards, fallen women, and dominion-over-the-uterus as plot devices, nearly the whole canon instantly evaporates. I honestly don’t know how TCM broadcasts this crap with a straight face. “The story of a man who lived a man’s life, the story of a woman who believed in one man.” It amounts, in large part, to hate speech.

Then, while in line at Whole Foods, I espied the current copy of Vanity Fair, and was repelled by a cover featuring, in full drag, the most famous dude-fantasy cipher of the 20th century, Marilyn Monroe. The cover story, which I haven’t read, purportedly contains vital new information on the “mystery” of her death. Pah. I’ll tell you what killed Marilyn Monroe. Femininity. It kills thousands of women every day.

Why was I at Whole Foods? I’d run out of an absurd thing. Chardonnay Oak-Smoked Fleur de Sel. I put this wacky salt on everything, including watermelon and peanut butter toast. You may opine that sodium chloride is sodium chloride, but until you do a side-by-side taste test with this Chardonay Oak-Smoked Fleur de Sel and Morton’s Iodized I have nothing to say to you.

Meanwhile, Stingray’s out in Napa lurking in some wine cellar, and she’s got a wine cellar blog. It’s got great photos of incomprehensible winemaking equipage, as well as of the porta-potties that dot Napa’s picturesque vinyards like the plastic turquoise flowers of spring. Before she biffed out there and began reporting back about the full-blown sexism, classism, and racism attending viticultural culture, I used to think that wineries were pleasant, sun-drenched agrarian paradises. Now I realize that I will have to give up oenophilia on principle and start brewing my own feminist hooch in the bathtub.

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Pressing spinster auntly business (I have to lounge by a pool again, dammit) will keep me away from my desk today, but I can’t see leaving yall without a photograph of some quiche. From the Blue Star Cafeteria. Which is a dumb name for a restaurant that isn’t a cafeteria.

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Of course you care what I had for lunch: a spinach and goat cheese crepe with caramelized onion and tomato from Flip Happy Crepes.

To the two 6th St. joggers who ducked into Whole Foods, made for the produce section, proceeded to cool themselves by rolling cucumbers over their sweaty B.O. hides, and then put the cucumbers back:

I look forward to the day when I can return the favor.

To the merry prankster who linked here from Something Awful, thus flooding my moderation queue with asinine schoolboy vulgarities:

I look forward to the day when I can return the favor.

To the genius women who run Flip Happy Crepes out of an old Airstream in that pecan grove off of Lamar and Barton Springs:

I’ll never be able to return that favor, so I’ll just return. Every day. See you tomorrow.

To poor divorced Anna Pasternak, whose column in Australia’s Herald Sun suggests that “the intrinsic emotional make-up of high-IQ women [is] flawed,” resulting in an inability to sustain love relationships, and that “big brained” women shouldn’t be “too dominant or competitive” unless they want to die old maids:

If your smart-women-are-unlovable theory were accurate, you’d have more dates than a palm tree.

Damn. Sorry. That was juvenile. What I meant to say was this. You might consider that “brilliant” women, from whose eyes the scales have fallen, are not “flawed”, but are merely more difficult to dominate, thus ensulkening the partner who sees her/himself as the rightful heir to patriarchal privilege based on the traditionally lopsided power differential of the heteromonogamogodly model. In other words, it’s the weenie’s fantasy, i.e. the culture of domination, that’s flawed, not the brainiacs.

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