Archive for the 'Oppression Culture' Category

Consent is back!

Published by Twisty on January 10, 2012. 98 Comments

In keeping with my new policy of barely writing posts ever, I suggest you check out this essay written by Lisa at A Radical Transfeminist. The article enlarges with no small eloquence on my favorite topic, women’n'consent. I snip a large-ish chunk of it here for your consideration.

Here Lisa discusses the nature of the dudely habit of deliberately misunderstanding refusal. You know, when they suddenly experience an utterly confounding ambiguity in standard modes of refusal that, in all non-boink-related contexts, are completely transparent? This purposeful denial of women’s humanity, it’s pretty much the nub of patriarchal oppression.

I’d like to ask the reader to do a brief mental exercise. (If you’d rather not, just skip to the next paragraph.) I’d like you to remember the last time you found it difficult to give an explicit “no” to somebody in a non-sexual context. Maybe they asked you to do them a favour, or to join them for a drink. Did you speak up and say, outright, “No”? Did you apologise for your “no”? Did you qualify it and say, “Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t make it today“? If you gave an outright “no”, what privileged positions do you occupy in society, and how does your answer differ from the answers of people occupying more marginalised positions?

This form of refusal was analysed in 1999 by Kitzinger and Frith (K&F) in Just Say No? The Use of Conversation Analysis in Developing a Feminist Perspective on Sexual Refusal. Despite the seeming ambiguity in question/refusal acts like, “We were wondering if you wanted to come over Saturday for dinner”, “Well, uhh, it’d be great but we promised Carol already”, they are widely understood by the participants as straightforward refusals.

K&F conclude by saying that, “For men to claim [in a sexual context] that they do not ‘understand’ such refusals to be refusals (because, for example, they do not include the word ‘no’) is to lay claim to an astounding and implausible ignorance of normative conversational patterns.”

Especially intriguing is the notion that the unequivocal “no” is the exclusive purview of privilege.

Posted in Men Hate You and Oppression Culture. Bite me, Chad.

Insert better post on the tiny hate-filled mind of Rick Santorum here

Published by Twisty on January 7, 2012. 74 Comments

Rick Santorum

The most popular national news stories currently on the CBS News website are hideous tales of sensational death. “Skydiver’s Fall Caught On Tape.” “Boy throws rocks at cars, shot by crossbow.” “Casey Anthony’s dad: Drugs killed Caylee.” “Horrified onlookers saw hikers go over waterfall.” “Tree crushes girl on Christmas day.”

And apparently Osama bin Laden is still dead.

It’s too bad CBS readers’ prurience extends only to freak accidents and violent mishaps. If only they were more interested in bashing Rick Santorum, because that dude is a fucking racist, homophobic, misogynist knob. No doubt you heard this on NPR the other day:

Rick Santorum singled out blacks as being recipients of assistance through federal benefit programs, telling a mostly-white audience he doesn’t want to “make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” — CBS News

Santorum seems to think that the only people benefiting from public assistance are those lazy-ass black folks. Uh-oh, looks like somebody forgot to check the stats before making super-racist remarks at an Iowa rally (not that facts ever get in the way of tiny hate-filled zealots):

CBS News found that of the people on food stamps in Iowa, only nine percent are black and 84 percent are white.

Of course, guffawing over stupid shit Rick Santorum says is like shooting candy out of the mouths of baby fish in a barrel. This post at Think Progress compiles a list of his Top 10 most outrageous campaign statements. My personal fave: that “abortion exceptions to protect women’s health are ‘phony’.”

Back in 1997, when the partial-birth abortion ban was roiling in Washington, Ellen Goodman noted that the Santorum camp viewed “‘health’ [as] nothing but a loophole for women who would abort a pregnancy to fit into a prom dress.” Either he thinks life-threatening pregnancies are just a figment of the Feminazi imagination, or women’s lives are of such little significance that sacrificing them for fetuses is entirely consistent with the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women. Either way, I can’t think of anyone more deserving of his frothy Google reputation.

__________________
Photo of Osammy: AP

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

Shoe company to women: “you’re deformed.”

Published by Twisty on January 3, 2012. 134 Comments

Finally, a shoe company is using vagina marketing to leverage women’s UAEW (universally acknowledged essential weirdness) into profits! Behold the little insert I found in the box containing my new pair of Merrell hiking shoes.

Red lines afflict all women's legs

This riveting brochure explains that “women move differently than men.” This differentude, implies the brochure, is because of a deformity afflicting the entire sex class: “wider hips and a lower center of gravity.” Or, in clinical terms, “cooties.” According to Merrell this deformity is measured by “something called a Q-Angle.”

The red lines in the illustration show just how naturally fucked up women are in terms of our godawful Q-angle. This congenital fucked uppedness, says the brochure, causes women to “[alter] the natural pattern of movement” which “ultimately results in discomfort and pain.” That’s right. Women can’t even walk right. We can’t manage a “natural pattern of movement.” We’re debilitated by female physiology. We need help.

The rest of insert explains how Merrell shoes address women’s flagrantly abnormal kinesiology with — what else — scientifically designed red spots in the soles.

So you can’t even buy a pair of ugly-ass unisex hiking shoes without being told how different you are from the default standard human? You’re supposed to be grateful to Merrell for pointing out your freakishness, because after they explain what’s wrong with you, they let you know they got your back? “It’s about time,” says the brochure in a conspiratorial women’s magazine tone, “shoes started conforming to women.” That’ll be $89.95, you freak of nature.

Up top, Merrell!

I’m not saying, by the way, that Q-angle really isn’t a thing, because it is. I looked it up in Wheeless’ Textbook of Orthopaedics, and what a gripping read it was. Q-angle is determined by the angle of the patella relative to the tibial tubercle and anterior superior iliac spine. In other words, it describes how knock-kneed you are.

But get this: a 1983 study found that the normal angle for dudes is 14 degrees, and for women, 17 degrees. Plus or minus 3 degrees. So a normal dude can have a 17 degree Q-angle, and a normal woman can have a 14-degree Q-angle. All this “difference” is only a matter of 3 degrees, and some overlap between the sexes is likely, and it’s all normal. When you consider that there are 360 degrees total, 3 degrees hardly seems worth mentioning, which is probably why Merrell doesn’t. Merrell also neglects to mention that the biomechanics of the knee are further influenced by other stuff, such as the length of the patellar tendon, and whether you blew out your ACL when vaulting off a rearing horse.

All I’m saying is, any claim that a mass-produced, off-the-shelf sport shoe with randomly placed red spots can solve “discomfort” associated with normal physiology is just stupid. And in this case, fucking sexist.

The shoes, incidentally, gave me a blister.

Posted in Oppression Culture and The megatheocorporatocracy. Bite me, Chad.

Thus spake Debbie Downer

Published by Twisty on December 26, 2011. 73 Comments

Though the life of a spinster aunt is mostly fluffy and carefree, there are certain unpleasant situations wherein the Auntly Directive explicitly calls for taking the wind out of people’s sails.

Sail de-winding has gotten a bad rap, as it has been embraced as bloodsport over the years by various do-gooders and buttinskis. Remember “tough love”?

“I hate to take the wind out of your sails, Son, but your Marilyn Manson marijuana lifestyle frightens your mother, so we’re having you arrested.”

Sail de-winding has also been wielded for the greater good — though to little avail — by dudely scientists and professional skeptics:

“I hate to take the wind out of your sails, my godly friend, but there is no scientific evidence whatsoever to support the hypothesis that when you die your disembodied consciousness will float up to the clouds to be reunited with your loved ones. Also, you’re stupid.”

It has been complained about in various Nick Lowe songs, too.

But let’s be clear: it’s spinster aunts who invented the practice of foisting truth on overstimulated people who don’t want to hear it.

That’s right. Our specialized lobes can detect a self-destructive folly at 200 yards. When our peeps’ sails have wind in them, and we perceive that this wind is perhaps a bit gusty for this time of year, and that it is composed not of wholesome breezes but of farts and sordid delusion, we cannot hold our tongue.

I recall the time my pal Solange Pettigrew called to cut me in on an exciting business proposition. This frabjous business, she effluviated in breathless tones, was going to liberate her from the daily grind and transport her to a world of more or less incessant travel to exotic lands. It could do the same for me. She explained that all I had to do was buy my own personalized ‘travel website’ from her, whereupon hordes of internet travelers would flock to it and I would make a fortune. In her mind’s eye she had already purchased a steamer trunk full of hula skirts and was getting her groove back with a hunky cabana boy. I had never seen her so happy. Clearly I needed to step in.

So I protruded the spinster proboscis and immediately detected in her sails the whiff of a wind most foul. But how? This woman has a master’s degree in common sense from Stanford, for chrissake. She couldn’t be that obliv–

Oh, but she was. Solange Pettigrew had in fact gone grossly agog. So forthwith onto my auntly shoulders fell the stinky task of informing the poor sap that this travel website deal was no gilded Jetway out of meaningless corporate drudgery, but was actually a Ponzi scheme.

Did I want to be the one who brought her life’s young dream crashing down like the housing market upon her dewy brow? Certainly not. I’d rather have been given a root canal by a sweaty dentist. But according to the Spinster Code, failure to place these person-to-person calls on the clue phone is not an option. Sail de-winding is the only ethical course.

Which brings me to my chum Sukey, who is an inveterate bargain hunter. One of her endearing qualities is that when she finds a hot deal, she cannot rest until she has alerted her entire acquaintance to the bonanza. I often get this call from Sukey:

“Get down to $aver$ immediately! Wahoo is only 99 cents a pound!”

Let us all feast like kings on wahoo, right? Wrong. I’m the one who says, “Wahoo for 99 cents? Where’d it come from, the dumpster behind Whole Foods?”

While driving around yesterday Sukey stumbled across some women on the side of the road selling “1200-thread-count Egyptian cotton king sheet sets” out of a beat-up Econoline van for 20 bucks a hit. Sukey bought a set on the spot and galloped home at breakneck speed to call everyone up. She couldn’t bear for her friends to spend another hellish night needlessly tossing and turning on nasty burlap from Bed Bath and Beyond when we could be nestled in luxury coziness from the banks of the river Nile.

“Wait a second,” I said, my wind-in-sails detector heating up. “1200 thread-count Egyptian cotton king sheet sets for 20 bucks? Yeah, and I’m Herman Cain’s baby mama.”

I hated to do it, but my hands, I tell you, were tied.

“Sukey,” I said, “read the label. Read it, and weep.”

Whereupon it was discovered that the sheets had been made in China by indentured wage slaves. Furthermore they were not cotton of Egyptian or any other origin, but microfiber, and most likely weren’t 1200 threads per inch, either.

Sukey wept.

Hey, I’m just doing my job.

It’s like when I happen to run into the occasional woman who thinks Bust is a feminist magazine. Or maybe she believes that femininity is “natural,” or that “radiant skin” is desirable. Look at her sails! Her bloomy, billowing sails, bloated with hot wind! What can I do? If I don’t take that wind outta them things she might go around the rest of her life arguing that burlesque is an empowering form of feminine self-expression.

So I cram down her neck the truth that our patriarchal social order, despite what she’s been told since the cradle, doesn’t really have her best interests at heart. I explain that she is defined in this social order solely with respect to male interests, and that she is a member of an oppressed sex class out of which she may not opt, and that her success in life is entirely a matter of the degree to which she appeases her oppressor.

She protests. She demurs. She vituperates. She calls me a sex-hating harridan prude.

And then her lobe starts to pulsate. The mascara falls from her eyes. She grasps that, yes, patriarchy is founded on oppression and suffering, that Ponzi schemes and thread-count cons are logical consequences in a world order that is itself the Mother of All Scams, and most horribly of all, that she is both complicit and a dupe in the whole set-up.

Her life is ruined, and she has me to thank for it.*

Trust no one.

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* Note: this business about her lobe beginning to pulsate and me ruining her life, it’s all a fantasy. In real life nobody ever believes me.

Debbie Downer photo nicked from Wikipedia.

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

That’s a more

Published by Twisty on December 15, 2011. 125 Comments

Some day maybe I’ll write a post. Until then, two things.

First, via PhysioProf, this: after millennia of sprain-free use by Romans in sensible shoes, they’re remodeling the streets of Rome to accommodate stiletto heels. Apparently the picturesque cobblestones of old are a hazard to the ligaments of pedestrians on Via del Corso who, though insufficiently fem-proficient, must nevertheless cave in to pressure to sport pornulated footwear. Ditching the stilettos? Unthinkable.

Farrier with hoof

The second thing: this is what my dude farrier said to me yesterday, after delivering the unpleasant news that my horse has developed thrush from standing in mud: “Now don’t get all dramatic and act like a woman.”

Posted in Oppression Culture and The Beauty Ultimatum. Bite me, Chad.

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

Published by Jill on November 23, 2011. 95 Comments

God, PBS sucks. Here’s why.

PBS, though it wants you to believe that it’s above this sort of thing (which it tries to demonstrate, as I have noted elsewhere, by those promo spots wherein divers Attractive Sample Children of the World in colorful rompers leap across the screen in slow-motion), definitely shoulders its fair share of the global misogyny-load.

First, have you seen the latest feel-good PBS promo montage? Among the various images of joyous human triumph and closeups of frogs licking their own eyeballs is a clippet excerpted from a show in which Tina Fey is awarded the Mark Twain Prize for Humor.

As you know, Tina Fey approaches greatness in many respects, and comes as close to a feminist presence as is tolerable by network television. Here is one of the pithy, relevant bits she did during her acceptance speech:

And, you know, politics aside, the success of Sarah Palin and women like her is good for all women — except, of course — those who will end up, you know, like, paying for their own rape kit ‘n’ stuff, but for everybody else, it’s a win-win. Unless you’re a gay woman who wants to marry your partner of 20 years — whatever. But for most women, the success of conservative women is good for all of us. Unless you believe in evolution. You know – actually, I take it back. The whole thing’s a disaster. — [cite: HuffPo]

Her speech ran several minutes, but the clippet PBS selected for the montage depicts Fey, the closest thing we have to a TV feminist, ducking her head in an apparent curtsey. Non-ironically.

Really? Tina Fey is too threatening a personage to be represented on PBS with an unbowed head? Come on.

OK, that’s a small thing, a split second thing, but you know as well as I do how those split seconds add up to whole lifetimes.

The Palin bit, incidentally, got edited out of the final cut of the award show. Way to keep it real, PBS.

Meanwhile, a four-part series entitled “America in Primetime” uses clips from “groundbreaking” television shows to explicate the manner in which TV character archetypes supposedly reflect actual human experience. The result is a stone butch dudefest.

The series imparts this message: “TV is about dudes, it’s awesome, and it’s art” (“Primetime’s” secondary argument for the awesome artness of TV appears to be that, compared to 2-hour feature films, TV series are a lot longer. But I digress).

Each episode in this “Primetime” series takes as its subject one of four character archetypes: “The Independent Woman,” “The Man of the House,” “The Misfit.” I watched “The Crusader.” This episode, quoth the website, “delves into the increasingly grey area between right and wrong as television heroes confront internal demons while seeking their own forms of justice.”

“The Crusader” features interviews with actors and writers who keep insisting that TV “mirrors” the “human experience.” You will hardly be surprised when I reveal that, in order to be a crusading TV hero who mirrors the human experience, you have to be a white dude in the middle of a bunch of physical violence. Human experience, according to American television, is white dude experience. Examples of TV crusaders: House from “House,” Sipowicz from “NYPD Blue,” Hawkeye from “M*A*S*H”, Jack Bauer from “24.”

Of course, PBS, as I mentioned earlier, loves diversity, so the producers of “Primetime” throw in a couple of tokens. They can’t profile an Asian crusader because none exists (well, there’s Kwai Chang Caine from “Kung Fu,” but that guy was only half Chinese, and problematically David Carradine was entirely white). Undaunted, they’re lucky to be able to kill both black and gay birds with one stone via Omar from “The Wire,” the noble gayblack criminal gunslinger so beloved of edgy American audiences.

“Primetime” also includes a perfunctory chick hero. She is neither Xena nor Buffy nor Starbuck nor Sidney from “Alias” nor Max from “Dark Angel.” No, she’s Scully from “X-Files,” a choice that particularly reeks of tokenism.

Scully's baby

Sure, we love Scully, the gun-toting FBI scientist field agent with the blazing news-anchor helmet hair, but let’s face it: the only thing she crusades for is the status quo. Scully has no demons, seeks no personal brand of justice. She’s just the tame, unthreatening, adult voice of reason, who, as Gillian Anderson here laughingly notes, is always filmed physically walking several steps behind her dude partner. They never give her anything more interesting to do than foil and rebuke and be secretly in love with the vastly more compelling and demon-filled and crusadery Mulder. Naturally — because what else can you to do your female lead? — aliens abduct her and rip out her ovaries. Mulder, on the other hand, is off getting high with the Indians. And when Mulder leaves the series? Like all female leads on TV shows that have run out of steam, Scully is of course saddled with an unwieldy alien baby. She spends the entire final season whingeing “My baby! My baby!” Scully can only be considered a crusader if you define “crusader” as “baby-obsessed killjoy who plays second banana to the much more complicated dude who really is a crusader.”

Says “Primetime” interviewee Diablo Cody, woman creator of “The United States of Tara,” in an attempt to explain the dearth of TV chicks with complex interior struggles,

Not to get all women’s studies on you, but maybe the idea of a hero with a really straightforward goal is sort of particularly male.

Yeah, for the lovagod, Diablo, don’t get all women’s studies on us; the dudes for whom TV is written find that very unsexy.

UPDATE: I have since watched the “Misfit” and “Independent Woman” segments of “America in Primetime.” In the former, it’s all dudes again. Dudes, dudes, dudes. Nerdy or quirky dudes “who defied comic stereotypes and societal expectations to reflect America’s diverse personalities.” White dude personalities, that is. Dwight from “The Office,” Gomez from “The Addams Family,” Louie de Palma from “Taxi.” Etc. Again, there’s one token chick, Tara from “The United States of Tara,” a character who plays dissociative personality disorder for laffs.

Unsurprisingly, most of the (all white) women characters featured in the “Independent Woman” segment are more accurately described as either misfits or crusaders or both (Roseanne, Mary Richards, Murphy Brown, Nurse Jackie), but are lumped together in a special “strong woman” ghetto because they are Vagina-Americans.

The clips are entertaining, but I stand by my original assessment of the series’ uncritical acceptance of a certain level of misogyny in entertainment. “Independent Woman” has that brainwashed tone you always encounter whenever the discourse tries to argue that since the death of June Cleaver modern women are livin’ the life of Riley. The thesis: since women TV leads don’t have to be paragons of motherhood anymore, and in fact can even have drug habits and be clinically insane in addition to being heterosexual hotties who remain deeply concerned with their relationships, modern television is a reflection of women’s liberation from patriarchal oppression.

Such as when the affluent white gals on “Sex In the City” sit around chic Manhattan restaurants discussing blow jobs. Women on TV, says “America in Primetime,” can be anything imaginable. Except, it turns out, a crusader or a misfit.

In a patriarchy, convincing the sex class they’re not oppressed is the name of the game. Thanks, TV!

Incidentally, I didn’t bother watching the “Man of the House” segment because those doofus dad sitcoms make me want to rip my own head off.

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Scully’s baby photo here.

Posted in Mass Media, Movies and TV and Oppression Culture. Bite me, Chad.

Kanteensploitation

Published by Jill on October 4, 2011. 54 Comments

Central Texan spinster aunts on the go are apt to become desiccated if they don’t tote around cold, life-giving liquids at all times. For this reason I once possessed a thing called Klean Kanteen, an insulated steel vacuum bottle in which I stashed my iced coffee and filtered organic free range rainwater. Wheresoever I went, so too wenteth the Klean Kanteen. Horribly, one day a dust storm snatched it out of my tentacle and blew it up to Kansas (or maybe a dingo ite it, who can remember?). Anyway, I never really got over the loss, because that Klean Kanteen was the bomb. They’re not joking around with that insulation. I’ve come back the next day and found ice cubes and half a marg still rattling around in that thing. Par-tay.

So the other day I ordered a couple of new Klean Kanteens off the internet, but when the box arrived I could but curl the spinster lip. I was obliged to create the mess pictured below that I might liberate my bottles from the packaging and proceed with my beverage-centric life.

Waste products generated by purchase of 2 insulated bottles

A. Tissue paper
B. Packing material
C. Shipping carton
D. Display cards containing the “Café” (i.e. sippy cup) lids
E. Instruction cards advising the consumer that hot liquids are apt to be hot
F. Guitar case sticker, so you can advertise Klean Kanteen at Burning Man
G. Brochure for Recharge, a sort of designer Gatorade powder
H. Two samples of Recharge
I. Paper tags attached to superfluous plastic lids
J. Superfluous plastic lids
K. Ball chain attaching the superfluous tags to the superfluous lids

Who wraps a steel cylinder in tissue? It’s steel. If I’d wanted to unwrap an object encased in miles of packaging, I’d have ordered a Ming vase with a unicorn egg in it.

Crabby at the prospect of having to responsibly dispose of all this crap (can you even recycle ball chain?), I looked up Klean Kanteen’s website so I could waggle a bitter claw at their No-BPA!/pro-environment/garbage generating hypocrisy. That’s when I discovered that they make the damn things in China.

But chillax, O thou Klean Kanteen kustomer! Klean Kanteen shares “some of” your concerns about buying crap of Chinese manufacture. They devote a whole section of the site to warming your cockles with stories of exquisitely content factory workers. Take, for example, this heartwarming tableau: a Klean Kanteen “representative” visits the factory’s undisclosed location 4 times a year, not just to check quality control, but also to share tea and crumpets with a lucky menial.

Meet Yao Sheng Fu, one of the workers at our manufacturing site in China. During one of our regular visits, he sat down with Klean Kanteen® and shared a little about his life and what it’s like to work at the factory.

Yao had just finished his shift and was happy* to join Klean Kanteen co-owner Jeff Cresswell on the patio that overlooks the open quad at the factory grounds.** Over tea and some tasty Chinese pastries,*** he told us he moved from the province of Gui Zhon, known for steel production, to work at the Klean Kanteen® factory four years ago.

“Many people want to work at this factory because it has a reputation for being a good place,” he said, explaining that the factory’s reputation is part of the reason he moved here. He hopes it will continue to grow.

He travels home to see his family about twice a year and always goes during Chinese New Year.

When Jeff asked him where he’d go if he could travel anywhere in the world, Yao said he’d love to visit New York City.

Yeah, and when Jeff asked him what he’d do if he could have any job in the world, Yao said that after he gets back from his fabulous New York vacation (he’s staying at the Waldorf), he’d love to remain here at the unnamed factory, churning out metal bottles for sanctimonious American yuppies for all time.

Zhang family in jeans factory: not too chipper. From Last Train Home by Lixin Fan.

I don’t know if you saw the 2009 documentary “Last Train Home”? It aired on “POV” the other night, and it’s been haunting me ever since. It’s an awesome and wrenching film about a Chinese factory worker family and how totally fucking screwed they are. Motivated by a desire to fund the education that they believe will improve the lives of the children they left behind, the Zhangs move from the farm to a distant factory town to sew overpriced jeans for American export. For 16 years they endure fingers worked to the bone, makeshift dormitory living, cooking on the floor, slave wages, domestic violence, broken dreams, road to hell paved with good intentions, and the annual trip home for Chinese New Year.

I mention this film because that’s the backdrop: the annual migration of hundreds of millions of Chinese factory workers (“the single largest migrant work force in the world”) as they all throng their way home to rural villages for Chinese New Year. It takes the Zhangs days, in mobbed trains and buses, to traverse 1300 miles. When they finally arrive, they discover that the kid for whom they’ve sacrificed a decade and a half of their lives in meaningless drudgery has gone rogue. At 17 she blows off school, moves to a big city and gets a job in a nightclub, and well, you know where that’s going. Before she scrams, her father beats the crap out of her. Which beating, incidentally, the filmmaker records with a cool, unflinching detachment, making the violence seem like a sane and logical outcome of Zhang’s pact with the devil.

Klean Kanteens make pretty girls smile, despite prune-hands from latex gloves. From Klean Kanteen website.

Anyway, I imagine that Yao Sheng Fu, maker of my Klean Kanteen, is one of the New Year’s throng who has made a similar devil-pact. Maybe Mr Pastry-Eating Kanteen Honcho’s quarterly factory visits do ensure that Yao isn’t cooking on the floor in a warehouse dorm hellhole while he supports a distant family that he beats up at New Year’s, but then again, maybe they don’t.

You may flatter yerself that you’re doing no harm — such as when you buy a reusable steel canteen so you can stop littering the world with those endless plastic Ozarka bottles — but no matter what, you’re always reaming someone. That’s the main sucky thing about the whole patriarchy set-up, it turns everybody into a fucking asshole. Me, Mr Zhang, Mr Kanteen: what a bunch of schmucks.

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* Yeah, I’ll bet old Yao Sheng Fu was happy as a clam to hang around the sweatshop with some rich gringo suit after slaving over the steel bottle machine for 12 or 16 hours.

** No doubt the pampered Klean Kanteen workers lounge around on this picturesque patio sipping cosmos during their numerous breaks.

*** Quaint indigenous local foods are awesome.

Posted in Movies and TV and Oppression Culture. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt slowly emerges from stupor

Published by Jill on September 5, 2011. 635 Comments

It’s 69 degrees! It’s 69 degrees! My dendrites are free from waxy yellow build-up!

So I thought I might as well enlarge on a point that seems to have sprouted some ambiguity of late, regarding my views on intersectionality.

Here’s what Bushfire said:

Twisty does focus on women’s oppression but she also makes it clear that other oppressions are at work and she doesn’t use broad generalizations about women.

And here’s what AlienNumber said:

Really? Funny, we’re reading the same thing and I don’t get this.

AlienNumber went on:

Twisty, the way I’ve been reading/understanding her – and maybe I am projecting, which is entirely plausible – connects ‘other oppressions’ to the one underlying, fundamental oppression of women. I’m putting ‘other oppressions’ in quotation marks because there are no such things. Racism/classism/colonialism/homophobia etc ARE sexism.

Apparently I have not been entirely clear. What else is new.

1. While I do perceive a connection between the “other oppressions” to which AlienNumber alludes, in my view the connective tissue is not Women’s Oppression, but rather the megatheocorporatocratic ideology of domination to which it is my somewhat lazy habit to refer as patriarchy. Domination ideology is predicated on the notion that social hierarchies are rooted in and validated by Divine Truth. All oppression — such as “women are whores” and “let’s enslave some Africans”– proceeds from this idea.

In other words, a universal oppression paradigm makes the world go round. As a result, all non-white, non-straight, non-abled, non-affluent, non-dude, non-godbag, non-Western [etc] persons are forced into subclasses in order that they may enjoy their own customized versions of tyranny. Women — the sex class — are but one of these many subclasses. It’s a pretty big and significant one, to be sure, hence the whole women’s liberation movement dealio (and this blog), but it’s not the whole bollawax.

Obviously, membership in one subclass does not preclude membership in others, hence the whole intersectionality dealio. Racism, classism, colonialism, homophobia — these are not equivalent to sexism. These isms share common components (see “domination ideology,” above), yes, and I speculate that a feminist revolt would go a long way toward fixing all that shit, on accounta most (not all) oppressed subclasses have women in’em, too — meaning that, for instance, racism cannot be eliminated without women’s liberation because you can’t say “racism is over!” if you’re still oppressing women of color — but the experiences and narratives and motives of all these subclasses, though similar in that they proceed from the same primary ideology, are demonstrably not identical.

To recap: women’s oppression is not the armature upon which all other oppression is hung. However, because sexism has been so comprehensively assimilated across the board, the elimination of racism, classism, ableism, homophobia et al cannot obtain without the simultaneous liberation of women from patriarchal tyranny.

2. This blog focuses primarily on the gruesome effects of patriarchy on the sex class because it particularly pleases me that it should. This focus should not be construed as an endorsement of the view that white feminists know what’s best for everybody or some shit.

Posted in Oppression Culture and Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt dashes off some fluff, proceeds with overbooked Sunday

Published by Jill on July 31, 2011. 148 Comments

No time to post, but look at this, I got another head-pat from a dude!

Hello,

While I am a dude, and disagree with a lot of your worldview, I’d like to let you know I really enjoy reading your blog. You’re a very good writer and your posts are entertaining and thought-stimulating. Please keep up the good work — there is a paucity of actual quality content in the blogosphere, and I daresay that you’re propping up the mean.

When women write me, they never, ever tell me that I am “a very good writer” and to “keep up the good work” because there isn’t enough decent writing on the Internet. Women say things like “that post on consent changed my life,” or “Now I know I’m not alone/crazy/hysterical.”

Dudes, on the other hand, always feel compelled to inform me that they disagree with me (this is a non-negotiable component of dude fan mail), but that they are nevertheless are willing to be entertained by me. They usually include a couple of 25-cent words, like “daresay” and “paucity.” “Keep up the good work” is another essential element. Thanks for the dudely encouragement, dude! Because I was totally thinking about packing up shop and opening up a pole dancing studio at Whole Foods.

UPDATE (or, perhaps, DOWNDATE): I wrote a much better post on this topic last year, back when I was smarter and there were more patriarchy-blaming hours in the day. The Hanging Chads of Savage Death Island. This post is better because it’s more long-winded, and also because at the end it explains how feminist revolt will make pornography obsolete. Thanks to MaryK and AlienNumber for reminding me of it.

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

What fresh old hell is this?

Published by Jill on July 28, 2011. 66 Comments

I thought I’d heard it all when it comes to the fine tradition of loving mothers forced by sicko patriarchal culture to inflict unspeakable sex-related tortures on their daughters for their own good, but I was wrong. I most regretfully bring you breast ironing.

When I saw the headline “Breast ironing tradition in Cameroon” I thought, “that can’t mean breast ironing.” But at the same time I knew it did mean breast ironing. Because “breast ironing” sounds like something just fucked-up enough to be a tradition: women try to stunt their teen kids’ breast growth with these hot pokers so they don’t get knocked up.

Every morning before school, nine-year-old Terisia Techu would undergo a painful procedure. Her mother would take a burning hot pestle straight out of a fire and use it to press her breasts.

With tears in her eyes as she recalls what it was like, Terisia tells CNN that one day the pestle was so hot, it burned her, leaving a mark. Now 18, she is still traumatized.

Her mother, Grace, denies the incident. But she proudly demonstrates the method she used on her daughter for several weeks, saying the goal was to make her less desirable to boys — and stave off pregnancy.

A study found that one in four girls in Cameroon have been affected by the practice.

There is apparently some effort underway to initiate the use of sex ed, rather than red-hot pestles, to “stave off pregnancy.” I’m pretty sure that if they ironed their son’s dicks instead it would achieve the desired result.

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