I Blame The Patriarchy

The can at the chic Hotel San José on trendy South Congress Ave: where edgy, creative people with sculpted bed-head go to pee. It’s unisex!

Once again spinster auntly pursuits interfere with today’s blaming schedule; I must take charge of my 3-year-old niece Rotel. She telephoned yesterday to inform me — in the background I heard her mother’s muffled but unmistakable chortle — that I was inviting her over for an indefinite period.

Rotel was explicit about her expectations regarding such endeavors as we might undertake, expectations which, I don’t mind telling you, seem somewhat far-fetched when you consider that extended interims in the company of 3-year-olds are not quite your line. For example, it appears I will have to forego my customary afternoon sacrament of pâté, vodka martinis, and a bracing 95-mile-an-hour drive in the country with the top down, in favor of “jumping on the big bed.” Also, the kid has ordered mac-and-cheese in a box and no carrots for dinner.

In a box! The skin crawls. Would that I were not in direct competition with my sister Tidy’s in-laws for the title of Favorite Aunt. Yes, I currently hold the lead by many furlongs (my winning strategy is this: give in to all demands for ice cream), but nothing is certain.

Blood, I suppose, is thicker than powdered cheese in a foil packet. But, damn.

Well. Since I can offer no improvement, cute kid story-wise, over the excellence routinely displayed by professional mommybloggers, I will leave it at that. Or rather, I will leave you with a link to this acrid essay on the supposed stupidity of parturient people who disdain to be medicalized, written by a surpassingly arrogant 30-something male MD who fancies himself a “compassionate person by nature” and is morbidly in love with his male privilege penis white coat.

Needless to say, if you don’t hear from me in 48 hours, start calling hospitals and police stations.

[Thanks Brianna]

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It is a comfort to know that, in the event of a sudden torrent, the can designated for use at Blue Star Cafeteria by people who identify or are identified as women is equipped with a handy drain.

Although it is a restaurant, the Blue Star Cafeteria isn’t a cafeteria. Naturally this is both distressing and a huge relief.

It’s a relief because if it really were a cafeteria — a species of restaurant notable only for its ability to attract a dining clientele despite its open hostility toward food — my gaping maw wouldn’t have gone within a mile of it at lunch today, and I would have become peckish.

But it’s distressing because it harbinges* the brutal murder of yet another perfectly decent word; at the Blue Star, the meaning of “cafeteria” in all its 20th century formica-and-steam-tabled splendor has not only been sacrificed to irony (irony is unconscionable whenever food is involved), but has been made into one of those words that can no longer be relied upon to mean what it means. I can but shove my furrowed brow into white-knuckled hands. What a world. What’s next? Bell-bottom pants?

Nevertheless, to the Blue Star Cafeteria we did hie. It’s owned by the same guy who runs the more decently named 34th St. Cafe, where a serviceable sandwich has on more than one occasion found a warm welcome in the Twisty paunch, and which my sister Tidy always engages to cater events she doesn’t invite me to, so we thought, why the heck not try the new joint.

Here is Maverick, congenial Blue Star host who was unable to contain his exuberance over the comical resemblance of my camera lens to a flaccid reproductive organ that will remain unnamed (I confess I egged him on by wiggling it up and down repeatedly).

Vegetarians avert your eyes, for the next thing you see will be the blue cheese bacon burger consumed without compunction by Stingray.

Then we ate coconut chess pie, which pie I can recommend without reservation.

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*No, it’s really a word. Look it up.

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Stingray calls this “western kitsch,” but I fail to see what’s so kitschy about a gold spray-painted horseshoe.

I-35 runs down the middle of Austin, a cee-ment ribbon of apartheid segregating the populace according to caste. On the west side, which is never called “the West Side,” is the university, the Whole Foods, the horrid 6th Street clubs, the state and city government, and most of the honkys, including me. On the East Side, which, when one is on the west side is always called The East Side because it isn’t the default affluent honky Austin, are the persons of color, persons who can’t afford the west side, assorted impecunious artsy-musiciany types, the gentrified yuppies who inevitably stalk the artsy-musiciany types, some virtuous militants who have spray-painted “Yuppies Off The East Side!” all over everything, and Norbizness.

Stingray and I tippy-toed across the highway the other night in search of some vittles and a couple of margs, which we found at El Gringo.

Here’s the blindingly bright shiny can.

El Gringo pushes one of my favorite cuisines: Lowbrow Bistro (alternatively “Big & Dumb”, or “Texan”). This school of culinary thought is not excessively nuanced and presents but a minimal challenge to the unschooled palate, but ideally satisfies four criteria: there’s chile in everything, it’s masterminded by someone who knows her way around a peck of pickled peppers, there’s a deep-fryer in the kitchen, and it’s served on a covered patio without benefit of chi-chi white tablecloths. To wit:

Ancho chile onion soup with a crouton of queso fresco broiled on a hunk of bolillo, on a bare, fake wood laminate table. The cheese tasted faintly of feet, and the grease-halo was not insignificant, but otherwise, quite a palatable little number.

Stingray enjoyed a thing called the South Padre Platter: 47 pounds of battered, deep-fried fish, crabcakes, oysters, bacon-wrapped shrimp, fries, and “pickled vegetables,” i.e. slaw. I wish I had a picture of it; it looked like an artery’s last gasp.

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The exterior of the can at Café Caffeine poses a philosophic challenge to the connoisseur in juxtaposing a bleak and crummy frameless painting with ironic vintage deco signage, but the message is ultimately one of post-industrial alienation.

You know how when you’re driving along, whistling a happy tune, and you pass a business and the name of the business strikes you as pretentious or esoteric or obscure to the extent you have no idea what they’re selling, and even if you did you’d never be able to go in there because of the goofy name, so — and this is a law eternal — you turn to your sidekick and guffaw, “For the luva pete, what kind of gnarled brain came up with that howler”?

Well, daily, and for months now, I have passed this joint Café Caffeine while en route from the Twisty Bungalow to one of my usual glittering, spectacular destinations. Café Caffeine, Café Caffeine! Ignited by the devilish enigma of Café Caffeine, a spark of curiosity in my cold and empty brain began first to simmer, then to boil, until now, roaring past in slow motion, with Barber’s Adagio for Strings inexplicably playing, I cannot help but glance at its little strip mall storefront, curl my lip at the sign, and cry out, “What? What? What it is you sell in there?”

Next door is a place called “Moxie”, where they sell moxes. Nice ones, too.

The Café Caffeine aesthetic suffers, perhaps, from a superabundance of subtlety.

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Feast your eyes upon the sink in the can at Emo’s on Red River while you contemplate today’s question.

What is “fun”?

Because of its early associations — many of which were not without their cheap French whiff of the meretricious (it’s not called ‘tomfoolery’ for nothin) — with practical jokes, cons, and hoaxes, Johnson in 1755 thought it a ‘low cant word’, but today everbody loves fun. In fact, in these days of plastic-scented anti-enlightenment, fun, especially if bouncy blonde beach babes bubble all over it, is often ordained as an end justifiable by any means. Does a truly innocent diversion exist? Does class enter into it? In what ways is fun subject, perhaps invisibly, to patriarchal dogma and assumptions made by the dominant culture?

I must know!

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I did not photoshop the undersea aura into this snap; this is one of the few women’s cans I have ever seen that has ventured beyond “pinkly flattering” into the uncharted territory of “Martian hag” as a criterion for its lighting scheme.

They razed a trailer park and tore down Maria’s Taco XPress a few months ago in order to put up a Walgreen’s. If you want to know what the Walgreen’s looks like, take a gander out your livingroom window at the identical store they built in your neighborhood last week.

For a generic megacorp, Walgreen’s has a somewhat palatable record on emergency contraception [click here for the barely-literate protestations of one of the 'pro-life' pharmacists they fired for refusing to dispense it; click here for the story of one feminist blogger's real-life horror experience with persisting antediluvian attitudes toward it], but that’s no excuse for making their ubiquitous stores so fucking ugly.

Maria’s was relocated to a spot nearby. It’s not the same, because nothing — with the exception of the taco verde, which is still a tongue-scalding mass of limp green beans despised by all right-thinking epicures except me — is ever the same, but I am pleased to report that the joint is still coated in sufficient quanties of that comforting South Austin je-ne-sais-funque.

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The grim and sinister baby-changing table in the can at Kerbey Lane has graffiti all over it. It’s where all the infant junkies of South Austin go to get changed. I knew you would want to see it, but—and I blame my dog Bert for this—the pictures came out like crap on accounta when I was snappin’em I had to jump up and down on my one functional leg so as not to tip over into the toilet. Which toilet, though it is cleaner than the baby table, is nevertheless nowhere a spinster aunt wants to be. So all I can show you is the somewhat creepy bathroom hall.

I don’t know what other people eat at Kerbey Lane, but I go for the Cholesterol Platter, served all day: two slices of French toast, two slices of bacon fat, and two scrambled eggs.

I required this meal today after my vigorous workout at physical therapy. The workout pretty much consisted of tapping my foot, which used to be one of my strongest talents. The fact is, I made the Olympic Toe-Tapping Team in 1980, although of course I never got to compete, because that was the year the USA boycotted the Olympics to protest the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.

Nowadays, I couldn’t tap a toe with pigs. In PT, after raising my foot an inch off the floor about 15 times, I thought my calf muscle, which has lain fallow for 2 weeks, had caught fire. This evidence of my paucity of buffitude caused my physical therapist, the gifted Lori Schwanz, to emit a chuckle.

Back at Kerbey Lane, Stingray ordered a biscuit and a sausage patty, which ingredients she then formed into a hideous little breakfast burger. Shocking stuff.

Pig enthusiasts: don’t bother. I already know pigs are cool. Let’s just let this one go, hey?

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The lavatory has been locked for three hours solid…. I think they are using it for an operating room….
NURSE: “I can’t find her pulse, doctor.”
DR. BENWAY: “Maybe she got it up her snatch in a finger stall.”
NURSE: “Adrenalin, doctor?”

Above: treat yourself to the panoramic view from the throne in the can at the Chinatown in the strip mall next to what used to be the Tom Thumb supermarket in Westlake. “Chinatown” refers to a couple of semi-related Austin restaurants, rather than to an actual Chinatown, of which, unsurprisingly, there isn’t one in Austin, although there are plenty of disaffected youths sneaking Burroughs paperbacks into public washrooms.

And there are crab Rangoons. I have never understood this stuff, which if you’ve never eaten one, is a glob of cream cheese, or whitish ooze, or mugwumpian secretion of some sort, squished into a wonton wrapper and deep-fried. You dunk it in a mixture of sweet fluorescent pink sauce and hot yellow mustard, which can nauseate you if you look at it too long. It tastes vulgar, like a seedy carnival, and not necessarily in a bad way. I have never experienced anything resembling crab in association with eating one.

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But first: the can at Flipnotics. Good iced coffee. Really funked-up soap dispenser.

My post on fizzy wine in a pink can recently drew a “male feminist” out of his pin-up encrusted lair and into the open patriarchy-blaming field, with predictably hilarious consequences.

This male feminist (let’s call him “MF” for short), after apprising the group of his high testosterone level, his genius-level “IQ,” and his penchant for porn, announced that his feminist work (which consists of giving money to NARAL) is nothing less than a princely and altruistic gift to all womankind. Why were we to cheer MF’s selflessness on behalf of the public good? Because “[he's] married, meaning that the sexual advantage to [his] support of feminism is zero.” I’ll let you chuckle over that for a minute.

MF couldn’t seem to grasp why, after so excruciatingly dudely an outburst, there was no enthusiastic clamor to book him as the keynote speaker at the next BlameCon in Bali. His pussy was hurting pretty bad by the end, and by way of delivering a parting zinger, he chastised some of us for using—dear god—sarcasm.

Not having just fallen off the tiny tomato truck yesterday, I am familiar with this MF’s MO. It’s always the same. Dude alights from on high, beaming with his extraordinary magnanimity (”I’m supporting your cause with my bandwidth”). Expresses shock when his blithe what-about-the-men remarks about the boffosity of porn are met with curled lips and stink eyes. Enlightens me that porn empowers women. Gets defensive. Says he is too a feminist because he watches porn with his wife (whom, he’ll have me know, he doesn’t even beat). Gets on high horse. Informs me that I’m not a real feminist, because he happens to know some real feminists, and they love pole dancing, and porn, of course, him. Oh, and they aren’t the least bit hostile. In fact, they lovingly embrace the male point of view. In fact, they’re strippers. I should be more like them if I want influential and good-hearted MFs like him to listen to me. Then demands that I explain what, if it isn’t about equal pay or the freedom to pole dance, feminism is. Can’t understand why I’m so mean. Gets on higher horse. Bitches about my sentence structure, calls me “shrill,” deploys a few boring clichés, and accuses me of “not doing anything” to change the world.

I have to say, I wonder why so many people think that spending hours and hours each week writing feminist critiques of the dominant culture isn’t “doing” anything. What do they think it is, then? Some fluffy conceit? Lying in bed all day eating bonbons? Chopped liver? But that’s another essay.

Anyway, here is Ron Sullivan’s synopsis of the MF phenomenon, which is way too good to leave mouldering in the comments:

One thing an old broad like me has seen many many many times already is some huffulacious oh-so-sincere dude walking in to a group of women almost at random and telling them

a/ what they should be doing in their free time;
b/ how to do it right;
c/ how to be feminists;
d/ why he has their best interests at heart, really;
e/ why he’s qualified to give them orders;
f/ that they’re intolerant, which is self-evidently a Bad Thing;
g/ that they’re preaching to the choir (and the biggest surprise is that they’re preaching);
h/ that some of his best fucks are women;
i/ how to be better feminists;
j/ that they’re not serious enough;
k/ that his wife thinks he’s the greatest;
l/ what God thinks;
m/ why whatever he’s doing this month is more important then feminism;
n/ that feminism is boo-zhwah, and that’s self-evidently a Bad Thing;
o/ that they’re shrill — wow, I almost forgot shrill;
p/ that they can’t pee standing up;
q/ that they should be ashamed of themselves;
r/ that they just don’t welcome open and vigorous debate;
s/ that he needs a beer (this is followed by an expectant silence);
t/ that they’re taking everything he said wrong;
u/ that they’re unreasonable;
v/ that they’re ~touchy~;
w/ that they’ve never said anything about oppression of women in (choose sauce: Iraq, Afghanistan, China, sub-Saharan Africa, the southeastern USA, the ghet-to, Brazil, Antarctica)
x/ that they should apologize to him because his parents had him circumcised;
y/ that he Is Too A Feminist (which evidently means something);
z/ how they should transcend feminism and embrace humanism.

Pick any two menu items and get the third half-price; pick any three and get the fourth free. With five you get a can of wine. And if you’re the guy in question, you get a free hot cup of Shut the Fuck Up.

Thus doth the discussion, when MFs show up on the blog, often turn, as this one did, into another dazzling and effervescent debate on whether men can be feminists at all.

Yesterday a commenter opined that men can be, at best, sympathizers, but suggested that even that’s no good, that the temptation to “leech” off the cause without having to assume any personal risk is just too great, and renders them suspect.

Mandos Mandos Mandos, I Blame The Patriarchy’s self-proclaimed “scapegoat,” responded that “if men can only be sympathizers, and sympathizers are not particularly positive, then [...] there is no way for men to be positive. That has a lot of interesting consequences.”

Chris Clarke, who says he’s no feminist, likens the male feminist conceit to cause-glomming. “I read Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua’s This Bridge Called My Back the year it was published, and found it invaluable in understanding a part of American culture I had until then missed. Were I to call myself a Chicana as a result of my political support, I would be laughed out of the planning meeting.”

Now we’re getting somewhere. MFs protest the rock and the hard place between which they find themselves with this whole “get out of my face, I will never trust you for all the reasons Ron listed above” thing, but how, exactly, is a guy claiming to be a feminist different from Chris claiming to be a Chicana? It is much the same when white girls try to “sympathize” with black girls. I am not surprised when the efforts of my upper-middle-class-prep-school-honky-self, absent any actual experience of racial discrimination, are met with suspicion at the Women Of Color Unite Against Honky Oppression convention. There are inner circles of class solidarity into which an outside “sympathizer” simply cannot tactfully incurse or reasonably expect to be invited. Raise money for causes? Sure. Vote for progressive legislation? Duh. Support the movement rather than pretend to sympathize, risk-free, with individuals? Word. But there comes a point at which one must be content to align oneself with the ideology, and then politely get the hell out their way.

But do MF dudes grasp this? No. Unaware that they are still flaunting precisely the white male privilege from which feminists aspire to be liberated, they insist on joining the rank and file so that they can explain feminism to the stupid women. They must infiltrate right down to the core (one example of which core would be, say, this blog, which expressly caters to a female audience of radical feminists). Once in, they start leaving the seat up and throwing their weight around, with the result that they either get laid (or its blogular equivalent, successfully hijacking the thread), or start whining and threatening that we’re nothing without them and accusing us accursed ungrateful humorless prudey hairy dykes of not kissing their asses with sexy enough lips.

But this is all bullshit posturing. The real issue is that a thing is ultimately right or it is ultimately wrong, regardless of how its PR is managed. Racism, for example, is wrong, even if some black chicks think I have my head up my ass and don’t invite me to the cookouts. Likewise, these white fuckwads who say “you’re just too shrill, I don’t like your unsexy tone, the liberation of women will never happen and it’s all your fault” are not seeing the larger ideological and/or ethical picture. It is either wrong to oppress people or it isn’t. What’s it gonna be, assholes?

Although, like I said before, I don’t give a rat’s ass what these honky liberal motherfuckers do, as long as they do it somewhere else.

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Fried oysters (with fried calamari at the other end of the plate) at Ranch 616: highly edible

Stingray and I have embarked on the Fried Oyster Tour of Austin. The purpose of this endeavor is not so much to determine a gold medalist as it is to simply eat fried oysters as often as possible. Our exertions in this quarter have led us more than once to a huge black naugahyde booth at Ranch 616, where the excellent oysters come with a convenient side of fried squid and two sauces and, if you like (which I do), a glass of Zardetto brand Prosecco.

As far as this spinster aunt is concerned, the ubiquitous Zardetto is the new Budweiser. But this essay, perhaps ill-advisedly, is not about Prosecco, or even, to the extent that any post of mine ever abstains from so a succulent theme, oysters.* It is about the fear and loathing expressed by a woman who encountered Stingray in the washroom queue at Ranch 616 the other night.

Though Stingray is—to borrow a lunkheaded monosyllabic qualifier from Hub (you remember old Hub, the guy whose blogger wife famously opined that a post-nuptial weight gain is the moral equivalent of a vinyl siding swindle)—hot, she does not practice femininity. Her unwillingness to capitulate to the sexbot mandate is, frankly, a danger to the kidneys of certain members of certain classes. To wit:

As our story opens, Stingray, our hero, feeling the effects of the aforementioned Zardetto, was in line for the women’s john. Before long she was joined by an older woman of, it would transpire, somewhat provincial proclivities (we decided later she was Not From Around Here). This gnarly specimen gave Stingray the once-over, detected no “girly” appurtenances, and evidently decided thereupon that S. was a dude (or possibly, as I brightly suggested afterward, a pree-vert). The burning question of Stingray’s rightful claim to a position in the women’s queue thusly settled in her own mind, our villainess initiated butting-in-line maneuvers. But what’s this! She registered great displeasure when apprised, in mid-butt, of Stingray’s resolute intention to use the girls’ can no matter what assumptions had been made about anyone’s genitalia. The woman scrammed, apparently so flipped out by this…this insanity, that holding it in—which, any doctor will tell you, is no good—seemed preferable to hanging around a dimly-lit pissoir with so audaciously androgynous a character as young Stingray.

Why did a hasty retreat the old bat beat? Because Stingray was clearly a reprobate, if not a criminal. According to patriarchy’s gender fraud laws, women must be plainly labeled at all times to ensure that they are a) continuously and easily available for male scrutiny, b) more easily construed as “other,” in order to make discrimination and marginalization and violence against them justifiable, and c) properly processed in social contexts as subordinates or competitors for male attention or bathroom queue contenders. Stingray’s washroom opponent, an enthusiastic apostle of patriarchy, could naught but flee the taint of Stingray’s terrible sexbiguity.

All human interaction is directed by a universally enforced fetish for dominance and submission. Thus, any social encounter, however trivial, demands that sex identifications be established immediately—prior, even, to diagnoses of class and race. This requirement isn’t just some arbitrary folly. There is no room for ambiguity! A dude must know who to oppress, and oppression is often a split-second decision. Say a dude hasn’t leered at a woman in a few minutes, and he feels the need for a self-gratificational ogle coming on. The consequences of leering at another dude are dire; patriarchy permits him to leer only at women, who are constrained to the sex class for that purpose. But he shouldn’t have to interview the next person he sees just to determine whether they’ve got a pussy. For the sake of efficiency, pussy must be clearly marked and plainly evident from as great a distance as possible, so the requisite assholicity can commence with all speed.

This operation is facilitated by the practice of heterosexual femininity, which behavior is more or less mandatory. Our hypothetical dude easily recognizes the warning signs of femininity: there’s makeup and clothing and the tireless pursuit of “beauty,” obviously, but he also detects the deferential head-tilt, the going one-down in social stand-offs, the perma-smile and other supplicatory body language, and of course the quiet desperation.

A woman who repudiates this pussy-identifying feminine drag is an affront to the hive. Censure and other punishments await she who resists. She can also cause great excitement in public cans.

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*Indeed, whereas on the surface my blogular secretions may often appear with some regularity and no little venom merely to implicate patriarchy in various crimes against humanity , a close reading will reveal a masterfully occult molluscoidean subtext.

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