Sexy Chilean miner costume.
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Archive for the 'Rape Culture' Category
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It’s almost Halloween, the annual Unleash Your Inner Dudefantasy Receptacle festival. Not you, of course. I know you’re going as a Chilean miner.
Everyone else, however will be either Sexy Nerd, High School Tease, Miss Prep School, Prep School Delinquent, Bad Schoolgirl, Varsity Vixen, Study Date School Girl, or Sexy Mrs Potato Head. This yandy dot com website sells over 80 different — and when I say “different” I mean “identical” — plaid schoolgirl costumes.
Dudes love — and when I say “love” I mean “despise” — sexually active plaid children and the adult women who spend $59.99 on cheap crap from China to look like them.
Until an actual patriarchy-blaming time slot opens up in a day or two, allow your absentee blogger to offer a) an award-nominated photograph of the leopard frog eggs found yesterday in the Spinstitute for Texas Herpetology Dept’s experimental algae-choked swamp of a former swimming pool, and b) this light and amusing BDSM-related interlude entitled “You’re chaining up far too many women.” Thanks to blamer Mary Ann — who says in her email that she not only loves but also adores me — for sending it in.
Suddenly an idea for a great new time-saving email policy suggests itself: from now on my secretary Phil will be instructed to only read emails that commence with declarations of the writer’s love and adoration for me. Notifications from my derelict cell phone company, my ISP, Amazon.com, the Human Fund, RH Reality Check, and dudes who write in to complain that the I Blame the Patriarchy commenting policy is sexist, classist, racist, and some other ist I can’t remember? Fuggeddabowdit.
This spinster aunt has no time for you people right now. So let us all praise blamer Phio Gistic, who sent in a link to some jaw-dropping shit that just went down in St. Louis Missouri, the mattress-stain of a town where, coincidentally, I spent the 25 worst years of my life.
Naturally, what happened is this: a woman was dancing in a St Louis club in 2004, and naturally “Girls Gone Wild” was there exploiting people, and naturally a third party exposed the woman’s breasts as she said, “no, no.”
Same-ole, same-ole.
But then the video came out and the woman sued, claiming she never gave consent and that the video represented an actual assault. The jaw-dropping shit is that a jury of my former homies actually ruled in favor of the “Girls Gone Wild” porn franchise. Consent is irrelevant when cameras are present!
St. Louis. Always classy.
Here’s the link to the post at Jezebel.
Yikes. And when I saw the addendum, wherein it is revealed that a fucking dick writer at the crap news weekly I used to work for nominated the victim in his “Ass-Clown of the Week” column, I was rendered speechless. And then, when I read the fucking dick’s managing editor’s apology, wherein she excuses the fucking dick with a “boys will be boys” and describes the subjects of “Girls Gone Wild” as “stupid,” I was rendered even speechlesser.
Meanwhile, everyone’s favorite photo subject: Southern leopard frogs in flagrante delicto. Tomorrow: the fruit of their loins!
P.S. All the comments stuck in moderation for the past week have been freed, except for the extremely long ones, which I don’t have time to read. Go start your own blog, long comment writers!
Sure, I’ll smile, if you take this match and light your fucking mustache on fire.
This week’s Sunday Morning Hurl comes from misogynist dude site Askmen.com.
Askmen.com runs a recurring feature dedicated to “pickup lines.” A pickup line is a phrase used by suave movie bachelors and doofus TV sitcom knobs (and, apparently, by dorks who read Askmen. com) to turn unsuspecting women with whom they are not acquainted into hot, wet, pliable meatsocks.
The concept is predicated on the notion that women are morons.
The pickup line is a staple theme in the narrative of male sexual domination culture, where it is believed that, when properly worded and expertly delivered, it has the magical power to completely disarm a woman, flip her “on” switch, and guaran-fucking-tee her compliance. The concept of “the pickup” itself has competetive, jokey, pervy, and, of course, rapey components.
Askmen.com publishes a new pickup line every week. Some are labeled “Funny Pickup Line,” others “Cocky Pickup Line.” Oddly, none are called “Hokey Dipshit Pickup Line.” The editors add a little introductory remark to each one. These remarks support my hypothesis: that to qualify as a pickup line a phrase must contain lies, flattery, bullshit, and cheesiness, which qualities are intended to obscure the utterer’s actual meaning, which is “I want to use you as a receptacle. Open sesame.” Subterfuge, in other words, is seen as a quite normal and integral component of the venerable dudely tradition of sexual conquest.
Here’s a selection of the Askmen introductory remarks, followed by my editorial remarks, followed by the pickup lines themselves, which stand alone as monuments of heteronormative sexist farce:
Whether it’s true or not, you can still give this pickup line a try. We dare you.
Well, the guys have gone and dared you. What choice do you have?
A woman as beautiful as you deserves a man as rich as me.
“This pickup line is virtually guaranteed to make her giggle.”
And lard knows, once a chick giggles, she is legally bound to have sex with you.
“Excuse me, is your name Mickey? ‘Cause you’re so fine you blow my mind.”
“This pickup line is best used in the wee hours of the morning, when she’s less likely to think you’re a creep.”
Being tired and drunk will lower her resistance to your natural creepiness.
“You know, good girls get presents this time of year, but naughty girls get to have fun.”
“Why not try a little kindness the next time you’re trying to pick up a woman?”
Instead of your usual method of roofies and duct tape.
“I’ve had a terrible day, and it always makes me happy to see a gorgeous woman smile. Would you smile for me? “
“Once you’re fortified with liquid courage, try this pickup line on the hottest woman at the bar.”
It is common knowledge that the hottest women at the bar instantaneously give blow jobs to drunk assholes who stumble over and say
“you look like you could use a good one-night stand.”
The denizens of Spinster HQ have a hard time believing that any live dude who isn’t Disco Stu would even consider saying any of this stupid shit to an actual woman. However, whether or not men really use pickup lines is of secondary importance to the perpetuation, on the Askmen website and elsewhere, of the atavistic idea that women are essentially just sex troves, ripe for pillaging once unlocked by a few magic syllables.
It’s the last day of Art Week, so I thought I’d better actually squeeze in some actual art. Here’s a painting by Sue Williams.* A Funny Thing Happened, 1992. It comes with a trigger alert.
This painting, about 4′ square, sold for $61,000 in 2008.
The picture depicts three rape scenarios: the first begins with the protagonist wearing “pretty new shoes” and ends with the victim’s beheading and inner uncertainty about what just happened (“now what is it I’m feeling?” asks her disembodied head). In the second (“Funnier”) the victim fights back, but it is unclear whether she is successful. In the third (“Funniest”) a nail-polished hand fires a gun at a set of disembodied dude-organs (“Oh geez, is it really all that bad?” asks the hand. “Don’t shoot” says the dude-organ).
On the edge of the picture, a headless angel flap flap flaps, captioned “too late” and “couldn’t decide.”
What you can’t make out from my bootlegged JPEG are the tiny scribbled inscriptions that reveal, comic book-style, the woman’s inner monologue, some Greek chorus stuff, and the male figures’ (rapist, doctor) out-loud utterances.
“– and don’t forget to dress for success! the Dali Lama”
“Shut up! Can you find anything to cram in her mouth?”
“Bad panties to be caught raped in. Plan ahead.”
“– We don’t know if she enjoyed it or not. This case remains a mystery…”
“Out of my way– I’m a shit doctor. Slut.”
“Evidence too embarrassing”
Here is the Artist’s statement, 1993:
Do victims feel the kick as pain or pleasure? ‘Fuck off.’ When the object of my love and affection gives me the boot as hard as he can it hurts quite a bit. Also, a deep feeling of humiliation and rejection (harder please). Yet there is something horny about the feeling: dear old Dad. Of course I go back for more (home). This is a riot for everyone with their shit together. Well no alternatives came to mind at the time. What can I say? And all these bruises about the face and misshapen lip touching the nose (a turn-off) so everyone knows what you’ve been up to. Oh, the embarrassment, the shameful feeling of worminess. ‘Look, an untogether woman’ Even from Dad! ‘How could she let that happen?’ No gun. ‘How could she do that to herself?’ How did I kick myself in the head? I am a worm, hear me whimper mumble mumble. Fuck you all. Fifteen years of therapy, groups, twelve-step-programmes. I’ll never do it again. Then I am attacked and raped by a total stranger (I swear! O can’t he see that I am centered and working on boundary issues? That I have my shit together: Hell — I OWN my OWN SHIT. What gives? Why wasn’t I training in combat? Should I go outside again? Well, no alternatives came to mind at the time.**
Back in the 70s one of my art history professors, the curmudgeonly conservative Norris Kelly Smith (d. 1998), used to do this for the final exam: He’d project a slide of some ghastly masterpiece from the Uffizi and say “Would you hang this on your living room wall? Why or why not?”
Just so you know, if you wrote in your bluebook “I wouldn’t hang this on my wall because I don’t like it,” you’d get an F.
Because Norris K was so enamored of his Caravaggios and Parmagianinos and Cavatelli Conbroccolis, I never thought to piss him off and squander my grade point average by writing anything negative about the paintings. So I’d puke out all the crap he wanted to hear about vanishing points and contrapposto enbiggening the Glory of Man.
I get a big charge outta imagining what Norris K would have said about Sue Williams. He probably wouldn’t even have considered it art.
I wouldn’t hang A Funny Thing Happened on my wall because I wouldn’t want to have to look at the graphic though sardonic representation of rape every day over my pitcher of margs. I would certainly hang it on your wall, though, if you lived nearby, along with a printout of Williams’ artist statement, because I would like to come and see it sometimes, and enjoy the heartwarming validation of the creepy sensation of the self-doubtiness of the sex class experience, and because it is funny and horrible at the same time, a pairing I find appealing when “horrible” is unavoidable.
_________________________
* Sorry, I don’t own this painting, so the best I can do is this is crappy scan from my coffee table book. Another online image is available here, it’s smaller but sharper.
** Rickett, Helena and Peggy Phelan. Art and Feminism. New York: Phaidon Press. 2006. p 160.
It’s heartwarming, our pretty society’s outpouring of love for little girls. Behold the sugarplum fairytale of this 13-year old Pennsylvania girl:
According to a marginally informative article in the Lehigh Valley Morning Call, Douchebag Supreme Michael J Lisk raped the girl repeatedly for over a year, made her pregnant, then furtively buried the fetus after she induced her own abortion with a “lead pencil” (a process lasting three days).
The article is lousy with rape culture and fetus-fetish language, probably pulled verbatim from the police report. Patriarchy-favorable language like this is used all the time in police reports and the media, where it is instrumental in perpetuating the normalization of violent misogyny. In this case, the lingo portrays the kid as an active participant in deviant baby-killing.
– She “threw” the plastic bag containing the fetus she had “delivered.”
– The article describes a tender birth scene wherein the rapist exhorts the girl to “push hard.”
– The girl “gave birth” to a “stillborn baby.”
– As though they ought to be considered a couple, “the two” had a long-standing “sexual relationship” from the time she was 12.
Translation: clearly this little Lolita was no innocent virgin naif.
Small wonder, then, that the comments from imperfectly educated denizens of the Pennsylvania Poconos identify the girl as a dirty slut and call for her head. They’re all worked up about this baby-killer slut they read about in the paper.
I know when I was 13, I knew what sex was and that is caused pregnacy [sic] and that we have babies in hosipitals [sic]. If we dont [sic] know anything by that age, then the education system in america [sic] is a joke. she should be charged because she knows that wasnt [sic] right, bottom line.
Well, the author is herself irrefutable evidence of at least one of her points: the “education system in america” is a joke.
[T]hose of you who think a thirteen year old doesn’t know about sex, you need to enter the real world. I am also curious to know how she knew how to give herself an abortion.
Obviously a teenage girl who knows enough to abort a fetus with a Number 2 Ticonderoga, after “having sex” with a 30-year-old perv, deserves nothing but contempt from the self-righteous townsfolk.
Why isn’t the girl being charged with anything? [...] She did the abortion herself and she put the baby in a bag and left it at the base of a tree, so she is just as guilty.
Teenage girls simply cannot usurp control of their own uteruses from 30-year-old serial rapists, goddammit, and expect to get away with it. Not on our watch! They are just as guilty as serial pedophile rapists who bury the evidence of their criminal activity to evade prosecution.
The angry mob wants that kid punished, goddammit, because if she’s old enough to “have sex,” she’s old enough to know that inducing an abortion with a pencil is “wrong.”
Well, except that she wasn’t “having sex,” she was raped, and it isn’t “wrong” — or even illegal — to have an abortion.
It is astonishing, the ease with which an angry mob can convene an ad hoc tribunal to ostracize the most damaged victims of their own diseased culture. They would deny the existence of rape culture, even if it means imprisoning a 13-year-old child for trying to exert some pitiful influence over her own body and her own future, even after she had been violated — by the serial rapist’s own admission, “countless times” — for over a year, only to endure a home-made abortion.
Yeah, a year of rapes and a three-day self-inflicted abortion. I bet that was a cakewalk.
Nobody on the planet is as despised as teenage girls.
No time to post this morning, so I thought to mildly amuse by publishing a selection of reject-pile comments from the post I wrote yesterday. These were all authored, if you can believe it, by people who did not read the Guidelines for Commenters!
Yesterday’s little fillip of blaming rapture, you may recall, concerned an essay written by Scienceblogger Jason G Goldman in which he summarized, without “taking sides,” some studies on pornography. According to Goldman, the studies found that porn’s effects on its consumers isn’t really so bad.
That’s right. Dudes have actually conducted studies that show how oppressors don’t really seem to suffer too much from consuming the “product” (Goldman’s term for the graphic representation of women’s subjugation) of their oppression. No way, really? Privilege is totally awesome? Who knew?
Combining my analysis of the tone of Goldman’s essay (if it walks like an endorsement and talks like an endorsement …)* with the fact that he’d cherry-picked only “porn is pretty benign” studies, I concluded that this was yet another blob of misogynist science-prattle demonstrating the distressing degree of obliviousness that even educated men present when it comes to the meaning of ordinary patriarchy, men’s role in the oppression hierarchy, and their deficit of empathy with the oppressed classes. I also took the opportunity to openly mock one of Goldman’s commenters, a dick who exemplifies total dickness with his stated conviction that, because he likes consuming the graphic representation of rapes, there simply cannot be anything wrong with porn.
Meanwhile, other bloggers agreed. Goldman has since cracked under pressure and removed the post, which is too bad, since many of us have put an effort into making an example of it, pointing at it and laughing, focusing the rage of an angry mob upon it, etc. Goldman has since suggested, here and at Zuska’s (and maybe elsewhere, but how should I know; what am I, Google?), that his post was just an off-the-cuff little tiptoe down Sexology Lane, that he was completely unaware that pornography is a “divisive issue,” that he never intended to offend anyone, and he’s sorry.
“I haven’t yet – anywhere – stated what my opinions are, until now: I think that any normalization of the objectification of women or violence against women – even if the women portrayed are doing so ostensibly consensually – is not okay.
I, further, thought that it was reasonable to ask questions about the effects of a certain product, separately from the whether or not that product should be made in the first place. And I thought I could do so objectively. But, as Pal says, perhaps that is naive.
This is an incredibly divisive issue, for many reasons, and I unwittingly walked into a major battlefield without, as Pal says, the proper flashlight. And in doing so, I (unintentionally) offended a handful of people I care about, as well as many others, and for that, I apologize.”
Imagine inhabiting a universe where you are oblivious to the fact that pornography is controversial! Wait, is that it, up there? There, in the clouds! If I squint through my bile-colored trifocals, I think I can glimpse that happy world’s champagne waterslides and gumdrop toadstools and rainbow tacos and rape-free society! Scotty, beam me up! What’s that? It’s dudes-only? Blarg!
By the way, this blogger (who you can tell has been reading PZ Myers, because she uses the word “woo,” and also because she links to PZ Myers) thinks that, because I outed the deeply embedded antifeminist mores demonstrated by a dudely science blogger, that I am anti-science! Me! And after all I just went through to try to sell a skeptical faction of the Blametariat on the superior number one-ness of the scientific method! Some days it just doesn’t pay to turn off the Ab-Fab DVDs and get out of bed.
Anyway, I promised deleted comments, and deliver them I shall. And yes, I realize that when you publish deleted comments, they aren’t technically deleted anymore. So, without further ado, check out these psychotic remarks from “James,” some self-styled science-knob inquisitor:
I’m curious about this sentence: “There is a difference between banning porn and eradicating the demand for porn, a delicate nuance that no dude ever seems able to contemplate.” I assume you’re working from an assumption that the desire to see porn in men is largely, if not completely, fabricated by society? So then your objective would be weaning males of porn or the desire for visual sexual stimulation, which is a very invasive course of action regarding a group you don’t belong to. Obviously predicated on the idea that porn is entirely negative towards women, even when representing acts of consensual sex.
So I suppose my ultimate questions would be: what evidence you have that porn is negative? How you would design future double blind studies (longitudinal if you wish) that could demonstrate whether porn was ultimately good, bad, or neutral?
I fly into transports over the notion that redesigning the social order so that males no longer frolick unchecked in a culture of rape is “a very invasive course of action regarding a group you don’t belong to.” Like porn exists in a vacuum. Dude is oblivious that rape culture depends on the oppression of the group I do belong to. And then he demands scientific proof that oppression is bad! God, is there anything sexier than a domineering science-knob? I’ve got your longitudinal study right here, douchebag!
I had to chuck out this next comment from “Pearl” for its tragic antifeminist naivete.
Ok, Let me just say that as a woman, I love porn. It helps me get off. And I’m not going to lie, I don’t see it as an exploitation of women. I respect that most women have an opinion, and I’m not any authority to have much of one. All I’m saying is that you can’t tell a person that their opinion is wrong.
If a woman tells a man that his opinion is wrong she’s a feminist. If a man tells a woman that her opinion is wrong, he’s sexist. See the hypocrisy there? If we’re going to play the blame game here, I will openly say that feminists fucked it up for women. I love that we should be equal to men, but god damnit, I love a man who opens doors for me and pays for dinner. In fact, sometimes I expect it. Mr. Goldman here is simply stating a point. I don’t have the expertise to squash or agree with his argument. So women, Love y’all but get off your high horses. You are constantly bitching about how men are sexist, but what about you? You are also pretty fucking sexist.
I know I’m probably going to get bitched out and yelled at for having an opinion, but honestly I’m only stating an opinion. I think being overly feminist can also repress. Just keep it in mind ladies.
Newsflash, ladies! It is no longer permissible to tell a person that their opinion is wrong! I guess the Internet will be shutting down now.
Here’s an oldie but goodie:
Good luck finding a man.
Right back atcha, heteronormative moron dick!
Let us close with a sentiment popular among fucking douchebags, fetchingly and incomprehensibly encased in gratuitious ellipses.
… Well, I see we have the crazy feminist who thinks all men are evil over here, best to disregard…
This shit just writes itself.
Well, hold the fort, crazy feminist sexist ladies! I’ll be back soon with more No. 1 Science Information!
UPDATE: In an interesting gambit, Goldman has put his post back up, but it is not the original; this version is, he says, “stripped of speculation and editorializing” and begins with a soul-searching intro in which the author reflects on whether “the effects of a product can be separated from the question of the ethics of whether or not that product should be made in the first place.”
Referring to the spoils of human oppression as a “product” is a remarkable manifestation of patriarchotoxicity, and sorely chomps the chaps of all of us here at Savage Death Island.
_________________
* Q: Hey Twisty, what’s up with the ellipsis?
A: Trailing off into ’silence’ — i.e. leaving the end of the sentence up to the reader’s imagination — is called aposiopesis, and may be indicated legitimately by an ellipsis. Like any rhetorical device, the use of aposiopesis is restricted to professionals who are trained in its judicious and sparing application.
The extent to which dudes just don’t get it fucking blows my lobe.
While readin’ along over at the Scienceblogs, I encountered an essay entitled Just How Bad Is Porn, Anyway? Try to contain your surprise; it was authored by a dude.
Whenever I see a science dude begin to muse on the philosophic value of pornography, my lobe starts to tingle. What are the odds the guy can stop himself from making with the wink-wink/nudge-nudge? I immediately begin shuffling through my desk drawer for the blamehammer. It’s a foregone conclusion that I’ll be needing it in short order.
In the afore-referenced essay, Scienceblogger Jason G Goldman of The Thoughtful Animal, who files the piece under “Sexual Behavior and Mating,” takes it upon himself to summarize the findings of a few studies on the effects of pornography on human happiness. He does this in response to troubling news that an anti-porn group is convening in Boston to discuss an action plan for dismantling porn culture.
Weeeelll, it isn’t long before Goldman says
So clearly this is a complicated issue. What’s a responsible scientist to do? An experiment, of course. I know: I’ll watch a TON of porn, and then see if I become sexist or racist, or feel any more aggressive than baseline.
Hahaha! An experiment where you have to watch tons of porn! That’s a funny joke! It reminds me of real sexology experiments. Like the ones where subjects are naked and “invasive probes and electrodes” are inserted into their vaginas. Those researchers are, of course, totally objective professionals when it comes to getting grant money to make porn right in their own labs.
But back to Goldman and his objective overview of porn studies:
Let’s make a few things clear: I am not taking sides in the issue of whether or not pornography should be censored or restricted (but most forms of censorship make me very uncomfortable). This is meant to review some of the research that’s been conducted on whether or not there is a reliable causal relationship between pornography and various Bad Things. [boldface Goldman's]
Translation: “I totally think pornography should not be censored or restricted. Let’s look at some studies that don’t prove anything bad about porn.”
Goldman presents some Danish research showing that there are more Danes who love porn than Danes who don’t love porn, and some research showing that porn has a positive impact on sexual satisfaction with Croatian vanillas but not on that of kinky Croatians, and some American research showing that dudes who use a lot of porn aren’t necessarily all that violent, unless they were fucked up already.
You know, the usual. Pornography is “free speech.” Pornography is only harmful to the user when he is a deviant perv to begin with. Male aggression is associated with buttloads of porn use only in a select few previously-messed-up douchebags. ‘Normal’ porn consumers, i.e. ‘most’ men (fully 98% of all men, apparently, and 80% of all women), are happy, healthy, well-adjusted, and brimming with contentment. It’s the kook-and-psychopath minority out there who get all compulsive on your ass, or who act out all rapey, giving well-adjusted exploiters a bad name.
Goldman cites no research on the effects of pornography on the pornulated women themselves, or of porn culture on women’s status within the sexbot continuum.
In fact, he seems to suggest that there are but two possible stances on porn. You’re either for it, or you’re for banning it. He omits to consider other, more elegant schemes. Such as the solution we advocate here on Savage Death Island, wherein pornography is made, not illegal, but obsolete, via elimination of the sex class, which may be accomplished by feminist revolt. There is a difference between banning porn and eradicating the demand for porn, a delicate nuance that no dude ever seems able to contemplate. A life without porn is not to be borne! Any feminist who suggests otherwise is an irrational kook.
Like all men who claim to have a bunch of sex-poz feminist BFFs and who consider that access to porn is guaranteed under the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women, Goldman doesn’t appear to grasp that patriarchy — a social order predicated on the oppression of women as a sex class — is actually real, and that as such, ours is a culture of domination wherein the ‘art form’ known as pornography is the graphic representation of rape.
The comments on Goldman’s post, proceeding from enlightened science-minds, exhibit the usual unsophisticated grasp of women’s oppression.*
– Why all the fuss about porn? Anti-porn activists should redirect their anti-porn energy to fixing the BP oil leak.
– Porn is noble “sex work.”
– Sex work isn’t exploitation because women make a shit-ton of money doing it.
– Porn stars are famous, and famous is good.
– If porn is so bad, how do you explain Celebrity Porn Star X, who has her own production company and is rich?
– Porn is an important “safety valve” that allows everyman’s inner rapist to get off, no harm no foul, thus preventing real rapes.
– If we de-stigmatized “sex work,” we could keep porn available
– If we regulated prostitution, we could keep hookers available
These are all textbook patriarchy-denier dillies, to be sure (I look forward to reading the counter-arguments in the Blame-a-teria). However, my favorite comments in the series are by one cs shelton. Here is a mansplainer of the first water. How breathtakingly predictable, how automatically autocratic he is when he informs feminist commenter Skeptifem that she is “emotional” and therefore “doesn’t reflect reality or practicality or human rights or even feminism in a reasonable way.” What did Skeptifem say to incur this scolding?
Often pornography IS violence against women, so asking if porn causes that is a silly question. Normalizing that situation is horrible. Paying for a luxury item with such an immense human cost is deplorable. No porn is worth it, and I don’t think people should be free to buy something that causes the rape of women. What is crazy is that the rape of a woman can become speech if someone takes a picture. People act like the rape of women in porn isn’t enough, that it has to spread to other women for it to matter.
Yup, that Skeptifem sure is in denial about reality and human rights and feminism, there. Good thing old cs shelton, feminism expert and pornoisseur, is on hand to set her straight. But it gets even better. Dude goes on to categorically assert, based exclusively on his personal experience as a pornsick horndog teen, that “the paleolithic venus was NOT a goddess figure. She was a masturbation aid.”
He alludes, apparently, to the Venus of Willendorf, the XXX-rated statuette believed to have once adorned the dashboard of Fred Flintstone’s Rockmobile.
cs shelton, who lives furtively in his mom’s basement on Norman Rockwell Street in a TV version of 1953, goes on to make the astonishing assertion that “porn is barely tolerated in the USA.”
Whaaa?
But the best is yet to come. Behold cs shelton’s final arguments in support of the Pornography Preservationists of America. They are the old moldy classics.
– he is a feminist, so he is exempt from accusations of sexism
– anti-porn is the same as “sex negative”, and sex-negativity is a “subjugator of women”
– because the demand for porn is “so overpowering,” any attempt to eradicate it would be “insane” and also “BAD FOR WOMEN”
– his girlfriend likes porn
and, finally, I kid you not,
I invented porn with no outside influence (same as masturbation) when I was 11. I drew naked people. I figured out what felt good. It came to me naturally, and to trash porn as inherently evil or anti-woman is to say that a natural part of who I am sexually is bad and horrible. So no, I ain’t having it.
Oh dear; cs shelton’s reasoning is an unfortunate mis-application of a No. 1 Math Property, the dear old Transitive Property of Equality.** It works great when you’re talking conditionally about objective values represented by letters of the alphabet, but not so much when applied to questions of ethics, human oppression, and male entitlement. To wit:
Porn is who he is, and who he is is good, therefore porn is good.
Also, he personally and spontaneously created porn, and anything he crapped out at the age of 11 is natural and holy, therefore porn is natural and holy.
You can’t make this shit up.
Kill me now.
_________________
*Except for one or two comments like Zuska’s, who excellently remarks with a curled lip,
“Oh, porn is awesome. Soooooo empowerful! I’ll bet every d00d dreams of being the hot chick lying there on the floor/desk/couch/bed/whatever, waiting for the money shot to splatter all over one’s face. No?”
** Join me as I harken back to 4th grade: If a=b, and b=c, then a=c
Venus of Willendorf photo: Wikipedia. < http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/VenusWillendorf.jpg >
It’s always the way: some horndog dude decides to prong a woman, then ends up dissatisfied with the results. So he has a tantrum. The tantrum may take one, or a combination, of many interesting forms.
Sometimes the woman doesn’t want him around anymore, so he stalks her. Sometimes she makes him hate her so much that he emails naked pictures of her to the whole school. Sometimes she gets old or fat so he keeps her around to do his laundry but starts pronging a younger woman on the DL. Sometimes she stops putting out so he fires her from her job. Sometimes the woman interprets the pronging as rape, so he calls her a liar and tortures her with mental cruelty and courtroom drama and ends up doing no jail time.
And sometimes he makes the woman pregnant. In this case he can choose from many, many popular options. He might he murder her, beat her, abandon her, marry her, slut-shame her, or, as in today’s case, appeal to the patriarchal justice system to enforce his wishes as to what should be done with the contents of her personal uterus.
I allude to Greg Bruell, a dude who, having some time ago made the personal decision to father no further children, proceeded to prong his girlfriend anyway (as reported in Salon).
Here I interject some No.1 Science Information, information that, had Greg Bruell been apprised of it, might have prevented all of his piteous suffering. That information is this: heterosexual pronging ranks Number One in the World as the most efficacious method of all time for obtaining pregnancy. You might think Greg Bruell had been at least dimly aware of the consequences of heterosexual pronging, since he has already fathered two children. However, Greg Bruell has apparently failed to grasp the connection between his lusty throbbing and the pitter-patter of little feet. Men, who are born with the right to prong anything that moves, are not typically required to understand this kind of cause and effect, since, as I mentioned above, they can easily oil out of any untoward consequences of their actions merely by invoking any of the buttload of traditional exemptions: claiming ignorance, deceit, she asked for it, she cuckolded him, or — an oldie but goodie — that the burden of pregnancy is totally a chick problem.
Anyway, Greg Bruell claims that he and his girlfriend agreed that she would terminate her next pregnancy “without waffling.” So when she boldly asserted human agency, kept the kid, and sued him for child support, Bruell blew a wheel. His gambit for oiling out of his responsibility? He owns the uterus! The National Center for Men took up the cause, saying (according to Salon):
“When a man and woman have discussed what they want and have an agreement, I do not think she has a right to impose her change of mind.”
You heard that right. The “I” in the above quotation is our old pal, antifeminist knob Mel Feit, who thinks women don’t have a right to change their minds.
Taken to its logical conclusion, this crackpot ideology would turn all women’s interactions with men into legally binding contracts permitting men to use them according to their whim. The contracts can be verbal (“She didn’t say ‘no’!”), sartorial (“she dressed like a whore so my hands were tied!), alcoholical (“if she didn’t want to have sex she shouldn’t have passed out at my party”), or body-language-ical (“she winked at me. What was I supposed to do, not rape her?”).
If for some unexplained reason you acquiesce to sex with a dude, and then, after reconsidering, change your mind three minutes later, tough shit, lady. He doesn’t have to stop, because you already said yes. It won’t be rape, because you already said yes. A yes, once given, exists in perpetuity! It’s a binding contract.
How is this possible in the tiny mind of Mel Feit? Well, according to the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women, women exist in a perpetual state of “yes.” This state of “yes” extends not only to sexual availability, but to compliance with male wishes in any quarter, across the board. To wit:
Bruell’s girlfriend supposedly agreed she would have an abortion if he ever knocked her up again. At that moment of yes, according to the Feit, this woman gave up her own autonomy and ceded control of her personal sovereignty to representative of the state Greg Bruell. Because she had agreed to be an occasional receptacle for his ejaculate, her uterus actually became the property of Greg Bruell. Greg Bruell thinks his ownership of the uterus should have afforded him the opportunity to force her to abort the fetus. And now that she’s defied his authority and had the kid anyway, he’s claiming she “deceived” him.
What? No!
Hey Greg Bruell: your genetic material is under your jurisdiction only as long as you keep it locked up in your gunk box. The instant you give your sticky little wad its joyous send-off, and the two of you part company, its fate becomes the purview of another host body. It is no longer your property, and you can’t say dick about what happens to it. However, it’s only fair that you should pay a fine for littering.
Don’t want women suing you for child support? Zip it up, you fucking dipshit!
Why can’t the same argument be turned around and applied to women?
Because women are an oppressed class without fully human status. The pervasiveness and normalization of rape culture strips women of the same quality of autonomy that men enjoy. Women are not always permitted to opt out of perpetual sexual availability without suffering harmful consequences.
Because, in other words, of the patriarchy.
This Mel Feit guy, in case you’ve forgotten, is the author of much virulent misogynist MRA crap. Such as these gems:
“At a certain point during arousal, we don’t have complete control over our ability to stop. To equate that with brutal, violent rape weakens the whole concept of rape.” [cite]
Because, duh, men should define rape.
“When will public discussions about sexuality recognize that, in this culture, women already make most of the decisions about sexual intercourse?” [ibid.]
Even if this were true — a fantastical contingency is almost too ludicrous to contemplate — what would be so terrible about it? Since women are forced to bear all the consequences of “sexuality”– from self-destructive beauty practices torape, pregnancy, child-rearing, and beyond, it would make the most sense if women actually did have some power in this quarter.
Only women have the extraordinary freedom to enjoy sexual intimacy free from the fear of forced parenthood. [cite]
Whaoah! That’s a hot one! Obviously, by “women with extraordinary freedom” he means “mythical creatures whose legal right to an abortion is not obstructed at every turn by puritanical godbag misogynist legislation.”
But I am a Western, privileged internet feminist, which means that all I care about is clothes, so here is my favorite:
[...] A woman has a greater freedom when she gets dressed in the morning. She can wear what she wants to wear because she can be what she wants to be. She can wear traditionally male clothing because she can do traditionally male things, work in traditionally male jobs, assume traditionally male roles and personality traits. She can cross over into a man’s world, share men’s experiences, then return to a world where no men are allowed. You might say she can choose to wear the pants in the family. She has free choice in fashion because she has free choice in life. [cite]
Mel Feit is bummed out on accounta a supposedly feminist woman in a pair of pants told him she wouldn’t fuck him because — I do not lie — he likes to wear skirts. This unspeakable tragedy has forced Mel Feit to dream up all kinds of wacky fantasies about how liberating it is to be a woman in our society, and about how selfish women are for refusing to share our magnificent skirt-freedoms with him.
Jesus in a jetpack, like anyone really gives a shit if Mel fucking Feit wears a skirt! I will personally donate all of my skirts to Mel Feit, if he will just promise to wear them to all future christenings, bar mitzvas, weddings, business meetings, and talk show tapings.
O if only I had all day to huddle at the desk and make fun of old skirt-coveting Mel Feit who can’t get laid by women in pants. But unfortunately I’ve got to sit around and watch the grass grow.
[Thanks, Ashley]
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