Archive for the 'Sexploitation' Category

BeeDeeEssEm insiders have unpopular revelation

Published by Twisty on February 7, 2012. 72 Comments

I hope you’re sitting down, because I am about to reveal the shock of a lifetime.

Abuse is rampant in the BDSM ‘community’.

But don’t take my word for it. Here is BDSM “activist and sex worker” Kitty Stryker:

“When I start to think of the number of times I have been cajoled, pressured, or forced into sex that I did not want when I came into ‘the BDSM community’, I can’t actually count them,” Stryker wrote in Good Vibrations’ magazine. “As I reflected on the number of times I’ve … been pressured into a situation where saying ‘no’ was either not respected or not an option, or said that I did not want a certain kind of toy used on me which was then used, I’m kind of horrified.”

According to Stryker, ignoring safe words, torturing women submissives with “toys,” and raping them is de rigueur around the dungeon, but nobody in the scene will admit it or cop to it. When a member of the ‘community’ does speak out, she is ignored or accused of being a whiner. Or of being drunk. A cloak of secrecy envelops our enlightened fetishists, which fetishists, I might add, are constantly defending their corny lifestyle as liberating, empowerful, and awesome.

You know it always works out super great for women in environments that are enveloped by cloaks of secrecy.

So, as is revealed in the afore-linked article, a couple of BDSM activist ladies are trying to get the word out about the abuse. But uh-oh. Surprise. They are being met with resistance from upholders of the BDSM status quo. One of these grumpy gusses suggests that women who get themselves assaulted are basically asking for it. She avers that the activists’ position has “some of the flavor of the kind of victimhood that we see from some second wave feminists.” And I hate to have to tell you, she doesn’t consider “second wave feminist” a compliment!

The scene is at least tacitly acknowledged by its adherents to be inherently dangerous, spawning a victim-blaming protocol of safeguards reminiscent of those rape-avoidance email forwards. Cautions one avid participant:

A bottom/sub MUST investigate who they are seeking to play with. They MUST insist that their safe words are honored. They should, when playing with someone new or unfamiliar, have someone they trust be present to look out for their safety. A bottom/sub should never play with someone the first time in a private location (someone’s home, hotel, etc.). If public play spaces are not available, try to set an arrangement where there will be someone to look after their best interests.

As in, “Yo, dude, I insist that you not rape me when I say the safe word.” Telling a rapist not to rape me, now why didn’t I think of that? That always works!

Since time began, the argument here on Savage Death Island has been that the fetishization of oppression culture is pretty profoundly antifeminist. Arguments from BDSM fans about its awesomeness have always had the whiff of denial and delusion about them. The notion that the BDSM community is a kinky little oasis of trust and respect in a world that in every other respect is governed by misogynist patriarchal mores has never rung true. Of course men rape women in the BDSM scene, because men rape women, period. You don’t have to be a world-class spinster aunt specializing in No. 1 Science Information to conclude that enactment of abuse scenarios for sexual gratification is unlikely to result in an abuse-free outcome. Or to recognize all the usual trappings of rape culture, from victim-silencing to ineffectual rape-prevention advice to circling the wagons to protect the abusers. Far from “pushing the boundaries” and being “transgressive,” BDSM is nothing but the same tired old status quo in a corny rubber slave mask.

And it’s stupid.

[Note: Using the acronym "BDSM" in your comment will send it straight to moderation; that's just how the spamulator works.]

Thanks Matty

Posted in Rape Culture and Sexploitation. Bite me, Chad.

A few lite thoughts on rape and prostitution

Published by Twisty on January 31, 2012. 96 Comments

Note: After writing this post, I was obliged to jettison the vaunted Facebook experiment. Still on Twitter, though, @IBlame.

Since announcing the Facebook experiment I’ve done practically nothing but approve friend requests and wince my way through a bunch of untamed emoticons and lolz, but one patriarchy-blaming discussion did happen to catch my jaundiced eye. Through the haze of jacknut gas — I believe there is no way to contain jacknuts on Facebook, so this experiment may be coming to a swifter-than-expected close — I detected an argument worth making. This argument erupted when I asserted, as I so often do, that prostitution is a system under the auspices of which rape is legitimized by introducing the element of monetary compensation as a mitigating factor. I said, in other words, that prostitution is pay-per-rape.

You can probably guess what happened next. That’s right, it was the old sex-workers-(and clueless dudes)-vs-woman-hating-radfems type-deal. The scenario goes something like this (I excerpt from the [now-defunct] Facebook thread):

Sex Worker: I’m a professional dominatrix. Sex work is not equal to rape. It isn’t that sex workers don’t get raped, but rape is certainly not the norm. In fact, just the experience of being a sex worker, just as the experience of being an extremely active, healthy sexual person, has the unfortunate consequence of increasing the chances of encountering a sexually abusive person.

Sex worker supporter: In rape advocacy, the woman defines and names her experience because to behave otherwise is to insist that her experiences are less valid than an advocates’ interpretation. Calling sex work “rape” implies that sex workers are too ignorant to define their own reality. How is that respectful?

Some clueless dude: What do you mean it’s rape? In legal prostitution (like Amsterdam) the worker always has the right to say no. Prostitution is a service, like therapy or a massage. If our puritan society would quit demonizing it, it could be regulated and the stigma removed.

[Normally it isn't useful to accommodate clueless dude commentary in any discussion of prostitution, but I include this one for comic relief. Women have the right to say "no"? Ha! Good one! Our "puritan society"? Wha? Has this guy turned on a TV in the last 15 years? "Like Amsterdam"? Dude, if Dutch prostitution is so awesome, how come so few Dutch women heed its siren call? 75% of sex workers in the Netherlands, many of them children, many of them trafficked, are migrants from Thailand, China, Nigeria, and Eastern Europe. Legalizing prostitution in the Netherlands has merely given criminal gangs a leg up and created an invisible underclass of abused, marginalized, undocumented immigrants with no access to social services and no protections under the legal system.]

But I digress.

Savage Death Island recognizes that the word “rape” rankles those with a heavy investment in the status quo. It rankles the married ladies when I aver that marriage is institutionalized rape, because their Nigels are special guys. It rankles victim’s advocates who believe I’m making light of “real” rape. Likewise it rankles the prostituted ladies because they are sex professionals, not victims.

According to sex professionals with internet access, they don’t need a bunch of do-goody theorizers telling them what their experience is or isn’t. They don’t want any radical feminists all up in their shit telling them what they can and can’t do with their lives. They are empowered to make their own choices. They are themselves feminists, so shut up already with the paternalistic jibba-jabba.

I get it. It’s like when some dude shows up to explain feminism to me. So I’d better clarify a couple of things.

If a prostituted woman wishes to describe her experience as that of a trained professional working a trade, she will get no argument from me. I am not interested in telling her how to feel about herself or her work. I don’t deny that there may well exist a cohort of contented, fairly-compensated sex workers who freely choose to find personal fulfillment in providing what they believe is a valuable service. I don’t blame sex workers for choosing to do sex work. I don’t hate sex workers. I don’t even hate women. I advocate fully human status for women in the sex industry, as I do for all female persons in any sex-class industry (including the motherhood industry, the childhood industry, and the spinster industry). I don’t believe prostitution should be illegal. Like many sex worker advocates, I’m for decriminalization.

Oh, and while I’m at it, it should be understood that when I employ such colorful phrases as “men use women as toilets,” I am not describing my personal feelings toward women; I’m describing the institutionalized, enpornulated male contempt of the sex class, which contempt has been documented ad nauseam on this here blog by many professional patriarchy blamers. I do not regard prostituted women as toilets, but it is my contention that men who use them do.

To rephrase, if you are an empowerful sex worker and you don’t feel that your respectful clients and considerate bosses are raping/pimping you, congratulations! The contingency to which I allude — that prostitution is pay-per-rape — doesn’t apply to you.

It does apply, however, to the unknowable legions of women and girls who have been coerced into the life by thugs and drugs and who remain abused and marginalized by misogynist cultural mores and antediluvian jurisprudence. It applies to all exploited women and girls for whom the bitter, grinding reality of misogyny as a human rights crisis cannot be glossed over with fantasies about women’s empowerment and delusions about agency and choice. Here’s my gist:

The patriarchal set-up has it fixed so that the practice of commodifying women’s bodies necessarily creates a rich and fetid growth medium for violence and exploitation. The persistent condition of women as an underclass of rape-receptacles (as per the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women) relies on this concept of bod-commodification. Abuses are not limited to prostituted women, but extend to the entirety of the sex class. Just the other day, for example, my own great state of Texas ruled that women seeking abortions must be forcibly pronged by doctors wielding vaginal ultrasound probes. That’s right, it’s state rape!*

Sex worker advocacy groups seeking to change this set-up to women’s advantage will not succeed, because patriarchy will never allow the liberation of the sex class.

Which brings us to the unfortunate disconnect between Savage Death Islandism and sex work advocacy. Though both yearn for an end to human rights abuses suffered by prostituted women, ultimately we are at cross-purposes. The Savage Death Island idea is to smash patriarchy entirely via revolution, thereby liberating women from the tyranny of the sex class, eliminating the vast power imbalance that lies at the root of fetishized and eroticized dominance, and obviating the demand for prostitution altogether. The sex workers, on the other hand, desire to make a living from patriarchal oppression. So there’s the rub: the feminist revolt scheme would ultimately put them all out of work, because, post-revolution, sex would cease to be a commodity.

Unless patriarchy is smashed, prostituted women will always be oppressed, because all women will always be oppressed.

_____________________
* The abortion sonogram law, which lawmakers passed last legislative session, requires doctors to perform sonograms and describe what they see, including the size of the fetus and the length of its limbs. The measure has been in court almost since it passed, with opponents arguing it violates doctors’ First Amendment rights by forcing them to disclose information that isn’t medically necessary and that the woman may not want to hear. [...] Gov. Rick Perry also praised today’s ruling, calling it “a victory for all who stand in defense of life.” — Texas Tribune

Posted in Rape Culture and Sexploitation. Bite me, Chad.

“Law and Order: Mutilated Women Unit” ep cleverly appeals to multiple niche fetishes at once

Published by Jill on October 1, 2011. 22 Comments

Law and Order Mutilated Women Unit

A murdered teen isn’t lurid enough; better make her a prostitute with HIV.

Posted in Sexploitation and The Entertainment Industrial Complex. Bite me, Chad.

Ditwuss Award de la semaine: PETA

Published by Jill on August 24, 2011. 257 Comments

By now — since it is my custom to lollygag, dawdle, and often even dilly-dally until steamy breaking news has developed an unappealing crust on top before I set about wrinkling my lip at it — you have already heard of and perhaps even forgotten all about the irritating information that PETA intends to launch a porn site. Reportedly the site will lure porn enthusiasts with XXX naked sex ladies, then sock it to’em with explicit animal torture vids. This will supposedly encourage the ethical treatment of animals by … who, exactly? Dickheads who look at porn?

It’s pretty optimistic to imagine that dickheads who look at porn are capable of appreciating what is meant by “ethical.” So I guess the intended audience for this site is dudes who can’t bear to contemplate saving the whales without jerking off at the same time.

In fact, it has been suggested that the only possible result of the juxtaposition of human and animal exploitation on a porn site is the eroticization of animal torture. To be sure, this contingency is considerably less remote than the screwy idea that pornography, which is itself abuse, can actually stop abuse. Pornography, in fact, is the antithesis of “ethical treatment”. It relies for its existence on violence against women. As such it appeals directly to its consumer’s abusiveness. Fetishized abuse is the whole point of pornography.

On the face of it, the ethical treatment of animals sounds like a cause anyone could get behind. Unfortunately, that ship sailed for PETA long ago. They haul in $30 million a year, but they won’t spend a dime on a no-kill shelter. Crossing over to the Dark Side, they’ve all but abandoned useful discourse in order to mutate into a churlish Offensive Themes Theater troupe that seems to exist only for the sake of its softcore self. Their sexist, racist, anti-Semitic, full frontal shock campaigns — featuring Nazis, KKKlansmen, and of course copious amounts of female celebrity skin — are more juvenile, narcissistic performance art than revolution. PETA, Grande Douchebagge of the animal rights movement, has long been in the human exploitation business; this new .xxx site is merely a formality.

Knobs.

For a longer and more amusing article on the crapulence of PETA, see “Ingrid Newkirk Is The Worst Person In The World,” a January 2010 post by Jenna Sauers at Jezebel.

By the way. Carved in one of the many stones in the ancient city of Obstrepopolis, Savage Death Island, is the slogan “Go vegan, chump!”

_________________
“Ditwuss” = DTWS = “degrades the whole species”

Posted in Bloodsport and Sexploitation. Bite me, Chad.

Teen addict chic

Published by Jill on August 21, 2011. 38 Comments

One blamer recently brought up the idea that fashion models are getting younger and more pornulated with each passing moment, with which idea nobody within barfing distance of a keyboard could argue. Following the tangent, someone else noted the increasing ubiquity of a creepy subgroup who sport the “young abused drugged look.”

A propos of which, an Urban Outfitters catalog recently showed up at Spinster HQ. The catalog is basically blank-faced, doped-up teenagers wearing tight, disheveled, thrift-store-looking outfits in gritty bohemian settings. The photos aren’t in-yer-face shocking or anything, but that’s what’s so creepy about it. The honky pubescent girl, looking sallow, emaciated, forlorn and exploited, is now such a standard figure in contemporary pop culture that nobody bats an eye. Behold some scans, all from the wrinkled August 2011 catalog I pulled out of the trash.


Above: they shackled this poor urchin to the wall with gaffer’s tape. Below: these loopy teens are about to OD.

Above: pallid teen junkie corpse is a variation on the theme. Below: cornered teen is too malnourished to fight back.

Above: stoned 14-year-old wears ratty $80 sweater in a sexy, off-the-shoulder look. Below: another corpse variation: teens passed out on dirty linoleum floor, someone throws pineapples at them.

Above: exploited teen wallows in melted popsicles on dirty linoleum. Below: two more sexy cornered teens.

Skeletal, zoned-out teens in ready-to-wear rags, as a fashion aesthetic, really chaps the hide. Like most stuff that is supposed to be transgressive, it merely plays to a normalized pervy fetish. And it’s disingenuous. Remember when homeless-chic was lampooned by Will Ferrell in “Zoolander” (the inventor of the piano-key tie designs the cutting edge “Derelicte” line)? Culture-appropriating mainstream designers simulate the look of junkie runaways to sell to latter-day Warholian boho scensters and the milk-crate furniture set. But anyone who’s ever been around any real teen drug subculture can tell you it’s about as romantic as a jar full of scabs.

Posted in Sexploitation. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt can’t shut the fuck up all of a sudden

Published by Jill on August 18, 2011. 108 Comments

Radical feminist blog discussions can take some interesting turns, some of the interestingest of which arise from the wacky circumstance of Savage Death Island’s status as — and we don’t want this to be true, but true it is — a patriarchal subculture. We can’t exist outside or independently of the dominant culture — nothing can — so we’re stuck trying to invent a post-patriarchal world order from within patriarchy’s crapulent boundaries. Even as we’re relegated to the crapulent lunatic fringe, we’re enfoisted with the crapulent language of patriarchy, and its crapulent traditions and conventions, and its crapulent art. Every time we complain about some particularly crapulent aspect of all this crapulence, we get resisted, often by feminists themselves, because crappy though it may be, this is the only culture we’ve got. We’ve gotten kind of used to it. We forget, pretty often, to question its authority.

Take the other day, when the discussion turned to the crapulence of horndog author Vladimir Nabokov and his icky novel Lolita. I said something like “this is some crapulent kiddie porn shit, yo.”

Whereupon a reader, obviously experiencing one of those spontaneous liberal-dude fugue states that overtake us all from time to time, and careful not to “pick a side of the argument,” commented

But there is a greater issue at stake here: that of censorship.

You probably remember, couple of days ago, hearing the unmistakable roar of a lobe revving up to about 7800 SPM.* That was my lobe.

What follows is more or less how I responded to the idea that some tiresome dude-novel should be exempt from feminist critique on accounta censorship-is-bad. I had to add some stuff, of course, to prevent this post from being dangerously shortwinded.

1. There is (I said) no greater issue at stake than the liberation of women from patriarchal oppression.

The liberation of women from patriarchal oppression is more important than a man’s right to 24-hour access to poontang. It’s more important than a woman’s right to the performance of sexy empowering femininity. It’s more important than a scholarly analysis of a canonical work. It’s more important than censorship.

Censorship has meant this and that and the other thing over the years. The government won’t let you burn flags. The authorities herd you and your “Who Would Jesus Bomb?” protest sign into a “free speech” zone when Dubya shows up at a rally. The secret police throw you in prison for writing stuff unflattering stuff about your totalitarian government. Your library uses content-control software. The TV network bleeps out your (or Gordon Ramsay’s) F-bombs. The self-censoring Internet feminist uses the word F-bomb instead of the word fuck for no reason.

In the context of Internet feminist discourse, however, censorship seems to be something only feminist dissidents do, probably because we hate freedom! Censorship means “the practice of feminists voicing dissenting opinions on the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women.”

According to this interpretation, we Nazi feminists, with our intolerable idea that the fetishization of women’s oppression violates all women, are to be harassed, shouted down, and condemned by the liberal dudes found swinging from every rafter of the Internet, in an effort to suppress our dissent. Why? Apparently because saying “Lolita sucks” is tantamount to demanding a book-burning. Of a beloved, transgressive monument to lyric dudeliness.

Ironically, dudely suppression of feminist dissent is itself censorship, the very -ship that these free speech-lovin’ dudes purport to be against. Censorship is apparently bad only when it threatens to undermine DudeNation’s death-grip on its own sceptre of passion.

2. It is not censorship to advance feminist critiques of dudeliocentric art-porn.

In order to perform actual censorship, a censor must first occupy a position of authority over the censoree, and must be able to command minions sufficient for enforcement. The dudes and dudesses of DudeNation, for example, censor radical feminists all the time. Have you ever seen a radical feminist sitcom, fashion spread, toilet cleaner commercial, or New York Times bestseller?

It’s no secret that this very blog gets hit with DDoS attacks all the flippin’ time. Censorship!

Conversely, radical feminists, dangling by gnarled claws from our remote precipice out in Lunatic Fringe, are in no position to censor anything. We’re not in power. We have no authority. We enjoy little privilege. We command no minions. Even if we wanted to, which we don’t, we couldn’t prevent even one celebrated genius from writing child rape fantasies and calling it art.

About all we can do is advance feminist critiques and submit feminist analyses, both here on the Internet, and through the awesome power of those super-effective patriarchy-busting “THIS DEGRADES WOMEN” stickers hastily applied to American Apparel ads in bus stops. We can argue that the publication and artification of Lolita-esque child rape fantasies contributes to the fetishization of women’s oppression and is therefore antifeminist and inimical to all women generally.

We can also suggest remedies. Such as “if you make pornography you’re a misogynist rape apologist douche, so cut it the fuck out, you dumb fuck.” And also, “if you consume pornography you’re a misogynist rape apologist douche, so cut it the fuck out, you dumb fuck.” In fact, pretty much, “whenever you are anything but wildly enthusiastic about the repeal of male privilege, you’re a dumb fuck doing something you should be cutting the fuck out.”

3. The revolution will render all graphic representations of rape obsolete by smashing the domination/submission paradigm.

Once domination/submission bites the dust as the primary model upon which all human relationships are based, 99.9% of the beloved literary canon will start to look dated, corny, and bigoted, because it was all written in support of, from the point of view of, and under the auspices of patriarchal oppression. By bigots.

In other words, since oppression will cease to be fetishized by the enlightened survivors of the revolution, pornography will cease to exist, all on its own. The demand will evaporate. No censorship required! Just add common sense and simple human compassion!

4. The degree to which the idea of a world in which Shakespeare, Joyce and Nabokov are considered quaint relics of a barbaric age makes one uneasy, it is precisely to that degree that one is imbued with, invested in, and brainwashed by patriarchal mores.

Go ahead. Defend The Taming of the Shrew as a feminist bildungsroman all you want. You know you’re just pulling a bunch of English major bullshit outta your status quo-lovin’ ass.

To recap:
Is Lolita art? Sure, why not? It’s misogynist, barbaric art that degrades the whole species. Awesome.

Should Lolita be banned? Nah. Banning it, or any other pornographic “work,” would be like trying to treat 2,567,438 purulent boils with a single drop of Boil-Away.** Banning stuff never works. It just creates shadowy, subterranean subcultures who get off on the bannedness of their precious banned thing.

In any event, banning Lolita would do nothing to eradicate the underlying humanitarian crisis of which it is a symptom. Instead, I suggest a feminist response to pornography that advocates — persistently, and with salty language, ridicule, satire, and shaming — the eradication of any social order predicated on the existence and oppression of a sex class.

___________________
* SPM = Spinspulsations Per Minute

** By Ronco

Posted in Art is my LIFE, Blogulation and Sexploitation. Bite me, Chad.

Kurrent Events Korner

Published by Jill on August 9, 2011. 53 Comments

Spinster aunts throughout the galaxy are amazed by Illinois Senate Bill 1037. Unlike most senate bills, Illinois Senate Bill 1037 appears to contain little, if any, overt misogyny. In fact, it allows victims of sex trafficking to expunge the criminal records they acquired through being forced into prostitution.

“Victims of human trafficking are often forced into prostitution and other crimes against their own will, and too many of them are being prosecuted as criminals,” Rep. Yarbrough said. “When we have evidence that involuntary human trafficking was the cause of the crime, even though the victim may not have had the ability or representation to prove it during trial, we must do the right thing and reverse their conviction so they can move on with repairing their lives.” [cite]

What tha? This sounds almost reasonable. I must have woken up in a utopian alternate universe where little bones of compassion are occasionally thrown to the oppressed.

Wait, nope, scratch that. No utopia here. The fashion industry, for example, still exists, as I see from the 1537 emails I’ve gotten about young Thylane Blondeau, the pornulated 10-year-old French model whose sexy Vogue photo spreads are flippin icky.

Her mother must be a terrible person! is the refrain.

Well, perhaps Maman has neglected, like everyone else on the fucking planet, to engage in a little critical thinking concerning the nature of pornography and its role in women’s oppression, but she is not the main asshole here. The main asshole is the global pornsick appetite for the sexification of female persons. If there wasn’t an insatiable audience for preteen sexbots, there wouldn’t be any preteen sexbots.

It’s true that Ms Blondeau cannot actually give meaningful consent allowing the commodification of her body, and that this is outrageous. However, it’s not outrageous merely because she’s only 10 years old. Her mother can’t give meaningful consent, either. In a patriarchy, meaningful consent is not an option for any member of the sex class. Sex is a commodity, and women are sex, so Ms Blondeau’s commodification is entirely consistent is the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women. Even if her parents weren’t pimping her out, she’d still be fucked.

Why?

She’s a girl in a patriarchy.

After feminist revolt, consent will not be an issue, because there will be no commodification in the first place.

Which is a big part of why dudes hate feminists. Holy shit, we want to take away their porn!

Posted in Not Altogether Depressing, Politics, Sexploitation and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.

From the No Shit, Sherlock Dept.

Published by Jill on July 20, 2011. 130 Comments

I hope you’re sitting down, because you’re going to be shocked, shocked at the totally unexpected results of this study on crime and prostitution:

Men who pay for sex are more likely than non-buyers to commit a variety of offenses, including violent crimes against women, according to research conducted in the Boston area.

I know, right? It seems impossible! I mean, as the liberal dudes are always telling us deluded, unfunny, hairy harridans, prostitution and pornography are awesome! It’s a victimless crime, a harmless way for regular guys to do what comes naturally according to their evolutionary destiny. Also, prostitution and pornography empower women! Seriously, those bitches are laughing all the way to the bank!

And yet, here are these pornsick johns (or, as Reuters quaintly refers to them, “buyers of commercial sex”), roaming the city of Boston, committing felonies and assaulting women left and right. It’s almost as if there’s a relationship between violence and misogyny!

For example, significantly fewer sex buyers, 47 percent against 70 percent, reported that they were taught about respect for women in sex education classes.

Almost three in four of the sex buyers reported they learned about sex from pornography, whereas only 54 percent of the non-buyers did so.

The two groups also held significantly different attitudes regarding whether prostitution was consenting sex or exploitation. Men who bought sex were significantly less empathetic toward women working as prostitutes.

But sex buyers “seemed to justify their involvement in the sex industry by stating their belief … that women in prostitution were intrinsically different from non-prostituting women,” the study’s authors said.

And my very favorite:

Sex buyers often commented that they liked the power relationship intrinsic to prostitution.

Well knock me over with a feather.

Discuss.

Posted in Sexploitation. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt temporarily icked out by stupid Geraldo Rivera column

Published by Jill on May 19, 2011. 13 Comments

Holy shit, remember that dude Geraldo Rivera? The edgy, muck-raking journalist from 40 years ago? But then he kind of turned into a supremely annoying one-man tabloid? I hadn’t seen him around lately, so I’d assumed he’d been sent off to Joke-Butt Island, where guys with 70s porn mustaches go to die, but no, he popped up in my news reader this morning with a column in Fox News Latino on professional throbbing-gristelian (rhymes with “Aristotelian”) Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Rivera writes like a third-rate blogger. As a second-rate blogger, I ought to know.

His column is titled “Geraldo Rivera: Arnold’s Telenovela.” In it he enumerates the “three stereotypes [that] color her story.” By ‘her’ he means Mildred Baena, the woman who Schwarzenegger — who as you know is now at the center of a so-called “love child” scandal — exploited, pronged, and impregnated. Rivera calls Baena “Patty” or “The Mexican Maid!”

The “three stereotypes” involve Baena’s status as an immigrant menial whose sex appeal was irresistible to the powerful robot governor. Rivera fills in the narrative with colorful speculation.

Rivera’s main objective in the piece appears to be a takedown of Schwarzenegger (flecked, of course, with the admiration all dudes feel for other dudes who demonstrate in their sexploits “chutzpah, arrogance, narcissism, and cosmic balls”). He does, in fact, suggest that, if the title weren’t already held by John Edwards, Schwarzenegger would be “the creep of all time.” However, no journalist — and certainly no “journalist” — was ever able to resist depicting the victim of a famous sexual harasser as anything other than the essence of sex itself, and Rivera is no exception.

Using a writing style that is both lumpen and pulsating with tabloid idioms (“honey trap,” “uncontrolled sex machine”), he wastes no time in insulting Baena. I give you the first two sentences of the article:

Mildred Patricia Baena [...] would never be mistaken for Salma Hayek; yet she has now become the country’s most prominent Latina, temporarily eclipsing even Shakira and JLo. Like Latina Raquel Welsh or Rita Hayworth in their time, she was irresistible, attracting the affection, loyalty and generosity of a big man, larger than life.

He then flips the misogyny switch from pornulation to sentimental maudlin mode. Not just a woman with “classic smoldering appeal,” Baena is also the essence of fantasy wifeliness: long-suffering, patient, self-sacrificing, loyal, will put out and do laundry, etc.

“To raise her son in the literal shadow of that swaggering man, keeping the truth of their child’s parentage secret for a time even from Arnold, required world-class love and trust.”

That’s right, Geraldo. She was his toilet; that always breeds world-class love and trust.

Kill me now.

Posted in Knobjectivism, Mass Media, Sexploitation and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt too lazy to write essay, posts blamer comment instead

Published by Jill on February 6, 2011. 35 Comments

This short essay, written by blamer TwissB in response to yesterday’s anti anti-abortion bill post, is so swell it deserves its own page. TwissB is, as the kids say, (or used to say 5 years ago), teh awesome. Wow, you say, I wish she had a feminist reference website! Well, your wish is my command. Yay!

********************

And even now another ERA silly season is in full swing as legislators in various states (e.g. Florida and Virginia) are being assured by ERA enthusiasts that a constitutional prohibition on sex discrimination against women will “NOT regulate abortion”! While they alternate these assurances on odd days with pro-choice marches on even days, one can only marvel at so much misplaced energy.

So, it’s time to offer a radical alternative.

Balkanizing primary sex discrimination into a swarm of separate issues as current Official Feminism does denies women a coherent way of rebelling against it. Primary sex discrimination is men’s invasive, subordinating attack on women’s reproductive organs through pregnancy regulation, prostitution, and pornography – the perfect target since nothing misogyny can do to hurt that organ unique to women can inflict the slightest pain on men. Consider any of those “but women are different so it would be discrimination if you treated them the same as men” bits of Aristotelian holy writ and sure enough the uterus or its related gotcha parts and functions are cited as the pretext for any acts of restriction or dehumanization men want to be free to inflict on women.

When it comes to anything men regard as “sex,” the right to treat women differently is taken for granted. Primary sex discrimination is protected by a gentlemen’s agreement. It is enough to trot out abstractions like the interest of the state, men’s natural needs, or the First Amendment to turn the cruelest attacks on women into unchallengeable institutions.

Difference arguments are more overtly made in cases of secondary sex discrimination in employment, for example, or military service assignment, or single sex schooling. Legal practitioners know that there is nothing in the Constitution to prohibit sex discrimination against women, but only Justice Scalia dares to say so.

Disparate impact is tertiary sex discrimination which can be ignored by courts and legislators or remedied as men’s advantage is perceived.

If women were to make a concerted attack on primary sex discrimination – pregnancy regulation, prostitution and pornography, I think we’d wreck the men’s game. It would tie the liberal and conservative cats’ tails together and hang them over the clothesline. But it would also challenge women on the left and the right to quit collaborating with men in reducing the most anti-women practices to political entertainment for men.

Posted in Men Hate You, Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society and Sexploitation. Bite me, Chad.