Archive for the 'Strawfeminism' Category

Spinster aunt was once adored by Dude Nation

Published by Jill on October 23, 2011. 399 Comments

A blamer mentioned yesterday that there’s a new post somewhere arguing that I’m a “bimbo-hating radical who undermines feminism by trying to take women’s sexiness away.”

Just one? I was shocked.

The author as mannequin, c. 1985

I have not read this post, and, with regret, I must deny myself the pleasure of doing so. When I tell you that my reading list currently measures about 6.79 times as long as one of those articles in The New Yorker that nobody has ever finished, and that at the bottom of it is Genji, and that at the middle is Dorothy Parker’s Sunset Gun, and that at the top is this weeks’ People magazine, you will understand. Legion are the Internet feminists who misconstrue my worldview because it is inconsistent with what they wish to believe about their status re: life’s rich pageant, and every one of them has written a gripping blog post about it. Fascinating reading, without a doubt, but there are not enough hours in the day.

Fortunately, I have already read so many of these posts that I can, in my mind’s jaundiced eye, reproduce the one in question verbatim. They appear frequently, as spores after a soft rain — that is, whenever I publish an essay condemning as antifeminist one or another of the beloved rites of femininity. Blow jobs. Beauty. Pencil skirts. Burlesque. “Sex work” as a “choice.” Recently I jotted down a couple of lines on a study commissioned by a cosmetics company. This study purported to show that cosmetics benefit women. My response to this study was, in sum, a Bronx cheer (may I mention that on the planet Obstreperon, we don’t use our mouths for this? No, I didn’t think so.).

No doubt my dim view of makeup, and by extension, of the quest for pure sexiness, ruffled a few marabou bustiers. Long, long ago, argue the bustiers, when Andrea Dworkin roamed the earth, femininity may well have been a tool of the man. But, they claim, no more. Today’s feminist, empowered by all those articles on vibrators in Bust magazine, chooses choices of her own free will. These choices mirror her own unique sartorial, sexual, and philosophical personality. That these unique choices happen to align precisely with standard male porn fantasies, and that they are therefore rewarded with positive attention, is purely coincidental.

Such a viewpoint is a luxury of youth. It is the great tragedy of the women’s liberation movement that fully-realized feminist consciousness is too rarely achieved by women who are still young and fit enough to take on Dude Nation in a knife fight. Too often, it’s only when a woman ages out of pornosity, and is too old to do anything but take pictures of cows, that she discovers what the world really thinks of her.

Lest I be misconstrued as a prudey old sourpuss: nobody understands the reluctance to grok the fullness of patriarchal oppression better than I. I will illustrate this point with, not just an autobiographical anecdote, but with photographs.

The author as Spitzie West, tough slut in bondage-wear, in the early 90s

Born a mousey intellectual, in my twenties I discovered all the perks of Porn2K-Compliance. I amassed drawers full of Chanel makeup. I had boxes of wigs. I combed the thrift stores incessantly. I had so many clothes I had to turn a spare bedroom into a closet. I spent hours every day assembling outfits, dying my hair, and styling my edgy hipster look. I never wore the same thing twice.

It was expensive and time-consuming, but my resulting reputation as a glamorous wisecracking ballbuster sexpot dominatrix made me famous and adored. Everybody wanted to know me, photograph me, take me to dinner, put me in their fashion show. I had fans. I had protégées. I told men to fuck off and I wrote songs about vibrators, so I thought I was a feminist. I was too dumb, when I was young and adored, to grasp that all I had done was to succeed at femininity, and that femininity is no pinnacle of human achievement.

It would be many years before I would understand that femininity, the practice of femininity, and the fetishization of femininity degrades all women. That femininity is not a “choice” when the alternative is derision, ridicule, workplace sanctions, or ostracization. That femininity is a set of degrading behaviors that communicates one’s level of commitment to male authority and women’s oppression. That femininity is coerced appeasement, regardless of how successfully it is now marketed to young women as feminism.

I turned out OK, so I’m not too worried about these sex-poz young ladies who think I want to deprive them of sexiness. They really can’t be blamed, either for thinking I’m a buzzkill, or for being deceived by Dude Nation and mistaking sex-attention for love; Dude Nation puts considerable effort into selling its message. Certainly by the time women age out of the system, although one hopes well before then, it will have dawned on them that femininity isn’t just a matter of personal choice, but is in fact a major element on the continuum of global misogyny that begins with “choosing” to wear lipstick for fun and ends with violence and murder.

In the meantime, at least they’re having a fucking good time.

Posted in Strawfeminism and The Beauty Ultimatum. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt reads comment on Dawkins website, wrinkles lip

Published by Jill on March 19, 2011. 117 Comments

Liberal dudes (and that boobquake chick) just love celebrity biologist Richard Dawkins. Even some Internet feminists may be said not to vomit blood at the mention of his name. Because no greater proponent of atheism than yours truly ever camera-stalked a Rio Grand turkey in the Texas Hill Country, even the Spinster Library contains a couple of Dawkins’ popular, well-written books. They are enjoyable if one is charmed by that mellifluous English public school manner of expression, and if human penis-based arguments against godbagism typically convey buoyancy to your ocean-going vessel.

As an added precaution, the Great Council of the Dieri would also keep a stockpile of boys’ foreskins in constant readiness, because of their homeopathic power to produce rain.*

Despite his admirable enthusiasm for some of the richer morsels of history’s bounty, Dawkins is, as I have always maintained, no feminist. This is a disappointment but hardly surprising, since rare indeed is the intellectual Western motherfucker who is not enamored of the glorious myth that he and his ilk, in their educated and progressive magnanimity, have liberated their women.

It’s a disappointment, not just because it blows whenever a superstar brainiac turns out to be a knob about the global humanitarian crisis of patriarchal oppression, but also because of this: if otherwise rational, right-thinking, internationally worshiped dudes of Dawkins’ stature can remain deluded about the tyranny of male privilege, the chance in hell that feminist revolution might be said to stand is like unto that of a snowball. Particularly when women themselves, in the shape of self-described “equity feminists,” saunter through the town square declaring that patriarchal oppression in America does not exist. Even more particularly when the Dawkinses openly admire the  self-described feminists’ declarations.

The specific Dawkins-approved, self-described feminist to whom I allude is, of course, the notorious Christina Hoff Sommers, professional turncoat and author of several “Dudes Rule!”-themed books, such as the hatespeechy Who Stole Feminism, and that modern MRA classic The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men.

Sommers thinks American feminists should put a sock in it and take it easy. Why? Because Americans have got patriarchy licked. Women are officially free. La di da da, free. She invents an enemy of American women’s freedom: “gender feminists,” mythical creatures who hate men but for some reason nevertheless maintain that men and women are “essentially the same.”

“Gender feminists” are probably more accurately described as “feminists who think Sommers is full of shit.”

So anyway, some commenter on the Richard Dawkins fanboy site suggested that Dawkins take a gander at one of Sommers’ antifeminist lectures. Here is the link to the lecture. Its gist is that “eccentric gender feminists” have staged a coup and taken over the women’s movement. Whereupon the eccentrics instituted a disinformation campaign, spreading foul lies about — I kid you not — ancient Roman emperors, while leaving a trail of bloodied, quivering equity feminists and the men they love in their wake. Sommers even takes a couple of shots at Eve Ensler for — get this — failing to sufficiently praise dudes in the Vagina Monologues.

This excerpt from Sommers’ lecture states her premise.

[I]n 1994 [...] I published a book entitled Who Stole Feminism? The book was strongly feminist, but it rejected the idea that American women were oppressed. For the most part, feminism had succeeded, I said. By the nineties, I argued, American women were among the freest and most liberated in the world. It was no longer reasonable to say that as a group women were far worse off than men. Yes, there were still inequities, but to speak of American society as a “patriarchy” or to refer to American women as second class citizens was frankly absurd.

Hey, Christina Hoff Sommers, what about that pesky 75 cents-on-the-dollar pay disparity, or the fact that only 15% of American political offices are held by women? Sommers, it turns out, isn’t even sure that these “factoids” are true (given the opposition’s proven propensity for lying about ancient Roman history), but even if they are, they can be easily explained by that handy psuedoscience mainstay, evolutionary psychology. You see, men and women are neither physically nor cognitively “the same,” therefore it is irrational to expect men and women to excel equally. Men are simply hardwired to win more political campaigns than women. Apparently men are also hardwired to make more money than women. So feminists should accept their biological destiny, “tone down the rhetoric against men,” and bask in our sexism-free utopia.

No advanced blamer requires a refutation of that ludicrous argument, so we’ll just press on to Sommers’ views on the “eccentric” idea that some menacing entity called “patriarchy” goes around victimizing women.

The dominant philosophy of today’s women’s movement is not equity feminism–but “victim feminism.” “Victim” feminists don’t want to hear about the ways in which women have succeeded. They want to focus on and often invent new ways and perspectives in which women can be regarded as oppressed and subordinated to men.

A few words on this women-as-victims stuff:

Largely because of the success of the funfeminist movement, which argues that women do too have agency, dammit! (as long as their choiciness stays perfectly aligned with male interests), to view women as victims has become passé and unpopular. Women aren’t victims anymore now that we can own property, vote, and have the right to pole-dance in our boyfriends’ apartments. Furthermore, the argument goes, if we traipse about the countryside exaggerating the sorry plight of women (when in fact the plight of women, though admittedly not quite as awesome as men’s, is at least not as sorry as it was), we’re just buying into that unattractive, unempowerfulized, hysterical “victim mentality.” We freely choose to wear 6-inch heels, and if we author this choice, we cannot therefore be victims of it. If we don’t think we are victims, we won’t be victims.

You know; only sick people take pills; therefore, if I don’t take pills, I won’t be sick.

What this argument fails to consider, regardless of a few funfeminists’ purported choice to choose choices, is that, hourly, billions of women worldwide suffer everything from discrimination to murder exclusively because of their sex. Women cannot choose the “I’m-not-a-victim” choice. Not even the funfeminists can choose it, not really, because when stuff like “you cannot rape me” or “my appearance is meaningless” or “the state cannot interfere with the contents of my own personal uterus” is not on the menu of choices, no real agency exists. But apparently, claiming that patriarchy victimizes women is just whiney.

So why in the world would scores of radical feminists, both Internetian (rhymes with “Venetian”) and regular, devote their public lives to exposing the violence perpetrated by the dominant culture if there were nothing to expose? What possible motivation could we have for supposedly “inventing new ways in which women can be regarded as oppressed”?

Sommers offers a helpful explanation: “There are a lot of homely women in women’s studies. Preaching these anti-male, anti-sex sermons is a way for them to compensate for various heartaches–they’re just mad at the beautiful girls.”**

Meanwhile, upon reading the Sommers speech, Dawkins was moved to comment: “Thank you for this. I have now read the lecture you recommend, and it is indeed excellent.”

The anointed one has spoken.
______________________
* Dawkins, Richard. Unweaving the Rainbow. Mariner Books, 2000. p.182.

** Sommers has denied ever making this remark.

Thanks, Stella Tex.

Posted in Dear god what about the men?, Men Hate You, Oppression Culture, Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society, Strawfeminism, The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Yesterday and Women hate you. Bite me, Chad.

Husband and wife blog team on board with antifeminist backlash even though it’s so 20 years ago

Published by Jill on December 25, 2009. 101 Comments

Wait. I have a blog? Shitfire!

But wow, check out this dumb blog. It’s one of those blogs that has “book deal” written all over it.

It’s supposedly a husband-and-wife joint coaching the reader on the successful pursuit of traditional manliness. Traditional manliness isn’t just a lifestyle, it’s a movement! It agitates in support of the appreciation of “classic cocktails,” of knowing how to “set the agenda” at “meetings,” and, as in the example below, of navigating the perilous waters of dating incomprehensible women.

Women are suckers for a man with a plan because it shows you have initiative, can think ahead, and aren’t shy about taking the lead. Don’t punt and ask her what she wants to do. Be a man! You’re the one doing the asking, so it’s your duty to come up with something that she’ll enjoy. When a woman is with a man that has a plan, they feel they can relax and really enjoy themselves. [Cite]

The husband/wife blog uses terms like on board to mean “having drunk the pre-feminist nostalgia Kool-Aid” and man up to mean — well, the precise definition of man up remains indeterminate, but I believe that on manliness blogs it concerns embracing with vigor a set of supposedly lost upper-middle-class honky patriarchal affectations, like the moral necessity of wearing suits to class, of criticizing women who think femininity is stupid, and of growing handlebar mustaches.

Here’s a post in which the manliness-loving duo expose the egregious double standard imposed upon manliness-seeking men by scruffy feminists in sweatpants. Apparently scruffy feminists in sweatpants want men to eschew their natural barbarism*, but are not sufficiently on board with their own feminine role in this business of manning up.

“[T]he new movement towards a return to traditional manliness needs women to be on board to be successful. After all, if you have men opening doors and asking women on real dates, and they’re just laughing in your face, that’s clearly not going to work out too well. And if you have men striving to be their best, but they feel like women aren’t even trying, you’ve got a recipe for creating strained relations between the sexes and bitter and disillusioned men who think all women are an unappealing mess who are not worth the trouble of dealing with. [...] [T]hese days a new double standard has emerged where it’s okay to celebrate men manning up, but telling women they need to recover some of their femininity is offensive.”

Ladies, if you desire your interactions with the nattily-dressed oppressor to be as painless as possible, you will do your nails and makeup.

_________________________
* “[Y]our car probably smells. Leaving sweaty gym bags or Saturday morning’s fish catch in a car causes odor to build up in the upholstery. Spare your date the olfactory torture by airing out your car and spraying it down with Febreeze.”

[Gracias, Rebecca]

Posted in Blogulation, Dear god what about the men?, Femininity, Knobjectivism, Men Hate You, Oppression Culture, Strawfeminism, The Beauty Ultimatum and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.

OzWatch ‘09: Misogyny on Parade

Published by Jill on November 29, 2009. 46 Comments

Displaying an astonishing capacity for patriarchy-blaming, somebody in charge of public education in Victoria AU wishes to implement anti-violence-against-women training in a couple of schools. It’s called “Respectful Relationship Education.”

Possible classroom activities include students acting out scenes of sexual coercion after which students would suggest more appropriate behaviour. [...] They would combat common attitudes among boys such as young women are either “good girls or sluts”, the report said. [...] It said feminist theories were best at explaining the link between gender power relations and violence against women, and must underpin the programs.

You go, Victoria! Sounds great, right?

Wrong! Because it’s “shoving capital ‘F’ feminism down their throats.” It’s — brace yourself — “compulsory feminism.”

Compulsory feminism, unlike the heartwarming compulsory capital ‘M’ misogyny the shoving down of which our throats are all accustomed to, is apparently nothing short of child abuse. One nervous misogynist, Australian Family Association spokesman John Morrissey, blurts with swaggering bravado that “strident feminist propaganda won’t wash with boys,” but he nevertheless vigorously opposes the program; apparently his confidence in the red-blooded Australian boy’s natural aversion to strident feminist propaganda is not 100%. He is anxious that some strident feminism might work its way in through the chinks. The “feminisation” of boys is already a Number 1 red-alert crisis situation, given the declining population of male teachers in schools.

The fear that oppression-sensitivity training will pussywhip boys into a class of oppressed autobot pansies is not confined to Australian Family Association spokesman John Morrissey. This knob at misogynist dudesite Mensnewsdaily puts it this way: “Beware boys! The female Taliban is coming for you!”

And then he says — I’m not even kidding — “Don’t such programs send the grossly incorrect message that all boys need to be ‘educated’ about how to treat women?”

That’s right. Apparently men spring from the womb fully enlightened. It insults them sorely to insinuate that they are in any way responsible for violence against women. Any attempt to suggest otherwise merely represents another diabolical tactic in the feminists’ bid for “global dominance.” Educating boys about the culture of domination will strip them of their ability to form “a single original thought on any subject.”

And then he says — I’m still not even kidding — “Who made feminists the experts on explaining violence in relationships?”

Seriously! Apparently misogynist schmuckwads, not women whose lives are devoted to the study of oppression dynamics, are the only persons capable of such intellectual nuance.

Fucking moron.

Posted in Dear god what about the men?, Knobjectivism, Lobe-blowing, Men Hate You, Strawfeminism, The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today and The megatheocorporatocracy. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt reads a couple of GoogleAlerts

Published by Twisty on February 12, 2009. 65 Comments

Once in a while it amuses me to read my Google Alerts for keyword “feminist” as I slurp down my soylent green kombucha. The blog results are always enlightening. A bit of a barometer. If the random blogger is any indication, feminism’s in bad shape, women. Here are two depressing examples from today’s alert email.

This post by blogger scarlettscion is typical of Google’s selections in the ”feminist” department*; it’s blandly pro-patriarchy and without much in the way of philosophic value. It is entitled “Am I a feminist?”

“Yes I fucking AM.” proclaims the author. But, she hastens to reassure her readers, she likes men. In fact, men don’t oppress women, “culture” does. And we’re all guilty of culture.

Her argument proceeds from the hypothesis that most feminists are judgmental buttbags. We hate men and we hate women who wear skirts. Our author is not that kind of hatey feminist. She is — and this is apparently her sole mode of feminist rebellion — the kind who “objects to ads” that “portray us as material objects.” But on the other hand,

A little objectification never hurt anyone. Ideally I’d like to see a bit more even spread of that objectification (where are all the sexy clothes for men? Why don’t they have hot uncomfortable shoes?) but that doesn’t mean that I think women looking sexy is BAD BAD BAD.

Possibly there’s hope for scarlettscion; she is under the impression that feminists hate “sex workers”, but at least she sort of gets that advertising is exploitative.

I’m not so sure about this guy.

Meet Ric James, outraged dude and self-described “common man.” He quotes an article describing a vicious expression of Saudi misogyny (woman sentenced to “100 lashes” and imprisonment after becoming pregnant pursuant to her having been gang-raped), then actually starts yelling at feminists for failing to force the world to end these travesties by making a big stink about this down at Saudi HQ. That’s right. In an unusual twist on the feminist-bashing trope, he’s supposedly pissed that women are ridding the world of their own oppression in insufficient numbers.

His argument is that, because he’s been forced to endure humiliating “diversity training” at the hands of “some woman with a glaring eye,” women suck. Which explains our failure.

Where are those women, those marchers, those picketers now? Shouldn’t they be in front of the Saudi Embassy or shouting at their elected reps or flooding the media (print, radio, and TV) with demands that we loudly condemn such actions? I know I do and say so when I get the opportunity. Where, I wonder, are they?”

Well, if we were anything like Ric James, we’d be sitting around on our privileged kiesters, self-righteously awaiting the right “opportunity” to “flood the media,” expecting a few disenfranchised women to fix the problem of male violence. But fortunately, we’re not like Ric James. Feminists are loudly condemning this shit all day, every day, all over the world. The trouble is, there are too few feminists, and too many people like Ric and scarlettscion. They’re more interested in deriding feminists than in listening to us as we howl into an indifferent wind.
___________________
* Fun fact: I Blame the Patriarchy has never been listed under “feminism” in a GoogleAlert.

Posted in Blogulation, Men Hate You, Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society, Strawfeminism and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.

Women’s Sexuality 2.0

Published by Twisty on February 7, 2009. 113 Comments

brownreclusespider.jpg

As is my custom of a Saturday morning, I was just settling into a bell hooks essay [1], an aerosol waffle by my side, admiring from the corner of my eye the noble drooling countenance of my golden retriever Bert, when suddenly –

But wait a second. bell hooks has reminded me that I was, before my computer meltdown crisis threw me into a tailspin-cum-funk the size of Guam, about to declare war on this whole pro-sex/anti-sex/3rd wave/2nd wave/mix-n-match feminism-fight theme that keeps me awake at night. To wit:

In 1994 hooks published an anti-funfeminism essay wherein she explains that, within a feminist framework, being “pro-sex” is not the same as being pro-dudeliocentric pornulational prong-a-rama pole-dancin dick-suckin degrade-me-baby submission [2]. Being pro-sex, she says, means “mov[ing] away from sexually dead encounters with patriarchal men who eroticize exploitative power and domination scenarios that in no way embrace female sexual agency.” She envisions a sexuality that is both “liberatory and fun.”

But uh-oh. The feminist movement has failed to provide women with a blueprint for a sexuality that is liberatory and fun, i.e., not rooted in power politics. This is not surprising to the spinster aunt, since the only available blueprint for any human behavior is the one authored by a culture of domination outside of which it is prohibitively difficult, if not impossible, to exist.

hooks perceives that this lack-of-blueprint situation has engendered a fatal hitch in feminism’s gitalong, which hitch has pretty much invited the invention of funfeminism. She views the situation as a bi-componential publicity problem.

One: humorless, prudey, anti-sex, “ruthlessly dogmatic” white chick feminists have drowned out the radical “pro-sex collective.” Because humorless, prudey, anti-sex, ruthlessly dogmatic white chicks are so easily derided by Dude Nation, hooks says, they’re the only ones who get any press, so feminism as a whole gets a bad rap. “It is no wonder,” she writes, “that the public voices of puritanical, reformist feminism turn most folks off.”

Two: the pro-sex collective has not produced sufficient quantities of “counter-hegemonic evidence to disprove the popular sexist stereotype that women in [the] feminist movement are antisex and antimen.” This evidence would take the form of art, literature, and film, and would document the new women’s sexuality, currently defined only as “new, exciting, liberatory, and fun.” Presumably the world would then see what a feminist really looks like: a chick who digs sex (not dude-sex).

Thus has feminism more or less unraveled into this pro vs. anti dealio. Meanwhile, into the gaping void left by prude-silenced pro-sexers has shimmied, with stripper pole and Brazilian wax complete, the phallocentric antithesis of feminism: funfeminism. hooks refers to it by its 1994 moniker “new feminism,” describing it as a mass-media “marketing ploy to advance the opportunistic concerns of individual women while simultaneously acting as an agent of antifeminist backlash by undermining feminism’s radical / revolutionary gains.” She identifies funfeminism as a commodity sold to a public made queasy by the thought of a sexual dynamic that doesn’t fetishize oppression. It is “being brought to us as a product that works effectively to set women against one another, to engage us in competition wars over which brand of feminism is more effective.”

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: funfeminism isn’t a movement, it’s a consumer lifestyle, and it’s male-identified to boot. It appropriates the tired old patriarchal model, announces “I choose to be degraded, so shut your pie-hole!” and is rewarded with approbative dudely analyses praising its practitioners for having the sense to be antifeminist feminists. That it’s still raunchin’ strong 15 years after hooks lambasted it pretty much proves her point, that feminism got behind the 8-ball with this sex thing and just couldn’t recover.

Take note: hooks is not maintaining that feminism screwed up because it wasn’t sexay enough. She’s saying that, owing to race and class issues within the movement, it couldn’t cohere sufficiently to deliver an alternative to sexay that acknowledges that women can be sexual and human at the same time.

[What hooks doesn't mention in her essay -- perhaps because they were, in the pre-Palin days of yore, still under the radar -- is funfeminism's sister group, also rushing in to fill the gap left by unresolved contradictions within the feminist movement: the right-wing Bible-thumpin' anti-abortion pearl-clutchers. What a masochistic bunch of misogynists they are! Those who don't openly revile feminism in the public square often describe their women-hatin' ways as feminist. Keepers of the status quo reward this gang for playing virgin to the funfeminist's whore. But I digress.]

Well, enough already. Here’s my point at long fucking last: Pro-sexitude, as envisioned by hooks, is a radical feminist consummation devoutly to be wished. I am not entirely convinced that global acclimation to such a radically new (and to some, totally unpalatable) dynamic can be accomplished through art, but there can be no doubt that the concept of women as human beings — the nexus of any feminist view of sexuality — could really use some positive mainstream publicity.

However, in the event that art should fail as a feminist growth medium, I suggest revolution. A post-patriarchal society would, by definition, include Women’s Sexuality 2.0.

Anti-men is dumb. Anti-sex is dumber. But having sex with men, when doing so eroticizes your own oppression, is the dumbest thing ever. Women to whom feminism is important enough will make it a priority to run screaming from such dehumanizing encounters. And if they are bell hooksian enough, they will document themselves with a camcorder and put it up on YouTube (or whatever corner of the internet permits radical feminist video).

I was going to propose some suggestions for a new, exciting, liberatory, and fun sexuality, but I couldn’t think of anything except this:

Do it with girls!

I know. Not helpful. But what about this:

If your Nigel’s flaws include an antifeminist worldview — and I include under that heading the disturbing habit of flapping the covers around after farting in bed — dump him.

Like I said. Envisioning new, exciting, liberatory, fun sex is tough. When gazing beyond the suffocating perimeter of this oppressive patriarchy set-up — which set-up inflicts derision, violence, and loneliness on those who resist it — enlightenment and liberation are but mirages shimmering on a desert horizon.

Anyway, the really important thing I was gonna say before I got off on this goofy bell hooks tangent was: holy shit! There’s a brown recluse spider in my sink! It’s got six eyes!

__________________________
1. hooks, bell. “Power to the Pussy: We Don’t Wannabe Dicks in Drag.” Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representation. New York: Routledge, 1994. 9-23.

2. Ibid. “Talking Sex.” 73-81.

Posted in Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society, Sexploitation, Strawfeminism and Varmint Center. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt really does read her email

Published by Twisty on January 26, 2009. 44 Comments

Top o the marnin, blamers. You know how I rely on you to email me with cultural bacteria I can grow in the petrie dish of blame down in the lab, but relax. You can all stop sending me the link to the $3.8 million virginity auction. I’m hip to it. And I cannot possibly improve on Amanda’s response, which is more or less that “virginity” is a bogus construct, and that the “auction” is a hoax to advertise a Nevada brothel.

Amanda, ever the optimist, also holds out hope that the hoaxer is both meta and feminist enough to be enjoying a big hearty feminist laugh over having duped a bunch of right-wing pervs into confusing an amorphous cultural construct with an object worth millions. If Amanda’s right, it’s a pretty elegant joke, but I don’t see how it can play out unless the virgin in question makes with a gotcha! statement.

Meanwhile, you can all stop sending the link to the Monstrous Women movie trailer, too. I assure you that I have a) watched it and b) guffawed at it.

This Monstrous Women vid has been bumping around the lefty blogosphere as a joke-butt for a while, so you probably already know that it advertises an antifeminist Christian propaganda film called “The Monstrous Regiment of Women.” The film purports to “prove that feminism has in fact restricted choices for all women, brought heartache to the lives of many, and perpetuated the largest holocaust since the beginning of time.”

Indeed, the filmmakers appear to have drawn inspiration from “The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women,” a 500-year-old tract written by a godbag Scotsdude who believed that women are “weak, sick, impotent, foolish, mad, and frenetic.” The Scotsdude, Protestant reformer and professional misogynist John Knox, was absolutely apoplectic that a woman (Elizabeth I) should be sovereign of England, on accounta “God, by order of his creation, has spoiled [deprived] women of authority and dominion,” which makes “the empire of a woman [...] repugnant to nature.”*

Knox was a wackjob, all right, but the filmmakers have to dumb him down for an audience of modern homeschooled Christians. Knox meant “regiment” in the sense of a “regime,” as in “the regime of Queen Elizabeth,” but the movie uses the word in the modern sense to give the hilarious impression that a veritable army of frothing feminists swarms the countryside with swords made of IUDs and shields made of paycheck stubs to blacken the souls of our innocent daughters and foment despair in the hearts of formerly happy hausfraus.

So anyway, that’s the backstory.

If you have demurred when it comes to actually watching the video — and I wouldn’t blame you if you had, as it is difficult to maintain a healthy appetite for your fluffy morning waffle while a string of misogynist women make unenlightened wackaloon remarks about how feminists want the State to rip babies from the arms of their mommies and force the unhappy women to work in salt mines (no joke!) — I’ll give you a brief synopsis of the trailer in question.

Antifeminist propaganda always sounds more realistic when it comes softly, in a wounded tone, from the delicate mouths of demure right-wing collaborators, so the film, though it was produced and directed by dudes, features exclusively women, whose talking heads “extol femininity” and “blast feminism.”

“The problem with feminism is the cultivation of an attitude of victimization,” desiccated, pink-faced old gasbag Phyllis Schlafly is dragged out of mothballs to opine. Feminists, she declares, “get out of bed with a chip on their shoulder.” Because we have completely pulled out of our asses the insane idea that the world order is based on a system of domination and submission. We just made up this patriarchy myth because we’re all too ugly to get a man.

Hillary Clinton, says one kindly old granny, alluding to the ghastliest female abomination she can think of, had the unmitigated gall to show no interest whatsoever in baking cookies. The horror.

A “former cadet” with a pixelated face and the name “Jane Doe” explains matter-of-factly that women in the military inevitably have crying “fits,” and that when they do, they are ridiculed and raped. Jane Doe confused me for a minute until I realized that she — or I should say, the filmmakers — isn’t taking a dudes-shouldn’t-rape-women stance — which would be inconsistent in an antifeminist film. Instead she — or rather, they — are suggesting that it is unnatural for women to be in the military in the first place, and that rape is their just punishment. Blaming weak, sick, impotent, foolish, mad, frenetic women makes much more sense than holding noble young warriors accountable for their uncontrollable eruptions of barbarism.

A delicate flower (and author of the gripping page-turner Raising Maidens of Virtue), dressed in virtuous white flowing robes, declaims that if you dress “loose,” you’re just asking for it, you godless slut. An oldie but goodie.

My favorite — this is where I made with the guffaw — is the woman who, during a stint as Satan’s handmaiden, says she was in “the abortion industry.” The business model of this industry, she says, is to “go into schools” and “get” teenage girls to be sexually active, with the stated goal that the newly ensluttified teens have “3 to 5 abortions between the ages of 13 and 18.” Performing abortions on sexy teenagers is just that lucrative. The carnivorous feminists who cooked up this baby-hating scheme are laughing all the way to the bank.

The ex-abortepreneur lady, you’ll be happy to know, is now a member of a group that shoves Jesus and compulsory pregnancy down the throats of indigent women.

You know, I am deeply heartened that somebody somewhere — OK, it’s just a couple of godbag wackjobs whose website actually contains the phrase “in regards to,” but they’re better than nothing — takes feminism seriously enough to bother making a cockumentary like this. It almost makes it seem like we’ve got some kind of movement goin’ on. Alas. Would that we were a monstrous regiment.

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* UPDATE: I am gently corrected by a more scholarly blamer than myself, who suggests that the object of Knox’s antipathy was not the Protestant ER 1, but the two Catholic Queen Marys (“Bloody” and “of Scots”). Although I did read that Elizabeth, who was no Knox fan on account of his misogynist ways, did kill his career forthwith.

Posted in Femininity, Godbagism, Men Hate You, Strawfeminism and Women hate you. Bite me, Chad.

Dispatch from the 100 Best Gender Studies Blogs department

Published by Twisty on January 13, 2009. 45 Comments

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: 93.7% of 21st century feminist time is wasted reassuring people that feminists don’t hate men.

I’ve also said this before and I’ll say it again: the link to a synopsis of the Twisty Worldview is right there in the sidebar; why will nobody ever read it? Why?

I issue these complaints because I just received an email from someone named Kelly who was pleased to inform me that I Blame the Patriarchy has been included on some list of “the best” gender studies blogs, and thoughtfully provided the link just in case my readers might find the list “interesting.” [1]

Whenever I am emailed by a complete stranger about something my readers might find interesting, it is a foregone conclusion that 1) my readers will not find it interesting, and 2) I am being tapped for some free advertising. Sometimes it’s a publisher offering me a review copy of some book I would never read in a million years, or a producer offering me a review copy of some movie I would never watch in a million years. Sometimes it’s a blogger who is excited to say he’s added me to his sexyfeminism blogroll, and maybe I could do the same for him, which of course I wouldn’t do in a million years. In all cases, the complete stranger can be relied upon to know nothing whatsoever about this blog or the people who read it.

Today’s email turned out to be a website promoting online college degrees. The website’s blog is titled, I kid you not, “Learn-gasm.” It publishes lists of “100 Best” single-issue blogs — fashion, history, etc. Learn-gasm then emails the lucky bloggers, apprises them of the great honor, and suggests that their readers would get a big bang out of this list. The idea being, presumably, that, once lured to the site by appealing to their pet interests, patriarchy-blamers would sign up in droves for online college courses.

I can see it now, the Rev. B. Dagger Lee earning her online degree in Christian Studies at the University of Phoenix.

Anyway, I was up with my 3 AM hot flash-cum-night-sweats and had nothing better to do after changing the sheets, so I clicked over to Learn-gasm’s “100 Best Gender Studies Blogs.” Sure enough, there was I Blame the Patriarchy, right after Feministing in the Feminism section.

Learn-gasm appears to have been written by a high school sophomore named Christina. Here’s how Christina describes Feministing:

“This blog was designed as a place for women to share their thoughts and feelings about issues that affect their lives.”

Deep.

And I Blame the Patriarchy?

“Here you’ll find gender issues explored from a distinctly anti-male, pro-feminist point of view.”

Look, I know this is just some cut-rate advertising ploy, and that there is plenty of shit on the web way worse than a list of gender study-ish blogs with meaningless descriptions, but I was cut to the quick, the quick, I tell you, by this latest blatant mischaracterization of my views.

It’s like Superglue, this loony idea that the spinster aunt — the aunt who merely yearns, swilling Scotch alone on her lime green recliner at spinster HQ, for women to assume fully human status in our cold, miserable world — promotes man-hating. I explain it all the time, and it’s right there in the sidebar, but I more or less constantly find myself correcting my detractors, pointing out that my antipathy is directed at male privilege, not at males themselves, either conceptually or personally [2]. Yet “Twisty hates men!” is the constant refrain. So why the ceaseless, deliberate misunderestimation?

Well, I’ll tell you.

In this crummy patriarchy set-up, where men dominate a sex class of women, any suggestion that women are actually human is perceived as an attack on the natural order. Which natural order consists of male authority and female submission. “Male,” in our culture, is the equivalent of and a synonym for authority. Therefore, “women are human,” a statement that challenges male authority, can only be understood to mean “I hate men.” And when a spinster aunt hates men, she’s just asking for it, you know? She proves that women suck, and invalidates all of feminism!

Incidentally, what kind of moron includes a supposedly “anti-male” blog on a list of 100 Best anything?

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[1] I have refrained from linkage on principle, but if your heart is set on a degree in Criminal Justice or Operations Management from an “accredited” internet college, don’t let me stand in your way; feel free to Google “bachelorsdegreeonline.”

[2] Of course I have no problem whatsoever directing antipathy toward individual men who exercise their privilege in revolting, tacky, exploitative, or violent ways.

Posted in Blogulation, Strawfeminism and The megatheocorporatocracy. Bite me, Chad.

The new virgin menace

Published by Twisty on April 2, 2008. 65 Comments

There’s a virgin at Harvard.

Unusual, perhaps, but still, no big whoop, right?

Wrong! It’s such a big whoop that the New York Times Magazine has run a story on her. In order to vaguely sort of ridicule her. Because no matter what a woman does in this world, it’s the wrong fucking thing. Especially if she’s doin’ it at an Ivy League school.

Not that I give a crap about “virginity.” I’m sex-neutral, yo. But only a moron could fail to perceive that, from the default Dude Nation perspective, no matter what a woman’s sexual history, she’s fair game for open contempt. Women who don’t embrace porn culture are “anti-sex,” and women who do are “sluts,” and the treacherous territory in the middle is meticulously policed, with punishments for slight deviations readily meted out, by whatever micro-culture happens to control their lady-parts.

Sure, there are moments when the performance of either virginity or pornulation might occasion a pat on the head from the dominant class, but these evanescent little successes are fugitive in nature. Male appetites for madonnas vs. whores shift like the sands of time. Women who struggle to strike a balance — getting a boob job one minute, having their “virginity” surgically reinstated the next, all the while hurtling towards the inevitable ignominy of crone-dom — get sucked into the Femininity Hole, never to be human again.

But I digress.

The gist of the NYT story is this: Janie Fredell is saving it for godly heterosexual marriage. And lard help us, she’s part of a trend!

College is a hottt, sweaty, pornified hook-up culture, discovered the horrified young Fredell when she betook herself to Cambridge MA from Colorado Springs, the podunkian cradle of her youthful chastity. The Harvard boys were, she observed with a keen eye, “uncouth and socially inept.” Further study led her to conclude that there exists a “double standard which devalues women for their sexual pasts and glorifies men for theirs.”

Accoutered with so useful a piece of intelligence, Fredell might have taken any of several routes. Needless to say, she omitted to turn to radical feminism. Instead she joined a gang of Catholics called True Love Revolution, which promotes, “for reasons entirely secular,” abstinence from premarital boinking. She didn’t stop there. She decided to stand up for her “lifestyle,” which had become the subject of much campus mockery, by adopting a public persona: the Campus Virgin. In a widely publicized debate, she took on one of the Campus Sluts, a fellow student who writes a popular sex blog (is there such a thing as an un popular sex blog?), but to the disappointment of spectators, it was a non-starter when the event failed to devolve into a catfight.

The rest of the piece is a sort of history of organized Ivy League celibacy, punctuated with unintentionally comical appearances by Fredell’s male co-virgin (he secretly yearns for Fredell) and the obligatory comparisons between Fredell and the sex blogger (these comparisons are confined to the porn-quotient of each woman’s outfit, and the disparity in their attitudes toward food. The stereotype-confirming message? Fredell is uptight because she wears modest jeans and won’t eat a dessert she clearly desires, whereas the sex blogger, who hoovered up “every crumb [...] including a ginger cake with cream-cheese frosting and raspberry compote,” while wearing a miniskirt and stilettos, demonstrates a laudable joie de vivre).

Anyway, Fredell’s solution to the problem of the aforementioned double standard is a) to promote chastity until marriage (but only heterosexual marriage; homos have to abstain forever) and b) — you guessed it — to call herself a feminist.

Aside from both the anti-homo bigotry and the misappropriation of the term “feminist,” this is my problem with the conclusion reached by Janie Fredell (the discerning reader will observe that it is precisely the same problem I have with funfeminism):

You can’t get out of the sex class just by saying you’re out of it. Saying “no” to uncouth boys in preparation for heterosexual marriage (heterosexual marriage is the basic unit of patriarchy) and calling it “empowering” is no different from saying “yes” to uncouth boys in preparation for a BDSM three-way and calling that “empowering.” In trying to liberate themselves from what they have rationally identified as the constraints of the sex class mandate, both the virgin and the sex blogger actually capitulate by continuing to define themselves in terms of sex (Fredell even aligns herself with pornulists when she describes virginity as “extremely alluring”). Note that control of the concept of sex is not up to either of them. That pleasure falls strictly within the purview of the male-dominated social order. Thus, in a patriarchy, all sex, gay or straight, marital, pre-, or abstained-from, is dudesex.

That’s the thing about patriarchy. It does the defining, not you. That’s what makes it the dominant paradigm. You can abstain from sex, you can fuck your way across the universe, you can be a stone butch dyke with a utility belt, you can get your boobs amputated and your uterus ripped out, you can be sex-neutral in your own crackpot mind, you can be ugly or hawt, you can be the Democrats’ presidential nominee, you can even age out of desirability, but you will always be defined in terms of, and used according to, that which the dominant culture describes as your essence: sex. Or, as you are alternately defined: a receptacle for the perpetuation of male supremacy.

UPDATE: Ha!

Posted in Femininity, Men Hate You and Strawfeminism. Bite me, Chad.

The evangelical pro-life guide to sexy feminism

Published by Twisty on March 25, 2008. 156 Comments

These remarks from reader Liz conveniently summarize, more or less, my own views on sexy feminism. She begins with quoted text from another commenter.

“Sexy feminism (aka sex-positivism) isn’t about appealing to men and thus perpetuation [sic] the patriarchy through internalized sexism. It’s about claiming our own sexual pleasure and our own bodies. It’s about doing what we want despite the patriarchy. It’s about using our bodies for our own pleasure or to express our own thoughts, despite how you or anyone else interprets our bodies. We’re saying, ‘It’s my body and I get to decide how to use it.’” [Context]

It’s interesting that [Twisty] mention[s] Clinton and fun feminism in the same post, because people criticize Clinton as “more of the same,” and that’s exactly how I feel whenever a feminist tries to convince me that “sexy feminism” is about having control over your own sexuality. You know what would make me feel like I had control over my own sexuality? Having the same rights as guys to walk around topless on the beach without feeling afraid or ogled as some kind of sex object, or being able to breast feed my baby in public without that being offensive or risque or any kind of issue at all, or being able to walk home at night alone without being groped by some drunk asshole.

Instead, “sex positive” feminists focus on is the ability to accept themselves as sexual, which they only attain by presenting a version of themselves that others readily find acceptable and have since way before I was born. Would you feel so empowered by your sexuality if you didn’t have a receptive audience? Nothing new here. Nothing challenging.

I think our desire to gain control over our own sexuality is important (and hopefully possible), but this whole “sexy feminist” movement completely misunderstands what that means. I’m “sex positive,” (stupid term) by the way, and I think that this label is completely misused by practically everyone as a way of insinuating that those who disagree with their self-exploitation are somehow anti-sex.

We already have the ability to use our bodies to turn ourselves on and others on. What we don’t have is the control over showing our bodies in a non-sexual way, because whenever the clothes come off, we’re sexualized. Being able to control that distinction is central to having true control over your body, yet “sexy feminists” never talk about that, and they just present us with more lame burlesque acts and sad porn sites.

As long as Liz brought it up, let me just say this one last thing about sexy feminism. It’s a too-too-tool of the patriarkay. It’s an expedient justification, a way to rebrand what everybody does when they’re in their twenties, which is to drink too much and screw a lot, as a cool 21st-century-activist political activity.

This would just be kind of funny, you know, youthful hi-jinx and whatnot, except that, since it is entirely devoid of philosophic value, sexy feminism has sort of caught on. It’s had the untoward effect of diluting the message of actual feminism. And the even more untoward effect of vilifying radical feminism. And the even more untoward effect of strengthening patriarchal oppression.

What do I mean by “sexy feminism”? Suicide Girls. Bust magazine. BDSM. The “position” that women should be free to “choose” femininity if that’s what bangs their box. The idea that embracing sexploitation is “empowering.” The notion that women “can do what we want despite patriarchy.”

What I don’t mean is: the effort to liberate women’s sexuality from the clutches of its traditional, misogynist, male-defined constraints, i.e. the effort to define women’s sexuality in terms of women, as opposed to men defining women in terms of sex. These are issues of ongoing concern to serious feminists and committed spinster aunts, but, as it turns out, have nothing to do with the preservation of feminine submission as a lifestyle choice.

Let’s face it, girls. We’re living in a war zone and orgasms are a dime a dozen. The performance of pornulated, dude-appeasing sex moves just isn’t important enough to form the basis of an entire political ideology. Particularly when that ideology presumes to co opt and dilute a movement which was formerly of some use to women. Seeing as how feminism was originally founded on sound philosophical principles thought up by thinkers, and had the potential to liberate millions of women from an endless cycle of violence, persecution, and poverty.

Sexy feminism creates two groups of women, but, oddly enough, neither group is for women. I allude to the “sex-positive” group and the “anti-sex” group. The first benefits the status quo. It reassures women who fear the burden of true liberation that femininity is a legitimate identity. The second is the fictitious enemy of the first — a stand-in for the real oppressor — and functions as the dark, hairy background against which the glowing orgasmic accomplishments of the sexy feminists may glitter in the light of life’s dudely disco ball. Of course there is no real group of anti-sexites; this is a fabrication that allows sexy feminists to indulge in patriarchy-appeasing misogyny on feminist blogs.

I propose third, easy-breezy alternative to the suffocating conformity demanded by this tiresome positive vs. negative binary thought system: sex-neutralism. Get busy, don’t get busy, whatever! While recognizing that penis placement has enormous political, social, and economic ramifications, particularly for members of the sex caste, the sex-neutral feminist — and I may be the only one alive — puts the act itself on a par with sneezing. Pleasant enough when it happens, but hardly worth elevating to the pinnacle of human acheivement, or devoting 98% of an internet to.

“Thoughts,” as our first commenter suggests, may well be “expressed” through boinking, but whether such thoughts differ substantially in philosophic value from sneezal effluents is dubitable.

By the way, you can’t “do what you want despite patriarchy.” Patriarchy declines to offer you full agency, even if — particularly if — you try to take it. That’s why patriarchy is bad.

Posted in Femininity and Strawfeminism. Bite me, Chad.