Archive for the 'The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today' Category

Pinkness ensures replication of patriarchal ideals

Published by Twisty on January 21, 2012. 114 Comments

How delightful to follow a link on the US birth control coverage benefit to HuffPo’s “Women” page. Everything is baby-pink!

What a relief, all that pink, because the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women clearly state that if the fairer sex go longer than 16 minutes without girlification, ghettoization, infantilization, and condescension, they’re liable to start acting like unfuckable men. From there, as you can well imagine, it’s but a short, slippery hop to the cosmos-rocking vortex of horror that would be the dissolution of the gender binary, followed closely by the total destruction of oppression culture as we know it.

In short, to save the galaxy, public institutions need to keep women’s shit pink. So kudos to the internet’s most popular blog for doing its part to ensure the ongoing safety of the status quo.

The reassuring baby-pinkness sets the “Women” section apart from the regular Huffington Post. The regular Huffington Post color scheme is a non-giggly, trustworthy forest green. This green HuffPo, of course, is not for women, but rather for normal people, people who dig porn and don’t dream of weddings 18 hours a day. Replete with gravitas, it’s got stories about Newt Gingrich’s horndog open marriage, a girl getting eaten by a crocodile, a severed head found in Hollywood Park, and a photo of that slut Snooki without her slut makeup.

But the pink women of America don’t give a shit about that crap. What we want is a list of the Top 10 cities where “sensitive men” can be found. We want horoscopes, because astrology is totally fun. And when we read about Newt Gingrich, we don’t want to think about the South Carolina primary, we want to ponder the weighty question of whether you should let your husband screw other women. We want articles explaining why booty calls (“comfort sex”) are awesome. We want about 257 other articles on relationship management and self-loathing. In short, as long as it has to do with sex, it has to do with women. Women equal sex!

The birth control coverage benefit, by the way, is one of the few not altogether depressing things to come down the women’s health pike in quite some time. If you missed it: it ensures (with the usual godbaggy caveats) that health insurance will now cover prescription birth control. For years misogynist jacknuts who adhere to the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women have concluded that any sexual use of women, such as compulsory pregnancy, is perfectly awesome, and that the whole concept of reproductive health is just a feminist, America-hating scam, and that legislation ought to reflect the sacredness of the dudely seed over the health and well-being of us second-class glory holes.

For a second, over at the Huffington Post, while reporting on a rare government platform that appears to quasi-validate the human status of women, the natural order was out of whack. But luckily the aforementioned blog post on the victory for women’s reproductive health appears on a “liberal” forum in a pink ghetto surrounded by infinite messages that women are sex toilets. Whew! Natural order restored!

Posted in Compulsory pregnancy, Mass Media, Not Altogether Depressing and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.

The thread about Siri

Published by Twisty on December 3, 2011. 117 Comments

My phone takes rather a familiar tone.

“I’d rather talk about why Siri is sexist.” — blamer Josquin, on a thread about Rape-X.

Well, have at it, Josquin!

For my part, I haven’t been able to determine whether Siri is sexist or not, because she declines to function properly on my phone. I have come to actively dislike her. Just now I asked her if she was sexist; her answer was that she can’t answer.

“Can’t,” Siri? Or won’t? Cagey.

UPDATE: Two seconds of Googling reveals that, duh, of course Siri is sexist. Siri’s programmers are dudes, after all. Quelle surprise, Amanda Marcotte has a post addressing this very topic.

Siri behaves much like a retrograde male fantasy of the ever-compliant secretary: discreet, understanding, willing to roll with any demand a man might come up with, teasingly accepting of dirty jokes. Oh yeah, and mainly indifferent to the needs of women.

At my house, we discovered this while playing with Siri’s quickly established willingness to look up prostitutes for a straight man in need. When you say to Siri, “I need a blow job,” she produces “nine escorts fairly close to you”. You get the same result if you say, “I’m horny” into it, even with my very female voice.

So she’ll find you a prostitute but she won’t tell you where you can get birth control or an abortion? Siri’s a damned collaborator?

I’ll have to take Amanda’s word for it, since my Siri is apparently too busy blowing dudes to give me the time of day. Literally, she won’t even tell me what time it is.

UPDATE 2: Jane Martinson, who, because all other writing at the Guardian is presumed to be for dudes, writes The Women’s Blog, says that in the UK Siri is a dude, and is useful only for implementing search engines, and only if it is spoken to in an American accent. UK Siri will, however, locate reproductive health clinics on Google for you. Thus Martinson’s findings are that Siri isn’t sexist, just stupid.

She’s wrong of course.

UPDATE 3: A “writing fellow” at American Prospect wants to make it clear that s/he is not accusing Apple of misogyny when s/he concurs with Amanda about the reproductive health thing: “The problem with Siri isn’t that the programmers hate women, it’s that they [women] weren’t even on the radar.”

Hey, writing fellow! The intent of the programmers is flippin irrelevant. The point, silly fellow, is that women experience exclusion from “the radar” as misogyny. Misogyny.

Posted in Open Threads and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.

Whew, that was close

Published by Jill on November 10, 2011. 66 Comments

Wouldn’t you know it, my office was recently swallowed up by a quantum vortex-oscillation anomaly, so, obviously, I haven’t been able to get much blaming in. However, the subspace crystalline entity hasn’t yet been spontaneously generated that could prevent this professional spinster aunt from discharging two of her most cherished duties: recognizing a human rights victory, and hacking up loogey of savage death disdain for busybody godbags everywhere. It is in this spirit of consororitous obstreperosity that I step across the event horizon into this bizarro-universe to publish this post.

I know it is a bizarro-universe because I am typing the following words:

Let us mark with a glad cry the defeat of Initiative 26, the depraved attempt by delusional godbags in Mississippi — the most delusionally godbaggy state in the US — to confer “personhood” on fertilized human eggs. Hah-yee ip-ip! A heartfelt butch-ass chin-nod of appreciation goes out from Spinster HQ to everyone who worked on the successful campaign to smush that extremely crappy amendment.

I have to say, zygote worship truly is one of the freakier manifestations of modern fundamentalist misogyny. Here is a zygote (magnification 2.73 bajillion):

Zygote: Suck it, human host! I rule and you're Number 2!

How could the Lard love that dumb thing more than, for example, me?

Spinster aunt hails a TARDIS.

I’m not only a more scintillating conversationalist than a zygote, but I can type faster, I pay taxes, and I look better in plaid. Jesus! These meddling religioshitbags! Their deity is a total loser with bad taste.

As you know, whenever people go around recognizing odd bits of reproductive matter as “persons,” they simultaneously un-recognize women as persons, ceding ownership of women’s personal internal organs to the state and instituting a programme of compulsory pregnancy. If Initiative 26 had passed, those two cells up there would actually have more human rights than an actual human woman. For instance, unlike actual women, the state wouldn’t be able to dictate to the cells what they could or couldn’t do with their personal organelles. The state probably doesn’t even know what organelles are. Furthermore, zygotes would enjoy state-mandated free room and board at their human host’s expense. They wouldn’t even have to pay for cable.

But the lives of actual human women would remain subject to the whim of the Jesus-sucking mob. Raped at 14 by your mother’s meth-head boyfriend? Suck it, whore, you’re bringin’ that fetus to term. Got cancer and need chemo and radiation? Suck it, whore, you’re bringin’ that fetus to term. Aren’t feelin’ it with the compulsory pregnancy dealio, like it might be somewhat discrepant from your goal to win the Tricorder X Prize? Suck it, whore, you’re bringin’ that fetus to term! And you’d better be a good mother once it’s born — so no getting depressed, no having a glass of wine to dull the crushing pain of your hijacked life, no having any time to yourself — or we’ll put you on the evening news and throw the kid in foster care with pedophiles.

Another point on the depraved misogyny continuum is this shit in Saudi Arabia, where it is a flippin headline when a woman drives a flippin car. Saudi women, as you know, are banned from driving. Apparently if they jaunt around town behind the wheel they become sin-magnets who give God brain tumors. In Saudi Arabia, women never reach the age of majority. They are, their whole lives, wholly owned subsidiaries of male dudes, and can’t do anything without dudely permission.

So the other day some 29 Saudi women got fed up with this program. They took to the open road and drove to the grocery store. This act of defiance unleashed quite the furor.

An anti-driving group on Facebook has called on “real men” to beat up women who drive. On Twitter, activists were called “westernised whores.” Washington Post

Dudes on the Internet: so classy the world over.

Considering that last September a woman who got busted for driving while female was sentenced to 10 lashes by some Muslim putzwad whose deity is also a total loser, these 29 rogue drivers also get a heartfelt butch-ass chin-nod from Spinster HQ. May the day soon arrive when they can fire their hated chauffeurs.

(As a westernised whore, I personally think having a chauffeur would be awesome, but à chacun son gôut.)

Posted in Compulsory pregnancy, Politics and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.

And another thing I’m sick of

Published by Jill on November 7, 2011. 106 Comments

On NPR the other day some interviewer — I forget which one — was interviewing some novelist — I forget which one — about the novelist’s new novel — I forget which one. The interviewer was a woman, the novelist was a woman, and the novel was about some women.

“How difficult was it,” asked the interviewer, “to write strong women characters?”

My bitter, mirthless laugh drowned out the author’s earnest reply. Because:

“So, Mr Chaucer/Joyce/Hemingway/Virtually Any Other Male Author In The History Of English And American Literature, how difficult was it to write strong men characters?”

It’s a given, not a talk show topic, that strong male characters will inhabit any given work of regular fiction. Dude characters have their requisite flaws, but they’re fully drawn and interesting because men are popularly conceived to already be strong enough to have books written about them. In fact, the word “strong” never prepends the word “man” in American English unless the topic is circus acts. But in recent literature, film, TV, and blogs, the Strong Woman has emerged as a thing, an archetype.

What are the components of this strong woman character?

In some cases, perhaps, they are the same components as any other well-written character. But in the popular imagination, the Strong Woman is the one-dimensional composite of post-feminist megatheocorporatocratic marketing: tough but feminine, fighty, a little mouthy, indomitable in the face of adversity, but ultimately heterosexual and predominantly concerned with relationships. Always, at her core, is that reassuring lump of insecurity that ends up making her life about men. She is the latest addition to the cluster of popular stock characters infesting the literary canon: the harridan, the voluptuary, the madwoman in the attic, the girl next door, the cipher, the virgin, the nag, the mother-in-law, the mouse, the shrew, and the spinster aunt.

Because she is a femininity affirmation device, the Strong Woman is never strong in the sense that she actually seeks actual liberation. For instance, she never says, “to hell with this funfeminism crap, I’m blowing off the beauty mandate and challenging patriarchal oppression.” She just holds her head up and conquers breast cancer or earns that big promotion, and is enriched by the experience, and then has a relationship with a dude.

Enough with the “strong woman” designation, already. All women are “strong.” If we’re not strong, we’re dead.

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

Storytime Korner

Published by Jill on October 15, 2011. 135 Comments

Hotel San JoseWell, a couple weeks ago Stingray and I were prancing up S. Congress Ave after having anointed ourselves with hipster fumes at Jo’s, when this wacked out hipster kid comes careening toward us, chanting nonsense. His bearing was somewhat aggressive, so we said “nyah!” back at him. He gave us the once-over with a stinkeye that seemed to suggest that he wouldn’t be at all surprised if we turned out to be the cause of the economic downturn. Then he actually jeered.

“You’re just too stupid,” went the jeer, “to know what I’m talking about!”

Stingray and I exhanged a chuckle as we passed, going, “yeah right, we’re too stupid, that’ll be the day.” We were confident in our lack of stupidity because we have never in our lives been the intellectual inferiors of some rude stoner gibberish-babbling kid who by this time had alighted on the stoop of the Hotel San Jose and assumed a recumbent, yet somehow hostile, pose. The mysterious words were oozing out of him like blood.

“What did that shit even mean?” I said, dodging a pair of American Apparel models.

“Yeah,” said Stingray, “what a load.”

What was the stoner kid chanting?

“Occupy Wall Street!”

______________
Photo: Scene of the burst of solo stoner activism. Hotel San Jose, Austin TX, February 2006.

Posted in The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.

Whoops

Published by Jill on October 1, 2011. 30 Comments

Any moron knows not to kick someone in the head while wearing open-toed shoes.

Forgot I had a blog. Sorry about that.

But here’s a sweet little movie you won’t want to miss. Girl Fight airs on Lifetime this Monday. “Inspired” by a “true story” about mean girls who beat up one of their own and post it on YouTube for internet fame and revenge, it’s super on-trend. Although Lifetime says “Girl Fight” is about “peer pressure, media scrutiny and forgiveness” its actual purpose would appear be 1) to deliver titillating footage of a teenage girl kicking the shit out of a teenage girl, and 2) to intone another cautionary tale about the dire consequences that can go down whenever a teenage girl steps out of line (or, in an unguarded moment, posts something juvenile on Twitter).

The Lifetime Channel, as has been noted by larger brains than mine, is the TV authority of record when it comes to documenting the People magazine experience of Vagina-Americans. Violence, betrayal, insanity, torment, and murder. The Entertainment Industrial Complex has a vested interest in the defeat of feminist revolt, since a victory would rob them of all their most lurid plot devices.

Posted in Femininity, Mass Media, The Entertainment Industrial Complex and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. 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.

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.

Misogyny in the news: that’s entertainment!

Published by Jill on April 25, 2011. 63 Comments

You can always rely on news headlines to breathe a bit of life into the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women. For example, today’s two most popular stories on the KXAN Austin News website are

Pregnant woman beaten in north Austin
and
Mom finds grown man in teen’s bed.

You already know what these stories are about, but here are the synopses anyway:

1. Some prince of a guy punched his pregnant girlfriend in the face, rendering her unconscious, when he learned that the fetus didn’t contain any of his genetic material. Unexpected paternity is a very popular justification for smacking pregnant women around. Dudes love to violently punish women for getting pronged by other dudes, as well as for getting impregnated. Take that, bitch!

2. When a 14-year-old girl seemed too reluctant to leave her bedroom for a whole day, her mother became suspicious and broke down the door, whereupon she discovered a 22-year-old dude lounging in the daughter’s bed. The dude turned out to be one of those online predators. The news story omits no titillating detail. Oh, and in case you were worried that the girl would be let off the hook, rest assured that her mother is “holding her responsible” and has taken away her cell phone and computer. Take that, teen victim of dudely predation!

Note that in both stories the victims get what they deserve. The pregnant slut gets a beatdown, and the teen slut gets shamed by her own mom.

Cultural narratives consecrating the serene glow of motherhood and the innocent beauty of youth are pretty ubiquitous, yet pregnant women and teen girls are two of the most reviled and abused subsets of the sex class you’ll find anywhere (pregnant teens might as well just hang it up; no single group on the planet is as disenfranchised). The aforementioned news stories/cautionary tales show what happens when women fail to precisely mirror the Virgin Mary. They’re popular because beating pregnant women and raping teenage girls are themselves popular. In fact, these violent experiences transcend “popular”; they’re effing universal.

How universal? Well, everyone reading the headlines either has been beaten by, or knows someone who’s been beaten by, or is himself, a fuckwad in a jealous rage. Everyone has either fantasized about raping a kid, or has raped a kid, or knows that kid, or has been that kid.

But woe betide the Internet feminist who asserts that the universality of violence against women proves the existence of a global system of misogynist oppression. Feminists, apparently for the compelling reason that that we are simply jealous of the pretty girls, never shut the fuck up and accept that women are “equal” now. A spinster aunt gets so fed up with hearing how “equal” women are that she is apt to consider a comedy bit delivered by juvenile ultramisogynist Comedy Central dudebro Daniel Tosh a breath of fresh air. I’m not even kidding.

Daneil Tosh, whose tired comedy schtick is an endeavor to give the most offense possible, is, in the parlance of his peer group, a fucking douche. Douche-itude is generally greatly admired by the peer group to which I allude, but clearly something has gone awry with young Mr. Tosh. In fact, I’m surprised he hasn’t been brought before a DudeNation tribunal to face charges of treason, because here he is on national television actually admitting, to a nation of patriarchy-deniers, that patriarchy exists.

“At least we’re not women, right fellas?”

Laughter and applause.

“Ugh. Jeez. What is that like? Is it awful? Is it horrible? To know you’re Number 2?”

Laughter.

“By the way, these aren’t my beliefs, it’s my observations on the world I live in. If it changes, I’ll adjust the material accordingly.”

Laughter.

“I love when you try to rationalize it: ‘Oh, it’s great being a woman! Free drinks is worth not having equality!’”

Laughter and applause. [From Daniel Tosh one-hour special "Happy Thoughts," aired March 2011 on Comedy Central]

I consider this a breath of fresh air, not because it’s so nice when young white dudes exploit oppression for personal gain, but because a member of Team Misogyny has actually spoketh the truth for half a second. The truth being Men Hate You.

Even if I wanted to, which I don’t, I can’t link to the actual bit, since the video, which unsurprisingly also contains hilarious jokes about raping babies and beating girlfriends, is apparently considered actual comedy gold and is kept in some kind of a comedy vault.

Posted in Mass Media, Oppression Culture, The Entertainment Industrial Complex and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.

The boundless American appetite for the agony of strangers in crisis

Published by Jill on April 16, 2011. 78 Comments

According to the Blametariat, irrational fear of crows is a thing.

Spinster aunts are award-nominated experts on irrationality, but this crow dealio was news to us down at HQ, where the tragic dearth of crows has long been lamented, especially since recently screening a PBS documentary on the extraordinary intellective powers of these birds.

Still, it’s not surprising that people irrationally fear crows. The beady eyes, the ominous portent of deathiness, the nevermore, the occultish silhouette against a full moon. According to the Internet, people can irrationally afear pretty much anything. Feet. String. Death.

My sibling Tidy, for example, cannot abide a snake in any way, shape, or form. I’m not saying I don’t lurch sideways a foot or so whenever a serpent unexpectedly heaves into view, but the possibility of snakecine encounters doesn’t prevent me from traipsing through the woods on a spring morning with a cup of coffee and a couple of fairly decent dogs. Not Tidy, though. She wouldn’t traipse through the woods on a spring morning, with coffee and dogs or without, if it was the last spring morning on earth. She would rather have root canal sans novocaine performed in an unheated Siberian gulag in February by an ex-Nazi who keeps asking “is it safe?”.

Irrational behavior is entertaining as hell, apparently. It is so goddam entertaining that enterprising TV producers routinely exploit it for personal gain. Yesterday I happened to see on television a docu-reality show called “My Strange Addiction.” A woman compulsively eats toilet paper, a dude is in love with a mannequin. Experts are consulted. Gripping stuff. And this show is but e pluribus unum; there’s a whole Behind The Scenes With Crazy Chicks TV genre.

The depressing “Intervention” springs to mind. Producers collude with family members to deceive unsuspecting addicts into allowing themselves to be filmed shooting up or passed out in their own vomit. Lots of footage of weeping mothers. The addict inevitably storms out of the titular intervention, but eventually is talked into rehab. The family promises to attend codependency counseling, but they never bother to actually follow through, revealing that they don’t, in fact, give as much of a fuck as they pretended to during the shooting. Riveting reality-ishness, guaranteed to physically sicken you if you have ever known or been a real-life addict.

Voyeuristic schadenfreudians cannot be said to lack for hoardersploitation shows. There are not one, not two, not three, but four programs (as far as I know) devoted to compulsive hoarding. A light, comedic take on the debilitating illness is Style Network’s long-running “Clean House.” Host Niecy Nash opens up cans of SBF (Sassy Black Girlfriend) on clinically disposophobic couples from whose filthy households you can’t believe CPS hasn’t removed the kids. You can’t help but be alarmed that Nash, a D-list comedian who doesn’t even play a doctor on TV, has been put in charge of counseling all these clinically ill people. But somehow every show culminates with a jolly yard sale, and in the end the family gets a spa weekend, a home makeover, and happiness.

Possibly because hoarding is actually somewhat less hilarious than “Clean House” would suggest, things get progressively darker from there. “Hoarders” on A&E, and TLC’s “Hoarding: Buried Alive” are essentially the same dispiriting show. In every episode, a lone woman’s deep emotional attachment to her floor-to-ceiling mountains of garbage, hazardous waste, and thrift store crap threatens both her relationships and her physical health. Each dirty little stuffed animal or chipped teacup is a treasure with which she cannot part without trauma. When the despondent family fails to cure her with tears and shame, an expert wearing a respirator (it stinks in there!) tries to talk some sense into her. But the siren call of the trash is too strong. The epilogue always delivers the sad news that the city has condemned her house because the poor woman couldn’t get a grip.

But just when you think televised video of shattered lives edited for your viewing pleasure couldn’t get any more exploitative, Animal Planet presents the contemptible, incomparable “Confessions: Animal Hoarding.” New York magazine calls this “the most depressing reality show of all time.”

Horribly, truer words were never published on this or any other Internet.

It’s no secret that all reality shows are depressing in one way or another. Whether the competition style (wherein contestants turn on each other and ostracize the weak while “judges” decide their fate), or the documentary style (the focus is on some sort of aberration, such as homicidal brides-to-be), you can’t watch them without a gnawing sense of shame. That plastic surgery-cum-beauty pageant series was pretty hard to take, and lard knows the regular hoarding shows are seriously problematic, but it is difficult to imagine passing off as entertainment a more disturbing scenario than the one presented by “Confessions: Animal Hoarding”. Sad, damaged, isolated people try to cope with personal pain by imprisoning in their own filth dozens or even hundreds of helpless cats, dogs, horses, or bunnies. The afflicted subjects don’t perceive themselves as abusers even when mummified kitten corpses are excavated from couch cushions; they “love” the animals upon whom they have visited this suffering, and freak out when removal is threatened. If you can sit through an entire episode of this horrorshow your lobe is made of sterner stuff than mine.

Where to begin with the blaming? The hoarders are goaded into crisis mode by the producers, are filmed at their most degraded and desperate moments, and are ultimately depicted as delusional grotesques. It is unclear whether they actually receive any long-term psychiatry, or whether their “treatment” ends when the respirator-wearin’ expert splits town with the film crew. The exploitation of animal suffering adds a whole nother level of quease. Often, because animal protection laws are inadequate, some of the removed animals may be returned to their abusers. But the most repellent aspect is that the whole enterprise is fed by a slavering prurience for human debasement-as-spectacle.

Who but a stunt driver with a death wish would attempt the insane Ben White/I-35 flyover?

But wait. Just so we’re clear, sometimes what appears to be irrational behavior is merely a case of extreme common sense, and it’s everybody else who’s flippin’ crazy. Certain spinster aunts, for example, will not attempt to drive an automobile over the ridiculously high 290 East/MoPac North overpass without a couple of milligrams of Ativan on board. Furthermore, we they will not, under any circumstances or any amount of drugs, even consider the even higher Ben White-to-northbound I-35 flyover, even though this sensible choice necessitates an inconvenient detour. Though some snake-phobic siblings may — and do — vociferously disagree, there is nothing irrational about flyover-avoidance behavior. On the contrary; tooling at 60 miles per hour across the Ben White Ramp of Death is what’s irrational. Seriously, this ramp is unbelievable. In terms of improbability, gargatuaneousness, vertiginosity and suicidality, driving a car over the fucking St Louis Arch would pale in comparison.

Anyway, “Confessions: Animal Hoarding” wins this week’s Ditwuss Award.*

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* Ditwuss = DTWS = Degrades The Whole Species.

Crow photo: screengrab from “A Murder of Crows” | Nature | PBS

Flyover photo: Google Maps

Posted in Lobe-blowing, Mass Media, The Entertainment Industrial Complex and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.