Archive for the 'Women hate you' Category

Spinster aunt loses train of thought, abandons essay

Published by Jill on July 15, 2011. 90 Comments

It is one of the bitterest, lobe-burstingest ironies of feminism that its meager success has collaterally enbiggened the opportunities of antifeminist women. Susan Faludi once pointed out that progressive women who succeed professionally often publicly give props to feminism even as they inwardly struggle with patriarchy-generated guilt and self-doubt, but that prominent right wing women do the opposite, publicly espousing antifeminist ideology to the masses while personally putting feminist principles smoothly and efficiently into practice on the DL.

Take Michele Bachmann. She hates gays and fluorescent light, and loves Jesus and compulsory pregnancy, but has no qualms whatsoever about enjoying an influential, self-determined career outside the home as she flits about the political sphere.* It’s almost as though she fancies herself a liberated woman with some personal agency. She has used the feminist springboard to swan-dive into prominence, from which spot she can proceed to gay-bash, suck up to Dude Nation, and demand constitutional amendments prohibiting abortion.

Now one hears all this absurd murmuring about Bachmann (and her creepy godmother Sarah Palin) having turned themselves officially into something called “evangelical feminists.”

You know, like Jews for Jesus, or Baby Seals for Canadian Seal Clubbers.

Apparently there really is a movement of evangelical feminists, and they’re cheesed. They appear to actually grasp the idea that women are human, so they’re voting Bachmann and Palin off their island (Women Who Ignore Biblical Misogyny Island. It’s a about a thousand nautical miles south of Savage Death Island).

“This application of the term ["evangelical feminist" to Bachmann and Palin] twists the meaning of both “evangelical” and “feminism.” It equates “evangelical” with a far right political ideology rather than its historic definition. And it equates “feminism” simply with a woman’s running for public office even though she may deny full equality and autonomy for women in other areas of life. — Letha Dawson Scanzoni, founding mother of the Biblical feminist movement

Meanwhile, actual feminism continues to gasp for breath as it gets simultaneously coopted, beaten with fundie clubs, and redefined as antifeminism by various assholes. For example, the quotation above came from this blog called Religion Dispatches, where blogger Julie Ingersoll also hipped me to the existence of Smart Girl Summit 2011.**

Smart Girl Summit 2011 will feature arch-misogynist Phyllis Schlafly, who will address “girls” (actually women, but calling them girls reassures everyone of the actual status of female adults) on the subject of how feminism threatens to destroy all life on Earth. Smart Girl Politics is an antifeminist 501(c) dedicated to nurturing misogyny in nascent conservatives by “empowering” them to “fight like a girl” for their right to cram patriarchal mores down everybody’s throat.

Uh oh. This essay had a point, but I’ve forgotten what it was, and now I gotta go to work, so I guess I’ll just leave it here flapping in the breeze. Pointless, breeze-flappin’ essays; they’re what separate the spinster aunt hacks from the responsible journalists who are paid by employers to write professional, polished, unbiased pieces on Justin Bieber or health care reform.

_______________________
* When feminist women buck the hausfrau system, it’s a different story; Bachmann’s evangelical brethren view it as “a satanic attack on the [American family].”

** How fucking patronizing is that name, “Smart Girl Summit”? Can you even imagine a conservative political action group holding a Smart Boy Summit for adult men? To teach them how to fight like a girl? Haw!

Posted in Politics, Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society and Women hate you. 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.

A lil bit of twerking and lifting

Published by Jill on December 18, 2010. 39 Comments

Patriarchy blamers are world renowned for their (professed) eschewment of cable television, so it is possible that you have not heard of the most misogynist TV show ever conceived. As an award-nominated professional bearer of bad news, I am here to correct this situation.

The history of women’s degradation is long and colorful, but this “Bridalplasty” show takes the wedding cake. Once it has taken the wedding cake, it smushes it in the face of the last little shred of simple human dignity to which the sex class has been desperately clinging for the past 8000 years.

Wait, did I say “Bridalplasty”?

I’m afraid so, and yup, it’s exactly the gross-out you think it is. The hideous mutant clone of “Bridezillas” and “The Swan,” “Bridalplasty” is a tour de force of exploitation megalotainment such as the world has never known. The laughably sicko “plot”? Says the website: “Brides-to-be compete in challenges to earn plastic-surgery procedures in a quest to win their ultimate dream wedding.”

Is there anything about that sentence that fails to induce dry heaves?

Still, you almost have to admire the show’s creators for managing to clabber together into a single pulsating, inspissated lump of banality not one, not two, but three really top-tier femininity behaviors: catfighting, weddings, and self-mutilation. A typical scene depicts one contestant visiting another in her hospital bed as she convalesces from a nosejob; their conversation is about forming an “alliance” to thwart the evil bitch Jessica (“You better sleep with one eye open, bitch, ‘cuz I’m after you.”). Promos include a conventionally pretty contestant stabbing at her own head with pointed fingers, declaiming “I want this butt-face fixed!” Of the humiliating “challenges” let me say this: brides-to-be are given two glasses of sparkling wine and instructed to determine which one cost only $3.98; apparently this test reveals whether they possess sufficient taste to pull off a classy wedding reception. So it’s classist on top of everything else. Awesome! The prize for guessing correctly is a surgery to implant cadaver meat in their lips or some shit.

The lobe-blowing thing is that the show’s audience can drink in all this misogyny week after week and not take to the streets demanding immediate liberation from patriarchal tyranny.

Or can they? Has “Bridalplasty’s” corporate-sponsored hate and scorn finally pushed devoted E! channel viewers too far? A glance at the E! discussion board reveals this glittering jewel of feminist outrage:

“Personally I think this is a disgustingly misogynistic show! The very idea that a woman is incapable of being a ‘perfect bride’ without undergoing radical, dangerous surgery to be more aesthetically pleasing to the general public is obscene.”

I regret to say that this commenter’s future as a patriarchy blamer is not, perhaps, so bright as it initially appears. She knows what “misogyny” means, and she gets that plastic surgery is an extreme form of it, but doesn’t seem to grasp the inherent misogyny in the concepts of either bride-dom or feminine perfection. Sadly, although a few other detractors add their rancor to the comments, their unanimous refrain suggest that beauty, dudely validation, and marriage remain undisputed life goals:

“These women [don't need surgery; they] were obviously proposed to because their husbands think that they are [already] beautiful.”

That is, they’ve got it made in the shade; their dudes have pre-approved their degree of conformity to the patriarchal beauty mandate or they never would have popped the question in the first place.

Unsurprisingly, most of the remaining comments are quite the little tiptoe down Self-Loathing Lane:

There is nothing wrong with wanting to enter marriage a lil more perfect/ sexier than you did when you were just a “girlfriend”….what better gift to give urself and hubby than to be than a (better) “trophy wife”, even if it takes a lil bit of twerking and lifting.

The E! channel, for those saintly readers who don’t own televisions, is also responsible for such life-affirming programming as “The Girls Next Door,” a reality show about the enpornulated women who make a living draping themselves like silk bathrobes over septuagenarian perv Hugh Hefner’s living corpse, and “True Hollywood Story,” which produces incisive documentaries revealing such “insider secrets” as Katy Perry’s having once eaten at Taco Bell, and interviews with prostituted women who have been used by Charlie Sheen.

Yeah, it burns.

_____________________
Photo nicked from the “Bridalplasty” website.

Posted in Femininity, Mass Media, Oppression Culture, The Beauty Ultimatum, The Entertainment Industrial Complex and Women hate you. Bite me, Chad.

Sunday Morning Hurl: Mama Grizzlies

Published by Jill on July 18, 2010. 410 Comments


What the Mama Grizzly is wearing this season. From SarahPAC video.

Whenever a right-wing woman — any right-wing woman — claims to be a feminist, she doesn’t do it in a vacuum. She isn’t just hurting herself. Her antifeminist feminism has violent repercussions and broad implications. It spreads like a contagion from patriotically-attired partisan church lady to Fox news to housewife to housedaughter, cutting a swath of intellectual death in its wake. Research conducted here at the Spinstitute for the Intellectual Lifespan of Female Children shows that for each right-wing woman who performs in the capacity of an empowerful flag-waving heterosexual, 107.6 little girls can kiss their future human agency goodbye as it flutters off into the aether. Like their mothers before them, these little girls will have to pay for their own rape kits, be denied access to abortions, shop for pink lipstick at Wal-Mart, and be judged on their compliance with male desire until they ultimately become wife-slaves in nuclear families of their own, dedicated to consumerism and the replication of patriarchy.

Because the right-wing woman’s real agenda is compulsory compliance with megatheocorporatocratic mandates governing fair use of women, it’s bad enough when specimens from the rank and file pretend to give a fuck about other women. But when celebrity airhead Sarah Palin, with cameras running, gets all feisty and empowerful, the number of doomed girls vomitosially increases to 2,320,917, rising exponentially each time somebody watches her “Mama Grizzlies” SarahPAC vid on YouTube.

Mama Grizzlies! It’s a “mom awakening.” They’re gonna “get things done!” What things? Who the hell knows? Who the hell cares? Sarah Palin loves America, and that’s good enough for moms!

“Moms kinda just know when somethin’s wrong,” asserts Palin, addressing her back-to-basics, anti-intellectual female fan base, all of whom “just know” that ‘women’s intuition’ is a sound basis for vague social policy. Palin’s video blames “these policies comin’ out of DC right now,” this “fundamental transformation of America” for the existence of all this stuff that moms just kinda know is wrong.

But what wrong stuff, exactly, do the moms kinda just know? What, precisely, is the Mama Grizzly banding together against? To what — if it isn’t too much to ask — is she saying “no”?

Apparently, Mama Grizzlies are against whatever they kinda just want to be against, because Palin doesn’t mention a single issue in her video. It features a few quick cuts to protesters waving issue-ish but ultimately vacuous posters (“ANNOY LIBERAL WORK HARD & PAY YOUR OWN BILLS”), but what this charming little fillip of issue-less propaganda actually does is give uninformed right-wing women an anti-Obama political identity, a white ladies’ tribe to join. It’s the Mama Grizzlies Tribe, where you can be against stuff without even knowing what it is, where you all you have to grasp about politics is that something’s kinda just wrong, and that Sarah Palin’s gonna get it fixed because, even though she doesn’t hold public office and isn’t running for one, she loves America, so vote for her candidates in November.

Mama Grizzlies may not have a specific cause, but they are just as tough and fighty as Sarah! To wit:

The Mama Grizzlies are “gonna turn this thing around” and “get our country back on the right track.” They’re “banding together, rising up, and saying ‘no this isn’t right’. For our kids and for our grandkids. [...] Lookout Washington! Cuz there’s a whole stampede of pink elephants crossin’ the line and the ETA is November 2nd 2010!”

Lookout Washington! A pack of Mama Grizzlies have just morphed into a herd of pink elephants! Either way, you’re gonna have a sanitation problem on your hands.

Posted in The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today, The megatheocorporatocracy and Women hate you. Bite me, Chad.

“Women withhold sex because men let them get away with it”

Published by Jill on June 12, 2010. 93 Comments

Feel like puking? Check out this crusty scab of human hatred from the Fox News website, a men’s advice column entitled “Reasons Women Withhold Sex.”

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “why would I feel like puking?” Or possibly, “why would anyone bother writing a men’s advice column entitled ‘Reasons Women Withhold Sex’ when the answer, so obvious to anyone with half a grip, is ‘because sex with you sucks’?”

But apparently men need to hear something other than the truth. Enter men’s advice-ist Sarah Stefanson. Rarely has so puke-a-riffic an example of the acculturation of sexist male entitlement been seen in this, or any other, galaxy.

I would call Sarah Stefanson a lousy turncoat collaborating suck-up shitbag, but I don’t want to jump to conclusions. There’s always the possibility that she was forced against her will to scrawl this feces-stain on the knickers of human achievement. Forced, perhaps, by some asshole who literally held a gun to her head, threatening to kneecap her 80-year-old grandma and foreclose on her 9-acre dirt farm, send a shipment of tainted vaccines to blind orphans in Bangladesh, and drown a sackful of kittens in a pond of toxic run-off. That has to be the scenario, because otherwise I’d be forced to contemplate that there actually exists a woman so degraded, so corrupt, so sociopathic, or so desperate that she would willingly turn out this kind of unremitting, lobe-scorching dudebro misogyny for the pitiful sum of 10 cents a word.

But I digress.

Sarah Stefanson’s hate speech addresses a dudely audience, and begins, I am sorry to say, like this:

One of the benefits of being in a long-term relationship is that you have someone that you can readily depend on for regular sex.

But uh-oh. Dude’s dependable meatsock may not be feelin’ it. She may even be “withholding” it. This suggests that the benefits of which Sarah Stefanson speaks so glowingly might be experienced by the party of the second part as unpleasantness. Hence her tips on how to manipulate your sex-woman and “get the carnal door open again” (Jaysus, 10 cents a word for that? Kill me now).

Observes Stefanson, “if there’s one area of a relationship women think they have control over, it’s sex.” But don’t buy it, men!

In the wild world of men’s advice columny, “purposefully withholding” sex is universally understood as a wholly nefarious, cruel, and mystifying method of female retribution. That’s because sex is a commodity to which men are entitled by the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women. Women are the sex class. If the flow of access is interrupted, the natural order is out of whack, and your sex-woman needs to be reset. But hey, chillax, bra! Stefanson’s column addresses the painful question “what can a suffering dude do when his receptacle is ‘purposefully withholding’ sex?”

In answering the question, Sarah Stefanson, with whom I begin to grow increasingly annoyed, leaves no tired old war-between-the-sexes cliché unturned. Women who “close up shop” (yes, really) are manipulative, out to prove who’s boss, cheating, or “playing games.” If they’re too tired to fuck, men are urged to poke them with sticks. If none of the tactics listed sufficiently cajoles them, “you might have to wait it out and service yourself until she comes to her senses.” But ultimately, Sarah Stefanson opines, women withhold sex “because men let them get away with it.” So man up, you spineless fairy, and take what’s yours.

Stefanson’s article is a stupid lowbrow clump of oppression-culture condensation, and doesn’t really merit a full-on paragraph-by-paragraph analysis, but it’s worth pointing out that it was filed on a major news website under “Men’s Health,” where it is accepted, uncritically and without analysis, that women are an underclass with so little agency that sexual manipulation is their only recourse.

Puke.

[Thanks, PhioGistic]

Posted in Dear god what about the men?, Men Hate You, Oppression Culture and Women hate you. Bite me, Chad.

Citizens of the Poconos, unite against slutty teen rape victims!

Published by Jill on June 9, 2010. 68 Comments

It’s heartwarming, our pretty society’s outpouring of love for little girls. Behold the sugarplum fairytale of this 13-year old Pennsylvania girl:

According to a marginally informative article in the Lehigh Valley Morning Call, Douchebag Supreme Michael J Lisk raped the girl repeatedly for over a year, made her pregnant, then furtively buried the fetus after she induced her own abortion with a “lead pencil” (a process lasting three days).

The article is lousy with rape culture and fetus-fetish language, probably pulled verbatim from the police report. Patriarchy-favorable language like this is used all the time in police reports and the media, where it is instrumental in perpetuating the normalization of violent misogyny. In this case, the lingo portrays the kid as an active participant in deviant baby-killing.

– She “threw” the plastic bag containing the fetus she had “delivered.”
– The article describes a tender birth scene wherein the rapist exhorts the girl to “push hard.”
– The girl “gave birth” to a “stillborn baby.”
– As though they ought to be considered a couple, “the two” had a long-standing “sexual relationship” from the time she was 12.

Translation: clearly this little Lolita was no innocent virgin naif.

Small wonder, then, that the comments from imperfectly educated denizens of the Pennsylvania Poconos identify the girl as a dirty slut and call for her head. They’re all worked up about this baby-killer slut they read about in the paper.

I know when I was 13, I knew what sex was and that is caused pregnacy [sic] and that we have babies in hosipitals [sic]. If we dont [sic] know anything by that age, then the education system in america [sic] is a joke. she should be charged because she knows that wasnt [sic] right, bottom line.

Well, the author is herself irrefutable evidence of at least one of her points: the “education system in america” is a joke.

[T]hose of you who think a thirteen year old doesn’t know about sex, you need to enter the real world. I am also curious to know how she knew how to give herself an abortion.

Obviously a teenage girl who knows enough to abort a fetus with a Number 2 Ticonderoga, after “having sex” with a 30-year-old perv, deserves nothing but contempt from the self-righteous townsfolk.

Why isn’t the girl being charged with anything? [...] She did the abortion herself and she put the baby in a bag and left it at the base of a tree, so she is just as guilty.

Teenage girls simply cannot usurp control of their own uteruses from 30-year-old serial rapists, goddammit, and expect to get away with it. Not on our watch! They are just as guilty as serial pedophile rapists who bury the evidence of their criminal activity to evade prosecution.

The angry mob wants that kid punished, goddammit, because if she’s old enough to “have sex,” she’s old enough to know that inducing an abortion with a pencil is “wrong.”

Well, except that she wasn’t “having sex,” she was raped, and it isn’t “wrong” — or even illegal — to have an abortion.

It is astonishing, the ease with which an angry mob can convene an ad hoc tribunal to ostracize the most damaged victims of their own diseased culture. They would deny the existence of rape culture, even if it means imprisoning a 13-year-old child for trying to exert some pitiful influence over her own body and her own future, even after she had been violated — by the serial rapist’s own admission, “countless times” — for over a year, only to endure a home-made abortion.

Yeah, a year of rapes and a three-day self-inflicted abortion. I bet that was a cakewalk.

Nobody on the planet is as despised as teenage girls.

Posted in Bloodsport, Lobe-blowing, Men Hate You, Rape Culture, The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today and Women hate you. Bite me, Chad.

Hugs, Twisty: Woman’s sex appeal is unbearable to knob coworkers

Published by Jill on June 5, 2010. 62 Comments

To: Twisty Faster
From: maria m. miranda
Subject: Jezebel: woman fired for being too sexy at job
Message: I know Jezebel covered this, but I want YOU to write about it.

Dear maria m. miranda,

Nothing gives me greater pleasure than catering to the whims of complete strangers!

Here’s my synopsis [pieced together from the original story at Village Voice and Anna North's essay on same at Jezebel]: Debrahlee Lorenzana is fired from Citibank for bankering while female. She’s suing the chumpass motherfuckers for discrimination.

Lorenzana’s story is older than a spinster’s bunions: because of the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women, wherein is codified the equation of “women” with “sex,” Lorenzana’s Beauty2K-compliance, which is considerable, was deemed “too distracting” for her dude coworkers “to bear.” Citibank managers criticized her for looking too sexy, for not wearing makeup, for wearing high heels, for not wearing high heels, for wearing pencil skirts, for wearing sweaters, for wearing “fitted” business suits, for not straightening her hair, etc. They also performed an office-neuter on her: omitted to give her essential training which forced her to rely on male coworkers for favors.

It was further speculated in the Jezebel comments that Lorenzana’s female colleagues experienced her as a source of acute agony and contrived to “cut her off at the knees” forthwith.

In other words, Lorenzana was hectored, harassed, and discriminated against.

And then, when the Village Voice reports on her lawsuit, they include a weird 26-photo online slideshow of the “amihotornot” variety, asking readers to more or less rate Lorenzana’s sex appeal, this in addition to the patriarchy-affirming, porn-is-great language and tone of the article generally. As of this writing, the slideshow has nearly 300 comments. I stopped reading after the first 10 or so, which all voiced the same sentiment: she ain’t all that, she should “get over” herself, she must have deep character flaws that caused her female manager to give her the axe, obviously she is looking to parlay this frivolous lawsuit into celebrity.

Poor Debrahlee Lorenzana. Possessing a physique and — according to the Village Voice, which lovingly devotes a whole paragraph to her five closets of designer clothes — a sense of fashion that mirror precisely the sort of physique and sense of fashion most highly prized by dicks who consume pornography and prostituted women, Lorenzana was perceived to emit porn-rays too hot for Citibank.

Here is what is irrelevant to the case:

Lorenzana’s Christian Louboutin heels
Lorenzana’s point on the sexbot continuum
Lorenzana’s aspirations to fame and fortune
That Lorenzana unlikeably tried to save herself by ratting out some women tellers for wearing hooker outfits
Whether Lorenzana chooses to emit porn rays, or whether her natural self merely happens to conform precisely to pornulated beauty ideals.

What is relevant:

That Lorenzana is being punished for porn culture.

There’s a femininity tightrope that all public women are forced to walk, and she got bounced off, into the vat of boiling misogyny below. Whenever a public woman fails to balance the following factors just right, the some dick jounces the rope, and splat she goes. To wit:

Public women should be X amount feminine, X amount motherly, X amount hot, X amount beautiful, X amount young, X amount confident, X amount helpless, X amount exotic, X amount educated, X amount intelligent (required: the last two values < the men in the office), X amount gay (the last value almost always = 0). The ratios are fluid, shifting from day to day at the whim of public sentiment, so that a woman may think she’s got it pretty well sewed up, only to wake up one fine spring morn to discover that the parade being thrown in her honor has suddenly vanished. Later she finds out it’s because she stupidly forgot she was a member of the sex class, and had dared to imagine that she would be judged on merit rather than her ability to do femininity right.

Eventually we all fall off the rope.

Hugs,
Twisty

Posted in Femininity, Hugs, Twisty, Keep your bias off my gender, Men Hate You, Oppression Culture, The Beauty Ultimatum and Women hate you. Bite me, Chad.

Liveblogging my busy morning

Published by Jill on April 28, 2010. 88 Comments

Listening to NPR. Piece on Depression photographer Dorothea Lange. Lange expert describes the so-called “Destitute Mother” photograph as iconic in that the woman pictured clearly exhibits anxiety about being dirt-poor, but is also “a very beautiful woman.”

The subject’s actual identity (Florence Thompson, age 32; had just sold the tires off her car to buy food so her kids wouldn’t have to eat frozen dead birds) is obscured by time and the American Artocracy’s mandate to de-dimensionalize women. Thanks to the universal plucky American spirit Thompson still managed to be hot enough enough to become the face of the Great Depression.

Posted in Art is my LIFE, The Beauty Ultimatum and Women hate you. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt reads boobquake emails

Published by Jill on April 23, 2010. 235 Comments

Hey folks, you can stop sending me the “boobquake” alert. Consider me apprised.

What’s a “boobquake”? A reaction to some dude’s proclamation that saucy women showing cleavage are responsible for the recent catastrophic earthquakes, “Boobquake” is blogger Jen McCreight’s idea of “a boob joke.”

Damn, those are always hilarious!

McCreight’s boob joke was this: since that fundamentalist dude has a misogynist fantasy idea about the power of mammary glands over global seismic activity, let’s show him he’s wrong! McCreight calls for all women to wear their most cleavagey outfit at an appointed hour, then sit back and wait for the Big Quake. When it doesn’t come, we can all have a big laugh at the fundamentalist dude’s expense!

McCreight was surprised when about 47.876 million people joined her boob joke on Facebook, largely in the shape of helpful dudes offering to photograph the event.

Says McCreight, wishing to deflect feminist fury:

“I just want to apologize if this comes off as demeaning toward women. To be honest, it started as silly joke that I hurriedly fired off since I was about to miss the beginning of House. I never thought it would get the attention it did. If I would have known, I would have spent more time being careful about my wording.”

We’ve all said stupid things on the Internet. But when you say stupid things about encouraging women to protest oppression by capitulating to Dude Nation’s fondest desire, and then blame it on a compulsion to watch a stupid misogynist TV show, all I can say is, ewww.

Naturally, because it involves a woman urging other women to show us their tits, McCreight is being interviewed by national and global media.

Ewww.

I conclude that McCreight omitted, in her haste to watch the beginning of, perhaps, “American Idol,” to proof-read her statement, forgetting to change the spine-wrenching “if I would have known” to the economical and correct “had I known.”

Double-ewww.

Posted in Blogulation, Sexploitation, The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Yesterday, Ways In Which the Internet Sucks and Women hate you. Bite me, Chad.

Scum: not the real enemy

Published by Jill on March 30, 2010. 167 Comments

Sick of beauty? Dang it, me too. That’s why I’m posting on it more or less nonstop.

Blamer Magriff, reading yesterday’s post on how beauty is dumb, suggested that for crying out loud, people, shut the fuck up about beauty. She based her suggestion on the notion that writing about beauty merely perpetuates its evil power, like unto dropping delicious little nuggets of our splintered selves into its gaping maw.

The less attention we pay to how women look, one way or another, the better, at least for a while. And that goes for everyone. Stop talking about it already, it’s the ultimate sore subject, and everyone knows sores don’t heal if you insist on picking and picking at them.

Lard knows I love Magriff like fish sauce loves a spring roll, but I cannot get behind this thesis. To enlarge on the diseased skin metaphor: just as the treatment for a festering carbuncle is unlikely to include ignoring the carbuncle, so too might ignoring the hideous consequences of a critical aspect of women’s subjugation be unlikely to make it go away. I remind the Blametariat that, because women are an oppressed class, we don’t have the luxury of simply existing and lounging on the Lido Deck and traipsing around town as though our appearance were totally a politically neutral dealio and there was no global humanitarian crisis afflicting our entire population. That perk is reserved for the dominant class. We are an oppressed class, so everything women do, voluntary or no, is a political act. Is this tiresome? Painful? Exhausting? It sure is! That’s why I advocate immediate feminist revolt. Maybe then we could take a fucking load off, for crissake.

Anyway, I was motivated to complain about beauty for the second day in a row by a soap commercial on television. The soap commercial to which I allude is one of that insidious species of soap commercials that plays into women’s insecurities concerning our level of commitment to beauty and beauty products. In this ad, a group of women confront the horror of “soap scum.”

That’s right! You called it! It’s our old friend Dove!

Dear old Dove! Who can forget 2004’s surreal Campaign for Real Beauty? This devious advertising gimmick paraded conventionally pretty women and posed them crouching awkwardly in their underwear, rebranding soap model hotness to include a few more fat cells than previously allowed on TV. Dove called the models “real women.” They were meant to appeal to potential Dove butt-cream customers because the women were not the typical pubescent Slavic speedfreak toothpicks.

Internet feminists laughed and laughed. We were well used to this kind of schizoid women’s marketing. We cut our vagina dentatas on glossy women’s magazines where one page contains an article on the dangers of dieting but on the facing page is a giant ad for Lean Cuisine Bacon Alfredo Pizza (320 calories). Those 2004 Dove models might have had a little meat on their bones, but the message was same shit, different day: “Hotness is king! Buy yours here!”

The creepiest thing about it all was the camaraderiffic tone. The Dove company pretending to be your best friend and trusted confidante and professional life coach all rolled into a single “beauty bar,” existing solely for the purpose of helping you and your precious self-esteem be more beautiful than ever. Six years later, I’m still shuddering.

The Dove website is a fucking scream, by the way. Dork city! Check this out:

“As part of the launch campaign, DOVE invited women to rediscover the beauty in their own hair.”

Invited by an altruistic cosmetics company who cared for nothing so much as her self-esteem, Twisty discovered the Taj Mahal, a sunset on the beach, and a monarch chrysalis deep within the tangled web of her own hair.

Rediscovered beauty hair

And there’s actually a link titled “Real women react to soap scum.” No shit.

“So, Daphne, whatcha been up to lately?”

“Oh, not much. I got an internet video gig.”

“Doing what? Tickling kittens? Weeping piteously over Star Wars?”

“Nah. Reacting to soap scum.”

“Soap scum? Sweet!”

But back to the commercial. It’s set up like some kind of bizarro-world scientific study, which for some reason is being conducted outside using wacky equipment: life-sized woman-shaped mirrors with shower heads attached to their tops. The mirrors have cute flip hairdos. A bunch of women are “invited” — Dove is constantly inviting women to do moronic shit — to take part in the demonstration, which will reveal “the truth” about soap scum.

Dove puts the women test subjects to work right away. Cleaning, of course. What else?

“Every woman washed mirrors,” the narrator says, introducing the unlikely premise.

Cut to women diligently soaping up their weird woman-shaped mirrors. Cue the showers for a rinse.

Uh-oh. There’s unsightly white shit left on the mirrors! But why?

“Soap leaves soap scum behind every time you wash.”

Oh, no!

Yet, “you can’t see [the soap scum] on your skin …” admits the narrator.

So technically, what they’ve shown is that a substance purported to be soap can leave white shit on woman-shaped mirrors with shower heads stuck to them, and that actors can be paid to look horrified by this.

Happily for consumers who loathe and despise white shit on woman-shaped mirrors, Dove is “different.” As is demonstrated by a pretty, naked, decidedly non-scummy woman in a towel who caresses her cleavage with a sensual hand, Dove leaves skin “soft, smooth, and always soap-scum-free.”

Can you imagine being that towel model?

“So Miriam, whatcha been doin lately?”

“Oh, I got a job wearing a towel and feeling myself up on soap commercials.”

“You do this with a straight face?”

“It puts food on the table, OK?”

“But towel modeling? At your age?”

“Lucky for me Dove is an equal opportunity exploiter. As long as you’re really, really photogenic, towel models can be as old as 35, 36!”

The Campaign for Real Beauty has now morphed into the Dove Self-Esteem Fund, which “was developed to help free the next generation from self-limiting beauty stereotypes [and] promot[e] a wider definition of beauty.”

Notice that, in promoting this supposedly “wider” definition of beauty, Dove is tacitly promoting an all-important corollary: that there will always be those hopeless unfortunates in the margins for whom the definition still isn’t wide enough. Meaning that this new fake commodified Dove beauty will continue to retain exclusivity and unattainability, while injecting a new dose of guilt: if you can’t manage to be beautiful even under these new, lowered standards, you can’t be trying hard enough, or spending enough money.

Here’s a little taste of some of the shitty shit that beauty does:

• It creates and reinforces the notion of the sex class.

• It creates and reinforces the notion of social status.

• It promotes pointless adversarial relationships between women, effectively isolating them from each other (divide and conquer).

• It promotes physically and emotionally damaging, dangerous practices.

• It genericizes women, transforming them from humans into interchangeable fleshbots.

• It infantilizes women, transforming them from humans into morons who seek baby-soft skin.

• It publicly communicates private information which may be used against a woman, including her caste, sexual availability, and degree of personal investment in patriarchal mores.

• It diverts women’s financial resources from things like health care and organic margaritas to the beauty industrial complex, to the tune of billions a year.

• It diverts women’s attention from stuff that actually matters, like global women’s oppression, to superficial, meaningless, neurotic rituals. One of which is that you must endeavor to be free of scum at all times.

So that’s why I’m writing about beauty again. If it doesn’t get some bad press once in a while, people might forget how bad it sucks. It sucks way worse than soap scum.

Posted in Femininity, Mass Media, Oppression Culture, The Beauty Ultimatum and Women hate you. Bite me, Chad.