I Blame The Patriarchy

Hey, hepcats!

Jill — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 18:10:31 +0000

Fun fact: katydids are kosher. Come’n git it.

Why do you even have a patriarchy-blaming blog, Twisty, if you’re just gonna go AWOL and post pictures of skinks and katydids every 17.6 days?

Well, here’s the sitch. Brace yourself, because it sucks the bag.

It’s cricket season. Cricket season and blaming season cannot coexist.

Why the flarb not, you ask?

The reason is this: every night at about 2:47 AM some benighted cricket infests the bunkhouse in some cranny 6 inches from my ear and commences its chirpy oratorio. No spinster aunt on earth can sleep through that skin-crawling racket, so out of the TempurPedic I flop. At which point I either eat a tub of Cool Whip or strap on the point-and-shoot and saunter out to see what’s doin’ down at the old Orthoptera Compound. With the result that I get no sleep. My obstreperal lobe shrinks to the size of a frog egg. I am hurled into a moral darkness. Blaming is impossible under these circumstances.

Most people, when they are hurled into a moral darkness by unrelenting cricket-induced insomnia, go out and have a fuckin good time. They join a motorcycle gang, get a new tattoo, and do awesome drugs.

But all I have to show for it are 476 pictures of the huge katydid living on my drainpipe.

And the skink in the carport.

Would you believe that the katydid was bigger than the skink?

Molting garden spider of the week

Jill — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 19:16:22 +0000

Phil, my secretary, has declined to ghost-write my essay today. He called in claiming writer’s block. What a load. He just wanted to lie around on the couch eating sour cream ‘n’ onion potato chips. I could hear Hair Battle Spectacular in the background when he called.

What’s Hair Battle Spectacular? A TV hair-do competition reality show. Stylists with fake nicknames affix scaffolding, found objects, and neon hair extensions onto models’ heads, whereupon they back-comb mile-high “fantasy” hair-dos that nobody could ever actually wear because if you lifted your chin even a couple of degrees to swig a marg, the earth’s gravitational pull on the hair-mass would snap your neck in half. The show is mesmerizingly asinine. I’m begging you not to watch it without hootin’ a doob first.

On a patriarchy-blaming note, the hair models are all beautiful women, presumably because, owing to the gender-binary component of the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women, similarly attractive men wouldn’t be caught dead looking that ridiculous. In our photo, stylist “Malibu” pours an actual cocktail into her model’s coiffure to demonstrate its ability to hold its liquor. It’s about time somebody invented a watertight beehive.

Anyway, with Phil on the lam and me without a minute to spare, you’re stuck with heartwarming nature crap again in lieu of a post. Luckily, it’s a molting Argiope aurantia, everybody’s second-favorite orbweaver.

________________________
Hair Battle Spectacular photo swiped from the Oxygen website. Oxygen, Oprah’s purportedly woman-centric cable channel, is also responsible for Bad Girls Club, a stultifyingly dull reality show consisting mostly of catfights between hot babes, Tori & Dean, a stultifyingly dull reality show featuring a privileged white celebrity heterosexual married couple living their uninteresting lives, and Snapped, the it’s-horrible-yet-I-can’t-look-away documentary series about ‘normal’ women who turn without warning into homicidal maniacs.

Spinster aunt posts place-holder

Jill — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 16:21:27 +0000

It’s been non-stop action here at Spinster Aunt World Headquarters. Things, like this zucchini, which are the size of Guam, keep happening. Please stand by while an excellent essay is generated by my secretary Phil. Thank you.

Poetry Korner with Jennifer

Jill — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 03:35:42 +0000

Today we revive a dormant tradition here at I Blame the Patriarchy, the tradition of showcasing blamer poetry, which tradition is dormant only because nobody has put a pome in the comments in a while. This one is particularly fine. It’s a goddam sonnet.

Jennifer Weild
August 4, 2010 at 1:01 pm

Ask her nothing, dudely dudes, for she
before all else does thee in truth despise.
Do not protest thy honesty. Twisty
knows well the lies thy phallus signifies.

Aloft above her ranch the boiling hawks
the smallish, brownish birds and mice do hunt,
while Twisty Jill o’er interwebs doth stalk
the stupid man who dares her wield her gun.

Do not, dear dudes, assume sincerity
will shield thee from the spit of her contempt.
She can to thee attribute no real parity.
Your penis by itself leaves you exempt.

Tremble then, dear man, before you post,
or your head surrender to her cruelty’s boast.

Poetry Korner

Spinster aunt casts jaundiced eye at popular television show

Jill — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 14:07:47 +0000

Hollywood has long been recognized by the Global Cabal of Spinster Aunts as Ground Zero for American misogyny. Like everything that gurgles forth from that foul city, this Mad Men sensation that’s sweeping the nation has many sicko antifeminist repercussions.

Never heard of Mad Men? It’s a “critically acclaimed” — which means that edgy dudes like it — American TV show set in the early pre-feminist 60’s, about handsome dudes in an ad agency and the hot women they screw. Its chief appeal is the sex they have in painstakingly authentic sets and period costumes.

Aside from the obvious thrill of enjoying without compunction a throwback fantasy Man’s World untainted by the unseemly Women’s Lib movement, Mad Men is problematic for another reason. Unsurprisingly, actual women are now being encouraged to emulate the “lovely ladies” of the show, on the subject of whose “kicking silhouettes” much ink has been spilled. From sheknows.com:

“January Jones told the British magazine Tatler, ‘[Series creator Matthew Weiner] would prefer we didn’t work out and that we eat really well, so we look like healthy women.’

Mad Men producers allegedly felt January Jones was too thin last year and it helped her embrace the healthy side of being fit. ‘It’s okay to have curves and be a woman,’ Jones advocated. ‘I wish more women would realize that’s what men like.’

Because what men like should always be at the heart of a woman’s personal health regimen. Particularly when those men are Hollywood producers.

And this:

“Kudos to Matthew Weiner for using the rocking bodies of January Jones, Christina Hendricks and Elisabeth Moss as an example for looking good the right way.”

Whoa there, Trigger. Did the author just say “kudos to some dude for using the bodies of some women”? Hey, author! The 60’s just called and they want their moron misogynist copywriter back!

How charming, this menacing admonition:

“Weiner isn’t suggesting the vivacious beauties go hog wild, so don’t get any ideas.”

Yes, ladies. Don’t get any ideas. The Flying Fickle Finger of Fashion will fuck you up. It may be “okay to be a woman,” but January Jones neglects to emphasize that this is true only if you stay within strict parameters of horndog dude prongability as described by the male creator of a Hollywood TV show. That’s right, the standards have shifted again! You can gain 15 pounds, but not an ounce more, and you must now find a way to be hot and healthy but without muscle tone. Good luck!

Horribly, women who are not walking skeletons will hail this as some kind of victory for “real” women, now that a meatier body shape is putatively in style, and the holy grail of femininity — sexaliciousity — is within their reach. But see, it doesn’t matter whether the fashion is thin or “curvy”; the horror is that the beauty standard, whatever it is, is so fleeting as to be unattainable, period.

Why, in 2010, is a woman’s body is considered a fashion accessory at all? Men’s bodies don’t go in and out of fashion. Nobody is telling the dudes of Mad Men to eat more ice cream and stop working out so their kicking silhouettes will be more curvy. As if!

Spinster aunt wastes time

Jill — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 23:42:50 +0000

Of the many time-wasting hobbies in which spinster aunts are known to indulge, one of the most beloved is the close reading — or megamicronalysis, to use the clinical term — of some passage of text or other.

Why the close reading? Why not para-sailing? Why not chemical engineering?

Because spinster aunts used to be English majors, and old habits die hard.

Not an English major? Don’t know or care what the heck I’m talking about? Fantastic! A close reading is when a total nerd takes a chunk of text and gives it the Everlovin Eye of Scrutiny. By which I mean, she whips out her language-loupe and inspects the text-chunk, line by line, word by word, letter by letter, with assiduous concentration on tone, point of view, verb tense, style, connotation, imagery, symbolism, syntax, literary device, motif, theme, punctuation, density, negative space, texture, aroma, atomic weight, or what have you. These attributes — atomic weight et al — form the subtext. A subtext contains layers of meaning that cannot be conveyed by the text’s superficies alone. In fact, the meaning of a subtext’s layers often exists solely in the mind of the total nerd. That’s what’s so marvelous about it.

Subtexts and all their perilous possibilities are irresistible to English majors.

Once a text has been flayed open and every aspect of its shimmering sub-substance lies exposed and quivering in the 60-watt light of the English major’s second-hand desk lamp, the close reading is complete. At this point it is customary to write a long, tedious paper that maybe two people in the world will ever read, in which the English major not only reveals the results of her megamicronalysis, but craftily uses her findings as evidence supporting whatever brilliant and obscure argument she’s making about the text.

Why make a brilliant argument about text at all? Why not do something useful like go down-the-coast and cap that fucking oil leak?

Indeed, it is a question for the ages. One hypothesis: the English major has deduced that English words strung together in certain sequences can express certain ideas, almost as though they were a kind of language. Furthermore, she has realized that her strings of words can express ideas about somebody else’s strings of words, and that these ideas are just too fuckin replete with philosophic value not to synthesize into a long, tedious paper that ultimately draws weighty conclusions about the human condition. Also — brace yourself — close readings can be performed on other close readings, creating string upon string upon string of words expressing this, that, and the other thing, ad infinitum, until the whole of human genius has been explicated, turning the very cosmos itself into an open if slightly long and tedious book!

Thus is the close reading, if one is of a certain lowbrow temperament, immensely satisfying to execute.

In the cut-throat world of patriarchy blaming, close readings are particularly valuable. In the parlance of people who write things about things, “teasing out” the subtexts concealed within garden-variety patriarchy-generated texts (news reportage, field guides to Texas lepidoptera, Italo Calvino short stories) can reveal realer truths about the culture of oppression that might otherwise languish in obscurity where they do no women no good no how.

A favorite self-replenishing source of patriarchy-generated text falls in the Emails Sent In By Dudes category. Say, here’s one now!

Twisty,

Despite my being a male reader of your blog (and one who doesn’t even meet the commenter criteria), I know that neither you nor any other feminist has a responsibility to explain feminism to men. I’m kind of stupid, however, so I am going to go ahead and ask you for your opinion on a recent issue, and for advice on how to proceed. Also, I know that you don’t have definitive authority to speak for feminists, let alone women, but I still seek your opinion as a person far more experienced in these matters than I. I am asking that you grant this, not as an obligation, but as a favor from one possessing wisdom to one sorely needing it. There is undoubtedly some male presumption on my part in asking this, but I would ask that you look beyond that to see that I am honestly endeavoring to do what is right.

The case I am writing in regards to is that which is reported here:

[yadda yadda yadda]*

Sincerely,
Jeremy

Jeremy is asking for something, a thing to which he seems to be aware that he is not entitled, but which a lifetime of dude-on-dudess interaction has nevertheless taught him to expect. He appeals for an exception to the Spinster Prime Directive by asking a spinster aunt to define rape for him, so that he can look smart on some other blog.

Jeremy presents his case in first person, from the point of view of an entity described as a “male reader.” This gives us important information about Jeremy. It tells us straight away that Jeremy has determined that the most basic tenet of the blog — “if you’re a dude, don’t ask me shit” — does not apply to him. We may therefore identify him as a schmuck.

Jeremy refers to “I” or “me” eleven times in this single paragraph. Nine times he refers as “you” to the Internet feminist known as Twisty. His conversational tone (“I” and “you”) suggests that Jeremy perceives a relationship between himself and Twisty. Although he sees himself as the dominant figure in the relationship, Jeremy wishes Twisty to regard it as one approximating that of sovereign/supplicant, where Twisty is the sovereign and Jeremy the supplicant. We infer this because, whereas Jeremy describes himself as “kind of stupid,” he floridly flatters Twisty as “one possessing wisdom” and “experience” who is in a position to “grant” what Jeremy wants. This gambit is transparently calculated to butter Twisty up, that she might cast a benign eye upon his heartfelt plea and do him the favor of setting aside her Internet feminist agenda by telling him what to think.

It is clear, however, that Jeremy doesn’t actually consider himself stupid. We know this because a) in the entire history of the entire Internet, there have only been like two instances of people writing stuff online who were not convinced absolutely of their own moral authority and intellectual superiority, and even these were later shown to have been hoaxes, and b) because Jeremy chucks around, albeit awkwardly, a few 50-cent phrases that he wouldn’t expect a genuinely stupid person to chuck (“definitive authority,” “honestly endeavoring”).

In fact, describing himself as “kind of stupid” and admitting up front that he is not qualified to take part in patriarchy blaming’s cutting-edge dialecticals is merely common self-deprecation, a device used to suggest a sense of humor and a bit of submissiveness where none actually exists, the better to cajole a boon out of a reluctant boon-granter.

In other words, Jeremy is a disingenuous suck-up.

The self-deprecating claim of stupidity allows Jeremy to acknowledge Twisty’s unequivocally stated lack of interest in running a school for boys, while simultaneously deploying an affect so irresistible that Twisty will have no choice but to abandon — “not out of obligation, but as a favor” — her stated mission and personal beliefs in order to cater to his whim.

Why should she do this catering? Because Jeremy is “honestly endeavoring to do what is right.” It is common knowledge that there are no worthier recipients of favors from Internet feminists than honest dudely endeavorers. For, honest though his endeavoring be, Jeremy simply cannot achieve do-rightness without Twisty’s guiding hand on the rudder of his conscience. Is this because he is too lazy to read 17 books on radical feminist theory?

Yes. Yes, it is.

If there’s one thing an English major learns from having had to write, over the course of her academic career, 73 or 74 papers on The Great Gatsby, it’s that when a first person dude claims he’s honest, he lies.

Yes, ladies, the world and the Internet are crawling with dudely entitlement; it may come disguised as the lying lies of obsequious flatterers, but when it does, the English major has it covered like a fuzzy pink seat on a toilet.

_________________________
* Here is the rest of Jeremy’s email. Feel free to address, in the comments, the “recent issue” [!] of rape-by-deceit.

But first: You know, the only reason men are so anxious to define rape all the goddam time is to keep women from getting away with having too much autonomy over their sexy selves. If I were to define rape for anyone who thinks rape requires defining it might go something like “It’s rape whenever she says it’s rape, douche.”

To summarize, a Palestinian Arab was recently convicted for Rape by Deception on the grounds that he claimed to be Jewish in order to have sex with a Jewish woman. There is some question as to whether he actually intentionally deceived her, but that wasn’t really relevant to the discussion, which quickly turned to whether or not this should be classified as rape. In the comment section to that blog post (which you may want to read for context), I attempted to make the argument that this would, indeed, count as rape, on the grounds that deceiving someone in order something they would not otherwise do is coercion, and that coerced sex is rape. In a later post I attempted to clarify this by stating that I find coercion, of any form or severity, to be the defining factor in whether an instance of sexual activity is rape, admitting that there is some degree of variability in the severity in these rape acts, which by this definition includes everything from violent rape, to statutory rape, to prostitution and pornography, to lying about one’s interest in a long term relationship.

Opposition from the other commenters has caused me to question my argument, however. Some have pointed out that it might tend to infantilize women, and others that it is offensive to victims of violent rape to dilute the term by including so much in the definition. Further, there are several counterexamples (such as a women lying about her sexual history to avoid scaring off potential sexual partners, or a light-skinned woman of African descent lying about her racial ancestry in order to marry into white society) that I desperately do not want to classify as rape, but would seem to follow from the system I put forward. If opposition to my arguments were universal, I would withdraw my argument, believing it be a case of an oppressor blind to oppression. However, a couple of commenters have supported my conclusion, at least one of whom I have cause to believe is female, so I am stuck.

I would very much appreciate your opinion on this matter, and am more than willing to accept that I may have been dramatically wrong in my conclusion. I understand that you may choose to use this E-mail on your blog to make example/fun of.

Spinster aunt cries for help

Jill — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:28:49 +0000

It has been brought to my attention that IBTP has become infested with much adware or spyware or chumpware of some sort. Several blamers have written in to observe that this proliferation of tracking cookies makes it look like I am “monetizing” the site. I assure you, this could not be further from the truth. I am 100% against monetizing, both the word and the act.

As the veteran blamer knows all too well, I am not much good with this sort of thing, so if anybody has an idea where it might have come from, and how I might cleanse my code, I would be much obliged. But for the lovagod hurry! This is seriously chapping my entire hide.

Here’s a list compiled by kindly and thoughtful blamer awhirlinlondon. Thanks, Whirli!

__________________________________

Cookie:[myname]@atdmt.com (This is from http://www.atlassolutions.com/ – slogan: Do you know everything you need to know about your audience? Do you have all the expertise you need to succeed? What if you could generate more revenue simply by forecasting smarter?)

(All follow the same format so will just list the companies/acronyms)

@revsci.net (http://revsci.net/ – Audience targeting)

@sixapart.112.2o7.net (“2o7.net and omtrdc.net are domains used by Adobe to help provide portions of its Adobe… products. Specifically, this domain is used by Adobe to place cookies, on behalf of its customers, on the computers of visitors to customers’ selected websites.” You have a general one from this place as well as one from the cable news company Msnbc and one from MSN Portal.)

@specificclick.net (No vendor website available, but I did find a link that describes these as “infections” – http://paretologic.com/resources/definitions.aspx?remove=specificclick%20cookie IBTP has 2 cookies from this group.

@mediaplex.com (“…provides innovative technology solutions for advertisers and agencies to enable them to meet their specific business requirements and consistently exceed campaign and revenue goals.”)

@fastclick.net (Now owned by valueclick. More online advertising. IBTP has two cookies from this bunch)

@trafficmp.com (Traffic Marketplace – “…our next-generation targeting solution combines anonymous user interest, behavior, demographic and psychographic information from more than 600,000 proprietary web sites… We’ll find your audience, no matter where they are across our network.”)

@xiti.com (AT Internet.com – Behavioral analysis, viral expansion, ROI, i.e. more of the same.)

@tribalfusion.com (“Fully customized advertising solutions.”)

@advertising.com (more of the same.)

@ads.pointroll.com (Digital Marketing Solutions)

@quantserve.com (Quantcast Measurement Service – this one looks fucking nasty. Here’s the link: http://www.quantcast.com/)

@traveladvertising.com (Is what it sounds like it is.)

@questionmarket.com (Managed by Safecount.net. More advertising.)

@statcounter.com (“A free yet reliable invisible web tracker, highly configurable hit counter and real-time detailed web stats. Insert a simple piece of our code on your web page or blog and you will be able to analyse and monitor all the visitors to your website in real-time!) I would imagine that you/Wordpress installed this one – you have two cookies from them.

@apmebf.com (More advertising.)

@realmedia.com (and again.) You’ve also got one from @network.realmedia.com

@adviva.net, put out by Specificmedia.co.uk.

@ad.yieldmanager.com

Fan mail from another flounder saddens spinster aunt

Jill — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 12:45:50 +0000

I am so sad about this guy! Apparently I’ve been deleting his comments, which comments — I’m just guessing of course — might not have precisely represented the apex of human achievement, since I don’t remember them or him.

Matthew
mattstefanson@gmail.com
207.47.241.108
Submitted on 2010/07/27 at 11:13pm

Post my comments. Don’t be afraid of open discourse, you wanker. Is this how Neo-Feminist nutbags run their websites? with censorship? You suck.

“You suck.” Seriously? That’s the insult?

See, this is why I’m sad. Stupid, uninteresting people keep saying things.

Spinster aunt has even less time today than yesterday

Jill — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:37:10 +0000

Until an actual patriarchy-blaming time slot opens up in a day or two, allow your absentee blogger to offer a) an award-nominated photograph of the leopard frog eggs found yesterday in the Spinstitute for Texas Herpetology Dept’s experimental algae-choked swamp of a former swimming pool, and b) this light and amusing BDSM-related interlude entitled “You’re chaining up far too many women.” Thanks to blamer Mary Ann — who says in her email that she not only loves but also adores me — for sending it in.

Suddenly an idea for a great new time-saving email policy suggests itself: from now on my secretary Phil will be instructed to only read emails that commence with declarations of the writer’s love and adoration for me. Notifications from my derelict cell phone company, my ISP, Amazon.com, the Human Fund, RH Reality Check, and dudes who write in to complain that the I Blame the Patriarchy commenting policy is sexist, classist, racist, and some other ist I can’t remember? Fuggeddabowdit.

Spinster aunt has no time for you

Jill — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 17:15:19 +0000

This spinster aunt has no time for you people right now. So let us all praise blamer Phio Gistic, who sent in a link to some jaw-dropping shit that just went down in St. Louis Missouri, the mattress-stain of a town where, coincidentally, I spent the 25 worst years of my life.

Naturally, what happened is this: a woman was dancing in a St Louis club in 2004, and naturally “Girls Gone Wild” was there exploiting people, and naturally a third party exposed the woman’s breasts as she said, “no, no.”

Same-ole, same-ole.

But then the video came out and the woman sued, claiming she never gave consent and that the video represented an actual assault. The jaw-dropping shit is that a jury of my former homies actually ruled in favor of the “Girls Gone Wild” porn franchise. Consent is irrelevant when cameras are present!

St. Louis. Always classy.

Here’s the link to the post at Jezebel.

Yikes. And when I saw the addendum, wherein it is revealed that a fucking dick writer at the crap news weekly I used to work for nominated the victim in his “Ass-Clown of the Week” column, I was rendered speechless. And then, when I read the fucking dick’s managing editor’s apology, wherein she excuses the fucking dick with a “boys will be boys” and describes the subjects of “Girls Gone Wild” as “stupid,” I was rendered even speechlesser.

Meanwhile, everyone’s favorite photo subject: Southern leopard frogs in flagrante delicto. Tomorrow: the fruit of their loins!

P.S. All the comments stuck in moderation for the past week have been freed, except for the extremely long ones, which I don’t have time to read. Go start your own blog, long comment writers!