As is her wont, spinster aunt continues writing about yesterday’s post

Published by Jill on June 8, 2010. 53 Comments

No time to post this morning, so I thought to mildly amuse by publishing a selection of reject-pile comments from the post I wrote yesterday. These were all authored, if you can believe it, by people who did not read the Guidelines for Commenters!

Yesterday’s little fillip of blaming rapture, you may recall, concerned an essay written by Scienceblogger Jason G Goldman in which he summarized, without “taking sides,” some studies on pornography. According to Goldman, the studies found that porn’s effects on its consumers isn’t really so bad.

That’s right. Dudes have actually conducted studies that show how oppressors don’t really seem to suffer too much from consuming the “product” (Goldman’s term for the graphic representation of women’s subjugation) of their oppression. No way, really? Privilege is totally awesome? Who knew?

Combining my analysis of the tone of Goldman’s essay (if it walks like an endorsement and talks like an endorsement …)* with the fact that he’d cherry-picked only “porn is pretty benign” studies, I concluded that this was yet another blob of misogynist science-prattle demonstrating the distressing degree of obliviousness that even educated men present when it comes to the meaning of ordinary patriarchy, men’s role in the oppression hierarchy, and their deficit of empathy with the oppressed classes. I also took the opportunity to openly mock one of Goldman’s commenters, a dick who exemplifies total dickness with his stated conviction that, because he likes consuming the graphic representation of rapes, there simply cannot be anything wrong with porn.

Meanwhile, other bloggers agreed. Goldman has since cracked under pressure and removed the post, which is too bad, since many of us have put an effort into making an example of it, pointing at it and laughing, focusing the rage of an angry mob upon it, etc. Goldman has since suggested, here and at Zuska’s (and maybe elsewhere, but how should I know; what am I, Google?), that his post was just an off-the-cuff little tiptoe down Sexology Lane, that he was completely unaware that pornography is a “divisive issue,” that he never intended to offend anyone, and he’s sorry.

“I haven’t yet – anywhere – stated what my opinions are, until now: I think that any normalization of the objectification of women or violence against women – even if the women portrayed are doing so ostensibly consensually – is not okay.

I, further, thought that it was reasonable to ask questions about the effects of a certain product, separately from the whether or not that product should be made in the first place. And I thought I could do so objectively. But, as Pal says, perhaps that is naive.

This is an incredibly divisive issue, for many reasons, and I unwittingly walked into a major battlefield without, as Pal says, the proper flashlight. And in doing so, I (unintentionally) offended a handful of people I care about, as well as many others, and for that, I apologize.”

Imagine inhabiting a universe where you are oblivious to the fact that pornography is controversial! Wait, is that it, up there? There, in the clouds! If I squint through my bile-colored trifocals, I think I can glimpse that happy world’s champagne waterslides and gumdrop toadstools and rainbow tacos and rape-free society! Scotty, beam me up! What’s that? It’s dudes-only? Blarg!

By the way, this blogger (who you can tell has been reading PZ Myers, because she uses the word “woo,” and also because she links to PZ Myers) thinks that, because I outed the deeply embedded antifeminist mores demonstrated by a dudely science blogger, that I am anti-science! Me! And after all I just went through to try to sell a skeptical faction of the Blametariat on the superior number one-ness of the scientific method! Some days it just doesn’t pay to turn off the Ab-Fab DVDs and get out of bed.

Anyway, I promised deleted comments, and deliver them I shall. And yes, I realize that when you publish deleted comments, they aren’t technically deleted anymore. So, without further ado, check out these psychotic remarks from “James,” some self-styled science-knob inquisitor:

I’m curious about this sentence: “There is a difference between banning porn and eradicating the demand for porn, a delicate nuance that no dude ever seems able to contemplate.” I assume you’re working from an assumption that the desire to see porn in men is largely, if not completely, fabricated by society? So then your objective would be weaning males of porn or the desire for visual sexual stimulation, which is a very invasive course of action regarding a group you don’t belong to. Obviously predicated on the idea that porn is entirely negative towards women, even when representing acts of consensual sex.

So I suppose my ultimate questions would be: what evidence you have that porn is negative? How you would design future double blind studies (longitudinal if you wish) that could demonstrate whether porn was ultimately good, bad, or neutral?

I fly into transports over the notion that redesigning the social order so that males no longer frolick unchecked in a culture of rape is “a very invasive course of action regarding a group you don’t belong to.” Like porn exists in a vacuum. Dude is oblivious that rape culture depends on the oppression of the group I do belong to. And then he demands scientific proof that oppression is bad! God, is there anything sexier than a domineering science-knob? I’ve got your longitudinal study right here, douchebag!

I had to chuck out this next comment from “Pearl” for its tragic antifeminist naivete.

Ok, Let me just say that as a woman, I love porn. It helps me get off. And I’m not going to lie, I don’t see it as an exploitation of women. I respect that most women have an opinion, and I’m not any authority to have much of one. All I’m saying is that you can’t tell a person that their opinion is wrong.

If a woman tells a man that his opinion is wrong she’s a feminist. If a man tells a woman that her opinion is wrong, he’s sexist. See the hypocrisy there? If we’re going to play the blame game here, I will openly say that feminists fucked it up for women. I love that we should be equal to men, but god damnit, I love a man who opens doors for me and pays for dinner. In fact, sometimes I expect it. Mr. Goldman here is simply stating a point. I don’t have the expertise to squash or agree with his argument. So women, Love y’all but get off your high horses. You are constantly bitching about how men are sexist, but what about you? You are also pretty fucking sexist.

I know I’m probably going to get bitched out and yelled at for having an opinion, but honestly I’m only stating an opinion. I think being overly feminist can also repress. Just keep it in mind ladies.

Newsflash, ladies! It is no longer permissible to tell a person that their opinion is wrong! I guess the Internet will be shutting down now.

Here’s an oldie but goodie:

Good luck finding a man.

Right back atcha, heteronormative moron dick!

Let us close with a sentiment popular among fucking douchebags, fetchingly and incomprehensibly encased in gratuitious ellipses.

… Well, I see we have the crazy feminist who thinks all men are evil over here, best to disregard…

This shit just writes itself.

Well, hold the fort, crazy feminist sexist ladies! I’ll be back soon with more No. 1 Science Information!

UPDATE: In an interesting gambit, Goldman has put his post back up, but it is not the original; this version is, he says, “stripped of speculation and editorializing” and begins with a soul-searching intro in which the author reflects on whether “the effects of a product can be separated from the question of the ethics of whether or not that product should be made in the first place.”

Referring to the spoils of human oppression as a “product” is a remarkable manifestation of patriarchotoxicity, and sorely chomps the chaps of all of us here at Savage Death Island.

_________________
* Q: Hey Twisty, what’s up with the ellipsis?
A: Trailing off into ’silence’ — i.e. leaving the end of the sentence up to the reader’s imagination — is called aposiopesis, and may be indicated legitimately by an ellipsis. Like any rhetorical device, the use of aposiopesis is restricted to professionals who are trained in its judicious and sparing application.

Posted in Blogulation, Knobjectivism, Men Hate You, Rape Culture and Sexploitation. Bite me, Chad.

Science dudes declare porn good, support claim with Danish graphs, flawed reasoning

Published by Jill on June 7, 2010. 177 Comments

The extent to which dudes just don’t get it fucking blows my lobe.

While readin’ along over at the Scienceblogs, I encountered an essay entitled Just How Bad Is Porn, Anyway? Try to contain your surprise; it was authored by a dude.

Whenever I see a science dude begin to muse on the philosophic value of pornography, my lobe starts to tingle. What are the odds the guy can stop himself from making with the wink-wink/nudge-nudge? I immediately begin shuffling through my desk drawer for the blamehammer. It’s a foregone conclusion that I’ll be needing it in short order.

In the afore-referenced essay, Scienceblogger Jason G Goldman of The Thoughtful Animal, who files the piece under “Sexual Behavior and Mating,” takes it upon himself to summarize the findings of a few studies on the effects of pornography on human happiness. He does this in response to troubling news that an anti-porn group is convening in Boston to discuss an action plan for dismantling porn culture.

Weeeelll, it isn’t long before Goldman says

So clearly this is a complicated issue. What’s a responsible scientist to do? An experiment, of course. I know: I’ll watch a TON of porn, and then see if I become sexist or racist, or feel any more aggressive than baseline.

Hahaha! An experiment where you have to watch tons of porn! That’s a funny joke! It reminds me of real sexology experiments. Like the ones where subjects are naked and “invasive probes and electrodes” are inserted into their vaginas. Those researchers are, of course, totally objective professionals when it comes to getting grant money to make porn right in their own labs.

But back to Goldman and his objective overview of porn studies:

Let’s make a few things clear: I am not taking sides in the issue of whether or not pornography should be censored or restricted (but most forms of censorship make me very uncomfortable). This is meant to review some of the research that’s been conducted on whether or not there is a reliable causal relationship between pornography and various Bad Things. [boldface Goldman's]

Translation: “I totally think pornography should not be censored or restricted. Let’s look at some studies that don’t prove anything bad about porn.”

Goldman presents some Danish research showing that there are more Danes who love porn than Danes who don’t love porn, and some research showing that porn has a positive impact on sexual satisfaction with Croatian vanillas but not on that of kinky Croatians, and some American research showing that dudes who use a lot of porn aren’t necessarily all that violent, unless they were fucked up already.

You know, the usual. Pornography is “free speech.” Pornography is only harmful to the user when he is a deviant perv to begin with. Male aggression is associated with buttloads of porn use only in a select few previously-messed-up douchebags. ‘Normal’ porn consumers, i.e. ‘most’ men (fully 98% of all men, apparently, and 80% of all women), are happy, healthy, well-adjusted, and brimming with contentment. It’s the kook-and-psychopath minority out there who get all compulsive on your ass, or who act out all rapey, giving well-adjusted exploiters a bad name.

Goldman cites no research on the effects of pornography on the pornulated women themselves, or of porn culture on women’s status within the sexbot continuum.

In fact, he seems to suggest that there are but two possible stances on porn. You’re either for it, or you’re for banning it. He omits to consider other, more elegant schemes. Such as the solution we advocate here on Savage Death Island, wherein pornography is made, not illegal, but obsolete, via elimination of the sex class, which may be accomplished by feminist revolt. There is a difference between banning porn and eradicating the demand for porn, a delicate nuance that no dude ever seems able to contemplate. A life without porn is not to be borne! Any feminist who suggests otherwise is an irrational kook.

Like all men who claim to have a bunch of sex-poz feminist BFFs and who consider that access to porn is guaranteed under the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women, Goldman doesn’t appear to grasp that patriarchy — a social order predicated on the oppression of women as a sex class — is actually real, and that as such, ours is a culture of domination wherein the ‘art form’ known as pornography is the graphic representation of rape.

The comments on Goldman’s post, proceeding from enlightened science-minds, exhibit the usual unsophisticated grasp of women’s oppression.*

– Why all the fuss about porn? Anti-porn activists should redirect their anti-porn energy to fixing the BP oil leak.
– Porn is noble “sex work.”
– Sex work isn’t exploitation because women make a shit-ton of money doing it.
– Porn stars are famous, and famous is good.
– If porn is so bad, how do you explain Celebrity Porn Star X, who has her own production company and is rich?
– Porn is an important “safety valve” that allows everyman’s inner rapist to get off, no harm no foul, thus preventing real rapes.
– If we de-stigmatized “sex work,” we could keep porn available
– If we regulated prostitution, we could keep hookers available

These are all textbook patriarchy-denier dillies, to be sure (I look forward to reading the counter-arguments in the Blame-a-teria). However, my favorite comments in the series are by one cs shelton. Here is a mansplainer of the first water. How breathtakingly predictable, how automatically autocratic he is when he informs feminist commenter Skeptifem that she is “emotional” and therefore “doesn’t reflect reality or practicality or human rights or even feminism in a reasonable way.” What did Skeptifem say to incur this scolding?

Often pornography IS violence against women, so asking if porn causes that is a silly question. Normalizing that situation is horrible. Paying for a luxury item with such an immense human cost is deplorable. No porn is worth it, and I don’t think people should be free to buy something that causes the rape of women. What is crazy is that the rape of a woman can become speech if someone takes a picture. People act like the rape of women in porn isn’t enough, that it has to spread to other women for it to matter.

Yup, that Skeptifem sure is in denial about reality and human rights and feminism, there. Good thing old cs shelton, feminism expert and pornoisseur, is on hand to set her straight. But it gets even better. Dude goes on to categorically assert, based exclusively on his personal experience as a pornsick horndog teen, that “the paleolithic venus was NOT a goddess figure. She was a masturbation aid.”

He alludes, apparently, to the Venus of Willendorf, the XXX-rated statuette believed to have once adorned the dashboard of Fred Flintstone’s Rockmobile.

cs shelton, who lives furtively in his mom’s basement on Norman Rockwell Street in a TV version of 1953, goes on to make the astonishing assertion that “porn is barely tolerated in the USA.”

Whaaa?

But the best is yet to come. Behold cs shelton’s final arguments in support of the Pornography Preservationists of America. They are the old moldy classics.

– he is a feminist, so he is exempt from accusations of sexism
– anti-porn is the same as “sex negative”, and sex-negativity is a “subjugator of women”
– because the demand for porn is “so overpowering,” any attempt to eradicate it would be “insane” and also “BAD FOR WOMEN”
– his girlfriend likes porn

and, finally, I kid you not,

I invented porn with no outside influence (same as masturbation) when I was 11. I drew naked people. I figured out what felt good. It came to me naturally, and to trash porn as inherently evil or anti-woman is to say that a natural part of who I am sexually is bad and horrible. So no, I ain’t having it.

Oh dear; cs shelton’s reasoning is an unfortunate mis-application of a No. 1 Math Property, the dear old Transitive Property of Equality.** It works great when you’re talking conditionally about objective values represented by letters of the alphabet, but not so much when applied to questions of ethics, human oppression, and male entitlement. To wit:

Porn is who he is, and who he is is good, therefore porn is good.

Also, he personally and spontaneously created porn, and anything he crapped out at the age of 11 is natural and holy, therefore porn is natural and holy.

You can’t make this shit up.

Kill me now.

_________________
*Except for one or two comments like Zuska’s, who excellently remarks with a curled lip,

“Oh, porn is awesome. Soooooo empowerful! I’ll bet every d00d dreams of being the hot chick lying there on the floor/desk/couch/bed/whatever, waiting for the money shot to splatter all over one’s face. No?”

** Join me as I harken back to 4th grade: If a=b, and b=c, then a=c

Venus of Willendorf photo: Wikipedia. < http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/VenusWillendorf.jpg >

Posted in Blogulation, Junk Studies, Knobjectivism, Lobe-blowing, Men Hate You, Number 1 Science Information, Rape Culture and Sexploitation. 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.

Bubble-breakings of a entire fool

Published by Jill on June 4, 2010. 43 Comments

Tomato hornworm

Remember when you first got the Internet? I don’t, but maybe you do. Maybe you remember how kooky those first few spams were? Penis enlargement! Baldness! Impotence! Bwahaha! Nigerian princes with money trouble! Bwahaha! Etc.

Alas, those days are gone. Spam remains dude-centric, like all manifestations of patriarchal culture, but now it’s all banal lists of links to niche porn, or worse, the spammer just phones it in with a monotone “nice post, thnks. britni sex tape” or “how to fix my credit … I must put a bookmark on this website!…”

O the tedium.

Until today. I’m not sure what, precisely, is being expressed here, but whatever it is, it’s totally got a vigorous, sutra-esque, cosmic truthity thing going on.

Eating, loving, singing and digesting are, in actuality, the four acts of the mirthful opera known as freshness, and they pass like bubbles of a grit of champagne. Whoever lets them break without having enjoyed them is a entire fool. Sent from my iPad 4G

Meanwhile, today’s No. 1 Science Information takes the shape of the tomato hornworm, a moth larva belonging to the popular sphinx family of moths. In larval form, the tomato hornworm is known primarily as a pest of the first water. This fat caterpillar is precisely the color of tomato vines, which pigmentational situation we here at the lab attribute to a science-process known as freshness, or, as some folks like to think of it, natural selection.

The tomato hornworm can exceed lengths of 3-4 inches, and will make short work of your eggplant, bell pepper, and tomato plants, which insatiable pillaging you’re likely to take personally, but really, just let it go.

The spike, or “horn,” on its butt is intimidating, but doesn’t sting.

After the tomato hornworm spends the winter pupating deep in the cold, hard ground, it emerges in spring as a humongous — and I mean a 5-incher, bigger than some hummingbirds — bark-hued sphinx moth with orange spots on its sides. At dusk, the moth ransacks flowers, relieving them of nectar.

Observations by the Twistitute for Arthropodical Enstudiement, Lepidoptera Dept include:

The tomato hornworm poops out enormous (1 cm) capsules (or, as the entomologically-inclined like to call it, frass) shaped like radiatore pasta.

The tomato hornworm emits very disturbing clicks when you pry it off your tomato vine (which is difficult, because that fucking caterpillar does not want to go). This alarming sound may be interpreted by heartwarming nature crappists as the voice of a sentient being declaring “As a goddam tomato hornworm I assert my natural right to be here on this vine so piss off, you grotesque pink savage.”

It’s all part of the mirthful opera of freshness.

_________________
No. 1 Tomato Hornworm Information Notes

Drees, Bastiaan M. and Jackman, John A. A Field Guide to Common Texas Insects. Houston: Gulf Publishing. 1998.

Dave’s Garden, “Definition of tobacco hornworm”. June 4, 2010 < http://davesgarden.com/guides/terms/go/3080/ >
_________________

Posted in Heartwarming Nature Crap, Not Altogether Depressing, Number 1 Science Information, Varmint Center and Ways in Which the Internet Is a Hoot. Bite me, Chad.

MRAs on parade: chumpass motherfucker declares ownership of girlfriend’s uterus

Published by Jill on May 31, 2010. 86 Comments

It’s always the way: some horndog dude decides to prong a woman, then ends up dissatisfied with the results. So he has a tantrum. The tantrum may take one, or a combination, of many interesting forms.

Sometimes the woman doesn’t want him around anymore, so he stalks her. Sometimes she makes him hate her so much that he emails naked pictures of her to the whole school. Sometimes she gets old or fat so he keeps her around to do his laundry but starts pronging a younger woman on the DL. Sometimes she stops putting out so he fires her from her job. Sometimes the woman interprets the pronging as rape, so he calls her a liar and tortures her with mental cruelty and courtroom drama and ends up doing no jail time.

And sometimes he makes the woman pregnant. In this case he can choose from many, many popular options. He might he murder her, beat her, abandon her, marry her, slut-shame her, or, as in today’s case, appeal to the patriarchal justice system to enforce his wishes as to what should be done with the contents of her personal uterus.

I allude to Greg Bruell, a dude who, having some time ago made the personal decision to father no further children, proceeded to prong his girlfriend anyway (as reported in Salon).

Here I interject some No.1 Science Information, information that, had Greg Bruell been apprised of it, might have prevented all of his piteous suffering. That information is this: heterosexual pronging ranks Number One in the World as the most efficacious method of all time for obtaining pregnancy. You might think Greg Bruell had been at least dimly aware of the consequences of heterosexual pronging, since he has already fathered two children. However, Greg Bruell has apparently failed to grasp the connection between his lusty throbbing and the pitter-patter of little feet. Men, who are born with the right to prong anything that moves, are not typically required to understand this kind of cause and effect, since, as I mentioned above, they can easily oil out of any untoward consequences of their actions merely by invoking any of the buttload of traditional exemptions: claiming ignorance, deceit, she asked for it, she cuckolded him, or — an oldie but goodie — that the burden of pregnancy is totally a chick problem.

Anyway, Greg Bruell claims that he and his girlfriend agreed that she would terminate her next pregnancy “without waffling.” So when she boldly asserted human agency, kept the kid, and sued him for child support, Bruell blew a wheel. His gambit for oiling out of his responsibility? He owns the uterus! The National Center for Men took up the cause, saying (according to Salon):

“When a man and woman have discussed what they want and have an agreement, I do not think she has a right to impose her change of mind.”

You heard that right. The “I” in the above quotation is our old pal, antifeminist knob Mel Feit, who thinks women don’t have a right to change their minds.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this crackpot ideology would turn all women’s interactions with men into legally binding contracts permitting men to use them according to their whim. The contracts can be verbal (“She didn’t say ‘no’!”), sartorial (“she dressed like a whore so my hands were tied!), alcoholical (“if she didn’t want to have sex she shouldn’t have passed out at my party”), or body-language-ical (“she winked at me. What was I supposed to do, not rape her?”).

If for some unexplained reason you acquiesce to sex with a dude, and then, after reconsidering, change your mind three minutes later, tough shit, lady. He doesn’t have to stop, because you already said yes. It won’t be rape, because you already said yes. A yes, once given, exists in perpetuity! It’s a binding contract.

How is this possible in the tiny mind of Mel Feit? Well, according to the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women, women exist in a perpetual state of “yes.” This state of “yes” extends not only to sexual availability, but to compliance with male wishes in any quarter, across the board. To wit:

Bruell’s girlfriend supposedly agreed she would have an abortion if he ever knocked her up again. At that moment of yes, according to the Feit, this woman gave up her own autonomy and ceded control of her personal sovereignty to representative of the state Greg Bruell. Because she had agreed to be an occasional receptacle for his ejaculate, her uterus actually became the property of Greg Bruell. Greg Bruell thinks his ownership of the uterus should have afforded him the opportunity to force her to abort the fetus. And now that she’s defied his authority and had the kid anyway, he’s claiming she “deceived” him.

What? No!

Hey Greg Bruell: your genetic material is under your jurisdiction only as long as you keep it locked up in your gunk box. The instant you give your sticky little wad its joyous send-off, and the two of you part company, its fate becomes the purview of another host body. It is no longer your property, and you can’t say dick about what happens to it. However, it’s only fair that you should pay a fine for littering.

Don’t want women suing you for child support? Zip it up, you fucking dipshit!

Why can’t the same argument be turned around and applied to women?

Because women are an oppressed class without fully human status. The pervasiveness and normalization of rape culture strips women of the same quality of autonomy that men enjoy. Women are not always permitted to opt out of perpetual sexual availability without suffering harmful consequences.

Because, in other words, of the patriarchy.

This Mel Feit guy, in case you’ve forgotten, is the author of much virulent misogynist MRA crap. Such as these gems:

“At a certain point during arousal, we don’t have complete control over our ability to stop. To equate that with brutal, violent rape weakens the whole concept of rape.” [cite]

Because, duh, men should define rape.

“When will public discussions about sexuality recognize that, in this culture, women already make most of the decisions about sexual intercourse?” [ibid.]

Even if this were true — a fantastical contingency is almost too ludicrous to contemplate — what would be so terrible about it? Since women are forced to bear all the consequences of “sexuality”– from self-destructive beauty practices torape, pregnancy, child-rearing, and beyond, it would make the most sense if women actually did have some power in this quarter.

Only women have the extraordinary freedom to enjoy sexual intimacy free from the fear of forced parenthood. [cite]

Whaoah! That’s a hot one! Obviously, by “women with extraordinary freedom” he means “mythical creatures whose legal right to an abortion is not obstructed at every turn by puritanical godbag misogynist legislation.”

But I am a Western, privileged internet feminist, which means that all I care about is clothes, so here is my favorite:

[...] A woman has a greater freedom when she gets dressed in the morning. She can wear what she wants to wear because she can be what she wants to be. She can wear traditionally male clothing because she can do traditionally male things, work in traditionally male jobs, assume traditionally male roles and personality traits. She can cross over into a man’s world, share men’s experiences, then return to a world where no men are allowed. You might say she can choose to wear the pants in the family. She has free choice in fashion because she has free choice in life. [cite]

Mel Feit is bummed out on accounta a supposedly feminist woman in a pair of pants told him she wouldn’t fuck him because — I do not lie — he likes to wear skirts. This unspeakable tragedy has forced Mel Feit to dream up all kinds of wacky fantasies about how liberating it is to be a woman in our society, and about how selfish women are for refusing to share our magnificent skirt-freedoms with him.

Jesus in a jetpack, like anyone really gives a shit if Mel fucking Feit wears a skirt! I will personally donate all of my skirts to Mel Feit, if he will just promise to wear them to all future christenings, bar mitzvas, weddings, business meetings, and talk show tapings.

O if only I had all day to huddle at the desk and make fun of old skirt-coveting Mel Feit who can’t get laid by women in pants. But unfortunately I’ve got to sit around and watch the grass grow.

[Thanks, Ashley]

Posted in Dear god what about the men?, Knobjectivism, Lobe-blowing, Men Hate You, Rape Culture and The Argument Against Human Reproduction. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt is only mildly inconvenienced by having to post something to her blog

Published by Jill on May 30, 2010. 91 Comments

Do I have time to write a post today? Hell, no! So I’m re-publishing an excerpt from one of Helen Huntingdon’s comments on the recent ultra-controversial science post. Do I have time to link to the specific comment? Hell, no! To read the whole thing, type “Helen Huntingdon” into the new search engine (over there on the right) and see what pops up.

The other day someone told me you can’t really get to know someone without living with them. Unsurprisingly, it was a dude who said this, since he was arguing why het couples should live together (married or un-), no matter how statistically risky this is for the woman. I said that if this was true, it must be possible to identify something of value that cannot be learned any other way, so what would that be? He couldn’t come up with anything that wasn’t obviously absurdly false. I said that the assertion that to “truly know” someone you must live together is probably nothing more than cultural myth, but that this one conversation hadn’t produced evidence warranting drawing a conclusion either way.

It’s too bad I don’t have time to enlarge on this theme, but I do have time to continue the tradition of pointing out what I great post I would have written if I didn’t have to drive 20 miles to put white gunk on a horse’s eye. It would have had something to do with widely accepted but bullshit cultural myths, such as “rabbits are rodents,” or “it is possible to boost your self-esteem by losing weight.”

Name your bullshit myths below!

UPDATE: the damn search engine is suddenly not acting right. Will fix it soon.

Posted in Dear god what about the men?, Knobjectivism and Oppression Culture. Bite me, Chad.

Spiny tree pig of the week

Published by Jill on May 29, 2010. 54 Comments

North American Porcupine
It’s a bastard Monty Python sketch around here: Spiny Norman meets the plummetin’ sheep. My Golden Retriever Bert treed this specimen. North American porcupine roosting in live oak tree, Cottonmouth County TX, April 2010.

Here’s some No. 1 Science Porcupine Information:

They’re the most longevitous of rodents, maxing out at 10 years, which is longer than some Golden Retrievers. They eat bark. They like salt. Quills are specialized hairs. Porcupines don’t shoot their quills, but they (the quills) fall right out when dogs bite’em. The ends of the quills are shaped so that they work their way inextricably into the flesh of their would-be assassins. Possibly, against the eventuality of the porcupine pronging itself, quills are coated with an antibiotic substance that prevents primary infection when your dog gets porcupined.

In closing, I’d just like to say that my lobe is entirely blown by the recent and entirely lobe-blowing spate of anti-sciencism here at I Blame the Patriarchy.

The last time my lobe was this blown by something I read on the Internet, I was instantly transformed from Jill Psmith, casual funfeminist hipster punkrock sexlesbo, to Twisty Faster, Internet Radical Feminist. I allude to the moment I discovered that all of my liberal-dude real life pals, with whom I’d been canoodling on a local listserv, were actually gross antifeminist woman-hating pornsick horndogs. The year was 2001. A conveniently passing obstreperal ray originating from a distant galaxy blew my lobe on the spot. The result was this blog.

Here on Savage Death Island, we like to think that our thirst for knowledge is what separates us from the fucking dipshits. Thus I am shocked to learn that there exists so pronounced a thirst for backwardism.

Needless to say, stand by; way more No. 1 Science Information is in the offing.

If you have any Porcupine Science Information to add, feel free to enlighten the group. As a connoisseur of hideous smells, I am particularly curious about the reputed stench of the porcupine den, which stench I have never personally nostriled.

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No. 1 Science Information Notes

Schmidly, David J. The Mammals of Texas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.

Conger, Cristen. “What’s the best way to remove porcupine quills?”. 13 October 2008. HowStuffWorks.com. Retrieved 29 May 2010.
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Posted in Heartwarming Nature Crap, Lobe-blowing and Number 1 Science Information. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt has nothing better to do than bloviate on the same topic as yesterday

Published by Jill on May 28, 2010. 107 Comments

The argument has been made that intuition is superior to science because it is somehow free of the oppressive misogynist entanglements that encumber its dude-dominated counterpart. A spin-off of this argument says that, because academia has traditionally given (and continues to give) women the stink-eyed bum’s rush, science is antifeminist and, presumably, must be shunned in favor of this women-centric intuition dealio.

Unfortunately, it is not possible for any concept, process, person, or cognitive function to exist outside of patriarchy. That’s what patriarchy is: a world order with firmly established and inescapable auspices. Science, like everything else on the planet, is Dude Nation’s minion, yes, but “intuition” doesn’t exist in a magical patriarchy-free zone merely because it is associated with women’s reality. In fact, it is because of patriarchy that women were assigned the supposedly unique and mystical power of hunchiness the first place.

Thus do we dispense with the first argument. Onward to Argument 2!

It is understandable and even necessary that feminist women should cast a jaundiced eye upon such facts as have been amassed by a scientific community that exists primarily to serve the megatheocorporatocracy. More than a few of these ‘facts’ have been used to smush women (and other sentient beings) over the past couple of hundred years, for the exclusive benefit of the ruling class (primarily Penis-Americans). Furthermore, nobody can argue that the science community isn’t really fucking sexist; more than a few women have contributed to scientific discovery, only to be ignored by both the Nobel committee and the PBS documentary that popularizes the breakthrough during pledge drive.

But the statement “science harms women” is not as accurate as is “the application, by misogynist knobs, of scientific method to systems of oppression harms women.”

Science is just knowledge, and scientific method is just a way of acquiring it. Because our world order is predicated on a pack of lies, it is, of course, incumbent on the individual to determine the truth and/or philosophic value in anything presented as scientific fact, but it is imprudent, backward, and self-destructive to curl a suspicious lip at knowledge itself (I will stop short of calling it irrational, since self-destruction may sometimes be seen as a reasonable solution to certain insurmountable pickles; however, such situations are generally the result of the fundamental incompatibility of fully-realized humanity and oppression culture).

Anyways, I assert that knowledge not acquired through scientific method is way more suspect than that which is acquired through scientific method, on accounta, without quantifiable, measurable evidence to which analysis has been applied and upon which the full force of one’s awesome intellective powers has been brought to bear, what you got there is unsupported assertion based on reasoning that may or may not be flawed, but you’ll never know, because you didn’t run your shit through the Number 1 Science Information Test Lab.

Another term for “unsupported assertion based on reasoning that may or may not be flawed, but you’ll never know, because you didn’t run your shit through the Number 1 Science Information Test Lab” is belief. I could give you 7,894,532 examples of goofy or uncool results obtained from the confusion of belief with fact, and maybe I will, if my secretary Phil ever gets back from Starbuck’s with my double Caffe Immenso. Until then, perhaps 2 or 3 will suffice.

One example of flawed reasoning substituted for scientific inquiry, recently mentioned by a couple of blamers, is the tragic vaccines-cause-autism movement: my kid got vaccinated, my kid developed autism, therefore vaccines cause autism.

Another imperfect grasp of causation was famously demonstrated by the cargo cults of the South Pacific: some folks in New Guinea, having observed fabulous wealth being offloaded from war planes during WW II, erroneously concluded that technology-shaped things cause cool stuff to appear, and believed that they could attract more cool stuff by building imitation landing strips and replica airplanes out of vegetation, and by marching around in homemade military uniforms carrying gun-shaped pieces of wood.

Wait, wait, here’s a hot one (also vaccine-related): the notion, put forth by godbag misogynist politicians, that vaccinating teenage girls against papillomavirus causes them to turn into sluts.

Still another term for “unsupported assertion based on reasoning that may or may not be flawed, but you’ll never know because you didn’t run your shit through the Number 1 Science Information Test Lab” is intuition.

You know? I’m gonna go ahead and assert that ‘intuition’, a psycho-clairvoyant precognitive Spidey sense, doesn’t even exist. I prefer the term ‘insight’ to denote the process of observation and deduction applied at knee-jerk light-speed by the free-flowing neurotransmitters of a well-greased lobe. Like when you invent the wheel, or when you’re strolling along, and you encounter a stick, and your lobe sends up a flare, and sure enough the stick turns out to be a snake. That sort of thing.

It is true that, as an oppressed class, women have been trained to ignore, at least in certain circumstances, this handy and useful brain function, with the untoward result that we’ve become more compliant with the mandates of rape culture than if we’d been encouraged from birth to exercise to the max our awesome lobe-powers. We are exhorted (and rewarded when we do) to place a higher premium on conformity than we do on our own safety and well-being, even when the free-flowing neurotransmitters of our well-greased lobe initially suggest “No! Stop! Don’t do it, fool!”

Suppression of lobe function is how women end up married to schmucks, wearing high heels, faking orgasms, getting boob jobs, and smiling coyly at strangers with candy.

But heck, isn’t there a baby-with-the-bathwater thing going on with this full-bore embrace of the myth of intuition at the expense of actual science? The insight-bush might bear the occasional fruit, but the lobe isn’t omniscient! The lobe can’t predict the future! The lobe simply cannot intuit which of the brown spiders, purple mushrooms, or lumps in your boob will kill you! You need actual knowledge to traverse this treacherous terrain. This kind of knowledge comes from science.

While this so-called ‘intuition’ dealio may give satisfactory results as an immediate dispenser of just prejudice in emergencies, when there’s time, why not send the old intuition around to a couple of the other lobes for some rational analysis? Why not check out what some other people have done, rational analysis-wise, with their so-called intuitions? Why cling to myth, assumption, fallacy, or belief? And what about intellectual curiosity? What about enbiggening the horizons of human endeavor?

Persistent and willful ignorance is the enemy of liberation! A life that eschews science is a life is lived entirely in the present, like that of a beetle, or a puppy. And although puppies possess several enviable attributes, a surpassing appreciation of the value of truth isn’t one of’em.

Although it can possibly be said that puppies are themselves cosmic articulations* of truth.

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*I anthropomorphize the cosmos in this fashion for purposes of sentimentality and poeticalness only.

Posted in Magical Mysteries from Godtown, Number 1 Science Information and Oppression Culture. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt reveals her inner Firestone

Published by Jill on May 27, 2010. 94 Comments

Holy bajoly! The discussion on one of my recent posts has taken quite an unexpected turn. It went from the idea that women’s history has been erased/co-opted by the dominant culture to the idea that — I’m not even kidding — science is bad!

Unfortunately I have to go and see a girl about a horse, so time is short, but here’s the gist of the much better post I had intended to write on this topic (it was going to have more jokes, and probably an unforgettable new coined term, so it’s too bad, but there it is):

Science is bad, apparently, because men dominate the field. Also, women are better than men because we “have an intuitive understanding of nature and the processes involved.”

Concludes this commenter:

All the paper that men need to record history that they destroy, to transmit information, that we used to tell by stories and metaphors, is just a waste. They are just inefficient. It’s annoying because I always understood how bees and flies and some birds and bats flew, intuitively and it is only in 2005 that male scientists begin to understand it, with high tech equipment. It’s annoying also because they claim we never knew it, when Nietche(sp) wrote about it, the oscillation. It’s soooo dumb.

Women’s intuition? Seriously?

Again I say it: holy bajoly!

Intuition is unproven conjecture based on this, that, or the other thing. As blamer Nails put it:

Science is about understanding that your intuition is not always right and that the way to really *know* that it was involves testing and repeatability and good structure for experiments. You can tell me you intuitively know whatever you want to, but it doesn’t prove it at all.

Science is a process by which one discovers actual truth. Have Pinkfaced Captains of Industry and their Dude Nation minions subverted the scientific method for evil? Sure. Does their having done that invalidate the method itself, to the extent that goddessy ladies should pooh-pooh the whole idea in favor of some kind of magic lady-worship cult, the centerpiece of which is faith in “feelings”?

It is unlikely that the best place to find truth-n-beauty is at a matriarchy convention in San Marcos where the subject of the keynote speech is “My Journey with Sekhmet Goddess of Power and Change” and afterward there’s a drum circle.

Patriarchy is the problem, not science. Science does not oppress women. Dude culture oppresses women. I’m not advocating “science equality,’ either. I’m advocating — as always — liberation from oppression. Is anything more liberating than truth-n-beauty? I ask you.

Scientific discovery leading to human-friendly technology is the only way we’re gonna get out of the dark ages. For example, here at the lab at Spinster HQ we’re working on an anti-patchouli ray which we fully expect will change the way we smell public spaces forever more.

Posted in Blogulation, Magical Mysteries from Godtown, Number 1 Science Information and Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society. Bite me, Chad.

Gentle reminder of the week

Published by Jill on May 26, 2010. 41 Comments

It seems there may be some confusion regarding the degree of frequency with which patriarchy blamers are expected to comment on a given post. Thus do I trot out of mothballs the relevant passage from our award-nominated manifesto, Patriarchy-Blaming the Twisty Way: Guidelines for Commenters:

If you find yourself commenting more than 2 or 3 times on a given post, please consider shutting the old piehole.

Following this simple advice will prevent the comments section from becoming a bottomless pit of dreadful stream-of-consciousness-ness. Thank you and carry on.

Posted in Announcements and Blogulation. Bite me, Chad.