Still Life with Shatner Bobblehead and Duct Tape

Published by Jill on February 4, 2010. 36 Comments

Still Life with Shatner Bobblehead and Duct Tape

Oh, no.

In the picturesque Texas Hill Country, where for 2 years it did nothing but not rain, it now does nothing but rain.

Remember that Ray Bradbury story where the kid lives on a planet where it only stops raining for like 10 minutes once every 80 years or whatever, and everybody looks forward to it like mad, but the kid, whose only dream is to frolic outside unmolested by condensed atmospheric moisture, is accidentally locked in a closet by feckless playmates and misses the golden 10 minutes? It’s like that here at Spinster HQ. And, if I may say so, what the fuck? I turn my gaze skyward, hoping to catch an errant rose-gold ray of sun so that my lobe might convert it into obstreperantin or chortletic acid, but no. The sky’s just a vast expanse of dirty white wetness and it’s screwing sorely with my neurotransmitters. About the only ones left in my lobe are depressulose and stupenephrine. My yippee receptors are just flappin’ in the breeze, flappin’ in the breeze.

Maybe all this water wouldn’t be so bad if I were a newt, but a newt I’m not.

I’ve been told that the rain stops occasionally. Having been driven mad by the incessant tappa-tappa on the window pane-a, I am dubious in the extreme that this is the case, but if it is true, for the lovagod call my ass up when it happens, so I can biff out to the nearest field and do the butt-dance without having to put on that clammy rubber hula skirt.

It goes without saying that cabin fever has begun to manifest itself in the shape of TV viewing. Here are some of the repellent results of this pursuit.

1. A television commercial advertising a vitamin pill called Centrum Ultra Men’s asserts that some things are made just for men. According to the commercial, three of those things, besides, presumably, Centrum Ultra Men’s vitamin pills, are:

• bobbleheads

• duct tape

• a third thing I can’t remember

I’m calling bullshit on Centrum Ultra Men’s vitamin pills. I have in my possession one bobblehead and four rolls of duct tape, of which fact I provide photographic evidence above. I submit that the gender binary narrative supported by Centrum Ultra Men’s vitamin pills is bogus, dated, and sexist. Obviously bobbleheads and duct tape are not made just for men, but for anyone who needs a bobblehead, or who has to tape shit together.

Take me, for example. Like most women, bobbleheads and duct tape are integral to my daily routine. In fact, when checking the Spinster Agenda this morning, just after “Pump Iron, Get Ripped” and just before “Corrupt the Youth of Today” I observed these items: “apply ducktape to blown-out sole on paddock boot” and “tabulate preliminary results of Shatner bobblehead/Cheez-Whiz experiment.”

2. Another instance of sexism on television what recently caught mine eye was a promo for a show on Comedy Misogyny Central called “Tosh.0″. In this promo, Tosh.0, a loud, 20-something duuude — or perhaps he is a bobblehead — hilariously and edgily tantalizes his teen male audience with a segment that promises to answer the burning question “can women parallel park?” Cut to footage of a car backing up crazily onto a sidewalk. Women, avers Tosh.0, can absolutely not parallel park! Watch his show! Because denigrating women with moth-eaten sexist stereotypes is freakin awesome!

By some sad coincidence, I was using the Internet this morning, and just happened to come across the very segment Tosh.0 was promoting in his commercial. The video does, I regret to say, entirely live up to the extremely diminished expectations I have been forced to adopt regarding Men Aged 18-34. Not only does young Tosh.0 mock a middle-aged woman for being “really old,” he makes racist remarks about “L.A. Asians,” and throws in a few superannuated “jokes” about how women sucker innocent men into relationships, thereby destroying men’s lives.

To recap, this is what passes for funny on a major TV network in 2010: women can’t drive, old women can’t drive, Vietnamese women can’t drive, and women, with their cunning stupidity, live to shatter the dreams of innocent men.

3. I sometimes watch CNN while I’m pumping iron and getting ripped, and believe me, an aunt could write a dissertation, a Broadway play, and several meaningful protest songs on the garish spectacle of patriarchal mores on parade every minute on that network. But I’ll just skip all that and proceed directly to the commercial that irritated me this morning.

A handsome, silver-haired guy tells the camera that even though he did “everything he was supposed to do” as far as fitness and “eating right,” he still had a heart attack. So now he takes aspirin every day.

This ad isn’t explicitly sexist (although when compared with the “feminine” version of the same commercial — middle-aged wife-and-mother is “lucky” her daughter gave her an aspirin during her heart attack — its genderedness is pretty glaring). What particularly chaps the hide is this obnoxious practice of marketing through fear of sudden death cardiac death arrest. Because, wait. You mean I can pump iron and get ripped and eat nothing but raw spinach smoothies and take Centrum Ultra Spinster’s vitamin pills, and I still might croak, unless I get my butt on an “aspirin regimen”? Sign me up!

"Dramatization" of germs on Your Family

4. Jesus in a jetpack! Check out the huge fucking green “germs” on that member of someone’s family! It turns out that “hundreds of bacteria” could be on my kitchen hand sanitizer dispenser! I need an electronic motion-sensor model. I’ll mount it on my fence, so that when the feral hogs trot by, it’ll kill 99.9% of their swine flu.

Photo still from Lysol commercial. Note the word “Dramatization” in the lower left corner. Good thing they put that there, because otherwise I’d have been forced to conclude that the wholesome sport of basketball is now being threatened by a race of giant carnivorous paramecia.

Posted in Keep your bias off my gender, Mass Media and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt goes to pieces

Published by Jill on January 30, 2010. 46 Comments

Oh no! A 40-second video of a dancing cartoon butt wreaks havoc with my neurotransmitters!

Below, sent in by blamer Katie — thanks, Katie! — is the video that generated my paroxysm. According to my secretary Phil, the video is funny, but not as funny as I think it is.

Posted in Art is my LIFE, Mass Media, Not Altogether Depressing, Pre-recorded Twisty and Ways in Which the Internet Is a Hoot. Bite me, Chad.

There are molecules in the brain called “neurotransmitters”

Published by Jill on January 29, 2010. 102 Comments

Because of my award-nominated, it-is-highly-unlikely-that-you-are-qualified-to-post-here moderation policy — “Old Iron-Fist” is what they call me down at Spinster HQ — readers of I Blame the Patriarchy aren’t always exposed to mansplaining at standard Internet concentrations. I sometimes wonder if this is really all to the good, since mansplaining can be so goddam hilarious, and who doesn’t enjoy a hearty guffaw after a hard day of gossiping or neurosurgery or trench-digging or whatever it is that you do all day?

But then I come to my senses.

Mansplaining — you know mansplaining, right? It’s that loud, annoying, repetitive alarm call that men emit whenever they perceive a lower-status person challenging their authority — isn’t really so goddam hilarious in and of itself. This is because it is a hallmark of domination culture, because it is comprised primarily of meaningless noise (whether taken in or out of context), and because it is obfuscatory, oppressive, denigrating, sexist, and rude. It can only achieve comic status when openly mocked. Preferably by an angry mob.

My thoughts turned briefly to mansplanation mockery this morning when I found myself deleting a something of a dilly. The author in question was, as is typical, correcting me on this point and that, explaining that my views (but not his) are “sexist,” yadda yadda, in a tone that suggested so deep a reverence for his own intellect that he’d expect the solar system to explode if he failed to execute this very important takedown on my blog. His brilliant denouement? The assertion that if I “honestly” disagree with him — apparently this contingency should be all but impossible — then “what [I] practice isn’t feminism.”

Aww yiah. It’s my very favorite species of mansplaining, the species where some dim bulb with a feeble and unsophisticated grasp of the principles — instead of kissing my ass and begging me brokenly for a few words of enlightenment that might ultimately prevent him from going through life known to the ladies as Chad, the Purulent Lump of Gonorrhea — purports to know — better than the actual feminist — what feminism is or isn’t.

How appropriate that veteran blamer Ron Sullivan should have chosen this point to alert me to an excellent mansplaining-mockery post at Zuska’s entitled “You May Be A Mansplainer If …”. This post is the greatest thing ever published on either this Internet or that one. Zuska invites readers to give examples of, and to ridicule, mansplaining. It’s the angry mob of which I spoke so yearningly just a moment ago! As of this writing there are over 200 comments. Like this one by Zuskateer mightydoll, a classic in the Men Literally Cannot Hear Women Speaking Division.

my ex used to do this:

ex: something’s wrong with my computer.

me: Oh, looks like there’s a phrenicle in the stubert zone

ex: something’s wrong with my computer

me: Why not check the stubert zone for phrenicles?

ex: something’s wrong with my computer – - I’ll ask Dick at work about it.

A WEEK PASSES IN WHICH I MENTION THE STUBERT PHRENICLES A FEW MORE TIMES

ex: Hey, I spoke to Dick at work about my computer. Turns out, (begins speaking really slowly) there are these things called phrenicles which SPEAK … TO… the molydimes. The molydimes can reside in the jiminy zone, or they can reside in the stubert zone, but WHEN they reside in the stubert zone, sometimes there’s a problem with them communicating with the loovarths, so it’s best to keep phrenicles out of the stubert zone. All I have to do is move these phrenicles back to the jiminy zone and it’s solved. Isn’t Dick at work a computer god?

me: …

Or this, from SKM:

You might be a mansplainer if you begin a sentence addressed to a woman whom you know holds a degree in neuroscience with “there are molecules in the brain called neurotransmitters”.

This You May Be A Mansplainer post is not without its bittersweet moments. For instance, there is the introduction into English of the exquisite and apparently Brazilian phrase “rule crapper” ( as in “There, he did it again, he just crapped a rule”), but tragically, the author of this revelatory comment simultaneously mansplains that mansplaining “is not necessarily sexist” because men crap rules at other men all the time.

Even if it happens to dudes, it can still be sexist, yo.

Poop, I just crapped a rule!

Poop!

In fact, quite the buttload of Zuska’s mansplaining commenters are apparently authoritative experts on mansplaining. This is surprising and kind of meta, since it is a well-known fact that men who claim to know what the fuck mansplaining is cannot resist mansplaining that it doesn’t, at least for them, exist. More than a few of them mansplain that theirs is a truly lofty and nuanced apprehension of mansplaining, which is why when they do it they aren’t really doing it, so it isn’t the same as when actual mansplainers mansplain.

Then the outraged feminist shows up with the news that this awful manhating post has — get ready for a shock – made feminism the laughingstock of the whole internet. Oh no.

“Stop helping” is this outraged feminist’s refrain. Women should steer clear of critical analyses of male privilege because it makes us unpopular with the Chads of the world.

This is all outrageous and very maddening!

God, the whole thing is just swell.

Posted in Blogulation, Dear god what about the men?, Men Hate You, Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society and Ways in Which the Internet Is a Hoot. Bite me, Chad.

Original iPad joke

Published by Jill on January 28, 2010. 29 Comments

Remember this vid from the Jerktassic Epoch?

Jokes about menstruation are hilarious because menstruation is gross and alluding to it is fucking transgressive.

Posted in Oppression Culture, The Entertainment Industrial Complex, The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Yesterday and Ways in Which the Internet Is a Hoot. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt begins post with “I,” tells anecdote

Published by Jill on January 28, 2010. 43 Comments

I recently blew out a lobe laughing a cold, ulcerated laugh. It happened yesterday, when my sibling Tidy told me a sad tale of Christian insanity, which tale I now relate to you, right after I bore you with some background details.

For reasons that, to my surprise, turned out to be none of my goddam business, Tidy has started sending my niece Rotel to one of those honky upper-middle-class god-affiliated schools where the kids wear uniforms and attend mandatory “chapel” sessions. For the past few months I have been nervously eyeballing the child, ever alert for signs that the faithy godbag indoctrination has begun to take, so that I might countermand that moron crap with an auntly intervention of Question Authority-ism. So far it’s been all clear, which is why it was quite a jolt when, during a recent babysitting gig, young Rotel broke into song, and the song she broke into was not “Fried Ham, Fried Ham, Cheese and Baloney,” but a horrifying ditty about dewdrops of mercy and Jesus and how he is the “light of the world.” The goopy dewdroppy Jesosity blew my mind. There was only one possible response.

“Holy shit!” I said.

Both of the nieces busted out laughing. They know I am prohibited by Tidy from saying “holy shit” in their presence. They don’t know it’s because Tidy is afraid they might repeat it in front of nice people, nice people who will form the opinion that Tidy is a self-absorbed loose-moraled alcoholic for permitting her daughters’ exposure to anyone low-class enough to say “holy shit” in front of little kids. The nice people will have no choice but to call CFS. The nieces will be thrown into foster care, Tidy will be sentenced to lousy-mother prison, and I, corrupter of youth, will face a firing squad.

I’ll get a cigarette out of the deal, though, so it won’t be a total loss.

But I digress. The sad tale of Christian insanity I mentioned at the beginning of this post starts here:

The other day Tidy hears that a public school on the poor side of town has raised over $4000 for Haitian relief. She thinks this is awesome, so she calls up Rotel’s affluent god-based school to suggest that they get a sort of break-the-piggy-bank-for-Haiti initiative going. So the kids might broaden their philanthropical horizons or whatever. To Tidy’s surprise, the god school wasn’t down, not in the slightest.

Not that they are totally ignoring Haiti! Au contraire! They’re “keeping Haiti in front of the students” with “prayer.”

That’s when the laugh erupted and lobe blew out.

It was already pulsating a bit from the smelliness of the idea of repurposing the earthquake as a sort of social studies unit to teach young WASPs, not about human suffering and its root causes, but about compulsory altruism and the duty to allocate a small percentage of one’s white privilege loot to indigent brown foreigners. Totally screwed Haitians = golden opportunity to introduce noblesse oblige to Richie Rich.

Gross, yeah, and a poor substitute for the new world order that would really put things right, but at least it generates a little cash for immediate relief efforts. If you haven’t eaten in 4 days, and you manage to scrounge one of those fabled energy biscuits, do you really give a crap about the motives of the sanctimonious chump who texted 10 bucks to the Red Cross?

This prayer gambit on the other hand. It is difficult to imagine an emptier, worthlesser, time-wastinger, efficaciouslesser gesture. In fact, organized prayer has been proven to be 137 times worse than doing nothing at all. This is because compulsory group participation in phony appeals to a fake benevolent American deity is a political behavior that not only fosters intolerable levels of community sanctimony, but reinforces a culture of oppression through repetition of patriarchal doctrine. So not only do marginalized groups get the immediate shaft in the form of material non-support during a crisis; not only are little kids duped into thinking that muttering a few words in chapel is good for earthquake victims; but organized prayer replicates the deleterious effects of godbagism by storing them in the common consciousness to ensure ignorance and obfuscation of truth for future generations.

The starving, sick, homeless Haitians should really be luxuriating in all that prayer right about now. Who needs food, water, and antibiotics when little rich kids in Texas are, on your behalf, being forced by deluded authority figures to mutter nonsensical crap to an impotent made-up figment?

Posted in Godbagism, Magical Mysteries from Godtown, Oppression Culture, The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today and The megatheocorporatocracy. Bite me, Chad.

Mockery Korner

Published by Jill on January 25, 2010. 44 Comments

I regret that today’s post is one of those posts in which I recycle a couple of reader comments from the trash bin, because they express comicalness. Today’s are both dudely.

In our first example, the author alludes to some Japanese fetish footwear I pictured in a post way back in the Osteopassic Period. I’ve gotten quite a bit of mileage out of that post, as The World At Large continues to google “torture fetish shoes” with no small frequency.

Hello.

I am a man. Yes, I know, please bear with me. I’m one of those men who’se Mother tried to bring him up pro-feminist in the seventies.

My partner, who is a woman, desperately wants a pair of these shoes. “What will you do in them?”, I ask. Just sit around, looking at them, seems to be the idea (as she accepts she won’t be able to stand up), presumably while I cook dinner.

Trouble is, my partner is a student, and has no money, so she wants me to pay 200 pounds (UK) for these shoes. So I ask you: am I more of an instrument of the oppressive status quo if I buy them or do not?

Hey, Man. Seriously? It must be a helluva rush to know you wield Absolute Shoe Power over your woman. Do you also mete out food and shelter, in addition to clothing? Do you write to Internet feminists when your woman, let’s say, wants a sandwich and you aren’t sure if you should be contributing to her fat content?

Damn, that’s hot!

Our second example, wherein a dude named Clinton responds to a recent post about Focus on the Family’s spokesfootballer, is just batshit. I reproduce it here because I love the first line so much: “People like you are the reason that people don’t grow up to be better than they are.”

People like you are the reason that people don’t grow up to be better than they are. Since you refuse to be a good person, why would you expect anyone else to be, as well? You think that Focus on the Family is loony because they are pro-life, but you neglect your own looniness in rejecting the Savior of mankind, Jesus Christ. And apparently it’s okay to insult the very foundation of Christianity (”ghost of a dead Nazarene on a stick”), but it’s not okay to take the moral high ground and believe that all life is sacred. Why don’t you do the world a favor and stop blogging, or try and treat people with respect. Even if you’re correct (which you’re not, by the way), people in the wrong aren’t going to admit that they’re wrong if you have a high and mighty attitude, and insult them. If you hope to change anyone’s minds, you need to change your attitude.

Not only is it “loony” not to worship the ghost of a dead Nazarene on a stick, it’s my fault that wrongthinking people don’t change their wrongthinking ways. Because I don’t ask nice enough. One of my favorite arguments ever: wrong may be wrong, but she who points it out is wrongest of all!

Oh, and that last part about my attitude? Clinton plagiarized it word for word from a speech my mother authored and delivered more or less continuously from 1968-1980.

Posted in Blogulation, Magical Mysteries from Godtown and Oppression Culture. Bite me, Chad.

Rednecks vs hogs

Published by Jill on January 24, 2010. 44 Comments

Feral hog track

Do you often say to yourself, “I wonder, what does a feral hog track look like, anyway?” Look no further. Behold the goods. This track was huge enough that I have no wish to encounter the hog what made it. It probably has giant venomous fangs, spiked tail, and 6-inch claws.

Texas has more feral hogs than any other state. That’s because Texas has more rednecks than any other state. It is the fondest dream of certain of these rednecks to hunt wild hogs with pit bulls, so they make sure there are always plenty of’em roaming the countryside, terrorizing the citizenry.

I can get rid of my feral hog by calling one of these rednecks. They offer free hog removal in return for the thrill of the hunt. But then, of course, I’d have rednecks on the farm. I don’t know which is worse. It is, as Stingray said, a question for the ages.

Posted in Bloodsport, El Rancho Deluxe, Heartwarming Nature Crap and Varmint Center. Bite me, Chad.

Pre-abortion ultrasound laws generate amusing Onion vid

Published by Jill on January 19, 2010. 48 Comments


New Law Requires Women To Name Baby, Paint Nursery Before Getting Abortion

Remember this, from last summer?

Oklahoma is the only state in the nation that mandated a physician to both conduct an ultrasound and describe the images to the patient.

“The ultrasound provision takes away a patient’s choice about whether or not to view an ultrasound, and it requires physicians to provide information to their patients that the physicians do not believe is medically necessary,” Toti said.

“It’s an affront to women’s autonomy and decision-making power, and it’s also an intrusion to the physician-patient relationship.”

And this?

“One [Oklahoma] law would require women to fill out a lengthy survey that asks, among other things, about their race, education and reason for seeking an abortion. It asks women whether they’re having relationship problems, whether they can’t afford to raise a child or whether having a baby would dramatically change their lives.

Another section requires doctors to provide detailed information about complications that arise as a result of the procedure.”

The mind reels.

[Thanks, Wiggles]

Posted in Compulsory pregnancy, Mass Media, The Argument Against Human Reproduction and Ways in Which the Internet Is a Hoot. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt publishes post on godly football player without titling it first

Published by Jill on January 18, 2010. 72 Comments

Redneck beer coozy

According to the Internet, a celebrity football player and his mother are making a pro-compulsory pregnancy Super Bowl commercial for noted hysterical antifeminist group Focus on the Family. Reportedly the gist of the commercial is the heartwarming tale of the pre-parturient football mother, who experienced life-threatening issues while pregnant and was advised by doctors to abort the fetus. Well, Football Mom begged to differ. Since abortions invalidate and indecentuate women, she brought her fetus to term, whereupon it matured into a dude who made a shit-ton of money throwing a ball around in a stylized form of organized combat. She raised herself a star quarterback who loves Jesus! Her gamble paid off, says Focus on the Family; yours will, too!

I love the hyperreactive, emotionally unstable “argument” supporting the premise that abortions “kill babies” that would otherwise grow up to become influential celebrities. If you have an abortion you’re murdering the future winner of the Nobel Prize for Selflessness, etc.

Oy.

Try this simple experiment. If you are in a public place, such as the Super S “grocery” store in Dripping Springs, Texas, this unborn-fetuses-are-the-Mother-Teresas-of-tomorrow thesis can be disproved in about 47 seconds. A quick glance around this shrine to Creme Filling will confirm that your fellow shoppers — all former fetuses brought to term as per God’s Plan, then abandoned by that same God to forage for sustenance in this forsaken hellhole of wilted iceberg lettuce and plastic-wrapped genetically modified snack foods — count no Mother Teresas among their number. No Presidents of the United States, no Nobel laureates, no celebrities, no astronauts, not even any local TV news anchors. It turns out that the vast majority of fetuses brought to term are just regular chumps the existence of whom is a matter of extreme inconsequentiality to the cosmos. They don’t cure cancer or negotiate peace settlements in the Middle East. They eat sliced baloney, wear beige Easy Spirit shoes, and sheathe their Miller Lites in beer coozies that say “I don’t need the INTERNET, my wife knows EVERYTHING!”

This same experiment can be performed anywhere — in urban sidewalks, rock clubs, trendy coffee huts, taco stands, and upscale shopping malls –with homogeneous results. Which results are: exceedingly few non-aborted fetuses become saintly millionaire football players.

What Focus on the Family conveniently omits to consider is the proposition diametric to their Heroic Fetus thesis. That is: applying their own loony reasoning to the problem of the existence of Bad Dudes — it follows that an abortion today could unburden the world of tomorrow’s rapist, suicide bomber, or genocidal maniac. Why wouldn’t that be a good idea?

Focus on the Family blames evildoers on crummy families where there is too much MTV and not enough “attuning to God’s presence and calling.”

O for the simpler days of yore, when you could just take your “snippy” teen “out to the back 40 acres” and “get his mind straight” (apparently, back in the days of yore, everybody had 40 acres in the back. This area was called “The Whuppin’ 40″). But now, instead of compliant teens who shape up the minute Paw kicks the shit out of’em, MTV has created a race of headstrong youths who are, inconveniently, able to “articulate their anger,” thus “compound[ing] the difficulties of growing up.”

Here’s an excerpt from the Super Bowl commercial story that’s creepy in ways I just can’t put my finger on.

“Tebow, one of the most esteemed college football players ever, has been very vocal about his Christian faith and his love for Jesus Christ.”

A college football player loves the ghost of a dead Nazarene on a stick, so he’s qualified to compel pregnancy? That doesn’t even make sense in a world gone mad!

It’s not Tebow so much as this recent Haiti-spawned spate of vocality about love for Jesus Christ, I suppose, that sticks in the spinster craw. On CNN yesterday there were countless videos of traumatized Haitians stumbling around in rubble, alluding to God in fearful, reverent and favorable terms. It blows the lobe. This earthquake and subsequent torments visited randomly upon the survivors is a pretty good argument of in favor of an indifferent, deity-free universe, but apparently other, more fanciful conclusions have been drawn. The heart bleeds.

Posted in Compulsory pregnancy, Godbagism, Magical Mysteries from Godtown, Mass Media and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.

Cheap frills: spinster aunt views child beauty pageant on TV

Published by Jill on January 13, 2010. 74 Comments
Remind you of anyone?

Remind you of anyone?

This dude is charged with murdering a woman unfortunate enough to have married him — she documented his violent episodes in her diary — and the Beeb reports that she had a “volatile personality”?

!

* * * * * * * * * *

In other antifeminist news, yesterday the satellite dish at Spinster HQ received a program called “Little Miss Perfect.” This turned out to be a reality show about women who have internalized the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women to the extent that they embrace an astonishing hobby. The hobby is the competitive display of their female children, whom they trick out in the most extreme, sexualized feminine drag imaginable, at an event called the Little Miss Perfect Pageant. Cameras follow around two young hopefuls and their mothers as they practice “wow-wear” dance routines, rent cheezy dresses, and glam up for the competition. Like all reality shows, the subtext of “Little Miss Perfect” is “Get a load of these weirdos!”

Of passing interest: the Little Miss Perfect Pageant is governed by a feminine male emcee. He is the only male character in the show. He sings a song about dreams coming true to the tots as they contort themselves into the celebrated “pretty feet” pose. I experience a momentary pang of prurient curiosity about this slightly sinister dude, whose degraded circumstances I perceive as dangling somewhere between bathos and pathos. What bizarre fusion of the tragic and the mundane might lead a girlyman to wind up singing syrupy ballads to creepy-looking kids at Little Miss Perfect pageants in meeting-rooms at Marriott hotels in red states? I guess I’ll never know.

Of course, now he’s on national satellite TV in stunning high-def, so I suppose it’s a moot point.

Meanwhile, the kids are on stage, gleaming in “eveningwear”: yards of gem-studded organza, full makeup, false eyelashes, spray tans, giant wigs, acrylic nails, and fake teeth. They look like they were dipped in a mixture of glucose and polyurethane, polished with an orbital waxer, and finished off with a couple of cans of Aquanet. They are 8-year-old proto-pole-dancing virgins with unceasingly bared teeth who shake their moneymakers and wink come-hitherly at the judges.

Fortunately, the gaudy spectacle did not blow my entire tiny mind, for I am acquainted with the child pageant phenomenon. The library at Spinster HQ contains a pink coffeetable book entitled High Glitz: The Extravagant World of Child Beauty Pageants. It’s full-o Susan Anderson’s lurid photographs of teensy beauty queens. In the foreword to High Glitz a chappie named Robert Greene makes a statement with which I cannot quibble:

“We are not used to treating the inner lives of young girls with the proper seriousness — as a subject worthy of study and analysis.”

This is certainly true of the producers of “Little Miss Perfect.” They depict the mothers as slightly batshit and the inner lives of the young girls as non-existent. The resulting pseudo-documentary smells, predictably, of burnt polyester.

Greene, however, chides horrified and nay-saying spectators for what he perceives as an outdated unwillingness to accord basic human agency to pageant contestants. He argues that everything about humans is “artificial” whether it is obvious to adults or not; therefore these junior artifice-junkies are cutting-edge visionaries and artistes, and their unsparingly spangled exaltation of fembottery is the authentic pre-pubescent girl fantasy. In other words, cheap frills is their culture, it has legitimacy, and you’re unevolved if you imagine that these kids are nothing more than victims of their batty stage mothers’ frustrated longings.

Thus far Greene and I are two hearts beating as, perhaps, one-and-a-half, but we part company altogether when he launches into a paean to the supposedly extraordinary insights of Victorian pedophile Lewis Carroll, whom Greene lauds as the lone personage in all of recorded history who has given the inner lives of young girls their due.* And when he as good as declares that child beauty pageants are the greatest thing since high-speed GPS internet iphone video chat blog shopping, I clench up; the desire to magnify femininity by a factor of about 6 million and put it on public display may be genuine, but, since femininity is the practice of obeisance to oppressive mores, pageants don’t exactly amount to the pinnacle of human endeavor, or even a minor victory for Truth and Beauty.

However, Greene gets no argument from me when he asserts that, unlike boys, who are applauded for their active inventiveness, little girls are universally and sexistly seen as “essentially passive and weak” and incapable of inventing a meaningful culture. There can be no doubt that human society generally smirks condescendingly at female children, dismissing them as vapid impotents-in-training, and that this treatment is totally bogus.

I further agree that, as far as the participants themselves are concerned, this kiddie burlesque has at least the same (if not greater) philosophic value as playing soccer or performing at a piano recital. An adult spectator may not credit it, but, given the porn-dominated zeitgeist, competing for rhinestone crowns by transforming into idealized miniature sexbots is a perfectly valid and fulfilling pursuit that has, from the perspective of the kid, nothing to do with seduction or titillation, and everything to do with plain old human creative impulses. What does a 7-year-old know from titillation? If a spray-tanned tap-dancing kindergardener in a wiglet and off-the-shoulder cupcake dress evokes spasms of horror in the onlooker, it’s certainly not the kid’s fault; she’s merely coloring with the available crayons, and plainly having pretty high time doing it. It’s not the stage mother’s fault, either; she indulges the kid’s young dream with thousand-dollar gowns, rhinestone corsetry, professional coaches, and bionic dentures, not because she’s a psycho abuser, but because she just wants her kid to excel at something.

But won’t they be scarred for life? Undoubtedly, but not because of the tawdry nature of the Little Miss Perfect contest. Beauty pageants don’t fuck kids up. Growing up in a culture that despises them fucks them up, and no little girl is immune from that.

I submit that anyone who is uncomfortable with Little Miss Perfect is ethically obliged to be just as uncomfortable with femininity in general. Little Miss Perfect is merely one of a gazillion equally nauseating points on the Porno-Feminine Continuum within which all female citizens of the globe are confined by a culture of oppression.

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* Mr Greene apparently feels that Charles Dodgson’s hobby as a child pornographer uniquely qualified him as an expert on girl culture. Forget The Secret Garden, Mrs Basil E Frankweiler, Go Ask Alice, It’s Me, Margaret, A Wrinkle in Time, Diary of Anne Frank, etc.

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