I Blame The Patriarchy

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.

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.

________________________
* 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.

Still from a YouTube vid exposing unspeakable sickosity at New Jersey Bravo Packing company. Disturbing in the extreme.

Spinster aunts are multi-faceted — which is fortunate, because otherwise our Down With Patriarchy! ways would render us friendless and alone — and one of those facets is that we have been horse-crazy since birth. Horse people are just as nutty as dog show people (Best In Show is no exaggeration), only with bigger vet bills. The ones who aren’t nutty are crooks. Only a small percentage of horse people have anything like what you might call a grip.

For years I’ve been a devoted fan of Fugly Horse of the Day. This excellent blog is authored by Fugly, one of the few with a grip. Sparing the reader the goopy glitter-butterfly sentimentality that seems to infest so many horse blogs, Fugly advocates for the species, rescues OTTBs (off-the-track Thoroughbreds), comments sensibly and humorously on the horse business, makes fun of the nuts, and exposes the crooks. Her blog is insanely popular, so an army of Fuglies nationwide can be mobilized at a moment’s notice to spy on crazy trainers, call bullshit on ignorant breeders, locate stolen horses, and rescue abandoned animals from kill-buyers at auctions. Some of her liveliest writing is on those crapulent sickos who merge “crook” and “nutty” into “sociopath.”

Behold Fugly’s declaration of war on the Bravo Meat Packing slaughterhouse in New Jersey. The slaughterhouse produces illegal horse meat for owners of exotic animals (lions, tigers, and bears, I guess) and exists with the protection of corrupt government. The horses who end up there are starved and brutalized by sociopath abusers before being turned into lunch for somebody’s pet ocelot. I am happy to report that the head sociopath recently died, hopefully in agony, but the slaughterhouse is still going full tilt.

“[Rescued mare] Buttercup was living at Bravo for close to a year and was a part of Monty’s “lean meat” experiment. To procure lean meat, a horse must start out fat and healthy and then be starved for months to a point of lean muscle tissue. Buttercup was not only starved at the Bravo kill lot, but medically neglected as well. She had gashes on her right front leg and severe cellulitis on her left back leg that were left untreated by Monty and Joe Merola for months. Consequently, Buttercup will have chronic cellulitis for the rest of her life in her left back leg. Luckily, she is still rid-able and the vet would like her to be ridden to keep the swelling down.”

This joint needs to be shut down, so I’m joining the Fuglitariat in getting the word out. I’m not sure how much crossover there is between the horse world and patriarchy blamers, but animal suffering is animal suffering, and I’m officially declaring horse abuse as a Savage Death Island blame-motif. If you live in Jersey and give a crap about shit, call up your state lege and tell’em to quit subsidizing this horrorshow.

Horse slaughter for human consumption is illegal in the U.S. This means that unwanted horses — often failed or lame racehorses or show horses, 100,000 of’em a year — are sent to American auctions, bought by kill buyers for $50 or $100, and shipped — under abhorrent conditions in double-decker pig trucks — to Mexico for slaughter.

Go vegan!

Beautiful Smith & Wesson Cuff Bracelet

As riveting, in terms of spectacle and intrigue, as the actual real life of the Internet feminist may be, I am reluctant to reveal too many details, lest the reader become over-excited by the awesome scope of it and have to be hospitalized. But trust me when I say that an unusually large glob of events, circumstances, matters, and occasions are concatenating around here, and that I appear to be at the hub of it (if an Internet feminist may be said to be at the hub of a glob). As you have perhaps surmised from my undernourished, Twisty-Lite postings of late, I’m blowing off the blog, for an interim of indeterminate duration.

By “blowing off” I mean “not writing very much stuff,” or possibly, “writing not very much stuff pretty intermittently, which stuff will probably turn out to be stuff hardly anybody gives a crap about.” You know. The usual.

For instance, right now I gotta go interview a 22-year-old self-described Rodeo Pageant Trophy Winner (which trophy is, apparently, “a beautiful Smith & Wesson cuff bracelet.” I surmise from this cryptic admission that her big win was at a prison rodeo).

Grieve for me.

Speaking of mayhem, it’s about time for the Annual Holiday Trio of Random Passages from the SCUM Manifesto.

“A small handful of SCUM can take over the country within a year by systematically fucking up the system, selectively destroying property, and murder:

SCUM will become members of the unwork force, the fuck-up force; they will get jobs of various kinds and unwork. For example, SCUM salesgirls will not charge for merchandise; SCUM telephone operators will not charge for calls; SCUM office and factory workers, in addition to fucking up their work, will secretly destroy equipment. SCUM will unwork at a job until fired, then get a new job to unwork at.

SCUM will forcibly relieve bus drivers, cab drivers and subway token sellers of their jobs and run buses and cabs and dispense free tokens to the public.

SCUM will destroy all useless and harmful objects – cars, store windows, ‘Great Art,’ etc.

Eventually SCUM will take over the airwaves – radio and TV networks – by forcibly relieving of their jobs all radio and TV employees who would impede SCUM’s entry into the broadcasting studios.

SCUM will couple-bust — barge into mixed (male-female) couples, wherever they are, and bust them up.”

and:

“SCUM will conduct Turd Sessions, at which every male present will give a speech beginning with the sentence: “I am a turd, a lowly, abject turd,” then proceed to list all the ways in which he is.”

and:

“It is most tempting to pick off the female “Great Artists,” liars and phonies, etc, along with the men, but that would be inexpedient, as it would not be clear to most of the public that the female killed was a male. All women have a fink streak in them, to a greater or lesser degree, but it stems from a lifetime of living among men. Eliminate men and women will shape up. Women are improvable; men are not, although their behavior is. When SCUM gets hot on their asses it’ll shape up fast.”

What the hell, how about a Holiday Bonus Passage:

“SCUM, being cool and selfish, will not subject itself to getting rapped on the head with billy clubs; that’s for the nice, “privileged, educated” middle class ladies with a high regard for the touching faith in the essential goodness of Daddy and policemen. If SCUM ever marches it will be over the President’s stupid, sickening face; if SCUM ever strikes, it will be in the dark with a six-inch blade.”

Put that in your snowglobe and shake it.

Wait. I have a blog? Shitfire!

But wow, check out this dumb blog. It’s one of those blogs that has “book deal” written all over it.

It’s supposedly a husband-and-wife joint coaching the reader on the successful pursuit of traditional manliness. Traditional manliness isn’t just a lifestyle, it’s a movement! It agitates in support of the appreciation of “classic cocktails,” of knowing how to “set the agenda” at “meetings,” and, as in the example below, of navigating the perilous waters of dating incomprehensible women.

Women are suckers for a man with a plan because it shows you have initiative, can think ahead, and aren’t shy about taking the lead. Don’t punt and ask her what she wants to do. Be a man! You’re the one doing the asking, so it’s your duty to come up with something that she’ll enjoy. When a woman is with a man that has a plan, they feel they can relax and really enjoy themselves. [Cite]

The husband/wife blog uses terms like on board to mean “having drunk the pre-feminist nostalgia Kool-Aid” and man up to mean — well, the precise definition of man up remains indeterminate, but I believe that on manliness blogs it concerns embracing with vigor a set of supposedly lost upper-middle-class honky patriarchal affectations, like the moral necessity of wearing suits to class, of criticizing women who think femininity is stupid, and of growing handlebar mustaches.

Here’s a post in which the manliness-loving duo expose the egregious double standard imposed upon manliness-seeking men by scruffy feminists in sweatpants. Apparently scruffy feminists in sweatpants want men to eschew their natural barbarism*, but are not sufficiently on board with their own feminine role in this business of manning up.

“[T]he new movement towards a return to traditional manliness needs women to be on board to be successful. After all, if you have men opening doors and asking women on real dates, and they’re just laughing in your face, that’s clearly not going to work out too well. And if you have men striving to be their best, but they feel like women aren’t even trying, you’ve got a recipe for creating strained relations between the sexes and bitter and disillusioned men who think all women are an unappealing mess who are not worth the trouble of dealing with. [...] [T]hese days a new double standard has emerged where it’s okay to celebrate men manning up, but telling women they need to recover some of their femininity is offensive.”

Ladies, if you desire your interactions with the nattily-dressed oppressor to be as painless as possible, you will do your nails and makeup.

_________________________
* “[Y]our car probably smells. Leaving sweaty gym bags or Saturday morning’s fish catch in a car causes odor to build up in the upholstery. Spare your date the olfactory torture by airing out your car and spraying it down with Febreeze.”

[Gracias, Rebecca]

The Nashville Corrections Department, conveniently located adjacent to a Christian Science Reading Room and Balloon-A-Tune, is where you will find concerned rape preventionists Rita R. Reed and Benjamin F. Bean.

A propos of scaremail forwards:

[Dear Twisty,]

Howdy!

I was just the happy recipient of the following text message on my phone:

Please be aware and be careful….

National Gang Week is starting: This is their new target method. While driving on any roads, if you see a baby car seat sitting on the side of the road, DO NOT STOP! These are gangs targeting people, especially women, to stop their vehicle to help a baby. They make this baby look as if it has blood on itself or on its clothing. when you get out of your vehicle in attempt to help, the gangs will jump from their hiding spots. they have beaten women to near death then continue to rape them and other torture methods.

DO NOT STOP! CALL THE POLICE IMMEDIATELY!!!

-Rita R. Reed. TN Dept of Corrections Central Dispatch. (615) 253-8182 (615) 401-6811(fax)

So, naturally, I shifted uncomfortably in my car (and wouldn’t ya know it, the only text message I get all week I end up reading while driving) on accounta being filled with the requisite dread that every woman is obliged to feel at all times. Once home, I set myself to teh Google and while I couldn’t find any Snopes entry on this particular one, I noticed a series of similar debunked messages wherein gang-members (read = BROWN MEN!) rape/murder/maim/etc. women, especially white women, especially mothers. Just another way for the patriarchy to keep us askeered and racist at the same time! Two for the price of one unsolicited text message!

Here’s the Snopes search, if you want to be sickened and entirely justified all at once. I know, I know: that’s your daily bread, sister.

IBTP.

- Woman.
______________________________________

Dear Woman,

Your text sample is a real beaut. A cursory Spinstanalysis:

The “please” capitalizes on the recipient’s susceptibility to bogeyman mythology by emphasizing the author’s solicitous concern: Please! I beg of you! If not for yourself, then for your children! Read this text message and take it to heart because you will die otherwise, and anonymous authors of text messages care.

The ellipsis — a four-pointer — portends a dark and foreboding situation urging the recipient to consider entering an undefined state of general awareness and carefulness. Yellow Alert!

No, make that an Orange Alert; “gangs” are involved. And although they are targeting “people,” they have a particular fascination for women. This means you.

So wait, now we have “National Gang Week”? Whence cometh this 411? Does the King of the Gangs send out a press release to Safety Mom Weekly? “Watch out, bitches! We will soon be attacking innocents on a roadside near you”? And what’s the protocol? Is it take a gang to lunch or else? And, really, a whole week? Mothers, secretaries, and women only get a day. Spinster aunts get bupkis. Breast Cancer Awareness — despite the fact that everybody in the solar system already oozes breast cancer awareness from every pore — gets a whole month, but you can’t expect the megatheocorporatocracy to deny itself 29 extra days to cash in hardcore on the golden eggs from that poor, sick old goose. As a matter of fact, the CEO of Pink Ink Inc, manufacturer of the ubiquitous pepto-pink pigment (the secret ingredient is panda fetuses), has banked enough to buy a private island in the Caribbean. He’s got an English valet with a better vocabulary than his, a pair of tickets on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, and a margarita machine.

Anyway, National Gang Week is “starting,” but the author omits to include the date, which leaves the end of National Gang Week sort of up in the air. And if the text message sender is to be believed, the object of this infinite National Gang Week appears to be that participating gangs must suddenly abandon the tried-and-true in order to implement elaborate and cumbersome methods of murder and mayhem. To wit:

A car seat with a bloody baby, placed by the side of “any road,” while multiple gang bangers, coiled like cobras in “hiding spots,” eternally await the random good Samaritan, hoping it’s a tenderhearted little woman they can torture, and not a cop? The scheme strikes me as a trifle busy. And passive, time-consuming, and comparatively unremunerative. Don’t they normally just rob you at gunpoint? Simple, but efficient. No bulky props, no waiting around. They don’t even really need the gun. I was once robbed at fingerpoint, of $3 and a Chanel lipstick. Lucky for me it wasn’t National Gang Week at the time, or I’d be singin’ soprano today!

It turns out that the gangstas of National Gang Week don’t want your money or your lipstick. Instead of dealing drugs, waging turf wars, and pimpin hos, these guys prefer to loll about on roadsides, luring women who take an inordinate interest in discarded car seats, beat them not quite to death, rape them, and torture them. I guess they’ve been watching Law & Order: Rape Cops, the TV show where it’s always National Gang Week.

ANYWAY!!! I GOOGLED RITA R. REED AND FOUND THE FOLLOWING!!!! Brace yourself….

According to Snopes, “National Gang Week” originated as an email hoax before jumping species to infest the cell phones of innocent blamers. Note the subtle differences between this email version and the text message.

Subject: FW: Driver beware
National Gang Week is starting: This is their new target method while driving on any roads, If you see a baby car seat sitting on the side of the road DO NOT STOP!!!! These are gangs targeting people, especially women, to stop their vehicle to help a baby. They make this baby look as if it has blood on itself or on its clothes, when you get out of your vehicle in attempt to help, the gangs jump out from cornfields or tall bushes. They have beaten women to near death, and then continue to rape them with baseball bats and other torture methods. This is not just a forward of information, it is within our area. If you do happen to see a car seat DO NOT STOP CALL THE POLICE IMMEDIATELY!! Please send this on to everyone you know.*

Benjamin F. Bean
State Of Tennessee
Department Of Correction
Central Dispatch
5th Floor Rachel Jackson Bldg.
320 Sixth Avenue North
Nashville,Tennessee 37242-0465

The syntactical and punctuation mishaps remain, but this Benjamin F Bean’s email is a bit more colorized, a bit more cinematic than Rita R Reed’s text message. In Mr Bean’s particular Bizarrohorrorwelt, the reader must not merely please be careful; she is ordered to beware (Admit it. The last time you were told to beware, you were whiffling through a tulgey wood, am I right?). Mr Bean’s gangs don’t just jump, they jump out of ominous tall bushes and forbidding cornfields. They don’t just rape, they rape with baseball bats. And what of the eccentric and somewhat sinister “This is not just a forward of information, it is within our area” admonition? Doth Mr Bean of the long, official mailing address protest too much that he is a reliable narrator? Happily, he remembers to close with the traditional “Forward this to everyone you know,” which beloved valediction — curiously omitted by Rita R Reed — is central to the scaremail terrorthodoxy.

My question is this: has a dude ever sent you one of these things? Because I’m formulating a hypothesis that fear-forwards of the rape-and-murder variety are the particular purview of women, both as senders and as recipients. I formulate this hypothesis in response to what I sense is the vague perception that these forwards are in fact sent by an amorphous entity known as The Patriarchy.

Hugs,
Twisty

_________________________
* The *About.com version has Mr Bean asking you to send this “onto” everyone you know. Ow!

It is considered “self-improvement” to “uncover the truth about men.” I know this because I have just read a paperback purporting to enlarge on this “men, revealed at last!” theme, and the words “self-improvement” are printed right on the jacket.

I have to confess that, in reading this book, Little White Whys: A Woman’s Guide through the Lies Men Tell and Why by I.P. Freely MD, my self has not been improved in any way whatsoever. Unless it can be construed as a sort of character-building exercise to endure a lot of very bad writing on the tedious What Makes Dudes Tick theme.

Here is an example of the enlightenment the book offers women: that when a straight dude puts you “on the back burner,” it means you are “fuckable,” although not to the degree of his “1st string” hotties. Apparently I.P. Freely MD and his publisher feel that a grasp of this vital information about men will improve the heck out of you.

I.P. Freely MD isn’t really the author’s name, incidentally; as a humane gesture, I thought I would spare him the embarrassment of reproducing his name in conjunction with this awful book, as he obviously dashed the thing off as a parody in about eleven minutes because he lost a bet, and it was sent to the publisher without his knowledge. I mean, look at the title. No editor ever laid eyes on it. The only thing even remotely writerly about it is that it contains words.

Also, I.P. Freely MD writes, horribly, in the second person plural, addressing the reader as “ladies.” As you know, the only persons qualified to address a person as “ladies” are lesbian gym teachers. I.P. Freely MD inserts the word into nearly every sentence, as though he were giving the keynote speech at the Clueless Ladies in Need of Dudely Advice Symposium. As in

“Ladies, the key here for you is patience. You have to handle us no differently than you would a toddler approaching the terrible twos.”

See what I mean about parody? Hey, I.P. Freely MD! 1972 called and they want their Care and Feeding of the Man-Child crap back, right?

However, if we were to play along and assume that I.P. Freely MD is in earnest, we might best paraphrase his thesis as “all men are liars and that’s the truth.” Avers IPF MD in the riveting introduction to his oeuvre,

“This is a precise reference book of men’s lies [...] Ladies, what I will attempt to do is give you an intimate tour of the workings of the male mind. Ladies, prepare; this may ’sting a little’ … (sorry, it’s the MD in me) [...] Ladies, if I offend you, I do apologize beforehand.”

Freely’s deepest wish — aside from banking the spare change he’s picking up from sales of this crappy book — is to spare women everywhere the anguish they will suffer as a result of believing a single word that comes out of any dude’s mouth. How will he do this? By revealing all the lies men tell women, and recommending what course of action women should take.

I will spare you the anguish of spending $14.95 to find out. Freely’s recommendation, based on his professional medical knowledge of the inherent foulness of masculine behavior, is a universal “suck it up, babe.”

The approach is twofold. After asserting what a lot of degenerate louses men are, I.P Freely MD suggests that lovelorn babes should ask their prospects a lot of questions to determine the extent of their degenerate lousiness, e.g. has he ever been married? Does he have any kids? Has he ever had legal problems? Does he own that car? Has he ever had sex with a man?

However, once a woman has found a dude who isn’t an unemployed crackhead jailbird homo pedestrian, I.P. Freely MD explains how she should navigate his web of lies in order to have a “loving, lasting relationship” with him.

How should she do this? By not asking questions. Seriously. After you’ve hooked him, questions merely irk a degenerate louse, for he cannot reasonably be expected to answer truthfully. Questions such as how many girlfriends he has had, whether he loves you, whether he slept with your best friend, and — seriously — whether these jeans make your ass look fat: cut this shit the fuck out, ladies. Men would rather watch ESPN than deal with your whiney insecurities.

Also, ladies, “be really careful here of what you demand that he do with you or for you on Saturday mornings.” If you dare to exist on Saturday mornings, ladies, do it somewhere far away from him. Go to a white sale or something.

Also, do everything it says in this book, otherwise your man will leave you for someone hotter and downgrade you to the booty call list.

It’s 2009, and medical men are still giving ladies the same moth-eaten pointers on how to more perfectly suck up to them. Here’s the self-improvement book I wanna see: Fuck the Dominant Paradigm: Stop Viewing Yourself in Terms of Dudes, Politics, Religion, Culture, Celebrities, Porn, and Internet Feminists, and Just Do Whatever Funky Shit You Like.

It was on a recent comment thread that the subject of racial bias in abduction reportage popped up. I allude to the phenomenon where a white woman and a black woman may be kidnaped on the same day, but the news media only get overwrought about the white girl. The socio-pathology underlying the phenomenon is said to be that, for a given kidnap/murder, the depth of responding media prurience correlates precisely with the abductee’s sex and social status.

As an aside, let us please observe a moment of silence for how fucking educational this blog is. I had always informally thought of the aforementioned phenomenon as Natalee Hollowayism. Come to find out it’s an official syndrome. It’s called, in fact, Missing White Woman Syndrome. I read all about it in Wikipedia. Speaking of Wikipedia, here’s a kind of funny example of Wikipedian copy-editing gone awry:

“Described as ‘bright and beautiful,’ Huston’s remains were found more than a year later.”

But I digress.

No, wait, I feel another digression coming on. While I’m on the subject of race bias, an anecdote:

Austin’s swankiest second-hand store is a joint called Uncommon Objects. This shop, located on trendy South Congress on the event horizon of an irony wormhole, is jammed to the joists with quirky, overpriced mid-20th century bric-a-brac and weird-ass shit running the gamut from cheezy to creepy: huge pink vulvateen ceramic ashtrays, disfigured and disembodied rubber baby-doll heads, rusty old dental instruments, frayed Masonic tapestries embroidered with sinister symbols, etc. I go a-rummaging there whenever I’m in the market for a Mason jar full of petrified sugar cubes ca. 1953, or a disintegrating antique leather baby shoe, or, as was the case yesterday when I adjourned thither for a quick rootle, a heartwarming gift for my sidekick Stingray (see the chic and elegant plastic brooch pictured above; although for some reason, she failed to warm to it in the enthusiastic manner I had anticipated).

Anyway, I had just finished examining a disturbing, moldy-looking object labeled “FAKE HAM $45″ when I espied a faded 8 x 10 portrait of a young couple in love. The label said, “PHOTO OF BLACK COUPLE $16.50.”

Because I am an advanced patriarchy-blamer and world-famous sleuth, I immediately looked for, and detected, a similar photo of a white couple. You’ll never believe it! The sticker on this photograph did not say “PHOTO OF WHITE COUPLE $16.50.” It said “ROMANTIC PHOTO, $30.”

So there ya go.

Onward. In the comments thread to which I allude above, blamer Speedbudget observes, with respect to the idea that media coverage of women’s abductions reflects what blamer Isabel sneeringly refers to as “a public outpouring of concern:”

“In my neck of the woods, the public outpouring is one of, you guessed it, disdain for the women who get themselves kidnapped, raped, and murdered. You know. Cause she should have been doing whatever it is women should do to avoid getting kidnapped, raped, and tortured by the perpetrators of crimes everywhere.

The media tends to use these stories as object lessons for us ladybrain holders. The commentary on news programs is all about how to keep yourself safe, not about the perpetrators and how men have some [I would say "all" -- Ed.] responsibility for the violence.”

Coincidentally, I recently received, from blamer frootloopz, an email on a totally related subject. The email contained a satiric regendering of one of those “scaremongering emails that people forward to me from ‘An Othershire Police Constabulary’ about how I shouldn’t go out at night, shouldn’t drink alcohol, shouldn’t do this, shouldn’t do that etc.” For the edification of the cosmos, I reproduce (a slightly modified version of) it here.

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Sexual Assault Prevention Tips Guaranteed to Work

Don’t forget: Honesty is the best policy. When asking a woman out on a date, don’t pretend that you are interested in her as a person; tell her straight up that you expect to be assaulting her later. If you don’t communicate your intentions, the woman may take it as a sign that you do not plan to rape her.

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Forward this, along with $1, to everyone you know, and soon you will be a millionaire!

Only you can settle the drastically important argument roiling in the comments section. So which is it? Are you an incredibly gifted satirist, or a college sophomore?