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.

Heartwarming $20 Bill of the Week

Published by Jill on May 26, 2010. 19 Comments

American money (and spider)

The picturesque Texas Hill Country is full of pleasant surprises. Take this abnormally tiny $20 bill, for example. I sure did!

Posted in El Rancho Deluxe, Heartwarming Nature Crap and Not Altogether Depressing. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt yearns for radfem wiki

Published by Jill on May 24, 2010. 133 Comments

Have you tacqueax seen this? I found it when I was researching TV tropes. It’s called TV Tropes.

TV Tropes is a charmingly nerdy, somewhat dorkily written pseudo-scholarly reference work, a wiki-style compendium of literary conventions and devices used in television and beyond. Some of the tropes are direct from the good old literary canon, some are modern coinages what may or may not stand the test of time, but it’s all so Byzantine and labyrinthine and mezzanine and infinitely recursive I just can’t stop reading it.

This wiki is nothing if not overkill. It covers the beaming up of the aforementioned conventions and devices into the 21st century media mothership, sure, but it also identifies, classifies, and documents modern media-specific conventions and devices to the point of neurosis. This thing is hilarious, especially if you are a cinquagenarian spinster aunt who has begun to feel the hot breath of future shock on her wrinkly neck, because the concepts are often specific to pop sub-cultures I know nothing about on accounta they weren’t around when I was young enough to care about pop sub-cultures to the point of identifiying, classifying and documenting their minutiae. Anime. Video games. Fanfic.

Here’s an example.

Paratext

Everything that is an element of the whole package immediately encompassing the text and not part of the text itself.

In other words, all that stuff that isn’t a part of the show/movie/story itself, but still comes with it. The stuff on the box, the stuff that comes before the show/movie, etc.

I had to meditate on that for a minute before I grasped what is meant by “the whole package” and “stuff on the box.” Whereas I might consider dustjacket blurbs as examples of something called “paratext,” it never before dawned on me that there is a whole, classifiable species of non-content “content” that envelops modern media. Bonus material, pop-ups, trailers, bloopers, closing credits, even PBS titles thanking Viewers Like You. I would quibble that some of this stuff isn’t, technically, text, but a lot of it is, so, fine.

Anyway, I mention all this because it has long been a dream of mine to do something similar with a blaming wiki. How convenient it would be! Instead of putting all this time and effort into banging out these lousy posts, I could just publish a collection of wiki links to the specific ideas and concepts I wish to drag out of mothballs to make whatever point, and call it a day! Because let’s face it; there’s not a whole lotta new under the patriarchy blaming sun.

Not My Nigel, Mansplainin, Obstreperal Lobe, She Was Asking For It, Empowerfulment, etc — they’d all be neatly collected in one spot for your blaming pleasure. Sadly, I’ve never been able to figure out how to do this wiki without having to spend 8 days a week culling out all the troll crap.

The idea for this non-post popped into my lobe when I noticed that my last two essays (“The Girl” and “The Slain Masseuse”) are actually blaming-trope classifications in disguise.

Got any favorite blaming conventions of your own? Or any idea how to pull off the wiki? Please enlighten the group.

Posted in Mass Media, Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society, The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today and Ways in Which the Internet Is a Hoot. Bite me, Chad.

Profiles in Patriarchy: “The Slain Masseuse”

Published by Jill on May 23, 2010. 31 Comments

Good lard! TV! I ask you. They should exhibit TV right next to the Old Testament in the Great Moments in Patriarchy-Replication Technology Museum.

I just watched half of a true-crime-umentary: “48 Hours | Mystery: Seven Days of Rage: The Craigslist Killer.” I would say that the subject of this true-crime-umentary was Craigslist killer Philip Markoff, except that it wasn’t. The real star of the show was Dead Hookers and Kinky Sex.

That’s right, almost the entire program was devoted to sensationalizing the killer’s victims, prostituted women described variously as “the Las Vegas escort,” “a stripper” and “the slain masseuse” who had placed “erotic services” ads on Craigslist. Here is how murder victim Julissa Brisman is portrayed:

“What we know about Julissa before this was that she was a party girl. She was living the high life in New York,” said Cramer. “She was a young, beautiful girl in New York City and she took full advantage of her youth and her beauty to, you know, live it up.”

Cut to a bunch of photographs of “aspiring model”/”slain masseuse” Brisman in various states of poutiness and undress. The pornulated photos were taken by a super-gross photographer dude who “was helping Julissa in her career.”

Let me tell you this one thing. Gross old dudes who photograph young women in lingerie to “help them in their career,” and then give the photos to “48 Hours” after the women are murdered in high-profile Beedy Ess Em cases can kiss my entire ass.

But I digress.

Just in case there were members of the viewing audience who didn’t get sufficiently off on photos of dead women in porn outfits, or who enjoy sexually-charged racist epithets, “48 Hours | Mystery” threw in Vanity Fair reporter Maureen Orth’s observations about Craigslist’s sex section:

“Craigslist has a huge number of categories – M for T, men for trannies; T for M, trannies for men; rice queens, white guys who only like Asians; burritos, white guys who only like Latinos. I mean, these are all up there, all the time.”

Nice. But shit, I digress again.

My hide is particularly chapped by an interview with victim #1, whom Markoff kidnaped, terrorized, and robbed at gunpoint. Right off the bat the focus is on her boobs, on her line of work and how “lucrative” it is, and on how she was askin’ for it by booking herself into a swanky hotel as a free agent hooker.

[TV sexploitation sexpert Joe] Moura said that by acting as her own boss, Tricia was increasing her risk.

“If there’s a street prostitute, she’s gonna have a pimp down the street or across the street on the corner who’s protecting her. Somebody using Craigslist getting a fancy hotel in Boston, she’s on her own.”

So ladies, remember; if you’re gonna work the classier hotels, you’d better get yourself a pimp to “protect” you. Otherwise you might come down with a terminal case of slain masseuse.

Posted in Mass Media, Rape Culture, Sexploitation and The Entertainment Industrial Complex. Bite me, Chad.

Profiles in Patriarchy: “The Girl”

Published by Jill on May 21, 2010. 84 Comments

No secrets will be revealed when I say that I watch television with depressing regularity, and that this habit chaps my hide a mile wide, but I can’t stop, because the carnage endlessly fascinates. Even the supposedly feminist shows (“30 Rock”) feature, not real feminism, but only bogus patriarchy-marketing TV feminism.

Bogus patriarchy-marketing TV feminism is when the lead character is a woman, but she’s doing a man’s job with a bunch of other men, only backwards, in high heels. And sexxxy.

The exception is Jada Pinkett Smith, non-threateningly depicted doing a woman’s job, but with attitude: she stars as a caring, nurturing (but sexxxy) head nurse on a mediocre hospital drama. Smith’s is a proper female minority character who lives to serve. She bosses the honky doctors around a little, but when she bucks the system it’s always for her suffering patients, and never for herself.

During the last TV season, the trend was toward saucy female leads as blonde cops with relationship problems and buttloads of sex appeal. In “The Closer,” Kyra Sedgewick — horrible South Carolina accent and comical chocolate addiction complete — simultaneously heads a homicide squad and amuses her FBI husband with endearing feminine airhead antics while dressed as June Cleaver. In “In Plain Sight” Mary Somebody plays Mary Somebody Else, a US marshall who has triple-X muchacho-on-gringa sex with her smokin hot Telemundo soap opera star boyfriend. Holly Hunter is every biker’s raunchy fantasy chick in “Saving Grace,” one of those shows where a Christian-type God is a wisecracking mentor character.

Despite featuring women in title roles, these shows all feature male knight-in-shining-armor characters, dudely authority figures, scenes wherein women are chained by the wrists in dungeons, and dialog that alludes to the female rape/murder victim as “the girl.”

The girl, the girl, the girl. It is beyond insufferable when TV cops allude to female rape/murder victims as “the girl.” “The girl” is a convention enjoying huge popularity since the invention of TV cops, and before. Why, just this morning, in another hot flash-induced state of TCM-watching insomnia, I saw 20 minutes of a godawful 1956 western called “The Last Hunt,” in which the central theme is two white guys, one “good” and one “bad,” fighting to the death over ownership of a kidnaped Native American “girl.” This character appears as a silent prop in practically every scene, has like 2 lines, and is named in the credits only as “Indian Girl” (but is played by a smokin hot honky actress). Every line of dudely dialogue includes the phrase “he stole my woman.” Dude Nation translation: questions of good and evil are questions for white men; whoever ends up with the captive mute squaw wins.

Speaking of TCM and Native Americans, currently they’re running a series called “Race and Hollywood: Native American Images On Film.”

They get a UCLA professor to say a few introductory words about how patriarchal 20th-century Hollywood portrayed Native Americans and pretty much invented the damaging stereotypes that persist to this day, then they show John Ford’s “Stagecoach” (Geronimo’s on the warpath!) to illustrate the point. That’s swell, but what drives me nuts about these things — they’ve done similar series with gays and Asians — is that they seem to think it absolves them of the crime of perpetuating racist propaganda. For a week or two they pretend to support a critical approach to these horrible, bigoted movies, but then for the rest of the year they show’em over and over again, without UCLA professors of Native American Studies introducing them, without offering the slightest critical analysis, and without compunction or apology or chagrin. In fact, if anything, the tone of the presenters toward Hollywood’s joyful immortalization of honky oppression is downright celebratory. And of course TCM completely ignores the massive sexism and misogyny that oozes out of nearly every “classic movie” ever made (see my essay on “How To Murder Your Wife.”).

Mang, I gotta get some sleep.

Posted in Mass Media, The Entertainment Industrial Complex and all old movies suck. Bite me, Chad.

“The Czech-born supermodel teamed her Dolce and Gabbana LBD with bondage heels.”

Published by Jill on May 17, 2010. 100 Comments

Images In Modern Patriarchy Quiz

Match the following captions to the celebrity red carpet collages below (or suggest your own):

Caption 1. “The world is my oyster.”

Caption 2. “I am paid to be your fantasy but nevertheless I feel violated by your relentless, prurient gaze.” (Alternately: “Fine, take the boobs, but you’re not getting anywhere near the pussy.”)

Collage A

Collage B

____________________________

[Photos nicked from the following websites:

http://dimp-thegossipboy.blogspot.com/2009_06_01_archive.html

http://www.popsugar.co.uk/Photos-2009-Brit-Awards-Red-Carpet-Including-Fearne-Cotton-Alexa-Chung-Alexandra-Burke-Holly-Willoughby-2829300

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1277819/Cannes-Film-Festival-2010-Robin-Hood-stars-Russell-Crowe-Cate-Blancett-jet-in.html

http://profashionelle.com/clive-davis-pre-grammy-party-2008-celebrity-red-carpet-fashion/

http://www.insidesocal.com/outinhollywood/2008/09/emmy-odds-and-ends.html

http://www.thehothits.com/news/13568/guy-googles-'i-hate-guy-sebastian',-shocked-at-results!!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1278893/Cannes-Film-Festival-2010-Eva-Herzigova-plays-sultry-lead-role-lace-dress.html#ixzz0oCA3ZHIe

http://www.popsugar.com.au/tag/nicholas+hoult

http://images.eonline.com/eol_images/Entire_Site/20080812/425.cruise.downey.mcconaughey2.081208.jpg

http://lounge.cwtv.com/showthread.php?t=558132&page=3]

Posted in Femininity, Oppression Culture, Rape Culture, Sexploitation and The Entertainment Industrial Complex. Bite me, Chad.

And they moved to Stars Hollow and lived happily ever after

Published by Jill on May 16, 2010. 95 Comments

Blessed Virgin hates you

This post would have appeared earlier, but I only just now got the gore and debris cleaned up. I allude to the obstreperal lobe tissue dripping from the bunkhouse rafters. That’s right, I blew another lobe, and no doubt you did, too, when you heard about the insane bill that just passed in Missouri.

Missouri’s state legislature, like that of many states, has invaded the personal bodies of its citizenry and enslaved their uteruses. Without compunction of any kind, this cruel and bloated governing body swaggers around the countryside, snapping its fingers, yelling “jump,” and smirking when the captive uteruses ask “how high?”.

There was already an extremely obnoxious law in Missouri forcing women seeking abortions — 24 hours in advance of the procedure — to sit through a lecture (bring a book) on the supposed mental and physical devastation that abortions supposedly cause. The idea being that, after a heartstring-tugging indoctrination with patriarchy-replicating, godsick disinformation about the certainty of a post-abortion lifetime of regret, cancer, depression, infertility, desperate yearning and insanity, women would voluntarily abdicate their personal bodily sovereignty in order to incubate fetuses for the state, which state would then abandon all parties concerned at the conclusion of gestation.

So things were bad enough in Missouri before, but with this new law they’re even worse. Instead of being forced to endure this patronizing abortion-is-bad-for-you crap via telephone, women are now required to audit in person. Providers must also describe the adorable little fingers and toes, the teensy little heartbeat, the precious little turned-up nose of the “unborn child.” Then they have to offer the woman an ultrasound and a chance to hear for herself how adorable the teensy heartbeat is. Then — no shit — they have to hand over “a state-produced brochure proclaiming: ‘The life of each human being begins at conception. Abortion will terminate the life of a separate, unique, living human being.’” If the woman is pretty young, they have to show her a couple of seasons’ worth of “Gilmore Girls,” because that’s such a realistic portrayal of the long-term results of teen pregnancy. Then they lock her in a room for an hour or two with a statue of the Blessed Virgin who weeps tears of blood.

This in-person ‘consultation’ means double the trips to the clinic, more time off the job, and, in the case of women who have to travel for their procedures (that is, everyone in Missouri who doesn’t live in Kansas City, Columbia, or the CWE), the time and expense of putting up in a Motel 6 and eating Grand Slam Fried Polyester Combos at Denny’s while they do their 24-hour stretch of state-mandated limbo. In other words, it merely throws more asinine obstacles in the path of any Missouri citizen who wishes to exercise her fucking legal right to an abortion. Not to mention her human right to personal autonomy.

As far as I know, there is no collateral provision in the law requiring abortion providers to detail the risks inherent in not terminating an unwanted pregnancy. For example, which women are most likely to be murdered? Pregnant women, that’s who! Neither is there a requirement that women be apprised of other unpleasant pregnancy-related crap, such as the public monitoring of their personal habits (no smoking! no drinking!); the insipid, infantilizing culture of American “moms-to-be”; life-threatening conditions such as preeclampsia and postpartum depression; 18 years of financial hardship; 18 years of unpaid domestic labor; empty-nest syndrome; and, naturally, the deleterious impact of human reproduction on the environment. Not to mention that women who don’t have children are free from a lifetime of public shaming for their bad mothering skills and from having to incorporate the word “piddle” into their vocabulary. You’d think that people might find all that information at least as useful as the “fact” that parasitic clumps of cells are Jesus’s Mini-Me. But the State of Missouri couldn’t give a flip about actual facts.

It’s just another dastardly case of institutionalized misogyny and oppression disguised as a romantic fascination with adorable fetuses. I puke on the Missouri state legislature. “The life of each human being begins with conception?” Shoot me now. Every time a politician utters this meaningless godsick hate speech he lands another kick in the teeth of Truth and Beauty’s rotting corpse.

Posted in Compulsory pregnancy, Godbagism, Lobe-blowing, Oppression Culture and Politics. Bite me, Chad.

Heartwarming marsupial of the week

Published by Jill on May 14, 2010. 81 Comments

Hearwarming marsupial of the week

What a darling fellow! This gentle furry woodland creature comes around every night at 8 o’clock to frolic amid the rotting kitchen waste in my compost bin, at which point our nightly staring contest commences. He growls at me, inch-long fangs dripping with disease, for as long as I care to listen (video below). I have never outlasted him.

Meanwhile, is Elena Kagan queer?

Absolutely! Straight women do not play sports! Especially not softball. If a straight chick tries to play softball, the queer girls on the team turn her gay right away.

But mang, it would totally blow your mind, the sheer vastness of the number of queer women who think they’re straight. It’s like, over a thousand!

I mention this only because the Is-She-Gay thing is causing national media to point the fickle floodlight of fear (and loathing) at spinster aunthood. Heterosexual married people secretly yearn for and covet our awesomeness. But since we are symbols of freedom from the oppression of the nuclear family, we are reviled by those who have invested their entire identities in the paradigm.

They are, by the way, fucking dipshits. And by “they” I mean “them.”

Posted in Heartwarming Nature Crap and Keep your bias off my gender. Bite me, Chad.

Speak to me not of tulips

Published by Jill on May 10, 2010. 73 Comments

Saugatuck

Saugatuck, Michigan, you will be interested to know, is a summer lakeside resort for wealthy vacationing refugees from Chicago. Although I am not a wealthy vacationing refugee from Chicago, I was recently obliged to biff off to Saugatuck for a few days, to rally round the sickbed of an aged relative.

Here’s how it all shook out:

My sibling Tidy was in charge of organizing the northward migration of the Faster branch of the family. I had already commenced panicking because I’d just found out that we were going to hit town right in the fucking middle of Tulip Time.

Sad tulips, Holland MI

Tulip Time is a week-long festival wherein the honky citizenry of the adjoining town of Holland, Michigan all put on wooden shoes and pointy lace caps, take to the streets, and clomp their brains out in celebration of their supposed Dutch heritage. They do this against a wholesome backdrop of tulips that were, perhaps, at their most dewy fresh the week prior. The honkys of Holland, Michigan get a big bang out of celebrating their Dutchiness. Thousands of others agree, apparently, and come from miles around to observe the Hollandites’ gaudy display of something called “street scrubbing” that I have yet to figure out what the fuck.

Wooden shoes: a spinster aunt cries, "why?"

Hence my panic. Traveling in general is bad enough (you can’t, it turns out, even get from Cottonmouth County to Saugatuck, Michigan; first you have to go to Austin, then Dallas, then Detroit, and then Grand Rapids, via a series of increasingly improbable conveyances! Seriously! And the whole time the only thing you can find to eat is ’salad’ in plastic boxes!).

Not only did the thought of crowds of Dutch-loving tulip worshipers strike terror in my lobe, Tulip Time meant that no decent hotel rooms would be left, and that I would be obliged, in addition to all this other bullshit, to put up at some fleabag flophouse or, worse, a quaint bed-and-breakfast.

Perhaps you are one of those adventuresome psychos whose idea of a big time is to move into a complete stranger’s weirdly-appointed, moldy-smelling, creaky old house for a couple of days. Maybe you enjoy sitting around a communal dining table first thing in the morning with six or eight alien septuagenarians each of whom is bursting with such vim that they think nothing of bounding up the 332 steps to the top of Mount Baldy-Head or whatever the hell it is and then telling you all about it over grapefruit garnished with a maraschino cherry before you’ve even had your coffee in a chipped china cup. Maybe you get a charge out of feeling obligated to ingest the ‘innkeeper’s specialty’ — a sort of goopy egg pudding doused with caramel sauce and earnestness — for breakfast instead of your usual life-giving spinach smoothie. Possibly you are a connoisseur of diaphanous 19th century walls and of having to tiptoe around in your room after 8 PM for fear of rousting up the whole house. Fine. Go stay in a B&B with my blessing. But leave me out of it. When it comes to lodging in lakeside resorts, give me privacy or give me a gun.

“For the lovagod,” I therefore said to Tidy, “don’t, whatever you do, book us into a goddam quaint B&B.”

When we rolled up in front of the quaint B&B, a low moan escaped my piehole.

“Talk to the hand, ” said Tidy. After 16 hours of continuous and gruelling travel, 4 of which hours were, I am sorry to say, the unfortunate result of my inadvertently having gotten us lost owing to the similarity between “I-96″ and “I-94″ (I mean, come on!) old Tidy was apparently not in the mood. I had the last laugh when our mother elected to sleep in the same bed with her on accounta Mom’s own quaint trundle was uninhabitable.

But I digress.

Repellnt Dutch kid plaster figures, Holland, MI

Back in Holland Michigan, at one of the 358 or 359 Tulip Time parades down the main drag, I made a few observations.

1. I espied a float, sponsored by the Turning Pointe School of Dance and Borculo Wrecker Service, toting the Holland Area Mothers of Multiples. Nothing warms a spinster aunt’s heart like the spectacle of white women dressing up like LDS wives and getting acclaimed for their feats of reproduction.

Mothers of Multiples

2. No persons of color attended the event.

3. White people in Holland, Michigan, when feeling festive, eat things called ‘elephant ears’: absurd globs of fried dough the size of hubcaps.

Elephant ear

Anyway, now that I’m back in civilization, and it has apparently been scientifically proven that Boobquakes cause earthquakes in Taiwan, I can go back to sneering at regular stuff.

More of my trip photos are on display here.

Posted in Easy Persiflage and Not Altogether Depressing. Bite me, Chad.