“Within 10 seconds I saw him shape-shift”

Published by Twisty on December 31, 2011. 92 Comments

Don't you just want to fuck me?

You never heard such jarring guffaws jangling through the drywall halls of Spinster HQ as when we got hipped to this Braco dude. Laughter rang out like the nightly gunfire at my neighbor’s place.

If you’ve never heard of him — and since you’re a reasonable person with normal inclinations who never, with the notable exception of IBTP, wastes valuable time reading pointless shit on the Internet, why would you have? — here’s the deal with Braco. He’s a messianic New Age con artist from Croatia. Get this:

He “gazes.” That’s it. He just drifts out on stage, looks at the audience for a couple of minutes, then scrams. The end. Fin. Fade to black. Followers flock to him and throw money. Why?

“He only offers a gift to people through his silent gaze, without words or teachings, allowing people’s own reported experiences of transformative changes – in their lives, relationships, careers, finances and health – to define his work.” — Braco’s website

His ‘work’! Do you fully comprehend the awesomeness of this Braco tool? He doesn’t do shit! He doesn’t have to learn English. He doesn’t have to memorize a bunch of polyester New Age platitudes. He doesn’t have to allude to ancient texts. He doesn’t have to do yoga. He doesn’t even have to touch any sick people. He only has to eyeball’em for 5 minutes and then float silently away. Mass hysteria does the rest.

He doesn’t have to pay a bunch of staff, either; his “gazing events” are staffed by, as Tinfoil Hattie calls’em, swooning volunteers. And he seems to hold a lot of these gaze-a-paloozas in Hawaii, so that when he’s done staring down the gullible, he can beat it back to a Mai-Tai under a palapa with an ocean view.

This scam is a work of such extraordinary beauty and criminal genius it brings a tear to my jaundiced eye. Compare it, for instance, to the overly complex, gaudy, and commercialized Osama bin Laden lookalike, Osho®.

Osho® is a popular guru dude in India. According to Osho®’s website, American author Tom Robbins says he is “the most dangerous man since Jesus Christ.” Well, Tom Robbins said it, I believe it, and that settles it!

Whereas Braco’s schtick is elegant and understated, Osho® is the Elvis of the zany cult leaders. He’s got a luxury International Meditation Resort with an olympic pool, a mediation spa, a “Multiversity,” and a buttload of programs, books, theme songs, newsletters, pay-per-view YouTube vids, therapies, horoscopes, and other assorted merch. His overhead must be considerable, so it makes sense that one of his most elite programs consists of “full immersion.” This is where followers actually pay tuition to toil at the resort as menials for 6 hours a day, 7 days a week for a 3-month stretch with no days off and no possibility of parole. They have to pay extra for food, too, at Osho®’s dining rooms and “gourmet café spots.”

Unlike Braco, Osho® never shuts the fuck up. He’s a proponent of “silence shared in words.” The universe, he says, is “certainly made of silence.” To support this claim, he’s got an Internet radio station where he yaks nonstop. When I tuned in he was using his silent words to opine that men are of the sun, women are of the moon, and the sun is aggressive and intellectual, and the moon is receptive and passive. “The woman has to flower in her moon-hood, as the man has to flower in his sun-hood.” Well, knock me over with a feather, some randy old mystic is pronouncing on the essence of women and “sex energy” using elements of the solar system as a metaphor.

I bet old Braco laughs and laughs (quietly) at this Osho® goob and his needlessly strained vocal cords. Braco’s ‘work’ consists of not doing jack, yet his disciples, such as the woman quoted below who is too cheap to take her cat to the vet, report excellent results.

I went to a Braco gazing in NJ recently. The energy that he is channeling is very real. I purchased the DVD entitled the Golden Bridge. It records Braco’s voice which transmits this high frequency energy. My cat rec’d a healing in the fact that she hasn’t vomited in 4 days [...] My cat usually throws up at least once or twice a day.

I mention all of this to complain about the modern habit of confusing “energy” with “pixie dust.” Whenever some dude with long hair starts blabbing about harmonizing your life-energy, or healing your toothache by staring at you, or purging your colon of toxins, and he’s selling tickets, you know it’s time for a Savage Death eye-roll. Energy isn’t an enchanted force field. It doesn’t “flow through” people or cats, can’t be generated by puncturing the epidermis with tiny needles, is not boundless, isn’t “positive” or “negative” with respect to human contentment, cannot be expended mentally, is not “inner,” is not subject to the alignment of stars, does not vibrate your aura, and can’t be channeled, focused, or transmitted by the gaze of mute Croatians or the DVDs of trademarked Indians for the purpose of achieving human happiness. Energy is a measurement of the capacity of a body or system to do work.*

These corny-ass hippie mystics. I ask you. Hey, I know. If you lack vim, I suggest you take a little exercise and eat some goddam kale. If you’re sick, go to a doctor. If you’re unhappy, dump your pig boyfriend. If you crave serenity, take a Xanax. If your life is meaningless, foment revolution. Bitch, pleeze.

___________________
* Dictionary.com says it, I believe it, and that settles it!

Thanks to blamer Tinfoil Hattie for clueing me in to Braco. Thanks also to blamer Keri for trumping him with Baba Dez, “one of the grossest dudes of all time.”

Braco photo from this Howard Stern “video”

Osho® photo from this web page.

Posted in Magical Mysteries from Godtown. Bite me, Chad.

Blamer starts something

Published by Twisty on December 26, 2011. 23 Comments

Breaking news: blamer Cootie Twoshoes has started a blamer book club at Goodreads. I can but endorse such an endeavor.

Apparently what you do is, you go here, create a Goodreads account, and then get jiggy with it. Feminist literary critique is practically a lost art. I urge anyone who reads stuff to give it a try.

Posted in Announcements. Bite me, Chad.

Thus spake Debbie Downer

Published by Twisty on December 26, 2011. 73 Comments

Though the life of a spinster aunt is mostly fluffy and carefree, there are certain unpleasant situations wherein the Auntly Directive explicitly calls for taking the wind out of people’s sails.

Sail de-winding has gotten a bad rap, as it has been embraced as bloodsport over the years by various do-gooders and buttinskis. Remember “tough love”?

“I hate to take the wind out of your sails, Son, but your Marilyn Manson marijuana lifestyle frightens your mother, so we’re having you arrested.”

Sail de-winding has also been wielded for the greater good — though to little avail — by dudely scientists and professional skeptics:

“I hate to take the wind out of your sails, my godly friend, but there is no scientific evidence whatsoever to support the hypothesis that when you die your disembodied consciousness will float up to the clouds to be reunited with your loved ones. Also, you’re stupid.”

It has been complained about in various Nick Lowe songs, too.

But let’s be clear: it’s spinster aunts who invented the practice of foisting truth on overstimulated people who don’t want to hear it.

That’s right. Our specialized lobes can detect a self-destructive folly at 200 yards. When our peeps’ sails have wind in them, and we perceive that this wind is perhaps a bit gusty for this time of year, and that it is composed not of wholesome breezes but of farts and sordid delusion, we cannot hold our tongue.

I recall the time my pal Solange Pettigrew called to cut me in on an exciting business proposition. This frabjous business, she effluviated in breathless tones, was going to liberate her from the daily grind and transport her to a world of more or less incessant travel to exotic lands. It could do the same for me. She explained that all I had to do was buy my own personalized ‘travel website’ from her, whereupon hordes of internet travelers would flock to it and I would make a fortune. In her mind’s eye she had already purchased a steamer trunk full of hula skirts and was getting her groove back with a hunky cabana boy. I had never seen her so happy. Clearly I needed to step in.

So I protruded the spinster proboscis and immediately detected in her sails the whiff of a wind most foul. But how? This woman has a master’s degree in common sense from Stanford, for chrissake. She couldn’t be that obliv–

Oh, but she was. Solange Pettigrew had in fact gone grossly agog. So forthwith onto my auntly shoulders fell the stinky task of informing the poor sap that this travel website deal was no gilded Jetway out of meaningless corporate drudgery, but was actually a Ponzi scheme.

Did I want to be the one who brought her life’s young dream crashing down like the housing market upon her dewy brow? Certainly not. I’d rather have been given a root canal by a sweaty dentist. But according to the Spinster Code, failure to place these person-to-person calls on the clue phone is not an option. Sail de-winding is the only ethical course.

Which brings me to my chum Sukey, who is an inveterate bargain hunter. One of her endearing qualities is that when she finds a hot deal, she cannot rest until she has alerted her entire acquaintance to the bonanza. I often get this call from Sukey:

“Get down to $aver$ immediately! Wahoo is only 99 cents a pound!”

Let us all feast like kings on wahoo, right? Wrong. I’m the one who says, “Wahoo for 99 cents? Where’d it come from, the dumpster behind Whole Foods?”

While driving around yesterday Sukey stumbled across some women on the side of the road selling “1200-thread-count Egyptian cotton king sheet sets” out of a beat-up Econoline van for 20 bucks a hit. Sukey bought a set on the spot and galloped home at breakneck speed to call everyone up. She couldn’t bear for her friends to spend another hellish night needlessly tossing and turning on nasty burlap from Bed Bath and Beyond when we could be nestled in luxury coziness from the banks of the river Nile.

“Wait a second,” I said, my wind-in-sails detector heating up. “1200 thread-count Egyptian cotton king sheet sets for 20 bucks? Yeah, and I’m Herman Cain’s baby mama.”

I hated to do it, but my hands, I tell you, were tied.

“Sukey,” I said, “read the label. Read it, and weep.”

Whereupon it was discovered that the sheets had been made in China by indentured wage slaves. Furthermore they were not cotton of Egyptian or any other origin, but microfiber, and most likely weren’t 1200 threads per inch, either.

Sukey wept.

Hey, I’m just doing my job.

It’s like when I happen to run into the occasional woman who thinks Bust is a feminist magazine. Or maybe she believes that femininity is “natural,” or that “radiant skin” is desirable. Look at her sails! Her bloomy, billowing sails, bloated with hot wind! What can I do? If I don’t take that wind outta them things she might go around the rest of her life arguing that burlesque is an empowering form of feminine self-expression.

So I cram down her neck the truth that our patriarchal social order, despite what she’s been told since the cradle, doesn’t really have her best interests at heart. I explain that she is defined in this social order solely with respect to male interests, and that she is a member of an oppressed sex class out of which she may not opt, and that her success in life is entirely a matter of the degree to which she appeases her oppressor.

She protests. She demurs. She vituperates. She calls me a sex-hating harridan prude.

And then her lobe starts to pulsate. The mascara falls from her eyes. She grasps that, yes, patriarchy is founded on oppression and suffering, that Ponzi schemes and thread-count cons are logical consequences in a world order that is itself the Mother of All Scams, and most horribly of all, that she is both complicit and a dupe in the whole set-up.

Her life is ruined, and she has me to thank for it.*

Trust no one.

_____________________
* Note: this business about her lobe beginning to pulsate and me ruining her life, it’s all a fantasy. In real life nobody ever believes me.

Debbie Downer photo nicked from Wikipedia.

Posted in Bloodsport and Oppression Culture. Bite me, Chad.

That’s a more

Published by Twisty on December 15, 2011. 125 Comments

Some day maybe I’ll write a post. Until then, two things.

First, via PhysioProf, this: after millennia of sprain-free use by Romans in sensible shoes, they’re remodeling the streets of Rome to accommodate stiletto heels. Apparently the picturesque cobblestones of old are a hazard to the ligaments of pedestrians on Via del Corso who, though insufficiently fem-proficient, must nevertheless cave in to pressure to sport pornulated footwear. Ditching the stilettos? Unthinkable.

Farrier with hoof

The second thing: this is what my dude farrier said to me yesterday, after delivering the unpleasant news that my horse has developed thrush from standing in mud: “Now don’t get all dramatic and act like a woman.”

Posted in Oppression Culture and The Beauty Ultimatum. Bite me, Chad.

The thread about Siri

Published by Twisty on December 3, 2011. 117 Comments

My phone takes rather a familiar tone.

“I’d rather talk about why Siri is sexist.” — blamer Josquin, on a thread about Rape-X.

Well, have at it, Josquin!

For my part, I haven’t been able to determine whether Siri is sexist or not, because she declines to function properly on my phone. I have come to actively dislike her. Just now I asked her if she was sexist; her answer was that she can’t answer.

“Can’t,” Siri? Or won’t? Cagey.

UPDATE: Two seconds of Googling reveals that, duh, of course Siri is sexist. Siri’s programmers are dudes, after all. Quelle surprise, Amanda Marcotte has a post addressing this very topic.

Siri behaves much like a retrograde male fantasy of the ever-compliant secretary: discreet, understanding, willing to roll with any demand a man might come up with, teasingly accepting of dirty jokes. Oh yeah, and mainly indifferent to the needs of women.

At my house, we discovered this while playing with Siri’s quickly established willingness to look up prostitutes for a straight man in need. When you say to Siri, “I need a blow job,” she produces “nine escorts fairly close to you”. You get the same result if you say, “I’m horny” into it, even with my very female voice.

So she’ll find you a prostitute but she won’t tell you where you can get birth control or an abortion? Siri’s a damned collaborator?

I’ll have to take Amanda’s word for it, since my Siri is apparently too busy blowing dudes to give me the time of day. Literally, she won’t even tell me what time it is.

UPDATE 2: Jane Martinson, who, because all other writing at the Guardian is presumed to be for dudes, writes The Women’s Blog, says that in the UK Siri is a dude, and is useful only for implementing search engines, and only if it is spoken to in an American accent. UK Siri will, however, locate reproductive health clinics on Google for you. Thus Martinson’s findings are that Siri isn’t sexist, just stupid.

She’s wrong of course.

UPDATE 3: A “writing fellow” at American Prospect wants to make it clear that s/he is not accusing Apple of misogyny when s/he concurs with Amanda about the reproductive health thing: “The problem with Siri isn’t that the programmers hate women, it’s that they [women] weren’t even on the radar.”

Hey, writing fellow! The intent of the programmers is flippin irrelevant. The point, silly fellow, is that women experience exclusion from “the radar” as misogyny. Misogyny.

Posted in Open Threads and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt forgets what year it is, starts yammering about RapeAxe again

Published by Twisty on December 2, 2011. 60 Comments

Jayzus in a jetpack. So much has happened since last we spoke that I’m just going to ignore it all and proceed straight to the latest installment of the Anti-Rape Device Chronicles.

You know the Anti-Rape Device Chronicles, right? A long and sordid history attends the battle for dudely control over the problematic human vagina. The timeline so far:

Middle Ages: Chastity belts are implemented by jealous brutes to enforce feminine purity against other jealous brutes. Or are they?

1996: British historians debunk as myth the notion that medieval chastity belts ever existed as anything other than 19th century “curiosities for the prurient or jokes for the tasteless.”

Cheesy BDSM-wear, only 500 bucks on eBay.

This dude writes a scholarly analysis of the mythology. The chastity belt naturally finds its niche as a corny prop in the BDSM community, where it is anything but an anti-rape device.

2000: The “killer tampon” is invented by South African septuagenarian Jaap Haumann. Quoth he, “I designed a hard cylindrical plastic core which contains the spring blade, which slices when pressed against. […] When the rapist attacks the woman and penetration takes place, the point of his penis will touch the section containing the blade and it (the penis), or at least a part of it, is sliced off.” Haumann notes that South Africa is the rape capital of the world.

2005: A now-defunct website announces “FemDefense,” a spike-equipped vaginal insert reminiscent of, but slightly less disfiguring than, Haumann’s dick mutilator. The imaginary FemDefense and its faux marketing campaign turns out to be a conceptual art project by Swedish artist Leif Lindell; the “product” is never manufactured but makes the rounds on the feminist blogosphere, prompting a profusion of whataboutthemen whingeing. Photo here.

2005 again: Sonnet Ehlers, a South African activist, invents RapeX (later changed to RapeAxe). This is a hollow vaginal insert with lined with barbs. “When the attacker attempts vaginal penetration,” says Ehlers, “the barbs attach themselves to the penis, causing great discomfort. The device must be surgically removed, which will result in the positive identification of the attacker and subsequent arrest.”

2006: Production of Rapex “delayed” by squeamish dick preservationists.

2010: The newly renamed RapeAxe is in the news again when Ehlers announces plans to hand out 30,000 of them for free at South Africa’s World Cup.

Today: Blamer Sandi emails me (thanks, Sandi!) with a link to the 2010 Gizmodo story; I fail to notice the date and commence writing this post as though it were breaking news, quite forgetting that we discussed the subject last year in the comments of this post.

Well, untimely though it be, you get this post anyway, because it’s the one I wrote.

So. Consider a minor shift of focus in the wonderful world of rape culture. First there is this imaginary chastity belt, which leaves nothing to the imagination in terms of the 19th century woman’s moral status: a whole mythos erupts around the idea of medieval dudes asserting ownership of their women by literally locking up the only thing about them that matters. You can still rape, though, you just need a key.

Scroll down to the 21st century. Haumann, Lindell, and Ehlers’ devices are more victim-oriented. They don’t prevent rape, but they do suggest instantaneous unpleasant consequences for rapists. Therefore they are controversial.

But why should that be? Are we, as a society, pro-rapist?

Heck yeah we are.

Historically, society tolerates rape because it is more or less consistent with the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women, but the idea that rape might conceivably involve violence against rapists is just too shocking. Judging by the many comment threads discussing RapeAxe, a significant contingent of Internetians believe that women possess neither sufficient personal bodily sovereignty nor sufficient personal integrity to be trusted with such a device.

Concern trolls pretend to worry that dick-blood might harm the rape victim (more than a rape, apparently), or that the device might make the rapist madder than he already is, or that it’s sending the wrong message and promoting the dreaded “victim mentality” to tell women to be prepared for rape at any moment. The squeamish dick preservationists object that dick mutilation is “just wrong,” that RapeAxe is “vindictive,” and of course that women are evil and will surely be unable to resist using it to injure innocent men who prong in ignorance.

The objectionable violence is interpreted as originating, not with the rapist, but with the vengeful woman who has deployed the barbaric peen-shredding RapeAxe.

Pah. The thing that would prevent any and all peen-shredding is the thing that nobody can fathom: keeping it their pants.

I’ve commented before that this RapeAxe thing is a pretty compelling little gizmo. It can’t prevent rape, but at least it theoretically improves the chances of a conviction. And of course the agony it inflicts on the rapist is conceptually satisfying and poetically justical. And it dovetails so neatly with my wacko consent scheme. Theoretically, anyone equipped with one of these little dealios abides, unlike you or me, in a persistent state of having said “no.” Only removal of the RapeAxe can switch on consent. No ambiguity. Simple as that.

But alas, after considering it lo these many years, I can’t say I have high hopes for its efficacy. Enterprising rapists could easily game the system. For example, it would be the work of an instant for a dude with a gun to force his victim to remove it. In the end, whatever measures a woman takes to keep assholes from assaulting her, some chumpass perv will figure out how to circumvent them. Women can’t prevent rape.

Like the feminist email forward says: preventing rape is easy: just don’t rape anybody, stupid.

Posted in Rape Culture and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Yesterday. Bite me, Chad.

Little Niggling Instances of the Redoubtable Efficacy of Patriarchal Oppression, Part II: Shit I Saw on PBS

Published by Jill on November 23, 2011. 95 Comments

God, PBS sucks. Here’s why.

PBS, though it wants you to believe that it’s above this sort of thing (which it tries to demonstrate, as I have noted elsewhere, by those promo spots wherein divers Attractive Sample Children of the World in colorful rompers leap across the screen in slow-motion), definitely shoulders its fair share of the global misogyny-load.

First, have you seen the latest feel-good PBS promo montage? Among the various images of joyous human triumph and closeups of frogs licking their own eyeballs is a clippet excerpted from a show in which Tina Fey is awarded the Mark Twain Prize for Humor.

As you know, Tina Fey approaches greatness in many respects, and comes as close to a feminist presence as is tolerable by network television. Here is one of the pithy, relevant bits she did during her acceptance speech:

And, you know, politics aside, the success of Sarah Palin and women like her is good for all women — except, of course — those who will end up, you know, like, paying for their own rape kit ‘n’ stuff, but for everybody else, it’s a win-win. Unless you’re a gay woman who wants to marry your partner of 20 years — whatever. But for most women, the success of conservative women is good for all of us. Unless you believe in evolution. You know – actually, I take it back. The whole thing’s a disaster. — [cite: HuffPo]

Her speech ran several minutes, but the clippet PBS selected for the montage depicts Fey, the closest thing we have to a TV feminist, ducking her head in an apparent curtsey. Non-ironically.

Really? Tina Fey is too threatening a personage to be represented on PBS with an unbowed head? Come on.

OK, that’s a small thing, a split second thing, but you know as well as I do how those split seconds add up to whole lifetimes.

The Palin bit, incidentally, got edited out of the final cut of the award show. Way to keep it real, PBS.

Meanwhile, a four-part series entitled “America in Primetime” uses clips from “groundbreaking” television shows to explicate the manner in which TV character archetypes supposedly reflect actual human experience. The result is a stone butch dudefest.

The series imparts this message: “TV is about dudes, it’s awesome, and it’s art” (“Primetime’s” secondary argument for the awesome artness of TV appears to be that, compared to 2-hour feature films, TV series are a lot longer. But I digress).

Each episode in this “Primetime” series takes as its subject one of four character archetypes: “The Independent Woman,” “The Man of the House,” “The Misfit.” I watched “The Crusader.” This episode, quoth the website, “delves into the increasingly grey area between right and wrong as television heroes confront internal demons while seeking their own forms of justice.”

“The Crusader” features interviews with actors and writers who keep insisting that TV “mirrors” the “human experience.” You will hardly be surprised when I reveal that, in order to be a crusading TV hero who mirrors the human experience, you have to be a white dude in the middle of a bunch of physical violence. Human experience, according to American television, is white dude experience. Examples of TV crusaders: House from “House,” Sipowicz from “NYPD Blue,” Hawkeye from “M*A*S*H”, Jack Bauer from “24.”

Of course, PBS, as I mentioned earlier, loves diversity, so the producers of “Primetime” throw in a couple of tokens. They can’t profile an Asian crusader because none exists (well, there’s Kwai Chang Caine from “Kung Fu,” but that guy was only half Chinese, and problematically David Carradine was entirely white). Undaunted, they’re lucky to be able to kill both black and gay birds with one stone via Omar from “The Wire,” the noble gayblack criminal gunslinger so beloved of edgy American audiences.

“Primetime” also includes a perfunctory chick hero. She is neither Xena nor Buffy nor Starbuck nor Sidney from “Alias” nor Max from “Dark Angel.” No, she’s Scully from “X-Files,” a choice that particularly reeks of tokenism.

Scully's baby

Sure, we love Scully, the gun-toting FBI scientist field agent with the blazing news-anchor helmet hair, but let’s face it: the only thing she crusades for is the status quo. Scully has no demons, seeks no personal brand of justice. She’s just the tame, unthreatening, adult voice of reason, who, as Gillian Anderson here laughingly notes, is always filmed physically walking several steps behind her dude partner. They never give her anything more interesting to do than foil and rebuke and be secretly in love with the vastly more compelling and demon-filled and crusadery Mulder. Naturally — because what else can you to do your female lead? — aliens abduct her and rip out her ovaries. Mulder, on the other hand, is off getting high with the Indians. And when Mulder leaves the series? Like all female leads on TV shows that have run out of steam, Scully is of course saddled with an unwieldy alien baby. She spends the entire final season whingeing “My baby! My baby!” Scully can only be considered a crusader if you define “crusader” as “baby-obsessed killjoy who plays second banana to the much more complicated dude who really is a crusader.”

Says “Primetime” interviewee Diablo Cody, woman creator of “The United States of Tara,” in an attempt to explain the dearth of TV chicks with complex interior struggles,

Not to get all women’s studies on you, but maybe the idea of a hero with a really straightforward goal is sort of particularly male.

Yeah, for the lovagod, Diablo, don’t get all women’s studies on us; the dudes for whom TV is written find that very unsexy.

UPDATE: I have since watched the “Misfit” and “Independent Woman” segments of “America in Primetime.” In the former, it’s all dudes again. Dudes, dudes, dudes. Nerdy or quirky dudes “who defied comic stereotypes and societal expectations to reflect America’s diverse personalities.” White dude personalities, that is. Dwight from “The Office,” Gomez from “The Addams Family,” Louie de Palma from “Taxi.” Etc. Again, there’s one token chick, Tara from “The United States of Tara,” a character who plays dissociative personality disorder for laffs.

Unsurprisingly, most of the (all white) women characters featured in the “Independent Woman” segment are more accurately described as either misfits or crusaders or both (Roseanne, Mary Richards, Murphy Brown, Nurse Jackie), but are lumped together in a special “strong woman” ghetto because they are Vagina-Americans.

The clips are entertaining, but I stand by my original assessment of the series’ uncritical acceptance of a certain level of misogyny in entertainment. “Independent Woman” has that brainwashed tone you always encounter whenever the discourse tries to argue that since the death of June Cleaver modern women are livin’ the life of Riley. The thesis: since women TV leads don’t have to be paragons of motherhood anymore, and in fact can even have drug habits and be clinically insane in addition to being heterosexual hotties who remain deeply concerned with their relationships, modern television is a reflection of women’s liberation from patriarchal oppression.

Such as when the affluent white gals on “Sex In the City” sit around chic Manhattan restaurants discussing blow jobs. Women on TV, says “America in Primetime,” can be anything imaginable. Except, it turns out, a crusader or a misfit.

In a patriarchy, convincing the sex class they’re not oppressed is the name of the game. Thanks, TV!

Incidentally, I didn’t bother watching the “Man of the House” segment because those doofus dad sitcoms make me want to rip my own head off.

_______________________
Scully’s baby photo here.

Posted in Mass Media, Movies and TV and Oppression Culture. Bite me, Chad.

Little Niggling Instances of the Redoubtable Efficacy of Patriarchal Oppression, Part I

Published by Jill on November 22, 2011. 41 Comments

Certainly nothing will delight you more than to be apprised of a few instances of patriarchal oppression noted in and around Spinster HQ over the last 48 hours (I originally wrote “24 hours” but I forgot to finish the post yesterday). Two are from real life, and two originated on PBS. I’ll do the PBS ones later; this here post will stick with the real life episodes. Because they are personally anecdotal in nature and contain many first person pronouns, you may wish to skip them. I know I would.

Real Life Episode #1

As you may recall, I have recently come into a buttload of feral donkeys. I am the world’s foremost expert on everything except feral donkeys, so I email a reputable donkey rescue. I ask whether they can recommend any local donkey clubs or wild burro support groups or Central Texas donksperts who can help me with my new donks.

The reply to my query comes from the chieftain of the rescue organization, a chap calling himself “Burro man.” Because patriarchy is our social order, Burro man responds, not with anything remotely resembling an answer to my simple question, but with a useless mansplaination on how to train donkeys. As if I had asked “will you please explain in six sentences or less how to train donkeys?” Because it is totally possible to explain donkey training in six sentences or less.

Burro man’s donkey training method, incidentally, is to corner the animal in a pen with a section of portable panel. Boy, I can hardly wait to get out there and try to put the squeeze on a terrified, 500-pound feral donkey with an 80-pound piece of steel tube fencing. Nobody’ll get hurt at all.

Thanks a bundle, Burro man.

Real Life Episode #2

I invite a recommended fencing contractor over to give me an estimate (so I can fence in the aforementioned donkeys). Instead of the fun conversation about fence post diameters and brace configurations I had so joyfully anticipated, the discourse immediately takes a most unpleasant turn. I am dismayed to perceive that Mr McFence is one of those white dude megabores who blabs nonstop, not about fences, but about himself. And about his even more megaboring family.

With the result that I can now assert without fear of contradiction that I rank as the world’s Number 1 expert on this McFence numbskull. If Alfred A. Knopf called and said, “Hey Twisty, how’s about you ghost-write McFence’s autobiography?” they’d have the finished manuscript on their desk in less than a week. If I took a test and the essay question was “McFence’s views on corruption and the radical Muslim agenda in the Obama presidency may be said to precisely mimic those of Fox News pundits. Discuss,” I would totally ace that test. If the amount of McFence’s daughter’s annual salary was the answer on Final Jeopardy, I would totally win the big money. I know where McFence was born, the name of his church, and the names, occupations, and geographic locations of each of his forty-seven adult children (who were expertly raised by the sainted wife who really wears the pants in the family).

Oblivious to signs of my increasingly excruciating boredom, such as my grimace, my pulsating obstreperal lobe, or my repeated attempts to discuss fencing, Mr McFence will not rest until he has revealed more tedious details of his personal life. I would spare you, but then you wouldn’t know the true extent of my pain. So: he is 67 years old, he recently lost 40 pounds, he’s a Tea Partyer, his family are holy rollers, he wants to move to Alaska, he’s “part Cherokee,” and (like all Central Texas contractors) his favorite client and best friend in the whole world is Willie Nelson, especially now that Willie has fired all the “druggies” and has accountants who pay up promptly.

It’s as though he’s been cribbing from a list entitled “The Main Things Spinster Aunts Couldn’t Care Less About.”

You are undoubtedly familiar with the version of this guy who lives in your town, so I hardly need mention that during the course of our encounter, McFence runs out of A material early on, and is obliged to recycle most of his monologue three and four times. Maybe he thinks I won’t notice because I’m just a dumb donkey farmer.

At first it is unclear to me why my presence is required at all, since he is so determined never to let me speak. I eventually catch on that my role during the delivery of this epic soliloquy is to nod each time I am informed that that he’d been a Marine sniper “in Nam” where his best buddy sniped “over 300 kills” and “the V-C” had a bounty on his head.

Finally, after a hour and a half and many failed attempts, I manage to steer his attention toward a topic that is more fascinating than his mass-murdering Army buddy by many orders of magnitude: cedar posts and wire mesh. After the stunning revelation that McFence’s LDL cholesterol is down from 188 to 130, and before suffering for the 3rd time the gripping information that his son works as a landscaper on the coast, I actually pry an estimate out of him. He is silent for about 34 seconds while he does the cipherin’ in his head. He’s so quiet I begin to wonder if his astonishing profusion of empty babbling has in fact ruptured a vocal cord. But it is not to be. Horribly, he gets a second wind. McFence goes on to tell me how honest he is, how he’s just plain folks, how the good lord is looking out for him, and — don’t pretend you didn’t see this coming –

“I treat my wetbacks like family.”

Ohhhhh yeah.

It was a most painful way to learn this lesson, but believe me, I will never again leave the house without packing my Mr T in Your Pocket Talking Keychain. The most excellent device ever invented, Mr T in Your Pocket is used to advise dipshits to shut their piehole with your choice of 6 of the beloved A-Teamer’s most colorful catchphrases, including “Don’t make me mad, grrrr!”, the succinct “Shut up, fool!”, and of course the iconic “Quitcho jibba jabba!”

Incidentally, Mr T in Your Pocket is identical to Radical Feminist in Your Pocket, except that Radical Feminist in Your Pocket does not actually exist, probably because in it “Don’t gimme no backtalk, sucka!” has been replaced by the rather more romantic phrase “Please remain still while I saw off your racist mansplaining pencil-dick with the rusty machete they issue all humorless hairy feminists in Women’s Studies, fool!”

Next time: Little Niggling Instances of the Redoubtable Efficacy of Patriarchal Oppression, Part II: Shit I Saw on PBS.

Posted in Knobjectivism, Lobe-blowing, Patriarchy, my patriarchy and The Argument Against Human Reproduction. Bite me, Chad.

The Donkey Chronicles, Part 2

Published by Jill on November 17, 2011. 52 Comments

Certainly you are on the edge of your seat awaiting some sort of resolution to the Donkey Situation. Here’s the status report:

The donkeys’ owner has finally been located, thanks to the expert sleuthing of Sgt. Jimmy of the Cottonmouth County Sheriff’s Dept.

Daphne and Liriope, Donk InvadersCrappily, it turns out that the owner is Mr Classy from seven or eight ranches over. He is the irascible lying sumbitch who hates his neighbors, beats dogs, impales babies on pitchforks, welches on bets, drinks Miller Lite, goes to church, and eats at Cracker Barrel. He wants nothing to do with the donkeys. In fact, he’s been letting them roam free for years. Reports from ranches as far as 5 miles distant attest that these donkeys are quite the jetsetters. It’s gotten even worse since the drought. The creek that traverses all the ranches in this area has run dry, leaving a creekbed that livestock on the lam use as a sort of highway that runs for miles. These 3 donkeys are among the more notorious rogues.

Mr Classy tells Sgt. Jimmy that he is sick and tired of these donkeys, and that if he is forced to come and collect them from my place, he’ll just shoot’em.

I am now totally screwed, because although the urgency with which I require three feral donkeys is immeasurably slight, I obviously can’t send them back to that redneck dicksmoke and his cheap-ass shotgun. I mean, I jumped into 60 degree water to save that drowning jenny. It was a poignant, dramatic, and heartwarming episode that would have made an excellent feel-good segment on the local evening news. I can’t just send her off to be murdered after a thing like that, right?

So I tell Sgt Jimmy that I’ll forgive all the damages if Mr Classy will just sign the donkeys over to me. This is a pretty good deal for Mr Classy, since feral donkeys are worth quite a bit less than nothing in these days of drought and hay famine, and the damage caused by Daphne’s natatory episode, which I had intended to hit him up for, will amount to quite a pile.

So Sgt. Jimmy attempts to broker the deal, occasioning a call from Mrs Classy. She wants to know what time today I can come and get the donkeys. What do you mean, I say. Don’t I already have them? No, she says, they’re at her neighbor’s place, she can see them from the road. Sure enough. Since breakfast the donkeys have apparently traversed 3 miles of rough terrain and are now completely absent from El Rancho Deluxe.

This surprises me. It hadn’t dawned on me for some reason that the donkeys would decide to go back. Why would any donkey elect to abandon swimming pools and hay for a ranch with no swimming pools and hay? But it also drives home the realization that the three donkeys are in fact afflicted with a wanderlust woven so deeply within their mettle that even so magnetic a personality as my own is powerless against it. They’re tumbleweeds in the John Ford movie of life. “Babe, I gotta ramble” is their motto. “Don’t fence me in” is the theme song that plays during their fadeouts.

Which means I gotta fence them in.

I tell Mrs Classy that I’ll have to run some new fence before I can take custody, which should take a couple of weeks. This pisses off Mrs Classy. Since no promise of a future good deed goes unpunished, she delivers a brief but colorful monologue expressing her dissatisfaction with the time line. But what can I do?

So the anticlimax is that I still have not officially adopted 3 wild donkeys, and that the fence guy is coming out next week to take a look.

To be continued.

Posted in Announcements, El Rancho Deluxe, Heartwarming Nature Crap and Horse Blogging. Bite me, Chad.

To whomever is missing 3 donkeys near Rattlesnake, TX

Published by Jill on November 12, 2011. 66 Comments

Donkey in the pool[UPDATE: Donkey mistook pool cover for solid ground, fell in, got trapped in deep end under pool cover. Had a hell of a time -- about an hour and a half -- getting her out. Her best friend paced on the sidelines the whole time in a sort of worried panic, hee-hawing more or less continuously. I'm sure you heard it over in Australia. My ears are still ringing. Couldn't get the trapped donkey to climb up the steps, because she's a donkey. Tried to bite me whenever I'd get close enough to toss a rope around her girth. Eventually she saw reason and climbed out on her own. She stood still for a second, then shook the water off, pooped in the pool, gave me the atomic stink-eye and trotted off into the night to rejoin her anxious troupe. If I end up keeping her I'm naming her after one of the Naiades. Possibly Daphne, who fended off Apollo by turning into a laurel tree, or Liriope, the mother of Narcissus.]

Three donkeys

I have your donkeys (not pictured: the third donkey).

Longhorn cow

Oh, and those 12 gaudy Texas longhorn cattle you bought so you could make like Ross Perot and keep your ag exemption in style? I have those, too (not pictured: 11 other ginormous cattle with 6′ racks). I will happily return them to you once you’ve reimbursed me for the damages.

Thank you.

Posted in Announcements and El Rancho Deluxe. Bite me, Chad.