Oct 24 2012
Keen observers will have surmised this already, but I’m blowin’ off IBTP indefinitely. I’ll leave it up because no doubt it contributes incalculable value to Internet feminism. I’m turning comments off, though, for obvious reasons.
This isn’t necessarily good-bye, however! Not that you’d be interested, but I started a new blog about My Absurd Life as a Crone in the Cut-Throat Country. Get this, it’s just one anecdote after another, ha!
See you in the funny papers!
Sep 07 2012
My riveting post on “Roseanne” and “Rizzoli & Isles” will have to wait; on the subject of abortion “rights” in the US, here (from the comments on a recent post) is veteran blamer TwissB articulating pretty much what I would say if I had 20 minutes to slap together a paragraph:
You have to wonder what good it is to bother supporting women for political posts when they can’t summon the courage and common sense to knock out insulting language like this in the 2012 Democratic Platform under the heading “Protecting a Woman’s Right to Choose”:
“Abortion is an intensely personal decision between a woman, her family, her doctor, and her clergy; there is no place for politicians or government to get in the way.”
Well shucks, if her family, doctor, and clergy get to make a woman’s decision for her, why not drag in politicians, governments, and any stray passerby and his dog to have their say as well? What kind of a personal decision is that??
And why the judgmental and gratuitously emotional ‘intensely’? Her decision and state of mind are her own business.
All these inserts and modifiers should remind women that their famous ‘right to choose’ is a cruel illusion and a blurring of the meaning of the word ‘right.’ Rights are inherent to the person, but women’s rights mean nothing in a country where men can continue to withhold constitutional recognition of them.
I don’t see a dime’s worth of difference between parties in men’s determination to control women as breed stock.
Me neither. I hereby assert my “God-given” right to declare the Dem’s platform to be the capital of Crapville.
Aug 30 2012
A propos of any befuddlement concerning the current popularity of corny BDSM novels:
Last night while waiting for my orecchiette to cook, I flipped on the TV. It was a 60′s-era episode of “Gunsmoke,” the longest-running primetime TV series in American history. Here is the scene I saw:
A Marlboro Man and a hot but sass-talkin’ pioneer woman with a suspiciously modern hairdo are arguing in a rustic cabin. The Marlboro Man is “proposin’” to her, but it turns out he doesn’t even know her name. She is pissed about this, calls him a “wax figure.” She tries to leave. He grabs her by the shoulders and starts lecturing her, shaking her every so often as punctuation. When she mouths off, he hits her in the face.
The Marlboro Man looks confused and apologizes for hitting her. He ain’t never hit no woman before. Suddenly demure and submissive, she smiles up at him gratefully, and admits she reckons she had it comin’.
I turned it off then, but it looked a dead cert. that these two were gonna hook up by the time they rolled credits. This would preserve the natural oder, because the M.M. was actually a really nice guy who was driven to violence by his passion for the sassy pioneer woman whose name he doesn’t know. It was a love-assault!
This was considered family entertainment.
In a brief, shining moment for American television, “Gunsmoke” was canceled in 1975 and replaced by the only remotely feminist program ever to air on an American network: “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”
Anyway, domination and submission are ingrained in the whole American psychosex narrative not least because crap like “Gunsmoke” was always on during dinner when we were kids. We learned to normalize violence against women over Mom’s meatloaf.
This might be an old show reflecting decades-old mores, but it’s still playing in 2012 in primetime.
CORRECTION: “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” first aired in 1970 — not 1975 — and ran until 1977. Replacing “Gunsmoke” in 1975 were MTM spinoffs “Rhoda” and “Pyllis.” Thanks to alert reader Jay for the fact-checking.
CORRECTION: That’s “Phyllis,” not “Pyllis.” Egads.
Aug 28 2012
This woman wants to standardize “discovery attribution” across the entire Internet.
What is discovery attribution?
Remora photo borrowed from Britannica Online for Kids
Don’t blame Popova for that crappy mixed zoological metaphor, by the way; she puts it this way:
In an age of information overload, information discovery — the service of bringing to the public’s attention that which is interesting, meaningful, important, and otherwise worthy of our time and thought — is a form of creative and intellectual labor, and one of increasing importance and urgency. A form of authorship, if you will.
When Popova says that collecting stuff from around the internet is work, she’ll get no argument from me. She spends fifteen hours a day on her gargantuan Internetian output. Fifteen hours! The last time I spent fifteen hours on anything, it was a “Breaking Bad” bender, which enterprise, it should not surprise you to learn, failed to enbiggen anyone’s intellectual horizons. No lives were lost, fortunately, but a couple of dogs went unwalked, and I’m pretty sure some auntly neurons went on permanent hiatus, because day-um, that show is some effin hardcore culture-of-domination shit. Lard help me, I can’t look away!
But I digress.
Somewhere on the wild and wooly continuum of public media, along with stuff like journalistic integrity, plagiarism, fact-checking, and lyin-when-you-oughta-be-truthin, lies the gnarly concept of attribution. Attribution answers the question “not that we don’t trust you, but where did your idea come from?” This, alas, is a question that must be answered, so you can prove you’re not a low-down thieving plagiarist jacknut. And also, theoretically, so that motivated readers can continue their philosophic odyssey through your source material.
But the answer isn’t always straightforward. When you consider that all human knowledge depends on all the human knowledge that came before it, and acknowledge that there’s nothing new under the sun, and agree that even if it were possible to do (which it isn’t), art created in a vacuum without any cultural or historical or social references would be meaningless, it turns out that no matter what the idea, you didn’t — to downcycle a phrase — build that.
I’m all for attributin’. But how far back should you go?
In the interest of preventing the work of bringers-of-interestingness-to-the-public’s-attention from perishing in obscurity, Popova’s solution is the “Curator’s Code,” an implementation of unicode symbols that represent the closely related concepts of “via” and “hat tip.” In the spirit of classiness and mutual respect, everyone across the Internet would start via-ing and hat-tipping right and left, giving credit where credit is due, etc. For example, I got the idea for this post from Popova, so I should “via” her. Like this.
ᔥMaria Popova. That little squiggle is the symbol for “via.”*
So you pop ovah to Popova’s, and presumably from there the hyperlink trail will lead eventually to Idea Zero, the ur-concept from which hath sprung all intervening notions leading to the enturdification of an Internetian curator’s code.
But wait. Did I get the idea for this post from Popova?
I started typing this after I experienced what I initially thought were two separate Internetian incidents.
1) While listening to an On the Media podcast I heard an interview with the aforementioned Maria Popova, boostering for her curator’s code.
2) Twelve hours later somebody happened to comment on IBTP that another blog had erroneously credited me for ideas to which I had alluded in my post, but which had in fact orignated at another blog.
Hmm, I said. Maybe there’s a post in this.
But who to credit? And on second thought, I really get the actual idea from Popova? Maybe she was just the inspiration, in which case she isn’t entitled to a full-on via; she only gets, according to Popova’s code, a hat-tip. As should ↬Linda, the commenter who pointed out the aforementioned misattribution.
But why was I interested in the idea of attribution in the first place? Isn’t it true that deeper, in the roiling vat of grease and yearning that is my obstreperal lobe, there did ferment yet another story I’d heard somewhere else? I think I recall Jayson Blair, the elder statesman of journalistic fabrication, throwing in his 2 cents on some NPR talk show about freshman media liars Fareed Zakaria and Jonah Lehrer. And not only that, but I remember reading another article condemning Lehrer for plagiarizing himself, which sort of stung, because I recycle my own material all the time on this blog, because let’s face it, there are only so many ways you can say “you are a member of the sex class and the only way out is feminist revolt.”
And then I began thinking about all the other possible “inspirations” for this post. A horrible tangled web it was. How do you determine the provenance of an idea? How do you map out which of the lifetime 35,789,021 bajillion info-units received by your cerebral cortex has caused your neurons to fire in precisely this manner?
Crap. As a bloggist or a Tweetist or a what have you, one can only exercise one’s best efforts not to steal shit from people (or, apparently, from one’s own self), so that when one glimpses herself in the shop window at the Tractor Supply Co, the person looking back isn’t a fraud and a schmuck.
But I have to say, as this essay began to take shape, it stopped being about the original thing and started being about something else. I thought, shit, I’ll never figure out where I heard the Jayson Blair thing, so I can’t properly attribute that, and the same goes for that self-plagiarizing dealio. So I decided I would just write a post called “You are a member of the sex class and the only way out is feminist revolt,” attribute it to Jonah Lehrer, and call it a day.
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* FYI I think I heard Alec Baldwin compare Liz Lemon to a remora on a “30 Rock” rerun the other day. So there’s the hat-tip inspiration for that joke.
** The squiggle is supposed to link back to the Curator’s Code site, which, for the record, I find confusing. It seems to me that if it links anywhere, it ought to be to the source material, mostly because it’s a pain in the ass to type in two links where one would suffice. Besides, I don’t believe that symbols in universal usage should require administration by independent websites. But then, I’m no Curator’s Code creator so what do I know.
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Aug 23 2012
Madonna in Moscow
I suck.
Fortunately, the continued loom of the Pussy Riot banner has inspired a few vigilant readers to send up a blame-flare. They cite an excellent and provocative blog post on the subject at Radfem Hub. In this post a rat is smelled and the rotten insides of the Western coverage of the Pussy Riot case are subsequently excavated and run up the feminist flagpole for all seven of the world’s radical feminists to see.
[I will concede that running excavated insides up a flagpole, as well as the idea that a flagpole might even be described as "feminist", are contingencies that may only exist in a very poorly constructed metaphor. Moving on.]
The aforementioned Radfem Hub post gleams like a golden jaundiced eye at the very pinnacle of world class patriarchy-blaming.
“Now while I support without ambiguity the liberation of Pussy Riot’s members, it’s worth pausing for a minute to ask ourselves, as radical feminists, what the political dynamics are here. Why would Western media denounce so passionately the repression of feminists in Russia, when it usually only diffuses information that supports male supremacy and patriarchy? Feminism has long disappeared from any malestream media, except when journalists can turn it into male masturbation material, that is pornify either our suffering or our resistance to it [sic]. What’s going on here?”
This is the essence of the blaming method.
First you observe a thing. Then, because you weren’t born yesterday and therefore are perfectly aware that nothing exists that doesn’t promote the continued subjugation of the sex class, you examine the thing closely to determine the ways in which it supports an antifeminist culture of domination. The object of your scrutiny can literally be anything: a behavior, a practice, a movie, a law, a cultural norm, a piece of art, a bestseller, a YouTube video, a trial verdict, a scientific study, an unspoken rule, a turn of phrase, an internet meme, a photograph, a local custom, a medical procedure, a paradigm, an article of clothing, a blog post, your lunch, or a media frenzy over the imprisonment of a Russian all-girl punk band. If you conduct it unflinchingly, your examination absolutely will, I can guaran-fucking-tee without the slightest hesitation, bear flaming blaming-fruit. Patriarchal oppression replicates itself in every detail of human existence.
“What’s going on here?” should be the motto of every dedicated blamer.
In the case of the Pussy Riot whoopdeedoo, it seems that quite a lot is going on, most of it untoward, unsavory, and, it goes without saying, antifeminist. Quoth the author of the post, echoing another patriarchy-blaming maxim (If the liberal peen is keen, the result can only demean):
“You can measure the degree of feminism of an action by how men react to it, and if men collectively cheer and celebrate it, then you can be pretty sure there’s something wrong about it, or that it doesn’t somehow support our liberation from men. And as far as I can recall, even the slutwalks didn’t get as much coverage or public appraisal. What was it that men liked so much about Pussy Riot?”
Apart from, of course, the opportunity to say the word “pussy” 37,265 thousand times a day with complete impunity?
It turns out, according to Radfem Hub, that Pussy Riot is something akin to a women’s auxiliary of a Russian gang of pervy dude anarchists.** Known collectively as Voina, the group exploit the women in public stunts involving torture porn and humiliation. Read the post for the lurid details; they disgust me too much to summarize here. Suffice it to say that, although the Pussy Riot women are branded by Western media as militant feminists and masked avengers championing the cause of freedom, the freedom in question is only sexual, and is sought so assiduously merely to preserve male sexual access to degraded, roach-covered meat toilets. Pussy Riot are now characterized, not as feminists, but as sex slaves.
This is the only kind of “feminism” anyone around here ever sees anymore. Slutwalks, Boobythons, “nude revolutionaries,” 12-year-olds in Times Square wearing cheerful, colorful knitted bondage masks in solidarity with women’s sexual “empowerment.” [NYTimes] P.U.
Which might explain Madonna’s interest in the case; any excuse to perform a striptease onstage, right Madge?
The enpornulated antifeminist specifics of the Pussy Riot case notwithstanding, here at Spinster HQ we continue to pull for the release of the group from prison, as we do for all women who are imprisoned, exploited, and oppressed.
Anyway, the moral of the story is trust no one. Remember, if the liberal peen is keen, the result can only demean.
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* For the benefit of future blamers who have come across this post after the Free Pussy Riot banner has been taken down, here it is.
** These pornsick Voina knobs are referred to by the NY Times as an “art group.” Their repellent antics with a dead chicken et al may be reviewed in the Radfem Hub post. The Times describes Voina’s stunts as “brazen forms of dissent” but makes no mention of their mondo-degrading sexploitative nature, even as it extols “the ladies of Pussy Riot”‘s feminist moxie.
Madonna photo from Guardian.co.uk.
Thanks to TwissB and the commenter posting as “reader”.
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Aug 22 2012
I usually find that by the time I get around to watching a YouTube vid, it’s already been co-opted for a Burger King commercial and its catch-phrase is appearing on bargain-bin T-shirts at Walgreen’s. But on the outside chance that your finger is even more distant from the pulse of pop culture than mine, here’s the Legitimate Rape song. ↬
Aug 20 2012
Veteran blamer Liza sneaked this link into the comments on yesterday’s post: the pinkfaced Republican genius running against Missouri senator Claire McCaskill has breaking news about human reproduction. According to nominee Todd Akin, women possess heretofore unheard-of “biological defenses” against any pregnancy that might result from a thing he calls “legitimate rape.” That women can magically dispatch a rape-engendered pregnancy is why Akin thinks that it’s just fine to oppose abortion rights across the board.
“First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare,” Akin told KTVI-TV in an interview posted Sunday. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
Well, I have to say, that’s news to me. From what I understand from doctors, the female body can only “shut that whole thing down” by getting a fucking abortion. How does this anti-pregnancy bodily function work, exactly? Are abortifacients conveniently secreted by the victim’s Human Rights Lobe in response to sexual assault or what? Gosh, I hope Mr Akin isn’t thinking about the biological defense where the victim says “no, get the fuck away from me,” causing the rapist to concede, “Oh, well, damn! I guess that’s the end of that. See you around,” because it turns out that method of shutting the whole thing down doesn’t, alas, work so good.
And you gotta love that dear old “legitimate rape” concept. Like Whoopi’s rape-rape, it postulates the concomitant existence of a variety of rape that we apparently can all pretty much dismiss as inconsequential in the grand scheme of violence against women. You know, the fun kind of rape!
Moron.
Aug 17 2012
Holy crap, it’s been so long since I posted that I actually forgot my blog admin password. And then I realized I forgot the password to the thing where I store my passwords. Spent over half an hour straightening that all out. By then I was so exhausted I had to sit around with a trippple essspressso reading the internet on an iPad. Whereupon I learned one or two things.
For example, I found out that modern brides-to-be are now expected to pose for porn photo shoots as wedding gifts for their porndog husbands. This conveys to the groom, in graphic terms that even he can understand, a sense of his woman’s commitment to pornulational hegemony, to male supremacist mores, and to such compliant self-abasement as befits a newly endrudgened member of the sex class. It used to be enough that she put up with having cake smashed in her face at the reception, but now she’s gotta spread it for some perv “boudoir” photographer? Seriously, can wedding culture get any more gross?
But enough about me. What about this flippin all-girl Chicktown in Saudi Arabia? That’s right, Saudi dudes are building an entire woman-only city so they can put their underutilized females to work in a separate-but-unequal environment while continuing to comply with antediluvian laws governing women’s oppression. Now that is some super-sexist shit, there. Like, the sexistest shit ever. You might be tempted to think, “yay, you go girls, it’s a separatist’s dream come true,” but you know these women arent going to enjoy any real autonomy. When has apartheid ever produced anything but misery and oppression and rancor?
I’d go off on this for about another 17 paragraphs, but I’ve got niece duty in Austin. The kid is having some kind of hula girl party. Le sigh, as they say in these chick blogs.
Jul 28 2012
Fully loaded ice bucket next to couch? Check. Bottle of Prosecco in it? Check. Bag of Funyuns? Check.
That’s right. Time to watch the season premier of “Breaking Bad.”
Wait! The phone’s ringing? Son of a bitch, phone off hook, not-check!
Well, it was my mother. I always answer when it’s my mother because she’s in the habit of falling down and snapping her bones in half. At her funeral I don’t want to be the asshole standing there in mourning weeds thinking, “I could have saved her, but I was too busy gnawing on Funyuns while watching a TV show about the moral decay of a fictional suburban white drug lord.”
To my horror, my mother, whose bones were not broken this time, wanted to know if I was watching the Olympic Opening Ceremonies. This meant, in effect, that I had to watch the Olympic Opening Ceremonies. Summoning all the courage of the Fasters, I poured myself a glass and hit the remote.
The thing had already been underway for some minutes. I understand there was supposedly some story arc involving England Thru the Ages or whatever, and that I had just missed a fake queen skydiving, but even those two contingencies could not mitigate my confused, quasi-enskeevedness over the incomprehensible spectacle of about 28,000 children in luminous insane asylum beds, attended by an army of parlour-maid-looking female nurses. So it’s true then, what generations of Americans raised on Dickens have always suspected? That all English children are raised in Victorian orphanages? But what of the unsettling giant baby? What the fuck was that?*
And oh, they can’t be serious. A British Invasion medley? Really?
Of all the nasty, below-the-belt showbiz conventions, medleys suck the worst. There is no pleasure, no gratification, no philosophic value in a medley. There is only a sort of jarring pain, a stab of yearning, in being forced to endure 3 seconds of a beloved rock classic interrupted by 3 seconds of another beloved rock classic, many times in rapid succession. You just want to hear one whole fucking song, even if it’s fucking “Stairway to Heaven,” although one would of course prefer “Kashmir.”
By the way, all the featured medley artists were dudes. In Swinging London, birds didn’t rock.
At some point during the 3 seconds of “Bohemian Rhapsody” one of the commentators broke the sobering news that another dude, Sir Paul, was scheduled to appear at any moment. That did it. My filial obligations be damned! I immediately switched back to “Breaking Bad,” and you would have done the same. Can anybody even look at Paul McCartney — especially now that he’s an irrelevant geezer — without experiencing that haunting, guilty pang? You know, the one that whispers, “they killed the wrong Beatle”? Alternatively, I understand that when some of the younger set look at Paul McCartney, their pang says “Who the hell is Paul McCartney?”
The subject is nominally the Olympics here, so I’ll have to mention with a curled lip the women’s beach volleyball male fantasy/beach blanket bingo outfits.
Talk of cold weather had created panic in the British press that the female players would go for long-sleeves instead of the standard bikinis – a longtime but little used rule in international volleyball […] But the beach party atmosphere was augmented by the dancers, who filled the downtime with kicklines and even one tango that ended up with the dance partners flopping suggestively in the sand. [Huffington Post]
The “Playboy Prince” Harry has front row seats to the women’s final. Need I say more?
Probably not, but I will anyway. Just in case you were anxious that coverage of the sport would fail to sufficiently objectify the athletes, the Huffington Post comes through with this classy booty shot.
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* I have since been apprised that the hospital beds spelled out “NHS” and were meant to represent Britain’s national health service. It still seems strange that national health would be depicted by 19th century sick people, but whatever. England’s just quirky like that!
Beds photo from Christian Science Monitor
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Jul 25 2012
This device, invented by a woman suffering the femininity-imposed body dysmorphia typical of all 21st century women over the age of 12 (she was moved to create it “out of pure panic,”) attaches to your hair and stretches out your face. It’s a mini torture-rack for your head. The purported purpose of the face bungee is to “take 10 years off your face.” The actual purpose of the face bungee is to make you feel like something stuck on the bottom of a cheap shoe.
According to the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women, it is of paramount importance that all women should endeavor to look ten years younger than they are. If the pursuit of 10-years-youngerness is painful and costs money, so much the better, as the world order depends for its continued stability on the mighty cornerstone of women’s self-loathing. Without self-loathing it would be impossible to coerce women’s boundless contributions to consumerist culture, dude-affirming culture, porn culture, misogynist culture, and the unpaid drudgery of the nuclear family.
But dayum, the heart bleeds for those poor women in the video. They look exactly the same with the face bungee as without it! You just wanna take’em out for a marg and read’em selections from the S.C.U.M Manifesto or something.
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