Obnoxious Female Feminist Korner

This guy, writing at the Guardian, is under the impression that, not only is feminism about “equality,” but that he should be awarded “full membership” in the “feminist movement.” Why? Because of, apparently, his “remarkable imagination and sense of empathy.”

Yeah, and I’ll be a woman of color blogger, too.

Opinionator Khaled Diab purports to speak for all nice guys who don’t go around raping their sisters, but the tone of his essay suggests that his personal feelings are deeply hurt. The resistance shown by what must be the all of 17 or 18 diehards worldwide who still turn a skeptical eye toward “feminist” men has cut him to the quick, and he means to put a stop to it.

He drags out all the usual patronizing arguments in favor of his election to the Global Feminist Cabal.

To exclude him is “sexist.” Which is so “paradoxical.”

“Outsiders,” Diab points out helpfully, often “become the iconic embodiment of certain struggles, such as the privileged young doctor turned poor man’s revolutionary.”

Apparently there is a long tradition, in class struggle, of privileged young doctors bailing out poor men. Feminists are just shooting themselves in the foot if they deny one of these privileged young doctors the opportunity to fulfill his destiny and defeat sexism on their behalf, thereafter to erect a statue of this iconic embodiment in the town square.

Moreover, chides the sentimental Diab, chicks can be chauvinist pigs, too! Men “don’t have a monopoly on being domineering.” Seriously. Men wouldn’t dominate “the movement” any more than “obnoxious female feminists” do; remember, men are so remarkably imaginative and empathetic (hey, I know! The men could protect the nice feminists from the obnoxious ones.).

Diab complains that having “direct experience” of sex-based oppression shouldn’t really be the deal-breaker that those 17 or 18 feminists make it out to be. But. If we insist: it turns out men do have direct experience! Which Diab defines as the impact on the dominant class when people of lower status get screwed over. Clearly the male experience of “anger and frustration” on his wife’s behalf is qualitatively identical to enduring the persistent threat of violence that every woman suffers whenever she leaves the house (and often even when she doesn’t), or the fact that white dudes own several of her internal organs, or living in poverty with 3 kids and no healthcare.

His direct experience of women’s oppression so sorely chaps his hide that — although he allows that he doesn’t go to rallies or “shout from the rooftops” — Diab demands to “fight shoulder to shoulder” with women as a “fully-fledged feminist.” I suppose we can take that to mean that he won’t be kicking the shit out of Mrs. Diab. How iconic.

“You don’t,” he opines, by way of proving his progressiveness, “need to be [...] a member of a minority to appreciate the suffering caused by racism.” Well. You can “appreciate” it all you like, but that doesn’t mean you get to learn the secret handshake or come to the potlucks. For all Diab’s “direct experience,” the defining aspect of oppression appears to have eluded him. That is, the oppressed don’t trust him. What did he expect, the big whiner? He enjoys supremacy over them every day.

So appreciate away, dude. With the emphasis on “away.”

Fetuslove, Canadian-style

As a Texan lesbo spinster aunt, I am the world’s leading authority on Canadian abortion law, so when I got an mass email from Bonnie Gembey at LEAF Manitoba that said, “Ladies, the Harper government is up to its usual shenanigans again,” I knew just what to do.

I went straight to Google and looked up LEAF Manitoba and “Harper government.”

It turns out that Canada has a Prime Minister named Stephen Harper, and has had since 2006! I must’ve slept through that election.

Like all Prime Ministers, Stephen Harper is a peach of a guy. He is an AC/DC fan, belongs to an evangelical church in Ottawa, bribes MPs to change their votes, and opposes spousal benefits for same-sex couples.

No, it’s true! I read it in Wikipedia.

LEAF Manitoba, on the other hand, is not only not favored with a Wikipedia blurb, it doesn’t seem to have a website at all. I finally found what I believe is their parent organization, though, the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund. Here is their mission statement:

* To ensure the rights of women and girls in Canada, as guaranteed in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, are upheld in our courts, human rights commissions and government agencies; and

* To take actions to reveal how factors such as race, class, Aboriginal status, sexual orientation, ability, and religion compound discrimination against women.

LEAF doesn’t mention anything about overthrowing the social order per se, but it appears that they grasp the general idea that women are human. In fact, the second part of their statement, wherein they vow to “reveal” how the social order facilitates women’s oppression, sounds suspiciously similar to patriarchy-blaming. Can I get a hell-yeah!

Anyway, what’s got LEAFer Bonnie Gembey’s oysters in a pot is a bill working its way through Parliament, Bill C-484. This bill would grant legal personhood to — say it with me — fetuses. The sentimentally-titled “Unborn Victims of Crime Act” would allow authorities to press additional, more bad-ass charges if a fetus (the “unborn child”) is aborted concurrent with a violent crime perpetrated against a woman (the “mother”).

Jiminy crickets! you are undoubtedly thinking. Where the fuck does a profoundly fucked up idea like fetal personhood come from?

It comes, O young onion, from a cabal of dudes indoctrinated from the cradle with magical misogynist thinking. This cabal of dudes arbitrarily decides, based on their self-identification as patriarchs, on their fucked-up interpretation of a 2000-year-old text written by fucked-up barbarians, and on their insensibly passionate love for their own sperm (which they appear to believe are mini-men), that a clot of cells is precisely, qualitatively, philosophically, even phenotypically the equivalent of any old autonomous being sauntering through the town square.

But why? Why ignore science and common sense and one’s ethical obligation to half the human race to perpetuate this quaint but destructive fiction?

As poetical blogger Richard Jeffrey Newman (whose excellent essay on the godbag origins of the anti-choice movement I recommend, not least because it reminded me of the hilarious little homunculus idea) sez:

If I am [...] essentially no different from the bundles of cells that result from the coming together of egg and sperm, then protecting the children-to-be growing in the wombs of pregnant women from the “capricious” choices of free-willed women is a kind of retroactive self-preservation.

That’s right. It’s male ego, male fear of death. Fetal personhood places the status of women right where it belongs: firmly in the cytoplasm of a parasitic growth containing dudely mini-me DNA.

Fetal personhood is fucked in many ways, but relevant to Bill C-484, it is fucked because whereas it purports to remedy violent crime against pregnant women, it does nothing to address the factors that actually contribute to violence against women, and will certainly erode abortion rights (which, I think I can say without fear of contradiction, is the bill’s real purpose).

The LEAF press release suggests all manner of proposals that could help achieve the purported purpose of Bill C-484, without quite so much of the antifeminist fetus-loving godbagism. Such as

adequate financial security for women and children trying to leave abusive situations, more stable funding and education opportunities for women with children, and better training for police, lawyers and judges and better [funding] for transition houses and women’s groups serving the needs of abused women.*

LEAF goes on to call out the government for what it is: the above-described cabal:

If this or any other Canadian government was serious about addressing violence against women, including pregnant women, it would look to the wealth of recommendations made over the years by a range of community-based organizations with expertise in assisting women and children victims of violence.*

And maybe it wouldn’t endeavor write into law the psychopathic notion that women are nothing but fetus-incubating meat bags. Jesus tap-dancing Christ. If a fetus is a person, a woman isn’t.

_____________________________
* Sorry, no link; I quoted this text from Bonnie Gembey’s email, and was unable to find it anywhere on the LEAF website.

I sprained my ankle

I know, I know, who gives a tub of Cool Whip about anyone’s orthopedic problems? But you should give a tub of Cool Whip about this orthopedic problem, because had I not spent the afternoon immobilized with an ice pack and a laptop in my lime green recliner, I might never have found this incredible video, which has forever changed the way I look at a cappella renditions of popular TV themes, and which I now share with you, my most intimate and valued invisible internet friend. Prepare to have your mind blown.

Note: Because it is not readily apparent from the video — even though the title of the video is “Battlestar Galactica Theme” — I will clue you in: it’s the Battlestar Galactica theme.

I had to quit watching “Battlestar Galactica” because that yell-o-headed Cylon in the red fuck-me dress was just too sexy for my shirt.

[Via Wired]

Good morning, patriarchy!

There were a couple of tornadoes swirling around the Texas Hill Country last night, so this morning, upon springing from the TempurPedic like Morning-bright Apollo, I fire up the Weather Channel to assess the probability that I will find my horse Stanley stuck in a tree when I nip off to the barn later today.

But the teevee isn’t tuned to the Weather Channel. Instead, the first image to contract the Twisty irises this morning is a guy in a puffy shirt with a canine overbite embracing a statuesque blonde supermodel.

“To hell with foreplay!” he snarls. His fake dental prostheses clamp onto her throat. Blood spurts. Woman screams.

That’s right. It’s a gothsploitation film called “Way of the Vampire.” At 8 in the morning.

Vampires. What a load of misogynist BDSM catholicbag cornball crap that is.

Fuck You Aussie Perverts

Here’s some good news: Lauredhel of Hoyden About Town has opened up a HollaBack franchise serving Australia’s harassed masses. The “pillocks, numpties, asshats and douchebags of the Australian streets” are hereby on notice.

HollaBack, in case you were on vacation the day Al Gore invented the Internet, is a “global social movement“ consisting of websites that publish the blurry cellphone photos you take of the jagoffs who harass you on the street. You send’em a brief account of your brush with pervitude, then sit back with a pitcher of margs and a fattie while your photo wends its way throughout the World Wide Web. HollaBack also has handy links about street harassment and is entertaining, edifying and deeply gratifying.

Used to be there was only one HollaBack, HollaBackNYC, which is where I sent my photo of ”King Leer.“ Localized HollaBack branches have since sprung up all over the world (see any HollaBack site to find the branch office nearest you). It is my policy to photograph, with intent to disparage, any dude I encounter who wields his manly privilege at me or my posse, and I encourage one and all to do the same.

The scheme is Spinster Aunt approved; it’s non-violent resistance!

For extra credit, check out:

1. sajbrfems’ “52 Acts of Cyberfeminist Creativity,” art related to the HollaBack concept.

2. At HollaBackNYC, Jessica Valenti youtubes (it may as well be a verb; everything else is) a sad tale of subway harassment entitled ”Fuck You Public Perverts.“

Schooled

Blamers may have noticed my awkward silence on the topic of Amandagate. Not that the entire bloggofemispheriat has been chewing its nails down to unsightly nubs awaiting my pronouncements on the subject, but I hope it’s not too fanciful to surmise that some of you may have wondered if and when I was gonna step up.

That day is today.

It turns out I am not an advanced patriarchy blamer. I may have to stop commenting on this blog.

If I am to be taken seriously as a spinster aunt — which may or may not be possible or even desirable, as I am a person who has taken to eating Funyuns for lunch — it is incumbent on me to stay informed on various current bloggofeminist ideologies. Which I ain’t sufficiently done.

I grasp the necessity of doing so, however, and not just in view of recent events; fluency in feminist ideology is precisely what I require of progressive dude bloggers who flit around the World Wide Web claiming to be down with women’s issues. Invariably, with these guys, a pie fight ad shows up in their sidebar, some feminist readers raise a stink, and the white dudes summarily shout’em down. Then one of their progressive buds writes a “Where are all the women bloggers?” post, and someone says, “Dude! Ana Marie Cox!” and they all go back to Hillary-bashing. If I’ve seen it once I’ve seen it eight times.

It’s the same thing with the women of color feminist bloggers and the white feminist bloggers. A white feminist blogger, for example, cannot plug a book written by another white feminist blogger (who is currently under the gun for failing to cite precedent work by women of color), and simultaneously ignore the implications this has for women of color, without it appearing as an act of open hostility. Doing this more or less says, “This author has no fluency. You might as well be reading Perez Hilton.”

It seems so obvious now, so why didn’t I see it before?

That’s right! White privilege! It’s just like male privilege, except in this context it’s just for white chicks. Where dude bloggers may exercise control over women according to their status, white feminist bloggers may exercise control over women of color according to their status.

[Although if I may, in an aside, remark on how absurd it feels to claim "status" of any kind in the feminist blogosphere, which is a community in which I am generally reviled as a sex-hating lesbo nutjob outcast. But I digress.]

In the example cited above, the one where I allude to having posted a pro-Marcotte book dealio, the “control” aspect was expressed in my failure to address the current controversy. In so failing, I effectively endorsed white privilege in feminist bloggery, and closed down a potential avenue of discussion. That this was unintentional is of no consequence; it was perceived by many, and rightly so, as an example of what has been popularly referred to as “circling the wagons.”

The sad irony is that I never cut dudes the tiniest bit of slack in the male privilege department. They write in and say, “But Twisty, I never rape my girlfriend, aren’t you being just a little shrill?”

And I always reply (well, I always used to reply; I just ignore’em now, they make me so tired, especially when they go into minute, graphic detail about their sex lives. Why do they all do that?), “You might,” I used to tell them, “be the nicest male dude on 9 planets, but the fact remains that you’re a dude, so you automatically benefit from male privilege whether you actively choose to or not, and unfortunately this privilege, though it may be invisible to you, is experienced by women as misogyny, again, whether you like it or not.”

It’s the same exact thing with white privilege. So, if you’re a white feminist blogger: you may not choose it, you may hate it, you may ignore it, or you may not even see it, but you do exercise your white privilege daily, and it is absurd to expect that this exercise would be perceived by women of color as anything but racism. Because it is racism, dum-dum.

I know, I know! We don’t mean it! We’ve blogged against racism a hundred times. It is our fondest wish to support women of color. Why are these WOC harping on that one little thing we said in our last post that, OK, in retrospect, might seem a bit patronizing? Why are they being so mean? Can’t they see we’re on their side, overall? And anyway, can we help it if we blog about white feminist things? After all, that’s what we are.

Well, if you’ll permit an analogy: there’ve been pro-abortion posts aplenty at DKos, but after that pie-fight shit I wouldn’t read that blog again with a 10-foot pole. As I wrote back then, a spinster aunt comes to expect from one’s supposedly progressive bloggers a certain level of fluency in rudimentary feminist thought, so when they come out all “Yay pornography! Screw you if you can’t take a joke, you shrill harpy cunt!” you tend to view them with a jaundiced eye. Obviously they’ll throw you to the wolves the minute you start telling’em shit they don’t want to hear.

You feel that, white feminists? That’s your obstreperal lobe telling you that feminism and good intentions do not a get-out-of-racism-free card make.

For the second half of this discussion I am indebted to PhysioProf, who, like 10 days ago, wrote an excellent (and strangely light-on-the-expletives) post “Intellectual Appropriation, Attribution of Credit, and Privilege.” In his essay PP outlines the basic cornerstones of fair play in scholarship, what he considers a “really important self-regulating feature of traditional intellectual discourse in academia that [he thinks] bloggers could stand to learn a few things from.”

In praxis I am loath to adopt anything labeled “traditional in academia,” since academic tradition is one of patriarchy’s most reliable methods of self-replication. However, short of revolution and a new world order wherein intellectual property is nothing but a quaint historical footnote, I’m gonna have give this one to PhysioProf.

The crux on the gist of his nub is this: “Ignorance is not an excuse.”

Now. Some bloggers say Amanda appropriated material from Brownfemipower for a piece on women ‘n immigration that appeared at RH Reality Check and AlterNet; Amanda says no, she came up with the analysis on her own after attending an ACLU conference.

But PhysioProf intimates, and I agree, that if A and B expound similarly, and A’s work pre-dates B’s, the onus is on B to sniff A out and give the props. This no-excuse thing extends from “accidental” ignorance of pre-existing work, such as might describe the Amanda/BFP situation, to “intentional” ignorance, such as purposely avoiding exposure to certain bloggofeminist oeuvres despite, or even because of, their relevance to one’s own work.

In other words, even if Amanda had never heard of Brownfemipower in all her life, and had arrived in an intellectual vacuum at the conclusions she published at RH Reality Check/AlterNet, hard upon her subsequent discovery of Brownfemipower’s pre-existing work — the existence of which appears to be a fact — good scholarship suggests that an acknowledgment of those prior efforts should have hove into view toot sweet. Yet — and please correct me if I’m wrong — so far as I know, no such acknowledgment appears.

So where does sloppy research intersect with white privilege? In this case, right in the old book tour. Amanda’s purported appropriation, whether accidental, intentional, real or imagined, of BFP’s analysis, combined with her book’s debut and an altercation involving some women of color and the book’s publisher, is a stunning example of the exercise of white privilege resonating as racism throughout the blogular RWOC community. Because of Amanda’s A-list status — which status magnifies both her privilege and her responsibility whether she likes it or not — the event has transcended the usual fucque-up du blogue. Her continued disavowals now join with the uncomfortable silence of certain spinster aunts to grandiloquently underscore a problem endemic to feminism since its inception: the invisibility of women of color.

So not only would the aforementioned acknowledgment of Brownfemipower’s work satisfy PhysioProf’s academic protocols, it would be a great opportunity to expose to a wide audience the hideous inclination of white privilege to sabotage, bias, and encrapulate the pitiful, ineffectual, condescending efforts of white feminists to “support” women of color. As Huck Finn says, “a little thing like that don’t cost nothing, and it’s just the little things that makes a feminist blogger to be looked up to and liked.”

That’s right. Nothing new here. Just getting stuff off my hairy boobless chest.

NOTE: No endemic problem is the fault of a single person. Only a chumpass would blame Amanda personally for engendering some monumental schism in the very fabric of feminism. Therefore, anyone who cares to comment on this post should be advised that any ad feminam attacks will be deleted.

ANOTHER NOTE: I trust it will withstand denuciations of wagon-circling if I wish a fellow blogger, whose talent I admire, continued success with her book, which, I hear, is already in its 2nd printing. “Woot!”, as it were.

MO State House: “Women are morons”

Let us now turn to an abortion story that ought to be a hoax but isn’t.

And so it came to pass that the Missouri state House gave a big thumbs-up to a bill that, among other things, would require abortion providers to “offer pertinent information” to women 24 hours prior to their procedures.

The actual pertinence of the information is in the eye of the beholder, of course. If this spinster aunt were the beholder, I would inform any woman who asked me that being forced to wait 24 hours for an abortion is misogynistical, condescending, and incon-fucking-venient.

I would add that being shamed into enduring a theatrical production in ultrasound starring the uterine growth’s precious angelic heartbeat is anti-choice melodrama.

I would also point out that being made to inspect anti-choice pamphlets is abuse, since slogans like “life begins at conception!” are merely arbitrary edicts frothing up from the patriarcho-godbag gash in the fabric of Truth ‘n Beauty, and are unsupported by any scientific evidence.

Not that anyone would ask me, of course. Women have been disposing of uterine growths for millennia without my advice, and frankly I like it that way.

But unfortunately the eye doing the beholding in this case is not only not me, it’s not anyone who gives a fig for women’s liberation from biological slavery; it’s the dudely Missouri State House of Representatives, proud usurpers of private uteruses, superciliously hiding behind some bogus and supremely antifeminist idea of “informed consent.”

“Informed consent” means “Hysterical moron pregnant ladies cannot be relied upon to discharge their duty properly, so the State’s gotta get all up in there.”

The bill now proceeds to the Senate, where I can’t imagine anyone will have the balls to poo-poo it.

She couldn’t just sign it “R. Mutt” and call it a day?

Like you never saw this coming:

Yale will put the kibosh on Aliza Shvarts’ blood-cube at the big Art Show unless the Diva Cup diva

submits a clear and unambiguous written statement that her installation is a work of fiction: that she did not try to inseminate herself and induce miscarriages, and that no human blood will be physically displayed.

Because Art is godly and dudely and should always be literally, unambiguously true, and literally, unambiguously devoid of the artist’s ladyparts (which two conditions are really one and the same); anything less shows a shocking disregard for human life, heterosexuality, the rules, the Lord, the exacting standards of misogyny uniformly and eternally endorsed by our august culture of domination, and those baronial Yale benefactors who happen to be anti-choice.

I don’t suppose the world will really miss another art student blood-cube, though.

Miscarriage art cube provokes “outcry”

Art student Aliza Shvarts’ unholy, cavalier attitude toward the sanctity of the human blastocyst has squanked out the Yale undergraduate art department.

To obtain materials for her senior art project — a cube encased in plastic and blood onto which video is projected — Shvarts, over a period of nine months, inseminated herself “as often as possible,” induced an undisclosed number of miscarriages, videotaped the events subsequently transpiring in her bathtub, and preserved the effluents.

Ours is a quaint, superstitious culture with strict rules about where and when and why and how male and female reproductive materials may touch. There are different consequences depending on the sex of the parties involved. For example, there are no consequences at all for men (unless they are homos). But women sure have a lot of explaining to do if their genetic material touches someone else’s before they have secured the permission of a bunch of authority figures, such as the ghost of a dead Nazarene on a stick, their dad, their boyfriend, or the U.S. Government.

Genetic material co-minglings that end before a live birth can occur are sometimes overlooked if they are seen as the expression of a popular deity’s capricious nature. These are called “miscarriages” and are God’s will. However, exceptions may obtain if the woman miscarrying is of low moral character, say, a teen slut (as we saw last week, if a teenager exhibits the poor judgement to (a) get knocked up and (b) expel the tissue on a plane, Homicide marches her straight off to the hoosegow), or an art student.

Should a free-wheelin’ Bohemian chick expel reproductive material as a function of her own agency, her motives (unlike those of the deity) can only be interpreted as insufferably self-serving and nefarious, an affront to human decency, even sociopathic. According to the Yale Daily News, the general tone around campus (among those who have heard of Shvarts) seems to be one of “shock.” One undergrad opined that inducing miscarriages for purposes of senior art projects is “morally wrong.” Another was quoted as being unimpressed with the work to the extent that she feels it violates the Constitution.

So a woman may have a miscarriage, but only if she doesn’t want one.

And lard help her if she should try to make a political statement with it.

Whether or not the reproductive material from a young bohemian’s uterus may be exhibited without incident on cubes in Undergraduate Art Shows at Yale remains to be seen; few authority figures know about Shvarts yet. The Yale paper says that, as of yesterday, the even campus reproductive activist groups were unaware of the piece. I suspect that the reason the uterus cops haven’t called out a hit on Shvarts is that they haven’t yet had the pleasure of being scandalized and titillated by her flagrant abuse of her magic feminine powers.

UPDATE: Turns out Shvarts was just pulling our leg! Obviously bucking for a slot on “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me.”

According to the Chicago Trib: “When confronted by three senior Yale officials, including two deans, Shvarts acknowledged that she was never pregnant and did not induce abortions.” Even so,

Ted Miller, a spokesman for NARAL Pro-Choice America, called the concept offensive and “not a constructive addition to the debate over reproductive rights.”

Peter Wolfgang, executive director of the Family Institute of Connecticut, an anti-abortion group, said his anger was not mitigated by the fact that Shvarts may never not have been pregnant. “I’m astounded by this woman’s callousness,” he said.

I’m kind of disappointed. If it had been real, it would have been gross and asinine, but worth an hour and a half of my life writing an essay about. Now that it’s fake, it’s just asinine. Shvarts owes me an hour and a half.

Medical test results of the week

For those of you who follow my cancersploits and were wondering how my battery of scans from the other day turned out: a big old nugatory on all fronts.

I post this because I have noticed a marked tendency among the more melodramatically-inclined sector of the blametariat to speculate, in the absence of specific information to the contrary, that I am dead or dying.

Not yet, apparently.

Thanks to you all for your interest in my tumors and in my continued existence.