Jun 27 2012

Blaming XPress: blurb + open thread

Categories:

Not Altogether Depressing

by Twisty

Since my blogging time will be pre-empted by a horrifying dentist appointment this morning, here’s a link to a blurb sent in by blamer Keri. Male concern-teen in some Tumblr wields an admonishing sign, “Dear Girls: Don’t be insecure. You don’t need makeup and nice clothes. You’re all fucking beautiful.” Unleashing a feminist backlash. And then a bunch of sign-wielders.

Tragically, I read this in the aforelinked post:

“Hopefully [the concern boys] won’t take these women’s hilarious responses as an excuse to devolve into nasty adult misogynists.”

No, no, no. It’s mega-irritating when women are supposed to expect rotten behavior from dudes when we don’t appease. As I have noted elsewhere about 286574 times, the wrongness of oppression isn’t contingent on the sweet demeanor of the oppressed.

Off to the torture chair. My new dentist is, I think, godly, which bodes ill. Feel free to express your views on dentists, sign-wielding, or anything else in the comments.

165 comments

Jun 26 2012

Discrimination Korner: Cover your boobs whether you have them or not

Categories:

Bloodsport, Crazy sexy cancer, Keep your bias off my gender

by Twisty

The author in 2006

Because, unlike me, you pay attention to current events, you have probably heard about the Seattle woman who got booted out of the public pool for trying to swim topless while boobless. Dudes flaunt the torso daily without eliciting comment, but the Seattle Parks & Rec Dept. gave Jodi Jaecks the bum’s rush because she has mastectomy scars instead of nips, and apparently the sight of her horrible post-surgical chest was grossing everyone the fuck out. There was no choice but to go all Taliban on her ass and inform her that her body is too offensive for public display, and she would have to wear a “gender appropriate” top in the pool.

Jaecks is one of the approximately 3 other women on the entire planet besides me who declined to get “reconstruction” after breast cancer surgery. * Her boobs are a thing of the past, so why would she wear a goddam boulder holder? Wearing clothes when you intend to be underwater is kind of weird anyway, but for a person who lacks the sort of tissue that requires the support of spandex scaffolding, and who in fact asserts that such superfluous garments actually inflict pain on her scars, it’s flippin absurd.

But women, including 45-year-old androgynous lesbian women, are expected to perform femininity at all times, even when they have been effectively neutered by various cancer amputations, and even when it hurts. Our skitzo enpinkified survivor culture values pluckiness but requires capitulation. The imperative is ever to appease. Enforce/Embrace the gender binary lest civilization crumble!

Here’s how I put it, back in Aught-Eight:

The world will literally explode if the following two conflicting conditions are met: (a) a female appears in public topless, and (b) a female in public fails to produce mammary tissue upon inspection.

You see the catch? It’s not exactly a Catch-22; that catch comes later. This is more of a Catch-23. If you have mammary tissue, you have to cover it up. If you don’t have mammary tissue, you’re obliged to get some, then cover it up. If you don’t get some, you still have to cover it up.

To put it another way: you have to hide it in order to prove that you have it. If you can’t prove that you have it, you have to prove that you’re willing to fake having it.

It goes without saying that if you won’t fake having it by hiding what isn’t, you must be shunned.

Thus did Seattle shun Jodi Jaecks. Apparently they actually accused her of intentionally trying to “shock” people. Fuck. You know what’s shocking? 1 in 7 women get breast cancer, and nobody’s ever seen a post-op chest. Fuck. The nonsensical arbitrariness of social convention never ceases to cheese an aunt off.

Eventually, back in Seattle, the magnanimous Parks & Rec Superintendent relented somewhat on the compulsory tankini issue, reclassifying Jaecks as not so “alarming” after all. At present, Jaecks is permitted to go trunks-only, but only during designated adult swim periods. Protect the delicate youths from monstrous cancer-women lest their idyllic Grand Theft Auto-playin’ childhoods be irreparably damaged by a couple of scars on a middle-aged woman.

Anecdote: my young nieces Fin and Rotel have grown up fully cognizant of my boob scars. They know what cancer is, they know what surgery is, and I can assure the anxious public that despite this exposure they are 100% unfazed. They are way more interested in my tattoo, but that’s a scar for another day.

________________
* “Reconstruction” is in quotation marks because the surgery to which it alludes does not actually reconstruct a functioning breast. The surgery, which is risky, painful, and has absolutely zero therapeutic value, con-structs a funbag. This allows the patient to resume her rightful rung on the discrimination ladder as she recuperates from the horrible disease that nearly killed her.

155 comments

Jun 24 2012

Breaking: Elite Dubba-You-O-Em-Ay-Ens Frame Feminist Agenda

Categories:

Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society

by Twisty

Years from now, after the revolution, we’ll look back on these wacky times and laugh (“Feminists with housekeepers and nannies? Bwaa!”), but at present one suffers just a smidge of elite-white-women-and-their-problems fatigue.

I allude to the Anne-Marie Slaughter vs. Sheryl Sandberg knife fight over the eternal (since the 1970′s, anyway) question “can women ‘have it all’?” By which is meant “can affluent, highly educated honky women have it all?”, since everyone knows poor women can’t have jack shit. Sandberg says yeah, if you get off your duff and crank it out like a dude and don’t let the bastards get you down. Slaughter says no, the deck is totally stacked against affluent, highly educated honky women. She has written a now-famous essay addressing the particular issues afflicting her bedraggled women-in-leadership-roles demographic. See Friday’s NYTimes for a recap.

The heart bleeds for Slaughter, who apparently has just realized that patriarchy actually exists. She has probably always suspected that it existed for women in what she quaintly calls “the real world,” but now it’s dawned on her that it exists even for people like her, a tenured international affairs professor at Princeton, TV pundit, and former State Department honcho.

What siren call of reason led her to conclude that she can’t “have it all”? It’s hard to tell, since her lengthy lament in the Atlantic is, I regret to say, liberally obfuscated with personal anecdotes about her kids and the many high-powered Washington social events she attended where the discussions appear to have revolved (conveniently, it would turn out, for the success of her upcoming article on same) exclusively around the subject of “life-work balance.” However, it seems that ultimately what got Slaughter cheesed was the gnawing awareness that parenting a rebellious teen is not as highly valued by DudeNation as racking up 976 billable hours per day, and that she therefore couldn’t run her State Department department without feeling torn asunder by the gnarled claw of maternal guilt.

In other words, life at the top is too grueling for the feminist ladies who wish concurrently to participate in the romance of the nuclear family. Lawyering and politicking and other power-professions need to take it down a notch so women can have fulfilling careers and raise their kids. Slaughter’s thesis appears to be that if patriarchy can be made a little bit more user-friendly for the privileged white ladies of the leadership class, it can only raise the happiness quotient of the entire planet.

I certainly want nothing more than for privileged women to have it easier, and I’m pretty gung-ho about chucking out the status quo. But tweaking the system so that supermoms can office-drone (or write national policy) from home computers is not the solution to getting more women into positions of power. Quoth Rebecca Traister in the afore-linked NYTimes article, this whole “have it all” narrative “irresponsibly conflate[s] liberation with satisfaction.”

Liberation is the solution.

Instead of trying to get the State Department to install classified document equipment in your home office, I suggest we begin by smashing up the core of patriarchy: the nuclear family.

One house, two frustrated parents, two neurotic kids: it’s got to go. It’s a weird, irrational, often narcissistic construct that forces the modern gal into an impossible life of stress, isolation, and failure: she’s a sex provider, fetus incubator, domestic drudge, child care professional, inventory maintainer, bacon bringer-homer, and fry-it-up-in-a-panner. The only way a woman in this day and age can compete with dudes in the public sphere is to contract out half (or more) of the labor generated by this inefficient, insular arrangement (and employing nannies and housekeepers just reinforces an already oppressive caste system).

But because the nuclear family model so elegantly screws women and children over, it has become the most cherished cornerstone of the megatheocorporatocracy. The first job of the nuclear family is to indoctrinate its kids with a thorough appreciation for the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women, so essential for the replication of patriarchal mores. The nuclear family relies on guilt to shackle women to the home. The nuclear family makes women financially and relationshipally dependent, feeds corporate greed, replicates heternormativity, promotes social conservatism, inflicts suffering when it fails (as do more than half of nuclear families), and supports fast food, disposable culture, and poor taste.

Thus do women, raised as masochists, crave the dream.

Germaine Greer — in The Whole Woman, I think — has proposed that we harken back to days of yore when humans lived in communal clumps with aunts, cousins, grandmas. Domestic drudgery and child care are spread across a wider pool of talent, everyone has more time for personal pursuits, old people aren’t shipped off to death dorms, and, most intriguingly, Greer maintains that kids in this more diverse environment don’t whine.

Anyway, the point is, as long as the nuclear family is the familial unit of choice, the future success of the culture of domination is ensured.

65 comments

Jun 21 2012

Ladyjunk strikes fear in hearts of Michigan ledge

Categories:

Bloodsport, Men Hate You, Politics, The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Yesterday

by Twisty

Cast your mind back, back, back through the mists of time to the craggy cliffs of the distant past, and you may recall a little blurb I wrote on the subject of the vaginafication of pop culture. Media personages, in an effort to enhippen themselves using the time-honored technique of women’s objectification, have taken to sticking the hi-fuckin-larious word “vagina” in all their scripts, monologues, and comedy bits. To the extent that some industry dudes are now claiming to suffer from vagina fatigue.

Not so, apparently, dudely Michigan state politicians. Vaginas rattle them to the core. I allude, in particular, to one Republican State Representative Mike Callton, who considers the allusion to female anatomy

“so offensive, I don’t even want to say it in front of women. I would not say that in mixed company.”

What the what? Why, in this age of vagina saturation, is Michigan state rep Mike Callton flipping his weenypeen? Dear god, did one of his female colleagues call him a cuntalina on the House floor?

Almost! It turns out that State Rep Lisa Brown alluded to her own vadge, using the word horrible word “vagina,” in a speech criticizing some super-misogynist anti-choice bill. The next day, after figuring out how horrified they were by this and what an excellet pretext this would be for shutting the bitch up, the pro-compulsory-pregnancy honchos banned her ass.

That’s right. Banned, by Republican jacknuts, from the debate, because she used the word “vagina” in a discussion on women’s health care legislation. Brown’s shockingly disgusting obscenity “violated the decorum of the House.”

Ladyparts. Can’t allude to’em on the House floor,** can’t remove unwanted parasites from’em. It’s almost like men control’em!

Here is Rep. Brown’s first person account of the Michigan ledge’s vaginasteria.

____________________
* This super-edgy fad comes mere decades after Eve Ensler.

** Alternate rules apply to TV and internet, wherein one is required to allude to the vulva at all times, although it is mandatory that the less accurate word “vagina” be substituted, because apparently nobody in the entertainment business has ever so much as glanced at an anatomy poster at the gyno’s office.

58 comments

Jun 05 2012

From the Should Be Obvious But For Some Reason People Don’t Get It Dept.

Categories:

Oppression Culture

by Twisty

Racism extends considerably beyond prejudiced beliefs. The essential feature of racism is not hostility or misperception, but rather the defense of a system from which advantage is derived on the basis of race. The manner in which the defense is articulated – either with hostility or subtlety – is not nearly as important as the fact that it insures the continuation of a privileged relationship. Thus it is necessary to broaden the definition of racism beyond prejudice to include sentiments that in their consequence, if not in their intent, support the racial status quo.

________________
From a comment submitted on June 3 by Pheeno, attributed thusly:

Wellman, David T. Portraits of White Racism. Second Edition. Cited in: “Definitions of Racism”. Center for the Study of White American Culture, Inc. 2001. 23 Dec 2004.

Thanks, Pheeno.

120 comments

May 27 2012

Actor who has had the balls to utter “vagina” on TV: “It’s just an inherently funny word”

Categories:

Movies and TV

by Twisty

The sassy ubiquity of the hilarious word “vagina” in popular culture is the subject of this foofy article in the LA Times.

Unmentionable for so long, referred to with euphemisms including “down there” and “hoo-ha,” the anatomically correct “vagina” has gone mainstream. It’s now become not just acceptable in many circles but fashionable. It’s being used as a punch line on sitcoms and in movies. It’s appeared on magazine covers. It’s become a political shorthand in an election year laden with women’s health and reproductive issues. It even has its own memoir — “Vagina: A New Biography” by Naomi Wolf — due in September.

At long last. Women are gettin’ more liberated because sitcoms now feel free to play the vadge for long-overdue laffs!

The photo is the cast of “Girls,” a presumably (I haven’t seen it) edgy “twentysomething HBO comedy” famous for having been masterminded by — hold on to your hats — a smart young lady. According to the Times, “Girls” alludes to vaginas at least once every episode. The pretty, youthful, honky cast is so empowerfulled by this vadge-banter that they pose, like all liberated women who are free to exude their personal sovereignty, with their knees demurely touching. Guarding the vagina with their lives.

As you know, if a woman’s knees aren’t stuck together, she’s a skank.

But uh-oh, are there too many vaginas on TV? Is the joke gettin’ played out? The article goes on to quote “Two and a Half Men” co-creator and noted feminist activist Lee Aronsohn as saying “We’re approaching peak vagina on television, the point of labia saturation.”

Once vaginas stop being so hi-fucking-larious, I guess they’ll have to move on to the next edgy way to objectify women. Although, having studied women’s objectification in popular culture pretty thoroughly for the past decade, it seems to me they’ll be hard pressed to come up with anything more degrading than “Pregnant in Heels,” “The Swan,” or “Bridezillas.”

Or “Bad Girls Club,” “Snapped,” “The Real Housewives of Jagoff County,” every cop drama because without fail there will be an episode wherein a woman is gagged and chained by the wrists in a gnarly basement, every newscast, every stand-up special on Comedy Central, every other show on Comedy Central, every beer/laundry detergent/diet soda/frozen dinner/Swiffer/chocolate bar/toilet paper/yogurt/et al commercial, every movie on TCM, and every movie and every show on every other channel, especially “I Love Lucy.”

All the above shit is racist and heternormative, too.

____________________
Photo from latimes.com.

236 comments

May 13 2012

Gag me with a silver spoon

Categories:

Femininity, Heartwarming Nature Crap, TV Sucks

by Twisty

I am pretty sure that you were wondering whether my manure pile has produced any frisbee-sized mushrooms recently.

Mushrooms (big-ass)

Meanwhile, I just heard, out of the corner of my ear, a commercial for a new reality TV show called Pregnant in Heels. I thought it was going to be a dramedy about prostituted women. Nope. Rich chicks. They attend MomPrep, the Upper East Side’s “premier training academy for mothers-to-be.”

Each week, viewers will join Rosie and her team as they tackle two new clients and their pregnancy dilemmas. From shotgun wedding planning and rock n’roll nursery makeovers, to daddy boot camps and even getting the baby into British aristocracy, Rosie Pope is the maternity concierge to the most affluent –- and hormonal -– expectant mothers in the city.

Pregnant in heels. That pretty much answers the question “in what deplorable state should the ideal P2K-compliant woman persistently abide?”

68 comments

May 09 2012

Hugs, Twisty: Hey I know, let’s chuck some transgenderism chitchat at the wall and see what sticks!

Categories:

Femininity, Hugs, Twisty, Keep your bias off my gender, Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society

by Twisty

I don’t know if it’s because I’m feeling pretty fresh and minty after having taken a few personal days months, or simply because I’m experiencing a nostalgic hankering for the days of yore when we so often enjoyed polite, pinkies-in-the-air discourse on the topic, but I just couldn’t let this email from an anguished blamer languish another minute in my electronic pile.

***********

Dear Twisty,

I’m trans-critical. So I know we disagree on that but, and while I’m competently radical feminist literate, I’m more and more feeling very weird about the dominant online trans-critical approach (as opposed to, say, what I feel like is often implicit if not always explicit in radical feminist literature which is that trans-criticism, if it can exist, has to be critical of the societal implications for further or novel kinds of dominance over women as a political class) which seems to be that one must oppose transgenderism based on some kind of gross chronological lens for viewing the ontological position of women as an underclass (eg, the vagina literally physically appeared on earth first) whereas I take a deeply strategically-focused political view that the drive to exploit appears first and the setup and use of women (whether because of vaginas or not, because honestly who gives a fuck, except in the use of our biology as a political tool re reproductive rights, etc.) as an underclass comes second to that primary societal and/or psychological force to exploit. I feel that’s strategically important because it’s politicizes rather than moralizes about women’s subjugation which is necessary to, well you know, change the world.

So, I don’t even know. I know our views aren’t strictly aligned but fucking hell, I feel like I’m crazy right now. I want to know if

1. I’m not incorrect to think there is a political and strategic criticism of transgenderism to be made (in fact, I think you’ve kind of made it on your blog yourself regarding gender roles but of a somewhat paler shade than my own, feel free to correct me if I’m wrong) and

2. That maybe there’s a reason the thinkers who write books have a better political understanding of the subjugation of women regarding gender roles and the biological determinist blogging nutters are the ones blabbering all over the internet (present company excluded for cheap dig at bloggers) and what I really need to do is just fully internalize that sentiment and not get so caught up in how dangerously wrong *for women and feminism* they are which is making me a crazy person?

Alternatively, I’m delusional which I’m receptive to hearing too.

Thanks for your time.

wildas

******************

Dear wildas,

Your email has lots of big words and time is short. If I understand you correctly (which I probably don’t, since I read at about a 10th grade level), you’re saying you are tortured by the blogular culture of trans criticism, which counts among its gnarly features a lack of scholarly literaritude and a focus on the primacy of XX-based vadge ownership. Also, you want to know if you are crazy.

I regret that I cannot diagnose an internet-feminism-related descent into madness — although a suggestion that you quit reading blogs that maddenize you might not go amiss (I myself am never happier than when I am miles away from any web browser, as may be deduced from my recent 2-month hiatus) — but I’ll gladly provide my own view on trans criticism.

My own view goes like this:

As you know, a patriarchal paradigm obligates the citizenry to align precisely with either Gender A or Gender B, with the result that those who (for whatever reason) don’t align are oppressed and screwed over. It is inevitable that this binary gender system will produce a vigorous exploitative element, because the gender-binary is synonymous with patriarchy, and patriarchy is synonymous with institutionalized exploitation.

Concomittantly, because the vigorous exploitative element is so injurious, the system must also attract a vigorously outraged element (the published feminist theorists, the Savage Death Islandists, the blamers, the radical feminists, the “biological determinist blogging nutters”). If the binary gender situtation didn’t fuck almost everyone over, internet feminism wouldn’t exist.

Nobody and nothing can exist outside the paradigm.

I state the obvious as a preamble to the notion that trans-criticism as a scholarly pursuit more or less misses the mark. It will surprise nobody when I reaveal that, instead, I am all for the patriarchy-critical, because I have eyeballed the situation with a wild surmise and concluded that the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women (a.k.a. the megatheocorporatocracy, a.k.a. the Universal Cult of Domination, a.k.a. the kyriarchy) is the only reason anyone ever talks about gender at all. Or does gender at all. Or critically analyzes on blogs the differing approaches to gender at all.

By contrast, on the planet Obstreperon, where patriarchy was abolished centuries ago following the Spinster Aunt Rebellion of 3658, “male” and “female” are quaint anachronisms, recollected only dimly by the creakiest and wispiest of superannuated crones who in their innocent youth were told frightening tales by their frail grannies about anti-abortion legislation, plastic surgery, pornography, and the horrid olden days before uterusbots liberated the sex class. Since on the planet Obstreperon there is no sex-based oppression context within which to define femininity, the word has no meaning and the behavior does not exist.

You know what does exist on Obstreperon? Jetpacks!

Here on Savage Death Island (Obstreperon’s Earth outpost), femininity is defined as the performance of dude-appeasement. So I’d like to ask everyone: to what extent does femininity afflict your identity? Before this question is interpreted as baiting or argumentative, let me remind the blametariat that all women of every description, including trans women, are obliged to perform some degree of femininity or face the consequences.

As for whether bloggers as a class are less qualified to pronounce on theorietical issues than women with advanced degrees who publish scholarly works at small presses, I am moved to remark that sweeping generalizations are the enemy of truth and beauty.

Fight the power.

Hugs, Twisty

Note: This blog does not acknowledge a “trans debate.” Everyone has a right to exist on her own terms. As always, hatas and anti-trans comments will get the heave-ho.

149 comments

May 08 2012

High five

Categories:

Announcements

by Twisty

Work gloves

Wait, I have a blog?

Let’s see, what’s happened since my last post? The underwater dogs, “Call Me Maybe,” and a psycho homophobic preacher.

Plus ça change plus c’est la même chose.

There, we’re all caught up.

34 comments

Mar 15 2012

Le sacre du printemps

Categories:

Announcements, Heartwarming Nature Crap, Open Threads

by Twisty

Chrysanthemum stamen
___________
Lyrical abstract expressionist painting? Hell no! It’s a chrysanthemum stamen magnified 50 times!

Perceptive readers will have percepted that it’s gettin to be spring again. At Spinster HQ, this development can mean only one thing: get the fuck outside, chump! Which is exactly what I have done. Instead of assiduously poring over horrible news about this and that and the infinitous abyss that is the War on the Sex Class, I’ve been flitting about the countryside squinting at stuff. The purling stream, the margin green, with flowers bedeck’d, a vernal scene, etc. La di da.

AntherGetting the fuck outside isn’t for everyone, of course, but the realm of bugs and lizards and manure-pile funguses is the one dimension where a fully-loaded spinster aunt can more or less live life with the fewest incursions of slutquakes, peens, baby-soft skin, Boing-Boing, acts of Congress, and other dudeliocentricities. This year I am excited to be wielding a compact wireless microscope that sends blurry-ass images straight to the iPhone, so miniscule flora and fauna can be spied on right in the field (also, it’s great for entertaining kids in restaurants. “Check out the caterpillar in this salad!”). Observe, to the left, another bit of floral anatomy, an anther from a purple wild flower so tiny it isn’t even in the field guide. This shit really sends me, mang. Sci-fi nerds have yet to imagine the containment field that could restrain my exuberance over this iPhone microscope development.

Exuberance, as the poet said, is beauty.

La di da.

ArugulaAnyway, because there are, today alone, about 371 more purple things I have to look at with this new microscrope, I am more disinclined than usual to vituperate with curled lip on the subject of politics and oppression. So I thought I’d cop out, blog-wise, and initiate another open thread. Let the embloviations begin.

Left: heartwarming arugula flower petal, magnified 200 times.

400 comments

Older posts «

» Newer posts