Pinkness ensures replication of patriarchal ideals

Published by Twisty on January 21, 2012. 33 Comments

How delightful to follow a link on the US birth control coverage benefit to HuffPo’s “Women” page. Everything is baby-pink!

What a relief, all that pink, because the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women clearly state that if the fairer sex go longer than 16 minutes without girlification, ghettoization, infantilization, and condescension, they’re liable to start acting like unfuckable men. From there, as you can well imagine, it’s but a short, slippery hop to the cosmos-rocking vortex of horror that would be the dissolution of the gender binary, followed closely by the total destruction of oppression culture as we know it.

In short, to save the galaxy, public institutions need to keep women’s shit pink. So kudos to the internet’s most popular blog for doing its part to ensure the ongoing safety of the status quo.

The reassuring baby-pinkness sets the “Women” section apart from the regular Huffington Post. The regular Huffington Post color scheme is a non-giggly, trustworthy forest green. This green HuffPo, of course, is not for women, but rather for normal people, people who dig porn and don’t dream of weddings 18 hours a day. Replete with gravitas, it’s got stories about Newt Gingrich’s horndog open marriage, a girl getting eaten by a crocodile, a severed head found in Hollywood Park, and a photo of that slut Snooki without her slut makeup.

But the pink women of America don’t give a shit about that crap. What we want is a list of the Top 10 cities where “sensitive men” can be found. We want horoscopes, because astrology is totally fun. And when we read about Newt Gingrich, we don’t want to think about the South Carolina primary, we want to ponder the weighty question of whether you should let your husband screw other women. We want articles explaining why booty calls (“comfort sex”) are awesome. We want about 257 other articles on relationship management and self-loathing. In short, as long as it has to do with sex, it has to do with women. Women equal sex!

The birth control coverage benefit, by the way, is one of the few not altogether depressing things to come down the women’s health pike in quite some time. If you missed it: it ensures (with the usual godbaggy caveats) that health insurance will now cover prescription birth control. For years misogynist jacknuts who adhere to the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women have concluded that any sexual use of women, such as compulsory pregnancy, is perfectly awesome, and that the whole concept of reproductive health is just a feminist, America-hating scam, and that legislation ought to reflect the sacredness of the dudely seed over the health and well-being of us second-class glory holes.

For a second, over at the Huffington Post, while reporting on a rare government platform that appears to quasi-validate the human status of women, the natural order was out of whack. But luckily the aforementioned blog post on the victory for women’s reproductive health appears on a “liberal” forum in a pink ghetto surrounded by infinite messages that women are sex toilets. Whew! Natural order restored!

Posted in Compulsory pregnancy, Mass Media, Not Altogether Depressing and The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Today. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt downloads book

Published by Twisty on January 20, 2012. 73 Comments

Mushrooms in the manure pile

Spinster aunts, it is widely known, are among the world’s foremost experts, but the relentless trickle of time can erode even the masterful chops of our giant spongiform lobes. Which is why it never hurts to burnish the old bean with a weltanshauung-enbiggening book every now and then.

As luck would have it, just as I was casting about for some new spore of knowledge to fill an empty spot in my iPad, somebody on the radio was interviewing the author of this book Mushroom. Mushroom, I am pleased to report, is all about “the triumph of the fungi.” Jackpot!

Writes shroompert Nicholas P Money, “On breezy days, the wind is full of invisible biology.”

You had me at “money,” Nicholas P Money!

Señor Money continues,

We are bathed in a soup of these procreative morsels and inhale the biosphere with every breath. If that doesn’t make you reach for nasal spray, consider that each mushroom that elbows itself from the ground sheds hundreds of millions, even trillions, of microscopic spores. As a source of airborne particulates, the mushroom is a masterpiece of natural engineering. [1]

Aunts like mushrooms and fun mushroom facts, it’s just that simple. For example, the eradication of fungi would occasion the immediate cessation of all life on this planet. Also, some of them are delicious. Also, any author who thinks “bathing in soup” works as a metaphor deserves a Savage Death Island you-go-girl. This book is for me!

[On a side note, this whole ebook thing: what's your take? It's always sad and traumatic and occasions nostalgic, purist paeans to the days of yore whenever the dear old childhood technology gets edged out by something more modern. Plato, for instance (or one of those other dead Greeks), was bummed when the written word started taking off. He thought it would be the ruin of civilization if people didn't have to memorize everything all the time.

But aside from the comforting musty smell, I'm not convinced that paper books are, in praxis, superior to digital ones. For instance, although I relish the feel of a hardbound tome in my gnarled claw as much as the next aunt, in recent years my reading spurts have tapered off. Why? On accounta sitting down with a book, in the quiet of the afternoon, bathed in a soup of soporific sunbeam motes or, as it turns out, mushroom spores, in the cushy lounge chair every middle-aged aunt should own-- it's an insta-nap. I might as well wash down a handful of Ambiens with a handful of Lunestas. Whereas it remains an unexplained mystery, but I don't experience this bookalepsy when reading from a screen. Which means that, since I started downloading my lit, I'm now actually reading 99.99% more of every book I start.

Also, if you cut and paste from an ebook into your blog, it automatically creates the footnote. Sa-weet.]

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1. Money, Nicholas P. (2011-10-24). Mushroom (Kindle Locations 115-118). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

Photo: Jill Psmith. Mushrooms in the manure pile. Cottonmouth County, TX. January 2012.

Posted in Books and Heartwarming Nature Crap. Bite me, Chad.

Fairy tale Sunday

Published by Twisty on January 15, 2012. 174 Comments

Have you heard about the recent breast implant scare in Europe and South America? It goes like this:

A French manufacturer (Poly Implant Prosthese, or “PIP”) gets busted for making their sexbags with cut-rate industrial grade silicone and (some allege) a fuel additive. The bags are distributed globally into the innocent chests of over 300,000 women. Naturally, these cheap-ass implants are rupture-prone. Depending on the agenda of the organization doing the reporting, the rupture rate is between 1% and 7%.

In the wake of this revelation there emerges a big furor over whether governments will endorse recommendations to remove the PIPs, who will pay for the removals, whether patients should get free replacements, and which patients would qualify for which services. In the UK, for example, although they’re not recommending removal across the board, the NHS says it will remove the chest units for free, but it won’t replace ‘em. Etc.

Here is the story of a UK woman who needed big boobs, so she took out a loan and got some PIPs installed. Five years of suffering later, she finds out the PIPs have been recalled, but the installer, Harley Medical Group, won’t pay. Suck it, lady, that’s what you get for being fatuous and vain.

Mang, this kind of thing makes my lobe sprout tumors.

As Marianne Møllmann of Amnesty International notes in her essay on the subject of the PIP scare,

[I]t is an intervention which is carried out solely to satisfy stereotyped notions of what a women could or should be, and which has:
1. no discernible health benefits;
2. a negative impact on women’s sexual health; and
3. permanent effects on women’s health more generally.

But oh snap! Møllmann isn’t talking about breast implants. She’s talking about female genital mutilation. In her essay she observes the similarities between FGM and breast enbiggenment surgery (what I’ll call FBM, female breast mutilation). She even remarks that, apart from the fact that “the former makes us queasy and the second doesn’t,” they’re the same flippin thing. Like most people, however, she stops short of calling FBM a human rights violation, although to most Westerners, FGM clearly is.

But really, what’s the diff? The two practices occupy overlapping points in the oppression continuum. They are both the result of misogynist social conditioning, they are both carried out on victims who have little or no personal autonomy, they are both justified by the notion that conformity to a patriarchal ideal will improve their chances of success. Either they are both a human rights violation, or neither is.

Much is made of the notion that FGM is practiced 1) in unsanitary conditions 2) on children who have not consented, and for those two reasons it supposedly differs wildly from elective procedures performed in clinics on empowerful Western women who are jumbo-izing their boobs “for themselves.” But I assert that even adult women who ostensibly agree to breast mutilation cannot have arrived at that choice from a position of full human agency. I assert this because no woman anywhere enjoys full human agency.

300,000 women in this PIP debacle alone. It’s a fucking bloodbath! The sequence of events leading to this moment are tragic, macabre, and horrific in the extreme. Consider:

300,000 women aren’t dumb. But instead of getting an invitation to life’s rich pageant, since the cradle they have done nothing but absorb messages that illuminate their many defects. As a matter of survival they have been forced to embrace femininity as their prime directive. Land a dude and beget the son and heir, etc.

Now adults, these women perceive that, as members of the sex class, their prospects with dudes — and in fact their value as human beings — depend entirely on the degree to which they succeed in appeasing the dominant class. They grasp that greater rewards accrue to women who display sexual availability than do to women who make no effort to submissively self-pornulate. They further observe that they belong to a culture wherein large breasts are fetishized. They surmise that they will achieve higher status, and in turn be happy and loved, if they conform as closely as possible to the fetishized ideal.

So 300,000 women study themselves in the mirror. They note in scrupulous detail their numerous cosmetic departures from the beauty standard. They decide that they are defective enough to warrant self-mutilation. They submit to extremely gross, painful, invasive, potentially life-ending surgery wherein leaky baggies filled with a substance normally used as mattress gel are implanted into healthy tissue. Their reward? Now they can send the message the oppressor longs to hear: “You win. I am a sack of meat. Fill me up with your fluids, your garbage, your mattress gel, and your disdain.”

And they live happily ever after.

Posted in Bloodsport, Lobe-blowing and The Beauty Ultimatum. Bite me, Chad.

Finally got that audio plug-in everyone’s been talking about

Published by Twisty on January 14, 2012. 10 Comments

From the award-nominated album “The Touch-Ass Duo Sings the Way Out Club Hits 1990-1999.” The Whiskey I Drink by Fred Friction.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Posted in Announcements. Bite me, Chad.

One more thing

Published by Twisty on January 10, 2012. 69 Comments

Also, am I the only one who compulsively watched that “Portlandia” marathon on IFC the other day even though the unrelenting, precious self-consciousness of it made me want to rip my own ex-hipster face off?

Hey, I finally wrote a sentence concise enough for Facebook! I’m gonna post it right away!

Posted in Art is my LIFE and The Entertainment Industrial Complex. Bite me, Chad.

Consent is back!

Published by Twisty on January 10, 2012. 97 Comments

In keeping with my new policy of barely writing posts ever, I suggest you check out this essay written by Lisa at A Radical Transfeminist. The article enlarges with no small eloquence on my favorite topic, women’n'consent. I snip a large-ish chunk of it here for your consideration.

Here Lisa discusses the nature of the dudely habit of deliberately misunderstanding refusal. You know, when they suddenly experience an utterly confounding ambiguity in standard modes of refusal that, in all non-boink-related contexts, are completely transparent? This purposeful denial of women’s humanity, it’s pretty much the nub of patriarchal oppression.

I’d like to ask the reader to do a brief mental exercise. (If you’d rather not, just skip to the next paragraph.) I’d like you to remember the last time you found it difficult to give an explicit “no” to somebody in a non-sexual context. Maybe they asked you to do them a favour, or to join them for a drink. Did you speak up and say, outright, “No”? Did you apologise for your “no”? Did you qualify it and say, “Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t make it today“? If you gave an outright “no”, what privileged positions do you occupy in society, and how does your answer differ from the answers of people occupying more marginalised positions?

This form of refusal was analysed in 1999 by Kitzinger and Frith (K&F) in Just Say No? The Use of Conversation Analysis in Developing a Feminist Perspective on Sexual Refusal. Despite the seeming ambiguity in question/refusal acts like, “We were wondering if you wanted to come over Saturday for dinner”, “Well, uhh, it’d be great but we promised Carol already”, they are widely understood by the participants as straightforward refusals.

K&F conclude by saying that, “For men to claim [in a sexual context] that they do not ‘understand’ such refusals to be refusals (because, for example, they do not include the word ‘no’) is to lay claim to an astounding and implausible ignorance of normative conversational patterns.”

Especially intriguing is the notion that the unequivocal “no” is the exclusive purview of privilege.

Posted in Men Hate You and Oppression Culture. Bite me, Chad.

Insert better post on the tiny hate-filled mind of Rick Santorum here

Published by Twisty on January 7, 2012. 74 Comments

Rick Santorum

The most popular national news stories currently on the CBS News website are hideous tales of sensational death. “Skydiver’s Fall Caught On Tape.” “Boy throws rocks at cars, shot by crossbow.” “Casey Anthony’s dad: Drugs killed Caylee.” “Horrified onlookers saw hikers go over waterfall.” “Tree crushes girl on Christmas day.”

And apparently Osama bin Laden is still dead.

It’s too bad CBS readers’ prurience extends only to freak accidents and violent mishaps. If only they were more interested in bashing Rick Santorum, because that dude is a fucking racist, homophobic, misogynist knob. No doubt you heard this on NPR the other day:

Rick Santorum singled out blacks as being recipients of assistance through federal benefit programs, telling a mostly-white audience he doesn’t want to “make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” — CBS News

Santorum seems to think that the only people benefiting from public assistance are those lazy-ass black folks. Uh-oh, looks like somebody forgot to check the stats before making super-racist remarks at an Iowa rally (not that facts ever get in the way of tiny hate-filled zealots):

CBS News found that of the people on food stamps in Iowa, only nine percent are black and 84 percent are white.

Of course, guffawing over stupid shit Rick Santorum says is like shooting candy out of the mouths of baby fish in a barrel. This post at Think Progress compiles a list of his Top 10 most outrageous campaign statements. My personal fave: that “abortion exceptions to protect women’s health are ‘phony’.”

Back in 1997, when the partial-birth abortion ban was roiling in Washington, Ellen Goodman noted that the Santorum camp viewed “‘health’ [as] nothing but a loophole for women who would abort a pregnancy to fit into a prom dress.” Either he thinks life-threatening pregnancies are just a figment of the Feminazi imagination, or women’s lives are of such little significance that sacrificing them for fetuses is entirely consistent with the Global Accords Governing Fair Use of Women. Either way, I can’t think of anyone more deserving of his frothy Google reputation.

__________________
Photo of Osammy: AP

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

Shoe company to women: “you’re deformed.”

Published by Twisty on January 3, 2012. 130 Comments

Finally, a shoe company is using vagina marketing to leverage women’s UAEW (universally acknowledged essential weirdness) into profits! Behold the little insert I found in the box containing my new pair of Merrell hiking shoes.

Red lines afflict all women's legs

This riveting brochure explains that “women move differently than men.” This differentude, implies the brochure, is because of a deformity afflicting the entire sex class: “wider hips and a lower center of gravity.” Or, in clinical terms, “cooties.” According to Merrell this deformity is measured by “something called a Q-Angle.”

The red lines in the illustration show just how naturally fucked up women are in terms of our godawful Q-angle. This congenital fucked uppedness, says the brochure, causes women to “[alter] the natural pattern of movement” which “ultimately results in discomfort and pain.” That’s right. Women can’t even walk right. We can’t manage a “natural pattern of movement.” We’re debilitated by female physiology. We need help.

The rest of insert explains how Merrell shoes address women’s flagrantly abnormal kinesiology with — what else — scientifically designed red spots in the soles.

So you can’t even buy a pair of ugly-ass unisex hiking shoes without being told how different you are from the default standard human? You’re supposed to be grateful to Merrell for pointing out your freakishness, because after they explain what’s wrong with you, they let you know they got your back? “It’s about time,” says the brochure in a conspiratorial women’s magazine tone, “shoes started conforming to women.” That’ll be $89.95, you freak of nature.

Up top, Merrell!

I’m not saying, by the way, that Q-angle really isn’t a thing, because it is. I looked it up in Wheeless’ Textbook of Orthopaedics, and what a gripping read it was. Q-angle is determined by the angle of the patella relative to the tibial tubercle and anterior superior iliac spine. In other words, it describes how knock-kneed you are.

But get this: a 1983 study found that the normal angle for dudes is 14 degrees, and for women, 17 degrees. Plus or minus 3 degrees. So a normal dude can have a 17 degree Q-angle, and a normal woman can have a 14-degree Q-angle. All this “difference” is only a matter of 3 degrees, and some overlap between the sexes is likely, and it’s all normal. When you consider that there are 360 degrees total, 3 degrees hardly seems worth mentioning, which is probably why Merrell doesn’t. Merrell also neglects to mention that the biomechanics of the knee are further influenced by other stuff, such as the length of the patellar tendon, and whether you blew out your ACL when vaulting off a rearing horse.

All I’m saying is, any claim that a mass-produced, off-the-shelf sport shoe with randomly placed red spots can solve “discomfort” associated with normal physiology is just stupid. And in this case, fucking sexist.

The shoes, incidentally, gave me a blister.

Posted in Oppression Culture and The megatheocorporatocracy. Bite me, Chad.

“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.

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* 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.