I Blame The Patriarchy

Announcements, Heartwarming Nature Crap, Open Threads

by Twisty

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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.

Getting 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.

Anyway, 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.

216 comments

Art is my LIFE, Not Altogether Depressing, Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society, The megatheocorporatocracy

by Twisty

It’s International Women’s Day again! Why, it seems like only last year that a couple of people in the media spent a few hours pretending that anyone gives a crap about women’s issues. Tomorrow, progressive dudepundits like Matthew Yglesias can go back to pointing out how the whole “war against women” anti-birth-control dealio (which for some reason everyone is treating like some kind of recent and bizarre ‘phenomenon’) is really not about women at all. No, the “real stakes in the contraceptives fight,” according to Yglesias, is about regular health care for regular people.

In the meantime, my inbox today will be full of girl-a-riffic stuff like this:

Freethought blogger Maryam Namazie has teamed up with sex-poz Slutwalkist Sonya JF Barnett to promote a calendar featuring photos of “nude revolutionaries.” The calendar is meant to express solidarity with “Secular Liberal Feminist Vegetarian Idealist Individualist Egyptian” Aliaa Magda Elmahdy. Why does Aliaa Magda Elmahdy require the solidarity of nude revolutionaries? Well, she went and posted nude photos of herself on her blog.

“Big whoop,” you say. “It’s 2012. Who doesn’t post nude photos of themselves on their blog? I’ve done it myself about 37 times.”

Well, Elmahdy abides in Egypt, which as you know is one of those countries where it sucks to be a girl. They’re running one of those popular wars-on-women there, too. The preeminent fundamentalist godbag movement, the Salafis, are big on keeping women wrapped up like porphyric nuns and isolated from public view. I don’t need to tell you what happens when women are isolated from public view. The word “abuse” springs to mind. Elmahdy intended the photos to be understood as “screams against a society of violence, racism, sexism, sexual harassment and hypocrisy.”

Well, you can imagine the uproar. The hate started pouring in. Facebook was all a-Twitter.

Eventually Elmahdy’s radical fuck-you to crapulent Islamist misogynist tradition got some feminist ladies on this side of the pond all lathered up on her behalf. Naturally they decided to respond by publishing a classic traditional centerfoldian pin-up girl style calendar, with a different nude revolutionary representing each month. The emailer hipping me to this thing, Saskia Vogel, referred to herself as “Miss March.”

This link directly downloads the calendar as a PDF, straight to naked young Elmadhy in her Bettie Page stockings and ruby slippers, so, you know, not work-safe or whatever. Or you can buy it for 20 bucks. The proceeds “will go towards supporting women’s rights and free expression.” No details are offered concerning the precise nature of the women’s rights and free expression what will be supported. Each to her own, of course, but gawd, I sort of get the feeling it will have something to do with burlesque.

But I digress.

There is cohort of blamers who believe that whenever it comes to feminists trying to foment revolution, if I can’t say anything nice I shouldn’t say it at all. If you are of this cohort, prepare to be annoyed, because I’m about to be all, like, “oh, mang, not again!” about these nude revolutionaries. For it is the duty of the spinster aunt to squint a critical eye at any public performance of femininity-as-act-of-subversion. In the ancient scrolls of Savage Death Island it is written that the tactic of using femininity against The Man, though it almost always proceeds from a decently feminist core agenda, is flippin’ difficult to pull off, and can enjoy but limited success on accounta patriarchy cannot allow femininity to be anything but itself, and will squash it like a bug every time.

Regarding Elmahdy, an aunt can but applaud the sense of outrage and activist response to oppression engendered by her blogular efforts. As I mentioned earlier, it’s no secret that women in Egypt are encouraged by stone-throwing godbags to wear head-to-toe Hefty bags or else, so you can appreciate that Elmahdy’s public self-nudification is quite the act of courage, transgressiveness, disobedience, and bird-flipping. In that culture, the sheer novelty of a publicly naked woman, and the subsequent attention it will draw to her cause, perhaps justifies the act. But. The context of Elmahdy’s revolutionary behavior does not align precisely with the context of Western feminism. Particularly with that of the Western Feminism of Empowerfulness.

By which I mean, the consequences for say, Canadian nude revolutionary Sonya JF Barnett, who claims that her nude calendar project “pushes the envelope,” cannot be construed as even remotely similar to those Elmahdy must currently be enduring. I should think that hardly anyone, as a result of viewing an arty black-and-white photo, will wish to imprison Barnett, or ostracize her, or abuse her, or kill her (not, at any rate, more strenuously than they do any other Canadian woman). In fact, Barnett will likely receive a shit-ton of praise and admiration, especially from those icky feminist-ally dudes who are always so gung-ho when hot women use their bodies to make political statements (nobody cheered louder for Slutwalk than liberal dudes). Unfortunately, it is unlikely to sock it to the Western male gaze when a striking woman appears in a nudie calendar, even if the calendar images are artsily gritted up, appended with feminist slogans, and picture only mildly enpornulated women whose compliance with Beauty2K is somewhat less than that which is normally associated with mainstream pornography.

“But Twisty,” you say. “Pornography? Seriously? You are mad; this thing isn’t pornography, it’s feminist activism. It says so right on the calendar.”

At a time when free expression and women’s rights and bodies are under attack by Islamism and the religious-right, nudity is an important form of resistance and defiance.

I agree that with this project they’re trying to call attention to the patriarchy-delimited scope of women’s existence, which makes it activism, but they’re doing it pornally, which makes it problematic. They’re not pornvertising on a PETA scale or anything, but the paradigm that generated the artistic vision displayed by this work is unmistakably dudelio- and pornliocentric. They’ve just swapped out the porn stars with what are known in today’s Hollywoodized parlance as “real” women. It’s all still looking, looking, looking at naked chicks.

I allege that, in a patriarchy, all images of women, particularly but not limited to those that involve nudity, and particularly but not limited to those that allude to a traditional cheesecake aesthetic, are inherently pornographic. I allege this not because I believe that women are themselves inherently degraded pornbot livestock, but because the imagery is always realized under the auspices of — and for an audience acclimated to — a culture of pornsick patriarchal oppression. Images of women can only be interpreted from within a framework of misogyny that universally defines women in terms of male desire, male fantasy, male incontinence, and male power. No framework for interpretation exists other than that which defines women as the sex class.

As always, I hope that these nude revolutionaries prove me wrong and somehow manage to strike the blow for women’s “free expression” that they intend. But I mostly hope that Aliaa Magda Elmahdy makes it through her protest in one piece.

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If you’re casting about for an example of a really badly written Wikipedia article, check out “nude calendar.”

136 comments

Bloodsport

by Twisty

Your fellow citizen Holly expresses her dissatisfaction with my parking technique, and chronicles her suffering as a result of same, in this charming windshield chastisement.

The heart bleeds for Your fellow citizen Holly. It must have been bloody inconvenient, having to crawl in from the passenger side.

Holly, a woman of principle, simply cannot remain silent when it comes to her right to unobstructed access to her late model sedan. I wonder how she feels about unobstructed access to birth control.

94 comments

Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society, The Poetical Blamer

by Twisty

A prose poem by blamer Notorious PhD, hidden in yesterday’s comments, describes a tribal gathering on Savage Death Island.

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Over tacos and margaritas, Sylvie announces to her radfem peers, “I’ve decided to take a Nigel.” Radfem besties exchange significant glances, then one says, “Are you sure that’s wise?” Sylvie whips out a pros and cons list, and they all debate it well into the night.

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As long as you get out at the first sign of lobe leakage. Lobe leakage, as you know, is the result of shrapnel from the explosion and subsequent disintegration of your personal autonomy. Women are conditioned to stay in relationships way after the initial detonation, often soldiering on until their lobes are just festering, shredded bags of pus.

Don’t let this happen to you! Dump him!

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Photo: Jill Psmith. “Prickly Pear Margaritas.” The Prickly Pear Margaritas of East Austin. The Spinstitute for the Study of Magentitude in Beverages, 2007.

113 comments

El Rancho Deluxe

by Twisty

I offer this photo as proof of auntliness. Nothing cracks up a couple of nieces more than careening around a farm in a Gator full of horse poop.

Whenever I think about the rude awakening they’re about to get, patriarchy-wise, my lobe explodes and I have to beam back to Obstreperon for a transplant.

46 comments

Announcements

by Twisty

Screw it. I’m just gonna keep this theme. It’s just a flippin blog.

25 comments

Announcements

by Twisty

The old blog theme is broken. I am substituting this boilerplate WordPress theme until I can fix it. I agree that it is ugly. I know you will find a way to cope. Thank you.

37 comments

Femininity, Keep your bias off my gender

by Twisty

If you are a lady whose heart’s desire is to buy a Boing-Boing T-shirt featuring a giant angry unicorn puking blood, the privilege will cost you $2 more than it will cost a dude. This is because, although the women’s shirts are smaller and use less fabric, women Boingers apparently must appease dudenation by spending more money and sporting a sex-identifying “deluxe baby doll fit.”

I guess the women’s “deluxe baby doll” shirt is actually a onesie, since as everyone knows, grown women identify with, model their lives on, and wish to resemble both babies and dolls.

32 comments

Movies and TV, TV Sucks

by Twisty

The morning after the Oscars — no I didn’t watch it, as Angelina Jolie’s Leg is fairly irrelevant in the life of a reclusive dirt farmer — seems as good a time as any to trot out one of my favorite themes. Which is:

If misogyny didn’t exist, if the human uterus was not the property of male interests, if boinking were truly the apolitical, natural bodily function everyone alw