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If women were human, no one would read books about serial killers.

28 Jan

If people were capable of viewing women as human beings, their murders would not evoke prurient fascination and bolster book sales. Big “if,” I know.

After reading an excellent post at The F Word yesterday related to a serial killer whose existence I was theretofore unaware of, I made the foolish decision to google the Robert Pickton case to learn more about it. In the first page of results I came across a collection of salacious accounts of a man raping, killing, and dismembering prostituted women and feeding their body parts to the pigs on his farm (and, possibly, to other humans, as some accounts claim he mixed the dead women’s flesh with pork and served it to those who visited the farm).

The public just loves serial killers, and this case had all of the elements that make for the kind of serial killer story a misogynistic society can really get down with. First — and most telling — the victims were nearly all prostitutes, many of whom are said to have had drug problems. That element is mentioned early in every account of the case in order to assure the reader that he or she may proceed to revel in maximum prurience without any feelings of fear or guilt, because everyone knows that prostituted women with drug problems are about as worthless as anyone can get and deserved to be raped and murdered. With that concern out of the way, the authors of the stories delve into the gory details of what they choose to pretend was a bizarre aberration, treating the salivating reader to the fine points of how Pickton lured, trapped, brutalized, raped, and murdered up to 49 female human beings.

Each account that I read made mention of Pickton’s farm, the Piggy Palace, where he held parties that hundreds of people attended. They also mention Pickton’s 1997 arrest for the attempted murder of  a woman who escaped after Pickton handcuffed and stabbed her, and of the many times police visited Pickford’s farm on the suspicion that he was connected to a growing list of missing women. Despite those visits and several searches of the farm, Pickton managed to murder several more women before being caught in 2002. Each of the stories also mentioned that, though he had only been convicted of killing six women, police were aware that the number of women Pickton had murdered was likely 49. They were aware of that number because Pickton admitted to an undercover cop posing as a cell mate that he had killed 49 women and wished he could have had the chance to kill one more to make it an even 50.

It doesn’t take a philologist to understand the underlying messages glossed over in the reporting on this and other serial killer cases. Pickton felt comfortable enough to admit to a near stranger that he had killed 49 human beings, which means two things. First, he had to have disclosed his activities to several people with whom he had closer relationships prior to having been caught, and none of those people came forward. Second, he was so secure in the knowledge that other men hate women as much as he does that he didn’t expect his new “cell mate” to blink when he admitted to 43 murders he had not yet been charged with. Then there is the fact that scores of bands played and hundreds of men partied at Pickton’s farm, many of whom recalled later having witnessed violent scenes involving prostituted women and deeming the place creepy. One dude who frequented the farm reported to police that there were purses and women’s IDs all over the place, but that information resulted in a search that — either because Pickton was coincidentally slightly less secure and careless in his assumption that everyone would overlook his murdering prostituted women on that day or because the police did a half-assed job (likely both) — turned up nothing that would put a stop to Pickton’s activities. In short, the hundreds of men who had the chance to didn’t care enough about prostituted women to bother putting forth a smidgen of effort to prevent them from being raped and murdered.

There are marathons of biographies of serial killers on television nearly constantly, and books written about serial killers perennially occupy the upper reaches of bestseller lists. People revel in serial killer stories because serial killers generally tend to kill women, and the culture is so desensitized to the murder of women that it can be taken as pure entertainment, especially when those women are prostitutes. Prostitutes, in the fictional account of their existence provided by libertarian, individualistic, boot-strap ideology, became prostitutes out of some moral failing of their own, and thus deserve far less sympathy and police resources than other women (whose murders are still entertaining, though slightly scarier — to women).

Serial killers take revenge on women on behalf of misogynistic society for rejecting men and for straying outside the boundaries of acceptable behavior, and they scare other women back into line by doing so. Serial killers punish prostitutes for being prostitutes — despite the fact that their being prostituted in the first place is already usually punishment for their having been born poor or having been victims of abuse — and everyone but prostitutes and feminists seems to find that acceptable. Societal obsession with men who compulsively murder women and the fact that no one seems all that interested in the thoughts of men who routinely shoot other men indicate that the fascination comes not from the purportedly bizarre landscape of serial killers’ psyches, but from the fact that they are murdering women. What is interesting about serial killers and the cultural enthrallment with them is not how aberrant their psychology is, but how banal and pedestrian their hatred of women is. An obsession with serial killers might go really well with the general thoughtless consumption of macabre bullshit like Norwegian death metal and horror movies, but it does not indicate anything about the obsessor other than that he has mistakenly come to believe that men who sexualize violence by murdering women are doing anything but reflecting the logical conclusion of mainstream societal misogyny.

Nine Deucian Socio-political Theory Part 1

20 Oct

Before I proceed, I would like to announce that the independent coffee shop from which I will dispatch this post sells a “light bodied” coffee called Dirty Nekkid Lady.

A reader by the name of Gaffa moseyed on by here t’other day, shortly after I had published my Dr. Pepper Ten™ post, to inform me that she (I’m assuming Gaffa is a she, since women are the default humans, according to me) feels frustrated and disappointed in my recent choice of post topics:

There’s the law Congress is trying to pass about no longer requiring Catholic hospitals to at least transfer women to another hospital in cases of medical emergencies rather than perform abortions; there’s Scott Brown’s pronouncement on the fuckability of Elizabeth Warren, and there’s the NYPD mace-ing of women who were simply watching the Occupy protest, and all you can bring yourself to blog on lately are Avatar, Diet Dr. Pepper, and Slim Jim ads? Really?

Most people bristle at being told what they should be writing about, but I initially felt like a terrible feminist, probably due mostly to the fact that I haven’t written much in the last few months, but also because at least some of the people who read my blog apparently find what I choose to write about trivial. I have a lot of reasons for not writing as much as I used to and am still working out where this blog as a whole is going and why, but I’m not all that worried about explaining any of that right this second. What I am interested in doing, however, is explaining my choices with regard to post topics, as it appears I haven’t been clear enough in illustrating just why I think stupid movies and shitty commercials are such a BFD. I mustn’t forget that I write this blog in order to build a movement, not to have a radical feminist intellectual circle jerk with people who are already familiar with the theory that underlies my flip phrases (not that I don’t enjoy radical feminist intellectual circle jerks).

As to the suggested alternative topics, I don’t make a habit of writing about US electoral politics — even when politicians prove that they are misogynistic wangs — because US electoral politics is a professional wrestling league designed to distract the public from what genuinely warrants attention and energy (my somewhat recent post on the Anthony Weiner fracas notwithstanding, though that post has as much to do with just how ridiculous a distraction electoral politics is as with my opinion of Weiner and his wiener). I don’t write about abortion all that often because I’ve said all I have to say on the subject and am aware that the right to safe and legal abortion is constantly under siege, and because every liberal feminist blog covers every abortion story that emerges, mostly satisfactorily. And cops macing female protesters, though it is of course fucked up, is the kind of thing Liberal Dude protesters will blog about plenty in an attempt to “get pussy” by pretending to chivalrousness.

This might disappoint Gaffa (and probably several other people), but I will likely continue to do what I have done since the advent of the ‘chine, which is, among other things, write about popular culture (including porn, BDSM, entertainment media, and marketing) and the ways in which it reflects and shapes societal misogyny. I will do so for two reasons. First and least importantly, writing about popular culture affords me the opportunity to entertain myself and (so I hear) a few others. Second, I actually believe popular culture to be chiefly to blame for the continuation of misogyny. The fact that we have gendered diet sodas might appear trivial due to its brazen absurdity, but people are going to buy Dr. Pepper Ten™, billions of people have uncritically absorbed the ridiculous messages Avatar™ managed to communicate, and men are going to eat poisonous sticks made of lips, assholes, and chemicals because they hate everything associated with femininity so much that they’re willing to eat Slim Jims™ when they’re told that Slim Jims™ will save them from faggotry.

It is essential to understand why these chunks of cultural detritus that we, the non-befuddled, rightly identify as absurd manage to influence the behavior of the general public. My view, derived chiefly from my understanding of radical feminist and anti-imperialist theory, is as follows:

In order for a hierarchy to exist, one must be able to identify who belongs to which status group. That is usually accomplished by defining a subordinate group (or groups) in relation to the dominant group. As in, dominant group A claims to exhibit characteristics X, Y, and Z, so subordinate group B is purported to exhibit characteristics L, M, and N, which are usually the opposite of or “complementary” (the language of hierarchy apologists) to characteristics X, Y, and Z. But difference alone doesn’t make a hierarchy, so the (real or purported) characteristics of the subordinated group are devalued in relation to the characteristics of dominant groups and are generally derided. In the case of gender hierarchy, for example, the prevailing ideology is that men are strong, women are weak; men are rational, women are emotional; men are high-minded, women are petty, jealous, and vain, etc. In order for male (or white, or Anglo-American, or upper class) supremacy to continue, the members of the dominant group are taught that they must do everything within their power to distance themselves, by means of whatever markers possible, from the subordinate group. Because women and men within the same social classes interact and, indeed, live in the same households in most cases, boys and men must go to much greater lengths to disassociate themselves from people they exist in such close association with. Hence, boys are inundated from a very young age with lessons on how to avoid what are most likely natural human behaviors (crying, displaying compassion and emotions other than anger, and so on) because such behaviors are deemed “feminine.”

There is a reason that little boys loathe pink while little girls either like or have neutral feelings about blue. There is also a reason that boys put “NO GIRLS ALLOWED” signs on their hideouts while little girls don’t shun boys — and then only do so half-heartedly — until they perceive that boys dislike them and react accordingly.

Coca-Cola™ and Con-Agra Foods ™ (the makers of Dr. Pepper Ten™ and Slim Jim™, respectively) and the ad outfits that work for them don’t likely have a nuanced, lucid, or even conscious understanding of how and why these mechanisms of identity differentiation and hierarchy affirmation work, but they know they exist. And being corporations, which are entities characterized by absolute amorality, they use the tools available to them to attain their only purpose, which is profit. By taking note of men’s perceived need to disassociate themselves from women and the misogyny from whence that perception arises, these corporations both reflect the level of woman hatred that characterizes contemporary American culture and solidify (and, in my view, increase) it.

Next time I find myself here at the Dirty Nekkid Lady-pushing coffee house, I will further infuriate those who want me to stop talking about Dr. Pepper Ten™, Slim Jims™, and stupid movies by using all three to elucidate my theory of emergent neo-masculinity that relies upon the extreme rejection of the survival instinct in excruciatingly verbose detail, and by finding the most ridiculous possible means by which to relate Avatar™, DP10™, and Slim Jims™ to my hypothesis as to the origins of patriarchy itself!

Coming Soon: Coca-Brola

15 Oct

The number of comments I’m required to delete that attempt to defend butthole bleaching tells me that I am not yet free to retire from blogging and bask in the glory of a post-male supremacist utopia, so I suppose I had better get back to it. It’s often hard to decide which squash to pluck from the cornucopia of examples of societal misogyny at my disposal, but I received a comment the other day from GraceMargaret regarding an ad campaign for Dr. Pepper Ten and was confronted not hours later with a dude brandishing a Dr. Pepper Ten, so this one fell into my lap, as it were.

Ad campaigns designed to sell products to men that had previously been marketed chiefly to women aren’t exactly novel at this point, but they seem to be getting more bizarre by the month. What were marketing departments thinking, targeting only women with admonitions to buy, buy, buy beauty and diet products? By associating diet drinks, diet pills, shower gel, and eye firming serums with womanity, the fuckability industries effectively precluded any chance they’d be able to sell any of their wares to people who’d rather die than be associated with women. The challenge overcoming the vagina stigma associated with these products poses to marketing, product development, and advertising departments has resulted in some fairly hilarious material. A recent trip to Target highlighted that for me when I wandered through the shower gel section and found shower pouffes in neon green, neon pink, cream, and aqua, then found the men’s shower gel section, where the pouffes were labeled “men’s shower buffs” and came in navy, maroon, black, and dark gray.  They were also four cents cheaper, which means Target had to — in addition to instructing the factory to create these additional “manly” colors — create a separate SKU for the “men’s shower buff” in order to differentiate it from the faggoty ol’ regular shower pouffe.

But that ain’t shit. Does anyone remember the Axe Detailer Shower Tool (thanks KendallMcK)?

Unilever created a men’s shower “tool” that looked exactly like a tire, then took the automotive theme even further by terming the item a “detailer” and putting out a commercial in which they refer to men’s balls and wiener as the “undercarriage.” Just ridiculous. Men will balk at no suggestion for how they might disassociate themselves with women, apparently, no matter how stupid it makes them look. Just look at the Slim Jim “Manbulance” campaign.

But we’re here to talk about soda. “We’ve been telling you that men drink Coke and women drink Diet Coke for decades, but forget that and start drinking it now, OK, bro?” is a pretty hard sell, but Coke figured, once they formulated a new zero-calorie Coke variant by mixing aspartame and Acesulfame K, that they could solve that problem by marketing the new formula to men as Coke Zero. The can is black and it purportedly tastes more like Coke. Add that to an ad campaign that appeals to the turgid male ego and sense of entitlement and you’ve got an officially non-gay diet soda:

The plan worked. Ask anyone who works in a restaurant who asks them for Coke Zero and opts to order regular Coke when the answer is no.

Though the Coke Zero marketing campaign indicated that it was a product designed for men — who, unlike women, deserve both zero calories and “real Coke taste” — women were never explicitly excluded from the right to quaff the new wonder beverage. Dr. Pepper, however, is letting women know that their new diet soda is for men only, and that women are welcome to fuck off and die before they’ll be invited to drink a DP10 with the boys. Dr. Pepper Ten has ten calories — from actual high fructose corn syrup — in addition to a machine-gun gray can, but the differences between Dr. Pepper Ten and Diet Dr. Pepper don’t end at minor formula adjustments and can design changes; the slogan for the new product is “Dr. Pepper Ten: It’s Not for Women.” Women can drink Diet Dr. Pepper, which “tastes more like regular Dr. Pepper” (than other drinks that weren’t Dr. Pepper or Diet Dr. Pepper before the advent of Dr. Pepper Ten, I’m assuming) or they can drink water or some other gay shit, but they are not welcome to DP10.

The ad mimics Predator, Sniper, Commando, Rambo, etc. and features a generic Action Asshole™ riding around in a Jeep, shooting a giant gun, and battling snakes and bad guys, all the while keeping his cool and nonchalantly informing the women in the audience that this is a movie for men, and Dr. Pepper Ten is soda for men. He then tosses an empty soda can from the vehicle — which triggers a net that catches the antagonists following his Jeep — and triumphantly points at the camera and declares, “catchphrase!” in an attempt to make idiots feel smart for realizing that action movie cliches are cliches in 2011, when everyone else figured it out sometime around 1993.

The question has been raised whether the TV spot is satirical, given the absurd tenor of the Coke Zero and Pepsi Max ads. I would be inclined to take that view if it weren’t for the fact that Dr. Pepper is trying to sell a product to half of all Americans, not fans of the good bits of  The Colbert Report and The Onion, or the fact that Dr. Pepper is planning a “mobile Man Cave” tour in the test market cities to promote DP10 (one of which I unfortunately live in), or the fact that this campaign looks exactly like every other example of dudevertising in recent memory (see the Burger King Seven-Incher, the Slim Jim Manbulance, every commercial ever aired on Spike or FX, etc.). Unclever, self-aware, faux snark deployed by people who don’t understand what they’re parodying or why it deserves derision does not satire make.

Men are going to start drinking Dr. Pepper Ten because men are stupid, but women, according to focus groups, are cool with the no-bitches-or-hoes marketing approach to the extent that they plan to drink the new product, incorrectly assuming that the new formula will come with slightly less cancer than Diet Dr. Pepper. That leads me to two depressing conclusions. First, so many women have absorbed the message that a woman who wears a size four or above is a fundamental failure as a human being that a multi-national corporation can safely assume that, even if they accompany it with a misogynistic marketing push that explicitly states that the product is not for women, women will buy any low-calorie product that appears on a shelf. Women will buy something that they think will help them avoid gaining weight even if it is being sold by an entity that expresses overt disdain for women, which means women have had their self-respect and dignity beaten out of them by the fuckability mandate. Second, men hate women and fear anything associated with womanliness to such an extreme extent that corporations can now sell products to men on the basis of nothing other than their not being for women. What men are buying here is not a diet soda, which was already available in the exact same flavor, but rather a diet soda with a “suck my dick” label. Societal misogyny and the absurdity of gender symbolism have infiltrated the diet soda market to the point that there are now formulas and can designs for men only. Think about that.

New Study Finds Nitrites Decrease Gayness

30 Aug

Watching cable is almost never a good idea, but watching G4 is especially ill-advised. In fact, Spike might be the only channel on television more likely than G4 to cause a feminist to angrily stomp around her own apartment in front of no one. So there I was, watching a little G4 the other day when I happened to catch a new Slim Jim ad. I haven’t seen a Slim Jim joint since they hired Macho Man Savage to cement what one assumes must have been their already large following in the wrestling fan community, and I had just learned of Savage’s demise (mainly because a lot of my Facebook friends are, unfortunately, the kinds of dorks who think it’s clever to publicly lament the death of a professional wrestler), so I was mildly interested in seeing whether they would be distributing a Macho Man Savage Memorial Stick for people to snap into. This is what I saw:

The ad opens with a heavy dude with a beard (which has somehow become the new ideal male form, according to men) sitting in the back of Slim Jim’s “manbulance” (that’s right) stocked with various meat sticks. He asks the two EMTs how he ended up in their care, and they inform him that he had “just a salad” for lunch, a fact that leaves him both befuddled and irate. The scene then cuts to Slim Jim’s new logo, a play on the caduceus, and an auditory and visual claim that Slim Jims are “made from stuff guys need.” Pretty well flabbergasted, I decided to go check out the Slim Jim YouTube offerings to see whether this ad was a stand-alone unit or part of a larger campaign aimed at winning the Worst Ad Campaign Concept of 2011 trophy. Here is the first ad I found:

Slim Jim ran this ad in advance of all the others to introduce the public to the idea that they would be rolling the manbulance out in the near future in an attempt to “save men from themselves,” the “selves” being indicated by a wedding set-up and the “saving” occurring when the manbulance crashes through the nuptial arch, thus rescuing a would-be groom from having to endure entering into the one social institution that most guarantees the continuation of his social, financial, and cultural supremacy. This introductory spot was followed up with several ads in which more fat and/or bearded medical authorities tacitly call men faggots for engaging in various activities that are tritely associated with femininity before throwing a meat stick at them. A few examples:

Note the kegerators in this uber-manly waiting room, attended not by a nurse, but a “murse.” Because gay chick shit begins with the letter N, whereas real men only begin words with M.

Alright, that’s enough.

You might be laboring under the delusion that Slim Jim consumption is at odds with a healthy lifestyle, but that’s because you’re a pussy. Women might be able to get by on various combinations of vegetables, protein, and grains, but guys need sodium nitrite and dog food grade meat, and Slim Jim is literally made of stuff guys need. Men have needs women just can’t understand. They need food, shelter, and companionship just like women do, but they have additional specialized requirements that derive from their unique evolutionary heritage. For example, because their ancestors traveled in packs to kill animals for food and to capture women to rape in order to further the species, men have an instinctive need to get together in groups to sexually harass women and to eat foods that allow them to spiritually connect with their forebears who feasted on meat straight off of the bone, foods such as buffalo wings. In prehistoric times, men also spent quite a bit of time playing tic-tac-toe with their companions in the dirt, which explains why modern men need to commune via online video games, poker nights, and fantasy football leagues. And, of course, we all know that, because male hormones have such a powerful influence on men’s behavior, men require regular doses of Coors Light and pornography to keep their innate desire to rape and kill everything they see in check.

But seriously. What exactly is Slim Jim trying to tell us about men, women, and what “guys need”? Women do yoga, ride scooters, eat salads, practice hygiene, and willingly display sentimentality, so men need to eat sticks made out of barely-USDA-approved beef, “mechanically separated chicken” (whatever the fuck that is), toxic chemicals, and “spices”? Or is it that men’s dream of redefining modern manhood as endless adolescence is threatened by the stubbornly enduring expectation that men will eventually move out of their parents’ houses, get jobs, and cut down their video game time? For which the only remedy is a stick made out of barely-USDA-approved beef, “mechanically separated chicken” (whatever the fuck that is), toxic chemicals, and “spices”?

The ad men (they must have been men) behind the Slim Jim manbulance campaign aren’t really breaking any new ground as much as they are simply taking notice of the ubiquitous — though somewhat inchoate — neo-masculine ideology cropping up everywhere one looks, from Man vs. Food to beard contests. In order to be a real man, one must be dirty, hairy, and stupid to the point of self-destructiveness. The poorer one’s decision making skills, the greater his masculinity, it seems.

Unhealthy is the new manly because women, in an attempt to adhere to the weight guidelines of the fuckability mandate, have become associated with just about all healthy decisions a human being can make (in addition, of course, to some of the most unhealthy), and no one wants to be associated with women. Hairiness is the new manly because women, in acquiescing to porn culture’s demands, are removing nearly every hair from their bodies that isn’t on the top of their heads. Irresponsible, lazy, and stupid are the new manly because women keep showing up in previously male-only corporate and academic environments, thus removing “breadwinner,” “scholar,” and “responsible adult” from the list of roles men can occupy while maintaining strict boundaries between the male and female social realms. Whatever women are doing, men have got to knock off in order to maintain gender difference, and as women begin to do just about everything, men are left with few roles other than hot dog eating champion and porn connoisseur. Men are literally going to kill themselves in order to uphold some form of difference on which to base male supremacist hierarchy, even if the difference becomes so bizarre and stupid as to threaten to logically — and possibly materially — subvert the hierarchy itself.

Male privilege is truly a sight to behold. Men can behave like gluttonous, lazy, petulant infants, wantonly using, abusing, and disregarding women who are demonstrably more competent and civilized than they are, and yet still retain control of all of the governments on Earth, own 99% of the world’s property, and require women to do two thirds of the work done in the world for a tenth of the total wages that work produces. No matter how ridiculous and barbaric men’s behavior becomes — even according to standards conceived of and enforced by men — they expect to continue to dominate the world and all of its social structures because they have been able to do since the dawn of time by simply changing the rules or resorting to violence when women breach the gender divide. No word yet on how they’ll continue to do so on a diet of Slim Jims and PBR, so maybe there’s hope.

FBI Rescues 69 Kids from Sex Slavery, Doesn’t Mind Leaving 299,931 More in Danger

22 Nov

The FBI announced the other day the arrest of over 800 people (let’s be serious here, men) involved in the sexual exploitation of minors and the rescue of 69 children in Operation Cross Country V, an action carried out under the Innocence Lost Initiative. Excellent news, to be sure. Still, one cannot help but see the rescue of 69 children as a single lick on the world’s biggest Tootsie Pop when it is estimated that 300,000 children are currently at risk of sexual exploitation in the US, that a million children are sexually exploited annually worldwide, and that of the estimated 27 million individuals being kept in slavery around the world, 80% are women and children, with 70% of those victims trafficked into the sex industry.

In the FBI’s press release, Shawn Henry, executive assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch said, “There is no work more important than protecting America’s children and freeing them from the cycle of victimization.” But the FBI’s own budget seems to indicate that there are about 6000 things that are more important than that; in fiscal year 2010, the FBI spent nearly $4.6 billion on terrorism and “national security,” but only $3.1 billion on all domestic issues – including combating sex trafficking – combined.

Between 1968 and 2006, a total of 548 terrorist attacks, causing 4165 injuries and 3227 fatalities, occurred in the US. That’s over the course of almost forty years and averages out to 104 injuries and 80 fatalities annually. If the FBI were to devote equivalent resources to combating every issue that resulted in a similar number of casualties, we’d have a billion dollar task force dedicated to preventing injuries related to re-enactments of scenes from Jackass. Still, of the $306 million he requested from Congress to expand existing programs in fiscal year 2011′s budget proposal, FBI Director Robert Mueller only sought $10.8 million to expand the Innocence Lost Initiative and other programs aimed at protecting children from being raped for profit, while he asked for $25.2 million to supplement the already swollen “anti-terrorism” budget.

According to the 2010 budget, the FBI’s goal was to rescue 150 children from sexual exploitation. Without exploring how gross an idea “150 out of 300,000 is cool with us” is, that leaves 299,850 kids at risk of being raped for profit. We need to seriously rethink the definition of “national security” when hundreds of thousands of women and children are being sexually exploited within the US, and, as a culture, we need to confront the reasons these numbers continue to grow. They continue to grow because the sexualization of children and the objectification and degradation of women in our popular media and porn create demand in the market in women and “barely legal” (and younger) girls for men to pay to rape. I realize that protecting women and children from being sold into sex slavery won’t make Exxon-Mobil or L-3 Communications any money, but the FBI really ought to be spending a few more dollars on programs aimed at doing it anyway and a few less dollars on concocting rationalizations for killing/incarcerating/surveiling more brown people.

I’m really tired of hearing about Electra. And individualism.

3 Oct

Where in the samhill have I been? Sorry, y’all. I have excuses, but posting them would be both narcissistic and boring, and I’ve got other things I want to talk about.

Whilst enduring a flight from Portland to Atlanta last week, I decided to read this month’s issue of Harper’s rather than watch the same three episodes of The Office that Delta has been playing on their flights for the last three months, an issue that included an article by Susan Faludi entitled “American Electra: Feminism’s Ritual Matricide.” How could I resist, right? A cover story in a tweed brigade northeastern intellectual rag intimating that young feminists, in accordance with the boring old trope derived from the progenitors of classical western misogyny, are literally (OK, fine, figuratively) killing old feminists, which explains what the (weighty pause followed by the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey) Problem with the Feminist Movement is? Not only was I going to read the shit out of that, but I even got a pen out to take notes. I mean, there might be a letter to the editor in there somewhere, might there not?

I didn’t immediately jump to the conclusion that Faludi had accepted a position as the shoeshine girl of the mainstream media establishment that she had eviscerated in Backlash, but I will admit that I did start skipping in that direction. How could I not? From the title alone, I surmised that I was about to read another tired rehashing of the same old bullshit line: there’s a fundamental and inherent flaw in the feminist movement, and that flaw is women, whose very nature requires that they scratch each others’ eyes out and steal each others’ boyfriends and precludes them from accomplishing anything other than inspiring the coining of the term “fashionista.”

Well, it wasn’t quite that bad, but there were some pretty serious problems.

Faludi starts out illustrating the misunderstandings between Second and Third Wave feminists and the ways in which those misunderstandings undermine the cohesion of “the feminist movement” (whatever that is), then extrapolates the purported generational rift that characterizes the contemporary world of feminism back to previous eras. To sum it up, the First Wave earned women the right to vote, and the consumerism of the 1920s created a generation of frivolous, ungrateful young women who rejected their mothers’ idealism in favor of a new image of womanhood that advertisers had sold them. Cigarettes and mass-produced flapper fashion came to replace the ballot as the symbols of women’s freedom, and the feminist movement had been neutered by the power elite, whether intentionally or not. Then came the Second Wave, in which young feminists expressed hatred for their mothers and the stifling brand of conformist femininity they represented. Finally, we have the current round of matricide, in which Third Wavers are waxing poetic about pube waxing while pronouncing Second Wavers and their methods and ideas irrelevant in the age of the iPod.

It’s a tidy little picture, and it works well with a sleek and misogynistic cliche like the ol’ Electra parable. The problem, as is always the case with these attempts to misrepresent feminism in order to sell magazines, is reality.

The first problem is that the argument isn’t actually all that smooth, which I suspect might be the result of the fact that Faludi herself doesn’t truly believe that feminism as a movement is fucked and that it’s fucked because women hate their mothers. Faludi’s sympathies clearly lie with the Clytemnestras in her formulation, or at least with the First Wave and Second Wave Clytemnestras, but there seems to be a giant break in her cyclical progression of ritual matricide; the daughters of the First Wavers, having been duped by Edward Bernays and his disciples into believing that projecting an image of liberation by means of Lucky Strike cigarettes was good enough, eschewed further substantial feminist agitation and shat all over their mothers’ dreams, and then we jump to the current Second vs. Third Wave throwdown, in which the younger generation’s narcissism and consumerism has destroyed the unity and potential of their mothers’ movement. The picture, a few quotes from Second Wavers about hating their mothers notwithstanding, looks more like a parallel with a two-generation gap than a steady progression of generations of matricidal women. First of all, who were the Clytemnestras to the Second Wave Electras? Stereotypical 50s housewives? I thought this was a story about inter-generational squabbling within the feminist movement, but Faludi doesn’t make a single reference to the existence of feminism between the 20s and the 60s*, which is a fairly major problem. If I’m to give any credence to a historical argument, the person making the argument needs to know something about history. She could have easily made the argument that Second Wavers jettisoned the difference-based ideology of labor feminists in favor of smashing gender roles and achieving equal legal protection for women (or at least some of them did), but I don’t know whether she even knows those labor feminists existed.

The second problem, provided that we look only at the two generational conflicts that Faludi presents as parallels, is that young women in both instances come off as lazy inheritors of a legacy they don’t deserve or make the most of. I’ve obviously got mixed feelings on the Second/Third Wave issue, being that I’m a 33-year-old radical anti-porn feminist whose activism has, until recently, consisted of writing blog posts under a pseudonym, but I do take issue with that characterization, if only on behalf of other young feminists I know, who do an awful lot more actual (as opposed to virtual) stomping around and kicking ass in the name of women’s liberation than they’re given credit for. But anyway, it’s 2010. Does anyone pay attention to groups of people in public with signs? Isn’t making use of modern communication media a more effective means by which to raise awareness of an issue? Tactics evolve with movements, and the internet has allowed more and more women to join the discussion when they might otherwise have been excluded. Until young women quit volunteering their time to support causes that they believe in, let’s quit giving them shit for writing about women’s issues on blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, huh?

We’ve got a third problem: why are we always trying to figure out what’s wrong with the feminist movement? At what point will there not be something wrong with the feminist movement? When every single person who uses the word “feminist” agrees on every single issue that affects every single woman? Sorry, but that shit ain’t coming any time soon, and when it does we’ll know that the movement has been taken over by men. What is constructive about pontificating on the failings of feminism? Does it teach us how to move forward? Faludi’s piece ends on an extremely bleak note, with a professor of Women’s Studies lugubriously recounting her program being cut as a result of the fact that young women just couldn’t be bothered to learn about anything other than Lady Gaga and exclusionary Judith Butler-esque abstractions that take the focus off of real women’s lives and allow privileged, narcissistic brats to feel superior in their ability to understand what the fuck is even being discussed. I understand her concern, I truly do, but that ain’t all there is out there, and Faludi comes dangerously close to doing what she accuses the mainstream media of having done throughout the course of the history of the women’s movement: pronouncing feminism dead. Constructive criticism is one thing, but sounding the death-knell for the feminist movement and blaming it on some threadbare trope from gynophobic folklore is quite another thing for a feminist to do.

I’ve got some constructive criticism: feminist writers ought to focus on the ideas they have that are actually interesting and insightful and express them honestly rather than forcing them into a mold that will be acceptable to a bunch of old crotchety sexists who someone has mistakenly anointed the arbiters of intellectual rigorousness. I know we all have to make a living, but let’s at least try not to sell out that hard. And I say that honestly, because Faludi touched upon something far more interesting, important, and potentially revolutionary than the ridiculous Electra complex style device: the role of marketing and advertising in the co-optation and attempted destruction of feminism. It’s no surprise that she detects increasing danger in the attempts of marketers to repackage and neuter feminism, and it’s no surprise that she sees these attempts increasing in intensity in direct response to the threat posed by the progress women have made in society (she did write Backlash and all). She’s right. But how about we place the blame for that where it belongs rather than with women themselves? I realize that such an approach makes me sound like an arrogant dick who thinks she’s the only one who “sees through the bullshit” while calling young feminists in the 1920s and the 2000s dupes of the highest order, but I’m not writing this post from Jupiter a thousand years from now. I’m a dupe, too. We’re all dupes (and I mean all of us, not just women and/or feminists), and we need to face it or we’re fucked.

But what does it even mean to be a consumerist sap? What makes us susceptible to buying into watered-down commodified versions of feminism? Why and how do the powers that be rip us off and then sell our own ideas back to our kids (or little sisters) in an adulterated form? It seems to me that the cycle is fairly consistent, at least with regard to consumerist “democratic” societies since the 1920s (things tend to work out serendipitously for the power elite, I know): a group of people gets tired of being shat upon and makes their presence known, the people who sell us things freak out and worry that these people represent a threat to their continued existence and dominance, they then calm down and try to figure out how to sell things to these people, they put all their resources into analyzing and manipulating this new target market, it starts to work because buying products is far easier than sustaining a revolutionary movement over the course of years or even decades, and then the power elite regain their grip on things until the next upheaval comes to pass. (Of course, you have to believe that under capitalism the interests of government and the capitalist class dovetail in order for this to ring true, but if you don’t believe that, you should probably not be reading this blog.)

That’s where I agree with Faludi’s analysis: consumerist co-optation of feminism has become ever more insidious and effective over the course of the past half century or so. But I don’t believe the outlook is so dismal. Maybe it’s because I’m young (we’re optimists!), maybe it’s because I’m a radical (we’re idealists!), maybe it’s because I’m a fool (most likely), but I think I may have found a nugget of the solution in Faludi’s piece.

The problem is the obsession with the concept of individualism, and if we can either temper our desire to be “individuals” or find a way to actually be individuals, we may just be alright. Group movements, posing the huge threat that they did to the status quo, provoked too much retribution in the late 60s and early 70s to survive, and people turned inward, hoping that they’d foment a gradual revolution by revolutionizing themselves. Self-actualization and self-realization took the place of group action and unity, and the power elite took note of that turn and exploited it. Republican politicians encouraged identity politics and the division of the working class and along racial** and gender lines, capitalists found ways to market “lifestyles” in order to help people create and maintain the illusion of their own new-found individuality, and selfishness and self-absorption triumphed over cooperation and empathy as the world (and especially the US) made the transition from the fairly radical liberal consensus that characterized the 30s through the 60s to the conservative consensus that has dominated our lives and political culture since at least the late 70s***. Individualism has, of course, always been a part of our political culture and our foundational sense of who we are here in the US, but the fragmented, mistrustful, and generally selfish tenor of American society in the last three decades is a direct result of the purposeful manipulation of that concept by politicians and corporations in their continued effort to get greater control over and to better be able to predict our behavior as voters (subjects) and consumers****. And just think about the billions of dollars that have been made by opportunists who have capitalized on our belief that we are all special little snowflakes and that we need to express our uniqueness to the world in order to be understood by other “individuals” that, if the cult of individualism has any internal logic, have no hope of ever doing so. We’re being divided and conquered, my friends. And duped. Marketers have convinced us all that we’re discreet units, complete individuals, totally alone and unique, which precludes us getting any of our needs met by anything other than consumerism. That was at work in the 20s, but it’s been so successful since the 80s that even the attempts at thinking of “women as a class” that characterize Second Wave and Marxist feminism have been lost to “my experience.” *****

There has probably never been a bigger threat to the foundation of our social hierarchy than the specter of women’s liberation from patriarchy and the misappropriation of our labor under capitalism. It stands to reason, then, that those with capitalistic or patriarchal leanings would put their back into sucking the qi out of any movement that posed that threat, and that they’d do it the same way they always have: by doing their best to dupe us into taking the easy way out and buying symbols of our liberation rather than sustaining the fight to actually win it. Feminism became yet another lifestyle that could be marketed to women as a means to express their individuality and power. So we got a bill of goods in place of anything substantial: Virginia Slims, shoulder pads, Playgirl, and the Pill. We got the opportunity to act like men for a price, and then the phallocrats got to blame the fact that such a facsimile of equality didn’t make us happy on feminism rather than on the fact that what we were buying was an empty package that claimed to contain personal liberation.******

That process of co-optation and chicanery has continued apace, and recognizing that and moving away from it might be the key to the future of the feminist movement, if it is decided that there needs to be one. I obviously do believe we need a feminist movement and that it’s possible for one to exist without any matricide or filicide, but you can’t work to ameliorate the conditions of women as a class if you can’t conceive of yourself as part of a class called “women” and can’t conceive of the word “feminism” without “my” preceding it.

* See Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America; Kate Weigand, Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women’s Liberation; and Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique: The American Left, The Cold War, and Modern Feminism.

** See Hugh Davis Graham, Collision Course: The Strange Convergence of Affirmative Action and Immigration Policy in America; John David Skrentny, The Ironies of Affirmative Action: Politics, Culture, and Justice in America; and Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution.

*** See David Vogel, Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America.

**** See Lizbeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America.

***** This paragraph is the result of a combination several years of  school and a recent viewing of The Century of the Self, a super rad BBC documentary series.

****** See Susan Faludi, Backlash.

Apparently some porn agent in Atlanta really wants me to get back to blogging.

9 Jun

Or else why would I have received this e-mail from one Delicious Freak?

MANDI KANE/ADULT MODEL AVAILABLE FOR IMMEDIATE WORK:

Real Name: _________ *
Stage Name: Mandi Kane
Current Location: _____ *
Age: 22
Race: White
Height: 5’3″
Weight: 115lbs.
Stats: 36B- 26- 36
Hair: Brunette
Eyes: Green
Skin: Fair
Dress: 3-5
Shoe: 7
Piercings: None
Tattoos: 4 (2 Front, 2 Back)
Available for website/film/photos including Solo, Toy, G/G, B/G, G/G/B, B/B/G, Light Bondage, School Girl, Submissive, Spanking (Receiving).
Fetish, Multiple partners,Interracial negotiable.
EROTIC DYMES INC.
adult models, performers and entertainers
Booking:Info & Rates
Email: eroticdymesinc@gmail.com
706-300-9356

“Perception is reality.”

I’d include the accompanying photos, but then, you know, you’d all be as bummed as I am right now, and I don’t wish that upon any of my lovely readers.

Where to start? Let’s think first about the name of the company, Erotic Dymes. One could interpret that name in one of two ways, and I can’t decide which one is more offensive. On the one hand, they could be referring to the women they represent as dimes, as in tens, as in reducing human beings to numbers on a scale that measures exactly how interested the average porndog would be in using them for the one purpose he (and pretty much everyone else) thinks they were born for. On the other hand, they might just idolize Ludacris, in which case they’d be referring to the women they represent as dime pieces, as in a dime a dozen, as in completely valueless as human beings once they’ve served their extremely limited purpose. Something tells me it’s a little of both, even if they aren’t copping to the latter view.

Then there’s the detailed physical description. Is it just me, or does that shit read like something out of a shopping catalog? And what are catalogs for? To sell objects for people to use until they tire of them and throw them away. I know more about this woman’s physique than I do about my best friend’s, and she’s a complete stranger. I do not, however, know anything else about her at all, because she’s not a real human being, she’s an object for sale by men to men to be used for whatever purpose men who hate her for no reason want to put her to so that they can make a profit selling images of men using her body to other men who hate her for no reason so that they can jack off more efficiently. Delicious Freak, it seems, wants to sell me a human being.

In fact, it would seem that the only thing that separates this electronic epistle from your average product description is the fact that this product gets a say in whether she fucks black guys. Now, there’s no fucking way I’m going to make the argument that this woman is somehow morally reprehensible for putting limits on what she will and will not allow to be done to her for money, but something about that “interracial negotiable” thing has just given me the kind of heebie-jeebies one only gets when confronted with an absolutely elephantine pile of tangled intersectional oppression and exploitation.

And finally, I can never resist ripping on people who break out quotations in inappropriate contexts (and there is no appropriate context for breaking out quotations). “Perception is reality.”  Delicious Freak, it appears, is a philosophy major. Despite the incongruous and dorky nature of that quote, I’ll go ahead and put it to the test: my perception is that everyone involved in selling women’s bodies — if there’s any justice in the world — ought to have a skydiving accident this weekend, that everyone on Earth hates women, and that the author of this e-mail couldn’t possibly have barked up any wronger tree even if he were a representative from La Raza hitting Lou Dobbs up for a platinum circle donation. Well, would you look at that.

I’ll be back tomorrow with more posts than you can shake a vegan corndog at.

* I’m not publishing this woman’s real name or location in relation to this abominable bullshit in case she should some day decide she’d like to get out of the porn business.

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Fall 2010 Course Offerings in the Men’s Studies Department

25 Apr

Reader Elizabeth tipped me off last week to a podcast of some DaHarb named Lionel Tiger (no, seriously) who has had the blisteringly original idea that universities, if they’re going to offer Women’s Studies courses, ought to be required – in the name of equality – to offer Men’s Studies courses. As someone who has spent the last eight years on college campuses futzing around various humanities and social sciences departments, I would like to reassure Mr. Tiger that he needn’t worry about men’s curricular under-representation. Men’s Studies actually already exists. I don’t know what they call it at Rutgers where he teaches, but at the two universities I’ve attended, they call it Literature, History, Art History, Political Science, Economics, and Area Studies. Really, nearly every course taught in every humanities or social science department on Earth could be considered Men’s Studies were it not for the token textbook chapter here and there on “women’s history” or “women’s literature.” Or maybe Tiger is concerned when he looks at the course catalog and sees a section for African American Studies, Asian American Studies, Chicano Studies, Women’s Studies, etc. but doesn’t see a White Men’s Studies, an omission that would imply that white men aren’t oppressed enough to warrant a department dedicated to the study of their suffering. I mean, just imagine.*

Let’s pretend for a minute that the majority of Women’s Studies departments haven’t already been rebranded and ideologically reworked as Gender Studies departments and think about what kinds of courses might fall under the rubric of Men’s Studies. Davetavius and I have designed for your perusal a hypothetical grouping of course offerings for the Fall 2010 semester for the Men’s Studies department at Alternate Universe State (I’m guessing that it might be possible that in some alternate universe there exists a shortage of college courses about men and their concerns, though I still doubt it).

Undergraduate Course Offerings

MNST 101 Introduction to Chicks – Required for all Men’s Studies majors. Introduces basic concepts in the study of chicks, how to get them to get naked, and what’s wrong with them. Concepts that will be covered include basic sexual coercion techniques, creative avoidance of privilege examination, and basic victim-blaming.

MNST 110 Strip Club Etiquette  — This course will give students a thorough grounding in the behavior expected at strip clubs. Topics will include avoiding contact with bouncers, how to discreetly inquire about the availability of intercourse or fellatio, how to maximize the amount of attention one can get per tip dollar, how to avoid ingesting pubic hairs at free strip club lunch buffets, the parameters of lap dances, advanced glitter removal laundry techniques, and basic alibi formation.

MNST 123 Intermediate Automobile Appreciation – Building on the fundamentals taught in MNST 122, this course will take students beyond a basic understanding and appreciation of horsepower and will prepare them to classify American vehicles by year and to detect and precisely identify common vehicle modifications. Prerequisite: MNST 122 Basic Automobile Appreciation or proof of ownership of a classic vehicle as defined by department guidelines. May be taken concurrently with MNST 124 Introduction to Drifting.

MNST 209 Intermediate NFL Theory – This course will build upon the basic knowledge of the NFL taught in MNST 109 to prepare students to call sports talk radio shows and discuss coaching strategies and to assemble a viable fantasy football team. Intended to prepare students for MNST 210 Applied NFL Theory: Fantasy Football. Prerequisite: MNST 109 Basic NFL Theory To Prevent Sounding Like A Faggot or permission of the coach.

MNST 212 Applied Fart Science – This course will allow students to put what they have learned in the course of our two-semester fart theory sequence into practice. Topics to be covered include public flatulence strategies, mind control techniques that will allow one to maintain a straight face while others attempt to detect the source of a fart, complex “pull my finger” sequences, the scientific principles of rectal methane combustion, and rhetorical strategies for smelt it/dealt it disputes. Prerequisite: MNST 211 Intermediate Fart Theory or department placement exam.

MNST 323 Directed Research in Mammarian Theory – Senior seminar intended for MNST majors. This course will allow students to move beyond basic breast appreciation and to formulate an individualized mammarian taxonomy in preparation for the senior thesis (required for all MNST majors, a 25,000-word essay on who has/had the world’s greatest tits). Students work with an advisor to identify three individual areas of interest (e.g., 80s boob comedies, silicon implants versus saline implants, tactile versus visual breast appreciation, etc.) and to examine relevant research data. Intended as preparation for MNST 324 Senior Thesis Seminar in Advanced Mammarian Studies. Prerequisite: at least four courses in the MNST 310-319 range of upper-division Mammarian Theory courses.

Graduate Course Offerings

MNST 412 Computer Science for Men: Advanced Pornography Perusal Techniques – This course will prepare students to develop complex Boolean search sequences for the efficient and precise acquisition of highly specific pornographic content. Final exam to consist of a timed search for a minimum of five free video clips matching at least 7 of 10 of the criteria outlined in a randomly chosen description of a 4Chan member’s preferred masturbatory fantasy. Intended for MA students as preparation for the MA thesis in the Erotic Arts sub-field. Prerequisite: MNST 380 Intermediate Pornography Perusal Techniques: Moving Beyond Basic Anal.

MNST 465 Directed Research in Microbrews – This course builds on the MNST 460-464 series of courses in microbrew appreciation to prepare MA students to write the MA thesis in the Fermented Beverages sub-field. Students work with an advisor to identify three breweries (either domestic, European, or a combination of the two) and to sample and analyze the products of each before writing a comparative thesis in the field. Students seeking entry into the PhD program with a focus in Fermented Beverages are encouraged to complete MNST 466 Applied Microbrew Theory: Home Brewing and/or MNST 467 Applied Microbrew Theory: Advanced Punning for Beer Naming in preparation for their doctoral research. Prerequisite: MNST 464 Advanced Microbrew Appreciation: Boulder vs. Belgium.

MNST 501 Advanced Men’s Rhetoric for PhD Students – This multidisciplinary course is intended to help doctoral students to prepare for their oral qualifying examinations by introducing them to advanced rhetorical strategies for the defense of male privilege and the male-supremacist status quo. Topics to be covered include creative interpretation and misrepresentation of rape and domestic violence statistics, the utilization of historical precedent as a rationalization for the continued subjugation of women and/or people of color, the deployment of basic evolutionary psychology/biology to excuse sociopathic behavior on the part of men, advanced applied false analogy theory for use in situations in which it is advantageous to compare the white male heterosexual experience to that of groups of people who have actually been oppressed, and advanced men’s ultramicro-economic theory, which will prepare students to appear to refute the claims of Marxist and anarchist feminists about men’s systemic misappropriation of women’s labor by producing anecdotal evidence that a woman once took advantage of a man for monetary gain. Having completed this course, students will have the opportunity to earn extra credit for participation in a debate with students from the university’s Women’s Studies department at which everyone will be required to give both sides’ arguments equal weight regardless of the quantity and quality of thought and knowledge that underlies each, as to do otherwise would unfairly disadvantage the Men’s Studies students. This event, like our department, will be funded with monies taken from the Women’s Studies budget.

Should you have a class title or description to suggest, please do so in comments. The department will surely expand.

* Since I know everyone really wants to know my opinion on the organization of university curricula: in short, ____ Studies departments only serve to create the illusion of commonalities that are at best crude and misleading and to further ghettoize the study of women, non-heterosexuals, and people of color. A wiser tack to take would be to quit judging all people against a white male heterosexual yardstick and require that the professors of regular ol’ history/literature/etc. courses quit pretending dead white men were the only people who ever did anything noteworthy.

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Facebook update causes Nine Deuce to delete contact, hate Nietzsche even more.

6 Apr

Well, I’ve been shirking long enough and it’s time to write. I suppose the many, many MRA-penned death threats I’ve been getting this week have had something to do with my reluctance to get back on the old bloggeroony, but fuck those assholes.

For some reason, I have as one o’ my Facebook bros a dude I tertiarily knew when I was 20, and this particular dude has been a source of laughter for me on many occasions. He’s about 40 years old, has been a rave DJ for the last 16 years, and, like rave DJs the world over, has a hankering for women half his age because they’re too young to realize how fucking ridiculous it is for a 40-year-old man to be hanging around in dodgy industrial lofts playing tired, rehashed 1999 house music for teenagers on ketamine by night while spending his days writing and re-writing online bios about what a serious musical artist he is. I know I’m supposed to disassociate myself from all sexists, misogynists, users of women, and general dickfers, but I just can’t seem to do so sometimes. As revolting as these types can be, they’re also good for a laugh. I mean really, what in the world is funnier than a person who has striven for so long to avoid analyzing himself or the world around him that he has successfully convinced himself that playing records in public matters and that the absurd thoughts that MDMA causes in the minds of people who dress like kindergarteners gone wild might have the potential to radically improve human society? I can’t give up a source of entertainment that rich just because the guy happens to objectify women. Call me a sell-out if you must; I still don’t listen to Ludacris or go see Seth Rogen movies.

Anyway, this particular individual has recently been having problems with his girlfriend, aged 22. I know this because he stopped posting her borderline pornographic head shots with captions like “My little super model” and began writing cryptic updates about the value of honesty and how wack it is when “people” attempt to deceive others. It was REAL subtle, I assure you. I admit it, I snickered at this fellow’s misfortune, but only because I think it’s very funny when adults air their relationship difficulties in a public forum. I especially like it when they include song lyrics they think are pertinent to the situation. Well, this dude dealt very poorly with having been cheated on and dumped and, in between posting updates such as, “I don’t have to put up with this shit. I’m ____ _______!”, got a little introspective and started checking out quotes from European philosophers on the internet, the choicest of which he elected to share with his many Facebook pals. Most of them were the kind of silly, obvious, sophomoric nonsense that seems to appeal so much to Fight Club fans (sorry, Geoff) and MMA enthusiasts, but one of them really got me to snickering. The other night, this sage posted a quote from our boy Friedrich Nietzsche that nearly made me drop my taco:

“The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.”

I started sputtering and cussing in a manner reminiscent of Dennis Leary discussing Steven Seagal’s ponytail as I recounted the quote and its context to Davetavius. In between giggles and exclamations of surprise at just how ridiculous people are capable of being, we came to a very important conclusion: it’s probably best to avoid anyone who likes to talk about Nietzsche.

Think about the famous people who claim him as an influence. Marilyn Manson? Jim Morrison? (Scott Stapp claims to be the inheritor of Jim Morrison’s legacy, so we can indirectly blame Nietzsche for the existence of Creed. OK, maybe that’s a slight stretch, but whatever.) Yes, I’m aware that Nietzsche did present some interesting ideas about the possibilities of intellectual inquiry, and that all those French dudes I’m forced to read every semester would have been nowhere without the foundation Nietzsche laid (I’ll give him credit for some of that, but he also gets credit for helping some of those French dudes drop us into the toilet of relativism we now swim in), but very few people know anything about that. Most people who go around quoting Nietzsche do so because they heard he questioned the basis of morality, and that kind of shit really appeals to people who are looking to intellectualize their juvenile, narcissistic interest in smoking pot and participating in faux-Wiccan orgies or whatever.

But as hilarious as Jim Morrison was (The Doors is the greatest comedy ever made) and as embarrassing as Marilyn Manson is, they still at least deserve credit for attempting to understand something Nietzsche wrote beyond whatever one-liners one can find on a website of quotations that also includes “I’m the type of nigga that’s built to last. If you fuck with me, I’ll put my foot in ya ass” (NWA, “Gangsta Gangsta”). Jim Morrison was most definitely a self-absorbed asshole whose “art” amounted to getting ripped, fucking whoever was around, abusing his girlfriend, and overusing the word “death,” but at least he was smart enough to justify his behavior in terms that were not quite yet trite in the 1960s (now, on the other hand…). And though I cannot help but snort, snicker, and pretend to fall over with mirth when someone tries to tell me what a genius Marilyn Manson is, I suppose I can admit that he seems reasonably intelligent and that he possesses the mental faculties required to manipulate quasi-rebellious adolescents en masse. But this DJ dude, and the vast majority of dudes I come across who love to repeat banal quotes from philosophers in some impuissant attempt at projecting sophistication, cannot boast of such, and hence deserve even more derision than Morrison and Manson (fuck, what a rad super group that would have been).

And it’s the selection of quotes like the one above that tip you off to who these guys are. Let’s think about that quote for a minute. Real men want danger and play, and hence they’re into women because women are “the most dangerous plaything”? SNORT.

Now, I know better than to spend any time stomping around in a rage over the misogyny present in nearly every philosophical text from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (whoops, I mean ever). I do, after all, have to sift through them once in awhile to get at ideas that I need to write or think about. But it’s 2010. Even DJs should know that the ideas these guys held about women and gender roles are fucking silly. Nearly every one of these continental thinkers seemed not to realize the contradiction between making the assertion that women are mentally inferior children who need male guidance even if “guidance” requires physical violence, and then claiming that women are evil geniuses who will make use of their wily-ass feminine wiles to dupe even the most astute among men of letters into doing their bidding, bidding that almost always results in the destruction of the man of letters in question. It’s fairly obvious that these guys had some serious problems relating to women (maybe because they were continental intellectuals, the totality of which group has never produced one dude any woman should have deigned to have sex with), and that their ideas about what it means to be a man resemble most closely the masculine ideal of The Lord of the Rings or some other such regressive dorkery, so why the admiration?

Oh, right, because quotes like that from figures one has heard mentioned by people who wear glasses do a sahweet job of grounding one’s own stupid worldview and behavioral tendencies in pseudo-intellectual authoritativeness. After all, in this day and age the kind of dude who, at 40, dates someone who was born when he reached the age of majority needs to stand on the shoulders of giants if he’s to reconcile his penchant for preying on younger women who have yet to develop the maturity and self-confidence to recognize what a creepy DaHarb he is with his insistence on crediting them with the kind of depraved brilliance that would allow them to victimize him. I mean, really, how else are we to interpret the “dangerous plaything” concept?

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Why I Hate Men Part 2: Guys Take Up Space

18 Feb

I know you all must be tired of all this football talk being as it’s a bunch of yammering about men’s interests on a purportedly feminist website. (I can tell by my hits, but come on, that header image of the idiot football fans whooping it up like monkeys over the Jets was pretty funny, right?) I figured I’d compensate by talking some more about men, but in a much less charitable tone (not that I was all that charitable about football, but I did allow a bit of male perspective onto the site, which I suppose I deserve a fine for). And hence we resume the Why I Hate Men series.

You remember Airport Asshole, don’t you? He was the muse, as it were, that inspired me to write the Why I Hate Men series in the first place. Now, I know I haven’t exactly whipped this series out, but the important thing — according to me — is that I’m getting to it now.  Anyway, Airport Asshole exhibited so many of the characteristics that make men such a generally repulsive bunch that I’ve decided to go ahead and use him as an example to illustrate the subjects of each of the posts in this series. He serves as a particularly fine case study for this post.

Have you ever seen Just One of the Guys? It’s probably my favorite 80s movie — if not my favorite movie of all time — and if you haven’t seen it you’re missing something very major in your life. The story is awesome. Terry Griffith (played by the world’s greatest actor, Joyce Hyser), a popular teenage girl at an Arizona high school, determines after overhearing her journalism teacher and some old perv who also teaches at the school discussing the old perv’s desire to bang her that the reason she didn’t win the school’s journalism contest was because she’s a girl. Because her only dream in life is to enter the field of journalism, and because the contest winner will compete against the winner from a rival high school for a summer internship at the local paper, Terri decides to disguise herself as a boy and enroll in the other school in order to submit her article there. Luckily for Terri, her parents are out of town at the time, her name is Terri, Sturgis-Wilder High School has lax paperwork requirements for incoming students, and the school’s journalism contest’s deadline is two weeks later than that at her original institution, Pearl High School (otherwise the whole thing would never have worked, har har). Hijinks ensue as Terri attempts to pass herself off as a boy while partying her way through two unsupervised weeks with her sex-crazed younger brother, Buddy. I won’t ruin the rest of the story for you, but you need to see it. It’s got Billy Zabka (the bad guy from Karate Kid) as the greatest 80s movie bully of all time, it’s got Billy Jacoby (Brad from Silver Spoons) as the pervy little brother, it’s got Leigh McCloskey (who was unfortunately in Fraternity Vacation with Tim Robbins, retch) as the asshole college boyfriend, it’s got Arye Gross (Gordon Bloomfeld — of the Marina Del Rey Bloomfelds — from Soul Man) as one of the school’s nerds, it’s got a custom title-track written and performed by Shalamar, and the soundtrack features one of the greatest songs ever made, “Trouble” by Lindsey Buckingham. Seriously. See it.

What in the hell, you must be asking, does this have to do with Nine Deuce hating men? Not much, really, but it’s essential set-up for the following clip in which Buddy, on the occasion of Terri’s first appearance as a dude (in a KILLER wing cap), teaches her how to pass for male. I’d recommend watching the whole seven minutes or so, but the essential bit starts at about 4:37.

Buddy, though he may be a little asshole, is right about one thing: guys take up space. Airport Asshole took up a LOT of space, using seats as luggage racks, sprawling out over several chairs, sticking his legs out into the aisle so that anyone walking past would be forced to squeeze by him and all of his personal items. Men take up space. They take up space on the subway, in restaurants, at the library, everywhere. They spread out. They make themselves at home. They take up as much space as they require and, often, much more without regard for anyone else’s existence. It’s not exactly ground-breaking to say that men take up more than their fair share of space (I mean, what woman who has ever lived with a dude hasn’t had to tell him to get the fuck out of the middle of the bed so she can lie down), but that’s really only the most obvious manifestation of the underlying problem with most of the male products of our culture (and most others): a turgid, overflowing, completely unexamined sense of entitlement. And is there any more repugnant personality characteristic than an obvious sense of entitlement?

That sense of entitlement encompasses much more than just a requirement for a lot of physical space, it also includes an expectation on the part of most men that they be free to take up as much of several more abstract forms of space as they want to. Men grow up believing that the world revolves around them (because it does), and that cannot but lead to boorishness. Just think about the behaviors that the average parent and society at large encourage in children. Little girls are taught to take up as little room as possible, to be nice to everyone, to be quiet, to be sweet, to emulate the demure and coquettish behaviors they see adult women exhibiting around them and on television, to keep their opinions to themselves unless they’re handing out compliments, to think of everyone in the world’s needs and wants before their own. Little boys, on the other hand, are encouraged to be rambunctious, confident, and bold. They’re rarely told how to sit or how to walk or how to talk unless they’re exhibiting absolutely egregious behavior, and they learn to emulate the behaviors of the adult men they see around them and on television. And current male role models come in two general types: the imposing, intimidating man’s man who frowns at everyone all the time (think Don Draper and Keith Olbermann) and the bratty asshole “man-child,” the positive portrayal of which has made it possible for Kevin Smith to afford the world’s ultimate gaming system and as many of those Japanese sex robots as anyone could possibly want (I’m guessing — I suppose he could be into collecting Warhammer 40,000 figurines and hanging out with strippers).

What both of these types have in common, and what boys generally absorb as they’re squished into the male gender mold, is a sense of entitlement to take up space on every possible front. Let us look at a few examples:

  • Men expect to get to talk, and they expect everyone to listen to them, whether they know what they’re talking about or not. Now, I see no problem with anyone expecting people to listen to them in discussions in which they possess relevant knowledge, but this goes far beyond that. For example, I have an advanced degree in a certain subject and am in the process of obtaining an even advanceder one. Still, there are men I know who have not taken one course or read three books on the subject who think they’ve got a thing or two to tell me about that subject. Despite the fact that they’re almost always completely factually and analytically off base and despite the fact that I have several pieces of paper from universities (the bastions of the white male-centric epistemological order) people in other countries have heard of that prove that I know more about the subject than these dudes do, I am expected to endure their sophomoric proclamations and to prove to them that I am not wrong for disagreeing with their ill-informed conclusions. Then there are the “intellectual” types who come to this and other feminist blogs to explain things to us womenfolk, operating on the presumption that, even though we’ve been thinking, reading, and writing about these subjects for longer than they’ve been ruminating on the majesty of “alternative” internet porn and how “rad” Nietzsche was, we could never possibly have conceived of what they’re bringing to the table and thus ought to take their uninformed and painfully banal opinions-disguised-as-fact as gospel. They feel entitled to sap the energy of feminists by forcing us to repeatedly explain to them why feminism and not humanism, why the feminist movement does not need male leadership or consulting services, why the female gender role causes more psychic harm than male privilege, why bukkake isn’t a feminist act for the recipient. In short, men, whether they are qualified to or not (and they are most often not), take up too goddamn much intellectual space.
  • Men expect women to give them the benefit of the doubt and to waste our time considering possible excuses for their stupid behavior. When I talk to people I know about porn use, without fail dudes tell me that men can’t help but use porn because ____, ____, and ____ make it impossible to do otherwise. When I note that this or that dude is a homophobic, misogynistic asshole, some other dude will tell me it isn’t his fault, he just grew up in a culture in which he was expected to act like a Pantera fan. I get it because I have also spent my entire three decades in a culture that expects me to behave in ways that I find absurd, but I don’t engage in those behaviors because I’ve realized that they’re absurd and have decided not to engage in them because I am responsible for my own behavior. Weird, I know. But where does all of this empathy go when it comes to women’s behavior? Why aren’t these dudes brainstorming excuses for women’s actions that they don’t particularly like? Because men are entitled to empathy and women aren’t. Doi. Men take up too much emotional space.
  • Men feel entitled to unfettered access to women’s bodies. Men coerce women into sex they do not want by means of emotional manipulation, physical and psychological terrorism, and plain old brute force. They push their partners into sex acts that they might not want to do. They refuse to stop when they’re asked to stop, pretending not to know the difference between yes and no. They grope us, harass us, leer at us, and threaten us, and expect us to take it as a compliment.  Men also think they’re entitled to use pornography despite the fact that women and girls are abused in its production and despite the negative effects their and others’ porn use has on the women they are close to and on women as a group. The world is awash in images of what men want; advertisements, porn, movies, television, strip clubs, women’s fashion, and the female sex role in general all exist to cater to men’s sexual wants to the detriment of women’s free sexual expression and our bodily and mental health. Men and their aggressive, oppressive sexuality take up too much social space.
  • Men feel entitled to use the language that ought to be reserved for discussing real oppression to equate their petty, individualistic grievances with much more serious and widespread phenomena. Men think they ought to be considered equally put upon simply because they can come up with an example of a time a man suffered. They, from their loftily oblivious position, don’t have to think very hard about the issue at hand. If they can come up with a single example to show that they, too, have at one time or another been victims, then they are off the hook and don’t need to acknowledge their privilege. They argue that if women want equality, then women have to be willing to give men equal room to whine about what they’ve been made to suffer. They don’t see the big picture, but rather each tiny incident as if it weren’t connected to larger social forces. Hence, you have men complaining about some overblown case of a false rape accusation but unwilling to confront the reality of what it means to be female in a culture in which women’s sexuality is seen as the property of men. Or you see men suing bars that have ladies’ night because it’s not fair to make men (who make more money than women) pay a cover when women don’t have to, taking no account of anything other than the “unfairness” of unequal cover charges. It’s similar to the old, “If black people can say nigger, why can’t I?” argument. It’s utter tomfoolery, but it’s the crux of every MRA argument, this conception of equality that’s completely myopic (at best) and/or dishonest. Men take up too much discursive space.

Feel free to add to this admittedly short (because of lack of time, not material) list.

Now, I can already hear the complaints of gender essentialism here. I am not claiming that these traits are inborn, or that all men exhibit all of them, but rather that our current cultural construction of masculinity encourages them in most men to varying degrees (translation: I hope I don’t need to say this, but if this isn’t about you, it isn’t about you). I’m also not claiming that the feminine gender role is superior to the masculine one. I have quite a few objections to the feminine role, as I’m sure everyone knows. No, it’s masculinity AND femininity that are the problem, because we don’t need two gender roles arranged in a hierarchy maintained by sexualized violence and political and social repression. The behaviors I’m outlining in this series are bad because they are boorish, aggressive, emotionally violent, and lead to unnecessary suffering on the part of women and the men who have to deal with alpha male bullshit. That these behaviors are associated with maleness reflects badly on the concept of masculinity, yes, but my response isn’t to say that femininity should replace masculinity as a hegemon, but rather that both should disappear, as should the stupid practices associated with them. There are valuable things associated with femininity (caring about people, knowing how to do practical tasks in order to take care of yourself and others, etc.) and with masculinity (I’ll think of something), but only those things associated with maleness are valued because devaluing women’s contributions to the world allows for women’s continued economic and social subjugation. My suggestion is that we do away with these stupid ideas of masculinity and femininity and start judging characteristics based on morality, utility, etc. and THEN decide whether something is worth doing. The behaviors I’ve outlined above fail the test, and not because they’re associated with masculinity, but because they’re rude and destructive.  The answer isn’t to “feminize” men or replace masculinity with femininity in the hierarchy, but rather to get rid of constraining gender roles AND the hierarchy so that we can all just be human and display whatever characteristics come comfortably to us. I still have some faith in the idea that human nature in its natural state isn’t quite as shitty as it is in the current hierarchical order. If you’re a dude and you think this reads like a portrait of an asshole and doesn’t reflect your behavior, then don’t give me shit, do something constructive and go tell it to men who do behave this way. I promise you won’t be hard pressed to find them.

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