Pardon my suckage once again, I could not draw a pair of angel wings to save my life.  You would laugh if you knew how much time was wasted on this stupid thing.  It looks like a moose with icicles.  The entire post is suckalicious, so at least it’s consistent. 

As part of an ongoing existential crisis I sought outside sources, and as any good radical feminist knows, those sources included both pro and con.  We get to be smug because religious fanatics and the like, so it goes, only consult those whose prior agreement reinforces the desired outcome.  This guy questions how many steps over the line are allowed before one’s character changes from the box marked ‘evil’ into the the box marked ‘good’.  Feminazis are naturally curious about such things, you know.  Our evilness may be in jeopardy.   He explains my gravitating towards stupid stuff:

“This splitting of things into all-good and all-bad, with the attendant projection and scapegoating, appears to start in us as infants. Since it continues into childhood, it explains why fairy tales use such stark concepts of good and evil. It’s the only thing children can understand. Unfortunately, it also continues with us into adulthood, with catastrophic results. It is an infantile defense, a concept fit only for cartoons and fairy tales, but one with which we as adults consistently judge the complex world with all its shades of gray.”

I of course do not like this, but it gets better:

“One interpretation of the story of the Garden of Eden supports the view that projection starts in us when we are very young. I personally think this myth makes more sense if we consider Adam and Eve to be about four-years-old, because they are as unaware and ignorant as apples.

In the story, the first thing Adam does, when caught breaking the rules, is to point at Eve and say, “She made me do it.” Eve, no different than Adam, then shifts blame onto the serpent. “It’s his fault, not mine,” she says. An old story, but a very perceptive one that clearly tells us that scapegoating is one of the first things we do. One interpretation of the story claims Adam and Eve’s scapegoating, and refusal to accept responsibility for their actions, is what got them kicked out of the Garden of Eden, thereby bringing evil into the world.

Although I certainly don’t believe Adam and Eve were real people, and the story is just a myth (although a very wise one), it suggests that if they had not scapegoated each other, or had accepted responsibility for what they had done, they might have been allowed to stay. The moral, obviously, is that one of the first steps back to the Garden of Eden (to the extent it can exist in this world) is acceptance of responsibility and the cessation of scapegoating. It can’t be done through violence.”

Oh, so according to another thing he wrote, I’m not really evil.  HA!  Of course he’s lying.  Except I’m feeling a budding kinship with clueless twits, so perhaps a downgrade to merely wicked is in order.  What does it say when even a vile feminazi feels sympathy for men?  This is terrible news.  Worst case scenario, I could end up dating my neighbor - holy crap.  

Next post: either transgenderism or a really awesome surprise! 

My favorite Emo Phillips joke, paraphrased:
I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a feminist standing on the edge, about to jump off.

So I ran over and said, “Stop! don’t do it!”

“Why shouldn’t I?” she said.

I said, “Well, there’s so much to live for!”

She said, “Like what?”

I said, “Well…are you feminist or a non-feminist?”

She said, “Feminist.”

I said, “Me too! Are you a regular feminist or a pro-porn feminist?”

She said, “Regular feminist.”

I said, “Me too! Are you a regular feminist or a radical feminist?”

She said, “Radical feminist.”

I said, “Me too! Are you Dworkin or Frye?”

She said, “Dworkin!”

I said, “Wow! Me too! Are you Dworkin-Who-Loves-Men or Dworkin-Who-Hates-Men?”

She said, “Dworkin-Who-Hates-Men!”

I said, “Me too! Are you original Dworkin-Who-Hates-Men, or are you Reformed Dworkin-Who-Hates-Men?”

She said, “Reformed Dworkin-Who-Hates-Men!”

I said, “Me too! Are you Reformed Dworkin-Who-Hates-Men, reformation of Heart’s;
or Reformed Dworkin-Who-Hates-Men, reformation of Twisty’s?”

She said, “Reformed Dworkin-Who-Hates-Men, reformation of Twisty’s!”

I said, “Die, heretic scum,” and pushed her off.

Please remember, I am a professional asshole.  Do not try being an asshole at home, without adult supervision. 

Ever since Sudy did that video detailing how white feminists are ignoring their privilege in relation to feminists of color, that incident – and perhaps others – appeared to galvanize some brownish feminists into rage. Ordinarily I like rage, except when it’s directed at the label I’m boxed into. Amazingly enough, this made me uncomfortable.

Justice and I emailed back and forth. Convinced she would see things my way if I persisted, persuasive arguments were employed. Eventually, a tiny light appeared at the end of the tunnel. Being an obnoxious twit with a ironic sense of humor, an email ensued, which ticked her off so much it was doubtful she would take me seriously ever again. It was a summation of previous discussions – this time written as if I were a man responding to feministy demands – and I thought she’d be pleased that I had finally noticed the little light off in the distance, and also amused at my references to men’s sexism. Amazingly enough it had the opposite reaction, and her few emails after that seemed to positively seethe with frustration.

The email is below if you’re interested, but apologies for sounding simple – it’s the only way I can parse out problem areas sometimes. Big words are scary, but not as scary as the ideas they represent. Notice how I was writing the email to Justice as if I were writing a blog post to everyone. Oh, no narcissism there. Gee, why was she so huffy?

“Justice keeps bugging me to work on my white privilege, and I wish she’d stop. How can I enjoy it if she keeps making me feel guilty? Damn her. Hmmm, that sounds kinda bad, I don’t really enjoy the thought of people being oppressed. Well, damn her again!

But it’s kinda hypocritical for feminists to insist that men work on their gender privilege, and yet we don’t have to work on our white privilege or even examine our own little selves for traces of it. Wah, I don’t wanna be a hypocrite. She is a pain in the ass. I will blame her rather than actually dealing with the issue. Yeah, that’ll work, nobody will notice and I can pretend it doesn’t exist.

Excellent. Except I can’t critique anybody, including what I believe is the intractable problem (men) if I really did believe all that crap, because frankly I’m not that much of an asshole. So, how to deal with my white privilege? I dealt with it the same way everybody else deals with information they don’t like – DENIAL.

First, I tried telling her that in the summertime I get really really dark-skinned and am frequently mistaken for something other than white, in a friendly i-am-so-down-with-you-sisters kind of way. Surprisingly enough, she basically ignored that one – almost as if the men who claim that one dick-grab in a bar is somehow equal to a lifetime of harassment and intimidation are completely worthless.

Then, I tried the old hey-i’m-not-a-racist-so-don’t-blame-me routine. I figured this one might work, but no dice. She muttered something about “silence equals support for the patriarchy” and “the patriarchy is built on oppression” or some such [crap] – I’m still trying to ignore it at this point, obviously.

Third, I attempted the always popular i-don’t-benefit-from-it-because-i-got-other-isms-up-the- rootie-patootie-and-those-are-crappy-too. Surely this one could be expected to garner sympathy, but she’s mean, and so it didn’t work either. She said none of those were racism, and racism adds another layer on top of all those I had mentioned. Unfortunately she has a point. Curses, foiled again.

Next up – you can see by now that at least I’m persistent in my defense of not needing to work on my white privilege, right? I offered the extremely sneaky i’m-not-racist-but-those-other- people-are-so-what-should-we-do-about-them? This would surely distract her, as this technique is extremely effective on most activists. Hey, it works on feminists all the time. Unfortunately for me, Justice is way sharper than that, and meaner too, so it didn’t work at all.

Nope, she insists that I have white privilege and I have to deal with it. God she’s a pain.

So then, I tried the last misogynistic trick I knew – which is where I learned all these btw – and that was to suggest that perhaps if-she-just-calmed-down-and-told-me-things-in-a-different- way-then-maybe-i-could-understand. Crap, it didn’t work. She very politely (and patiently really) set me straight.

Frankly, in retrospect I’m wondering why I thought any of those tactics would. Perhaps the this-is-all-a-big-joke-and-gosh-isn’t-it-funny will pass muster. Somehow I don’t think it will. Hmmm, okay, I give up.

All kidding as a coping mechanism aside, I didn’t even realize what I was doing at the time, and afterwards I felt like an idiot. It was the very same bag of tricks that the patriarchy uses to resist dealing with problems affecting the very people that men claim to love, and which always capitulates to logic eventually. Great, I’m using it on my sisters, awesome.

The only reason I finally saw the pattern of my own behavior was because I was trying to figure out why she seemed so mad – even though I was being so “reasonable” – and because she kept poking holes in my bag of denial so that it became a seive. All the dumbass excuses and justifications leaked out until all that remained were chunks of stupidity – and have I mentioned that I’m not so much of an asshole that I can look idiocy in the eye and pretend it’s gold?

This all fascinates me on another level as well; white women in WOC space reminds me of men in womyn space and it gives me more perspective on what men have to cope with when dealing with gender issues. But of course I am going to stomp on my burgeoning sympathy for men like a ton of bricks, because in most cases they are deliberately using our sympathy as yet another delay tactic.  Unlike men, most women do not need to hear a thousand accusations before we respond.

[...] That is the exact same thing that men do when dealing with gender privilege, and that garbage stinks just as bad when a feminist does it. Except, I really don’t know how to deal with my white privilege. I mean, what am I supposed to do about it, exactly? I could use a cluestick, if you don’t mind helping out a blind white woman some more. END EMAIL QUOTE

Justice plucked a lovely quote from Amy’s Brain and which I will share with you. Her bolding for emphasis:

“One of the privileges of being normal and ordinary is a cer­tain unconsciousness. When one is
that which is taken as the norm in one’s social environment, one does not have to think about it. Often, in discussions about prejudice and discrimi­nation I hear statements like these: “I don’t think of myself as heterosexual”; “I don’t think of myself as white”; “I don’t think of myself as a man”; “I’m just a person, I just think of myself as a person.” If one is the norm, one does not have to know what one is. If one is marginal, one does not have the privilege of not noticing what one is.

This absence of privilege is a presence of knowledge. As such, it can be a great resource, given only that the marginal person does not scorn the knowledge and lust for inclusion in themainstream, for the unconsciousness of normalcy. I do not say this casually or callously; I knowthe longing for normalcy and the burden of knowledge. But the knowledge, and the marginality, can be embraced. The alternative to em­bracing them is erasing the meaning of one’s own experience in order to blend in as normal-pretending that one’s difference is nothing, really, nothing more significant than a prefer­ence for foreign cars, bourbon or western-cut clothes.”

From Marilyn Frye, “Lesbian Feminism and the Gay Rights Movement: Another View of Male Supremacy, Another Separatism” in The Politics of Reality: essays in feminist theory (Crossing Press, 1983).

Posted here with J’s permission.  Also, I will never write another blog post using Firefox.

Either transgenderism or my own white privilege was scheduled to be discussed roasted and broiled today, but I’m kinda busy watching ThePinkyShow™. I have no idea what you could do with five minutes instead of reading my spewage.

Pinky has a way of asking the most profound questions in such a simply charming format, it’s difficult to remain unaffected. Found via ArtThreat, which has no pictures to steal, but is still pretty cool anyway. While ordinarily Youtube is far too plebian to mention, Pinky’s bandwidth would appreciate you scoping out their awesome past videos from there. Have a great day!

Don’t ask me how I wound up at the University of Otago website while searching for a Sesame Street Big Bird picture for another post, but I did, and some of the woodcuts on display are gorgous.  The description for this one reads:

This is the second German edition of the original Pour et contre la femme (For and Against Women; 1951), compiled by Georges Pavis (1886-1951), the French illustrator. It contains 366 epigrams, with female nude studies by JBW at the start of each month. Here is Balzac’s epigram for March: on the ease of fighting with men rather than fighting with one’s wife. The first German edition appeared in 1955.

What kind of character trait is required before one can eliminate all educational opportunites for a group, and then turn around and laugh at that group because they have no education?

What kind of character trait is required before one can eliminate all job opportunities for a group, and then turn around and laugh at them because they have no alternative but to use the only thing they do have – their body – as a bargaining tool?

Really, what kind of character trait is required before one can be that much of an asshole?  Because whatever kind it is, men sure do have an abundance. 

Men called women hysterical, illogical idiots – not just once but for centuries.  Amazingly enough, even though women had no formal education and the men did, women could oftentimes best them in an argument.   Men, with all of their alleged superiority and formal education, must have been kind of stupid if they couldn’t win an argument against someone who had none.   Plus, they even had to bolster their claims with nudy pictures, as if bare breasts proved anything other than men think with their sardine swizzlers.

You know, it’s only common sense that if a woman must depend on her looks to catch and keep her only source of income, that she will invariably become paranoid about her appearance.  Yet somehow, men were too freaking stupid to comprehend basic cause-and-effect, and would laugh at women for their insecurities.  Nice going, assholes.

But we know the real reason, and it had nothing to do with men being stupid, and everything to do with men being absolute control freaks over those whom they claimed to love. 

And we know they are still doing it to this very day, or we would have anyway if I had found the picture of Big Bird.     I totally crack myself up.  My blog hostess skills are becoming quite lax, sorry, I’ll try to straighten up and fly right. 

Men are assholes.  Here’s my favorite woodcut so far:

Oh, and Happy New Year, btw.     

Someone* wanted to know how men could suggest insist that their access entitlement to porn body parts was crucial to their mental health and social development; and she noticed in particular how men could at the same time claim that the respectful dehumanized images found in the average porn has absolutely no influence on their attitudes  behavior towards women. 

Excellent!  She wanted a rebuttal to that and here it –

We interrupt your regularily scheduled commercial stream to bring you a brief message from the product sponser:

The difference between what we know to be true, as opposed to what is emphasized, tells us something important about the culture in which we reside — if we can but see the dichtonomy.  While there are numerous reasons why we might not see what is right in front of us – exhaustion, stress, too busy rushing from one activity to another – sometimes one of those reasons is plain old denial, which sometimes can be healthy and necessary when faced with an immediate attack on our psyche.  It buys us time until we learn better coping skills, but it can also become it’s own  source of stress and confusion if we never move forward.

Some types of denial are based on simple avoidence, a desire to protect ourselves from the discomfort of a painful reality.  We pretend the thing in front of us is not important and so we don’t have to acknowlege it, or deal with the consequences.

Other types of denial work to protect ourselves from how others perceive us.  By insisting that we don’t even know that something is wrong, we eliminate our own accountable for our failure to act.  We are blameless, because we didn’t know.  We remain innocent in other’s eyes.   So when men continually pretend to not understand plain language – “this is rape, stop, now” – it should tell us something very important about men.  

But it doesn’t, because the thing that hurts our brain gets in the way, and so we don’t want to know.  It doesn’t have to be this way.  The patriarchy is just a giant game, like Monopoly or Life, and uses every psychological tool and manipulation tactic in the DSM-II to stack the deck in it’s favor.  It’s a game that has a happy ending for everyone – but only if you see the game.  You cannot end what you do not see.  Blind blundering hope will never race as fast to catch the moving prize as those who see where the movement trends, and wisely takes the shortcut.

Still other types of denial perform a more intensive service, which is to shift blame away from one source to another.  This happens when a fault-finding mission is underway, and it becomes a game among all players to see who gets caught holding the proverbial smoking gun.   In other words, blame the problem on somebody else, before somebody blames you.  While this is a lovely denial mechanism and a very useful way to avoid attention, one itsy-bitsy tiny thing needs to be made clear.   Before someone even gets to the point where she feels it is necessary to shift the focus onto somebody else, that person either has to experience some degree of responsibilty for the problem in the first place, or that person recognizes that she will be the likely focus.

Looks up.  Is that a fair assessment, do you think?  And what exactly does that have to do with the original question and finding a rebuttal?

Advertisers spends billions of dollars each year convincing people to buy their products, and millions are invested in marketing/psychology research, which studies how and why people make the goofy buying decisions we do.  There is an entire subfield of study devoted exclusively to “how to get shoppers to walk away from the fricking door” — I kid you not.  (People tend to walk in a store and pause in the doorway, which blocks the path of incoming customers; and we can’t have that.)

**Obviously** companies wouldn’t blow their budget each year, decade after decade, if advertising didn’t influence attitudes and affect change in behavior.  This statement alone should refute the claim of pro-pornies quite nicely.  But in addition to that, there is a massive amount of research demonstrating that people who are exposed to porn will give convicted rapists less punishment, etc.

 All of that should be enough to close the argument, and yet it never does.

Gee, I wonder why?

That bit of logic -with a TON of proof  to back it up – never is quite good enough to pass muster with the patriarchy, it is instead dismissed and minimized, and distractions flourish.  But those are strictly manipulative tactics and do not and never will amount to a logical refutation of feminist arguments.

Have you considered the subject of denial? 

I don’t think the answer to the original question has anything at all to do with what would appease the patriarchy, in my arrogant opinion, because it never addresses the real problem.  The question for me is “why do men deny the bloody fucking obvious?”

The only reason for admitting a problem is to fix the problem.  Their denial is a tactical delay, which hopefully will buy them more time in which to fuck women over.  

But folks – what is the next question in the que?  Come on, there’s another one.  Ask it.  You cannot find the answer until you find the question.  Your happy ending to the game is waiting for you.

*The person who asked this question may or may not want credit for inspiring today’s spewage.  I am waiting for her approval.   Yes, she is fabulous.

Porn research which refutes quite nicely the awful pro-porny propaganda bandied about so cheerfully on message boards. Feel free to cut and paste to your heart’s content, as reputable peer-reviewed research is the only thing which makes misogynists cry.

This section is occasionally updated and refined. Not to mention it’s permanently archived on a free site, so it won’t ever change it’s address or disappear. Bookmark for your convenience! More links containing additional peer-reviewed studies are listed at the bottom.

(more…)

This is the ‘reason’ stupetufried brain-dead men routinely give for not cleaning up more and leaving all the toilet scrubbing and floor shining to the scullery maid, who doesn’t mind all that much, mainly because she’s heard that line so many times she believes the period on the end of the sentence means to stop thinking any more about it.  But because my beady little eyes spy ellipses where other people see periods, I keep going.  This is my take:

What he is saying is exactly what he did say, and he meant every word.  He doesn’t give a shit when something, particularly of a domestic nature, bothers you.  He doesn’t care, and his lack of concern is YOUR problem to cope with, not his.

And because I am an evil feminazi working overtime on christmas eve*, here is my version of the preceeding events:

“Well, hurrah-for-brains, I really don’t care all that much about shaving my legs or exercising two hours a day or depriving myself of chocolate as often as I do, because I just don’t care as much as you do that I fit into that scrap of lace you jokingly refer to as my cute little maid’s outfit whilst you bought me for christmas.

In fact, I care so little that I’m going to do what I want for a change, and I don’t give a shit that those extra pounds mean more to you than they do to me.”

See how that works?    Do you understand yet that I neeeeeeed chocolate, and my neighbor will not make the mucho dark chocolate cake with four layers of creamy coffee-tinged filling and topped with a dark chocolate glaze until New Year’s?  What is wrong with people?    I only have two truffles left, and they will not survive unmolested for long.

I really have no idea what is wrong with me, I once went two whole years without a drop of coco leaf and now I can’t last a day.  The sad thing is, I know many women who deprive themselves of chocolate heaven on a daily basis, all because they are trying desperately to be thin enough to appease their man.  And yet, their dood doesn’t seem to do much besides pay half the household bills from his 40hr a week paycheck, and to make matters worse, would probably discourage the pouring of hot chocolate glazing on his weenier.  Dood!  Chocolate deprivation is an on-going, non-stop 24/7/364 ordeal!  That extra paycheck isn’t worth the hassle.

 *Crudeness Early Warning System Activated!  Detection Status:  Incoming!* 

I swear the only reason men want women to swallow is because they know their sardine flavored baby-batter tastes disgusting, and they want to see who is stupid enough to pretend to like it.   Given that the whole point of the patriarchy’s existence is to convince us to accept our sexbot-babymaker status as a higher calling and our only purpose so that we should just bend-over with a smile and a kiss, it really shouldn’t be surprising they want us to enjoy slurping down toxic sludge while pretending it’s manna from heaven. 

Since I’m still rambling.  Why all the misogynistic jokes about smelly vaginas when manjoose really does taste like the sardine encrusted salt at the bottom of my fishtank?  If men find the smell so awful, then why do they coerce women into sex before the woman has a chance to decide for herself and prepare accordingly?  Why do women never complain about eating crud on a daily basis but men feel they are entitled to whine about something that is washed, waxed, powdered and coifed before every opening night?  Do women actually like day-old sardine juice, or is that one of those things the BetterWife™ pretends isn’t really happening because she doesn’t want it to?

No matter what a man does to prevent it, his spewage will always taste worse than chocolate, I think that’s my point. 

Apologies for broaching delicate sensitivities; my other neighbor gave me some homemade apple wine from my apples I gave him this past summer, and yes I had a smidgen earlier too much.  *I had to let this one age overnight, to see if I still wanted to post the naughty bits.   But it had to be included, to match the photochop.  When I wrote it, I was thinking about all the interesting search phrases that people have used.  “raped grandma is number 1!    Also, hi Scarlet!  Welcome! 

Amazingly enough, the sky came courtsey of Steven Pinker, an evolutionary psychologist who thinks women evolved with attached broomsticks; and the faithful woman really is a HappyHousewife who wuvs cleaning up after her man.  I thought they deserved each other.

My suckability may or may not improve – I almost learned how to make a mask!  How exciting!  Need a bloggy with bigger borders though, sorry for the breakage if your browser doesn’t format correctly.  The caption reads, “Oooh, I think I see a good man over there!”  Hmmm, I should have included her HappyPills.