If patriarchy had a red button, I'd push the shit out of it

I admit that being conventionally attractive (although less so today than before, being that I stopped caring about what pant size I wear) and white severely benefits my social reception. It also helps that my French and South-eastern European background always give me a "knowledgeable" air by the nature of my sharp features and dark hair. Regardless, I absolutely notice the difference with how people treat me depending on what I wear. I used to be very self-conscious when I ran to the corner store in wrinkled shorts and sans makeup, but recently, I find myself forgetting to shave my legs for a week or more. I still do the "fat check" in the mirror, and I wish I could stop. I put on clothes, and then check to make sure, at various angles, that bits of untoned and flabby stomach, thighs, and back don't noticeably show. I hate this tendency in myself, but I have no idea how to stop it. Perhaps someone, someone blindingly stupid, might read this and think, "gee Jenn, lose some weight and you'll feel better about yourself!" And the fact of the matter is that no, I won't feel better about myself or lose weight, thanks ever so much. I feel better about myself when I am in shape and doing well in my social and school life. When I was the skinniest I ever have been in my life, a size two, and closely resembled Natalie Portman, I thought I was the ugliest and fattest girl in school. My negative body-thoughts now, at a size 12, are much less frequent. Still, they persist.

The fact is that I still wish I could change this in myself. Ha! I might as well submit myself to the illusion that I am a god, not a human, and that my perception of myself is not at all linked to society's judgement. Humans are inevitably social creatures. Every time I submit to patriarchal guidelines of dress my submission is rewarded with praise, attention, and sometimes, love. To think that anyone could erase that influence in their lifetime is beyond absurd. To even dream that my "fat check" ritual is a choice in the real sense of the word is shear idiocy. I know that this lack of choice and individuality bother the typical Western "master of my own destiny" philosophy, but we should all know by now what I think of the utter bullshit that taints mind of the average American.

I apologize for the digression, but it is relevant. I notice how people perceive me in public simply because a social organism, I am programmed by evolution to do so. For someone to come along and say "stick it up and stop caring what people think of you!" is just so utterly simplistic that I seriously question the validity of conventional wisdom. One day, I will write a critically acclaimed philosophical treatise on what utter nonsense conventional "wisdom" is, and how it serves the interests of those in power. Perhaps this is wishful thinking.

Nevertheless, when I venture out of the house bedecked in large trendy jewelry, clingy tops, matching shoes, and a tastefully made-up face, I definitely notice the difference between that and "normal mode": unshaven legs, no makeup, shorts, old faded tees, hair up, and sometimes, godforbid, glasses. My hygiene is always impeccable in either case. My hair, even when I don't do much to it, stays neat by the good care of my fantastic hair stylist and her shampoo recommendations. I never ever smell, even in the disgusting Arizona summers. But still, in "glamour mode" I find that men smile at me, clerks make small talk, my friends make more eye contact, women graciously let me cut in front of them if I have fewer items, kids grin at me, and my family talks more about my successes than failures. In "normal mode" I am completely invisible. I still can get stares by the nature of my disproportionately large breasts and lips, but it's in a "eww slutty homeless crack addict/hooker" way, not in a "where did you get that cute top?" way. Men ignore me. Clerks don't make small talk and get angry if I notice a mistake rather than apologize. Women look down on me and turn up their noses. Children stare at me, sometimes point out my hairy legs to their mothers. And my family, the worst of all, tells me how worried they are about how I don't have a boyfriend, how I seem depressed, and how I come off as cold and bitchy. All of this after I have taken painful introspective care to make sure that my mannerisms do not change at all regardless of how I am dressed.

And it is beyond stupid to ask myself to be angry because I am too shallow to let go of what others think about me. I simply cannot, and I submit that no other human on the face of this planet can either. We can bottle these feelings of inadequacy up as much as we want, but they will persist in things like depression, domestic disturbances, eating disorders, and various other widespread social ills. What makes me so incredibly angry is that I feel this way at all. I cannot defeat human nature. What humanity could do, and it chooses not to, is destroy these stupid gender expectations. Erase the taint of marketing. Ship everyone out who uses power to sell a product or idea on our inadequacies to some deserted island, and then wipe it off the face of the planet with those stockpiled missiles. I, personally, would push that little red button until it cracked in half under the strain of my fervor. Everything in me hates this violence humanity submits itself to, and then viciously defends regardless of social class, political alliances, or privileges. And the shear gall of those who would deny it! Humanity as we know it is terminally ill. The thought that my inclination to destroy those parts of our culture that I feel are responsible for most of our present ills would be reviled as insane rather than praised as enlightened is truly a testament to how far this madness has encroached on our mental territory.

To this day, I hate myself no matter how far or close to the patriarchal guidelines I find myself. The only thing that at all diminishes this relentless self-hatred is the knowledge that I never, not once, consented to this nonsense. I urge everyone else to stop thinking of themselves as the instruments of their own self-destruction and start recognizing how the system we inhabit is specifically designed to make us hate ourselves and destroy ourselves, and then fool each other into thinking that everything is alright, that the most oppressed is responsible for our suffering (racism anyone?), or that the individual who cries silently to themselves with the thought that they cannot overcome this madness is pathetic and weak.

There are two kinds of people in this world: those that are oppressed by the patriarchy, and those that think they are not.

But godammit, if you're going to try to push my hands away from that red button, at least understand my urge to claw your fucking face off.

Wanted: Snuff porn and women-hatin' in a two hour package

You know, I really regret not walking out of Wanted and asking for my money back. I also really regret not expressing how much I hated this movie to the male friends I saw it with.

Wanted was about as close as you can get to snuff porn without actually watching something illegal. The movie's only redeemable quality is that the script decided to throw in some existential fate plot themes at the end, just to break up the monotony of violent garbage.

The camera angles made me nauseous. Fight scenes, which were the entirety of the movie, were shot in such a shaky manner that I felt like I had eaten twenty pounds of nachos and then rode state fair rides for three hours straight. Then they were slowed down, randomly, so that the audience could get a good look at the blood and bruises. Know what is the only thing more exciting than two hours of violence? Two hours of slow-motion violence. Oh yeah!

Not only did the movie glorify violence, the protagonist's goal of using such violence is to "be the man". Several times in the story, the protagonist fervently wishes for someone to utter the exact words, "you are the man!" When someone does, it is only in recognition of his violent ways and hot love interest. In case you did not catch that, violence is exciting! Killing people on command, emotionlessly, is the definition of manhood! Where's the moral of the story? When I could find one, it was that the purpose of life is to be as much of a badass violent jerk as possible. Because that's exciting, whereas being a normal citizen is pathetic.

So besides the glorification of violence, what else did Wanted have to offer? The million dollar question, my dear readers, is the hatred of women.

Although there are a slew of men in the film (duh, it's an action film), there are only three women. Let's go over their roles.

1. Janice the fat boss - Janice was the bitchy boss that everyone in the audience should love to hate. Her shrill relentless tone and overly made-up face is supposed to be as comical as her girth. Women in power are fat and annoying, or so the writers of Wanted think. Our protagonist gets his comeuppance by telling her to stop being a bitch (seriously, that's the exact word he uses) and expresses some sort of vague pity for her grotesque fatness, which is apparently the reason why she could be such a horrible person to him.

2. Cathy the ex-girlfriend - Cathy is skinny, but she's also a whore. She sleeps with his best-friend, because that's what women do, you know. Them women always take advantage of teh menz. The only interaction she seems to have with the protagonist is to nag and complain. Then the movie switches to a completely unnecessary sex scene where the audience gets their fill. Because Cathy is skinny, she gets to be fucked. But she's still portrayed as a bitch, and a whore.

3. Fox the assassin - Jolie could have potentially played an empowered female role. Little to my surprise, nothing is further than the truth. I should have known as soon as her code name was revealed as "Fox". Jolie's only purpose in this film is to teach Wesley how to be bad ass, inspire him to magically curve a bullet with his awesome chauvinist powers to avoid hitting her, be the victim of a violent crime as a child to inspire her to kill people, show her bare ass for no apparent reason, make out with him in front of his ex to show that bitch how manly Wesley is, and then kill herself in the process of saving him.

What have I learned from Wanted? Well, I learned that if you're fat and a woman, you're a horrible bitch. I learned that if you are skinny and a woman, you're a horrible nag and a whore. I learned that if you are skinny, powerful, and a woman, you're a pornorific plot device who gets to play second fiddle to someone with less experience than you, have the honor of having sex (or at least appearing to) with the male protagonist, and then kill yourself for him.

I also learned that gratuitous violence is really really awesome if it is accompanied by horrible camera techniques, pointless slow-motion, and a complete void of morality.

Wanted looks and feels like a teenage porn addict and gun enthusiast's wet dream. If I did not know better, I would have thought that it was satire. Of course, the only thing sadder than someone out there thought that this could possibly be a good movie is that seemingly everyone thinks it was a good movie.

Life and Blogging: Incompatible, accompanied by comic and video

Planning my grandparent's 50th anniversary luncheon with my mother was such a time-suck that I've been completely absent from the internets for the past week or so. I didn't even read any of my blog subscriptions which was a blasphemy of the highest degree. My very small audience will be happy to note that I'm currently sitting on a rant on the pornification of bisexuality.

In other news, I totally caught that interview with Jessica Valenti, writer and founder of the popular Feministing.com, on Moblogic:

Nothing particularly hard-hitting there, but we feminists tend to be a bit stand-offish in wider forums with our views. Probably because of trolls on comments like this:

Jessica Valenti is a bigot, she just happens to back what is currently a politically correct and popular form of bigotry.

The way they talk on her website you'd think women were living in some kind of planet of the apes scenario and yet she seems to manage to live a rather privileged life of celebrity, book deals and socialising.

She's not even an intelligent bigot, or she's highly intellectually dishonest, but then again her career is based on this notion that women are horribly oppressed - it's in her interests to keep perpetuating this idea.

No, I will not link to the comment. Trolls don't get free audiences here.

First of all, since when is feminism popular? I think our dear troll is confusing feminism with Suicide Girls or the various teenie-bopper fads that confuse titillation with empowerment and equality.

It's really obvious that Jessica is "privileged". I mean, she has to put up with asinine trolls and their sophomoric logic day in and day out! I do that too, although on a much smaller scale, and I can tell you how much fun it is, and how much money I make. Jessica's "socializing" is called activism. Instead of getting drunk and shooting the breeze with buddies, which is fun in moderation, try something more productive like writing books.

Finally, our dear troll punctuates his sentiment with the tired-and-true, "shuttup opportunistic man-hating whore!" sentiment. Any feminist knows she's doing something right when she gets this gem thrown at her. From trolls in my very personal rape thread whining about teh poor menz to anonymous emails about how I alienate people from feminism with my awful, terrible book reviews and pop-culture sociology, there seems to be no shortage of men, and the occasional woman, who seem to think that the people pointing out discrimination are somehow more to blame for society's ills than the people that perpetuate those attitudes with the defense of their willful ignorance.

In more colloquial terms, via Penny Arcade:

(Cross-posted)

Firefox 3.0

Yeah, I'm going to download Mozilla Firefox 3.0 the day it comes out, June 17. I'm a huge dork. Rumor on the street is that it's more secure, and not so much of a system hog. As someone who's crashed her laptop several with sixty or more tags open, I'm really going to appreciate this. My only hope is that my beloved plug-ins, like the javascript blocking and ass-saving No Script, will be compatible with the upgrade.

Coldplay- Viva La Vida [Full]

I used to rule the world
Seas would rise when I gave the word
Now in the morning I sweep alone
Sweep the streets I used to own

I used to roll the dice
Feel the fear in my enemy's eyes
Listen as the crowd would sing:
"Now the old king is dead! Long live the king!"

One minute I held the key
Next the walls were closed on me
And I discovered that my castles stand
Upon pillars of salt and pillars of sand

I hear Jerusalem bells a ringing
Roman Cavalry choirs are singing
Be my mirror my sword and shield
My missionaries in a foreign field
For some reason I can't explain
Once you go there was never, never an honest word
That was when I ruled the world

It was the wicked and wild wind
Blew down the doors to let me in.
Shattered windows and the sound of drums
People couldn't believe what I'd become

Revolutionaries wait
For my head on a silver plate
Just a puppet on a lonely string
Oh who would ever want to be king?

I hear Jerusalem bells a ringing
Roman Cavalry choirs are singing
Be my mirror my sword and shield
My missionaries in a foreign field
For some reason I can't explain
I know Saint Peter will call my name
Never an honest word
But that was when I ruled the world

Am I the only one ridiculously excited by the upcoming Coldplay album? I love me some political rock. Plus, the musicality and the metaphorical lyrics of this hugely popular British band make my inner music and English geek very happy. I, for one, will be definitely purchasing the album in full.

Flickr Mosaic Meme

Lifted shamelessly from Egalantine's Cake.

The concept:

• Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
• Using only the first page, pick an image.
• Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd's mosaic maker.

The Questions:

1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One Word to describe you.
12. Your flickr name

The Explanation:

1. Someone named Jen takes nice pictures of bugs
2. Risotto, and I can cook a mean garlic mushroom one
3. Apparently my high school shares a name with this curious sculpture
4. Nothing is prettier than red
5. Portman is awesome, I forgive her for Star Wars
6. I want a Mojito right now
7. French Canada reclaiming my roots and shizznit
8. Tiramisu, the more the better
9. Cats are the philosophers I wished I could be
10. I love books, especially the smell of them
11. My eccentricity isn't as obvious as awesomely purple hair though
12. Apparently some blue butterflies are called polyommatus icarus by smart people

Caturday Obligatory Cuteness

I am so enamored of my cats that it is pathetic. In my defense, they are the furry overlords of my humble abode, who have so graciously decided to pose for pictures in return for Lap Time and worship.

Napoleon, as you can observe above, is incredibly pink, white, and fluffy. He and his twenty-pound bulk enjoy eating through twenty-five dollars of cat food a month and commandeering my lap whenever he pleases.

Napoleon and his brother, Lil' Guy, impeded my futile attempt at organization cleaning yesterday by distracting me with their awesome fuzziness. After an hour or two of Lap Time this humble peon had to provide catnip as a suitable exchange for permission to dismantle the playground.

Geekin' Out, Like Whoa

I just bought a new Blackberry 8830 World Edition from Alltel today. My old cell phone broke many months ago, and Verizon refused to pay for a new one unless I renewed my contract for an additional two years. No thank you Verizon, your data plans are full of suck.

So I switched to Alltel and their glorious top-of-the-line Blackberry and unlimited data plan. I cannot believe that I lived without my glorious Crackberry for so long. I love it and its dual-band data and voice. I praise its lovely voice dialing that actually works. Alltel, their blazing fast data network, and My Circle minute-saving is full of win and awesome.

As a requirement for my French classes in Quebec this summer, I have to do photo blogging of the city. The camera I got for my sixteenth birthday was clunky, out of date, and had poor battery life. I had no choice but to invest in a new camera. Panasonic's Lumix DMC-LZ6 fit the bill nicely. It was not sleek or slim, but I was willing to compromise for the only camera under $200 without pathetic optical zoom. For $120, 7.2 megapixels and 6x optical zoom made me a very happy geek. The camera has no microphone, and the focusing is wacky if you accidentally put it on the wrong setting, but I am willing to save a couple hundred dollars for the sake of a camera that takes a bit of fiddling to work. In all honesty, I do not give a shit about start-up time, size, megapixels, or brand name. I just want the most optical zoom for the buck. I have Photoshop and basic camera skills for shit's sake, I don't require a camera with a couple hundred dollars worth of contrast-fixing microprocessors. Thank you Panasonic for making a digital camera powerful enough to take good pictures without throwing in $300 worth of bullshit.

Not For Sale

From the European Women's Lobby, a documentary on prostitution, and why full legalization cannot grant women the agency they deserve in three parts:

Part One:

Part Two:

Part Three:

Like I have said before in the comments section of an earlier post, I do not support the legalization of prostitution because I feel that legal systems would not be interested in women's rights over the market demand or the privacy of the pimp or john. From stories like the D.C. Madam to the normalization of violence against sex workers, it is very clear that the American justice system is not as interested in protecting the extremely vulnerable women in the sex industry as they are demonizing them. With statistics coming out of European countries like Britain's deplorably low rape conviction rate, it looks as if my skepticism for any legal institution is well founded. Like this documentary, I think that the only solution is to criminalize buying sex and decriminalize selling sex like Sweden did. There are hundreds of trafficked women and children in Sweden, compared to the thousands elsewhere. While Sweden's solution is hardly ideal, it seems to be doing a lot of good.

So while I believe that the best policy is always legalization, and I shy away from anything that looks like morality legislation, there are simply too many human rights violations in the market of prostitution that legal systems are not equipped, or willing, to handle. The interest of protecting women from the most grievous harms trumps any right to buy sex. I have never yet seen any argument that is capable of convincing me that the sex trade is so demonstrably important that it must be allowed to flourish even if the majority of women meeting the demand for sex are raped, trafficked, abused, or coerced. As long as we live in a patriarchy unwilling to hold our agency over our own bodies above any wrongly perceived right to abuse, neglect, harm, and fuck, it is shamefully irresponsible to legitimize the deplorable conditions in which the sex trade operates.

Shatterboy

In a Rape Culture, anyone can be a rape victim or a rapist.

On Being a Bookworm, Part Two - why do men look at porn?

Probably the most radical way that being a Feminist impacted my everyday life is that I found myself morally conflicted over my very large stash of porn. After discovering that many people are anti-porn without the usual religious justifications (see: One Angry Girl's website), I found it much easier to throw out my collection without feeling like I was anti-sex or pandering to moral conservatives.

Because pornography is something that used to be such a big part of my life, the first book I picked up at the library happened to be Pamela Paul's Pornified. I hoped the book would help clarify various opinions that I entertained about the adult industry.

Even though I am only fifty or so pages into the book, I can already tell that Paul is an excellent author. Her first chapter frames later arguments in such a way that the conclusion she wants you to make seems natural. She only introduces her radical or controversial premises where the reader should have already entertained them with the presented data. Her writing is manipulative, so to speak, albeit in an admirable fashion.

Through polls and first-hand narratives, Paul identifies various reasons why men view pornography habitually:

1. As a learning tool - how to get women, interesting sexual practices, anatomy, what turns him on and what does not
   
2. Instant gratification - cheap, a way to quickly get aroused and masturbate,
   
3. Dissatisfaction - SO will not be adventurous in bed, he is lonely, he wants some variety, SO isn't around, SO is cranky or not attractive
4. Boredom - it's entertaining, the really disgusting stuff is funny, something to do at work, out of curiosity, a voyeuristic look into someone else's sex life
5. Insecurities - puts men in power and control always, lets a man look at women he feels he cannot attract in reality, a way to demean women after having to treat them as equals all day, a haven for men, looking at abusive painful situations for attractive women as punishment for not having sex with them, critiquing porn stars to make themselves feel better
6. Safety - no emotional investment, no chance of rejection, no need to be attractive yourself, no hard to please women

And how they excuse the habit:

1. Men are beastial, without porn there would be more rape and murder
2. Men need variety, to sow their oats
3. Everyone does it unless they are frigid or overly religious
4. It's an appreciation of beauty
   

I thought her passage on the porn fantasy was especially poignant:

The women in pornography exist in order to please men, and are therefore willing to do anything. The will dominate or act submissive. They can play dumb or talk back, moan quietly or scream, cry in anger or pleasure. They will accommodate whatever a man wants them to do, be it anal sex, double penetration, or multiple orgasms. The porn star is always responsive; she would never complain about a man being late or taking too long to come... She's easily aroused, naturally and consistently orgasmic, and malleable. She is what he wants her to be. She's a cheerleader, a nurse, a virgin, a teenager, your best friend's mother. She is every woman who was ever out of your league. She's the girl next door, the prom queen, the hot teacher, the supermodel, the celebrity. She is every woman who ever did the rejecting. She used to be a lesbian, she used to be frigid, she used to be a virgin. She is every woman who cannot be had. Now she loves sex, she can't get enough of it; she can't get enough of sex with you. She is every woman who should appreciate you... each encounter begins anew, meeting as welcome strangers and parting with gratitude.

Of all the requirements for enjoyable pornography, men most commonly cite the appearance of a woman's pleasure as key. She has to seem as if she's having fun... she should make the viewer feel that she's doing what she does because she wants to.

"The women in porn tend to act as though the sex act is earth shattering every time, even though realistically speaking, it's not like that all the time," Ethan says. "But it's still fantastic--that enthusiasm really appeals to me." Asked if his wife is enthusiastic about sex he says in a lackluster voice, "yeah, I guess so." But he goes on to say, "the women in porn are just different, though, and that's the appeal. I like the whole innocence vibe of young girls. The tautness of youth, tighter and clearer skin, the bright faces." His wife, Candace is already twenty-nine years old, a good decade past his ideal.

What porn presents is the complete objectification of women. Not only do they exist only as you want them, when you want them, they are always happy to serve you.

If I spent my day looking at pictures of expensive sports cars, nobody would doubt that I would jump at the chance to own one. The same principle applies to men and pornography: what they look at is undoubtedly what they want. However, they don't want a Porn Star--a woman using her body for a paycheck, who is sexually available to anyone with money--they want a monogamous porn star: a woman that is sexually available only to them, who thinks first of their pleasure in bed, asks for nothing in return, and is infinitely grateful for their attention. I do not want the car payments that go along with the sports car. I want nothing of the expensive reality of owning a high-maintenance vehicle. Men who view porn are the same; I surmise that they do not want the sexually empowered porn star, they want someone whose sexuality is dependent on his whims, someone that only exists solely please him. He does not want the porn star, but the character she plays.

View previous parts of this series: Part One

Animal Cruelty is Not Sexy

Cross-posted at Female Impersonator

"Sex sells". When it is not selling me pants, sunglasses, bikini waxes, and a fat-complex it is now selling me morality. Take away the message and what is the difference between an ad like this and one like this? The answer is absolutely nothing. Naked women have nothing to do with Levi's pants or vegetarianism. The message, "this lifestyle promoted in this ad is sexy", does not vary between the two ads. The only difference is that one lifestyle is that of buying jeans, and the other is the lifestyle of not eating meat.

We humans must be incredibly stupid to fall for such shoddy marketing. I really have no words for a society that buys cheap body-spray en masse when the half-wit marketing experts at the firm have nothing more to say for their product other than it makes women take off their bras. How does it do that? Nobody knows, simply because there is a cognitive dissonance when I try to compute a reality in which people are convinced to buy a product on the promise of sex that it cannot possibly deliver.

Axe Body Spray is hardly the worst offender. Axe promotes no political agenda other than the dudely enjoyment of foul smelling cologne masking the fact that you have not showered in a week, or the simple-minded pursuit of titties. This ad campaign works, I might say, because the people who would use cheap cologne to excuse not taking a shower would be the kind of dupes to connect buying something with getting laid.

Liberals, however, claim to function on a higher level. Empathetic beings concerned with the plight of life everywhere do not need bared breasts and toned asses to buy, or not buy, a lifestyle.

Wrong.

Guess what bikini models have to do with the suffering of chickens? Absolutely nothing. If PETA really wished to highlight the suffering of animals, they would make their protests horrible, frightening, and sickening. With so shortage of horrifying images of animal suffering (five minutes of googling produced this, this, this, and this) why does PETA, among other organizations, feel the need to sell the idea that animals are suffering for our lifestyle with sex?

Melanie B, from the Spice Girls, would also like you to know that Sex Trafficking is hot. "Get your tits out for trafficking!" an activist asks us. We all know that strippers and prostitutes always get the best side of the law, because society as a whole values their opinions and personhood so much. Making our causes into our pimps and baring it all for a liberal cause, of course, wins the respect of many. It is also very relevant to the discussion at hand. Animal abuse and the unwilling trafficking of sexual slaves in our own country is titillating and sexy.

PETA reminds me of a circa-1970s Al Sharpton, who shot himself and his cause in the foot by involking the ire of New York Jews with some insensitive antisemitic remarks. To this day, Sharpton and his pose of goons continue to give activists a really bad name by various other classy shenanigans such as sexism and rape apology. Of course, the average American can tell you that he or she thinks Sharpton is full of shit. He or she will place Sharpton in the "bat-shit crazy" category alongside PETA. The most damaging person to their causes, obviously, is PETA activists and Sharpton themselves. The average American is not convinced. Thus Sharpton and PETA are unsuccessful.

In contrast, anti-abortion activists continue to get considerably more positive press than PETA. The reason why is not rocket science. Perhaps it is because their ad campaign is so blessedly simple and horrifying. I am firmly and absolutely pro-choice. However, I will say that if I had no opinion on eating meat or abortion, the anti-abortion ad would be significantly more morally compelling than a strip-tease for animal rights.

There are only two rules to good advertising: keep it simple and relevant. The anti-abortion ad is a picture of an abortion, thus it is relevant. It just states, "abortion is bad". The PETA ads, however, are convoluted and self-defeating. Alicia Silverstone with no clothes on does not really have anything to do with my greasy hamburger. The PETA ad asks the viewer to make a connection between nakedness, fur, and animal cruelty. The connection is tenuous, and thus, falls apart. The abortion ad achieves its purpose while the PETA ad does not.

Not only does PETA need to fire its marketing executives, the organization itself is probably the only thing on the planet more self-defeating than Al Sharpton. Commenters will poo-poo my critique all they want, but the fact remains that feminists can be agents of their own oppression especially when they sell their bodies for a cause that has nothing to do with sex. Yes, the woman who climbed into a cage while naked and pregnant in the cold to protest animal cruelty did so consensually. Would she, however, have posed nude if female nudity was not the biggest successful seller of unnecessary over-processed shit on the planet?

In conclusion, I hate PETA, and will continue to do so because:
(a) They utterly fail at marketing
(b) They protest the cruelty of animals with the objectification of the female body
(c) They diminish the horror of their cause with meaningless strip teases
(d) They diminish and poo-poo the objections of activists for other causes
(e) They are the most unintentionally self-parodying group on the face of this Earth

I will not continue to suffer any fools, especially sexist fools that sit on their high-horse naked and defeat feminism's basic tenements in order to diminish the real issue of the objectification of women, and to sexualize the suffering of animals.

Note: As the author of this post, I will delete comments that are trolling and offensive, and ask that all contributors to this tread ignore all those who will attempt to hijack the thread.

"Post-feminism Society" Laughs at Female Objectification

Here in our "post-feminism society", where genders are finally equal in every sense of the word (yes, that is sarcasm), we can comfortably laugh at female bondage and the antiquated notion that your wife is your property at MarryOurDaughter.com. Maybe I am just being a kill-joy, but I thought for something to be satire it required that the targeted audience, men who objectify women, could not view or say it without a shred of irony. I just think it is probably in bad taste to mock something that is not at all historical. Considering that Washington University just handed out an honorary degree to Phyllis Schlafly, the woman who supports marital rape, the view that marriage renders a woman the sexual property of her husband is alive and well even in the ever-praised bastion of gender equality, the Western world.

Eerily, the website reads more like a pedophile's shopping list than the lame attempt at satire it really is. From the profiles:

Katelyn F.
Age: 14
Location: Caribbean

Bride Price: $24,995

Our own Little Mermaid Katie Lynn swims like a fish and isn’t happy unless she’s getting wet! She got her SCUBA ticket at 12 and she can pull more than her weight as crew on any kind of boat or ship. She tells us she’s tired of dry land and that’s she’s looking for a husband who works on, by or in the water.

I suppose I have no sense of humor, being that I do not think that selling young girls into slavery to men is at all funny.

The testimonials, of course, sound familiar:

"Thank God for your site! Our daughter was really nervous walking down the aisle, but she seems okay now and the money we got let us keep our farm and even add on a few acres."

Because selling your daughters to keep afloat is nothing new to real people, in real places, right now:

"We were not so desperate before. Now I have to marry them younger. And all five of them will have to get married if the drought becomes worse. The bride price is 200,000 afghanis. His father came to our house to arrange it. The boy pays in installments. First he paid us 5,000 afghanis, which I used to buy food."

Accusations of shrill feminist aside, my definition of satire lies more along educational lines. Meaning, of course, that the purpose of satire is to educate people how utterly ridiculous the universal phenomenon of objectifying women really is. Piss poor attempts at being clever like the Marry Our Daughter website are, at best, getting a sick laugh out of female objectification without providing any relevant context. At worst, the site operates on the same wavelength as the ubiquitous rape joke, the headlining punch-line of every half-wit comic's cliche repertoire.

New rule: poking fun at stereotypes, especially anything resembling female objectification, is only funny if and only if sexist pigs cannot chuckle along without a shred of irony and self-reflection.

Unread Books Meme

From Eljay, the Unread Books Meme:

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights (thank you Sparknotes)
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick (Junior English teacher taught it without reading it. LOL WUT?)
Ulysses (this fucking book. Grrr)
Madame Bovary (Guh, and I thought the last was bad)
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice (I hate 'love' stories filled with simpering females)
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged (I hate Rand with such passion)
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera (Was too stupid to bear)
Brave New World
The Fountainhead (Rand must die)
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons (plot, what plot?)
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables (so long, so good!)
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune (too much literary masturbation)
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter (I hate. this. fucking. book.)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita (had to take shower afterwards, felt dirty)
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (My love affair with Victor Hugo!)
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

Anonymity and Sexism on the Internet

Cross-posted at Female Impersonator

Anonymity gives people the gall to do and say what they would never think of doing if it had their real face and name attached to it. I suppose I am as guilty as many; I usually avoid frontal head shots in profile pictures or using my very distinctive surname. I like to use this anonymity to say things that I do not have the courage to say, or to say the things that I feel I have no real audience for. After all, no one in my Jewish family really wants to hear any negative thoughts about Palestine, do they? More importantly, anonymity allows me to act the way I wish, instead of how I think that others expect me to act. I am free to share my same-sex relationships here, away from people that know me, because of the judgment that I fear will follow me in my professional pursuits.

This anonymity has allowed me to grow as a person. I can be who I feel like I need to be, and say what I want to say without a fear of consequence. I can stand up for what I believe and what I think and not be just another cog in the machine. I have taken this opportunity to be anonymous with open arms, embraced it, and turned it into a marvelous experience of self-awakening and growth.

However, I increasingly find that this use of anonymity is fairly rare on the internet. In my public face-to-face feminist protests and meetings, very little negativity is said to my face. Most people have tact so instilled in them that they will not say something sexist to a very vocal feminist's face. I am increasingly aware that this does not mean that they do not hold their misogyny very close to their hearts, and perhaps talk about that "bitch of a cunt at that Vagina Monologues table on Senior Lawn" to their friends. Most of all, I am very aware that if given the opportunity of anonymity, the expression of their patriarchy socialization knows no tact.

Anonymous message board postings have ruined my chance at an elected position in our large campus Democratic organization by references to my "feminazi adherence to Hillary Clinton" and the worry that I will "vote with my vagina" in university matters as well.

Myspace bulletins helped drive a high school classmate of mine to a suicide attempt when it was leaked that she was about to prosecute a high school teacher, the coach of the nationally placed soccer team, for sexual assault. Messages like "whore", and "stupid slut, ruining an the life of an important part of our community" were commonplace. The case was dropped, the man who tried to rape an ex-student after plying her with alcohol goes free, and the combination of the injustice, betrayal, and shame land someone I brushed elbows with in Pre-Calculus in the hospital with charcoal and aspirin being bumped out of her stomach.

A political forum I frequent claims that I "give feminists a bad name", urges that I "lighten up and remove that stick from your vagina", or that I should "listen up you cunt". JAP (Jewish American Princess), slut, attention whore, feminazi, Daddy's girl are common slurs and double as argumentative tactics. A large group of seemingly liberal and educated politically-minded people find no fault with attacking a woman for daring to be a feminist in a public space, for having the gall to accuse them and their society of misogyny.

These are only my personal experiences. I do not doubt that most of you have had similar, and perhaps even more serious instances of shaming, assault, insult, harassment, and sabotage by expressing your adherence to women's issues, by not having a penis, or any combination of the above. Once respectable communication outlets and blogs like DailyKos are overrun with bigots and trolls that harass female bloggers. TIME magazine mocks the feminist movement. The lowest of the low, 4chan.org's random image board (very NSFW), is populated by anonymous users that share rape porn, inform women "[show us your] tits, [or] get the fuck out", and circulate pictures of underage girls with cries to "stick it in her pooper"!

Meanwhile, new studies are showing that sexist jokes, the very kind of low-brow excuse that sexist pigs use when called out on their bigotry, foster discrimination towards women and higher toleration of sexism. Our days are littered with the corpses of thousands objectified and mocked women, and still it seems that nobody seems to grasp that there is some sort of negative consequence for the defense of the patriarchy that masks itself in humor and anonymity.

We have known for a long time that the streets are not safe for women. Public forums do not welcome those that do not adhere to their feminine socialization and titter appealingly at sexist slurs and demeaning groping. Even in our own homes, we are not safe. Not only are women at risk of being assaulted by their brothers, fathers, and husbands, they are verbally assaulted every day under the excuse of the First Amendment and humor and enabled by anonymity in chatrooms, by email, and in social websites.

The internet has allowed me to be who I truly am. However, the internet has also allowed many others the same opportunity, and it seems that they truly are sexist pigs.

Rock of Misogyny

Cross-posted at Female Impersonator

The greatest way to observe how not to be a feminist is to watch reality television. No show my roommates watched this year fit that horrible stereotype more perfectly than "Rock of Love 2" in which Brett Michaels, the former lead singer of Poison, simultaneously dates/fucks 25 women.

Tonight was the Reunion show, where Brett and his Rock of Love, Ambre, met again while a studio full of slobbering apes, including him and his male co-host, leer at his female cast-mates.

I was roped into watching the show by a product of my weak will and the constraints of living in a patio home with two other people. I suppose I stayed in front of the television simply because it was too bad to believe.

Regardless, the highlight of the night was not the objectification of the French stripper, Angelique. What was perhaps the saddest thing I heard was the irony of a man who simultaneously dated over twenty women and made no secret of his "rock star lifestyle" (read: right to sleep around in a farce of a committed relationship) questioning the character of two women. In particular, runner-up Daisy DeLaHoya, who lived with her ex-boyfriend-turned-friend, and Kristy Joe Muller, who first went on the show while she was separated from her husband, and now claims that she has committed to six months of relationship counseling with him before she makes a final decision.

Oh the horror. You "fake" sluts; how dare you play with the emotions of a man who is sleeping with and dating many women at once while you are close friends with your ex or separated from your husband.

The cherry on top of the shit sundae was when Daisy angrily asked why Brett took advantage of her feelings for him the final night of the show to get some nookie. Admist snickers from the audience (how dare that woman question a man!) Brett replied, "well, I am a man".

Yes, of course you are. Brett Michaels would like you to know that men have no free will outside of the rushing of blood to their penis. The satisfaction of his manly libido is much more important than your feelings. Honestly Daisy, did you think you could possibly be equal to a man?