I Blame The Patriarchy

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I'm Moving

It is not beautiful yet (for instance, it contains a renegade blogroll not of my doing), but I've gone and migrated I Blame The Patriarchy to its new home, and if you want your comments to live in posterity, please leave'em over there. TypePad's bummin me out.

And if you have any idea how I learn how to do WordPress in five minutes or less, email my ass ASAP.

Fuck Culture

Proceeds from Kiss Me I'm Irish wristbands go to The Awareness Survivor Fund

Culture. Culture culture culture. I am sick and tired of culture. I am sick and tired of the retards who are trying to preserve culture because they think it's sacred or something and they worship it. Culture's not sacred. It's guk growing in a petrie dish. A set of behaviors upon the successful assimilation of which a given individual is ruthlessly judged by her prejudiced and parochial peers.

Why would anybody want to get involved with that? Keep your culture offa me, freak!

Check out this dipshit assistant minister of culture and heritage from Fiji, who has been bitten by the popular culture-worship bug, and who recently announced to her constituents that "human, women's, children's, and individual rights are eroding the indigenous national identity." She wants women to "accept only what is in accordance with traditional culture and values, with particular stress on hairstyles and dress codes."

As you know, I am the world's foremost authority on the status of women in Fiji, so you can believe me when I say that if chumps in their own government are advocating pickling women in the good old pre-feminist brine so that they'll conform to some kind of quaint "national identity" dictated by crowd-pleasin' hair-dos, it can't be good. In fact, it looks to me like they're wanting to put the kibosh on women's rights because they fuck with Fiji's brand.

Culture, despite the hallucinations of those who yearn for a simpler, gentler time, isn't static and cannot be sustained unchanged. People like Fiji's assistant minister for culture and heritage who wish to mummify it for its own sake, presumably against the ravages of feminism or the homo agenda or the swarthy Muslims or global homogeneity, are suffering from nostalgia and delusion and xenophobia. We should look the other way when those quaint Saudi dudes stone their women to death. It's their culture!

It's tough toenails, but the day is almost upon us when culture will no longer be practiced by isolated pockets of diverse and colorful indigenous natives. I'd say good riddance, too, since culture is just another word for patriarchy. Sadly, what we're getting instead is no great improvement over the quaint crap it replaces. Today's culture is an homogenous, pulsating gray fungus oozing out of TVs and internet porn sites and McDonaldses and Wal-Marts. It reeks of polyester and grease. And male honky domination. If it's eaten away all the naive and picturesque social constructs that everyone loves to imagine are alive and well in other, less complicated parts of the world like Fiji, well, that's too bad, but odds are those dear old traditions were oppressin' somebody. So fuck'em.

Here are some other examples of culture-worship that really chap my hide.

• Christmas culture! Ay yi yi! It abominates! Red and green! The merriness mandate! Incessant sleigh bells echoing through the streets! Awful representations of quaint Victorian English ice skaters! That retarded grandma/reindeer song!

• And what's with these honkys who adopt trendy Chinese babies and suddenly they have to be all about the kid's "cultural heritage"? Whence cometh the bizarre and frankly racist notion that a Chinese baby is genetically hardwired to appreciate--nay, to require--exposure to a necessarily arbitrary and incomplete set of non-western customs? Will it develop crippling personality disorders if it is not given enough moo goo gai pan?

• Or what about when you're in a bar and you hear some dumb white American dude declaim in a Chicago accent, by way of revealing something deeply significant about himself, "well, you know, I'm one-sixteenth Cherokee." What the fuck difference does that make? You're still an asshole! Or, "well, you know I'm Irish." Hello, dumb American dude! You're not Irish! The closest you've ever gotten to Ireland is a box of Lucky Charms! And big whoop about Ireland anyway! You can get a Guinness in South Austin! The erstwhile geographical location of your remote ancestors is not a measure of your character!

Fashion Week: Bangladesh

Fashion week is particularly hardcore in Bangladesh, where an outlaw militant Islamist group has vowed to murder any woman not wearing a veil. These unpleasant godbags--who are also implicated in some of those bombings you always hear about on NPR while you're getting your coffee and never think about again--are the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen. The Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen, afllicted by vulgar delusion as are all godbags, are some ugly, mean-spirited fucks. They've bombed 21 people to death in the last two weeks, and, pleased with the success of this marketing strategy in promoting their deity's brand, now prepare to take it on home by imprisoning the females.

“Women," announced the Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen, "will be killed if they are found to move around without wearing burqa from the first day of Zilhaj. Women, including non-Muslims, are hereby advised not to go out of home without burqa. Seclusion has been made compulsory for you."

Note how similar the sentiment of this threat is to those warnings that we little ladies here in the free world are always getting from helpful male authority figures on how to avoid getting raped. "Just do what us dudes say, and nobody gets hurt, except when we decide to kick your ass anyway."

Vigil

Canadian vigiliers gettin all up in it [Toronto Star]

It's probably news to Americans, but our Canadian readers are aware that sixteen years ago, nutjob/proto-MRA Marc Lépine skulked into L'École Polytechnique at the Université de Montréal, announced that he hated feminists, and opened fire on some women engineering students. He killed 14 of them and injured 13 more. He naturally shot his own head off immediately thereafter.

It's a pity that more brutalizers of women don't shoot their own heads off.

According to the Vancouver Sun, Canadian women's groups across the country recently held vigils and memorials, mostly involving roses and candles, for the Montréal Massacre as part of a "national day of remembrance and action on violence against women." I was not invited to speak at any of these events, so vigilizers were not treated to my plan for promoting suicide amongst misogynists. They heard lectures full of statistics that, because of statistic-fatigue, make everybody's eyes glaze over:

Girls are four times more likely than boys to be sexually assaulted by family members, adolescent wives are three times more likely to be murdered and 12 per cent of girls in grade 9 are pressured to have sex. [Toronto Star]

"We're asking for a 10-year campaign to raise awareness amd change behavior toward women," quoth the president of the Québec Women's Federation. She alludes, apparently, to similar rose-and-candle campaigns used "to curb drunk driving and boost seatbelt use."

Nice try, but when drunk driving is still a national pastime, I am pained by the desperation of the idea that a few years of advertising in bus stops should make a dent in millennia's worth of the systemic misogyny that culminates in daily butcherings of women. Particularly when there are still plenty of fucks who make exceedingly hilarious remarks like this to commemorate the Montréal Massacre:

If you'd like a different perspective on what men are like, try deviating from the usual question that the Violence Against Women lobby ask about men. I hear the same question over and over, and particularly at this time of year: if you're going to be attacked, who is more likely to be attacking you? A woman or a man? I have a different question: if you're going to be rescued from an attacker, who is more likely to rescue you? A woman or a man? In both questions the answer is "a man."

I don't know who this Violence Against Women lobby is, but the question I always ask dipshit men about men is "Don't you EVER shut the fuck up?"

Obstreperal Bliss Complete

The new, herbally improved Twisty

Soundtrack A
Soundtrack B

I'm Linktarded.

I'm AWOL today, taking a trip without leaving the farm, so to give you an idea of the quality readership here at I Blame The Patriarchy, here are a couple of links readers have sent in:

A vibrator that can be controlled by a Bluetooth phone in possession of a third party [From Birte in Germany]

Some pervtard pretending to be a cop prank-calls a McDonald's and presuades the manager to strip-search and otherwise torment one of her best employees. [From Pearlstein]

If you haven't heard of Holla Back yet [from Hollaback]:

"Here's a description from our site:
Holla Back NYC empowers New Yorkers to Holla Back at street harassers.   Whether you're commuting, lunching, partying, dancing, walking, chilling, drinking, or sunning, you have the right to feel safe, confident, and sexy, without being the object of some dickwad's fantasy.So stop walkin' on and Holla Back!

By posting pictures of the harassers, we give people a weapon against harassment. Join us in the fight to kick some street harasser ass!

Love,
Emily from the Hollaback team!

--
If you can't slap 'em,
snap 'em.

Gay-friendly buyer's guide from Human Rights Campagin (if you MUST buy crap for Xmas). [From Beth].

Stepfather and adoptive mother beat 11-year-old girl into a coma, want kid kept on ventilator to stave off murder charge. Nice. [From MsKate]

That hilarious Will Ferrell as Shrub on gloabal warming vid [from Wordgirl]

Puk'd!

My last taco for a week

First of all, a big thank-you to Tammy, who sent me a bunch of excellent hats and a Neil Gaiman book and some wacky Canadian chocolate bars (Eat-More? What tha?) all the way from British Columbia. You're a peach!

Meanwhile: Monday, I am sorry to say, kicks off another chemo week for me. As usual, you can expect posts and emails to be nonexistent, or irregular, or at the very least stupid for a few days while the poison knocks me on my entire milky-white ass. My oncologist has thrown everything she's got at my predeliction for Xtreme Kweez, but in the end has thrown up--pun intended-- her hands and deemed me A Puker and that's all there is to it.

Speaking of pharmacology: if you're like me--and of course you are--you can't turn on your computer these days without reading about some nutjob pharmacist who won't fill some poor schmo's prescription because it would kill the Baby Jesus. I just read at Pandagon about some asshole who, anecdotally, refused to give a woman her fucking Valtrex because "God is punishing you for your sin."

When exactly did pharmacists morph into a tribe of insane judgmental godbags storming the countryside, refusing to pharm? Has the profession been infiltrated by fetus-lovin' drugophobe terrorists whose ultimate goal is to stop entirely the flow of medications to sick people? Because, as Shakespeare's Sister astutely points out, how do they know God has stopped at merely sticking women with herpes for the crime of getting laid? What if He sometimes issues, say, cancer as punishment for other, non-pussy-havin'-related misdeeds? "And if he does," she wonders, "how do the pharmacists know whose prescriptions to rip up and whose to fill?"

The answer is: naturally God rewards his adoring pharmy minions with what they want, so he skips over the boring shit and only tells'em about the lurid sex lives of unclean women. And it's a damn good thing, too, because I suppose you might say I've committed some pretty sinny acts in my day, such as hubris, and gluttony, and coveting my neighbor's wife, and if the pharmacists knew that God had given me cancer to punish me for this stuff, I might never get my stool softeners.

Raper's Delight, Part II

Shakespeare's Sister has just alerted me to a quintessential tale of 21st century American misogyny: that of a 17-year-old gang-rape victim (now 19) who, instead of seeing the testicles of her three attackers chewed off by a frothing pack of delirious pit bulls in the town square, has in fact been prosecuted for and found guilty of filing a false police report.

As I understand it, the judge, a graduate of Dicksmoke State Law School, decided that the victim's drunken, doped-up thief of a mother, who testified for the defense that her daughter didn't "act traumatized" after the rape, was a credible witness. So they threw the book at that slut of a lying teenage ho, and the pitiable, falsely accused boys-who-will-be-boys sauntered off to tea and crumpets at the Dorchester.

If our beloved sex-addicted patriarchy did not regularly inject itself with life-giving shots of yippee-rape, it might astonish us that a judge would consider that a victim's drunken mother--a woman of such discerning tastes that she apparently keeps intimate company with a convicted child molester--is competent to assess the weather, let alone the psychological state of her raped daughter.

It might further astonish us that, in order to see justice, women are now apparently required to follow rules of trauma decorum following a rape. But as usual, we don't know what the rules are! The old white dudes change'em all the goddam time! Maybe we could cover our asses by presenting a crowd-pleasing set of hysterical-chick behaviors consistent with those enacted by stock characters on "Law & Order: SVU"? Such as huddling for 3 days in the corner of the bathtub with the shower running, rubbing holes in our skin with a loofah, muttering Bible verses?

But I digress.
 
What I was saying is that we are not astonished by the criminal act of this fucktarded judge. It's no secret that our culture is one that trembles with joy whenever there's a fallen woman to be publicly humiliated on accounta she has haplessly found herself pronged by the business end of red-blooded American manhood. And we are so accustomed to and exhausted by criminal acts of both public officials and the moralizing godbag teeming throng who cheers them on that when we read about this shit in blogs, it's all we can do to lift our exhausted fingers to type the exhausted comment "*sigh*."

But let us not forget that in this case the judge--corrupted, as are all white dudes in positions of authority, by the noxious, viscous emanations of Ol' Peeno*--has applied the same time-honored, patriarchy-endorsed orthodoxy deemed so peachy in those savage 3rd world outposts of barbarism where splayfooted tribal elders set rape victims on fire and give all her family's goats to the rapists. This case differs only in degree.
___________________________

*Ol' Peeno, The National Penis, throbs under glass in the Museum of American Patriarchy (located at the tip of the Washington Monument in D.C.) and erupts, to the delight of pornsick visitors from across our great land, into the stagnant national miasma its gaseous smegs of oppression every hour on the hour.