feminist blogs

It has come to my attention that certain individuals are questioning my vacation schedule. In the words of commenter Aunti Disestablishmentarian, “Between your Red hot Chili Pepper and that Raul Feller, you sure do take alot of vacations! You’d give the Preznit a run for his money in terms of ‘most days off.’”

Christ on a club cracker with alfalfa sprouts, people, can you blame me? First of all, the Chili Peppers rule. They just do, sorry, end of story. Secondly, Anthony Kiedis is really, really good in bed. I mean think about it: if you had Anthony Kiedis in one hand and a large supply of some seriously fine mind-altering substances in the other, what would you do? Hang around here and write blog posts?

It’s not like I’m missing some big fucking Happy Dance back here in the real world. The past couple of weeks have been so goddamn depressing I don’t know why there hasn’t been a spate of mass suicides across the land. The media’s hate-on of Hillary continues unabated; I swear to god, I think those guys’ dicks must be hard all the time. It’s a fucking paroxysm, an orgy, a crack high of misogyny. And Obama is a fucking asshole who’s increasingly looking to me like an amoral creep. Yes, I will vote for him if he’s the nominee, no question, even work to support his campaign, blah blah blah, but I say it here: I do not like thee, Dr. Fell. I do not like thee one fucking little bit. Trash Hillary, trash the Clinton presidency, have your wife say she probably wouldn’t even help Hillary get elected (remember Bill saying that if Obama was the nominee he’d do everything in his power to help him win?), indulge in coded or not-so-coded misogyny, feed bullshit smears to the press, anything. Hope and change my ass. This guy is the new Reagan. Remember Reagan? An empty suit whose entire political life was based on giving speeches that people liked. I was appalled at the stupidity of the American public when they 1) elected Reagan and then 2) re-elected the son of a bitch, and that during a recession no less, ’cause it was “Morning in America,” see? Yes, the American people in all their wisdom actually voted for a goddamn cereal commercial.

But lo and fucking behold, nobody seems to get that Obama is the same can of soup. His speeches are written by a speechwriter, you fucking twits. Deliberately crafted to sound as much like MLK and JFK as possible. Do you not get that? Ignore the speeches and look at the man. Look at how he can’t hold his own in a debate. Look at his record. Look at the content. Look at the mudslinging his campaign engages in. God almighty, Americans are morons.

And the Brits are no fucking better, Mr.-Archbishop-Eyebrows-who-can-wipe-my-ass. Hey, why not sharia law in Britain? Oh, but only for family matters, says Eyebrow Man, by which he means the entire spectrum of codified patriarchal abuse that governs women’s personal lives: divorce, marriage, custody, marital rape, marital beatings, financial support, “honor,” etc. Clearly His Very Reverend Eyebrows think it’s just peachy keen for women to be second-class citizens because after all, they’re not really human, are they? They’re just women. Eight hundred years of English jurisprudence and a modern European concept of civil rights are fine and dandy, but they do only apply to human beings. Which lets women right out.

The only good thing that happened in the past two weeks was Robin Morgan’s kick-ass piece about the sexism dogging Hillary’s candidacy (go read it, it’s fucking great), but goddamn if a couple of third-wave feminists didn’t ruin the moment by wilfully misinterpreting the essay as a personal attack on them. Why? Who the fuck knows. I guess they saw the words “young” and “women” next to each other and the voices in their head told them it was a coded message from Morgan to them personally. Shit, they must have even better substances than I do.

Where’s Anthony? Anthony! Come back!

My family is trying to talk me into coming back to life. They liked having me alive — I guess it’s some kind of love thing — and with the holidays approaching they’ve been pressuring me pretty heavily to climb back into the ol’ meat suit. My mother keeps calling me up in the Smoking Lounge, talking about Thanksgiving dinner and Molly and Christmas trees and the various advantages to being alive as opposed to dead in a tent with an ex-parrot who has a pumpkin for a head.

Last night I got online again and cruised around the blogulofeminewsosphere, trying to reacquaint myself with the world. Having spent the past several weeks in a kind of self-induced psychotic break, it was a bit of a shock to be plunged back into the harsh glare:

• A gang-rape victim in Saudi Arabia is sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in jail because she was out without a male guardian. Her husband protests the ruling yet still claims that Saudi society — in which women have virtually no legal rights and are the wards and chattel of their male relatives — is “very respectful of women.”

• Christian fundamentalists in the U.S., no doubt jealous of the Saudi success story, are brainwashing their daughters from birth to think of themselves as the property of their fathers.

• Some freak in Texas editorializes that the wearing of pants and unveiled hair has “led to the slow whorification of ladyhood.”

• An 11-year-old gang-rape victim in Georgia (U.S.) is accused of being a lying slut.

• Rape victims in Hungary are denied justice by courts and police who maintain that women who are raped are really just prostitutes or (you guessed it) lying sluts.

• Western expatriate sexist creeps in Moscow are thrilled to discover that “women’s lib never happened here.” Indeed: violence against women in Russia is so pervasive that 70% of married women are abused by their husbands. Political will and funding to deal with the problem are virtually non-existent. Moscow, a city of 10 million, does not have a single shelter for battered women.

• At Jets games in New York male fans form gauntlets and demand that any passing woman expose her breasts; the women are spat on and pelted with beer bottles for refusing. (One woman who cooperated was subsequently threatened with arrest for indecent behavior — yes, she was reprimanded, not the hundreds of men surrounding her.)

• The Australian teenagers who gang-raped a girl and then sold the video of it as homemade pornography are released without serving any jail time.

• The rape nightmare in the Congo continues unabated; many hospitalized victims are so badly injured their internal plumbing no longer works.

• A feminist activist in Iran is sentenced to be whipped and imprisoned as punishment for advocating women’s rights.

• Less than 60% of Americans believe unequivocally that women should play an equal role with men in public life.

• Maureen Dowd refers to Hillary Clinton as a dominatrix, Chris Matthews calls her a she-devil, and a McCain barnacle calls her a bitch. (I believe “lying slut” is reserved for rape victims.)

• The U.N. reports that most of the 800 million illiterate adults in the world are women; most of the 100 million children not in school are girls. Women earn three-quarters of what men do and their unpaid labor would, if calculated, equal trillions of dollars. Women hold only 17% of the parliamentary seats in the world, but they constitute 70% of the people living in poverty.

Yep, the world is still a shit pie for women. And that’s by no means a systematic survey; it’s just what caught my eye in the hour or two I spent getting caught up around the tubes. My reaction is twofold:

1. I want to go back into the tent with Raoul.
2. We need more feminism in the world. A lot more.

On the first point I need not elaborate; long-time readers will have observed that I have a tendency to disappear (into a tent, the Smoking Lounge, France, what have you) when The Horror Of It All starts to be too much.

I don’t need to belabor the second point either, but I do have something to add. Look again at that list of news items. That’s why I have no tolerance for anti-feminists. None. Zero. Feminism is the belief that women are human; it is the movement to secure their full human rights. It’s about stopping the rapes and the lashings and the mutilations and the oppression and the abuse. If you think that the best way for you to spend your time in this world is by working against feminism, then I’ve got no time for you.

And that goes for all anti-feminists, whatever the variety. MRAs with miniature dicks? Check. Christian fundamentalists who think Saudi Arabia sounds like Big Rock Candy Mountain? Check. So-called liberal dudes who become annoyed every time they’re asked to consider women’s rights? Check.

And the women, too, alas — though I don’t mean those true believers who have been Stockholmed into accepting their own God-ordained inferiority. No, I mean the women who cynically capitalize on the popularity of anti-feminism for the sake of their own self-aggrandizement. (You know the shtick — from Ann Coulter to Wendy McElroy to Toni Bentley to the trolls who haunt the blogosphere posing as “feminist critics.”) Since they are also women under patriarchy I usually hold my fire, but do I have time for them? That would be no, Bob.

So the next time some anti-feminist goblin shows up here and I promptly zap its tiny ass into a smoldering cinder, you’ll know why. I got no time for those people.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Raoul sporting his new head. Thanks for the suggestion, Sis!

Raoul and I are back from the Himalayas. Got a bunch of stuff to catch up on, and I owe you guys an anthropology post, eh? Eh. (Vocal mannerism courtesy of two weeks in a tent with Raoul. When he was a parrot he lived with a family in Montreal.)

Sorry for the light posting this week. Raoul and I are on an astral backpacking tour of the Himalayas.

My new favorite drink: Sherpa tea, with salt and rancid yak butter. Out of this world.

It’s time to come clean with the reason I’m still hanging around here in the Spirit Smoking Lounge instead of resuming my corporeal form among the living. We’re now at Death+39 days, and I’m not sure how much longer the old meat sack will stay fresh on the heart-lung machine I’ve got hooked up in the garage. I occasionally pop back in to take the neurons on a spin around the block, make sure all the synapses are firing, that sort of thing, but I’m postponing the inevitable re-corporealization as long as possible.

The reason? Well, there’s the smoking, of course, and the tequila shots with no hangover, and the Nerf ball games with Nietzsche (who has really, really lightened up since he died), and the infinite knowledge and wisdom thing — all that’s great. But what’s really keeping me here is Raoul. Raoul, my Spirit boyfriend.

I lurve me some Raoul.

One of the most gratifying aspects of Spirit sex is that you can take on any form you want. Yesterday, for example, after spending a rather embarrassingly humongous amount of time staring at the sexy man picture, with my Spirit tongue hanging out and everything, it occurred to me to ask Raoul to make himself look like that. And he did! The lack of a head is weird, though, so we’re shopping around for something suitable.

Now here’s a coincidence. It so happens that I’ve been kicking around the idea of taking on advertising again to cover the site costs, and just this morning I was complaining to the other spirits here in the Smoking Lounge about the problems with Google Adsense.

Me: The problem with Adsense is that it goes off keywords
Spirit of Adsense: High Paying Keywords. Get Millions of High Paying Adsense Keywords & Develop Adsense Pages.
Me: but it doesn’t do any other screening
Spirit of Adsense: Buy imported Oriental screens. Shoji Screens Starting at $69.00.
Me: so if you have a feminist blog with the word “feminism” in your posts or on your header
Spirit of Adsense: The Book Feminists Don’t Want You To Read. Women Who Make the World Worse, by Kate O’Beirne. Now at 34% off. $16.47 in hardcover.
Me: you get ads for anti-feminist things.
Spirit of Adsense: Discover the Truth about God’s Plan for Men and Women. Biblical Headship and Christian Submission.
Me: For example, you could write a post about those fake Crisis Pregnancy Centers
Spirit of Adsense: Pregnant? Scared? Alone?
Me: and lo and behold if Adsense doesn’t serve up an ad from a goddamn Crisis Pregnancy Center right there in your fucking sidebar!
Spirit of Adsense: Hot Sidebar Fucking Online. Watch Free XXX Videos.

It’s really annoying. This blog averages about 150,000 page views a month, a minuscule figure compared to blogs like Feministing, which I understand is actually visible from space. Still, it’s ten times the circulation of my local Auto Trader. I should at least be able to sell ad space for a 2000 TOYOTA CAMRY 4 Dr LE V6 Sedan, at, ac, pw, pdl, tilt, cc, CD, loaded, Exc Cond, MUST SEE.

But back to Victoria’s post. The porn-ad thing made her think of this guy, a conceptual artist who has created pollination porn for plants. Here’s the description from Reuters:

Conceptual artist Jonathon Keats… filmed a six-minute long video of plants getting pollinated, then edited his uncensored footage into a gritty black-and-white porn video. The result was what he claims to be the world’s first plant porn movie, “Cinema Botanica.”

“It is very boring but that is part of the essence of pornography, that it is very repetitive,” he said.

During September his film will be projected onto an audience of 60 house plants lined in rows at the 1078 Gallery, an alternative arts space in Chico, California - a venue Keats has dubbed “the world’s first porn theater for house plants.”

It’s a sublime demonstration, isn’t it? A row of house plants lined up in front of a screen where grainy pollination footage is being projected. When I read that I thought this Jonathan Keats person was a good guy, the kind of artist who is able to deconstruct our cultural narratives and expose the absurdities.* I thought he was a feminist.

I was wrong.

Keats says he chose pornography because “it is so innately appealing.” What? Innate? And appealing to whom? He cheerfully cites early nickelodeons and refers to “humans,” as if pornography were as natural and innocuous as breathing, as if he hadn’t the faintest idea that pornography is a cultural artifact of our misogynistic society. Is it possible he’s deliberately playing the fool? That was my first guess, given his record as a performance artist.**

But it seems he really is a fool when it comes to everything connected to gender and sexuality. I dug around and discovered that not only is Keats a fool, he’s also an anti-feminist and a historical illiterate (a not unusual combination). In a book review at Salon — a serious book review, written apparently of his own free will and not under duress or in a state of extreme intoxication — he said, “What was once the argument of the gentleman misogynist is now the line taken by the academic feminist: The sexual body is a dangerous thing, best shrouded from sight.” He referred to “hetero-patriarchal dominance” as a self-evidently absurd phrase, and went on to claim that “the academic feminist orthodoxy [wants] to keep the feminine body hidden from view, and female sexuality under wraps.” And finally, “the corset has been an instrument of liberation.”

I know, I know, you’re thinking, “Performance art! Gotta be! Clearly he’s just committed to his form.” Because really, who could be that stupid? But there’s more where that came from, since Keats regularly stinks up various online venues with his puerile ruminations. In one column he argued breathlessly that American Psycho was a work of “genius.” His own first novel was so sexist that even the profoundly non-feminist Publisher’s Weekly felt compelled to comment.

It’s a shame, because if Keats weren’t a pornhound (which I’m betting five hundred gazillion dollars he is), he might be able to think about sexuality with the same transgressive humor he brings to religion. Instead he’s in thrall to the age, soaking in the effluvium of an obscene culture, unable to recognize that his frame of reference is, indeed, a frame and not Eternal Truth.

Of course it’s possible that everything he writes about sex and gender is a knowing joke; that his entire output, including his own novel, is intended as ironic commentary. But if so, his stance is so indistinguishable from the dominant cultural narrative that whatever irony he may have intended has vanished. With no space between subject and object, not even the tiniest crack, there is no commentary. The joke’s on him.

*Remember the Kilgore Trout story about the planet where pornography consists of movies of people eating?

I’ve been saying the same thing for years.

Avatar courtesy of the Rev. B. Dagger Lee

I’m back.

Sometime during the late evening hours of August 10, 2007, I was assimilated by BlogWarBot, resulting in a new, horrifying entity: Dr. BlogWarBot Socks. This Borg-like creature maintained control of the blog for several days, until an emergency intervention by a crack team of lolkitteh avatars (see above) finally succeeded in removing the alien implants this morning.

When I first started blogging, I had no idea that blogs could be so vulnerable, much less those by fictional characters such as myself. Long-time readers may be reminded of the unpleasant incident last summer, when my physical host was possessed by The Virus for over week. And there was that day when the Ministry of Truth took over the blog, though of course I completely welcomed that and was deeply grateful to Minitrue for explaining things to my readers in such a clear and, well, truthful fashion!

At any rate, my message to other bloggers, particularly fictitious ones, is to be careful. You never know when another fictional character could take over your blog.

Fuck off. Go away. Do not post here. If you do, your comment will be deleted.

The intertube is a big place and there are plenty of websites where you can indulge your fetid delusions about how the nigras/Jews/bitches have ruined the world and robbed you of your destiny. Not here.

FUCK OFF.

Dr. Socks contemplates a return to blogging.

So, as Mandos would say, I’ve been out.

I’ve been on a kind of strike, if you will, a personal sabbatical from The World. Not just from blogging, but from email, the news, everything. My computer has been off — actually off, no power, off – for almost two weeks. That’s unprecedented for me.

I didn’t plan the hiatus in advance; if I had, I would have told you all I was going. No, it just sort of came about spontaneously. It was one day week before last: I was reading the news and saw that a U.S. court had ruled that habeas corpus was really just a 700-year-old hoax probably dreamed up by commie pinko fags and certainly nothing that President Jesus and his crack team of torturers should have to worry about. And you know what? I just couldn’t take it anymore. Just couldn’t deal. I closed the browser, turned off the computer, and went and sat on the sofa in the living room.

And that’s pretty much where I’ve been for the past two weeks.

Sitting on the sofa is a wonderful thing. You can stare into space. You can think about your book and the people in it. You can sketch the house where they live, which is very good for occupying the front of your attention while the back of your brain sorts out knotty issues of plot and character and occasionally surprises you with rather wonderful discoveries. You can pet your dog. You can drink coffee in the morning and Long Island iced teas at night. I love the sofa.

A couple of times I thought about checking in on the blog, at least to make sure the thing wasn’t drowning in spam, but that would have required turning on the computer, which in turn would have led inexorably to checking my email, and ultimately, horror of horrors, reading the news. And that, my friends, I just couldn’t do. As long as my computer remained off, I could continue my sofal reverie.

I did hear a couple of pieces of news via my mother: one, that the Queen, as expected, got the Oscar for her brilliant portrayal of Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect. I was so pleased. She’s won many honors through her long reign, but you just know the Oscar has to be special.

I also heard from my mother yesterday that Scooter Libby was found guilty. As it happened, when she told me this I had just awakened from a dream in which President Bush had Bill and Hillary Clinton executed by firing squad. (For some reason I was there to witness the execution, and I can report that while both Clintons were clearly nervous, they held up and faced the thing bravely.) Those two things together — I mean the Libby verdict and the firing squad — made me think, for the first time in two weeks, that it might be mildly interesting to see what’s in the news. The Clintons are still alive, aren’t they?

Then this morning I woke up wondering what you all were up to.

So here I am, back at the computer. I still haven’t checked the news yet, but I think I’ll do that next. Or maybe I’ll start sorting through the bazillion email messages that have collected in my inbox. I apologize for disappearing without warning; I apologize for causing anyone concern; I apologize for not checking in sooner; I apologize that all these apologies are necessary. I’m going to write a song called “I Apologize” and put up a YouTube video of myself performing it in sackcloth and ashes.

As Phil Oakey says in that Human League song, “Please forgive me.”