Sweet baby Jesus and the orphans!

My ears are ringing. I *know* I should know by now, but I’m staggered anew at just how fucking misogynist and judgmental and retrograde Sam in the City is.

Fuck. Just READ THIS ARTICLE.

Blah Women Ruled By Hormones. Blah oxytocin: One Hormone to Rule Them All. Blah SLUTTLYSLUTTLYSLUTBAGS – they ALWAYS get what they deserve. Blah caveman philosophy: Women Who Like Sex Are Slutty Lifesucking Lying Bitches (as opposed to the other chicks who are Frigid Lifesucking Lying Bitches). Blah blah slutshaming blah. Blah follow stupid rules to get desired results, blah hormonal destiny and women never knowing their own mind, blah false attributions of cause (sex on first date) and effect (CALAMITY!SHAME!MEN BEHAVING LIKE PRICKS!) pulled out of her arse.Blah blah feminism making us sluts and leading to our precious princess heartsies getting squished:

Yet despite how much feminism hoopla exists around the subject, and no matter how many times we are told that women needn’t be afraid of putting themselves out there if the chemistry is right, the lighting is good and he paid for her dinner [oh boy did feminists ever NOT say that shit!] (even if it is the first date, the first encounter or with a complete stranger), there are unfortunately some grave emotional consequences …[for women who are doing what they're told by 'advice columnists' and playing manipulation games rather than doing what feminists advise and having sex IF AND WHEN AND HOWEVER THE FUCK you feel like it]

Then she invites us to take the ‘30 day no sex challenge’. Quite frankly I’d rather take the fucking All Bran Challenge, and that’s saying something since that shit tastes like carpeted cardboard.

Thank you Josephine Tovey

Well I missed the apparent broohaha over Michelle Obama and her exposure of arms in the last little while.

I did *not* miss the publication of the photos that were alleged to be of Pauline Hanson.

This article talks about both.

It’s looking at classism in politics, particularly as related to women, and more generally about attitudes to women and the bodies/looks of women in politics.

I wish we could start having these kinds of conversations in more productive and sensible ways.

So it’s nice to see one article published in a mainstream newspaper that actually says “And who cares if they HAD been real”.

Bless…

Sometimes people are great.

Oh no you DIDN’T!!

The female prosecutor running the Josef Fritzl trial has just been called a ‘female Harry Potter’ (hat tip to Spanky for pointing out this article).

The opening statement from the slim, black-haired lawyer, whose glasses and black robe give her a passing resemblance to a sort of female Harry Potter, was hailed by the Austrian media as being fit for Hollywood.

Oh. The black robe that all legal counsel wear you mean???

So, does the defence lawyer look like Darth Vader then? Sounds mildly fucking appropriate.

So there’s a woman in a robe and you’re disussing:

Her looks

Her ‘child-like-ness’

That she’s ‘fit for Hollywood’ (WOOWOO, give up your amazing legal career and this trial where you’re going to take down a very very bad father NOW, and shoot an action movie ‘baby’, maybe you could even score a Playboy spread while you’re at it. CHRIST can you imagine? “Harry Potter goes BAD – work our WANDS baby!!!”)

Despite her youth [she's 33 thanks - you don't NORMALLY hesistate to define that as Old Bag Age] and relative inexperience [please provide evidence of such], the court in Sankt Poelten decided to leave Burkheiser in charge of the case [yes, and she's going to WIPE THE FLOOR with Rudolf the Oh So Experienced Defence Lawyer and Fritzl will go away for a long long time].

She had passed her exams as both lawyer, judge and public prosecutor and had also worked as a mediator. [So I guess she's not all that green is she??]She is also a qualified sign language translator.[Nice segueway...WTF is your point?]

Fuck. Forgive my inability to get the formatting under control here (last two paras quotes from SMH article)

AND THEN….
“Fritzl face up to crimes – Austrian forced to watch testimony from raped daughter” is the headline that takes you to this article

“Shame-faced Fritzl forced to watch daughter’s rape testimony”

“Forced”? Let’s talk about comparitive force, and shame for that matter. He forced his daughter to submit to his continual rape of her, he forced her to bear his children, he forced her to live in a dank basement, he forced her to deal with his abduction of some of those children. Sorry if I don’t care that he’s ‘forced’ to watch her testimony – and its not ‘force’ so much as the inevitable outcome of HIS actions. I think it is absolutely the wrong focus for any article on this matter, and I don’t care how much ’shame’ you import into his facial expressions. He might have wanted to feel shame much earlier and you know STOP. If he felt shame over *what he did* then he could long ago have sought help/topped himself, so to me? It appears he’s only feeling the SHAME of the world SEEING what he did, of being caught, of being DISCOVERED. Excuse me if I don’t give a flying fuck.

Thanks fuckwit – now with bonus HP-style Mark of the Troll

So ‘David’ has been around getting in my face about how men are really the violence victims in society (never mind that when you look at it they’re also the fucking perpetrators!!).

No no, in David-land it’s one giant matriarchal conspiracy.

And also, David apparently knows the feminist communities better than I do. He uses this knowledge to assure me that in a search for ‘proof’ that feminists care about violence against men as well as against women I’ll only ever find feminist blogs ridiculing violence against men…sure where you’re pulling dodgy stats out of your arse that say the ‘real problem’ of domestic violence is that women beat men ALL THE TIME AND WAY MORE THAN THE OTHER WAY AROUND AND IT’S WAY MORE SERIOUS we’ll mock you but that’s not the same thing dickhead. Also let’s assume we DO care about violence against boys and men, a/ because we’re generally leftwing pinkos who care about shit like that and b/ cos IF NOTHING ELSE the masculine culture of violence is self perpetuating. We care when you kick the shit out of each other cos it results in more surly manly men with anger issues and a higher likelihood that as usual women and children will pay the price for the giant chips on your shoulders.

But if anyone can be arsed engaging with this fuckwit (who by the way has been spammed, I’m not going to have arguments with idiots) by providing links in the comments, go ahead. Me? Busy working, studying, raising a boy child (thought OBVIOUSLY as a feminist I would be super *pleased* if my wonderful son had the shit kicked out of him cos FEMINISTS DON”T CARE ABOUT VIOLENCE DIRECTED AT BOYS/MEN – if my son was physically/emotionally broken by the fucked up masculinity of patriarchy I’d tip my shrew head back and roar with LAUGHTER, cos I’m a FEMINIST, not a mother!!) trying to be a good human being and friend and lover (oh YEAH, come to think of it I really hope someone lays some fucked up violence on my wonderful lover, cos he’s a MAN, and FEMINISTS DON’T CARE!! What do *I* care if this wonderful, beautiful man is annihilated in a shit attack of random violence with no explanation that primarily happens FROM MEN and WITH NO REASON???). I don’t care to spend time finding *evidence* of something that is evident when reading ninety percent of all feminist work (that we care) that idiot MRAs will refute with a ‘suuuuuuure’, or something similarly vacuous.

David? I told you once to go fuck yourself, and I meant it. I’m not your fucking research assistant. Have a coke and a smile and shut the fuck up.

Thanks for your input, Rudolf

Trigger warnings (a discussion of the trial the infamous Fritzl incest case in Austria)

As reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, Josef Fritzl’s lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, who has argued his client was trying only to create a second family, maintained he was “not a monster”

“If you only lock up your daughter to have sex with her, you’re not going to have any children, you’re not going to get schoolbooks (for them) or a Christmas tree,” he said.

“If it was just rape, sexual lust, then he wouldn’t have wanted children, or he could have used contraception. Or if he just didn’t care and had the children, he could have just got rid of them.

” As a monster I’d kill all of them downstairs”.

Apparently, in the land according to Rudolf, Fritzl was “only” trying to create a second family. With his daughter. Against her consent. By locking her up in the dungeon and telling her mother she’d gone missing. And raping her. And raping her. And raping her. Oh well then. Let’s invite him over for drinks, shall we?

Look fuckwit (and hey, I work in a law firm, I know a defence lawyer has to talk some shit) let’s get a few things straight.

Rape IS NOT the same as sexual lust. LUST is fine. LUST leads to sex, or wanking. Rape involves forcing another person to hold still while you get off ‘on them’ – and on their fear, pain, humiliation and discomfort.

Fucking your underage daughter kept captive in your basement is NOT sex, it is RAPE.

Yes, he COULD have used contraception. That would have been preferable. While this woman now loves and cares for her children, I’ve no doubt whatsoever that she would far prefer NOT to have borne the children of her father. Not using contraception makes what he did to her WORSE, not better, and it does NOTHING to mitigate his guilt over rape, incest, sequestration, slavery and coercion and says nothing about the charges of murder.

He could ‘just have got rid of them’. That the man has a bizarrely warped sense of familial ties is not in question. That he didn’t kill all the children (though he does stand accused of killing one) does NOTHING to mitigate his guilt as charged with rape, incest, slavery and coercion and tells us nothing about the charge of murder for the child he’s accused of murdering. The man CLEARLY does not operate by a logic any of us recognise as functional.

“As a monster I’d kill all of them downstairs”. Well thanks for the insight into you fuckwit, but YOU are not on trial, and HE is, so what YOU would do is of little to no relevance here. AGAIN you’re assuming that only MONSTERS rape, only MONSTERS commit incest. This IS a monstrous case. But ‘monsters’ come in all forms, and really I’d guess that their sheer unpredicability adds to their horror. Not only does Rudolf tell us what he’d do as a monster, but what monsters do/would do/what their motivations are. We have all kinds of ‘monsters’ in society if you want to use this terminology, so I really think that uppity lawyers should avoid talking shit about What Monsters Do as if there’s ANY basis for these assertions.

ALSO he’s not CHARGED with being a ‘monster’ so whether he’s a *monster* or *just a man*, a man who felt he owned his daughter in every sense of the word, a man who wanted to rape his daughter, a man who planned it by decking out the basement for JUST SUCH A PURPOSE, a man who then raped his young daughter, kept her captive in his basement, lied to her mother and said she’d run away, watched her produce *his* children, stole some of them from her and then used threats to those children that remained with her in order to keep his daughter ‘in line’ essentially DOES NOT MATTER in relation to the charges he’s facing and all this monster talk is a nice distraction, a little sleight of hand to distract us from the POINT, from the CHARGES, from WHAT THIS MAN DID TO HIS FAMILY.

Artist would be ‘amused’ if someone had followed him for a day

May I suggest that this dude really needs to think about gender as it relates to safety, violence, stalking and fear?

He has a work up which is based on a full day he spent following a woman and taking photos, ‘pretending he was a terrorist’, playing little boy games of spying and ‘fun’.(In the end he worked from one photo which makes you wonder if any of the rest of it was anything other than the self indulgent wankings of a grown man being clueless about the real world and pretending he’s just a naughty little boy).

He selected this woman because of her “wonderful clean hair” (ok) and has previously done works reflecting on a guy who apparently used to run up to women and chop off their ponytails and keep them. Haha, harmless ‘hijinks’, just some random taking a woman’s hair and keeping it, nothing at all creepy about that. Let’s celebrate it, cos I’m sure the women were amused and fine with it!

He’s ‘not worried about what the police might think’ about this latest jaunt. But he might feel ’sheepish’ if the subject knew. But in her position he’d be “amused to think I hadn’t caught them”.

Dude? Listen to me now: If you follow a woman around all day? If she finds out later? Chances are that she will NOT be amused. If you’d said ‘Hey I’m an artist, do you mind if one day in the next two weeks I trail you around like a creepy Where’s Wally?’ and she’d agreed, then ok. But she didn’t, and essentially if you get your head out of your arse for a moment and see things from the unknowing person’s perspective you were stalking her. Following her. A man, following a woman all across the city. For art.

But not all life is art is it?  And even if the ‘punchline’ amused someone tht does not take away all the fear and concern you could have caused during the day. And I’m sorry but as a woman who is extremely aware of being alone/followed I would NOT find that amusing. In fact I would be terrified if I suspected, cos HEY, women live in a world where THE LAST THING they’d think if they spotted a guy following them is ‘Oh, he must be a harmless artist having a little aroused giggle at how sneaky and stealthy and naughty he is’.

Women aren’t your props dude. Get a new hobby.

I really need sleep

It started by seeing this photo:linked to over at bluestherapy, and my promise to take this phrase up as a blasphemy, and followed the course of my inevitable demise when I followed the pic back to the site (Look I found you some Crazy – Picture is Unrelated) and being reasonably meh about most of the photos, a vague half smile here or there, and then in my sleepy boredom being caught off guard by this:

and I’ve JUST. EFFING. LOST IT. Seriously. I went down like a bag of giggling shit. I squealed with laughter until my son came out to check on me thinking I was wailing – then I laughed more until tears came and all sound except this weird little clicking noise had ceased. And still I laughed.

I would warrant it’s mostly over-tired hysteria, but even now I can’t look at it again without laughing. The whole scene. WTF happened at this family dinner to get grandma boogying, dad dropping the daks, mum laughing in an I’m-not-gonna-stop-you way…and then, that kid, hyped but ignoring the adult idiocy and just fucking ROCKING OUT. Sweet baby Jesus and the orphans. He’s so great. He’s like a mini Owen Wilson or Jack Black or something just totally flying his freak flag and bellowing his anthem for all to hear. And WHO was left sober enough to take the photo of all this??

Oh god! (Wipes eyes). Night kids.

“Watch this space” (or FP butchers all your favourite philosophies!)

A note of apology before I start. I am struck by fragmented memories of writings by Foucault and Irigaray – more like shards of glass lodged discomfortingly somewhere in my lumpy grey matter. So if I am torturing the logic of your favourite philosophers in the connections I’m making feel free to point it out. Nicely. Or feel free to kiss my arse if you’re going to be rude (best apology ever??).

So Wildly Parenthetical and I have organised to tag team on posting on (The?) Dollhouse each week. (I really ought to learn it’s proper name I guess)

However, we’re both horribly busy and disorganised, so we haven’t go there yet.

I am fairly surprised by the slamming it’s copped. I don’t uncomplicatedly like the show. I think it lacks the polish of Buffy and I find parts of every episode discomforting.

Part of that is the fact that people will say and do the most appalling things to Echo. Ostensibly because they are discomforted by the fact she’s a kind of ‘doll’, a kind of ‘robot’, the ’she’s not real’ thing comes up again and again. But you cringe when you hear it and you also know that these are things that are said to and against women all the time, not just against Echo. Echo’s specific situation becomes a way to explore attitudes towards women while we get to see the things people say when they think they won’t be held to account as she’ll be wiped anyway. The cruelties and the underlying violence of the way people will speak about women if they think they’ll get away with it/it will be forgotten/the other lacks the power to do anything about it.

As WP has argued (or we have, or somehow we’ve discussed) it goes to the very heart of objectification – not just women objectified sexually, but women commodified, in all kinds of ways – women as literally objects, as property, as less than human. The Actives are set up as embodying this in a literal sense and the ways in which that plays out offers us chances to draw parrallels to women in ‘real life’ in ‘regular roles’. In what sense are women NOT objectified and commodified, their bodies, their emotional work, their domestic labour? It isn’t just tits and arse that are at issue with objectification – women are still concieved of in lots of ways as property, as things, as means to an end and I think this show offers us a way to explore that further.

I think that some of the criticism has stopped short in initially slamming a scenario without fully investigating what it is there for, what it intends to do. For instance, I want to know when we will get to go back and discover HOW Caroline ended up in this situation, what was the back story, how did she come to *be* “an Active”? How did the organisation get her to even come in for the meeting? There is presumably some way in which she was ‘beholden’ or caught…what’s the story there? And yes I *do* think it’s important.

I also think that so far we have seen some pretty interesting scenarios played out. Humans are ‘wiped’ and have ‘The Perfect’ personality programmed in for whatever the occassion.

This affects personality and physiology. How? Why?

When it does, and the professional negotiator turns out to have been a prior victim of sexual abuse we end up with a woman whose abuse led to her suicide causing the undoing of the perpetrator, beyond the grave, and THROUGH another woman. In some senses that woman DID face the perpetrator, did overcome what broke her earlier, and in another sense ‘Echo’ did that, made it possible.

To me, that’s some pretty powerful stuff, some pretty serious head-fucking around individuality and Cartesian dualism, and also…well it blew me away! So far I’ve heard it reduced to a cliche of the ‘frigid abuse victim’ which I honestly don’t see. Firstly who said anything about ‘frigidity’? The woman’s *breathing shut down* when she recognised her attacker, that’s not frigidity, that’s shock. Secondly that particular reaction gets us to go ‘WTF?? It’s not even ‘her’ body, or ‘Echo’s’ physiology…what’s going on?

It screws with a number of entrenched ideas that critical and cultural studies see violence in and value questioning, tugging at, overturning, examining the weaknesses in.

If you reduce people to convenient ‘meatsacks’, the mere ‘body’ in which to house whatever ‘ideal’ is required for a given situation, if you take away their memories and self will and ‘implant them’ with personalities…when the illness of the programmed affects the body of the programmeee…when the body of the programmee overcomes situations she was not programmed for., solves problems she’s not ‘equipped for’ because the programmers didn’t think of it,well account for this please Descartes!?

And since those ideas have produced some shitty shitty effects, particularly for women, and in terms of race relations, well I think that’s an idea worth fucking with.

What other ideas?

I want to discuss Foucault and the production of ‘docile bodies’ and how Whedon constantly draws the analogy that attempting to subdue and control people; even ‘for their own good’ is ALWAYS a terrible terrible idea. This time he is getting at this in a radically physical sense…these people are stripped of all capacity for self determination, in order to produce a placid *white noise* kind of subject,a ‘blank slate’ a walking ‘thing/person’ – ostensibly for ease of control, and self interest (easier to program for new assignments) and as was drawn out this week to minimise the violent impact of what they do to these subjects- the wiping process is described by those with a vested interest as safe, calm, undamaging, a good thing to do, but we are always allowed to see that it is violent, that these subjects have been sold a lie, that it is painful and demeaning in that they are continually subjected to the wipe and rewipe, the automaton responses….

But they never can contain or control can they? Already we’ve seen spillage from assignment to ‘blank slate’, recognitions, humanity, shock on the face of those who think they’re objectively ‘detached’, the ramifications of what they do explode outwards and outwards and outwards.

And then we have Alpha.

Anyway, there are a gazillion ideas that connect from the show to current reading and news, to feminism and theory. Too many to keep track of.

And I feel anxious about this post now, because I’m unclear of who initially mentioned which of the ideas above. As discussed with WP we get together, we chat, we watch the episode, and ideas tumble all over one another. When it comes to writing about the episode or the show in general, it’s hard to know anymore whose ideas are whose as fragments of ideas tumble across one another, interlock, connections are made and conversation shoots off in different directions.

But I figure that’s ok, firstly as you know, the ‘ideas’ we’ll be discussing will never be solely our own anyway, and there are problems with pretending that could be so (even if that’s a very common stance)…and also, I kinda like it, I like that it subverts the phallocentric idea of ‘knowledge’ and ‘objectivity’ and ‘the expert’ etc…it sounds a little like the basics I can remember of Irigaray’s discussion of ‘the feminine’ – that men are constantly talking about women’s ‘flightiness’ in conversation, her lack of cohesion, and the way in which she turns this around as a positive. And there we go again with overlap and enmeshed ideas – I believe it was WP who popped Irigaray in mind as her post will involve Irigaray’s ideas in a more comprehensive way…

Rather than that scopophilic  approach of pulling all things to itself, to claim so kind of rational cohesion, and an ownership of knowledge and to say ‘This is truth’, and ‘I am an authority’ to the exclusion of other views, the feminine *does* constantly fold in on itself, is contextual, does self refer, does constantly touch, is multiple, fragmented, flight, takes many paths:

one must listen to her differently in order to hear an “other meaning” which is constantly in the process of weaving itself, at the same time ceaselessly embracing words and yet casting them off to avoid becoming fixed, immobilized*

Perhaps it’s too big a claim for the show as yet – but it’s leaking, it’s spiralling, it can’t be contained, pinned down, defined. I think this kind of overlapping, interweaving, imploding/exploding is partly the very *point* of a show fucking with subjectivity, dualism, objectification, misogyny and well probably other things I’ve missed.

So in short…I’m going to keep watching and WP and I will tag team on the episodes. We’re only like four behind! Too easy!

* Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One – p 103

Winner of the Shut the Fuck Up Files for this week

Fashion ‘writer’ Mindy Laube banging on about yucky yucky fat.

Ms Laube makes what she seems to think is a compelling aesthetic ‘argument’ for loudly proclaiming (no really, in bolded capitals) that the average woman in Australia is 5′4″ and a size 14, and announces that that is (always and uncontrivertibly and in EVERY CASE) “FAT!” and goes on to expound on how disgusting fat is.

Apparently (based on the school photos of Ms Laube) we’ve, as a nation ‘let oursevles go’ and have gotten WAAAAAAAAAAY fatter!

There were NO overweight boys when SHE was growing up  and only ONE fat girl and ONE fat teacher! QED. (What are you taking lessons in logic from Sam in the City???)

Here’s an idea: if you wanna pull a stat out of your arse, then in order to ‘prove’ the big differences between now and then maybe you ought to COMPARE YOUR STATS ACRSS TIME instead of let us collectively wade through your fucking YEAR BOOK for evidence, fool!

She drops clangers such as weight comes from sloth and gluttony, and teenage girls with bellies in bikinis are a symptom of a majorly upsetting societal ill that only Ms Laube has the intestinal fortitude to tackle: We’re LACKING VANITY!!!

Mindy Laube? SHUT THE FUCK UP!