So… “Spouting Feminist Rhetoric While Carrying a Duke Diploma”

Fellow Duke feminists have reported verbal thrashings from the larger feminist community on the ongoing Duke Lacrosse debacle, confirming my suspicions that if you don’t toe the line, you’re hung out to dry faster than you can say “Pressler.” And that just ain’t right.

Let’s put aside the team’s boorish behaviour, as well as the embedded patriarchy at Duke (it’s there, girls and boys, I’m not going to deny it), and focus on the fact that this case has been plagued by inconsistencies and cock-ups (har har) from the start.

Continue reading “So… “Spouting Feminist Rhetoric While Carrying a Duke Diploma””

The Beauty Punch

Homemade peach cobbler courtesy of friends & neighbours makes me feel guilty. Scarfing down said cobbler while watchting girls get trashed on the Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency because of all too “real” waistlines ought to be in the Major Leagues of guilt, especially since I used to have the rail-thin model body that catty gay bookers in designer scarves so admired. But hey, now that I hover between a 4 and a 6, and am practically Jabba the Hut by fashion standards, I’ve become a hit with Mexican construction workers and grocery cashiers (it’s weight and class, baby, weight and class), and being fawned over solely by beautiful gay men is a bit self-defeating, really.

Speaking of girls and image, d’you really think we’d all be yapping about JonBenet Ramsey a decade later if it weren’t for her golden looks and locks? No offense to the poor girl, but the media’s pornographic fascination with her and her family scared me even back when I was a twelve-year old who could barely spell “pedophilia.”

Oh, and while we’re at it, the Annotated Lolita is going very well, thanks for asking. All those puns are falling right into place. It’s not quite a beach-read, as I discovered when I took it to Falls Lake today, but at least it makes me look respectable. Or does it?

Coming up tomorrow:

Do you know those takes on discrimination such as “Driving While Black” and “Flying While Muslim”? How about “Spouting Feminist Rhetoric While Carrying a Duke Diploma”?

Hm. It doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. But I am planning a rant nonetheless.

Welcome to… my balls

As an immigrant to the United States, I’ve been treated fairly well, even in the South. The “go back to Russia” (it’s Ukraine, dammit) comments were mostly spewed forth by my classmates who, as students at a poncy private school really ought to have… Oh, never mind. That’s not the point here, really. Race and class were on my side. I’m lily-white, and the aforementioned poncy private school really drove up my credentials even among the crusty “Ah’m a proud Americun, who the heck are you” crowd.

Senator George Allen’s little macaca cock-up tells me just how lucky I was when it comes to skin-colour, nasty classmates (and a few other rogue dipshits) be damned. Because it’s not really the “macaca” comment that bothers me (somehow I seriously doubt that Allen is “edumacated” enough to know what the hell a “macaca” is, though, as one astute blogger points out, why use a word if you have no idea as to its actual meaning?), it’s the “welcome to America” part that really sets my bad Ukrainian teeth on the edge.

Continue reading “Welcome to… my balls”

Fascism in disguise

I find it telling that the first commenter on a good abortion post over at Bitch Ph.D. immediately started blathering about “irresponsible pre-marital sex.” Honey, a lot of us womenfolk out there have extremely hot, extremely responsible pre-marital sex, and just because we don’t buy into your fundamentalist do-it-the-good-Christian-way-or-burn-in-hell crap doesn’t mean we ought to have the state policing our wombs.

P.S. A story of one abortion (oh no, what a whore, she wasn’t ashamed).

Live Flesh

Zuzu at Feministe noticed a perverse new article on Details, an occasionally homoerotic men’s rag, which includes a picture of the bottom half of a pig’s body, in heels, as an illustration to an article that supposedly praises “curvy” stars such as Gretchen Mol and Scarlett Johansson, among other things. Salon’s broadsheet is echoing Zuzu’s frustration:

…the “Fatties” label and reference to the photo gallery as a “smorgasbord,” and of course the pig in heels, simply confirms the high esteem in which Details’ editors hold women who don’t starve themselves.

As a woman who used to be extremely thin, and as someone who veers from enjoying my curves and the occasional ice cream sundae to crying hysterically in front of the mirror at night and wishing I could chop my hips off and feed myself to cannibals, I AM SO BLOODY TIRED OF THIS.

Can’t I just go a day, or an hour, without being bombarded by messages in the media about what I “should” look like? Can shallow men’s magazines stop having a laugh at the expense of those of us who do not snort cocaine for breakfast just to fit into those jeans from GAP Kids (and let’s be real here, there are plenty of normal, small people out there, but Kate Bosworth is not “naturally” skinny as one Broadsheet commenter claims; she was healthy and hot in “Blue Crush” and has since dwindled down to the point of resembling a couture-clad pogo-stick)?

Why is that the minute I travel outside of America I do not feel the need to flatten my hips? Why is it that I don’t feel the need to diet myself into oblivion when I’m in Ukraine? And hey, I’m not even considered overweight. I’m basically at my healthiest weight, and yet somehow I am not at peace.

I can only imagine what a size 12 woman would feel whilst looking at an article like that, but I’m guessing that all those asswipes in Broadsheet’s comment-section telling her to be a good fucking sport would probably fail to amuse her.

This is beside the fact that most of the women considered “fat” by the editors of Details are only really large in the bosom. Or is Liz Taylor in her heyday reall “fat”? And does that mean that the new “fat” is pretty much anything above a size 0?

How odd and discouraging and catty. Look at the VENUS painting at the top of this blog. Venus, the goddess of love, ring any bells? The editors of Details would call her a bloody porker and tell her to go see Dr. 90210 for a tummy-tuck. Yuck.

P.S. One reader on Pandagon said something that made me feel very anxious and sad:  “This is the kind of stuff that scares me as the father of a daughter.” This stuff is bad enough when you’re 22, but a whole lot worse when you’re 12.