theology&geometry

You know, Girls Gone Wild commercials have really soured my opinion of the steel drums. Before, I was fairly indifferent about them. But now, any time I hear them, I automatically want to throw up.

Twisty’s back! I did not get the memo.

Barf:

“It’s a girl power kind of thing,” Shafman says. “You’re kind of making a statement: I know I’m a woman. I know I’m the most sought after victim in regards to sexual assault, sexual abuse. So please stay away from me. If in the event you do come after me, I’m going to use my pink Taser to put you on the ground.”

“Most sought after victim in regards to sexual assault”? Wow, there’s a superlative for the yearbook.

Also worth noting is the potential victims’ very polite regard for their potential attackers’ physical well-being (ie “please stay away from me!”):

Amnesty International, an activist group, frowns on the C2 and any attempt to spread the use of stun guns.

Shafman has a quick answer for Amnesty International. If she had a choice of getting shocked or being attacked with something else, “I’d much rather be assaulted by a Taser.”

Yes, ladies, even when you’re trying to defend yourself from deranged rapists, it’s important not to do anything that could really hurt them. Just zap them with your cute pink Taser and then run away — slowly, I guess — in your stilettos. Girl power!

Ugh, fuck. I’m going back to bed.

Thaddeus Matthews brings to our attention the curious case of the pastor of World Overcomers Church (the church that brought us the crazy cross-wielding Statue of Liberty) who felt the need to urge the women in his congregation to get freaky in the bedroom to keep their husbands faithful.

From Thaddeus:

In the pulpit was a Queen sized bed draped in burgundy and gold.

Members were wondering why the place that normally Pastor Alton R. Williams preaches the word of God from had turned into a large bedroom, when he entered wearing a robe and pajama pants with his bible in hand. the lights are dimmed, mode music is playing,Williams at this point lays on the bed reading from the Songs of Solomon.

While still reading the bible his wife Sherrilyn enters the sanctuary wearing a long red feathered seductive fitting gown. Mrs. Williams very seductively walks across the pulpit turn bedroom and sits on the bed next to her husband. She closes his bible and begins to rub on him, and then lefts him from the bed and very passionately embraces and kisses him. Pastor Williams whose Sunday morning freak session is designed to save marriages tells the women in the congregation “This is how to keep your husband so the Hoe don’t get him”.

Mmmmmkay.

This is an old schtick, dressed up in gaudy bedsheets. Just a few months ago, megapreacher Joel Osteen — he of the impossibly smiley gums — apparently encouraged the women of his congregation to shop at Victoria’s Secret to keep their husbands interested.

Obviously you know what I’m going to say at this point.

[Sarcastic remark and possible ad hominem attack on both preachers.]

[Snark regarding the insanity of the people who must attend these churches.]

[General musing about the state of Christianity today, and how it is so pathetically off-track of its stated goal, which is to make people more like Christ.]

[Sincere denunciation of the pervasive sexist practice of making women responsible for the behavior of men.]

[Pissy indictment of the culture's insistence on placing a woman's highest power and value in her sexuality, and not just her sexuality, but her ability and willingness to please men with her sexuality.]

[Acknowledgment, once again, that the most subtle and ubiquitous form of man-hating comes not from feminists, but from those who seem to believe that men are sub-human animals who can't control their own behavior and must rely on the womenfolk to do it for them.]

Repeat. Ad nauseum.

Just when you thought Caddy Chicks were setting the bar for scantily clad ridiculousness, Tiger Time Lawn Care ups the ante with its hawt bikini-wearing lawn-mowers.

Bristle at the pornification of the mundane realm of yardwork! Chuckle at the utter idiocy of people who might pay extra for hot youngstuff to step foot on their property! Enjoy the hilarious condescension in this video! Here’s an idea, reporter dude: If it’s so fucking laughable that you have to mock your own questions, WHY EVEN FUCKING COVER IT?!

I fear for our society. Really, I do.

Shorter Globe and Mail column: Who cares if you don’t want to do it; STFU and spread ‘em to hang onto your asshole boyfriend/husband.

Those poor dudes, having to endure that constant need to pork things.

What’s so hilarious (and by hilarious I mean, of course, sad) is this quote by some pseudonymous dude:

“If men don’t feel respected or loved, if they don’t feel like a man, if they have to walk around on eggshells when it comes to their sex drive, if their horniness is treated like an inconsiderate act of selfishness – like typical male behaviour – then they will reassert themselves with another woman.”

And several paragraphs later, the columnist writing this garbage says this:

Most young mothers will tell you that after having their bodies taken over by pregnancy, and then the demands of breastfeeding and constant monitoring of a baby, what they would really like at night is to be left alone for a bit, untouched. They’ve overdosed on closeness for the time being.

But husbands still want their wives to view them as the primary relationship.

Got that? You shouldn’t treat an inconsiderate act of selfishness — the act of hounding someone who does not want sex for sex — as exactly what it is: An inconsiderate act of selfishness. Because, you know, it hurts dudes’ feelings and emasculates them.

Unbelievable. Completely predictable.

But this one’s more than just annoying and stupid.

Win a ringtone if you can click your mouse button fast enough to unravel this coy hottie’s sweater. Note how both of the unravelers look like your stereotypical unhinged, dark-alley rapist types, and marvel as (you can’t see it here, as this is just a screenshot) the rapidly exposed hottie demurely covers up her bikinied crotch as her sweater dress is removed by said unhinged rapist type.

Wrinkle your brow as you see “your” avatar kicked off the screen and proclaimed a “LOSER!” if you do not rip the sweater off your own personal coy hottie.

Scoff as the ad prompts, “Participation required.” (Yes, for fuck’s sake. We know participation in the idiotic patriarchal paradigm of dominance is required.)

Dry heave as you realize this ad, stupid and random as it may be (and, in fact, especially because of its stupidity and randomness), is indicative of the way our society feels about the accessibility of the bodies of women. If it’s there, brothers, help yourselves. UNLESS YOU’RE A LOSER.

[Who knows how long this ad will occupy the space on this page (I was looking up the lyrics to "AFK" by Pinback), but check it out if it's still there. I have not seen this ad anywhere else. Yet.

UPDATE: As of 1:20 a.m. on 5/20, it's not there anymore. If you see it pop up elsewhere, please do let me know.]

Working for a big corporate media behemoth has its perks: Decent pay, health insurance, air conditioning, cake when people get awards, etc. But there are drawbacks, too.

[Disclaimer: I like my job and would like to keep it. I am only writing this here at my personal blog because these are points I would be happy to make to any of my superiors if consulted; I write better than I speak, so I am, in effect, collecting my thoughts on the matter and offering them up for mass consideration. And ridicule. You know, whatevs.]

For one, you have to put disclaimers on your personal opinions because no one wants to get Dooced.

For two, you have to count yourself among the ranks of the dreaded MSM, which can make it tricky to rail against the dreaded MSM.

For three, you have to suffer through all sorts of insipid corporate e-mails from people you’ve never met who don’t know your name or what you do.

For four, you are but a cog in a much larger machine that will often be used in ways you really, really wish would just evaporate and go away, because they’re so horrid and your influence is so minimal that you can’t really do anything about it.

I allude, clumsily, of course, to this: Skirt! — a monthly women’s publication currently being offered to subscribers of the Knoxville News Sentinel (among other papers, I’m sure, including, very possibly, the CA in days to come).

I have to admit, I am not clear on all of the details of Skirt!. All I know is what one of my bosses told me when he laid his March copy down near myself and two fellow young women designers and asked us to take a look and tell him what we thought of the unconventional design approach. He described it as a publication geared toward youngish, successful professional women.

My first impression, based on the name and the flag design alone, was one of uncontrolled revulsion.

“Skirt!” is written in some vaguely familiar and probably commonly misused typeface (my guess is Franklin Gothic), and is at times stretched and condensed and all manner of other typographic abominations in order to achieve a sort of chaotic, frantic, childish feel, punctuated frenetically with an exclamation point. Which really bugged one of my co-workers for some reason. (Perhaps she had an exclamation-point accident as a child or something?) The ‘i’ utilizes a different typeface than the rest of the word — some sort of italic serif deal, which, on the website, is animated to be a blinking eye. I am sort of happy yet still queasy to report that there is NO EYE in the print edition. Small miracles and all.

So, based on name alone, you know where this is going. Tell me you’ve got a publication for strong, successful women and I’ll usually be all, “Okay, right on,” thinking we’ve got a political-minded, informative, thoughtful outlet on our hands. Tell me it’s called “Skirt!” and my brain will start shutting down. Suddenly you’ve introduced fashion and feminine markers into the premise. Not to mention the secondary verbal definition of “skirt,” which means to avoid or work around. It’s indirect; it’s passive.

Open up the tabloid (it’s a large tab, maybe the size of the Scene or the Flyer — though I’m thinking the Scene is bit taller than the Flyer — printed on hi-brite with what seems to be full color available on every page, though they don’t use full color on every page, which I’ll get to in a minute) and you’re met with the typical blitzkrieg of colorful advertising that greets you in any periodical. My boss asked our opinion of the editorial/advertising design divide, since it seems to have blurred a bit within the pages of Skirt!, thanks to the editorial and ad designer being one in the same.

The pages of Skirt! feature gaudy blue and violet display type, aligned anywhichway seems cutesy and fun, and hefty sprinklings of solidly colored flower clip-art. Think flower power clip-art. Flowers and text, flowers and text, cute illustrations of vaguely ethnic women with impossibly long nails and eyelashes and hair, flowers and text. Ads. Flowers. Ads. Text and flowers. Ads.

One of the more remarkable (and profoundly depressing) aspects of the design is the editorial photography. All editorial (non-advertising) photographs are printed in black and white. I am told that this is — and I shit you not — because women look better when not photographed in color. That’s so their complexions don’t look so icky in print.

So you’ve got brightly colored ads of airbrushed models sitting alongside somber black and white portraits of actual women.

I’m not sure there could be a more clear and ironic distortion of what it means to be a “real” woman than this policy.

The ads sing, of course, in full color, while the editorial copy whispers. “HEY YOU SHOULD BUY SOME OF THIS AWESOME DEPILATORY CREAM” vs. “Hi, my name is Mary Ann and I save lives because I am a paramedic who works 36-hour days while raising a kid on my own and raising money for cancer patients.”

It’s almost too sad to ponder.

The rest of the editorial copy within the newsmag ranges from the feel-good, pat-yourself-on-the-back-for-having-a-job type profiles of working/creative women to the usual hyperconsumerist agitprop about which wrinkle creams get the best results and so forth.

And then, of course, there are the little things. “Shemail” as a stand-in for “e-mail.” A section called “PMS: Problems Men Started (right now, featuring “Girls Gone Wild,” “Voting machines,” “Brawling,” “Office cubicles,” and “Homophobia.”). A page in the print edition devoted to the skirt of the month. And then this borderline crazy letter from the publisher about her leap into the unknown territory of publishing health and beauty tips for upwardly mobile honky women. Because, you know, that’s something that’s never been done before.

And yet, Skirt! proclaims its mission so loudly on its cover that I must snicker at the bitter irony (see Fig. 2 for details). A huge-ass tagline that touts its deepness and its ability to bring you to the light, to a revelation about yourself is, at best, a display in marketing hackery and, at worst, a cruel joke perpetrated on unsuspecting readers who, after years and years of being bludgeoned by the spiked mace of patriarchy-consumerism, may not know how to wield a skepticism filter properly.

It’s just sad, really, that any of this could be touted as deep and meaningful, when it is so clearly viciously superficial and about anything but actual empowerment.

But that is the way with words and products hawked to the empowerful woman and the patriarchal construct that keeps her in check.

That’s why this publication, aimed supposedly at professional women (which implies the twenty and thirty and forty and fiftysomething set, at the very least), looks like a joke; its design aesthetic is more suited to a magazine for tween girls who can more easily be wooed by cute flowers and choppy typography (which they see in their glossy mags every day anyway). And the copy? Well, it’s the same hyperfeminine/hyperconsumerist shit you can read in any depressing glossy fashion mag that purports to be Empowered Woman’s Best Friend.

Twisty, the patron saint of the What I Wish I Had Written, gets the last word:

This modern preoccupation with the Empowerful Woman was funny for a while, but it begins to wear thin. I predict that if a post-patriarchal social history of the New Millennium ever gets written there will be a hilarious chapter on this bizarre, buffoonish construct.

I allude to the confident, photogenic, entirely fictitious female who inhabits TV ads, “Sex in the City,” Oprah, and the popular imagination. Today’s woman isn’t a feminist. She doesn’t need to be, because she’s empowered.

She may only earn 3/4 of what a man earns, but she damn well has the empower to look sexy doing it in her cheapcrap push-up bra from Victoria’s Secret. She has the empower to demand pink products from manufacturers. She has the empower to cry out ‘I did it for me!’ when she gets her boob job; maybe she even has the empower to believe it. The empowerful woman is saucy, yet feminine. Clever, yet feminine. In her early thirties, yet feminine. Heterosexual, yet feminine. Stays in shape eating Lean Cuisine and sweating blue Gatorade while kickboxing in slow motion, yet feminine. Yes, the empowerful woman is many things. Too bad powerful isn’t one of them. That’s because feminine is all of them.

When John H visited Memphis back in December, he asked me what made me become a feminist. I said it came largely from growing up in a religious household where the man was, by virtue of his sex, the automatic leader of the family, and how that view of man at the absolute top was not only personally insulting, but also really impractical. Egalitarian relationships tend to make everyone more happy than those where sex/gender determines destiny.

Anyway, it was an incomplete answer, because I’d never really considered that there might exist a point in my life where I turned the switch from “apathetic” to “feminist.” I remember the approximate time frame during which I began to self-identify as feminist — spring of 2001. (I’m an infant in feminist years, it’s true.)

Tonight, I realized when I read this that there is an actual event in my life that triggered my feminism or, more accurately, upped it from a slow drip to a full-on deluge.

And it’s this woman:

Her name is Hwang Geum Joo, and she was a “comfort woman” for Japanese soldiers during World War II. “Comfort women” were actually sex slaves — many of them young girls — placed in “comfort stations” near the front lines, who were repeatedly raped and beaten and, in some cases, murdered. Hwang Geum Joo and others are currently embroiled in a battle to get the Japanese government to make an official apology to the now-elderly comfort women still living. The Japanese government has so far refused to make an official apology, so the surviving comfort women are imploring the U.S. for a little help.

Comfort women were unknown to me until Monday, March 12, 2001. That night I attended Hwang Geum Joo’s lecture in the James Union Building at MTSU. I was there out of my own interest, but also because I knew we had sent a reporter to cover the event for Sidelines, so I figured I could also help cover the story if needed (which I did in this not-very-well-written story here*).

The Tennessee Room was packed that night. I was moved to tears listening to this woman’s story, translated by Dr. Jid Lee. She told us that the Japanese government was recruiting girls to work in a factory, and absolute obedience was required from the occupying government, so she left her foster family and volunteered for the work. She soon found out what kind of factory she’d be working in when soldiers dumped her and the other girls in an old field and made them huddle together like dogs while they were assigned Japanese names and forbidden to speak their native Korean.

During her first year as a comfort woman, she was shared between officers according to their rank, and then forced to have sex with the soldiers — usually 30 or 40 a day and even more on weekends.

“I was good for three things,” said Hwang. “That was to have sex, translate for them and mend socks.”

Hwang Geum Joo said the girls in her barracks were all young. Many had never had sex before, and most had not been menstruating for very long. If at all.

Because of this, the girls who became pregnant were often not aware of their state. Daily injections of painkillers were toxic to the fetuses, causing the mothers to not only lose the babies, but also become sterile due to damaged uteruses.

The girls’ bodies would be swollen from both the infections and the shots they received to kill the pain.

A girl was allowed to be sick only twice during her tenure as a Comfort Woman. Upon the third sickness (if it prevented her from “performing”), a girl would either be taken away and never return, or she would be placed at the bottom of a pit and dead Japanese soldiers would be poured on top of her. The sick girl would eventually suffocate to death at the bottom of the mass grave.

Out of 20 women held at her barracks, eight survived. Joo was the only one strong enough to walk away.

The scars inflicted by her time as a comfort woman run deep. In fact, she showed us, by pulling up her garment and displaying the ragged scar where doctors had removed her gangrenous uterus and much of her intestines because they had become rotten from malnutrition. It took ten years of penicillin injections to get rid of the STDs.

She told us that she remains leery of men and boys older than five, because she’s worried about what they want from her. She can’t drink milk because of its resemblance to semen, and she can’t eat bananas because they resemble a penis.

There’s something that didn’t make it into the story has always stuck with me. That photo up there, the one of Hwang Geum Joo surrounded by blackness, is an amazing photo for obvious reasons. It’s a simple portrait, but there’s a heartbreaking story behind it.

The photographer, Matthew Starling**, met with Hwang Geum Joo before the lecture to take her photograph for the story. She was absolutely terrified of him and nearly refused to go anywhere near him, just because he was a man. I think I remember that someone else had to be in the room with them before the shoot could happen. (I’m not sure if she knew, but I’m sure it would have made it worse had she known that Matt is a former military man.)

That night, that story, changed my life. To know that a group of men — in this case, the Japanese government and military officials — could sit around a table and think of ways to boost troop morale and come to the conclusion that enslavement of young girls and women and repeated rape and beatings would do just the trick to make Johnny Soldier feel and fight better, well, if that doesn’t change your perception of the world and its attitude toward women, then might I politely suggest that you go off and die in a fire?

The comfort women debacle is a very sinister, very clear example of the capacity to which women can be and are hated by men. Not all men, sure. But enough. Fucking enough.

*One of the obvious errors in this article is the inconsistency with which we referred to Hwang Geum Joo. It’s Hwang sometimes, Joo others. This arose because we had conflicting information about Korean naming conventions, and which portion of the name should be considered the surname, which is typically what news writers use in subsequent references to the person in question. I actually still have no idea which part of the name is correct, which is why I’ve used the full name throughout this post. Does anyone know?

There are other errors, too, or maybe not errors but instances of clumsy and superfluous wording. What can I say? It was a team project and we were both new reporters dealing with a horrific, mind-boggling subject.

** whose work I adore but whose website will hijack and resize your browser window, so be forewarned

I know the Daily Mail isn’t a bastion of progressivism, but sometimes I’m still (naively) shocked when I click over there to read a news story and get to looking around at the place. Take their Femail section, for example.

We have another model dying from symptoms of anorexia, the “war” raging in offices between the child-free and parents, celebrity sex tryst news, and a reality show starlet’s story about being beaten by her father. Click the full Femail link and be taken to a whole page of vacuous and depressing stories about the psychological torture of rape, fashion, wrinkles, a doped-up starlet, the hell of being a “kept man,” and purses. All sandwiched around one story that is actually kind of interesting and important — this one about a right-to-die case involving a 30-year-old woman with a degenerative heart and lung condition and a spinal disorder. Why this story (which would be more interesting if it hadn’t been written in the Daily Mail‘s insufferable first person, writer-as-integrat-part-of-narrative fashion) is in the Femail section — the section supposedly reserved for “fashion, beauty, relationships” — I really don’t know. I suppose by sheer virtue of its having a woman in it, it qualifies. (The better and more obvious question is why does Femail suck so hard anyway?) But an icky match it makes up against that heinous tale of the dude who makes less money than his wife.

The pain that kept man must feel. Perhaps euthanasia would help him out too.