I just have to say...

...that I'm so freakin' glad that Twisty Faster has returned to my daily blog reads. I am not her. I cannot live my life as she does. I can't chuck all of femininity, all thoughts of binary gender roles, all of heterosexual sex. I can't go through life doing as she does; throwing the blinders off so as to really see and label all the patriarchal bullshit there is to behold. I NEED to move through most of my life in denial. Otherwise, wouldn't your head explode if you really thought about it that much?

But I need to read Twisty daily. I need to know that someone else sees it. And not only sees it, but can articulate it so clearly. I need to know that all those things I see on TV that tell me how I am required to act as this or that kind of woman in order to be accepted in "Dude Nation", all the times I see people like my dad who cannot even comment on any facet of a particular woman's life without first summing up her worth in hotness/fuckability points, all the junk science research that assumes the male default and show how females 'deviate' from that norm, all those things that subtly irritate my obstreperal lobe* on a daily basis but I can't articulate into words; that someone else can. Twisty does it.

She took nearly four months off from blogging, and who can blame her? I don't know how she blogs about all this stuff every day without going on a wild shooting spree (especially living in Texas. Talk about shooting fish in a barrel.) Anyway, she came back. And I'm so happy I can almost give up het sex forever.

Almost.

Anyway, today's gem is in regards to the feminizing of everything. The pinking up of unisex products to further separate women as being "different" from the standard, default product that men use. The marketing juggernaut that is making everything pink for women. For example, this bottle of Russian Vodka is now femmed up for women.

Russian Vodka bottle shaped in hourglass feminine shape (no head or arms of course) with a Marilyn Monroe-esque skirt blown up to reveal the brand name on, um, Marilyn's crotch.

Says she:

Behold the neat trick. First, you make women act like simpletons, broodmares, janitors, mannequins, and sex slaves before you grant them social approval. You call this behavior “femininity” and explain that it is their essential nature, and that any deviation from the program will be punished. Then you infantilize and ridicule the ones who get it right, and vilify and abuse the ones who get it wrong (you can also vilify and abuse the ones who get it right, because, let’s be honest; the world is your oyster).

With so much riding on it, whether femininity is performed right or wrong is an issue of enormous concern to women. That’s where the Empowerful Pink Marketing Juggernaut comes it. They package femininity, changing it a bit every so often so that the old version eventually becomes obsolete, and sell it to women as insurance against getting it wrong. This pink capitalist enterprise has the dual effect of diverting women’s income back to the male-dominated megatheocorporatocracy, while simultaneously reinforcing women’s investment in the bogus feminine identity and marking (with pink, the color of female infancy) the objects tainted with girl-cooties. The woman festooned with pink accessories, therefore, may be easily identified from a distance as a friend to Dude Nation.

Femininity, in fact, can’t even be practiced without stuff (which is one way of debunking the argument that it is an inherited sex trait). It is simply not possible for a woman without makeup and deodorant and lingerie and kitten heels and diet pills and clothes without pockets and anti-wrinkle cream that promises “glowing skin” and self-help books explaining the best ways to suck up to men and jewelry and razors and tweezers and lemon-scented cleaning products and boxes of Lean Cuisine in the freezer — all stuff that must be bought — to be fully feminine.

Femininity — selling it, doing it, approving of it, pinking it, drinking it — is antifeminist,
fool.

*The obstreperal lobe is the portion of the brain, discovered by Twisty Faster herself, that resists and denounces control and oppression. Mine is quite often strained and in terrible danger of forming a loud and ugly cancer that will take over my conformacortex, the part of my cerebellum that allows me to keep company in polite society.

Comments

[shannon]

All hail the return of Twisty, King of the Feminists!

And I love that pretty sepia pic of D and the boys!

[Angela]

I got so much of this in college.
It really is interesting.
I can't think about this too much.
I do like watching children's movies and looking for things like this

PS
I gave you something on my site