God knows what they’ve done to Fayne Turney or threatened her with in order to force this “confession,” but it’s interesting that they put a bag on her head for the occasion. Interesting because it’s popular nowadays to claim that the headscarf is just an expression of one’s faith in Allah and Muslim identity.

Is Faye Turney a Muslim now?

The headscarf is a cultural quirk that far predates the Koran; it comes straight out of the viciously patriarchal society of the Arab peninsula. It symbolizes female subservience and always has. If the headscarf were just an expression of one’s faith, it wouldn’t be obligatory. If it were just an expression of faith, it wouldn’t be forced on non-believers. If it were just an expression of faith, non-Muslim British women would be allowed to appear on television in an Islamic country without wearing the stupid thing. If it were just an expression of faith, women not wearing the headscarf would be able to walk down the street in an Islamic country without risk of being assaulted or having acid thrown on them or being dragged off and raped.

Which is not to say, of course, that it can’t be an expression of faith, or that women who actually want to wear the idiot rag shouldn’t be allowed to. But it is absurd to pretend, as so many want to do nowadays, that the veil is just some value-free ahistorical badge of Muslim identity with absolutely no connection to the extreme oppression of women in traditional Islamic society.

P.S. Note to neophytes: If you’re unfamiliar with my blog, rest assured that I loathe all patriarchal godbaggery with equal fervor. Islamic fundamentalists, Christofascist fucktwits, industrial-strength Chareidi men who beat up women on buses* — I hate ‘em all. This Sky Fairy shit has got to go.

*Hat tip to Foilwoman (and apologies for never getting around to blogging it properly).

Posted by Violet under Gender Issues, Godbags on March 28, 2007, 9:31 pm EST

24 Comments »

Every time I read somebody saying that patriarchy doesn’t exist anymore, feminism’s won, etc., etc., I think, try being a feminist blogger for a while. Or if you already are a feminist blogger, wait a bit until the shit finds you. Or try doing online research on anything connected to feminism and find yourself shoulder-deep in a slime pit of woman-hating so toxic it makes you want to weep with fear and despair.

I’m reminded of that right now because a blogger named Kathy Sierra is under some pretty serious attack. I don’t know this blogger at all; I’m only aware of the situation because Lindsay Beyerstein (Majikthise) mentioned it.

Go see for yourself.

This is not some isolated thing. Women in the blogosphere catch this stuff all the time. The most popular feminist bloggers rack up hundreds of these vomitous threats. There are websites — popular websites — where men indulge in this frenzy of hatred every goddamn day. Incredibly enough, these same websites often have long, moist-palmed diatribes against feminism as a “hate” ideology.

I don’t know how to help Kathy, except to leave messages of support, but I’ll keep you posted if the collective femblog brain comes up with anything we can do.

God, sometimes I just feel so fucking tired.

Posted by Violet under Gender Issues on March 26, 2007, 7:21 pm EST

12 Comments »

This picture has absolutely nothing to do with the post. I just think it’s cool.

Hi, everybody. Remember me? Right. The long-lost blog hostess.

Okay, here’s the deal: I’m fed up and irritated with many, many things. Not you all, of course: actually you’re one of the, um, things (?) that I find cheering. Not that you’re things, but — anyway. One reason I started this blog was so that I could vent about things that piss me off, but somehow I’ve gotten myself into a mode where I’m actually too fed up to blog about the things I’m fed up about. So, to try and break through to the other side (break on through to the other side, sang Hot Sexy Dead Jim Morrison before he was dead), I’m just going to start listing the things I hate. Feel free to join in and we can make this a party. Misery and company, yadeyade.

People and Things I Hate Right Now: a list off the top of my head in no particular order

1. George Orwell
2. Colette
3. Bush
4. Russia
5. The French
6. Traditional Home magazine
7. German toilets
8. Anti-feminists
9. Pornography
10. The National Review
11. Albert Camus
12. Wikipedia
13. Sexist asshats
14. Republicans
15. Comment spam
16. Trackback spam
17. Email spam
18. Ethiopia
19. Pakistan
20. FGM
21. Christian fundamentalists
22. Islamic fundamentalists
23. Jewish fundamentalists
24. Rich people
25. Whoever did the ad campaign for Clorox bleach
26. Advertising agencies, all of them
27. People who talk in corporate-speak
28. Traditional Home magazine (yes, again, and a thousand times)
29. Fashion
30. Karl Lagerfield
31. Hip-hugger pants
32. Rap music
33. Alberto Gonzales
34. Bush (again)
35. Tolstoy
36. Misogynists
37. Rick Tramonto
38. People who idolize famous chefs
39. Caviar
40. People who fly to Italy just to eat truffles
41. Sexist Italians
42. Karl Rove
43. Camille Paglia
44. Stupid sexist male novelists who think prostitutes all love their work and their pimps
45. Stupid sexist male novelists who think women find street harassment charming
46. That fucktwit German judge who denied a Muslim woman a quick divorce from her abusive husband because husbands have the right under Sharia law to beat their wives
47. Sharia law
48. “Feminists” who think hiring strippers to entertain at a professional conference is a feminist act
49. Sudan
50. George Balanchine

Okay, well, that’s a start!

Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on March 24, 2007, 4:49 am EST

56 Comments »

When I was a child I had a little kiddie book on the Presidents of the United States, with brief biographies and pictures of each one. I remember being bewildered by the fate of Andrew Johnson. Congress impeached him because he fired Stanton? Wasn’t that a bit of an overreaction? The book, you see, omitted to explain the politics surrounding Reconstruction, the bitter divide between the Radical Republicans and the racist Southern Democrats, and the fact that Johnson was an intolerable twit.

(Note for you young folks: in my youth we didn’t have no computers or none of them there intertubes, and a six-year-old was pretty much stuck with the information in whatever books were available.)

At any rate, this whole business with Attorney General Torquemada reminds me a little of that. He’s in deep shit because he fired a bunch of U.S. attorneys, which indeed was a very bad thing and a gross abuse of power, but it actually pales beside the bigger truth that Torquemada is a goddamn psychopath who believes the President is above the law, treaties we’ve signed don’t apply to us, and torture is A Good Thing. That this man is Attorney General at all is one of the most astonishing facts of modern American life. In a sane world, the memos he issued as White House Counsel would have acted as a permanent prophylactic against his ever becoming Attorney General, a kind of reverse-CV alerting everyone in the universe that this person was unsuitable for any goverment job at all. But then, in a sane world Bush wouldn’t be President in the first place. This is a guy whose big achievement as governor was to execute retarded people, for chrissake — and as a matter of fact, Torquemada helped him out with that, too. Bush and Torquie are like the Bobsey Twins of Sadism: started out relatively small in Texas, frying prisoners for fun, then made it all the way to the White House where they could groove by proxy on the rape, torture, and organ failure of hundreds of people. I bet they watch the Abu Ghraib slides down in the White House theatre for shits and giggles on Saturday nights. Kick back with some booze and blow and run those slides. Yee haw.

But what was I saying? Oh yeah, the firing thing. Hey, if that’s what it takes to bring the fucker down, that’s fine with me. Whatever.

Posted by Violet under Just Impeach the Stupid Freak on March 14, 2007, 3:38 pm EST

10 Comments »

Our generals are morons.

What a clown. How stupid do you have to be in this day and age to think homosexuality is a matter of “morality”?

Posted by Violet under Various and Sundry on March 13, 2007, 11:13 am EST

9 Comments »

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.”

Posted by Violet under Reclusive Leftist on March 7, 2007, 7:00 pm EST

23 Comments »