My family is trying to talk me into coming back to life. They liked having me alive — I guess it’s some kind of love thing — and with the holidays approaching they’ve been pressuring me pretty heavily to climb back into the ol’ meat suit. My mother keeps calling me up in the Smoking Lounge, talking about Thanksgiving dinner and Molly and Christmas trees and the various advantages to being alive as opposed to dead in a tent with an ex-parrot who has a pumpkin for a head.
Last night I got online again and cruised around the blogulofeminewsosphere, trying to reacquaint myself with the world. Having spent the past several weeks in a kind of self-induced psychotic break, it was a bit of a shock to be plunged back into the harsh glare:
A gang-rape victim in Saudi Arabia is sentenced to 200 lashes and six months in jail because she was out without a male guardian. Her husband protests the ruling yet still claims that Saudi society — in which women have virtually no legal rights and are the wards and chattel of their male relatives — is “very respectful of women.”
Christian fundamentalists in the U.S., no doubt jealous of the Saudi success story, are brainwashing their daughters from birth to think of themselves as the property of their fathers.
Some freak in Texas editorializes that the wearing of pants and unveiled hair has “led to the slow whorification of ladyhood.”
An 11-year-old gang-rape victim in Georgia (U.S.) is accused of being a lying slut.
Rape victims in Hungary are denied justice by courts and police who maintain that women who are raped are really just prostitutes or (you guessed it) lying sluts.
Western expatriate sexist creeps in Moscow are thrilled to discover that “women’s lib never happened here.” Indeed: violence against women in Russia is so pervasive that 70% of married women are abused by their husbands. Political will and funding to deal with the problem are virtually non-existent. Moscow, a city of 10 million, does not have a single shelter for battered women.
At Jets games in New York male fans form gauntlets and demand that any passing woman expose her breasts; the women are spat on and pelted with beer bottles for refusing. (One woman who cooperated was subsequently threatened with arrest for indecent behavior — yes, she was reprimanded, not the hundreds of men surrounding her.)
The Australian teenagers who gang-raped a girl and then sold the video of it as homemade pornography are released without serving any jail time.
The rape nightmare in the Congo continues unabated; many hospitalized victims are so badly injured their internal plumbing no longer works.
A feminist activist in Iran is sentenced to be whipped and imprisoned as punishment for advocating women’s rights.
Less than 60% of Americans believe unequivocally that women should play an equal role with men in public life.
Maureen Dowd refers to Hillary Clinton as a dominatrix, Chris Matthews calls her a she-devil, and a McCain barnacle calls her a bitch. (I believe “lying slut” is reserved for rape victims.)
The U.N. reports that most of the 800 million illiterate adults in the world are women; most of the 100 million children not in school are girls. Women earn three-quarters of what men do and their unpaid labor would, if calculated, equal trillions of dollars. Women hold only 17% of the parliamentary seats in the world, but they constitute 70% of the people living in poverty.
Yep, the world is still a shit pie for women. And that’s by no means a systematic survey; it’s just what caught my eye in the hour or two I spent getting caught up around the tubes. My reaction is twofold:
- I want to go back into the tent with Raoul.
- We need more feminism in the world. A lot more.
On the first point I need not elaborate; long-time readers will have observed that I have a tendency to disappear (into a tent, the Smoking Lounge, France, what have you) when The Horror Of It All starts to be too much.
I don’t need to belabor the second point either, but I do have something to add. Look again at that list of news items. That’s why I have no tolerance for anti-feminists. None. Zero. Feminism is the belief that women are human; it is the movement to secure their full human rights. It’s about stopping the rapes and the lashings and the mutilations and the oppression and the abuse. If you think that the best way for you to spend your time in this world is by working against feminism, then I’ve got no time for you.
And that goes for all anti-feminists, whatever the variety. MRAs with miniature dicks? Check. Christian fundamentalists who think Saudi Arabia sounds like Big Rock Candy Mountain? Check. So-called liberal dudes who become annoyed every time they’re asked to consider women’s rights? Check.
And the women, too, alas — though I don’t mean those true believers who have been Stockholmed into accepting their own God-ordained inferiority. No, I mean the women who cynically capitalize on the popularity of anti-feminism for the sake of their own self-aggrandizement. (You know the shtick — from Ann Coulter to Wendy McElroy to Toni Bentley to the trolls who haunt the blogosphere posing as “feminist critics.”) Since they are also women under patriarchy I usually hold my fire, but do I have time for them? That would be no, Bob.
So the next time some anti-feminist goblin shows up here and I promptly zap its tiny ass into a smoldering cinder, you’ll know why. I got no time for those people.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Why We Still Need Feminism, Reclusive Leftist, Recommended, Holidays, Raoul on November 22, 2007, 2:11 pm EST
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Raoul sporting his new head. Thanks for the suggestion, Sis!
Raoul and I are back from the Himalayas. Got a bunch of stuff to catch up on, and I owe you guys an anthropology post, eh? Eh. (Vocal mannerism courtesy of two weeks in a tent with Raoul. When he was a parrot he lived with a family in Montreal.)
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Reclusive Leftist, Various and Sundry, Raoul on November 6, 2007, 1:46 am EST
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I’ve spent what seems like decades of my life with my hands immersed in wet, sloppy pumpkin goo, scraping out the endless insides of orange gourds, shearing away at the rind to get that front wall thin enough for my magnificent carving to come. Pumpkin poo under my finger nails; pumpkin glop in the big bowl next to me; pumpkin rind in my dog’s mouth as she settles down to eat the contraband piece she grabbed off the newspaper when I wasn’t looking, contraband that will disappear into her stomach only to reappear later in another form, all over her dog bed and the carpet and my couch.
But not this year.
This year I’m in a tent in the Himalayas with Raoul, and there are no pumpkins for sale. My bag of Halloween stuff — carving tools, Carve O’Lantern kits, creased paper patterns from years past still with bits of Scotch tape adhering to the corners — is in the closet in my study. Or maybe in the garage. Or possibly in my little storage unit. Wherever it is, it’s not here.
I want to post pictures of my past masterpieces, but I can’t find them. I can’t find anything anymore. You want to know what my life looks like? Picture a mountain — picture Everest, since it’s right outside my tent as I type this: a giant jutting monster rising 12,000 feet above the Tibetan Plateau. Now imagine this mountain is made of paper. Paper, books, journals, books, sketches, books, bills, books, special offers, 0% APR on balance transfers until December 1, accept our gift today, your national forests are at risk, hurry offer ends November 16, dare to compete, pre-approval notice, please respond within 4 weeks, cash back, you’ve been selected, it’s time to renew, free shipping for the holidays. Annual reports. Sierra Club newsletters. Special Notices. And catalogs — Holy Chomolunga, the catalogs. Plow & Hearth Jackson & Perkins Metropolitan Museum Plow & Hearth Smithsonian Fire Mountain Plow & Hearth Land’s End Travel Smith Foster and Smith Plow & Hearth Victorian Trading Co.
Somewhere, deep inside this paper mountain, is my life.
I did find this one picture, and only because it was on my old computer:
I have no idea when that was. Five years ago? Ten? Who the hell knows.
At any rate, this year I’m going to be doing my carving online. No pumpkin poo for me and Raoul, by god. Thanks to the power of the inner tubes, I’m now hipped to the new, poo-free way to carve:
Pumpkin Simulator
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Holidays, Raoul on October 31, 2007, 2:56 pm EST
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Left: An FBI sketch of “D.B. Cooper.” Right: The late Kenneth Christiansen, Northwest purser and former paratrooper, who, despite his strong resemblance to a doofus elf on quaaludes, may have been the notorious hijacker.
Raoul and I had a fake fight last night so we could make up later, and while he was out of the tent I passed the time reading the D.B. Cooper story in last week’s New York magazine. Damn. Could it be? Probably not, but it’s a good piece anyway. Read it even if you think D.B. is just spattered DNA somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.
If you’re a young whippersnapper and don’t know about D.B. Cooper, or if you’re an old whippersnapper but you’ve forgotten a lot of the case (or never gave a hoot in the first place), Crime Library has a good review. My hatred of Crime Library burns with the heat of a thousand suns (just how many ad views do you need from each article for crying out loud? What next, a paragraph per page? The greed, the greed, people, it’s destroying you) but their rundown on the Cooper case includes a bunch of details about the hijacking that didn’t make it into the New York piece.
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Various and Sundry, Raoul on October 29, 2007, 4:26 am EST
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Sorry for the light posting this week. Raoul and I are on an astral backpacking tour of the Himalayas.
My new favorite drink: Sherpa tea, with salt and rancid yak butter. Out of this world.
Update for Sis: Here’s one of Raoul with fewer clothes on.
We’re still experimenting with different heads.
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Reclusive Leftist, Raoul on October 25, 2007, 9:25 pm EST
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And more importantly, what is they learning?
I was shopping for a new head for Raoul when I came across a terrifying place called einsteins-emporium.com, “The Internet’s Largest Science and Nature Store.” Please, god, don’t let it be true.
So, does that mean that a biography is the story of two people’s lives? Or is it perhaps the story of a bisexual’s life? Are biologists bisexuals?
Oh, that’s why they’re called zoologists! ‘Cause they take care of the animals in the zoo!
Who wrote this shit? Are they Creationists? Are they Republicans?
They’re definitely sexists, ’cause that crap is all over the site:
So was Thales just a pre-Socratic punk band?
Never mind — let’s just thank our lucky stars that men are still asking all those science-y questions. Cause we women are too busy getting our hair done.
Gee, I wonder if there’s a branch of science that deals with gender-neutral language? Probably not, since the great men of science have assured us that something as ephemeral as language has no impact whatsoever on man’s attitude to the world around him. Science is open to all men! Normal men, female men — everybody!
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Various and Sundry, Raoul on October 4, 2007, 12:33 am EST
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It’s time to come clean with the reason I’m still hanging around here in the Spirit Smoking Lounge instead of resuming my corporeal form among the living. We’re now at Death+39 days, and I’m not sure how much longer the old meat sack will stay fresh on the heart-lung machine I’ve got hooked up in the garage. I occasionally pop back in to take the neurons on a spin around the block, make sure all the synapses are firing, that sort of thing, but I’m postponing the inevitable re-corporealization as long as possible.
The reason? Well, there’s the smoking, of course, and the tequila shots with no hangover, and the Nerf ball games with Nietzsche (who has really, really lightened up since he died), and the infinite knowledge and wisdom thing — all that’s great. But what’s really keeping me here is Raoul. Raoul, my Spirit boyfriend.
I lurve me some Raoul.
One of the most gratifying aspects of Spirit sex is that you can take on any form you want. Yesterday, for example, after spending a rather embarrassingly humongous amount of time staring at the sexy man picture, with my Spirit tongue hanging out and everything, it occurred to me to ask Raoul to make himself look like that. And he did! The lack of a head is weird, though, so we’re shopping around for something suitable.
Posted by The Ghost of Violet under Reclusive Leftist, Raoul on October 2, 2007, 4:42 pm EST
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