"Do you guys get, I mean actually get, that our society is a patriarchy? Patriarchy isn’t just a gimmick for a blog. It really exists. There are actual implications. Do you get that a patriarchy is predicated on exploitation and victimization? It’s not a joke! It’s not an abstract concept dreamed up by some wannabe ideologue making up catch-phrases while idling away the afternoons with pitchers of margs. Exploitation and victimization is the actual set-up! A person is either an exploiter or a victim, or sometimes both, but never neither.
This means me! This means you!
This means that, until patriarchy is smashed, we ain’t got a chance.
Meanwhile, do you guys see that there is no other possible outcome, in a society based on exploitation and victimization, than for the Don Imuses and the Daily Koses of the world to shit, frequently, on members of the lower castes? Shitting on the lower castes is a privilege built into the system. When exercised with macho aplomb, it attracts advertisers. It creates prestige. It makes money. It entertains the masses."
so. at the risk of contradicting my own self, what's it going to be? is civility really a solution or just a more palatable hidey hole for the exploiters?
[and i really dig that top 'graph.]
2 comments:
oh, dear. she's jumped the irony shark.
well--yeah. smashing the entire all-encompassing System. the one that (if you read the rest of her stuff) has apparently been around since the dawn of forever, is unescapable, cannot be subverted, and she still hasn't ever come up with any sort of coherent narrative of what she -does- want. just mostly that it involves no forced sexual exploitation, femininity, gender roles, or capris, not necessarily in that order. Oh, yeah, and there's also (vague handwave) some other stuff. And it's terribly terribly urgent, which is why we sit around day after day handwringing about sports corsets and the Pussycat Dolls and Helen Mirren's whorish ballgown and where has all the Taste gone and not really talking about any sort of y'know concrete action. But someday soon--The Revolution! SMASH the oppressive vaguely defined System that means Everything Bad Ever! (in a remarkably selective sort of way, but still)
mhm. I'll get right on that.
wv: ickhy
exactly.
aw, dang, don't kill my feisty buzz! but. yes. you're right.
it's all rather futile, then, isn't it? i mean, what would concrete action look like? a reversal of the power paradigm? we'd end up with the same culture, but just wearing a skirt. a flattening of everything, a 'let's start from scratch' movement? i shudder at the Lord of the Flies images i have in my head.
i guess the so called revolution and the problem itself are suffering from a certain kind of intractability. (is that even a word?)
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