Protected: 365 days

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

Protected: Bleak Expectations

This post is password protected. To view it please enter your password below:

Password:

[Lazy blogging] McCain

From popbitch:

For anyone that didn’t know. John McCain was at the bottom of his military class at Annapolis, but still got to pilot a fighter plane due to his father’s connections. He is the son and the grandson of admirals. He finished 894 [out] of 899 in his graduating class. Despite crashing five aircraft, John McCain was never disciplined. And son-of-single-mother Obama is, of course, the privileged elitist.

Well of course. *rolls eyes*

[Lazy blogging] Literally

Good heavens! I just discovered I have not updated this since long before Shakespeare wast a boy. You would not believe the amount of people that are totally stalking me. I prostrate myself in sorrow and beg thy forgiveness.

I am absolutely consumed with setting fire to people wearing Crocs, planning my wedding, and just generally being a delightful mistress to the servants. My day seems to be a litany of stuff and giggles from lunchtime to early afternoon. I am not complaining though. Perchance.

I swear on the bones of my ancestors, think of me as I battle mine enemies. You have my word! Until my paycheck dawneth.

Man alive! That was one of those ‘fun’ five minute blogging things you can do, before you realise that it’s taking at least three minutes longer than it should, and that you ran out of interest four minutes ago. Plus, it uses dreadful punctuation (now corrected).

Here.

——

In other news: it’s actually not raining. Lo and be-bloomin-hold.

Celebrity building spawnage

This has been on my mind ever since the newest celebrity babies (the Jolie-Pitt/ Pitt-Jolie twins) joined our sorry world. Children as accessories, then. I’m thinking of the adoptees from third-world countries, in the main.* I’m also thinking of the likes of the following (from popbitch of all places).

We thought in the West the days of child slavery were, thankfully, over. Yet for many of the children of celebrities, a life born into slavery even from the first weeks of life, beckons.

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt waited barely three weeks before turning their twins into cash cows, putting them to work in front of the cameras for a multi-million pound fee. No matter that the fee was for a good cause, it was their children who had to earn it.

OK! magazine’s repost to Hello’s Brangelina exclusive this week was to bring out its big guns, in the shape of Jordan. Her daughter, Princess, got to celebrate her first birthday by helping her “uncle” Richard Desmond sell copies of his magazine. Jordan’s willingness to tell the world that her one-year old daughter never wears the same things twice and has a hundred pairs of shoes ensured OK! had as many column inches as Hello.

And in LA, the Beckhams’ continuing quest for even more fame saw David pick up an award at the Teen Choice Awards. And helping make sure he got the most coverage from the event, his three boys, in matching outfits (and haircuts just like their Dad, to ram the point home) also had to get up on stage and act up, like performing monkeys.

Surely as concerned, right-thinking citizens we should support the work of the anti-child slavery movement by shunning these harsh taskmasters?

Children there, building celebrity cred since 1998. And you all thought it was about shoes and handbags. Well it’s not. It’s about dressing your children up in finery that costs a small fortune, parading them in front of cameras looking cute and just that little bit precocious, and selling pictures of them to whoever bids the highest. It has a sort of pimping feel to it, frankly.

—-

* Imma gonna save them there little brown babies from sure peril for what would they do without us selfless and beautiful Americans! I don’t want an ugly one, mind. Or a fat one. Or one with eyes too far apart. Or one with too much hair. Or one with too little hair. Or one with strange eyes. Or one that’s too big. Or one that’s ugly. Have I mentioned that already?

[Lazy blogging] TT

Trailer for Tropic Thunder.

Jack Black’s two scenes: one fart, and one ‘look at my ass’.

That about sums up his pitiful talents for me.

Shame Downey Jr bothered doing this.

Repost of another entitled ‘Rape trafficking interlude with Peridot Ash’

I want to pass this informative (and difficult) piece along. It’s one of those issues of which everyone should be aware. Most of us know about the trafficking of women for prostitution, but the problem of trafficking for the specific purposes of rape is a lesser known fact.

From iblamethepatriarchy.

Rare is the blamer who is unfamiliar with the concept of human sex trafficking: rape-o-preneurs lure indigent overseas women to the US, lying to them about the real nature of the “work” they’ll be doing, enslaving them under repellent conditions, and pocketing the filthy lucre.

Peridot Ash, writing in 2007 at Friction, A Sex Worker’s Weblog, points out that the supply of prostituted women already here is sufficient to fulfill the demand, so why go to the trouble of importing them? Two reasons.

One [reason] is obvious, to keep all the money they make off these slaves. The other, a point which most documentaries and news reports about trafficking don’t dare touch, is that there is a demand for RAPE that needs to met.

Face it. It’s not just the rare sicko. There’s a whole market for rape that these kinds of traffickers cater to. The traffickers lie to the women about what work they’ll be doing abroad. Because the customers WANT women who aren’t willing, who will struggle against them while they force them to do things and beat them. They get off on that and they’ll pay somebody to let them do it in a place that’s safe for them.

Trafficked sex slaves, young onions, are the murky far end of the rape continuum, the one that proceeds from the pornulation of mainstream media, escalates into your boyfriend going, “Come on, just a little longer, I’m almost there,” devolves into the mainstream with the winky, nudgy, boys-will-be-boys attitude toward street harassment, and climaxes with the date assault you are reluctant to report because you didn’t say “no” loud enough. For the joyrapist who’s keepin it real, there are prostituted women he can pay to assault. This shit is all rape, but the rapists are protected by long-standing patriarchal tradition.

I allude to the tradition that women are toilets.

Nobody knows how many women are illegally trafficked into the US to be sold as rape victims. A 2007 WaPo article chronicles the “outrage” echoing throughout the land when lavishly funded anti-trafficking initiatives failed to find them in sufficiently garish numbers. The Bush administration paid out 28 million bucks to save an estimated 14,500 to 17,500 annual sex slaves, but no sex slaves were to be found. $125,000 granted to a Dallas nonprofit only turned up 3 victims, goddammit. That’s $41,000 per perma-raped woman. Unacceptable!

Given my intimacy with the creepy manifestations of patriarchy, I find it hard to believe that in the whole Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex, only 3 trafficked women existed in 2007. The more likely scenario is that, given the subterranean nature of rape culture, traffickers weren’t exactly leaping to their feet, waving tattered lingerie in the air, and yelling, “Here we are, Serpico!” One suspects that slavers might take steps to avoid detection, and that they’d keep their victims so marginalized that they’d fall resoundingly through the cracks that our misogynist social order so conveniently maintains for just that purpose.

But even if the number of victims has been, for whatever reason, exaggerated, what of it? Trafficked sex slaves, real or imagined, form a significant chunk of our mainstream pornulated domination narrative. TV crime dramas can’t keep their mitts off the idea. Just last night I watched a popular cable TV show called “Burn Notice” (advertised on the USA network as “pure and simple fun”) which featured an underground dungeonful of Russian hotties in torn underwear fleeing for their lives while the smirking rockstar hero shot a bunch of people up. DudeAmerica can’t resist hot young prostituted Russians! And clearly, they can’t resist the idea that there exists, in some bounteous, sexy netherworld, hordes of kidnaped foreign sluts just waiting to be abused in the dank subumbra of their beloved rape culture.

It gives me difficulty breathing.

Vorderman ‘forced’ to quit quiz Countdown

Vodders is ‘forced’ to leave Countdown. I am outraged! First we lose Whitely* and now we’re losing Vodders. No, no, no!

Presenter Carol Vorderman felt forced to leave Channel 4 quiz show Countdown after she was told to take a 90% pay cut, her manager has said.

Agent John Miles said Vorderman, 47, had been told the series survived the death of host Richard Whiteley in 2005, and could “easily survive without you”.

Vorderman, a co-host since its 1982 start, said she wanted everyone “to know the truth” about her departure.

A Channel 4 spokeswoman said: “We never comment on presenters’ salaries.”

Vorderman, who is reported to earn in the region of £900,000 a year from the show, announced she was leaving on Friday.

Mr Miles said his client had offered to accept a pay cut of one-third, in line with a 33% budget cut being imposed on the show by ITV Productions, which makes Countdown for Channel 4.

But he said she felt she was left with no alternative but to leave after she was told to take or leave an offer of 10% of her current salary, and given 48 hours to decide.

Link.

I think we should all boycott Countdown. Well, those of us home at 4 o’clock or thereabouts in the afternoon. Which doesn’t include me. But the rest of you. Yes, massive boycott.

——

* Admittedly, that was not really within anyone’s control.

Repost of another entitled ‘The Audacity of Bodily Autonomy’

I’m still all out of my own eloquence and inspiration for posting, so I’m going to utilise someone else’s again. This is a post from someone who has no end of eloquence. She’s right on the button.

Surgeon sued for giving anesthetized patient temporary tattoo. The tattoo was not at all medical in nature. She had surgery for a herniated disc and the next morning discovered a rose tattoo had been placed on her abdomen below her panty line. The doctor doesn’t deny doing it. In fact he claims he does this with all his patients to lift their spirits after surgery. Now, the really interesting (and disturbing) thing about this situation is how people have reacted to this woman’s decision to sue. The comments on this article are just the tip of the iceberg. Many people seem to be outraged by this woman being willing to sue this doctor for marking her (however temporarily) in her pelvic area without her permission.

We’ve all gone the rounds about the politics of choice as it applies to reproduction. But the idea that women’s bodies are public property doesn’t stop there. Catcalling, comments on weight, comments on hair or makeup from strangers are all just symptoms of a larger societal delusion that women’s bodies are a commodity first. Somehow we’ve gotten stuck in this idea that a woman’s valuing of her body as a part of her self comes second because her first role is to belong to the world at large. Women who refuse to accept that paradigm and insist on being recognized as people first whether it be by yelling back at catcallers, refusing to let strangers touch them, or filing suit when they feel they’ve been violated are then castigated for having the temerity to think that they can dictate what happens to their bodies. Apparently we’re just supposed accept these ‘lesser’ intrusions and not take steps to reclaim that sense of safety because nice girls know their place and don’t delude themselves that they have a right to feel safe and comfortable.

Well, I’m with the women who yell back, who walk away, who press charges and file lawsuits. Because it is past time we got past this idea that being nice = being a willing victim that never complains. I don’t want to live in a reality where people think marking an unconscious woman without her permission is a-okay because it’s temporary, or he didn’t mean any harm, or there’s no proof that he ‘actually molested her’ so she shouldn’t seek legal recourse. I know I’m talking crazy, but wouldn’t be nice to live in a world where women were viewed as people first? Where people didn’t blame the victim, but instead celebrated her willingness to fight back?

Well said.

The comments on the original piece are, well, typical.

Orwell would be turning in his grave, innit

The phone rings:

Hello, is that Miss Hooligan (inevitable mispronunciation of real name)

Yes, that’s right.

Hi, this is somebody or other form Kwik-Fit. When you were in with us recently, you indicated that you would like to be phoned when your car insurance is up for renewal to see if we could give you a better deal.

Oh, did I? Ok. Well, as it happens, I renewed with my current provider last week.

Oh, that’s alright. Thanks for your time etc.

No problem. Bye bye. Hangs up.

——

Thinks: wait a minute. How do they know my insurance was due to be renewed?

Realises: THEY know everything.