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(Trigger Warning: Satire to the point of disturbance)
Yes, while on bloggular sabbatical I met and fell in love with a bearded liberal dude named Zed at a locals only Power Play Bar*, found coupled bliss in a pricey studio apartment cooking him organic lunch (but he cooks dinner—we egals know how to rock a feminist relationship), learned a second language while backpacking through Europe on my parent’s dollar and became an I Can’t Help it Feminist. Life is glorious. Weather is here. Wish you were beautiful.
Knowing full and well the confusion this recent conversion will cause, I should clarify a few points about my new found life as an I Can’t Help it Feminist.
Yes, I used to be one of those: a choice feminist. I used to believe women, upon examining their condition, could find it in themselves to make a different, less painful life.
Yes, I must come clean: I used to believe in choice and change.
I used to believe in autonomy, agency and freedom to move about in the spheres of feminist conscience whilst taking the most ingrained and damaging nuggets of patriarchal brainwashing and intellectually lobotomizing them.
Hell, I used to believe in feminist journeys.
I used to believe what we did in the bedroom, preferences for self-expression, the kind of people we are, were all part of a malleable feminist landscape—with bends, ebbs, flows, threads to be cut and re-sewn, again and again.
I used to believe in a feminism that could reject, resist, reform.
Oh how bigoted I was then!
(Granted, I was pallin’ around with those dogmatic radical feminists with all their talk of hope and words of encouragement and suggestions to get out of the hell hole.)
To all my new found allies: I’m SO SORRY I WILL NEVER SPOUT SUCH HATEFUL CRAP AGAIN!
Because, yes, now I know.
Whatever you do in the bedroom, you can’t help. No matter how many times you examine it, no matter how many times you think you might hate it so much you wanna go jump off a bridge while securing a chained noose to the perimeters of your neck and the scaffolding-whilst also aiming for the shark’s maw-no you can’t help it.
No matter how many times you’ve tried blocking thoughts about some older man insisting on you calling him Daddy while being orally serviced, it doesn’t matter. You can’t help it. You’ve had those thoughts for as long as you can remember!
If you feel you are a queer man trapped in a transgendered body with a hard-wired preference for paisley skirts and pin-striped business suits, then. you. are. It’s your biologically determined state!
If every time your mouth is without lipstick you find it neurologically impossible to emit serotonin then don’t fight your wiring! Your brain expects to find raspberry colored carcinogenic fecal matter lacquered to the outer extremities of your lips and when it doesn’t find it your brain gets VERY UPSET.
You are a feminist.
You.can’t.help.it!
I Can’t Help it Feminism is more than just a message of completely blind understanding, tolerance and acceptance. It’s the hopeful hopeless message that everything you are now is everything you have ever been and will always be.
And that, my friends, is a feminism ANYONE AND EVERYONE WHO HAS EVER HAD EVEN THE TINIEST INKLING WOMEN MIGHT BE GETTING SLIGHTED JUST A BIT can get behind.
*What, have you not been? Power Play Bars are about owning power. With play! Everyone gets a feather boa and black latex stick at admission. The rest of the evening is spent being randomly tickled by feathers and poked/slapped/prodded by The Stick. (Haught.) I was waiting in line at the restroom when I got three hard slaps to my ass. (Ouch!/Hot!) This was code for “Hey can me and my friend take turns c*nt torturing you with our steely pocket knives?” To which I responded by gently plucking two feathers from the boa and sticking one up each guy’s nostril (one was Zed’s!). This meant “Yeah but I’m a feminist so make sure you do it in a feminist kind of way.”
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Buried Alive 
Brilliant. That’s all I have to say. I would laugh if it weren’t so spot on.
Comment by atheistwoman May 8, 2009 @ 7:26 pmI DID laugh! Spot on!
Comment by Boadie MacLeod October 13, 2011 @ 10:43 pmYes, it’s trick humor AW.
Comment by pisaquaririse May 8, 2009 @ 9:11 pmThanks for stopping by on my first day back!
Well criminy, as long as you do it in a feminist kind of way!
Comment by thebewilderness May 9, 2009 @ 4:19 amha. Yes! That’s the spirit thebewilderness!
Comment by pisaquaririse May 9, 2009 @ 12:09 pmI can’t help it, I’m a separatist.
But I try to do it in a feminist way. I know that *equality* is what I should be striving for, but the appeal is separatism is just so, so, oh, I don’t know, *irresistible*.
Comment by Mary Sunshine May 9, 2009 @ 2:17 pmThat made me laugh in a painful way. You shouldn’t do stuff like that to people with a dodgy gut (I can’t help it).
Comment by Polly Styrene May 9, 2009 @ 2:19 pmOh goodie MS and Polly–more helpless saps! Yes that’s what this movement needs! What else can you not help??? Indulge, indulge!
Comment by pisaquaririse May 9, 2009 @ 10:32 pmHa, ha. You write good satire. Does this mean you’re going to start blogging again with more regularity? I hope so.
Comment by bonobobabe May 11, 2009 @ 1:56 pmYes BBB–perhaps with obsession even.
Comment by pisaquaririse May 11, 2009 @ 2:55 pm& Thanks ya.
Organic lunches and empowerfulmentalizement. Mmm…
Comment by Lara May 20, 2009 @ 9:34 amExcellent satire. Disturbingly accurate.
Comment by Laurelin May 20, 2009 @ 11:52 amHA This is fantabulous! And apologies for not noticing you’d started blogging again, I’ve been considering how to remain sane in an insane world, which does tend to preclude getting out much.
Comment by m Andrea July 27, 2009 @ 12:54 pmThis is an important post but …..the fact is if you beat a child regularly and tell her it is love and give love only after you have beaten her and are cold and distant the rest of the time, she will be hard wired to be a sado masochist. And that is a fact but not a fact ever discussed or acknowledged by feminists. The fact is parental care hard wires sexuality.
Now don’t get the knifes out. I am a radical feminist not a can’t help it one. But this happened to me and others I have worked with to-end abuse. It is in the case histories of rapists, killers, batterers and child abusers.
My response to learning my sexuality was all around dominance submission was to end sexuality with partners. It took a long time to find out that this had happened to me as we lived in dark times without any sexual education.
It is a heavy thing to give up sexual partners and beyond that the fantasies never never leave. They are there when you masturbate and are acted out emotionally in non sexual relationships. So some women and men give up. I think that we must help them until and unless they start to pass on their sickness by breeding. Then they should be subject to the same scrutiny and restrictions feminists now give male abusers.
This post while getting at the root problems offers nothing but ridicule for the victim of child abuse whose entire wiring has been twisted by that abuse. You are correct that by whining “there is nothing I can do” the feminist is wrong. First of all having sex while reenacting the abuse reinforces the twisted wiring and escalates it. Child abuse is the curse that keeps on giving.
So what to do? I reject sexualized abuse as much as possible. I recommend reading (Straus)because I know that therapists who understand the dynamic are rare and even those that do – have no answers. Think about how well the addiction recovery programs work. They do not know how to help us recover and we must as usual do the best we can on our own.
Most of all I recommend getting really heavy about ending child abuse. This should be at the core of every feminist organization. When we end child abuse we will end violence against women.
And the first step in that progress is to admit that women abuse children including male child as much as men do although men kill more children than women do. Women both sexually and physically abuse children in great numbers including those women we call “victims” of domestic abuse. Men do not report abuse by women.
So we need to stop protecting abusers both males and females. Children should be removed from both parents in DV situations until the non abuser can be trusted to protect. Intra family violence should be treated just as violence outside the family. Children who report sexual abuse should be removed until the abuser is criminally prosecuted and jailed. The other parent should be supervised and the child observed for signs of brainwashing. The actual dynamic of domestic violence wherein the women keeps dragging the children back into at risk situations has to be re-evaluated in terms of feminist analysis with an understanding of how the children’s sexuality is being twisted by the atmosphere of such homes.
We need to understand, we must look at the world we want to build not just the woman we want to to help. We have to accept equality between men and women, meaning real EQUAL rights and responsibilities. Men should not be forced to breed and should have the right to demand abortion. No one should be forced to reproduce when they know they are not fit. Women should not be allowed to carry to term a child the father does not want just as no man should be able to force a woman to breed.
We have to stop protecting ourselves and other women at the expense of children. Children who will wait for us in those dark streets where we walk alone.
Comment by Greenconsciousness March 13, 2010 @ 11:51 amWe need to bring the concept of children’s villages back to the US. Clusters of cottages where children who can not be trusted live with regular caregivers live in extended families. Sustainable communities with gardens, and small business where the children gain job skills and receive everything they need. Because at least 40% of parents are abusers. Christians believe god tells them to beat children. Think about the roots of violence. Think where it all comes from. Radical solutions are necessary.
Comment by Greenconsciousness March 13, 2010 @ 12:00 pmPS I did not take this post as satire because it actually came up a billion times in the movement and on line. I want to wear make up even though they torture animals to produce it and it is toxic and i look like a clown. Why? Where does that crap come from? It comes from where their approval,love and praise came from when they were three. No I did not take this post as a joke.
Comment by Greenconsciousness March 13, 2010 @ 12:05 pmThis is an important post but …..the fact is if you beat a child regularly and tell her it is love and give love only after you have beaten her and are cold and distant the rest of the time, she will be hard wired to be a sado masochist. And that is a fact but not a fact ever discussed or acknowledged by feminists. The fact is parental care hard wires sexuality.
No, it doesn’t.
It conditions them to it.
That is not hardwired.
Hardwired would be a sado masochist in spite of contrary conditioning.
The damage can be ameliorated, though it is the work of a lifetime to do so.
Comment by thebewilderness March 27, 2010 @ 7:41 pmWhile a sociopath may be a sado masochist, a sado masochist is not necessarily a sociopath.
One is hardwired, the other conditioned.
Greenconsciousness– I too was abused and “reared” by a toxic, abusive coupling of “I hurt you for your own good” and “God, you’re so STUPID sometimes. ” It’s shit, pure shit, that anyone must endure this–let alone in the most formative, innocent and unconditonally-loving time of their lives. I hate it for you, I hate it for myself, I hate it for the millions who are wrenched by fear of parental violence this evening. This is first, foremost and most importantly, my response to *you*.
~Re: Hard-wiring (see thebewilderness–on everything)
But I will add to it…
Think about the wider social implications of all this hard-wiring. How would revolutions have happened, change occurred, if people were hard-wired. For any major transition or revolution there have to be people in it who are going against their upbringing. There have to be children who were raised thinking gay/black/female/etc/on and on people are terrible but ended up thinking differently. There have to be children brought up being hit and beaten who decide that there are better ways to guide children. There always have to be the transition people (and really, aren’t we all “transition people” in some way?).
Now, maybe in your mind, the transition people are still “hard-wired” and, like you, end up suffering because they are in a constant state of conflict with strong urges. I certainly know that such people exist but I don’t think they are a universal fact (or an indication of any hard-wired phenomenon). My thoughts on this here are influenced by not only mine and others’ experiences but, as well, an incredible body of knowledge on the plasticity of our brains.
I am in total agreement with your expressed urgency (and intensity) for ending child abuse. Absolutely.
The legal and cultural flesh-ings of doing so? That would take another post.
“This post while getting at the root problems offers nothing but ridicule for the victim of child abuse whose entire wiring has been twisted by that abuse. You are correct that by whining “there is nothing I can do” the feminist is wrong.”
This post ridicules the whining. People who whine and make excuses perpetuate problems. Child abuse will continue to exist with concepts like “hard-wiring” flying out-the-mouth at every turn. So, yes, I use acidic remarks to expose the irresponsible framework used to relay serious issues. One can be FROM the problem and PART of the problem.
Comment by pisaquaririse April 12, 2010 @ 3:47 am