Lie Back and Think of England

I’ve been in an imposed non-blogging period, mostly because I can’t find an internet plan costing less than $4860986094 per month and I’m not willing to mortgage my sister to pay for my blog. Consider this a brief reprieve from the drought, motivated mainly by disgust.

This is a short summary of an article that appeared in the SMH’s weekend life and style supplement, the core message of which was that married men with higher libidos than their wives should be allowed to have sex with them whenever the fancy strikes.

A woman, 54, from Hobart spent the first 10 years of her marriage fighting about sex, always nervous about an unwanted advance. “He’d be snoring loudly and I’d still lie there worrying that the hand was going to come creeping over.”

This is the “issue”: women in heterosexual marriages being undesiring of sex with their husbands. This poor woman, who lived in acute and daily fear of rape, is characterised as being in possession of a Serious Fucking Problem, a “low libido”. I just, for the life of me, cannot understand how someone’s brain could read her experiences and immediately peg her as the problem. What about her disgusting rapist husband? That’s her Serious Fucking Problem.

I can’t even do the rest of the piece justice, it contains so many violently misogynist tropes. It presents women as the deviant, their bodies as commodities and possessions, strips them of bodily sovereignty, ignores their sexual pleasure, ignores non-het relationships, justifies extreme male privilege, advocates rape. It’s like someone presented the author (who is a woman) with a lucky dip of woman-hating and she decided to steal the entire bag and run for the hills.

All of this illustrates, I suppose, that the Herald is less a daily broadsheet and more a dissemination tool for sick social hygiene messages from 1952. Yay.

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Twisted

Hooters employee wins benefits after being denied work for showing physical signs of suffering domestic violence.

This is unbelievable. I mean, I’ve seen some twisted irony in my time. I’m a connoisseur of twisted irony. I ride twisted irony to work and leave it outside with a nosebag. But a woman being fired from her sexist, objectifying job because she showed physical signs of gender-based violence is just too much.

From the Hooters employee handbook:

Customers can go many places for wings and beer, but it is our Hooters girls who make our concept unique. Hooters offers its customers the look of the “All American Cheerleader, Surfer, Girl Next Door.” The essence of the Hooters concept is entertainment through female sex appeal, of which the LOOK is a key part.

[…]

SMILE!!! A big smile is an important part of the Hooters Girl LOOK and your stage appearance!!!

This is some pretty sinister shit. Obviously the objective of many parts of the entertainment industry, where it involves women at all, is to edit down the already inherently restrictive category of ‘woman’ to include only two-dimensional white femmebots between the ages of 18 and 30, whose tiny outfits and glittery smiles indicate their perpetual state of arousal and capitulation. But the Hooters handbook doesn’t even try to hide it; all the cards are on the table, right there. You skinny white bitches had better SMILE while you’re getting ogled. (And if you don’t, you’ll get a knuckle sandwich.)

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