Oh shit, y'all, it is on.
Failbook hasn't been pushing my buttons for the last two weeks or so. I was starting to secretly wonder if . . . no, it can't be, but maybe . . . are they reading this blog?? I do tweet them with a link when they do something absolutely atrocious. But they've certainly never responded.
This is typical of my relationship, if you can call it that, with Failbook. I email them, or tweet at them, or use their contact form to complain -- not that I do this very often, mind you, but I did it a few times when they started using "frape" like it was the new hotness instead of a hot mess -- and they never get back to me. Ever. Not even a form letter to say, "Thank you for your concern. Humor is subjective, blah blah patronizing bullshit, we hope you enjoy our product."
So, I don't know, I thought they could be silently reading. I have to assume they read my emails and were silent, so I postulated that they could get my tweets and stay silent, too.
Anyway, my point is, my ridiculous fantasy wherein they read this blog and say to themselves, "Shit, we are being assholes by promoting some of this stuff"? Shattered. Totally shattered. All thanks to today's post.
A woman kicks off this layer cake of sexism with this gem, which I have always hated with a fiery passion: "If a man says something in the middle of the forest and there isn't a woman around to hear him, is he still wrong?"
STOP. STOP IT. I know you think you're being cute, but you are perpetuating this Henny Youngman vision of heterosexual relationships that still, to this day, colors almost all interactions between men and women. Women nag! Men pout! Take my wife, please! Christ on a cracker, have we seriously not moved past that?? You are free to date and/or marry anyone you choose (if you are het -- we're working on it for the gay half of this equation, obviously). Why would a woman become involved with a man who, in her opinion, is always wrong?? Why would a man become involved with a woman who believed that about him? Can we not all agree that men are sometimes right and sometimes wrong, and that women are sometimes right and sometimes wrong, because as wacky as it sounds, we are all the same species?!?!
A woman says, "Of course." Shut up.
A man says, "Balderdash, we are always right." Triple, no, quadruple shut up. "Women are always telling men they're wrong" is an ugly manifestation of our culture's ideas of heterosexuality, but "Men are always right" is an even uglier manifestation of men's domination of women. Read some of the stories at No Longer Quivering and then make that fucking joke.
And the last comment, the one that no doubt launched it onto Failbook, is a man saying, "If a tree falls on a woman and no one is around to hear her, why is a tree in the kitchen".
Let's go through what that one sentence is doing:
- Telling a woman her place is in the kitchen; and
- Throwing in a healthy dose of violence, by way of blunt object trauma.
Lest you think I am overreacting, I invite you to watch The Daily Show's coverage of the 2004 March for Women's Lives (which I proudly attended). It's only 6 minutes long, and it's hilarious, so you should watch the whole thing. But if you're insanely pressed for time, skip ahead to the 2:30 mark, where you see that the anti-abortion protesters are screaming at the marchers, "SUBMIT! BACK TO THE KITCHEN! NOTHING COMPLICATED!"
So, yeah, about your irony? There are plenty of people who don't find it so fucking ironic.
In summary: imagine a train speeding along at 90 MPH carrying a metric ton of sexism. Now imagine Snidely Whiplash has tied a giant sexist douchenozzle to the tracks. Finally, imagine a trucker carrying a wide load of sexism is speeding towards the train tracks, because the arm that's supposed to come down to stop him is tragically malfunctioning.
That KABOOM reverberating through my little scenario is the trainwreck of sexism that this post created. Ugh, it's like sexist shrapnel is being lodged in my brain. Get it out, get it out!
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