An interesting discussion over at Eschaton about the absolutely hysterical "gift item" that depicts Hillary Clinton as "nutcracker" has me considering the amazing notion that any woman who aspires to a position of power must be harmful to men's genitalia. As far as I know, Hillary's never expressed any desire to "crack" any man's "nuts." It's the simple fact that she wants to lead that makes it obvious, and obviously hysterical, that she's a danger to every man's cock.
And, I wonder what the converse would be. A toy Rudy Guliani that kicks women in the crotch? A "gift item" that depicts Huckabee cutting off women's breasts? A "novelty" Romney that rips off a woman's clitoris? A McCain doll that says, "I want to control women's wombs," whenever you press the button? Where's the Obama doll that depicts him fucking white men in the ass or whipping them and calling them "Toby"? If those items are "beyond the pale," how come the Hillary nutcracker is OK? How come the humor only goes one way?
Would those xmas gifts get the same grudging chuckle as the nutcracking Hillary? If not, why not? Because from where I sit, toys showing Republican men harming women's reproductive organs are far more spot on than a toy based on the notion that Hillary Clinton wants to do damage to men's penises.
7 comments:
Well, hey, at least they can't claim that she's soft on terror!
I haven't given this a lot of thought as I sit here waiting for the girls to fall asleep so I can be santa, but my first instinct is: good that they recognize that a few balls are gonna get cracked. You know what they say, "If you wanna make an omelet, you gotta crack a few nuts..."
--whiskey girl
"Hillary Clinton wants to do damage to men's penises."
I don't know about that but I question why men have to carry their cocks around for them all their lives when in this age they give the men such a bad time and don't make good use of them.
I wouldn't mind a woman president at all, but not her, she goes to frigging bible study.
The big nuts rise to the top and we have to vote for them, this country is screwed and will fail, like Rome did.
Then I will be able to say "I told you so".
Are you ready for it to fail? Because I don't think it will be that much longer, in your lifetime I think.
No, I'm guessing that you are not ready for that, but I am as ready as I can get.
Have a peaceful Getmas.
That was the oddest post I ever read. I don't know that you can discern much meaning from a stupid gag toy. I may have seen that thing on the Drudge Report a couple of months ago, and it may be a rip from Limbaugh's "testicle lock box", an item used by women to keep men under control. The lock box is not neccessarily a Hillary device or attributed to any ability to keep her man Bill under control. As for the female counter-notion, I'd say it is summed up best by one of the office staff, "all men are pigs".
I have a good friend with a collection of political memorabilia that goes back to the days of Andrew Jackson. If he gets a Hilary nutcracker, I'm gonna disown him.
See, this is the problem. We live in a country full of Bubbas who would conceive the notion of the item and then design it, and then contract the Chinese to make it, and then have it imported back here to sell to other Bubbas.
Hecate --
Klaus Theweleit's book Male Fantasies: Women, Floods, Bodies, History sheds light on the subconscious impulses of the Keyboard Kommandos, and it's not a pretty picture.
http://www.amazon.com/Male-Fantasies-Floods-History-Literature/dp/0816614490
blog review -- The Pinocchio Theory
http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=280
Male Fantasies was a wonderfully over-the-top study of the relations between misogyny and fascism. More precisely, it was a kind of left-Freudian analysis of the Freikorps, which was a proto-Nazi militia in Germany just after the end of World War I. In analyzing letters, fiction, and propaganda created by members of the Freikorps, Theweleit uncovered a configuration in which militarism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism were driven by a fear of dissolving boundaries, a reactive need to affirm the body’s hardness and invulnerability, a phobic resistance to the “oceanic,” and to flows and flexibilities of all sorts: these latter being associated with the maternal, the sexual, the feminine, etc. Theweleit both grounded this configuration very closely in the particularities of time, place, culture, and social class; and suggested how the pathology he uncovered had larger resonances throughout the history of misogynistic Western culture.
blog comment -- culturekitchen
http://www.culturekitchen.com/archives/002904.html
I think there is a crisis of masculinity at work in this country right now. The September 11 bombings of both the WTC and the Pentagon shook our sense as Americans of being inviolable. Our borders were penetrated; this country was symbolically raped, and it's not surprising that a lot of the rhetoric that has emerged has been hyper-masculinized: from country songs that emphasize that the USA is going to kick some ass to the images of Iraqi prisoners as victims of sexual violence and torture in our prisons, it's not hard to look and see this administration's hyper-masculinist symbolic of death and destruction raining down on those who dared to attack us.
"The crucial element of fascism is its explicit sexual language, what Theweleit calls "the conscious coding" or the "over-explicitness of the fascist language of symbol." This fascist symbolization creates a particular kind of psychic economy which places sexuality in the service of destruction. Despite its sexually charged politics, fascism is an anti-eros, "the core of all fascist progaganda is a battle against everything that constitues enjoyment and pleasure"...He shows that in this world of war the repudiation of one's own body, of femininity, becomes a psychic compulsion which associates masculinity with hardness, destruction, and self-denial."
From the foreward by Anson Rabinbach and Jessica Benjamin to Vol II. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies. ppg. xii-xiii
I would argue that despite the fact that sex appears to be everywhere in this culture, in fact, one of the main tenets of the right-wing agenda is anti-eros. Sex is pleasurable, and sex, because it creates loyalties between individuals, is a threat to the state. It's hard to be loyal to an abstract ideal such as patriotism when you love someone. The right wing in this country has also allied itself with Christianity, which, promotes the spirit over the flesh, distrusts the flesh because of its propensity to sin, and promotes a disciplined sexuality with its privileging of marriage.
Thank you Hecate, and thank you -ck-. Nothing like a little observation, honesty, and digging! Goes a long way!
Kurt Vonnegut, who's in Heaven now, concluded that the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA - you youngsters can look it up) didn't pass because America has made its choice, and said it does NOT value women equally as persons. KV, upon whom be peace, was very pessimistic at the end - he said that the America his generation dreamed of, that would live up to its high ideals, that came through the Depression and defeated Fascism in World War II - that dream of a humane and reasonable nation can NEVER come true, because power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
But maybe Kurt was wrong - I hope so. And certainly part of what may make him wrong is the fact that all things come into being, wax, wane, and fade away - and America's power over the rest of the human race is fading. The tremendous power to bribe and threaten others never translated into the power to make whole nations obey, because the power to destroy is not the same as the power to control. The ruling class of the MICFiC*, with their personal experience of disemploying anyone insufficiently deferential or profitable, cannot understand this, unfortunately. I am afraid that Hillary is, despite her lack of a Y chromosome, otherwise too much in tune with the MICFiC world view to be the President I would hope for. But perhaps, if she continues the decline of American power that the Bush/Cheney Gang has done such a great job with, she is the President the world needs.
*MICFiC - Military Industrial Financial Corporate Media Complex - a conspiracy to use, abuse, and confuse the people, to "milk, shear, and slaughter the sheeple", figuratively speaking - except the slaughter is literal.
Post a Comment