Saturday, October 16, 2010

How far back does this lash go?

So now Working Girl - a movie so brutally misogynist for its period that one could see women coming out of the cinema in tears of rage when it was released - is an example of feminism, narrating and valorizing "women's liberation" and "emancipation".

Even to suggest the film is a "co-optation" of feminism is flatly absurd; it doesn't even pretend to deal in "emancipation" or "liberation", but is rather unmistakeably a tale of upward mobility and the conservation of family and country: the American dream.

Tess is not a victim of patriarchy but of snobbery. Her working class identity is associated with the preservation of "traditional" values including gender hierarchy which the decadent upper classes have allowed to weaken; she will carry into the world of wealth and privilege an infusion of the homely virtues ordinary folk have safeguarded while the liberal establishment has gone off on its innovating excesses. (Her chosen radio network matches her, in contrast to the mad cosmopolitanism which endangers American purity and empire.) Women enjoy too much power in the world Tess seeks to enter, not too little; the achievement of her goals is entwined with the restoration of dominant masculinity in an unhealthily feminized milieu. Hers is a standard, populist quest of the Hortatio Alger type with the usual brer rabbit con artist modifications. That the protagonist is female registers reality and facilitates the anti-feminist backlash features of the story.



The anti-feminist backlash features are central and emphatic. Working Girl is a film about replacing Sigourney Weaver's threatening woman-with-a-phallus with Melanie Griffith's adoreably compliant subordinate - destroying that wicked woman who buys her own handbags and putting one who receives them as gifts from men in her stead. It is a film which strips, humiliates, pillories and expels a traditional female scapegoat for the sins of capital to cleanse the patriarchal establishment which emerges from this ritual benevolent, meritocratic, (that efficient market magic revealing true values as in Trading Places) but also an honest and upright realm of stable and honourable "family" businesses, where heritage is respectable and worthy, and in which there is a place, and rewards, for women who know how to be helpmeets. Working Girl - what Griffith is, like Jamie Lee Curtis before her, and what Sigourney Weaver, a wealthy woman employer, is not - operates an archaic fable with Wagnerian ideas of gender rendered as cutesy contemporary: the merger brings together Petty Marsh and Dewey Stone, an eternal story to restore the timeless balance that has been disrupted. The narrative revives the flagging male's potency and demotes "the woman on Wall Street" from partner to entry level with the same sequence of gender-elaborating events.

One oughn't overlook the principal purpose of all this restoration, this modifying of the glorified volatility and mobility celebrated by Trading Places five years earlier. The film's conclusion consists of a powerful plea for the natural right of intellectual property, and it is this plea to which the expulsion of the scapegoated masculized woman gives affective intensity. Baring and whipping the "bony ass" of the fraudulent uppity woman and advancing the concept of the unique, individually produced Idea is a single gesture which secures the troubled and threatened world of US capital via the culture industry - dominace in software (in content, ideas, images) is what will defend US capital from the Japanese lords of hardware (as Griffith/Tess defends Trask from Japanese takeover). Restoring fatherly authority in the American House is (as is typical) a duty to protect the nation from foreign menaces (the villainess is fluent in German), and this is bound up with asserting the right to exploit, endlessly, without restraint, images of women. The cult of Intellectual Property requires the defamation and destruction of feminism, replacing it (caricatured as the reign of a corrupt, lascivious, unscrupulous female despot, Marie Antoinette, Catherine the Great) here with a kind of philogynist patriarchy, because white supremacist patriarchy and its core proprietor Individualism are necessary to both its theology and its practise.


The future promised by this restoration and redirection of "progressive" history is hardly disguised, with a denouement eroticising overwork as the narrative climax eroticised dull business dealings: they haven't even time to sit down to breakfast together, these weary lovers. In less than ten years they will be Pfeiffer and Clooney glamorousing a condition wherein employers' demands on successful professionals endanger their children and don't even leave them the energy to kiss.

72 comments:

  1. So wait a minute- let me get this straight. Some crap Hollywood production from the 80s starring Melanie Griffith is supposed to be representative of "feminists" or the feminist "agenda" or something?

    Guffaw.

    Oh it'd be easier to get annoyed by this stuff if it weren't so patently ridiculous on the face of it.

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  2. This one's really got it all:

    Let's see... we've got women who catfight over "status" (get it- when women are involved, "status" gets put in quotation marks, and their interpersonal problems are just SO CUTE. We like to call them "catfights", see...) Women who are only working because they want to sleep around like drunken sluts. Women who are working but obviously really want the Big Strong Mens to take care of them- or at least, sleep with them a few times. And of course, New York is the only place in the world where "materialistic" women live, we've got that one, too.

    Does Archie Bunker get a screenplay credit for this one?

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  3. It *seems* like what this Lenin guy is trying to say is that "neoliberalism" (note the reification here- Marx would not be pleased) co-opted "feminism", so now "feminism" actually can be best described using the dubious hermeneutical practice whereby mass media productions are conflated with reality in an alarming attempt to ignore actual political movements and instead replace them with caricatures from sound and screen.

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  4. I know lenin knows better than this actually, but I really think he is working to justify Zizneycorp here.

    if this michael nichols, kevin wade, robert greenhut thing is "feminism", then "feminism" would reasonable be the target of a "critique" that outed it's "complicity" with neoliberalism etc etc.

    this is zizneycorp returning everything to the extreme square one byu this substitution of "the imaginary" for reality (justified by the insistance that we have no access to reality but only to "the imaginary")

    this is convenient because reactionary cocaculture is the imaginary and therefore the reality - its the evidence that proves its own accuracy.

    like the Wire is now baltimore itself; the tv serial fiction is the evidence for the "theories" and explanations which it itself asserts.

    Working Girl is the evidence for what feminism is and why it is really bad for women, an argument it itself asserts; it is both thesis and also the proof of the thesis...

    this has all happened really recently I think.


    so racism and sexism itself now are feminism and antiracism... like its a radical antiracist daring position to say "black folks can rise above half-apes with the help of 'white culture'" and its a radical feminist stance to berate women as unnatural for "milkless breasts".

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  5. Normally, I'd say 'One Fine Day' was just mediocre, but after all, it's got Michelle Pfeiffer in it, and she likes butch/macho types. Why, in 'Cheri', she can't even pretend to be this interested in this little Versace-spot auditioner, who's been looking at old paintings of Na-pole-bone of Waterloo, and he is NOT pulling it off.

    Since you two white chicks are so objectionble, and could never get da pahht, I must proclaim 'One Fine Day' a masterpiece, even though Arpege has tried to tell me stories about how Michelle was a 'bitch', (yes, she used that word in that case), when she just had a normal Hollywood goddam tantrum. And people got all nonplussed when Martha Stewart had the gall to FIRE someone because of incompetence.

    In fact, all of Michelle Pfeiffer's movies are masterpieces, no matter how shitty--but especially 'Scarface' and 'The Fabulous Baker Boys'. And I never even noticed the misogyny in 'Working Girl', although I never liked Melanie Griffith all that much; she was good in 'Mulholland Falls', but Jennifer Connelley had the sex-bomb number, and knew how to show tits.

    I bet neither one of you could get the starring role in a film bio of Betty Friedan or Kate Millett. Although Anodyne could play a Marie Curie who does BDSM on the side. ACTRESS???? You said goddam ACTRESS??? women porn stars are NOT actresses and neither are the men, except on rare occasions, and they are ALWAYS prostitutes (which is fine with me, of course, I enjoy the oldest profession, personally), but ACTORS! You have NO respect for ART at all, rilly just unb'liev'ble...and they are PROSTITUTES even if they go home and do little TV with the baby and act 'pretty much like 9-5ers'. Gimme a break, fucking for money on film is just like offstage (or on--there were some Lesbians in the East Village that did cunnilingus on stage, I unfortunately missed this great ACTING).

    http://dimewars.com/Blog/Janet-Jackson-On--For-Colored-Girls--Movie-Poster.aspx?BlogID=5ad4698e-0452-4976-b89f-b79add8d19e4

    Here you are, girls! More fodder for finding White Males at work on the Females of Colour again, they choose Janet Jackson, of course, sentimental favourite because no more the 6 years between 'wardrobe malfunction Super Bowl', and 'sister widow' of Michael Jackson. Naturally, my ex-roommie would be just as pissed as you, what with the str8 hair, and looking kind of like a beautiful porno gal to me. And I read Carol Connors's IMDb entry, she has a family and everything, and didn't even get std's from John Holmes back in the days of the masterpiece 'The Erotic Adventures of Candy'. Oh my god that was so fabulous when they fucked in that movie. And Gail Palmer went on the Stanley Siegel Show and said that the 'World Theater' was a 'nice theater'. And indeed it was. I have thought of their pregnancy for some 25 years now (you know, coitus is always pregnancy, although I ought to copyright that, since it's so profound. It's in my story about a hotsheet motel in Queens where John Holmes fucks Lana Turner and Jeff Stryker fucks Sandra Dee, and then the guys get it on with each other. Dee and Turner were too mother/daughter to have sex, esp. since Lana had sent Cheryl to reform school not for killing Gorgeous Johnny, but for fucking him (it made her mad, and she was lucky she didn't kill them both--oh MAN, you should see the old 'Postman Only Rings Twice'--Lana is so gorgeous it can't even be believed!

    But Arpege could play Susan Sontag and Gloria Steinem, and Anodyne play Jane Goodall in the jungles posing for National Geographic.

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  6. "In fact, all of Michelle Pfeiffer's movies are masterpieces, no matter how shitty"

    what about batman returns?

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  7. Well, I guess it rilly is true that there's only a certain kind of highly intellectual nerd who goes for the 'bony ass type'. Of course, since you are looking for a full propagation of 'women with a phallus', you don't mind that at all. I tell you something, though, gals, the 'woman with a phallus' is still so in the minority that you are now going to need to resort to Meryl Streep in 'The Devil Wears Prada'. Cause she's got it. And this happens to be the worst piece of shit movie I've nearly ever seen, and she herself has done plenty (although her Lesbian in 'The Hours' is nice and grubby--many Lesbians are as into this, how you say, 'overly casual look' as are the nellie queens into flossing their teeth on the street).

    Now I think Hilary Clinton is an exemplary 'woman with a phallus'. She just ignored Bill's dalliance with that zaftig young intern, and went onto the World Platform, scaring many nations into submission which needed it.

    "Baring and whipping the "bony ass" of the fraudulent uppity woman and advancing the concept of the unique, individually produced Idea is a single gesture which secures the troubled and threatened world of US capital via the culture industry -"

    That's the best howler I've read in a long time, Arpege. I knew you could do it. Other bony-assed uppity women include this woman I know very well, used to be a good friend of mine, but now that she's widowed, she's 'seen the world and is back into falling in love with women'. She's not just 'bony-ass', she's also boring, and walks in this weird loping way which even her 100% Lesbian aunt (who is still a pretty good friend of mine) doesn't even do. I saw her on the street yesterday, with this slumped shoulders and long stride. After all, what we want is to get rid of all 'traditional feminine characteristics' that make men want to penetrate women, now don't we? Now do you have any idea why most men (including some of us who usually work the male johns) would prefer to penetrate Lana Turner than, say, Julie Andrews, who is definitely so bony-ass that she finally 'came out' as having tits in 'SOB', I think, but I don't really care if she's got big tits or not, they're still hers, and that's bad news.

    Of course, what we are looking for, and Arpege has always indicated this, is how a man can be attracted to a woman he's not by nature attracted to. It doesn't matter what the woman wants, including bags in the David Lynch ad, she ought to be able to have it, because it's impossible that the 'original working class' could be Capitalist, even if they bought a Rolls-Royce the way Jane Fonda did before she started going to a Baptist Church of Colour in Atlanta, and refused to listen to Buddhists after she undid her tits. Now Anodyne, I know you don't think getting your tits fixed is as good a career opportunity as doing 'dorky things in labs', but you have expressed the understanding that some women may have to do this, but this means they have to kill the man after they've made the money off his desire to penetrate this boob-job woman. So now, I ask you the all-important question: IS Jane Fonda the only woman insane enough to get her tits fixed and then feel guilty enough to pay BIG MONEY to get them UNFIXED, and 'jus' be natural'. Now, as we all know, Tory Spelling, known for being rich as holy hell (and her mama's 'understated apt. in LA is twice the amount of all 13 homes of John and Cindy McCain, this is after she moved out of that Spelling house where they imported real snow for Xmas), did lie about getting her tits fixed, but this didn't cause nearly as much expenditure as getting them fixed and then letting the air out (as with a tire), or getting the implants delicately removed.

    Thank you.

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  8. "what about batman returns?"

    Yes, that is a perfect example, lad. It is a shitty movie and a masterpiece nonetheless. I have to teach a lesson here, so I must be firm.

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  9. michelle pfeiffer - you puzzled me a minute there, but now i remember - I heard that on a recent film she gave a pa as a gift some soaps that the pa herself had delivered to her as just PART of a gidt including a spa visit or something. She kept the spa visit but gave the pa her gift soaps.

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  10. she is absurdly beautiful though, or was once. I bet Age of Innocence is even good in versions that are dubbed.

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  11. "women porn stars are NOT actresses and neither are the men, except on rare occasions, and they are ALWAYS prostitutes" - well not actresses maybe but not prostitutes, no no. not those stars of yore like gloria leonard or tracy lords; they made a lot of money.

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  12. "she is absurdly beautiful though, or was once."

    Oh thank god we agree on something. No, she still is, and was incredibly so in 'Cheri'. She's just 50, that's not that old anymore. But she doesn't get many parts at all--Nicole Kidman gets everything for some years now. And I guess the Jolie/Pitt woman may get some of the fluff, I don't keep up closely. That whole movie a lot of people didn't like who know the Colette (somehow I keep forgetting to read it, and I love the whole idea of Colette), but the problem even without getting upset by Frears's direction (I liked all the decadent sumptuousness) was just that Rupert Friend was not charismatic enough. It needed like the young Alain Delon or this not very talented gigolo-husband-actor lives down the street, and is actually married to this much older psychiatrist woman, who is OUT OF HER MIND! She started telling me at the Food Emporium, me a PERFECT STRANGER, 'my husband's not making enough money...' but he is absolutely the right look for this 'pet boy', and had a role in a B'way show just called 'Beautiful Young Man'. But Rupert Friend was not good. Kathy Bates was hilarious, though, I had a blast with her. She was at a ballet performance I went to recently, she's funny just being around her.

    Oh. My. God. This couple have a Samoyad named 'Chauncey'. They are so ridiculous. Should I read the Colette novella? I guess that goes without saying, I don't know why I've never gotten around to reading her thoroughly.

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  13. So now Working Girl - a movie so brutally misogynist for its period that one could see women coming out of the cinema in tears of rage when it was released - is an example of "feminism".

    Would you kindly point me to the bit in Seymour's essay where this claim is made? It seems to me that he's saying the exact opposite:

    "Nichols, a liberal, produced something stunningly Reaganite... As a story about female liberation, the message appears to be that emancipation is found through an alliance with patriarchs and union-busting Reaganite capitalists, in enmity with envious self-serving women, and consists of rising above your inferiors. Neoliberal capitalism thus positions itself as the revolutionary force driving women's liberation, in the form of a vibrant, dynamic meritocracy."

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  14. "Would you kindly point me to the bit in Seymour's essay where this claim is made?"

    You quote it yourself:

    Neoliberal capitalism thus positions itself as the revolutionary force driving women's liberation

    What do you understand "women's liberation" to mean?

    The assertion is that this movie depicts "women's liberation" (attributing it to "neoliberal capitalism" although in fact it is actually with the help of a regulatory protectionist measure - media ownership laws - that the protagonist Tess achieves her advancement) when it clearly does not; it clearly depicts women's vilification, containment, chastisement, demotion and subordination. The powerful woman, wicked as woman and to feminise, thus other, the wickedness of the ruling class, is destroyed and the good woman, the truly feminine woman whose femininity makes the man masculine and restores the proper order of things, the feminine woman content with her subordinate role, is vindicated.

    Does that help?

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  15. In other words here:

    Neoliberal capitalism thus positions itself as the revolutionary force driving women's liberation

    that says: "this film Working Girl depicts women's liberation and valorizes it and through it, valorizes that to which it is attributed ("neoliberal capitalism)"

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  16. "Does that help?" No, not at all.

    First of all, the post has "feminism" in quotation marks, and yet the word doesn't appear that all in Seymour's piece, so that's misleading for a start. Secondly, the film transparently claims to be about female emancipation in the workplace, so Seymour is not wrong there. But to suggest that he's in any way endorsing the claim is just ridiculous - he does nothing in fact except take it apart.

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  17. (And hey, neoliberalism also claims to have a solution to poverty, but you wouldn't call it "socialist" for this reason, would you? Although it has been tried.)

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  18. I have seen people argue that Working Girl is an allegory of revolution with Tess the working class overthrowing Katherine the ruling class. That's much the way fans read the Wire no? Characters representing forces, Marlo = "unencumbered capitalism", etc..


    "he post has "feminism" in quotation marks, and yet the word doesn't appear that all in Seymour's piece,"

    well it does appear in the comments doesn't it? And movies valorizing "women's liberation" and "women's emacipation" can be described intelligibly as feminist. If you don't want to accept that, that's really fine with me. I'll find it difficult to believe your sincerity though, not that this matters.

    "the film transparently claims to be about female emancipation in the workplace"

    to be about "female emancipation in the workplace"? This is how you describe Tess' having her ideas stolen and Katherine Parker's firing? Or Tess getting an office on a middle floor and a secretary of her own? Or what exactly?

    And is this "female emancipation in the workplace" depicted as nice or nasty? Something we are invited to cheer or deplore?

    "neoliberalism also claims to have a solution to poverty, but you wouldn't call it "socialist" for this reason"

    I didn't call neoliberalism feminist, did I? But you and leninino have advanced the proposition that there is a "remarkable similarity between 'liberating' feminism and 'liberating' capitalism and...the desire for emancipation...[look]s wholly interchangeable with the desire to buy more things."

    I think you're wrong wrong wrong and pink sexist pigs! Sorry. No offense, but I do! Feminism isn't like capitalism AT ALL - your pink piggy chauvinism is! So there. Now shoot me.

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  19. "the post has "feminism" in quotation marks, and yet the word doesn't appear that all in Seymour's piece, so that's misleading for a start."

    Okay, well, maybe a little, if you never saw scare quotes, I guess. I'll change that, to be clear.

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  20. to be about "female emancipation in the workplace"? This is how you describe Tess' having her ideas stolen and Katherine Parker's firing? Or Tess getting an office on a middle floor and a secretary of her own? Or what exactly?

    It’s called Working Girl, for crying out loud.

    And is this "female emancipation in the workplace" depicted as nice or nasty? Something we are invited to cheer or deplore?

    Cheer, for sure. Like in The Devil Wears Prada. But that’s neither here nor there. A lot of people and a lot of groups make claims to be either feminists or socialists. Surely if you have an interest in either of these things then it behoves to you to evaluate those claims, which, it seems to me, is what Seymour does, and in a way that is not antipathetic to your own reading of the film. I’m not sure how you actually get to attribute to him the syllogism Working Girl = Feminism, Working Girl = Neoliberal, Neoliberalism = Bad therefore Feminism = Bad. I don’t think it’s where he’s going with it at all. But that obviously is just me, nobody seems to have taken it up in the comments.

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  21. " But to suggest that he's in any way endorsing the claim is just ridiculous - he does nothing in fact except take it apart."

    Take what claim apart? The claim that the film depicts "Neoliberal capitalism... as the revolutionary force driving women's liberation"? It's his own claim; you just quoted it.

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  22. It’s called Working Girl, for crying out loud.

    Yes Giovanni, but in English this means "prostitute."

    For Crying. Out. Loud.

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  23. Hooker, that is. Streetwalker. Member of the oldest profession.

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  24. Take what claim apart? The claim that the film depicts "Neoliberal capitalism... as the revolutionary force driving women's liberation"?

    Nope, the claim that it's a feminist film.

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  25. (The other claim, that the film depicts "Neoliberal capitalism... as the revolutionary force driving women's liberation", squares with my recollection of the film. That surely doesn't mean that neoliberal capitalism *is* such a revolutionary force, and none of us are about to attribute that thought to Mr. Seymour, surely. But that's note what this post says - this post says that Seymour claimed that WG is an example of feminism. To which my answer would be: eh?)

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  26. " But that’s neither here nor there."

    Well, we've been here before, and as I have said I think any interpretation that requires declaring major elements of the object "neither here nor there" shows its weakness. Obviously how we are to feel about the events depicted is both here and there, and dismissing this as irrelevant suggests to me a kind of propagandistic approach to the reading, a determination to trim the object to fit your reading rather than to account for the object. How we feel about the characters, their deeds, their positions, their fates, is what needs to be accounted for, it seems to me.

    "in a way that is not antipathetic to your own reading of the film."

    I have not the slightest doubt that Richard's reading and mine are identical actually. I think we see product like this very similarly. But. What is happening here is a need to find an evil feminism that would justify a certain critique that you have both bought into I think - this race to the bottom, feminism is "naked greed" "selfishness" and "consumerism", all about "individual" gratification, an expensive italian briefcase, a job, a condo, etc. And one cannot really find this among the products of people who call themselves feminists, not even the depraved Americans at Feministing, so Mike Nichols and Robert Greenhut's bit of immensely profitable cocaculture will have to serve as the example of this evil vain "complicit" feminism that needs to be scourged.

    The problem is it's not even pretending to be feminist. It is straight up backlash - it is about toppling the woman who has risen too high and reinstating a femininity that is nbot wholly abject and grovelling, not barefoot and pregnant, but is willingly subordinate to men, sexy, smart and still submissive, the girl friday, the trophy, the suitable companion for a dominant, successful man.

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  27. Yes Giovanni, but in English this means "prostitute."

    Oh, for sure, and I'm not disagreeing for a minute with the view that it's a brutally mysoginistic film. It's just that its mysoginy isn't at all at odds with its depiction of neoliberalism as an instrument of female emancipation in the workplace - quite the contrary.

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  28. "Nope, the claim that it's a feminist film."

    Can you kindly point me to the part of the text where he claims it is not?

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  29. Can you kindly point me to the part of the text where he claims it is not?

    Nice try, but if you're keen to go for the counter-intuitive polemic, then the burden of proof is all on you I'm afraid. The post (I'm fairly confused about who wrote it and who I'm talking to, not that it bothers me) made a pretty strong claim, quotation mark at all. Let's see some textual evidence for it. Otherwise I'm simply going to have to point out the bleeding obvious, namely that saying "Sarah Palin claims to be a feminist" - a factual empirical statement - is not quite the same as saying "Sarah Palin is a feminist".

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  30. "ts depiction of neoliberalism as an instrument of female emancipation in the workplace - quite the contrary."

    I believe that you think this but I can't guess why unless you help me follow. Can you be specific here? What are you referring to?

    How is "neoliberalism" represented? How does "female" appear to be signified? What suggests "emancipation" to you? How does the film attribute this emancipation of female(s) to neoliberalism?

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  31. "Let's see some textual evidence for it."

    Textual evidence for what?

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  32. only me here, lcc, as qlipoth because it happened that way when i took the quotations off feminism.

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  33. For the claim that Seymour wrote that Working Girl is an example of feminism. Are you just messing with me at this point?

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  34. " the counter-intuitive polemic"

    nothing of the kind. you are unique in your incomprehension. look at the comments - pinkscare's for example. everyone but you understands Leninino is saying the film is an example of feminism adapted to or "co-opted" by reaganite propaganda.

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  35. Very well, I'm clearly wasting your time.

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  36. pinkscare:

    "As a story about female liberation, the message appears to be that emancipation is found through an alliance with patriarchs and union-busting Reaganite capitalists, in enmity with envious self-serving women, and consists of rising above your inferiors. Neoliberal capitalism thus positions itself as the revolutionary force driving women's liberation, in the form of a vibrant, dynamic meritocracy."

    Excellent post. I found it interesting that the above story of women's "liberation" told within this film is more or less, I take it, the image of "feminism" that Walter Benn-Michaels uses to argue against women's liberation tout court. He does the same with anti-racist struggle. Now, obviously these are terrible arguments he's giving.

    But what really frustrates me, is that one would have to be extremely ignorant of history to be in a position to buy his caricatures of feminism and anti-racism. It's almost as though marxist-feminism and socialist feminism of the 70s never happened for him (not to speak of multitudes of work since then)...as though all of the social movements involved in women's liberation have only ever demanded this neoliberal model of "liberation". That guy is a total fraud.



    You are the only person I think who does not accept "a story about female liberation" that sees this liberation as positive to mean a feminist story; most people understanding that "women's liberation" is an alternative term for "feminism".

    no, not messing at all.

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  37. Not wasting my time though you may try to by making non-specific sort of judge-at-the-bench demands for more textual evidence. I can be a lot but lacking detail and specifics in my arguments is not something of which I think I can be justly accused.

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  38. he point is leninino is using this as an axampple of revolutionary radical rightism - feminist, neoliberal, a movie about liberation and the future!

    on the contrary, it is a conservative film. It champions traditional family values, traditional protectionist nationalist capitalism, traditional American dream mythology, through the ample use of traditional imagery and ideas - radio, the boat of immigrants, Pygmalion, the screwball comedy, a main character reminiscent of Judy Holiday.

    And it suggests all will be well because of America's traditional, the American essence. The American way of life, which rewards talent and ingenuity, which is fair and honest, which never discriminated, which doesn't need feminism to be good to women, will be saved by the culture industry, by bottling the American essence (individuality) and selling it.

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  39. It's NOT the hardware, the apparatus, the cash, that gives metro radio it's value - it's the personality of the individual Slim Slicker. This is what the all-bizniz "neolib" globalizer Katherine does not understand but the wholesome ordinary American Tess does understand.

    This is a conservative film with a conseravative populist message about capitalism and values and romance, that looks to the past not the future for its sexiness and its reassurances. It secures trust in the future by associating it with the past, latching to the past and to "what's real". It's not about eroticising illusions and abstractions and volatility - it's not "neoliberal" in that sense, like the matrix of whatever. It's about the goodness and security of tradition, about pith not appearance. Everyone is happy and where they belong - even the bad boyfriend is made happy in his staten island working class world, and tess ends where she belongs - not at the top, where a trickster in a world rewarding image might end, but in the middle somewhere. Delighted to be there. This is a society that can always finally determine the truth and the right value of people...and she's middling. Not brilliant, not stupid, but the American mythology's everyman whose utopia is sketched out in her little office with a window that's better than a cubible, and she has one woman underling, and her husband is her superior but he's not the big boss either, and this is the happiness that can be had.

    And it is supposed to envision "socialism" in a sense, the real attainable socialism, the hive of middle class, who will never have the wealth of the aristos, whose contact with empire is limited to crashing the scene of ambiguous party decor. And it is supposed to envision this as what should be and can be but it doesn't really convince does it? the filmmaker knows its just a nostalgic fantasy.

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  40. yes and

    "Sarah Palin claims to be a feminist" - a factual empirical statement - is not quite the same as saying "Sarah Palin is a feminist".

    right. what is in dispute here is not that

    "Working Girl is not feminist" (true)

    but that "Working Girl claims to be feminist" (false)

    now Sarah Palin is a person and Working Girl is a film. A person can be a feminist but a cocaculture commodity cannot under any circumstances. therefore the second claim is all that really matters here - does Working Girl articulate a feminist discourse? This is what's in dispute.

    Even if it did it would still not be feminist. That is, no hollywood film can be feminist, but it can claim to be, it can package itself as. Like Nike products - they are not feminist but they can speak a feminist language in their self-promotion. Hollywood films cannot be feminist but they can claim to be, or speak as if they were - say An Unmarried Woman, The Color Purle, 9 to 5, Silkwood, Jungle Fever, maybe Thelma and Louise.

    Clearly Working Girl does not speak this feminist discourse that films can speak. It articulates a misogynist antifeminsist discourse.

    not every story that concerns a woman who achieves happiness is feminist. Cinderella is not necessarily a feminist story. And this is cinderella, as you may have noticed. (Her explanation of her "idea" is the slipper test)

    Cinderella is not a story of women's emancipation or liberation, even though she is freed from unjust bondage in the stepmother's home; and in Working Girl she is elevated in class, freed from the drudgery of secretarial work, like cinderella. These are stories with other concerns than "women's liberation" or "emancipation".

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  41. This weekend I watched a far superior work of social realism called Working Girls (1986), about actual prostitutes. Watching this and thinking that Working Girl was released only two years later really drives home the idea that the cocaculture industry was furiously manufacturing backlash all through the 80s. But then, does anyone who has any familiarity with politics or feminism not know this already?

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  42. "right. what is in dispute here is not that

    "Working Girl is not feminist" (true)

    but that "Working Girl claims to be feminist" (false)


    Why is this so hard for people to wrap their heads around? This is exactly what people don't get about Sex & the City, either, especially people who aren't from the U.S. That show was not by, for, or about feminists. It was in fact *anti*-feminist and unabashedly so. No U.S. feminist endorsed that show as shining beacon of feminist ideals-- maybe some of them talked about how it reflected a certain malaise among the general female population, or about female bonding in the new millennium- I don't even really recall it being a huge topic of discussion. SatC was a morality play about what happens when you're too successful in life as a woman- a lot like Working Girl in that way. With a theme along the lines of "what women really want is to get married and be a little wife, and feminism is diverting them from their natural needs and wants, it'll end in tragedy, such as orgasms and promiscuity"...

    Sometimes I think a lot of people from other countries mistake all American TV and movies for documentary.

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  43. in 1988 is was easy to understand

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/videos/workinggirlrkempley_a0c9d9.htm

    WAPO:

    "Working Girl" is a delectable reworking of the ultimate girl's myth, a corporate Cinderella story with shades of a self-made Pygmalion. This scrumptious romantic comedy with its blithe cast is as easy to watch as swirling ball gowns and dancing feet. But oh me, oh my, how much more demanding it is to be a fairy tale heroine these days. Happily-ever-aftering is hard as hell.

    The divorce rate being what it is, Prince Charming just isn't the answer anymore. Today's Cinderella first sets her sights on a career, and if the prince is part of the package, so much the better. Girls in glass slippers want car phones, briefcases, seats on the stock exchange. And, fairy godmother, make that pumpkin a leveraged buy-out.

    Here director Mike Nichols waves the wand over Melanie Griffith, who's as luminous as Marilyn Monroe, as adorable as one of Disney's singing mice. She clearly has the stuff of a megastar, and the movie glows from her. Harrison Ford and Sigourney Weaver are handsome arbitrageur and evil stepmentor to Griffith's struggling Tess McGill, a sexpot with a night-school MBA.

    On her 30th birthday, the brokerage firm secretary becomes more determined than ever to climb the corporate ladder, fighting off lecherous and/or treacherous colleagues at every rung. Equal parts vulnerability and fiduciary pluck, the heroine sets her sights on the firm's entry-level program, but it is restricted to Ivy Leaguers who don't need the money. Tess, who looks, talks and walks like a blue-collar Staten Islander, initially doesn't fit the bill.

    Weaver is the ultimate witch as the high-powered Katharine Parker, a breezy, insensitive sexist who pretends to help her new secretary while stealing her brilliant ideas. Katharine plays a game of just-us-girls, but Tess runs the errands and pours the coffee. "I'd love to help you, but you can't busy the quarterback with passing out the Gatorade," Katharine says. And there's the more insidious, "Bring me your ideas and we'll see what we can make happen." Truly Katharine is fit to fill Joan Crawford's shoulder pads.


    really something happened, some kind of mass brain damage; this is the effects of Zizeneyism that has just played this old con trick of kind of heads I win tales you lose, really just insisting repeatedly that "against the typical view that women should be barefoot and pregnant cinderella's feminist trajectory...."

    just insisting and insisting, but "in passing", and an entire generation of younguns has been conned and confused so hopelessly they really can't think.

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  44. I believe the brain damage took hold only about ten years ago and was a relatively contained problem until about five years ago.

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  45. "No U.S. feminist endorsed that show as shining beacon of feminist ideals"

    right, like ally MacBeal and Bridget Jones before it, feminists rejected these products, and a psoodfeminism, an ersatz cocafeminism, a fake, an astroturf feminist criticism (camille paglia etc) was created and aggressively promoted to counteract and replace feminism.

    Now, Made in Dagenham has the look of something that is a co-opted feminism, influenced by sex and the city's essentialising sisterhood, but also taking into account something in the audience, the reality of a feminism, and feminist hgistory, and feminist sentiments, and just twisting it to the needs of capital and entertainment commodities and ideological requirements. But it's got reconstituted powdered feminism as an ingredient; The Color Purple had that too, as did 9 to 5, maybe Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, maybe Waiting to Exhale (based on the initial novel of chic lit), maybe the Milagro Beanfield War, some others. Not Working Girl. Working Girl never had that, anymore than did Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal.

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  46. Working Girls (1986

    the Lizzie Borden thing - I never saw it. I'm going to look for it.

    I think really there is this constant wiping out of memory, this Amnesia, really resetting to some extreme base of an unimaginably horrible "nature" every day, an extreme that never even existed...every day we have to start again from scratch. Even in every conversation, you have to establish every premiss...

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  47. It's getting to the point where I'm kind of amused by it. Makes me laugh it's so absurd... and then people wonder why nobody wants to major in philosophy anymore... I'm a little embarrassed to admit that's what my first B.A. was in anymore.

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  48. It's like Zizney has so succeeded that the task is now for culture and moeurs to crawl back to 18th century liberalism.

    It's not even "back" its something new, a kind of Auschwitz baseline. And anything better than Auschwitz is progressive and controversial.

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  49. There's a predictability to the rhetoric, if not a "logic" behind it... but there's also so much that just doesn't add up. How is it that the obvious fascist subtext of a lot of this "theory" doesn't get noticed much? Why are we now expected to sit and watch extremely clumsy sleight-of-hand that transforms conservatism into leftism and fascism into post-liberal intellectualism? And just clap at the end and pretend the illusion held up?

    It's like I said earlier, I can't help but feel that all of this "going back to square one", the silly requests to provide more evidence that come simultaneously with the complaint that you're being too picky, are just a slightly more sophisticated form of that game school kids play. Lalala, hands on my ears, I can't hear you!

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  50. Or the classic "can't win for losing" game that dominant masculinity is always foisting on women.

    If you work outside the home, you're materialistic and vain, if you stay home, you're clingy and dependent. If you're interested in and enjoy sex, you're a vain materialistic slut, but if you're not you're a frigid bitch. If you comply with Beauty2k standards, you're practically a porn star "exploiting" yourself for the enjoyment of men, if you don't then you're a disgusting hippie lesbian multiculturalist. All of these years go by, and still this is the (lack of) valence we see in phallocentric discourse. It's trapped. Keeps circling around and around these same aporetic quasi-problems that would be so easily solved or circumvented by dumping the damned idealism, sexism, and racism already.

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  51. that's it

    and then one gets annoyed and then one can be berated for rudeness and insults.

    now angel merkel has come near to saying what zizney has been saying for ten years. but there will never be an acknowledgement that conditions had to be created for merkel to start talking like a nazi. and there had to be conditions created for sarkozy to deport roms. And these conditions were created by the culture industry. And zizneycorp was a big part of this because it focussed on the core region of the culture industry where resistance to and refusal of this - more than resistance, pushing ever forward - should have been strongest and most vigilant. The region that should ahve had zero tolerance for this was actually transformed by zizneycorp for ten years into the region leading the recuperation of this fascist discourse.

    now its like oh! look angela merkel is declaring multiculturalism a failure! yes well this means she has come into line with the last ten years of the New Left Review. And In These Times. And The London Review of Books. The Guardian, the The New Statesman, The New Humanist...all these have celebrated exactly what she is saying, for years and years now. And they have all celebrated the reassertion of white supremacy and White Identity, White Culture and We White Leftists Freeing Ourselves From Politically Correct Self-Flagellation.

    On every hipster blog this was advanced. And at every hipster conference, year after year what Angela Merkel now says was spoken from the podium and wildly cheered. Celebrated as brilliant. It is still being celebrated.

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  52. Someone should write a book called Anterograde Amnesia and the Pseudo-Left... I'd read it...

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  53. "Or the classic "can't win for losing" game that dominant masculinity is always foisting on women.

    If you work outside the home, you're materialistic and vain, if you stay home, you're clingy and dependent. If you're interested in and enjoy sex, you're a vain materialistic slut, but if you're not you're a frigid bitch. If you comply with Beauty2k standards, you're practically a porn star "exploiting" yourself for the enjoyment of men, if you don't then you're a disgusting hippie lesbian multiculturalist. All of these years go by, and still this is the (lack of) valence we see in phallocentric discourse. It's trapped. Keeps circling around and around these same aporetic quasi-problems that would be so easily solved or circumvented by dumping the damned idealism, sexism, and racism already."

    Oh MAN, you're just SO fucking profound. Rilly just unb'lievable. Expect as MUCH dominant masculinity as you deserve!

    "Keeps circling around and around these same aporetic quasi-problems that would be so easily solved or circumvented by dumping the damned idealism, sexism, and racism already."

    Oh yeah? Well, why don't you try dumping it? Even without cooperating with Dejan on parodies of you, you write such adumbrations, it defies credulity. Or are you just tired? Personally, I think it would be very simple to 'just dump the idealism, sexism, and racism already'. After all, there are NO other problems.

    "and then one gets annoyed and then one can be berated for rudeness and insults."

    As well you fucking should, Arpege. And don't be surprised if it doesn't keep happening that MEN appear, and this includes WHITE MEN. I don't really care about either of your boring ideas, but as I said yesterday, it's good you've given up on converting all these horrible men to the 'boney-assed' ideal, because they are not buying it. No BONEY-ASSED or BOOB JOB-PROUD women need apply for penetration. Just use your dildoes, or Japanese Eggplant are nice and pliant, I once used five size gradations of them from the Farmer's Market on my ass back in 2000.

    You're both obviously bony-assed feminazis. And it's not going to be thrown out till you improve your OWN behaviour, or just accept the 'unfair reaction'.

    ReplyDelete
  54. Looks like someone got into the crackrock again...

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  55. I would be thrilled if about half of the white men I can think of off the top of my would disappear, but apparently most of them are un-deter-able.

    In fact, I'd pay somebody to do it for me, I would.

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  56. Besides, boob-job proud women get penetrated all the time, Patrick. I know the heterosexuals move in mysterious ways, but even you should realize this.

    Hell, even old ladies and babies are rapeable... I don't see why boney asses would deter anybody.

    ReplyDelete
  57. "Japanese Eggplant are nice and pliant, I once used five size gradations of them from the Farmer's Market on my ass back in 2000."

    Beware of the ratatouille chez Mullins.

    ReplyDelete
  58. Looks like someone got into the crackrock again...

    11:49 AM

    I'm sure that is knowledgeable, being a paranoid megalomaniacal dope fiend from way back, while continuing her moo-cow kvetch number. Wow, you must be about as enticing as Jean Stapleton's tits.

    Blogger anodynelite said...

    I would be thrilled if about half of the white men I can think of off the top of my would disappear, but apparently most of them are un-deter-able.

    In fact, I'd pay somebody to do it for me, I would.

    11:51 AM

    Honey, don't I know you'd pay, you've said something about mob, haven't you? or was that somebody else. Why don't you just put ya-self out of your eternal whining misery already? I don't know how the surviving half of your homicide-tsunami is going to feel about your humourlessness and MOO-COWNESS.

    Anyway, you don't have the money. Ha ha. Lesb'an Glass Ceiling, eh old girl?

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  59. 'Besides, boob-job proud women get penetrated all the time, Patrick. I know the heterosexuals move in mysterious ways, but even you should realize this.

    Hell, even old ladies and babies are rapeable... I don't see why boney asses would deter anybody.'

    I'd like to fuck a boob-job proud woman if it weren't obvious and didn't look like real-life photoshopping. Some of pumped peters look pretty bad, but Max DeLong did a pretty good job, and has 14 inches, which he can keep fairly hard. And stop insulting my 'homosexuality', I realized last night that I was str8, because of reincarnating Johnny Stompanato.

    No, old ladies, babies, and bony-assed feminazis are not my cup of sperm.

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  60. "Japanese Eggplant are nice and pliant, I once used five size gradations of them from the Farmer's Market on my ass back in 2000."

    Beware of the ratatouille chez Mullins."

    Julia Child would say: 'The sauce can be deliciously enriched with the addition of...'

    Marquis de Sade would say: 'Mme., I dispute the honour of sucking this Noble Eggplant'.

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  61. No seriously Patrick, ever walked by C-Town grocery? You sound just like those people who sit outside all day and all night, smoking crack and yelling random shit.

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  62. We don't have C-Towns in Manhattan, dear, and I've never had crack, but thanks all the same. god knows, yours isn't random, it's like a fucking drone.

    Oh wait. I did go to a C-Town in Sunnyside, Queens, and bought Chore Girl Scrub Pads at near cost. Why pay more?

    "It’s called Working Girl, for crying out loud.

    Yes Giovanni, but in English this means "prostitute."

    For Crying. Out. Loud.

    4:50 PM

    Qlipoth said...
    Hooker, that is. Streetwalker. Member of the oldest profession"

    Now that wasn't very nice of Arpege to call me a Working Girl, now was it. It accuses me not of femininity, but rather of feminism.

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  63. "You sound just like those people who sit outside all day and all night, smoking crack and yelling random shit."

    I think that's a stereotyping of street people and the dispossessed and homeless. At least I've taught you that C-Town is a chain grocery now.

    Thank you.

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  64. absurdly beautiful

    Arpege, I meant to tell you that is very good. My ex-gf. was once out with a friend after their ballet class, and it was one of those gorgeous blue winter New York days, sharp and hard-blue. He was talking about how beautiful it was, and D., in her desire to be slightly cooler, said 'yes, excruciatingly beautiful'. Ver gut.

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  65. Will you be serving word salad with that?

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  66. "michelle pfeiffer - you puzzled me a minute there, but now i remember - I heard that on a recent film she gave a pa as a gift some soaps that the pa herself had delivered to her as just PART of a gidt including a spa visit or something. She kept the spa visit but gave the pa her gift soaps."

    That's absolutely hilarious, but I don't believe a WORD OF IT! Michelle's no idiot. But it does remind me of many White Male Supremacist Bony-Assed Masculized Feminists who want to do proper recycling, you know, say there are probably some New Age converts to Badiou who feel that there Marianne Williamson dropped-friends would be glad to receive their own gifts back after they'd been exposed to a more enlightened subjectivity--it's no longer the same gift, but has a new 'aura' surrounding it.

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  67. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  68. you are just anti-penis, that's really all it amounts to. Same with that horrible Assistant Womyn. Who the flying fuck would ever do it with either of you?

    One thing is clear, you love that story of the Zizek and the black man more than any other, you are a vicious man-hater, and not to be trusted in any way. In case you don't get the message, all our emails are rendered null and void. You are vicious communist, stalinist, and would betray a friend in two seconds. Also, even if it means 'losing a friend' who liked it that 'we'd kissed and made up', that's fine with me. It sounds to me like he's into bony-assed masculized feminazis himself, and I hardly have a thing to prove to him by listening to your bullshit.
    9:10 AM

    ReplyDelete
  69. Yes, you're erasing them all right. Okay, in this case, I will put EVERYTHING, BUT EVERYTHING at Dejan's.

    And THIS, of course, is just FINE with you:



    anodynelite said...
    I would be thrilled if about half of the white men I can think of off the top of my would disappear, but apparently most of them are un-deter-able.

    In fact, I'd pay somebody to do it for me, I would.

    11:51 AM

    Both rotten to the core, and yeah, just FINE to kill men. After all, all men are white and prove the black-on-black crime is really just WHITE. Asshole bitches.

    ReplyDelete
  70. Yes, you're erasing them all right. Okay, in this case, I will put EVERYTHING, BUT EVERYTHING at Dejan's.

    And THIS, of course, is just FINE with you:



    anodynelite said...
    I would be thrilled if about half of the white men I can think of off the top of my would disappear, but apparently most of them are un-deter-able.

    In fact, I'd pay somebody to do it for me, I would.

    11:51 AM

    Both rotten to the core, and yeah, just FINE to kill men. After all, all men are white and prove the black-on-black crime is really just WHITE. Asshole bitches.

    ReplyDelete
  71. I removed the link to the Anita Hill story. You've convinced me that she probably just was easily offended by loose talk. In fact, she probably should apologize.

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