Obama nominates a liberal woman of color for the Supreme Court. Guess Twisty Faster's reaction!
A) "This is a great day that shows just how far our country has come."
B) "While I applaud the choice of a woman of color for this position, I have reservations about her record and political leanings."
C) "HE HUGGED HER THAT ASSHOLE HE HATES WOMEN."
If you guessed C), congratulations, you've read Twisty Faster before.
Some of the comments are golden too.
Wow. At least he’s not beheading her or something.
Uh... yeah. Yeah, that's a good thing. It's probably just political though; he knows if he beheads her now the confirmation process is going to be a nightmare.
If that man ever tried to touch me I’d make sure I pissed all over myself before hand. And I’d hold him tight and linger. I’d actually like to change a messy tampon and shake his hand right after. No washing.
Is this your politics or just your fetish?
And of course it’s paternalist. Do you actually suggest there’s no power differential between a dude President of the United States and a female Hispanic judge upon whom He bestoweth shit?
I dunno, man, beats the hell out of not bestowething shit.
If nominating someone to the Supreme Court is an insult to their race and gender, fuck, I don't know what would be a compliment.
So if a high-ranking man hugs a subordinate or semi-subordinate, he's gay and oppressing him in the name of the patriarchy. Got it then.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous - Well, hugging is basically sex. Or at least that's how I justified some of my stories in high school.
ReplyDeleteIt's TWISTY FASTER! What is this a freaking surprise? Stop reading that site, just stop. If you can't resist typing in the URL get some of that blocker software.
ReplyDeletePervtastic-- It's HOLLY PERVOCRACY! She likes poking fun of dogmatic wack-jobs. Why is this a surprise?
ReplyDeleteFirst comment at Twisty's place: Picture it in a world where dudes hug each other without cringing. Not that such a world could ever exist.I love this. Apparently, post-patriarchy, post-racism, post-whatever, men will still be unable to hug without cringing. I guess she's arguing, I don't know, determinism.
ReplyDeletePervtastic - Just because you already know she's crazy doesn't make her less crazy, man.
ReplyDeleteIt's good to call out craziness. I've got Twisty fatigue, that's my problem. For a while I could read that site and say "Whoa, that's...special. I'm going to get some popcorn. You need anything, Twizzler? Rasinets?" But after a while the crazy hateful (and the 'I didn't say anything hateful, you must be illiterate') just stopped being offensive in a way I found entertaining and started depressing the hell out of me.
ReplyDeletePerv, I don't think Holly can stop even if she wants to.
ReplyDeleteAlso, where I come from, men hug each other all the time. Friends, teammates, whoever.
Don Gwinn, yeah really. I've seen plenty of dudes hug each other without "cringing," in all different sorts of circumstances. To think that "the patriarchy" is so all-powerful that it makes any display of male-on-male affection impossible -- in direct contradiction to the reality one can observe with one's eyes, any day of the week -- well, it's insane! & it leads to the conclusion that progress, or a more feminist world, is impossible. Which is what this woman & her peeps seem to think anyway.
ReplyDeleteYou know, if one simply Googles "obama hugging", one gets all kinds of pictures of Obama hugging men. Shock! Gasp! Actually, I think pictures of him hugging men are a slight majority. Is he oppressing them, too? By being President and all that, he, I dunno, emasculates them, so he's really oppressing women? In that case, Georgia Bush is a discredit to her sex.
ReplyDeletePervtastic - I guess I'm just stubborn. I don't think of Twisty (or Cosmo, or PUA dudes, etc.) as depressing, but as the gift that keeps on giving.
ReplyDeleteI also hope, in my more grandiose moments, that crazy people can serve as extreme illustrations of delusional and destructive beliefs that more reasonable-seeming people might also hold, but eh. Mostly it's just an old habit from growing up near a beach. The weirder and grosser something is, the more I've gotta poke at it.
Don Gwinn - Yeah, my male coworkers hug sometimes too, and the Patriarchy's enforcement agents have failed to respond.
(They also exhibit an interesting homophobia dichotomy in that homophobic insults aimed at straight guys fly all over the place--"you're such a faggot!"--but no one harasses the actual gay guys who work here. Bob is a queer-ass butt-monkey, but Joe's cool, he's just gay.)
lastnightsclothes - Your secret is safe with me.
And Twisty doesn't want an incrementally better world, that's insufficiently dramatic and exciting and it would put her out of a job. She wants to see herself as a leader of a brave underground Resistance, and in the absence of any actual Nazis she'll just have to hallucinate some.
Twisty lives, I think, in my neighborhood here in Austin. She even touted one of my favorite restaurants in her blog (which disturbed me no end).
ReplyDeleteI think she exhibits a peculiarly Austin mindset, one which permits one to assert a POV to the point of conscious self-parody.
IOW: she really is a second-wave ideologue, and she also plays a parody of one on the internet.
Whee!
Oriscus - I'm aware that Twisty is a little bit parodic (although I think she also sometimes hides behind the "If it doesn't go over well, act like it was a parody" game), but I also believe that her readers are largely genuine, non-Austin, dead-serious lunatics. In many ways they interest me much more than she does.
ReplyDeleteWoo, I hugged a couple dudes last night! Fight the patriarchy! Power!
ReplyDeleteOne of them wasn't even gay. The majority of them were, though.
Also, "Twisty Faster if Fucking Insane" might be the most on the nose tag I've seen on any blog ever, Holly.
It's not *funny* to call a gay guy gay. It's like that scene in "No Retreat, No Surrender" when the kid taunts Van Damme by shouting, "I don't think so . . . RUSSIAN!"
ReplyDeleteVan Damme's eyebrows shot up over his hairline and he screamed in rage, but since he was playing a Russian mafioso, you would think it was kind of tautological as trash talk goes.
Thanks, Holly -
ReplyDeleteThe "if it doesn't work, it's parody" game is part-and-parcel of that Austin mindset.
Think black-helicopter-wackjob Alex Jones. He believes it in his very marrow, but he's self-consciously over-the-top in his presentation. Or for a yankeefied version, Rush Limbaugh. If you're offended, I'm joking, if not...
Revival preachers down here have been doing that shit for ages.
In light of this post, it is ironic that Twisty has responded to commenters offended by her use of the c-word with a (rambling) post that boils down to "why so serious?".
ReplyDelete(I don't see why she didn't just replace the c-word with something else and add a footnote saying "sorry" in a witty way.)