Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Well, duh.

From Feministe (aka "Humorless Progressive Central"):

A few recent headlines:

Iraqi guards kill female suicide bomber

Female suicide bomber in Iraq kills 15, wounds 40

Suicide bomber kills 7 policemen in northern Iraq

Can you guess the gender of the third suicide bomber?


Let's not read too much into that, okay? The oppressive tool of the patriarchy that writes all those headlines probably realizes that "Dog Bites Man" just isn't much of a eye-grabber.

I'm surprised they're even called "suicide bombers", and not "differently metabolismed anti-Western capitalist oppressor patriarchy explosive deliverypersons".



[Beavis]Heheheheheh. I said "oppressive tool of the patriarchy"...[/Beavis]

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's just the privilege of a phallocentric society. That's why guns are phallic; not due to physics or engineering, but a subconscious desire to enlarge the phallus.

Wait a minute. If a gun is a pseudo-phallus, does that make a bomb vest a pseudo-womb/mammaries? (Now there's a dissertation for the aspiring Women's Studies student.)

Anonymous said...

I just wish they'd try it at home, first.

word: xurxn
And you know what that means...

MadRocketScientist said...

Ya know, for a web site that has some pretty strong anti-gun/violence rhetoric, I am amused to see their header graphic is a little girl running down the street holding a pump action scatter gun with a pistol grip.

Tam said...

See? That's totally false advertising, because the first time I saw it, I was like "All right! This is gonna be my kinda place!"

Anonymous said...

I said that the little girl with the shit brown overalls has a shotgun with the ejection port on the wrong side.

Anyway, it's suppose to be ironic, not empowering.

ltooekto!

Anonymous said...

[Continuing...]

And the dissertation could be about why suicide bombing is viewed more negatively than the phallocentric shooting spree.

Throw in some Derrida and it would be Ph.D. material.

(There, I think I've run this joke into the ground.)

alath said...

Reading the linked-to piece and the comments made my head hurt. Being oppressed looks like a really exhausting job. Apparently you have to learn a whole new language, too.

Anonymous said...

You know what, I have a hunch there's one common factor each of the bombers has, regardless of genderositude. Something they share, maybe like, oh, a religion maybe, or, ummmm... too bad none of the headlines offer a clue.

Well, let's not let useless speculation distract us from the perennial spectacle of feminists parodying themselves.

staghounds said...

Ummm, it means that there is a presumption in the media that anyone doing something terrible and violent is a man.

So adding the sex of a killer when it's male is an unnecessary modifier.

Tam said...

Well, you have to admit that if I just say "suicide bomber", the presumption that he pees standing up and yells "Allahu akhbar!" a lot is, statistically speaking, a fairly safe one.

Again, I'm not sure it has as much to do with presumptions as the whole "Man bites dog!" thing.

Tam said...

For further presumptions, picture the following perps:

"Bodies found under floor of suburban home."

"SUV carjacked on downtown street corner last night."

"Parent drowns three young children."

You have probably subconsciously filled in the race and gender of all three hypothetical criminals. Does that make you racist and sexist, or an observer of statistical trends?

MadRocketScientist said...

Male
Male
Female

Did I get it right? What do I win?

Anonymous said...

I'm thinking Tam meant:
White male
Black male
White female

Historically we are lead to believe that certain crimes are performed by distinct subcultures of our country. Thus the horrified OMG a woman dared to blow herself up.

I do like the bomb vest / pseudo-breast take on things. Maybe getting a step toward the promised virgins?

George Weinberg said...

Ms. clueless has it exactly ass backwards. Writing "female suicide bomber" isn't ignoring the fact that most suicide bombers are men, it's deliberately emphasizing it.