The Scold’s Bridle
by Mia
In America.. the branks were a type of humiliation punishment, while in medieval Europe, they were used more as a torture device. This device was said to have originated in Scotland in the 1500’s.
Is it true that all the world loves a bitch? Snarky, sassy, sometimes smart and/or sexy and usually nasty.
I don’t remember watching this much when it was popular, though all the homos at school really loved it. Did real women act like this? Did they aspire to this? Psychotically competitive, obsessed with ridiculous clothes, jewelry, actually physically cat fighting, jealousy, constant oneupmanship ? As awful and Bad as it was, compared to what is mainstream presently it almost seems civilized. Again, the Either/Or meme in full bloom. One either identified with The Bitch or The Priss. Evans played the ever-exasperated holier-than-thou goody-two-shoes to Collins’ relentless campy agent provocateur.
Samantha and Jeannie (Donna and Lucy too) are dead, long live the Bitch.
Neither resembled anyone I knew, though perhaps that was the point. Maybe one day we could grow up to be the Ultimate Bad or Good Girl. We could be Mrs. CEO, or, we could take him for everything he was worth and make our mission in life making his next wife’s life a living Hell as per Dynasty. Whether we were The Good One or The Bad One, we would be soaking in bubble-filled tubs while telling someone off or creating trouble. Men too, were to believe this was when we were at our most fabulous, and now they believe they want this as well, believing that nagging , ragging and controlling = love and caring. Perhaps if I were a man raised by an unloving mother or a day-care center, I might believe that too. What did we get for this new No-one-tells-me-what’s-what-I-don’t-need-you-f*ck-off attitude?
Veruca Salt: bratty, demanding little bitch from Original Willy Wonka movie
Men are terrified of us now, preferring ‘friends with benefits’ over anything resembling depth. There’s no winning in this. There’s no real intimacy. We get angry and rag on them about dumb crap that doesn’t matter. Then they withdraw. Or we cry, and they fear us even more in a different way. We have ruined ourselves, they have forgotten true masculinity, the generation before them having been subjected to the first wave of what was called ‘feminism’. Now they are constantly apologizing, while walking on eggshells, in a self-protective, yet often glib dance, peacock feathers adorned with tribal tattoos and piercings.
This is an actual book. It spawned t-shirts and bumper stickers, the Either/Or Girl-Power Boys-Suck movement co-opting the message. Do you want your sons seeing this? Daughters? See how we lose when we adopt memes/slogans/suckworthy agendas of 99.9% of the media?
and here we have ‘Heartless Bitches’, a celebration of ..Bitchy. You’ll have to google it if you care, don’t really feel like linking to it.
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I hate sappy, insipid songs as well as many of the other things mentioned, but I doubt that is enough to qualify me as an Official Bitch. Nor do I want to qualify. Still, the site is an interesting and amusing study of how these women got this way. Can’t say as I blame them on some of it. At times it is difficult to NOT become a Total Actual Bitch (as opposed to the Total Woman, of 70’s fame). It is interesting on one of their pages, they criticize a site http://www.americanwomensuck.com/index.html which is doing something similar to what they do, and like their own site, some of it is true. Most of us are somewhere along the continuum, more or less, but are not caricatures or propaganda icons.
The strange irony of the oxymoronic Equality/Diversity Conundrum – We’re all the same, Tolerate Differences! is that it negates what it purports to support.
I once posted about not letting media/those with their own agenda set the tone, define the terms and the frame of reference from which one judges and looks at the world, say men vs woman. I try to not accept the logical fallacies or the Either/Or choice presented which leave one picking a side or pitting us against our own. I still believe that. Of course I’ve been called a ‘hater’, a ‘racist’ a ‘whateverIST’ yet I summarily reject their suppositions and dispensations, preferring instead to use critical thinking , combing that with what is left of my sanity, and self-defining through being and actions rather than defined by others, which places artificial limitations and categorizations. It is possible we can go beyond these things, and in this, we can prevail. Not getting caught up in being an Either/Or or accepting the yoke of the ‘IST’ could be part of how we get there.
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Gloucester High School: Imagine the Reproductively Incorrect Possibilities!
Feminists PO’d but not so much for the idea that maybe deciding to do this because you’re bored with school or TV, or that it would be neat to have kids all at the same time as your friends -I think I still know one person from high school , though we don’t get together much. No, they are annoyed with the criticism itself, they are annoyed that the girls were mocked and that they might possibly feel bad.
In regards to the pregnant teen club at Gloucester High School:
“..I asked Sue Todd – who oversees the on-campus day-care center at Gloucester High – if there was any role for shame when talking about a 15-year-old hooking up with a a homeless guy to get her pregnant.
“I believe in accountability,” she told me, “but no, I don’t think there is a place for shame.”
and of course, the feminists are not amused: http://tinyurl.com/5sfz2u
“What a dick”, they say.
Maybe if they were doing it as a political weapon against the illegals, yeah, that would be better, but only if almost ALL teenage White girls did it, not just this little bunch, and they couldn’t stop at the one child. That would be as unproductive as the 35-45 year olds with the one child, although at least they have a better chance at multiple births because of fertility drugs, but the older group suffers an overall decreased fertility , so that would have to be mapped out – Funny this one incident makes news, but when it comes to illegals, or the typical disproportionately represented by certain groups, it is the DEFAULT- almost ALL of certain groups do this very same thing, and we pay for it through social programs, but when White kids do it, oh the hullabaloo.Can’t have that, these girls need to get well paying jobs so they can pay for huge taxes to pay for the illegals kids.
OMG, how dare anyone ever mention race?! Or even insinuate it? I know, I know, you hate my ‘hate’, but ..Wait! I thought you said Race doesn’t exist! Ok , umm it sometimes does exists, uhh it your mind, the racist’s mind, but not in real life, umm, ahh- except when one is a victim or oppressed somehow by Evil Whitey. Anyway….Should the girls be ashamed?
Not that they will be having children, but perhaps that they made it into some cliquish game, like adding a friend on myspace- for that, yes. The upside if this is catchy, like almost anything people do that gets on TV, it will be copied. With quotas for jobs having to be met because of affirmative action (non-merit system) and outsourcing, and many young men wanting to ride skateboards and party until they are 50, when said 50 yr old man takes out personal ads describing the 27 year old professional with no baggage they are seeking, well, maybe it isn’t so dumb. Look at it this way, those children will be almost grown and out of the house by then, and they can then get into college on some ‘welfare to work’ scholarship/grant, and have their PhD by the time they are in their early 30’s if they want to bother. So, these girls might as well have their kids young. They can help break a system that is far more illegitimate than the children they are carrying, before all the money runs out for WIC and single parent welfare. Maybe they can even get a free apartment out of the deal. Maybe even habitat for humanity will build them a free house. If they girls feel discriminated against in any of these programs because they are White, they can sue – yeah right- it s taken as default also that Whites don’t need any hep, and shouldn’t take it, and if we do, itis shameful. I don’t think these girls parents will be raided by CPS as in the recent FLDS case, or their babies taken away. After all, do they look like they have a huge investment in religion or building a social/religio/political group? But they COULD, if they wanted to.
Why shouldn’t the opportunity for the government sponsoring their lives and those of their children be open to them as well as the welfare mother in Harlem or the illegals getting free everything ? This system is going down the drain, and there just aren’t as many chances for those not landed gentry to gain anything substantial. Those lower to all the way up to upper middle class are taking the hit for all the unchecked immigration and accompanying costs. There are plenty of Whites who know they aren’t headed in that direction, maybe their grades aren’t high enough, or they aren’t from enough Actual Privilege to cross the river into some kind of security- so why not have kids young? At that particular school, they even have a day-care if the mommies want to finish school. How many latte-schlepping jobs later on are going to offer that for free? This doesn’t even touch upon the fact that historically speaking, the idea of perpetually delaying motherhood is fairly new.
If the other groups can declare they can have as many kids as they want, able to support them or not, that it is a kind of civil right, then White teens can too. The whole wait-until-you-are-on-you-last-egg crapula is a scam, one has much more energy and health when young. Maturity sometimes does come with age, but maturity and responsibility CAN be learned by DOING. Age isn’t necessarily a precursor-cursor of maturity. I hope they at least take care of themselves and if they do give the children up, that they see the importance of what faith the adoptive family is. Oh I know, that shouldn’t count. All that matters is luuvvv and that the adoptive family says the right, cool sounding things on their profile. It is worrisome to think how many teens will give their babies to people who ‘seemed cool’ or ‘progressive’ or bought them some toy, then the child ends up dead, as in the Joel Steinberg case. So this trend catching on being a good idea is contingent upon the idea that they are preserving their culture, religion, race, and rejecting all Skank Culture, like MTV, RAP, celebrity obsession, partying, drugs, and other media induced and encouraged sicknesses like cutting oneself, starving oneself, being loud and obnoxious, trendiness, materialism, credit-card debt, and letting go of some (now nigh-impossible in some areas) American Dream that may not be available to them even if they played the game perfectly.
Socialized this, socialized that. It appears we are on the road to this, it only makes logical sense to see that coming at the rate we are welcoming a huge underclass, wrecking our lending system by fictionalizing earnings in order to lend to groups who just don’t qualify. The sub prime lending minority nightmare is like trying to apply affirmative action to money. That is like lending friends a ton of money- Unless you are just GIVING away the money, it just won’t work. Just like Equality Magic doesn’t work. To borrow a concept from the subject of the rant following this one , we’re in Denial.
Remembering Recovery: The Commercialization/Seminarization of Shame, ‘We’re all Victims/Abusers/Co-Dependents/’Dysfunctional’
Shame can sometimes be a good thing, like planting a tree. In the world of psychobabble, shame is to be avoided at all costs. In the 80’s we were inundated with books and talk shows about our dysfunctional families and how we could learn to get beyond the blame and the shame, guilt- gee back then , there was a book on how to get beyond any kind of introspection that might lead to feeling like crap, even if it was appropriate, we were repeatedly told that feeling bad was something that meant one needed to go to a support meeting , wash ones dirty linen, hold hands and/or hug . The 12 step/shame/recovery/John Bradshaw-on-PBS-every-night movement was, and possibly still is, a Caligulian orgy of whining and victim-hood, its twin being the TV talk show circuit. It was a huge industry- what is surprising is how quickly we jumped on the bandwagon, being that most people had a less-than-terrific childhood yet were not raging alcoholics or drug abusers.
That didn’t matter anymore. You probably knew someone, a friend, a family member who was ‘addicted’ to something. You could still join the club as the Adult Child , or Codependent. There was a place for you , warm and sympathetic where they would tell scary stories, or you could tell your own. This used to be what one had a priest or friends for, and if you ended up spilling your guts to them, it was certainly not a social event. You didn’t get a 5 year chip. The problem was with these groups is that there was, as people who see their loved one’s murderers get executed- never any ‘closure’. The Hell of it just went on and on and on. You could never really be finished with ‘recovery’. One would always wear the scarlet letter of said dysfunction or accomplice to another’s and begin the march to the scaffold anew at every meeting. “I am powerless over X, .. ”
There was no particular religion attached to the Recovery Cult as it was a religion in itself. There were all the basic ingredients of religion: something like prayer, higher powers, forgiveness, stuff to read, meetings to attend, pamphlets, free coffee. Today we still have these groups, which spawned other groups and movements, some officially religious like Promise Keepers, some not, but all are usually built around some kind of outside group. There’s not much in the way of shame these days, and I don’t mean shame in the World Redefined sense. Not in the sense of definitions co-opted by the mainstream, TV, or other media. In order to be self-conscious, one must first be conscious. Given the choice between reciting the serenity prayer and 12 step groups and the stocks, I’ll take the stocks.
Quotes on Punishment: http://www.worldofquotes.com/topic/Punishment/index.html
Shame in Ancient Greece, David Konstan
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2267/is_4_70/ai_112943734/pg_1?tag=artBody;col1 “Thus the warrior society represented in the Homeric epics–a shame culture, according to E. R. Dodds (1951)–slowly gave way to a guilt culture..” Just my own interpretation of what this , and much of where he is going with semantics turning into a kind of theology. Greco-Roman culture wasn’t always Christian-shame was borne out of a sense of personal right/wrong or familial code or something not gotten from religion per se.
“Like many other cultures, Greece and Rome did not have distinct terms for what we call shame and guilt, and they seem to have made do with one concept where we recognize two. This view, however, presupposes a natural correspondence among psychological ideas across linguistic and social boundaries. Thus, the Greek term we customarily translate as “shame” is imagined to match, more or less, the English concept, unless perhaps, in the absence of a word for guilt, Greek shame had a somewhat wider extension so as to include some (or all) of the modern notion of guilt. Alternatively–and this is the more common assumption-the ancient Greeks simply failed to achieve a notion of guilt, which is in turn a sign of the poverty of their moral vocabulary and their incomplete psychological development.”
Well, isn’t that a stretch as his alternative meaning saying if we Greeks used shame/guilt either interchangeably or in realizing they are all part of the same dog, we were somehow lacking in moral fiber or psychological development . Is it our fault there are other more visceral and direct ways of getting to essentially the same place? There is plenty written by Aristotle and Plato on shame/guilt/etc. Hardly anything in Greek is ‘easy’ and one dimensional as is English, or shall I say, as ‘precise’. It is more condensed, encompassing other meanings and definitions as ‘givens’. If you ask a man how he is feeling, he might say, “I’m tired” or “I’m hungry”, and that is exactly and all he means. Ask a woman how they are feeling and you will probably get something that encompasses a general state, a culmination of that day. In that sense, English would be more like masculine, linear ways of defining states of being, Greek would be more feminine in that same way, encompassing a larger spectrum, less precise.
Then he goes on to admit: “In fact, the ancient Greek emotional lexicon does not map neatly onto modern English concepts.” From speaking to my father about things I have had him translate for me from Greek>>English, I can attest to this. How many times have I heard him say: “well, it isn’t like this or that word in English. It isn’t only the words that are wrong, the feeling is different too. It means this , but it also can mean this thing, depends on the context.” In any case, when one reads these scholarly pieces, one must also see into the culture and language and even limitations of the writer.
Modesty, such a lonely word..
This photo is from a site called ‘The Bad Mother’s Club’. Doesn’t this just warn your heart? I think it is supposed to be ironic. I think. Kind of hard to tell if the idea is ‘Oh boy, mom gets a night out once in a while’ or if it is more like ‘haha, see you later, sucker’.
Pic From MTV Spring Break show
“Unaffected modesty is the sweetest charm of female excellence, the richest gem in the diadem of their honour.” Noah Webster
Jenna Bush, falling-down-drunk (the one on top)
http://tiny.cc/DYb5r I didn’t want to direct link to the site I pulled this from. Baby belly-dancer from a beauty contest in Romania. Not that people don’t do things as stupid here. Jon Benet. The mother of this toddler should be ashamed AND shamed. One simply does not DO that to their children. It’s vulgar and disgusting. Most people out there in Mainstream Media World would probably find all but the last photo non-objectionable, just another aspect of our neat-o Crapified Culture. In railing against this, some will raise logical fallacies such as “Well, if we aren’t into all that in-your-face porno stuff, than we will made to be Puritans!, No dancing, no Starbucks, no fun ever! Women will be burned at the stake, drowned in the family pool, why, we’ll be genitally mutilated before you can say 911!” Well, hysteria mavens- that’s not really the case.
As you may have noticed, there is an artistic rendering of a woman at the top of my blog (although I may have changed it by the time anyone reads this). I have photo shopped her slightly in case someone should take issue with ..whatever. In researching the issue of modesty, humility, I have once again run into the problem of people wanting pre-packaged definitions rather than finding their own way. Some see modesty as focusing on what one wears, and have many rules surrounding this. Others see it as having something to do with clothing, but that it doesn’t stop there, that it is also a quality of personality, or the heart, innate in some, learned through religion or other beliefs in others. Says Regina Schmiedicke :
“In his book Man and Women, Dietrich von Hildebrand points to a particular “perfection” of the feminine nature: “We find in women a unity of personality by the fact that heart, intellect, and temperament are much more interwoven…This unity of the female type of human person displays itself also in a greater unity of inner and exterior life, in a unity of style embracing the soul itself as well as the exterior demeanor….In our fragmented society, scanty clothing has somehow become associated with women’s social progress-as if the “right” to wear less indicated that we are moving up in the world. ” http://www.theuniversityconcourse.com/IV,4,2-5-1999/Schmiedicke.htm She goes on to talk about religion, but are these ideas are exclusive to any particular religion or even to religion itself? There are some good points, though I am not sure I agree with all of them,:
“With their visual sensitivity, men are free to look at a chastely-dressed girl and just enjoy looking at her, without a trace of sexual temptation.”
Yet again with the Either/Or concept. Perhaps this could be revised to state that if she is less obvious it may be easier for him to see other things besides how she appeals sexually, perhaps giving them another ‘starting point’. Just being realistic, not putting men down. It would seem that some of the modesty movement makes men feel guilty for looking at women with desire. Isn’t that what they are supposed to do? The boys say in apologetic, confessional tones in videos concerning the subject of modesty how they think sexual thoughts when they see a girl dressed revealingly as if their own desire is something bad, unnatural, something to be quashed and only directly related to what someone is wearing, which I think is nonsense.
The sad part of the ‘show-off MTV Ho’ influence is not that boys like looking at women’s bodies, but that when constantly exposed the ‘let it all hang out’ meme, they may miss all the other parts of what is unique and beautiful about femininity, and this leads them in my opinion further away from us, even as it leads them further away from the subtleties and intricacies of the man/woman interaction. Some may think these ideas old-fashioned and perhaps they are, but aren’t the small things, the everyday qualities of what we offer each other, the tones in which we speak, the ways in which we appreciate each other (or fail to) – aren’t those the things that deepen with maturity- or perhaps learned- or forgotten and relearned in adulthood? Are those things worth being dispensed with in an effort to ‘cut to the chase’ in taking the role of pursuit and capture from men?
Again, the oxymoronic media sexolitics , combining their political agenda with sex ,young women think “we’re free to show all, be whatever we want, be as wild as we want, look how much attention I can get , whee! we’re not going to let anyone tell us how to be, here it is, in your face, deal with it!” may actually kill off desire, or one-dimensionalize something much more complex. The constant overt sexuality thus kills off the sensuality, progressively and possibly unconsciously stealing from them what they would dream and fantasize about before it ever happened. Kind of a mentalsexual circumcision through a calculated and relentless numbing process. I remember as a teenager at the movie theater, my boyfriend just touching my hair- he didn’t do anything else to me, not even kiss me- yet still- the shivers that invoked, the letters we would write, the endless longing- Now, that would be considered cornball and maybe prudish.
There’s a lot of support for ‘being bad’ in a contrived, copycat kind of way. There’s always support for calling attention to yourself. Grandmas gone wild, lawn hoses gone wild, pigeon droppings gone wild.
http://momsformodesty.blogspot.com/ There isn’t much support for this. To most, any form of modesty isn’t ‘Hot’. No shirts that proclaim “I taught your boyfriend that thing your mom likes”.
There’s a lot of support for this on TV: enter cougar coaching. Gawd. Horrible.
I liked the words of Spencer Kimball (bold accent mine, italics his):
“President Spencer W. Kimball (1895–1985) encouraged us to create a culture of modesty different from the one that may exist outside of our homes: “We can create a style of our own. … We must be different. We need not do anything we do not wish to do. We can create our own style and standards. We can influence the patterns among our own people, and we can also help to develop proper community patterns.” 1 http://www.lds.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=2354fccf2b7db010VgnVCM1000004d82620aRCRD&locale=0&sourceId=87d476e6ffe0c010VgnVCM1000004d82620a____
Notes-
AIDOS (or Aedos) was the goddess (or daimona) spirit of modesty, reverence and respect. She was a companion of the goddess Nemesis (goddess of retribution, vengeance). Aidos, as a quality, was that feeling of reverence or shame which restrains men from wrong; Nemesis was righteous indignation aroused by the sight of the wicked living in undeserved good fortune.
http://www.theoi.com/Daimon/Aidos.html
http://www.scribd.com/doc/3270730/INFERNAL-DEVICE-Machinery-of-Torture-and-Execution
http://www.the-night.net/torture/
http://www.occasionalhell.com/infdevice/index.php
Coloring book? http://www.lulu.com/content/158455
You can see video reconstructions of these on the ‘Evil White Male Patriarchy Channel’ (AKA history channel). They seem to be having quite a good time with these.
http://www.history.com/minisites/surviving-history
The Spoils of War 