Sunday 15 August 2021

The Sunday Ishmael 15/08/21

 
I'm indebted to Cettina Vicenzino for this neat illustration of the sexualised Sicilian rice ball.

Catania is Sicily's second largest city, on the east coast, at the base of Mount Etna. Catania's rice balls are called arancino (plural arancini) - they are pointed and therefore male, of course.  The city of Palermo is over 2,700 years old and is in the northwest of Sicily, by the Gulf of Palermo in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Palerma's rice balls are rounded, therefore feminine, and are called arancina (plural arancine).
This is a male quick release coupling:

This is a female coupling:

The fact that there are two sexes is so embedded in human beings that we designate rice balls and fittings as male or female, on the basis of their shape. We all understand this. Society is organised on the basis that men and women form pair bonds in which children are conceived through an act in which an adult male ejaculates semen into an adult woman's vagina, it swims like crazy into her womb, lashing its little tail, penetrates the woman's egg, to form a zygote which becomes an embryo, which, if lucky, will become a viable baby and grow into an adult, nurtured by the man and woman who created it, and go on to form a pair bond of his or her own, and the whole merry dance continues through the gene-erations.

How can this simple arrangement, which has brought us successfully through millennia, have gone so wrong in this year of grace, 2021?
The Plymouth tragedy, in which six people died unnecessarily, is horrifying. The blame currently seems to be laid on the shoulders of the police, and undoubtedly, had the perpetrator not had a shotgun to hand when he was overwhelmed by whatever it was that ailed him, maybe the loss of life wouldn't have been as great as it was. However, young Jake Davison could have armed himself with or without a gun license. Jake himself, seems to have laid the blame for his angst at the feet of his mother, as so many do when a child disappoints, in that she was his first victim. He, of course, was his own final victim. He was a troubled soul. Maybe he would still have been troubled had the internet never existed, but in a less technologically sophisticated age, his expectations of sexual fulfillment might never have been so unrealistically enhanced, he might never have found a friendship group who shared unrealistic grievances about women, and he might have settled down with a homely, ordinary young woman, had a couple of kids and lived a humdrum sort of life of everyday happiness. Or he might have turned into the village eccentric, muttering to himself and not washing. Either way, he would have lived beyond age 22. And five other people would have been able to live out their allotted span.
Back when I was in the criminal justice trade, I worked with a forensic psychologist (forensic (adjective): relating to or denoting the application of scientific methods and techniques to the investigation of crime). Amongst many other interesting bits and pieces, he was of the opinion that the male urge to seek arousal was the driver behind major technological inventions: developments in portraiture to create realistic images through such devices as the camera obscura, the printing press, the Mutoscope, (What the Butler Saw machines), photography, film, television, and, supremely, the computer and the world wide web.
I used to work with sex offenders who, decades ago, had to laboriously create their own portfolios of titillatory materials from photos taken at kiddy sports days and by tearing pictures out of the children’s underwear section of Littlewood’s catalogues. Top shelf magazines (so called because they were supposedly out of the eye-line of a child) in newsagents shops contained images that would be considered tame these days, when more explicit material is available on main stream TV. If they had access to cities, they could visit sex shops in dodgy areas, where they could request material from Amsterdam. All this, though, required effort, and the ever present difficulty of hiding the stash from censorious parents, appalled wife or curious children.


The internet changed the game. Mainstream pornography sites have made the search for masturbatory images very easy. They have normalised such behaviour. The BBC (other television channels are available and almost as culpable) seems committed to an agenda of grooming the nation. The threshold of what is normal has changed. Yes, there are some men who have always preferred masturbating to images of children and abused women, but the internet has drawn some men into more and more extreme and aberrant masturbatory material. It is an escalating pathway. It leads to flawed thinking by some men who see explicit depictions of attractive women engaged in orgasmic behaviours and conclude that this is normal, usual and why the hell aren't I getting any of that? Internet friends in Incel groups encourage such thinking. As we saw in Plymouth, the consequences are shattering. I've never been a bloke and I don't intend becoming one, so how on earth can I know how it feels to be a sexually frustrated man? But in working with sex offenders, the distinction between need and desire should be made. One needs food and water to sustain life. Lack of sex does not cause death. Unless encouraged by an Incel group.

The escalating pathway of abusive images, according to Michael Sheath, who works at the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, for the rehabilitation of offenders, leads from the conflation of easy access to hardcore and deviant pornography, to an interest in child molestation. "The link is unambiguous.”
Rob Jones, director of threat leadership at the National Crime Agency, stated: “The prevalence on the open web of images of child sexual abuse – and the use of the web to groom and livestream abuse – represents a crisis for modern society.” The police UK database of known child abuse images has 17 million unique entries, and is growing by 500,000 images every two months. Around 850 people, mainly men, are arrested each month in England and Wales for downloading indecent images or grooming children online. That is 10,200 per year - compared with 2010, when there were only 407.
Am I wrong to suggest that masturbating to images of adult women can lead to an interest in the sexual abuse of children? Maybe the unholy triumvirate of Epstein, Maxwell and Windsor could help us out with that question.


Here's some thoughts from mr ishmael on such matters:
 
.......JUST ANOTHER DREAMER, DREAMING ABOUT EVERYMAN. 26/6/2016

For most of my life I have staunchly advocated the rights of people to fuck as they choose or are impelled to do, acting within whatever is the current law. I am mindful that such a posture can be seen as endorsing an over-reach of the criminal law, already pernicious and invasive, and that we should assume goodness on the part of all and leave people to do as they please; there is, however, a host of reasons for us policing sexual conduct, we need only look to the Harriet Harman paedophile scandal, a time in recent memory when cynical men found -were given - opportunity to romanticise and dignify cruel perversion, to bring it under the Rights banner, to have its cause championed by a squalid elite, that there should have been permitted to exist an organisation called the Paedophile Information Exchange is now almost unbelieveable - that it now seems monstrous is not due to legislators, some - at least some - of whom were and remain fellow-travellers but to victims and campaigners on their behalf; Harriet Harman would have seen all the children buggered, the ghastly, hideous Leon Brittan would lose the evidence, Margaret Thatcher and the Prince of Wales would cuddle the perpetrators; the Churches would - and still do - protect the culprit and slander the victim.

I mention this staggering, national, institutionalised criminality because that's what I voted against, the other day.* I voted against Filth, so, too, I suspect, did millions of others.

I don't give a fuck about Europe, I rarely go and even when I do I live in a land where I am no longer citizen but citizen-suspect and so travel to anywhere is an ordeal of suspicion and bullying and hostility. In or out of Europe my masters presume me guilty of something.

The same people - the Harmans, the Straws - those who embraced the Paedophile Information Exchange now make me suspect in my own land, the repulsive, impertinent cocksuckers of Satan. The same people who nourished alien child-grooming gangs, people like Mr Jack Bribes'n'Torture and Mr Dennis the Crook McShane, call me reactionary and ill-informed.

I don't give a fuck about trade, either. I know about trade, I have traded, I know how to make a profit; people will do it, they always have, when its prohibited, for fuck's sake, people smuggle. People want goods and services, other people want to provide them, in that process value is added, taxation raised, services provided. If the Sultans of Brussels restrict UK trade with member states, if they impede the exporting of BMWs to the UK, they'll be hung from the lamp posts, their balls in their mouths.

Trade is civilisation, now unelected bureaucrats and buffoons like Obama sternly threaten that civilisation, threaten livelihoods and public services, cheeky cunts. Obama can't stop hundreds of tonnes of cocaine being shipped-in to America's rich, thousands of tonnes of hash coming over the border or being grown at home and yet he wants to punish somebody who makes widgets in West Bromwich, somebody should punch him in his stupid, stuttering gob, kick his scrawny arse up and down Pennsylvania Avenue. I voted against Obama, the other day, too.

I read a comment thread in the Guardian, the other day, about fragrance, they didn't call it fragrance, just perfumes and deodorant. The NewPeople, it seems, are incensed by perfumes on the tube, in which, daily, they go about their angry lives. It's gonna kill them all, people wearing scent. It should be made illegal. Walking through airport perfume retailers just quite ruins their experience. They really were raging and drooling. (Me, I try them all, at the airport, I love fragrances, light ones, heavy ones. I like the good, old ones the most - Chanel, Guelain, Dior - but I like some of the newer ones, too, Calvin Klein and Boss, all the various Obsessions and Poisons, quite makes my journey, sniffing and testing nice smells. Not these joyless, prohibitive bastards who read the Guardian, y'know, thinking it still is the Guardian.) Recently, in Aberdeen Hospital, an older, lady phlebologist came to take a blood sample, I knew her of old, I think she may be a bit deaf, has a minor speech impediment, like deaf people sometimes do, and I really, really like her. Gosh, I said, tentatively, that perfume's nice, what is it? She laughed to herself and eventually said - It's one of my husband's aftershaves, it's an expensive one, but he doesn't like it, doesn't wear it, so I do. It's alright for pushing this trolley up and down hospital corridors. I laughed out-loud, saying, that's the sorta thing I'd do, too, and it is. Although I have lots of good stuff I very rarely wear any man cologne, coupla times a year, maybe, that's it, charity shop'll get a scented bonanza when I die, but I always like it when I do, nothing erotic about it, nothing seductive, I just like the smell, and the craft of the parfumier, and if mrs ishmael is putting some on I'll have a dab on my wrists, sniff it, through the day. Guardian readers, by a hundred to one, want perfumes banned in public places, their train journeys are made miserable by scent. Now, if I had to travel daily on one of those fucking subterranean cattle trains beloved of BoJo and Kahn the Kunt then other people's perfumes would be way down my list of grievances. I am nowhere near as clever as the average Guardian reader, even so, I am hundreds of miles from the nearest subway train system and if people can't stand the trains they should move to the country and live off their wits, only they haven't got any and thus witless prefer to find something which others enjoy and prohibit it. I voted against the Guardian, too, the other day, too, anyone who writes for it, anyone who supports it by occasional purchase or by subscription. Polly Toynbee? Gimme strength.

But I didn't come to talk about the Eurendum. mr bob doney offered his thanks for the endless commentary, here, of discouragement to our enemies and I thought I should say something about that because, inasmuch as my opinion matters more than another's, which it doesn't, that is not how I see it, this cyber streetcorner.

mr tdg sometimes obliquely challenges my assertions about and support for the people. Worlds, he reminds us, they rise and fall, this is all a speck in Time's eye; art, thought and culture, that is the stuff which matters, not tribal squabbles over who bestrides the dungheap and I am rightly reproved, even though I do hymn, often, those other things.

What the people want, according to any objective analysis of how Want is expressed and satisfied, is tat and pornography, bling and boobs; the best selling newspaper in the country succeeded because of its daily portrayal of teenage tits, the younger the better, and lies, filthy, disgusting lies, about everything, not just about Hillsbro. Rupert Murdoch and his McKenzie sluts - Trevor Kavanagh, Larry Lamb, Adam Lard, Kay Burley, Toilets Maguire, Andrew Pierce and notably the redneck playboy ancien, Andy Neil, have disfigured the nation, coarsened the public discourse, corrupted the police and ensnared the legislature. All this happened, though, because of and not despite the people, whose rights we have sought to strengthen and protect. Why do we bother, why do we celebrate the Eurendum result when, tomorrow, those who voted for departure would also vote for hanging, for castration, would genuflect before some braindead, crooked bullyboy foreign football manager?

Well, my response to my episodic self-scourging is to remind myself that things, for Everyman, at home and abroad for very man, have grown much better than they were when I was born.
* The United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, took place on 23 June 2016 in the United Kingdom (UK) and Gibraltar to ask the electorate whether the country should remain a member of, or leave, the European Union. The referendum resulted in 51.9% of the votes cast being in favour of leaving the EU.

A Question of Manners (an extract)

Bearing in mind that the Internet's major discourse is upon the subject of the digitised reproduction of largely degenerate and unhealthy, even dangerous and rightly illegal sexual activity, it seems, in any event, contradictory to be seeking, within the same medium, a lasting code or codes of conduct. PornoWeb, the final frontier. Whither manners, amid doggysex and wall-to-wall gangbanging?

Operation Delego was a major international law enforcement investigation which dismantled a paedophile ring that operated an invitation-only Internet site named Dreamboard featuring incentives for posting images of the violent sexual abuse of young children under twelve, including infants. Arrests were made in Canada, Denmark, Ecuador, France, Germany, Hungary, Kenya, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Qatar, Serbia, Sweden, Switzerland and the US. Only 72 charges were filed against the approximately 600 members of Dreamboard.

More Child Porn Isshoos 3/8/11


From Hiroshima and Nagasaki onwards, US foreign policy is an unending, kaleidoscopic snuff movie. In colonial wars and in covert operations GI Joe and psychobastard spooks from the CIA have distinguished themselves in genocide, torture, assassinations and chemical warfare, from My Lai to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay sanctimonious Bible-thumping klansmen have shrugged their Christian shoulders at crimes and abuses perpetrated in their names; successive presidents, leaders of the free world, as they delight in calling themselves, have insulated themselves from oversight and accountability, much less prosecution.

Led by the Torturing Attorney General, a gaggle of senior Uncle Sam law enforcers stood congratulating themselves yesterday for busting seventy or so nonces, worldwide, all of them fitting mr ptb's recent description - each member of the site, Dreamboat or some such, to retain his membership, had to upload new fresh images of him violently abusing children, preferably infants and the victims had to be in visible distress. One after another the bureaucrats praised each other, themselves, their staff, each other again and vowed that They can run but they can't hide. I don't know what fraction of a fraction of one per cent of hardcore nonces seventy constitutes but it'll be tiny to the point of invisibility. It's welcome, their capture, of course, but hardly a triumph and among fellow-travellers in nonce cyberspace it will make no difference whatsoever - these people are driven by a compulsion beyond reason - one would have thought that was self evident, even to the dummies at the Department of Justice. And there is another form of child pornography, as abusive as abusive can be, one in which the entire apparatus of Uncle Sam is brought to bear on defenceless children all around the world.
..............................................................
 

 

The developments in Afghanistan this week would have met with mr ishmael's unqualified approval. The Taliban has regained control of their country, from which they were ousted in 2001 by the Americans, following what they call 9/11 ( because they always put the date and the month in the wrong order). The Afghan government seems to have put up no opposition, so at least there has been minimal bloodshed, although there will be a cull of all the Western collaborators as the Taliban returns the country to their version of a pure Islamic state. The BBC is doing its level best to take us back into the war and occupation of Afghanistan, by whipping up sympathy for the plight of women who have rejected the Taliban's Islamic values  – we can only hope that the beeb does not prevail, and that the deal Biden struck with the Taliban holds. The influence of the BBC on shaping opinion is massive. And what are they up to? Instead of saying Thank Fuck that’s over,  reciting the statistics of dead and wounded, and the costs of being America’s lapdog in this 20 year war, they are wheeling out these totties who are wailing but we thought we were living in a Western democracy and now you’ve gone and abandoned us.

Had Britain been under occupation by a foreign power – say China – for 20 years, imagine the relief with which their withdrawal would be greeted, and how the quislings and collaborators with the occupying Chinese would be dealt with.  

Anyway, the War was long enough to be up there with the grand old history book wars:

  • the Hundred Years’ War: 1337 - 1453 - We fought the French
  • the Thirty Years War: 1618 -1648 - Big European bust up. We joined in a bit 
  • the Twenty Years War: 2001 - 2021- We helped America with their Operation Enduring Freedom. Estimated deaths in Afghanistan as a direct consequence of the war: 171,000 to 174,000 people. Long story short - we were worse than the Taliban. On the side of the Bad Guys again.

mr ishmael's essays today are:
 
 .......JUST ANOTHER DREAMER, DREAMING ABOUT EVERYMAN. 26/6/2016 
A Question of Manners  (an extract)
More Child Porn Ishoos                     drafted 3/8/11
 
 Answer to last week's crossword clue : Responsible Adult
 ..................................................

Both anthologies of the work  of mr ishmael and his young Polish friend, Stanislav, Plumb Cheap for You:  Honest Not Invent and Vent Stack - are available to purchase for mere money at Lulu or Amazon. It is cheaper to buy from Lulu. Here's how to buy your own copies: 

Please register an account with them first. This will save you a couple of quid, as going straight into the link provided below seems to make paypal think it's ok to charge in dollars, and apply their own conversion rate, which will put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow our link; a pop-up box asks for age confirmation - simply set the date to (say) 1 January 1960, and proceed. (If you type the title, the anthology will not appear as a search result until the "show explicit content" box - found at the bottom left by scrolling down - has been checked.  You may also see the age verification box, as above, at this point.) 
 The full title is "Vent Stack love from stanislav" by ishmael smith, and the cover you'll see is red with white titles and a picture of Buster the Previous Blog Dog having a green thought in a green shade. 

Link for the paperback:

 https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/ishmael-smith/vent-stack/paperback/product-q8jzk2.html?page=1&pageSize=4

Or...

shorter link, which might make it easier if you wish to paste it into an email and tell a friend:

 https://tinyurl.com/naajavmu

 Honest, Not Invent is available in paperback or hardback.

Link for Hard Back : 

https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/ishmael-smith/honest-not-invent/hardcover/product-njr7vg.html

Link for Paper Back : 

https://www.lulu.com/en/us/shop/ishmael-smith/honest-not-invent/paperback/product-wq2kpg.html

At checkout, try PROWRITINGAID15, WELCOME15 or TREAT15 in the coupon box, which  takes 15% off the price before postage.  If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.  

With the 15% voucher, the book (including delivery to a UK address) should cost £10.89



 

19 comments:

inmate said...

Not wishing to be a pedant mrs I, both Quik release couplings are female.

https://agrilineproducts.com/parts-by-category/hydraulics/couplings/quick-release-couplings Half way down the page you’ll see male/female couplings (not filth).

Yes there are only two sexes, fact.
All men are wankers, fact.
Mr Billy Connelly used to tell a joke to that effect: man shouted WANKER ! and every bloke in the street turned to see if it was them the man wanted.
I think the withdrawal of the military from Afghanistan will come back to bite us in the arse, when the heroine supplies dwindle more young men will have to go back there.

Mike said...

Never been to Sicily, although its long been on my todo list - ever since Montalbano.

The Palermo arancina would be my choice, but wouldn't complain about the alternative.

To date, there has never been a case where a same sex couple has managed to produce naturally, and biologically, a child. Buying them in Africa, because their colour somehow makes it acceptable, or at least less able to be criticised, doesn't count.

mrs ishmael said...

Hi, mr inmate, thank you for the link to agriline products' couplings - I had a little look, and refer you to the Machine Mart catalogue, https://www.machinemart.co.uk/p/female-quick-release-snap-coupling-1-4/ which provided my information for the post and persists in telling me that I illustrated a male and a female coupling. It does sound like filth, I agree.
And it is not the fact of ubiquitous wanking that I was drawing attention to, but the type of masturbatory material chosen and the addiction to online porn, that draws some men into the use of more and more extreme material - similar to the use of heroin, which requires incrementally larger doses to achieve the same effect. Thank you for the opportunity of clarifying that point.

mrs ishmael said...

Ah, mr mike, Commissaire Montal-bano - I love the music, the buildings, the parched landscapes, the comedy policemen, the rapid Italian; Montalbano himself with his constant irritation and greed - such a shame I can never stay awake for a whole episode - well, they are long, and the BBC punts them out at 9:00pm on a Saturday night, when I have usually enjoyed a glass or so of Montepulciano d'Abruzzo with my Pasta 'Ncasciata. The wine blurb says it is intense, clean and attractive, with aromas of black cherry, blueberry, plum and violet with almond flowers and walnut husks. Be sure to drink it warm - a splash of hot water from the kettle helps to release all those incredible flavours.
I've never been to Sicily, either, and I don't suppose I ever will, now. It won't look like the TV series, though, which seems to have tidied all the people away before filming commences.

inmate said...

I’m sorry Mrs I, it would appear that even my favourite shop is wrong, in their description of a ‘male’ quick release connector. If you look at the images just below the one you linked to, you will see the male connectors, to the rhs of the page: if you squint at them they even look like a small penis, they connect into the top of the one you linked, and lock in place by means of spring loaded ball bearings. The threaded part, either internal or external, on the posted pics, is the means of fitting them to the appropriate pipe work from the air supply, usually ‘sealed’ with PTFE tape.
As for your original post point. I think one would have to have some particularly sick or depraved mind or be of the belief that they are untouchable: Jack Torture, the McCanns, George Robertson, the Blairs and all the rest mentioned in the post.
I cannot for the life of me find the fascination in child porn, maybe Ally Campbell would like to explain, or snuff porn, or granny porn FFS. These people don’t deserve help, they need, like a rabid dog, putting down.

mrs ishmael said...

Nope, mr inmate, I'm not giving in that easily. Isn't the part you point out described as an adapter? Anyroadup, the thing of it is that the male coupling sticks out and the female coupling receives the sticky-out-bit. Sorry for the filth, general readers,but that's ToolTalk.
As for euthanising sexual offenders, you know I can't agree with that. I have real difficulty in accepting the occasional necessity of euthanising animals. However, I have worked with sex offenders and I do not believe that there exists any treatment, therapy or "help" that will change their sexual orientation. No doubt the woke people will tell us that it is ethically wrong to even contemplate such a thing, as with the outcry against conversion therapy. The best one can achieve is containment to keep potential victims out of their clutches.

inmate said...

Almost there mrs I, just the wrong way round. The adapter is the threaded part, internal or external, the coupling is the male/female part.
If you’ve got 15 minutes spare watch this Canuck chappie, he explains it well.
https://youtu.be/68Bwx4Aap8U

“As for euthanising sexual offenders, you know I can't agree with that. I have real difficulty in accepting the occasional necessity of euthanising animals. However, I have worked with sex offenders and I do not believe that there exists any treatment, therapy or "help" that will change their sexual orientation…

When we know that nothing more can be done for our warm furry friends. When we’ve given them all the treatments, therapy and help. Family pets who have never abused, tortured or murdered children, we, reluctantly, accept that, perhaps, putting them to sleep is the kindest option.
Our NHS, our govament, had no second thoughts about euthanising the Old Folks, for the sin of being old and to save a few quid in pension payments.
Our govament have abandoned the Women and Children to a violent cult of abusers and torturers; what was it the prophet said: little girls are for marrying, little boys are for sex. No problem in killing thousands if there’s money to be made.
No, sorry, most people deserve all the help we can possibly give, some don’t. Blair, Hancock, Straw, Johnson, child abusers and torturers and cult followers of a pedophile deserve to be removed from society, permanently.

mrs ishmael said...

And in International News:
Afghan President Ghani flees Kabul in helicopter stuffed with cash: Reports
By PTI
| Updated: Monday, August 16, 2021, 19:58 [IST]
Google Oneindia News
Moscow, Aug 16: Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani has fled the war-torn country aboard a helicopter stuffed with money but had to leave some cash as it could not be squeezed into the chopper, according to Russian official media reports on Monday.
Taliban insurgents swept Kabul on Sunday after a sudden and unprecedented collapse of the US-backed Ghani government, prompting the president to join fellow citizens and foreigners to leave the country.
Quoting Russian embassy in Kabul, Russian official news agency TASS reported that the 72-year-old President fled Afghanistan aboard a helicopter packed with money.
"As for the reasons for the collapse of the regime, they are characterised by how Ghani fled the country. Four cars were packed with money, and they tried to cram another bag of cash into the helicopter. Not all the cash managed to squeeze in, and some of the money was left lying on the airfield," a mission employee was quoted as saying by the report.
Though TASS did not name the mission employee, quoting Russian diplomatic mission spokesperson Nikita Ishenko, Russian wire service Sputnik reported that Ghani was escorted with cars filled with cash as he was fleeing Kabul.
"They tried to put part of the money into a helicopter, but everything did not fit. And some of the money was left on the runway," Ishenko said.

(Ghani's stash was bloated by the pay that he had withheld from his army. No wonder they had no stomach for the fight.)

mrs ishmael said...

Enough ToolTalk, mr inmate - my interest is but casual, at most. You win.
These issues of sexual politics that you refer to are so dreadfully complex that I hesitate to state a decided view. But I know that a society that approves judicial killing is a society that has at its heart something ancient and unclean, that the killing deforms everyone involved in it and the possibility of error undermines the whole thing.
I was interested to learn that one of the first actions of the Taliban was to paint over images of women on billboards. I remember a WonderBra billboard that presided over the FiveWays roundabout in Birmingham in the Nineties. One of those Hello Boys adverts, with six foot tall giant jugs constituting a major road traffic distraction. I would definitely have approved of painting over that image. Far from being an icon of female liberation and supercute, it was a debasing image of enslavement to patriarchal capitalism. Don't tell me that the model was being paid squillions of squids and was not only consenting, but hungry for the exposure. The fact that she was a willing participator isn't the point. My consent had not been sought to being exposed to an image that, in essence, debases women, depicts them as sexually available, shameless, and, to trot out a now-historic phrase - no more than a sex object. The embedding of such beliefs about women in the psyches of some men debases the ways in which men and women relate to each other, endangers women and contributes to the misogyny, fury and frustration that fuels the Incel movement.

inmate said...

Not looking to win mrs I, merely to inform, educate, its the reason I come here, to educate myself.
Patriarchal Capitalism? I presume that’s rich men getting even more rich, don’t think I’ve seen the benefits of patriarchal capitalism.
The Talimen painting over billboards showing women is a far more sinister, evil ideology. They believe that women are on a par with animals and treat them accordingly.

mrs ishmael said...

Can I refer you to this, mr inmate? http://www.cadtm.org/Capitalism-and-Patriarchy-Two-Systems-that-Feed-off-Each-Other, from the website of the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt (CADTM)
Long story short:
Patriarchy is a social order based on the holding of power and privileges by men: a socially constructed reality, so powerful that it constitutes a way of thinking deeply rooted in our cultures, ordinary reflexes and institutions. Violence, discourse and stereotypes naturalize and justify unequal gender relations at work and in everyday life.
Capitalism is a social order comprising a set of economic laws and mechanisms, and containing exploitation, domination and alienation.
Patriarchy is millennia-old and so embedded in our understanding of the world and human beings that we simply do not see and therefore do not challenge the benefits and disadvantages that it has created.
Comparatively, Capitalism is the new kid on the block - it replaced the mediaeval feudal system and continues to play out in Western nations, who cannot conceive that there may be better ways of doing things.

ultrapox said...

on the grounds, mrs ishmael, that he constitutes an iconic centre-spread for "patriarchal capitalism", one suspects there may exist many debased and ideologically enslaved conservatives who would equally welcome banning images of the great big tit in number ten.

ultrapox said...

excuse my rudely butting-in to your materialist dialectic, mrs ishmael, but would you deem the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism to be one more symbiotic or cannibalistic in nature?

mrs ishmael said...

That's funny, mr ultrapox, my dear - thanks for lightening the mood!

mongoose said...

As we will see this coming few months in Afghanistan, mrs i, a brutish big un will usually be abke to impose his will upon a little un. That is the basis of patriarchy. Women are smaller on the average and weaker on the average than men. And in the past, this kept women from everything. The horrific scale of death in childbirth and thereafter weighted the scales in a terribly chilling way too. There probably wasn't any cold-hearted economic sense in educating a poor girl who you'd sell in marriage but who might die the first year. That's the animal world that we lived in before medicine.

There is no difference between men and women in anything really beyond that that requires physicality. The Peterson chap says that women are more "agreeable" and he is probably right. When kindness and civilisation are removed though, as they now will be in Afghanistan, brute force wins, and that's men. As you say, this is now enshrined in the habit of eons.

I do not doubt that my tiny wife is my equal in every way - and my better in very many ways actually - except physicality, and what we will call assertiveness or aggression. If the builder has to be brought to heel, I do it. I am able to be disagreeable more easily than is she. But when the kids have to be loved or helkped, I see no difference. When the Russians come though it will be me waiting behind the door to run them through with my javelins while Miss runs to safety with our grandkids. And that is right and proper. Perhaps I assume too much.

The strangeness of this is that my non-PC sins hereabove are almost nothing compared to the Taliban sins to come. You must see that the irritating mansplaining I have just indulged in is nothing compared to the head-chopping, woman-stoning backwardness of yesteryear coming to Afghanistan. Here we are, man, woman, debating as friends and equals the ruin of the world.

mrs ishmael said...

Woah, gentlemen - just because I took exception to the massive mazumbas presiding over the Five Ways roundabout in the Nineties, it does not mean that I have become radicalised or a convert to Sharia law, under which my disputatiousness would have me imprisoned, at best. The variant of Sharia as interpreted by the Pashtun tribesmen who form the Taliban is a disgusting religion and culture and one that I, secular to my backbone after an adolescent fling with Catholicism and Elvis Presley, would join the stampede out of Afghanistan to avoid, were I unfortunate enough to live in that benighted country.
However, in the matter of the invasion of a sovereign state by UK and US troops in 2001 we see an act of war that was justified only by the act of terrorism perpetrated on US soil in September 2001. That casus belli surely ceased to exist after the assassination of Osama bin Laden in May 2011. The continuation of an Army of Occupation in Afghanistan after that date was an attempt to impose Western secular values on an Islamic state in pursuance of some aspect of the West's sphere of influence. Was it to protect the heroin industry, as mr inmate suggests, at the top of this thread? Or something else? Whatever, I do not think it right to tell other people what to do in their own country - maybe that is too much exposure to Star Trek's Prime Directive in my youth - on the basis that is not how we would do it.
The fact that the Taliban reasserted control of Afghanistan, without opposition, in the week in which the occupying Army withdrew demonstrates that the majority of the Afghan people welcomed a return to the status quo ante bellum.
Surely it is their right to do so, and to live in the way that they have chosen?
Now, should Al Quaeda be welcomed by the Taliban to set up shop again in Afghan, and to use it as a base to launch terrorist attacks - or acts of war - on Western nations, then that would constitute a further casus belli that would justify a second invasion. But these are matters for speculation and for the future.

inmate said...

Thanks for the referral mrs I, I will try my best to get an understanding of my faults and privileges. I will report back when my thoughtcrime and wrongthink have been corrected.

mrs ishmael said...

Ouch, mr inmate, you slay me with your sarcasm. Was I being bossy? It is my besetting fault, I fear.

inmate said...

My comment was not aimed at your good self mrs I, more at the anti-anything that white, males and females, have achieved throughout history.