W
elcome to Hotel Satire where gals
come to learn how to most closely resemble livestock. This month
we decided to answer a few letters from gals out there who seem
completely unaware of their livestock resemblance, as well as everything
else about their God-given roles in the world.
Dear Hotel Satire Gals (HSG),
I read a shocking article in the April 5
Boston Globe
titled
“Online ads offer rooms in return for sex” by Dan Goodin.
The article appears, interestingly, squeezed in next to a Macy’s
ad for menswear, so you can guess who’s placing the rent for
sex ads. Anyway, it seems that there are more than eight million
ads per month on this popular website. In Atlanta a room is offered
in exchange for “sex and light office duty.” In Los Angeles
a “one-bedroom pool house” is offered free to a “girl
that is skilled and willing.” In New York City a $700 a month
room is available at a discount to a “fit female willing to
provide sex.” Another seeks a “female that likes to be
nude. Nothing more expected.” A man offering a $350-a-month
room in the San Francisco area advertized thusly: “I usually
rent the room for 600, but if you are really ticklish and willing
to trade being tickled for the extra rent, then we have a deal.”
Don’t you find this outrageous? Did everybody miss the women’s
movement?
Signed, Enraged
Dear Man-hater,
Regarding your question about missing the gal’s lib movement:
yes, thankfully, most men certainly missed it and they’re the
ones that count. As to the ads: sex outside marriage is ungodly.
Need we remind you (and the eight million classified advertisers)
that marriage is a beautiful institution that permits guys to get
sex, light housekeeping, and occasional office duties on demand
in exchange for which gals get to be what God intended: i.e., domestic
appendages whose purpose is to service men. If these ads had offered
rent in exchange for sex, housekeeping duties, with an “option
to marry,” then no problem.
Dear HSG,
I read in the
New York Times
Book Review
of March
19 about a new book,
Manliness,
by Harvard professor of government,
Harvey C. Mansfield, who writes such pithy sentences as, “Though
it’s clear that women can be manly, it’s just as clear
that they are not as manly or as often manly as men.” Huh!?
This guy teaches—and at Harvard?
Reviewer Walter Kirn quotes Mansfield writing such things as “male
and female are innately different” and “Our science rather
clumsily confirms the stereotype about manliness….” and
feminists “stole all their ideas from Marx [economics] and
Nietzsche [nihilism].” Wha?
Mansfield ends by saying, “So, weaker than men, women have
to be indirect to get what they want, they simply can’t insist.”
Reviewer Kirn tells us, “After making what he believes to be
a meal of all these clucking hens that think they’re roosters,
Mansfield wipes up the grease by going back to Aristotle and something
called ‘philosophical courage,’ which is held out as the
manliest manliness yet.”
Is there no end to the continuous not-so-thinly-veiled misogyny
that argues for a gender hierarchy of character traits where women
are to shut up and stay in their male-assigned places?
Signed, Enough Already
Dear Lesbian,
Yes, this guy’s for real and it’s a beautiful book and
surely no one is more of an expert on manliness than a Harvard professor
of government. We concur with Mansfield when he addresses gals’
attempts to be independent, saying, “becoming manlike is a
strange way of proving you are independent of men (ladylike would
seem to be a better way)” and “men are a mixture of pluck
and pride….”
Also, we admire a man who makes his case for men being men and gals
being, well, not men by using lots of literary references—
Homer and Kipling, for instance—to prove his scientific point.
If we could return to Homer’s ever so manly 8th century BC
or even Kipling’s 19th, when gals were basically ladylike (i.e.,
property), everything would be okay.
Dear HSG,
I recently watched
Brokeback Mountain
on DVD as I missed
it when it played in our local movie theater. All I have to say
is, “What the f___?” And I mean that literally. These
guys fall in love with each other after a few months of fishing,
camping, herding sheep, and exchanging simple sentences? I don’t
buy it. Subsequently, they both get married and their wives take
care of the home, the shopping, the cooking, the cleaning, their
husbands, the children, and have jobs to boot. In return they get
morose husbands who hardly say more than two words to them. And
yet these guys are miserable and unfulfilled, presumably because
they only get to go camping and fishing with each other once a year?
Is this a joke?
It’s the women who should be complaining, for chrissakes. Is
the
Brokeback
in the title a sly reference to the misogyny
that underlies this filmic crap? When will Hollywood make a movie
where women are depicted realistically and of equal importance rather
than subsumed and where guys actually behave like human beings,
i.e., like women? Then maybe there will be some decent love stories
told, same-sex or otherwise.
Signed, Aaagghhh!
Dear Sociopath,
The answer to your question about Hollywood is “Never!”
By the way we saw
Brokeback Mountain
. We enjoyed the horseback
riding and sheep herding, but closed our eyes during certain parts,
if you catch our drift. The reason we tolerated the same-sex disgustingness
is because this film’s message is a good one. It’s not
about love, as the director claims, it’s about how today’s
gals are driving men crazy and if they don’t stop it, then
their men are going to do unspeakable things in a tent in order
to teach you gals a lesson.
Dear HSG,
I was reading a review in the March 19
Times Sunday Review of
Books
titled “Chick-Lit Pandemic.” It’s about
a collection of essays called
Chick Lit
. By the way, an example
of chick lit is
Bridget Jones
’s
Diary
, which
the review describes as being about a woman who is “endearing,
hung over, and running late for work.” Co-editor Mallory Young
writes that in countries “where feminism hasn’t fully
taken root, chick lit might be offering the feminist joys of freedom
and the post-feminist joys of consumerism simultaneously.”
Excuse me? If feminism hasn’t taken root, how can they enjoy post-feminism?
And doesn’t it seem a bit bizarre to be using the words
chick lit and feminism in the same sentence? Especially when writing
about a genre where the goal for gals is (to be thin enough and
beautiful enough) to find the right man? Jeez, at least the 1950s
Cherry Ames, Student Nurse
series—for all her perky
curls and pretty frocks—was about her being a student nurse,
not her search for a husband. And why is chick lit a pandemic????????
Signed, Not a Farm Animal
Dear Pinko Terrorist,
Are you the same person who wrote to us about the March 19 article
on manliness? If so, please stop reading the
Sunday Times
,
it’s too liberal and feminist.
Moving on, the lesson here is that whatever words you use in reference
to gals make sure they are derogatory and belittling. Also, remember
that all things feminine are, in themselves, derogatory when used
as adjectives in reference to all things manly .
At Hotel Satire, we make sure to equate gals with domestic livestock
on a daily basis. Fresh and dried fruits and vegetables are also
good gal reference terms (tomatoes, peaches), as are baked goods
(cream puff, honey bun, cookie). Lately, inspired by Homer’s
use of epithets (swift-footed, rosy-fingered), we are prefacing
our references to gals when they read as chickie-litted and to gals
when the go to the movies as chickieflicked and gals when they bathe
or go swimming as chickie-dipped and gals when they are being ladylike
as chickie-zipped.
Lydia
Sargent is an actor and playwright. She co-founded
Z
Magazine
and has been on the staff once 1988
