We now present the first of what i hope will be many Guest Posts by Daisy Duchess, President of The National Organization of Feminist Weasels.
Daisy graduated from Wellesley in 1998 with a double major in Women’s Studies and Law. She spent seven years working as a prosecutor for the New Orleans D.A, a position which saw her jail thousands of homeless men for littering the streets with their presence.
Misogyny In Letters
By Daisy Duchess, President of The National Organization of Feminist Weasels
I would like to begin by thanking the pig for this opportunity, and by asking him if he’s stopped beating his wife and children yet. No, I don’t expect piggy to give me an answer to that, indeed I would expect him to take the Fifth! But that’s pigs for you, just so un-communicative!
Today I will present one of the many subtle yet pervasive acts of misogyny that occur in our society with frightening regularity – about every six minutes i believe.
Recently I visited a site by the name of Project Syndicate to check out Naomi Wolf’s latest writings, and as usual she was a bit too centerish for my tastes, but the subject of this post is not Ms Wolf’s wimpiness, but rather the left sidebar which lists the site’s contributors under the heading “Thought Leaders.”
Looking at this sidebar you will notice, apart from its obvious phallic connotations (and don’t think I don’t know what that’s supposed to imply) that Ms Wolf’s name is at the very bottom of the list of contributors! Now, the patriarchally inclined would say “Well, Daisy that’s because the list is alphabetically arranged and Wolf begins with a W, and no other contributors have names beginning with X, Y or Z!”
Bah! To that I say “Rubbish!” The fact is that ever since the prehistoric matriarchies were overthrown by the savage hordes of maleness, the patriarchy has arranged the order of letters in the alphabet to be prejudiced against women. As everyone knows, women have a natural tendency towards having surnames that begin with the latter letters of the alphabet (Wolf, Steinem, Xylophone and Zoology) whereas men are more likely to have surnames that start with the earlier letters (Bush, Cheney, Beck and my local grocer Billy Aardvark).
This, and only this, is the reason why names are arranged “alphabetically” in the modern patriarchies – the oppression and relegation of women to the bottom of website sidebars! After all, if this isn’t the purpose of this particular type of tyranny, why not just place names haphazardly? It would play havoc with library catalogs you say? Bah, don’t be so naïve!
This patriarchal colonization of the means of communication, the locus of intellectual self-expression, is the kind of small, everyday attack on women that society tends to largely ignore, the kind of attack that makes women feel diminished every time they open a book or write a letter, the kind of attack that must end, especially now that we have a feminist in the White House.