i love twisty. in a don't always agree with her but daaaaamn, but she's sharp sort of way. also? best blog title ever.

I Blame The Patriarchy

An example of the sort of thing an actively blaming spinster aunt must address: this morning I got an email from a woman who says her 17-year-old daughter has been reading I Blame The Patriarchy. The daughter is apparently troubled by my post on altar girls in India, wants to know whether nuns are being raped, and if so, why there isn’t “big outrage” over it.

The answer to these questions—that of course nuns are being raped, since they’re women, and that there isn’t big outrage over it because it is not the policy of any patriarchal society to exhibit big outrage over rape in general—leads to many unpleasant streams of consciousness originating within the Twisty obstreperal lobe. First I speculate whether the 17-year-old daughter is specifically worried about nuns—as opposed to, say, prostitutes, or housewives—because the cloistered bride of Christ occupies a place in the popular imagination somewhere next to baby bunnies, whereas hookers and housewives are fallen and uninteresting, respectively, making their rapes seem deserved or de rigueur, also respectively. Then I am moved to jokingly remark to myself that Bill Napoli would relish making an exception for a raped nun, as long as she was sufficiently mutilated in the process, and not too old, and that no priest would go to jail for it. Then I admonish self for being a sick fuck and why can’t I get this Napoli jagoff out of my mind. Then the notion that nun-rape is more popularly abhorrent than the rape of any other sort of woman morphs into a contemplation of the total weirdness of the practice of getting unmarriageable or politically inconvenient women out of the way by locking them up in convents and assigning them Godliness as a profession. This, in turn, makes me think about the Catholic church, and the untold ways in which it has totally fucked up the world, and therefrom, I begin to writhe in trepidation over the astonishing extent to which people have normalized—if you’ll forgive me using that geekism—oppression.