Our Cultural Vulva

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Welcome to Hotel Satire where we teach gals how to be the passive twits they were born to be. 

Except that right now we are in deep crisis and have suspended all gal training classes—even the ever- popular “Doormat” 101. Why? Well, part of being a gal is to discuss how to shop, when to shop, where to shop, how often to shop, etc. For us, shopping is a healthy reminder of our dependence on our husband’s (or other male’s) hard- earned money. It is a time to fight other gals, tooth and manicured nail, for that coveted sale item. It is a reminder that we, as gals, are limited to two basic topics: consumer items and more consumer items. 

Now, it turns out, shopping means something entirely different. According to Naomi Woolf, in an article on the Internet, “Shopping is a feminist issue.” Not only that, according to Naomi, every time we gals go shopping we are participating in the “sorority, or sisterhood.” Yikes. Isn’t “sisterhood” a code word for lesbian? This is terrible. If we shop, we’re in the sisterhood; if we don’t shop we’re not true gals. 

In this same article, titled “Anti- Consumerism Equals Anti-Wo- manism,” Naomi tells us that misogynist anti-globalization activists are trying to keep gals from shopping or, as she puts it, “Green stormtroopers” are destroying “women’s last safe inner space, their cultural vulva.” What the heck is a vulva? Okay, we don’t want to know. At Hotel Satire, the less gals know about their bodies, or anything else, the better. Not knowing these things means we can  spend large amounts of time in dependent interactions with male experts who know all about our bodies, thank goodness. 

Naomi says shopping “is the one time contemporary women are allowed to indulge in the activities men take for granted: socializing, networking, negotiating and refashioning the Self. It’s not about buying consumer goods, any more than the boys’ fishing trips or bowling leagues are about catching fish or knocking down pins.” 

WHAT? It’s not? We thought our hubbies’ fishing trips were about catching fish since they never seem to do any negotiating, much less actual talking.  

Plus, why does this make it a feminist issue? We thought feminism was about freeing gals from their passive twittedness and domestic appendagery. You mean it’s really about networking and socializing and negotiating, and refashioning the Self? That would make a heck of a lot of things feminist activities, wouldn't it? What about when men shop together, for example? What does that make them? 

Says Naomi, “Just look at women shopping, really shopping: you’ll see the depth of feeling with which they consult each other, the way conversation slips easily back and forth like the loom of a shuttle knitting Penelope’s web.” Uh, okay. So feminism is depth of feeling while shopping and also consulting each other? Where is this Naomi gal shopping? We can't remember any shopping experiences where Penelope’s web would have come to mind, whatever the hell that is—and we don’t want to know. It’s probably a sisterhood menstrual reference of some kind. 

But even more confusing is this: Naomi says that anti-globalization activists are against consumerism and are therefore anti-woman, i.e., anti-feminist. Then doesn’t that mean the gals at Hotel Satire have lots in common with anti-globalization activists who, as Naomi writes, attack clothing stores with “naked male aggression hiding behind clever slogans?” After all, naked male aggression and misogyny are crucial to what being a man is all about. We teach that stuff at the Hotel. 

What about, as Naomi writes, “Men wielding clubs, smashing female images draped in clothing too subtle for them to price, indulging in a ‘Green’ version of urban assault.” Except for the Green part, these guys seem perfect prospects for husbands, son-in-laws, etc. Even closer to our Hotel agenda, Naomi describes the passivity of the “female collaborators who hang back, doing their best to look like their male Alpha-wolf leaders in deliberately unflattering hairstyles and cast-off biker and soldier garments. The sheer unattractiveness of these victims’ style is itself the best evidence for the benefits of shopping—benefits these women have chosen to forgo.” 

Uh, wow. So not shopping equals being unattractive and therefore not feminist, as well as not entering the cultural vulva that is Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s.  

Naomi concludes “anti-Consumerism is misogyny. To hate shopping and all of its representatives is to hate women.” Yikes, loving to shop (and loving the companies that provide stuff to shop for) means we are sisters, but not shopping means hating gals, which is one of the things we teach here at the Hotel. What are we to do? 

Also, if we don’t shop, then “male purveyors of far darker, more sinister fashions—the burka, the veil, and the miniskirt—will take over.” What?!  

At Hotel Satire we support any clothing that make us look like irrelevant appendages or comatose twits, which the above mentioned items often do. Agghhhh. We don’t know who we are. 

But there’s more. We were perusing our hubby’s copy of Time Magazine (October 13) trying to find the fashion section (not for feminist shopping purposes, but to keep us involved in 24-hour mindless activity), when the Travelogue page caught our eye. It was all about the “frisky First Lady” winning hearts and minds in France and Russia. What?! The response to her trip was “heady, enthusiastic.” Why? Because “Mrs. Bush spoke in the gentle, feminist language… that U.N. types favor.” 

Whoa. What’s going on here—the First Lady described by using the dreaded F’s: frisky and feminist? The UN as favoring feminist language?! Our heads are spinning. Further, “At times she even sounded a bit like Hillary Clinton, saying that ‘learning empowers women to ask questions, to understand their rights and to make their own decisions’.” Noooooo, not Hillary again! Laura, honey, stop it. Didn’t you learn anything from hubby George’s naked aggression in Iran? Iraq? Iowa? Idaho? Iceland? Whatever. 

We can’t go on. Most of the Hotel gals have run screaming from the room. If you can’t count on your First Lady to concern herself solely with the care and feeding of hubbie, kids, and the family pet, what can you count on? 

There’s one glimmer of hope for the gals. Naomi says, “Shopping is about choice. And choice is what women demand.... Shopping is a human right—a woman’s right!” So to avoid the sisterhood-as-shopping trap we can shop alone and refuse to choose, maybe even join the anti-globalist female collaborators as they passively watch their men's naked aggression...or will that make us activists or deluded or confused or sisters or twits or what!?