Peter Wilhelm’s observations on 2014, the year of the butt and feminism’s changing face
By Peter Wilhelm
For over a hundred years, sundry incarnations of feminism have been assaulting the castles erected by male, patriarchal bastards. We (men) have now witnessed suffragettes hurling themselves under royal horses, demanding the right to console themselves with same-sex relationships (Queen Victoria didn't believe lesbianism was true, so it flourished while the buggers did hard time or fled), and now summon the courage to face the likes of Bill Cosby and the loathsome Jimmy Savile – investigation of whom (he's in the great pigpen in the sky) will yet deflate Britain's stiff upperness.
So we are cringing in our TV couches while women assert themselves. Have you seen how many newsreaders, journalists, CEOs, and "celebrities" are women?
Not only that. What are the (mainly men) watching while noshing on buttery popcorn on their sink-through pods? Turns out the major porn-watching countries include Pakistan, Egypt, Iran, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Pakistan's online obsession highlights searches for pigs, donkeys, dogs, cats and snakes. These are the folk who terrify us! Cut off their Internet and they'll surrender.
A universal matriarchy would solve everything. Or, er, maybe…
Previous recipes for feminism have been adjusted as women throw off their serfdom, the latest being to take their clothes off and assert what has been called their erotic capital. This has retrospectively shaped 2014 as "the year of the butt", with pretty explicit sex scenes invading the screen. I speak not of the utterly boring Nymphomaniac (a delight to those weathered men who go alone and wear overcoats) but your actual average songbird who posts nude pictures of herself all over the Internet. One female supporter had this to say:
"And so, posing nude in the bathtub, bubbles barely blurring her vagina, Miley Cyrus is again having fun on her own terms. All the anguished blah directed at her says more about our panic over youthful female sexuality than it says about her. Cyrus has shown she's all grown up. It's time we grew up too."
This is feminism's latest broadside: "Scream it out loud, I'm naked and proud." Simultaneously, the battlefront advances against masculine clichés about the human form being in any way fat, anorexic, tiny, gigantic, unusually addicted to BDSM, whatever; men just bounce these provocations off their beer bellies that sag to cover their genitalia and their pebbly knees.
Prostitution, too, is gradually edging into legal terrain along with marijuana. No-one is evermore to be denigrated as a "prostitute". Yesterday's vocabulary spin invented "sex worker" (150 000 in SA, 60% of them HIV-positive, but never mind that). Now, contemplate America's euphemisms. All persons of the night are now "victims of human trafficking". That refers to volunteers – not merely abductees of the bestial Boko Haram or ISIS.
Pre-Miley Cyrus's proud display of her bumps and stirry parts, we had pushed into our faces off the screen the remarkably asexual Kim Kardashian's bum. I can't reproduce the lacquered, brown-polished, enormous image – but go to Google www.glamourmagazine.co.uk/news/celebrity/ for further information.
This was also the year that gave us twerking ("a type of dancing which an individual, usually a female, dances to music in a sexually provocative manner, involving thrusting hip movements and a low squatting stance"). I wonder what Valerie Solanas – the sole member of the Society for Cutting Up Men, SCUM – who unsuccessfully shot Andy Warhol would have made of that?
It was Warhol who predicted that in future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. That span has contracted to about 15 seconds; and in the case of Kim Kardashian I wonder why (a) she gets more than 15 seconds; and (b) what exactly is she celebrated for other than her twerky rear?
If by any schizophrenic chance you wander into Parliament while it is in "session" (rioting kids vs Edwardian gents) you will certainly obtain an (unwanted) view of how they have all grown up – into jabbering ape-like entities who twerk nonstop against ideas that frighten them into wondering what life would be like (unsustainable!) without Jacob Zuma. Jake just sits in a corner eating his pie.
These people don't have colonial names such as Matthew, Mark, Luke & John – but flaunt indecipherable cognomens like Fifi Trixabelle, Little Pixie, Peaches Honeyblossom and Tiger Lily. Just call the ladies "Your Majesty" or "Minister" and you can't go wrong.
They are all former concubines of that tireless sex labourer, Mr. Zuma. In the key point where he appears to spend most of his time, the President tends to communicate in beastly grunts. He wants to nationalise our beauty parlours, and build atomic reactors that will cost zip and blanket the landscape like flies on a sweaty sex worker's back in midsummer.
So he keeps all the power while his post-feminist muppets reminisce about the year of the butt.
* Peter Wilhelm is an awarded novelist, poet, and journalist. Author of 10 published books, he was born in Cape Town (1943), he completed his schooling in the Transvaal and taught English and Science. He joined the Financial Mail in 1974 and returned to the Cape to briefly edit Leadership. He writes film reviews and a weekly satirical column. The column has been fired by three editors: Ken Owen, Caroline Southey, and Gasant Abader. The late journalist Patrick Laurence said: "Peter satirises everything that moves." His column has evolved and moved from one publication to another. We welcome him for an extended stay on Biznews.com.