Roseannearchy

by Roseanne Barr

  I must say, ladies and gentlemen, I support a woman’s right to chew. I also support a woman’s right not to be shot up with hormones. The minute I turned fifty, doctors started hawking the premenopausal hormones right away. They’re not going to stick me with any goddamned hormones! Have you seen all those horrid commercials on TV? They sell drugs like they’re Skittles; it’s awful.

  Another side effect of menopause is that you lose your sex drive, and they try to make you think that’s a bad thing. The doctors tell you to take hormones—male hormones (you know, testosterone)—because they say it will restore your sex drive, the elasticity of your skin, your youth, your memory, and will keep your girl chute receptive to your old man’s wiener, which is all hopped up and stiffened on Viagra. Speaking of old men and their wieners: They shouldn’t be fooling Mother Nature with those boner pills—she got mad enough about the margarine, remember, Boomers? The occasional organic woody is more than enough. And, trust me, gentlemen, gray hair does not make your gnarly knob look distinguished. And when it does rear its ugly head for old times’ sake, you should think of that as “me time”—a chance to catch up on your hitchhikin’ to heaven.

  Women don’t need more testosterone; men need less! This is the time in the world where we need cooperation and not competition. Testosterone makes people testy and competitive! Of course, the doctors tell you that fear of taking the hormones is a symptom of menopause. They got ya coming and going!

  I don’t need to be on male hormones. I have enough worries without having my IQ decreased by half, getting obsessed with duct taping things, watching cage fighting, and being unable to find anything when I need it. Oh yeah, I don’t want to get that obsession-with-balls thing, either: Throwing ’em, catching ’em, hitting ’em, kicking ’em, punting ’em, slamming ’em with racquets, tossing ’em through hoops, running with the egg-shaped ones through crowds of attackers to the end zone, bouncing ’em, batting ’em, or scratching ’em—balls, balls, balls! But enough ball-bashing. As I have joked for years, men do some things better, like reading maps, because only the male mind can conceive of one inch equaling one hundred miles.

  Fuck hormones, fuck doctors, and fuck all these pharmaceutical companies! I’m not taking hormones or anything like it that comes from a drug company, ‘cause that’s another bazillion- dollar-a-year industry that experiments on us like lab rats, telling us things are safe and then reversing their position two years later. I have no trust whatsoever in the drug companies after what they did to me with phen-fen. How can I trust them? They said it was safe, then three-quarters of the fat people in America died. But it was government approved, and I think that’s scary—the government approving drugs that elevate your mood on the one hand while fighting a war on drugs on the other. They’re fucking with our heads. The war on drugs is a war against poor people on street drugs waged by rich people on prescription drugs. Trying to drug us all is the goal of the hyenas who control things these days. I believe in self-medication as much as the next guy, but we don’t need chemical mood elevators. That’s what carbohydrates are for!

  So, fuck dieting and fuck aging! And fuck sex, too!

  Some things are just supposed to end. Now, with Viagra and those kinds of drugs, men are more out of control than ever before. It’s mainly old men who are taking the Viagra, and let’s be honest, nobody really wants to fuck an old man. Let alone for four hours! Who the hell wants to do it for longer than you did when you liked each other? All these old men are running around with their old boners, on their fifth set of children, who are all hopped up on Ritalin to slow them down so the old man can play ball with them.

  Since this menopause shit kicked in, I now hate sex. And I’m so glad. I feel liberated. Sex was never good for me for anything besides having kids and keeping the gardeners happy. Now I am much more spiritually centered and have more time to plot revenge—a much more satisfying pursuit, I assure one and all.

  Sex is the worst drug of all; that’s my opinion. When I think of all the horrible things I’ve done, the people I’ve betrayed just to have sex, I become almost too nauseated to eat. (I said almost.) I believe that the government—and by government I don’t mean the U.S. government, but the satanic world government—is drugging us all on testosterone-laced Starbucks coffee so we can be led by Satan’s disciples through the use of computers, including the chips we have in our heads that are constantly recharged by cell phones, to continually have our lower chakras overstimulated so we become lazy and unaware of everything that is actually going on in the world and only worry about things that don’t matter—like sharing our own germ-infested sex fluids with other members of the human race. Yes, that government is afraid that someone like me, a menopausal woman whose vision isn’t clouded with perverted, sickening thoughts, might actually stumble across the truth.

  I’d love to share this truth with you, but I can tell you’re all just a bunch of horny apes and it won’t do me any good. You’ll simply report me to the government, and they’ll send someone after me with a hypodermic needle full of male hormones, like the WHO flu shot! Women will be forced to take the male hormones or be shut away in FEMA camps until they start becoming part of the whole oversexualizing and duping of society.

  Now, I might get into some serious trouble on this next subject, like maybe I won’t ever be able to be in a Mike Myers movie, but what the hell, Grandma’s going for it. Fuck all the greedy corporations, like McDonald’s, Burger King, and all those responsible for the destruction of the rain forest. I read in Time magazine that these corporations are destroying one hundred thousand acres of rain forest per day. At first I didn’t care. I thought, Who gives a damn about parrots and monkeys and slugs? They ain’t even good eatin’. But do you know what else comes from rain forests? The cacao tree, where chocolate comes from! Holy God Almighty, is there no end to the greed of the fast-food nation? Goddammit, STOP THE MADNESS!

  The next subject on my “fuck you” list is a little closer to home. I have five kids, four of ’em grown, with their own lives, and to those four I say, “Get a job! You ungrateful little bastards!” These kids, after all we’ve done for them!

  Remember the times your mom lost it on you? Not the everyday losing it, but the kind that always seems to happen in parking lots? The kind when you’d see that terrifying look on her face just before giving you five on the butt in front of everyone in the world? “I TOLD YOU TO GET IN THE CAR NOW!” And you think, When I’m grown, I am going to get even with her by screaming at my own kids! Which you do, and then when they are grown, they try to get even with you. First, by saying everything you do is hypocritical and stupid, and then by yelling at your own precious grandchildren simply because they like you better than their own parents. They want to punish you for that and for everything else you have ever done.

  I remember my daughter saying, “God, Mother, you are such a fucking hypocrite!”

  I, of course, retorted, “Did you just say the F-word? Did you just fucking come in here and use the fucking F-word in front of your fucking mother?”

  Or how about the first time you realize your kid is on drugs?

  “Are you on drugs?”

  “No, I’m not, you old bag!”

  “Yes, you are, I can tell.”

  “No, I’m not on drugs, Mother. Gawd.”

  “Then why are you slurring your words and sweating?”

  “Um, am I slurring my words and sweating?”

  The tip-off! If they weren’t on drugs, they would have said, “I’m not slurring my words. Nor am I sweating. You’re just a blowhard old bag!” Or something smart-assed like that. But a show of instant self-doubt gives them away every goddamn time!

  “So where did you get these drugs that you are on?”

  “Out of your bedroom drawer, the one with the big rubber penis thing!”

  Ungrateful little bastards. They have no appreciation for the amount of drugs their parents have had to do in order to buy them the things they wanted. I told my kids:
“C’mere, you. Listen very carefully. Mommy is an adult who pays the bills around here, and as long as you are living under Mommy’s roof, you will respect Mommy’s right to drink or take drugs or stand on one foot naked in the middle of the living room. And you are to be drug- and alcohol-free, bring home good grades, and do whatever Mommy asks you to do with a smile on your face! Understand? Mommy is old and has earned the right to be drunk or on crack or whatever she wants!”

  Do you think I should take the hormones?

  I’m actually on this new experimental drug for menopause. The FDA hasn’t approved it yet. It’s an extract from the flower of this one herb that gives off this chemical called THC. . . .

  Everybody is on marijuana. I am under a doctor’s care and she has prescribed medical marijuana as the treatment for my obsessive-compulsive disorder, which causes me to smoke too much marijuana, brought about by years of smoking too much marijuana. Haile Selassie is the Lion of Judah! I saw a sign on the side of a bus in Beverly Hills that said, “Talk to your kids about pot.” So I went home and said: “Kids, do you know where I can get some weed?” Because that’s the only drug that should be legal. In fact, it should be mandatory.

  Women, wake up! Get off your diets and your hormones. We now possess the technology to biologically reengineer the male gender to be more docile and to have uniform penis size, thereby negating the need for wars.

  Hence my plan to harness the powers of genetic engineering and reshape, restore, and reinvigorate every penis on earth. This alone could bring peace and stability to our planet. Don’t you think that every government on the planet is controlled by a guy with a wiener identity issue? And who is telling women that we can’t get fat? Men who feel uncomfortable about their penises, that’s who! It’s Psychology 101, really. They call it projection—that’s when you project your problems onto another person. In this case, the men with penile issues are projecting their insecurities onto us, the women of the world. They don’t want us to get fat because their penises can’t get fat. Skinny dicks, skinny chicks. That’s how they want it.

  But it doesn’t have to be that way. Not anymore. I have the solution. We must begin immediate funding for mandatory penile normalization surgery, until there is just one size fits all and no more reason for conflict. “But where’s the money going to come from?” you ask. It doesn’t matter. Take it from anywhere. Because once every man in this world has had his penis normalized, we’ll have more money to burn. Take the military budget, for example. We won’t be needing that anymore. There won’t be any more wars. All the men will be too busy standing in front of the mirror admiring their new penises to fight a war. And even if you could somehow pry them away from the mirror, they still wouldn’t do it. Too dangerous. After all, they might hurt their penises. Once this happens, we can get as fat as we want. And no one will care. Women will finally be happy. We’ll be able to eat what we want whenever we want. And if for some reason we find ourselves in the position of having sex with a man, as with everything else, the job gets done quicker and more efficiently when you use the proper tool!

  The Bible claims that only two people can be trusted at the End of Days: the drunkard and the insane. Lucky for you, dear readers, I’m both. I hope that I’ve helped.

  Let’s recap:

  1. No more dieting

  2. No more hormones

  3. No more sex

  4. More laughing, more drinking, more singing

  5. More getting right with God

  Even God gets on my nerves sometimes. You know when you are all alone in your room, talking to God, and you’re getting answers that kinda piss you off? Like when you ask, “Why? Why do I have to be fat? Why?”

  And God answers: “Umm, because you eat hundreds of donuts a day.”

  Or you ask, “Why is yet another man leaving me? Why?”

  And thus speaks the Lord: “Because you treat them like crap.” And then you have to clarify just who is really telling you these heretical things, so you ask, “WHO THE HELL IS THIS?” and the conversation goes like this:

  God: “Let’s just say I’m your conscience.”

  You: “Well, where the hell have you been hiding?”

  God: “You just stopped listening.”

  You: “No, if you remember correctly, I told you that I would not bother you and you should not bother me. I was being nice and thoughtful of all the hard work you do.”

  God: “No, you were being a slave to your lower chakras. You get what you give. Don’t you get that yet? You ungrateful little bastard!”

  You: “Don’t you have war or starvation to attend to?”

  I want to remind everybody that even though we are living in scary times, we don’t need to be scared because God is smarter than all of us put together. I think I need to repeat that. God really doesn’t need our help, and I wish people would stop bringing God into their own heap of personal shit. She doesn’t care what we believe. She doesn’t care what we think. She only cares what we do. For centuries we’ve been killing each other over religion, over the holy books. Hmmm. Here’s a thought. I wonder what the Holy Book says about that? Let’s see, there’s nothing about waging endless war just because you don’t like the way the other guy wears his beard; there’s just lots of stuff about love and forgiveness. So much for centuries of theoretical moral questions bantered about by sages, professors, existentialists, and other assholes.

  Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, Isn’t the Bible full of fighting, arguing, and acts of random bitterness? Well, yeah, it is. But if you read the preface to the Bible, the preface that has been hidden away all these years by those who seek to hide the truth, it all makes sense. And, as it just so happens, I have a copy of the preface right here.

  It says: “Note of caution. Please be advised, the following references to fighting and other aggressive acts refer to the internal battle with one’s own self. These metaphors are not to be taken literally. They are a code. Signed, God.”

  Got it?

  God, in Her infinite wisdom and mercy, thinks of us as precious little retards. And She’s not going to rush in after we’ve fucked everything up and save us. She really isn’t, because She’s not codependent. We need to get out of God’s way. It’s people who fuck everything up—people and their goddamned justifications to try to control everything, to try to make it better than it already is.

  Take mad cow disease, for example. Cows were fed other dead, sick, crushed-up cows—that’s how they got it, in the feed. Cows are not meat eaters, they’re not cannibals, and when they ate their own kind, it blew all their circuits. Now we have to deal with an awful, incurable, fatal disease that was not even in existence until some idiot tried to cut corners! And what are the scientists doing to rectify the disease that they created? They are trying to clone a cow that is immune to mad cow disease. Hey, idiot, just don’t feed the cow any more rotting cows. It’s very simple. It’s very simple because God meant for it to be simple, without us getting in the way and messing everything up.

  It’s the same with war. I think all the scientists who figured out how to split the atom should have a great big meeting and figure out how to put the atom back together, and then leave it the fuck alone! This is the kind of thing that happens when you put all your faith and trust into the hands of a few so-called “leaders.” These guys don’t give a damn about us. They’re all in it for themselves. And these days, there is no such thing as a “surgical strike.” If anyone goes up in a blaze, we are all going with them.

  We need to stop the fighting. We need to make war illegal. We need to get over these ancient rules of tribalism. We need to evolve. We need to will evolution. And I know how. I have the evolution solution.

  It’s a computer chip to be implanted in all those who are willing to receive it. I call it the evolution chip, but you can call it the Holy Grail. This chip will wipe out primitive, instinctual behavior that is no longer relevant in the twenty-first century. It will block the urges toward tribal viol
ence. It will eradicate stupid, selfish thoughts and replace them with altruistic ones. It will open our eyes, and make us see that we are the problem. Not everyone else. Us. And it will give us the desire to improve ourselves, and will make us really good gardeners. Because we need to grow more things—things like marijuana. Every day there is less green and more sand than there was the day before. And once all the green has been replaced by sand, the battle will be over. And we will have lost.

  So, heed my advice. I beg of you. Or don’t. I mean, it’s not like I’m saying this for personal gain. What could I possibly get out of it? I’m already rich, gorgeous, funny, and impossibly stylish. What else is there?

  No. I’m saying this for you. And your children’s children. I tell you these things because I must. As the People’s Queen, the Domestic Goddess, I have no other choice. So you people had better start listening to me. I’m fifty-eight years old now, so everyone had better listen to me because I have all the answers!

  You know that play The Vagina Monologues? The one where everyone’s talking about their vaginas and whatnot? I was in that play once in L.A. I wanted to add some of my own words to the piece, and I got permission from the writer, Eve Ensler, to do so. She claims to have been inspired by me. One of the many.

  My monologue was titled “What My Vagina Smells Like.” And I decided to close the piece by adding, “My vagina smells like my husband’s face.” Apt, succinct, and to the point, don’t you think? Of course, the rest of the play was the regular propaganda regarding modern-day womanhood—you know, my vagina, boo-hoo, boo-hoo, blah, blah, blah.

  And that’s when I realized something. That’s when it all crystallized. I wouldn’t have called it The Vagina Monologues. I would have called it The Clitoral Monologues. After all, the clitoris is the sweet spot of the entire female apparatus. The jewel of the Nile! So threatening is the mighty clitoris that it must be relegated to a backseat to the vagina in a play that has to do with female parts! The vagina is nothing more than a baby-making tube that has nothing to do with real sexual pleasure in a woman! Even thinking women like Eve Ensler come up with new ways of denying that fact!