What Have You Been Up To Lately, Ian?

Glad you asked!

After finally publishing Sexpossessed, I decided to do a bit of revision on Gloria's Daughter and publish that too. So I tidied up the rough cover that I'd created when I put GD on those writing websites and got everything loaded into Kindle and Amazon's book-printing service, Createspace. The Kindle version is live and available for purchase. The paperback version has to go through a physical proof stage before it goes on sale. If you are a stickler about typos, there's at least a small chance I'll find some in the physical proof. (I already did a couple of editing passes, but things sometimes slip by me on the computer screen.) So you might want to wait about buying even the Kindle version until after I've done my hard-copy review. I'll fix any issues in both versions at the same time.

Writing-wise, I think I'm about to jump back into a story I've had on hold for a while called "Contrasts." It's probably going to be in the novella/very short novel range, and is about a couple of people who have a just-for-sex relationship over the course of a year without even knowing each others' names. Obviously, it's very x-rated, but more thoughtful than it might sound from that description.

Thank Heavens, Someone Wrote Something I Don't Feel Like Complaining About!

I'm going to wholeheartedly recommend the book Subway Girl by Donna Beck.

 

I've posted a review of it on Amazon.com, but I'll copy it here in case you're too stubborn to just take my recommendation and go buy it.

I've never understood how people of ordinary means live in New York City, where even a shoebox apartment rents for an arm and a leg. But among this book’s many accomplishments, it immersed me in what it might be like to live on the low end of the economic scale in the Big Apple, below even ordinary means - and what's more, how grateful you might be to live that way. The narrator, Ray Kelly, opens the story with his life in a shambles, a bare step above homelessness. Yet despite his precarious and even shabby existence, Ray comes across as not just likable but worthy of our respect -- primarily because of his self-deprecating sense of humor and the way he views and treats others. In Ray, author Donna Beck has created a fully realized, intense, appealing protagonist who is at once masculine and sensitive, downtrodden and hopeful, ordinary and extraordinary. Through his eyes we see a side of New York that is grungy and yet not bleak, squalid and yet not miserable. We join Ray at a low point in his life, but he never asks for our sympathy or anyone else's, and when a chance meeting with an attractive young woman upends him from his day-to-day daze, we immediately find ourselves rooting for him not just because we want the good guy to get the girl, but because we want life to be the kind of vibrant experience that Ray wakes up to and works to make real.

 The other central figure in the book, Alicia Kaer, begins in circumstances that seem outwardly the opposite of Ray's. She's employed, in school, working towards a career as a CPA, and seemingly doing everything right. But inside, in her own way, she's on the same kind of autopilot that Ray has been on, and we come to learn that in reality her situation is one of even greater desperation than his.

 Beck brings these two characters to life and brings them together, puts them through an emotionally charged and sometimes challenging courtship, has each teach the other, and in the process lets us know things we perhaps did not know before, and better understand if we did know. This is a book that revels in all the bright colors of life without shrinking from the dark ones. It’s a story of great humor and deep humanity, with a streak of passion that simmers and then flares with erotic heat as Ray and Alicia grow ever closer. And it features a diverse, vivacious supporting cast that adds charm and reality to the great metropolitan backdrop against which the romantic focus plays out.

 It’s a book that’s not just worth reading, but then, if you have the time, worth reading again.

Do me a favor and go read the preview and see if it doesn't catch your fancy.

Counterproductive Activism

I'd like to quote from a Salon.com article I just saw a link to on Facebook.

To My White Male Facebook Friends

Hi! I need your help!

Some of you (not all of you, thank heavens) have been getting very defensive when issues of race and gender arise lately. Others have rolled your eyes and looked the other way. The best of you, of course, have been energized to join in the dialogue in a supportive, positive way. Whichever one of those groups you fit into, I'd like to make some heartfelt pleas about how we all look at these subjects, and how we look at ourselves when we're discussing them.

Well, I'd like to quote that, but I can't, because it's not what was written in the article. Here's how the author actually began her piece:

To My White Male Facebook Friends

This post is for my white male Facebook friends.

Some of the most disturbing, subtle, insidious, racist comments I’ve seen over the past few weeks have been from my white male Facebook friends. I know a lot of my friends are just mass defriending people, but I’m not quite there yet, because I’m (foolishly, naively) hoping I can reach some of you in a way that creates some kind of change. I know, I know, who ever had his mind changed from something he read on the Internet? But here I am, tilting at windmills.

First, let me say, I’m not addressing you to put you on the defensive. I don’t want to fight. But I really am hoping to reach your heart. So please start with holding what I’m going to say in love and openness, and see if you can let this reach your heart before you fight it with your brain meats.

Next, let me say, this doesn’t apply to all of you. There are some great allies, advocates and freedom fighters among my friends, and I ask you to join this discussion.

Notice how in paragraph four she implicitly acknowledges the blatant stereotyping that her headline and first three paragraphs have been indulging in. The absolute fact of the matter is that her piece is not aimed at all of her white male Facebook friends. The entire remainder of the article makes it clear that she's speaking only to those FBFs who are in denial about white privilege and gender discrimination.

Even if she didn't want to write the entire article in the style I used in my mock quote, how hard would it really have been to insert the words "some of" into her headline and first sentence?

You can't, can't, can't commit the crime of racial and gender stereotyping and then turn around and wag your finger at others for doing the same thing. You can't complain about racial and gender boxes and also complain that someone gets defensive when you put him in a race-and-gender box.

This isn't because you don't have the moral high ground with regard to the vast majority of the people you're addressing. It's because people have a legitimate right to feel defensive when you start stereotyping them. And even if the stereotype is 70% or 80% true in someone's case, that still means you're being 20-30% a jerk to them, and it's fully justifiable to get annoyed at someone who's being a jerk.

You also can't repeatedly tell people, "Stop being so defensive. Stop being so defensive. Stop being so defensive," and expect them to remain calm and objective in digesting your message.

These behaviors alienate people. They take people who are in the borderlands and push them away from our community of supposed inclusivity and egalitarianism. They make us sound like condescending know-it-alls who can't be bothered to wield our knowledge in a focused and responsible way.

I'm a white male feminist married to a black woman, and I'm fully aware that there are vestigal racist attitudes lurking in my psyche that I need to be on constant guard against. I completely understand and agree with the need to work against the phenomenon of white privilege, and that gender equality is woefully far from an achieved reality.

So if your article makes my blood boil and makes me think you're an arrogant, hypocritical, condescending twit, imagine how it must make a non-feminist, privilege-denying guy respond.

If you want to reach people, step one is to make them feel respected. If you want to demonstrate respect, step one is to treat your audience as individuals, not as a block of monolithic pathologies who need you to lecture to them.

And if you want to stop white male defensiveness, step one is to quit addressing your accusations and chastisements to all white males.

An Actual, Physical, Dog-earable Book!

Well, it took longer than I expected, but Sexpossessed is at last available for sale in both physical and e-book form.

I will now be accepting calls from fame and fortune, and possibly infamy when I'm not in the mood to screen my calls.

This Shouldn't Be So Hard

I've got a lot of friends who, like me, are feminists. Which is a great thing. And they like to share articles that move them, which is also a great thing. And so I get tons of articles popping up in my Facebook feed on feminist issues.

Which actually ends up being, all too often, a tremendously frustrating thing.

For instance, this article recently aggravated the hell out of me. It's called "The One Basic Thing Men Still Don't Seem To Understand About Women."

What is that one thing?

That women are human beings.

Seriously, the author makes the repeated claim that men don't comprehend the existence of a self-aware, individual, thinking person inside each woman that they meet. And she seems to have absolutely no inkling that her claim is wildly insulting to men as a group, or that it represents a disrespect just as vile as the kind she complains of men exhibiting toward women.

How exactly are we supposed to win over non-feminists with this kind of hypocritical, condescending, and genuinely offensive style of presenting our points?

Of course men realize women are human beings.

Look, there are three truths that have to be recognized if we're going to get anywhere:

1) Men want sex.
2) All men are obnoxious some of the time, and some men are obnoxious (or worse) most of the time.
3) Therefore, some men are obnoxious (or worse) about wanting sex.

None of these truths is in any way impacted by whether a man perceives a woman as a human being.

Men who want sex (i.e., men) generally want to have sex with a human being. Sex is a human activity, by definition an interpersonal interaction, and something that is a fundamental part of our biological nature. The notion that wanting to have sex with someone inherently demeans them is, frankly, puritanical. As an exercise to demonstrate this, let's play a game of "Complete the Sentence."

I don't want to get to know you or find out about your thoughts and dreams; I just want you to _____.

fix my car
give me directions to Fifth and Main
cut my hair
provide adequate lectures in this accounting class
have sex with me
tell me whether I have cancer
vote McGillicutty for Mayor
call the police because I've just been beaten and robbed

Why is "have sex with me" considered dehumanizing when none of the others is? We live our lives constantly interacting with others for the fulfillment of our own needs, constantly oblivious to the hopes and aspirations of the individuals with whom we engage. And if we fail to deal respectfully with anyone in one of the circumstances listed above, it's a black mark on us. But the fact of just wanting one thing from someone isn't inherently demeaning; it's a normal facet of the human ability to compartmentalize, and of the way modern living brings us into contact with other people in narrow, fleeting moments.

Which brings us to Truth #2. The thesis of that aggravating op-ed seems to be that if men would just own up to the fact that women are people, everything would be fine. But I don't find that a digestible idea. When a man parks his sports car or pickup truck across two parking spaces, is he unaware that other human beings might like to use one of those spaces to park their own automobiles in? When a man leaves the toilet seat down, gets pee on the rim, and doesn't wipe it up, is he ignorant of the possibility that other human beings might need to sit on that toilet later? When a man answers his cell phone or has a full-volume conversation with his neighbor in the middle of a movie, is he oblivious to the presence of other human beings in the theater? No, in each of those cases, the man simply doesn't care. It's not a uniform characteristic of all males, and it's not a characteristic that's restricted to males alone. It's called being an asshole, and it's not something you can correct by proving the humanity of the asshole's victims to him (or her).

If we agree that Truth #3 is a problem (and we should), there are two ways we can approach it. We can try to change Truth #1, or we can try to change Truth #2. By making a mighty social effort against Truth #1, we might eliminate a fraction of the sexually obnoxious behavior men currently engage in. But we would do so at the cost of forcing all decent men to repress their own sexuality, to view it as something dirty and wrong, and to live lives of constant guilt and shame -- because the wanting to have sex is not going to go away, nor is the desire to look at and talk to attractive women in public places. Meanwhile, the assholes from Truth #2 would continue to behave just as they always have, because they would never bother to internalize the societal message that spontaneous sexual desire is wrong.

On the other hand, although fixing Truth #2 is a very tall order, doing so would completely solve the entire problem. And improve society in general a thousandfold. And free all men to be honest and open about Truth #1, which would result in a lot more respect-centered sexual fulfillment for both men and women.

In other words, it doesn't come down to, "Let's make men understand that women are people too." It comes down to, "Let's all make it clear that people shouldn't act like dicks to each other."

And that includes op-ed writers just as much as it includes men who notice an attractive woman walking down the street.

Progress Report!

So ... close ...

I received the first proof of Sexpossessed last week, and since it was a proof, I proofread it, and of course I found lots of things to correct, so I corrected them. And because one of the issues was a problem with the cover, I'm now waiting for a second proof to make sure it comes out okay.

The latest tracking information says it's due to arrive Saturday.

With fingers crossed, then, I will probably be ready to launch the book the same day, because I've got the Kindle version already set up, and "I Married a Galaxy-Conquering Alien Space Monstrosity" is enrolled in the Kindle Select program so that I can make it a free giveaway to coincide with Sexpossessed going live.

I've gotten some feedback on Gloria's Daughter, and I'm contemplating some changes to Part Three ... after which I think I'll put it up on Amazon as well.

So hopefully by the time Thanksgiving rolls around, I'll be awash in the spoils of fame.

What You're Not Seeing in the Hollaback Video

Bear with me here, because what I'm saying isn't going to be immediately obvious.

This video is making the viral rounds, and is definitely something important:

But I'm not sure the correct takeaway is what everyone thinks it is.

What does the video tell us? Well, if you're a woman, it may not tell you anything you don't already know. But if you're a man, it should give you an idea of what it feels like to be an attractive woman walking down the street simply trying to mind your own business. It should give you a sense of harassment, of concern for your own safety, of the frustration that accompanies someone else assuming they have the right to intrude on your life just because you're there and have something they want. And at moments, it should give you some inkling of what it feels like to worry that someone might try to physically force you into sexual contact.

And the conversations around the video almost all propose the same conclusion: that men should avoid doing all of the things the guys in the video are doing.

But -- and here's where people are going to ask what the hell is wrong with me -- that's not the correct response.

What???

Didn't the video make me understand what it's like to be harassed?

Yes, but I already knew what it's like to be harassed. I get harassed by survey people in shopping malls and by religious proselytizers going door-to-door. I've been harassed in a grocery store by a guy who mistook me for someone else and got really angry that I "refused" to recognize him.

Didn't the video make me understand what it's like to fear for one's safety in a public place?

Yes, but I already knew what it's like to fear for my safety in a public place. Homeless panhandlers often make me feel that way, although certainly not all of them do. The aforementioned guy in the grocery store definitely made me feel that way.

Didn't the video make me understand what it's like to have someone barge into your space and interrupt your thoughts just because they think they're entitled to do so and have no concern for whether you're currently receptive to whatever it is they want to say to you?

Yes, but I already knew what that's like. For one thing, I'm married, and my wife feels entitled to start talking to me whenever and wherever. Generally I don't mind, but sometimes I feel like I'm just a big ear for her to vent into. As another (more serious) example, I was recently in a game store waiting for my gaming group to arrive, and an awkward young man with no social skills came up to me and asked, "So what do you do?" He did this despite the fact that I was in an isolated side-room at the time and had my nose in a book. I responded minimally, without looking up (in part because I had my reading glasses on and they make the world look wonky beyond about two feet). He didn't take the hint, though, and I ended up having an excruciating conversation with him because he didn't even know how to talk games, and I had to do the heavy lifting of moving the conversation along because if I didn't say anything, he just stood there uncertainly in the silence.

The mistaken-identity guy in the grocery store even gave me a sense of what it's like to fear unwanted sexual contact.

So did I get anything new out of the video? Yes. I got a rough idea of what it's like to worry about all-out rape.

And I'll bet that for most people, that's the only truly new sensation evoked by the video. All of the rest of it -- the harassment, the sense of exploitation and intrusion, the feeling of being a commodity someone wants to use to their own ends -- all of us have felt all of those in different contexts as an unavoidable part of modern living. For heaven's sake, Girl Scouts selling cookies outside of Walmart make me feel that way. If I'm deliberately avoiding eye contact, don't try to guilt me into buying your cookies.

So my takeaway from the video isn't that men need to stop forcing these annoyances on women. It's that we need to create a world where no woman ever needs to worry about getting raped. Remove that fear, and everything in the video becomes enormously more tolerable. In contrast, if we got every man in the world to stop ogling, cat-calling, and hitting on women, the continued threat of rape would remain an unconscionable stain on our society.

Be honest now. If you had to choose between (1) eliminating the constant everyday irritation and energy drain women endure because of unwanted male attention and (2) eliminating rape, which only a subset of women ever experience ... would you really hesitate even a second about which one would more greatly improve the world and the lives of women everywhere?

"But we don't have to choose! We should eliminate both!"

I agree. However, the fact that one form of male-on-female rudeness is associated with sex in no way elevates that rudeness above other forms of rudeness in terms of priority. Everyone should be less rude to everyone. So what if men are carelessly rude to women because they're sexually attracted to them? People are rude to cashiers every day because they feel the cashiers are there to serve them. Political partisans are horribly rude to each other every day because they have differing philosophies. Spouses are rude to spouses every day because the vows of matrimony allow them to take each other for granted.

Rudeness is rudeness. If we elevate sexually motivated rudeness above other kinds of ill behavior, we're contributing to a mystification of sex that lies at the heart of the entire problem. Our society has made sex a Holy Grail that's portrayed as a divine wonder everyone should hope to attain, while simultaneously putting up enormous barriers to the fulfilling expression of one's sexuality. That cauldron of stressed and repressed biological need can't help but make people do crazy and sometimes rude and sometimes criminal things. Until we make sex ordinary, we will never eliminate the misdirected results of sexual frustration.

It is intolerable that our society continues to allow rape to occur. And the reality of rape casts a deep and gnawing shadow when men rudely foist unwanted attention on women. But we should not mistake the shadow for the monster that creates it, because we can't kill that monster by striking at shadows.

If you're a man and you watch that video and you decide you should stop intruding on women's lives and that you should also call other men out when you see them doing it, good for you. You're making the world a better place. But be aware that if that's all you do, you're just whitewashing things. You're just adding a veneer -- and one that will serve as an additional layer of repression for some men, potentially worsening the way they behave in private even if it improves the way they behave in public.

The unseen monster in that video is not sexism. It's rape.

Let's do something about it.

Naked Witches!

Every once in a while, just when I think Facebook is nothing but a depressing time-suck, someone will link to something like this article about the origins of certain witchy notions that we take for granted. It's a jaunty, risque look at the unsuspected foundations of a pop-culture cliche, but even if the article didn't have plenty to intrigue, it's worth clicking through for the pictures alone, like this one by Luis Ricardo Falero from 1878:



Jeepers! Where were these ladies when they were making "The Wizard of Oz"?

Sexy Kitchen Doo-Dahs

Okay, so cooking in a crock pot is not exactly glamorous. But it is easy, and you can make some pretty good stuff with one, and the whole house smells like something great is cooking for hours once it gets going, so we use one around our place from time to time. The major downside is that whatever you cook tends to get seared into the sides of the crock pot, making it really hard to clean.

But now (and I may be late to the party on this particular innovation) someone exceedingly clever has developed ...

crock pot condoms!

Yes, it's true, there is actually a way to make the formless, sloshy, stew-like recipes that tend to come out of a crock pot even more visually unappealing!

Since I do the dishes around our place, though, I'm not complaining.

Anyway, if you want dinner to come together nice and easy, and you don't want a big sticky mess to result when things get hot, I highly recommend a crock pot condom.

Well, I've Gotten Something Done at Least ...

Part three of "Gloria's Daughter" is now up on Literotica.com! I'm really unsure of how people will react to this one compared to the first two parts; I don't think it comes out of left field or anything, but it contains some darker moments, so I'm anxious to see if the response is as positive as it was for the earlier installments.

Jedi Mind Tricks Don't Work on Me

I'm really hoping that Roxanne Gay's recent op-ed piece in the Guardian, "These Aren't the Feminists You're Looking For," was secretly some kind of joke, or something she was forced to write because she lost a bet.

My initial plan after reading it was to make fun of her for saying at one point, "I don't truck in magical thinking," and then saying at another point, "Feminism should not be something that needs a seductive marketing campaign. The idea of women moving through the world as freely as men should sell itself." But it turns out Martha Plimpton already called her out on that.

So instead, I'll make fun of her this way: Can you imagine the head of a condom manufacturer saying, "Condom use should not be something that needs a seductive marketing campaign. The idea of having hot sex without worrying about pregnancy or disease should sell itself." Or how about, "Beer should not be something that needs a seductive marketing campaign. The idea of getting intoxicated on something that is legal and socially acceptable should sell itself."

Perhaps more in the same ballpark, could you imagine the NRA of a few years back saying, "Charlton Heston isn't the gun owner you're looking for," and following it up with, "Advocacy for gun rights should not be something that needs a seductive marketing campaign." How about Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch saying, "The idea of conservatism should sell itself"?

Look, when we talk about the way things should be, it's an ironic halfway measure to say that the ideas of feminism should sell themselves. In the world that should be, there'd be no need for feminism at all, because it wouldn't occur to anyone to treat men and women unequally. We don't live in a world where things work the way they should. That's why we need feminism. And that's why feminism needs to market itself.

But ultimately, the worst aspect of Gay's column is not the logical inconsistencies, not the failure to admit that we live in a world where marketing is a thing, and one that works. No, the worst of it is that she's put together a screed that consists of one long fit of complaining. She says that Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Watson aren't the feminists we're looking for ... but she doesn't say who we ought to be looking for instead. She says we need to pay attention to the "hard work" of feminism instead of admiring celebrity feminists, but she doesn't give a single strategy for addressing the goals of feminism.

All she does is say that we shouldn't be using the strategies that have been getting a lot of media attention recently. Apparently, we shouldn't listen to the long and detailed speech Emma Watson gave at the UN. We shouldn't care about making feminism more accessible to men. (That one was important enough to put in her first paragraph.) We shouldn't approve of contests in which advertising agencies are challenged to create awareness campaigns in favor of feminist goals.

I don't know. Maybe it's reverse psychology. Maybe she was playing "Truth or Dare" and somebody asked her for a truth she was too embarrassed to reveal, so she had to take the dare of writing a farcical and counterproductive column.

Whatever it was, I hope she comes to her senses soon, because she's obviously an intelligent person with strong communication skills, and I'm not prepared to say she's not the kind of feminist we're looking for.

We should be looking for just about every kind of feminist we can find.

After all, this whole thing is about getting everyone on the same side.

We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Self-Absorbed Meanderings To Bring You This Breaking News

I was all set to write a snarky post about a ridiculous article I read yesterday, when I came instead across this amazing picture:

In case you're wondering, that's not a piece of concept art for a sci-fi movie or an artist's imagining of some futuristic space scene. It's an actual photograph taken by the lander aboard the Rosetta spacecraft, currently closing in on Comet 67P/C-G in preparation for making the first-ever landing on a comet, most likely sometime next month.

Tune in later in the week for the snark. I just didn't have it in me after seeing this.

Progress Report

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Writing Challenge of the Day: Post Something Hilarious About Depression!

You know, I'm a depressive person, so you'd think I'd understand that the worst possible thing for me to do is to set a goal I'm guaranteed to fail at.

But here I am doing it anyway: attempting to make depression a source of amusement.

Is there anything less funny than depression?

Well, of course there is. But if I start listing all the less-funny-than-depression things I can think of, this writing challenge may end up seeming less impossible, but writing it will probably depress me, because if there's anything more depressing than depression, it would be deliberately thinking about all the things that are more depressing than depression.

We had a brief flurry of depression consciousness recently (I won't mention why ... very not-funny), but already it's receding into the background, as far as I can tell. And do you know why?

I don't. Honestly, I have no idea why some things catch the public attention and stick with us, while others provoke a giant but short-lived response and then disappear.

But I've got a couple of theories, and maybe one of them will have something funny in it.

First off, I'd bet that most of us with depression haven't leapt up during the recent coverage and said, "I'm depressed too! Wow, it sure is great that let you all know how terrible I feel about everything!" So it's pretty likely that people just aren't aware of how many of us there are moping around out here.

Secondly ... duhhh, it's depressing!

Those of us with depression tend to dwell on the things that depress us, but healthy people are much less likely to do that. If there's something that can't easily be fixed, most people just move along. As a result, the world is full of difficult-to-fix problems that aren't getting solved. So there's tons of fodder for us depressive types to focus on and get more depressed about, but non-depressive people are able to shrug and get on with their lives.

The upshot of this is that it's probably self-defeating to try to make depression a cause celebre (very depressing that I don't know how to make Blogger put the right accent mark in that word). The people most affected are too depressed to do anything about it, and the people who aren't directly affected would rather not think too much about it, because it's a downer.

So how can we fix depression?

First, by not worrying about it. Seriously, worrying is what causes depression in the first place, so let's not get another depression ball rolling.

Second, by accomplishing things. Depression is, in many cases, a state of learned helplessness in which the sufferer feels unable to improve any situation or circumstances. Even small accomplishments provide contradictory evidence to the sense that we are helpless, so depressive people need to remind themselves to do things. (Like writing blog entries.)

Third, by understanding that failure is okay. If you're not willing to fail at something, you're unlikely to try it in the first place. And if you don't try, you can never succeed. I'm pretty sure this post is not actually hilarious. At most, I bet it's only sporadically wry, whereas the title suggested that it might be thigh-slappingly funny. So my efforts here almost certainly rank somewhere between partial and abysmal failure. And the fact that I'm okay with failing abysmally is great. It's like a giant weight lifted off of me. I tried something, knowing that I was likely to fail, and now that I have, my prediction has been validated, and that makes me feel a sense of accomplishment.

Is depression funny? No. Was this post at least a little amusing? I think so. Do I feel better for having written it? Yes.

And that's enough for now.

The Reviews Are In!

Well, two of them so far, anyway, and five-stars on both, as a bonus!

Sales on "I Married a Galaxy-Conquering Alien Space Monstrosity" aren't exactly skyrocketing at the moment, but good reviews are a good start, so I have my fingers crossed that things will start gaining steam soon ...

Free Story!

My long-promised Literotica serial is now underway starting here.

Enjoy!

It's Alive! Alive!

So at long last, I've got something to add to my "Stuff I've Written" page. "I Married a Galaxy-Conquering Alien Space Monstrosity" is now live in Amazon's Kindle store, hopefully soon to be tearing its way up the ranks of bizarro alien space erotica. (Actually, it's guaranteed to be way up in those ranks, since it currently seems to be the only book that matches all four of those search terms.)

Anyway, if you've been breathlessly awaiting my published fiction debut after hanging on every word of each of my progress reports, I'm sure you'll want to rush right over to the story's Amazon page, where you can check out the "Look Inside" preview and see whether all your anticipation has been in vain.

I'd love to hear what anybody has to say about the story, positive or negative, so feel free to leave a review on Amazon, a comment here on the blog, or a giant multicolored graffiti mural on the side of a convenient boxcar, building or mountain.

Progress Report: Cover!

Here's the more-or-less final version of the cover to "I Married a Galaxy-Conquering Alien Space Monstrosity!"

I may tweak it some more before it gets slapped on the e-book, but I don't foresee major changes.

The story itself is undergoing an editing pass from a friend of mine. Then it just needs some formatting and it will be ready to unleash its havoc upon the world!

In other news, I've tidied up most of the publishing business preparations, so it's only a matter of getting stories finished, formatted, covered, and then uploaded to Amazon. I'll probably start revisions on my novel next week, after I get feedback from one of my trustiest beta readers.

If I'm industrious between now and then, maybe I'll even revise part one of the serial I'm writing for Literotica.com.

The game is afoot!

If You're the Smartest Person in the Room ...

Quiz time!

Are you smart enough to recognize the fatal flaw in the following advice?

"If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room."

It's a trick question ... there's not a single fatal flaw -- there are tons of them!

For instance ... what if the room is a bathroom?

And ... how do you ever have sex if the person you're hot for isn't exactly as smart as you?

I asked a bright thirteen-year-old I know what the problem with the sentence was, and he came up almost instantly with, "If you're the smartest person in the world, you're never going to be able to stay in a room. You'll have to spend all your time outside."

But it's worse than that. Once the smartest person realizes she has to stay out of all rooms, guess what? The second-smartest person in the world becomes the smartest person in any given room, so he has to stay outdoors as well.

Eventually, no one can be in any room, ever.

Many versions of this quote appear to be in circulation. Some say that if you're the smartest person in the room, you need to find a different room ... or invite some smarter people to join you in the room you're in. But why would the smarter people join you? That would make them the smartest people in the room, and then the advice says they should either leave or invite someone still smarter to join in.

More destructive still is the hidden elitism of the statement. It sounds like we're being advised to be humble, to seek out those who are smarter than ourselves so that we can get the best possible input into whatever we're attempting to do. But implicit in that idea is the certainty that someone who isn't as smart as you has little or nothing to offer -- that if you're the smartest person in the room, then the room is limited by the bounds of your intelligence.

Frankly, that's a load of crap.

For one thing, let's distinguish between smarts and intelligence. A high raw I.Q., properly educated, enables an individual to perform many tasks and calculations that are beyond the capabilities of lower-I.Q. individuals. But it's no guarantee whatsoever of good decision-making. Intelligent people are often trapped by the intellectual constructs they have absorbed, and may be at a complete loss in unfamiliar circumstances where those constructs don't apply. In contrast, a smart person has the ability to apply her intelligence fruitfully to a wide variety of situations and problems, because she has qualities of perception and understanding that the merely intelligent person does not necessarily possess.

If you're a really smart person, you ought to recognize relatively early in life that there's (a) always someone smarter than you, and (b) usually something to learn from everyone, even those who aren't your equals in pure I.Q.

Finally, the fact of the matter is, someone has to be the smartest person in the room. If that person happens to be you, and you happen to know of someone who might make a great contribution, you should invite that person regardless of how smart he is. But if circumstances call for quick action by the group of people on hand, then you need to accept the responsibility of being the smartest person in the room, and you need to use your smarts to help the group achieve the greatest possible synergy in addressing whatever task confronts it.

In other words, if you're the smartest person in the room, then hopefully you're smart enough to recognize whether the inhabitants of the room are up to the challenge that they face. At that point, you can make a sensible decision about whether it's worthwhile to pull someone else in, to find a different room of people, or to proceed forward with the team you have.

One thing's for sure: when you're the smartest person in the room, the last thing you should do is mindlessly jump up and say, "We're not up to this. We need someone smarter."

Research, Research

Sometimes, being a writer requires you to diligently research the most uninteresting minutiae in order to make a story feel real. Even with Google, it can be a pain in the rear, full of all kinds of frustration when search term after search term pulls up absolute garbage that has nothing to do with what you're trying to research.

Other times, it brings you across things like this slyly amusing article about the sordid and unspectacular history of the dental dam, and you think, damn, this is a pretty great job!

Progress Report 3

The good news is, I've gotten about 15-20,000 words done since last progress report. The sort of bad news is, most of it wasn't on my serial for Literotica. A pretty demented sci-fi story idea took over my brain and made me write it instead. It's called "I Married a Galaxy-Conquering Alien Space Monstrosity." The first draft's done, and I should be able to revise and post it in a week or two while finishing part three of the serial.

Assuming some other crazy story doesn't take over my brain in the meantime.

I did finally finish part two of the serial, and just tonight started part three ... I think I'm going to set myself a goal of posting the Space Monstrosity story and part one of the serial by the end of the month. Wish me luck!

Ogres & Ogling

All right, so I've previously said that I don't think there's anything wrong with a man looking at a woman's body if she doesn't catch him. But I've also said men shouldn't ogle women. How exactly do these two things go together?

The answer, as so often is the case, is ... science!

Okay, not just science, but science with a dash of simple decency thrown in.

Let's start off with some biological facts.

First up: the human brain is a pattern-spotting machine. And I do mean "machine." The brain is hard-wired to absorb sensory inputs, process them, and categorize them without any input from our conscious selves. If you're walking in the park and you see a dog catching a frisbee, your brain knows the dog is a dog before you can think the word "dog." It knows that the frisbee is a frisbee and is either headed right at you (dangerous!) or going some other direction (possibly interesting, possibly irrelevant). It knows these things within milliseconds or tens of milliseconds. It knows which objects within visual range are trees, which are dogs, and which are people at a speed that is, for all practical purposes, instantaneous. Cognitive processing of this information (incoming frisbee ... duck! rabid dog, run! hmm, a sycamore) lags behind, in the range of hundreds of milliseconds or longer.

In other words, we cannot choose what we perceive. In order to keep us from getting killed on a daily basis, evolution has arranged for our brains to provide us with categorized information much faster than we can consciously make use of it.

Next up: our biological purpose is to reproduce. Whatever philosophical or metaphysical or religious beliefs you have, when it comes to biology, we are baby-making machines, not artists or doctors or used car salesmen. And in the game of evolution, the best baby-making machine wins.

But men and women are very different kinds of baby-making machines. Men provide a simple shot of raw material, and they've got more of that raw material than they can ever possibly use. It replenishes constantly, and takes a very small amount of time to deliver. Women, on the other hand, provide the manufacturing infrastructure, and their time-frames are thus vastly different. Once the factory commits to putting out its next unit, you're looking at nine months before the woman gets another crack at reproducing.

As men and women walk down the street, therefore, their pattern-recognition machinery is feeding their conscious minds all kinds of data, including data about potential mates, and that data differs greatly between the sexes.

The male brain is categorizing humans into male (no mating potential) and female (mating potential), while categorizing females into a range of suitability for mating (old: minimal mating potential ... extremely thin: possibly nonfertile ... pregnant: definitely fertile ... curvaceous: probably fertile). As conscious thought comes online and begins to contemplate the women passing through the man's visual field, he is already primed to be attracted to the ones evolution has programmed him to consider most promising as mates. To avoid pursuing further, conscious investigation into an attractive woman's mating suitability, the man therefore must make an active choice to push aside the information that his pattern-recognition centers are providing him. This active choice is necessary because from evolution's viewpoint, the man could potentially pass on his genes by mating with every single female he meets, and when a highly promising candidate shows up, he may only get one shot at her. So there's a strong evolutionary pressure for men to focus on and evaluate mating candidates.

The female brain is also subconsciously and constantly categorizing people. But the female evolutionary pressure is entirely different. The woman has only a handful of opportunities to pass on her genes in her lifetime, and she'd better make those opportunities count. As her brain categorizes people, therefore, it's not just putting men into categories of high mating potential and low mating potential -- it's also putting them into categories of sexually threatening and sexually nonthreatening. A sexually threatening male represents a reduction in the woman's control over how her genes are passed on. Her brain is attempting to recognize and choose the right mate on a highly selective basis, and all of evolution's efforts at honing her ability to judge mating fitness will go to waste if a man impregnates her solely on the basis of his fitness-judging patterns and not hers. An attractive man thus represents a relatively modest priority to the woman's categorizing machinery because no matter how suitable he appears at a glance, she needs to take her time and get the choice right. In contrast, the unchosen impregnator represents an immediate danger to her reproductive success, which means he's a higher priority to watch out for than the attractive man.

So while the caveman was constantly looking out for any and all hot cavewomen, the cavewoman had to be constantly looking out for mister perfect caveman while also being wary of lustful looks from mister less-than-perfect.

You can see this playing out on the street or in the mall, where a look and a smile from one guy will bring a responding smile from a woman, whereas a look and a smile from the next guy might make the same woman return a blank stare or look away. If you're a guy, you know that you're not really consciously deciding to smile at a woman most of the time, while if you're a woman, you know that your answering smile or coldness occurs before you have time to think, "Mmm, hunky," or "Eww, creepy."

These impulses are part of our physiology, and we can't be blamed, male or female, for having them.

What we can be blamed for is choosing to run with the impulse once our conscious minds catch up. As males, we can be aware that our prolonged attention could set off a woman's biological imperative to avoid unchosen impregnation. As females, women can be aware that, far from every man who glances at them being a pig, every man who doesn't glance at them is consciously restraining his natural instincts -- or has subconsciously categorized them as a low mating priority. So you should either credit the non-lookers for their self-control or feel insulted by the bad taste that's obviously been programmed into their pattern-recognition machinery by genetics.

Meanwhile, as a society, we can and should recognize all of this and discuss it openly. We should not tell men to feel guilty about being attracted to lots of women. We should not tell women that men who look at them are demeaning and objectifying them. These approaches increase rather than decreasing the tension between the sexes because they make men repressed and neurotic while making women paranoid.

Most important of all -- and here I'm going to get much more serious --  we must work toward becoming a rape-free civilization. The existence of rape, and the unforgivable degree of tolerance our society has for it, takes women's biological mistrust of lustful strangers and turns it into a conscious fear. That fear robs them of the ability to enjoy having their beauty recognized and, in turn, robs any moral man of the opportunity to enjoy a constant source of natural wonder, because no moral man would want to risk sparking a woman's fear of rape.

In other words, a woman's annoyance at having a man ogle her should not trump a man's discomfort at having to constantly restrain his perfectly natural impulse to look. But a woman's fear of rape does trump that discomfort. It's unconscionable that we allow that fear to persist instead of cutting off its source.

Unfortunately, there's a widely accepted notion that ogling equals objectification and that objectification encourages rape. But rape is not primarily a crime of sexual desire. It's a crime of anger and resentment, feelings that arise out of mens' perceptions of impotence, emasculation, and enforced repression (among other things). Men who rape do not do so because they're attracted to women; they do so because they are angry at multitudes of things in their lives and also angry at women. By choosing to sexually punish a specific woman, they create a focus for all of their other anger and derive a sense of power over the world. It is not power over an object that they desire; it is power over a person -- a person whom they are making into a proxy for all the other people in their lives who infuriate them.

So if men want to be free to ogle, they first have to eliminate rape. And in order to eliminate rape, we must as a society dissociate sex from power. Sadly, we almost certainly can't eliminate disparities of power from our culture, which means we have to find a way to fully empower all men to enjoy their own sexuality, so that the power/sex connection is broken. This is something we currently do a terrible job at. Instead of teaching men that masturbation is a terrific substitute for sex, we teach them that it's shameful and humiliating. We teach them that providing their own source of sexual release is an indicator of failure, which inherently links sexual failure to all other forms of failure and opens a channel for generalized anger and hate to become tied in with sexual gratification.

We also teach men that there's something wrong with them if they can't land a woman. This exacerbates men's natural urge to look, because how can they land a woman if they're not looking for one? What we need to teach men instead, and women as well, is that if you can't land a mate, it's probably because you haven't figured out how to make yourself happy. Happy people are attractive. It's just that simple. Our pattern-recognizing brains can spot happiness from a mile away, and instantly categorize a happy person into the "must-be-doing-something-right / I-want-to-hang-with-them" file. A bizarrely well-concealed truth in life is that if you can't make yourself happy, it's highly unlikely that someone else will be able to do so. This creates a double-whammy effect in that men who can't find a woman become frustrated and resentful of women, while unhappy men who do find a woman often become frustrated and resentful of that woman for failing to bring them the happiness they expected.

Finally, in addition to teaching men how to be happy and self-fulfilled so that we dissociate sex from power, we also need to overhaul our justice system and our cultural understanding of rape and sex crimes in general. Authorities of all kinds need to treat accusation of sexual misconduct with the highest degree of seriousness, so that victims have no hesitation in coming forward. Furthermore, women need to know not just that they are able to report rape and unwanted sexual contact, but that it's their obligation to do so. The good guys can't do anything about the bad guys if they don't know what's happening, and if the bad guys get away with it they're very likely to repeat or escalate their offenses, which means that failure to report sexual misconduct makes one partially responsible for the future victims of the offender.

In a world where women have no need to fear men, a casual glance will imply a compliment, not a threat, and even the occasional open-mouthed gawking will at worst be an annoyance. We're not entitled to live life without annoyances -- human beings are fundamentally annoying, and we just have to get used to that.

But we are entitled to the appreciation of beauty and to freedom from fear, and we need to work toward a world in which those two things are not in conflict.

In the meantime, we men must keep in mind that freedom from fear is a higher priority than appreciation of beauty, because a person in fear is also kept from appreciating beauty. We must relinquish our fear-free, unrestrained appreciation of beauty, because in the world's current state, heedlessly exercising our impulse to look creates fear and steals away beauty for women, whereas exercising control reduces perceived beauty but creates no fear for us.

Use your peripheral vision, guys! Look from behind sunglasses without turning your heads. Learn to make do with a view from the rear, where you can't be seen.

And women, if you see a guy's eyes flick furtively toward your breasts, be aware that it usually means he wants to stop and stare, and is having a brief failure in his efforts to control his gaze. He's not insulting you. He's not demeaning you. He's momentarily losing a battle with millions of years of evolution. It's a battle that most of us fight solely for your sakes on a daily basis, and yes, sometimes we falter.

Understanding these things gives us all a chance to make the world a better place.

Caveman Speak

Buying that Dungeons and Dragons manual got me thinking about some of my olden days of role-playing, and for some reason, the game that popped into my head was one my group only played very briefly: "Og, the Caveman Game."

The genius and downfall of Og was its merciless restriction on language. The character sheet included a section with eighteen words listed, and you got to roll to see how many of those words your character knew and could speak. The range was 2 to 5 if I remember, and if you picked "eloquent" as your caveman's special ability you got a bonus two words. The list was: you, stick, small, shiny, me, hairy, big, go, rock, bang, cave, water, sleep, food, fire, smelly, thing, and (presumably just to be funny) verisimilitude. You could also petition the game master for the right to choose a word that wasn't on the list.

I picked you, me, and go, and in what I considered a stroke of genius, convinced the GM to let me add "fuck."

In case you've never thought about it, there are sooooo many ways to use the word fuck. With that one pick, I not only gave myself an edge for romancing the cave-ladies ("you, me, go fuck?"), I could also tell someone they'd disappointed me ("you fuck me."), threaten them if they were thinking about betraying me ("you fuck me, I fuck you!"), tell someone off ("go fuck you"), express dismay ("fuuuuck me!"), and of course, swear in a satisfying way whenever something went bad, as any role-player knows always happens sooner or later. The next best swear word was "smelly," and only one guy picked that. Everyone else was stuck just growling frustratedly at our misfortunes, while the one guy got to lamely say "smelly," and I got to shout "fuck!" By smacking my fist into my palm, I could also use it as a synonym for "hit," "fight," or "attack."

Eventually, after a lot of laughs, we gave up on Og because it didn't have an experience system to let you learn new words, which meant that we ran through most of the clever combinations of our vocabularies pretty quickly (even "fuck") , whereafter an adventure of even minimal complexity quickly became more a game of charades than a role-playing session.

But, fuck, was it ever a lot of fun at the start!

Progress Report 2

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

My Next Character is a Nudist Druid

Okay, so here's the weirdest thing about that review I described last post: the guy complained about a tiny strip of unclothed abdomen, but much earlier in the book there's a picture of a lady druid in a fur bikini. Bare legs, bare belly, bare shoulders, barely covered breasts ... but he picked the archer with her tiny patch of uncovered waistline to rag about.

The only explanation for this (other than that he just overlooked her) is that the reviewer recognized that there was absolutely nothing the least bit sexual about her pose, and as a druid she would logically be expected to disdain the conventions of ordinary society anyway.

Which made me go further and realize ... it would be perfectly reasonable for a D&D druid character to be a nudist. Put some gear in a backpack and just let everything else hang out. Walk through villages with all the townsfolk staring, argue with constables who want to make you put some clothes on, turn yourself into a tiger when people complain ...

Now I just need to find an unsuspecting group that's ready to play the new edition.

Dungeons and Dragons Grows Up ... the Oversensitized Aren't Quite Satisfied

I used to play a lot of Dungeons and Dragons when I was younger. Very fun game -- creative, social, entertaining ...

So when I heard they were bringing out a new edition, I wondered if I should be interested. The company went through this routine five or six years ago, and just flipping through the books in the bookstore told me they were aiming for a pre-teen/teen/MMO audience, not somewhat older aficionados of fantasy games such as myself.

Well, there couldn't be any harm in looking the new edition up online and reading some reviews, could there? Maybe a few longtime gamers would chime in and let me figure out whether it was worth looking at, or if all of us in the 35+ crowd should write the game off for good.

Wow, were there ever a lot of reviews piled up in a short period of time! And most of them seemed glowing, especially those by people who claimed to have played every edition of D&D since it was invented.

Might be worth a trip to the store to flip through a physical copy, I started thinking.

And then I came to a review that included a brief paragraph about the portrayal of women and minorities, which said there was a lot of minority representation in the artwork and that the female characters were almost all appropriately attired, except for one female archer on page 137, who had a bare midriff.

Bare midriff? Whoa, I am all over that, son. Where are my car keys?

At the store, I had to search around a little to find the book, but once I did, I went straight for page 137. Bare midriff! Oh, this is going to be good!

Page 140, too far. Page 131 ... overcompensated ... 133 ... 135 ... 137!

And there it was:

Holy shit, did you come all over yourself? Because I know I barely held it in. Salivating for more of this inappropriately attired lady?

That's it. That's the lurid display of skin that the reviewer found exceptionable enough to need remarking on.

Don't get me wrong. The guy didn't go on and on about how horrifically sexist this picture was. He didn't describe it as exploitive or titillating. He just said it had a bare midriff. But this is the example he cited to demonstrate that the women in the book were not 100% appropriately attired. Which means he thought this was inappropriate.

When you look at the entire picture, it's clear to anyone with any exposure to D&D or fantasy stories in general that this woman is intended to be a barbarian. Her midriff is bare because she's a barbarian, people. She doesn't care about social conventions. I mean look, she obviously doesn't even shave her armpits, right? (joke) And even as a wilderness-schooled outlander, she doesn't have bare legs or a naked shoulder. (Or maybe she has a naked shoulder, but we can't see it behind her hair, so I hardly think we can cry foul about its nudity.)

You can't even see her bellybutton!

Here's the scoop on this new D&D Player's Handbook (which, yes, I bought, because it is absolutely bloated with gorgeous fantasy artwork that is highly story- and character-oriented and I find I really would like to play the game again). Out of the 166 figures that I counted going page-by-page through the book (monsters not included):

99 are male.

47 are female.

20 are indeterminate.

13 are ethnic minorities.

The last of those sounds pretty skimpy until you consider the large number of pale blue elves and grey-skinned half-orcs and reddish tieflings. There are a substantial number of white European figures, but they do not dominate the book. In fact, in the section where you pick your character's race, the example shown for "human" is a black woman. 

Of the females, 13 show skin in the form of bare shoulders, necklines low enough to detect the curvature of breasts or actual cleavage, or a stretch of thigh. Quite a few others have contoured armor that makes it clear there are supposed to be breasts inside, but the contours are gentle, not bulging, and many of those figures would not be discernibly female if the armor didn't provide a cue, because they're elves or other races with slender builds and gentle facial features. 

Many of the 20 indeterminate figures are indeterminate because they have on bulky, non-contoured armor, and their features are androgynous enough that you simply can't tell their sex.

And this is all clearly deliberate. There's a human warrior who appears in three different pictures, and in none of them can I say for certain whether he's a guy with unusually soft features, or she's a woman with a muscular, stocky build like you might expect in a lady who chooses full plate armor for protection while swinging her sword. In one picture the character's jaw looks a little on the square side, but in another there's a delicate, feminine braid running through the hair.

Frankly, I'm astonished at the extraordinary degree to which the art in this book avoids even a hint of sexual sensuality. As a guy who cut his teeth on the fantasy artwork of Frank Frazetta and Jeff Jones, I just can't understand anyone calling that archer's tiny flash of midriff "inappropriate." Unless they'd put unisex clothing and hairstyles on everyone in the book, I don't see how the creators of this manual could have hit it much farther out of the park as a victory for respectful, person-centric depiction of women.

There is a brand of feminism that seems to consider female skin below the collar or above the wrist/knee an instant signal of sexism. People being watchful for exploitation have become so sensitized that they no longer accept female anatomy as a valid element in artistic or cinematic works.

In point of fact, there's a rich tradition of seductive witches, alluring succubi, lusty barbarian swordsmen, and other sexually provocative types in fantasy storytelling, and there's nothing wrong with any of those tropes, except when they become crutches for lazy writing. In a book aimed at teens and adults, shading a handful of the images with mildly erotic undertones  should be absolutely beyond reproach. Sex is a part of our humanity; there's no reason it shouldn't be part of a roleplaying game. But the creators of this volume chose to leave it out (or rather, out of the artwork, since the text openly tells players that they should feel free to create characters of whatever gender/orientation combination they'd like). I won't criticize the art directors for that; there are plenty of oversexed publications out there they they may feel a legitimate need to counterbalance.

To complain that they didn't go far enough, though, betrays an uncontemplative, reactionary force of habit, not a true concern for issues of human rights or respect for individuals' sexuality.

Whew. Now that I've got that off my chest, can anyone tell me where to find an actually inappropriate image of bare female midriff? Because I feel kind of cheated on that score.

Bossy

I've seen this before, but it annoyed me all afresh when I saw it just now in the Facebook feed for the Colbert Report. I'm transcribing from memory, but I think this is pretty close:

The next time you hear someone call a little girl "Bossy," stop them and say, "That little girl isn't being bossy. She's demonstrating executive leadership skills."

People, listen. Some little girls are bossy. Some little boys are bossy. When we see them being bossy, we absolutely need to call them out on it. Bossiness is not an "executive leadership skill." It's the substitution of brute intimidation for genuine people skills. It's a terrible detriment to our society, and it needs to be discouraged -- across the board.

This is the kind of empowerment we don't need: an empowerment that says dictating to others without respect or politeness is the right of men and therefore should be the right of women as well. No. It's not anybody's right to badger someone else into submission, ever.

Also: the next time you see someone judging a situation on the basis of a single word, you should stop that person and say, "Excuse me, but it appears that you have what's called a 'trigger word.' That's a word that provokes an unreasoning, reflexive, and usually negative reaction often disproportionate to or entirely inappropriate for the actual circumstances. You might want to seek professional help for that."

Slow Day for Book Sales?

How exactly is the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, from 2009, the number one bestseller in books on Amazon.com right now?

Is today National Try to Become a Psychologist Day?

Your Daily Dose of Societal Unfairness

So I read this article, and it made me angry. I anticipated a lot of the article's content from the title -- it's pretty obvious our society puts immense pressure on women to bear children, so I figured at least part of the piece would be about the author's experience having to contend with people's shock and disapproval that she would choose to remain childless.

What I wasn't prepared for was the idea that a woman's physician would refuse to refer her for a sterilization procedure even after several years of the woman asking. As the author points out, men can choose to have a vasectomy more or less whenever they want. How preposterous and condescending is it to tell a woman she can't similarly protect herself from unwanted pregnancy, especially on the grounds that she might change her mind and regret the decision? Hello-o! That's every decision of any importance in any adult's life!

Just so I have this straight, a woman should wait until she's 30 to choose a hysterectomy because that's a life-altering action that can't be undone. But she's free to choose to have children at whatever age she likes, because ... that's not a life-changing, irreversible decision?

Honestly, maybe it would be a great idea to force everyone to wait until they're 30 to make big decisions. But if so, it should be a general principle, not a single arbitrary restriction placed on women alone.

We live in a pretty messed-up world sometimes.

Quest for Eyeglasses: The Final Chapter

So obviously everyone is dying to know how it went when I returned to the Walmart optometry shop to pick up the glasses I ordered. Who helped Ian try his new glasses on? Was she hot? What inappropriate thoughts did he struggle with while seated across from her?

Well, it turns out there was a guy on duty when I showed up. Perfectly nice guy. I think he had a close-trimmed beard, maybe sort of reddish-brown hair? He put forward a much more personable demeanor than the female optician who helped me order the glasses the other day. In the end I thanked him or he thanked me, one of us said, "Have a great evening!" and the other one said, "You too!"

In other words, it was one of those absolutely forgettable moments of interaction that we all experience daily or at the very least weekly. Both of us, I think, sincerely meant the pleasantries we exchanged as we parted, but they were nonetheless pre-programmed and formulaic. I remember less of what he said or looked like and more that he disappeared into the back room for an exasperating length of time in order to reform the earpieces on my glasses.

Thus, because my male instincts put no time or effort into assessing him for his mating potential, he has already started to fade from my mind. Whereas the receptionist, the optometrist, and the first optician all remain firmly fixed there -- not just as pretty faces or bodies, but as personalities, as people.

I'm a strange person. Maybe other men are not this way. But when biology urges me to look at a woman, it does not cause me to depersonalize her. It causes me to process her unique facets more deeply, remember her longer, and wonder more about what's going on in her head than would be the case if I felt no tug to look, but merely passed by without ever contemplating her individuality.

I do not look in order to lessen; I look in order to appreciate and to learn.

At some point I'm going to write a post about why men should not indulge their urges to ogle. But that post is not going to equate ogling with objectification or exploitation, because in my personal experience it does neither of those things. Speaking only for myself, it is a yearning for connection that arises from sexual instinct but is not merely sexual.

If you want to criticize me for ignoring someone's personhood, you have to criticize me more for the nice-but-quickly-forgotten bearded guy this evening than for the three women I described earlier in the week.

Sorry, bearded guy. Now I feel bad about not looking at your name tag and at least knowing who you were.

Not all that bad, though. After all, you did make me wait an awfully long time while you bent those earpieces.