Don't Look Now

Okay, guys, before I rain on your parade, let me say that I’m with you: women are incredible. Gorgeous, virtually all of them. Among the most beautiful creations in the natural world. There shouldn’t be anything wrong with looking at them, finding them astonishing, and even saying so in the right circumstances.

So why is it that they don’t always consider it a compliment when we glance smilingly at them or remark on how lovely they appear to us?

Honestly, the answer here is so simple I shouldn’t have to point it out.

But we’re guys, and guys can be dense, so I’ll go ahead and explain it with a couple of quick mental exercises. 

First, I want you to imagine that you’re working at a job you like, a job you put a lot of pride and effort into and that you’re good at. You studied your ass off getting the right degree or training for it, you gave a genius interview, you’ve done everything right since you were hired, you’ve saved your team’s butts with your creative ideas on a regular basis, you’re always on time, you stay late when you need to – you’re the perfect employee.

And no one ever says anything appreciative to you about any of that.

Well, maybe once in a while someone does, but for the most part, they just take your talent and intelligence and work ethic for granted. Other people get lots of kudos for their efforts and get promoted every year or two, but your career just kind of putters along unnoticed.

So now imagine you’re walking down the hall, and a coworker says, “Hey, nice bipedalism, buddy! I mean, you’re just being exceptionally bipedal today.”

Then, a little later, you’re in a meeting, and your boss says, “Look at you and your opposable thumbs. Lots of people have thumbs, but you sure know how to oppose them. Good job.”

Nothing about your terrific productivity. Nothing about that suggestion of yours that made the whole department look good. Just regular and consistent compliments about attributes that are mere artifacts of being born human. 

You may very well think you have a really nice walk. You may consider your hand-eye coordination better than average, and maybe in elementary school you were best at “One-Two-Three-Four, I Declare a Thumb War.” But compliments about having two legs and opposable thumbs are still likely to  sit ill with you if all your real accomplishments are being overlooked.

Mental exercise number two:

You’re walking down the street. For whatever reason, you need to find something in your wallet, so you take it out and start digging around in it. As you’re walking along, you realize that someone significantly larger than you is approaching from the other direction, staring at your wallet. When you look up, the person smiles and says, “That’s a nice wallet full of money you’ve got there.” 

Even if the smile looks genuine and you’re on a crowded street where nothing is likely to happen, isn’t that going to make you uncomfortable? Especially if it happens again half a block later, and another block after that? 

“Yeah, that money’s lookin’ good, dude.”

“Whoo-eee! You’re loaded, aren’t you?”

How many comments like that will it take before you put your wallet away and hurry onward even though you may not have found whatever business card or free-coffee coupon you were looking for?

The thing is, if you see someone who has surprisingly good opposable thumbs or a really confident walk, or if you see someone in possession of an impressive sum of money in their billfold, it really ought to be a nice thing for you to comment on it, if you truly mean it in a positive, encouraging way. But in the world we live in, people often go unvalued for their talents, hard work, and striving. And in the world we live in, people are regularly accosted by strangers and relieved of their money through physical force or threat of violence. These facts create a context in which compliments about bipedalism and fat wallets could easily be unpleasant and even hurtful, regardless of the intent behind them.

So if you want to live in a world where you’re free to look at women as you like and tell passing strangers how beautiful you find them, then you need to get to work. You need to build a civilization in which women receive all the rewards and acclaim they deserve for their personal accomplishments and abilities. You need to build a civilization in which women feel completely safe at all times from unwanted physical advances and sexual assault.

You need to create a world in which people feel valued enough, and safe enough, that appreciative observation of their superficial attributes won’t be taken the wrong way.

In the meantime, if you just can’t repress your instinct to make eye contact with pretty women in public and smile at them, here’s a suggestion: 

Smile at everyone.

If we all did that, and meant it, I guarantee you many things would get better much more quickly.

Ewoks = Inequity!

I thought this article did a nice job summing up some of the issues that challenge us when we talk about the representation of women in film. And yeah, my purported reason for linking to it is that I'm a feminist and think it's an important topic ... but if I'm being honest, I have to admit it's really because I just plain hate Ewoks.

The Voters Speak!

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Sheesh! I Suck at Blogging!

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Self-driving Cars

You know, if those supposedly right-around-the-corner self-driving cars ever show up, won't it eventually mean there's no such thing as a back seat? I mean, at first they'll still have steering controls in case you have to take over driving, or in case you get outside the range of whatever brainiac computer controls city traffic. But eventually, they'll all be totally self-driving, and they might as well have the rows of seats facing each other, right?

Will there soon be whole generations of people who won't understand the concept of losing your virginity in the back seat of a car?

I'm Number One!

Woohoo! If I'm allowed to pat my back a bit, my most recent Literotica.com serial, Contrast, has landed the all-time highest-rated spot in its category, Interracial Romance.

These things shift and change over time, and who knows how long it will stay there. But at least it seems like I'm doing something right.

Here's What a Big Softie I Am

On the second night of our recent vacation to Disneyland, my wife and I went in the hotel's concierge lounge, where the TV on the wall was showing "Toy Story 3."  I assumed it was just somewhere in the middle of the film, and that I was safe. We got our snacks and sat down, my wife to one side of the table and her purse in the chair opposite the screen, which meant I had to sit with my back to the TV if I wanted to sit next to her. Which made me think I was even safer.

As we nibbled on cheese and crackers and chips and salsa and tiny pastries, I could hear enough of the dialogue to make me turn my head a couple of times, and I realized we'd come in at the very end of the show. I snacked some more and chatted with my wife and tried to play it cool, but I kept looking more and more often, and when I found I'd emptied my plate, I went for seconds and moved my wife's bag instead of returning to my original seat.

My wife laughed at me for not being able to avoid watching, then said a couple of things about it being such a good scene.  By the time it got to the part where the toys are holding hands, I was sniffling and rubbing the corner of my eye, and my wife said, "Awww, do you need a tissue, honey?"

But instead of embarrassing me in front of the handful of other adults in the room (no children), the comment brought a spontaneous shared blubbering from everyone present about what a wonderful and sad and perfect scene it was, and we all laughed and (some of us) cried our way through the rest of the movie, turning in the snap of a finger from three or four separately conversing clusters into a single whole, united in a state of silly, weepy joy at our inability to stop watching this cartoon. I was the only man there, and I have to admit I took a certain bizarre pride in being the one whose tears turned the switch that brought us so instantly together.

There's something about allowing yourself to feel, and especially to feel alongside others, that is its own special reward.

Isn't it bizarre how often we hold ourselves back from that?

Let Jargons be Jargons

Update, 10/29/16: There's some dumb-ass stuff in this post, but I'm leaving it up anyway, because I think it's worth thinking about. In particular, I remain convinced that we need to watch ourselves for patterns of language that make us sound like an exclusive clique, and we need to be patient with people who haven't yet absorbed the complex intellectual constructs behind these terms. If we find someone who bristles or goes blank at one of these words or phrases, we should shift gears and work in common language to bring them on board with the concepts, rather than doubling down and insisting on the righteousness of our progressive lexicon.

One of things I find frustrating about being a feminist is that feminism and gender-conscious activism are not always a particularly welcoming club. It's pretty doggone easy to come across articles or blog posts or Twitter feeds full of statements lamenting straight white cisgender male indulgence in heteronormative language and behavior that ends up contributing to rape culture.

Now, I know what's meant by each of those terms, and I know that the issues they address are real issues with profound negative consequences for women and for the collective psyche of our society. But to someone looking at feminism from the outside, the movement's language sounds at best like that of an insular academic subculture and at worst like an actively hostile clique.

"Cisgender" is the least offputting of the batch, but let's face it, it's awful. There's nothing intuitive about it -- it's weird looking and alien, and really has nothing to recommend it to the people it's supposed to describe. Intellectually, I think it's kind of cool, "cis" meaning the numerically prevalent form of something with "trans" being its inverse. But I had to look it up in the dictionary the first time I encountered it, and most people don't want to look things up in the dictionary.

What would be wrong with something like "plain-gender"? The word "plain" is known to everyone, and is neither favorable nor unfavorable because it has a variety of connotations -- some positive, some negative, and some neutral. It implies that which is commonplace, and seems far less likely to confuse or turn people off than "cis."

So let's look at "heteronormative." Anybody with basic reading comprehension skills should be able to glean from context that "heteronormative" means something bad. No one ever goes around talking about the benefits of heteronormative thinking. So if you're heterosexual, and you think of yourself as "normal," the word "heteronormative" seems to be calling two strikes against you. It's obviously something bad, so maybe it means being hetero is bad or being the norm is bad, or both. That automatically puts nonfeminists on the defensive and raises their barriers to the word.

But what if we replaced it with "heterotyping" or "heterotypical?" The echoes of "stereotyping" and "stereotypical" would make the terms more familiar and more sympathetic, because everybody already knows that stereotyping is bad, whereas most people don't think that the "norm" is bad. Furthermore, stereotyping is a special kind of bad -- we all get that it's usually very negative ... but we also know that everybody does it, and it's sometimes relatively harmless and can even be a source of humor. A nonfeminist might bristle at being called "heteronormative" while thinking, "Well, maybe I am 'heterotypical,' whatever that means," or "Could I be guilty of 'heterotyping?' I mean, I know I let myself stereotype people sometimes ..." So some combination of those two terms might be more accessible to nonfeminists from beyond academia than "heteronormative," which if we're honest sure sounds like an egghead pointing fingers and being snooty.

Finally, the most problematic is "rape culture." I think it's self-evident that any decent person who perceives her- or himself to be living in a "rape culture" must feel profoundly alienated from that culture, because any decent person finds rape abhorrent and unacceptable. So as soon as we use the term "rape culture" around those unfamiliar with its overall conceptual framework, we imply that we're a bunch of malcontents unable to tolerate and fit into society as a whole.

I have to ask, who wants to join that team? Who do we think is going to rally to a cause that advertises itself as alienated by and disjoined from the mainstream? Maybe we do live in a "rape culture," and maybe it does deserve our contempt and alienation -- but do we think boasting about that is going to bring people around to our way of thinking if they're deeply invested in what they perceive to be a generally decent society?

A major drawback of the phrase "rape culture" is that everyone knows about "gun culture" and "drug culture," which are both associated with people who actively engage in and want to promote the objects of their focus. "Gun culture" people think guns are great. "Drug culture" people like doing drugs. These are established terms, and the fact is that "rape culture" is not parallel to them in the least. There's no significant group out there openly advocating rape or its legalization.

In truth, "rape culture" is an awkward umbrella term for a slew of insidious and often subconscious attitudes and phenomena. It encompasses rape-enabling behaviors like the failure to properly investigate and prosecute rape, rape-denying behaviors like victim-blaming and slut-shaming, and general ignorance of rape due to media complacency. But in virtually none of those cases are the people involved in favor of rape. Aside from criminals cooking up date-rape drugs and the subset of fraternity types who distribute them and encourage or excuse their use, most of the elements of "rape culture" are not deliberate cultivations of rape.

So what we actually have is not a "rape culture," but a rape ecology. A set of conditions under which rape can flourish despite the fact that almost everybody believes that rape is bad. Rape is the weed or the weevil in our field of crops, and because we're not properly focused on fighting it, some of the things we do to fertilize and irrigate the field end up encouraging the weeds and weevils. "Rape culture" doesn't accurately describe that situation, and if we were to talk about "rape ecology" instead, nobody would think we were accusing the larger society of deliberately fostering rape.

Obviously, there's a huge amount of linguistic inertia that feminism would have to overcome in order to switch its current terminology to a vocabulary more friendly and welcoming to nonfeminist ears. But if we're worried about that inertia being difficult to overcome, we might as well just give up entirely, because the attitudes and societal structures we're up against are far, far more entrenched than the lingo we've developed to talk about them.

If we want everybody to be a feminist, I think we need to start using words everybody can buy into.

Otherwise, we might as well just talk amongst ourselves in Esperanto.

This is not a Music Recommendation

You need to rush out and buy the album "Children of the Stars" by The Orion Experience.



I know my post title says this isn't a music recommendation, and albums contain music, so it seems like I'm being a big fat liar, but stick with me.

The Orion Experience is a plucky New York City band obsessed with making exuberant, hook-filled pop music. They're brilliant, and they must know it, because everybody around them must be telling them they're brilliant all the time. Yet so far as I can tell, nobody's ever heard of them and they've been languishing in obscurity for years.

But when you listen to "Children of the Stars," you find that they don't seem to care. Because even greater than their obsession with blending the sounds of Blondie and the Beatles and ELO and Lady Gaga and a hundred other influences is their palpable belief in proclaiming the beauty of the universe while trying to make our human world a better place.

The album is so packed with optimism, enthusiasm, and encouragement that many cynical 21st Centurians will reflexively dismiss it as cornball fluff. But in spite of the wall of power-pop/glam-rock sound and the over-the-top cosmic lyrical frames, these people are genuinely on a mission to change the world, and the album is dead-set on getting you to pick yourself up and do your part.

Buy it, listen to it, believe in it. Then get busy building the reality you used to wish existed, before adulthood slowly ground it out of you.

Also, the music is really, really good. Sorry, I couldn't help saying so.

Plotting by the Numbers

I've seen a couple of people asking plotting questions on Facebook and Twitter, and since I'm totally stuck on where my next book should go, I thought, "Hey, I could pretend to be an expert on plotting and write an essay of sage advice to help these people out!" So here it is.

Because nothing appeals to writer types as much as being asked to do math, I think everyone will love this idea: to really plot well, just imagine it as a matter of sequencing, subtraction and substitution!

Here's how it works.

First, figure out what your characters are generally going to accomplish in the story. Is it a romance where two people end up living happily ever after? Is it a caper where the clever slink steals the villain's prized treasure? Is it a fantasy in which the hero becomes king or queen of the realm?

Whatever your core idea is, it will generally consist of some kind of goal, and every goal can be reached by a clearly outlined series of steps, right? So the next task in plotting is to write the steps needed for the protagonist(s) to accomplish the goal in the easiest and most straightforward way.

The lovers meet, recognize an attraction for each other, communicate that attraction openly and effectively, spend time together, working mutually to build a deeper and more intense relationship, until their honest and plainly exchanged emotions reach a such a height that they simultaneously realize that they must be together forever.

The villain's treasure is in an easily accessible, unguarded location that the heroic rogue is aware of, and to which the rogue possesses a key, so that she is able to travel to the location, enter, take the treasure, and make off unhindered.

The hero is the rightful heir of the kingdom, the current ruler is ready to retire, and the crown passes happily from sovereign to heir by way of the normal, peaceable laws of the land.

Obviously, these are not the plot-lines of particularly interesting stories. So what do we do? We take some things away.

The lovers don't both immediately recognize their attraction. One is or both are oblivious to or in denial of their emotions. Something keeps them from communicating openly with each other, or something muddles their communications in a way that creates conflict and tension. Something forces them apart, preventing the steady contact that would facilitate their romantic entanglement.

The would-be thief does not have that key, is missing knowledge of the treasure's location, and/or faces numerous barriers to accessing the villain's cache.

The hero doesn't realize his or her birthright. The current ruler is wicked and clings to power. Political conditions in the kingdom unbalance the ordinary path of succession.

Once we've taken away the tools, people, or circumstances that would make the goal easy to achieve, we substitute in the specifics of why those things are missing, and then we add in an alternate means of the protagonist(s) getting through that step.

Although the heroine falls for the hero right away, his emotions are not as immediate, because they've met while she is pretending to be someone else. She can't communicate her feelings without blowing her cover. Desperate for his affection, she tries to get around the situation by sending him anonymous notes.

The thief does not have the key because there are actually three keys, each in the possession of a different guardian. The keys must be inserted in the treasure vault and turned simultaneously in order to open it. Each guardian has a specific weakness that the thief exploits to gain the key, and in one case, the thief is able to convert the guardian to her cause, so that she has an assistant to help manage the simultaneous turning of the keys.

The hero's birthright is obscured because the true queen concealed the birth of her heir, knowing that the kingdom's aristocracy would soon overthrow her. But a locket around the babe's neck provides the proof of his or her true identity, and a wizardly ally of the queen is in a position to make the noble heir aware of the truth.

By starting with the large-scale elements of the protagonist's goal, we create the broad outline of the story. We can then repeat the same process with each sub-element of the plot, listing out the simplest steps the disguised heroine must undertake to complete whatever keeps her in her false identity; describing the surest, safest route for the thief to take with the first guardian, and then the second, and then the third; exposing the locket to the hero's awareness and designing a quick and simple path to the wizard. Then we undertake another round of subtraction and addition to complicate and resolve each sub-step.

This approach can be handled through rigorous pre-planning, of course, writing down and spelling out each sequence, subtraction, and substitution until the entire plot is outlined. But it can also be done on the fly by coming up with the first simple step toward the story goal without necessarily worrying about the ensuing steps until the first one has been accomplished. Working by the seat of the pants like that will sometimes paint your plot into a corner. But in other cases, the process of writing out the narrative will give you ideas for the next piece in the puzzle, and may keep things more spontaneous and fresh than creating and working from a detailed outline. If you try it one way and find yourself stuck, back up a bit and try it the other way to see if that works any better.

In short:

Where is the protagonist going?

What does she need to get there?

How can you take away some of the things she needs?

What challenge does she face in place of those needs?

And what can she use as a substitute to the original need in order to make steady progress toward her ultimate goal?

Just remember that it's much easier to spell out the easy way to do something than to craft a satisfyingly complex way of doing the same thing. And the process of making things a little more difficult and a little more difficult and a little more difficult -- well, that's pretty easy too.

Keep at it, and you'll eventually have something that looks impossibly complex to your readers, and they'll have no idea how you managed to build it.

Sex Ed: A Modest Proposal

I'm not particularly anti-gun, but I am strongly anti-abstinence-only when it comes to sex ed. Since a lot of people who are pro-gun are also pro-abstinence-only, it got me thinking.

What if they taught firearm safety classes the way abstinence-only sex ed classes work? You know ...

nobody showing you how to hold the thing right
nobody telling you there's a safety, or how it works
no instruction on the most effective places to aim
and no practice ... absolutely none, that's for sure

I mean, if it's a good way to teach one thing, why not teach everything that way?

Medical schools could teach doctors not to diagnose or treat patients...
Pilot schools could teach people how to keep planes on the ground...
Law schools could teach people how not to sue each other...

Okay, maybe the third of those would actually be worthwhile. And here's another:

Seminaries could teach people how not to preach.

Yeah, I definitely think that one sounds promising.