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.

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.