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

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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 ...