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.