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Sign Adam Lee’s Petition, Expand Atheism

By Chris Hall
January 14, 2013
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Ayn Rand picture with signature

Ayn Rand: The woman who made it hip to be a selfish asshole.

Here’s words you won’t see me write (or hear me say) very often: sign this online petition. Generally, I think that online petitions and surveys are naught but meaningless wankery, but this one I think can do some good. One of the problems I have with online petitions is that they seem to take on Grand, Important Problems by allowing you to do nothing more than click a link. Adam Lee’s petition, on the other hand, is very specific about who it’s talking to, and what it’s talking about:

We support making the atheist movement more diverse and inclusive. It’s long been clear that the skeptical movement has a preponderance of white men. While we don’t disdain their participation, we believe skepticism is valuable and important to people in all walks of life, and in accordance with that principle, we consider it vital to have a movement that reflects the demographics of the society we live in. If our community continues to be dominated by white men, it will become increasingly out-of-touch and irrelevant as Western society becomes increasingly multiracial and multicultural and as non-Western countries gain economic and cultural power.

To that end, we urge the atheist and skeptical organizations to make a conscious commitment to diversity: to intentionally reach out to people of all ages, genders and ethnic backgrounds to speak at our conventions, to serve on our boards of directors, and to be the public faces and representatives of skepticism. We believe that there are talented, dedicated and eminently qualified people of every gender and every race, and that seeking them out will strengthen our movement and broaden its appeal.

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Filed Under: Atheism, Feminism, Politics Tagged With: Atheism, feminism, godlessness, justice, misogyny, racism

Rick Santorum Doesn’t Want You to Get Laid

By Chris Hall
January 7, 2012
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Despite how obviously desperate the Republicans are to find anyone—ANYONE—who’s not Romney to nominate as their Presidential candidate, I never thought that they’d scrape the bottom of the barrel so much that Santorum would wind up in second place. And in second place by a mere eight votes, too.

santorum (san-TOR-um) n. 1. The frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex

As Paul Krugman notes, the fun part about the constant rotation of Republican Number Twos is that it brings all of their skeletons screaming out of the closet into the unforgiving glare of the media spotlight. In Santorum’s case, the more media coverage he gets, the more his name becomes synonymous with “the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex.” Used to be that was a well-known joke only among readers of Dan Savage, who helped come up with it after Senator Santorum compared consensual homosexuality to fucking dogs. (To be fair, he did allow that gay sex wasn’t quite as bad as fucking children or dogs, but that it was still pretty damn icky.)

Now, even Rachel Maddow and the New York Times make sly reference to it. Next thing you know, “santorum” will make it into the OED, and not as a proper noun.

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Filed Under: Politics, Sex and Gender, Uncategorized Tagged With: abortion, contraception, misogyny, Politics

Onion V. Reality

By Chris Hall
July 12, 2006
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If we ever run out of reasons to keep the Religious Right out of power (yeah, right!), then this ought to provide some motivation: it really is only a short step from reading the Bible literally to reading The Onion like it's The Washington Post.  If you can believe in a creation that took seven days, you can easily believe that there's a woman  on the editorial staff of The Onion named Caroline Weber who wrote an article called I'm So Psyched About This Abortion! Here's a few lines of the article:

As I pushed my way through the crowd, one of the picketers yelled, "How could you do this? How could you kill a child?" What? It's more like, "How could I wait this long?" It wasn't until now that I was lucky enough to be pregnant with a child I had no means to support. I tell you, for a long time, I thought it would never happen to me!

So, to all of you pro-lifers who are trying to rain on my parade, keep it to yourself, because I don't have the time for that kind of negativity. I've got an abortion to plan, and I just know it's going to be the best non-anesthetized invasive uterine surgery ever!

The funny thing is, I actually have the pro-life movement to thank for this opportunity. If my HMO wouldn't have bowed to their pressure not to cover oral contraceptives, I never would've gotten pregnant in the first place. Then what would I be doing a week from Thursday? I'll tell you what I wouldn't be doing: going to an awesome abortion clinic where I'll be the center of attention from the minute I put my feet up in those stirrups. I wouldn't be looking forward to induced dilation of my cervical opening and suctioning of my uterus, either. And I sure as heck wouldn't get the chance to have a doctor insert a metal instrument into my womb to dislodge tissue from my uterine wall!

Well. As soon as Pete, a pro-life blogger at March Together For Life, read those words, his first thought was that it was high time to use the power of Blogspot to give Ms. Weber a good talking to, so that she might understand the error of her whorish, baby-killin' ways:

Sorry ma'am, if you hadn't had sex you wouldn't have gotten pregnant, it's not the HMO's fault for not supporting your promiscuity while not married….

Miss Weber, you have killed your child, which you admit is a baby/human being, intentionally. That does make you an admitted murderer. I'm not going to "condemn you to hell", I'm going to pray for your forgiveness and for the suffering which you will endure when you realize what you have done. Every baby you see from that moment on is going to wake you up to the realization that you killed your child.

I can't think of what to type here that will sound pithy and intelligent, so I'm going to say the only thing that comes to mind: HUH?!? 

True, I don't give the Fundies much credit for intelligence, or even familiarity with the basic precepts of reality. But no matter how cynical I get, I just can't fucking keep up.  I would at least expect them to know that The Onion is a FUCKING JOKE PAPER.

Of course, Pete doesn't need me to tell him this; as of this writing, 649 people had commented on his post to tell him what an unbelievable jackass he is. His reply is actually the most revealing part of the whole thing, because he remains utterly clueless, even when it's pointed out to him. First, he keeps referring to Caroline Weber as if she's a real writer — all the personas in The Onion are as invented as the articles — and second, the pearl-clutching horror with which he tells us that, parody or not, she is a sterling example of the lib'rul baby-killing mindset, and then proceeds to prove it by creating a simpleminded parody of a liberal pro-choicer. He, however, really does expect us to believe that he met this woman.

I've considered deleting this entry, because frankly, I think this pompous little prick has gotten enough attention; he's turned into an Internet phenomenon overnight, and has even gotten a Wikipedia page out of it (although the page is currently being considered for deletion). In my ideal universe, I want to see him rot in obscurity.

But Pete really shows what I loathe and fear about the fundies: their literalism. People who can't think in metaphor or parody are the ones to keep your eye on because they've already decided what the answers are going to be far in advance of getting the facts. The inability to consider the world in abstract, mutable terms is what breeds fanatics and tyrants; the world consists of only binaries, and the opposing binaries can't be tolerated. In short, what might be the biggest warning sign about the aspirations of the Fundies is their utter lack of a sense of humor.

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Filed Under: Religious Right Tagged With: abortion, fundamentalism, March-Together-For-Life, misogyny, The-Onion

Writer's Block

By Chris Hall
May 24, 2006
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Geezis, I hate this.  I have two reviews for SugarClick due this week, before tomorrow. I've been sitting around for two days now, always about to start writing the first one, and always unable to do anything that I either want to do or should do because, goddammit, I'm going to start writing, really I am, in five minutes.  I have e-mails to write and I should fucking well be writing up cover letters to try and get some fucking work before my unemployment finally runs out. But this is just preying on my mind, driving me crazy.

Part of the problem is that I just loathe one of these sites more than words can say.  It's the rantings of a career womanizer, dripping with misogyny.  It's supposed to be his journal for sex-addiction therapy, but it lacks the insight or remorse that you would hope for from someone who's seeking a solution to behavior that he admits is self-destructive. There's lots of self-loathing, but that's not the same thing. 

In short, I feel unclean just reading this crap.  It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.  There is nothing sex-positive about it, nor for that matter anything positive about it.  And I think that I've been fidgeting around because I really, really don't want to deal with it.  I've been peering deep into the guy's blog to avoid judging him too harshly, but I still can't find anything that makes me feel any kind of empathy for him.  It's an ugly little blog, and I guess I'm going to have to deal with it eventually.

Back to the grindstone.

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Filed Under: Writing Tagged With: blogs, misogyny, sex-addiction, SugarClick, Writing

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