Literate Perversions

Steven Pressfield and Impostor’s Syndrome

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I don’t actually know who Steven Pressfield is, but this quote sums up a lot of my deepest fears, and the monologues that go through my head all the time. Frankly, I often have a hard time believing that anyone looks at my writing with anything other than kind indulgence. I do ask myself this question — Constantly. The trick is that although my brain understands the truth of Pressfield’s quote, my gut doesn’t quite buy it.

Steven Pressfield quote: "If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends) 'Am I REALLY a writer? Am I REALLY an artist?' Chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is *wildly* self confident. The real one is scared to death."

“If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends) ‘Am I REALLY a writer? Am I REALLY an artist?’ Chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is *wildly* self confident. The real one is scared to death.” — Steven Pressfield “The War of Art”

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How is Killing Fluffy Bunnies “Rapey”?

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Donnie Darko and Frank the Bunny in the Theater

A couple of years back, I wrote a piece called “Why Sex is Not Spiritual” for the SF Weekly arts blog, The Exhibitionist. It’s probably the best piece I ever wrote for them, and one of the best pieces I’ve written on atheism and sex.  It got a lot of comments, many of them outraged and offended. The people who were most pissed off were New-Agey types, Wiccan, and so forth, so there weren’t many comments telling me that I was going to hell. Pagans don’t do Hell. They just kind of shake their heads with a certain passive-aggressive condescension that lets you know that you’re close-minded at the very best, and probably a patriarchal bigot at the very worst.

Anyway, the piece was provocative enough that it still gets comments. Today, it got two from the same person, who goes by the handle startigerjln. (Known henceforth as ST.) The first is some kind of pseudo-scientific garbage that conflates neurological stimulation and temporal lobe epilepsy with spirituality. (It’s not; feelings of transcendence and emotional highs do not demonstrate the existence of spirits or souls.) It’s the second one that first bewildered me, then pissed me off. [Read more…]

Grammar Slut

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I heart Chelsea Summers. Her blog has always been one of the most literate web sites to deal with sex in the whole blogosphere, and she has just enough misanthropy that she has long since secured herself a place in the black, shriveled lump of muscle that is my heart. But she’s outdone herself with her two most recent entries. She’s started writing about one of the kinks that rules all my other kinks: Grammar.1

Stupid people don’t interest me, sexually or otherwise, and yes, just because you make grammatical or spelling mistakes doesn’t make you stupid. But you come off as a lot smarter if you can at least make a fucking effort, and let’s face it — you give some people a computer keyboard, and they just don’t seem to give a shit what comes out on the screen. Much as I love the Internet and all the geeky toys and perverted communities it makes available to me, it’s also an excruciating experience reading a lot of Internet prose, which is apparently written by people who surrendered all responsibility for correct language and style to a third-rate spellchecking program before they sent that part of their brain out to the dry cleaner’s and then promptly dropped the claim check behind the couch where it lay mouldering for eight months before being picked up by a rat to use as home improvement materials.

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  1. Please note the proper use of our friend the colon at the end of this sentence, which is covered in explicit detail by Chelsea in her second post about perverted grammar. ↩

Call For Submissions: Men Speak Out

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I got this in my e-mail box recently, from a friend of my girlfriend. I'm still ruminating over whether I have anything that I could contribute, especially since my approach to feminism tends to be that of the loyal opposition. I emphasize loyal.  Anyway, whether I wind up contributing or not, I thought it looked like a worthy enough venture to promote for anyone else who might be interested.

 CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Men Speak Out: ProFeminist Views on Gender, Sex and Power
Deadline: September 15, 2006

How can we better understand and imagine new possibilities for men and feminism?

Are you a guy who hates sexism? Do you call yourself a feminist? Have you spent hours over coffee (or beer) thinking about issues of gender, power, race, class, and sexuality? Are you involved with social justice activism? If so, then you have stories to tell and I'd like to hear what you have to say.
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Writer's Block

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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.