My co-author Eunice and I write porn. We call it ‘porn’ without flinching; where some people like to claim there’s a categorical distinction between porn and erotica, we both are of the opinion that po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to, it’s all a tempest in a linguistic teapot.
I bring this up because, having co-authored five books of the most twisted pornography ever conceived with Eunice, filled with kinks so esoteric they don’t even have names (we looked), I thought I understood the purpose of porn pretty well.
Porn is when you use explicit, super-kinky sex to explore themes like personhood theory, agency, autonomy, philosophical ethics, atonement and redemption, social values, and community.
Obviously.
So imagine my surprise when Joreth, my wife, suggested in a Quora post:
My spouse doesn’t watch porn. He doesn’t get it. To be fair, almost all porn is bad bad BAD filmmaking, and as a filmmaker myself, I don’t disagree at all. But I understand that the point of mainstream porn is just to put naked bodies rutting on screen for those who are visually aroused, and nothing else.
My spouse, however, writes porn, but not, like, mainstream porn. He writes literary tomes, super-accurate far-future science-fiction, and detailed world-building urban fantasy. That happens to have sex scenes in them. He does. not. understand. the point of porn. To him, “porn” is for arousing the intellect, which will then follow with physical arousal.
I’m just back from Dragon*Con, where I spent most of my time alternating between the writers track and the skeptics track, so during a panel on written porn, I put the question to the panelists.
All of whom sided with my wife on this.
As did, for that matter, most of the Internet.
Now, a lot of folks do draw a distinction between porn and erotica; something I heard often is that erotica can explore complex themes but porn can’t. There’s a fair amount of this gatekeeping in the erotica writer’s scene: “erotica is what I write; porn is that dirty nasty filth that other people write.” I personally don’t draw that line; to me, it smacks of classism, of “porn is bad but erotica is okay.” If your goal is to arouse, to quicken the senses, then it’s porn, no matter what else you may be doing.
But that also seems a minority opinion.
The porn Eunice and I write is incredibly explicit and very kinky indeed. It’s also, quite often, highly uncomfortable. (Eunice likes to say she’ll keep scaling the kink factor up and up until I cringe; that’s the sweet spot we’re aiming for.) The explicitness and the discomfort are part of the point—we explore ideas that are intrinsically uncomfortable, like “is it ethical to give consent to sex in such a way that you cannot revoke it?” (Spoiler: we both think the answer is yes. It’s strange that doing this is so wildely accepted in anything but sex—joining the militart, for instance—but when it comes to sex, people—even people in the kink scene—struggle with it.)
The word “porn” is emotionally charged. Using “erotica” in place of “porn” feels to me like a way to try to soften it, to hide from sexuality rather than engaging with it directly. Our novels confront uncomfortable ideas directly, without evasion; why not call them porn?
I’ve now been in Florida for over a month and a half, helping joreth get her new (to her) RV set up and situated…a project that involved gutting the entire inside, adding 600 watts of solar to the roof, and replacing the house batteries with a very large lithium battery bank.
As we’ve run bto and fro between Winter Haven and Orlando, mainly along I-4, a wretched hive of scum and poor civil engineering, I noticed a very peculiar thing:
Florida has given up on the idea of advancing your station through hard work.
Drive across Florida on Interstate 4. Drive around in downtown Winter Haven, Orlando, or Lakeland. Notice anything peculiar?
I’m talking, of course, about billboards. But not just any billboards. Florida is, to an extent I’ve not seen in any other state, littered with billboards…for accident lawyers. Billboards as far as the eye can see, all advertising how much money you can make if you are in an accident.
Billboard after billboard after billboard, all for accident attorneys. On the stretch of I-4 we’ve been driving regularly, most of the billboards—54%, by my count—are advertising accident attorneys.
They’re everywhere. It’s absolutely uncanny.
I took these photos from inside a moving car, so I know the quality isn’t the greatest, but they just go on and on. We would drive down stretches of road where every single billboard for miles advertised accident attorneys, one after another after another.
Florida has long been legendary for the staggering numbers of terrible drivers on the roads, the result of snowbirds coming down from all over the country without being accustomed to the rain, a olice force focused on making money over protecting public safety, and lax licensing laws.
But I think there’s another part of it as well:
In Florida, there’s a cultural attitude that says getting in a car accident that you can blame on someone else is like winning the lottery.
They even have lawyers who specialize in going after semi owner/operators and trucking companies.
And, of course, language is no barrier to your payday.
But the absolute freakiest thing?
Remember when I said that getting in a car wreck is like winning the lottery? I meant that literally, not figuratively.
Accident lawyers put up shiny happy billboards with shiny happy accident victims wearing shiny happy smiles under headlines trumpeting how much money they made.
(There’s something so very very Florida about this little scene: an “I won $500,000 in an injury lawsuit, isn’t that awesome?” billboard over a strip mall with a pawn and gun shop, an acupuncturist, a martial arts center, an MMA arena, and a weird Evangelical church, all sharing a roof.)
The way these billboards are designed, they’re exactly like state lottery billboards.
“Dude! You got hit by a car and smashed into rubble? Awesome! Cha-CHING!!!”
Every time you pull into traffic in Florida, you’re sharing the road with people who sincerely hope you hit them because that’s the way you get ahead in this world.
It’s really deeply creepy…and perversely, it incentivizes the exact opposite of driving defensively. Coming up to a light and it looks like someone might be about to run the red? Gun it! Get in that intersection and hope he slams into you. Then maybe you’ll be one of the shiny happy people with a big payday, baby!
Last night, at 12:42 AM Eastern time, my Talespinnter and I finished the first draft of our novel Spin, by far the most difficult, ambitious writing project I’ve ever been part of.
This novel has a story. I mean, it also is a story, but on top of that it has a story. Lemme take you back.
I met her on Quora. She talked about beta-testing sex toys, I had some toys in need of beta testing, so I slid into her DMs with “hey, pardon the intrusion, but would you like…?” She said yes, I gave her some prototypes, she gave me an excellent beta report, she invited me to a tabletop role-playing game she GMed, and the rest is (still unfolding) history.
Anyway, I already have a wife, and a girlfriend, and a crush, so we needed something to call her. She’s a writer and a marvelously inventive creator of worlds, so we cast around for a bit, she called me her Toymaker, and I called her my Talespinner. A spinner of tales. A weaver of dreams.
One of her friends was like “The Toymaker and the Talespinner? That sounds like a YA novel!”
Naturally, we immediately started thinking of a way to write a novel about a Toymaker and a Talespinner. We invented a world, we sat down,a nd we started to write.
30,353 words into what we expected to be an 80,000-90,000-word book, we realized that the idea of casting it as a YA novel just didn’t work. The story that kept trying to emerge was not the story we planned out, but something much bigger, much more subtle, and much, much, much darker.
So we scrapped those 30,353 words and started over from a clean sheet.
We realized quickly that the complexity of the story meant we couldn’t wing it, so we drafted an extensive, detailed 11,000-word outline that also served as an extensive set of background notes on the world and its politics, much of which informs the story even though it’s not explicitly discussed in the story.
It’s now been over two years since we started work on this new, reimagined version of the story, with the working title Spin.
It’s a far-future, post-Collapse magical realism literary novel set in a world where the central United States is now a quasi-Calvinish theocracy called the Dominionate. Human population has crashed to under a billion people. Human fertility has crashed to about a quarter what it is now. As in The Handmaid’s Tale, fertile women are effectively slaves, but unlike The Handmaid’s Tale, the Dominionate has managed to build a stable society that actually works for most of its people. (That’s the true horror, I think, of slave societies; it’s possible to construct stable, prosperous slave societies in which most people—at least the ones who aren’t slaves—are reasonably happy. It’s a little distressing how quickly people can become inured to horror if their own lives are fairly pleasant.)
We’ve been grinding on this novel for more than two years. Narratively, structurally, and in scope and scale, it’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever written. We know the first draft is, well, a first draft, and still needs a lot of work, but I am immensely proud of this book.
At one point, we found ourselves having difficulty nailing down the timing of part of the novel, so I flew out to Missouri so that my Talespinner and I could trace the steps of one of our protagonists. That let us put together a detailed timeline, and get a sense of the kind of terrain our protagonist would journey through.
A few thousand years from now, this will be the site of Half-Circle Cothold, the tiny village home to Aiyah Spinner.
I just…I cannot tell you how I feel that this first draft is done. So instead I’ll leave you with this excerpt. I know this is first-draft material in need of polish, but I’m so delighted to have it done I want to share. Enjoy!
“Ever notice how God tells the powerless to respect the powerful, but never the other way around?”
Nathaniel tensed, so subtly Diego doubted she’d noticed. He raised a finger, a quick subtle signal to Nathaniel to stand down. “Perhaps that’s because those with the most power also bear the most responsibility.”
“Ha! Easy for you to say. Look at you. The Grand Inquisitor, sitting atop a mountain of skulls, with the full might of the Church behind you. People die at your command. You answer to nobody but the Emissary himself. Funny how those in high places seem to spend more time talking about their responsibilities than their power.”
Nathaniel tensed again. Diego folded his hands in his lap, observing her for a time. Finally, he said, “Do you love people?”
“What?”
“Do you love your fellow man? Do you wish for humanity to continue?”
She turned her attention out the window, away from Diego. “I like some people well enough, I suppose. Can’t say I much care for people as a group.”
“Ah, that’s where you and I differ,” Diego said. “You see, I am a fan of all mankind.”
“You have a funny way of showing it. You kill people. You enforce conformity with violence.”
“I protect humanity.”
“You protect the Church’s power. And your own.”
“Power, young lady, is a means to an end, not an end in itself. How much do you know of history?”
“Enough to know it has always been written by people like you.”
“You must know there once was a time when we built machines that flew through the air, that traveled the roads as we are doing now without the need of horses, that generated unimaginable power from the very elements of creation itself.”
“So?”
Diego held up his hand. “Indulge an old man with some measure of influence over your destiny, if you please. Do you know what brought that time to an end?”
“I suppose you’re going to say we turned away from God. We abandoned the Divine Plan.”
“No, I’m going to say I don’t know. Nobody does. The Church theologians have ideas, as theologians often do, but I would encourage skepticism of any theological answer that seems to suit the interests of the person offering it.” Larali’s eyes widened in incredulity as he continued, “What’s of greater interest to me is the cause of the cycle of growth and collapse that came after. Perhaps mankind wasn’t meant to live in large, complex societies. The ancients certainly didn’t think so. They believed our true nature to be tribal, suited to societies no bigger than a hundred and fifty or so.”
“What?” Larali leaned forward, engaged despite herself. “How is that possible? There were billions of them!”
“Indeed. Their scholars believed that in order for a large civilization to thrive, it was first necessary to replace loyalty to the tribe with loyalty to something else, something bigger than the individual, bigger than the family, bigger than the tribe.”
“Let me guess. Something like the Church?”
“Something like the Church.”
“So you’re the enablers of civilization.”
“Yes. What you say with scorn, I say in earnest. We are the enablers of civilization. The ancients built their societies by welding together feuding, warlike tribes through conquest, not just of armies, but of ideas. Disunity into unity through a single vision.”
“How convenient,” Larali snorted. “You cement your own power in the knowledge that it’s better for all mankind. The ends justify the means.” She stared into the darkness outside the carriage, where Lieutenant Blacklock’s horse kept pace. “You surround yourself with armed men to enforce your will, then sleep at night by telling yourself that you’re bringing the benevolent light of civilization to the wretched masses. How many of the ancients told themselves the same thing, do you think?”
“Spoken with passion, for one who doesn’t much care for people,” Diego said.
“Maybe I just don’t think you can slaughter your way to a perfect world.”
In which Franklin makes everyone on all sides of the political divide angry
Okay, so. Some short while ago, a question floated through my Quora feed: Should men’s rights be more talked about, yes or no?
The thing about this question is it does not, and cannot, have a simple yes or no answer, because “rights” are not one thing. But even talking about talking about men’s rights tends to get people’s backs up. I will try to be as evenhanded as possible, in full understanding that I should be able to make everyone very angry indeed.
Let’s start here: The things people talk about when they talk about “rights,” especially in the context of systemic oppression, fall into two camps: rights everybody should have, and rights nobody should have. Conflating these things eradicates nuance and causes people to talk past each other.
Before I go any further, fair warning: Whataboutism, sealioning, and oppression Olympics in the comments will be terminated with extreme prejudice.
The most common objection I hear to any discussion about men’s rights is some variant of “men already control most of the world’s wealth, men are overrepresented in government and the upper tiers of corporations, men wield disproportionate power, the last thing on earth men need is more rights.”
That’s good sound bite activism, but it’s also a fetid, steaming pile of bullshit that’s irrelevant to any thoughtful discussion of men’s rights.
Yes, it is unquestionably true that men have all these advantages. We live in societies that overwhelmingly advantage men, absolutely. Yes, this is undeniable. Conservative men in the back who are getting pissed off because I said that, sit down. You hold tremendous advantages over women. American society gives you breaks that women don’t have. That’s just a fact.
Liberals, wait your turn, I’ll piss you off in a minute.
Yes, men are advantaged. Obviously. And that has fuckall to do with men’s rights, because those advantages are not rights. No reasonable person is saying that men should have more of that, because those are advantages nobody should have merely because they were born with a certain configuration of genitals.
When I worked as a designer, there was a ha-ha-only-serious notajoke common in the industry: “This would be a wonderful job if it weren’t for the clients.”
There’s a similar problem with men’s rights: it would be a wonderful conversation if it weren’t for the men having it.
Men’s rights activists (at least in the US; I don’t see this nearly as much in Europe) include some of the most terrible people you will ever find outside a Khmer Rouge death squad. They use “men’s rights” as a platform to bang on about how much they hate women and whine about how women’s liberation ruined the world because now they can’t find a nice passive sperm receptacle who will fuck them and make them a sandwich. I mean, they’re so awful, malignant narcissists look at MRAs and say “my god, there goes a bunch of toxic self-obsessed losers and no mistake.”
But beneath the self-indulgent whining, they do, and I have to grit my teeth to type this, they do have some legitimate points.
Like, for example, and this is the bit where having alienated a bunch of conservative men, I’ll piss off a bunch of liberals: Abuse of men by women, physical and emotional, is way, way, way, way, way, way more common than most people believe.
Like, we live in a society that trivializes, dismisses, and denies abuse of men by women—so much so that many people actually support abusive women.
Like, we live in a society that mocks male abuse survivors. I’ve experienced this myself.
Like, there are in fact double standards about men who sexually abuse young girls and women who sexually abuse young boys; women who sexually abuse underage victims consistently receive lighter penalties, according to peer-reviewed studies.
Like, men are more likely to die by suicide than women. Like, men are disproportionately victims of violence, though to be honest that’s a bit of an own goal because we’re more likely to be perpetrators of violence as well.
Ideally, conversations about rights are independent of the identity of the person having them. All rights—men’s rights, women’s rights, gay rights, Black rights, trans rights, religious rights—are human rights.
In practice, we cannot always frame the conversation that way, because patterns of institutional oppression mean that the abrogation of human rights always, always affects some groups of people more than others. This is why “all lives matter” and “feminism should be humanism” fail. (Well, one of the reasons, anyway; another is they’re disengenuous claptrap, but even assuming they were put forward in good faith, they’d still fail.)
It’s reasonable to pay more attention to the house that’s burning than the one that is not. It’s reasonable to pay more attention to the groups that are more disenfranchised than the ones that have more structural power.
Having said that, the lens with which we look at rights should always start with, is this something everyone should have? That’s a good first-pass filter to separate rights from privileges.
Should everyone have the right to be free of violence and abuse in their intimate relationships? Yes. Obviously.
Does intimate partner abuse disproportionately affect women? Yes. Obviously,
Does that make it okay to declare intimate partner abuse of men a non-issue? No. Obviously not. (Well, you’d think obviously not, but…)
People abuse and people are abused. Men abuse women. Women abuse men. Women abuse women. Men abuse men. We need to acknowledge that and we need to take it all seriously. “More women suffer so it’s okay if men suffer” is fucking monstrous and anyone who plays oppression Olympics that way does not deserve a fucking seat amongst decent human beings, and that’s a fucking hill I will die on.
At the same time, men, listen up.
Yes, it’s true that men can be drafted and women can’t, and it’s totally reasonable to frame this as an issue of men’s rights…
…but here’s the thing. There are 535 people in Congress and 384 of them are men, so please, for the love of God, stop yapping that this is a problem women need to fix. Jesus Tap-Dancing Christ.
Men passed those laws. Not women. Men hold the balance of power in Congress. Not women. The president is a man, not a woman. Shut your yaps about “I wOn’T sUpPoRt WoMeN’s RiGhTs UnTiL tHe WoMeN tAkE a StAnD aGaInSt ThE dRaFt.” Men, not women, created that problem. Men, not women, have the power to change it.
Same goes for men being more likely to die by violence than women. Yeah, we are…
…at the hands, overwhelmingly, of other men. How do you expect women to fix this, exactly?
A lot of the problems MRAs yap about can be traced directly to toxic masculinity, which is overwhelmingly those beliefs and attitudes held by men that are harmful to men. Don’t shove a stick in your own bicycle wheel and whine about what women did to you, my brother.
Alllllll that being said:
Society is fucked up and unequal and advantages some people over others, and yeah on balance men have a lot of things better than women do, but privilege is intersectional and there are places men are disadvantaged and yeah, if we’re talking about groups that are disadvantaged by structural social institutions we need to talk about places that happens to men too, and if that hurts your liberal fee-fees maybe it’s time to go take some remedial courses in basic human empathy and come back when you’ve grokked the notion that systemic harm is always wrong, even when it hurts people who are otherwise advantaged.
And now that I’ve pissed everyone off, I will say good day.
Last night, whilst casually doomscrolling Elon Musk’s weird hatesite Twitter (if he can deadname his daughter, I’ll deadname his propaganda engine), I randomly came across a long screed from a MAGA True Believer that I screencapped, because it offers such an interesting insight into the alternate reality of MAGA.
Here it is for the benefit of screen readers:
No one in my family who voted for Trump owns any stocks
For all the rich Democrats panicking today- you now know how it must have felt
When Jimmy Carter destroyed 400,000 trucking jobs
When Bill Clinton signed NAFTA, shipping jobs to Mexico and Canada, causing industry to board up in the middle of the country, left to rot
When he deregulated the finance industry and lead us to the 2008 housing crisis
And When Obama told us: “sorry, some jobs just aren’t coming back”
If you see this post, I hope you look in the mirror at some point today and recognize the destruction your own party has played in the lives of working class Americans
This is what liberation day is all about
No one is going to weep for your stock portfolio
Where were you when we lost our American dream?
If this isn’t the perfect example of self-sabotaging, “hurt myself to own the libs” alternate history narcissism, I don’t know what is. It’s absolutely fascinating.
And the thing is, it’s not completely bonkers. It starts with a kernel of truth. Yes, the American dream did bypass a lot of people, especially poor, uneducated workers who were told that factory job would always be there for them after they dropped out of high school, and for generations it was…until it wasn’t any more.
They woke up one day to a bleak landscape of poverty, unemployment, drugs, and complete irrelevance. They have few prospects and no path forward.
They’re angry, reasonably. They’re suffering. They feel neglected and passed over because they are neglected and passed over. They’re unable to put food on the table, they’re spiraling into drug addiction, and whenever they try to say anything about it, they’re treated as the butt of standup comedy jokes, if anyone pays any attention to them at all.
And in their rage, they’re shooting themselves in the gut with a shotgun in the hopes that some of the splash will make life worse for the liberals they blame for all their woes.
So, let’s talk about this post.
This is too long to fit in a Tweet, thanks to the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle: it always takes more work to counter bullshit than it takes to vomit it up in the first place.
So from the top:
Yes, she’s correct that her MAGA family doesn’t own stock. It’s quite likely her MAGA family can’t really explain what the stock market even is or how it works. When you live in, say, rural Kentucky, Wall Street seems like it’s on another planet, utterly unconnected with you or your life. It goes up, it goes down, who cares? Doesn’t affect you. If some rich people (not sure why they say rich Democrats, the people who make money in the stock market tend to be Republicans) lose money, what of it? Doesn’t affect them!
They actually believe this, because they don’t understand how the stock market works, so they see no connection between the price of stocks on Wall Street and the construction of a new factory in Louisville.
But more than that, they are hurt and angry, and their pain and rage has been manipulated to point at the wrong target. (This is easy to do; angry people are always vulnerable to manipulation.)
I’m going to go from the bottom up, because the first bit, the one about Jimmy Carter “destroying trucking jobs,” is especially delicious and ironic, cutting right to the heart of the intellectual dysfunction of MAGA.
So:
When Obama told us: “sorry, some jobs just aren’t coming back”
…he was right.
One of the fundamental conceits of the MAGA movement, which is first and foremost a populist movement of low-information voters, is that the President is somewhere between a king and a dictator, with a bunch of buttons on his desk that control everything from the price of eggs to the number of jobs at the local Piggly Wiggly.
To them when Obama said “those jobs aren’t coming back,” he wasn’t stating something that was already true, he was making it so. He decided those jobs wouldn’t come back, and then did…whatever it is they imagine that presidents do to make it happen.
They genuinely don’t get that their jobs disappeared because their boss outsourced to China, not because Obama made them go away. They genuinely don’t get that this is fundamental to how capitalism works. They genuinely don’t get that coal mining is done by machines today, not by dudes in overalls carving coal from dark tunnels. They genuinely don’t get that fewer people want to buy coal now.
It’s easier to blame the brown person than to learn basic economics. They genuinely don’t get that the president doesn’t decide how many people the mines hire.
Given a choice between the person who said “your coal mining jobs will never come back, but I will pay you to learn something else!” and the person who said “durr, I love coal, durr,” they chose the latter.
And guess what?
The jobs didn’t come back. Obviously.
When he deregulated the finance industry and lead us to the 2008 housing crisis
This is a common narrative on the Right. “Bill Clinton signed a law that stopped banks from redlining Black people to keep them from buying houses. A bunch of Black people with no money bought houses they couldn’t afford and boom.” Simple, easy to grasp, easy to understand if you don’t have an education.
Problem is, that’s not what happened. For one thing, if it was all Bill Clinton’s doing then why did the housing crisis happen everywhere in the world, not just in the United States? (Easy answer: MAGAs tend not to know or care what happens in the world, the USA is the only thing they know about.)
For another, if it was all about those dumbass poors buying houses they couldn’t afford, how come it overwhelmingly affected lenders who weren’t covered by Bill Clinton’s law? And how come the overwhelming majority of foreclosures happened in suburbs, not inner cities?
There’s a whole dive into this here, but the tl;dr is: It wasn’t Clinton. The truth is complicated; “Clinton did it” fits on a bumper sticker. If you’re poorly educated, bumper sticker logic wins every time.
When Bill Clinton signed NAFTA, shipping jobs to Mexico and Canada, causing industry to board up in the middle of the country, left to rot
One of the things we see among MAGA over and over is this idea that the president who signs a bill is the president who made it. They don’t understand how laws or agreements work; they don’t know how long it takes to egotiate complex treaties.
Bill Clinton signed NAFTA. He did not negotiate it. NAFTA was negotiated by…
Mexican President Carlos Salinas (L), President George H.W. Bush (center), Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney (R), October 7, 1992, negotiating NAFTA: The photo MAGA doesn’t want you to see
Typical MAGA, blaming Democrats for what Republicans do, and too incurious, too fundamentally uninterested in understanding the world we live in, to do even the tiniest bit of research. A Google search turns this up in ten seconds, which is nine seconds longer than MAGAs typically want to invest in their knowledge of politics.
And finally, the pièce de résistance:
When Jimmy Carter destroyed 400,000 trucking jobs
One of the articles of faith amongst the right, one of the pillars of the right-wing ideology, is “government bad, m’kay?” As the holy Prophet and Saint Ronald Reagan, peace be unto him, said, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
So in light of that, let’s talk about “Jimmy Carter destroying 400,000 trucking jobs,” because oh, man, this is delicious. MAGA doesn’t know what it wants.
Let’s talk about shipping before 1980. Specifically, let’s talk about how the government regulated shipping:
Trucking companies could only use routes approved by the Interstate Commerce Commission, the government agency overseeing trucking
Truckers could only apply for new routes if they could demonstrate that nobody served those routes, and the ICC approved
Truckers could not add new stops to existing routes without ICC approval
Trucking companies could not take over another company’s route without ICC approval
Sales of one route to another company demanded astronomical prices
Truckers could only charge rates approved by the ICC; requests for rate changes had to be submitted to the government for approval at least 30 days in advance
New trucking companies could not start shipping without government approval; you could not start a shipping business unless the government allowed it
Shippers in an area could object to new companies trying to get started in that area, and could object to new routes being added in their area—which they often did
In other words, trucking was pretty much the exact opposite of what conservatives wanted: No competition, no free enterprise, nobody allowed to start a business without government permission, government approval required for any changes, government setting the price.
The thing about MAGA is it wants what it wants until it wants something else.
There’s too much government regulation in oil drilling! We need to cut the red tape! Drill baby drill!
There’s too much regulation in home mortgages! We need to end government meddling in free markets! Redline, baby, redline!
There’s not enough government regulation in trucking! We need to bring back those old regulations! Protect our truckers’ jobs!
MAGA trying to decide if government regulation is good or bad today
Wait until next Tuesday and they’ll want something else. The only thing all their conflicting, contradictory desires have in common is it’s all the liberals’ fault.
No, that’s not fair. That’s not the only thing these conflicting desires have in common. The other thing they have in common is you have to be utterly ignorant of the basics of how the world works to believe any of this garbage. My God.
This is the fundamental contradiction of populism: populists don’t know what they want, but they sure are passionate about having it.
So there you have it. Insight into the MAGA mind, from a MAGA. Rage, fear, spite, all wrapped up with a neat bow of fundamental ignorance and incuriosity, weaponized against targets they truly do not understand.
Where were we when you lost your American dream?
We were telling you that your anti-intellectualism, your hatred of education, would destroy you in an advanced, technological society.
We were warning you that the world was changing and anyone who didn’t change with it would perish.
We were offering you free education and free training to make your lives and the lives of your children better.
That’s where we were.
The people who destroyed your dream are the ones telling you to blame the libs.
A short time ago, I started thinking about the fact that I will often do things that are Type 2 fun when I’m having sex.
Quick recap for those who aren’t familiar with the types of fun: Type 1 fun is stuff that’s just fun. Things you enjoy. Things you like doing in the moment. Type 2 fun is fun that isn’t enjoyable in the moment, but that you enjoy the memory of, or telling stories about later. (For many marathon runners, for example, actually running in the marathon itself isn’t fun; it’s painful, uncomfortable, exhausting, and miserable. But there’s joy in having run the marathon—joy in being able to reminisce about it later and in the knowledge that you did it.) Type 3 fun is stuff that just isn’t fun at all—not in the moment, not in the remembering of it, and you are not likely to do it again.
My girlfriend Maxine says there’s also a Type 4 fun: something that isn’t fun in the doing or the remembering, but that a third party has fun telling others about. “Hey, you remember that one time when Bob had that firecracker, and there was that big pail of fish heads…?”
Anyway, I saw an online article that suggested you should never do anything sexually that makes you uncomfortable, which frankly I thought was terrible advice. That got me to thinking about my personal sex onion: the layers of things I will and won’t do in sex.
It looks something like this. Everything inside the largest circle is stuff I’ll do; everything outside it, stuff I won’t.
There’s a lot of stuff inside the circle I don’t enjoy. I’m not a masochist; I don’t get aroused from pain, and it never feels good no matter how sexy the context is. But I will allow lovers to do things like needle play or impact play on me if they’re into it.
I spent years developing the Xenomorph Hiphugger Strapon because my wife, who knows my parents took me to see the movie Alien at far too tender an age and it terrified me for decades, suggested the alien facehugger could be made into a strapon sex toy:
My wife wearing a prototype (photo by author)
I am what Eunice calls a “reaction junkie.” It gets me hot seeing my lovers get hot. If there’s something that really really does it for you, something that lights you up and revs your motor, something that turns you on to the point of incandescence, I can probably make it work for me even if it’s not my thing. There’s something amazing and unbelievably sexy about seeing someone you love light up.
Even if it’s uncomfortable in the moment.
In fact, hidden beneath the layers of“ooh, sexy!” is a profound truth of the human condition, one that people who explore kink and people who run marathons share in common: Sometimes, in those moments of discomfort, you learn something about who you really are. Intense experiences bring out hidden parts of us.
As far as intimacy goes, it’s the most intimate thing I can imagine: allowing your lover to push your buttons, or being with a lover who allows you to push theirs, to see you in those moments of genuine authenticity.
I’ve allowed lovers to spank and crop me, to put needles into me, to give me forced orgasms one after the other until I pass out. All those things are inside my personal sex onion. I won’t say I enjoyed them in the moment of doing them, but I feel like all of those experiences have value—they’ve given me insight I might not have any other way.
Life’s cost of entry
The cost of entry of that insight is being willing to do things that challenge you. Which isn’t common, thanks in no small part to the number of people who will tell you, with apparent sincerity and the right intentions, never to do anything that makes you uncomfortable.
Which is advice we apply to no other area of human activity. (Can you imagine someone saying that about running a marathon, signing on for the Marines, learning to sail, learning ballet, or going mountain climbing?) We accept discomfort as the price for many valuable experiences…except sex.
Of course, none of this means you should allow yourself to be pressured into doing things you genuinely don’t want to do. I will almost certainly never run a marathon. Doing something onlyi because it’s uncomfortable…well, that’s the road to madness.
But rejecting something only because it might be uncomfortable? That’s not a way, I think, to live an interesting life. (You may not agree, and that’s okay. Your life, your body, your rules.)
Outcome vs Consent
See that circle down in the bottom right, the one labeled “things I’ve tried at are now a hard no”?
A long long time ago, in a whole different digital age, when LiveJournal was new and social media seemed alight with possibilities beyond political tampering by hostile state-level actors, I saw a conversation online where a guy said he’d never do anything sexual he wasn’t 100% comfortable with, because what if he tried it, he didn’t like it, and then his girlfriend asked him to do it again?
I told him, “then you say no. It’s okay to try something and decide you don’t like it.”
Boom! Mind. Blown.
But it’s true. It’s okay to say no to something you previously said yes to. Again, we understand this intuitively with everything except sex.
I’ve talked about this before, but many people also do a terrible job of separating consent from outcome. If you say yes to something, and decide that oyu hated it, even felt violated by it, your consent was not violated. If you say no to something, and someone does it anyway, then you decide you actually kinda liked it, your consent was still violated.
You cannot label something you agreed to do and then decided you didn’t like a consent violation. You can label something you never said yes to a consent violation, even if after the fact you enjoyed it.
If you freely consent to something, decide you don’t like it, and claim your consent was violated, you’re a shitty person. If you do something to someone who didn’t consent to it, then claim that it was okay because they liked it, you’re a shitty person. I feel like this ought to be obvious, but no matter how many times I say it, it’s not.
If no means no, then yes has to mean yes.
There are things I’ve tried I won’t do again. There are things that I didn’t agree to that weren’t terrible, that I even kinda liked, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was not okay to do something that violated my consent.
It’s okay to agree to things that you later find you didn’t like. Just don’t do them again. Your body, your rules, remember?
Taking apart the onion
The point here is that sex is a lot of things. You can have fun (Type 1 or Type 2!) during sex, yes, but you can also learn about yourself, and your lover, from sex. We know that we do all kinds of things for all kinds of reasons…maybe we simply need to remember sex is no different. We know marathons are uncomfortable, but also that people choose to do them anyway, and running a marathon last year doesn’t obligate you to run another next year.
I sleep in a loft bed, to make more room for my computers and one of my 3D printers, which I keep under the bed.
I needed a new floor lamp, and because I’m lazy, I wanted something I could turn on and off remotely without climbing out of bed. So I found a floor lamp on Amazon that advertised remote control capability.
Imagine my surprise when I opened the box and found no remote, just a QR code to download a smartphone app.
Buckle up, because this story is about to take a turn that would make William Gibson cringe.
My first hint something was wrong came when the app forced me to create an account on the manufacturer’s server before I could pair pair with the lamp.
But hey, I wanted to see how deep the rabbit hole went, so I made an account. The answer is “pretty deep.”
Once you pair over Bluetooth, the next thing you do is download your WiFi password to the lamp. You also must enable location services, so the lamp knows your location. (The software won’t work if you don’t.)
Once the lamp knows your location, you have a choice to make. It asks if you’d rather use the microphone in your phone, or the one built into the lamp.
Yes, you read that right. The lamp connects to your WiFi and your phone, knows where you are, and has a built in microphone.
Once you’ve made that particular Hobson’s choice, the app asks you to upload a selfie, so it can—get this—run facial recognition and AI expression analysis.
Why? So it can suggest a lighting scheme based on your mood.
The Terms of Service allow the manufacturer to store your face and do both facial recognition and AI analysis.
I uploaded a photo of a cat rather than my selfie.
You’re then connected to a community of other lamp users, so you can exchange lighting patterns and such…because, of course, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a person in possession of a floor lamp must be in want of a way to exchange lighting suggestions with complete strangers.
Here’s the light it suggested based on AI analysis of a cat.
The lamp was originally slated to arrive from Amazon on Monday, but when Monday came I got an email telling me that delivery was delayed and it would arrive on Tuesday.
Were I of a paranoid bent, I might believe that the delay allowed a government three-letter agency to intercept the shipment so they could do a supply chain attack, rerouting the lamp’s connection to the host servers (which is a really weird thing to say, if you think about it) through them as well.
George Orwell believed in a future where the government constantly watched the citizens, recording every detail of their lives. George Orwell didn’t know about outsourcing.
A few months back, Elon Musk, the right-wing owner of Twitter and Grok, his pet Generative AI project, posted something I wrote on his Twitter feed, with the caption “This is the quality of humor we want from Grok.”
He even had it pinned to his profile for a short while.
I wrote this over on Quora in March of 2024. On the one hand, it’s interesting to know that Elon Musk reads my stuff. On the other, do you notice anything funny about the screenshot of his Tweet?
Yup, no credit.
The Tweet went viral, and has since been posted all over Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Reddit, and TikTok…all without attribution.
Right now, as I write this, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has a market cap of $157,000,000,000, making it more valuable than companies like AT&T, Lowe’s, and Siemens.
It is not a profitable company; in fact, it’s burning cash at a prodigious rate. Unlike other companies, though, which burned cash early on to achieve economies of scale, OpenAI’s costs scale directly with size, which is not at all normal for tech companies. At its current rate of growth, in four years its datacenters will consume more electricity than some entire nations.
But I’m not here to talk about whether AI is the next Apple or the next Pets dot com. Instead, let’s talk about what generative AI is, and how it represents the greatest wealth transfer of the last fifty years.
AI is not intelligent. Generative AI does not know anything. Many people imagine that it’s a huge database of all the world’s facts, and when you ask ChatGPT something, it looks up the answer in that immense library of knowledge.
No.
Generative AI is actually more like an immense, staggeringly complex autocomplete. It ingests trillions of words, and it learns “when you see these words, the most likely next words are those words.” It doesn’t understand anything; in a very real sense, it doesn’t even “understand” what words are.
As the people over at MarkTechPost discovered, many LLM models struggle to answer basic arithmetic questions.
AIs make shit up. They have no knowledge and understand nothing; when presented with text input, they produce text output that follows the basic pattern of the input plus all the text they’ve seen before. That’s it. They will cheerfully produce output that looks plausible but is absolutely wrong—and the more sophisticated they are, the more likely they are to produce incorrect output.
If you want to understand Generative AI, you must, you absolutely must understand that it is not programmed with knowledge or facts. It takes in staggering quantities of text from all over and then it “learns” that these words are correlated with those words, so when it sees these words, it should spit out something that looks like those words.
It doesn’t produce information, it produces information-shaped spaces.
To produce those information-shaped spaces, it must be trained on absolutely staggering quantities of words. Hundreds of billions at least; trillions, preferably. This is another absolutely key thing to understand: the software itself is simple and pretty much valueless. Only the training gives it value. You can download the software for free.
So where does this training data come from?
You guessed it: the Internet.
OpenAI and the other AI companies sucked in trillions of words from hundreds of millions of sites. If you’ve ever posted anything on the Internet—an Amazon review, a blog, a Reddit post, anything—what you wrote was used to train AI.
AI companies are worth hundreds of billions of dollars. All that worth, every single penny of it, comes from unpaid work by people who provided content to the AI companies without their knowledge or consent and without compensation.
This is probably the single largest wealth transfer in modern history, and it went up, not down.
There are a few dirty secrets lurking within the data centers of AI companies. One is the staggering energy requirements. Training ChatGPT 4 required 7.2 gigawatt-hours of electricity, which is about the same amount that 6,307,200 homes use in an entire year. (I laugh at conservatives who whine “eLeCtRiC cArS aRe TeRrIbLe WhErE wIlL aLl ThE eLeCtRiCiTy CoMe FrOm” while fellating Elon Musk over how awesome AI is. Training ChatGPT 4 required enough power to charge a Tesla 144,000 times. Each single ChatGPT query consumes a measurable amount of power—about 2.9 watt-hours of electricity.
All the large LLMs were trained on copyrighted data, in violation of copyright. Every now and then they spit out recognizable chunks of the copyrighted data they were trained on; pieces of New York Times articles, Web essays, Reddit posts. OpenAI has, last time I checked, something like 47 major and hundreds of smaller copyright lawsuits pending against it, all of which it is fighting. (It might be more by now; there are so many it’s hard to keep up.)
That, I think, is the defining computer science ethical problem of our time: To what extent is it okay to build value and make money from other people’s work without their knowledge or consent?
Elon Musk recognizes the value in what I write. He recognizes that it has both artistic and financial value. He posts my content as an aspirational goal. He doesn’t credit me, even as he praises my work.
That’s a problem.
Those who create things of value are rarely recognized for the value they create, if the things they create can’t immediately be liquidated for cash. That’s not new. What’s new is the scale to which other people’s creativity is commoditized and turned into wealth by those who had nothing whatsoever to do with the work, and are merely profiting from the labor of others without consent.
“Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression – including blogposts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents – it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials. […]
Limiting training data to public domain books and drawings created more than a century ago might yield an interesting experiment, but would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today’s citizens.”
It also claims their use of other people’s work is “fair use,” even while they admit that chatbots sometimes spit out verbatim chunks of recognizable work. This is a highly dubious claim—while fair use doesn’t have a precise legal definition (the doctrine of fair use exists as an affirmative defense in court to charges of copyright infringement), one of the key components of fair use has always been commercialization of other people’s work…and with a market cap of $157,000,000,000, it’s pretty tough to argue that OpenAI is not commercializing other people’s work. It charges $20/month for full access to ChatGPT.
So at the end of the day, what we have is this: a company founded by people who are neither writers nor artists, producing hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth from the uncompensated, copyrighted work of writers and artists whilst cheerfully admitting that could not produce any value if they had to pay for their training data.
And it’s not just copyrighted data.
OpenAI Dall-e cheerfully spit this image out when I typed “Scrooge McDuck stealing money from starving artist.”
Here’s the thing:
Scrooge McDuck is trademarked. Trademark law is not the same as copyright law. Trademarks are more like patents than copyrights; in the US, trademarks are administered by the Patent and Trademark Office, not the copyright office.
In no way, shape, or form is this “fair use.”
Generative AI recognizes trademarked characters. You can ask it for renderings of Godzilla or Mickey Mouse or Spider-Man or Scrooge McDuck and it’ll cheerfully spit them out. The fact that Dall-e recognizes Scrooge and Spider-man and Godzilla demonstrates without a shadow of a doubt it was trained on trademarked properties.
So far, all the lawsuits aimed at AI infringement have been directed at the companies making AI models, but there’s no reason it has to be that way. You “write” a book with AI or you create a cover for your self-published work with AI and it turns out there’s a trademark or copyright violation in it? You can be sued. That hasn’t happened yet, but it will.
(Side note: The books I publish use covers commissioned from actual artists. Morally, ethically, and legally, this is the right thing to do.)
Why do I call OpenAI and its kin a socialist wealth transfer? Because they treat products of value as a community property. Karl Marx argued that socialism is the transition between capitalism and communism, a system where nothing is privately owned and everything belongs to the public, and that’s exactly how OpenAI and its kin see creative works: owned by nobody, belonging to the public, free to use. It’s just that “free to use” means “a vehicle for concentrating wealth.”
From creators according to their ability, to OpenAI according to its greed.
It seems to me that what we need as a society is a long, serious conversation about what it means to create value, and who should share in that value. It also seems to me this is exactly the conversation the United States is fundamentally incapable of having.
Trigger warning: Stalking, graphic death and rape threats, doxxing, threats of swatting, impersonation
I’ve been putting off writing this for a while now, because it involves dredging deep into some incredibly ugly stuff.
Most of you know that I’ve been stalked for years by a stalker (or stalkers) who has created fake social media profiles in my name to harass other people, and sent explicit, violent rape and death threats to me, my family, my friends, and those who follow me on social media.
This person, or these people, have made repeated rape and death threats directed at me, my wife, my father, and people who have expressed support for me or been rumored to be connected somehow with me online. They’ve sent death threats containing photographs of my partners. They’ve doxxed my family and partners.
The harassment has escalated over the past three years, as the rape and death threats have become more frequent, more violent, and more graphic. The stalker has escalated to threats of swatting (phoning fake tips to the police to have SWAT teams sent to the homes of the target). My websites have been DDoSed.
Last December, as I was leaving for Florida to help care for my mom, who was in the final stages of terminal cancer, I had an unexpected and rather uncomfortable conversation with Portland PD about an email I’d supposedly sent them saying I was stockpiling guns and the voices were telling me to murder my wife.
Fortunately, I have been documenting and reporting the stalking, rape and death threats, and harassment as it’s happened. The nature of the conversation changed once they pulled up the previous police reports and realized this was part of an ongoing pattern of harassment.
So how did we get here? And what does this have to do with polyamory?
Propaganda and the Poly Scene
So how did we get here? And what does this have to do with polyamory?
My first inkling something weird was going on came when a number of different people, some of whom I hadn’t spoken to in years, all messaged me to say “Do you know someone named Louisa Leontiades? She says she’s a journalist and she’s asking questions about you.” A few of those people sent me screenshots of messages or emails they’d received:
Louisa is a client of a former partner. After the relationship with that former partner ended, Louisa started messaging pretty much every female-presenting person who’d ever interacted with me online, going back through this very blog for decades, looking for women willing to dish dirt.
Next thing I know, somehow there are more “exes” that are accusing me of having “abused” them than the total number of people I’ve ever dated. Few forms of gaslighting are more head-twisty than someone you’ve never dated, never talked about dating, never wanted to date, never had sex with, never talked about having sex with, and never wanted to have sex with telling all and sundry about how you abused her when you were “together.” For a while, I quite literally thought I was going insane.
These “survivor stories,” as Louisa calls them, tended to the bizarre (like the woman who I’ve never been sexually or romantically connected with and never been in the same room with except in passing at a party claiming I abused her by flirting with someone else in front of her), toward the utterly untrue (a former partner claiming I “got her into” BDSM and that a 25-year-old is “too young to consent” to BDSM, when in fact she was interested in BDSM long before we ever met, and the fact her ex-husband wasn’t interested in BDSM was one of the reasons she divorced him), and the technically kind of true if you squint hard enough (my ex-wife claiming she was an “abuse victim” because I yelled at her on the phone once—which did happen—but declining to mention that it happened after we’d separated, when she broke into my house one night while I was out of town, stole a bunch of stuff like consumer electronics, then sold it to buy a new laptop).
As a side note, there’s a lesson here in how to spot the difference between journalism and a smear campaign. If a journalist hears “he yelled at me once on the phone,” he or she will ask followup questions: “Did this sort of thing happen often? What happened?” Ethical journalists also disclose personal or financial connections with the stories they cover.
My goal is not to go through all the rather strange “survivor stories” here. I may end up doing that at some future point, but that’s not the point of this blog post.
Right now, I’m here about the aftermath of these weird, wordy-but-vague accusations, what it says about the way many people see “social justice” as a tool of bullying and control, and how the poly scene’s support for “social justice” led directly to a barrage of rape and death threats against a whole bunch of other people beyond just me.
Louisa published these “survivor stories” from exes and non-exes with results you might predict: the Internet Hate Machine™ cranked up into full gear, I had to lock down comments on my blog because random strangers started posting death threats, I lost friends.
With all the various contradictory stories (“Franklin dated someone ten years younger than he was, he’s obviously an abuser,” “Franklin refused to date me because I’m younger than he is, he’s obviously ageist”), they became a sort of Rorschach test, with different people seeing different things in them. It’s kind of a Gish gallop of accusations.
One dude on social media wrote that I was clearly a bad person, because it was plain to him that I’d written the stories myself as a sort of humblebragging, since the theme to a lot of them is “I knew when I dated Franklin that he was polyamorous but he’s so awesome I wanted him all to myself and he said no.”
Seriously. Someone over on Quora actually said that.
Dr. Elisabeth Sheff, a sociologist and author who serves as an expert witness in court for abuse cases, published an analysis of the “survivor stories” that concluded the stories don’t actually describe abuse.
The poly community as a whole thought about her analysis, set aside their first knee-jerk emotional response, said “huh, I wonder if there’s a reason she might have reached those conclusions,” went back, and re-evaluated the survivor tales with a more considered eye…
Hahahahaha, I’m kidding, that didn’t happen. Instead, the Internet piled on to Dr. Sheff. She was threatened personally and professionally, and received so much harassment and abuse she was forced to back away from the whole situation. You know, classic straight-up bullying.
And it wasn’t just threats. A lot of folks sent her emails that they probably wouldn’t think of as problematic—messages like “don’t you realize you’re just hurting women who have been abused?” and “I’m so disgusted that an academic would support an abuser” and “I used to be such a fan of yours, but this has really made me rethink that,” because they couldn’t even consider the possibility that she might, you know, be right.
After that, things got even weirder.
“I want a just, fair, and equitable society, and I don’t care how many rape threats it takes to get there.”
Now let’s fast forward a bit, to a nonprofit polyamory convention run by a registered nonprofit in London, called “PolyDay.”
COVID interrupted the convention for a couple of years. During the COVID lockdown, a team not previously involved with PolyDay announced they would be taking over the PolyDay name and launching a new for-profit convention under that name.
The organization that owns the PolyDay convention informed these people firmly that it owns a trademark on the name, and they would not be permitted to use it.
Lockdown ends. The organizers of PolyDay announce the convention was on once more. I don’t know if the person who tried to steal the name started the rumor or merely amplified it, but anyway, someone starts a rumor that I own PolyDay, or run it, or somehow profit from it, depending on which version you believe. (For the record, I have absolutely nothing to do with it—I live in Portland, and it is owned and operated by a nonprofit in London.)
As the rumor spread through the North American polyamory scene, people said “Hey, we can look up the history and organization of PolyDay and figure out if this rumor is true.”
Hahahahaha, I’m kidding, that didn’t happen. Instead, a large number of people determined to make a more just and equitable society and stand up for women raced to their keyboards to send a flood of rape and death threats to the scheduled speakers at PolyDay. So many threats of serious violence poured in, the conference organizers canceled the event.
Apparently, threats of rape and murder are how some people think we create a more peaceful, more enlightened Utopia.
And it just kept going. Once this kind of harassment and bullying gets going, it takes on a life of its own. A former BBC and Guardian journalist named Jonathan Kent published a book on polyamory. Someone started a rumor that I profit from the book somehow, or (depending on which version you believe) that I secretly wrote it under his name, or something.
By now, I’m sure you can predict what happened next:
People looked up Jonathan online and realized he’s actually a person, a reporter with a long documented history, and not an alter ego for me? Hahaha no. Of course not.
People harassed him, called for a boycott of his (I mean “my”) book, threatened and harassed his podcasting co-host…because in this brave new world of empathy, compassion, and social justice, that’s what you do. You harass and intimidate anyone you don’t like, or anyone associated with anyone you don’t like, or anyone rumored to be connected to anyone you don’t like, so that one glorious day, if you harass and threaten enough people, you’ll wake to a world of perfect social justice.
Meanwhile, of course, the rape and death threats aimed at me and those close to me kept rolling in. My co-author Eunice and I released a science fiction novel; a bookstore that planned to host a book event got harassed into dropping the event. Some random stranger I’ve never met made a YouTube video about what a terrible person I am, repeating the “survivor stories,” insisted she wasn’t making the video for money, then used it to beg for Patreon donations.
So it goes.
And is still going. People are still following me around on social media, doxxing and threatening my partners, friends, and folks who follow me.
Just like with the “survivor stories” themselves, the stalking and threats have become a Rorschach test of their own. A random woman on Facebook told me, with what seemed like perfect sincerity, I must be making it all up, because men never get stalked, only women have stalkers.
So here’s the thing: The North American polyamory community has a problem.
I want to be clear this is not a problem everywhere. Poly folks elsewhere largely seem to roll their eyes at all this.
But the poly scene in North America is overrun with folks who are okay with using rape and death threats as a way to express themselves, who don’t do even the barest minimum of fact-checking, who are so caught up in righteous fury that sending women anonymous messages saying “I am going to rape you to death, here’s a photo of your house” seems like a perfectly reasonable way to support social justice for women.
Now, if this is you, if you’re one of the people who sat down at your computer to type out threats to Dr. Sheff or to the people scheduled to speak at a conference because you heard a rumor that it was somehow connected to me and couldn’t be arsed to fact-check, this essay is not for you. You are irredeemable and I don’t care what you think of me. I don’t quite understand the mentality of someone who says “I’m going to stand up for women and justice by sending a bunch of people I’ve never met anonymous emails saying I’m going to murder them if they present at this conference,” and honestly I don’t want to. If this is you, fuck off.
If this isn’t you, and you’re on the sidelines saying things like “I don’t know what the hell is going on but I don’t want to get involved,” well, I get it, I really do. I’ve been there myself. I’ve unquestioningly accepted stories because they fit a narrative I believed in, and discovered later that the things I’d been told didn’t actually happen, at least not the way they were presented to me. (I may write about that at some point as well.)
And I’m not saying the fact that a bunch of bullies and Internet trolls have taken it on themselves to send rape and death threats all over the Internet because, you know, that’s how you support women and fight for social justice automatically proves that what I’m saying is true and what they’re saying is false. Only that mmmmaybe it might be worthwhile to look a little closer, you know? After all, if people are wrong about basic things that can easily be checked, like who runs a nonprofit conference or who wrote a book, perhaps it might possibly be worth considering whether or not they’re trustworthy about things you can’t easily verify.
Moving the Overton window
I’d like to believe this is a fairly new thing—that twenty years ago, communities dedicated to egalitarianism and self-determination wouldn’t so quickly embrace this kind of toxic behavior. That’s probably wrong—the same thing was common in the 1970s feminist circles—but I do believe that events like GamerGate brought a new level of toxicity into acceptability.
If you don’t believe bullying and threats are okay, but you really don’t want to (or don’t care enough to!) get involved in other people’s drama (or you really don’t care enough to get involved), so you stay out of it, or you “don’t take sides”, or you choose a default rubric like “believe all women” because investigation is too much effort, well, that’s kind of how we ended up here, in a world where harass and threaten in the name of social justice, because they feel safe in their communities who appear to support them, or at least don’t oppose them.
Just a thought.
Brandolini’s Law, or the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle, tells us it takes longer to refute bullshit than it does to put it out there, and if there isn’t a corollary that tells us this is especially true when people have been told that it’s morally wrong to question the bullshit, there ought to be.
Few subcommunities have figured out how to deal with vague claims of mistreatment that kinda follow common narratives, and anyway few people really have the inclination to try to sort through it all. It’s easier to just assume that where there’s stuff that kinda looks like smoke, there must be fire, and accept a generalized “so-and-so is a bad person even if I’m not exactly clear on what he or she did.” Kinda the way people who still say the 2020 election was stolen say “there are thousands of affadavits about election fraud, it must be true.”
I mean, hell, I’ve done this myself. When you want to do right by the people around you, and you know enough about social justice to understand the uphill struggle people have faced for years getting anyone to take abuse they’ve faced seriously, you default to believing whatever you’re told by anyone who presents as an abuse survivor—a noble inclination, but one that is also easy to exploit.
Abuse is about power and control. When the poly scene went after Dr. Sheff, everyone else got the message loud and clear: Do as we say, or you’re next. Believe what we tell you to believe, or you’re next. Don’t ask questions. Keep your head down. Hate who we tell you to hate, or you’re next.
So perhaps this might be a good guideline: When you see people facing off against each other, with both sides claiming they’ve been mistreated, it might be helpful to ask yourself, “which of these two sides is sending rape and death threats, punishing anyone who steps out of line, and controlling the narrative through intimidation and threats of violence?” Because it’s hard to champion social justice and also think those things are okay.
I know the people sending the rape and death threats are a small minority, whose noise and zealotry make this seem more common than it is. That’s the thing, though: if you want your community to be a good space, sometimes you need to stand up to the bullies.
It’s okay to ask questions and look for more information. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
Note: Any comments containing abuse apologism, denialism, threats, rationalization, whataboutism, sealioning, or victim-blaming will be deleted.
Last weekend, while I was working with Joreth and Eunice on an upcoming episode of the Skeptical Pervert podcast, the conversation veered off in a direction I’ve been chewing on ever since: male expectations around sex.
Men and women have, by and large, grossly unequal experiences of sex: socially (men who have lots of lovers are “studs,” women with many lovers are “sluts”), physically (women bear a disproportionate amount of physical risk from sex: pregnancy, sexual violence, and so on), and even in their expectation of outcome (men are more likely to report a random encounter as physically satisfying, and often have an easier time reaching orgasm).
A lot of this imbalance is rooted in sexism, and we often talk about how sexism disproportionately harms women, but I think sexist ideas about getting it on hurt men, too. One of the ways that can happen is social pressure around sex: men are supposed to want it, supposed to take advantage of any opportunities to have it, and, I think, supposed to enjoy it even if it’s bad sex. Men are supposed to be opportunistic about sex.
In fact, I’ve often heard men say “there’s no such thing as bad sex.” I have literally never heard a single woman say this, but men? Oh yeah. All the damn time.
There is bad sex. Even for men. (As an old friend of mine was fond of saying, “if you think there’s no such thing as bad sex, you probably are bad sex.”)
The thing that got me to thinking along these lines was an event that happened in my sex life many years ago, back when I still lived in Florida, and had only recently started dating my ex-wife.
I came home from work one night to find all the lights low. Curious, I wandered into the bedroom, to find her in bed in a negligee, snuggled in with a female friend of hers. I was barely through the door before my wife dragged me down into the bed and started pulling off my clothes. Yadda yadda yadda, we had an unexpected threesome, me, my wife, and her friend.
Sounds like a Penthouse Letters, right? (Is Penthouse Letters even still a thing? I legit have no idea.)
But here’s the thing:
Her friend wasn’t someone I would have chosen as a lover. I tend, by and large, to decline offers of casual sex because casual sex doesn’t really work for me. And it was quite clear from the beginning that’s all this was: casual sex, no kissing, nothing beyond the grunt-n-thrust of two more or less emotionally uninvolved bodies.
It wasn’t good sex. I mean, yeah, I had an orgasm, she had an orgasm…but the thing that’s lingered, the overall psychic impression it left in me, was that it just…wasn’t fun.
I didn’t feel, back then, like I had any call to say no. And it wasn’t just because this woman I was dating had clearly gone through a lot of effort to set this up. No, it was more than that:
What kind of man turns down sex with a willing partner? What kind of man says no to a threesome?
Answer: Me, now. I’m way more likely to say no than I was when I was 22, and way more likely to decide that sex with someone I don’t feel connected to just isn’t worth it. But back then? It happened fast, I was in for the ride the instant I walked through the door, nobody at any point asked me if I was on board with this or not, and I genuinely didn’t feel I should—or could—say no.
And here’s another thing:
When I tell this story to other men, invariably, in-fucking-variably, the response I get is “What do you mean it wasn’t good sex? Are you mental? Your girlfriend arranged for you to have a threesome with another woman and you’re complaining about it? What’s wrong with you??!” (That is, when they don’t simply accuse me of making it up out of whole cloth—I get that a lot too, even about things I consider fairly mundane.)
Which leads me to think that for a lot of men, “good sex” is somehow…I don’t know if “performative” is the right word exactly, but good sex is in the context, not in how enjoyable it was or how you felt about it after.
Was she hot? Then it was good sex. Was it kinky? Then it was good sex. Did you get off? Then it was good sex. A threesome? Dude, that’s the brass ring, the sine qua non of awesome sex. You had a threesome with your girlfriend and another woman, arranged by her? You can’t get any better sex than that!
Whether it was satisfying, whether it met the needs of the people involved, whether it gave you what you want…irrelevant. Your girlfriend set you up with another woman! How jaded do you have to be not to think that’s good sex? Do you know how many men would kill for that experience?
The social construction of male sex is that men want sex, men should be grateful to have sex, and certain forms of sex—including the Holy Grail, sex with two women at once—is the pinnacle of the male sexual expression. The experience of that sex isn’t particularly important, or indeed even particularly relevant.
And I think that’s unfortunate. It means there are likely a lot of men out there having sex that…really isn’t that great, but that they’ve been told to believe is great, because what makes sex great is the display, the spectacle of it, not the experience of it.
But I rarely hear people talk about that, and that’s a damn shame.
I’m way more selective about sex now, and decline opportunities more often than I accept them (something else that often causes people to roll their eyes and say “yeah, sure, whatever, you’re clearly lying,” or in the case of one bloke I encountered on Quora who declared with absolute conviction, “no man anywhere would ever turn down sex”).
I wonder, sometimes, what the world might look like if we lived in a society that recognized men aren’t all cast from the same mold, and encouraged everyone to learn what works for them, and then have, you know, that kind of sex.
