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A Girl Corrupted By The Internet Is The Summoned Hero?!: Why isn’t this porn? Where’s the porn? There was a very wonderful porn premise and lots of setup for porn and I was looking forward to the part with fucking and then there was no fucking! Do I have to do everything myself around here?
Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work: A Practical Guide From The Country’s Foremost Relationship Expert: To be honest, I feel like I will enjoy any book four times as much if it has quizzes in it. Having occasional quizzes is the way to an Ozy’s heart. This book not only has quizzes in almost every chapter, it also has exercises! Are you paying attention, other nonfiction authors?
Gottman says that he can predict which couples will divorce with 91% accuracy: they begin conflicts by being harsh and accusatory; use the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling; feel flooded by their partner’s hostility; don’t de-escalate tense conversations through humor, asking to take a break, etc.; and instead of having fond memories of meeting each other, their honeymoon, their wedding, etc., either focus on annoyances or don’t have any memories at all. The rest of the book is devoted to fixing those problems: improving your knowledge of each other, increasing fondness, paying attention to your partner, accepting your partner’s influence, solving solvable problems, coping with unsolvable problems, and finding a sense of meaning.
One thing I found very interesting was that apparently according to Gottman’s research 7/10ths of relationship problems are perpetual problems: zie’s clean and she’s messy; he spends and his husband saves; she wants more sex than her girlfriend; she’s Jewish and her wife is Catholic. Nobody is going to convert, or stop leaving their dishes everywhere, or suddenly have a drop in libido. The difference between unsuccessful couples and successful couples is how they handle these recurring conflicts.
Outsider in the White House/The Speech/The Essential Bernie Sanders And His Vision For America: I’m rolling these all into one review because I read them within a span of a week and they all kind of melded together. Outsider in the White House is Sanders’s memoir about his political career; The Speech is the text of his eight-hour anti-tax-cut filibuster; The Essential Bernie Sanders is quotes from various Bernie speeches establishing his political bona fides. Outsider in the White House is the most entertaining read, and The Essential Bernie Sanders is the best introduction to his viewpoints. The Speech is absurdly repetitive, which makes sense as a filibuster but gets annoying in book form. (Yes, Bernie, we get it, we should invest in infrastructure to create jobs.)
I am more optimistic about Sanders’s electability than a lot of people are. He has a track record of successfully winning white working-class rural voters; when he started his political career, Vermont was a red state, and its current blueness is in part due to Sanders’s influence. And at least in his writing he’s absurdly charismatic: even when I disagree with him about just about every economic issue, I can’t help but like the guy.
Currently, I tentatively support Sanders. Although– as I said– we disagree a lot about economics, he has multiple decades of committed dovishness in foreign policy. (For instance, he refused to vote for a support-our-troops resolution in Congress during the First Gulf War because it said the president was doing a good job, even though this was purely symbolic and provided material for mudslingers decades later.) President Sanders would have to push his economic policy through a recalcitrant probably-Republican Congress, limiting his ability to do damage; however, as the President has nearly unilateral ability to start wars, his reluctance to do so is tremendously important. He also wants the Fed to prioritize unemployment, which I think is a good policy.
One thing I’m still confused about is Sanders’s opposition to free trade. Sometimes he takes the standard protectionist line of “Americans can’t compete with people making twenty-three cents an hour”, which is reasonable, but other times he argues that free trade kills jobs not only in America but in the developing world. In none of the books does he explain his reasoning for this particularly clearly, and naively it seems like the jobs have to go somewhere, so if someone could link me to a better explanation of what the fuck he’s thinking I would appreciate it.
tl;dr: I have never agreed with Sanders once, we fought on like seventy-five diff’rent fronts, but when all is said and all is done, Sanders has beliefs. Clinton has none.
If on a winter’s night a traveler: This is my shit. It follows a reader as they attempt to read Italo Calvino’s new book If on a winter’s night a traveler, only to be foiled by an increasingly implausible series of publishing mishaps, romantic interests, revolutionaries, conspiracies, and critical-theory-oriented literature classes. Metafictional as hell, gorgeous prose, possibly the only functional book written in second-person that I’ve ever read, and it breaks the fourth wall left, right, and center. You get the feeling reading it that Italo Calvino is going “did you see what I just did? Isn’t this awesome?” However, it’s not just Calvino showing off: every one of his tricks ultimately serves the meditation about the nature of fiction that is the novel’s purpose. And it’s funny! Well, it’s the sort of absurdist where I worry that I’m supposed to be Seriously Pondering the Deep Inner Meaning and I’m utterly missing the point by laughing, but eh, I laughed anyway.
Hikikomori: Adolescence Without End: Part of my motivation for reading this book was to investigate whether I would be inappropriately diagnosing myself with a culture-bound condition if I identified as a hikikomori (well, an ex-hikikomori with occasional relapses). No worries: the author– one of Japan’s leading experts on hikikomori– says that it exists cross-culturally, although in different forms. For instance, in the West, parents may be less tolerant of their withdrawing child, and instead of supporting them for years or decades kick them out to be homeless. The author is a Lacanian, which gave me a lot of eyerolls– hikikomori is related to castration anxiety, really— but ultimately his recommendations could have come out of a CBT workbook: begin by making small talk with the hikikomori; don’t lecture or pressure the hikikomori, which could cause them to withdraw further; organize structured social events led by therapists where the hikikomori can socialize with other hikikomori. I appreciated him pointing out that computer use is actually a protective factor for hikikomori: it keeps them from becoming completely disconnected from society, as they otherwise might. I was puzzled by the amount of emphasis placed on hikikomori violence; the author claims half of hikikomori have engaged in some violent action directed at their family (!) which is completely contrary to my experience and stereotypes. I have qualms about his advice (essentially living elsewhere for long periods of time and after many months returning for brief periods); as advice for normal cases of domestic violence it’s quite awful, but I don’t know if hikikomori violence is different.
The Raven Boys. The premise of the book isn’t really my thing– I’ve never been a person who’s been particularly interested in urban fantasy in which various conspiracy theories are really true, particularly when the conspiracy theories were made up by the author– but the characterization is so great that I found myself unutterably charmed. I spent the entire book alternating between wanting to give the characters hugs and to sit them down and give them a paternal talk about Life. Also, all five of the protagonists are dating and no one is allowed to convince me otherwise.
Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’m A Supervillain. Middle schoolers with superpowers wind up, through a series of hijinks, accidentally becoming supervillains. An idiot plot, which is much more forgivable because the protagonists are supposed to be literally thirteen. The superpowers are genuinely clever: the heroine is a mad scientist who goes into a fugue state while building inventions and thus has very little idea what they do; her best friend has the power of super cuteness, which hypnotizes people who look at her. (The best friend’s costume, of course, is teddy bear pajamas.) The plot, weirdly, is basically a lighter and softer version of the first couple chapters of Worm. Parallel evolution is magic, I guess.
Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work. An absolute delight of a book. I appreciate Melissa Gira Grant’s firm emphasis on treating sex work the way you treat any other kind of work: explicitly drawing out the similarities between emotional labor in sex work and in waitressing; pointing out that no one demands that fast-food workers feel empowered by their job before they can organize for better working conditions. Gira Grant theorizes that whore stigma controls a lot of women who aren’t sex workers: for instance, she argues that slut shaming is better understood as whorephobia which happens to be targeting women who aren’t sex workers. (I think this is really interesting and probably correct.) Apparently, during second-wave feminism, socialist feminist housewives and sex workers considered each other to be allies because, frankly, if your livelihood depends on you having sex with a man, you’re a sex worker. It’s fascinating to me how radical feminists and socialist feminists came to basically the same conclusion and had radically different responses: radical feminists were all “therefore sex work and marriage both need to be abolished!”, while socialist feminists were like “therefore both sex workers and housewives are members of the proletariat who need to organize for better conditions in the short term and work for the revolution in the long term!”
Sex At The Margins: Migration, Labor Markets, and the Sex Industry: The thesis of this book is that a lot of the women who migrate in order to sell sex are, actually, making a reasonable decision given their circumstances, and not actually being forced or coerced into it. The rescue industry, on the other hand, is disempowering and infantilizing to the women involved. I appreciated how Laura Agustin went back to the historical roots of women’s charitable work in the nineteenth century, arguing that the rescue industry is the latest outgrowth of middle-class women gaining power through attempting to get working-class women to follow middle-class behavioral norms. I feel like a lot of this book could be replaced by the sentence “FEMALE MIGRANTS HAVE AGENCY.” Which is good: that’s always something people need to remember.
Statistics Done Wrong: The Woefully Complete Guide. I recommend this book as a companion to How To Lie With Statistics. How To Lie With Statistics is more for the lay reader and focuses on the lies they’re most likely to encounter; Statistics Done Wrong aims at the scientific audience, and so spends a lot of time going “THAT’S NOT WHAT A P-VALUE MEANS! YOUR STUDIES ARE UNDERPOWERED! AAAAAAAAAAAAAA!” Reading about statistics makes me, as a person interested in evidence-based everything, want to hide my head under a blanket and not come out until the scientific community has gotten its act together.
Thing of Things 
“Where’s the porn? There was a very wonderful porn premise and lots of setup for porn and I was looking forward to the part with fucking and then there was no fucking!”
I do believe this is related to the author’s predeliction for teasing & denial 😛
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And my reaction here is EXACTLY WHY I DON’T DO TEASE-AND-DENIAL.
I was promised HOT DEMON-ON-OZY-SELF-INSERT ACTION, Eliezer! And now I DON’T HAVE ANY! I HOPE YOU’RE HAPPY
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I didn’t even like the story much, but oh, I did appreciate the cruelty 😀
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Do we have any empirical evidence that politicians that have beliefs generate better policy outcomes? It seems plausible, but I don’t have a lot of reason to believe it.
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Why isn’t this porn? Where’s the porn?
Ozy, I am literally curled up into a ball here. If there is anything in the universe I want to read less than sex scenes as done by Eliezer Yudkowsky in some kind of Japanese light novel style, I cannot think what it is.
Gottman says that he can predict which couples will divorce with 91% accuracy
And then goes on to give a list of characteristics which make me say “How can you even stay in the same building as one another? What the hell made you think getting married was a good idea? Do neither of you have families or did you get drunk in Vegas and that was what happened?”
Honestly – “I predict couples who hate one another’s guts, constantly fight, have no happy memories and were only thrown together by chance will divorce”. Tell me more, Doctor Obvious!
Bernie Sanders, to an outsider, looks unelectable. Even against Donald Trump. Democrat voters (hell, anyone voters) should hold their noses and vote for Hillary instead. Though as a European, I’m laughing at the whole “Sanders is a Communist!” thing – no, he’s a pink Socialist Labour type, maybe Old School Labour that is having a resurgence with Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, but not a Communist.
The sex work books – yeahhhhh. I’m a bit dubious about nice middle-class college types (?) telling me that working class women love being sex workers, it’s such a great opportunity. If sex work is so great, why aren’t straight men doing it? Are they doing it? What are the figures on gigolos? Male dancers/strippers – doing the same work for the same money as women, more, less, what? That’s the kind of study I want to see before we start talking about “Prostitution – Ever Consider A Career In Street-walking?” at school open days.
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Predicting divorce also requires one to predict which couples won’t divorce, and to me it sort of seems like you’ve fallen victim to hindsight bias. Of course it seems obvious once you’ve read it, that doesn’t mean that it was obvious before he thought of it.
Melissa Gira Grant is a former escort. The reason that there aren’t many straight male sex workers is that women don’t hire sex workers; porn (which does need straight men) has a massive oversupply of straight men attempting to become porn stars.
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women don’t hire sex workers; porn (which does need straight men) has a massive oversupply of straight men attempting to become porn stars
And that is exactly the kind of detail that I am talking about, and that I find fascinating. Is it that straight women don’t hire sex workers, do lesbian/queer women do so? Porn is another thing altogether, and I’m not surprised to hear that; it may well seem more glamorous(!) to be a porn star, and the men generally get to be the ones who are in the active, dominant role. That’s a whole other debate about the role of women in porn and are they presented as degraded, etc.
But I have the cynical viewpoint that if men are not interested in the job or the work, then it’s not considered valuable (or as valuable) and it’s not recompensed on the same level. So that makes me wary of “sex work is a legitimate career” – well, maybe, but when we have men clamouring for access to it for the money and sense of control over their circumstances, then I’ll believe it. That’s different to saying that, in certain situations, prostitution may be the best option or lesser of two evils.
Re: predicting divorce, work on that would seem useful in cases where “Jack and Jill and Tom and Sue were similar in class, education, work, how they handled relationship conflict and so forth, but Jack and Jill divorced after three years while Tom and Sue stayed married, how come?” If Jack and Jill were fighting all the time, I submit that’s not “it doesn’t mean it was obvious before he thought of it”, because everyone does expect people who don’t get on and now have the option of divorce to break up. If a couple who seem on the surface to be getting along no worse than anyone else do divorce, that is what is useful to examine and see why they do so.
Of course, if Jack and Jill are presenting a surface facade of rubbing along together but are fighting, harsh, accusatory, contemptuous, no fond memories etc. in private, then yes it’s no surprise they broke up and also no surprise nobody saw it coming. But to really be useful, the book would need to show people who want to know why their relationship failed, even if they weren’t engaging in that kind of behaviour, what happened and how to avoid it.
If you’re fighting with your spouse or partner and both of you are cold and cutting and drag up old slights and hold grudges and can’t think of the good times when you both felt things were really fine, you don’t need “the country’s foremost relationship expert” to tell you this is not a good sign, you just need to listen to your mother about “I said you should never have married him”.
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“Is it that straight women don’t hire sex workers, do lesbian/queer women do so?”
One former escort blogger that I read says that in her decade long career, she was only hired by an individual woman (that is, not a heterosexual couple) twice (https://maggiemcneill.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/seeking-sappho/). Obviously, that’s anecdotal, but it does point in the direction of lesbian women not being significantly more interested in hiring sex workers than straight women, on average.
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Re: Male and Female sex workers.
It’s not just about supply, it’s also about demand.
Straight men are doing it but in smaller numbers and/or lower pay because far fewer people are willing to pay straight men for sex. It’s a tad hard to sell what lots of other people are happy to give away for free.
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Which then butts up against the problem that we’ve had The Sexual Revolution and a lot of straight women are willing to give away sex for free, not to mention that married men/men in relationships also avail of prostitution. There was also the whole Ashley Madison debacle where it became plain that men were signing up in droves for a bit on the side but women weren’t, such that fake accounts in female names were being created by the website owners to encourage interaction and milk the johns for money.
It’s a chicken and egg problem: if straight men are not engaging in sex work and straight women are not inclined to think of hiring or using the services of sex workers because it is perceived as low-status, exploitation, dangerous, etc. then how do you raise the status of sex work when raising the status of an occupation depends on getting men to engage in it?
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“It’s a chicken and egg problem: if straight men are not engaging in sex work and straight women are not inclined to think of hiring or using the services of sex workers because it is perceived as low-status, exploitation, dangerous, etc. then how do you raise the status of sex work when raising the status of an occupation depends on getting men to engage in it?”
Getting men to engage in an occupation doesn’t seem to have raised the status of, to name just a few examples, plumbing, garbage collection, truck driving, construction, maintaining power lines, roofing, and performing manual labor on farms. In fact, pretty much every dangerous and/or labor intensive blue collar job is both low-status and overwhelmingly male. So forgive me if I’m skeptical of the idea that getting men involved in a profession will automatically increase the status of that profession.
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//In fact, pretty much every dangerous and/or labor intensive blue collar job is both low-status and overwhelmingly male.//
At a guess, I would think that the cause and effect is not “Males enter a profession, and it becomes high-status” but “Profession becomes high-status, so males enter it.”
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As an American from a conservative background, I see very little practical difference between Old School Labour and Communism (at least when Communism isn’t being used as cover for Stalinism; obviously Corbyn won’t literally create literal gulags.) Yes, Communism would theoretically outlaw all private businesses, while Old School Labour would simply restrict their growth and prohibitively tax and regulate them. But, Communism has near-zero chance of ever getting enacted in America, and if it was, any judge would throw it out as unconstitutional.
So – true, Sanders isn’t literally a Communist. But, he might as well be.
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They are doing it, in porn, for audiences of other straight men. If you’re asking why they don’t get paid for private sexual encounters by straight women… How do you like the weather on our planet? 🙂
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They’re doing it in porn to enable the straight male viewers to live out fantasy as self-inserting themselves as the actor. They’re necessary for that role – to be the one with the cock penetrating the female’s orifices – but not for any other identification with them. Though if any man wants to correct me on this, and that it wouldn’t be seen as a bit odd for a guy to say “Oh, Joe Stud is my favourite guy, I think he’s great!” (if the assumption by other men that what is meant is not “I wish I was as hung as Joe Stud and his twelve meaty throbbing inches” but rather “I like Joe Stud”), then please do so.
And you still have not provided an answer as to why straight women don’t hire men for sex, or why this is seen as so ludicrous a question as to invite speculation about my intelligence or lack of social nous. The notion of gigolos and toy-boys does exist; if wealthy older women can have male companions that are paid for sexual services, why is this not an option for less well-off women? Paid companionship is not restricted to wealthy straight men; that’s the whole point of being able to hire prostitutes.
So we have then to ask why this is: straight women don’t like sex? straight women want romance? straight women aren’t interested in casual sexual encounters with hot guys that are not about initiating a relationship but merely pleasurable physical contact?
But those things happen without paid sex work by the men, so it’s plainly not a case that straight women don’t want casual anonymous sex.
Is it the idea of paying for it? Is it the notion that women are sexual gatekeepers? I mean, it doesn’t really make sense if it’s simultaneously being argued that women can have as much sex as they like because men have to court them for sex and that women have the ultimate control over if a man gets sex and when and how, and if sex workers are majority female: most sex workers are not Les Grandes Horizontales being courted by kings and rich bourgeois for their favours at extravagant prices. Women as sexual consumers with the power to bid on favours and the power of veto would argue for men being sex workers for hire as much as women.
Why, if sex work is to be rehabilitated as a legitimate work choice, is it not being presented as an equal avenue for men? That’s my main point: you can write as many academic theses or pop science books or sociological tracts as you like, but as long as sex work is majority female (and gay male sex work is probably to be included in ‘sex work under the female model’ even if not precisely the same), then it will be perceived as low-status, as less revenue-generating (managing a legal brother or running prostitution where it’s not legal probably will get you more money; it’s easier to be a madam than a streetwalker) and as involving exploitation. You can talk about whorephobia and not using prostitute as a term anymore, but when you’re trying to raise the status of sex work, you’re not going to get far unless you have a whole lot more men involved as providers of sex work and not as the capital or boss class in it.
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I wasn’t seriously impugning your intelligence, only teasing. I thought the smiley face made that clear, but I apologize if it didn’t.
Okay; as a guy, I can tell you that’s not very accurate. Watching porn is like watching any other form of entertainment. I’m not “identifying” with the male actor any more than I’m “identifying” with Bruce Willis in Die Hard. I want him to be attractive because, all else equal, it’s sexier to watch attractive people having sex than unattractive ones. (Just like Die Hard wouldn’t have been as good a movie if Bruce had been a hundred pounds overweight.) However, the woman’s attractiveness is much more important, which presumably is why women in porn get paid a lot more than men.
Simply put, yes. Although I think an element of social organization that is present in every known human culture deserves to be described as something more than a “notion”. It’s a fact that women are sexual gatekeepers. Man proposes, woman disposes; that’s the general rule. The exceptions involve either very high-status men (who don’t need to do sex work) or very unattractive women (a niche market that is, as you pointed out, filled by a small number of male prostitutes).
The low-status nature of sex work is dictated by the fact that both sexes have vested interests in keeping the sexual marketplace inefficient. Less cynically, sex is seen as a proxy for love (especially in Western cultures), and since one can’t buy the latter, it makes sense to prohibit buying the former.
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In addition to all the straight men in porn that others have mentioned, there are a fair number of straight camboys. Most of their audience consists of gay or bisexual men, but that’s presumably easy for them to ignore since the audience usually only communicates through text.
In addition, it is far from unheard of for straight male porn stars to perform male/male scenes, to the point that the term “gay for pay” was coined to describe it.
There are also a not-insignificant number of straight male gigolos, sugar babies, and “kept men,” generally hired by wealthy older women, though their duties tend to be more involved than the average female prostitute. IE they are expected to provide dancing, wining and dining, and other romantic activities in addition to sex.
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Oh, and there are also Chippendale-style male revues and bachelorette party strippers, of course.
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I’m deliberately excluding gay sex work, since that is still within the province of men as sexual consumers (except this time they’re hiring males instead of females for sexual gratification).
Also trans sex workers, which is a whole other very involved kettle of fish.
The model that is probably the dominant one is that of the man as consumer and the woman as provider, whether that’s as Hooters waitress (as has been pointed out, there is no equivalent “Nutz” where cute young guys in tight pants that are padded in the front exist), stripper or prostitute and all points between.
And the unfortunate reality is that majority female occupations and professions *are* seen as low-status (see: primary school teacher, ‘soft’ sciences – and the idea here that the ‘hard’ sciences are the ‘real’ sciences are the physical and theoretical fields where men predominate is really fucking annoying to me – and the change in how computer science was regarded; in its early days, it was quasi-clerical work that was predominantly female, now programming is a perceived male field to the extent that the stereotypical image is of the male nerd and there are virulent arguments over sexism in computer-related fields) and potential for exploitation.
So if you’re talking about raising the status of sex workers, but you’re not examining why it’s a predominantly female area or the seismic changes in social attitudes that would have to happen before it became an attractive occupation for straight men, then you’re not going to get very far. You may make it “politically correct” for people to say “sex worker” instead of “whore” but people will still assign the same subjective judgement to the term.
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“I’m deliberately excluding gay sex work, since that is still within the province of men as sexual consumers (except this time they’re hiring males instead of females for sexual gratification).”
I fail to see how this is relevant. If you want to talk about the gender balance of a field, it makes no sense to include only the people in that field who cater to customers of the opposite gender.
“And the unfortunate reality is that majority female occupations and professions *are* seen as low-status”
Does that include graphic designers, fashion designers, photographers, and interior designers? I went to an art college, and all of the above majors were majority female when I was there. Actually, so many popular majors at that college are majority female that its Freshman class in 2015 was more than 65% women.
Maybe I’ve missed something, but I haven’t noticed any drop in the status of those art and design fields as women have entered them in massive numbers. They certainly seem higher status than many majority male professions such as plumber, garbageman, sanitation worker, roofer, Alaskan crab fisherman, etc.
“see: primary school teacher, ‘soft’ sciences – and the idea here that the ‘hard’ sciences are the ‘real’ sciences are the physical and theoretical fields where men predominate is really fucking annoying to me”
The “soft” sciences were considered soft long before women entered the field. The most obvious example is Sigmund Freud, the founder of modern psychology, who most definitely did not engage in rigorous science
Regardless, I’m pretty sure that biology is still considered a hard science despite a majority of biology graduates degrees being female. The idea that certain fields of science have “lost status” as women entered them is preposterous.
I also don’t think that primary school teachers were considered particularly high status back when they were mostly men, but maybe I haven’t researched history enough.
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A recent survey found that men and women were equally likely (6%) to have accepted payment for sex at some point in their lives. However, the same poll found that 1% of women and 12% of men have paid for sex.
I can think of a couple possible explanations for this:
1) Women who pay for sex pay a much larger number of different men for sex than men who pay for sex do, on average.
2) Gay and bisexual man are far more likely than straight men to take up prostitution.
3) A surprising amount of straight men are willing to go “gay for pay.”
4) Women are more willing to lie about having paid for sex than they are about having been paid for sex, so the actual percentage of women that have paid for sex is higher.
5) Women are equally willing to lie about having paid for sex as they are about having been paid for sex, and both of the percentages are higher in reality.
6). Men and women tend to use different definitions of “paying for sex,” so that, for example a poolboy who has sex with a female customer might consider that being paid for sex, but the woman might not.
1 seems highly implausible. 2 is relatively plausible, but considering that less than 4 percent of the male population identifies as gay or bisexual, I have a hard time imagining that it could happen in high enough numbers to explain all of the disparity. 4 and 5 are pretty plausible, since we know that women are more likely than men to lie about sex on surveys given the mathematically impossible results obtained by surveys that ask how many sexual partners respondents have had in their lifetimes. I have no idea how to determine the plausibility of 3 and 6.
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don’t worry, ozy. most people who read the raven cycle books come away with the impression that all five main characters are, in fact, dating each other (no matter what the author says). 🙂
(anyway, i’ve had a similar experience with these books. the premise didn’t sound like My Sort Of Thing at all, and normally i don’t think it *would* be– and i have some complaints about aspects of the plot and worldbuilding. but i like the writing– it’s, you know, YA prose: simple and very easy to read and absorb. but it’s also pretty evocative, funny, and/or moving at times– and i’m ENORMOUSLY FOND of all the main characters. one thing i love is that they’re *all* weird, messed-up nerds– nobody is the obligatory “normal everyman” audience self-insert character you tend to get in ensemble cast fantasy adventure stories.)
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In re free trade and jobs in the developing world–looking up the Trans-Pacific Partnership posts on Lawyers, Guns and Money might be helpful (they certainly taught me a lot). A good example is here: free trade with Mexico killed some manufacturing jobs here in the US because wages were lower, and killed corn farming jobs in Mexico because American industrialized and subsidized agriculture produced cheaper corn. So both those effects forced people in both countries into lower-paying jobs r unemployment, just in different industries.
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hmmm… that article ignores parts of the equation.
Sure, part of the problem is subsidized American products. it’s part of why the world trade organization tries to disallow governments from subsidizing products produced for export.
That being said, it ignores the effects of the cheaper products on anyone but the workers. Some chicken farmers are put out of business and millions of families are suddenly slightly richer because chicken costs them less.
It’s easy to fill a room with people who are put out of business by competition from more efficient industries but hard to identify the millions of people who are slightly helped.
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“He also wants the Fed to prioritize unemployment, which I think is a good policy.”
That could be good, or very, very bad, depending on what he means by it.
In certain situations there is a “tradeoff” between inflation and unemployment. I put tradeoff in scare quotes because I don’t think even with unemployment held constant that higher inflation is always bad.
Does Sanders have a sophisticated understanding of when there’s a tradeoff between price stability and inflation? Does he understand that it can just as easily go in the other direction: lower inflation reducing unemployment? Is he a Market Monetarist?
Or, as is much more likely given his ideological background, does he subscribe to a Philips curve model in which higher inflation always lowers unemployment, and why wouldn’t you want inflation anyway because it just takes money away from the evil 1% who hold dollar-denominated assets and redistributes it to the worthy “middle class”?
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“President Sanders would have to push his economic policy through a recalcitrant probably-Republican Congress, limiting his ability to do damage”
Yes, thankfully we have those Republicans there to fight the good fight and impose their economic ideas on a hypothetical Sanders Presidency, for the good of all of us. *Throws up in mouth a little*
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I’ve actually begun wondering why prose fiction doesn’t have more graphic sex scenes. It doesn’t seem like it’s nearly as heavily censored as other genres. I’ve read books published by reputable mainstream publishers that have a fair number of sex scenes (Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Mars Trilogy,” some of Harry Turtledove’s books, “The Ringworld Engineers”).
I don’t see why everyone doesn’t just follow their example and cram their books full of sex scenes. I suppose there could be some readers who don’t like sex scenes, but I have to imagine they’d be in the minority. There are also obviously some storylines that sex scenes can’t fit into organically, but there are also lots of stories where they do. There are lots of works where there is simply no justification to not include sex scenes.
In our society there does seem to be a common view that sex scenes are inherently bad, and that one needs to find a way to justify them in terms of character or story, in other words find a “redeeming quality” for them. It seems to me that the opposite is true, most people like sex scenes, so if an author doesn’t want to include sex scenes there needs to be some sort of justification for it. We need more criticism of authors for failing to include sex scenes.
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Fanfiction basically has a “if there isn’t a reason for the story not to have sex scenes, it has sex scenes” rule (because of the number of people who won’t read anything not rated Explicit/Mature).
I suspect a lot of the reason people don’t like sex scenes in fiction is that a lot of them are really *bad*. A lot of writers seem to have no idea how to write a sex scene which advances plot and characterization, and instead just write genitals banging against each other or purple prose about how much the characters are in Luuuuurve. This is sort of a self-perpetuating problem, of course: as long as authors don’t know what a plot-advancing sex scene looks like, they aren’t going to write one.
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It’s a very rare story where the actual mechanics of the sex, as opposed to the mere fact of it taking place, have any significance to the plot or characters.
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That’s true, but if you follow the “strip out all nonessential elements” to its logical conclusion you get a two sentence story:
“The hero gets into trouble. Then they get out of it.”
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That’s true for most american pop-culture and at the same time explains why lot of it is trash.
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@Ghatanathoah: Maybe you need to read a bit more widely.
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I think there’s a pretty good argument against porn, not on moralistic grounds, but on super-stimulus grounds. A snickers bar can follow a very simple formula to max out all the proxy variables that our brain uses to evaluate food quality, while actually being cheap, unhealthy crap. Art forms can do this to, like soap operas, or Michael Bay movies, or porn. They feel entertaining, but usually they’re just made to push the same buttons in the same way as all the other crap in their genre, without offering anything interesting or worthwhile.
It’s a little too far along the spectrum towards recreational drugs and wireheading.
Which isn’t to say one should feel too bad about occasionally enjoying a candy bar, or Transformers 2, or porn. But most people want to consume this stuff in moderation, and probably feel they consume too much of it already.
Authors who want to signal that they’re “serious”, that whatever they’re offering defiantly is not just another Transformers 2, will choose to deliberately distance themselves from junk-food generas, and porn is the junkiest of them all.
So if story X would be “improved” by adding porn, but only because people like X and people like porn too, then many authors will avoid that, because they don’t want to send the wrong signals about the quality of X. But if the porn can be made an intrinsic feature of X, then you’ve got some “redeeming qualities” and you can sell porn that isn’t totally formulaic and junk-foodish. But it’s still going to be fighting an uphill battle because half the time you’re trying to sell non-maximally-optimized-for-button-pushing material to porn consumers, and the other half your selling something signaling low quality to consumers looking for high quality.
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I’m not just saying that adding porn would improve fiction because porn and fiction are good separately. I generally find that high-quality stories with good plot and characterization improve porn considerably. If I care more about the characters I care more about their getting it on. I started liking porn a lot more after I forced myself to stop fast-forwarding past the setups. No matter how contrived they are, having the characters be actual characters makes it sexier.
The reverse is true as well. When I see characters having sex I care more about their struggles because I see one more thing that they have to live for. For example, I liked the original “A Nightmare On Elm Street” more than the remake mainly because it looked like the characters enjoyed their lives more in the original, and part of that was that they had sex (although the sex was heard, not seen)
Also, I don’t find “junk food” genres like soap operas and Michael Bay movies to be inherently more stimulating that “good” fiction, but avoid them because of superstimulus concerns. I actually enjoy “good” fiction more on every level. I would rather watch “Terminator” than “Transformers 2” not because I am overcoming superstimulus, but because I actually like “Terminator” better.
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Maybe the solution to satisfy both Ghatanathoah and myself would be to have all the sex in one chapter at regular intervals through the book. That way, Ghatanathoah could enjoy what they like (“Oooh, chapter nine! The third sex bit!”) and I could skip it (“Okay, chapter three, they’re going to be doing nothing but banging, so I can skip to chapter four when they’re actually investigating the mad strangler’s latest crime”)
🙂
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I think in this case Eleizer just doesn’t want the label “porn author”.
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In that case he probably should not put things on the internet that have a free preview that looks like porn, but hide the not-porn twist behind a paywall.
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Eh. I find a lot of sex scenes in books and movies completely unsexy*; it’s probably easier working with visual images, but writing is stuck with some variant of the “insert tab A in slot B” problem and, since everyone has their own notion of what turns them on**, there has to be a lowest common denominator of “this is generally regarded as sexy by the majority of people” which doesn’t make for great writing.
It’s not impossible, but the majority of books that are thrillers or crime or what ever other genre aren’t really about great prose, they’re about the plot and the action, and sticking the obligatory “chapter five: Tom and Sally go to bed” part in doesn’t do much.
* That’s probably because I’m asexual/aromantic and could happily do without the moaning and writhing bits that hold up the plot and action, and are often just thrown in to get the rating up to PG-13 but not go too much higher; you need to flash some tits’n’ass to get the teenage boys to come see the movie!
** That got me in trouble when commenting on a post about fanfic***; I mentioned that i find spanking etc. completely uninteresting and was delighted to find active stories in a small fandom I follow/miffed to find most of those stories were by one author who loved her some spanking scenes, not even for sexual purposes, just spanking in general and who structured the stories to be about and lead up to the spanking. I got severely ticked off for kink-shaming and expecting people to write only what I liked, when I’d been trying to point out that Your Kink Is Not My Kink (And That’s Okay)
*** Though I’m a lot more tolerant of sex scenes in fanfic, I suppose because (a) they’re about characters I know and like (b) I know if a story is gen, het, slash or whatever so I know to expect that there will be sex (c) often times the writing is just better than mainstream writing and you get emotional development or showing character through porn (yes, it happens) or it’s cracky fun and you just enjoy it
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I used to think “nothing wrong a few sex scenes in [media work], they’re usually nice to have and can’t possibly feel actively detrimental to the work.”
Then I watched GoldenEye.
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The superpowers are genuinely clever: the heroine is a mad scientist who goes into a fugue state while building inventions and thus has very little idea what they do
So kind of like Agatha at the beginning of Girl Genius? 😛
Metafictional as hell, gorgeous prose, possibly the only functional book written in second-person that I’ve ever read, and it breaks the fourth wall left, right, and center.
Now I’m just wondering what other second-person books you’ve read…
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//There was a very wonderful porn premise and lots of setup for porn and I was looking forward to the part with fucking and then there was no fucking! Do I have to do everything myself around here?//
Is that a hint about the next fic you’ll be putting on Ao3?
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If you are interested in evidence based things, I can add that the American Statistical Association just released their position on p-values. It is odd for the ASA to release a position on a specific statistical tool given that they cater to all sub specialities. Apparently the abuse of this one was just too much.
I’ll see if I can find a link for you.
Ah, here we go: http://amstat.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00031305.2016.1154108
The bibliography is quite good and had a citation to an accessible – if long and drawn out – introduction to Bayesian experimental statistics meant for psychologists. This might be of some interest given your ties to Less Wrong :-).
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