It’s an excellent book, I agree.
I’m one of the weirdos for whom it isn’t “work”. Writing is an addiction. Hell, 90% of my motivation for going back to college was “oh goodie, I’ll be able to write about this stuff and shoehorn it into term paper assignments, and at least one person, the professor, will have to read it!!” I’ve seldom procrastinated, although sometimes I’m waiting for some ideas in my head to gel and clarify (I go for long walks and that helps with that).
I’m always available as a beta reader by the way. (that goes for anyone on the SDMB)
I went to a poetry-and-prose reading night in Manhattan last night. Read for 20 minutes to an audience of other writers and it was well-received, including people saying “Don’t stop now, what happens next?”. That did me good, to get that kind of feedback, to reassure me that yes, I can tell a story, that my writing can be entertaining and not offputting.
For the benefit of anyone who missed it the first times(s), the way I write on my blog is not kin to the way I wrote when writing the book I’m trying to get published. The book is a story (a narrative, you know, characters and dialog and setting and stuff) whereas the blog postings have mostly been intellectual theory. It’s like the difference between prose and poetry. Liking Robin Morgan’s poetry is not a good guide to whether or not you’d like her intellectual theory work.
That does lend a certain additional credence to the folks saying “Your blog is not a very good advertisement for your book”. At least as far as attracting the relevant readership. (It might attract the professors who would be inclined to assign a book like mine as “Exhibit A” reading material for Gender and Sexuality 218 for Fall 2023 some day)
My blog posts tend to be like this. My book reads more like this.
Unfortunately (perhaps), my primary addiction is towards the intellectual-theory writing.
Huh. Did you give the professors quizzes afterward to make sure they actually read it?
Writing may be an addiction, but that’s not all there is to being a good writer. That is where the work comes in. The editing, the re writing, using different tools ( like outlines) to maintain a cohesive whole… soliciting frank feedback, objectively evaluating and incorporating it, more editing, more re writing…etc.
Indeed. Jotting something down is the easy part. Writing as a craft is the hard part.
How much time do you spend interacting with queer people under 30, much less queer people in junior high now (who would be the main people going to a 200-level class in 2023)? I think that using a book so out of touch with the way modern people with non-standard gender and sexuality think and talk would be a huge mistake for a professor.
This thread is reminding of the poster a few years back who wanted tips on how to get hired as a graphic designer. She posted a example of a website she’d designed, and it wasn’t just ugly, it was inept. A lot of experienced people gave very specific reasons why her work wasn’t up to professional standards in a very competitive field and what she’d need to work on to improve, and she grew very huffy and explained that she couldn’t do this and didn’t want to do that and didn’t have enough time to work on the other. It was eventually explained to her that if this was the case then she didn’t really want to be hired as a graphic designer, she just wanted to indulge in a fantasy of being paid to draw cartoon animals, and she flounced angrily back to her bedroom to doodle cat men in her exercise book and dream of the big time.
And you can’t seek refuge, as she did, in saying, “Well, my real work is much better”. For anybody reading your blog and reading this, this is your real writing: it’s all going out under your name, it’s all linked up, and it’s not leaving most people with the desire to pay to read more of it. It’s all an audition, AHunter, and if you want to be paid to be a writer, everything that goes out for the world to see has to be your best work. Not just for the professional discipline, although that ought to be huge for you, but because this is the impression you’re creating of yourself and the quality of your work. Anything else is just doodling for amusement*.
*And that was just a throwaway reply to a thread on a small message board, but yeah, I composed it carefully and edited thoroughly it before I hit submit. Which, of course, thanks to Gaudere’s Law means that I’ve missed about six egregious slips.
More than you do, I suspect, although mostly online rather than in in-person discussion groups.
I don’t know where you got the idea that I’m not fluent in the use of terms such as demiboy and sapiosexual and ace aro and so on and so forth. I also don’t know where you got the idea that the young folks disrespect people who use terms other than the ones they choose to use. That hasn’t been my experience at all. They respect people’s right to self-label and there are many overlapping terms where some people use this one and others use that one (such as “genderqueer” versus “nonbinary” or “enby”).
A common complaint in the community is that so many people act as if no one would come up with any of this shit if it weren’t the trendy thing to do. (Guinastasia summarized the attitude eloquently in her formulation “transtrender”), and as a consequence of that I’ve found young people pretty receptive to hearing about the experiences of people who identify outside the binary who can’t realistically be accused of hopping on to a trend bandwagon.
It’s a common notion that young people have no interest in history or anything that happened before their era, and are contemptuous and dismissive of older people. It’s a notion that was in full effect way back when I was young myself, and it wasn’t true then and it isn’t true now. It’s just that young people don’t automatically think that older people are wise or worth talking to. They’re right about that, too.
Yes, that’s what I meant by work. Drafting a novel is euphoric joy. I can’t eat, sleep, or focus on anything else. Revising a novel…
I like to use the word satisfying. Not nearly the same addictive quality. Not many emotional highs… lots of emotional lows.
AHunter3, I had a thought. I don’t know if it’s useful to you, but I was talking to Una and it got me thinking.
There are some of us (a lot of us? probably more than average on this board) who have felt like a freak or an outsider for most of our lives. With time, some of us learn to wear it as a badge of pride. The cost of changing to blend in is too high, and being proud of our uniqueness is better than feeling like shit all the time, so we embrace this thing that makes us uniquely us, and we become aware of the special challenges that come with that, and for some of us, we become advocates for others experiencing those issues. It’s definitely a part of how I learned to cope with my own um, special nature. The thing is, we can become really attached to that self-concept.
I have a close friend with whom I frequently share my darker thoughts to get through tough mental health days, and on occasion, I will say something to him like, ‘‘I am so fucked in the head,’’ and he will respond with, ‘‘Well, everybody is secretly nuts.’’
And it pisses me off every single time. He’s trying to reassure me that I’m not a freak and part of my coping mechanisms involve the self-concept that I am one. So he’s threatening this part of me that I value. Not only that, but he’s minimizing the fact that I live with all these serious mental health disorders and that while everybody can relate to depression, or anxiety, or whatever, not everybody can relate to having their lives destroyed by it, time and time again. Likewise, while ‘‘every family is dysfunctional,’’ most can’t touch the level of dysfunction I’m dealing with.
I realize I sound terrible and arrogant, and potentially minimizing people who struggle with similar issues, but this is honestly how I cope sometimes. It’s not a great part of human nature to need to frame things in these terms. But it’s part of how we learn to cope with the unique challenges we have. And so I think maybe this is a window into understanding where you are coming from.
But also, maybe, a window into understanding where other people are coming from. Because the second you say, ‘‘No, my family is so much worse than yours,’’ or ‘‘my depression is so much more severe,’’ or whatever, you alienate other people. And when you say, ‘‘Well, you’re just a sell-out,’’ you really alienate other people. (I recognize that’s more of an angry rant than anything else.)
So let’s see how we can turn this around, both for the purposes of this thread and possibly your messaging, if applicable. How can we get from, ‘‘My experiences are uniquely difficult in a way you will never understand,’’ to ‘‘I’ve suffered too, and I hear you’’ ?
How do we articulate the unique aspects of our experiences while also making space for other people who can relate, even in some small way?
How can we use common ground to faciliate discussions that lead to exploring issues (in your case) of gender identity and gender expression?
Because here’s the reality. Many men who made the choice to blend in are not sell-outs, they are suffering. They made the choices they did because the pain of doing otherwise felt like too great a cost. That’s a decision every man gets to make for himself. You can build a wall between yourself and them because they made a different decision, or you can say ‘‘Hey, this is the decision I made, and here’s why. And maybe not everybody is going to go in the same direction as I did, but let’s talk about what it means to be a male in this culture, and what we can choose to do in response to society’s pressures and expectations, in order to lessen that suffering.’’ And now, instead of reaching a handful of guys who want to radically throw off the bonds of masculinity, you’re reaching thousands who have been questioning the limitations imposed upon them by their gender, who are comfortable being masculine in a lot of contexts but maybe there are a couple areas where they are suffering and all they need is to hear your story in order to say, ''to hell with it, I am going to marry this woman and raise her children while she works, or ‘‘yes, goddamn it, I want to be tied up and spanked’’ or any number of other ways there are to subvert the dominant paradigm. Now you become this springboard for a movement without forcing people to fit into your box.
Just a thought. I probably will take you up on your offer for a beta read, if you can handle the fact that it’s pretty a heteronormative novel, because so am I. Well, in some ways it’s heteronormative, but I guess part of the fun for me was setting up the gender archetypes and knocking them down. She’s the submissive, but she also leads in the relationship. His overt masculinity is largely ovecompensation for trauma and marginalization. He’s way more emotional than she is. They are complex characters, at least. Maybe you would like it.
Hey, some of my favorite reading material is heteronormative. I’ve been addicted to the Outlander series since it was new, for instance 
Your analysis is good; yes, I realize some people think they’re being reassuring and have no realization that they’re negating me instead. I also would imagine that most (not just “many”, in fact) males who have felt the pressure to blend in are suffering from that. (That doesn’t give them carte blanche to ridicule or dismiss me for not doing as they did, but it’s nevertheless something I think is true)… but ultimately it would be inappropriate and insulting for me to tell them they are suffering if they don’t believe that they are suffering.
Communication gets messy sometimes.
Spice Weasel, you have articulated a lot of the vague thoughts I have had, and in a much more compassionate way, I think.
I have tried to make the point before, AHunter3, that you never seem to be looking for common ground. Not just with men who may, in degrees, be like you, nor with women, who may be uncomfortable or disagree with what you seem to saying about womanhood itself. At the heart of it, you are writing about being excluded,but it also comes across to me as being exclusionary of people who could be - even want to be - allies.
I actually find myself thinking a lot about your blogs while I am offline. Sometimes just reflecting, sometimes being irritated., sometimes mentally composing a reply. I have spoken to some of the more feminine men in my life about it. These are men who are younger than you, but share certain tendencies and feelings. They have chosen to redefine manhood in a way that works for them. They are not sellouts simply because they have chosen to be their own men and reject the aspects of masculinity they find toxic or offensive. .
So little in-person, peer-to-peer interaction, but a lot of online-only with people who self-select for the style of writing that you do where people who find you not interesting will quietly stop paying attention to the conversation. Probably a decent chunk of them people who contact you specifically because they liked what you wrote and not just a random sample. But probably not much casual social hanging out in a group that’s arbitrary and not selected specifically to like your writing or your writing style. I can see why you’d conclude that you’re reaching a lot of younger people because of the way you consistently filter things.
I don’t know where you got the idea that that was my position. I think the fact that you don’t use those terms at all, and that you spend a lot of writing talking about those concepts without using the terms while acting you’re breaking new ground by talking about the concept is what would be off-putting. The fact that your writing is deliberately cumbersome and convoluted and that you tend to talk down to people (“Do you see why?” is incredibly pompous) just serves to amplify the effect.
It seems like your preferred analysis technique to take a common notion, then assume that everyone but you believes it. That’s good when you want to believe that fairly common experiences are utterly unique and therefore interesting for their uniqueness, but not really good for actually understanding other people. I don’t actually believe that notion either, and there’s a huge difference between the ‘not interested in history and dismissive of older people’ that you postulated and ‘not deeply interested in Ahunter3’s personal history, especially when it’s written about in a low-content, high-word-count style, and dismissive of older people who are trying to talk down to them on a topic that they are more familiar with and have more discussion tools for than the old person’ that I think is likely to happen to you.
I don’t think you’re actually likely to become a textbook case of anything, or that you’re going to connect with the people you think you are anywhere near as well as you expect, but I also don’t think anything that another person says is likely to change your conviction that you are, so good luck!
You left out “'taking an extreme, outmoded or caricatured version of beliefs or behaviour, ascribing it his readers, and then proceeding to lecture them about why they’re wrong”, which is infuriating.
Wait, the “Overly Manly Victorian Man” meme isn’t actually the way all men behave? :eek:
Sure it is. At least, that’s what I was taught in “Manly Man” school that every man goes to once they hit puberty.
So I actually live in a world with virtually no inflexible gender expectations and everyone but me is aware of that. I’m projecting my own internalized notion of social beliefs about masculinity and declaring that I’m an atypical case, when actually there are very few if any remaining behavioral codes and rules outside of my own moldy-ass brain.
Fascinating.
Correct. There are no inflexible gender expectations.
I think most people do subscribe to some notion of “women do it this way, men do it that way”.
But I also think most educated people believe these notions are fraught with problems and thus should be questioned more than indulged.
I think that there are gender expectations, but that they are not quite as inflexible as you believe them to be.