I’m afraid this is one of those AHunter3 posts that I can’t be arsed to wade through. I’m just here for the comments. Maybe Richard Parker can step up to the challenge, like he did here.
Well, he’d probably be my 2nd choice, and I didn’t know (or forgot) that it’s already been done!
Remember the thread: “If The Lord of the Rings had been written by someone else?” Hmmmmmm.
My wild guess is that you’re over-thinking it.
And my estimate about copies sold isn’t even really about writing quality–the book could be much better written than I (frankly) suspect that it is, and it still is almost certain to sell almost nothing.
I’m interested in the topic, but sadly I found the original post to be verbose, poorly expressed and lacking examples (e.g. of conversation.)
Honestly, I suggest you get some advice on writing (or an editor.)
Good luck.
Since most young people communicate thru short texts nowadays, this is almost irrelevant.
He had an editor. He choose to dump his book contract rather than listen to the editor. The publisher leapt at the chance to dissolve the contract.
The main difference between a light romantic comedy and a horror movie is how the woman perceives the situation and no man can control that completely. I just had one go from an eager date to complete ice even though I didn’t do anything wrong and nothing changed except her mood for no known reason. She even got mad when I asked her the reason for it later because she didn’t have one.
My ex-wife jumped out of a moving car once while I was driving because she heard something on the radio and thought that I insulted her. The sad thing about people in general is that they can be completely irrational and there is nothing you can do to fix that. Even supposedly normal people can go off the rails with little warning for reasons only known to them.
It is fine to teach respectful behavior in general but flirting has to push boundaries by definition and you can’t child-proof the world. Some people are always going to misinterpret it even if you don’t do anything wrong. The alternative is to teach men to never hit on women and maintain segregation but that is not a good solution either.
:eek:
Is this true?
One other thing that I’ve noticed. Ahunter3, you’ve said one major reason you’re doing this is because you feel determined to help others who were in your position. But, I don’t see any interest in hearing from others. You claim you want to, but then it’s back to “I, me, my, etc”. Or you dismiss their experiences and hand wave them away, saying, “well, that’s not what happened to me.” You need to ask yourself: HOW is this helping others? And not just in a, “so they know they’re not alone,” way.
The fact is that feminine dudes don’t really face the problems that you did growing up quite as much. And I think you should be happy about that, and maybe consider that there’s not as much of a need for you to be an activist for it, at least your particular experience. Because I don’t think at this time that the way you’re going at it is going to help anyone, to put it bluntly.
The whole OP is about finding the one-true-way of flirting and the it is rigidly codified. That is were the OP is wrong. Every couple is formed differently, even when gender roles are clear. Some guys are more aggressive (like my best friend), some like me are more about talking, making laugh and being a good guy. A friend of mine is ugly, yet he would bring his guitar and start singing romantic songs and girls would be swooning all over him.
I won’t even try to know your personal experience in a non-traditional sex/gender way, and not even remotely have a feel for the differences between femme, feminine, sissy, and so on. However your “what’s it to you” attitude won’t help much.
Nobody taught ME how to flirt, in fact I’d say almost nobody was taught how to flirt. You try stuff, see what others do. Of course your being a “femmy boy” (I don’t know what that means) means you have no one, or very few people to use as role models and also the other people wouldn’t know how to respond either.
I’ll add to the pile on the your writing style only obscures your intentions, but “it’s everbody else’s fault” is usually a wrong assessment.
I’m more than a little tempted to pretend that it doesn’t matter to me that y’all think I’m incoherent or full of it. That’s not really true though. This post was more personal than most of what I’ve shared. So often, so many of you have asked for specifics: what the fuck makes me feel different from the hordes of other male people who happen to exhibit various characteristics that are often regarded as feminine, and all that.
It’s quite frustrating to not be understood. On top of that it’s unsettling to encounter so much contempt.
Mostly because I expect more of you, here. Not because I’m not used to it. But at the core of things, I keep stepping back and looking at what I’m trying to say, and I ask myself, “Am I batshit insane, obsessed with a bunch of notions and concepts that don’t really make any sense or have any relevance to anything that matters?” and I keep concluding “No. This stuff makes sense.” And I examine my writings themselves, and instead of finding them confusing verbose garbled monstrosities, they look damn good to me and I’m proud to put my name on them.
Yeah, OK. It’s a seriously haughty claim to make at this point. Enough so for me to be losing sleep over it. (Check the posting time). I’m asserting that I’m onto something, a set of concepts, that do make sense, and that I’m writing about them coherently and clearly, and yet the denizens of the Straight Dope of all places, a formidably brilliant if not-easily-impressed audience, isn’t seeing it that way.
And I’m still thinking, despite that, that it’s neither that the message isn’t all that I think it is nor a failure on my part to render it into words very effectively, but that you folks just don’t get it yet.
I apologize for my arrogance. (But I don’t anticipate that it will lessen)
Your “concepts” may make perfect sense.
But they aren’t delivered in a compelling, entertaining, or educational way. And you aren’t going to make your ideas more compelling, interesting, or educational by telling us that they are.
You have given us a piss-poor guide. Where are your examples? You could describe specific things that you have done in your flirt game, or you could cite examples from the media. You could make up some hypothetical situations. Illustrations are important here.
There is no humor in your post. You don’t engage us with discussion questions (e.g., “How did you learn how to flirt?”) You spend way too much time talking about what you are NOT talking about (a condescending and irritating device of yours because you are presuming that we are confused, and while providing supposed clarity, you obscure your meaning and leave us confused). You end your post with a statement that positions you (yet again) as a special snowflake playing the world’s small violin (“And no one had ever taught me how to flirt”). You don’t have a clincher that ties everything together. You just end with the same message that ends all your blog posts.
If I were looking for flirting tips, I wouldn’t be helped by your OP. And I say this as someone who doesn’t know how to flirt and doesn’t know which set of gender conventions to borrow from if I were to choose to flirt with someone.
And yet you don’t give any of those specifics. You post this, recognizing that it is a flaw mentioned by more than one person, and then blandly go on to ignore it and ramble on about something else.
I think part of the problem is that you don’t understand your audience.
It appears that you are reacting to a stereotype of what you think men (gender-standard men) do and think and believe and feel. We don’t.
It’s like one of your previous posts about how white people are afraid of black people out of guilt for oppressing them. Did you notice that virtually no one in that thread thought you were right?
You keep saying, over and over, that you are different. But you are different from a stereotype that doesn’t resonate with very many people, and you can’t seem to make any positive statements about what you feel, apart from “I’m not like that”. Neither are most people “like that”, so distinguishing yourself from “that” doesn’t tell us much.
Straight men flirt. It is not the case that there is this strict rule that we only behave towards women directly and aggressively. Nor is it the case that straight men are taught to flirt in straight male ways, and that there is some differently gender-queer method of flirting that someone should have taught you. Maybe if you talked about the process by which you learned to flirt, people who aren’t you would recognize and sympathize with that process, and be able to see similarities and differences with their experience.
You can’t deal with talking around the point by just saying “oh well you just don’t get me”.
As I have said before, if you want to post these blog entries, go ahead, since the mods have approved it. If you don’t want feedback, or aren’t going to take the feedback seriously, you don’t have to.
Regards,
Shodan
Hey, join the club of almost every guy out there.
Sounds like a cop out to me.
Your concepts make perfect sense to me. I just don’t feel it’s that interesting or you are breaking any new ground. You seem to feel your experience is super interesting and special and it just isn’t. There is a supreme arrogance in your writing that is offputting.
I don’t think flirting has to be, or even should be, overt from the get go.
It’s possible to throw out fairly innocuous statements that nonetheless give the other person a chance to show whether they’re interested. Then, if you’re getting good feedback, you can gradually ramp up those statements to be more overt.
That’s why the popular meme right now “Guys can’t flirt any more in our politically-correct culture” is absolutely false: if the situation looks like that to a person, they don’t understand what flirting is.
My favorite example of flirting gone wrong.
AHunter3, I have to agree with what some said above - it’s ***extremely ***unlikely that your book would be “talk-circuit, Q&A with audiences” stuff, all the more so if you can’t distill 500 pages of dry content down into 200 pages of interesting stuff. I say this as an author who fantasizes about writing bestsellers but knows I’ll be lucky to sell even a hundred copies.
95-99% of books never hit the big leagues. Ever.