A Twist of Things to Come

... and it's about a sexy women's magazine with with intelligent articles. Check it out: Filament Magazine: Man Candy for Women with Brains.

I think I did pretty well for being a bit rusty.

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In other news, I posted this video to my Facebook feed with the comment, "This is an amazingly honest interview." It is an interview with a very successful pastor who recently came out as gay to his church:



I got an email saying that an old college buddy had responded to it. His comments below the cut.

( A blast from my past. )

I didn't get the chance to respond, because he deleted his comment. Possibly because he didn't want to get into it with me, either because he caught his fallacious argument, or (more likely) because he knows I am intractably opposed to treating LGBTQ people as second class citizens and he would not change my mind. I hope it wasn't because he thought I would get mean or nasty with him, because I would not have.

Still, this video gives me hope for meaningful change that does not require people to reject their religion wholesale in order to treat others as equal. (Personally, I consider taking an action that would hurt another person for no good reason (i.e. denying them a right I take for granted, such as being able to marry someone I love) to be opposed by most religions on their most basic level. I hope that others will come to see the cultural persecution of people who are different in this light. Actually, I know they will, just maybe not in my lifetime.)

Oy, what a day.

Ugh. If I hear one more "9/11 was a government plot!" rant, I'm going to plotz. I've worked for the government for *years* and... there's just no way. Yes, they could be stupid and lazy and not do their due diligence to prevent a terrorist attack, but they could not pull off something like that. People wouldn't go for it. Not even for Hazard pay.

It's a shame that 9/11 has been used to justify so much conflict in the Middle East, and maybe some people want to believe that the government is so all-powerful that 9/11 could not have happened without the government knowing about it.

I'm griping about this here, because I don't want to start something elsewhere. I'm sick and I just can't stomach waging war against deliberate ignorance. But still.


Basically, I'd rant, but Penn and Teller already did it better:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcrF346sS_I

(Embedding was disabled.)

First off, thanks to lotusice for the link to Male Submission Art. (Much of it is work safe, though much of it is not, so mind where you are when you click.) These are images that focus on men, without the hyper-sexualized female tottering around on stilettos that seems to be exactly the same everywhere. (She's nothing but a figment of the porn-machine's imagination, anyway.)

It's an awesome site, but I'm writing right now because I'm grumpy. maymaym, whose site it is, posted today about the This Week in Kink podcast, in which the following jewel of complete stupidity appeared:

“I firmly and strongly believe that it is a woman’s role to be submissive to a man. I believe that submission in men is taught at conception because as soon as women realize that they’re pregnant, they start planning that child’s fucking future and quite often that the mother is definitely the beginning of the emasculation. That said, I think that women in the past couple of hundred years have gotten entirely too high on their own power and eventually need to be slapped in the fucking head and put in their place.”

First, mommie issues, much? Second, what planet has this twathead been living on in which women are so high on their own power that they need to be 'put in their place'? Certainly not the same world in which women who dared to vote had their fingers cut off by Taliban militants, and not the world in which a man ignored a woman beating on the windows and screaming "call the cops" from the back of his friend's car, while the friend borrowed a flashlight, a gas can and a shovel. A world where too many women end up in shallow fucking graves because of what's between their legs.

I am so angry about this shit, this shit that goes on every day in my world, in this world -- the same world my boys are growing up in -- that I'm actually a little afraid. Afraid of what I might do the next time some asshat chases me through a parking lot, pinches my behind on public transportation, or, really, just looks at me the wrong way.

Not to even mention the above statement's total misapprehension of the incredible strength and masculinity of the submissive man-- something the speaker probably will never understand, because in his heart of hearts it scares him [into a complete lack of fecal material].

This rant has been brought to you by a lifetime of witnessing misogynistic crap in silence. In my heart of hearts, I know that men who abuse women do so out of fear -- fear of a world in which they don't have the power they believe is their due.

Also, does anybody have a shovel I can borrow?

I've been writing a lot, my friends. Actual fiction, even. About 5000 words of that this week-- a good run for me, and the week's not over yet.

***

I've also noticed something else I've been doing lately. I'll type a post to a thread on a forum, or a blog or LJ, and then not post it. Because the last thing I ask myself before posting anything is, "Do I really want to deal with what some folks might try to make of this?"

On forums, the answer almost always seems to be, "Oh, hell no."

I did that with a blog post last night, basically going into the biological, instinctive and societal reasons why a question or statement of appreciation can also be perceived as a threat, even when no threat is intended. I thought it was funny and explained the idea clearly enough, but it got a little too personal in places. So I posted it and then switched it to private.

I guess I had visions of it being linked all over and starting a storm of poo with me at its epicenter. That is probably my delusions of grandeur speaking, but just the remote possibility was enough to give me pause.

My goal when it comes to internet slapfights is simple. I refuse to speak for anyone other than myself, and I will not tilt at windmills.

***

We took my husband's grandmother to the Birmingham zoo some years ago, and wheeled her around in a rented wheel chair. She was an awesome lady. As we passed by the elephant habitat, this one elephant pointed its behind at us and displayed its massive excretory prowess. It was one of those things that is so awful you can't help but watch. After about a minute (the elephant was still going) my Beloved's grandmother said, "Do we have to sit here and watch this?"

We realized, quite suddenly, that we did not, in fact, have to watch the elephant poop.

I want to live in a world where clueless sexism is like an elephant pooping-- loud, smelly and oddly fascinating, but not terribly relevant. I choose to live there, now. ;)

***

I think I finally got the idea that will make my first Lethe chapter work, but danged if it won't probably be a better first chapter than the Mobius chapter, just from a scene-setting standpoint. I suppose I'll worry about that later.