I Got Your Rape Culture Right Here: Part Two – I’m annoyed that the one time I was accused of rape, no one bothered to look into the issue.

You might wish to peruse part one.

Warning: This could be triggery as hell, but I don’t feel comfortable cutting it and making it easy to skip. :/

I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be annoyed that the one time I was accused of rape, no one bothered to look into the issue. I mean, everyone assumed I was telling the truth, and everyone assumed the girl was lying. As the beneficiary of that, I suppose I should be glad, but in retrospect I can’t help but feel annoyed that no one really bothered to ask that many questions. It was a serious issue, and no one treated it seriously. Okay, nice to be believed, but sad that everyone shrugged off the issue.

Allow me to explain.

Once there was a girl who had a massive crush on… you know, I’m not exactly sure. Yes, she wanted to get into a relationship with me, but she also wanted to be with some of the people I was with too. I’m not sure if this was so much a crush on me, so much as a crush on the situation. She just wanted to be part of the show, but she wasn’t balanced and rule two states: Don’t stick your dick in the crazy.. This situation was part of the formulation of that rule. Don’t bang drunk chicks came later, and because of similar situations.

So we’ve got this girl, who I worked out was psycho just as I was getting to a point where I might have really gotten myself into trouble. Now, I never actually slept with this girl, never got beyond some mild kissing. I then worked out she was a bit nuts, and about the time I had worked out that there was something wrong, a lot of other people also reached a similar conclusion. She faked a beating her father gave her, according to the person who said she told them, by smacking herself in the face with a book. A lot of people more or less came to the conclusion that she was too rich for their blood and cashed out of that card game but quick. I had already left that hot mess on the road by the time the “beating thing” came about, having decided that her talking smack about Syd was not on.

So a few weeks later, I get a phone call. I’m going to disguise things by even giving false initials.

G: Hey, how’s W in bed?
Me: No idea, it never got that far.
G: But she blew you right?
Me: Uh, no. It never went beyond first base.
G: Who the fuck says first base in 1996?
Me: I do. I’m all full of anachronistic shit.
G: That’s interesting.
Me: Ain’t it just? I also say ‘groovy’ a lot.
G: No, it’s interesting that you say you never fucked her.
Me: Why?
G: She’s saying that you and her basically fucked on a daily basis though most of May. Then one day, when she wasn’t in the mood, you ah… how do I put this?
Me: Are you talking rape?
G: Yeah, I guess I am. She’s saying you raped her.
Me: Okay, I deny that. It never got near sex with us.
G: Okay.
Me: Okay?
G: Well, she’s been saying that you and her fucked for a while, but she just dropped this rape thing today.
Me: Okay. So, what do you want to do about it?
G: Nothing I guess. I mean, I believe you.
Me: Okay.
G: Just look out, she’s talking all kinds of shit about you.

There was then another conversation with a person who said that she’d said I forced her to perform an oral act upon my person, but they didn’t even mention it to me at the time because they thought it sounded like bullshit. This was just the final nail in the coffin and after that whole accusation thing W was sent off to the island of misfit toys. The last I heard of her was over a year later when she called me, trying to patch things up. That conversation involved the words “suicide attempt” and “institution” and an admittance that she’d made the whole thing up because she was mad at me… or Syd, or G or U, or whoever she thought she was mad at. There was also a lot of crying and throwing herself against the stony rock face that passes for my tender mercy.

I didn’t say much, just admitted that the accusation had bothered me, and that I wasn’t sure I could bring myself to forgive her for making it. The thing is, we wouldn’t have gone back to being friends if I had, and my soul is pretty comfortable with the black marks on it. Makes it look all goth and sexy. To this day, I’m not sorry for not having handed out some half hearted bullshit non-apology like “Well, I guess we both did things wrong” and I’m not sorry for saying “Shush little lamb, I forgive you all the wrongs you tried to do me.”

What I feel is a deep sense of anger. Anger that someone would falsely accuse someone of the one of the darkest crimes our society has. Anger that everyone else just sort of looked at her, and then at me and went “Naaaaah!” without ever trying to really investigate the matter. Anger that things like this only serve to make it that much easier for a genuine case to be dismissed. There might even be some anger at myself, for not going into a righteous fury, demanding the truth be shown. I just let everyone drop it, and allowed the event to become another bump in an already bumpy summer. It became just another ostraka cast in to the voting that led to the eventual shunning of W from the group.

I’m still kind of bugged by how easily the whole thing went from accusation to acquittal though.

The thing that really keeps me up nights though, is that thought that I must have been associating with some real pieces of shit. Most the people in that group that I still associate with, either didn’t hear about this until much later, or only heard about it through third party channels because they’d decided that seeing W again wasn’t part of their life plan and they were already prepared to call her a lying bitch if she claimed the sky was blue and would have waited until sundown to scream that it was clearly orange and red. The people who let the accusation drop, the ones who heard it first hand, were so dismissive of it that subconsciously I think it tripped a switch for me. I watched them after that, and I must say that their attitudes to later events like this one did not bode well for us still being friends.

I don’t like how the thing was handled. I don’t like how some people I called friends treated the accuser. I don’t like how lightly it was all treated. Mind you, I don’t like people lying about me either. In fact nothing gets my blood up so much as someone telling a lie about me. The whole thing leaves me feeling sick and ambivalent about humanity.

Yeah, there’s no joke here, just another reason as to why I claim that life has no real heroes.

First Conctact Bias

I have an idea about why so many people think of vegans and atheist as being obnoxious and always trying to push their lifestyles on other people, despite it not really being the case. Mostly, both groups are just getting on with their lives, albeit a bit smugly, but if I took a hammer to the head of every person who went about smug and self-satisfied, there wouldn’t be a religious house of worship left in the world and most the universities would be empty, not to mention the months I’d have to spend in Hollywood and Wall Street. My arms would get tired and the joy of smashing in heads would quickly turn to dull drudgery is what I’m saying.

I will admit that I find vegans to be a bit exasperating when trying to feed them, but that’s more because I have to keep a constant tally in my head about whether or not a particular food item is allowed. After all, you learn just how oh so many things have some kind of animal product in them when you hang out with a vegetarian for a while, and vegans are even stricter. In fact, I knew one that refused to eat some plant based things because animals are wantonly harmed during their manufacture. Okay, fair enough, if you’ve decided not to eat bacon because of how the pigs are treated then you probably shouldn’t eat processed broccoli burgers or tofurky when you learn that they murder a kitten every time they make one. They do you know, just out of spite. Still, it’s a more or less valid lifestyle choice, and if you have to choose a lifestyle then denying god or eating only veggies is as valid as eating bacon or going to church every week.

However, back to the point I started with. Why do people find them so obnoxious when they’re usually not terribly pushy? I would like to suggest the concept of first contact as an explanation. Think about it, who was the first vegan you met and when did you meet them? Probably between 14 and 19 right? And they were about your age, yes? And like all teenagers who had single-handedly discovered something, they were endlessly obnoxious about trying to justify their new blasphemy by trying to convert everyone around them. I’ve got an idea that most people who have just discovered something are usually pretty unsure about it, and convincing other people to join makes them less unsure. In trying to convince other people to do it, they get to be pretty obnoxious and in the case of Christian Missionaries, down right evil. BTW, if you think I’m being hard on Missionaries, I will remind you I’m related to those fucking people and that I have extensive first hand knowledge about how down right evil those fucking people, and the groups they work with, are. This extends to the fact that I refer to them, consistently as “those fucking people” instead of say… my relatives.

Back to the point I was making though. If the first vegetarian ever you met would openly weep when you would eat a hamburger, or show you pictures of pigs being slaughtered when you’d think about bacon then perhaps you might get it in your head that vegetarians are all assholes and that vegans must be even worse. You don’t ever even have to meet an actual vegan, just by extension that they’re stricter than normal vegetarians, means they must be bigger assholes. Ipso to the Facto amirite? Well, no, since most your actual day-to-day vegetarians over the age of 21 aren’t all that obnoxious. Yeah, you’ll still get one now and then, but I’ve found holding their heads underwater for 10 minutes usually sorts that out.

When a person comes to this sort of lifestyle as an adult, their attitude is entirely different. They’re calm, willing to explain things, rarely try to convert anyone, and above all they’re respectful of those who don’t wish to follow their path. I know, you can always find an example of the one asshole, but that’s the point, it’s usually just one asshole, not the group as a whole. Sadly, by that time, the first contact bias has worked its way into your brain and it doesn’t matter how mature or intelligent they are, they still seem like a dick to you because that’s what you’re expecting of them.

I’ve found the same to be true pretty much across the board. After the age of 21 or so, most your teenage atheists either settle down to calmly not believing in god, or they slide back into belief and become complete assholes again. Sadly religionists very rarely convert like an adult. They’re always just a 14 year old who has discovered that vegetarianism can make them feel special via the act of trying to judge what everyone else is doing. Yeah, I’ve got my own first contact bias on religionist, but they so often give themselves a bad name and stories like this just don’t help. Even so, I know lots of people who subscribe to one religion or another who are perfectly decent people who don’t molest children or anything… and yes, I find it pretty fucking sad that I feel the need to clarify that fact. Of course, if you really sat down and examined my views on humanity on the whole, you would probably find it all pretty depressing.

Also, if I might just add as a final note: if you call yourself a vegetarian, but you still eat bacon, you are not a vegetarian. Seriously, you eat fucking bacon. That is the meatiest of all meats!

Careful with that word Mable, it’s loaded.

Rape Culture, as a phrase, is in a really dangerous place right now. See, it’s a really real thing that some people would like to pretend doesn’t exist, so they use any examples to ridicule and dismiss it. Sadly, some people lately are giving fuel to those who would like to destroy the discussion.

It’s in danger of going the way of Privilege, which can no longer be discussed because fuck the people who fucked that discussion up for the rest of us. No, I’m serious, we can no longer discuss privilege because some people decided to use it as a point of attack instead of as a point of understanding and they did it so well, and with no small amount of racist vitriol, that it has destroyed the topic for polite conversation. This post mentions several problems, all be it from a feminist standpoint, but the problems exist everywhere and those claims can just as easily be about race or religion or having your eggs over easy rather than scrambled.

And they asked, “So what’s your problem with flowers anyway?”

For sometime now, I’ve had a public stance of being against the giving of flowers to pretty girls. My personal view is that A) they are transitory (they’ll be gone in a week) and B) they don’t show any real thought. I’ve also got the basic problem that they’re cliché, but all artists complain like that if something has been done more than twice and flowers have been done more than twice. Now, this doesn’t mean I never buy flowers for a girl. I have done so several times, but the effect is heightened because when I do it, it proves that I did some thinking, went through my bag of tricks and decided that as Hardison said, you can’t hack a classic.

Speaking as an artist, my specialty is packages. Providing not one gift, but five. A little surprise package, with a continuing run of surprises. Sometimes, there’s even a cute little instruction sheet explaining the uses and reasons for each item. The result is a gift meant only for one, and a more impressed girl who knows that real thought went into this. And I still spend less than a dozen roses cost, even with shipping. I’ll give an example, I once sent someone a bad day kit. The bad day kit included (if I’m remembering correctly) a CD of music, a bag of candy, a comically small teddy bear and… oh I’m sure there were some other things. This was years ago now and I can’t remember every damn thing. However, I’m sure the girl (or girls because I’ve used the kit more than once) can chime in down in the comments section and tell you what was in theirs. It’s a memorable gift and always gets a good reaction. Now granted, once the candy is eaten a major part of the gift is gone, but you still end up with more than just a pack of dead flowers that you thrown away with no memorabilia besides an odd smell.

Okay, so maybe you don’t want to produce an entire package, sometime you just want to give on gift. I know people aren’t always ready for a huge collection of surprises. Sometimes you don’t want to deliver a blast of fun, sometimes you want a little something. Better yet, sometimes you want something that can sit on her desk at work. You like things to sit on desks at work because someone might ask about them and she can go “Oh that? Yeah, someone thinks I’m really special and gave me that today.” There is something to be said for making your girl the prettiest little princess in the office pool. HOWEVER! Flowers have been done my friend and there is a world outside that flowery box. I once had the idea to send a bag of flour to a girl, but I never went through with it. That would have been awesome though, flour instead of flowers. It would have totally gotten me laid when I thought of it in 1993, because conceptual jokes like that were huge at the time. The problem is, that’s a pun and we here at Fancy Industries are above puns.

So what do you do? You can have things delivered, but what? Well, that depends on the girl. Or perhaps it depends on the guy. Maybe you’re a girl/gay man who wants to give her/his boyfriend a nice something. It’s not my place to assign gender roles, particularly when I live in a world where no one ever sends me flowers EVER! I once got flowers on my birthday. ONCE! No one ever sends ME presents at work. I’m not disappointed or hurt, I’m just terribly, terribly angry. I’m not prepared to get into a big talk about gender politics so if you want to discuss that, go talk about it somewhere else. Today, we’re talking about guys giving gifts to girls and my problems with flowers. We’ll talk gender relations later. Right now, I’ve got other things on my mind.

So you want to send just one gift, one quick thing, right? Okay, here’s my suggestion to you, pay attention to her likes and dislikes. I’m fully aware that sounds like dipshit advice. That sounds like we should be sitting on the floor with our legs crossed, but I promise you this isn’t kindergarten. It’s just… that’s the sort of thing people forget when buying a quick gift. That’s why flowers are so much of a staple, it’s something girls are supposed to like, which I guess is another problem for me. It’s like, after that you might as well buy a unicorn poster or possibly some kind of ring with a big rock on it. Also, get her a kitchen and steal her shoes because your mentality is already in the 14th century and there are precious few dragons to kill these days. It just shows no thought whatsoever beyond “Dur… thing with boobs like pretty stuff” and I am against that sort of non-thinking in all its forms. Also, damn, I just nearly made flowers part of the rape culture. Good thing I deleted the sentence where I was going to the logical place after the kitchen comment. One must check and see if flowers are the best gift, or would something more personalized (or at least specific beyond kindergarten-level basic gender roles) go down a little better.

Examples help, so here is one. About a year ago, Syd was having a couple of bad days, so I girded my loins and decided to make her lunch. I had to go to the store to get some lunch things for her, and it was late, so I went to Meijer, which if you’re from the wrong part of the world, is a 24 hour market/superstore. One of the things that Meijer has is a toy isle. I walked down it, just looking to see what I could see, and I saw this guy here. At least, I think that’s the one, I’ve never seen it since I pulled my trick. See, I put the toy at the bottom of the bag and piled her food on top so that it wouldn’t be obvious until she got her lunch out and ate it. She really liked Iron Man, and was mega enthusiastic about the whole thing last year, so she really liked the thing. It’s still at her desk at work, presumably protecting her reproduction of a Chac-Mool statue she also has on her desk. So I gave her a happy meal, that’s what it amounts to, and she was happy and the item is still on her desk reminding her of it. So that worked better in that situation.

Now we’re getting to the place I really want to take us. If you’ve skimmed most of this, start reading now. There are subtle hints a girl will give you, if you listen for them, that will give you an idea of what gifts are going to go down well. She will say things like “I’ve always loved Moby Dick, but my copy is really beat to shit. I’d love a hard cover version, but it’s expensive.” Now, it’s not usually appropriate to run to your computer and order a copy right there and then, but you can squirrel that idea away for the next gift giving opportunity. Or perhaps she’ll mention a lifelong love for unicorns, but never (EVER) rainbow colored unicorns. Ah, now you have a go to idea for a gift. You just look for unicorns that don’t have rainbows for manes and tails. That’s harder than it sounds and sometimes you have to guy your nephew a dinosaur to cover up the fact that you also bought a couple of unicorns for her birthday and then forget you bought her those unicorns until like two weeks after her birthday and only find them on your own birthday and decide, fuck it, and give them to her on your birthday because what the hell, right? This happened to a friend of mine.

There are places where flowers are a good idea. Those places are only reachable through researching the recipient’s likes and dislikes, which is always a requirement for me anyway. What I’m saying is that I don’t do flowers for an opening salvo, I go for something else. It might seem like a little thing, but I don’t think so.

Next time, we’ll talk about reversing gender policies and you girls can send me a gift at work once in a while, ‘kay? The patriarchy won’t destroy itself you know.

“Geeky Girls” Are Also “Just Plain Girls”

I’d like to talk to you for a moment about women. Now, I’m going to say some things, horrible things, stereotypical things, and worst of all, true things. I’m going to cast my net wide and give my brush board strokes and I’ll probably batten down my hatches or seize my mizenmast or some other bullshit. The metaphors WILL NOT STOP! Not everything I’m about to say is going to apply to every girl, or every boy. However, as far as rough sketches of convenient thumbnails go, I’m going to be laser precise and probably do… something like something else that’s really spot-on… with a razor or something. I’m also going to say girl instead of woman, but I’ll also say boy instead of man so you can deal with the fact that I’m infantilizing everyone.

Most people say that Geek Girls are just like geeks, only better because they’re also girls. I have a different view. I say they’re girls, but they’re also geeks, which can be more problematic. I know this is one of those word swap things that generally annoys me, but here’s the thing, I always see it as “Oh yeah, and you don’t need to buy her flowers, you can just get her the latest WoW booster deck!” in those lists about dating Geeks Girls, proving how much the writer knows about WoW and women. See, all girls like to get some flowers or the equivalent now and then. Something that shows you love and adore her, something that she can put on her desk to silently announce that she is, in fact the prettiest princess for the day. What I’m saying is that she needs to be able to show everyone else you love her too. Geek or not, you need to show and prove. You bitches ain’t never gonna get out of needing to learn some poetry if you want to score.

See, your basic geek girl is a girl first, right? Before she knew about Trek Wars or Dr. Firefly or Buffy the True Blood Slayer or whatever it is you dweebs watch (I wouldn’t know) she was a normal girl with a love of horses and pink dresses. Even today, they’ve all got a horse poster or vampire book stashed away somewhere. Your geeky girl is a girl first, and possibly a woman, but I wouldn’t know about that. She worries about her weight, and if her hair looks nice and about how will she ever give the patriarchy what for if she worries about her weight and her hair and so on. And then, on top of that basic girlness, there is this level of geekiness. The awkwardness, the social anxiety (made worse because their bullies would be other girls who are almost exclusively mental torturers), the forgetting that not everyone knows the name of every character on the screen in any given Star Wars movie because they had all the toys and kept them catalogued until the age of 17. I never did that, I just remembered their names, fuck cataloguing. This is why I’ll never be one of you, I can pass for human so easily, I might actually be one.

One of my problems with the whole Geeks who are also Girls thing is that it ignores the fact that these girls are in fact girls. In the minds of these people, it makes them boy geeks with tits and a different approach to hygiene, rather than actual girls who have a different approach to hygiene because that’s something girls do. Too many times, the ‘man with tits’ thing rears its head and I really hate that because it neglects the feminine side of the person… which is the bit I like. I’ve always despised when someone just tries to break a person down to what amounts to a male stereotype of something and then does a sprite swap and expects us to get excited because now it’s a girl. You can’t just say “And it’s also a girl” because I’m going to sit there and go “SHE! She is also a girl… or even better yet, a person.”

Now, the important thing to remember is that none of this is theory. Most the friends I had in school were either queer, or they were geeks. Some of them turned out to be queer geeks, which surprised absolutely none of us, but that’s not important right now. For about ten years I dated two completely different kinds of geeky girls, at the same time which meant I was able to compare and contrast their attitudes. While they both showed signs of being typical women, they were also typical geeks of their particular geek caliber. Not all the stereotypes fit, but they both showed enough signs of being just plain girls that they could walk among the general population and on the other hand one of them would occasionally snort when she laughed, so… you know… snorting when they laugh. So yeah, I know the geeky girl and I can be relied upon as an expert witness in a court of law should this extraordinarily specific expertise ever actually be needed by an attorney.

My personal understanding of feminism is that, at its heart, it desires equality but not actually sameness. Sameness would be impossible anyway since our brains don’t work anything like the same. As we must remain separate, we try for equality, but without sacrificing any of the intrinsic things that make us what we are. No amount of knowing that rape culture is a real thing and understanding the mechanics of fear that goes with being a female in this world is going to make me not want to watch a pretty girl as she walks by. I can adjust my behavior, but looking is right on my DNA next to swearing with an increasingly colorful and expansive vocabulary as the day goes on. My point is that we cannot simply say that a geek girl is a geek who also is… you know a girl, but rather a girl with all the positive and negative traits of womanhood and also a geek, with all the good and bad that goes with that as well.

Also, WoW booster deck? Really? And the only other solution to that problem was flowers? I need to hold a fucking class or something. You motherfuckers need to learn the fine art of invention. Jesus Christ in cream sauce, at least mix it up with a balloon or a teddy bear or something. I’ll still think you’re a common as mud, but I’ll at least respect you for being mud with a leaf ground into it or something.

I got your rape culture right here. (Or: A Time I Got Annoyed About a Compliment)

About… ten maybe even fifteen years ago, I went somewhere and spent some time with some people. The details are cloudy, except for this one girl. She was nice, cute, and things progressed to the state of making out. Things got mildly frisky, because things often do, but not to the point where leaving the couch for a more private setting became an issue. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to sleep with her, but I wasn’t against the idea. She was sort of sure though. At least she was sure that she didn’t want to advance to that stage just yet. So, a classic request “Can we slow down a bit” goes out.

Now there are two responses to that, either you slow down to a level of comfort in hopes of warming her up some more, or you disengage and look for other prospects. I was on the fence, as I said, so I slowed down, but didn’t abandon the girl or anything. She was nice, I was fine, things didn’t need progressing. Now some guys might try to turn on an ounce of pressure, hoping to break down walls, but I didn’t do that. I just went with her pace and we cuddled and made out slightly.

So far, so hoopy. Nothing happened, but I was fine with that. Later, Syd tells me that this girl talked to her and was impressed that I was so kind, understanding, and accommodating. I didn’t try to pressure her, or do anything that would be considered ungallant. I have been ungallant in the past, and will be so again, but that time I was evidently the Baby Bear’s Bed of make-out partners. However, that sort of annoyed me.

Let’s think about this for a second. This girl went to my girlfriend and said “Hey! Your boyfriend didn’t even try to rape me! I’m so impressed! He’s a keeper!”

And friends, right there, that’s your rape culture. When a simple act of not trying to pressure someone into sex is thought to be so astounding that it’s worthy of meritous mention. It manifests itself in smaller ways, and bigger ways, but the fact that I backed off at the request to back off and adjusted my levels to suit her needs was evidently something out of Amazing Tales and I should be on the cover getting attacked by some sort of Penis-Squid monster with a fishbowl on its head… it just annoyed me slightly. I wasn’t annoyed at the time, because it’s always useful to have a reputation as the guy you can feel safe with, but it annoys me that it’s that easy to be considered a safe smooch.

Be the change you want.

I’ve sort of had problems with the “It Get Better*” Campaign for a while now. It’s not that there are way more people who get bullied besides just gay kids, it’s not that. I know some people who are bothered because sexuality doesn’t even enter into some bulling. No, my problem tends to be that it’s way too passive for me. I’ve always had a problem with passivity, particularly when change is desired. I don’t like the idea that you should just sit back and wait for it to get better. Would Ghandi have got very far with it gets better as a rallying cry? Would Martin Luther King? Better yet, would the young men and women who rioted in the summer of 1969 at the Stonewall Inn have got very far telling each other it gets better? Allow me to suggest the answer is fuck no.
*Bisexuals need not apply because apparently they’re all lying fucks who are “Going through a phase” according to some dickheads who should be run over by a bus.

I’ve talked about this before in the past, and I still feel the same way. You can accomplish more with a sock full of pennies upside someone’s head than you can just sitting and enduring torment. Also, when you smack a bitch with a sock full of pennies, the torment will end pretty quickly, no one wants to fuck with someone who packs a sock full of pennies. I know, I’m giving advice contrary to all the advice adults have given you your whole life, but when did an “Adult” giving “Advice” sound like someone who was looking out for your best interests rather than those of the status quo? How much interest do you really think they have in you rather than things being nice and relatively quite? And when was change ever performed by people quietly enduring? The answer is… NEVER! Only by making waves, causing trouble and fighting the good fight has change ever come.

So this is what I’m asking of you – Go be the change you want in the world. Yeah, that’s right, MAKE it better, RIGHT NOW! Why should you have to wait for some day in the future? And let’s remember, even if you are queer, if you’re the wrong kind of queer, then other queers will attack you, tell you that you’re lying and assign you an identity without your consent… just like the straight bigots do. Sitting around and waiting for those assholes to remember to stop persecuting someone for their sexual identity won’t work any better than waiting for some skin headed neo-nazi to do it. Sorry, got off on a tangent about hate figures who demand their rights while denying them from others and demeaning them for their lifestyles. Where was I?

AH YES!

So, be the change you want to be. Go out, stop people from beating on your friends. Meet force with force. If needs be, berate and smack people who attack you. Yeah, they’ll act like you’re the one being mean to them, like they’re the victim, but after a little while they will leave you alone. And it’s hard to keep people believing you’re the victim when you keep going in and attacking the person you claim is victimizing you. They’ll learn, or they’ll stop getting sympathy for repeatedly putting their head in a tiger’s mouth. You just need to keep up the message that bullshit will not be tolerated. Be the change, be the challenge, be Captain America! Ram Captain America down their throats. And if anyone complains that the phrasing sounds aggressively gay, you just look them in the eye and say “Captain America is my penis.” girls may want to keep a small rubber dildo to wave around at moments like this. A red, white and blue penis shaped one with a star on the tip will increase the imagery.

Just saying… rapture edition

This whole rapture business has made me want to start screaming something at Christians. The phrase, “Take a good, long, hard look at your religion” has been springing to my lips. Because seriously, that shit is kind of fucked up from an outsiders’ point of view.

I mean, only 3% of Christians are expected to be taken up in the rapture. That says to me that no matter how good you try to be, how strong your faith, you will never, ever be good enough. You signed up with the most judgmental prick in the universe, an over-powered busy body who wipes out all life because man is somehow “wicked” and he gets pissed about that. I mean, have you ever read the list of things at are an abomination unto Nuggan? Stupid shit, shit that don’t matter to nobody but this so-called god and the silly rules lawyers who quote him. What you eat, if you shave, mixing fabrics, who you fuck… shit that ain’t no body’s business, not even the gods. These aren’t rules for a good life, these are bullshit micromanaging laws to make sure you are kept in line by an office sociopath. I mean what kind of holy writ is this? It is a sin to be cool.

Second! Okay, gonna cheat but, this comic perfectly defines my second problem really. So, really? Pain, penury and persecution are the road to faith? You guys have heard about enjoying yourself, right? I mean, a mature god doesn’t tear your whole life apart just so you can prove to someone else how much you love them. If this were a relationship, people would tell you that you’re dating a psycho and you need to leave them… like now. Don’t pack, don’t tell him, run! Before he kills the firstborns… again!

Seriously, you want a god in your life, go pagan. They have cookies, some of them literally have devotional cookies*. Just for a moment, let’s compare the two. Pain, misery, arrogance of leaders, and the constant torment that the one time you frenched Suzie Jenkins on a dare in fourth grade (before you learned what frenching actually is) will damn you forever on the one side. On the other side, cookies, wine, sex, and a god who generally only fucks your shit up if you piss them off personally by burning one of their temples or killing their kid or something. Also, pagans rarely, if ever, go around claiming that the world is going to end on a set day just to get attention.

I’m just saying it might be time to take a good, hard look at your religion and ask yourself if maybe you should compare with what others are doing.

Just saying.

*Technically, they’re little cakes, but they’re really good cakes.

From my “Dear GreyWeirdo” column

From my Dear GreyWeirdo column

HEY! I got an Agony Aunt letter today! Many of you may not know this, but I’ve been a professional problem solver for years. I also answer people’s letters and give them advice as well. Let’s open it up and se what we’ve got.

Question:
Dear Weirdo,
This year has sucked some major balls. Nothing has gone right, there are maybe six people left alive and five of them are so heavily in debt to the sixth they may never see solvency again. Half the people I know spent the entire summer sick, the other half are just getting sick now. I just feel like I can’t go on anymore. I don’t even think I can muster up the energy to care about the holidays. I just can’t feel good anymore. Is there anything I can do, or should I just pack the whole thing in? Should I even bother with my VEWPRF cards? Is it the end of VEWPRF? Is it time to give up?

Desperate in Detroit

Well crap, sounds like someone else is trying to give up.

Dear Desperate,
No. No, this will not do. This is the shit, up with which, I will not put! This is not the end of VEWPRF! This is not even the beginning of the end, but it IS the end of the beginning. Only it isn’t, ‘cause I’m just getting started. Hang on, something wrong there. You just hold on Desperate, I’ll be back in a sec…

The ex-smokers and non-smokers among you will understand if I fake-light a candy cigarette before I begin. There are some things which are traditional at a moments like these.

Gather round my minions, it’s time we had a little chat about all the people who are feeling like poor old Desperate here. There are a lot of people who are worried, they’re scared, some of them are down right despondent. These are, quite frankly, the people who the holidays were designed for. Not for you, people who are well adjusted. It’s not a frame for your grandmother to hang her latest performance art piece about passive aggression on. It’s sure as fuck isn’t for those controlling assholes who think they should get to dictate what does and doesn’t make the holidays what they are. It’s for people like Desperate here.

Everyone depends on the VEWPRF season to pick them up after a really shitty year. It’s a release valve, a stress-relieving tool. There are people out there who really need a pick-me-up.

We can’t quit now!

Would Chuck Norris cut and run away, ceding from the country just because he didn’t like the way… okay bad example. I know! Did John Wayne just hide out in Hollywood and keep making cowboy movies during World War Two? Quick check of wikipeidia says… yes, yes he did.

fuck

JACK BENNY!

What did limp wristed, anti-racists, philanthropic, liberal old Jack Benny do when his nation was threatened? Joined the Navy and served with pride. When the co-star to his anti-Nazi movie died suddenly, did he cut everyone off and run away? FUCK NO! He went back to work, did some time with the USO and then flew to Germany on his own dime to personally punch Hitler in the crotch! What I am asking for, from you, is the spirit of Jack Benny. …you’ll understand you won’t be paid for this of course, times are tough and all.

There will now follow a series of adapted phrases I’ve found from those chaotic movie scenes, the sort often found in disaster of crisis movies.

In these dark times, when the cold is sweeping in and the barbarians are at the gate, we have to hold on and work together to pull ourselves out. The banks may have foreclosed the mortgage, the insurance company may have pulled the plug on grandma, the corporations may have slashed your salary to the bone and then beyond, BUT THEY WON’T TAKE THIS HOLIDAY! We’ve got to stand up and bring the true spirit of the season* back to the people! We will light those fucking strings of light. We will light them on the beaches, we shall light them on the trees, we shall light them in the fields and in the streets, we shall light them in the hills; we shall never surrender. We’ve never lost a holiday yet, and we’re not about to start now! I’ve got… 300 people on this… ship that I am… responsible for… and I… won’t let them down. I intend to stand up, I intend to look that dark and cold winter in the eye and I intend to ring these fucking bells until he runs scared and the sun returns! I have, if you will allow me to say, had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane! (Kindly imagine Brian Blessed speaking if you can at this moment) WE’RE GOING TO HAND THEM THE HAPPIEST VAGUE EARLY WINTER POSSIBLY RELIGIOUS FESTIVAL THEY’VE EVER SEEN! YEEEEEAAAAAARRHH!
*Mainly drinking and fucking, with some gifts, songs, lights and bells for good measure.

So let’s MOVE IT PEOPLE!

YOU! Get me a copy of every holiday story Amazon has, I want it cross referenced and collated by how damn twee it is. Throw out any Gift of the Magi stories though, I hate those.

YOU! Get me a big fat evergreen tree. I want this place reeking of pine.

YOU! Get me a thousand twinkling lights and glass baubles. I want this place dripping with decorations. Spare neither expense nor good taste.

YOU! Cook a turkey or something. It’s feast time, that’s where the word ‘festival’ comes from. (just go with it)

YOU! I want paper chains and construction paper snowmen. Get the kids to make some of those fold up snowflakes too while you’re at it.

YOU! Find Mannheim Steamroller and tell them that while we understand they’ve done other things, we need them to do the thing they do right.

YOU! Get me a copy of every special that plays on either broadcast or cable TV during December. I want movies, cartoons, and crappy specials you’d never watch under other conditions. I don’t care if it’s the Star Wars Holiday special, just run it.

YOU! Get some carolers! I want people with NO ability to sing whatsoever.

YOU! Bake some cookies! I like the frosted ones with the little silver balls.

YOU! Dress up in a red suit and tell gullible children you’re Santa. If they balk, tell them you’re one of his helpers.

YOU! Find out what cultures we’re ignoring so we can get their celebrations on board as well! This is not A holiday, this is ALL holidays!

YOU! Light a menorah, burn some incense on it, milk a goat, give the milk to a new born infant, kill the goat in the name of a few gods, then eat the goat! There will be other observances later, but just get started on those for now. I’ll get you a team to help out with the rest.

YOU! Put the kettle on. We need some hot drinks inside us!

And I’ll form the head!

Well?

Come on people, we’ve got a holiday to save. We’re not going to leave anyone out in the cold this time. Get the snowmen built, get the food going, get me Ted Striker Charles Dickens, get the songs started and GET THOSE LIGHTS BACK ON!

I hope this answers your questions Desperate. If not, just try to hold on, we’re working this bitch as hard as we can. Start with this, listen to an episode every day, that should help. To add extra help, I’ll be posting an Advent Calendar from now until the end. You’ll have a new surprise everyday, something different under every door. I’ll be doing this for you. Like Harry Tuttle said, “We’re all in this together.”

…

Looks like I picked the wrong month to stop snorting peppermint.

Let Pulp be Pulp

One of the problems I’ve had with a lot of media since the 90s is the table pounding insistence that pulp media is Important and needs to be taken seriously. There has been some strange insistence that all kinds of fantasy tales, hardboiled detective stories, comic books, and really low down pulpy sci-fi needs to be given the same weight as Dickens’ great works or Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu.

When I mention Sci-Fi there I am not talking about Asimov or some other respectable stuff that might appear in Analog or anything like that. I’m talking about stories about aliens putting women in gelatinous cubes to take them to Mars only to be stopped by square jawed men with laser guns in magazines called Fantastic Adventures and Amazing Stories. Some of the stories that first appeared in those kinds of magazines are now considered respectable, but sci-fi was really just the first group to rise from merely being pulp garbage to become something respectable.

I’m not saying that these stories are valueless, far from it, but I think we rob them of their greatness when we start to try and attach too much importance to them. We need to remind ourselves that these are disposable entertainment, meant only to excite the reader enough that they’ll buy the next issue. That they are representative of their times in both the thoughts and dreams of their society is something that I think hurts them in the long run, because saying that makes them cultural documents of importance rather than tales of guys with guns. They weren’t ever meant to be school room fodder, and fortunately they still often aren’t because of how the tales are written. You can’t really have 16 year olds reading The Maltese Falcon or Farewell My Lovely, their mothers just wouldn’t approve! When they get to college though, they do teach those and make attempts to drum the importance of these tales into kid’s heads.

That seems to me to be a great disservice, because I would really hate for someone to skip out of The Maltese Falcon thinking it’s going to be some ponderously important book banging you over the head with moral righteousness of an age gone by. That would be a damn shame since Sam Spade has got to be about the least morally righteous character in popular literature that still manages to be the guy on the right side by the end of the story. I’m really quite worried about the idea of any of these pulp stories being lumped in with the ponderous and important stories of the past because I don’t think they can (or even should) hold up under the weight.

I’ll give you an example from the movies. I’d heard about Double Indemnity being the granddaddy of Grand Poobahs of film noir for years. When I bought and watched it, what blew me away was how very average it was. I was annoyed by how fast Walter Neff moved in on Phyllis Dietrichson and started trying to seduce her halfway through telling her his name “Hi, I’m Walter ‘would you like my penis inside you’ Neff” because it destroyed any sense of reality for me. He came on too quickly, even for an insurance sales man. The rest of the movie was then hobbled from that point and didn’t recover well. I wouldn’t have been so annoyed, but this was supposed to be the greatest film noir ever made, and it wasn’t that great. If I hadn’t had it built up to such a degree, I would have thought it was alright, just okay, no big thing. Also, since one of my big interests is how and where films are influenced from, I knew that almost nothing in this movie was new. That also annoyed me. In the end, I gave the movie a seal of approval, but I do not rate it high on any of my lists. I think that being so built up, as it was, hurt it greatly because I was expecting more.

The commentary track just makes things worse, I couldn’t get through more than 5 minutes of the guy telling me how great everything was and how everything was the best thing ever. There are commentary tracks on most the Gangster Movies and Film Noir DVDs I’ve bought lately, from film scholars. Normally I like them, because these guys have studied and can bring in a perspective taking in the rest of the participant’s careers and what else was being produced at the time the movie was being done, however they can also weigh the movie down with a lot of importance that the movie doesn’t aspire to. The movies can be dragged down by the love these guys give them sometimes.

As I say, there have been a lot of scholarly reassessments of pulp style works, and attempts to raise them above the mire from which they were wrought. I think this is a mistake because what really attracts us to these things is their very unacceptability. If you brush them down, give them a shave and put nice clothes on them, they will loose some of that. Also, you’ll look like a damn fool because you’re trying to shave books and put suits on DVDs.

There has been a lot of table banging and demands that these stories and movies are important, that they should be respected as works of art and are still good and relevant to us today. Whenever I hear those people I often mutter that I agree with the last part but as for the first two, they’re crazy. I also tend to ask them to stop banging the damn table because they’re giving me a headache.

I really do think these things are worth reading and watching, but I don’t think most of them are any great works of art. The first year of The Fantastic Four isn’t the greatest work in comic books ever. It can actually be pretty hard to read by today’s standards, since it’s so pat and some of the characters are fairly one-dimensional. Consider The Shadow stories, which are now available in mass market forms again. Most of them are written by one guy, on the quick, to meet a publishing deadline. I remember reading some of them when I was a kid and finding them exciting but tragically flawed. Allan Quatermainwas the same way. That didn’t stop them from being a lot of fun though!

Most pulp works are like that actually. Lots of them can be tough to read because they were written quickly with little editorial input or scientific know how. But they were exciting, imaginative and great fun. It’s the visceral feeling that one gets from them that makes them exciting though. The energy with which they were torn from the type writer and rushed to get them on the magazine page is regularly evident in the works themselves. That energy manages, in most cases, to keep them from being dragged down under the weight of their own flaws.

However, we shouldn’t pretend we’re looking at high art, because we’re not. One or two pieces might rise above the rest and actually get to be art, but that’s entirely an accident in my view. These weren’t trying to be art, they were trying to be semi-popular and disposable entertainment. The pulp magazines weren’t trying to be anything than what they were, and that is noble enough within itself to be admired.

The other problem becomes that people get the idea that this stuff is important and try to make the current stuff as high falutin’ as they think the old stuff was. There are few things more painful than trying to read a comic book author who has gotten an idea of his medium’s importance. I was blown away at how badly Batman Hush was written, what with them mentioning The Purloined Letter twice an issue as if to scream to the reader “HEY! I’ve read a real book once! And it was one of them classic books you read in school and everything!” The sense that they wanted to raise the comic book to a literary level was evident, but it was also impossible because Jeph Loeb just wasn’t up to the challenge. Had he tried to stay low and pulpy, he might have made it. Instead he came off as amazingly pretentious and barely educated. Having tried to read some of his other stuff, I don’t think it’s an isolated incident. After the 400th Godfather direct rip off (it isn’t a reference if you lift it nearly verbatim) in four pages I gave up on The Long Halloween and have never gone back to it. My point here is that trying to tie extra importance to the art form only shows off the very large flaws in having a man dressed up like a flying rodent solving crimes. It’s ridiculous!

Trying to make hero comics into some higher art would really need a steady hand and genuine skill which most people just don’t have. It’s not a failing, not having that skill, only so many people can successfully put lipstick on a pig. Comic books can be raised to a finer art, but they usually have to abandon all pulpy trappings to do it.

We shouldn’t be attaching all this importance to these things anyway, because decoding all the extra meanings behind each phrase, panel and shot only turns consuming these things into work. Also, filling every comic panel with meaning and history only really works if your name is Alan Moore and even then, not always. I don’t want to have to look at viewing movies and reading stories as work, I want them to be fun. I reject the notion of entertainment as competition. I hate it when I hear people comparing books and movies like small indie bands no one has ever heard of or will ever care about. “Oh man, you read Chandler books? He’s so known he’s like, almost mainstream. No, I only read back copies of The Black Mask and Weird Tales. I don’t even get the reprints, you know? It’s more obscure my way.” Now be honest, you’re picturing a fat guy with an eyebrow piercing, an all black wardrobe and bad hygiene aren’t you? Well of course I am, but I know who I’m talk about you and you’ve probably never met him.

So yeah, let the pulp be pulp!

Let the film noir movies, the comic books, the detective stories, the sci-fi, the crime stories, the fantasy tales, the grindhouse movies, and all the other cheap, rough and ready entertainment just be some cheap, rough and ready bit of entertainment, without the artistic pretensions laid upon it. For this I will thank you.