Carnival of the Godless #70 is up over at Friendly Atheist, with its usual assortment of smart, funny, snarky, excellent atheist blogging. The carnival was kind enough to include both my Christian Spanking Porn and Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing To Do With God pieces, and I’m both honored and vastly entertained. Those two pieces are about as wildly disparate as my atheist writing gets — from the contemplation of the finality of death to a contemplation of spanking in fundamentalist Christian marriage — and it tickles me to see both pieces in the same carnival. (If i can get my piece on atheism in Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the next round, it’ll be a triple play.) See you on the merry-go-round!
Month: July 2007
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How I Write Porn: The Blowfish Blog
(FYI: This post contains a certain amount of information, not about my sex life exactly but about my sexual fantasies, which family members and others may not want to know about.)
If you’re interested in knowing how I write porn — either because you’re a porn writer yourself or you’re just curious — then check out my latest piece for the Blowfish Blog. The piece is all about my nuts-and-bolts process of writing erotic fiction — and, not coincidentally, my analysis of what makes erotic fiction work. Here’s the teaser:
I usually start with the physical actions. What the characters are doing, what they’re saying, which body part is going where.
“He gripped her wrist and twisted it behind her back.”
It’s what I call “the skeleton.” And the problem with most bad porn fiction is that it stops there. Too many porn writers think that a description of sex acts is all a porn story needs.
I have more sympathy with these writers than you might imagine. When I’m writing a first draft, I get very excited about these things, too. After all, when I’m having a sex fantasy, these are the things I fixate on: the breasts spilling out of a low-cut blouse, the cock pushing into a tight asshole, the hand smacking down on the bare bottom again and again. I know how those sex acts make me feel. Vividly.
And it’s easy to forget that conveying the sex acts doesn’t convey the feeling.
But it doesn’t.
So then I move on…
To find out what I move on to, read the rest of the piece on the Blowfish Blog. Enjoy!
Jolie Drove! (And We Are In What Decade Again?)
Ingrid and I flew out this weekend to see our new niece (baby pictures coming soon!), and as is the way of our people, we picked up a copy of Us magazine at the airport to read on the plane. (To be more accurate, Ingrid picked up a copy of Us magazine to read on the plane, and I mocked her mercilessly for it and then read it over her shoulder. As is the way of our people.)
So there was a bit about Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt taking some sort of driving trip… with the parenthetical remark, “Jolie drove!”
And I’ve been in a pop-culture snit about the remark ever since.
Why the fuck should that be in any way remarkable? Why should it be surprising, or even worth commenting on, that the woman in a hetero relationship did the driving on a family trip?
It’s the exclamation point that really got my goat. If there were simply a parenthetical remark saying “(Jolie drove),” it might have just been a passing remark to set the scene in more detail for a celebrity-obsessed public. It’s the exclamation point that makes the meaning clear. Wow! How strange! How fascinating! A movie-star couple went on a driving trip — and the woman drove the car! Heavens!
For fuck’s sake. This is the sort of thing I’d expect to see in a movie magazine from the Fifties. It’s straight out of the era of woman-driver jokes.
And I think that’s why it got my goat. I’m used to your garden-variety early-21st-century sexism — the hyper-critical body fascism, the glass ceiling, the “have it all” pressure to be successful at work while keeping a perfect happy home while maintaining a flawless personal appearance, the denial that sexism is still a problem, yada yada yada. And I’m used to the kinds of sexism that have been around for decades and indeed centuries: the virgin/whore complex, the contempt and hostility towards female sexual assertiveness, the characterization of powerful women as unfeminine shrikes. Again, yada yada yada. They tick me off, but unless they’re unusually egregious, I rarely feel inspired to blog about them.
But this was so dated, such a trope of sexism from another era, that I felt like it didn’t have any excuse. It’s not one of those forms of sexism that’s so prevalent it’s invisible. If it is invisible, it shouldn’t be. This is the sort of sexism that shouldn’t even be an issue anymore. This is the sort of clumsy, obvious, ham-handed gender rigidity that I thought our culture was at least making a token gesture towards avoiding.
Jolie drove!
For fuck’s sake.
A Carnival and a Swarm: Theocracy and Crankiness on the 4th of July
It’s the 4th of July, and in my mutant form of patriotism, I’m participating in a blogswarm against theocracy and a blog carnival called This Is Not My Country.
Blogswarm Against Theocracy is pretty much what it sounds like. About a bezillion people have been blogging against theocracy in the run-up to the Fourth of July, and their posts are being collected here. I put in my silly-but serious piece on the “Buffy” spinoff “Angel” and its angry atheist view of religion and theocracy. And there’s a lot of other wonderful blogging against theocracy happening on this patriotic holiday. Check it out.
And appropriately enough, the This Is Not My Country blog carnival, dedicated to “expressions not of hatred for one’s country but of disappointment or anger at its abandoning of its values,” is now up on Hell’s Handmaiden. It’s an odd and interesting assortment of cranky, mostly lefty political writing, and they were kind enough to include my No Sex Please, We’re Democrats piece about abstinence-only sex education over on the Blowfish Blog. Happy 4th, everybody!
The Jasmine Episodes: Atheism (and Anti-Theocracy) in Pop Culture
Warning: This post contains significant Buffy the Vampire Slayer content. However, I think it’ll be of interest to non-Buffy fans. If I’m wrong, and you read it anyway… well, that’s five minutes of your life that you’re never getting back. Them’s the breaks.
I was watching the Jasmine story arc of “Angel” recently (for those who aren’t familiar with the show, “Angel” was the spinoff series of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”). And it suddenly struck me, in that “Duh, I am an idiot, I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before” way:
This story is about religion.
From a pretty harsh atheist viewpoint. (Joss Whedon, the creator of the shows, is in fact an atheist — and not just an atheist, but a self-described “hard-line, angry atheist.”) The whole story is about why it’s harmful to believe in a deity that isn’t real, even if believing makes you happy. It’s about what, precisely, makes religion in general and theocracy in particular troubling at best and destructive at worst. And it’s about how religion has an inherent tendency to turn into theocracy given the opportunity — all religion, even a happy and blissful religion with a message of love and peace.
Here’s what happens in the story arc. (WARNING — SPOILER ALERT.) A powerful magical creature, Jasmine, comes into the human world. She’s born/brings herself into existence under extremely dubious circumstances (including possession, human sacrifice, and the manipulation of human history, among other things) — but when she springs fully formed into being, everyone who sees her is instantly filled with peace and bliss, love of one another and acceptance of themselves and the world… and a passionate desire to worship her. All the pain and suffering that had to happen in order for her to come into the world are explained as birth pains, and even the people who were injured the most by the process of her creation immediately love and worship her when they see her. And her power and influence grow exponentially, as more and more people become aware of her and worship her.
But there are problems. Jasmine’s spell is blissful, but it’s deceptive, and although her followers see her as a beautiful goddess, the reality is that she’s a hideous monster with worms crawling out of her decaying flesh.
Also, while she seems to genuinely want peace and love in the world, she also expects, and insists on, unquestioning obedience and devotion.
Also, she eats people.
A small number of people see Jasmine’s real face — and these people quickly become outcasts, violently hated by believers, having to hide and even go underground. Soon the bulk of Jasmine’s energy that’s not going towards spreading the word and building her numbers is going towards finding and destroying non-believers — a task she accomplishes by turning her followers into fanatical spies, filled with violent, venomous hatred towards the non-believers. Jasmine’s spell is finally broken when the story’s hero discovers her true name and reveals it to the world
So let’s look at this story’s atheist viewpoint on religion and theocracy.
Okay, duh. But I want to break it down anyway.
One: It’s better to know the truth then to hold a false belief, even if that makes you happy. This is a morally and emotionally complicated message, and the story doesn’t shy away from it: the pain people feel when they lose their belief, and their moral conflict at trying to take that belief away from others. But while many of the story’s other points serve to support this position, it also seems to be a basic moral tenet — truth is a fundamental good, pretty much no matter what. Even if it makes you feel bad in the short run, it is almost always better in the long and even medium run.
Two: It’s important to know the truth — because holding false beliefs makes you susceptible to being manipulated and deceived in other ways. People under Jasmine’s blissful, loving spell will do anything for her — burn down their beloved bookstore, turn against their dearest friends and hunt them down like dogs, allow themselves to be eaten. Jasmine’s will is seen by her believers as good by definition… and everything else, every perception and human connection and moral position, gets twisted to fit that unquestionable axiom.
Three:
Religion has a natural tendency to turn into theocracy.
When the stability and peace of a society is built on the foundation of a false belief, nothing is more important than perpetuating that belief, and stamping out non-belief. A society built on reality and truth and evidence can be questioned… but a society built on a false belief — or even an unproven and unprovable belief — has to bolster that belief, or else it will crumble. So as soon as a religious belief system gains a foothold and acquires any real social or political power, that power will be turned towards (a) spreading the faith and (b) stamping out non-belief.
There are certainly religious individuals who are comfortable and happy with other people not sharing their belief. But there aren’t bloody many religious institutions who are comfortable and happy with that… and the ones that are tend not to be very powerful. (Compare, for instance, the numbers and political power of the Southern Baptists to that of, say, the Quakers.) And the institutional refusal to allow a belief to be questioned naturally leads to evangelism, repression of dissent, and the consolidation of social and political power.
In other words — theocracy.
This is my entry in the Blogswarm Against Theocracy.
Humanist Symposium #4
The Humanist Symposium is an incredibly cool blog carnival — it collects blog writings about atheism with a positive view of atheist lives and philosophies, absent any critiques of religion. (Not that I object to critiques of religion. Some of my favorite atheist writing critiques religion. But like a lot of atheists, I get tired of hearing that atheists just criticize religion without offering anything positive to replace it, and I like that there’s a regular forum that shows exactly how mistaken that assessment is.)
Humanist Symposium #4 is up now at Nullifidian, with a fascinating variety of ideas and perspectives about life and death without God. They were kind enough to include my piece Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing To Do With God, so thanks to them for that. If you want a good selection of smart, thoughtful, positive atheist writing, I strongly encourage you to check it out.