No, Your Reliance On External Validation Is NOT Sexy

(NOTE: This essay was originally published on FetLife, the Facebook for Kinksters – but I thought it was sufficiently interesting to port over to my “Real” blog, even though it has a couple of Fet-specific references in it.  Because it deals with fatness and pride and attraction, and though I’m writing this in response to an essay that some of you might not be able to read, the essay is summed up and I don’t think I’m distorting it too much.)
“Inside the community and out, us normal people and skinny people are getting pretty damn tired of being told what and who we should find sexy.”
Here’s a trick to dissecting arguments: when someone starts off by telling you that they’re a “normal” person, you can safely assume the rest of their argument will be, “Here’s what society tells me, and I’m not going to bother for a second to contemplate whether that’s good or bad.”
And lo, that’s what we have here.
The story, as summarized in @MPsHoneyDoll’s essay, is:

• People don’t like fat people, so:
• I hated fat people myself:
• I hated myself so much that I changed myself
• Now people like me.
• So I like me.

 
And that is perfectly cool if you don’t find fat people attractive. Anyone who tells you that you are obliged to find any particular set of features attractive is an insecure git who needs the weight of numbers before they can relax.
You may be attractive to a small number of people. That’s cool.
The question is, are those people attractive to you?
If so, then awesome! Who cares if only one in 100,000 people wants to sex your bones up? If that one person is the dud/ette you wanted, then run rampant in the fields of glory, motherfucker!
If not, then you have that icktacular quandary of deciding how much you feel like changing for them.
Because here’s the ugly truth and the truth of ugly: you’re not going to have a 100% success rate at attracting the people you want. You just won’t, not over the course of a lifetime. And so you eventually have to make the decision of “Yes, if I changed my sexual identification and got a tattoo of a capuchin humping a watermelon and had bone-extension surgery to gain six inches in height, I could probably have them bed me. Is that worth it?”
And if you’re not processing too heavily, and these watermelon-humpers are in the majority, what you come to mistakenly believe is that there’s something wrong with you that you don’t naturally fit their mold of attractions.
There isn’t. There’s something wrong with your approach, presuming you want to date these people.
But if you’re just sort of skimming past all that, you don’t draw that vital difference between “This is a poor strategy for my goals” and “I am a failure as a human being,” and then come to think that cauterizing that hideous Thing They Do Not Like out of you is the only way to true happiness.
Not just for you.
For everybody.
Look, I’m neither pro- nor anti-fat. I actually find chubby women more attractive than skinny women. I think that my wife, who is overweight, can be actually healthier (she runs triathalons at her weight) than many skinny women who are more concerned with dress sizes than actual health. I believe that weight is merely one axis of many health considerations, and one that we demonize because we as society have decided that fat people are fucking disgusting.
But still, as a heart patient, I’m carrying forty extra pounds that endanger my well-being, so I’m trying to get it off. People who are 600 pounds are highly unlikely to be in the prime of health.
There’s a balance here. Sometimes, what society hates actually lines up with some genuine problems you have, and for God’s sake don’t do the nerd “reverse the polarity!” thing of going, “Well, if they hate it they must be wrong!” and then forever wrestling every conversation to be about your deep love of Transformers.
Maybe you’d be happier and less lonely if you bridged the gap and learned some common social skills – the moral equivalent of losing enough weight that you’re no longer at risk for coronary disease, but still chunky enough to appreciate a good sundae every once in a while.
“Normal” society, yes, rewards skinny people disproportionately. But it also rewards white people disproportionately. And straight people disproportionately. And men disproportionately. And if I’m not fucking careful, I can internalize those irrational hatreds and come to believe that there’s something wrong with me instead of society.
What @MPsHoneyDoll is regurgitating without thinking is the vomit that everyone poured onto her, all that societal hatred of fat people, which she drank up and internalized and now she can’t feel attractive unless she’s thin.
And hey, I’m not casting too many aspersions here: we all have our weak spots. I myself think I can’t be attractive unless I lure you in with words, which is equally dysfunctional.
The difference is that I’m not telling you all that really, being a poet is the only thing to do in this situation.
If @MPsHoneyDoll can only feel good if she’s thin, great! That’s an end-run around unthinkable pressures pushed onto you by thousands of people, and it may well be easier to give into that than to fight the power. I actually support that. Not every gay person needs to come out of the closet, not every kinky person needs to parade their slaves around the workplace.
(It helps if you do. Helps a lot. But it’s something I think is purest selfishness to demand of you, because fighting societal expectations takes a serious toll, and we trivialize people’s struggles when we forget that fundamental truth.)
But please, please, don’t not just cave to the pressure, but actually add to it, by telling folks that “normal” people find fat kiiiinda loathsome and implying heavily you’d be better if you just gave it up.
Because I’m willing to bet if we took you out to a crowd of “normal” people and showed them just what you loved on FetLife, most of them would think you were a fucking freak. And would you then tell me that yes, to make these generic people happy, we should give up our specifics?
No. Fuck that. “Normal” is not what we should be concerned with, especially in a fucktastic kink-saturated masturbationapocalypse like FetLife.
“Happy” is.
And yes: You will appeal to a wider variety of people if you lost weight. That’s the numbers, man. You’d also appeal to a wider variety of people on Fet if you were female, white, bisexual, and had big tits.
But it does not then follow that to be content, everyone should conform to what makes Kinky and Popular, the place where the most-loved photos wash up on FetLife. My wife has a shirt that says “I’m Someone’s Fetish,” and what matters is whether you can find the people who appreciate you for what you are.
And I’m perfectly within my rights to look at you and go, “Guh. You’re unattractive.” But that “unattractive” must always be accompanied with the properly-implied “to me,” and with the self-knowledge that just because a lot of people dislike something doesn’t mean it is actually wrong to be that.
I’m glad @MPsHoneyDoll is happier the way she is now. I am sad that she’s chosen to take a stance that heavily implies that anyone who doesn’t do what she did is fundamentally lacking on some level.
And I’ll tell you the truth: what makes me happy is not what will make you happy. Your job is to find what makes you happy, and then recognize this is not a one-size-fits all solution.
All I have ever written about is one path. I think it’s a pretty wide path, which is why my writings tend to be popular on Fet. But there are people who speak really beautiful and telling truths who never make it to K&P because those truths apply only to a narrow subset of people.
That makes those truths no less valid. Just less popular.
There is a difference.

I Am 12% Of The Best Podcast Fiction Of All Time

…at least I am according to David Steffen, who compiled his list of the Top 50 Podcast Fiction of All Time.  And I showed up six times on this list.
(My highest charting was #10, so I think that makes me like a really influential indie band.)
So in case you’re wondering (and there are many other good stories on that list to check out, if’n you like podcast fiction – check out Keffy in particular):

• #10: “Dead Merchandise” by Ferrett Steinmetz (Escape Pod)
• #24: “Hollow as the World” by Ferrett Steinmetz (Drabblecast)
• #27: “Devour” by Ferrett Steinmetz (Escape Pod)
• #29: “‘Run,’ Bakri Says” by Ferrett Steinmetz (Escape Pod)
• #40: “Suicide Notes, Written by an Alien Mind” by Ferrett Steinmetz (Pseudopod)
• #48: “As Below, So Above” by Ferrett Steinmetz (Podcastle)

On The Republican National Convention And Sex Workers.

I had a Tweet up for about twenty seconds that I then took down, which was this:
“Cleveland is hosting the National Republican Convention in 2016. I hope we have enough hookers.”
Which is funny to me, man.  I honestly don’t know if Cleveland has enough prostitutes to service all the incoming conservatives, because past conventions have shown that man, these staid-in-the-wool motherfuckers go through sex workers like nobody’s business.  We may have to import.  I’m sure several of my sex worker friends are looking at their calendars and just planning a blowout weekend.
But I took the Tweet down, not because I thought it was inaccurate, but because I thought in a shorter version it’d pass on overtones I didn’t want to create.  It seemed to degrade sex workers to me (and no, for some reason “I hope we have enough sex workers” didn’t strike me as funny in the same way).
Which is a weird thing about being careful with your communications: It’s not that what you say isn’t funny, but that it also encourages people to not question things.  To me, a hooker or a sex worker or a prostitute or whatever the fuck you call them are people, worthy of rights and protections.  But I suspect a lot of the people who might pass that gag along would be the sort of people who’d see selling sex as the incontrovertible evidence of bad morals/life decisions/etc.
The real joke here is how the Republicans try to make kinky sex illegal, and yet crave it the same way we do.  But I’m not sure that Tweet got it across without punching downwards more than I’d like.
Okay, rant break over, back to work.

You Get What You Give: How A Potato Salad Can Teach You To Run A Good Donation Drive

I had a friend who wanted very badly to go overseas.  Sadly, I can’t remember why she wanted to go overseas – we’ll get to that – but what I do remember was her disastrous donation drive.
She set up an Indiegogo account – a.k.a., “The place we go when we’re pretty sure a Kickstarter would fail” – and set up various tiers of rewards if she got enough money to go overseas: little tiny things like postcards, et al.  And what I remember was that the tier pattern went something like this:

• $30 – I will write you a personalized Tweet when I am in Czechoslovakia.

That’s where I started to feel a bit… insulted?  Overlooked?  Taken for granted?  Not a good feeling when I’m being asked to reach into my wallet.
As a writer, for me, being paid six cents a word – a word – is called “professional rates,” meaning it’s what the top-tier markets get.  And this campaign designed to induce me to give my friend money was giving them Tweet-rights of two cents per letter.
And I Tweet a lot.  I know how much time I spend composing a very thoughtful Tweet, which is at best three minutes.  So what my friend was saying to me, quite literally, was, “I think three minutes of my time is worth several hours of your paycheck while I relax on the beach in foreign lands.”
Already I was feeling a little dazed here.  And then I got to the next tier, which was something like:

• $50 – I will allow you access to the personalized blog where I detail my trip to Czechoslovakia.

That’s when I thought, oh, no, no, you’re doing it all wrong.  My friend was thinking entirely about what she wanted, the trip, and how much work each tier would be for her, then pricing them accordingly.  Which is the wrong way to look at it.
Here’s the secret to every donation drive – and keep in mind, I’ve run quite a few – the donation drives are never about what you want.
Every donation drive is about how you make the donator feel.
That’s actually true of every piece of written communication, but is especially true when you’re asking people to give you money.  When you do a donation drive, you are not trying to go to Czechoslovakia – you are trying to make a total stranger feel excited about getting you to Czechoslovakia.  And as such, your entire focus must be answering the question, “Why would someone who doesn’t know me feel wonderful about helping me to go on this trip?”
The whole reason I’m writing this now is because there is an infamous Kickstarter for potato salad – literally, the entire point was “If this funds, I will make myself some potato salad” – and it is, as of this morning, it is funded at $37,500 with 24 days left to go.  And I had several baffled sick friends saying, “I held a donation drive to pay off my crippling doctor’s bills and stalled out at $150, and this guy gets thousands for a goddamned potato salad?”
Yes.  Because potato salad guy actually seemed like fun.  It was goofy to even ask for such a thing, and funny, and people felt like “Hey, a guy like this I feel good about throwing away $1 to.”  In other words, “He provided me with $1 worth of amusement.”  And several thousand people joined in.
And watch carefully, my friends, as to how he reacted when all this escalated: did he hunker down when his stretch goals were made?  Hell no.  When this started to go viral, the dude said, “Well, hell, if people want this, I will throw a potato salad party,” and threw open a call for anyone in the area to come on down to Columbus and make some potato salad with him and dance around in the joy of potato salad.  The potato salad guy sounds like a fun time!  Hell, he’s in Columbus, I am damn tempted to go down for his potato salad fiesta.
The question is, did your donation drive provide $1 worth of entertainment?
Look, I’ve raised somewhere in the range of $5,000-$10,000 for Rebecca Alison Meyer, my goddaughter who died of brain cancer a month ago.  And that’s not nearly as celebratory fun as a potato salad party, but the reason I was so successful – as people have told me time and time again, sometimes to my chagrin – is that “You made Rebecca come alive for me.”  Being a writer, I tugged on your heartstrings to feel empathy for a beautiful spitfire of a girl that you’d never met, and so many of you donated to CureSearch for Cancer in her name.
I hesitate to use the term “entertainment” for such an awful travesty, but the point is people felt good either way about donating.  They felt like it was worth their money, emotionally.  And too many people, like my friend, get caught up on the tiers of rewards, thinking, “What can I churn out?” and forgetting that the rewards are merely another way of making people feel more excited about donating.
And when I see these medical donation drives, what I see is often a relentless stew of pain: “I’m miserable and broke and have to buy duct tape to hold in my shattered skull.  If you donate $5, well, it won’t actually make a dent in this mountain of medical debt I have, it’s all hopeless really, but if you’ll let me weep on you for some time I’ll send you a postcard to remind you exactly how little of a difference you made.”
Then they get no traction.
No, man, if I was poor enough to need funding to, say, buy myself some new glasses, I would ask this simple question: “Why would people feel good about giving me money to buy glasses?”  And by proxy, “What could I tell them to make them feel empathy – to make them go, ‘Aw, man, I’ll feel happy if this balding dude in Cleveland gets his glasses’?”
And I’d think, “Well, I have all these books I want to read.”  And I’d start making a list of all the books I’m excited about reading but can’t, but could if you helped me, then talk about these upcoming books and the very specific reasons I’m excited about reading them – going on about my love of, say, Jo Walton or Stephen King or Robert Bennett – and make you feel excited with me.
And then I’d say, “Why, I’d be so grateful if you helped me with these glasses, for $30 I’ll buy a book that you love and read it and tell you all the lovely things about it!”
Would that work?  I don’t know.  But I do know it’d work better than, “I’m broke and I need glasses, give me the cash.”
The lesson about Kickstarter or Indiegogo or any donation drive is that you get what you give.  My friend shouldn’t have made her blog a $50 tier – the blog access should have been for donation $1, the lowest possible level, telling people, “If you sign up in any way, I will let you into my world and tell you of all the wonders I find in Czechoslovakia.”  As it is, honestly, I don’t remember why my friend wanted to go to Czechoslovakia, which is a sign of how badly the drive was presented to me – she was my friend, I cared about her, and I couldn’t tell you what it meant to her aside from a thrusting hand in my face.
And, of course, her donation drive didn’t get anywhere.  What happened was what happened with most of the donation drives: her close friends gave what they could, a handful of acquaintances pitched it, and it stopped there because if you didn’t know my friend, well, this donation page would not have told you a darned thing about her.  She was very sad, even if she was resistant to changing her donation page because she’d worked so hard on it.
The lesson: be the potato salad.  Even if you’re sick and life is terrible, find a way to get people invested in your journey.  Give them only things that make them feel more invested in your journey.  Make them feel triumph when you succeed, and I can’t guarantee you’ll get potato salad money, but you’ll get more than you would have.  For sure.
(And if you’re looking for a good couple to donate to, may I suggest helping my friends Jeff and Tracy Spangler?  It couldn’t hurt.)

My East Coast Book Release Party: Word Bookstore in Brooklyn, On October 24th!

Hello, glorious mortals!
If you’ve been living under a rock, you may have missed that a) I sold a novel, and b) that novel is coming out on September 30th.  Or that I have a West Coast Release Party in San Francisco on October 11th.
But now?  I have an East Coast Release Party on October 24th at 7:00 at the Word Bookstore in Brooklyn!  I have not been to Word yet, but several people told me, “Awww, man, you have to see this store, it’s pretty amazing,” and so I shall.  And I’ll do a reading/Q&A/signing there! (And afterwards, I’ll almost certainly go out for drinks and hang out for a bit, because this is a celebration of fourteen years of work.)
So if you’re excited about my debut novel, and you’re anywhere within driving distance, I’ll say, “Hey, come on out and see me!  I’ll bring donuts – which, once you’ve read the novel, you’ll understand says something quite important about you all.” 
Remember: East Coast Release Party October 24th, West Coast Release Party October 11th.  I’ve allllmost got the details down for the too-critical Cleveland release party, and hopefully should have something for you by next week.  Also, since it’s been suggested and within driving distance, maybe a Detroit release party for all my pals out there.  But maybe that’s one too many release parties, I dunno.)
You may also ask, “Ferrett, what about a [My Neighborhood] Release Party?”  And the answer is that “Ferrett has a limited amount of vacation time, and family to visit on both coasts.  These Release Parties are tremendously exciting but also a net loss in cash, as there’s no way I’ll sell enough books to fund the driving trip and hotel stay to NYC – so alas, this is not so much ‘a book tour’ as ‘Ferrett thinks this would be fun to visit his Dad and throw this in.’”  While I’d love to visit your home town, I don’t have that kinda money to burn.
But you can still order Flex from any number of bookstores in advance.  Which would be nice.  Authors live or die on preorders, so if you’re not gonna attend a release party but wanna celebrate, you can do a little dance when Flex arrives on your doorstep.
And that, my friends, is the end of today’s marketing shill!  Move on.  Feel joy.  Walk about.