Why Pick-Up Artists Work, I Think.

Pick-up artists.  I have such a love/hate relationship with these guys.  I love that there’s someone out there trying to teach socially awkward men how to get the physical affection they need…
…but then in the process of gamifying the system, they proceed to objectify women and make sex into a competition.  Eventually women become like climbing mountains, where they start finding increasingly ridiculous challenges that they don’t even particularly want – they just need to take these new skills for a spin.  They rank women to measure their challenges, becoming what they despise in the process.
Anyway, there’s a lot of framework and standardization among pick-up artists.  You gotta “peacock,” wearing gaudy things so women will have something to comment on.  (I can vouch this works, as my casual conversations with women have tripled since I got my pretty pretty princess nails.)
You go out and “neg” women, subtly insulting them to show how thoroughly Not Impressed you are. (I can also vouch this works, as it’s something I sorta do semi-organically – I don’t set out to take pretty girls down a peg, but so many women are surrounded by men who are terrified to express an opinion, lest they accidentally drive this pretty girl away. Saying, “Holy crap, NO!” on occasion actually makes you more interesting, as you’re exhibiting a form of confidence.  I dislike outright insult just to drop them into defensive mode, though.)
You trot out well-worn anecdotes to try to get into the sack.  (*cough*)
The thing is, the pick-up routine becomes an obsession for these guys. They fine-tune the approach.  They start excluding variables.  They work on it like it was a stand-up routine, constantly polishing every aspect from the opener to the closer, and…
…I don’t know how necessary that whole schtick is.
See, I don’t think the routines of the pick-up artists are as key as they think – it’s just that women like casual sex as much as men do.  And while most guys claim they just want sex, it turns out they actually want commitment in a frightening way that creeps up around the edges.  They say women are the commitment-hungry gender, but holy God I’ve known so many dudes who had a one-night stand with someone they liked and could not let that shit go.
A lot of women are actually fine with casual sex.  It’s just that guys often try to sneak in “committed sex” under the guise of “casual sex,” and when that doesn’t work out for them then holy shit, let’s unleash a sewery tide of slut-shaming on this bitch who dared to spread her legs for me.
What a great reward system you’ve devised, guys!
So I think the routine isn’t all that important.  Expressing yourself as a confident person who’s not going to follow her around for the next six weeks, constantly calling after she’s made the mistake of hooking up with you?  That, my friend, is key.
I think that’s one of the reasons I – a pudgy, bug-eyed neurotic – has gotten as much sex as I have.  I like you.  I want to have sex with you.  It’s not going to be more than that unless you want it to be.  And given my lack of skills in many areas, that open-yet-unattached approach been surprisingly effective.
But hey.  I get the need for a routine, in some cases.  Particularly if you’re socially anxious, having the confidence of a script can help you gain the strength to talk to an attractive stranger.  Breaking the ice is fucking terrifying, especially when rejections can be so offhandedly cruel, and that’s why despite my reservations about PUAs I can’t say there’s not a need for at least some of what they do.
Seriously, though.  I think if you can just be actually legitimately okay with casual sex, you’d be surprised at how often it’ll happen.  Even for someone like me.

Selma: The Exceptional Biopic

I absolutely hate biopics because of the shameless way they game critical acclaim. Let’s take last year’s “Twelve Years A Slave,” for example.
I thought “Twelve Years” was a decent horror story and a thoroughly mediocre movie.  It had a few nice tricks, but the directing was pedestrian, the pacing turgid (and perhaps as a conscious directorial choice to make the audience feel the endlessness of slavery, but boring is still boring), and the writing functional.  On my own, I would have given it a B- in the way I did “Saw” – effective at making audiences wince, cathartic, but not much more.
But see, the magic of biopics is that if you make a film about something Truly Important, criticizing the story slurs right into criticizing the subject matter.
“How can you dislike Twelve Years?” people cried.  “Well, you must be for slavery!  How can you dismiss this whole experience?”
Except I’m not.  I think the historical relevance of Twelve Years is great, I’m glad we got a major motion picture on slavery (which hardly ever happens), I’m thoroughly anti-slavery.
However, I thought this picture was crappy.  I wish the story as presented was better.  I wish we had tons of films about slavery, the same way we have endless films on white people in the Regency era swanning through England, so we could see just how tedious this was by comparison.
Likewise, a Great Film about Gandhi or Alan Turing or anyone historically important becomes immediate Oscar-bait, because if you don’t like the movie then you must not recognize the greatness of Gandhi!
Worse, biopics lend themselves to what I call “Capote syndrome,” where you make a movie with one great performance – Philip Seymour Hoffman absolutely nailed it – but the film itself is wandering, and not particularly interesting, and so yeah, it absolutely deserves to win “Best Actor” but everyone else is meh.  (Likewise, I thought “Twelve Years” housed two great performances, wrapped in a big ball of meh.  I liked “Lincoln” just fine, but you take Daniel Day Lewis out of that film and it vanishes.)
So no; try though people might to conflate the historical importance with the cinematic execution, it’s possible to have a mediocre movie about a transforming historical figure.  And it’s possible I’m wrong about “Twelve Years” – we’ll see if anyone’s still watching it in a decade or two.  We all know that critics are often wrong, and I could be so here.  But my point is that thanks to public reaction, the distinction vanishes so it becomes hard to critique the film without seeming to dismiss the event.
(And that doesn’t mean that a mediocre movie won’t hit home and hit home hard for some.  Right now, I’m dealing with mourning for my goddaughter, who died of brain cancer.  Show me any movie about kids being sick, I fall apart.  But that doesn’t make those movies great movies or anything; they’re just plucking at heartstrings that are extremely tender.  Likewise, I don’t doubt that a film like, say, “The Butler” or “American Sniper” was absolutely moving for many people, but I question whether that’s because the movie was good or – like me and Rebecca – it was an average film that unearthed some super-intense memories.)
Now, after 500 words of trashing biopics….

OH MY GOD SELMA IS SO FUCKING GOOD

Selma is not some recreation of a man – it symbolizes the heart of the conflict of the Civil Rights movement, putting you firmly in the shoes of African-Americans in the 1960s and showing all the trials they had to face.
And Selma does not pull punches in the flaws of its characters, the conflicts that threatened to rip the Civil Rights movement apart.  Not all Negroes cheerfully lined up behind Martin Luther King; we see the militant wing of Malcolm X nipping at his heels, the local activists who are pissed that King has swept in to make a media show of a town they’ve been working for years to improve.
It pulls no punches in saying that MLK went to a town where the Sheriff was cool-headed enough not to beat the shit out of black people on national TV, and he failed, and he is choosing Selma because it will be a nice visual bloodbath to shock America into having some febrile nature of a conscience.
It shows how easily MLK could have been crushed, if LBJ had decided that he wanted King gone, and yet for all of LBJ’s good will MLK still needed to force LBJ’s hand so once again, the Negro’s right to vote wouldn’t be shuffled under in a tide of “We’ll get to that later.”
What we get with Selma is a story – and a good story, one filled with tension, because even though you know it works out you get to see the toll it took on the men who got us there.  It doesn’t pull away from the hard decisions; it leans into them, letting you see just how brave these people were without putting them on a pedestal where they’re just Big Damn Heroes.
Selma is as good as people say it is. And it’s an uncomfortable movie, but it’s also not torture porn; it shows you what you need to know, and does not shy away – that lingering shot of the dead girls at the beginning sets the stakes – but it’s more concerned with the living than the dead.  When Martin Luther has to go talk to a man whose grandson has died, the scene where he tries in vain to comfort the living takes twice as long as the death scene.  And that’s purposeful.  We feel the resonation of the deaths long after they’re gone.
Selma is modern.  It doesn’t have to stretch for parallels – though it’s largely unspoken except for one lyrical reference to Ferguson in the credits, we have a hidden set of deaths and abuse that nobody wants to look at.
There’s no modern-day analog to Martin Luther King, or even Malcolm X, and I don’t think that’s the fault of the black community.  Today is a day of fractures; there’s a thousand media outlets, everyone can have a blog, everyone’s on Twitter, everyone has their own choice.  I’m not sure we can have a great uniting figure any more.
When you hear the words of King, slow as syrup, each word thought through precisely, man.  You wish a little that we were back in the days when one man could be lifted to such heights.  Because what he said, and did, to focus the movement, to keep it on track, still resonates today.
Go see Selma.  It’s so worth it.

Why I'm Going To Be Civil To Your God Damned Ex-Boyfriend.

If you date actively in the poly scene for long enough, ex-lovers will accumulate at your feet like drifts of autumn leaves. You’ll date, discover they’re not right for you, probably have a couple of seriously nasty and hurtful arguments before some final stab from hell’s heart causes you to flee the premises.
Now: What do you do with all of these exes?
If the answer is “Ensure that everyone knows what shitty people they are so that no one will ever talk to them again,” congratulations! You may have just helped shatter your community.
Before we continue, let’s set some guidelines: if you broke up because s/he physically abused you or raped you, then that’s something your community deserves to know about, because those sorts of missing stairs go on to rape and abuse other people. I am by no means suggesting that you stay silent on issues of abuse so we can draw the quiet curtain of “Don’t cause drama.”
Yet most breakups involve some level of ugliness. While there are the occasional breakups that are cool-headed, mutual partings – “Why, yes, I believe we are incompatible, let us share a final cup of tea and depart as friends” – most breakups occur because at least one person thinks they’re being reasonable and at least one other person doesn’t.
As such, most relationships involve being aggrieved for weeks, months, before you come to realize that not only are they hurting you, but they believe they’re entirely justified in fucking you over.
So when that final trauma comes smashing down and you realize that this asshole is never going to stop hurting you, some people’s first inclination is to run around ensuring that this nefarious villain will never harm anyone again! And their friends, who’ve bought into this weird idea that “loyalty” means “backing your friends blindly,” will immediately ostracize and trash-talk the ex, and snub them at parties, and do their best to cut this cancer from the community….
Which ensures you’ll never really have a community.
Look, if this was a group of monogamous people, maybe that behavior could at least reach some stable point where everyone was happily dating and no new relationships could come along to form schisms.
But you’re not. You’re a poly group. You’re this incestuous bunch of folks dating each other, and there will never come a point where someone isn’t having a falling-out with someone else.
As such, what I see in a lot of poly communities is this complete inability to actually have a community. What you have instead is this constantly shifting tide of allegiances, where Sharon can’t be in the same room with Candy, and we like Sharon better, so fuck Candy, she’s not welcome at this party, which means that Candy’s friends won’t come either. Yet oh Christ, Bob just broke up with Sharon and who doesn’t like Bob, and…
…next thing you know, you have several warring factions, each constantly regrouping as new breakups bring a fresh wave of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and Jesus the drama never stops.
So my rule is that I’ll be civil to your ex, whenever possible.
I’ll be civil to my ex, whenever possible.
If you consistently can’t stand in the same room as your ex, you’ve probably got some issues.
And again, some caveats: I don’t expect you to be immediately good with being in the same place as your ex. Nor do I think you should watch avidly as they smooch on the couch with that new lover. There needs to be some cool-down time while you readjust to this new reality.
Nor do I expect you to act like everything’s okay. You don’t have to go over and make happy conversation with them. I’m not asking you to be best friends again, I’m asking that you learn to just exist in the same space.
Nor do I expect you to thumb the “mute” button on your issues. Bitching to your friends? Fuck, that’s the reason you *have* friends. Don’t spew toxic hatred to everyone you meet, but if you gotta vent to a buddy, I say vent away. People get down on gossip, but a) you can’t really stop gossip, and b) in some cases it’s an accurate way of determining who’s worth dating. If I’m as cruel as my ex-girlfriends think I am, well, that’s something y’all should take into account when I ask you on a date.
But asking everyone around you to restructure their parties just so you never see evidence of this human waste you used to love? That’s a bit over the top.
And yeah, I hear terrible things about exes. But I also know that breakups are where people are at their worst. If you judged me exclusively by the things I did in the waning weeks in a relationship, I would be a screaming rant-monster.
The truth is, people love hero narratives. It’s a lot easier to say, “Oh, I was so perfect! She was a monster!” And those narratives are neat and clean, because you’ve got a hero (and coincidentally, it’s always you!), and you’ve got a villain, and if you get enough of your friends to agree that this ex is a jerk then you can vote that villain off the island and feel good about it.
There are relationships with clear monsters, no questions. (Let’s harken back to that “rape and physical abuse” thing earlier.) But that’s not most breakups. Most breakups involve some jerky behavior that arises because two people have differing needs.
Most breakups involve both people acting a little jerky. Yet when you’re hip-deep in the Hero Narrative Of Breakups, you dismiss all the petty stuff you pulled as entirely reasonable, and amplify the mistakes of the Evil Ex.
Yet you do not have to make every ex into a villain. Try these magic words: “We had differing needs.” Those differing needs can cause a lot of hurt; if you’re allergic to wheat and I bake you a fresh loaf of bread, that’s gonna drop you straight into the Land O’Gastrointestinal Hell.
But that doesn’t mean that the baker is some criminal mastermind out to destroy the gluten-intolerant. It means that he loves baking, and he dated someone who couldn’t deal with that, and after a lot of anguish they decided this wasn’t going to work out.
It is worthwhile to be able to see a breakup as not the result of targeted cruelty, but rather the friction caused by two differing personalities. It is worthwhile to be able to see your own part in a breakup. It’s worthwhile to see your ex as someone who is simultaneously a decent person and yet someone who will cause you endless misery when you date.
That’s chemistry, baby. Some compounds are just volatile.
And it’s super-worthwhile not to drag everyone you know into taking sides in this battle. You don’t have to rally round the circle, punish your ex with all the ostracization and demonization at your disposal for every slight, haul your friends into this war you have created.
Me? I’m going to be civil to your ex. I may think he’s a jerk for what he did to you. I’m not going to be best friends with him, nor am I going to invite him to parties at my house that consist exclusively of my friends.
Yet if I see him at a club or a convention or at someone else’s party, I won’t be offended by his mere presence. I’m going to say “hello” and make my excuses and move on to someone I do enjoy talking to. Just as I would do with one of *my* exes, if I saw them at these places.
I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

So How DO You Promote A Book From Scratch?

I’m super-lucky with my debut novel; not only have I been blogging/publishing stories for years and am friends with tons of writers, but I’ve got the mighty Angry Robot marketing engine on my side to push FLEX like it was solid gold sliced bread.
But I have friends who are launching books from small presses and low contacts.  They have issues getting their books seen.
And since I’d like to be able to help people like this in the future, I’m asking you wise people for advice: If you had to start promoting your book from scratch, with a small social media footprint and no connections, where would you start?
I mean, what I’d do would be something like:
1)  Compile as complete a list of book bloggers as possible.  Not just the big influential ones I have little shot at, but all the smaller ones who might be amenable.
2)  Polish my pitch to pristine working order, much like I’d prep a query for an agent.
3)  Offer to send samples of my book to all of those people.
4)  See about holding a GoodReads giveaway.
5)  Investigate holding a blogging tour, pinpointing as many bloggers as I could to try to come up with fascinating takes on my book.
But would that work?  Is that actually effective?  I don’t know, but I know lots of you are effective self-publishers, or have crawled up to have successful books from humble starts – what worked for you?  Any and all tested advice on what’s effective (and, just as effectively, what’s not) is deeply appreciated.

Why We Need New Names For New Strains Of Racism

In my review of Annie the other day, I said that we needed a new name for the subconscious racism that permeated our system: the kind that causes cops to shoot black people twenty times more often than white people.  The kind where, if you’re a black person on OKCupid, you lose three-quarters of a star rating on average merely by the color of your skin.
That’s not some sort of global phenomenon; it’s sadly American.  There’s a great chapter in Dataclysm, written by one of OKC’s data analysts, discussing how that sort of racial bias isn’t as present in other cultures.  But years of American standards have caused lots of people to equate “black” with “unattractive” and “threatening” – even to other black people.
And I said we needed a new word to describe that racism – that unthinking regurgitation of all the biases ground into you.
And others said, “Why do we need a new word for racism?  It’s racism!  That’s all one thing.”
Well, I love words because they open up new ideas.  It’s sort of like how the color blue is a comparatively new invention – people used to think of the ocean as black or wine-red.  But someone said, “Hey, that water deserves its own color,” and now we have a new way of thinking of stuff.
Likewise: abuse.  We could just say, “Wow, that guy totally abused his wife,” and be correct.  But it’s more accurate, and evocative, to say, “He totally gaslighted her,” indicating a complex pattern of mental abuse that involves manipulating the facts to undermine her self-confidence and sanity.
Or we could just say, “She perpetrated identity fraud” and be correct.  But it’s more accurate to say “She catfished him,” indicating that she led him on romantically by lying about significant portions of her life.
Or heck, we could just say “They lied” and be correct in both examples!  But the beauty of words is that they provide shading, nuance, the fine-grained ability to convey a concept that, perhaps, we didn’t have before now.
Likewise, “racism” is a big damn word that covers a lot of ground.  It’s a word spread so thin it’s almost useless, like “liberal” or “conservative” – it could mean anything.  Having more words to convey the specific kinds of racism that one can perpetrate is helpful.
And “racist” is such a loaded word – it’s one of the worst insults you can toss at a white person, for good or for ill.   You say that to most white folks, it shuts down conversations.  It’s often not helpful in terms of getting the people who have some racist inclinations to reflect upon what they might be doing (even as it can be terribly empowering for minority communities to call out racism accurately).
As such, having new words to make a differentiation between “You are a card-carrying member of the KKK” and “You are a decent person who has absorbed some unfortunate ideas from a racist society” will be helpful.
Not a panacea, of course.  The idea of “mansplaining” is horrifically useful for women trying to outline a specific form of condescension, but of course there’s going to be disagreement over what it is.  I’ve been accused of “mansplaining” to someone who expressed confusion about something I said, when I didn’t even know the gender identity of the person I was clarifying myself to.  And there are doubtlessly people who do mansplain to women (including possibly me), who would argue to the hilt that they’re not doing that.  So even if we got that word, we’d doubtlessly have people using it when it didn’t quite fit, and people misunderstanding it, and people denying it…
…but that’s not a reason not to want this word.  That’s what happens to every word that describes a negative behavior.
Now what’ll happen next is that people will suggest all sorts of words in the comments here that could describe this subconscious bias, but all of those words will suck. And that’s not your fault!  Words only really take root once they reflect a story that resonates within that culture.  It’s no coincidence that “catfish” and “gaslight” both took root after a movie expressed their story.  And they’re both catchy words that don’t actually describe the situation much; they just happened to connect with a tale that people could relate to.
So I suspect this word-for-subconscious-bias will be a while in coming.  It’ll need some clear narrative in this country that brings it into focus – and that’s hard to do when we’re dealing with a bias that we can’t see.  The Occupy movement got partway there with “the 99%,” bringing an abstract concept almost into focus with a lot of protests hammering on it.  It may be that the nationwide protests for black justice find some way of highlighting this issue and bringing it into being.
And I want to see that brought into focus.  Because right now, to most white people, racism involves intent – you meant to be nice to black people, you know you don’t actively work to undermine them, so you’re fine!  And anyone who tells you that you’re hurting black people – you know, maybe by pulling the trigger on them twenty times sooner than you would someone with paler skin – must be trying to smear you.
But no.  Truth is, we’ve got a long history of hating dark skin in this country.  It’d be surprising if we could just shake it off without some active investigation of how we think.  And I wish we could find a word to get across that needed nuance of “Harboring no active hatreds might not be enough to stop you from hurting people.”