How's This "Reading What You Want To Read" Thing Going?

At the beginning of the year, I posted an essay called “Shelf Awareness,” where I outlined a critical difference between “books I want to read” and “books I want to have read.”  And I vowed to only read books I was damn well excited to read.
I’ve been reading a lot more books lately, and loving more of the ones I do.  Which is awesome.
The interesting thing is how this decision has expanded my definition of “books I have little interest in reading, but will feel nobler if I manage to finish them.”  Because if you’d asked me before I started this, my “books I want to have read” would have included:

• That classic work of literature that I’d be Very Smart if I actually ever finished;
• The Very Deep author that all my friends love, but I’ve never really been able to get into;
• That well-reviewed book that’s a modernist take on faerie tales, even though I way prefer comic book mythologies to faerie tale ones and I won’t get half the references.

But since doing this, I’ve discovered that “books I want to have read, but am not actually that thrilled to read” include:

• That second book in a series, where I kinda-liked the first book that worked as a standalone, but don’t want to watch them enter Sequel Rehash territory;
• The second-tier book from an author I like, and even though everyone’s said it’s not that great I feel like I should read it anyway;
• That book I bought in a moment of weakness at a dealer’s table, and I feel like I should read it to get my $14.99 worth before I spent another $40 on books.

There were a lot of books I was reading out of obligation – because I felt, for some weird reason, that I’d read books #1 and #2, so I might as well read #3.  Or this book looked so shiny on the dealer’s shelf, but now that I’ve brought it home I should read it out of some weird penance, because dammit it’s wasted money otherwise.
And like the other “want to have read” books, reading those gave me a lot of false starts, where I’d get a third of the way through the book and drift off to another one that I sorta-wanted to finish, then get bored with that, and then there’d be a stack of books next to the tub because I didn’t want to put them back, that would be admitting failure, but I really wasn’t looking forward to picking them up either.
Now?  I order from Amazon at will (or at least as “at will” as a man with a $25-a-week entertainment budget can afford to).  I discard series wantonly.  I let my own excitement percolate, not allowing myself to value some form of “completion” over the satisfaction of having read.
I look forward to hopping in the tub and devouring a good book.  More books get thrown out, but maybe that’s the way it should have always been.

My West Coast Book Release Party: Borderlands Books, on October 11th!

Heya, folks!
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.
But what you do not know is that I will be holding an official West Coast Release Party for Flex at Borderlands Books in San Francisco on October 11th!  I’m psyched, because the one time I went to this shop (which specializes in fantasy, sci-fi, and horror), I totally fell in love.  A love I expressed judiciously with my credit card and a bent back, staggering out of that store with an absurd load of books.  To get to do a reading/Q&A/signing there is totes exciting.
(I’ll also probably go out for drinks afterwards and invite you along, just to spend more time with y’all.  I like people.)
You may ask, “Ferrett, what about an East Coast Release Party?  Or, you know, a Cleveland one?”  And I’m still researching those.  Locally, I have some friends who need a bookstore that’s wheelchair-friendly, which rules out a surprising amount of local bookstores (as it wouldn’t be a party without those friends).  And if you know of a good New York-based bookstore that’d be amenable to a weasel, let me know.
You may also ask, “Ferrett, what about a Florida Release Party, or a Southern Release Party, or a European one?”  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 at Borderlands to fund the airplane trip to San Francisco – so alas, this is not so much ‘a book tour’ as ‘Ferrett thinks this would be fun to visit his mother and throw this in.'”  While I’d love to visit your home town, I don’t have that kinda money to burn.  Three stops is the max.
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.

Maya Angelou Was A Sex Worker

One of America’s greatest poets was a prostitute at one point in her life.  She herself was unashamed by it.  I had not heard of that.
My hope is that, reading that, a lot of people will realize they have some pretty negative stereotypes about sex work.
My fear is that rather than reconsidering their opinions on prostitution, people will reflexively lower their opinion of Maya Angelou.  And that would be a goddamned shame.
 

Why I Think The Men's Rights Activists Are Wrong: A (Lack Of) Manifesto

An interesting thread broke out in one of my entries the other day, as they are wont to do, and this one was about the problems that these Men’s Rights Activists are actually attempting to solve.  And the listed problems were:

• Boys are doing worse at school than women in almost all subjects.
• Men are attending college at lower rates than women, and graduating even less.
• Men commit suicide at a much greater rate than women. In the UK at least, men’s suicide rates have remained steady from 1981 to 2012, while women’s suicide has dropped significantly.
• Men are more likely to be the victims of street crime, and specifically are more likely to be murdered.
• Men receive harsher sentences for the same crimes as women, being more likely to be imprisoned and for longer.

Now, obviously this isn’t a comprehensive list of all Men’s Rights problems, nor was it intended to be; this is the Whitman’s Sampler, as it were.  But those last three items on suicide, street crime, and punishment, in particular, struck me as being pretty serious goddamned problems.
They also struck me as being a direct problem with traditional masculinity.
Are guys more likely to kill themselves?  Yes, absolutely.  But I see that because men are traditionally expected to not discuss emotions, keeping all that pent up, lest they be perceived as “weak” and perhaps even incompetent.  Their friendships tend to be shallower, as they share activities but not necessarily problems, and even if they did feel comfortable sharing problems safely, they may be emotionally incoherent because they haven’t been trained to investigate their own feelings.
So a lot of them, feeling like failures for even having emotions and no friends they feel comfortable talking to, eat their guns.
Likewise, I think men are more likely to be murdered because traditionally-masculinized men are generally trained to be confrontational.  If someone disrespects you, you can’t just let it slide or you’re a wimp; you have to call the other person out, just to let them know that you’re not that kind of man. There’s status on the line, the danger that someone might perceive you as someone to be taken advantage of.  So they’re far more likely to put themselves in danger needlessly.
Likewise, men receive harsher sentences partially because men are perceived as being more dangerous, but also because – and again, there’s that “traditional” masculinity thing popping up – I think those kinds of guys are way less likely to show remorse, because in the competitive world of dudes, apologizing is seen as a status demotion.
And you know what I don’t see the solution to that as?
A movement where guys get together and divide themselves thoroughly into “alpha” and “beta” males, structuring themselves into hierarchies where by acting up in increasingly bold ways they get status, and are encouraged to think about all the things that they’re owed due to their machismo ideas but not getting.
Shit, it’s tough to be a guy in this society.  There’s a lot of pressures placed on you to succeed, to be seen as succeeding, to win the prizes that society has said that you should have: the girl, the good career, the house, all that.  And that shit warps you severely, should you buy into it.  It makes you act in ways that actually kinda harm you.
Society does not train men to actually listen to the feedback that would make them better.  To me, that’s a serious problem.  And if you want to fix that, I’ll applaud.
But fixing that by focusing more on the dysfunctional elements that got you into this mess is just… suboptimal, to be kind.  Very kind.  Acting as though the solution to fix all of these woes is to double down on the stratification, to double down on the expectation that if you do all these things in the right order then a beautiful girl will magically drop out of the skies as your reward?
What I’m seeing in the Men’s Rights Activists movement is actually an intensification of all the terrible shit that’s gotten guys into trouble in the first place.  The biggest problem with traditional masculinity is that it’s decoupled from feedback – think about all those movies where the hero, ignoring the female’s wailing, mutters, “A guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do” and goes and does the manly thing even if nobody in the world wants him to do it.
In fact, the hero gets brownie points because nobody else in the world wants him to do it.
And what that masculinity does, is it alienates.  You wind up with some doofy dude following a script, hauling “helpless” women across the street whether they want to be helped or not, whether he actually wants to do it or not, because This Is What Men Do.  And he’s taught by movies that if he does this in the proper way, then John McClane (who has alienated his wife by being emotionally distant and unsupportive) will win his beautiful bride back.
That doesn’t really work.  What usually happens is that you have a guy eating all his emotions, not getting closer to his wife but in fact pushing her away (unless she’s eaten the same dosage of traditional masculinity and expects her husband to act this way), slowly finding that this script actually does not provide him with magical results.  But he looks around with envy, because other people seem to have all the shit that he doesn’t have (even if it’s because everyone else is putting on appearances because they’re following the script), and he feels this deep envy and despair because he’s doing what he’s supposed to and why aren’t the magical rewards raining from the heavens?
And what I see in the Men’s Rights Activists are guys who are doubling down on the script.
The script is the problem.
I don’t see any good solution to this knot of defensive expectations that involves telling guys, “Hey, if you’re just better than the other guys then life will be awesome.”  What I see a solution is as saying, “There is no script.  There is no guarantee in life.  But if you want X thing, then you must be prepared to honestly ask, ‘So why am I not getting it?’ and interrogate yourself boldly to see what you’d need to do to get it – whether that’s money, companionship, love, beauty, fresh pancakes – and then do that.”
Instead, what I see is a script: “Just become the alpha male, and had rock-chiseled abs and a white smile, and you will have the world of your dreams.”  No.  No.  Some of those women don’t want rock-chiseled abs.  Some of those women don’t want irritating douches who override all their needs with theirs.  Some of those women may want irritating douches who override all their needs with theirs, but something else about you isn’t compatible with them.
You are not guaranteed success.  At anything.
Anything that implies that there’s a script to be followed that invariably leads to success is always, always toxic.
So yeah.  Why are boys doing worse in school?  I don’t know.  I’ve been told that it’s because boys are more prone to acting out, and we’re no longer shrugging that off with “Boys will be boys.”  Maybe that’s a sign that boys are trained to not respect the rules, maybe it’s a sign that boys are more naturally boisterous and we need to adapt to them.  I don’t know.
But to me, the solution the Men’s Rights Activists are proposing seems mighty similar to “Because women want to weaken us.”  And in that, I disagree.  I think what weakens us is this ludicrous broken Script of Manliness that sort-of limped along back when everyone in society agreed that yeah, this is the way men are supposed to act, so we’ll all squint very hard to overlook the problems and pretend this is awesome.
But society’s too diverse for that to work.  Some philosophies are like Tinkerbell: they only work if everyone in the audience claps their goddamned hands.  And I think traditional masculinity falls apart when you don’t have all your neighbors going, “Yes, your husband’s a solitary misanthrope who dismisses your very existence and emotional needs, but you totally need to stay there for Reasons.”
That broke.  The next script, whatever it is, will also break.  What we need is not a script, but a training of flexibility so we can say to men, “Hey, you know how to get what you want?  It varies.  You’re not guaranteed to get it, and that kinda sucks.  But here’s your best chance.”
Really, everyone should be taught that.  Men or women.  Or whatever gender you wanna call yourself.

The Hierarchy Of Assumptions: Why All Generalizations Are Not Equal

Getting some righteous pushback on my piece about Men’s Rights Advocates, because I accused them of generalizations while generalizing myself.  A valid critique.  Generalizations are generally bad.
But:
There’s a distinct difference between “Generalizing 50% of our species” and “Generalizing a subculture composed of comparatively few people.”
If I say, “All people love Shaun of the Dead,” then chances of me picking a person at random from the seven billion humans who populate this planet who has even seen Shaun of the Dead: Pretty slim.
If I say, “All women love Shaun of the Dead,” then chances of me picking a woman at random from the three-point-five billion women who’s seen it: Also pretty slim.
If I say, “All liberals love Shaun of the Dead,” then I’ve at least chosen a group of people who have, to some extent, self-defined themselves.  But the concept of what a “liberal” is is pretty ill-defined, and even if I did, the chances that one of the millions of liberal-minded people around the world love Shaun of the Dead?  The odds are better than “All Women” or “All People,” but still kinda sketchy.
If I said “All moviegoers love Shaun of the Dead,” well, again – we’re at least generalizing by an activity that people have chosen to do, and a very well-defined one, which considerably ups the chance that they would have at least seen Shaun of the Dead.  And that they liked it.  But it’s probably not all that accurate a generalization even then.  Yet it’s definitely more of a defensible generalization than the first three.
If I said, “All cinema nerds love Shaun of the Dead,” then we have narrowed the range considerably: not just people who go to the movies, but people who have chosen to be nerdy (and probably somewhat obsessive) about movies.  Chances of my picking a cinema nerd at random (however one reasonably defines it) who has both seen Shaun of the Dead and likes it are approaching maybe one in four, or maybe one in three.
If I said, “All zombie movie fans love Shaun of the Dead,” well, now we’re talking.  That’s still a generalization, but people who have self-identified as zombie movie lovers have a better-than-even chance of having seen Shaun of the Dead, a high-profile zombie movie.  But even then, a fair number of them have seen it and found its comedy dissatisfying, or just haven’t gotten around to it.
If I said, “Everyone who watches movies at Gini and Ferrett’s house loves Shaun of the Dead,” well, you’d be batting about 66%.  And there’s a reasonable statement to make – not true in a perfect sense (I wouldn’t use it as an algorithm) but true in the sense that if you picked someone at random you’d have a good chance of being correct.
My point of this ludicrous thought-exercise is that when I say, “All Men’s Rights Advocates, a very narrow subculture on the Internet who have chosen to self-identify with a set of beliefs about the damaging things women are doing to men” act this way, it’s not entirely correct.  (Even if every dude I’ve encountered who identified as an MRA did act that way, I’m certainly not going to assume that every one is.)  But it’s definitely more correct as a generalization that says “All women act this way,” which a very significant number of Men’s Rights Advocates do say, repeatedly, in essays.
So yeah.  Am I right to make that generalization?  Not entirely.  But not all generalization is bad.  If I say, “Tea Partiers are against taxes,” well, there’s doubtlessly Phyllis the Tax-Lovin’ Republican, but if I picked a Tea Partier at random I’d probably be in the ballpark.  Likewise, if I said, “All of the active LiveJournal bloggers are Russian,” well, it’s not entirely true – the top 10 are English – but LiveJournal is certainly way more popular in Russia than here, these days, so it’s not an entirely inaccurate statement.
When I generalize about MRA dudes, I’m generalizing about a movement that has self-chosen certain beliefs.  Maybe not all MRA guys.
But quite potentially enough.