Perhaps The Most Wonderful Reading Of My Story Yet: "Riding Atlas"

A while back, I pointed you at my consanguination-as-drug-trip story “Riding Atlas,” which starts like this:

They were naked, now, on a dirty mattress.
“Neither of you have eaten or drunk anything for twenty-four hours?” Ryan asked, hauling equipment into the room: sloshing plastic buckets, packs of hypodermic needles, coils of tubing, straps. “And no drugs in your system? This is a pure trip. Just two bloods commingling. Any impurities will stop Atlas from getting inside you.”
Stewart didn’t answer. He was too distracted by all the naked couples. The attic floor was covered with bodies, lying belly to swollen belly on bedbug-blackened box springs. Their arms were thrust out above their heads, ears resting on their biceps; they clasped hands like lovers, each couple’s circulatory systems knitted into a single bloodstream.
Stewart felt his arms itch where the needles would be inserted, anticipation and fear churning into a sour mix in his gut. But Tina was ready, as she always was for things like this. She’d dragged him here, telling him they had to do this now, before they outlawed consanguination just like they’d outlawed LSD.
She stared up at Ryan with adoration as he strung the wiring above them with efficient motions. Her breath came in excited hitches.
Though his girlfriend was dry-humping Ryan with her eyes, Stewart took satisfaction in the way Ryan refused to look back. Ryan had wanted to take her to Atlas, but Tina had insisted her boyfriend should be her first time. And Stewart had gone along with it — because if he didn’t, Ryan would.
Once you’d exchanged the most vital bodily fluid, Stewart thought, sex was almost an afterthought. That must be why the consanguinated fucked so much. But Tina kept insisting this wasn’t about sex…

And I was glad when horror podcast Pseudopod picked it up for the dramatic reading, because a) I love all audio productions of my stories, and b) this is a particularly squicky story and I wanted to hear how it would feel when read by a pro.
Imagine how thrilled I was to hear that my friend Christopher Reynaga had been tapped to read the tale!   And let me tell you: he read my story like I want to read it.  His performance is stellar, and I want you to all to thunder forth and hear his narration.  So.  If you have forty minutes to have me poor some mingled blood in your ear, and feel like hearing what happens about two lovers who decide to join a circulatory system, well…. go to, my friends.

What's That? There's A New Interface? It's Terrible!

I can’t believe they changed the old, user-friendly version to this new crappy look.  It’s ugly, it’s nonfunctional, and it’s sure to drive the old users away.  How could they sift through all the available options and choose this awful look?
…what site am I talking about?  All of them.  Doesn’t matter.  Every time Facebook twitches, every time Gmail has a new look, it sends a spill of vomitous hate out to my Twitter-feed.  (God forbid Twitter actually changes its look.)  People fricking hate site redesigns, program redesigns, you name it.
I ignore them, because I remember two things:
1)  Back in the first days of Windows, when nobody was quite sure how to turn a complicated word processor into a GUI look and three titans battled for control of the market, they did a study.  Which word processor was easiest for people to use?  And so they did hundreds of tests putting the then-tiny Microsoft Word up against the juggernaut of Wordperfect for Windows, and Lotus’ well-reviewed-but-never-well-selling AmiPro.
They found that 90% – that’s 90%! – of the people agreed that one word processor was easiest to use.  That word processor?
The one they were familiar with.
That’s right, the user interface didn’t matter – what mattered was that you’d already done the hard work of parsing the user interface.  Once you knew how to save a document and how to print to an envelope, the program you used magically became “good” – even if you’d forgotten how ridiculous it was to learn in the beginning.  What people hated, it seemed, was the effort of relearning things.
2)  When I first redesigned StarCityGames.com (back when I still had significant input into the design process), I premiered a mostly red-and-yellow version of the site, to try to differentiate it from all the other blue-and-black Magic sites out there.  I got a lot of hate mail from people telling me the new design was awful, why did I go with those colors, how dare you fuck it up?  I saved them all in a folder.
Nine months later, I did another redesign, this time switching to the “classic” colors of green and yellow, since I though the red-and-yellow was a little eye-searing.  I also got a tide of hate mail.  But I compared.  Of the people who complained violently, discussing how the old look was better, about 10% were the people who’d emailed to bitch how terrible the old new look was.
That’s when I decided that most people just hate change.
This isn’t to say there aren’t terrible user interfaces out there – Windows 8 is a major misfire to me, and Facebook’s thankfully-aborted two-column content made it impossible to know where a given news item might fall.  But mostly, when I hear people whining that this new look is awful and unusable and clunky, I mentally substitute “I have to learn things again.”  And realize that once they’ve learned it, 90% of those people will settle down and be content.
Until the next change, of course.  Then they’ll hate it all over again.

I Have To Worldbuild The Past: On Birth Control

One of my favorite authors, Daniel Abraham, said this yesterday:
“I keep thinking that, since it happened before I was born, I’ve failed to grok how much reliable birth control changed things. Thousands of generations with one risk/reward set for sex, and two with the new rules. I expect the species to still be freaked out.”
Thing is, he’s right.  I was thinking what the world must have been like in the days when women could just get pregnant for having sex, and there was no consistent control over it, and I found myself slipping into my “science fiction worldbuilder” mode: what would be the ramifications of that decision?  How would that affect society? Because it was such an alien concept to me that I had to back into it.
Which was bizarre, because for me, sex has never been linked to procreation, except accidentally or when specifically desired.  Don’t want a kid?  You’ve got your IUD, your pill, your shot, and arguably condoms… the female body has ways of shutting that stuff down, and they’re all called science.  Sex is for pleasure – and if you approach it carefully, usually without too much danger of pregnancy happening.  I’m usually far more worried about my friends catching STDs than having unwanted children.
But yeah, when I go back a century or two, sex and procreation were pretty much inseparable, a sloppy entangled risk you could reduce only unreliably.  Maybe you could turn that 1-in-20 shot of getting pregnant into 1-in-100 if you pulled out and were careful, but… it still happened.  A lot.
And pregnancy was a sentence, in those days.  Dying during childbirth was a serious possibility, so getting pregnant was a potential death sentence even if you felt comfortable giving away the child.  And if you didn’t want to give birth?  Abortion, back in the days before we understood sanitation and proper surgery, was equally dangerous, if not more so.  You could take abortaficients, but those were like chemotherapy – a semi-controlled poison that may or may not work, and may actually kill you.
Sex was, in many very real ways, a direct link to death, and certainly to a different kind of life.  Back in the days when people literally starved to death for lack of government assistance, an extra mouth to feed could be a strain you couldn’t afford.  Especially if you were a single mother who would have to work, without the assistance of a full-time partner, without the concept of “days off” or “restricted workdays,” as even the comparatively genteel work of being a maid was literally a seventeen-hour day job, six days a week.
Which, as a guy who thinks of sex as more porn than babymaking, is deeply unsettling to contemplate.  That concept that all of this hideous slut-shaming I fight against has a kernel of old truth buried inside it – sleeping around could literally kill you as a woman, and on some level the mothers who were telling women to not give it up were speaking from some aspect of knowledge that hey, if he knocks you up, maybe you bleed out from this unwanted child.
There’s a bit of male privilege contemplating this alternate world, of course, but I also think it’s something that a lot of women who dismiss feminism also don’t ponder too heavily.  The concept that women can control their bodies is as natural to recent generations as the concept that we can have drinking water without cholera – which is to say, such an assumed thing that we forget all of the titanic societal changes that emerged to make that seemingly trivial feature happen.
So of course we’re still having battles over abortion, and birth control, and female reproductive rights.  It’d be eerie if we didn’t.  We’re dealing with the legacy of a whole culture based at least in part of thinking that sex had consequences, and we removed that like a magician whisking a cloth out from under some wine glasses, and now we have this vestigial set of terrors and ingrained shame fighting against a newer world where in fact we don’t have to worry about that.  I’m not saying the fine conservative legislators of Texas are fighting for the right cause – but it’d be like if we suddenly removed the need to eat, and then expected that nobody would fight to protect the legacy of eating animals as a noble and protective cause instead of the gratuitous and then-inexcusable barbarism it would suddenly become.
(Some would argue that it is already.  Mayhap they’re right, which only proves my point.)
But sometime just before I was born, women got handed a fantastic new power, one that shifted the very rules of biology.  We’re still working that out.  And I forget, in my assumption of these scientific miracles, just how fantastic and world-changing that shift continues to be.

Tiny Privileges

Whenever I go out to a restaurant that plays pop music, P!nk’s “Just Give Me A Reason” is playing.
That song is like pouring live ants in my ear.
It’s not that it’s a terrible song – I quite like P!nk, even if I keep wanting to pronounce her name with an alveolar click – but that it doesn’t hold up well on repetition.  It’s a simple, repetitive melody that’s not helped at all by Nate Reuss’s overly earnest response.  I’d wrung everything I needed to hear out of that song by the fifth time I heard it, and yet every time I walk into Jersey Mike’s for a sandwich, there P!nk is, annoying the crap out of me with this summer’s overplayed ballad.
And I’m grateful.
I’ve worked either at home or in an office for nearly twenty years now, having escaped what looked to be a lifetime of retail.  And I remember being stuck listening to the awful loop of whatever it was that our management had decided was pleasurable for our customers – in some cases, the same 45-minute sampler CD that looped over and over again until we found ways to quietly disable it.  Having to listen repeatedly to songs we had come to loathe was just another reminder of how insignificant we were in the scheme of things – low-paid grunts encouraged to shut up and smile no matter what the inconvenience.
Having control over what I can listen to?  That’s a power.  One that might go away if I get another job, a temporary benefit I’m going to relish for today.  It makes me feel a little sad for all the millions of people out there being force-fed Ya Mo’ B There one more time.  And it makes me appreciate the fact that I’m going to put on Fall Out Boy and listen to it until that wears thin, which it will, and then I can quietly discard it.

In Which I Talk About The Male Orgasm, And Feminism, And Stupid Ferretts

As most of y’all know, I’ve moved my explicit writings on sex over to FetLife, and only refer to ’em here when I think they’re particularly important.
In this case, I think it’s important.
I’ve written an essay over at Fet called “The Guilty Orgasm: One Guy’s Perspective On Guygasms,” which in turn is a response to a much better essay by a woman, titled “Men’s Orgasms: A Woman’s Perspective.” My essay has well over a thousand likes, and a fascinating comment stream of 200 or so comments; hers has an amazing 2,500 likes and 500+ comments, and I think should be mandated reading for men who have sex with women.
I’m not going to summarize overmuch, but the core point is how the societal expectation of how men should be in bed actually in many ways makes sex less enjoyable for both the woman and the man… and the two essays are a really good analysis of how men’s behavior is affected by a patriarchy just as much as women’s is.  It’s about vulnerability, and why that’s really difficult for guys in bed.
In some circumstances, I might post the essay on my blog, but in that case, the essay that inspired it would still be behind a login wall, and I’d really encourage you to read both.  Unfortunately, bugmenot has blocked FetLife, so it’s harder to log in, but a throwaway email address and two minutes’ worth of creating an account will get you in.  It’s an interesting discussion, and worth your time if you can get to it.