An Outpouring of Rage

I am a writer. No, that's not strong enough. I am a baccalaureate scholar with a degree in English literature. No, that's not good enough either.

I am autistic.

As many of those with autism associate with numbers, so do I with letters. Words are my lifeblood. Still, I suffer from occasional yet thankfully brief bouts of aphasia, which can still almost induce panic attacks. Were I to suffer a stroke or other calamity that stripped me of my ability to use words, I fear that I might die simply due to being separated from that which makes my mind whole.

Due to this, I cannot simply sit back and mock as others do the prevalence of books such as Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey as they top the bestseller list. True, books such as these, abominations that clutter the bargain shelves, are sometimes quite literally a dime a dozen. What sets off those two, however, is that they have sold millions of copies and are lauded as paragons of writing by a significant portion of the English-speaking world.

Twilight is bad enough, but Shades is even worse. It began as Twilight fan-fiction, in an alternate continuity where Edward was a multi-billionaire with an obsession with sadism in place of being a sparkly bloodsucker. It evolved into a three-part series of piss-poor smut with endlessly repeated phrases, bland characters and bullshit. Then again, the characters are once again bland so that the sheltered reader can self-insert and fantasize. Shades capitalizes on the rape fantasy that many women seem to have, the concept of "safe" rape. These women are deeply disturbed. To somehow sexualize an act that is literally built on stripping the humanity from a fellow human being requires a mind that I, thankfully, do not possess.

I have nothing against bondage or S&M kink, but this is none of that. It is bullshit pretending to be kink, allowing housewives to have their cake and eat it too by providing not only safe rape, but a bad boy for them to change. The sheer number of daddy issues in that last sentence alone should make several psychoanalysts spontaneously ejaculate.

It deeply troubles me - no, not strong enough. It terrifies me that the English language as a whole seems to be growing more stupid. This isn't like Shakespeare, where brilliant plays were presented to a bawdy and undereducated audience. This is a series of over two thousand pages, rife with spelling errors and endlessly repeated words. This was clearly published without any oversight or editing, as the author just did a find-replace search to remove Edward and Bella's names. The repetitiveness is understandable from that angle because a bad writer doesn't reread her previous chapters, so each new chapter of the fan fiction, posted as an independent document, would have the same cliches.

Words are my lifeblood, and this is an outpouring of necrosis. Consumers dictate what writers will produce in an attempt to make a living, and I am petrified to think of what may come next with this precedent set. Obviously these books cater to a festering psychological sore in Western women's lives, but if we hold up our damages as badges of honor, turn a detriment into a desirable, then our culture - and our language - will assuredly backslide into a fetid monstrosity.

Temptation my white Irish ass

What's the best way to prevent someone from doing something? Obviously this answer will vary and there is no one universal answer, but if you said that a good way to keep someone from undertaking an action is to treat them as intelligent and lay out the negative consequences for them, trusting them to do the right thing, there's a good chance you're right.
If you said that the universally best way is to just shame the person into submission and tell them that they don't know well enough to be trusted with their own lives, please take this moment to apply a stapler to your groin.

In case you haven't yet guessed, this post is riding the coattails of Coattails in reference to policy and rhetoric. In the barest essence, abstinence teaching doesn't fucking work. If you protest, look to the person whom Conservatives hold up as the proof that abstinence does work: Bristol Palin. She got herself knocked up and is still unmarried. And that last part seems to be the real thing about abstinence: its proponents seem to believe that "abstinence" means, "if you fuck you gotta get married," rather than the real origin word, "abstain." Then again, how can one expect Conservative thought to make any goddamn sense? In that vein,

Hypocrisy


Family values. The fuck are "family values," anyway? Nobody in the Romney or Bush or, hell, ANY camp can tell you what family values are. It's just a term they spew over and over like a moron with a word-a-day calendar trying to sound smart. Speaking of family values, how about we look at Newt Gingrich? How many wives has he ABANDONED TO DIE now? I think the tally is four. As soon as one of his wives falls ill he starts banging some other broad and once his wife is terminal he outright leaves her for this new model. This is not a one-time event, either. It's happened, like, three times now. Check it out for yourself.

With family values still firmly in mind, how about Larry Craig or any of the dozens of Republican congressmen and senators who have been caught in the act of performing or soliciting gay sex? Considering that one of the only definitions of family values that Conservatives can agree on is "not homos," that's a pretty fucking big issue, eh? In fact, let's use another heading. I have more to bitch about and it needs a separate section:

"Temptation"


The idea of temptation is easy enough for anyone to understand. You find yourself drawn to perform an act that is either sinful or not-good in some other way. Be it a hot chick when you're married, the opportunity to shoplift, or the urge to stab your fucking seventh-grade English teacher for exploiting your autism to abuse you (or maybe that last one was just me), something tempts the average person almost every day.
Now, straight males, tell me this: when is the last time you looked at another man's ass and had to resist the nigh-overwhelming urge to release a noise like a gorilla whose nipples are aflame before leaping upon said ass and pounding it until it resembled Jennie-O ground turkey? The answer, for most of the world, is "never," followed by, "what the fuck is wrong with you for asking that kind of question?"
That, my friends, is the difference between genuinely straight people and "straight" Conservatives. I bullshit you not, jump to any religious pundit or politician babbling about religion, particularly on Fox News, and just wait for one of them to mention "resisting the temptation of homosexuality" and how difficult such resistance is. In actuality, for those whose brains are wired for heterosexuality, there is no temptation, because we aren't wired to find those of our same sex attractive. I have watched my openly gay dorm-mate in college prance about in naught but his underwear and my only comment was to put on a damn shirt.
Find yourself a Bible. Open up to Leviticus, the book most Conservatives reference when put to task to actually give a point as to where it says not to be gay. This book also says to kill children who talk back and that rape victims must marry their rapists, among other things, but notice the term for lying with a man as with a woman: "it is an abomination." Not a sin, an abomination. Look at what else is an abomination: wearing clothes made of more than one fabric or color. If you've guessed by now that an abomination in the Bible isn't so much a monstrosity as something that's not a good idea to do, you've got it in one. Leviticus was written during the time that the Israelites were still numbering in the double-digits and were, like the rest of Western humanity, barely better than bonobos. If they could fuck something, they would. This would result in low reproduction and they'd all die off. Now look at Idiocracy, the Mike Judge cult classic. It's easier to tell stupid people that you can talk to plants or that, "I'm God so what I say goes" rather than trying to explain the intricate details to your flock while they're trying to bone their camels.
The Old Testament also has God ordering His people to rape the women of a conquered city and mount heads on spikes in His name, so maybe we shouldn't be following that particular half of the Bible so closely these days...
To make a long tangent a bit shorter, it's seeming to me that many decades ago the Conservatives' forefathers made a big damn deal about homosexuality so their children repressed their urges, since it appears that nearly every mainstream Conservative is at least bisexual from their "struggles with homosexual urges" that nobody else in the country really has to deal with.

Think on another section of temptation as seen by Conservatives: have you ever wondered how these groups, in their protests of things, come up with such perverse and insane ideas on their projected "slippery slopes"? To reference homosexuality again, one of the common protests is that if gay marriage is allowed it's only a short trip to people fucking and wanting to marry chickens. To me, this is evidence that Conservative perversion extends deep and they're afraid that if they're given permission to be gay they won't be able to control their actual twisted sexual urges, fucking barn animals or running through the streets violently raping people. In my opinion, we should all be very afraid of what twisted fantasies run through the minds of Republicans in power.