Category: Uncategorized

Dogmatic and dishonest

Ross Douthat points out the moral defect being exhibited by a corporation and a university in the New York Times, which happens to be identical to that previously demonstrated by a writer’s organization:

In both cases, Mozilla and Brandeis, there was a striking difference between the clarity of what had actually happened and the evasiveness of the official responses to the events. Eich stepped down rather than recant his past support for the view that one man and one woman makes a marriage; Hirsi Ali’s invitation was withdrawn because of her sweeping criticisms of Islamic culture. But neither the phrase “marriage” nor the word “Islam” appeared in the initial statements Mozilla and Brandeis released.

Instead, the Mozilla statement rambled in the language of inclusion: “Our organizational culture reflects diversity and inclusiveness. … Our culture of openness extends to encouraging staff and community to share their beliefs and opinions. …”

The statement on Hirsi Ali was slightly more direct, saying that “her past statements … are inconsistent with Brandeis University’s core values.” But it never specified what those statements or those values might be — and then it fell back, too, on pieties about diversity: “In the spirit of free expression that has defined Brandeis University throughout its history, Ms. Hirsi Ali is welcome to join us on campus in the future to engage in a dialogue about these important issues.”

What both cases illustrate, with their fuzzy rhetoric masking ideological pressure, is a serious moral defect at the heart of elite culture in America.

The defect, crucially, is not this culture’s bias against social conservatives, or its discomfort with stinging attacks on non-Western religions. Rather, it’s the refusal to admit — to others, and to itself — that these biases fundamentally trump the commitment to “free expression” or “diversity” affirmed in mission statements and news releases.

This refusal, this self-deception, means that we have far too many powerful communities (corporate, academic, journalistic) that are simultaneously dogmatic and dishonest about it — that promise diversity but only as the left defines it, that fill their ranks with ideologues and then claim to stand athwart bias and misinformation, that speak the language of pluralism while presiding over communities that resemble the beau ideal of Sandra Y. L. Korn.

It was precisely the same pattern of behavior with the SFWA. The rhetoric was fuzzy and muddled, and the accusations were incoherent. No actual reason was ever given for the purging of the nameless member; if I had not announced the identity of the expelled member on my blog, no one outside the inner circle of the organization would have even known who had been successfully targeted for removal by the SFWA president and his obedient Board.

The reason for the deceit is twofold; it is first necessary to preserve the self-conceit of the individuals involved. They do not wish to admit that they are hypocrites who are failing to live up to their professed ideals. It is no different than the reason priests who commit child abuse, teachers who have affairs with their students, and con men who perpetrate frauds are reluctant to confess to their misdeeds even after they are caught red-handed; they are ashamed of their idealistic failures and seek to hide those failures from the knowledge of those who will judge them for it.

And second, the self-deception is vital because admitting their failures means sacrificing the moral high ground in criticizing other organizations and losing their ability to hold other organizations accountable for doing the same thing they are doing.

Both reasons are why it is vital to continue to flaunt their actions in their faces, without mercy, until they admit what they have done and make an open and public choice between their supposed ideals and their ideological dogma. SFWA thought it was marginalizing me by purging me from its ranks, but instead, they elevated my stature, increased my readership, delineated the ideological lines in SF/F, and handed every critic of their dishonesty and dogma an effective weapon to use against them until they either a) come out of the closet concerning their ideology, or b ) correct their self-destructive course.

I think the interesting question to ask here is not why these organizations are behaving in this morally defective fashion, but rather, why now?

Resistance is necessary

It appears the federal government may have learned something since the days of Waco and Ruby Ridge:

A Nevada cattle rancher appears to have won his week-long battle with the federal government over a controversial cattle roundup that had led to the arrest of several protesters.

Cliven Bundy went head to head with the Bureau of Land Management over the removal of hundreds of his cattle from federal land, where the government said they were grazing illegally.

Bundy claims his herd of roughly 900 cattle have grazed on the land along the riverbed near Bunkerville, 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas, since 1870 and threatened a “range war” against the BLM on the Bundy Ranch website after one of his sons was arrested while protesting the removal of the cattle.

“I have no contract with the United States government,” Bundy said. “I was paying grazing fees for management and that’s what BLM was supposed to be, land managers and they were managing my ranch out of business, so I refused to pay.”

The federal government had countered that Bundy “owes the American people in excess of $1 million ” in unpaid grazing fees and “refuses to abide by the law of land, despite many opportunities over the last 20 years to do so.”

However, today the BLM said it would not enforce a court order to remove the cattle and was pulling out of the area.

“Based on information about conditions on the ground, and in consultation with law enforcement, we have made a decision to conclude the cattle gather because of our serious concern about the safety of employees and members of the public,” BLM Director Neil Kornze said.

On the other hand, its entirely possible that the BLM simply has not been militarized to the extent of the ATF and the FBI. As Bundy and his supporters have shown, one need not assume that one’s rights can be trampled at will.

Another hit piece

Lest you wonder about the tangible reality of the Blue SF/F- Pink SF/F divide, observe that Damien Walter has penned another hit piece in The Guardian aimed at a right-wing SF author, this time Larry Corriea, entitled “Science fiction needs to reflect that the future is queer“.

Does it now? That is an odd title, especially considering that a queer future is no future at all, given what we know about biology and human reproduction. But let us permit Mr. Walter speak his piece:

I spent most of my youth being told to get a haircut. As a boy of slight build who usually had hair down around my shoulders, I looked a bit too much like a girl for the comfort of the home counties. Society gets angry when gender roles are blurred, precisely because those roles are a fragile act put on with clothes, hairstyles and makeup. If they weren’t enforced, clearly defined gender roles would not exist.

I take comfort in the idea that most of the young men telling others to get a haircut today are rushing home to play at being buxom dark elf warrior maidens in World of Warcraft. Gamer culture has gained a bad reputation for misogyny, but it seems male gamers are more than a little curious about playing out female gender roles. It makes perfect sense. The real world enforces gender roles, but virtual worlds let gamers express the feminine parts of themselves that don’t fit in with their masculine identity.

Solipsism alert! Translation: Effeminate little boy is treated as if he’s a freak and a queer because he looks like a girl. Spends the rest of his life attempting to get back at society because he can’t figure out how to get a haircut and act like the other boys. And apparently he knows so little about online games that he doesn’t realize most male gamers play female characters because: a) if they’re going to spend hours looking at their character’s ass, they would prefer it to be an attractive female one, and, b) people give female characters lots of free stuff.

As proof of the fact that Walter simply doesn’t know what he is talking about, I note that while there are High Elves, Night Elves, and Blood Elves in World of Warcraft, there are no dark elves. Nor are any of the elves “buxom”.

The kind of virtual worlds that video games allow us to enter have been commonplace in science fiction for decades. But the way that the virtual inevitably blurs the representation of sex and gender is never explicitly dealt with. Science fiction is torn between its higher mission to explore the future, and its lower function as mass entertainment. Deep Space Nine may be the gayest Star Trek, but in common with most of sci-fi’s major franchises, it still keeps homosexuality and queerness of all kinds off screen.

Science fiction novels have gone much further in exploring queer futures. From the 1960s onwards New Wave authors like Joanna Russ, Samuel Delany, Ursula Le Guin and Thomas Disch began to push forward the representation of LGBT themes in science fiction. Russ’s 1975 novel The Female Man used the tool of alternative universes to explore how gender roles are socially constructed. As liberal democracies like Britain welcome their first gay marriages, queer visions of the future look prescient. But despite the success of these authors, SF still clings to an unrealistically straight vision of the future.

First, SF is rife with a broad variety of sexual freaks, fairies, and flamers. If one troubles to count up the number of sexually abnormal characters in SF, there are almost surely more than the two percent that they represent in the real world. Second, Walter’s article is parochial in the extreme. As countries from southern Africa to northern Eurasia criminalize homosexuality, it defies belief to claim that the sexual libertinism that has belatedly infested the demographically dying West is likely to represent the future, much less is certain to do so.

When author and historian Alex Dally Macfarlane made a call earlier this year for a vision of post-binary gender in SF,
her intelligent argument was met with predictably intractable ignorance
from conservative sci-fi fans. For writers and fans like Larry Correia,
whose virulent attack on MacFarlane was excellently dissected by Jim C Hines,
sex is a biological imperative and the idea of gender as a social
construct is a damn liberal lie! But Correia boils it down to a much
simpler argument. However accurate a queer future might be, SF authors
must continue to pander to the bigotry of conservative readers if they
want to be “commercial”.

It is readily apparent that Walter is not only a dishonest propagandist, but he is an inept SF author as well. He clearly violates the “Show, Don’t Tell” rule here, as he first claims that Macfarlane’s piece was intelligent – read it, it wasn’t – then claims that it was met with “ignorance” while refusing to provide any actual examples of said “ignorance”. Notice that while he describes Larry’s critique as a “virulent attack”, he fails to link to it, instead linking to what he inaccurately describes as McCreepy’s excellent dissection – read it, it wasn’t.

Which is of course nonsense. The science fiction novels of Iain M
Banks were bestsellers many times over, in part because the future they
explored was openly queer. Citizens of Banks’ future society the Culture
have the ability to change their sex at will, and frequently shift
between sexes and gender roles. Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 became both a
bestseller and multiple award winner with a vision of the future that
included fluid non-binary gender. And Nicola Griffith’s historical epic
Hild, nominated for this year’s Nebula awards by members of the SFWA, is
built around a bisexual protagonist.

The best science
fiction literature explores a future of fluid gender identity that is
much closer than many imagine. Genetic researchers have already
discovered the two genes that battle to determine the sex of every human,
opening the possibility of biological sex change in adult humans at the
genetic level. Combine these scientific advances with the changing
structure of our society and the gender shifts of virtual worlds and,
far from being the lifestyle of a minority, queerness looks very much
like the mainstream culture of the future. If science fiction has a role
at all, it’s to reflect that reality, not deny it.

First, the novels of Iain M Banks were not bestsellers because the futures they explored were infested with homosexuality. Indeed, sexuality in the Culture was largely irrelevant in light of the irrelevancy of biology, the human body, and indeed, the human mind. Banks’s future was primarily “queer” in that the AI-controlled Culture was sterile and, like Star Trek, required interactions with societies outside the Culture to provide any drama.

Nicola Griffith’s Hild tends to prove what Larry was saying: despite the benefit of its Nebula nomination and the Guardian coverage, it is presently ranked 42,234 on Amazon. Hardly evidence that “queerness looks very much
like the mainstream culture of the future”.

But his various moral and intellectual failings notwithstanding, the most offensive thing that Walter does in this article is question if science fiction has a role at all. It does have a role, an important role, but Walter, being one of the morally vacuous Autumn People described so vividly by Ray Bradbury, will never understand what it is. And the idea that science fiction’s only possible role is to reflect reality is downright laughable; if that were the case, so much for these common SF tropes: faster-than-light travel, alien life, secular societies, peaceful race relations, benign world government, and, of course, legal homosexuality.

So you see, we’re not the ones drawing the battle line. Though I am, as it happens, quite content to see Pink SF/F go headlong in this direction. Because if it does, it won’t be in the mainstream for long. And we’ll be more than happy to pick up the shattered pieces of what was once their market.

Live by the punch, die by the punch

I’m not sure which is more amusing, this young woman whining about her well-merited concussion or the people who are shocked that so many people aren’t sympathetic to a poor little woman who didn’t do anything except punch a rugby player in the face in the middle of a brawl.

Everyone with a warrior woman fetish should watch the video, repeatedly, until they get it through their heads that women simply cannot fight men. Too small, too weak, too slow. See the ragdoll-flopping and the way she goes limp? That’s from a single punch from a college-age man she assaulted who didn’t see her attack coming and clearly isn’t a trained fighter. She was lucky she only got a concussion; if he’d aimed a little lower, he’d probably have broken her jaw.

(Old martial arts trick: don’t aim for the cheekbones on a rear hand cross, aim for the jaw. It’s much harder to crush a cheekbone than to knock the jaw out of alignment. It’s instant incapacitation. Also, uppercuts work better to daze the opponent.)

This comment was the best: “I must be from a different era. I don’t hit women and I don’t like seeing
women being hit. Amazingly so many comments support the guy. Sick
world.”

I, on the other hand, very much enjoy seeing people who initiate violence smacked around, whether they are men or women. Although it is probably funnier when it is women getting flattened, because they seem to think that they have the right to initiate violence without suffering any consequences for it.

The thing is, it is very, very easy to avoid getting punched in the face. A) Don’t mouth off to anyone bigger than you are. B) Don’t hit anyone. If you are reading this, you are probably aware that I am not the nicest or most easygoing person in the world, but I have never, in my entire life, had anyone hit me back for anything I did or said. There is a very good reason for this: I am civil to strangers and I do not initiate the use of violence.

That doesn’t mean I won’t wash my hands in your blood if you hand me an engraved invitation by assaulting me, or that I won’t enjoy the sound of bones cracking and the rush of pure adrenaline that physical altercations provide… but I will not start anything. I may even turn the other cheek, if I am feeling particularly inspired. But that’s something to keep in mind. It is simply impossible to know if that quiet, polite guy in the corner, or that gentle giant sitting at the bar, is the sort of adrenaline junkie who happens to get off on the occasional burst of violence.

What most women don’t understand, either because they fear violence or don’t take it seriously, is that for many, if not most, men, it is a RUSH.

“Dual loyalty would be an improvement”

Ann Coulter points out that the big GOP donor Sheldon Alderson advocates immigration and amnesty in the USA, while simultanously supporting border fences and deportations in Israel:

Adelson is a big backer of amnesty, telling the Wall Street Journal: “It
would be inhumane to send those people back, to send 12 million people
out of this country. … So we’ve got to find a way, find a route for
those people to get legal citizenship.”

His newspaper, Israel Today, the largest newspaper in Israel, is wildly patriotic on immigration (and everything else). Israel Today has trumpeted the success of the 15-foot razor-wire
fence along Israel’s 140-mile border with Egypt, triumphantly noting
last August that, for the first time, “no infiltrations were recorded
from the Egyptian border, compared to 193 from the same month last
year.”

Adelson himself had suggested just such a policy to the Los Angeles
Times last year, saying he wanted to “Put a big fence around our
country.” By “our country,” he, of course, meant Israel. In America, he wants
illegal immigrants pouring across the border to provide him with an
endless supply of cheap labor.

Recently, Israel has been “rounding up” African refugees, giving them
$3,500 and plane tickets to Uganda, to encourage them to “self-deport.”
Welcome to El Al Airlines. We’re about to begin pre-boarding for
Flight 259, offering non-stop, one-way service to Kampala, Uganda. At
this time we’d like to invite our premium-plus illegal immigrants to
board.

Wait! I thought we couldn’t “round up” any illegal immigrants! I thought “self-deportation” was a laughable idea!

The amazing thing is that Adelson’s defenders failed to grasp the damning aspect of the quote. Daniel Greenfield of FrontPage tries to defend Adelson by pointing out: “The “fence” quote refers to keeping terrorists from the Palestinian
Authority out. It certainly isn’t about migrants coming through Egypt.”

That may be, but that’s really not the problem. The problem is that when Mr. Adelson referred to his country, he was talking about Israel, not the USA. Which means that while he may be in possession of a document that says he is a citizen of the United States, he is observably not an American, as evidenced by both the policies he advocates and his own words.

The problem is not that Mr. Adelson’s critics are anti-Semitic. The problem is that Mr. Adelson is anti-American.

The abuse-lottery of public school

This is a useful statistic about sexual harassment in junior high to keep in your pocket the next time you are asked about homeschooling:

An alarming number of instances of inappropriate sexual behavior among middle school students appear to be going unnoticed by teachers and other adults, a new study concludes. The study, written by three University of Illinois researchers, found that 21 percent of the students in the survey experienced some form of physical sexual harassment.

The students reported instances like being slapped on the buttocks, being rubbed against their bodies sexually or being forced to kiss another student. Much of the behavior happened in open areas, most commonly in the hallways, classrooms or gymnasiums.

And that’s just in junior high. Combine it with four more years high school and the fact that “9.6 percent of students in a national survey reported experiencing
educator sexual abuse at some point
in their previous k-12 school years”, and there is at least a one-in-three chance that your public school-attending child will be either sexually harassed or sexually abused at school.

The irony, of course, is that many of the same people who go nuclear over minor sexual harassment in the workplace will attempt to minimize the significance of sexual harassment at school, as if pre-teen children are more capable of dealing with it than adults.

One-in-five schoolchildren sexually harassed by other kids by the time they finish junior high. One-in-three schoolchildren sexually harassed or sexually abused by the time they graduate from high school. How little does a mother care about her children that she would voluntarily subject them to that abuse-lottery?

Neoconnery is anti-American

A Pakistani neocon explains why it is vital for American troops to remain at the disposal of Pakistani interests:

We neocons have fallen out of favor, not just on the left, where “neocon” is routinely used as a term of abuse, but also on the right, where libertarian-minded conservatives who favor a smaller (and cheaper) military have seized the initiative. Rand Paul, the junior senator from Kentucky, is just one of many Tea Party conservatives who has defined his foreign policy views in opposition to the neocons. And it’s easy to see why….

Given all of this, why am I still a neocon? Why do I still believe that the U.S. should maintain an overwhelming military edge over all potential rivals, and that we as a country ought to be willing to use our military power in defense of our ideals as well as our interests narrowly defined? There are two reasons: The first is that American strength is the linchpin of a peaceful, economically integrating world; and the second is that we know what it looks like when America embraces amoral realpolitik, and it’s not pretty.

Like it or not, America’s failure in Iraq does not change the fact that global stability depends on American global leadership, and American global leadership costs money. The United States is at the heart of a dense web of alliances. We extend formal security guarantees to more than 50 countries. Some see these alliances and guarantees as little more than a burden the U.S. can no longer afford. Yet what they actually do is dampen security competition. They reassure partner countries that they needn’t build up their militaries to defend themselves against their neighbors, which then reassures their neighbors that they needn’t build up their militaries. This virtuous cycle is one of the central reasons Western Europe and Japan recovered so quickly after the devastation of World War II, and why globalization has helped ease poverty around the world. For this virtuous cycle to be maintained, however, U.S. security guarantees must be considered credible. It must be clear that when the U.S. makes a security commitment to another country, that commitment will be met. This in turn means that the U.S. military must have the power and the reach to defend countries far from our borders.

It’s not an accident that most of the necons complaining that American isolationists ” don’t understand about American military power—and American morality” are second- and third-generation immigrants. They may be U.S. citizens but they are not Americans and they simply do not understand, at all, George Washington’s warning about entangling alliances.

Quite to the contrary, they demand more and more entanglement, preferably with their true homelands. As the Baseball, hot dogs, and apple pie-named Reihan Salam admits:

Why insist on moralistic crusades, as neocons are wont to do? I suppose I have a personal reason for doing so. It turns out that this week isn’t just the anniversary of the fall of Baghdad. It is also the 43rd anniversary of a telegram which an American consul general, Archer Blood, took the unusual
step of condemning his own government. As Gary Bass recounts in his chilling book The Blood Telegram, Richard Nixon and his chief foreign policy consigliere, Henry Kissinger, enthusiastically backed Pakistan’s military junta in its efforts to not only overturn the results of its country’s first free and fair election, but to massacre hundreds of thousands of Bengalis in an effort to teach what was then a rebellious province a lesson. One of the men who died, as it happens, was my uncle.

Knowing fully well that he was endangering his career, Blood decried
the American failure to defend democracy or to denounce Pakistani
atrocities. He also knew that had President Nixon decided to lift a
finger, he could have forced Pakistan to stay its hand. Yet it seems
that humanitarian considerations never entered the picture for Nixon and
Kissinger. They were apparently too taken with treating the world as a
chessboard to bother reckoning with the monstrous crimes they were
aiding and abetting. Though Pakistan was unable to prevent the emergence
of an independent Bangladesh, thanks in large part to India’s decision
to intervene, the country remains scarred by the bloodletting. Imagine
if a different president hadn’t cheered on Pakistan’s military rulers
but rather threatened to use U.S. power in defense of Bengali civilians.

Neocons are, for the most part, non-Americans who use the United States as a base in order to subvert American national interest in favor of Pakistani, or Israeli, or Iraqi, or Ukrainian national interests. The massacre of hundreds of thousands of barbarians by another group of barbarians is of no concern whatsoever to the American people. And clearly it is a mistake to have allowed men like Mr. Salem to enter the country, because he has repaid his hosts by attempting to involve them in the very violence he fled Pakistan to escape!

One can’t even properly describe these neocons as traitors, because they are loyal to their nations. The problem is that their nation is not the American nation. What Mr. Salem does not realize is that Rand Paul and most American isolationists understands very well what Mr. Salem and his fellow neocons want. They simply believe in putting American interests first.

The benefits of interventionism

Strangely enough, we’re not hearing so much about those wonderfully inspiring purple fingers in the lead-up to the coming Iraqi elections:

Children in Iraq could be legally married before the age of nine under sweeping legislation tabled on Tuesday that introduces new religious restrictions on women’s rights. As almost its last act before elections at the end of the month, the Iraqi parliament looks likely to pass new marital rules for its majority Shia community with a draft law criticised by human rights activists as “legalised inquality”

The legislation has been approved by the governing coalition in an effort to attract support from Shia Muslims in the April 30 vote.

Current Iraqi law sets the legal age for marriage at 18 without parental approval and states girls as young as 15 can be married only with a guardian’s approval. It does not allow for special provisions according to sect. But the legislation, known as the Jaafari law, introduces rules almost identical to those of neighbouring Iran, a Shia-dominated Islamic theocracy.

That’s certainly an effective way to reduce the rate of illegitimate births by teenage mothers. Remember, we are reliably informed that representative democracy is the best possible form of government for all human population groups and sub-species. And since all morals and cultural norms are relative, on what basis can anyone complain about six-year old girls getting married, especially anyone living in a degraded culture where men can “marry” men, women can “marry” women, and female children are permitted to obtain contraceptives and abortions without parental consent.

It’s democratic progress, ergo inevitable. Relax and enjoy it.

Lion’s Den IX: Sarah Hoyt

Sarah Hoyt is dipping her toe into the cold, but liberating waters of independent publishing with her book WITCHFINDER. She describes it thusly:

In Avalon, where the world runs on magic, the king of Britannia appoints a witchfinder to rescue unfortunates with magical power from lands where magic is a capital crime. Or he did. But after the royal princess was kidnapped from her cradle twenty years ago, all travel to other universes has been forbidden, and the position of witchfinder abolished. Seraphim Ainsling, Duke of Darkwater, son of the last witchfinder, breaks the edict. He can’t simply let people die for lack of rescue. His stubborn compassion will bring him trouble and disgrace, turmoil and danger — and maybe, just maybe, the greatest reward of all.

Sarah adds: This book was very strange. First, it started as an almost joke.  A friend
suggested we collaborate on it because, hey, people liked regency fantasies,
and we wrote a proposal (which was nothing like this.  For one, it was for a
much shorter book) and we sent it to my agent.  My agent first balked at
sending it out because “you have a woman from present-day Earth and someone
in the regency.  No one will know what to do with it.”  (Apparently she
never read things like Diana Wynne Jones Chrestomanci series or the ton of
time travel romance books that were so popular in the eighties.  Okay, truth
be told, I never read those either, but I DID hear of them.  Impossible not
to.)  Then she sent it out under pressure (or at least she said she had) and
the rejections agreed with her opinion. So, this book went in the drawer with about fifteen others that never sold
in proposal.

Two and a half years ago when I started blogging every day (and wasn’t out
politically yet) my biggest issue was what to blog about.  (It still is,
because there isn’t something that fascinating to me every day.)  So I
decided to make Fridays easier by posting a chapter of a novel every Friday. 
Why Witchfinder?  No idea.  I think it more or less was the first one to
come up.  Also, it was definitely not a Baen novel, so no problems with
upsetting my publisher.

I wrote to my friend, asked her if she’d send me a quit-claim on the novel.
She did.  I started posting it.  I thought it would be a shortish novel and
never come out officially, but I gave people the option of donating $6 and
when it was done, I’d edit it and send them an ebook.  I made $5k.  While
it’s not the advance I normally get for science fiction and fantasy, it was
the advance I got from Prime Crime for mystery.  (SF/F pay me better.)
Also, when I sent it out to be edited, my three editors who are two trusted
friends and my husband (yes, I know typos escaped.  Part of it was the way
it was written.  You should have seen it before) all thought I should
publish it.  Which led to my publishing it.

But structure/plot/possibly typo-ing it all feels very odd to me.  If you’d
asked me if I could write a novel a chapter a week over two years, I’d have
said you were nuts.  And yet, when I read it (other than continuity typos,
like people changing name, which I was still fixing at the last minute) it
read as well (or as badly, depending on your opinion!) as any other of my
works. Except perhaps the world building got WAY more convoluted than it
normally does, because I world build in sudden fits of brilliance and a year
and a half is a lot of time for such fits.
So, in a way this novel is a first two ways: it’s my first slow-written
novel, and my first indie novel.

VD: If you’re interested in reading WITCHFINDER, writing a review, and sending it to me for posting here, please send me an email with WITCHFINDER in the subject. And if you have any questions for Sarah about her book, please post them in the comments here.

I’m also looking for 10 launch reviewers for both a)  AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LANDS and b) TRANSHUMAN OR SUBHUMAN. For the former, you’ll need to be able to read it and post a review on Amazon over the coming weekend. Email me with either AWAKE or TRANSHUMAN in the subject, but not both, please.

Legalizing prostitution

Dr. Helen considers whether legal prostitution would free men from sexual control by women:

How can it be legal to sell sex but illegal to buy it? Who are you selling sex to if no men are allowed to buy it? Of course, any time one sees a feminist of the Catherine MacKinnon ilk, all logic goes out the window as long as men are rounded up and put in jail. This is sick, twisted logic and has no place in a free society. It was a group of women who apparently banned prostitution in the US according to this Wikipedia entry:

    Originally, prostitution was widely legal in the United States. Prostitution was made illegal in almost all states between 1910 and 1915 largely due to the influence of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

Perhaps women don’t want the competition from prostitutes for resources from men? Or they just feel disgusted that a man might be able to get sex so easily? I do wonder if men were able to go freely to prostitutes without fear of jail time if it would free them sexually from female and (and state) control?

It’s hard to think it would make too much difference, but then, the sexual marketplace does tend to look very different to a high status man to whom there are more sluts readily available than he can possibly nail than it does to a low status man who is working on a multi-year dateless spell.

The thing is, the Alphas and Betas don’t need more sexual access and I don’t see too many Deltas and Gammas availing themselves of whores because it’s hard to put a prostitute on a pedestal. It would tend to dispel the illusion of womanly virtue to which they cling, often in direct denial of the evidence.

My suspicion, and it is only that, is that legalizing prostitution might have a net virtuous effect on women, as the distinction between SMV and MMV would be more clear. In which case, the answer would be no, legalization would not free men from the sexual control of women.

In any event, there is no reason to ban prostitution except on grounds of religious morality, and if it is unconstitutional to ban everything from homogamy to abortion on those grounds, then I see no reason why the trade in sexual services should be limited in any way. Whether one pays the woman or not, the moral infraction committed is the same.