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.”
Why Your Lust For A Shared Fandom Is Fucking Up Your Relationships
My friend Rahul Kanakia wrote an excellent article called “Why Do All Sci-Fi Novels Assume That If A Person Likes All The Same Stuff As You, Then You’re Their Soulmate?” And there, he highlighted one of the major fallacies of geek culture: ZOMG IF I COULD JUST FIND A WOMAN WHO LIKES D&D, THEN WE’RE MEANT TO BE.
But honestly, while your mutual love of GI Joe cartoons is a good starting point to launch talks, it’s by no means a guarantee that you’re gonna be good at a relationship. I mean, yeah, “She loves D&D!” seems great – but if you’re a passionate roleplayer who nobly flings the rulebook aside in your quest to discover Your True Character, and you hook up with a girl who’s a merciless power-player who’d cheerfully run an orphan-slaughtering factory if the XP boost got her to twentieth level, then you’re probably not going to work out well in the long run.
That geek fallacy assumes, incorrectly, that there’s only one thing to love about any given media property – so if you both like it, then you both like the same thing. Yet every fandom’s a big place. When I say I love Star Wars, I love Luke. Others love Han. Or Darth Vader. Or Jar-Jar. And you seriously think a guy who has a room full of Jar-Jar collectibles is going to connect with the Capulet that is Lady Vader?
Now, I’m not saying love can’t blossom from the same fandom. (Frankly, I’ve never found two Terry Pratchett fans who couldn’t work it out.) But when fandom is presented as the unerring key to your heart, that leads to disaster. Because that encourages sad, lonely men (and women!) to view the opposite sex as some sort of collectible action figure – “Wait! I found the girl who likes Pokemon! That means I’m done!”
So they discard women who don’t like Pokemon, narrowing their vision to find that one Pikachu girl.
And they find her, and of course she’s surrounded by tons of other blinkered dudes who are convinced that if they can just get her attention, they are guaranteed love.
And they find her beset by men of all sorts, so many drooling dudes that it starts to erode their enjoyment in this hobby – sure, maybe she loved Pokemon once, but in a Pavlovian process she is now coming to associate “Pokemon” with “guys constantly pawing at her,” and that’s not cool.
But lo, they persevere on, pushing past all the other guys to become her friend. And they genuinely seem to believe on some level that merely a) being in close proximity to her, and b) sharing this hobby means c) hot smoochin’ FOREVER.
Yet A + B != C here.
That’s a problem with American culture in general, not just nerd culture. Every love story slurs “falling in love” and “staying in love” together, because functioning long-term relationships are hard to make dramatic. Falling in love, that’s exciting! It’s a first! Fireworks of new things! And breaking up, that’s exciting! All the arguments and final decisions!
So what we get, filtered through the lens of narrative interest, is this weird idea that “falling in love” has mostly the same mechanics as “maintaining a relationship.” And so we come to think what makes a good relationship is this constant fascination, endlessly going out for coffee and exchanging secrets and finding new places to go, because that’s what young couples do.
Except that’s the start of a relationship. All those grand gestures are because you’re finding out what the other person is like, having all of these grand talks because you don’t know them yet – and you’re trying to determine whether this is, indeed, good. And I’m not saying you shouldn’t be interested in someone, because part of maintaining a good relationship involves not going on autopilot – but too many old married couples have tried to restart their relationship by “Let’s go out for coffee,” only to discover that they actually don’t have much left to say to each other.
And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Gini and I have been together for fifteen years. We’ve heard all our good stories. We don’t have much to talk about because we’ve been there for everything that’s happened over the last fifteen years – we catch up when someone comes back from a convention, or when the new Avengers trailer drops. But if our relationship was predicated on “all the new things we did together,” our marriage would be buried in a broken heap down at the dump.
But what nerds come to think is that this flurry of initial conversation is proof you’re compatible. And it’s not. You’re confusing the gathering of proof with the proof itself.
Sometimes you talk for hours on the phone, yes, and what you discover in those hours on the phone is that this person (or at least who this person presents themselves as) is someone you’d like to call a friend. But when you have that terrible overhang of “exploration is romance” tangled up in this, then you get some very confused people. Hey! We spent days together! I comforted them when they were down! I did all the things that romantic couples do, and romance didn’t come tumbling out, so she did something wrong!
Except she didn’t. She figured out what kind of relationship she’d like to have with you. And you’re misinformed enough to believe that this process is what creates love, instead of realizing this process is where you discover if romantic love might exist.
(I say “she” here, because guy nerds are often the most vitriolic about misunderstanding the process, but hoo boy you see women assuming that “intense discussions” are “love” as well. Nerd culture is overwhelmingly male, and I’m discussing nerd culture, but Jesus please don’t take these examples as evidence that women don’t make these mistakes often.)
So what you’ll often see in male nerd cultures is this horrendous bitterness – hey, I found a woman who likes Pokemon! And we talked! We talked for hours! And she wasn’t interested in me!
She must be a fake nerd girl.
Because yeah, of course the problem isn’t that you foolishly assumed a shared fandom was your ticket to hot cuddles. Nor was it that you assumed that your having long talks would create a lasting love. No, the problem is that she just wasn’t into Pokemon enough, and god damn it how dare someone claim they’re into Pokemon when they won’t fuck me.
Whereas the truth is, watching Pokemon cartoons is a thing you can do together. It’s a good thing to switch back to when the awkward silence falls over that first date. But loving Pokemon doesn’t say a damn thing about what love language you speak, or how you react when your lover hurts you, or whether they’re good for you in bed, or how much you pay attention to the person you’re dating as opposed to watching this brightly-colored Japanese cartoon on the screen.
That shared love you have of fandom? It’s a good start. But a good start isn’t a guaranteed finish. And worse, that attitude is slowly making fandom a hostile place for women, by reducing their fandom to a sign of romantic compatibility, and encouraging every guy to think that they deserve a shot with her, and all the angry feedback that incurs when they don’t get it.
And if you’re wonder why it’s so hard to find a girl who’s into what you are, maybe you’re part of the problem. Because they do exist. They just may have chosen to take their love into a private space, where that affection they have for Green Lantern doesn’t turn their body into a bulls-eye.
Annie, Or: How To Do A Revamp Properly
Hollywood does a lot of reboots and revamps, uprooting classic stories to either a) tell them the exact same way you told them before, or b) changing so much that they forget exactly what made the original great.
Annie, however, is the finest revamp I have ever seen. It completely changes the classic Orphan Annie story – which is good, because that story’s almost a century old at this point, and encrusted with decades’ worth of predictable remakes. It’s fearless in the way it throws out whole elements, whole characters, changing classic songs without batting an eye.
And what you get is modern, and refreshing, and just as relevant as when the old Annie came out.
Annie’s been getting some terrible reviews – partially, I suspect, because the producers were a tad heavy-handed on the autotune. But I also think there’s a certain discomfort with how they’ve changed Annie – a soporific ode to yesterday’s greatness – into a fairly ugly reflection of today’s environment.
Thing is, for all the talk about The Black Annie being an outrage, Black is the new Irish. Annie was a red-haired moppet not because the people of old loved Gingers, but because she was clearly the unwanted offspring of an immigrant class most people despised. People back in the day would have properly read this encoding, but America’s largely forgotten the “NO IRISH” signs hung on places seeking employment. So having Annie be unwanted and black is proper.
And Annie is – well, not Annie. Don’t get me wrong, I love old Annie (I can quote you large swathes of the 1982 version), but old Annie was – well, sweet. She was supposed to be spunky, but after she rescued Sandy, she sort of lapsed into a cheerful passive aggression where she got what she wanted by sunnily guilt-tripping everyone.
This new Annie, however, celebrates the hustle.
This Annie schemes. She’s got dreams, and she doesn’t just sing Tomorrow – she’s hunting for side jobs to get the $43.20 to pay for the bureaucratic fees to find out who her parents were. She isn’t just thrilled to be with today’s equivalent of Daddy Warbucks – she’s actively using him, as she uses her. As witness this scene where Stacks (the new Warbucks) realizes he needs to put Annie up at his house in order to get the photo ops he needs:
Stacks: “There’s got to be an easier way to get these photos.”
Annie: “Not if you want me in ’em.”
And I think that white America is generally uncomfortable looking at this. Annie’s supposed to be escapist! Annie’s supposed to be sweet, a passive thing carried off by well-meaning rich people! But no; Annie explicitly rejects that paradigm, saying that the people who get rich work their ass off for it. Annie works hard, Stacks works hard – it’s a sharp-eyed look at the American Dream, wherein you won’t get anywhere if you don’t scrape for every penny, but by God the system can still knock you on your ass.
Speaking of which, Annie carries on the great tradition of keeping its creator Harold Gray spinning in his grave by completely changing Daddy Warbucks. The movie is firmly in the pro-FDR camp, but recognizes that things have changed since 1940. Stacks is now a cell phone billionaire running for mayor, mainly because it’s the next achievement to rack up for his massive ego. He has no particular plans for New York, no vision – it’s just the next step up in life for him.
And here’s the thing: the movie questions whether this is a good thing.
Whether Stacks is worthy of being mayor is a constant background issue. This new Annie implies that if you’re going to rule, you should do so with compassion, and while you can get elected it’s not going to be good for people if you do.
The new Annie also has compassion for everyone, man. The streets that Annie lives in? Rough, but supportive overall. They’ve got nobody but themselves. In particular the movie transforms Mrs. Hannigan, throwing out the random “Her brother and his ditzy girlfriend show up” plotline to provide Ms. Hannigan with a real and awful choice in politics. Ms. Hannigan has actual dreams – and while she’s unabashedly a monster, she once was a singer. She never made it. And that failed ambition curdled something within her.
In this new world of Annie, everyone has something worthwhile about them, if you look hard enough.
I suspect this movie’s getting pummeled in the reviews because, well, for a kid’s film it’s explicitly political. And as a remake, it is the precise opposite of what most people consider to be faithful – all the classic elements are erased. So you’ll have people pounding on it for putting in new musical numbers, or transforming the classics, and that’s it.
And… Annie’s black.
There needs to be a better word for racism, something more fine-grained. But in America, there’s this thread bubbling through our culture where white kids get to be adorable, but black kids are perceived as a threat more easily, seem more sinister. White people aren’t even aware of it, but the fact is that black people are twenty times more likely to be shot by cops, and I don’t think that’s because the cops are KKK members – I think it’s because years of cultural mores have piled up to quietly teach us that pale skin is forgivable, and dark skin is a harbinger of ill intent.
What’s the word when someone’s quietly regurgitating negative attitudes they’ve absorbed without even being aware of it? “Racism” sounds like an active choice to most white people. But there’s no better word to indicate these subliminal winces, the kind of thing where people say I dunno, Annie’s good but there was just something about her I didn’t click with.
And the danger of this sort of thing is that you get to handwave all criticism by claiming racism, which I am explicitly not. Like I said, this won’t be to everyone’s tastes. But the problem with this unthinking downgrading of African-Americans is that some percentage of negative reviews is doubtlessly due to this insidious undertow, and maybe it wouldn’t have made Annie A+ reviews across the board, but maybe it’d be a 6.0 on IMDB instead of the 4.9 it is now.
Regardless, though, Annie is an amazing movie. You’re going to get poppy auto-tune sprayed in your face, and if you don’t like that, then best stay away. But the film’s battled through crippling reviews and an early Sony leak of the full film three weeks before release to earn more than its budget, which indicates strongly that someone’s liking it. I suspect, in time, it may become a touchstone classic for someone in the next generation, much like Labyrinth was a box-office flop but inspired many young girls to be more than they were.
In any case, it’s not gonna be in theaters for much longer. I’d go see it while you can.