Big Ed's Place

In today’s modern world, it’s too often to take the dominance of Western culture and economies as normal. Yet for much of history, it was actually the East that was the pinnacle. While Europe wrestled with Dark Ages and Middle Ages and more, both the Near East and the Far East flourished. So why, with a head start, did China not end up dominating the world instead of the Europeans?

They had a chance, even as late as the 1400′s. Sixty years before Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape of Good Hope into the Indian Ocean, the Chinese Explorer Zheng He arrived at the Cape of Good Hope from the other direction. His fleet was significantly larger and the Chinese Empire much more powerful. Yet Portugal, later supplanted by other European powers, ended up owning the trade routes. Europe surged economically and culturally and surpassed China so that a few hundred years later, they were carving it up as part of their own empires.

So what happened?

In a word: bureaucracy.

The Chinese bureaucrats, who ran the country regarded the explorations as a waste of money and resources. China already was the Center of the Universe. Why spend any effort on barbarians? To add to the problems, they passed laws that restricted foreign travel and made it a capital crime to build big ocean going ships. The laws therefore made it impossible for any enterprising individuals to engage in exploration or trade outside of the bureaucrats’ control. There was no way an explorer could fund himself (or get another nation to fund him, as the Italian Columbus managed with Spain). The bureaucrats ruled.

Laws and bureaucracy killed the creative, explorative efforts of the Chinese people and eventually led to their destruction as a nation.

Now as much as we all tend to snarl about bureaucracy, it exists for some understandable reasons. Bureaucracies are put in place to manage and govern things on large scales. However, it doesn’t take long for them to do what they are really good at, which is maintain the status quo.

Deficit hawks in the US Government have known this for some time. It’s damn near impossible to kill a program once it’s established. No matter how outdated the agency or department, it can survive because the defenders of the status quo will fight harder and dirtier than those trying to end the program. After all, it’s the defender’s jobs and livelihood at stake. Most of us would fight hard ourselves.

And if we’re honest, most of us like the status quo. Not only is change scary, but chaos is usually downright frightening, if not hazardous. There have been studies that show that corrupt economies can succeed–if the corruption is stable. As long as someone knows what bribes they have to pay who, they can survive and even thrive. People can be creative because they know the rules. It’s when there are no rules that growth and creativity become impossible.

The major advantage of democracy, as practiced in the West with various checks against mob rule, is that it allows small slow change. The status quo is largely preserved without being stifling. Similarly, regulated capitalism allows ‘creative destruction’ where inefficient firms fail and new companies rise up, but chaos is still averted. The marketplace has rules and does not descend into “he with the biggest weapons makes all the rules.”

Which brings us to SOPA. By now, if you’re reading this, you’ve certainly heard about the Stop Online Piracy Act that magically appeared in the US Congress a few months ago and, if passed, would allow the Government to shut down IP addresses if any users of those IP addresses posted pirated content. This would allow them to de facto censor any cite that the bureaucrats chose, anywhere in the world (since the US controls IP assignments). It’s bad law and I strongly suspect it will be defeated in it’s current form (too much publicity), probably to rise up again more quietly in a different form later.

Why will it rise up again? Because SOPA is a perfect example of law and bureaucracy preserving the status quo. In this case, preserving the status quo of the media conglomerates, from music to movies to books.

A prime example of the media conglomerates getting the law changed is the Copyright Term Extension Act. In this law, pushed through with substantial lobbying by the Disney Corporation, the duration of copyright protection was extended by twenty years. The proponents at the time were attempting to get copyrights extended in perpetuity, so that creative works would never enter the public domain.

Spider Robinson addressed this in his Hugo winning story, Melancholy Elephants. His point is simple; a perpetual copyright will stifle creativity.

This isn’t hard to understand. While there are allowances for ‘fair use’ and ‘inspired by’ uses of copyrighted material, those allowances are only as good as one’s lawyers. If Disney decides to go after a writer or film maker that borrowed from them, however distantly and indirectly, do you think that person has a chance against their army of lawyers? Even if they’re right? The legal fees would crush them. The current legal system is designed not to reward those who are right, but those who can outlast the others. Big corporations with deep pockets have a serious edge. The filthy rich executives at Disney cannot afford to let The Mouse enter the public domain in any way, shape, or form, if they want to stay rich doing what they do now.

SOPA is the same gut reaction. Digital piracy undercuts the status quo. The media conglomerates can no longer get away with charging high rates for content, like they could when you had to buy a CD or a book or go to a theater to get their content. They can no longer control when and how consumers get the content–by restricting their film from appearing in foreign countries for example (aside: one acquaintance of mine points out that she’d pay for legal copies of ebooks if she could get them, but she can’t in her country. Amazon et al won’t sell them there. So what choice does she have?)

So SOPA is an attempt to use the law and bureaucracy to preserve the status quo. The eventual SOPA successor will attempt to do the same thing. If they succeed, we’re likely to end up like the 16th century Chinese, with a lack of creative improvement or true innovation (why produce something new if The Mouse lawyers can say a ‘oops, you borrowed from us, give us all the money you made or we’ll sue’?).

Except the true kicker is, the only way to preserve the status quo is to destroy the internet, much like the Chinese destroyed their ocean going fleets, because piracy isn’t the real problem, it’s the shift to a digital economy.

The status quo cannot survive when it costs nothing to make copies of content. The entire structure of the media conglomerates is based on the fact that it does cost something; that’s how they contribute value, or used to contribute value. People paid them for the distribution of the content via records, books, CD’s, and newspapers. That distribution required physical objects (an “atom” economy) that meant there was a cost to making copies and the conglomerates could do it better than individuals could. After all, if you want a book, you can always copy it by hand, but wouldn’t it just be cheaper to buy one at the store?

Apple and Amazon have figured this out. Apple isn’t charging 99 cents for a song. They’re charging 99 cents for the ease of finding the song you want, the knowledge that it’ll be of good quality and virus free, the security that it’s ‘legal’, and the awareness that you’re actually helping the creator of the content. Apple doesn’t spend its own money on the content. It spends it on making it easier to deliver the consumers the content they want. Amazon is as much of a master of this, if not more.

Now I’m not a fan of pirates. As a content creator, it chafes me when someone else makes money off of a story I wrote and I get nothing (and yes, it’s happened). I do consider that stealing. But going after the pirates is like trying to go after slave traders. They’re clever, ruthless, and there’s always more ready to replace the ones you destroy, as long as there’s profit in it.

Which is the key. As long as there’s profit in it.

The way to stop digital piracy is economically. The slave trade didn’t end because slave traders were destroyed. It ended because people stopped buying slaves (via cultural and legal shifts in much of the world and war in the US). Similarly, the mobsters of the twenties weren’t put out of business by law enforcement nearly as much as they were by the end of Prohibition.

iTunes and Amazon are the way to defeat piracy. People will pay for reputable distribution and ease of access. That’s just not the business model the media conglomerates have been following for the past century.

The new business models require creativity in business. They can support creativity in content creation. Laws and bureaucracy can’t. It’s as simple as that. SOPA’s a mistake, as its successor will be, but we can’t expect much else from those who need the stability over the creativity to remain rich.

Recently I received some visitors to this site from an unexpected source–an anti-feminist blog. One of the discussions had devolved into a discussion of rape fantasies, and someone in the comments had linked to my posts on the topic. So I went back to the source and looked around a bit before deciding to stay away (hence, no link to that blog).

My reason was simple–the blog author, obviously popular in that she drew hundreds of comments on each post, was clearly an evangelist. I don’t have the energy to waste on such folks, but I thought I’d explain here.

For I don’t use the term ‘evangelist’ in the context of organized religion where it’s so often used. For me, an evangelist is someone who believes they’ve found The Truth and are dedicated to converting other people so they see The Truth too. It’s religious in fervor, but not necessarily subject matter. There are anti-Government evangelists, anti-vaccine evangelists, environmental evangelists, and even Lady Gaga evangelists. The fervor of an evangelist can often spill into fanaticism.

The main problem I have with evangelists is the supposition that there is a fixed, knowable Truth. The world’s way too complex for anything other than approximations. Even basic physical reality breaks down at quantum levels. Why should human social constructs like government or relationships or even something as abstract as The Divine be knowable with such certainty? Yet an evangelist knows.

There’s a wonderful long aside into cognitive psychology about how people hold certainty about ideas that objectively can’t be proven, but I’ll avoid the bulk of it for now. My two cent hypothesis is that it has to do with self-identity and fragility about one’s self worth. If I believe something and that belief is part of my identity, then it’s threatening to be surrounded by people who don’t believe it. I’m forced into either withdrawing into a community of like believers or I’m forced to try to convert the non-believers. Or I could detach that belief from my self-identity, but that seems to be hard for many.

So an evangelist knows The Truth. And they need to bring The Truth to others. That can be difficult. We’re past the era of forced baptisms, but general salesmanship and false logic can.

For example, this anti-feminist blogger had some very nice visual graphs about how sexual promiscuity hurt the “most attractive” women. She argued that, without promiscuity, the women who were 10′s would pair up with the men who were 10′s, the 9′s with the 9′s, etc. However, if the 9′s, 8′s, etc. started behaving “as sluts”, then they’d get the men who were 10′s and the “most attractive” women would be left out.

Okay… I see the appeal of that argument. What woman doesn’t want to think she’s in the 10 category? Or at least high up in attractiveness? And what woman wouldn’t want to believe that her failure to land a great guy is due to “those sluts” stealing the good men away? It certainly argues for supporting the evangelist’s argument that we should engage in shaming those women so they won’t do it.

Yet there’s a major logical fallacy here. The term “attractive” is not defined. In fact, I’d argue it’s not fixed and all that’s happening with promiscuity is a rearrangement of the definition of attractiveness.

For example, let’s define “most attractive” as “bakes the best apple pie.” So we have a bunch of contests over a bunch of years to establish which women are the best apple pie bakers. They are the ones that get the wealthiest guys to buy them bakeries.

So then after a few decades, some women come along and start baking rhubarb pies. Some of the venture capitalists who buy bakeries discover that they like rhubarb pie. A lot. Maybe more than apple.

Of course, not all of them switch to rhubarb. Some still like apple a lot better. Some want a bit of both. As a result, how does anyone define “most attractive”? And, even if we could, what’s to prevent the great apple pie bakers from learning how to back rhubarb pie? Or coming up with a great chocolate pie recipe that changes the evaluation criteria once again?

The “most attractive” woman is a far more complex being than whether she has promiscuous sex or not. Some men still want virgins on their wedding night. Some men want to sit in a chair and watch their wives get gangbanged by strangers. That’s not even counting all of the ways that people are attractive that have nothing to do with sex.

So why not post this counter argument on the anti-feminist bloggers’ site? Simple, because she’s an evangelist.

In reading her other posts, she rather regularly insults people who disagree with her. Nastily. She also clearly twists arguments. Posting a comment on her site would just fuel the fire and rage that drives her. Furthermore, it’d suck me into who knows what arguments or possible retribution, all of which would consume time and energy best spent elsewhere. I’ve been down that path before. It’s not worth it. The only way to win with an evangelist is not to play.

Which, ultimately, leads to The Truth that evangelism is its own penalty. The more someone pushes The Truth, the clearer it is that they don’t trust The Truth to stand on its own. No one argues about the existence of gravity. Similarly, holocaust deniers get their own ostracism because the truth about what happened has been accepted by so many others. They’d do better, like the 9/11 Truthers do, to simply raise doubts and let people jump to their own conclusions.

Perhaps the anti-evangelist blogger will convince some folks that they should continue to shame women who have open sexuality and could be called sluts. Maybe she’ll help some women feel better about not being picked by the most desirable guys. Maybe she’ll even find a guy herself. But as long as she’s on the crusade, will she be happy?

Somehow I suspect The Truth behind that will be “no.”

Last week, Nobilis Reed posed a question: If there was a treatment that could safely and easily change a person’s sexual orientation, what sort of uses would you expect it to be put to?

My response was strong and negative. I believe that the first use would be for oppression by conservative organizations. They’d pressure or force gay members of their communities to convert to straight. Eliminate the sin but save the sinner. For there already exist ministries that brag about how they can ‘convert’ people to heterosexuality. The folks in those communities would jump at something that they knew would work beyond doubt.

I base this in part on a man I knew in the mid-90′s. He attended three meetings a week for sex addiction in addition to a ministry that was trying to convert him. His “addiction”? He couldn’t stop fantasizing about sex with men. He couldn’t fantasize about sex with women. So he was putting himself through hell trying to change himself. If he didn’t, his family, his friends, his church, and his entire social life would disown him. He couldn’t face the possibility of such ostracization.

While I knew him reasonably well, his wasn’t the only story I knew. Boys being expelled from BYU and losing all contact with their family because they kissed another boy. A girl raped so she’d have sex with men instead of girls. That’s not even counting what I know of through the press. There’s been a great deal of evil done in the world in the service of homophobia.

For homophobia fits part and parcel with conservative communities. The root of social conservatism, particularly religious conservatism, is that there are rules that must be followed. The rules dictate the individual’s role in the community and how they’re supposed to act, think, and feel. It creates a cohesiveness and unity to the community that is impossible otherwise. There’s greater security the tighter the rules are. Authoritarianism has less street crime, after all.

However, it wasn’t until I started exploring bdsm that I had greater insights into the value of the rules. For many in social conservative groups, the rules allow them to relax. It’s much like a submissive in bdsm. They know what they’re supposed to do, they do it, they’re loved and cared for. That can be damned attractive and sometimes makes me wonder if the difference between 24/7 bdsm’ers and some socially conservative marriages is simply the fetish wear.

Homosexuality is a problem in those communities. It upsets the defined male/female roles. It also plays against the traditional definition of masculinity. In fact, homophobia is often socially taught as part of what it means to be a man. Boys learn to call each other ‘fags’ as an insult pretty early on. That’s one reason why lesbianism is a bit more acceptable. The traditional definition of femininity doesn’t have homophobia built into it.

Those cultural views have shifted in the West, and done so particularly fast in the United States. The main reason appears to be personal knowledge of gays. The more people knew outed gays among their circles of family and friends, the more they accepted the political changes. It’s easy to deny rights to “those damn gays.” It’s hard to deny Uncle Harry those rights. Or “our friend Ann.”

But that acceptance is coupled with the belief that “it’s not Harry’s or Ann’s fault.” If homosexuality is fixed biologically, then there’s no sin to accuse them of. We don’t burn people at the stake for being left-handed anymore, after all.

Now I happen to personally believe that it shouldn’t matter whether homosexuality is a choice or not. What’s done in private is no one else’s business. Additionally, I happen to think sexuality is more fluid than hetero/homo/bi. I knew one woman who identified as lesbian as she only fell in love with women, fantasized about women, dreamed about women, and wanted to be with women. Except for a couple of times a year when she wanted a hard cock inside her. I know another woman who never had any romantic or sexual interest in other women, but had no problems having sex with another woman as part of group scenarios. I’ve known people who identified as hetero or homosexual at different points in their life.

But arguing that it shouldn’t make a difference is a nuance and nuance is lost on black and white rules followers. Maybe in a couple of generations homophobia will go the way of the acceptability of slavery. However, one only has to look at the American South post-Civil War to realize that’s going to be a long time coming.

That’s why I think Nobilis’ hypothetical orientation change would do far more damage than good in our world. Hatred and homophobia would win out over whatever good might come of such a procedure. While I like to speculate on a world where someone might fall in love with a friend and then change their orientation to make sex with that friend possible, it’s just too hypothetical for me to really consider.

So we’ve had another run of scandals about powerful and rich men behaving badly.

Can I yawn yet?

Perhaps I’m jaded, but it doesn’t take much perusal of the free story sites to go, “Duh. A reasonable percentage of men would behave badly if they had the ability.” Just read the number of stories that are clearly wish fulfillment in one form or another that include guys becoming powerful and getting the harem of women to screw them (consensually or not, depending on your subgenre).

Now obviously there are a lot of men who fantasize about behaving badly but leave it in the fantasy realm. But there’s also a lot of rich and powerful men who manage to keep their dicks in their pants too. Which is why the scandals irritate me in many ways.

For example, there are 50 governors in the United States. What percentage of them have been involved in sex scandals? I can think of two sitting ones–Schwarzenegger in California and Haley in South Carolina. That’s 4% (and Haley’s a woman and the scandalous items were never proven). Do we hear about the other 48? No. They’re either behaving well or not getting caught.

The latter is an interesting dilemma in the modern era. I’m actually surprised famous people don’t get caught off more often. With cell phone cameras so ubiquitous these days, it’s much harder to have an indiscreet moment that can’t be captured. There’s always a tabloid willing to pay for a story as the press conspiracy from the days of Kennedy is gone. Conspiracies such as the ones that protected Senator Ensign for a while still leak rumors. A powerful celebrity might be able to get away with something for a while, but never for long (people knew Schwarzenegger and Strauss-Kahn of the IMF were sleazy for some time).

So the scandals that do appear really fall into the category of “a bunch of people knew it, but now it’s made the big time for one reason or another.”

In other words, a fraction of powerful men have engaged in bad behavior for a while and generally gotten a wink and a nod. Until one day when they don’t.

The pattern is so consistent that I can’t help but be jaded. There will probably be a couple of such ‘men behaving badly’ scandals every year simply because there are so many celebrities around (4% of a big number is still a few every year). The sex will be pretty pedestrian by pervert standards. I can think of only one scandal involving pro dommes (Max Mosley), and none involving something truly kinky like farm animals. It’ll be scandal for the sake of scandal.

Instead, the ‘scandals’ that excite me are the ones that aren’t. Several years ago, then-Governor Roy Romer of Colorado, who’d been the Democratic National Committee chairman and one point, was caught kissing a woman on his staff by a reporter. At the next day’s press conference, he, his wife, and the woman stood together, said yes it had happened, yes the wife knew about it, and it was no one else’s business. End of scandal.

Or give me the open relationships. The ones where people know but don’t mind. Those are the interesting ones to me. How do they make it work? Is it really working? What details were important? Those grab my imagination and my interest.

However, those are questions of responsible adults. Not overgrown adolescents. Hence, they’re not about men behaving badly and so there’s no scandalous headlines to report.

Hence the yawn. A small percentage of powerful people play games, get caught, and it dominates the news cycle for a while. Little of true meaning changes. Little is learned other than some people can behave badly sexually simply because they can actually indulge their fantasies. It’s annoying enough to make me want to avoid pop culture even more.

Which is perhaps the lesson after all.

Often, erotica is shoved into a ‘taboo’ corner where it’s unacceptable to be openly consumed or created. Magazines and books don’t come in plain brown wrappers any more, but erotica and porn companies still use neutral sounding monikers for billing and shipping. Due to the opprobrium, most erotica writers use pen names. Additionally, both porn and erotica exploded when it became easy to consume them in the privacy of one’s home. VCR’s meant that people didn’t have to get caught going into adult movie theaters, or endure an unpleasant environment while they were there. Similarly, the internet dramatically increased porn consumption, with porn leading the way in many developments.

One unintended side effect of the disdain and marginalization of porn, however, was that it created a world with almost no limits. It has been like the traditional Japanese concept of shame. Once a Samurai brought shame on himself, well, it didn’t matter how much shame. There wasn’t a gradation going from “bad” to “worse” to “awful.” The line had been crossed and that was it.

But if the line has been crossed and it doesn’t matter, why not take it to the limit? What difference does it make, really, to cheat on your wife twenty times instead of five? Or to spend three days on a drug induced binge instead of one? There are obviously some celebrities in the news recently who’ve made that calculation.

Similarly, porn saw the rabid push to the limits. Rule 34 is proof of that. So is the explosion of some of the most tasteless boundary pushing porn imaginable. If being taboo or being shocking is all you have to differentiate yourself, and there’s no social penalty for being shocking because you’re already across the line, why not go for it?

So… cue the problem with where the line gets drawn. There is a movement in many quarters to bring quality erotica out from behind the line. Or to move the line so that “erotica” doesn’t have the disdain in popular culture. Of course, that’s much of the basis for the erotica vs. porn definition fight. Erotica is on the “acceptable” side of the line and porn is on the other.

Now rather than wade into that fight in this particular musing, I want to go back to my original metaphor and ask–is there really only one line? Or is there more than one? Or is there really a gradient?

And I’ve come to believe there are really two lines. The first is when something gets looked down on socially. The second is when it motivates a section of the population to actively go after the producers.

That second line, in porn, is clearly child pornography. I’ve discussed my views on it previously and don’t wish to repeat myself about how it should be treated. Instead, I’d like to steer into the area of fictional child porn.

In written erotica, or cartoon erotica, there are no actual child victims. It all comes from the creator’s imagination. As such, I believe it should be harmless and, in America, protected under the First Amendment.

But what I think doesn’t matter. I know of several erotica authors who have run into legal difficulties as a result of using pre-teen characters. Red Rose accepted a plea deal after facing criminal charges for obscenity. Frank McCoy chose to fight his, even though it meant traveling from Minnesota to Florida to defend himself. Dorsai was contacted by authorities and warned but not charged. I know of a handful of other cases that have other complications as well (like the authorities actually finding child porn on the author’s computer). All it takes is a prosecutor out to make a headline or acting out of personal moral revulsion to make someone’s life hell. It’s not necessarily a consolation to win the legal case if you’ve been dragged through the mud along the way.

This is, surprisingly, not purely academic for me. I recently had an opportunity to do graphic novel scripts for a new website for pay. Anyone who’s followed my Deep Dish discussions here knows that I would love to do more graphic novels, but having to pay an artist is holding me back. However, the website was going to allow comics that had pre-teen characters involved in sexual situations. Even if I was willing to be associated with a site that allowed that from a personal taste and morals standpoint, the legal jeopardy is too much to risk.

That’s what made me aware of this second line. Post-puberty teenagers–okay, that’s a grey area since the age of consent varies so much. Pre-puberty? Line. Big Red and flashing, for those who see it. And for me–I’m not going to cross it, even by second hand association.

Roger Ebert recently posted about “NSFW” in which he largely decried American puritanism. In the comments section, many people pointed out that the issue was less puritanism than keeping adult material out of the workplace. Some of this was for ‘hostile workplace’ reasons and some was for ‘you’re wasting company time and resources’ reasons.

I think the commenters are right–the issue is far more ‘at work’ than puritanism.

To me, “hostile workplace” is essentially a problem I’d call “not being adults,” which is extremely common unfortunately. There are things that just don’t belong in a work environment, there are things you don’t talk about with people you barely know, and there are things you don’t suggest or do to people who cannot say no. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who don’t recognize those things or who lack the respect to not go there.

For example, I once worked on a project where we were teamed with a different company. The project manager for the other company felt that it was perfectly fine to tell vulgar sexist jokes ‘as long as it was just us guys.’ Sorry, no. We’re not friends, we’re not hanging out by choice, and I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to sit there wondering if I should speak up and object, when I depend on you for funding, or if I should let it pass. There’s a level of respect that needs to be present in professional environments.

Strike that–present in all environments. And respect doesn’t mean following a bunch of ‘politically correct’ rules. It means treating people as people and as individuals and treating them as deserving of dignity simply for being human.

The “wasting time and company resources” issue, though, is a doozy of a problem to actually define. Because the root of the problem is the nature of work. It’s hard to define work in much of our modern world.

Some work is easy to define. People who work on commission, or own their own business, get paid by the job. There’s an exchange of money for a defined product or service, usually with a contract and various laws and regulations to back up that contract.

However, this gets difficult for many jobs where the work can’t be cleanly defined. Take a secretarial job. There are probably hundreds of little jobs that the average secretary does in a day. Writing the job description for those hundreds of little jobs and writing a contract for each of them would be prohibitively difficult, so we lump them together in a more general description and then pay secretaries by the hour.

And that’s where the definition problem creeps in. Are we paying the secretary for having his butt in the chair for 8 hours? Or are we paying him for those hundred little jobs? And what if he finishes those hundred little jobs in 4 hours instead of the agreed upon 8? Or what if that day there are only fifty little jobs to do? Or what if the jobs are arriving at his desk sporadically, so that he needs to be there hours 1-4, 6, and 8, but he’s not doing much hours 5 and 7? Is he stealing if he does something else like surf the web during hours 5 and 7?

Finding fair answers to these questions isn’t easy. It’s further complicated by the way the job definition transfers risk.

The best example of this is salaried employees. If an employee is drawing pay that does not depend on the number of hours they work, their employer is betting that they will have enough work to fill the standard work week. They’re taking a risk here, because if there isn’t enough work, they still have to pay the employee. In contrast, if there isn’t enough work to pay a strictly hourly employee, they may be able to send them home (or get scheduled for fewer hours the next week, which is more common). If there’s actually more work to do than what fills a standard work week and the salaried employee does it, then the employer actually comes out ahead on their bet.

So… what if the salaried employee is ahead of schedule? Can she go home early? Fire up her iPad and websurf at her desk? Use the computer in front of her for websurfing? Yes, there’s are argument that the employee should be taking the initiative and finding more work, but that’s not explicitly part of the contract most times. So is an employee really stealing if they’re not living up to implied but not explicit expectations?

This vagary makes it difficult to know when an employee is using company resources inappropriately and when they’re not. There’s no easy way to say, “well, he would be working if he wasn’t surfing porn” and is therefore worth disciplining. And except in rare circumstances, it’s hard to say “she’s worked hard enough that we can ignore whatever she’s doing privately in her office.”

So, between the vagaries of knowing when it would be okay for people to surf, and the potential for creating a hostile work environment, any company above the smallest is better off with a standard policy. Ebert, since he works largely from home, kind of definitionally meets that ‘small company’ standard, even if he’s technically a newspaper employee. Even if he weren’t, I’m sure he’d be cut some slack on the ‘stealing from the company’ standard since he clearly brings in a great deal of money to the paper. So I’m not surprised he saw the issue as puritanism first and workplace second.

So, with the election over, my experiment in “Blissful Ignorance” officially ended. I actually checked the news online Monday night and then let myself browse a couple of news and sports websites on Friday.

It didn’t feel particularly good.

Yes, I got the information I needed, but I ended up feeling sluggish. It was like I’d overeaten simply because the dessert looked good. Except it didn’t look that good, it had just been put on the table in front of me. It felt like lard coagulating in the arteries in my brain.

It also wiped out a half hour of writing during Friday’s lunch. This did not particularly please me once I realized what had happened.

For my writing time has become more precious these days. I want to write more and I want certain stories in my queue finished. There is no way to do so, though, without simply taking the time to write. So a half hour here or a half our there lost to sluggishness now feels like an affront.

Fortunately, I still managed to plug on the Deep Dish script on other days. I finished scripting pages 41-44 and started page 45. I also hopped around a bit when I was stuck on page 43 and did some panels here and there where I knew exactly what I wanted. Sometimes picking the low hanging fruit keeps the motivation going.

I also realized that, while I talk in page counts for Deep Dish, it might be helpful to put it in word count for comparison. The Deep Dish script in Word in now 84 pages long, and 24,708 words. Given that the full script is 2/3 done and the remaining 1/3 is done at a detailed outline level, I probably will top out between 30,000 and 35,000 words. That means the script is equivalent to a novella itself.

So the fact that it’s taking me several months is actually pretty reasonable, given my pace on fiction just prior to this. I’m not going to pull up the exact stats, but my last 30,000 word story (Fireworks) took me many months to write too.

Anyway, if I want to pick up the pace, it looks like a low news diet might be a great thing to continue. We’ll see how it goes.

It’s been harder to maintain my Blissful Ignorance this past week. The end of the week found me sliding into low energy due to the usual stresses and lack of sleep. We’re in a stage where our toddler doesn’t believe he needs to sleep, and that’s making it tough on his parents. There have been more than one time where I just wanted to zone out and flip to my habitual news sites. I have resisted, though.

The writing continues to be faster as well. I finished the edits on TMI and sent it to Nick. I reviewed the publisher’s proof of Irie no Kaubutsu. I also knocked out the final scripts for pages 37-40 of Deep Dish. I think I could grow to like this pace.

The hard part of the experiment, however, is seeing how upset I really do get when I see political ads now. I haven’t been able to entirely avoid them–when I’m driving I can’t always pull my hands from the wheel to change the radio station immediately. And there was the time I was trying to set up the DVR and failed to mute the TV–catching too much filth disguised as campaign commercials before I could track down the TV remote. It feels like being hit in the eyes with a flashlight after having gotten accustomed to living in a warm cocooning cave. It fucking hurts.

Which implies I’m likely to continue it. My mood’s up and I’m happier? The downsides seem pretty minor in comparison. Besides, I really want to finish some of my queue, and the only way to do that is to find more time. This seems to be one of the ways to do so.

This past week, I decided to conduct a “quality of life” experiment I dubbed “Blissful Ignorance.” From last Monday through the election, I would not check any news or sports websites, nor read the newspapers, nor watch TV news. I’d awoken to how I was so very pessimistic and cranky in my daily life and how much of that was due to my sense that the world’s going to hell. Now since this is a sex and writing site, I’ll skip the political rants and also skip whining about why sports was also bringing me down and just talk about how it’s going.

One week in, the biggest surprise for me is how much checking news or political sites was a habit. I’d read them over breakfast, a handful of times a day, and when I was in the process of procrastinating other stuff. Not doing it has created an unexpected void in my time. Admittedly, it’s not a big chunk of time–five minutes here, twenty minutes there–but it added up to more than I thought.

So some of that has been filled with writing. Despite only have two lunch hours to write this past week, I managed to finish the crappy first draft of TMI and do three editing passes. It stands at 2915 words. I need one more editing pass before I send it on to Nick for his review/edit. That will probably take a while since he has to get Ch18 of Summer Camp out first, but that’s okay by me.

I also completed the full scripts for pages 33-36 of Deep Dish. When I’ve been averaging 2-3 pages a week, to do a little more than that as well as the TMI work is quite heartening. This experiment may be worth it.

It may be worth it for other reasons. I’ve certainly been less cranky this past week. I don’t know if there will be a point where I will regret not knowing what’s going on in the world. I’ve certainly been disdainful of people who don’t follow the details enough to intelligently vote or otherwise participate in the political process, so the biggest discomfort so far has been the sense that I might be a hypocrite here. We’ll give it another couple of weeks to see if I can get over that.

I’m often surprised by people who don’t recognize how powerful the feminine is. By ‘feminine’ I mean feminine energy, particularly when embodied in a woman. The apex of it is of course feminine sexual energy.

Now I do mean feminine and not feminist. The latter is a political/cultural attempt to get women to be seen as more than just their sexuality. At least as it tends to engage me. My personal experience is that people who call themselves feminists rarely are interested in talking to me, and even more rarely interested in listening to me. There’s a political price to this disengagement, which is probably a topic for a different post.

For open feminine sexuality is incredibly powerful. Masculine men (hereafter referred to as ‘men’ or ‘guys’ depending on their maturity/awareness) simultaneously crave it and fear it. We adore it. We love being with it. We daydream about. And part of us is absolutely terrified of being overwhelmed by it.

The Koran says, “God made desire in ten parts and gave nine to women.” It’s used as justification for forcing women to cover up, which is little more than a recognition of how powerful their sexuality is. Similarly, prohibitions against women’s displays of sexuality throughout history would be meaningless if men weren’t afraid of it. You cage the tiger and not the housecat, after all.

Now I believe that a real man could resist temptation and carry on with his life, unlike boys in men’s bodies. But there are few real men in the world, making it in many ways a moot point. But I do recognize and have felt the fear of being drawn and consumed.

But that doesn’t prevent us men from craving women’s open sexuality at the same time. We create and visit strip clubs, which give us a simulacrum of open sexuality. We fall all over ourselves chasing the Mae Wests of the world. We write porn that is full of hot assertive women who crave sex with us, and often with more than us. Just spend some time on storiesonline or other free sites. The female characters usually have that open sexual energy–loving sex for sex and not being afraid to go after it. Also consider, why else would lesbian porn and bestiality porn be exciting to guys? There aren’t any guys in the picture for us to imagine ourselves as. But the thought that a woman likes sex so much that she’d be willing to get it wherever–that’s the draw.

I often think the whole madonna/whore or virgin/slut dichotomy can simply be traced to men’s push/pull fear/attraction of honest open female sexuality. Hookers and sluts let us get a taste of it for an hour or a night without having to live with it day in and day out where it might overwhelm us.

Now of course, I could be way off. I can only speak for myself and my observations, plus some of the men I’ve had honest conversations with about sexuality.

But one observation by Michael Korda made sense to me. He said that most guys can remember that point in their life when puberty played a nasty trick on them. They woke up and discovered girls and their desire for girls. Unfortunately, the girls their age had long hit puberty and were chasing or involved with older guys. Older girls wouldn’t look at them, and the younger girls were too young. As a result, they felt a strong sense of powerlessness.

I know I did. And it was awful, both then and later. To want, and to not know how to get. Why are time travel stories also popular on Storiesonline? I think largely because they provide a way of revisiting that time with the knowledge and therefore obliterating the residual memories of powerlessness. I also consider much of the ‘sour grapes’ behavior I’ve seen in guys in their 20′s as part of this. Some still don’t quite know how to get that energy, so they denigrate it.

But I also learned, in my transition from guy to man, to live with and surpass that fear and sense of powerlessness. After all, it wasn’t the women/girls doing it to me anymore–it was myself.

And as a result, I discovered a richness of living that was previously unimaginable. Being with a woman in the full throes of her sexuality can be like being in a boat in a storm. Yeah, ya gotta hang on, but what a ride! At the same time, just being with women can help me open my heart and feel deeper. A woman embodying her feminine energy can pull me out of my head faster and more effectively than any other trick I know.

It’s amazing, and I’ve come to adore women as a result. Because power is just that–energetic power, neither bad nor good. When we stop fearing it, we can find amazing uses for it. We just have to see what’s there.