Derry, Northern Ireland

Derry, Northern Ireland
A book I'm working on is set in this town.

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Porno Manifesto gets reviewed

This is from a reviewer on GoodReads.com. It got 4 stars...and it makes sense. I often don't know what I'm doing when I'm writing...not till it's done. And I see how far I've gone...or haven't.
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I was not expecting this to play out in the way that it did. It was oh so wrong. I did not get anything out of Alec's sense of revenge. I got why he did it, but oh boy did he go far. And his rationalizations and methods were just so out of this world.

But I liked being in his head. His POV was quite different, but it was also a whole hell of a lot like hearing those people say a rape is consensual if a woman has an orgasm so she must have wanted/liked it. Not true. I got what he was trying to prove, but I can't really agree since the bodies sense of pleasure does not prove that taking someone by force means they enjoyed it.

Either way, I still loved reading the book. It was crazy intense and I had to wonder if Alec was going to get away with what he was doing. I believe it actually worked! Just when I thought things hadn't gone the way he set them up to, it turns out that he finds out after the fact that it did. That was amazing to me. I don't really feel like anyone got what they deserved (except for Reza) and maybe Freddy, but I can't help but admire the deviousness of what all he did. That was just incredible. I was sad for Mika, though. That poor kid.

I was glad when Alec came to his senses, though. And when he found himself some happiness. Should he have been allowed to be happy after all of what he did? What those boys did to him was bad. It was utterly wrong, but he went so much further. It's amazing to me that I was able to feel happy for him and that he and his Panther self were able to get some peace in the end. All that anger could have destroyed him.

I have to say, much like How to Rape a Straight Guy, Kyle Michael Sullivan really made me think about things. He fucked with my head, too.

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No writing done worth anything, today. I crashed into an odd, angry mood when I watched a video of Russell Brand interviewing two members of the Westboro Baptist Church and had the weirdest feeling like I was watching Kabuki Theater. Like the two guys who were there and telling people they'd go to hell if they didn't think like them, were acting. And I just couldn't shake it.

Maybe they weren't really members. Maybe it was all just a setup. If so, they had the lingo down and the vile twisting of Scripture and the Gospels. Maybe it scared me a little -- not their claims that I'm going to hell but seeing them sit there and be so casual and certain in their hate and intolerance. You can't argue with people like that; they are deaf and dumb to anything but what they believe...and their type seems to be gaining ground around the world.

It's not just with Christians, but also with Muslims and Jews and Hindus...and in those two men I could see civilization being brought down by their intolerance and absolutist attitudes. I could see people like me being burned at the stake, again, because we didn't conform.

The end of the world isn't coming from the skies; it's coming from the stinking swamps that grew those creatures at Westboro Baptist Church.

2 comments:

Scott said...

I think you're looking in the wrong direction. 99.9999% of Christians do not think like the crazies at the Westboro Baptist "Church." It's not even a real church. It only has about 30 members, most of whom are family members of Fred Phelps. Demonstrating in an obnoxious fashion at military funerals, as Phelps does, is repulsive to everyone I know. That Phelps persists with this is evidence that he's mentally ill. In other words, there's no real danger to society as a whole from a fringe figure like Phelps.

In contrast, the dangers posed by Islamofascism are serious. The measures they take against those whose lifestyles do not conform with theirs are not merely something you might imagine happening in the distant future, they are happening now. Execution of homosexuals and of "apostates" from Islam (as well as innumerable other barbarisms) are routine in Iran, northern Mali and other places where radical Islam holds forth. For every supporter of Westboro Baptist Church, there are probably ten to a hundred thousand supporters of radical Islam.

JamTheCat said...

Herein lies part of the problem -- compartmentalization by people like Scott, who love to swear they are not like those scum.

He claims 99.9999% of Christians do not agree with Westboro, but the fact is that is nonsense. They aren't as in-your-face about it and don't hold up banners that say "God Hates Fags" and "God Hates You", but they also fight expanding the legal rights of marriage to gay men and women, some of them to extent of agreeing with and offering praise for Uganda's Christians' plan to pass a bill that executes people for being gay. They also fight allowing women to control their own bodies and too many have referred to rape as something that's the victim's fault. Few of them condemn people like Westboro. And some of their religious leaders have actually told people they will go to hell if they vote Democrat.

I don't see any difference between "Islamo-fascism" and "Commie-Christians" like Scott. Both want to force everyone around them to live by their archaic, patriarchal views, or else, and they take every opportunity to put down the other side and proclaim themselves the relevant ones.

Scott, you came to the wrong place to preach your denigrating crap. You are just as bad as Fred Phelps; you just like to hide it behind a facade of reason. Take it elsewhere.