Hey there, traveler!

LiveJournal is a great service, but it offers zip in the way of visitor-tracking. Therefore, I have a favor to ask of you: please leave me a comment letting me know who you are, and how you ended up here. No more detail than you're comfortable with, of course. Thanks much.

Circlet has a new ebook out, Sweet Somethings, with juicy excerpts from twenty different stories from twenty different collections, including one of my favorite scenes from "Ota Discovers Fire." Pick your favorite format(s) and download for free, or just read it online.
@Scribd
@Smashwords

Yeah, I know you're sick of the subject; I am too. However, since I seem to be drifting into that racket myself, I want to know how the readers of this journal, specifically, feel. I attempted to do this as a poll, but the number of permutations daunted me, so I'm gonna urge you to leave comments instead.

Presented with an e-book you want to read, would you rather acquire it formatted, or plain-text? Do you have a favored format?

Are you most likely to read it on your computer, a general portable device like an iPhone, or a dedicated e-book reader? Or would you want to print it out instead?

If you generally prefer paper books (and I suspect that most of you do), how much of a discount do e-books need to offer to be attractive to you?

Are there questions I should be asking that I'm not?

Anonymous comments are, as always, fine.

Apropos of porn and morality, this is a great week to mention that no writer on sexuality is more likely to make me not my head in agreement when reading than Greta Christina. My only real complaint about her sex writing (I confess that her equally-extensive writing about atheism bores me to tears) is that her essays are so substantive, so carefully reasoned, so meticulous that I'm often daunted by the prospect of absorbing them thoroughly enough to comment productively on them either here or on her blog. I have a considerable backlog of old pieces of hers I want to respond to. Some day. In the meantime, I urge you to go read the original--you won't regret it.

Last week the Globe ran a teaser on their front page: THE HIDDEN COST OF PORN; articles about the evils of pornography are always a great way for news outlets to have their cake and eat it too, leaping at the flimsiest of excuses> for another piece about that nasty, dirty, endlessly fascinating filth flarn filth.

When I hunted down the article they were plugging (I guess you could say that their marketing worked pretty well on me), it turned out to be a puff piece on local academic Gail Dines, who's written a book about the Eeeevils of Internet Pornography.

Now, there are a bunch of things the piece says or implies that are perfectly reasonable. Let me state them baldly:

• There exists commercially successful porn that is frankly misogynistic
  
• That subgenre has grown in the Internet era.
  
• There exists commercially successful porn in which the female performers are clearly not having a good time.
  
• Porn is more accessable to young people than it was 20 years ago.
  

The reason that I'm setting this forth as a bulleted list (apart from a fondness for bulleted lists) is to tease apart these factual statements from the fake syllogisms they appear in in the article.

“Pornography today is not your father’s Playboy,’’ says Dines, 51, a Wheelock College professor of sociology and women’s studies. “It’s hard-core, cruel, and brutal. So you’re bringing up a generation of boys who are more cruel, bored, and desensitized.’’

What's the star of that quote for me? "So." Such a vast claim of a neat causal relationship packed, compactly, into two little letters.

Judging by the article, this is Dines' main issue--the influence of pornography on young men. And, judging by the article, her handling of that influence is not to reason or to cite studies but to assert, as if it were a matter of universal consensus.

---

Now, many activists on my side of the aisle will oversimplify just as ludicrously in the other direction, asserting that there is no influence of media on the formation of sexual tastes. For me, the most elegant refutation of this position is the large and thriving superhero bondage fetish community. If there were no superhero comics, there would be no superhero bondage fetishists. Would these folks be fetishizing some similar set of triggers under a different name? Would they have completely unrelated kinks? I have no idea, but clearly their consumption of media had a role in profoundly shaping their sexuality.

This example does another thing, though, which is to demonstrate that the influence of media on sexuality is not confined to seuxally-explicit media, and what will prove to have an effect on an individual's mind (or on many minds in aggregate) is messy and deeply unpredictable.

Apart from all matters of morality, freedom, blah blah blah, that is my essential quarrel with positions like Dines'. Any attempt to control people's sexuality (and this absolutely about controlling people's sexuality--setting boundaries of what it is acceptable for people to be aroused by and what it isn't) by controlling what media they're exposed to strikes me as just exactly as likely to be effective as controlling tornadoes by regulating butterfly flight paths.

Further, it's notable to me that that those who would control the shaping of young sexualities seem always to take a purely subtractive approach. They're not proposing better, cleaner, more wholesome porn to replace the stuff that disgusts them (and is therefore immoral). The notion that there's a demand for sexually explicit media seems never to have occurred to them. I guess what's going on here is that they believe in the myth of a natural sexuality--the kind that develops, or, rather, emerges in the absence of any distorting influences. So all you have to do is keep a young person completely isolated from any strong sensory or emotional experiences until his eighteenth birthday, and a correct, mature, undistorted sexuality will spring forth, fully armed, on that date.

I confess to a certain skepticism.

This is just a quick note to let you know that a Google Video search for "butch women porn" gets about 46 results, whereas a search for "dead monkey porn" gets about 223, and a search for "super mario brothers porn" gets about 2,870 results.

"The victim was imprudent."
"The victim is not blameless here either."
"This was entirely the victim's fault."
"The victim deserved what they got."

These are not identical. This is the case whether we're talking about rape, traffic accidents, identity theft, or just housework. Treating the last of those as if it followed inevitably from any of the first three is always illogical, and often despicable.

This is just a quick note to let you know that, after a couple months of shopping-cart trouble, Circlet has the Ontological Engine audiobook back up for sale. Part 1 is free, the other three parts are a buck each. It's written and performed by Yours Truly, with production work by Hacksaw and bumper music by Emperor Norton's Stationary Marching Band.

I was thinking recently about the strange fact that the US, unusually among industrialized nations, still considers women's* chests to be obscene, such that exposing one to the public is a criminal act.

( I haz a theory! )