She Who Must Be Obeyed

Miss Tara: "I definitely watch many people around me run away from themselves constantly, justifying it with ‘business’ and replacing deeper connections with internet ‘friends’. I’m pretty guilty of it myself, although I’ve made a special effort lately to, as one person put it, "Stop all that fucking Twittering and get your ass into therapy."

And did you? I think we know the answer to the first. Good lord, girl. Must you be so damn spurned ... online?

Where is our dignity, after all. As women.

Not to worry. You're not the first woman to learn the virtue (and strength) of true humility via the tacky road of self-humiliation.

I'd say more, but there might be a Man reading ...

So ... do carry on with that second part. You know my motto: the kid comes first.

signed, 

    She who shall remain nameless.

The Man of My Dreams

I just picked this off a network, hey, like fruit from a tree, and hustled back here to publish my treasure, thereby both giving it away and making it more deeply mine.

Someone had posted the question, Who can I reach at Amazon to fix a customer service situation gone wrong? (I don't think you're supposed to take items from a closed site like this and—whoa, there's a blog police in my head?)

Answer: I just got a similarly weird "error msg" from L----In! First they say, hey, here's a new member who used to work at MMmedia just like you (the poor bastard). Perhaps you know him. As it turns out, I do, So I invite him to like, you know, L--- In. But then I get this ERROR MSG in response to my invite: "Please note: You cannot send invitations from this page because several recipients of your invitations indicated that they don't know you."

Have we achieved Fascist Networking yet?

sheesh!

Clarification added 6 hours ago:
Gosh, I didn't realize that this would be visible to everyone. Just to be clear, when I said "poor bastard," what I should have said was "poor FUCKING bastard."

And when I said "Fascist Networking" what I meant was "National Socialist Networking."

I hope this serves to clarify my position.

His only faults are that I have never met him, and, well, do you see him posting about me? (Answer: hell, no.)

Besides, the older men get, the more they like—no, let me put this another way: he is my age, give or take, and the whole of my life, since I was eleven or twelve, the male of the species has treated me as if I were as interested in naked women as they.

But it's really more than that. These things are pointers, in the way links point to something else, something huge, bigger than Google ever dreamt: Women are actually other people!

Different! Separate! Similar, in that we are as full of ourselves as any guy, with the same self-interest ... but with the addition, okay, of an inborn capacity to deeply care for and about others.

But enough about that. For now.

You Want Rage, Boy

God damn it, Locke, no sooner do I like you again than you turn around and do something sooo stupid.

Have you not obtained a clue? By now? There are many of us—women—who don't find that sort of thing funny ... just fuckin' lame. It's entertainment for guys—old guys—and truly obnoxious to me.

Why? Because it is, and yes I get to say so! And I'll tell you another thing, any hip chickies who claim to like it or take part in it are co-opted waaay beyond what they can possibly know.

You like women-as-objects? You approve? Believe me, we're still working very hard to just be other people.

So someone I thought of as friend posts a piece of sexist crap (and thinks he's just the cleverest thing, I know you do) but for me, coming across the page, it's shoving a setback right in my face.

Oh and thank you for contributing to the general cheapening of the web. If my daughter were young, I'd love her to come across your site. Not.

Dude, we are not all dudes. 

And even dudes, the younger ones, care.

I think i'll blog this email, as is.

Zo
     _ _ _ _ _ _

Just a spit in the wind against the massive business of internet pornography. But I don't care. I don't care how fuckin' big, how fuckn' hopeless. Who are you, if you do not say what is wrong?

“Entertainment” for men—human rights violation for women.

Only one point of view can possibly prevail.

Oh, here's the fuckin' link, you so dying to see. 

Zen And The Art of Maintaining What

Shelley writes: I read ZAMM once, a long time ago. I remembered thinking after reading the work that this was a book written by a man for men, though there is nothing in the work that is even remotely sexist. I felt, though, that I was reading a book written in language I've learned to speak fluently, but wasn't my native language. After Loren's reviews, I might try reading it again, and see if I still suffer the same disconnect.

What was worse, we were supposed to like that book ... and every other damn piece of writing that acted like half the world didn't exist. I find that waay more insidious. I don't remember understanding a damn thing.

Okay, not true, but if I'd faced up to what I understood perfectly well, I would have been appalled in real life (and therefore had no place to to live, me with two little, little kids.) Instead,  all that sort of feeling went underground where you better believe it ate at my cells. Turned my immune system inside out—we are mirroring creatures, and if the mirrors around us are all turned away, if the Narcissus spell has taken over the house, what am I saying? That sickness without begets sickness within?

You bet I am. Take care who you hang with. Better Pirsig should have written, Women, have your own money. Can you believe there was a time when the options were, for a girl without a high school diploma, and who could not clerk to save her soul, whose typing was a bloody nightmare: get married or hook. Blech. Revolting even to recount. As were the succeeding decades. Why am I telling you all this? It can't possibly be of interest, you have your own life, it's very hot where I live today.

Pirsig's son was murdered in San Francisco, someone we all cared about after plowing through that many pages. It was just a stupid little holdup, where the person with the gun sometimes for no reason at all pulls the trigger. We were all sorry for his loss.

(I skipped all the boring parts. I bet I would again.)