internet – Seven Troublesome Sisters

Like almost everything you can imagine, and a whole lot of things you can’t, it exists on the internet. The same wonderful, amazing tool that fuels my stories by letting me see locations I’ll never visit and open doors into the minds of others I will never meet, also allows me to find voices that repulse and frighten me. In fact, it allows me to find them easily.

Like most people, I avoid the dark corners of the internet, until my desire to make a character or incident more authentic drives me back to some putrid place. This time, I was trying to do something that seemed pretty safe. I was trying to learn more about Argentine women, because I was writing about one. Flipping through sites, I landed on a blog about how to get laid in Argentina. It seemed to be part of series of posts advising men about how to obtain casual, consensual and free sex in every country on earth. Crass but harmless.

The author advised me that women in Argentina were far too high maintenance and that I would be better off just heading over to neighboring Brazil. Something about the general tone started to bother me, and I filed it away for a possible future blog post of my own.

genius Because I’m a news junkie, over the last few days I’ve heard a lot about Trump’s new campaign chief executive Stephen Bannon, who also heads up Breitbart News. I had not heard of Breitbart News before, but according to a wealth of sources it is part of an alternate reality known as the alt right, in which a wide variety of paranoid white-centric ideas are held as truths. I checked it out for myself, and found headlines like “Obama Golfs as Louisiana Floods” and “Texas Voter ID Case Compared to Area 51 Alien Conspiracy” (two actual headlines used today). Okay, I’m going to go with the talking heads.

I also went back to the how-to-get-laid-in-Argentina blog, thinking I might write about it, and lo and behold I found another post there entitled “If Trump Doesn’t Win We’re Screwed.” Hmm. Seems like this guy writes about more topics than effective pick-up lines. It didn’t take much in the way of looking around to find a post called “Ugly Minority Girls Are Winning Beauty Pageants To Satisfy The Diversity Agenda” and to find comments like (I quote the exact words and apologize in advance for any offense) “overweight and obese girls have more sexual partners on average than girls who are in shape, because the same lack of impulse control that leads them to stuff their faces with food also leads them to hoover up cocks left and right” and “homosexuals and bisexuals are more likely than heterosexuals to be mentally ill: their malfunctioning sexual impulses lead to their entire personalities being dysfunctional.”

By this point I was looking for some bleach to clean out my browser. Ick. Yes, people can believe anything they want and they can also share those thoughts with others. But does this blogger seriously believe what he writes, or, like much of the alt right, does he just enjoy shocking people with outrageous statements?

I decided to look further into this. The blogger has a name, Daryush Valizadeh, and he achieved a small amount of infamy when he wrote a post in 2015 suggesting that rape be legalized on private property. His argument was that such a law would coerce women into becoming extremely careful (or paranoid), to the point of never being alone with a man with whom they did not want to have sex. Thus rape would be eliminated. After a lot of criticism, he claimed that he was being sarcastic.

sungazing5 The Southern Poverty Law Center follows him due to his “specific examples of misogyny and the threat, overt or implicit, of violence” and you can read their latest on him. (I am happy to provide a link to the SPLC site, but will not link to his blogs.) According to the short Wikipedia entry on him, he is against female promiscuity, which seems a rather odd stance for a man who writes books with titles like Bang Lithuania: How to Sleep with Lithuanian Women in Lithuania and Don’t Bang Denmark: How to Sleep with Danish Women in Denmark (If You Must). I have no idea what he has against Danish women.

Another odd contradiction is that along with his clarion call for men to be sexually aggressive, he has recently begun to rally his followers to reject globalism and adhere to nationalism. It seems a strange stance for a man who is the child of two immigrants, who has lived in multiple other countries and who writes travel books. Perhaps he is trying a little too hard to merge his philosophies about sex with the politics of the alt right.

I do confess to reading one of his posts from start to finish. It was titled something like “don’t have sex with feminists” and it advised men that the feminist movement could be seriously diminished if males would simply refuse to become intimate with women who held unacceptable ideas like wanting equal pay. (I’m serious, equal pay was the horrible feminist idea that he used as an example.) His plan for stopping feminism is for every man in every bar to respond clearly and firmly to every such statement with something like “then forget it, I’m not attracted to feminists.” He thinks this would make women feel so rejected that they would rethink their silly ideas.

I almost wrote the man to say “Please get all of your followers to do this. Please. What a service this would be.”

Imagine the scene in the bar. He says “Forget it, lady, I’m not attracted to feminists.” She says “Thank you so much for telling me. I’m not attracted to assholes.”

And everyone leaves the bar happy. See, even I can find one idea from the misogyny wing of the alt right movement with which to agree.

“A Streetcar Named Desire” made the phrase “I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers” infamous. While it is hard not to wince when the naive yet tragic Blanche DuBois utters it, I think that part of our discomfort comes from knowing that we all do rely sometimes on the goodwill of those we don’t know. Having spent the whole play or movie learning of the cruel events in Blanche’s life, this truth makes us uncomfortable, whether we find Blanche a likeable character or not.

Yet there it is. Reach out beyond your normal existence and you expose yourself to the danger that those unknown to you are devoid of compassion, at least for your particular welfare. It makes a person want to stay home and deal with no one but close friends and relatives. At least, one is inclined to stick with citizens of their own “village”, those who share customs, race, religion and nationality. When possible, one even seeks out those with common age and gender too. It’s safer that way, or so we think.

Enter the internet. Those of us who have years of clear memory before it existed still marvel at the way it can and does put perfect strangers in touch with each other. Yes, we’ve added safety rails all over the place. We rank and review each other and turn to moderators and block the obnoxious. But how does it go when we find we need some strangers in our life?

If you write books, you want a few people you’ve never met to read your novels before you take them to the next step. Friends and family have certain understandable shortcomings for this task, as I wrote about on my other blog. It turns out that the internet is full of unknown curious people, some of whom will actually volunteer to read your book. Should you let them?

If it seems like an easy yes, consider how much of ones heart goes into creating a novel. It is personal. Feedback delivered too harshly can stop any endeavor. Consider that you are depending on people, waiting on them before you continue with a task that means the world to you. They may lie to you, stringing you along with promises of feedback coming before they disappear, leaving you to wonder why they bothered with such a charade. Consider that they are strangers, and you are taking a risk with them.

My most recent novel is now in the hands of thirteen people, eight of whom I’ve never met. I’ve just heard from an older tax accountant in England who admires Margaret Thatcher, and from two young Hindu women engineers who share a passion for enlarging women’s rights in India. The British gentleman and I have played online word games for years and though we disagree about politics he has enjoyed my other books and agreed to beta read this one. My connection with the young women from India stems from one of them winning a copy of my first novel. So they aren’t total strangers, but we’ve never looked each other in the eye either, and I’ve just asked a lot of them.

Their feedback? Helpful. Very helpful, actually. These folks spent a lot of time, caught a lot of minor mistakes, and bothered to describe their best ideas for improving my story, and they did it all very kindly. The only rewards I have to give will be a thank you at the end of the book, and a t-shirt.(I do like to give away t-shirts.) I hope that I get to meet each of them someday,and they will be strangers no longer.

It’s an odd world. We can all choose to stay inside our own cozy homes, hoping never to get caught in a storm. It is true that storms can be dangerous. Or we can go outside every so often anyway, and feel the rain. It may be the best way to find a beta reader for one’s book. It’s the only way to turn strangers into friends.