Random header image... Refresh for more!

Posts from — April 2012

50 Shades of Grey, Mommy Porn, and Someone Gets a Belly-Punch

I’m reading 50 Shades of Grey — there, I said it.  I own it.  I mean, I own the book and I own the fact that I’m reading it.  For the 8 or so people left in America who don’t know about this book, it is Twilight rewritten sans vampires and avec a dominant/submissive relationship.  It’s in the #1 slot on Amazon and the film rights have been sold.  And it’s being hailed as Mommy Porn.

I wasn’t going to read the book simply because I wasn’t going to read the book.  Fine, there were reasons the book sounded like a total turnoff to me that are best left unsaid, but suffice to say, I wasn’t going to read it.  But my friend asked me to read it three times, so I finally relented and here I am, reading through the start of the dom/sub relationship.  A direct message to her: this better be worth it.

Can we return though for a moment to the term Mommy Porn?  There are several words that drive me crazy when I hear people use them: belly (hate this word), mommy juice for wine (seriously, why?), munchkin for children (what is wrong with calling them children?), and when people use “baby” as a term of endearment.  I am well aware that other people love these terms, love the sentence: “I poured the mommy juice down my throat and into my belly while I watched the munchkins, baby.”  But I don’t.  And now I have a new term that makes me want to gut punch someone’s… belly: mommy porn.

Does Forbes realize that there are mid-aged non-mothers who don’t have sex anymore and want to read something titillating?  Or mid-aged mothers who do have sex but also liked Twilight and feel like reading what amounts to the same book sans vampires?  That motherhood isn’t the divide between those who are still getting it on and those who aren’t.  It’s relationships stressed because life is stressful.  Because we’re overworked and commuting long distances and trying to raise children in competitive environments.  Or 7.3 million of us in this middle age range are seeing sex as either a massive chore or a physical action that serves to remind us what we don’t have because we’re infertile.  Seriously, 12.5% of child-bearing-age women are infertile — how does that factor into 50 Shades of Grey’s popularity?  What percentage of the 2 million or so copies sold have gone to infertile women?

Because this is pretty much as far as you can get from child-creating sex, unless your child-creating sex involves nipple clamps and whips.  Isn’t it possible that it’s an escape because it doesn’t resemble anything women associate with the sex they’re not having?  And I know you’re not having it because I went to a dinner party last year, and I was the only person at the table still having sex.  I was told by the other women that I needed to continue to have sex just so we could ensure one of our kind still remembers how to do it in case the shit-hits-the-fan, everyone else forgets, and we need to re-learn.  I would be the institutional memory.

But people are not having sex for so many reasons other than motherhood.  This dinner party was comprised of mothers and non-mothers.  Of single women and long-term married.  Of those with newborns and those with college-aged kids.  And only one of us was having sex.  So let’s not call it by a cutesy name: it’s porn.  It’s porn-for-women-that-men-probably-aren’t-going-to-be-interested-in-and-they’re-dreading-the-movie-version-because-a-woman-in-their-life-is-going-to-try-to-drag-them-to-it.

So raise your hand if you’re reading it.  And if you aren’t… why not? (And feel free to put down your name as Anon if you don’t want your name attached)

April 18, 2012   44 Comments

The Listserve; A Social Experiment about an Email Spotlight

Last week, a fellow BlogHer editor sent me a note about a new site that was starting up called The Listserve.  I wrote about it and my reservations on BlogHer, and one of the creators got in touch to answer those questions as well as many others I posed below.  I’ll admit that I have spent more time considering what might enter my inbox than what I would say if I was chosen.  I thought about it so much that I didn’t sign up.

The gist of the site is that it’s a listserve that sends out a daily email.  The email’s subject matter is chosen and provided by one member of the group.  It’s a lottery with a winner every day, and at the heart is the question: what would you say if you had one million people listening?

It’s a heady thought.  A slightly terrifying, overwhelming thought.

The project came out of a graduate class at NYU in the interactive telecommunications program (cue music from Rent — pretty much any song that contains Tom Collins and Angel Dumott Schunard) and Greg Dorsainville explains,

[We looked] to see what decisions people like you have made in order to foster the types of conversations you want. It’s amazing how design can control these sorts of aspects.  So the listserve is our attempt to foster interesting, diverse conversation, by giving  an amplified voice to people that may not have that normally between people who normally do not interact. With that goal, we want to make sure the conversation does not stray toward hate speech and other offensive language that mars too much of the Internet conversation space.

It’s an admirable goal; an interesting concept.  Don’t like the comment section of the New York Times (and… I don’t), then change the conversation.  Create an equally diverse community but don’t allow the conversation to devolve into name-calling and snarkiness.

Dorsainville reassured me that emails go through their team before being released to the entire listserve.

We reserve the right to reject emails that violate the spirit of the list. And that spirit is sensitive to being inclusive, diverse, and fair. I cannot say exactly until we see it, but I feel that our group and project want to respect the email space that people have given us.

Equally, when I expressed my fear that the listserve could be used to send out what amounts to a suicide note or a suicide threat and asked if the person would receive counsel, Dorsainville stepped up to the plate much in the way we’ve seen Frank Warren provide outreach via his project, Postsecret.

This listserve is not the wild west. We would never share a message to the list that comes close to a suicide note, and we would do our best to get that person the help they may need. We will do our best. I hope that helps.

Hate speech is expressly forbidden as stated in the “you won” letter, though when I asked who is defining hate speech and how would they  respond to accusations of censorship, Dorsainville admitted that they hadn’t yet figured this out.  Nor do they have a plan in place if the listserve morphs into what amounts to a daily advertisement.

If [the daily email] gets to be something that none of us want to open, we will reevaluate and probably attempt to reboot. But we want to know what comes, first.

There will be no way at this point for people to respond to the emails nor forums for discussion.  It is solely a one-way conversation from the speaker to our inboxes.  Nor have they considered whether or not they will track how many people actually open their daily email, therefore providing no information to the people providing the content: are they really speaking to one million people, or are the majority of those people hitting delete?  And lastly, there is no way to opt-out and ask not to be chosen in the daily lottery.

It is something we have discussed in the group, but so far we have decided for this to succeed, we cannot provide the mechanism to read only. It is important for the users to realize that at any point they may be thrust into the spotlight to address the group. I know that might sound difficult for most (since so many people tend not to want to talk out in public), but we do believe this is a great opportunity.

I ended up signing up for The Listserve.  The first email will be going out within the next 48 hours.  Who knows what I’ll find in my inbox; if it will be the most brilliant thought I would have never encountered in the circles I move in traditionally on the Web or if it will be words that will ruin my day.  It’s a big experiment, and we’re all the guinea pigs — the people who sign up as well as the bystanders who end up catching snippets of the discussion.

What specifically would you tell people if you were chosen?  And if I’m chosen, can I count on all of you to help me construct what to say?

April 18, 2012   11 Comments

Gmail is Down

Speaking of the Internet, apparently there is a worldwide outage of Gmail at the moment.  Even knowing that no one else has email either, therefore people will be generally understanding for why you haven’t responded to a particular message, this thought fills me with dread, even more so than the Blackberry outage this past fall where I couldn’t access email while away from the computer.  There is something unnerving about having the option to communicate taken away vs. my own choice.  There is something very different about not turning on email vs. email not functioning.

There should be a name for this type of anxiety.

It made me think about which emails I would miss the most if I couldn’t access them.  My first emails with Josh before and after our first date?  The one from Steve Jobs?  Random ones that I’ve starred and kept to reread whenever I’m feeling down?

Which emails would you miss the most?

April 17, 2012   10 Comments

The First Time I Saw the Internet

Liljan at Choose To Be Me and I were talking recently about the first time we heard about email.  I was standing on the camp’s driveway saying goodbye to another counselor who was heading back to college.  I was in high school, about to enter my senior year.  He was telling me about email, suggesting that I get an account if I can — he wasn’t sure it was available off of college campuses.  I couldn’t wrap my brain around the concept of email.  I literally pictured it like pneumatic tubes between houses, and the letter you typed on the computer somehow got printed out and dropped in a tube and it showed up at the other person’s house.  He kept repeating that there was no paper involved, but I couldn’t see how that was possible.  Even fax machines — which I knew about but had never used at that point — still utilized paper.

I thought this guy was crazy and filed the information away under things to figure out when I had to deal with it and not beforehand.

That year, my dad signed up for Prodigy, and I got my very own email address.  I could only email other Prodigy users — not people using a different system.  Which meant that I could email other family members as well as a boy I met online named Doug.  We gave each other relationship advice.  It was a pretty chaste online relationship: he, asking what his girlfriend meant when she said certain things because girls are so confusing! (“Melissa, do you think she really wants to go with me to the dance, or do you think she’s only saying that because she thinks that’s what I want to hear?  Girls are so confusing!”) and I asked him what he thought about my boyfriend (boys weren’t quite as confusing, but mine happened to tell me about his astral projection incidents, and that required a lot of verbal dissection with Doug).  We kept in touch through my first year of college and then Doug disappeared into the Internet ether, caught in some invisible pneumatic tube.

*******

In college, we had usenet rooms.  First of all, only a certain amount of people could be in the room at a given time.  So you logged in (by using your dial-up modem and tying up the phone line) and saw where you were in the queue.  During busy times, it could take hours to get on.  And then there was the frustration of losing the connection, which bumped you out of the system, and then you had to get in the queue again.  I went online a lot in the middle of the night.

Which meant that it was mostly Australians awake with me.  I spoke to a lot of people at Monash University and University of Ballarat.  I had one boy — whose name I’ve now forgotten — that I met online most nights to talk.  He was at Ballarat.  Almost everyone online back then was in college.

It took so long to get online and so long to send a message and get an answer, that you had to do something else in the meantime.  I remember that I read Vox in one evening while waiting to get into the usenet room.  There were a bunch of copies floating around campus.  When someone finished it, they left it in a public area and another person could take it.  I got my copy while sitting on Library Mall — someone walked by and passed along their copy after asking if I had read it.  I remember sitting there at night, moving the mouse from time to time so the screen saver would disappear and show me how many more people were ahead of me in the computer queue, and then reading the whole book in one sitting so I could pass it along to someone the next day.

I always wondered what happened to all those floating copies.  Later that year, I purchased my own copy at Canterbury books when they got in the pink cover.

Wait, we were talking about the Internet, not phone sex books.

The best part of usenet was that you could pop on, find someone from Norway (let’s say), and quickly ask your Scandinavian history question right before your Scandinavian history exam.  Usenet showed which university the person was writing from.  It was my first foray into obtaining quick information online.

*******

The first time I saw the World Wide Web, I was at work, at the National Endowment for the Humanities.  My friend called me into another co-worker’s office.  She was trying to log into the Web via a modem, and she showed us a website where you could read a book online.  By my junior year, I had Eudora and a university email address.  So even though I had finally wrapped my brain around email and wrote regularly with people far away (though a busy day was five messages, and I still needed to log on with a dial-up modem that tied up the phone line, so I only checked once at night, and that was at a very late hour when people probably wouldn’t be calling.  No one wanted to go online during the day and tie up the phone line), I couldn’t understand how the Internet would ever catch on.

In addition, the address bar was just a series of numbers — we still had IP addresses for websites vs. URLs — and there was no way to look up a page; no search engine.  You only knew of a website because someone had sent you the numbers, and you typed them in.  I couldn’t see how this was going to be useful.  What were we going to do?  Just sit around on our dial-up email sending each other random strings of numbers all day?  I would not be passing along these information chain letters, thank you very much!

Even though it was pretty damn cool.  I mean, 30 minutes to upload a single page wasn’t that long.

*******

My senior year of college, I got a webpage.  Someone in the IT department set it up for me.  It was a survey that people could fill out, and when they hit send, the results were emailed to me.  Every night, I could log into my email (during off-hours!) and collect the results and tally things up on paper.  It was a survey for a sexual anthropology paper I was writing about the transmission of viruses.

I ran around from classroom to classroom writing the same message on the chalkboard:

PLEASE DO NOT ERASE!

Please fill out my survey for my sexual anthropology paper.  It is a website.  The address is 49.238.78.12

This was not the exact note nor address, but it’s close enough.

Then I had to go back to rooms to make sure the message was not erased.  And sometimes I needed to argue with professors that there was no other way to get out word about the survey if I didn’t do this.  And my G-d, I had to touch chalk and I hated touching chalk. (I hate chalk so much that when I became a teacher, they replaced the chalkboard in my room with a whiteboard because I couldn’t stand the idea of touching chalk every day.)

And most professors told me to do my research the traditional way and not use a newfangled website!  And I said things like, “you just don’t understand, old man.”

Actually, I mostly nodded when they told me that because I agreed with them: this seemed like a very time-consuming and difficult way to collect information.

And yet, I did it anyway.  Because it was just so. damn. cool.

*******

What were your first experiences with email and the Web?

April 16, 2012   29 Comments

MFA Sunday School (One: Introductions and Expectations)

Welcome to MFA Sunday School, a once-a-week, free, online writing workshop.

Whether you are joining from the very beginning or finding this first post in the series at a later date, this is the place to get to know your virtual classmates, find writing partners, and introduce yourself to the rest of the group.  From time to time, I will be reminding people to dive back into the comment section below and find people to connect with over writing.  So introduce yourself even if you’re late to the game.

But first some logistics.

MFA Sunday School posts are uploaded on Sunday mornings.  You can subscribe to blog posts via the RSS feed, or look for them under the category heading “MFA Sunday School.”  You don’t need to read them on Sundays — in fact, you probably want to save them until you can concentrate on them.  I’ll usually give you homework at the end.  On the other hand, there will also sometimes be time-sensitive lessons such as a query letter critique, where once the critique is closed, we won’t be giving you an edit on your query letter until the next one.  So… follow along as closely as you need to follow along.  If that makes sense.

MFA programs are usually organized into two umbrella categories — fiction and poetry.  Some programs also hold classes on creative non-fiction and playwriting/screenwriting.  MFA Sunday School will cover the basics of poetry — free form and fixed form.  The basics of short story writing.  How to dissect fiction and then use what you learn to enhance your own work.  How to develop a novel.  How to write creative non-fiction.  Formatting for playwriting/screenwriting.  How to look at your own work with a critical eye.  How to submit to literary magazines.  How to pitch to editors.  How to form a relationship with a writing partner and look at each other’s work with a critical eye.  Critique of query letters.  And any other topics you’d like to know about that are usually covered in an MFA program.  In other words, anything and everything related to writing.

A few years ago, I wrote an eleven-part series on getting a book published. (You need to unfortunately read it from the bottom up since the top post is the eleventh or final post.)  We’ll be delving back into that too, especially because the publishing world keeps changing and as new options open, such as e-books or Amazon singles, we need to keep looking at the process of getting your work out there.  If you liked that series, MFA Sunday School is going to be similar except it will cover a wider range of topics.

I am your main teacher.  I have an aforementioned MFA.  I also studied creative writing as my undergraduate degree, so I have seven straight years of workshops.  I’ve published two books so far — one fiction, one non-fiction.  I have a handful of published poems.  I’ve been the editor in chief of two literary magazines.  I’m a section editor at BlogHer for Blogging & Social Media.  I’ve written the blog Stirrup Queens for almost six years.  I’m going to need to pull in other writers from time to time as well as agents, publishers, literary magazine editors so I won’t be the only person you’ll see here.  Hopefully we’ll have some fun guest speakers.

Why an online weekly writing program?  Why not.  I have the information in my brain; I know it’s expensive to go to university full time — it seems like a win-win.  The focus of an MFA program is not to get you published per se but to get you to be a better writer, a goal that many bloggers share with book writers and poets.  So I see this as a way of mutually supporting each other to become better writers whether your medium is fiction writing, poetry writing, playwriting/screenwriting or blogging.  I like connecting with people who like to write, who want to write better, who want to understanding the process of writing, who like words and want to play with them.

So, last few things before we start getting to know one another.  The comment section will be your space to speak to your classmates (always in a civil tone).  There will be exercises sometimes at the bottom of the post, and I would appreciate it, if you have a blog or online space, if you could post your work on YOUR blog and then post a link to the work in my comment section.  Then people can jump from here to visit your space.  If not, the comment section will become extremely crowded (sestinas are long!).  If you don’t have a blog, don’t worry; you can post your work here in the comment section.  I’m just trying to cut down on the number of people who do so.  The comment section for each lesson is open indefinitely.  If a particular exercise resonated with you, it’s a good idea to bookmark that post and return to it from time to time to see if there are new comments and new pieces of writing to read.

I definitely also recommend getting a writing partner.  You don’t have to do this immediately, but pay attention to other people in the comment section and see if there is someone who sounds like they could be a good fit.

I’m also going to start using the Prompt-ly list for general writing discussion, and it will compliment the MFA Sunday School posts.  It will be a place to ask questions, find writing partners, discuss the topic of the week, etc.  If you’re already on the Prompt-ly list and this appeals to you, no need to do anything.  If you’re not on the Prompt-ly list and want to be able to take the discussion off-blog and to email, sign up via that link.  If you’re on the Prompt-ly list and don’t want to talk about writing… well… then I’m not sure why you’re on the Prompt-ly list since I wrote in the opening post that there will be how-to information in the future.  It will still be a place to throw out blog ideas, interesting articles, and the like.  But this will take it one step further where it will be about all mediums of writing.  I’m not sure how often we’ll need to go to email for discussion, but throwing it out there as a resource that is already in place — an email group of writers.

And… that’s about it.

It’s now time for you to introduce who you are and why you’re here.  First and foremost, tell us about what you write: your blog, any publications, whether you’re more interested in poetry or fiction.  Tell us what you hope to learn as well as what you like to read.  What are your long-range goals?

And then please vote below to let me know which of the following topics appeal to you most (all will be covered, but I’m trying to get a sense of what people want to learn in depth vs. what people want to touch on briefly).  There is an “other” option for you to fill out other things you’d like to learn.  Or feel free to add that in your introduction below if you have a few items.

So welcome to class and let’s get ready to learn.

April 15, 2012   38 Comments

(c) 2006 Melissa S. Ford
The contents of this website are protected by applicable copyright laws. All rights are reserved by the author