Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
On Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue:
“In short, the book provides ample proof that Sarah Palin’s version of her own life is like the Turkish government’s version of the Armenian Genocide — and approximately as trustworthy.”
(h/t to Sarah)
I recommend the upcoming Going Rouge, instead.
I’m going to get around to interviewing S. Bear Bergman about hir new book, The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You, I promise.
For right now, though, I just want to say a few things about Bear’s writing.
I read a lot of books about gender, and even more about trans stuff. Some of them are smart, some of them can be funny, and many even make me think in ways I haven’t thought before.
But Bear – zie does all of that, & something else entirely. As I was reading chapter after chapter of this heady, layered, sexy memoir, I kept thinking about Marc Bolan & the lyrics of a song called “Spaceball Ricochet” which go:
Book after book
I get hooked
Everytime the writer
Talks me like a friend
That’s what it is that makes this book, and Bear’s Butch is a Noun, really stand out. Zie trusts the reader to think as hard as zie does, to laugh as hard, to fuck as hard, to work as hard to live as a decent person in the world. There is such a deep care for things – for hir love, hir family, hir tribe. It’s humbling, as a fellow writer, to feel so safe in the palm of another’s work.
So go buy it, and read it, & get back to me with your questions for Bear, and I will, by flattery or threat, get hir to answer at least a few of them.
You really wonder why, as Americans, we get so hung up on sex, and on sex work. You’d think in an uber-capitalist economy, monetizing fucking would be a good thing, but we get hung up anyway.
I’ve been very pleased while reading Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys
Do check it out
A Baptist Church is burning Bibles.
Church leaders deem Good News for Modern Man, the Evidence Bible, the New International Version Bible, the Green Bible and the Message Bible, as well as at least seven other versions of the Bible as “Satan’s Bibles,” according to the website. Attendees will also set fire to “Satan’s popular books” such as the work of “heretics” including the Pope, Mother Teresa, Billy Graham and Rick Warren.
Not to knock the whole of NC as a result, local David Lynch (not that one) said: “it’s a little disconcerting how close this is to my home. They are burning so much stuff I’ve dubbed them the hypocritical Christian Taliban,” Lynch said in a phone interview with Raw Story. “Just the scope of all the information they want to destroy is pretty disturbing.”
I’ve just been informed that both of my books are now available on Kindle.
I have no idea if this is a good thing or a bad thing for me, by which I mean, I have no idea what my electronic rights are.
But still, it makes me feel hip.
So here’s My Husband Betty
Another cool article that puts the whole “everything is genetically pre-determined” argument into perspective:
Yet there are differences in adults’ brains, and here Eliot is at her most original and persuasive: explaining how they arise from tiny sex differences in infancy. For instance, baby boys are more irritable than girls. That makes parents likely to interact less with their “nonsocial” sons, which could cause the sexes’ developmental pathways to diverge. By 4 months of age, boys and girls differ in how much eye contact they make, and differences in sociability, emotional expressivity, and verbal ability—all of which depend on interactions with parents—grow throughout childhood. The message that sons are wired to be nonverbal and emotionally distant thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The sexes “start out a little bit different” in fussiness, says Eliot, and parents “react differently to them,” producing the differences seen in adults.
The book is called Pink Brain, Blue Brain
There’s one great article about women in the world which to some degree states clearly that feminism is not dead & shouldn’t be, and another article, a book review, talks about the relationship between money and sex as laid out by the sex workers who wrote the essays in Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys
Friday they had a good article about Caster Semenya written by Alice Dreger.
It’s true, it’s true! I’m reading an advanced copy of Bear Bergman’s next book, The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You. Arsenal Pulp is hir publisher this time around, & the book is due out in October.
You can get it through an Indie Press bookstore.
If you haven’t read Bergman’s Butch Is a Noun, now’s the time to do so.
Watch this space for a review and an interview with Bear.
My On The Issues piece, How a Feminst Found Her Sexism, is now up on Bilerico.
On the Issues magazine has been around a long while, and over its history has published some very cool writers. Today I’m pleased to have joined the list, with an essay called “How a Feminist Found Her Sexism” for their summer issue which is entirely about gender.
From an article about sex selection & abortion:
While sex selection abortion allows women to make what is, in a sense, the ultimate in supposedly informed consumerism, it also can work to create a world where being female is viewed as the primary and most terminal of birth defects.
I’m very much looking forward to reading the whole of it.