Old books free for the taking
Because, you know, someone out there might want to learn CP/M. Like I did at one point! (And would still like to, but it’s an issue of prioritization.)
Seriously – if you want any of these books, even just to use as funny conversation starters, contact me.
- Mastering CP/M by Alan R. Miller, © 1983 SYBEX Inc.
- Computers Made Easy by Don Cassel, © 1984. This looks like a textbook for a general introduction to the wacky world of computers
- Amstrad Personal Computer PC1640 User Instructions, © 1987. Yes, it’s very specific.
- Apple II User’s Guide For Apple II Plus and Apple IIe (second edition), by Lon Poole, Martin McNiff, and Steven Cook, © 1983. There’s also a piece of paper tucked inside the front cover with instructions for something called the “encoder board” on the Apple II.
- Complete Logo Programming – Apple, by Steven L. Mandell and Colleen J. Mandell, © 1986. This is a hardcover textbook in basically perfect condition. A stamp on the inside cover reveals that it once was the property of Georgia Southern University.
- Home Computer Basics: An Introduction for Young People, by Jeffrey Rothfeder, © 1983. This is a short book aimed at children and it’s a real hoot. It says you can do literally anything with the Apple II.
- Computer Awareness by Merle Wood, © 1982. This is a paperback textbook for, I’d say, 4th to 6th graders.
To be totally honest, even though the video project is supposed to be helping me purge some of this stuff, it’s still tough. And if I had more room in the house I’d probably keep it. Sometimes getting rid of stuff is hard. Several months ago Rusty pushed me to throw away an old cooking pot that looked like it had been through the wars; that was really tough to do because it had been with me for so long, at some points being the only pot I owned.
Anyway. Let me know if you want any of these books, or if you want to paw through my other computer artifacts.
Panel at Sex 2.0: Revisiting Naked on the Internet
Two and a half years ago, Dacia interviewed me (and 79 other women) for her book Naked on the Internet. The book was published, according to Amazon, on May 9, 2007, which serendipitously makes Sex 2.0 the exact two-year anniversary of its release! (Not to mention Rusty’s and my fuckiversary, but that’s been addressed elsewhere.) During the 4:05-4:55 time slot this Saturday, Dacia is hosting a panel of women at Sex 2.0 who were interviewed for the book – me, Melissa Gira, and Furry Girl. (I don’t know if there will be any other late additions.) Here is the panel description:
Revisiting Naked on the Internet
My book Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads, and Cashing In On Internet Sexploration was published by Seal Press in 2007. This session will include a panel with some of the women I interviewed for the book; we will discuss what has changed and stayed the same in past two years. Questions include: How has the sense of community in online sexual networks changed since 2007? How have new technologies, applications, and websites (like Tumblr and Twitter) shifted the ways we think about sex online? How have shifts in law enforcement like crackdowns on online prostitution, arrests of teens for making child porn, and the obscenity trials of pornographers affected sex online?
Panelists: Audacia Ray, Furry Girl, Melissa Gira & Amber Rhea
If you are coming to Sex 2.0, I hope you’ll join us at the panel! And hopefully there will be video and/or audio of it (I think Rusty and I can swing the audio portion, at least).
“Write the book that scares you”
At WAM!, in the book proposals session, Courtney E. Martin said, “Write the book that scares you. Write the book that you needed to read.” When I heard that, my heart leapt to my throat. Her words have been resonating in my head ever since.
My comments at the time, in my liveblog, were:
Eeeek… that’s why I started the SOTS Forum site… but of course, I recently shut it down (though I plan to restart it as a Google group; a lot of that was because I broke it and couldn’t figure out how to fix it). But also, it just started feeling too detrimental to be hanging out in that place that I had passed. Maybe that sounds selfish… but that is how I felt.
Maybe one day I will feel like writing that book. I don’t know.
One of the other panelists in that session (don’t remember who, and apparently I didn’t liveblog it) said she firmly believed that everyone in the session has a great book in them. I don’t doubt that I do. It’s the getting it out part that’s terrifying. And not just because of this part (another quote from my liveblog), though that’s certainly part of it – and a passable excuse, if nothing else:
A lot of people talk a lot about writing a book, but actually doing it is a huge sacrifice of a lot of other activities. You have to spend a lot of time just sitting in a chair, writing.
And, last relevant liveblog quote for now:
Courtney: “The book that’s inside of you may be the book you don’t want to write.” It may be the thing that feels too painful, or pisses you off, or is too real or too personal.
She wrote a book about body image. She says she never wanted to write it, because dealing w/ body image issues had been so painful for her.
I can relate… more than a few people have said I should write a book about significant others of transgender people. And I don’t disagree… I mean, I *could* write a good book about it, and from a perspective that hasn’t been done thus far. But I just don’t know if I want to. That stuff, even though I’m “over it” in some ways, in other ways I just want to leave in the past and not think about.
Okay, now I think I’ve sufficiently set this thing up.
As mentioned above, I started the SOTS Forum site in December 2003, and ran the support forum there until earlier this year. Part of the reason for shutting down the forum was that I did something stupid one night while mucking around with FTP, shell access, and god knows what else, and basically deleted the entire database (or at least the message board front-end interface; I still don’t really know). But partly, just like the line about sitting in a chair and writing, that was a convenient excuse. Don’t get me wrong – it’s very true, I don’t have the time, necessary technical prowess in this particular area, nor the disposable income to pay someone what they would deserve in order to fix my fuck-up. But I’ll be honest: I had been thinking of shutting down the board for a while.
I didn’t really want to shut it down, wholesale. I wanted to pass it onto someone else who would take over as admin, webmistress, etc. Except nobody was stepping up. And I had been distancing myself from the board for a long time: posting only occasionally, and mainly just taking care of behind-the-scenes issues like combating spam. The reason – and even though I know, logically, it’s not “selfish,” it still feels that way and I feel guilty – was, to use a phrase previously used by a cisgendered* partner of a FTM in California who was a lifesaver of support for me in the first few days following my discovery: “It was getting too detrimental to wallow in other people’s pain.”
I was glad the board was there – hell, I created it specifically because of the glaring lack of support resources for SOs at the time when I needed it – but every time a new member would join and describe her (it was, 99% of the time, her) pain and agony, it was like I was reliving all of that misery, yet again.
I created the board because nothing like it existed. I created it to be the support forum I needed. And now, should I “write the book that [I] needed to read”?
Let’s face it, that book still does not exist. First of all, there are only a handful of books out there by SOs of trans people at all (some are mentioned here, and even with that list, I was reaching); and the ones that do exist are mainly of the “my partner transitioned but I stayed with them and it was tough and here’s how we did it” variety.
Which is great, and those books serve a purpose, and speak to the people who need it. But what I always got from those books’ existence, and more significantly the lack of books by the partners who didn’t stay?
Well, it was the same thing I got from the online support forums “for transsexuals and their partners” (the “and their partners” glommed on as a superficially-inclusive afterthought):
“If you really loved her**, you’d stay with her.”
In so many words, and not. I got it both ways.
And, too:
“Think about how she must be feeling! It’s so much worse for her!”
This is when I truly learned the importance of safe spaces.
The board – especially the “SOs only” area, visible only to those to whom I granted access – was sacrosanct. There was no accusatory language, no projecting, no trying to turn someone’s life falling apart into a teachable moment. There was no judgment. If you decided not to stay with your transitioning partner, it wasn’t because you didn’t love them enough, or you were transphobic (that was the accusation that always galled me the most), or you weren’t willing to stick it out through hard times (Religious Right anti-divorce rhetoric, anyone?) – it was because you were doing what was right for you. What a concept.
I wish the board existed, now, in book form. I want the details spelled out – the process of going through the five stages of grief (because in many ways, it is like mourning a death), trying to keep up external appearances while your world crumbles from the inside, the self-doubt and self-loathing and self-hatred and second-guessing and all the rest of it. I want the affirmation spelled out in all caps, underlined, italicized, bold:
You are not a bad person for not staying in a relationship with your trans partner!!!
I want that book to exist. I know the ability to write it is in me. Part of me wants to, but part of me feels resentful that someone else hasn’t already done it.
And, anyway: I think I’m still too scared.
—
* We never used that term on the board; I guess because no one knew it?
** A big no-no: using female pronouns when I’M NOT READY TO HEAR THEM. Hello, my life crisis is NOT political; do NOT make it about YOU.
Dirty Girls unite
Rachel signed my copy of Dirty Girls, “from one dirty girl to another.” How apt. Little did she know that one of Rusty’s nicknames for me is “dirty girl.”
When I first heard about the book, I had a personal “heh” moment re: the title, and at the same time I wondered if Rachel would take any flack about it. I’ve read, in various places both online and off, criticisms of terminology used to describe women who enjoy and pursue sex unapologetically, as dirty, slutty, nasty, etc. ad nauseum. Hell, I’ve even made such criticisms myself, especially wrt mainstream porn copy. So to the simple-minded, it might seem like a contradiction that I like being called names while fucking and being called Dirty Girl pretty much whenever (only by Rusty, though).
But like my personal penchant here, I see the title of this book as a reclaiming of words that have been used against openly sexual women.
Enough about that, though; get me started and I’ll pontificate all night instead of actually talking about the book. I’m not very good at writing book reviews, so I’ll just jump right in…
I received it yesterday, so I’ve only had time to read a few stories so far. Of course among the first I read were those written by people I know – Rachel’s “Icy Hot” and Melissa’s “A Prayer to be Made Cocksure” (love that title, btw). I also read the first story in the book, Marie Lyn Bernard’s “Fucking Around.”
“Icy Hot” is straightforward erotic fiction, but it’s not cheesy. That’s my problem with a lot of erotic fiction I’ve read; it just seems too silly. I can’t take it seriously, much less get turned on. Fortunately Rachel doesn’t do things like use the word “sex” as a euphemism for vulva. Personally, the idea of fucking in 105-degree weather makes me feel ill, but really that just shows that it’s good writing – because I could also really get a sense of how good an ice cube would feel on my skin in that situation.
Melissa’s story “A Prayer to be Made Cocksure” is written in a prose/poetry style that I used to try to achieve but always failed at. She pulls it off. It’s really a thing of beauty, and doesn’t feel forced or overly emo. It has a feel of timelessness, which I think was the point. I loved it, and I just have to say again that I LOVE that title!
And, I just loved “Fucking Around.” Basically she describes fucking different cities, or people that personify different cities. It might sound weird or corny, but you just have to read it. It was an excellent choice to kick off the book.
Thanks, Rachel, for sending me a copy of Dirty Girls, and I look forward to reading the rest as soon as possible!
123 meme
The rules:
- look up page 123 in the book that is nearest to you at this very minute
- look for the fifth sentence
- then post the three sentences that follow that fifth sentence on page 123.
I’m reasonably certain that I’ve done this meme before, but of course I’m too lazy to dig through the almost six years of archives to find it.
I’m currently reading Stephanie Coontz’s The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, and the sentences tend to be long. Here goes:
Conservatives who endorse the Bush administration’s Gag Rule, which prohibits physicians in federally funded family planning clinics from even mentioning abortion as an option, tend to be outraged that courts and federal agencies have “hamstrung” teachers and principals in the public schools by prohibiting corporal punishment. Liberals alarmed by the denial of free speech in family planning clinics and the lack of civil liberties for pregnant women accused of alcohol or drug abuse have been far less concerned about the privacy rights of men accused of child abuse or rape.
In 1967, conservatives successfully advocated expansion of welfare workers’ power to remove children from their families when the mothers were unmarried, on grounds that lack of marriage constituted, in and of itself, a “poor environment” for children.
Yes, that was only three sentences.
I highly recommend The Way We Never Were; it’s very interesting, and knocks down pretty much every piece of rhetoric about “family values” or “tradition.”
Quote of the day
From Wendy McElroy, via Ren:
Degrading is a subjective term. I find commercials in which women become orgasmic over soapsuds to be tremendously degrading. The bottom line is that every woman has the right to define what is degrading and liberating for herself.
The assumed degradation is often linked to the “objectification” of women: that is, porn converts them into sexual objects. What does this mean? If taken literally, it means nothing because objects don’t have sexuality; only beings do. But to say that porn portrays women as “sexual beings” makes for poor rhetoric. Usually, the term sex objects means showing women as body parts, reducing them to physical objects. What is wrong with this? Women are as much their bodies as they are their minds or souls. No one gets upset if you present women as “brains” or as spiritual beings. If I concentrated on a woman’s sense of humor to the exclusion of her other characteristics, is this degrading? Why is it degrading to focus on her sexuality?
<hint type=”passive-aggressive”> McElroy’s book XXX: A Woman’s Right to Pornography has been on my Amazon wish list for a while now. </hint>
I guess I should read this book
It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these silly quiz/meme things that purports to hold the key to vast secrets of my being; so here you go:
Which literature classic are you?
Virginia Woolf: Orlando.
You are a challenge, for outer events, the outside world, the time etc. play no importance to you. Your focus is in writing, in gender issues, and inside your own head. Self-analysis and exploration of yourself as well as the outer world hold great importance to you.
Take this quiz!
Quizilla | Join | Make A Quiz | More Quizzes | Grab Code
I haven’t read Orlando. I’ll be honest; I hadn’t even heard of it before this. Adding it to my Amazon wish list now…
Side note: I hate the code Quizilla generates. I always have to practically rewrite it. Can we please leave the <font> tag to rest in the 20th century, where it belongs?
Degrading?
As a precursor to my eventual full book review of Robert Jensen’s Getting Off, I wanted to post an excerpt from the chapter entitled “Pornography as a Mirror,” in which Jensen colorfully describes scenes from several porn movies in order to drive home the point of how awful and misogynistic all porn is.
With all the porn Jensen has watched (for research purposes, you understand), one can only assume that he summarized these particular movies because they’re the most effective at validating his thesis – and the most likely to garner a reaction of shock from readers. So what’s the deal with this…?
A scene from Delusional, a 2000 release from Vivid:
Lindsay, the film’s main character, is a woman slow to return to dating after she caught her husband cheating on her. She says she is waiting for the right man – a sensitive man – to come along. Her male coworker, Randy, clearly would like to be that man but must wait as Lindsay explores other sexual experiences, first with a woman named Alex, whom she meets online and assumes is a man. Later, after Alex and Lindsay have sex with a man in the kitchen of a restaurant, Lindsay is finally ready to accept Randy’s affection. He takes her home and tells her, “I’ll always be there for your no matter what. I just want to look out for you.” Lindsay lets down her defenses, and they embrace.
After kissing and removing their clothes, Lindsay begins oral sex on Randy while on her knees on the couch, and he then performs oral sex on her while she lies on the couch. They then have intercourse, with Lindsay saying, “Fuck me, fuck me, please” and “I have two fingers in my ass – do you like that?” This leads to the usual progression of positions: She is on top of him while he sits on the couch, and then he enters her vaginally from behind before he asks, “Do you want me to fuck you in the ass?” She answers in the affirmative. “Stick it in my ass,” she says. “I love the way you slide into my asshole. … Deep in my ass. … I’m coming on your cock in my ass.” After two minutes of anal intercourse, the scene ends with him masturbating and ejaculating on her breasts.
So, wait. Where’s the degrading part in that scene?
It just sounds like sex. And by some people’s standards, pretty vanilla sex. Even for people who would consider it at the kinky end of their personal spectrum, due to the dirty talk and assplay, I really can’t imagine anyone finding it degrading who didn’t have bigger hang-ups about sex in general. In fact, the only part of that excerpt that I see as degrading to women in any way is this:
Lindsay lets down her defenses
Note, that’s not a line from the movie. Those are Jensen’s chosen words to describe the onscreen events. I find it very telling that he uses language which casts the woman in the passive role, and the man in an active, even conquering role, with the implication of sex being a conquest and women having “defenses” which must be “broken down” by men.
This is, of course, the sexual script that’s reinforced by the dominant culture day in and day out, to the detriment of everyone. This skewed view of gender roles (as Figleaf would say, women as the “no-sex” class) is exactly what Jensen claims to be opposing. Yet with a few words, he’s revealed volumes about how entrenched he still is in sex-negative cultural norms.
In case you didn’t notice…
…there’s a new episode of Mostly ITP up. This one is an interview with David Kaufman, author of the fascinating book Peachtree Creek: A Natural and Unnatural History of Atlanta’s Watershed. And I think it’s one of the best interviews we’ve done to date. In addition to talking about the history of Peachtree Creek and what it’s like to go canoeing in raw sewage, we also discuss the current water situation (crisis?) in Georgia, and what can be done about it.
Should I subject myself to this?
So, Robert Jensen has a new book out, called Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. If you’ve been paying attention to this sort of thing, you already know my feelings about Mr. Jensen. But now, with the release of his book, plenty of people who call themselves progressive or liberal are falling all over themselves to praise him. And it makes me sick.
I don’t know if I want to read the book or not. On the one hand, I feel like I should, because of the “understand your enemies” thing (which is why I suffered through Female Chauvinist Pigs and Pornified), and also because I think if you talk about a book without having read it, you’re talking out of your ass (this was one of my main gripes about the Full Frontal Feminism fallout).
On the other hand, I don’t know how much head-desking I can take. I’ve read enough of his articles to know what Jensen’s M.O. is. And would a fisking of his book really accomplish anything? If it would, then I might be convinced to read it. But also, Chris Hall has already posted an excellent, thorough review at Sex In the Public Square. Here are a few key excerpts:
I can go on for hours and hours about what irredeemable psychic flotsam the great mass of porn is, and could probably fill several volumes thicker than Jensen’s on the mediocrity, body fascism, poor production values, labor abuses and sexism that dominate mainstream porn. These are all things that people of good conscience should find troubling about porn as it exists today. And yet, even as I calculate all the sins of pornography to the nth degree, and catalog the ways that I find it disappointing and trivial in taxonomies so detailed that the Library of Congress would have to invent a whole new indexing system, there’s something else: I think that in porn lies our salvation. For those of us who hate the ugly gordian knot of fear and loathing that our society ties our sexualities into, porn is essential. We need a genre of literature and art devoted to sexual arousal just as much as we need those that make us laugh, cry, or cringe in fear. And at the same time, we need to develop a critical language that we can use to think and speak about pornography. Without these things, we’ve resigned ourselves to remaining forever mute about our sexual desires.
[...]
By using this thin sliver of pornography to talk about the whole, Robert Jensen has eliminated alternative genders and sexualities entirely. He doesn’t have to wonder what it means to have a transgendered man like Buck Angel making a good living billing himself as a “man with a pussy.” Dykes who make porn for other women, like the Cyber-Dyke network, are not even acknowledged. There is not even a whisper of the thousands of web pages and videos and magazines that focus on women dominating men, or cock-and-ball torture, or any other of a million practices. These sexualities do not even exist in Robert Jensen’s cosmology; he has written them out of existence as neatly as a respectable family who resolutely doesn’t speak the name of the cousin living as a “confirmed bachelor.” But all of these identities and practices come with legal and social consequences. To simply discard so many lives in a book that claims to honestly explore the nature of desire in our society is not only intellectually dishonest, but hateful.
[...]
Robert Jensen’s passion is reserved for visualizing women’s sexual pain. Never once does he turn that passion the other direction to look at the possibilities for women’s sexual pleasure. There is not, in the end, so much difference between Jensen and the most misogynist, exploitative porn director; neither can imagine the sexual role of men as being anything other than to fuck, nor can they imagine women’s roles as being anything other than to be fucked. And that’s why, regardless of my doubts about mainstream porn, I can never, never imagine aligning myself with Jensen and his ilk. Because at the heart of his arguments, I see the same misogynist bullshit that I want to excise from pornography.
[...]
One of the things that keeps misogyny a thriving monster in our society is sexual shame and guilt. Violence against women and gays comes not from people who are comfortable being open about their desires, but by those who feel that their desires are somehow wrong. People have a limited capacity for accusing themselves. There are only so many times that a man will look at women and feel guilty about his lust before those thoughts whip around like a serpent devouring its tail. Then, the problem isn’t him. It’s that bitch in the short skirt, the whore who’s tempting him and who deserves whatever she gets. And then, we know the rest of the story. We’ve heard it too many times to forget. November 19 was the Transgender Day of Remembrance, and December 17 will be 5th Annual International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers precisely because we know how the story of people driven by sexual self-hatred turned inside-out ends.
So what do you think? Should I bother reading this book and posting a review?