Can You Not Feel The Progress?
You know, I don’t recall my middle school’s library being quite this edgy:
A concerned middle school teacher in Loudoun County, Virginia couldn’t let the comments of fellow school employee Stefany Guido slide after reportedly hearing her say some students — the majority of which are 11-13 years old — could be considered “sex workers.” Guido, a librarian at Sterling Middle school, made the statement while defending a library book which said sex work is just like any other job, comparable to a store clerk, an architect, or a journalist. As sex workers, students could benefit from the book’s placement on library shelves, Guido said.
Apparently, eleven-year-olds need to know how to whore themselves – and to know that whoring is, like, totally valid and empowering – because they may be transgender and may have to pay for hormones and surgical mutilations.
Oh shiny tomorrow.
Update, via the comments:
Lest you imagine the above must be an error or some one-off aberration:
Presumably, these other middle-school librarians didn’t find anything inapt about 11-year-olds learning about the glories of prostitution and its general awesomeness. Because “high-end escorts” can “pull in half a million dollars a year.” Though it seems to me that an 11-year-old “sex worker” would be an abused child, a child being trafficked. Not an ideal aspiration for the pre-pubescent. But maybe that’s just me and my uptight stuffiness.
Update 2:
In the comments – which you’re reading, of course – Mr Muldoon adds,
So judgmental, that empowering heroin isn’t going to pay for itself, you know.
Well, quite. An irony being that the overwhelming majority of the violence experienced by transgender people occurs during arguments with intimate partners, and interactions with drug dealers, and during the aforementioned “sex work.” Much of that, presumably, a result of deceiving punters as to what, exactly, is on sale. This is not a trivial detail. And the mouthings of many trans activists seem designed to make the risk of violence worse. As when the activist Riley Dennis, an Everyday Feminism contributor, told us that not wishing to have sex with him can only be due to seething bigotry. Mr Dennis believes, or claims to believe, that the particulars of what’s inside his underwear will be a delightful surprise for any unwitting straight man who succumbs.
This reminded me of an episode of the reality series Cops, in which some horny and heavily inebriated youth was about to hook up with a prostitute who wasn’t quite what ‘she’ seemed. It wasn’t at all clear that the youth knew what was going on and that in fact he was about to venture into a motel room with what, to a more sober eye, appeared to be a strapping chap in a trampy frock. Nor was it clear what would have happened if the surprise hadn’t been to his taste.
But hey, eleven-year-olds gotta have role models.
Also, open thread.
Correia had, and continues to have, several other robust streams of income prior to taking up writing…
Isaac Asimov once defined academic freedom as “outside income”. (This when his Dean was trying to get him ousted for bringing discredit on the university with his sf writing.)
I can think of a few other sf writers who have or had other sources of income–tenured professorships, tech company partnerships, technical consulting for Hollywood, screenwriting, magazine editor, etc.
Oh, it gets funnier
“Vaginal Sex for Gay Men.
I can indeed believe that it is a fraught issue, as I recall some gay men expressing disgust about women and their ladyparts. (But then, some lesbians have expressed disgust regarding men’s bodies.)
If I were going to take up science fiction writing, I would stay as far away from the SFWA as I could get. Seems like a bucket full of crabs to me…Not exactly what you want in a trade association.
Two chief problems, as I see it:
1. SFWA has been taken over by leftists.
2. It’s a lot easier to police the thoughts of members of your own organization than it is to negotiate with publishers, much less pressure and sue them.
David, wasn’t Lady Tallywacker famous?
In the U.S.—don’t know about elsewhere—it’s not all that uncommon for a customer to become violently upset—literally—to find that the lady of the evening he’s picked up has some of the attributes of a gentleman of the evening. This isn’t anything new, as transvestite hookers have been around forever, but the trans fad is causing it to happen more frequently than it used to. Usually the unfortunate hooker escapes with a beating, but sometimes the angry customer murders the deceptive “sex worker.”
I do wonder how much the SFWA and their lapdogs can effectively cancel a writer when the middlemen are largely irrelevant.
Eventually we will see SFWA members going beyond the publishing industry to get their enemies canceled by banks, payment processors, websites, internet services and software companies, and so on. After all, Mercedes Lackey is already on record as wholeheartedly approving of doing such things to people she disagrees with.
Great googly moogly, Moar Science™*, this time from our antipodal friends.
Carbon footprint of nitrous oxide (‘laughing gas”) should be explained to patients, anaesthetists say
OK, work with me here as I seem to be missing something, nitrous oxide, NO2, the individual components of which make up 98% of the atmosphere, appears to be somewhat lacking in “carbon”.
Maybe they are talking about all the energy it takes to make the NO2 and compress it, if so, there has to be alternatives. They tell us indeed there are:
Great, an invasive procedure with greater risk, opiates, an electrical device, and new age horseshit (hypnobirthing** – “With HypnoBirthing, I was able to truly empty my mind and breathe my way into birthing our baby…”)
True enough an epidural and opiates are effective but all these options have a mythical “carbon footprint”. I would love to see how these titans of Science!™ came up with their “calculations”. One would think anesthesiologists (anaesthetists in the US are not physicians) would have better thing to do.
That’s from the Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists.
I wonder if they will start “counseling” women on the “environmental impact” of having children at all.
As has been observed, sooner or later every professional organization gets taken over by political hacks (unless the hacks are rigorously and militantly opposed.)
NO2 is a greenhouse gas, but the amount used to dental work is vanishingly small. Idiots.
Oak Park schools: The idea that students misbehavior is only the result of teachers punishing minority students out of proportion is so out of touch it is laughable. But not in a good way. Wokies are so racist that they truly believe that blacks cannot control themselves and it is unfair to ask them to.
NO2 is a greenhouse gas, but the amount used to dental work is vanishingly small. Idiots.
It allows them to publicly demonstrate their virtue. And to train all of us to accept our proper roles as serfs.
(I recall reports of “green” activists admitting to each other that various restrictions being imposed on the citizens were environmentally trivial, but were nonetheless highly desirable because they “built consciousness” and “taught” citizens to assume their proper environmental thought patterns.)
Amy Wax famously pointed out that almost all of the racial disparities in income result from behaviors. If a minority stays married, finishes high school, teach your kids to read and make them do homework, stays out of gangs and jail and off drugs, then the income gap almost vanishes. Asians have done this. So have immigrants from India, Iran, etc. But victimology does not allow this as an answer.
NO2 is a greenhouse gas, but the amount used to dental work is vanishingly small. Idiots.
True enough for all three points, but instead of the greenhouse bit, the clowns in the paper are talking about carbon footprint instead, for reasons known but to their own off kilter selves.
“I know of a handful of men churning out formula romance novels for Harlequin under pseudonyms that have stable but limited careers because they can’t go to RITA conventions &c.”
“Are men banned from RWA conventions?”
Husband of a recently former RWA member, and the answer is no. There are very few men who wrote romances, but I know one of them, Leigh Greenwood, was an “out” male who didn’t suffer any bias as a result.
In our neck of the woods, one RWA member was a man who wrote M/M romances, which are extremely popular with women readers. And another man, Damon Suede, was president for a year.
Unfortunately, the RWA imploded in recent years. Part of it was the Covid panic shutdowns. Zoom meetings were not as much fun as the monthly gatherings, and the break gave many women time to wonder if it was worth it.
Worse, the woke infected the group and the leadership, rather than telling them, “we’re inclusive about the writing and not about the politics” kept backtracking and apologizing, disgusting many longtime members into leaving.
The final straw came at the last round of awards (which were renamed from the Ritas to honor a
colored woman writerwoman of writer colored.*The winning novel — which passed through several layers of judging — was a Western, in which the male hero participated in the Wounded Knee massacre, regretted his participation, turned to God for forgiveness, and won his lady love.
Such expressions of Christian theology and the idea of God forgiving the repentant caused such an outcry that the board revoked the award.
Now, many chapters have folded, the RWA sold their office building, and it may survive a year or two longer (if only because the folded chapters, by the bylaws, have to turn their bank account to the mothership, resulting in a temporary bump in income). But as a powerful group, the RWA’s dead meat.
* Not that there was anything wrong with that. She was a pioneering writer and deserves the honor. Shame it didn’t have that air of “we gotta to something to show we’re woke.”
“Are men banned from RWA conventions?”
I once heard a writer say that the reason male romance writers chose female pen names was not because of any prejudice in the publishing industry but simply because female book buyers expected to see female author names.
Vaginal sex for gay men.
That was the line that had me in stitches, Stephanie. “Vaginal.” “Gay.” Frankly, the whole thing puts me in mind of the famous quote from The Princess Bride:
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Vaginal sex for gay men.
I need a drink.
Let us all take a moment to pray for David’s liver.