Several recent posts deal with the effort to tear down the family, the borders between adults and children (part of a hatred of boundaries I'd already noted..), and the story of Moira Greyland.
First - I came across from this piece by Paul Lucas, “Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law”. It's actually the second part of a series. It opens with a lengthly discussion of writing for the audience vs writing for other authors (aka, why, despite my liking for Rush and other odds and ends of prog rock, I find a lot of it to be navel-gazing wankery...), but then leaps from that platform to the related tangent of what kind of people get trapped in the little bubbles, away from reality, trying desperately to impress each other:
Yes, Barthes, the inventor of the terms ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’, along with his colleagues Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir – so-called intellectuals – wanted to allow adults to be able to get away with raping children.
If you want to know what people are really like, look at the behaviour that they want to legalise. These people tried to turn children into ‘writerly’ books – objects on which they projected their own twisted desires.
First, separate the ‘author‘ from the ‘book‘, and the ‘family‘ from the ‘child‘. Then make up any old shit you want about what the ‘book‘ or ‘child‘ is telling you, your own ‘writerly’ interpretation, and you can do what the hell you want. In their world, “Tolkien was a transphobic racist,” and “That child wants to have sex with an adult.”
Today we have whole subcultures of writers who appeal only to other writers. We have architects in positions of influence who appeal only to other architects, and intellectuals who are only interested in what other intellectuals say. They pay no attention to the rest of society, there is no opinion that matters other than the people in their own weird and depraved worlds.
I also saw this piece by Rawle Nyanzi reviewing the Last Closet, in it he notes:
On top of that, she explains how much of the Berkeley counterculture scene tended to look the other way at child molestation in general and her parents in particular, and how authorities at the time generally weren’t helpful. The picture she paints of the Berkeley crowd is a harsh one, condemning them for displaying themselves as virtuous revolutionaries while allowing sexual offenses against children to go on unchecked. This, as well as brief participation as an independent adult in BDSM activities (with other adults) makes her develop strong opinions against non-traditional relationships in general, even if only adults are involved.
And a commenter notes:
It tells a lot about where American society is now when the bigger controversy is over Greyland’s disapproval of homosexuality rather than her parents’ sexual abuse and pedophilia.
It says something indeed. The degree to which this kind of degeneracy was excused within that community, and in the "intellectual" community at large was mostly unknown to me until the story of Moira Greyland broke several years ago, and it's worth repeating because I don't think people realize how utterly sick, vile, and evil some of these oh-so-reasonable sounding people are, and worse, how open they are about it, with it being covered up by their compatriots and the media pointing the spotlight of public scrutiny anywhere else.
Incidentally, the first part of the series looks at Mary Robinette Kowal butchering her own work. yes, that is possible.
She is a competent craftsman who can polish the word, if by word you mean "utter crap". For example, see Jeffro's review of her ugly Lady Astronaut of Mars:
The author appears to be extremely aggressive in her attempt to counter female stereotypes in science fiction, but she doesn’t seem to have anything compelling to offer in their place. There is no power here, no virility, no beauty, no passion, and no meaning here. There’s just a woman that strikes me as being an inadvertent reductio ad absurdum to our culture’s dominant views on women and women’s roles. Sure, she gets to be the hero and the astronaut in the end… but her sacrifice is more about her and how it makes her feel than anything else. She’s so myopic… and yet, she really would have been happier if she’d just been a mom and stayed at home. (Everyone else would have been happier, too. She’s strikes me as being the sort of person that you’d never want to do anything for you because she’s such a martyr that you’d never hear the end of it.)
I don’t have anything against this author personally and have no idea what else she’s done. Just based on reading this, I can only conjecture that she’d hate the sort of works that I prefer– Tolkien’s writing, for example. She strikes me as a competent wordsmith, but I don’t know that I can readily forgive her for using her talents to make something that is so intentionally ugly and hollow. Maybe I should feel sorry for her for her lack of imagination? Ah well, I guess this is all that’s left when a person has purged the chainmail bikini from their science fiction and fantasy. At the very least, this piece graphically demonstrates where that sort of idiocy ultimately leads….
Evil exists, and it must destroy and undermine and twist beauty and innocence.
