Bravo!

(from Frequently Felt)


 

(via vicemag)

VIGILANTES ARE TAGGING EGYPT’S SEXUAL HARASSERS WITH SPRAY PAINT

Despite worldwide publicity and campaigning, the approach to actually solving the sexual harassment epidemic in Egypt has sadly been a pretty apathetic one, with police giving less than a gram of shit about the situation, leaving street perverts to grope away until their hands are content. So it’s perhaps no surprise that anti-harassment groups in Cairo have gone vigilante, taking what’s left of the law into their own hands and patroling the streets to fight the harassment epidemic themselves.

We first heard about “Be A Man,” one of the more radical anti-harassment campaigns, from a story on NPR. The members of the group patroled during the recent Eid al-Adha festival celebrations, armed with cans of black and white spray paint, attacking, pinning down, and scarlet-lettering the shit out of grabbers and gropers with the words “I Am a Harasser.” Mostly men themselves, the activists wore matching fluoro jackets with “Harassment Prevention” scrawled across their backs in Arabic. I spoke to Muhammad Taimoor, leader and founder of the campaign, about their controversial tactics during the festival.

VICE: Hey Muhammad. Can you tell me a little bit about what’s been going on in the past few weeks?

Muhammad Taimoor: Yeah, we’ve been working against harassment with our campaign, “Be a Man.” A big problem here is that women-only carriages on the subway are being invaded by men who are then harassing the women onboard, so we’ve been working against that. It was Eid a couple of weeks ago and we were expecting that would be a particularly bad time for harassment. In the three days of Eid that I participated in, we caught about 300 cases of harassment—that’s 100 every day.

Wow, good job. How do you “catch” these cases?
Our tactics this time were pretty violent—a lot of people were offended because they didn’t like what we were doing. Basically, we attacked the harassers and spray-painted “I Am a Harasser” on anyone we caught in the act. The police weren’t at all supportive of what we were trying to do and they clearly weren’t ready to keep Egyptian women safe during Eid, so we did all the work on our own.

Why did you choose tagging with spray-paint as a tactic?
Because, in our society, a girl blames herself when she gets harassed. When she speaks out to her family about it, they blame her. Sometimes they prevent her from going to school or going outside because they think that sexual harassment is the girl’s problem, not the harasser’s problem. So, when our group attacks the harasser, the girl feels confident in herself. She feels like she was right, she feels like the street is supporting her. She’ll have the confidence to walk in the street without fear and she won’t be afraid to speak out if it happens again.

Keep Reading

A Great Night Of Godless Perversity

I had a real blast performing at the Godless Perversity reading at the
Center for Sex and Culture last night - as I just mentioned on my Classes And Appearances page.

If you (alas) weren't there I've posted a special, slightly-edited version of "Friday Night At The Calvary Hotel" that I performed on my M.Christian's Queer Imaginings site. The full version is available in both FILTHY BOYS: Male-Male Erotica and my brand new best-of-my-best queer erotica collection, STROKE THE FIRE: The Best ManLove Fiction of M. Christian.

BUT, as a special 'treat,' here's the piece I wrote but didn't perform - though if you happen not to be a Godless Pervert you might not want to skip the following ... but otherwise enjoy!

BIGGER THAN JESUS

"We're more popular than Jesus now ... Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary." – John Lennon

#

Your dad has one. Your brother has one. Your uncle has one. Your grandfather has one. Your great, great grandfather has … or more than likely had one.

Albert Einstein had one. Babe Ruth had one. Michelangelo had one. Leonardo had one. Shakespeare had one. Lincoln had one. Ghandi had one. Hitler had one. Stalin had one.

Paul McCartney has one. Ringo Starr has one. George Harrison had one. Mitt Romney has a small one. Barack Obama has a huge one.

Anne Coulter has one.

The Dalai Lama has one. Pat Robertson has one. The Pope has one. Jerry Falwell had one.

I have one.

And there it is: the lead in to the question. But, as I said, the answer is not quite as important, as revealing, as the reaction to it.

So ... just how big was Jesus?

# 

Aside from a few unfortunate accident victims it’s a universal constant: men, human males to be specific, have a penis.

Keeping the argument Christian because, let’s face it, Jews shouldn’t really have a problem with the idea: why shouldn’t he have had one?

So just how big was Jesus? Bigger than average? He was supposed to be the Son of God, wasn’t he? So he was pretty damned big, but he probably wouldn’t want to be too big – after all, he did say something about humility, right? It wouldn’t be right if he, say, couldn’t be big enough to fit through the eye of a needle, but so big that he might have been a diversion from the Sermon on the Mount.

Circumcision is a given as he was the King of the Jews and all. But what happened to that part of him? Considering how precious various parts of Saints have been it seems odd that there haven’t been there many great Raiders of the Lost Ark adventures trying to locate that missing part of the Son of God.

We know that Jesus rose after three days -- but like most men did a certain part of his anatomy rise before the rest of him? Granting him superhuman control we can skate over certain embarrassing ponderings, but others just beg to be asked. For instance, there’s a hunk of his early days missing from the Bible: were those simply too embarrassing to report. He was, after all, an adolescent – and like most adolescent's probably spent a large part of his time locked in the bathroom with the Aramaic version of Penthouse.

“Was Jesus bigger than John Holmes?” was the question I asked people on the street on a sunny San Francisco Sunday. Most of them didn’t know who John Holmes but said that Jesus was bigger.

Those that did know about John Holmes came close to inflicting physical bodily harm, so I’ve chosen to take their answers as affirmative-via-threatened ... though I wonder about their purity as they knew who John Holmes was.

Universally everyone interviewed said that he was bigger than the Beatles, but I have to wonder how they came to that conclusion: average length, intimate knowledge, or commutative measurement: Paul, John, George and then Ringo – one dick after another? Personally I lean towards the first as putting the Fab part of the Fab Four together would more than likely would make them bigger than John Holmes.

See, isn’t science fun?

But if he didn’t have a penis then what did he have? Was God so offended by one of his own creations, i.e. the penis, that he didn’t even give his son one?

Logic being apples to the oranges of faith, these few people couldn’t see beyond the playfulness of the question -- instead ramming headlong into a wall so inflexible they could only accept The Son Of God ... with the underparts of a Ken doll.

That's the question – that's what I'm asking here and what I asked those unfortunate pedestrians on a Sunday – but there's more to it, a more than I find even more disturbing than fundamentalist threats of violence.

Why is the idea of Jesus having a penis so upsetting? Before writing this I asked some people – religious or not – and got answers ranging from “turn the other cheek” hypocritical outrage to simple “squirming in seat” discomfort. Bad enough thinking of your father’s, let alone the son of a supposed all-father, was the flavor of the conversations.

Folks – mostly folks like us -- have talked about how Christianity has perverted and criminalized our flesh and blood natures, created a totally unrealistic and honestly disturbing fantasy world that real no human being could ever inhabit. A group-think nightmare worked out from very human self-interests of power and control from a few scraps of parchment and horribly distorted myths and fables.

The atheists, the agnostics, the insincere party-pagans -- we’ve given the Fundamentalists their little spot of land to burn each other at the stake on, stone gays on, refute evolution on, believe the divinity of the president and the USA on – at least in this little piece, but you folks are fair game: Christianity as an ignorantly adopted default religion, the divinity of Davy and Goliath, the ‘based on a true story’ mythology of Satan and his kick-boxing Son Of God nemesis, and the ‘proofs’ of divinity in tortillas and cheese sandwiches.

They're a lost cause. We can – rightfully – kick them aside. The future is not for them ... hell, even the present is not for them: they dream of – and deserve – a Disneyland Yesterday of smallpox, stonings, keeping the darkies in their place, and sex in the dark ... and only to make babies.

The Bible Thumpers have long since gone, slamming the door behind them -- so it’s just you and me now.

When I asked about Jesus's penis you smirked, you laughed through gritted teeth: oh, sure, Jesus had a penis. You can laugh at that one, self-righteously giggle at my lame jokes about how big The Son Of God was ... but, honestly, truthfully, how many of you hedged your bets by flicking your eyes at sky ... hoping that the Hairy Thunderer won’t be too pissed at you for even thinking about it.

That's the frightening thing: give the Fundimentalists their hysteria -- they’ve certainly earned it for running away from reality and into a land where the drugs that save their lives, the computers that let them scream and shout about the evils of a secular society, the engineering that puts roofs over their heads, all came from what they fear more than Satan and his cloven tap-shoes: science and thought. The dick of Jesus is theirs to scream and howl about.

But why should people who haven’t drunk the sacramental wine of Christianity found the idea of Jesus’s penis uncomfortable?

It’s understandable that the Fundamentalist rockers and mumblers would foam and froth, but why is the idea so disturbing for folks who have never read the Bible, any Bible, or even set foot in a church, any church, or who are – to put it politely – vocal about being not just unbelievers but that anyone who does believe is a complete, total, and utter moron.

We -- the atheists, the agnostics, the insincere party-pagans – far too easily forget what we are not believing about: where the real danger lies.

The Fundamentalists make themselves easy targets, dancing clowns in front of neon-green bulls eyes, but when people who have never been in any church, read any religious tract, or even openly sneer any anything to do with the idea of faith squirm in their seats, flick their eyes skyward, it pulls aside the curtain and shows that irrational belief is not loud and cartoonish but hidden in plain sight.

Sure, the Fundamentalists have left the party. But far too many people on this planet have all the ignorance but none of the dedication: they are the ones who shake their heads at evolution, gay rights, sexual expression, freedom of expression, and the Separation of Church and State while not understanding exactly why.

Will talking about Jesus’s penis change anything?

Of course it won’t – not immediately at any ate -- but I hope that maybe a few of you will think about it when you look out at the world and see only the burning crosses ... forgetting that the true darkness of believing the unbelievable, of irrational terrors of punishment by Dad in the Sky, is not just in the face of a screaming preacher but in the same discomfort that comes from walking under a ladder ... or thinking about Jesus's dick.

But one more thing: just to show that Jesus and his followers aren’t the only ones being picked on here – and, perhaps, reveal how deep this seam of fear runs through even we who consider ourselves above and beyond all these foolish fears, these ridiculous beliefs, these silly irrationalities:

Just how big was Mohammad?

Dumb Ways To Die

Pod People

Jack Finney
The Body Snatchers
1955

Hashima Island ... and Skyfall?!

(from M.Christian's Meine Kleine Fabrik)

In Skyfall, the Japanese island of Hashima serves as the secret headquarters of Raoul Silva, the well-coiffed Bond villain played by Javier Bardem. In reality, it serves as a sobering reminder of the pitfalls of industrialization, and the human toll it can exact. Late last month, Messy Nessy Chic published a detailed history of the island, which, at the turn of the 20th century, was a bustling coal-mining town owned by the Mitsubishi Corporation. 

Things took a turn for the sinister at the dawn of World War II, when the Japanese turned the island into a bona fide labor camp for Chinese and Korean prisoners. By 1959, the island boasted the highest population density on Earth (139,100 per square kilometer), and living conditions soon...  

Continue reading… (from The Verge)

Well, now I HAVE to get out there and watch Skyfall ... as I wrote about the glorious ruins of Hashima island for Dark Roasted Blend, and - naturally - the same article is in my book, Welcome to Weirdsville:



Crumbling plaster, broken and splintered lath, cracked cement, fractured concrete, gap-toothed brick walls, rusting iron, daggers of shattered glass … no argument about it: there's something hypnotically alluring, darkly fascinating, about a truly great ruin.

What's now decay and rot once was bright and brilliantly full of hope: Who lived here? What were their lives like? What happened? How did it all come apart? How did it all crumble to almost nothing?

In the case of Hashima Island, or Battleship Island as it's often called, hope and optimism became dust and decay because one black resource was replaced by a cheaper black resource. Populated first in 1887, the island – which is 15 kilometers from Nagasaki – only began to really, and phenomenally, become populated much later, in 1959.

Hashima is, for many ruin fans, the rotting and collapsing grail, the benchmark all other crumbling structures are measured against – and seeing pictures of the place it's easy to see why. Not only is Hashima frighteningly preserved in some places, as if the residents had just stepped out as few minutes before, but it is also, contrarily, spectacularly falling down. Beyond its current awe-inspiring state of decay, the island's dramatic isolation and its bizarre history make it the ruin of ruins.


Before that day when coal, the old black resource, was replaced by oil, another black resource, Hashima was the most densely populated area – ever. On that tiny island, crammed into what are now decaying tenements, were thousands of miners, their families (including children), support staff, administration, and everything necessary to make their lives at least tolerable. It's hard to imagine when looking at the empty doorways, ghostly apartments, and hauntingly vacant corridors what the lives of those people might have been like.

Unlike the post-apocalyptic drama of Hashima, we can very easily imagine what the lives of the residents of the famous Walled City of Kowloon were like – in fact we can ask them, as their city was torn down in 1993. The reason why the Walled City gets so frequently mentioned as a ruin is, while it was there, it was as if the people who lived in it were living their lives in the guts of some great, monstrous, maze.

To say that the city had a long history is an understatement, as its roots go back to the Song Dynasty (960 AD, if you need to know the date). The city was a curiosity for a very long time – a strange bit of legal knotting making it Chinese and not British -- but the labyrinth didn't start to grow appreciably until after the second world war when it became a haven for … well, people without a state: refugees, squatters, thieves, drug-dealers, and much more (and much worse). Neither Great Britain nor China refused to have anything to do with the immense warren of walkways, apartments, workshops, factories, brothels, gambling dens, and opium dens.


The Triad, who represented most of the criminal element, were pretty much forced out in the 70s – by a police attack some 30,000 strong, no less -- but the city remained as a kind of anarchist warren, a world-unto-itself where the residents built and maintained pretty much everything. Looking at pictures of the city today, it looks like some kind of ramshackle prison, a cyberpunk nightmare of florescent lights, spectrally flickering televisions, and mazes of perpetually damp hallways and trash-strewn alleyways. Yet, for many people living there, it was simply home.

Alas, the end of the living ruin that was the Walled City came to an end in the 90s when the residents were evacuated and their fantastic city-within-a-city was torn down. Interestingly, the Walled City has a strong connection to Hashima as, at its height, the Walled City had a population density almost rivaling that Japanese island. Before the bulldozers came, it had a staggering population of 50,000 people, all living in an area the size of a few city blocks.

But if you're talking ruins you have to talk about the ruin FROM THE FUTURE .. or at least a ruin that looks like it came from there.

If you travel to Taiwan, up north to be specific, you will find yourself in a what looks like the fantastic set from some kind of big-budget science fiction epic: the resort of San Zhi. Built in the 1980s, the resort was supposed to be, planned to be, a vacation spot from the next century .. BUT TODAY!


Unfortunately, the dreams of the developers stayed just that and, beyond a few remarkably-well-preserved, sections, San Zhi never materialized. But what they did build, and that's still there in all it's ruinous glory, is amazing: crumbling residential pods on a bleak and blasted landscape, a mini-sprawl of the future falling apart BUT TODAY!

Decaying, rotting, crumbling, collapsing – ruins are the remains of what was, of the lives of the people who lived in them. In the case of Hashima Island, what remains teases us with thoughts of what it must have been like to live in the most densely populated area in the world, ever; with the Walled City of Kowloon, we instead dream of what it must have been like to a resident of a labyrinthine living, breathing ruin; and then there is the painful folly of San Zhi – a ruin not from the past but strangely, wonderfully, from a tomorrow that might have been.

Still More Philosophy

 

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Reminder: I'm Reading At The The Godless Perverts Story Hour

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Bitten By Books Likes The Very Bloody Marys

(From M.Christian's Queer Imaginings)

Here's a very nice review of The Very Bloody Marys (out now in a new edition as part of the M.Christian ManLove Collection)

Bitten By Books:

Valentino, a daylight hemosapien, is training to become a vampire cop for the Le Counceil Carmin. He has been training for over a century and his boss/trainer, believes that he is worthless. Valentino readily agrees with him. 

Valentino is running late for work as usual and is worried that his boss, Pogue, will get angry with him, again. He jumps in a cab with a driving corpse and heads to Pogues home. Ombre who is a liaison for the Counseil tells him that Pogue is missing and Valentino has been chosen to look for him. Ombre believes that the Very Bloody Marys have something to do with it. 

During the night Valentino must not only find his boss and the Very Bloody Marys but he needs to figure out how. As the night goes on his To Do list becomes bigger and bigger. 

I had a lot of fun reading this book. It was a nice change to have a bumbling vampire and watch him fight Vespa riding vampires. He tries so hard to make it look like he knows what he is doing but in the end it is all for not. The cast of extras were wonderful additions to the story. Saul a wizard who owns a cat that talks and is addicted to cat nip, a chef who is a coroner who works at a morgue/restaurant was hysterical. A worthy under dog story.

Yet More Philosophy

Confessions Of A Literary Streetwalker: What Makes a Good Publisher?

Check this out: I just wrote a brand new "Confessions Of A Literary Streetwalker" piece for the always-great Erotica Readers and Writers site - all my previous columns, of course, have been collected in How To Write And Sell Erotica by Renaissance Books.

Here's a tease:

Before I begin (again), a bit of disclosure: While the following has been written in an attempt to be professionally and personally non-biased I am an Associate Publisher for Renaissance E Books. 

Now, with that out of the way (again)...

#

The last time I wrote an intro like the above it was for my Streetwalker column Self Or Not? – about why I feel that, even though it can be very alluring, I still recommend writers work with a publisher rather than go the self-publishing route.

After writing that column I've been thinking, a lot, about what makes a good publisher ... especially these days.  Not to (ahem) brag but I've been in the biz for quite a few years and have worked with a lot of publishers – both when books were printed on (gasp) actual paper, as well as in the new digital age, so I think I can say a bit about what makes a good publisher.

As always, keep in mind that this is somewhat subjective: what I like in a publisher may not be what you like in a publisher ... but the somewhat is there because, tastes aside, it's a publisher's job to get your book out so, hopefully, people will buy bunches of copies.

The world – as I mentioned – as totally changed, and so has what publishers not just can do but should be doing.  It may sound a bit ... emotional, but I like a publisher I can talk to – and who talks to me.  Sure, many publishers are simply too busy to answer every email immediately but that they get back to me eventually is more than enough to keep me happy.  I've dealt with far too many publishers who I have to write, write, write and write again to get an answer to even the simplest question.

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