Amina Sopwith

Of course it doesn't diminish her. She is unquestionably very talented, but it's a fact of showbiz that there is only a very narrow allowance for how women are allowed to look. It's natural that they can be difficult to tell apart when there's almost no real diversity among them and the few outliers are the exceptions that prove the rule. I can never recognise Sienna Miller, for some reason. It's like I have selective face blindness. It doesn't matter how many times I see her, I can never ever remember what she looks like. Trying to picture her now and drawing a blank.

Day tripper.

Busy bee.

Hurt feelings.

Returning to an earlier topic, and my characterisation of Goreans as being not the brightest of bulbs... I would never, ever make fun of someone for something such as having a low IQ (as if those scores prove anything apart from how good you are at IQ tests anyway) or a learning disability. That's not stupidity, any more than someone with a mobility problem is lazy or undisciplined. By its very nature (prescriptive, one-dimensional, turgid, crap in general), Gor does tend to attract a lot of people who are not conventionally clever or creative. The pressure to be Truly Gorean actively discourages anything else. But these people, who honestly don't know better, aren't really where my ire is directed. I'm more angry that the belief and subculture exploit them and validate it when they do have horrible hateful beliefs that they clearly aren't capable of questioning. What gets me about Gor is the wilful stupidity, the intellectual laziness, that absolutely abounds there. If you're capable of reading a book and quoting from it, then you're capable of thinking for 12 seconds about what you're perpetuating. Ok, most Goreans have never read any book that doesn't have flaps to lift up, but they generally can read and repeat nasty little misogynistic passages, put them in their profiles and then spend the next 25 years arguing about them. They're certainly capable of producing walls of tedious, self-aggrandising text that will actually make you wish Super Manly Swordsman Huntsman Who Is Totally Not Overcompensating For Anything would just come along and put you out of your misery. If you can do that, then you can understand why the source material is so unbelievably hateful and offensive. But you don't, because you're Gorean. Which at best means that you don't want to be bothered by such pesky things as misogyny and the glorification of abuse because you want to serve drinks or fart around on a battlefield until 1985 manages to get its costume back off you. And at worst means you actually did read all that twaddle, absorbed and understood it, and actually liked it. That's what it's about. It is true that not every single last Gorean is a slavering misogynist, but every single last Gorean is perpetuating and upholding someone who is.

Well, it is!

Don't be so absolutely ridiculous. It's clearly Gal Gadot.

Oh, it's everywhere. I'll try to find some threads where I go into more detail and PM you. I know some people think I overdo it because I'll use other topics as a springboard, but I actually bite back a lot of the attacks I could make. My intention, which I may or may not be succeeding in doing, is to attack Gor often enough for the strength of my feeling about it to be kind of funny in and of itself, but not so much that I become truly tedious. People, if I get it wrong then do tell me. Except for Goreans, of course, because I don't give a monkey's what that lot think. Which is why I think it's relevant here. And it's odd, because in the case of Gor, there really is no question even among the most devout believers that it really was all just made up by a stupid entitled man.

I'm sure we all know by now what I think of Gor and how I like to express it. As with so much humour, it's a defence. I rip the merciless and ever living piss out of it because it terrifies me. It's sinister, hateful and misogynistic, but it's unkillable and for many people it's the first and only experience they ever get with anything related to BDSM (it isn't BDSM, of course, but lots of people think it is, and that's partly what's so frightening). I don't actually find it remotely funny that there is an entire subculture based around a series of absolutely sh*t books that expound, at length and without irony, the literal subhumanity of women, how they all need, deserve and want horrible abuse and how every nasty misogynistic stereotype you've ever heard of, plus about 12 that you haven't, are in fact entirely true. The only defence I really have is to make it ridiculous (which isn't hard, because it IS completely risible). It's less frightening and also less powerful when it becomes a total joke. And a few people have said to me that they find my rants about it to be funny, that they are entertained by just how much I loathe it and - crucially - that I have caused them to reconsider their thoughts on it. That is exactly what I set out to do, so it warms the cockles of my black, shrivelled heart to hear it. When people are laughing, they're also listening. I'm not trying to convert Goreans to my way of thinking. If they've read the books I have, and many of them say they have, and they weren't repelled by the endless vile misogyny, then honestly I've got no idea how I can make the nastiness any clearer than the author did, and all I can really do is try to ward others off. I don't care if I offend people with it; if you find Gor acceptable then you've got no right to come at me claiming that I'm offensive. But I am careful never to attack anyone individually (except in anecdotes of various encounters with random anonymous Goreans or, of course, the great gutless witless worthless Glorious Leader Nobhead himself, and trust me he's been saying worse about me for considerably longer than I've been alive). I'll attack the culture and the source material and the beliefs but I won't make personal insults to the individual having the conversation. I'll just shout them in RL and moon at my laptop. Have at thee! And if someone thinks I'm not funny, well that's their prerogative. Nobody has to laugh. But I would remind them that the funniest scene the Glorious Leader ever wrote was a man dragging a woman along going HUR HUR RAPE RAPE RAPE while she cried OH NO NOT RAPE and he went YES RAPE HUR HUR and she cried OH NO NOT RAPE and then he went HUR HUR JUST KIDDING TIME TO EAT SOME GLUE HUR HUR I'M GOREAN RAAAAA. I mean, you really might as well laugh at my jokes. At least mine are intentional.

Beers, anyone?

And breathe...

I suspect it's very similar to a true Scotsman.

Gate closed.

Can I?

Ah.

Well, just remember that they're also assessing whether you're worth their time too. It's a two-way street. I'm interested that you think any old schlub can easily hold a polite and mutually enjoyable conversation with someone they've never met and that it's not a skill.

I don't really understand why you'd want to test someone like this right from the off. What are they supposed to have to prove to anyone?

Chocolate fountain.

There there.

L Frank Baum. I'm off to see the wizard.

I feel it must be possible to shoehorn in the "no, it's just ice cream" joke somehow.

Apparently it also means Left Foot Braking, Low Flying Bird and Lame F*** Boy. I'm none the wiser.

What does LFB stand for? I've tried looking it up but all I find is London Fire Brigade and Little Fat Buddy, neither of which make sense in the context.

Abandoned ship.