#the neurodivergent urge to make a 2000 word post when your pr manager is asleep

[oleworm]

Don’t reblog

Re: that last reblog

It is annoying, but I wouldn’t blame it on the apps themselves but on people’s attitudes on how we interact with ideas. When you’re scrolling by a post every two seconds apps do accelerate this tendency but these attitudes existed and were popular before. I’m guilty of thinking that maybe I should not add a certain book to my Goodreads because people I barely know might get “the wrong idea,” or clarifying at the end of a post, “I have taken great joy from this book for these particular reasons, but of course I do not share the author’s views on what society should be.” It’s frustrating to feel like you have to self-censor because someone might think you agree with everything the author said for the mere fact of having read their book, and at the same time it feels necessary to preemptively defend yourself when you’ve seen people harassed for much less.

A bit of writing is good because it makes you think, because it facilitates communication between human beings, it bridges the distance between strangers, loved ones, ages, continents, points out relationships and contradictions you might otherwise not have noticed. In certain (especially online) spaces it is no longer regarded positively that a person should read a controversial author because they want to know what the fuss is about. Instead there is a feeling that one should ignore, condemn or make fun of the work without having read it, unless it is in fashion with the social group the reader would like to associate with. I personally find it redundant, redundant and reductive that a lot of people will look specifically for material within a book to use in the mock trial to declare it morally worthless. Though to clarify I think it’s great when people rip into books to have fun and not to feel righteous and holy. And it is true that some material is vile. A lot of it, in fact, incites hatred, and seemingly innocuous things if read without care can plant prejudicial ideas in people’s minds. There’s also a lot of stuff people claim to dislike just because everybody else tells them to, because someone they don’t like happens to like it. I say to you, Come on, you owe it to yourself! You owe it to yourself to hate something for your own reasons. Not because your mutual or someone on YouTube told you to.

There are two writers that I’d like to mention, Ayn Rand and Andrea Dworkin. How many people that dislike them have read their works, and how many condemn them solely for the politics of their readers? Reading a book does not mean that a person has to endorse the author’s views. I will ask you, Don’t you want to know what it says? And I will tell you, You’re allowed to disagree with the thesis of a book you’ve chosen. And there is nothing shameful about it. There is nothing wrong with you, trust me, if the author of the book you read turns out to be what you consider to be a bad person with bad ideas.

When I read Ayn Rand’s “Anthem,” instead of the libertarian manifest she intended it to be I found in it an artifact, a historical document about the worldview of a refugee from the Soviet Union. What she felt, how she saw this development in history, an analogue to a diary or memoir. In spite of my expectations (I vaguely remember other people dunking on her prose) I found it really enjoyable how much she drew from emotion--anger, hope, disappointment--despite a lot of libertarians being self-professed rationalists. Another reason I was interested was because somebody told me that her English writing takes a lot from the Russian, a language that for a long time I’ve been interested in learning, especially in terms of grammar and, as I later found, its rhythm. That libertarians from a whole other continent, a whole other era should interpret it differently is another topic. It makes a lot of sense. If they and I are different people, it is natural that we should have different conclusions about the same book.

The radical feminist Andrea Dworkin is, of course, regarded with wariness due to her popularity among the TERFs. Now, I have not read the bulk of her material, so maybe I am wrong about this and am open to corrections, but the times where I’ve seen her refer to transgender people it was in generally positive or theoretical terms: more people would have the freedom to explore their gender and would manifest different gender identities and presentations in a world that was less sexist, if I remember correctly. And instead of the TERF tenet of biological essentialism, what this person asserts is that it is society that can and must be changed. An idea that most people can agree upon, though how exactly is the subject of debate. There are way more objectionable ideas in her work regarding children and animals, for example, but nobody points it out because few have actually read it. Though her views are on the (ha) radical end, it can be a useful read for people that never questioned why certain things are so, many of which are still considered a regular part of life in mainstream 21st century societies. One last thing along this tangent. To be honest, it has been some time since I read it, but I did get the feeling that a lot of the things she said are nowadays commonly accepted by modern feminists. Did we make a boogeyman out of these books because transphobes decided that they own them? I don’t know. Maybe she wrote a book where she says something really horrible and I haven’t read it.

I kind of lost the thread here... Graphomania strikes again. Oh yeah... It’s not bad to read a book because you’re curious about what it says. Even if it’s a book nobody likes. (I’d say being curious about it should be one of the main reasons anyone should read a book.) Tell your friends about them, tell strangers about them. If someone is wrong about a book or has a different opinion about it that doesn’t mean they’re stupid and evil. Or that you’re stupid and evil. You’re just two different people. And you won’t have any fun and you won’t understand anything if you’re looking at what other people say so you can agree with them. If you know you’re easily influenced maybe don’t read reviews before you’ve read the actual book or watched the actual movie.

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#the neurodivergent urge to make a 2000 word post when your pr manager is asleep