Petri Dish of Perversion

I spent most of the day trying to get three signatures on one tiny piece of paper for a class.  Very dumb.  I think that most people who go into Administration have peer pressure issues.  It would have been easier to just forge the damn signatures, but they frown on that sort of thing.  :-)  Naturally, the easiest person to get a hold of is the last person I need to sign it, and they won’t sign until the others sign.  I tried to be reasonable about it—after all, they get the paper again after they sign it anyway—and suggest that we break Tradition for once, but no.  Fine.  Fine.

What—if all the other administrators were jumping off a bridge, would you jump, too?

Do you guys call each other every morning and coordinate your outfits too, like in Junior High?

Well, that was what I wanted to say.

So I spent most of the day waiting.  It was fun.  And of course I had to park *completely* on the other side of campus.  I am *so* tired of this parking bullshit, but I guess it is the same at almost every school.  I went to hear someone famous (in a certain field) speak once, and he was hilarious; he had an accompanying slide show, and he was talking about his career.  When he came to the part of why he selected the school he did for (I think) post-grad work, he prefaced it by saying, “And Crazy Go Nuts University was particularly convincing in their letter, so I went there”.  And then he changed the slide to a letter on Crazy Go Nuts U’s stationery which said only, “We guarantee you a parking space.  Signed, Dean Smith”.  :-)  

Ok, I thought that was hilarious.

I am *still* not over the whole JT Leroy thing, by the way.  :-\  Teach me to not be sceptical of everything, I guess.  But really, there was nothing about the books that was all that bad, at least not such that one would have to justify writing it by creating a fictional character to then claim the work’s veracity in an autobiographical sense.  Especially when one then claims that the “author” has…well, a host of problems that there is no real purpose in relating, other than to “flesh out” the personality of the (alleged) writer as an actual person.  Creating a character to justify writing about something morally shocking (defusing the shock by claiming the events, or something similar, had actually happened) I could understand.  But there just really isn’t anything that is *that* bad in Leroy’s work.  

Which makes me wonder about the relationship between personal experience, mores, and the double standard applied by (most) Americans, but that is more than I can go into now, ‘cos I have to get to sleep.  :-)  But I just wonder:  Why is it that if something bad were to have been personally endured, it is an acceptable topic for open discussion (almost regardless of the act committed)?  I am not one who is big on censoring others, especially opinions and works of art or literature, so I have to concentrate to put myself in the minds of these uber-moral people who will condemn something that is pure fiction as being “immoral” or “pornographic” when on the other hand, Suzie The Saved Prostitute can go on talk shows and discuss what position she was being nailed in when she found Jesus, and that is ok.  Why are True Crime magazines all right—simply because they actually happened?  Why is it wrong to write fiction about fourteen year-old prostitutes, but it is Right for some True Crime-style television shows to throw in gratuitous shots of a serial killer’s home-made snuff film?  

Oh, and don’t tell me that they do not do that—I saw it just tonight, before I left to play trivia.  I watch too many shows like that to disingenuously claim that none of them ever, ever attempt to appeal to “prurient interests” (I just love that phrase).  They do.  Sometimes grossly.  But that is just fine, it seems.  Go figure, I guess.  It is just feeding the “victim culture” we seem to be cultivating in this country, and it is disgusting.  

And I also believe that claiming the story to be real absolves the author of any responsibility, which is revolting as well.  We’re becoming habituated to some of the foulest offences imaginable, to the point where the public demands what should be personal details to justify their empathy and interest.  And it appears that many victims are willing to turn themselves into golliwogs to obtain the sympathy they feel they deserve.  

I just find it all repulsive, really.  

I have had time to think about it (as I was waiting and waiting today), and I have come to the conclusion that I personally (ymmv) would have enjoyed Leroy’s writings *more* if I had known that they were fiction from the outset.  Footnoting that No Terminators Were Harmed In The Making Of This Story would have made me worry less after the author.  I would not have marvelled so at the emotions and imagery in consideration of its origin, true, but…I’m a big girl; I do not need fairy tales or justifications.  If I want to read about lot lizards, I am capable of doing so without pretending it is something unpalatable that I am enduring just so I know what that poor child went through, or whatever.  What shit.  I guess it all comes back to America’s love/hate relationship with All Things Sexual.  Or maybe I just have perversion and sex on the brain.  Who the hell knows.  Maybe everyone else is right, and *I* am wrong.  

Well, I’m sure it could happen.  :-)