Up Front by Emma Hart

"The Online World of Female Desire." I feel like I can actually hear my desk whimpering, "Please don't read that, please! I don't like the shouting and the being hit by your head. Can't we just skip one, just this once?"

 Well, maybe we could. But not this one. Because "For women indulging their curiosity, Internet erotica is less about flesh than finding Mr. Right" is by Ogi Ogas. We'll get to why that matters – and it really, really does – in a moment.

 First, though, let's take a wander through some gender essentialism, and yet another article saying that in some way, women don't really like sex. This is, "women like intimacy, commitment, and kittens."

 

One of our most interesting findings was that women are very different from men in how they use these online services. All across the planet, what most women seek out, in growing numbers, are not explicit scenes of sexual activity but character-driven stories of romantic relationships.

 

 But maybe he's right. I mean, this isn't a Daily Mail columnist interviewing six of her friends, this guy's a Scientist, and he has The Data. "Reliable data on the erotic interests of a broad swath of humanity." Men watch short porn videos. Women read, write, share and discuss stories about men having relationships. The whole point of that article is "women's brains are different", and we have to assume this guy has the data and the experience analysing it to back that up, right? And look, he even admits that yes, an awful lot of women do consume visual porn, while not quite managing to realise that the second-to-last paragraph undermines the point of the entire article. But those women are risk-takers. Adventurous. Testosterony. Men, really.

 He's studied fandoms, where women are producing and consuming these character-driven romances. Not, you'll note, explicit scenes of sexual activity.

 Now, if you've run across any slash-fic at all, this is probably the point at which you start to think, "Wait, what?"

 Perhaps, before running this piece, someone at the Wall Street Journal might have thought to google Ogi Ogas' book. Perhaps looked it up on Amazon. Scroll down past all the glowing reviews and look at the tags. 371 people have tagged this book "PhDs written in crayon".

 Why? Because he's this Ogi Ogas.

 

In late August 2009, two researchers -- Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam -- instigated a survey about women's desire and fandom, with an eye toward publishing a book called Rule 34: What Netporn Teaches Us About The Brain...

 

 ...they (unintentionally) made it quite clear that their intent in their project is to talk about human universals -- to use our fannish experience, our erotics and our desires, to reinforce ideas of universal, hard-wired, biological desire.

They are outsiders to fandom. They are outsiders to fanfiction. They are outsiders to slash. And they haven't tried to learn, or to understand, or to think about fannish communities. Instead, they have made assumptions about who we are, about what we read, about what we find hot; they plan to use those to explain what makes women tick, what our brains make us do.

 

  The very fan communities Ogas and colleague Sai Gaddam were studying rebelled against the study, finding the surveys they were given "ignorant, casually homophobic, patronising, misogynistic, profoundly privileged claptrap." In discussing the survey with fandom, Ogas used words like "shemale" and "trannies". When called on his language, he pulled a massive Flounce.

 Fandom participants either refused to respond to the survey, or deliberately gamed it, providing hilariously useless data. This book is, at least in part, based on those responses.

 Copies of the survey questions can be found here and here and the comments on those posts will make it clear just how offensive they were, and why. Or you could just consider the question, "If you enjoy m/m slash, which best describes your feelings about sexual relationships between two males who appear heterosexual?"

 Also, Boston University would like you all to know that Ogas is in no way affiliated with that institution. They would like people to stop emailing them complaining about what a massive jerk they think he is.

 In the meantime, it's perfectly possibly to examine the underlying premise that women are only interested in the erotic in the context of relationships by reading some fanfic. Let's even just use Legolas, like in the pictures on that article. PLEASE NOTE: these tender "erotic" relationships are NOT SAFE FOR WORK.

 Legolas/Eomer

 Legolas/Boromir

 Legolas/Aragorn

 Mmm. Here, have some more Legolas/Aragorn. Have all the Legolas/Aragorn you can take. Make sure I'm not cherry-picking here. So to speak.

 And if that wasn't sweet and tender and kitteny enough for you, try Sean Bean/Viggo Mortensen. (This is Real Person Fic. Some people may find this Disturbing.)

 Now, it's possible that a taste for written pornography is more common in women than in men, while more men might prefer visual pornography, and that such a difference might be biological rather than socialised. (Though then why describe women who like visual porn as "risk-takers"?) What's not possible is that A Billion Wicked Thoughts can make any credible contribution to the conversation.

 

 Speaking of credible contributions, I'll take this opportunity to blatantly link-whore a new site, The Lady Garden. I'll be writing here in future, along with Coley, Tallulah and Deborah. We'd love it if you dropped in, said hi, maybe had some tea and cake.

 As advised by mental health professionals, I have been attempting to cope with earthquake aftermath by returning to my normal habits as much as possible. Hence, perhaps, the following conversation:

 "Last night, I had this brilliant idea!"

 "Were you drunk?"

 "What did I just say? Anyway, I was saying to Megan-"

 "Oh Jesus."

 "-that there are a whole bunch of people in Christchurch who are working from home for the first time in their lives, and doing it under particularly trying circumstances. And given all my years of experience of working in my Winnie the Pooh pyjamas, I should write a column full of helpful advice."

 Also hence, almost certainly, my having had this conversation with myself.

 Anyway, I got right on that, and slightly over a week later, the typing started. There were a few games of solitaire first, of course, and some time spent chair-dancing while I warmed up, and since the top of this page I've checked Twitter six times and it's one in the morning. Which is kind of appropriate [Game of Scramble] because one of the hardest things to deal with when you're working from home [check comments at The Stroppery] is distractions.

 There's some really interesting advice about working from home around. "Most interesting" would be a tie between "make sure you still get up really early in the morning because that's the most productive time of the day" [wonder if there's an iPhone ap of a chainsaw starting up] and "hire a housekeeper and a nanny so those little everyday tasks don't keep distracting you". [Try to remember the name of that parenting advice that actress whose name I can't recall writes, fail.]

 The most useful advice? Have a door, shut it. Try to ensure that every partner, child and cat in your family understands that when the door is shut, you are Not At Home. [Look up the new Dutch porn magazine Filament has recommended.] The cats are just going to see it as a challenge, but it's more fun that way. [OOH, POSSETS HAS NEW PERFUMES OUT!]

 This is hardest, of course, if you have a family, and particularly in the school holidays. [Check the directions to the bach in Kaikoura.] Even if you don't, though, there may still be people in your life who find your being at home during the day Very Handy.

 Particularly if you're by yourself, but even if you're not, try to make an effort to leave the house every day. If, when you were working in town you met people for lunch, arrange to still do that. It might be a little more difficult now [let the cat in] but it's worth making the [let the cat out] effort, because you will disappear up your own arse without even noticing. [Check Twitter. Russell, go to bed.]

 These are not the biggest dangers, though. The biggest problem with working your existing office job from home [ha, look, a 2000 year old ad for a male prostitute, that's awesome]  is your job eating your life. Are you switching on your computer before your coffee machine? (By "switching on" I mean "waking up", I'm not crazy.) Are you reading work emails over breakfast? Have you done an hour's work before you make it to the shower? [I love this song, there's some real subtlety in the acoustic guitar, I really should get some more of this, I'll just – wait, no, finish this first. Fuck it, where was I?]

 [Chair-dancing]

 All the time that used to be yours still should be, including your travel time. Have a knock-off time after which you are no more reachable than you were previously. [Solita- no! Emma, stop being such a jerk-off. If you're not going to do this, you'll have to work on your novel, and you don't want to have to do that, now, do you?] Self-discipline means having designated goof-off times too.

 Still, the best advice I can give those of you now working out of your suburban homes? Noise-cancelling headphones. Awesome.

I never wanted to be one of those incredibly annoying self-appointed Guardians of Language. Words shift and change, and it's fascinating. I've even been working on not flinching when people say "less" instead of "fewer".

 What I do still find problematic is the point in the shift of language where a word starts to gain more general meaning, and there's no other word that conveys the precision it used to have. Or when a word – say, "significant" – has a precise meaning in one context, and also a more general usage, and confusion arises. I guess I just like having a bunch of different tools.

 So I hope I'm allowed a little moment to mourn the passing of the old, precise, technical meaning of the word "troll", and its morphing into a general insult. It's now seemingly being used to cover two different things I still find it important to distinguish. So I'm going to take a moment to dissect the corpse and see what can be learned from the anatomy of a Troll.

 There are important things – or at least, there used to be, and when I say "important", that's a relative term – that differentiate a Troll from just "some fuckwit on the internet".

 A Troll wants two things from an internet community: its pain and its attention. Positive attention and no attention at all seem to annoy Trolls about equally*. Both will make their bad behaviour escalate. They will say whatever they think it takes to get a rise out of a community, and it matters not at all if they actually believe what they're saying. Attention makes them stronger, but they're specially vulnerable to being ignored, and laughter. And slash weapons.

 Contrast this with what I call the True Believer. They absolutely mean what they're saying. What they want from a community is to change minds, to have somebody say, "Hey, you're right!"  Just like the person who turns up on your doorstep to talk to you about God, they're not interested in an actual conversation. A True Believer won't listen to what you say, or respond to it. They actually can't, because they're Believers. They argue from Faith, not Logic, and your experience, information and scientific studies have no chance against their Shield of Voluntary Ignorance.

 Actually, I told a lie. Let me come clean. I don't call them True Believers. I call them Tinkerbells. They're so bright and happy and sparkly and they make that cheery noise. And then they make it again. And again. Imagine an adorable curly-haired toddler standing next to your ear with a bell.

 So. Let's pop Tinkerbell up on the slab too. Tinks are often unfailingly polite, even while expressing some quite interesting bigotry. They usually have a fairly firm grasp of spelling and grammar, whereas your average troll can misspell some fairly offensive words. Tinks will never call you names. Most importantly, Tinks are not actually trying to hurt you. Trolls are.

 That said, I totally understand why Tinks get called Trolls sometimes.

 Neither a Troll nor a Tink is actually listening to you. The Tink can't, the Troll has no reason to. If you make a point while engaging them, neither will actually respond to it, preferring instead the Shifty Shifty Goalposts tactic. The Troll does this to keep you talking. The Tink does this because their belief has no structure, therefore there is no relation between one idea and the next. And you can't argue with that. Or at least you shouldn't, because it's a crushing waste of key-strokes.

 Both Tinks and Trolls will pursue a discussion to its bitter, bitter end. On the rare occasions that they give up before everyone else goes away, they will pull the Full Flounce. With neither a Tink nor a Troll is there the slightest chance that even your fineliest-honed wittiest response will make the slightest impression. You. Cannot. Win. Fuckers are like Weebles.

 So I'm guessing some of you are thinking, "Emma, given both Tinks and Trolls seem to be utter munting twatcocks, why is it important to discriminate between them? And where's my merlot?"

 Now, of course I think it's important, or I wouldn't be wasting all of this time and wine that, admittedly, I wasn't really using for anything else.

 Trolls are actually comparatively simple to deal with. Give them enough rope, cut down the corpse and chuck it out the door. Hope you haven't let them do too much damage in the process.

 Tinks are much more problematic. They're just saying what they, for want of a snarkier word, think. The last thing you want to do is lose the moral high ground to one – mostly because they absolutely love it. Call a Tink a Troll and they'll prance about being all ostentatiously offended, with their "I guess I crossed the Hive Mind", and their "You're just a big clique of Mean Girls", and their "You can't handle the truth!" and their Fucking Bells. The sound of bells carries a long way from the Moral High Ground.

 Consider Damien O'Connor. Is he a Tink – a genuine anti-union homophobe – or was he just trolling the Labour Party? If a Tink, he's been a massive failure, because frankly I would love it if all our opponents were that stupid. If a Troll, he's had quite the win, even managing to get Phil Goff to sort of say that all West Coasters are rednecks. I'd kind of like to know. Regardless of where he should be filed, though, that was one heck of a flounce.

 

*It may, in fact, not be possible to give a Troll positive attention without immediately descending into sarcasm. Obviously I'm not going to be the person who finds this out.

When I started at uni and moved into the Halls, we had three questions. They were our conversation-starters. You could ask them of anyone, in the hope that the answers would give you something to talk about, if not common ground. They weren't always asked in the same form, but the gist was the same. What's your name, what subjects are you doing, and where are you from?

That was the thing about being in Halls of Residence: we were all from somewhere, somewhere outside of Christchurch. The "Where you from?" question does, in a way, imply that you don't belong where you are, but it was never meant maliciously. We were all leaving home for the first time, so we didn't want to belong in the place we'd left, either. We could band together and commonly commiserate about being from Hokitika, or Masterton, or Oamaru – unless you were the guy from Auckland we were making fun of.

Once we started mingling with the wider student body (in some cases more literally than others), the answer to "Where you from?" was occasionally completely different. It was Cashmere, or StAC, or if they were prepared to admit it, Shirley. The meaning of the question actually changed depending on the answer.

Our "fromness" is broad, flexible and context-dependent. If we're in another country and someone asks us where we're from, we say "New Zealand". If we're in our own city, we might give a suburb, or a place of work, or wonder why the hell we're being asked. Do we look like we don't belong? Are we wearing the wrong clothes, or the wrong colour skin? Did we just order a daiquiri in a bar that has leaners?

Sometimes our "fromness" is deceptive. When I'm in Auckland, people who know me slightly but not thoroughly will say, "Christchurch? I thought you were from Wellington." Despite never having lived there, I seem to have something of an air of Wellingtonness about me, which is not displeasing. Though it should be added that this is not a mistake Wellingtonians tend to make. Mind you, half of Wellington's from Christchurch anyway.

When a place makes the news, especially in tragedy, whatever degree of "fromness" we have for it resonates. Even if our memories of it are painful or conflicted, we feel it. The negative fades away for a while: our sense of belonging, our memories of place, come to the fore. I watched it happen with ex-pats with Christchurch, and then again with Japan.

About three weeks ago, I left a phone message with a receptionist in another city. She asked where I was calling from, and when I said "Christchurch," she said, "Oh my God, I'm sorry!" and she wasn't even being snide. Then she asked if we were alright and how our house was, and I realised this was going to be the way of it for a while. My "fromness" involves disaster. The answer "Christchurch" now opens a conversation every time.

I guess I kind of knew this, even before the "You know you're from Christchurch when" stuff started turning up on Facebook. (Primarily, apparently, you know you're from Christchurch if spelling and grammar are amusing relics of a totalitarian past.) Those of us who have the choice, through circumstances and economics, have thought about whether to stay or go. We've made a conscious commitment to Christchurch, and driving our kids across the width of the city every day to their "temporary" school site. We're from Christchurch more than we used to be.

Last year marked the point where I'd lived in Christchurch for more than half my life. That did just sort of happen when I wasn't looking. What I'm more aware of is that we've just had an offer on my mother's house, and when that goes through, the last of my ties to Timaru will be severed. I'll never go back. I won't be from there any more. Unless, I suppose, it gets hit by some terrible natural disaster.

No, seriously, I'm just kidding. I wouldn't even wish this on Timaru.

Tuesday

 Sitting at the computer polishing the most recent chapter of my novel. I started it back in December, got the news my mother was very ill, and hadn't really been up to tackling it again since. About to mail it out to my reading group.

 Aftershock. No, earthquake. Sitting on the floor in the doorway hanging onto the frame. Everything is falling, crashing. Monitor and television both fall over forwards. So much noise. So much worse than anything before. Have been this scared once before, that I can remember. Legendary staunchness deserts. Screaming and crying.

 Stops for a bit. Grab my phone. Power out. Text from my partner Karl, "im okay." Text him back that I'm unhurt. Autocorrect changes it to 'injured'.

 "Injured."

 Karl freaks out a bit. Texts children.

 "Injured."

 Freaks out quite a bit more. Knows if I'm saying that, my leg has probably come off. Has to find children before he can come home. Heads for the carpark

 "Un. Hurt. Fuck you, autocorrect. Have you heard from the kids?"

 Rhiana joins him at the car. She was in the public library, not in the Southern Star building, where she should have been, which has lost its entire frontage.

 I get a text from Kieran saying he's okay, but narrowly missed by a falling pipe.

 Karl and Rhiana can only get as far as Latimer Square. Fortunately, that's the school evac point, and Kieran is there.

 Meanwhile, shaking continues at home. I get Karl's initial text six more times, and no reply to my last. Each "im okay" is less reassuring. Feeling like an episode of Dr Who. You know the one.

Put tweetdeck on my phone yesterday. Can still connect with outside world. Battery slowly dying. No, fastly dying.

 Shaking stops enough to start cleaning up. Broken crockery everywhere. Heirloom china of my grandmother's I just brought home from Mum's all broken. Falling shelving in both kids' bedrooms. On their beds. Lego propelled halfway up the hall. Phone battery dies.

 Family finally make it home. One of Kieran's friends with us, whose family cannot reach him. Have texted to say where he is, but texts still ghosting. Karl and Rhiana assemble top-class outdoor toilet facilities. Karl makes three unsuccessful attempts to take William home.

 Cats turn up. Huge.

 Fire up barbeque and give everyone a hot meal. Darkness falls, starts raining. Put buckets out to catch water. Go to bed about half eight after a stiff whisky. Aftershocks continue. Not much sleeping going on.

 Must have gone to sleep, woken by phone at around 1a.m. My boss at Bardic Web, Cris, ringing from Canada. Friends in US have just woken up and seen the news.

 

 Wednesday

 Still no power, no water, no fucking idea what's going on. Relying on battery-operated radio and Radio New Zealand. Another failed attempt to return William. Cannot get through to his parents. (Turns out they only have cordless phones on their landline.) But, people carrying water, must be a tanker around.

 Karl investigates. Not a tanker. They've been drilling a bore on the corner of Linwood and St Johns, and it's pouring out hundred of litres of water. People are taking their wheelie bins down and filling them.

 Local dairy is sort-of open. Wonderful, wonderful people selling from the door at normal prices.

 William's parents arrive. Every bridge over the Avon broken. Have had to come to Bromley from Burwood via Riccarton. Their older son had to abandon his car and walk home last night, took him nine hours.

 Get out a jigsaw. By evening, children squinting over it by candlelight, have nearly finished. I have been gardening, as it's "the only thing I do that doesn't plug in." Reports of deaths. Still don't know where a lot of our friends are. Have been switching sim cards with money on to phones with battery power. Texts still ghosting. Wondering about the texts coming from people in the rubble.

 Contemplate bugging out, driving to Timaru and staying in my mother's house. Would leave, but for cats, who are badly stressed.

 Cook frittata on the barbeque. Fucking rock, to be honest.

 Thinking we might have to just go to bed again when the lights come on. Power! Rush to plug laptops and phones back in. Turn on television. Start seeing first pictures. Start crying. Watch fifty emails arrive. Cry some more. Karl contacts his parents. I have no parents to contact. Start smoking again.

 

Thursday

 Discovering, slowly, friends are okay. People in west Christchurch have power and running water. Just know, with this many people dead and missing, there'll be someone we know. Offers of help and beds flooding in.

 Still crying, on and off. Reputation for staunchness possibly fucked forever.