Why choose?

November 18, 2022November 18, 2022 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

Reverse Harem and the (r)evolution of Romance writing

If you aren’t an avid ebook reader, it’s likely you’ve never heard of the genre, which has begun to call itself “why choose” because algorithms are prurient snitches. Yet it’s the strongest trend in self published romance, with no signs of slowing down.

It is also an astonishing indicator of where culture is headed. Because two out of every five ebooks sold are romance, and reverse harem tropes are EVERYWHERE.

So what the heck is it? Nothing more or less than a romance story where the heroine gets ALL the boys. Without having to choose between them, favoring one and only one. Without lying or cheating, with the consent of all the men, which is perhaps the most fantastical aspect of the genre, that three or more cis-het guys could get over their egos enough to get along with their partner’s metamour.

OK so what the heck is a metamour?

It’s the point at which the Why Choose genre gets really interesting. Because, pardon me if I’m wrong, but this is polyamory. A metamour is your lover’s lover. Not your competition, just “the other person who loves the same person as me.”

Meaning the strongest trend in romance writing is a vigorous, fun-loving, open-hearted repudiation of the nuclear family. One of the lynchpins of Western society, blamed repeatedly (and quite sensibly) for maintaining women’s inferior status. Less than half a decade ago, women in the US were being arrested for wearing pants. A wife needed her husband’s permission to open her own bank account. The assumption was nearly universal that all women wanted was safety. That women weren’t sexual, weren’t interested in freedom in being their own person, in existing for any reason besides replicating DNA aka having babies.

Oh, my sweet summer child…

That has never been enough. And hear me out, this is not some Sandberg gaslighting about how every woman miraculously can have it all aka a high paying high pressure job as well as a functional marriage, happy children, and time enough to seek personal meaning. Such women usually have nannies. And they are frequently miserable. The women, not the nannies, though I reckon a fair few of them are less than thrilled with what often functions like a sort of indentured servitude.

This is of course not universal. But that’s the point. Women want different things. Women can finally have what they want. And yes, RH is a book trend. It isn’t a sign of the death of marriage. But it is certainly a sign that the Overton window has shifted hugely in the direction of even more freedom for women. And for men, who must bear the brunt of being denied softness, emotionality, compassion. Who are taught they must defend their tiny tribe against an entire world which wants them dead. Truth is, the world usually isn’t paying attention. Truth is, modern marriage isn’t a siege state. Wives are not chattel, nor are they princesses, to be kept in a tower and denied the world.

Women are raw, and horny, and also nice and pretty and kind, but still red-blooded, salivating, alive. And we are tired of being told what to do.

There is a world filled with possibilities. Even it’s only words on a page or a screen. A world where women get exactly what they want, and men are happy for it to happen. So come on over! Sometimes the grass really is greener even once you’ve hopped the fence.

The Golden Age is Always Tomorrow

November 9, 2022November 9, 2022 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

There’s a popular illusion that the past was a magically better place, an opinion usually voiced with the words “good old days back when people respected each other” and to this I say: there are no good old days.

Dickens was right, while the past may have been the best of times, it was the absolute fucking worst of times. No more than a hundred years ago, most of us wouldn’t have lived past forty, not (only) because everyone was sick all the time, but because if you weren’t at least middle class, your life was often barely livable. We can’t all have been Napoleon, in other words. Most of us would have been peons.

And no, the 1950s does not qualify. Not while millions worldwide still suffered under the lash of European colonialism. Not while polio ravaged families and doctors raced to eradicate this deadly virus through mandatory vaccinations. Ahem. Not under Jim Crow, not under McCarthy. There was no golden age. This moment, right here and now, may be our peak, as close as we will ever get, unless we put everything we have into stopping the juggernaut of climate change from crushing everything else.

Your move, humanity.

No flash photography

November 7, 2022 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

Banksy is one of the greatest living artists. Because we don’t know if anything he’s ever told us is true.

Even when he says he’s telling the truth. Particularly when he says he is, as in his film Exit Through the Gift Shop. Tracing Banksy’s often reluctant involvement in the abrupt rise and fall of another street artist, the film is either a shocking record of true life, or a sublime fake.

We don’t know.

That’s the art.

Not the spray paint, not the ruined theme parks, but the very inscrutability of the artist’s existence. The art is in the fact that we will carve out of our very walls a rock he is said to have touched and hang the rock on an art gallery wall then charge other people money to view it. The art is the news story about the painting which shredded itself the moment it was sold.

He is invisible, criminal, liminal. We might never see his face. That is his art, and our psychology is his canvas.

photos by Lewis Roberts / Robin Wersich / Cole Patrick on Unsplash / treatment by The Fixer

The chipped stone wall of an insurance firm’s downtown office, the alley which never sees sun, the corner of the underground parking garage where a drift of dead leaves has gathered: this is the mental state of so many of us. Waiting for the unknown to express itself upon us.

A vivid red balloon, a bunch of flowers, a rat with a felt-tipped pen scrawling a name, any name.

Making something from nothing.

Making us into art.

Wait, which one of us sits on the couch?

November 3, 2022 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

I thought I’d work on a story this morning and instead I played therapist to myself. I even asked questions, and replied like a person was sitting across from me. So much of therapy is letting the patient/client talk themselves to their solutions. I think I learned something. But I won’t share it here. Those sessions are confidential, don’t you know?

A brief reply

October 27, 2022 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

what if

the fact that

we make all meaning

wasn’t so frightening

what if

all that happened to you

simply happened

not by some secret choice

not by your soul’s decree to test you with this struggle

not by some greater need for you to know this pain

but just by chance

by the unequal equilibrium of time

and your passage through it

pain is not a prize

neither is its end

what if

we learned to love

the fact that

there is

nothing

to love

(2022)

I rarely explain my poetry. If the meaning isn’t embedded in the words and cadence then I’ve written it wrong.

In this case I wish it known, as I am attempting to offer a counter narrative to the idea that suffering is both virtuous and necessary. Trauma isn’t really a gift. It isn’t a magical “teaching.” It’s one’s recovery from a painful or stressful experience that is the teaching. Trauma is the damage that occurs when we have no teacher.

Suffering in itself is not particularly noble. Maybe you need to believe it is, as part of your journey to overcoming your trauma, but it was not and is not necessary for you to experience pain in order for you to be a whole person. The nobility of suffering is a lie of power, to make the oppressed love their oppression.

You do not need to burn in order to rise.

You didn’t deserve to be hurt.

The hangover

October 26, 2022 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

We get them from drinking, from drugs. From the ending of a significant relationship. From reading a book so stunning you can’t imagine reading anything else until you’ve gotten over it. And from writing, though I won’t claim to have produce any truly intoxicating prose. Yet.

Funnily enough, one of the hallmark symptoms of a book-writing hangover is complete denial that that’s what you’re experiencing. I laid down 20,000 (coherent, edited) words in only a few weeks. Yesterday I cried as I wrote the ending, because it’s a teaser story for a series I’m writing next year so it doesn’t end with a happily ever after, or even a happy for now. And yet this morning as I sat dumbfounded at my desk, unable to rouse the slightest interest in any aspect of authorpreneurship, I didn’t once think I had a hangover.

Of course I do. I broke their hearts (spoiler: they’re not mad at each other.) And yes, fictional characters are just words arranged in a certain sequence on a page, but they are also active thought-forms, with what often feels to their creator as a sort of independent self-awareness. It takes time for the writer to detach from a deeply felt composition. I’ve nursed this idea for a year, and now it’s no longer necessary. There is a measure of grieving in this. The last book was worse, as it was the culmination of two years of work and hung on a character who has become as real to me as my IRL friends. That I can’t shake his hand is slightly painful.

Only yesterday I wrote that creativity is a strange phenomenon. The existence of the writing hangover just proves my point.

Remember to refill the well.

You cannot have it all

On a pale blue background, a fortune cookie has been broken in half and pulled apart to show the fortune, which reads "A plan you have been working on for a long time is beginning to take shape."

October 23, 2022 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

In something like 1997 I went to the Detroit Auto Show

Big deal, because no one ever does that, right? It felt big. It may in fact be the last time I felt technology was going to solve our problems, because they had electric cars, and they weren’t horrible little boxes but huge shiny objects of maximum desire.

After a few hours of bright lights on slowly rotating supercars, we left the semi-arid wasteland that was downtown Detroit in the mid-1990s and returned to the innocuous inner/outer suburb of Ferndale (pre-gentrification, as in they didn’t even have an Old Navy yet) in my friend’s economy four-door. An American-made car with an engine so poorly designed he feared to drive it two weekends in a row. Clearly we were not yet living in the glittering super-future.

But I had a thought. Like any good chaos magician, I know what thoughts can do. So I let this thought have its way for a little. It was a thought about myself in the future.

Even ordinary people have heard of using visualization to get their goals. This is nothing new to magick, and is pretty much how anyone gets anything done, not by knowing how they will do the thing but by knowing what they want to have done by the end of doing it.

You have to see it, feel it, taste it, know the experience of success. Our brains are easily fooled. Thoughts and memories strike us like lived experience, and so giving yourself the “false memory” of having achieved your goal fools the mind into thinking: yes, you have achieved before, and yes, it was this amazing. So let’s do it again.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and vision-work and “clarifying your goals” are similar paths to a similar goal, that of getting to know the feeling of having what you want. It’s one thing to plan how to reach your goal. What works even better is believing the goal is so achievable that it might as well have already happened. It exists in the future and all you need to do is keep moving and you will align with it.

I don’t give a hot damn whether magick is ‘real’ or not. It’s real because it works (we can discuss spelling in a minute if anyone cares.) It’s so real that science does it too (see above under CBT) and spiritual practitioners of all stripes have been doing more or less exactly that for centuries.

What’s my point?

My point is that as we left the auto show I saw a sort of self. A me that I might be. And I wanted it. I wanted that me to be a real me, to be where I was at the age of 45. In ways too complex to explain, through circumstance and luck and a number of really interesting mistakes, I think I might have done it.

I think about myself way too much. Really I do, so much that I had to start writing fiction to deal with all the selves I wish I could be.

I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

I’ve come to terms with my limitations. There are thousands of experiences I will not and cannot ever have, no matter how badly I want them. This isn’t because I’m denying myself, but because I simply do not have space or time in this single human life to do all one could ever want to do. I have to choose how I spend my time with deliberation because I can only have so many decades left, and certain paths take a long time to walk. I could become a neurosurgeon/flamenco world champion/*insert huge achievement* if I truly wished, but I would have to give up what I’m presently doing and make that my sole endeavor. Do you see now what I mean? There’s just too much world. I can’t have it all.

But I can have my little vision. I have become my little vision.

Which means I had better get another one.