Why E-Books Stink

Actually e-books don’t stink, they smell like nothing. Gone is the stale musty scent of times gone by, the faint hint of vanilla and old ink.

You cannot get disgusted at an e-book and hurl it against a wall. There are people walking in the world who will never know the deep satisfaction that comes from slamming the receiver on an old telephone down, or hurling a book against the wall. That is sad.

You cannot comb garage sales and back alley bookstores seeking some ancient and well-loved copy of a rare e-book, some obscure piece of pulp fiction or a trashy little bundle of sci/fi, covered in dust and yellowing about the edges.

With e-books, there’s no reason to leave your home at all.E-books, well they self destruct. They cannot go missing for 40 years in someone’s attic only to be discovered among the cobwebs like some rare and priceless treasure, long hidden in a desert tomb.

You cannot tear the pages out of an e-book. This is an exceedingly cruel situation to find oneself in, especially when the author has done something with a character you do not like. How can I fix it for you, if I cannot tear out your pages and shred them?

You cannot write in the margins of an e-book. How can I possibly correct your grammar and cheap editing if I cannot scribble all over your work? There are things that must be said, notations made, sentences underlined. Who pours indifference over a book and refuses to converse with it? Who does that??!

E-books can die on you right in the middle of the best part! There is nothing worse than being threatened with a low battery right when you are about to get to the crux of the matter.

With a paperback one can always light a candle or get a flashlight when the power goes out. With an e-book, one is compelled to travel for miles just to find a public restroom with an electrical outlet so as to continue the story.

E-books lack the scars of love, the stretch marks and coffee stains that come from being well-loved and well shared. There are no torn covers, no wrinkles and finger prints that reveal this delicious little book once shared intimacy with others.

There are people who will never catch a whiff of an old cigar, the stale musty scent of times gone by, the faint hint of vanilla and old ink. People who will never know the joy of blowing off the dust, tucking those brittle yellow pages back into their spine, and lovingly caressing your new-found treasure.

That is very sad.

I, however, have known all these things and have inhaled the joy to be found there, devoured the contents within, and when disappointed, hurled the thing at the wall. How do I explain these things to my children and grandchildren, these secret things that are being lost and stolen, these moments they will never understand?

Of vampires and necrophiles

We live in interesting times. Women’s sexuality has never been more prominently displayed than it is today, in all it unbridled glory and strange perversions. We have Miley Cyrus riding her wrecking ball and dancing half-naked with teddy bears, teen age angst and distress over the Twilight vampire who sparkles, and millions now anxiously awaiting Christian Grey in 50 shades on the silver screen.

I read the Twilight series and 50 shades, or rather I skimmed through them as best I could and read the synopsis and reviews. Sexual perversion is one thing, but literary perversion is downright horrifying.

Twilight actually really rattled my cage, here we have this woman writing for 12-13 year old girls who happen to be right at the sexual bonding peek where their perceptions of love and romance, their sexuality, are going to be formed…permanently, for life. So who is to become the object of their affection? Do you long for bestiality or necrophilia? Team Jacob or Team Edward? Do you throw yourself into torment and angst over the dead guy or the werewolf? What could possibility go wrong with those archetypes in a young girl’s mind??

To make matters worse, so many lines between good and evil were blurred in those books, so Edward the sparkly vampire becomes good, even though he is undead, even though he feeds off human blood or sacrifices a few small animals instead, even thought he is a vampire. It’s okay to love a soulless man without a pulse. You can heal him your love. Besides, you are totally powerless and free from all personal responsibility. You are mesmerized by his gaze. Also somewhat suicidal, but don’t let that distress you.

It’s okay that he sat by her bed side and watched her sleep as a small child, fantasizing about her. There are an awful lot of “yes, it’s evil, but it’s okay” in the Twilight series. Love transcends all boundaries apparently, even moral ones.

Just when you thought it was safe to come out of the secret underground bunker and lay down your garlic and cross, along came 50 shades of Grey and another soulless man without a pulse. Ah yes, because what woman doesn’t need yet another excuse to seek out and align themselves with a broken man? To make it even better, here, you can just learn to sexually bond with abuse and then everyone will be happy! Anastasia Steele really is happy, although what she seeks she is also compelled to destroy, hence the break up, the attempts to fix him, to marry and civilize him.

So what makes it all perversion? Well dead people, animals, children, BDSM, the elimination of any sexual boundaries, treating of people as if they were flat, two-dimensional sexual objects, are all good markers. The exploitation of natural biology, the distortion of women’s sexuality, the blurring of lines until we are seduced, or rather herded away by the crowd from all that is good and golden and healthy there.

What really makes Twilight and 50 shades a perversion of women’s sexuality however, is that unlike love, what you seek you are compelled to destroy. Love lifts people up, it encourages, it nurtures, it supports. Love gone wrong destroys. In the Twilight series we are introduced to the idea that “what we seek, we must destroy” because one of the first issues Edward faces is having to make Bella a vampire, to kill her. He wrestles with this, struggles against it, but in the end she is turned, killed basically. Christian Grey must crush Anastasia and she speaks of this often, of feeling as if she is being erased, of being concerned she is loosing herself. She in turn is driven to try to “fix him,” to alter who and what he is, no doubt in an attempt to survive herself.

Toying with power is a huge component of women’s sexuality. Not a bad one, not an unhealthy thing, but what really becomes problematic is when there are no sexual boundaries to contain that. Boundaries create safety. This blurring of lines that you see all over our society is not healthy, especially for women. That is what is at the heart of these books and those are the questions we wrestle with as a society. Is she strong and empowered or devoid of all agency? Who is responsible here, Bella or Edward? Christian or Anastasia? Do women own their own sexuality or are we easily lured off like prey? Just how much agency do we have? How much do we even want?

What fascinates me is that the more feminism you see in the world, the more female dominance, the more women will seek to be dominated. It’s a rather interesting phenomenon and one that often proceeds a major social upheaval. Sometimes I wonder if women don’t psychically have a way of just knowing when it is time to align themselves with more powerful men, right before the poo hits the fan. Call it a 6th sense survival skill.