It's often observed by college students that one is most inclined to clean one's room when one should be writing one's term papers. Similarly ones term papers urgently demand attention to the precise degree that one's room needs cleaning.

This morning I have been doubly productive -- not only cleaning to the uttermost depths of the refrigerator but also knocking out posts with aplomb. I have not, however, made an inch of progress on a project that a) I'll actually get paid to do that is b) due Monday morning. :-P

Meanwhile, though, I might as well mention something I've been meaning to write about in greater detail for several weeks. In one of my whirlwind patrols of the Tumblr erotic self-photograpy circuit I've started to notice more and more women seem to be picking up the vulva equivalent of male cock-shot syndrome. While increasing numbers of women seem to be engaging in this allegedly exclusively male behavior I don't know if they're yet emailing them to random recipients on dating sites. But I sort of imagine that as time passes and social permissions equalize we'll probably start seeing a little more of women doing it.

Another observation about the male-cock-shot syndrome. Just as not all women are likely to start exclusively posting 8x10 color glossies of their vulvas, it turns out that neither do most men!

It also occurs to me that, gender narratives notwithstanding, a lot of men may have been sending out those photos for the same reason women seem to have started doing it. Because they can, sure. But also not so much because they're aggressive or even utterly, esthetically clueless. I think instead it's because they imagine that everyone else will be as fascinated by the poster's locus of erotic pleasure as the posters themselves tend to be.

Well.

Duty calls.

Oh, not that duty though! I can't work on my paid, near-deadline project now, oh no. Now I have to go shopping for the week!

After that I may have to mop the roof! :-P

Note: I haven't done a "guest blogging" post for years. I used to do them whenever I went out of town. I'm now back from my epic trip to Greece (if not entirely over my epic case of 10-time-zone jet lag.) But this topic just knocks for a guest-post opportunity. So better late than never.

University of Pennsylvania linguistics professor Mark Liberman, no fan of the highly and often arbitrarily-prescriptive Elements of Style dryly notes

The most recent xkcd offers some sound editorial guidance:

The validity of the strip's title string ("The best thing about Strunk/White fanfiction is that it's virtually guaranteed to be well written") is less clear, for reasons that Geoff Pullum has explained at length in various places, for example here.

...

I have not been able to find any non-fictional instances of Strunk/White fan fiction, but we can hope that in the future, references to these names will more often be separated by a slash than by an ampersand. ]

Source: Language Log

Evidently there are entire websites (I think they're called "kink meme" sites) where slash fans who are readers can request character and activity pairings and other slash fans who are writers will attempt to fulfill the request.  I'm almost completely clueless about slash but I think Liberman could request Strunk/White slash fiction here.

Guest Blogger Opportunity: Feel free to write your own Strunk/White fiction either here in comments or on your own blog.

Request: If you know of other better Kink Meme sites (where one could best request Strink/White stories) let me know in comments and I'll promote them to the main post.

Final request: If you already know of Strunk/White slash, whether you've written it or just read it, you can of course links to that in comments as well.

Update from comments:

• I cited asylums.insanejournal.com/kinkmemes
• Argyle cites http://kinkmemes.livejournal.com/
• Thanks to Argyle again, Livejournal comes through with Strunk/White slash. Bonus points! Their safe-word is "Oxford comma!"

Jill Filipovic says

In the aftermath of the Anthony Weiner weiner-scandal, the Washington Post asks women what kind of sexts (as they kids say) they’d appreciate receiving. Women ™ say:

“I would like a photo of a made bed,” says Kathryn Roberts, who works at a law firm in Washington. “I would take rose petals, but I want them on top of a made bed.” And not that fake kind of made, either, where the comforter is smooth but the sheets are a jumbled mess.

“Or laundry,” adds her friend Andrea Neurohr.

“Folded laundry,” elaborates Roberts. “Maybe in a wicker basket.”

Get it? Cleaning is so important to women it’s basically pornography! Haha oh women, with their clean laundry and their distaste for sexual pleasure and the male body.

Source: Feministe

Back when I was posting a lot of nude and/or erotic self-photography I went ahead and tested the hypothesis that women would rather see men folding laundry or making beds.  The results were positive but most of my non-domestic photo series were considerably more popular.

At any rate, based on my past experience I think whether photos of men folding laundry or making beds can be sexy has a lot more to do with the men and a lot less to do with the laundry.*

See the "Half-Nekkid Thursday" version of this post, with less safe-for-work examples,here.

* Note: if you're going to put rose petals on a bed there's a good chance you're going to have to use bleach to get the stains out.  Or else, I guess, use rose-colored sheets.

ZOMG! While digging further into the convention that rape in popular media is ok when it's women raping men, as in The Wedding Crashers, I ran into a pretty cool, and awesomely level-headed website that deals directly with the issue. It's called, not quite correctly, Television Tropes and Idioms. Not quite correctly, I say, because it covers not just tropes in TV but also movies, comics, and advertising. Also, in a way even better, in anime, hentai, and fan-fic.

What's fun about the site is that while they seem pretty solidly informed about the realities of sexual assault and rape they don't treat the issues as a gender or moral failing, they treat them as the lazy, knee-jerk, graceless, and unskilled writing clichés they almost always are.

Rape Is OK When It Is Female on Male

Obviously if you're watching a scene with a woman tied to a bed while a man forces sex on her, the final act of that movie will involve said man getting shot in the face by Bruce Willis. If, on the other hand, it's a man being tied down and forced into sex by a pretty lady, well, you're watching a wacky romantic comedy. — C. Coville, 6 Romantic Movie Gestures That Can Get You Prison Time, Cracked.com

Rape is a cruel and evil act, beyond kicking the dog or many of the most villainous acts in media. Except when they fall in love with the rapist, of course.

In a number of works, however, there is one other exception: when the victim is a man, and the attacker is a woman.

This kind of rape is often treated as nil since men are stereotyped as having nothing but sex on the brain, always eager for it and cannot be traumatized by sex if it is arousing. Consequently, a man raped by an attractive woman is considered a lucky man and a man being raped by an unattractive woman is comedy gold. Because of this, most examples are from comedies.

Compare Rape Is Okay When It's Female On Female, Rape Is Funny When It Is Male On Male, Rape As Comedy, and Rape Is Okay If It's Divine On Mortal.

Source: Television Tropes and Idioms (note: click through to see myriad links and examples)

So that's pretty straightforward -- right on the money when it comes to easy dismissal of sexual assault on men. (The Wedding Crashers is referenced in the lead quote and mentioned first under "Movies" in very-long list of examples.) And good for them.

But check out the scorn they heap on the fan-fic trope they call Rape Is The New Dead Parents (emphasis in 2nd paragraph mine.)

"It turns out that Darkness, Diabolo, Crab and Goyle's dad was a vampire. He committed suicide by slitting his wrists with a razor. He had raped them and stuff before too. They all got so depressed that they became goffik and converted to Stanism [sic]. —My Immortal

"The rape was thrown in there for good measure." — Bennett The Sage on the above

A lot of amateur writers out there find the tragic backstory appealing. After all, most of the interesting characters didn't get raised in Suburbia, USA with a loving, complete family that cared for them. That's just boring. But Character Development is hard... You mean you have to explain things? But it takes so long to establish mental illness, and physical handicaps would only get in the way. Can't you just say they got raped and be done with it?

Anyway, this is the tendency for writers who are just starting out, or for very lazy writers, often of fanfiction and role playing, but it can appear just about anywhere, to just casually drop rape into their characters' story for Deus Angst Machina or Wangst. Usually found in backstory, but it's not uncommon for rape to happen "on-screen" via two sentences that wouldn't qualify as IKEA Erotica. The writers want to add some dimension of frailty to their character and give a good reason for moodiness, but it's done in such a flimsy and unexplored way that it means... nothing. It's mentioned like mentioning a casual detail on a college application. Perhaps the hallmark of the Sympathetic Sue, this trope tends to evoke kneejerk righteous anger with its use. It takes one of those horrible things which take years to get over, if ever, and turns it into a rather cheap shock.

...

The classical line for this trope is "Jane once got raped when walking home one night [optional:and her parents didn't care]."

Note that this is not merely Rape As Backstory. While it often overlaps, that has its own page and is neutral. Also note that this is not just poorly handled rape; it has to be out of the story's attention within at most a minute and never show up again.

The trope name comes from the fact that Parental Abandonment used to be the stock "tragic background" of badly created characters. Perhaps due to a combination of dead parents being considered cliche by uncaring writers (and less common in Real Life) and the fact that they think rape spares everything short of the character's virginity, it has replaced the dead parents for lazy tragedy.

Physically abusive parents are quickly becoming popular as the go to tragic backstory. Then again, rape is often still involved.

Examples of this in amateur writing are too numerous to list and too forgettable to remember. It still occasionally makes its way into the more dubious works, however. Differentiated from Rape As Drama and Rape As Comedy in that its neither of these. It's just... there.

Before adding an example, please think of whether or not the trope could be removed without impacting the rest of the story any more than 2% requiring a rewrite.

See also how rape is dismissed in Rape Is Okay When It's Female On Female

"in large part based on the idea that lesbian sex is not "real" sex. Men, penises, and penile penetration are central to sexual relations; without a penis involved, there can be no sex, and without sex, there can be no rape. Therefore, anything a woman does to another woman is "not a big deal."

And check out Rape Is Funny When It Is Male On Male

But male rape is funny... At least to the guy doing the raping. — Theory of Everything

It's not.

A subtrope of Rape As Comedy. Usually played for laughs when a known straight character is hit on by another man, especially one that's physically larger.

Even when it's not supposed to be funny, it's still considered funny. Scenes like the outright rapes shown in films such as Deliverance, Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption are obviously supposed to be horrific; however they are routinely snickered at, rather than cried over as with male-on-female rape-scenes.

Anyway, it's a cool site throughout.