Literary Clusterfucks 2013

(Responding to Goole's question.)

huh, thx

"Try my delicious chocolate cakes!"
*blogs* "THE CAKES ARE ACTUALLY MADE OUT OF SHIT!!!"
*erases blog post*
*goes on radio*
"Yes they're so rich and moist"

Slate, with the embarrassing title, "Ride 'Em Cowboy!"

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/books/2013/01/alisa_valdes_the_feminist_and_the_cowboy_reviewed.html

First line: "Every era’s liberated woman gets the good fuck she deserves."

That interviewer was just a terrible speaker and story-teller, she could barely think of a coherent idea to put into words, I don't think any one sentence finished the way it began. This is who gets a radio show?? In Colorado, I guess?

Oh okay now she's saying her new boyfriend wrote the cowboy a thank-you letter for having tamed the shrew. Verbatim, btw. We're done here.

I'm trying to be kind -- maybe she really needs the money from the book so is doing her best to sell it, but her comment is making me want to vomit.

The verbal instructions the cowboy gives Valdes once she agrees to submit to him are a guide to daily living. No back-talking; no second-guessing; no sarcastic, smart-ass remarks. She must never exit the car unless he opens the door for her. She must never walk on the street side of the sidewalk. In one especially creepy scene, Valdes has just overheard another woman leave a voicemail for the cowboy saying she wishes he were joining her in the shower. The cowboy lies about the voicemail, and Valdes knows he is lying. But then she remembers some article she read saying that women were “biologically programmed” to find cheating men more attractive. “I was hurt, sad, and turned on.” He unbuckles his belt, and she throws her arms around his neck. “Biology,” she writes with a shrug.

I'm trying to be kind -- maybe she really needs the money from the book so is doing her best to sell it, but her comment is making me want to vomit.

― Solange and thanks for all the fish (Nicole), Thursday, January 10, 2013 1:23 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I kind of feel like she has a moral responsibility, at very least, to NOT promote this book assuming the erased blog post is true, whether or not she needs the money

http://www.guiltypleasuresbookreviews.com/2013/01/arc-review-the-feminist-and-the-cowboy-an-unlikely-love-story-by-alisa-valdes-rodriguez.html

The Feminist and The Cowboy is a wild ride through a time that I both remember and, am happy to admit, I was never truly involved in. Yes, I believe in woman’s rights, I even tell my husband that I didn’t need him before and I don’t need him now, but, I WANT him in my life. There’s a difference. I love when he opens the door for me, when he offers to help with the housework, when he cooks dinner. I think it sets a wonderful example for our sons to see that Dad isn’t just sitting around expecting to be waited on hand and foot and is willing to be “there” for me. And, also for my sons to see that I am still an independent woman that does not always depend on the “man” for everything in my life. It took a lot of convincing on the part of “The Cowboy” to get Alisa to see that for herself.

So, yes, I enjoyed the book. It was nice reliving those days when the name “Gloria Steinem” put fear into the eyes of men and when woman stood up for what they believed in. But, I would never have gone to the extremes that Ms. Valdez did. Now, I know that most of you are too young to remember or even know about the woman’s movement but you can thank people like Alisa for opening a lot of doors for us today. This book was refreshing, witty and a fun read. It was written with a little bit of humor (her description of her dates were hysterical) and lots of deep, inner thoughts. I give her a lot of credit for admitting to her faults, for seeing herself for how she was, for finally submitting to “The Cowboy” and giving herself up to him and be willing to change for “love” even if all that she ever knew was being threatened. I wish Alisa and “The Cowboy” many happy and fulfilling years together and honestly hope that they both get their Happily Ever After. God knows that “The Cowboy” deserves it and Alisa has earned it.

@MizAlisa

Did you miss my radio interview with Amy Oliver this morning? No worries. Here's the podcast! I had such fun. Cool lady....

“An irresistible, post-feminist Taming of the Shrew. Don’t be scared by the premise. This is not a story about a woman relinquishing her identity. Quite the opposite. It is a riveting tale about how a brilliant, strong-minded woman liberated herself from a dreary, male-bashing, reality-denying feminism.”
—Christina Hoff Sommers, author of The War Against Boys; How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men

“This is a real-life romance novel, as they are truly written, where a handsome, but flawed hero enhances the life of a woman battling her own demons. He doesn't save her. She doesn't change him… The book is insightful, sassy, sarcastic, intelligent, emotional and will challenge the preconceived concepts about conservatives and liberals and everyone in between.”
–Julie Leto, New York Times bestselling author

“Valdes has written a thought-provoking exploration of her own missteps and the tremendous obstacles she has overcome to achieve happiness in the second half of her life.”
—Publishers Weekly

Such fun. xp

Valdes talked glancingly about those rules in the interview but edited/elided to make them seem reasonable: instead of "never exit the car" it was, "let him open my door when we're in his home area, because in that environment it's a sign of respect." It seems to me like she's still editing the story of her experiences for each audience to get them on board, and I wonder how much of the story she's willing to admit and stand by, even to herself.

Sometimes it's too soon to look clearly on how wrong you were and how hurt you got, I can grok that, but I wish she wasn't doing it/didn't have to do it in public.

We have an answer:

Alisa Valdes ‏@MizAlisa

To those of you asking about the disappearance of yesterday's blog post: I was asked to take it down by my publisher, and did. The end.

jesus

oh man I hope there isn't a tragic libel suit in the near future

This is some bleak shit

fucking shit

fucking rapist-enabling patriarchal bullshit

Alisa Valdes ‏@MizAlisa
@PerezHilton Hi. I need to talk to you!!! (Dirty Girls Social Club author) please email me? al✧✧✧.val✧✧✧@gm✧✧✧.c✧✧
10:43 AM - 10 Jan 13

It is a riveting tale about how a brilliant, strong-minded woman liberated herself from a dreary, male-bashing, reality-denying feminism.

alpha publisher

this whole thing is horrifying

Jezebel should pick this up. They ran a story on her last month.

But Valdes is a scold: She pauses the story for extended explanations of just how little fun those of us who are not sleeping with cowboys are having. Feminism has ruined us all. In denying biology, it has thrown men into crisis. As her friend tells her, “They want to be men, but hate themselves for wanting to be men, so they push it all down and act like freakin’ Prince,”

uh

Prince is the ultimate dude IMO, like how much pure swagger must you have to flaunt high heels and cover yourself in lace and still get women to fall all over themselves for you?

I wish more men acted like Prince, tbh.

"hey girl, how you like my assless yellow pants?"
"AAAAIIIIIE!" *throws panties*

Alisa Valdes ‏@MizAlisa
To those of you asking about the disappearance of yesterday's blog post: I was asked to take it down by my publisher, and did. The end.

Holy shit. I guess there might be some sort of contractual thing where by giving the book negative publicity they're entitled to ask for the advance back or something? In which case, the publishers are evil. Otherwise, I just can't comprehend why you would make such a strong stand and then pretend nothing happened.

abusive author-publisher relationship :(

The Jezebel review: http://jezebel.com/alisa-valdes/

The New York Post is harsh: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/books/taming_of_the_shrewd_4mC0IDcGGPNlKquCYVz15O

What about those feminist ideals she once so highly prized?

“Freedom would never come from trying to force men to be women and women to be men, as so many radical feminists seemed to believe it would. Freedom came when I connected to this ancestral feminine womanhood that I carried in my DNA and stopped feeling guilty for all that it spoke me.”

In return, he offered her this: “Never thought I’d say this about you, but you might make a handy little ranch wife someday.”

The cynical among us might say that this all sounds too good — or too absurd — to be true.

The bestseller list is chock-full of books on “traditional values.” Perhaps this is her way back into the bestseller club that might no longer want her as a member?

Valdes admits that despite receiving a reported $400,000 advance for “Dirty Girls Social Club,” she is flat broke and nearly homeless. Her Lexus had been repossessed and her half-million-dollar home was short-sold.

“I had badly mismanaged my promising literary career a few years before, by being a woman without proper boundaries, an angry woman and self-destructive on a grand scale,” she writes.

Is this her mea culpa? Or is it merely link bait, a calculated bid to drum up controversy and a way to ensure a coveted talking-head spot in the media?

Either way, she might have some trouble with the marketing.

This October she wrote a blog post called “Saying Goodbye to the Cowboy.” In it — and probably despite her publisher’s hesitations — she writes about their breakup.

The cowboy’s last words to his feminist lover are downright brutal: “Stop. It’s over. This isn’t your home. It will never be your home. I don’t want you. Goodbye, Alisa.”

She followed up with few harsh tweets about her former paramour: “Things he now says he didn’t like about me? My ethnicity (!), my friends, my son (!), my parents, my tweeting unflattering truths like this.”

Valdes might be down — but she’s not out of the game just yet.

She’s started yet another blog devoted to love letters sent between her and a much younger writer, 29-year-old Michael Gandy, a fellow bleeding heart and founder of the nonprofit organization The Benevolence Community.

Do we smell a sequel?

^ The New York Post review was written before her now deleted post went up

It appears to be published by a Penguin offshoot. I'd hope the request was made for legal reasons and not for evil ones but it's difficult to tell sometimes.

I don't think you have to look very hard to find legal issues that a publisher would want to protect/distance itself from in a blog post where the author accuses the man in the book she published with your company of rape and then posts a video of him.

I also don't think you can really divorce those legal reasons from the evil reasons.

Well at least I know what one of our sister "big" houses is doing today--getting lots of emails from their CEO/publisher telling them not to talk to the press or offer any comment in a public place.

I think the publisher is evil because they agreed to publish this in the first place.

but agreed to publish this knowing how much?

The major difference I can see between this clusterfuck of a relationship and hundreds of thousands of similar clusterfucks is that one of the two people involved has written about it at great length and sold it to a publisher and founded a blog around it. The fact that she is a published author may carry a certain prestige, but it is no guarantee that she knows what she is doing, understands herself, or understands her lover. It only guarantees that she knows how to write declarative sentences.

I'm sorry her relationship with that cowboy turned out so horribly and his actions do not appear very creditable or kind, but I also can't say much in favor of her judgement, which seems to land her in an endless series of fuckups which she feels she must broadcast to the universe, first asserting then retracting many fundamental ideas with an equal passion and conviction of her rightness.

well, I mean, yeah xp

That night they disagree on nearly every subject, but “that kiss was so flippin’ good that I didn’t want to risk not getting another one by, you know, arguing or making unreasonable demands.”

So she holds her tongue. And gets in bed with the cowboy. “Angels sang arias. The earth moved,” she waxes on.

After only one night, she’s seemed to undergo an entire political change of heart.

“Maybe I didn’t know that I thought I knew. Maybe the world wasn’t as simple as they made it seem on the Rachel Maddow show,” she says.

With him, she’s in heaven, finally “free” of the feminist dogma that had defined her.

“The dirty little secret of feminism, I suddenly understood, was that it could never go as far as it aimed to, because we were, all of us, fundamentally shackled to our own biology,” she writes. “Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution could not be erased in one bra-burning decade, just because Gloria Steinem or Alice Walker said so.”

Now the idea that women are capable of doing anything that men can do — one that defined her earlier career — is almost overnight damned as mere “craziness.”

In man that's called thinking with his prick.

I have a lot of issues with serial memoirists, but this is just horrifying. And it'll probably only get worse when antifeminists pick up her book as a cause célèbre and ignore the context.

Ugh ugh ugh.

i think it's interesting that the 'cowboy' is also an actor

the whole situation, the handling of it...everything is really terrible

it'll probably only get worse when antifeminists pick up her book as a cause célèbre and ignore the context.

Or dismiss it as the crazy feminist being bitter and trying to get revenge for being dumped. The whole situation is really fucked up.

this whole thing is 10 kinds of fucked up - just from the excerpts available online, the relationship depicted in the memoir is clearly, unambiguously, abusive.

'the passion letters' are also super creepy and OTT

xxp Apparently per the radio interview some casting person was looking for a "cowboy, a real cowboy" type and kept asking around and ppl kept saying, "You've really got to meet {this guy}" and they did, and he got a bit part in something, and then more bit parts, etc, but when agents told him to move to LA to get more work he dissed them.

The Atlantic review: http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/01/woman-rejects-feminism-continues-to-disdain-femininity/266889/

Valdes insists that through her relationship with the cowboy she grew and learned to reject second wave feminism, and to instead embrace the feminine. In practice, though, her book is suffused with a visceral loathing for the feminine. It's just that this loathing is mostly directed at men. She repeatedly sneers at the guys she's dated for being "emasculated," or, in one memorable phrase, for being "sniveling little boys, with crow's feet and online-porn addiction." She says that the reason her first marriage broke up was that she was the bread-winner and she couldn't respect her husband for staying at home and cooking and cleaning. And finally, in a remarkable display of homophobia, she sneers at pop stars from Prince to David Bowie for not projecting a sufficiently normative vision of masculinity. " A tiny little man with no body hair, running around in fucking thigh-high stiletto heels, singing in the highest falsetto in the world about how you were a 'Little Red Corvette'? Are you fucking kidding me?" Thus, before her transformation, she was a ball-breaking second waver who spent a lot of time verbally castrating men—and after her transformation, she's a ball-breaking non-second-waver who spends a lot of time verbally castrating men. The difference just doesn't seem that profound.

bam