From: jtrue@acpub.duke.edu (jtrue)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: Re: fuck / jtrue
Date: 18 Dec 92 18:21:41 GMT
Followup-To: rec.arts.poems
Organization: the gospel of zagnut

In article <1992Dec17.170930.10834@news.acns.nwu.edu>,
marek@casbah.acns.nwu.edu (Marek Lugowski) wrote:
> 
> In article <jtrue-161292221203@phil.zoo.duke.edu> jtrue@acpub.duke.edu (jtrue) writes:
> >there are 2 I think
> >...
> 
> John, I don't think I have ever responded to your post.  Perhaps you are
> being very tongue in cheek and just too subtle for me, what with my English
> being a second language.  On the off chance that you mean what you write
> above, you are full of shit, in the most metaphorical sense.  You are
> just contributing to useless, no -- worse -- *destructive* attitudes that
> prudery and puritanism of America brings out in people.  Bet you don't even
> know you heritage, it is so well engrained in your values, as espoused
> here.

OK.  First of all.  Don't take it so personally.  I wrote this deal not as
a response to anyone's poem but because I was bored one night, flipping
through Don and Marie (et al's) thread and had some thoughts about the use
of fuck.  Maybe I went too far with my connection of this term with sexual
violence.  But there are some empirical observations concerning gender that
I'm working off here (see below).  But as I said to Marie (who e-mailed me
some very intelligent criticisms), I may have a sampling problem.

As far as not knowing my heritage.  Damn straight I don't.  I don't give a
shit what my ancestry was.  IMHO, ethnicity causes a couple of orders of
magnitude more trouble than it's worth (cf former Yugoslavia, former USSR).

Prude, maybe.  I find fuck poems pretty boring.  There are a lot of fuck
poems on r.a.p.  I actually didn't know what fraction of the fuck poems
were yours, Marek.  I had no idea that rendering my opinions on this word
would be perceived as an attack on your body of work.

Puritan?  I think not.  Puritans don't dig atheists.
    
> 
> And now for a positive statement:  fuck, shit and other "naughty" words
> are only naughty to the naughty ear.  If you are allergic to them, it is
> your problem.  If you cannot grasp the context woven around them because
> they are present, you are closed-minded, closed-hearted.  If you mean all
> that crap about violence towards women by men, you are an idiot, and a
> politically naive one.  Also, you have not read any feminist erotica, pal.

Just trying to relate the empirical data (my observations):

1)  To me, "fuck" sounds like a fairly violent word.
2)  "fuck" is said more by men than by women.
3)  Men more often use fuck to refer to sex than women.
4)  Sex referred to as fucking seems to mean less than sex referred to as
other, more thoughtful terms (my opinion, here).  Sex referred to as
fucking frequently involves objectification of the "fucked person" by the
person who said "fuck."
5)  Regarding feminist erotica, you're right, I haven't read any.  It seems
to be pretty rare compared with male-oriented erotica (even if we assume
that erotica and pornography are separable and that
erotica=non-exploitative whereas pornography=exploitative, something I
personally haven't figured out yet).  Why is this?

with

6) This society has a sexual violence problem.  The problem is not caused
by women.  This society was not founded by women.

My take home message:
There's more to life than sex.  And there's more to sex than fucking. 
(IMHO, more women have figured these 2 things out than men.  IMHO, things
would be a lot better if more men figured this out.)

Didn't think I'd get into a flame war, but that's the way it goes I guess.

I'm heading home to my beloved Palmyra (NY) on Monday.  Won't be back til
93 hits.  Happy Holidays to all my fellow r.a.p.pers!
including:
> 
> 				-- Marek

Ho Ho fucking Ho!
-jtrue