Pat Powers's Blog: Pat Powers Goes BEYOND Outer Subspace!, page 2
December 9, 2022
I Have My Own Website!
So, I feel like a tree lost in the forest of social media of late. I need a lair from which to operate, and this blog ain't it, mainly because its age gate is absolutely fucked up. I can't even gain access to this blog sometimes, and I'm the freaking blogger! So I built a Wordpress site, Pat Powers Writes
There's also the fact that on the website, I can divide up my posts to better suit visitor's interest.
My site has a filthy bookstore where you can find ALL of my books, whether published on Amazon or Smashwords. Neither Amazon nor Smashwords would allow me to link to my books published on other sites, so this is a win. And unlike my old International Bookstore, the contents of this bookstore are scalable and can be viewed on tablets and phones as well as desktop computers. (This is true of all the pages on my site.)
I also have a gallery where I put up whatever images interest me or inspire a funny caption. They're very NSFW images, that's why I put an age gate on the site.
My site has a blog, of course, where you will find some very familiar posts, with new stuff to come. You won't find promotional posts for my books there, however, I have a separate page for those.
I've also got a page for movie and media reviews, pulling up reviews from my old websites Bondagerotica and Jolly Roper that seem particular cogent, funny or otherwise worthwhile.
I've also got a page titled "Why I'm OK With Writing Rape Fantasies" which is exactly what it says on the tin. For all the people who have trouble with that notion.
There will undoubtedly be other pages, other changes to the website, it's a work in progress. I'm gonna replace all the outdated drivel on the side of this blog with just a link to the website. If you want to find my books, you can find them there.
Bon appetit!
There's also the fact that on the website, I can divide up my posts to better suit visitor's interest.
My site has a filthy bookstore where you can find ALL of my books, whether published on Amazon or Smashwords. Neither Amazon nor Smashwords would allow me to link to my books published on other sites, so this is a win. And unlike my old International Bookstore, the contents of this bookstore are scalable and can be viewed on tablets and phones as well as desktop computers. (This is true of all the pages on my site.)
I also have a gallery where I put up whatever images interest me or inspire a funny caption. They're very NSFW images, that's why I put an age gate on the site.
My site has a blog, of course, where you will find some very familiar posts, with new stuff to come. You won't find promotional posts for my books there, however, I have a separate page for those.
I've also got a page for movie and media reviews, pulling up reviews from my old websites Bondagerotica and Jolly Roper that seem particular cogent, funny or otherwise worthwhile.
I've also got a page titled "Why I'm OK With Writing Rape Fantasies" which is exactly what it says on the tin. For all the people who have trouble with that notion.
There will undoubtedly be other pages, other changes to the website, it's a work in progress. I'm gonna replace all the outdated drivel on the side of this blog with just a link to the website. If you want to find my books, you can find them there.
Bon appetit!
November 1, 2022
"Abducted, Roped & Raped: Enemies to Lovers" Now On Smashwords
Here's the link for the novella on Smashwords
"Abducted, Roped and Raped: Enemies to Lovers" was originally going to be titled “The Modern Bodice Ripper” because that’s what it is, a modern take on the bodice ripper theme in a contemporary taboo erotica setting.
(For those who don’t know, a bodice ripper is a subgenre of old-time romances that were essentially rape fantasies. They passed muster because they were not at all explicit, in fact, you could read a bodice ripper and never even know that a rape had occurred. They way it worked is, say an 18th century pirate captain captured a comely woman of good breeding after a sea battle. He drags her into his cabin and rips off her bodice (it’s some kind of undergarment they used to wear on the outside). She shrieks. Cut to some time later. They’re both fully dressed again. He’s all smirky and happy and she’s all shy and timid, as was the custom of the times. That’s how you knew a rape had occurred. That was about as explicit as it got in those days.)
Then I realized that the title would show up in alphabetical listings a lot better if it was just “Bodice Ripper.” So “Bodice Ripper” it was.
Then I did a little keyword research and discovered that “bodice ripper” isn’t exactly a popular keyword nowadays. I might be at the top of a pile of relatively rarely-searched-for titles, which means low sales because not many customers.
So I tried a different subgenre that fits the storyline along with some terms that describe what happens in the story. The title I came up with is “Abducted, Roped & Raped: Enemies To Lovers.”
That worked a lot better in the search engines. I’m on the second page of search results for “Enemies to Lovers” which is a term that gets over 10,000 hits on Smashwords. That’s MUCH improved.
Now as to the matter of updating the “Enemies to Lovers” trope, that has proven difficult for me. Since rapes were not only not explicit but could just barely be inferred in the old days, it was fairly easy for authors to sidestep the moral and ethical issues of rape just to slide a little fantasy fuel in there. (In fact, there’s a thread on Goodreads about 80s authors having to rewrite their books to eliminate even the INFERRED rape scenes in order to get published on Amazon, which has disappointed their fans who LIKED the original version.)
But I wrote an explicit bodice ripper: the male lead (Cal) repeatedly rapes the female lead (Melody) and it’s described in long, explicit detail, “rape for titillation” as the Smashwords form describes it.
Now I’m personally fine with writing “rape for titillation” fiction. Basically it’s because fiction isn’t real, and publishing rape fantasy fiction doesn’t make rape more commonplace (or “normalized”). I wrote a blog post explaining why with cites and everything. Click here to read it.
Clearly, my morality is not the basis on which censorship exists. Censorship exists on the basis of “I’m in power, I make the rules, f&&k you, writer.” In the case of Amazon I’m sure it’s a matter of balancing on the edge between profitability (they don’t care really about the morality of what they publish) and how much shit the prudes are shoveling over this and that. (“Prude” being my term for whoever advocates censoring sexuality in fiction, whatever their declared rationale might be.)
But the problem was, I had to figure out a way to write characters who might reasonably behave as bodice ripper characters do, in the modern day. And that was tough. Frankly, it was unreasonable behavior for the historical times it was supposed to be in.
So what I did was look for a character who was well outside traditional morality. And I feel I created one in Melody Chastain. Is she your average girl next door? Of course not, nor should she be. But I feel that a character like the one I created might conceivably have done what my character did under the same circumstances.
You’ll just have to read the novella to find out what she did and why and decide for yourself on that point. Bwahaha! as they say...
"Abducted, Roped and Raped: Enemies to Lovers" was originally going to be titled “The Modern Bodice Ripper” because that’s what it is, a modern take on the bodice ripper theme in a contemporary taboo erotica setting.
(For those who don’t know, a bodice ripper is a subgenre of old-time romances that were essentially rape fantasies. They passed muster because they were not at all explicit, in fact, you could read a bodice ripper and never even know that a rape had occurred. They way it worked is, say an 18th century pirate captain captured a comely woman of good breeding after a sea battle. He drags her into his cabin and rips off her bodice (it’s some kind of undergarment they used to wear on the outside). She shrieks. Cut to some time later. They’re both fully dressed again. He’s all smirky and happy and she’s all shy and timid, as was the custom of the times. That’s how you knew a rape had occurred. That was about as explicit as it got in those days.)
Then I realized that the title would show up in alphabetical listings a lot better if it was just “Bodice Ripper.” So “Bodice Ripper” it was.
Then I did a little keyword research and discovered that “bodice ripper” isn’t exactly a popular keyword nowadays. I might be at the top of a pile of relatively rarely-searched-for titles, which means low sales because not many customers.
So I tried a different subgenre that fits the storyline along with some terms that describe what happens in the story. The title I came up with is “Abducted, Roped & Raped: Enemies To Lovers.”
That worked a lot better in the search engines. I’m on the second page of search results for “Enemies to Lovers” which is a term that gets over 10,000 hits on Smashwords. That’s MUCH improved.
Now as to the matter of updating the “Enemies to Lovers” trope, that has proven difficult for me. Since rapes were not only not explicit but could just barely be inferred in the old days, it was fairly easy for authors to sidestep the moral and ethical issues of rape just to slide a little fantasy fuel in there. (In fact, there’s a thread on Goodreads about 80s authors having to rewrite their books to eliminate even the INFERRED rape scenes in order to get published on Amazon, which has disappointed their fans who LIKED the original version.)
But I wrote an explicit bodice ripper: the male lead (Cal) repeatedly rapes the female lead (Melody) and it’s described in long, explicit detail, “rape for titillation” as the Smashwords form describes it.
Now I’m personally fine with writing “rape for titillation” fiction. Basically it’s because fiction isn’t real, and publishing rape fantasy fiction doesn’t make rape more commonplace (or “normalized”). I wrote a blog post explaining why with cites and everything. Click here to read it.
Clearly, my morality is not the basis on which censorship exists. Censorship exists on the basis of “I’m in power, I make the rules, f&&k you, writer.” In the case of Amazon I’m sure it’s a matter of balancing on the edge between profitability (they don’t care really about the morality of what they publish) and how much shit the prudes are shoveling over this and that. (“Prude” being my term for whoever advocates censoring sexuality in fiction, whatever their declared rationale might be.)
But the problem was, I had to figure out a way to write characters who might reasonably behave as bodice ripper characters do, in the modern day. And that was tough. Frankly, it was unreasonable behavior for the historical times it was supposed to be in.
So what I did was look for a character who was well outside traditional morality. And I feel I created one in Melody Chastain. Is she your average girl next door? Of course not, nor should she be. But I feel that a character like the one I created might conceivably have done what my character did under the same circumstances.
You’ll just have to read the novella to find out what she did and why and decide for yourself on that point. Bwahaha! as they say...
September 24, 2022
“Your Body Or Your Life” Now Available on Smashwords
Here's the Smashwords link.
Here’s the short blurb for you blurb fiends:
Penny Paxton’s peaceful life among the Free Foragers of the Forest is rudely interrupted when the Patriarchal Raiders raid her village and capture her. She winds up tied to a bed deep in the passion pits of the Maledom Dominion, a sex slave. What is the ultimate secret that will allow her to escape her life of endless forced sexual bondage? Read this 15,000 word novelette and find out!
OK, here’s the straight skinny on this story. My previous short story, Butterfly went over a freaking cliff, that’s the story. It went over a cliff on Amazon. It went over a cliff on Smashwords. I’m not going to report the numbers, they’re embarrassing even to me. He’ll they’d be embarrassing to my goldfish if I had one.
Thing is, “Butterfly” was a pretty clean story. Clean, hell, it was WHOLESOME, for being a kinky erotic romance. Tons of explicit maledom/femsub sex with lots of sexual bondage of course, but everybody in the story was totally onboard with what was going on and having a wonderful time. Dancing, eating out (the restaurant kind, perv!) and tons of fun, exciting consensual sex.
And that’s how I marketed it, as a fun, clean, wholesome sexual bondage romance. And it went over a cliff on Amazon. And it went over a cliff on Smashwords. I mean, publishing that story was like dropping a penny down a well and never hearing the “splash.” If it weren’t for the fact that I have considerable backmatter built up, I might not have had any sales at all. Jeebus.
And that’s why “Your Body Or Your Life” is such a rapefest. It starts off with sex slave rape and proceeds to a mass capture and kidnapping with a public mass virgin gang rape. Consensuality? The characters in my story never experience it. Hell, they never HEARD OF it.
And me being me I added an ending that will Ruin… er, Change… Everything and force readers to re-evaluate the entire structure of modern society, something not normally found in hardcore nonconsensual rape erotica, but lemme tell ya… it works!
The rape erotica takes place in part of a mythical (because I just made it up) 1990s B movie that’s like most of those B-movies where the Peaceful Forest Dwellers’ village gets attacked by Grubby Raiders. We’ve all seen them, the Peaceful Forest Dwellers are all standing around in filmy togas grooving on how sweet they’ve got it hanging around in the forest, then the Grubby Raiders ride in, generally on horses, sometimes in SUVs or jeeps or motorcycles (curiously, almost never on bicycles) and they start beating, killing, robbing, kidnapping and raping everyone, as Grubby Raiders do.
I don’t have any brief for or against consensuality per se. Some stories consensuality works in, others it doesn’t. Some stories demand both nonconsensuality and consensuality (such as all the trad romances where the pirate rapes the main character and then falls in love with her, i.e., bodice rippers). I kind of hate that publishers push so hard to keep things consensual. What, do they think that the generally female readers who enjoy rape fantasies constitute some kind of danger to the public? It’s insane. Fantasy is fantasy, reality is reality. Readers can tell; most women who enjoy rape fantasy stories have NO interest in being raped in reality. Why can’t prudes and publishers tell?
Anway, we’ll see how this one does. It’s 15,000 words long and about 10,000 of those words is kidnapping and rape scenes with bondage throughout. Woo-hoo!
(Note: in its first day of sales, "Your Body Or Your Life" has doubled the sales of "Butterfly" in the three weeks since its release. And the backmatter sales have been great, more than ten times what I made off "Butterfly" in its 3 weeks. I think I have my answer as to which sort of story sells better.)
Here’s the short blurb for you blurb fiends:
Penny Paxton’s peaceful life among the Free Foragers of the Forest is rudely interrupted when the Patriarchal Raiders raid her village and capture her. She winds up tied to a bed deep in the passion pits of the Maledom Dominion, a sex slave. What is the ultimate secret that will allow her to escape her life of endless forced sexual bondage? Read this 15,000 word novelette and find out!
OK, here’s the straight skinny on this story. My previous short story, Butterfly went over a freaking cliff, that’s the story. It went over a cliff on Amazon. It went over a cliff on Smashwords. I’m not going to report the numbers, they’re embarrassing even to me. He’ll they’d be embarrassing to my goldfish if I had one.
Thing is, “Butterfly” was a pretty clean story. Clean, hell, it was WHOLESOME, for being a kinky erotic romance. Tons of explicit maledom/femsub sex with lots of sexual bondage of course, but everybody in the story was totally onboard with what was going on and having a wonderful time. Dancing, eating out (the restaurant kind, perv!) and tons of fun, exciting consensual sex.
And that’s how I marketed it, as a fun, clean, wholesome sexual bondage romance. And it went over a cliff on Amazon. And it went over a cliff on Smashwords. I mean, publishing that story was like dropping a penny down a well and never hearing the “splash.” If it weren’t for the fact that I have considerable backmatter built up, I might not have had any sales at all. Jeebus.
And that’s why “Your Body Or Your Life” is such a rapefest. It starts off with sex slave rape and proceeds to a mass capture and kidnapping with a public mass virgin gang rape. Consensuality? The characters in my story never experience it. Hell, they never HEARD OF it.
And me being me I added an ending that will Ruin… er, Change… Everything and force readers to re-evaluate the entire structure of modern society, something not normally found in hardcore nonconsensual rape erotica, but lemme tell ya… it works!
The rape erotica takes place in part of a mythical (because I just made it up) 1990s B movie that’s like most of those B-movies where the Peaceful Forest Dwellers’ village gets attacked by Grubby Raiders. We’ve all seen them, the Peaceful Forest Dwellers are all standing around in filmy togas grooving on how sweet they’ve got it hanging around in the forest, then the Grubby Raiders ride in, generally on horses, sometimes in SUVs or jeeps or motorcycles (curiously, almost never on bicycles) and they start beating, killing, robbing, kidnapping and raping everyone, as Grubby Raiders do.
I don’t have any brief for or against consensuality per se. Some stories consensuality works in, others it doesn’t. Some stories demand both nonconsensuality and consensuality (such as all the trad romances where the pirate rapes the main character and then falls in love with her, i.e., bodice rippers). I kind of hate that publishers push so hard to keep things consensual. What, do they think that the generally female readers who enjoy rape fantasies constitute some kind of danger to the public? It’s insane. Fantasy is fantasy, reality is reality. Readers can tell; most women who enjoy rape fantasy stories have NO interest in being raped in reality. Why can’t prudes and publishers tell?
Anway, we’ll see how this one does. It’s 15,000 words long and about 10,000 of those words is kidnapping and rape scenes with bondage throughout. Woo-hoo!
(Note: in its first day of sales, "Your Body Or Your Life" has doubled the sales of "Butterfly" in the three weeks since its release. And the backmatter sales have been great, more than ten times what I made off "Butterfly" in its 3 weeks. I think I have my answer as to which sort of story sells better.)
September 2, 2022
"Butterfly: A Day In The Park" Now Available on Amazon and Smashwords
Butterfly A Day In The Park
Just click here to be whisked away to Smashwords and get the story!
Or just click here to be whisked away to Amazon to get the story!
So here ya go friends, another light-hearted kinky erotic romance. But one appropriate for Labor Day. In this story I tried to imagine what it would be like to live in a society where no one is insecure about having food, shelter and clothing and no one is required to work, and the work that is available is four six hour days out of an eight day week: in short, a four day work week and a four day weekend. (We could do this right now if we wanted to.) They have plenty of time for love.
Also in that world, BDSM is considered the normal way to have sex. It is, in short, a fun world. The story is about two people who go to the park, dance, have lunch and go to a sex dungeon and have all sort of sexy dungeon fun. That is literally all there is to the novella, though they have a LOT of sexy dungeon fun.
We don't live in a society like that, but Labor Day IS a three day vacation, so here's hoping you all have a wonderful time this Labor Day.
Just click here to be whisked away to Smashwords and get the story!
Or just click here to be whisked away to Amazon to get the story!
So here ya go friends, another light-hearted kinky erotic romance. But one appropriate for Labor Day. In this story I tried to imagine what it would be like to live in a society where no one is insecure about having food, shelter and clothing and no one is required to work, and the work that is available is four six hour days out of an eight day week: in short, a four day work week and a four day weekend. (We could do this right now if we wanted to.) They have plenty of time for love.
Also in that world, BDSM is considered the normal way to have sex. It is, in short, a fun world. The story is about two people who go to the park, dance, have lunch and go to a sex dungeon and have all sort of sexy dungeon fun. That is literally all there is to the novella, though they have a LOT of sexy dungeon fun.
We don't live in a society like that, but Labor Day IS a three day vacation, so here's hoping you all have a wonderful time this Labor Day.
August 4, 2022
"The Slave Girl Diet" Now Available on Smashwords
You can buy “The Slave Girl Diet” here.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/photo/...
First off, let me give you the blurb for my new book, “The Slave Girl Diet.” Then I want to do some bragging. I came up with some neat ideas for this book, and I want to brag about them, and where better than my blog, and, well, all over social media?
“Earth business tycoon and renowned chef Chloe goes through a crosstime gate to take the slave girl diet in a Collar World kennel. Will the constant public nudity, bondage and sex turn her into just another submissive, mindless slave girl drooling for sexual bondage use? More importantly, will it get the weight off and keep it off? Read this 66,000 word erotic SF novel and find out!”
OK, you’ve got the picture. But what you don’t have is the fiendish plot hook I came up with to compel Chloe to go to Collar World to diet. I first proposed that in the future, Earth and Collar World come up with medical tech that allows people to de-age their bodies: that is, their 70 year old bodies can transform back into 20 year old bodies, leaving all the infirmaries and illnesses of old age behind. Wonderful!
But there is one fiendish catch. Any weight you may have picked up on your journey through life doesn’t go away. It stays with you. If you are overweight when you take the de-aging treatment, you are young, vital and... overweight. And since the de-aging tech can be used repeatedly, you face the prospect of hundreds, perhaps thousands of years of life being overweight.
This would, I believe, create some very, very motivated dieters. And is, if I may say so myself, is a deliciously imaginative use of SF tropes. Because the old de-aging tech has been used again and again, but never in this way. Bwahahahahahaha!
(Not giving away any spoilers here, you find all this out in the first chapter.)
And it just so happens that Collar World has developed a dieting technique that gets the weight off and keeps it off. For years… possibly forever. No one knows, as de-aging tech is as new to Collar World as it is to Earth. But every woman who’s gone through the diet has kept the weight off since returning to Earth.
And of course the diet involves lots and lots and lots of bondage and sex and maledom/femsub behavior. The slave girl diet kennels are full of fit Masters determined to help those slave girls reach those weight goals – like it or not! And hence there is a ton of erotica.
I wanted people to see Chloe as a person, not as an instance of “overweight” so I did two things. First, I wrote the story entirely in first person perspective… Chloe’s perspective. So the reader is not looking at Chloe from the outside, they are looking out at the world through her eyes. And Chloe, while she is aware that she is overweight, does not see herself as overweight. And so the reader hopefully will see her as a person and not just an instance of “overweight.”
Along those same lines, in Collar World obese people are rare. Collar World natives lead a much healthier lifestyle than Earth people do, and effective dieting techniques have been developed to help the relatively few obese people lose weight and keep it off. As a result, they don’t do fat shaming. The concept wouldn’t occur to them, it’s not part of their culture. They would feel that a person who is overweight has a health problem, like having the measles or psoriasis or whatever. They know an overweight person has a problem, but they don’t assume it’s because of a moral failure on the overweight person’s part.
It makes for an interesting story, combined with the other plot twists. At least that’s my hope. Buy the novel and find out for yourself.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/photo/...
First off, let me give you the blurb for my new book, “The Slave Girl Diet.” Then I want to do some bragging. I came up with some neat ideas for this book, and I want to brag about them, and where better than my blog, and, well, all over social media?
“Earth business tycoon and renowned chef Chloe goes through a crosstime gate to take the slave girl diet in a Collar World kennel. Will the constant public nudity, bondage and sex turn her into just another submissive, mindless slave girl drooling for sexual bondage use? More importantly, will it get the weight off and keep it off? Read this 66,000 word erotic SF novel and find out!”
OK, you’ve got the picture. But what you don’t have is the fiendish plot hook I came up with to compel Chloe to go to Collar World to diet. I first proposed that in the future, Earth and Collar World come up with medical tech that allows people to de-age their bodies: that is, their 70 year old bodies can transform back into 20 year old bodies, leaving all the infirmaries and illnesses of old age behind. Wonderful!
But there is one fiendish catch. Any weight you may have picked up on your journey through life doesn’t go away. It stays with you. If you are overweight when you take the de-aging treatment, you are young, vital and... overweight. And since the de-aging tech can be used repeatedly, you face the prospect of hundreds, perhaps thousands of years of life being overweight.
This would, I believe, create some very, very motivated dieters. And is, if I may say so myself, is a deliciously imaginative use of SF tropes. Because the old de-aging tech has been used again and again, but never in this way. Bwahahahahahaha!
(Not giving away any spoilers here, you find all this out in the first chapter.)
And it just so happens that Collar World has developed a dieting technique that gets the weight off and keeps it off. For years… possibly forever. No one knows, as de-aging tech is as new to Collar World as it is to Earth. But every woman who’s gone through the diet has kept the weight off since returning to Earth.
And of course the diet involves lots and lots and lots of bondage and sex and maledom/femsub behavior. The slave girl diet kennels are full of fit Masters determined to help those slave girls reach those weight goals – like it or not! And hence there is a ton of erotica.
I wanted people to see Chloe as a person, not as an instance of “overweight” so I did two things. First, I wrote the story entirely in first person perspective… Chloe’s perspective. So the reader is not looking at Chloe from the outside, they are looking out at the world through her eyes. And Chloe, while she is aware that she is overweight, does not see herself as overweight. And so the reader hopefully will see her as a person and not just an instance of “overweight.”
Along those same lines, in Collar World obese people are rare. Collar World natives lead a much healthier lifestyle than Earth people do, and effective dieting techniques have been developed to help the relatively few obese people lose weight and keep it off. As a result, they don’t do fat shaming. The concept wouldn’t occur to them, it’s not part of their culture. They would feel that a person who is overweight has a health problem, like having the measles or psoriasis or whatever. They know an overweight person has a problem, but they don’t assume it’s because of a moral failure on the overweight person’s part.
It makes for an interesting story, combined with the other plot twists. At least that’s my hope. Buy the novel and find out for yourself.
June 29, 2022
The Honey Trapp Adventures Now Available on Smashwords and Amazon
You can obtain the Honey Trapp Adventures here on Smashwords. If and when you purchase, use coupon code VZ86G. Offer good through July 5.
You can also obtain it here on Amazon. We aim to please.
Honey Trapp, born to wealth but orphaned at an early age by a tragic auto accident, finds solace in a wild partying lifestyle that fully expresses her submissive sexual desires. Convinced by her collegiate studies of atmospheric science that the end of human civilization is coming soon due to climate change, Honey parties like there’s no tomorrow. Intelligent, young, beautiful, wealthy and uninhibited, she has no problem being accepted by the upper echelons of the jet set as one of them.
But there’s more to Honey than meets the eye. Honey funnels some of her wealth to the Initiative, a secret organization devoted to fighting climate change by whatever means are necessary. Mostly this involves upsetting the plans of various fossil fuel oligarchs.
Some of those oligarchs and their minions are into BDSM and have harems. The women in such harems are sometimes local talent, but elite dominants also hire women from the Bascom Slave Kennels, a secret supplier of beautiful, discreet, trained and carefully vetted submissives who play at being slave girls for elite dominants, for a price.
Honey, eager to help bring the oily oligarchs down and save the planet, and also totally down with being a slave girl/harem girl for her own very kinky reasons, goes through the Bascom kennels’ sex slave training program. Then she travels the world, infiltrating the sex harems of oligarchs and ferreting out their secrets for the Initiative, because even as a naked, bound and gagged slave girl, Honey has ears..
Join Honey as she goes to the possibly mythical nation of Los Miserabils in South America in “The Naked Jungle,” to the semi-mythical nation of England in “England Goes Boom!” to the overtly mythical nation of Greece in “Greek Harem”, and to the mythically corrupt state of Louisiana in “Louisiana Slay Ride,” fighting fossil fuel oligarchs’ evil plans and slaking her slavegirl lust with one dominant alpha male after another all the way. It’s more than 115,000 words of danger, excitement and sexual bondage!
This collection includes all four of the Honey Trapp stories previously published on Smashwords.
You can also obtain it here on Amazon. We aim to please.
Honey Trapp, born to wealth but orphaned at an early age by a tragic auto accident, finds solace in a wild partying lifestyle that fully expresses her submissive sexual desires. Convinced by her collegiate studies of atmospheric science that the end of human civilization is coming soon due to climate change, Honey parties like there’s no tomorrow. Intelligent, young, beautiful, wealthy and uninhibited, she has no problem being accepted by the upper echelons of the jet set as one of them.
But there’s more to Honey than meets the eye. Honey funnels some of her wealth to the Initiative, a secret organization devoted to fighting climate change by whatever means are necessary. Mostly this involves upsetting the plans of various fossil fuel oligarchs.
Some of those oligarchs and their minions are into BDSM and have harems. The women in such harems are sometimes local talent, but elite dominants also hire women from the Bascom Slave Kennels, a secret supplier of beautiful, discreet, trained and carefully vetted submissives who play at being slave girls for elite dominants, for a price.
Honey, eager to help bring the oily oligarchs down and save the planet, and also totally down with being a slave girl/harem girl for her own very kinky reasons, goes through the Bascom kennels’ sex slave training program. Then she travels the world, infiltrating the sex harems of oligarchs and ferreting out their secrets for the Initiative, because even as a naked, bound and gagged slave girl, Honey has ears..
Join Honey as she goes to the possibly mythical nation of Los Miserabils in South America in “The Naked Jungle,” to the semi-mythical nation of England in “England Goes Boom!” to the overtly mythical nation of Greece in “Greek Harem”, and to the mythically corrupt state of Louisiana in “Louisiana Slay Ride,” fighting fossil fuel oligarchs’ evil plans and slaking her slavegirl lust with one dominant alpha male after another all the way. It’s more than 115,000 words of danger, excitement and sexual bondage!
This collection includes all four of the Honey Trapp stories previously published on Smashwords.
May 27, 2022
"Karg" Now Available on Smashwords in Kindle and Other Ebook Formats
Here's the link!
Karg asks the burning question of our times: “What if Margaret Mead was a curvy blonde astronaut and got captured and enslaved by warriors on a primitive planet and discovered she really liked sexual bondage and sex slavery?”
Karg is the story of Susan Yearby, a curvy astronaut who is stranded on Karg, a planet full of dinosaur-like giant lizards and the warriors who ride them, and sexy slave girls and the warriors who ride them. Separated from Tully when an unknown enemy blows up their lander and forces their mother ship to flee the solar system, Susan is quickly captured and enslaved by the primitives who live on Karg. Somehow, she must find Tully and make her way across this strange planet full of perils and discover what attacked their lander.
Susan’s journey is a long one, leading her through primitive bondage rituals and rites, the slightly more civilized Fighting Pits of Kanorga, a barn where she becomes a hucow, a field where Susan is one of many prizes in a battle fought by dinosaur-riding warriors and much more. She spends almost all of her time on Karg naked and in chains and she is raped, enslaved, sold and generally treated badly.
Keeping it together under such circumstances is a tall order, but even naked and in chains, Susan has inner resources her captors cannot even guess at... and a blazing determination to find her way back to Tully and civilization with nothing but her wits and her nanotech to aid her.
Karg is not the counter Earth, it’s the under-the-counter Earth! This novel is 117,000 words long and is not part of any other universe ... that we know of!
Karg asks the burning question of our times: “What if Margaret Mead was a curvy blonde astronaut and got captured and enslaved by warriors on a primitive planet and discovered she really liked sexual bondage and sex slavery?”
Karg is the story of Susan Yearby, a curvy astronaut who is stranded on Karg, a planet full of dinosaur-like giant lizards and the warriors who ride them, and sexy slave girls and the warriors who ride them. Separated from Tully when an unknown enemy blows up their lander and forces their mother ship to flee the solar system, Susan is quickly captured and enslaved by the primitives who live on Karg. Somehow, she must find Tully and make her way across this strange planet full of perils and discover what attacked their lander.
Susan’s journey is a long one, leading her through primitive bondage rituals and rites, the slightly more civilized Fighting Pits of Kanorga, a barn where she becomes a hucow, a field where Susan is one of many prizes in a battle fought by dinosaur-riding warriors and much more. She spends almost all of her time on Karg naked and in chains and she is raped, enslaved, sold and generally treated badly.
Keeping it together under such circumstances is a tall order, but even naked and in chains, Susan has inner resources her captors cannot even guess at... and a blazing determination to find her way back to Tully and civilization with nothing but her wits and her nanotech to aid her.
Karg is not the counter Earth, it’s the under-the-counter Earth! This novel is 117,000 words long and is not part of any other universe ... that we know of!
May 14, 2022
"Louisiana Slay Ride" Now Available on Amazon and Smashwords
Here's the Amazon Link
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B1B6FL78
Here's the Smashwords Link
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view...
Here's the blurb:
“I know oligarchs can get away with almost anything, but setting off nukes under oil wells has to be the one thing not even an oligarch could get away with.”
Those were Honey Trapps’ words when she first heard abut Jacques Ledoux. Ledoux was Louisiana third generation oil wealth, a man who believed in himself but who probably should not have. He had already squandered a great deal of money on various unsuccessful schemes, so much that he was now only immensely wealthy instead of insanely wealthy. And Ledoux’s latest scheme looked like a desperate attempt to recoup his losses.
There were also rumors in the wealthy BDSM circles that Honey Trapp traveled in that some subs who scened with Ledoux never scened with anybody again. When the Initiative asks her to join Ledoux’s harem and get the goods on his nuke scheme in the most sexually submissive way possible, Honey doesn’t want to go. She has a rule about not subbing for even the most alpha male doms if they have bad reports from other subs, and subs who vanish is about as bad as the reports can get.
But Ledoux is rich and connected and hides his secrets well, if the rumors are even true. Only Honey’s unique skills at working her way into a dom’s heart via organs located elsewhere on his anatomy can worm the secrets out of him.
It’s Honey’s most dangerous assignment yet, filled with intrigue, danger and much sexually submissive hanky-panky in Ledoux’s harem. Sex, adventure and intrigue abound as Honey risks her person and her fortune to stop an oligarch from precipitating a nuclear disaster.
This novel is just over 43,000 words in length and is part of the Honey Trapp series.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B1B6FL78
Here's the Smashwords Link
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view...
Here's the blurb:
“I know oligarchs can get away with almost anything, but setting off nukes under oil wells has to be the one thing not even an oligarch could get away with.”
Those were Honey Trapps’ words when she first heard abut Jacques Ledoux. Ledoux was Louisiana third generation oil wealth, a man who believed in himself but who probably should not have. He had already squandered a great deal of money on various unsuccessful schemes, so much that he was now only immensely wealthy instead of insanely wealthy. And Ledoux’s latest scheme looked like a desperate attempt to recoup his losses.
There were also rumors in the wealthy BDSM circles that Honey Trapp traveled in that some subs who scened with Ledoux never scened with anybody again. When the Initiative asks her to join Ledoux’s harem and get the goods on his nuke scheme in the most sexually submissive way possible, Honey doesn’t want to go. She has a rule about not subbing for even the most alpha male doms if they have bad reports from other subs, and subs who vanish is about as bad as the reports can get.
But Ledoux is rich and connected and hides his secrets well, if the rumors are even true. Only Honey’s unique skills at working her way into a dom’s heart via organs located elsewhere on his anatomy can worm the secrets out of him.
It’s Honey’s most dangerous assignment yet, filled with intrigue, danger and much sexually submissive hanky-panky in Ledoux’s harem. Sex, adventure and intrigue abound as Honey risks her person and her fortune to stop an oligarch from precipitating a nuclear disaster.
This novel is just over 43,000 words in length and is part of the Honey Trapp series.
Cover for the Smashwords version of "Louisiana Slay Ride" Cover for the Amazon version of "Louisiana Slay Ride" Raw art file of Second Life avatar for "Louisiana Slay Ride" I like the cover art I got for “Louisiana Slay Ride" but getting there wasn
I've written a long post about the travails of making a cover for my new book. You might find it amusing to read, but I can't really post the images here since they are decidedly NSFW. So instead, here's a link to my Blogger post about these travails, which includes the images in question.
https://politicallysexy.blogspot.com/...
The images, although NSFW don't have sex or full nudity, private parts are covered because them's the rules on both Amazon and Smashwords. Enjoy.
https://politicallysexy.blogspot.com/...
The images, although NSFW don't have sex or full nudity, private parts are covered because them's the rules on both Amazon and Smashwords. Enjoy.
April 26, 2022
PMC Glasses Have Clouded Netflix’s Vision
In which I become the 4,263,769th writer to weigh in on "What's Wrong With Netflix"
There has been a lot of theorizing about what might have gone wrong with Netflix that has caused them to have the Earth-shattering minimal dip in subscriptions that they recently reported, causing them to have a 35 percent drop in market capitalization because investors are flighty idiots. (Not that I blame them, I’d be nervous too if I had two nickels to rub together in this ghoulish Late Stage Capitalism nightmare economy.)
Anyway, I want to get in on this whole theorizing thing myself, because I think I have a theory that is more all-encompassing than most other theories, which tend to run along the lines of “Netflix is failing because it isn’t making the kind of movies/shows I like any more.” My theory is more theoretical, more all-encompassing, explaining why Netflix fails to make or buy engaging content for its subscribers most of the time.
My theory is that the Netflix execs, the producers, the showrunners, the directors, set designers and decorators, costume designers and the writers are all members of the Professional Managerial Class (or PMC) or are at least PMC wannabes.
First of all, what do I mean by PMC glasses? I mean the people who make Netflix productions see the world from the viewpoint of one of the top 10 percent of American society, or world society. They are the affluent, the comfortable, the successful. They aren’t angry about anything. They aren’t upset about anything. They may have their causes and their viewpoints, but they’re comfortable causes and comfortable viewpoints.
And I’m not claiming that all these people being members of the PMC class or PMC wannabes is the result of any conspiracy. No one deliberately gave all those jobs to people just because they were PMC class members. Instead they gave people who are successful in film and television money, plenty of it, enough to propel them into the PMC class. By the time they got to the point where they were cutting deals with Netflix, they had been successful for a while. Members in good standing of the PMC class.
That’s why Netflix comedies aren’t funny. To be really funny, humor needs an edge provided by anger, by outsider outrage, which is generally in short supply among the very comfortable PMC class.
For example, one of the most successful, if not the most successful offerings on Netflix recently was “Don’t Look Up!” in which a planet-killer asteroid approaching Earth is an obvious stand-in for the climate crisis. It is edgy it is angry it is full of the sort of stuff that PMC types might find disturbing, looking at politics, politicians, the military and the media with a very hard, cynical eye. It has a downbeat ending and it portrays the mighty on Earth as a bunch of self-obsessed, greedy idiots who are too busy money grubbing and power grabbing to save themselves.
“Don’t Look Up!” would seem prove me wrong, except it had some outsider outrage going from David Sirota who co-wrote the script with director Adam McKay. Sirota was a senior advisor to Bernie Sanders’ 2020 Presidential campaign, and prior to “Don’t Look Up” was primarily known as a leftie commentator. He wasn’t a Marxist-Leninist, but he could fairly be described as a Social Democrat like Bernie Sanders.
It was Sirota’s leftist outrage over climate change and his in-depth knowledge of the duplicity of the media and politics that made the barbs sharp and nasty. “Don’t Look Up” succeeded by borrowing its outrage from a political outsider, Sirota. The instincts of most PMC types would be to moderate the anger and the rage, replacing it with merely clever wordplay and very broad satire, leaving “Don’t Look Up!” in the vicinity of funny. Sirota’s knowledge and anger kept it right on target.
This rarely happens on Netflix, and I think that’s what makes the service dull. Once Netflix started getting up to 100 million subscribers, its major preoccupation became finding entertainment that wouldn’t offend its enormous base, rather than entertainment that would make them glad they were subscribers.
This impulse, combined with the PMC goggles that want to make everything look comfortable and safe makes everything dull and interesting. The comedies aren’t funny (lookin’ at you, “Yes Day” “Bad Trip” and “Starsky and Hutch”) the romances aren’t all that romantic and definitely not sexy (lookin’ at you, all of Netflix’s recent romcoms) and the action/adventure stuff is vigorous and active but not at all compelling (lookin’ at you “Red Notice,” and “Eagle Eye”) and sometimes they’re just godawful (lookin’ at you “Spenser Confidential”).
The sexuality stuff is also indicative. They can’t even match softcore porn in their sex scenes. It’s all ladylike porn, if you know what I mean. There are a lot of articles on the Internet about movies and shows that have porny scenes and content, and I’ve watched some of them, and they’re a bunch of nothingburgers compared to actual porn. They’re not porny, they’re kinda sorta in a way pornish, at best.
Do an image search of such notably “porny” movies and shows as “365 Days,” “Bridgerton,” and “Sex Education” if you like, you’ll see what I mean if you’re familiar with actual porn. There’s not much of it, it’s underlit, and most of the good parts get blacked out. It’s PMC porn, in short, nothing to offend someone too much and yet give them the impression that they saw something sexy.
The problem is, the PMC vision doesn’t “see” the vast majority of Netflix subscribers, who are definitely not part of the PMC class. They don’t connect with their subscribers psychologically, intellectually or emotionally. Netflix’s PMC types may have some demographic data, but they have no idea who their subscribers are are or how they live, other than “not as well as me.”
So the PMC types turn out generic stuff that doesn’t really interest their subscribers. The bland, comfortable stuff that suites the PMC vision doesn’t work for the angry, increasingly impoverished bulk of Americans locked in alienating, dead-end jobs that bore them and which they hate, while also taking great pleasure in gaming and social media of various sorts that the PMC types typically do not understand well.
If Netflix and its content providers wanted to appeal to their actual audience, if they could actually SEE them, they’d have more characters who were out-of-touch seniors doing and saying stupid things. They’d have more characters who were horrible corporate bosses making their employees’ lives miserable. They’d have more characters who were lovable slackers outwitting their horrible bosses and having sex with all the pretty girls and making the lives of those around them more rewarding, though generally not in monetary ways.
Climate change would be a huge theme in a lot of stories. Housing would be a theme, mostly not being able to get it. The way the PMC and the oligarchs rip off middle class and poor people would be a steady background theme to the stories, and often the main theme.
Homeless people would be portrayed as people, not drugged-out zombies. And most people would be living in cramped apartments, often with roommates to make paying the rent possible. And the struggle to keep the rent paid would be a much bigger thing.
PMC types would say such stories are boring and distressing, not the sort of thing people want to watch to be entertained. But the real truth is that the “people” they’re describing are the PMC class, because they can’t see the rest of us, and don’t want to.
And they would really HATE stories about how they economically oppress everyone else except their oligarch masters, and which detail how horribly managers treat employees as a group, because they instinctively dislike any story that reveals just how much better off their lives are than those of the middle class and poor people they systematically oppress.
So Netflix, its management and content creators consisting only of PMC types, don’t show these things or anything like them. They have shows about wealthy people, often members of the PMC class and oligarchs who lead “interesting” lives. Even when they portray members of the poor and middle class they do so through PMC lenses. The middle class and poor people on Netflix live in housing that is much nicer than real middle class and poor people could ever afford. They generally wear clothing and have possessions that are nicer than most middle class and poor people can afford. In fact, they tend to live like upper middle class and lower upper class people do – PMC types pretending to be poor and middle class, in short.
When Netflix does attempt a realistic or gritty depiction of poor or middle class people, they tend to go way too dark. For example “Hillbilly Elegy”is a gritty depiction of how tough people in Appalachian mountain country have it. It was presented in the PMC-controlled mainstream media as a sympathetic portrayal of Appalachian mountain people. But very quickly reviews came out saying that the movie was actually poverty porn, focusing only on the miseries of the Appalachian poor, creating a misleading view of who they were as people. Even when the PMC types are looking hard at the middle class and the poor, they cannot see them as they are.
Wouldn’t pay them to, you know.
I hope I haven’t given you the impression that the PMC are conspiring to exclude and misrepresent the poor and the middle class. It’s just a case of shared interests leading to a shared vision, one of those unwritten cultural things that’s invisible and would be denied by most members of the PMC.
But there are some members of the PMC who do intentionally lie and mislead about the economic oppression of the poor and middle class. Academics and media people often know enough to know that the wealth of the oligarchs comes from the economic oppression of the poor and middle class, but you’ll never hear it from their commentating and the media enterprises they work for.
And if PMC commentators do somehow attempt to tell a progressive message, especially on political or economic topics, they are very rapidly fired. For example, when MSNBC hired Dylan Rattigan, Krystal Ball, Ed Schultz and Cenk Uygar to give a progressive “edge” to their coverage, then fired them all when it turned out they had spines.
How does this all relate to Netflix’s woes? Netflix, with its hundreds of millions of subscribers and its PMC staff and oligarch management can’t see its subscribers, and by “see” I mean understand. What’s more, they don’t WANT to see their subscribers. What they really want to do is feed the subscribers bland, feel-good escapism and works that support the status quo, even when they claim to be edgy, challenging work.
(That’s why Netflix, and ALL the streaming media are so ecstatically happy with comic book movies. Movies about spandex-clad idiot good guys flying around and foiling the plans of spandex-clad idiot bad guys are just the pablum they want to serve to subscribers to keep them docile and unaware.)
This is why virtually all the entertianment options on Netflix rouse only half-hearted interest among subscribers, if they rouse any interest at all. Netflix and every streaming service and cable provider would LOVE to provide entertainment that will have audiences absolutely rapt over what they’re watching and eager for more. Many may actually believe they are doing just that. Some people do love a lot of Netflix productions. And some of them are good. (“Don’t Look Up!” “The Witcher” “Stranger Things” “Travelers” and some others.) But generally they’re a drop in the bucket compared to the huge swirling mass of mediocrity that is most of Netflix’s (and most other streaming services’) productions.
There’s a reason for that. Netflix’s content isn’t made for us. It’s made by PMC people, for PMC people, though many of them think they are making shows for us. They aren’t. That’s why they aren’t any good. They’re not supposed to be good. They’re supposed to be tranquilizers. Soma. And they are. Netflix’s collection of merely tolerable films isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.
See you at work tomorrow, bright and early!
There has been a lot of theorizing about what might have gone wrong with Netflix that has caused them to have the Earth-shattering minimal dip in subscriptions that they recently reported, causing them to have a 35 percent drop in market capitalization because investors are flighty idiots. (Not that I blame them, I’d be nervous too if I had two nickels to rub together in this ghoulish Late Stage Capitalism nightmare economy.)
Anyway, I want to get in on this whole theorizing thing myself, because I think I have a theory that is more all-encompassing than most other theories, which tend to run along the lines of “Netflix is failing because it isn’t making the kind of movies/shows I like any more.” My theory is more theoretical, more all-encompassing, explaining why Netflix fails to make or buy engaging content for its subscribers most of the time.
My theory is that the Netflix execs, the producers, the showrunners, the directors, set designers and decorators, costume designers and the writers are all members of the Professional Managerial Class (or PMC) or are at least PMC wannabes.
First of all, what do I mean by PMC glasses? I mean the people who make Netflix productions see the world from the viewpoint of one of the top 10 percent of American society, or world society. They are the affluent, the comfortable, the successful. They aren’t angry about anything. They aren’t upset about anything. They may have their causes and their viewpoints, but they’re comfortable causes and comfortable viewpoints.
And I’m not claiming that all these people being members of the PMC class or PMC wannabes is the result of any conspiracy. No one deliberately gave all those jobs to people just because they were PMC class members. Instead they gave people who are successful in film and television money, plenty of it, enough to propel them into the PMC class. By the time they got to the point where they were cutting deals with Netflix, they had been successful for a while. Members in good standing of the PMC class.
That’s why Netflix comedies aren’t funny. To be really funny, humor needs an edge provided by anger, by outsider outrage, which is generally in short supply among the very comfortable PMC class.
For example, one of the most successful, if not the most successful offerings on Netflix recently was “Don’t Look Up!” in which a planet-killer asteroid approaching Earth is an obvious stand-in for the climate crisis. It is edgy it is angry it is full of the sort of stuff that PMC types might find disturbing, looking at politics, politicians, the military and the media with a very hard, cynical eye. It has a downbeat ending and it portrays the mighty on Earth as a bunch of self-obsessed, greedy idiots who are too busy money grubbing and power grabbing to save themselves.
“Don’t Look Up!” would seem prove me wrong, except it had some outsider outrage going from David Sirota who co-wrote the script with director Adam McKay. Sirota was a senior advisor to Bernie Sanders’ 2020 Presidential campaign, and prior to “Don’t Look Up” was primarily known as a leftie commentator. He wasn’t a Marxist-Leninist, but he could fairly be described as a Social Democrat like Bernie Sanders.
It was Sirota’s leftist outrage over climate change and his in-depth knowledge of the duplicity of the media and politics that made the barbs sharp and nasty. “Don’t Look Up” succeeded by borrowing its outrage from a political outsider, Sirota. The instincts of most PMC types would be to moderate the anger and the rage, replacing it with merely clever wordplay and very broad satire, leaving “Don’t Look Up!” in the vicinity of funny. Sirota’s knowledge and anger kept it right on target.
This rarely happens on Netflix, and I think that’s what makes the service dull. Once Netflix started getting up to 100 million subscribers, its major preoccupation became finding entertainment that wouldn’t offend its enormous base, rather than entertainment that would make them glad they were subscribers.
This impulse, combined with the PMC goggles that want to make everything look comfortable and safe makes everything dull and interesting. The comedies aren’t funny (lookin’ at you, “Yes Day” “Bad Trip” and “Starsky and Hutch”) the romances aren’t all that romantic and definitely not sexy (lookin’ at you, all of Netflix’s recent romcoms) and the action/adventure stuff is vigorous and active but not at all compelling (lookin’ at you “Red Notice,” and “Eagle Eye”) and sometimes they’re just godawful (lookin’ at you “Spenser Confidential”).
The sexuality stuff is also indicative. They can’t even match softcore porn in their sex scenes. It’s all ladylike porn, if you know what I mean. There are a lot of articles on the Internet about movies and shows that have porny scenes and content, and I’ve watched some of them, and they’re a bunch of nothingburgers compared to actual porn. They’re not porny, they’re kinda sorta in a way pornish, at best.
Do an image search of such notably “porny” movies and shows as “365 Days,” “Bridgerton,” and “Sex Education” if you like, you’ll see what I mean if you’re familiar with actual porn. There’s not much of it, it’s underlit, and most of the good parts get blacked out. It’s PMC porn, in short, nothing to offend someone too much and yet give them the impression that they saw something sexy.
The problem is, the PMC vision doesn’t “see” the vast majority of Netflix subscribers, who are definitely not part of the PMC class. They don’t connect with their subscribers psychologically, intellectually or emotionally. Netflix’s PMC types may have some demographic data, but they have no idea who their subscribers are are or how they live, other than “not as well as me.”
So the PMC types turn out generic stuff that doesn’t really interest their subscribers. The bland, comfortable stuff that suites the PMC vision doesn’t work for the angry, increasingly impoverished bulk of Americans locked in alienating, dead-end jobs that bore them and which they hate, while also taking great pleasure in gaming and social media of various sorts that the PMC types typically do not understand well.
If Netflix and its content providers wanted to appeal to their actual audience, if they could actually SEE them, they’d have more characters who were out-of-touch seniors doing and saying stupid things. They’d have more characters who were horrible corporate bosses making their employees’ lives miserable. They’d have more characters who were lovable slackers outwitting their horrible bosses and having sex with all the pretty girls and making the lives of those around them more rewarding, though generally not in monetary ways.
Climate change would be a huge theme in a lot of stories. Housing would be a theme, mostly not being able to get it. The way the PMC and the oligarchs rip off middle class and poor people would be a steady background theme to the stories, and often the main theme.
Homeless people would be portrayed as people, not drugged-out zombies. And most people would be living in cramped apartments, often with roommates to make paying the rent possible. And the struggle to keep the rent paid would be a much bigger thing.
PMC types would say such stories are boring and distressing, not the sort of thing people want to watch to be entertained. But the real truth is that the “people” they’re describing are the PMC class, because they can’t see the rest of us, and don’t want to.
And they would really HATE stories about how they economically oppress everyone else except their oligarch masters, and which detail how horribly managers treat employees as a group, because they instinctively dislike any story that reveals just how much better off their lives are than those of the middle class and poor people they systematically oppress.
So Netflix, its management and content creators consisting only of PMC types, don’t show these things or anything like them. They have shows about wealthy people, often members of the PMC class and oligarchs who lead “interesting” lives. Even when they portray members of the poor and middle class they do so through PMC lenses. The middle class and poor people on Netflix live in housing that is much nicer than real middle class and poor people could ever afford. They generally wear clothing and have possessions that are nicer than most middle class and poor people can afford. In fact, they tend to live like upper middle class and lower upper class people do – PMC types pretending to be poor and middle class, in short.
When Netflix does attempt a realistic or gritty depiction of poor or middle class people, they tend to go way too dark. For example “Hillbilly Elegy”is a gritty depiction of how tough people in Appalachian mountain country have it. It was presented in the PMC-controlled mainstream media as a sympathetic portrayal of Appalachian mountain people. But very quickly reviews came out saying that the movie was actually poverty porn, focusing only on the miseries of the Appalachian poor, creating a misleading view of who they were as people. Even when the PMC types are looking hard at the middle class and the poor, they cannot see them as they are.
Wouldn’t pay them to, you know.
I hope I haven’t given you the impression that the PMC are conspiring to exclude and misrepresent the poor and the middle class. It’s just a case of shared interests leading to a shared vision, one of those unwritten cultural things that’s invisible and would be denied by most members of the PMC.
But there are some members of the PMC who do intentionally lie and mislead about the economic oppression of the poor and middle class. Academics and media people often know enough to know that the wealth of the oligarchs comes from the economic oppression of the poor and middle class, but you’ll never hear it from their commentating and the media enterprises they work for.
And if PMC commentators do somehow attempt to tell a progressive message, especially on political or economic topics, they are very rapidly fired. For example, when MSNBC hired Dylan Rattigan, Krystal Ball, Ed Schultz and Cenk Uygar to give a progressive “edge” to their coverage, then fired them all when it turned out they had spines.
How does this all relate to Netflix’s woes? Netflix, with its hundreds of millions of subscribers and its PMC staff and oligarch management can’t see its subscribers, and by “see” I mean understand. What’s more, they don’t WANT to see their subscribers. What they really want to do is feed the subscribers bland, feel-good escapism and works that support the status quo, even when they claim to be edgy, challenging work.
(That’s why Netflix, and ALL the streaming media are so ecstatically happy with comic book movies. Movies about spandex-clad idiot good guys flying around and foiling the plans of spandex-clad idiot bad guys are just the pablum they want to serve to subscribers to keep them docile and unaware.)
This is why virtually all the entertianment options on Netflix rouse only half-hearted interest among subscribers, if they rouse any interest at all. Netflix and every streaming service and cable provider would LOVE to provide entertainment that will have audiences absolutely rapt over what they’re watching and eager for more. Many may actually believe they are doing just that. Some people do love a lot of Netflix productions. And some of them are good. (“Don’t Look Up!” “The Witcher” “Stranger Things” “Travelers” and some others.) But generally they’re a drop in the bucket compared to the huge swirling mass of mediocrity that is most of Netflix’s (and most other streaming services’) productions.
There’s a reason for that. Netflix’s content isn’t made for us. It’s made by PMC people, for PMC people, though many of them think they are making shows for us. They aren’t. That’s why they aren’t any good. They’re not supposed to be good. They’re supposed to be tranquilizers. Soma. And they are. Netflix’s collection of merely tolerable films isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.
See you at work tomorrow, bright and early!
Pat Powers Goes BEYOND Outer Subspace!
A blog for me to talk about my books, the writing life, and whatever else lodges deep within the steamy recesses of my alleged brain.
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