Weekend Entertainment Guide 8/9/24

South Park, seeing how far a book review can go

I have finally responded to all the queries for Changing of the Guards: Pluto on the Precipice — only three days behind schedule! Many writers who have been featured in Hot on Substack are on board, so I am looking forward to the project.

I’m not going to do a full version of Hot on Substack this week. There are plenty of important news stories going on, such as turbulence in financial markets, the Olympic Games, and contenders for the 2024 election, but I have not had time to follow them closely between processing anthology queries and attending various family gatherings.

The Pluto/Neptune polarity shift of the mid-1990s

In my previous post, I correlated Pluto and Neptune switching signs roughly simultaneously in recent decades with wild pendulum swings in the handling of free speech issues. We are currently in the process of Pluto and Neptune moving from the cautious Earth/Water polarity to the bold Air/Fire polarity, so we will probably rocket directly from the unpleasant extreme of repressive cancel culture to the also unpleasant opposite extreme of people blurting out every unfiltered brain fart.

I now want to look closer at the last time we experienced a shift from the Earth/Water polarity to the Air/Fire polarity. This happened in the mid-1990s, when Pluto moved from Scorpio (Water) to Sagittarius (Fire), and Neptune moved from Capricorn (Earth) to Aquarius (Air).

The Parents Music Resource Center formed in April 1985. In response to its efforts, labels reading “Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics” began to appear on record albums and other music recordings in 1990. While all of this was going on, Pluto was in Scorpio and Neptune was in Capricorn. The 1994 formation of the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, which put rating labels on video games, then took place with Pluto in Scorpio, Neptune in Capricorn, and Saturn in Pisces.

Such efforts were satirized in the June 1999 movie South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. By then, Pluto was at 8° Sagittarius, and Neptune was at 3° Aquarius — the vibe had changed!

I was a little too young to see the movie when it first came out, so I didn’t get around to watching it until this past Christmas. Although the movie began with a strong defense of free speech, the plot completely fell apart as it went on, focusing on a purported gay relationship between Satan and Saddam Hussein. Yeah, there are some things about the 1990s that I do not miss.  

Of course, the movie was based on the TV series South Park, which launched on Comedy Central on August 13, 1997, according to Wikipedia. At that time, Pluto was at 2° Sagittarius, and Neptune was at 27° Capricorn — it was a transitional moment like we are in right now.

What is not literary cancel culture

In recent posts, I have railed against the repressive effects of literary cancel culture. At this point, I want to provide an example of a blog post that is harshly critical of a book without being part of literary cancel culture. Not every book is the right fit for every reader, and it is okay to acknowledge that — you aren’t even required to be friendly about it!

I would never have known anything about Their Troublesome Crush by Xan West if Substack blogger

Holly MathNerd

hadn’t written a scathing review of the obscure novel. Holly MathNerd missed an opportunity to get an affiliate marketing sale, because I actually bought the e-book on Amazon to see what warranted such a ruckus.

As an aside, it is easy to set up Amazon affiliate links on a Substack blog, and more Substack bloggers should try it. However, you get kicked out of the Amazon Associates Program if you don’t make enough sales in your first six months; I’ve been kicked out for not making enough sales twice, so I will just leave it alone for now and wait for Amazon to pay my balance of roughly $2.50. If Holly MathNerd goes through with writing additional scathing book reviews, though, she could potentially rake in more affiliate marketing sales than I did!

I wanted to like Their Troublesome Crush just out of spite for the wildly over-the-top negative review it got. Spite could only carry me about halfway through the book, though. The story had to do with polyamorous relationships among people who each had a lot going on in their personal lives. I ultimately got bored and didn’t care who wound up dating whomever.

I personally do not share Holly MathNerd’s views on gender issues, and I personally would not have written the book review she wrote. However, her book review does not count as an example of literary cancel culture because it does not do the following sorts of things that have unfortunately been done to various authors by others in recent years as described in PEN America’s 2023 report “Booklash: Literary Freedom, Online Outrage, and the Language of Harm”:

• Demand that the book be withdrawn from publication

• Call for boycotts related to the book

• Demand that others recant their endorsement of the book

• Advocate for personal harassment of the author

• Claim that the book harmed her personally

• Try to stop me from buying or reading the book

I bought the book and read part of it and came to my own conclusions. That is how literary culture is supposed to function.

Xan West actually died in 2020 and is therefore not around to enjoy this renaissance of interest in their work. Even West acknowledged in a way that not every book is the right fit for every reader. On their personal blog, West provided a detailed list of content warnings for their short stories. Most of it is stuff I would never have thought to provide content warnings for, but West evidently knew their audience, and good for West and their audience.

My own thinking on content warnings/trigger warnings has evolved over time. I used to have a knee-jerk negative reaction just because I thought they were coming from the same people who were causing all the problems with literary cancel culture. At this point, though, I see content warnings as the equivalent of food allergy labels that give individuals the ability to personally choose to avoid books that contain something they have a problem with, which could actually serve as a helpful antidote to literary cancel culture. To give an example from Xan West’s list of content warnings, if you were triggered by “whorephobia,” you would simply make an informed decision to avoid the story “Dancing for Daddy” and read one of West’s other stories instead of trying to ban everyone else from reading “Dancing for Daddy.”

I currently advocate for the development of a simple and concise content warning system that would essentially provide allergen labels for books. Much like food packaging clearly flags the presence of the most common food allergens, books would have a barcode-sized label placed near the barcode clearly flagging the presence of the most common emotional triggers.

An allergy is basically a boundary. When you have a food allergy, you often have to say, “No, I can’t eat that.” Similarly, acknowledging one’s allergy to certain types of book content is acknowledging a personal boundary. That is probably what needs to happen here.

In his article, “My Healing Journey from Being an Emotional Abuser,” Paul Colaianni identified the root of his problem as “A lack of personal boundaries,” elaborating:

The answer is that I was living in a world where I was afraid to ask for what I wanted. I carried around the fear of expressing myself or letting people know what behavior was acceptable and what wasn’t. I hated confrontation and didn’t want to be truthful with others because of my fear of the consequences.

Again, it might seem odd to connect a lack of boundaries with acting badly toward those you claim to love, but when you don’t have boundaries, you may choose to instead manipulate those around you. After all, if you can make others do what you want, you don’t even have to have boundaries!

The South Park song “Blame Canada,” shown in the video earlier this post, makes a similar point. In the movie South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, the parents found it easier to blame Canada for allowing entertainers Terrance and Phillip to produce offensive content than to enforce boundaries regarding the content their own children consumed.

People of literary cancel culture, ask for what you want. Declare your boundaries. Tell the rest of us what the big eight allergens flagged on book labels ought to be. We’ll flag them, and you can then make an informed decision to personally avoid the books that contain whatever it is you are allergic to instead of trying to censor those books for everyone.

Your window of opportunity to act on this is not long. Starting in spring 2025, Neptune, the planet of what the collective idealizes, will move from Pisces, the sign of careful compassion for vulnerable minorities, into Aries, the sign of leaping first and looking later. The world is on its absolute last grains of patience for the atmosphere of terror you have created, so protect whatever is genuinely worth protecting now before you have to spend the next 14 years of Neptune’s transit through Aries shutting the heck up.