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Chuck Wendig (on weak & entitled men)

Chuck Wendig is funnier than I am, even when he’s pissed off. Especially then.

More Chuck/Howdy distinctions: Wendig’s funnier, more productive, less frightened of fiction, more joyfully profane and (allegedly) actually makes decent money as a writer. (I actually quite like him, though.) He writes a blog called Terrible Minds which is particularly aimed at writers, and secondarily at those who enjoy and consume fantasy and science fiction, whether electronically or by manual analog movement of stained wood-pulp tissues. (So-called “pages” within three-dimensional, sometimes weighty and sharp-cornered “books”. Weird stuff.) He has met Neil Gaiman. He has a writing shed.

But here’s how Chuck and I are brothers: he is the father of a little boy that he’s evidently fascinated by and cuckoo about; he believes in creativity and wonder; he has a thing for Margaret Atwood; he’s wacky about words (his writing is like steroid-enhanced psychedelic popcorn and, like mine, digresses wildly but with way more profanity and phrases like “shit-shellacked”, “jerky lackwits”, “a ranty, yelly, gesticulating mess of a screed” [about “arting harder”], and “a pair of toddler underoos spackled with mess”; AND, if you thought I’d never get to the point, like me he is often inclined to spew inflammable verbal dragon-venom when men are hateful towards women and their aspirations. Chuck Wendig is bloody merciless and absolutely off-his-nut indignant when men are whiny, machofeeble, femophobic and protective of illogical and illegitimate privilege. It enrages him. It enrages me, though less colourfully and NSFW-ish.

So, be warned, here comes Chuckles the Angry Clown dismissing weak and entitled men with the back of his cartoonishly large and paint-spattered hand. (And one well-placed F-bomb.) He had run across misogynistic use of the word (it’s not a word, “it’s not even a thing”) meninism (*shudders, rushes back to re-read Wendig’s derisive head-slap*):

“Men who think they’ve been victimized by feminism are like burglars who sue the homeowners they were burgling because they stubbed their toe on a fucking coffee table.”

Chuck is so frank.

Chuck Wendig (19something to the phantasmagoric present) is an American writer, game designer, and cultural critic (oh, if he ever read this, how he’d giggle or spew). He is a likeable contrarian, and no doubt is vilified in circles I’m not interested in bisecting. As with Stephen King, the snob in me wonders what he could do if he slowed down and got “serious” — in other words, became something other than the writer he is because of other people’s biases. He does, it appears, what he likes.

 

Comment (1)

  1. Ben Howden

    And of course there are indeed burglars who have done such things. Or at least the legal opening exists – suing for loss of potential income, bodily harm… Or so I’ve been told.
    “Vilified in circles I’m not interested in bisecting” – well put.

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