Rod Dreher knows sex sells
My emphases, just to save you time:
[NFR: In doing more research on the book last night, I discovered that the slutty protagonist turns out to have had an abusive past that is meant to partly explain her behavior. That, and we are exposed to the horror of “slut-shaming,” which is condemned. Seems to me that the author gets to present softcore porn to her readers by wrapping it in a moralistic message, like the church lady gossip who says, “I’m just telling you this so you can pray for her.” — RD]
Wait, what doggy is this tail wagging? What post does this comment above belong to?
Why, this one:
New in the Young Adult section, a novel called Firsts. From the publisher MacMillan’s description...
You can read the book’s first chapter here. It’s soft-core porn. Here’s more, from inside the book. I’m going to put this below the jump, to spare those who would rather not see it. I think it’s important that you see it to know what’s out there.
But, really, now, what is a Christian-flavored carnival barker supposed to do?
This sexy underage teen post has already received 27 comments as I write this, while a previous one trying to flog his Dante book for this Lent has only received 8. Can't take an oyster-slurping European vacation on 8 Dante comments, now, can you.
Sex sells, Rod Dreher knows it, particularly if it's a voyeuristic ogle of some forbidden underage teen sex, so he's got the Popular Mechanics wrapper to put around your National Geographic when you want to examine that underage native teen culture in more depth.
But watch out when he gets back to that Caitlyn Jenner stuff. Sooner or later he's going to get the itch to put German tranny hi-jinks below the fold, too, and nobody wants to see that.
In doing more research on the book last night. . .
ReplyDeleteNot sure I want to know what that "research" entailed, IYKWIMAITYD.
I think he's letting his readers handle that, IYKWIMAITYD, by explicitly quoting passages back to him in the comments, now at 45.
DeleteI can't decide if his reference to "doing research" is hilarious or appalling in the degree to which it signals his lack of self-awareness. I mean, it's like bad script-writing on some ridiculous sitcom. You can almost hear the laugh track after the line on "research." And yet Rod soldiers on . . .
DeleteRod's whole body of blogging is a form of pornography, Some would call it outrage porn or apocalypse porn but the endless series of breathless hysteria is quite pornographic in the sense that its meant tio titilate people's emotions by stoking their baser instincts. Its like the preacher who describes sexual sins in great detail to a congregation that can feel moral outgrage while getting their ID stroked. Its also a way to bring in more clicks because our working boy is not above pandering.
DeleteI can't decide if his reference to "doing research" is hilarious or appalling in the degree to which it signals his lack of self-awareness.
DeleteThe latter, definitely. I can't recall a single instance of a sly double entendre, meant to get a chuckle, in all I've read of Dreher's output. Plus, he doesn't seem to think through what he writes (hence the UPDATES when he has to explain what the post meant, or to correct 180-degree-wrong factual errors).
(Sorry to be leap-frogging comments, Anon.)
DeleteRod's whole body of blogging is a form of pornography, Some would call it outrage porn or apocalypse porn but the endless series of breathless hysteria is quite pornographic ....
Dreher's current jihad over children with cellphones is a perfect example of the "breathless hysteria" you mention.
Just as we would expect the drug dealer who consumes his own product to appear stoned, we could reasonably expect the outrage pornographer who consumes his own wares to be, well, exciteble and breathless.
DeleteThere is a great deal of auto- going on here wherein the producer is also the star is also the audience; add your own suffixes.
I think you're overstating Rod's cleverness, his blogging is driven by his fear de jour.
ReplyDeletePeak oil
Peak Christianity
Too much Trump
To much gay
And the constant monster lurking under his bed, as it were, teenage sexuality.
-anonymous maximus
I don't think it is any testament to cleverness that he posts click-bait. He's just doing what his employer wants; he's just being a typical Content Provider.
DeleteHmmm...
Is Dreher in the SEB industry? That stands for Search Engine BenOptimization.
Case in point, Pauli.
DeleteHis boss, Wick Allison, is only interested in circulation. The reason this guy Barrett Brown is still doing time is that he was caught while doing time there snorting morphine with the other inmates.
Let's review: Barrett Brown is the mouthpiece for Anonymous, which hacks and destroys peoples' IT property. He was arrested for threatening the family of an FBI agent. He's still doing time because he likes his morphine highs.
But Wick likes him because his editor, Tim Rogers (to the right of Troy Aikman) won a national magazine award for writing an article about him, so every opportunity to reference Brown becomes an opportunity to toot Wick's own horn.
Wick could care less what happens to Brown, as long as he remains a dependable source of hits.
Same with Dreher. He's no Christian, to use underage teen soft porn to suck readers in, he's just a Christian-flavored click whore. What does he know about the world outside his cozy corner, his blog and email? Underage teens are just Lolita blog content and click bait mules to him.
That's why Wick adores him so, because he doesn't allow the morality of the former (true Christian) to cramp his true latter style.
He's just doing what his employer wants; he's just being a typical Content Provider.
DeleteI don't see it that way.
Now his employer may have stumbled on to a click-bait cash cow with Rod; but I don't see Rod purposely posting click-bate. I think he actually worries about this stuff all the time. His only exposure to the real world is online from his little safe-space/home office or emails from anonymous readers who tell him that the orthodox sky is falling. I just hope his kids spend enough time around his brother-in-law so as to have a positive male role model in their lives who doesn't live in fear all the time.
-anonymous maximus
Remember Rod sells what is good for Rod Dreher. Such as doing an article for Time magazine saying "You love Pope Francis but I am not going back to the Catholic Church."http://ideas.time.com/2013/09/29/im-still-not-going-back-to-the-catholic-church/
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of a lack of self-awareness, I offer this. I embarrassed myself simply by reading it.
ReplyDeleteP.S. This is indeed a window into the upcoming long-awaited BenOp book. It will obviously be a meta-analysis of what others have written, selected by Dreher to fit the predefined narrative, with little first-hand observations or analysis (only that gained by his travels to places with good food where he wanted to go anyway).
O, the writer's lot is hard, indeed..
DeleteThe Toiling Professional Writer's use of feminine third-person generic pronouns, in a paragraph immediately following one in which the feminine third-person pronoun refers to a specific person, is noted. Must be that the "craftsman" always opts for trendiness over clarity. "Yes, I must write; it's who I am."
Ha! Obviously you and I were doing the same thing in different places at the same time this morning, Pik. Great minds, great minds.
DeleteRod Dreher gives us a great window into something else as well, far more valuable than his own narcissism, namely the serendipity of cultural advance, particularly technological cultural advance, and particularly indiscriminately democratizing cultural advance.
For example, where would Dreher be today in an alternate universe without blogging, particularly mass-democratically available blogging of the sort that scraped clean any barriers to writing for the public all the way down to ground level? Maybe an obscure English teacher?
The flip side of that perspective is the question of what really good Christian writers have become relatively more obscured by virture of the white noise generated by prolific typists such as Dreher and his ilk?
Be careful what you wish for. The popular little voice chip all the cool kids are plugging into their larynges tomorrow may drown out that opera diva you might really have liked to hear.
Not to resurrect that thread we recently flogged, but I have some faith (or wishful thinking, anyway) that Beauty and Truth eventually win out after all the noise fades.
DeleteHaving said that, it sure is taking a long time for hip-hop to go away....
Pik, the problem I was referring to wasn't of good opera being lost in a sea of hip-hop, it was of good opera being lost in a sea of mediocre opera become possible by some serendipitous cultural or technological development, the way blogging unleashed the mediocre blatherings of a facile rural Louisiana typist once editors found themselves scraped clean as gatekeepers from all but a relatively few publishers.
DeleteThis is the flip side of the social media explosion Diane was lauding in another context: it allows a Dreher to, for example, appoint himself as the Voice of Orthodoxy unopposed.
And if any of our Orthodox friends are reading this, understand that, until you say otherwise, and frequently, and loudly, Rod Dreher will continue to be free to define not only the theology and practice of Orthodoxy for the otherwise ignorant but also the persona of the Orthodox, that is, what it means to be Orthodox is to be like Rod Dreher.
When Dreher discovered blogging he discovered a means to wreak his revenge on the world he could only have dreamed of on that high school field trip motel floor. And now he's cashing that in, on everyone, big time.