Alternatively Oregon\u2019s local culture actually isn\u2019t fundamentally based on pedophilia and incest, and in fact your worldview is a function of your own most prurient sexual desires and plans to act on them. In other words, you\u2019re an extreme pervert who\u2019s projecting his desires onto others.
\n\n\nIt’s being at a bar with 70s-born Oregonians and hearing them laughing comparing the teachers their friends were fucking in high school. Hearing a table of teachers at another bar laughing about how it’s always the gym and music teachers getting caught.
It’s reading, in the Gen X alt-weekly when I first came to Portland, about how mayor/governor Neil Goldschmidt had been fucking one of his employees’ teenage daughters in the 70s and “Neil and the babysitter” was an amusing open secret among the city elite. And then about how then-mayor Sam Adams fucking his (male) high school intern might get the boobs worked up but the real scandal was how his budgeting overemphasized capital outlays instead of operating costs.
It’s thinking about the profusion of strip clubs Portland is so proud of and how before the ‘90s takeoff of porn chic, sex workers were regularly attributed to being abused by their dads
(and kind of having a sense of hypersexuality and how that would work, and picking up how some aspects of the locals’ culture made most sense if there had been more hypersexual kids in the social economy growing up)
and honestly, how “oh and there’s a big downtown scene of angry runaway street kids” was taken for granted and anyone living east enough in “Felony Flats” is assumed to be a methhead and Portland’s sense of the default citizen was basically as a functioning alcoholic
That and seeing this one ad for a summer “Rock Camp For Girls” that had testimonies to how hot chick rockers were \u2013 I don’t think it was for parents wanting hot daughters to fuck, but it was the ad’s guileless assumption that enabling your daughter’s sexual appeal was something a caring parent would do for them that struck me
And to bring it back to SFF short stories, Omelas \u2013 you know, the chill city full of farmer’s markets with the smell of marijuana on the air where everything being so chill is based on a horrifically abused child that most everyone comes to accept and not really think about \u2013 was clearly based on Ursula Le Guin’s hometown of Portland, the name comes from reversing a road sign for “Salem, OR”
It’s how when I stopped down in Roseburg I could tell the local elite had been keeping up appearances by filling downtown space with nonprofits and how one downtown building was just ~the place where the police take kids when they arrest their parents for fucking them~ and it wasn’t even that small
Honestly, the way Oregon was a bastion of second-wave radfem separatism but it’s not TERFy
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