Date: September 30 2024 2:04 PM Title: part 1/6
Right, so firstly I deserve a shirt that says 'I survived this Essay' from how long it is.
I'm sure you've gotten remarks on the contents of the essay itself so I'm going to set that aside and instead approach this from the actual structure of an essay in English. It is, in a word, a fuckin' mess. Overly rambling, impenetrable to your average reader, and more asides with vague relation to the overall point than Beowulf.
As it is, most people aren't going to bother reading beyond the first paragraph and that is a failure of the writer not the reader. If your actual structure is what puts off readers that is completely on you and having talked to people that tried to read it and said nah, its a problem.
Since you couch this as more of a philosophical text rather than a scientific one, I will offer a golden rule from Hamlet that is usually applied in fiction writing but applies well to most forms of writing. Brevity is the soul of wit. That means don't waste my fuckin' time. You keep it concise, easy to understand, and digestible. To your average lay person, this is as digestible as granite.
As one of many examples I found in this:
"Parrhasius and Zeuxis, two ancient Greek artists, had once engaged in a painting contest. The task was clear: to depict the real world as faithfully as possible. The great master Zeuxis decided to paint grapes; when it came time to present the results of their work, he removed the curtain covering his painting—and hungry birds flew down to the canvas. Confident in his victory, he looked at Parrhasius’s still-covered painting and called on him to unveil his work. And so Parrhasius turned out to be the winner—he had painted the very curtain that Zeuxis had mistaken for a real object, believing it to hide the actual subject matter."
This entire paragraph and the one following it can and should be entirely removed. It serves only to be referenced later on in a vague connection during later points. Nothing about it provides any impactful supporting use to your overall point that your average person is going to care about.
If your essay isn't made for the average reader then it exists as basically little more than self masturbatory philosophy flexing where you will link this, assert your points as fact, and when someone responds to you, you can tell them to read your essay because you absolutely know its impenetrable. And if they continue to try and debate your content when they haven't read it you can disregard their opinions because clearly they aren't suited for the debate. And if you don't then your English grasp isn't as solid as you think it is structure wise.
Overall your grade here is a D+ from me. I know you don't want advice because tbh thats not the point of writing something like this, but. Carve the shit out of this. Cut the absolute shit out of the metric ton of fat. I put this thing through a word counter. It said its 17k words long. 17,000. Holy shit, there are complete stories for size fetish out there that aren't that length lol. There are maybe 7k words that have anything useful, impactful, or informative to say. That is completely absurd. No one is gonna wanna engage with this, regardless of contents. You could have an interesting discussion here personally in my opinion given the content, but its presentation ensures your discussions will be with very few people.
tl;dr edit this shit down to like a quarter of the size, remove the self hand job pseudo intellectual references, and make your point more clear and you maybe have a decent essay.
Author's Response:
Thank you for the feedback. I understand you brought up the Greek tale only as an example, but I cannot stress enough how vital it is for the entire essay. It's probably the last thing I would remove, literally. This tale is an incredibly useful metaphor for everything I describe. If you don't understand some passage, you only have to ask yourself: 'what would be the curtain here?'. It's the most important backbone of the entire system.
I am always sincere and I have something of a phobia of not telling what I believe to be the truth (which makes it really hard to have small talk irl, by the way...), so I kindly ask you to take what I'm about to say as nothing less than my real thoughts on this matter; not as an act of boasting or mental masturbation, or anything else that it isn't. The comments about my essay being difficult to read were a shock to me. I tried my best to make it as readable as possible, and I modelled its structure according to my own train of thought that led me to the conclusions I present before I even started writing it (my notes aside). I always try to tell the reader what I'm about to do in the following sections, summarize what I've done, and explain the entire road ahead. I clearly define what I mean by every important word, such as 'size,' 'shame,' 'sexuality,' 'drive,' 'desire,' etc. I repeat myself just so that the reader doesn't have to check again what I mean by 'linguification' or 'pre-symbolic', for example. I wrote a summary of the entire process of the emergence of a size enjoyer at the end. I divided the essay into thematic parts, each of them serving a clearly stated purpose. I assure you sincerely and with all my heart, that I thought each word through. My writing speed is usually a few sentences an hour (well, my sentences are long, so let's say 200 words an hour). Any reference I make is not meant to be an act of philosophical wankery, but an invitation to look closer, connect loose threads, and gain a better understanding by averaging the meanings of each word or reference.
This essay was initially posted on my FB group, each part a separate post. Perhaps this is why it didn't appear to be this difficult for my readers there to read it. I am still, however, personally baffled by you thinking 17k words is long. You only have to read it; I had to write it, in two languages nonetheless, after spending every day for months trying to work the issues out; months of lectures, reading, and examination of every piece of information related to my childhood. It's not much to ask for, especially for something that I believe to be the most important contribution to the understanding of size as a culture phenomenon.
I must admit something about my creative process, and especially writing philosophy: I do it for myself. I'm happy when people read my stories, but if someone is put off by the introduction or is only looking for a quick read with one hand on the mouse or the phone and the other on their pp, instead of something to think about for the next few days or more, I do not particularly care about such a reader.
I will not make any substantial edits to this essay and I will likely continue expanding it with addendums, but make no mistake, I am taking your (and other people's) comments seriously. I'll try to eventually publish a version only a few thousands words long, likely with references to the original in certain places, for people who want to look further into the matter or just don't understand the logical leaps I'm making. Or maybe a video? I'll see what I can do, though I have already a dozen or so stories that I began writing but haven't finished to work on, ha!