not your typical annihilatrix ([info]furiosity) wrote,
@ 2008-05-19 20:17:00
Previous Entry  Add to memories!  Tell a Friend  Next Entry
Current mood: crazy
Current music:the american national anthem, fittingly enough
Entry tags:rant

MUMMEEEE! THAT MAN TOUCHED MY NO-NO PLACE!
Link trail: Why I disapprove, and why I will be neither ashamed, nor silent. | Sorry, But Your Kink Is Not Okay

The underlying assumption, even after all these years and all these debates, seems to be that anyone with kinks outside the vanilla zone must necessarily practice those kinks IRL. So that someone who likes breathplay on the page must have kinky breathplay sex whenever the occasion presents itself. And, by extension, anyone who gets hot and bothered looking at pictures or reading stories where children are engaged in sexual acts must necessarily involve children in his/her sex life on a regular basis, right?

Well, no, of course not, that's just a bit harsh, but there's a thin line between fantasy and pedophilia! We must be vigilant! We must be careful! We must police ourselves! Right? LOL NO. What we must do is nothing. Fandom owes nothing to anyone. 'Must' is not a word that fandom generally understands, and the sooner one works that out for oneself, the better.

I don't know about you, but I've never camped in any deserts and quite frankly I have no desire to do so, ever. I'm not a big fan of camping, y'see. Running water is important to my daily functioning. I might want to visit a desert in a tricked-out converted army vehicle and have a smoke while sitting on a rock outcropping and gazing into a pair of binoculars just to look like I have a reason to be there, but I wouldn't want to spend days there. And yet, I enjoy very much the accounts of travels through our planet's various deserts. The Novel that Eats My Life is set quite frequently in a desert. However, in real life, I do not want anything to do with deserts. They're awful hot during the day and cold at night; there are all manner of creepy-crawlies that make their homes there. They're harsh, forbidding places. Like all else in nature, they are beautiful, but in that look-but-don't-touch way, as far as I'm concerned. This, in case it's unclear, is an example of a person (me) enjoying fictional depictions of something (deserts) without having any desire to experience that something in reality. It's more likely than you think!

I'm sure many of you have read books where you were thrilled to follow along on the protag's journey as she battled fierce snakes, emissaries of Borg, or lusty pirates. I am equally sure that a goodly 90% of you would crawl away babbling should you ever encounter an actual fierce snake, Borg emissary, or a cutlass-wielding pirate. Me, I wouldn't blame ya. What looks awesome on the page is usually far less impressive in reality. Dead bodies, for example, are not particularly scary or sinister. An assassin's work is not glamorous. Neither is drug addiction. But there are books that makes us fear those dead bodies, sympathise with assassins and cheer them on, and think that a drug addict is just about the coolest person to ever walk the earth. None of it is real. We can think this way and not feel guilty because none of it is real. I can sympathise with a killer if I've been given a compelling on-page personality. Out here in real life, I think murder's about the most cowardly thing you can do and in general, I don't think there are ever circumstances that can mitigate murder. Should I then feel guilty when I read The Day of the Jackal and feel an admiration for the man's methods? Of course not; that would be just silly. My true admiration is not for the man or for his methods, it's for Forsythe's depiction of them.

Fiction and reality are entirely separate realms. It's fairly easy to make that connection when we're talking about cute things like the Borg or deserts. Why is it so fucking hard to grasp when we're talking about sex?

Just because Person X gets off on bloodplay in fic doesn't necessarily mean she practises it. Even if she does practise it, there is more than likely mutual consent involved. Unless her name's Lizzie Borden, I guess. In the case of kidfic, there are issues around consent that are absent in things like bloodplay -- in child/adult, the presumption is that real consent is not possible because the child can't give his/her consent. But that just brings us back to: FAKE CHILD. FAKE DESERT. FICTIONAL SETTING. NOT. REAL. Does "innocent until proven guilty" ring any bells? 'Cause it should.

Fandom will never be a place where someone can be 100% comfortable. There are always going to be people who are appalled at what you do in fandom. Even if all you do is write fluff about kittens pooping rainbows, somebody somewhere is bitching about your precarious grasp on sanity and your utter inability to portray realistic characters. Trust me on that one.

Above all, if someone's preferences are bothering or upsetting you, you are the one with the problem. Not them. If we were talking about behaviour, that would be a different story. But we're not, and it's not.


(Read 160 comments) - (Post a new comment)


[info]thelana
2008-05-20 09:52 am UTC (link)
1.) Discussions like this always remind me of the argumentation against killer games. Various people point out that most people who play violent computer games aren't violent in real life or even argue that it relaxes them or helps them work out their aggression in other ways. Yet on the flip side you also do have mentally disturbed people who do also enjoy those games. Basically, not everybody who fantasizes (in fic form or otherwise) about childrape fic childrapes in real life. But chances are that somebody who childrapes in real life fantasizes and justifies it in real life. And really, is it that wrong, if you come across a fic to ask "hey, are you one or the other"? After all, do I know you? Do I know what you do in real life? And since I don't know, why shouldn't I ask about it? There are way too many examples of real life crimes being committed or being carried on for a long time because everybody turned and blind eye and "left them their privacy". And just asking "are you one or the other"? doesn't even come close to malicious harassment.

2.) Personal judgement. As various people have said, of course it's perfectly reasonable to dislike people because they read/write/love certain things. After all I don't particularly enjoy associating with people who vote Republican. Or love country music. Or are violently pro-creationism. Or pick their nose in public. Or uses "nigger" in casual conversation. So why wouldn't it be a valid reaction to say "Because of this I don't like you and wouldn't want to associate with you in real life"? Particularly if there is no good explanation other "This is my kink and it's my right to, stupid vanilla people, rawwwwrawwwwrawwww!".

3.) In fandom we talk a lot about how the shows we watch or books series we read affect us. We talk about whether show X is misogynist, whether it sends the wrong message about women, about religion, about race issues, about hopes and dreams. So why on earth wouldn't we talk about whether fic could also send the wrong message, just like we talk about these things in regards to books? Nobody is suggesting that any book/show/fic immediately corrupts hapless little children, but it might still affect whether you like something, feel comfortable with it and wonder if it's something you want to support.

4.) I think that fanfic is less of a danger because it's such a female environment and women are often wired differently (which doesn't excuse things, mind). But if these were men we are talking about? Who's to say if they wouldn't graduate from childrape fic to maybe drawing childrape to maybe wanting pics of it and WHAM one more reason for a child out there somewhere being abused. One more sleazebag getting money. One more real life crime being committed. It's all nice to throw "You can't distinguish fantasy from reality" in the faces of people who take offense to these things, but fact is that there are people who can't and since I don't know who is on the other side of the computer, I don't know if whoever writes this fic is one or the other. If their desires stop firmly at fictional people, whether they ever think about it in real life or whether their harddrive his filled with child porn.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]florahart
2008-05-20 07:31 pm UTC (link)
Oh, dear. I went on at length. Splitting comment...

And just asking "are you one or the other"? doesn't even come close to malicious harassment.

Here is a question that most of us would find offensive.

"So, I notice you're female and in your twenties. Tell me. Are you one of those women that gets totally irrational and therefore cannot be trusted to mind the store in the day or two before her time of the month?"

No, no, wait. Seriously. Don't flee. A small fraction of women (maybe 2-3%) have not PMS but a way, way more pronounced chemical imbalance that leads to serious, sometimes very serious, problems. Such women sometimes (so, this is a fraction of that 2-3%) find that without treatment they actually do fly into violent rages or become dangerously depressed or (various other psychiatric symptoms) three or four days a month. There's no way to tell in a job interview which women these are, no way to tell by looking on first meeting them. But I think most women would be at least very annoyed, and possibly inclined to file a sexual discrimination lawsuit, if asked this question. And the percentage of people engaging in criminal activity who are reading fanfic? Probably smaller than that.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]florahart
2008-05-20 07:31 pm UTC (link)
But if these were men we are talking about? Who's to say if they wouldn't graduate from childrape fic to maybe drawing childrape to maybe wanting pics of it and WHAM one more reason for a child out there somewhere being abused.

There are two things in here I want to talk about.

1. Statistically, it is true that overwhelmingly more of the (caught) rapists are men than women. This doesn't mean that the number of men who rape is a particularly large percentage. It might be true that it is, or it might not; you can't say. That is, say you have ten rapists, and nine of them are men. All you know from that is that nine of your ten (90%) identified rapists are men and that nine times as many of the rapists you have caught are men than women. However, without a sense of the overall percentages of the larger group (is this ten rapists in 100 people? 1000? 10,000?) and without an overall sense of whether there are unsolved rapes out there, you can't make very good statements about men versus women. One possibility is that men are nine times as likely to rape. Another is that they are nine times as likely to be caught. Another is that due to other social forces, their crimes are nine times as likely to be reported. Another is that there are social forces at work in this setting that converged to create nine men who are rapists. We don't know which of these, if any, are true, and therefore, we can make some guesses about whether men or women are more likely rapists, and about how many men in a given group might be, but we can't really make good generalizations about individual men, or even individual groups of men. 90% of rapists are men does NOT mean 90% of men are rapists, and while I have no idea whether you have any difficulty with that statement, I have known people who believe it DOES mean that, so it's worth saying again. It is possible for 90% of rapists to be men, and yet only .0001% of men to be rapists (10 rapists, of whom 9 are men, in a population of 9,000,000).

All I'm saying here is that to suggest it's okay in safe female space but not once we include men requires some very large assumptions about what happens when men see or read or hear the same things as women; I think we are far from having, as a society, a complete picture of how brains and bodies and fantasies work for either sex, and I think there are far, far too many pieces of data involved for a question of, "but what if the person looking is a man" to be a greatly relevant one. A better one is, "but what if the person looking is a rapist," but if they already are, this image didn't do it. And if one person becomes a rapist based on this picture, but 10,000 people look at this picture and 9999 of them do not become rapists, then is it the individual, or the image?

2. I want to talk about the problem of "graduating" to additional levels of behavior. I agree that humans learn and expand on existing behavior--you move from place to place by wriggling, crawling, walking, running, each skill taking the previous and adding. However, when we talk about criminal behavior and things like "gateway" drugs, we run into some problems of causality and of reporting.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]florahart
2008-05-20 07:32 pm UTC (link)
As to pornographic images, especially images that involve children, studying how and whether they act as gateways to child abuse has an enormous problem: if you self-report looking at and enjoying such images (of real-seeming children), your behavior is already deemed criminal, and even in relatively safe space, you're likely to find yourself in a hell of a lot of hot water, even if you clearly believe the images you are looking at are not of real children, and even if you are not a person who will ever act to harm a real child. Why is this a problem? Here's why: it seriously messes with the control group. NO ONE is willing to stand up and say, hey, man, I've been looking at those kinds of images for forty years and nothing bad has happened. No one is willing to invite the kind of personal invasion that would bring--if you told a psychiatrist this, you would run the risk s/he might believe you pose a risk to self or others, and therefore would be under no obligation to maintain your privacy; she would never face sanctions for revealing your statements because enough people believe this to be a reasonable concern that even if it were found that you literally had never so much as been issued a speeding ticket, if the only questionable thing was that you had a bunch of realistic (but not real children) art on your computer or under your bed and a thorough investigation didn't turn up one single person ever who thought you had transgressed against them in any way, you would probably still find yourself being Watched. Forever. Oh, and if you had a job that had anything to do with children, even peripherally, you'd likely lose it.

Anyway. So since there IS no control group, no group of normal adults who will stand up and say yes, I look at chan, it's impossible to draw any conclusions about what leads people who do engage in criminal and hurtful behavior to do so. It is true that most child rapists have images of child rape. However, it is also true that most of them wear underwear, eat vegetables, and move from room to room in their homes by walking. And yes, I know, everyone does those things; this is my point. There is no way to get a remotely reliable count of how many of us look at various kinds of questionable images and get off on it; therefore, there is no way to know whether the correspondence between "people" who look at these images" and "people who commit rape" is in any way useful. If 1 in 10 people who look at these images do that first, and then go on to rape, citing ideas they got from these images, I agree, we have a problem. But if 1 in 100 do? Probably a problem. 1 in 1000? In 10,000? 100,000? Then we're back to the question of whether this is the image or the individual.

Further, it is not unreasonable to suggest that images could possibly work to prevent criminal and hurtful behavior. If I were, and please to be noting, I am positing a situation, not admitting to one, yes? If I were a person who had realized about herself that watching images of kids squirming and crying was what I got off on, and I realized I craved that and felt a pull to see it? And I were also a responsible adult (okay, that part isn't positing; I really am *g*)? I might seek to find ways to meet my own needs without harming anyone. I might be well aware that asking for help would get me the aforementioned hot water. I might, therefore, seek out images that allowed me to satisfy my craving without any actual children being harmed. I believe that if a person does this, and it works, she ought never to be punished for that. Seriously. I also believe if she tries this and it doesn't work, she is obliged to go ahead and ask for the help, but if she can get what she needs without bringing down the judgment of the state on her head? I'm good with that.

I don't disagree with your point 3, as to how we talk about these things in the source material and therefore perhaps might in the fannish material, and I also don't disagree with point 2; you certainly can choose not to hang with people who look at images you don't prefer. I just think your dividing line between personal and social responsibility lies someplace different from mine.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

[info]arantzain
2008-05-20 09:20 pm UTC (link)
This is an excellent post; thank you for being both so clear and so careful in your arguments.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]furiosity
2008-05-20 07:51 pm UTC (link)
Yet on the flip side you also do have mentally disturbed people who do also enjoy those games.
And how many of them have been convicted of violent crime, compared to the general population? Somehow I don't think that percentage is even worth mentioning, putting aside the fact that the percentage of mentally disturbed people with access to means of harming other people is not staggeringly high. Most of the time, chances are, you are not dealing with a mentally disturbed individual. And punishing those who do understand the line between fiction and reality by assuming there's a 50/50 chance they're sick in the head is counter-productive, not to mention counter-intuitive, because there is NOT a 50/50 chance. It's not a "are you one or the other?" -type question if you take statistics into account.

But chances are that somebody who childrapes in real life fantasizes and justifies it in real life. And really, is it that wrong, if you come across a fic to ask "hey, are you one or the other"?
Well, kind of, yes. Because truly mentally ill people are often on medication that simply doesn't make it possible to write fiction, "sick" or otherwise. The glamorous image of the brilliant but mad creator is a one-in-a-million type of occurrence; most mentally ill people are too fucked up to produce creative work with any consistency. Would you be insulted if I looked at your icon and asked you if you were a Muslim woman or just a pretender? The question comes from a knee-jerk assumption -- it's far from malicious harassment, you're right, but it says a lot more about the asker than it does about the person being asked.

So why wouldn't it be a valid reaction to say "Because of this I don't like you and wouldn't want to associate with you in real life"?
It isn't an invalid reaction at all. Saying "I believe that your fictional preferences unquestionably mark you as a sick bastard and therefore I don't want anything to do with you" is a perfectly valid and reasonable personal choice. It is not the same as saying "people like you should get out of my fandom, because I have the right idea about what kinds of things are okay to enjoy and what kinds of things aren't".

So why on earth wouldn't we talk about whether fic could also send the wrong message
Your analogy breaks down because our favourite shows and books do NOT tell us, beforehand, what we're in for. I don't think anyone was prepared for canon incest in the Harry Potter series, and yet it's very much there. George RR Martin's books do not warn on the back jacket that your beloved main characters are going to keep dying gruesome deaths. You usually don't know what kind of message you're going to get when you pick up a new series or start watching a new show, so the discussion is understandable and natural. If someone reads a fic labelled "WARNING: ADULT/CHILD" and then whines that the fic sends the wrong message, well, I got nothing. If warnings are present, and they almost always (99% of cases) are, "Don't Like Don't Read" is USEFUL. Bitching about clearly warned-for potentially squicky material just does not compare to that. If you don't want to support chan, you simply don't read it.

But if these were men we are talking about? Who's to say if they wouldn't graduate from childrape fic to maybe drawing childrape to maybe wanting pics of it
I think [info]florahart said it better than I could, but I put to you this question: what about men who read childrape fic and imagine themselves as the child? Are they exempt? What about women who read rapefic and imagine themselves as the victim? Not everyone approaches fiction in the same way, particularly not controversial fiction, and drawing gender lines is not going to make anything "okay" or "not okay". I find the idea that men are more likely to graduate from fantasy to reality preposterous simply because I have lots of male friends who live and breathe for Grand Theft Auto/World of Warcraft/Diablo, but not a one of them would ever try and transport their badass in-game persona into reality. It doesn't matter if someone is male or female; fantasies are not wrong.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

[info]lilian_cho
2008-05-21 03:53 pm UTC (link)
O/T, but:

I don't think anyone was prepared for canon incest in the Harry Potter series, and yet it's very much there.

The Dumbledores?

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)

[info]furiosity
2008-05-21 03:56 pm UTC (link)
The Blacks. "The house of my fathers" as uttered by Walburga Black is quite literal if you take a careful look at the Black family tree. Not to mention Arthur Weasley's jovial admission that all the pure-bloods are related in one way or another.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)
Black family tree
[info]lilian_cho
2008-05-21 04:16 pm UTC (link)
Ah okay, I thought you meant incest in the level of George R.R. Martin's twincest ;-)

And hey, those Blacks are canonically underage when they father their children! (At least in the original version of the Black family tree)

(Reply to this) (Parent)

(Read 160 comments) - (Post a new comment)

Create an Account
Forgot your login or password?
Login w/ OpenID
English • Español • Deutsch • Русский…