On representation, purity culture, and sex.

[beatrice_otter]

Them: Fiction affects reality!  Representation matters! The stories we tell affect the way we see the world!
Me: Yes, yes!  Let's talk about racism in general and anti-black racism in particular and the intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability, and how we need to both advocate for (and support) media featuring people other than straight white able-bodied neurotypical men, and let's talk about how we can hack our own brains to shift our preferences to be more inclusive, and--
Them: And that's why everything you read or make must be Morally Pure and if there's any dubcon you are a rapist and if there's any sexy stuff for anyone under 18 you are a pedophile!
Me: :facepalm:

The "media affects reality" idea gets brought up in two ways, these days, and one of them I heartily agree with ("so therefore we need to promote greater diversity and inclusiveness") and one of them I heartily disagree with ("so therefore we need to police our desires so that we only desire/read/write/watch things that are Acceptably Pure And Unproblematic").  And there are a lot of reasons for that, but I spent some time last night pondering what the difference is and why.  I mean, the basic underlying idea (that representation matters and the stories we tell affect our view of the world) is quite true, and provable; why do I accept that argument for things like racism in fic and not for, say, dubcon sex?  (Insert arguments about thought control and the viciousness of purity culture here; enough electrons have been spilled arguing about this that I don't need to go into detail.)

What got me thinking about this specifically was a case where someone wrote a PWP Black Panther fic, shipping a black character and a white character, chock full of really racist tropes fetishizing the black character, and defended it with "that's just my fantasy!"  Why do I accept (and defend) the right of people to write/read Hydra Trash Party, and think that's acceptable, but think that the racism fetish kink is a step too far and shouldn't use the same justifications?  Here's what I've come up with.

1)  Everybody knows that noncon is bad in real life.
When someone writes, say, a fic with noncon in it, nobody is arguing that noncon is good or should happen outside of fiction.  You can have fantasies where you are raped and know perfectly well that however titilating it may be to you, you would NEVER want ANYTHING even CLOSE to it to happen in real life.  Like, you might try kinky role-playing with someone(s) you trust to simulate it, but there's still a big difference between fantasy and reality.  Neither fandom nor the larger culture is trying to claim that being raped is a good thing.  There is a clear separation between fantasy and reality.  As long as that separation is maintained, there is little if any harm in exploring that fantasy, and often good.  (allows people to know themselves better, work through their issues, see that they're not alone and having disturbing fantasies doesn't make you a bad person.)

On the other hand, when someone writes fetishizing racist porn, there are a LOT of people in society and in fandom who ... can't tell that it's racist and demeaning to the people that it's fetishizing.  Extremely few people (especially in fandom) believe "women want to be raped" but there are a LOT of people who believe "black men are animalistic and insatiable" or "asian women are submissive" or whatever fetish you're writing.  And that makes a HUGE difference in the ethics of both reading and writing.  If you write out your noncon fantasy, nobody who reads it is going to assume it means that rape is good and you're just reflecting reality.  If you write out your racist fetish fantasy, lots of people who read it are going to be nodding along and going, yes, X really are like that.

2) There's a far wider gap between, say, noncon porn and reality than there is between racism and reality
So you have written your Hydra Trash Party fic where Bucky Barnes gets abused and raped and everything is really creepy.  Are you going to go in to the office the next day and start beating up the low many on the totem pole?  No?  Didn't think so.  Are you going to try and live out those kinks in your daily life?  No, unless MAYBE you and your partner are into BDSM, and then there are a lot of manuals for how to explore those fantasies in a safe, sane, consensual, non-damaging way.  You're not going to start treating people like Rumlow treated Bucky; even if you wanted to, there is a wide gulf between that and socially acceptable behavior.  Even if you wanted to, there are resources in society for stopping people like that and helping their victims get away.  Not enough, but they exist.

On the other hand, if your fantasy is Black men being animalistic and insatiable?  Huge amounts of our culture are devoted to saying just that, everything from the (in)justice system to the news to the movies and TV we watch to the jokes we tell.  Instead of society being disgusted by your actions, society will support you and egg you on.  There's no gap between your fantasy and what society thinks the world is like.

In conclusion: representation matters, and the stories we tell affect how we think and feel.  However, when there is a clear separation between fantasy and reality (as in the case of non-fetishizing kinky porn) there's a limit to how much the fantasy can affect us in negative ways, and it's better to allow people to explore the less-nice parts of their psyche than to shame and demean them for ever thinking anything that isn't "unproblematic" enough.  On the other hand, when there isn't a clear separation between fantasy and reality (as with racist, ableist, etc. fetishes), that's when the stories we tell and give brain space to are most likely to affect us for the worse, reinforcing the -isms in our hearts and minds.

Comments

[ratcreature]

I think arguing with that wider gap is problematic. It may apply for straightforward rape porn, but not for a lot of "consent-related" tropes that people enjoy in fiction. Like say teacher student fantasies, boss employee fantasies, romcom stalking tropes etc. For a lot of these whether or not the constellation is considered okay, or creepy, or a form of rape or coercion is not universally agreed upon. And many of these tropes overlap with fairly toxic views of relationships and and women.

[sulien]

Thank you! What you said and then some as well.

[melannen]

Yeah, I think that's why I'm perfectly okay with, say, Hydra Trash Party, which knows very well that it's screwed up, but I can't take Kylo/Rey apologists.

There's still plenty of canon out there that says stalking, abusing and/or gaslighting someone is a perfectly okay way to start a romance. And plenty of parts of fandom will fail to read noncon and abuse and power differential as creepy or coercive or fucked-up or RL okay if the actors are hot enough, similarly to the way they'll fail to see racist tropes if they have an incentive not to.

And unfortunately, the people who can't see the difference (between abusive and not abusive, between racist and not-racist, but also between works that normalize and behavior and works that don't, or who think the only alternative to normalizing is being didactic) are the ones who are least likely to listen to any nuanced discussion about it, and who most need to hear.

I think, given the way the Black Panther movie directly addresses race, there could be some REALLY HOT, REALLY FUCKED UP porn that plays with stereotypes about black men, between Erik's issues, M'Baku's issues, T'Challa's issues, and Ross's issues, while making it very clear that it is NOT OKAY. I suspect there are just as many racism survivors who could use porn that worked with that kind of stuff as there are rape survivors who benefit from noncon. (I mean, was just listening to a podcast with two Indigenous Canadian fangirls who spent a lot of time talking about their deeply problematic yet undeniably hot cowboy fetishes - it's a thing.) Not talking about it, or scaring people away from working with it, is not the way to make it get better.

But do I trust fandom as a whole to either write it or discuss it well, especially White fandom, especially me? Hell no.

[ratcreature]

Yeah. I think the reason why personally I am more "comfortable" with misogynistic kinks is simply that I am on the "victim" side of that (even while also perpetuating it structurally as you do in patriarchy). But I would not want to make that a basis for judging what is "okay" to write.

And if I am honest I have to admit that I enjoyed plenty of porn that meshed with my kinks even when the author seemed to entirely lack awareness of how messed the things they are writing were. So I can't even claim that I only enjoy the "self-aware" approaches.

And I don't think it is primarily a porn issue even. Some of my own narrative kinks that I am most uncomfortable with are related to my love for ritualized and glorified concepts of violence/war/warriors in fiction. Like, even if these days the war/violence itself may be depicted as (superficially) horrendous (yet beautifully choreographed), it serves as a backdrop for displays of honor, solidarity, comradeship, bonding etc., which I like a lot, even though intellectually I know how much these narratives are part of the underlying support system of militaristic and patriarchal ideologies. I still love those stories, emotionally, so on a gut level I plain *like* the fictional version of the ideology I resent in RL, because my ideas of drama, of good storytelling whatever have been ingrained to me in a patriarchal culture.

[beatrice_otter]

Well, there's a lot of gray area, and I am painting with a wide brush here.

[(Anonymous)]

EXACTLY. There are also a lot of stories of people using fictional pedophilic content (and of course I'm not talking about underage sex sinceminors do read and write fic as a way to discover themselves, but more like adult/child fic, teacher/student fic, smut about pre-teen characters (aged up or not) etc.), to groom young people in fandom. Everyone might know rape is bad, but the younger teens in fandom who see fic about pedophilic circumstances might not know better, and there are a lot of adults who'll take advantage of that. I've heard a ton of horror stories of kids falling victim to abuse from older people in fandom through that kind of normalisation of pedophilic fic/content.