theliteraryluggage - Tumblr blog

theliteraryluggage · 10 hours

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Hey! I've been following you for a while, and some time ago you mentioned that while you didn't identify as such (understandably), that your position would square closely to being a "pro-shipper" when it comes to fandom/media depiction discourse. I'm someone who definitely agrees that depiction =/= endorsement, but also I do believe in the effects fiction can have regarding propaganda, and that what you write can reveal some positions you might have, even if no one can realistically pull out your exact intentions when analyzing what you wrote.

This is coming from someone who's been flip-flopping on the discourse for a while: I used to call myself an "anti-anti" back when that was the term for the people who fell on that side of fandom shipping discourse, I had my own problematic ships that I'd definitely get callouts for, and then I eventually fell out of them and out of anti-anti/pro-shipper communities bc of how reactionary and racist they were, as well as how inviting they were for anti-sjw/anti-feminist types. With that fallout, I started adopting a more "Yeah, all things considered, if you like/romanticize/sexualize [X] in fiction, you are a bad person" mentality.

There IS one point where I'm still iffy on though, and it's the subject of depicting this topics in very obviously titillating ways through fanfiction and the like. I find the argument that in these cases you won't be able to tell the difference between a depiction that "explores sensitive topics" vs one that's just written to get someone off a bit dishonest, because just opening a bunch of "dead dove" tagged stories on AO3 would tell you the opposite. I've personally clicked and read enough of such fanfiction to know that there is a glaring difference most of the time.

I just don't personally know how to reconcile, for myself, the idea that the aforementioned exists an can continue to exist without problem, with my personal politics and not making light of abuse. Would that not count as making light of it? People, for example, decry rape jokes all the time, and I've seen the same people who would do just that make blasé, lighthearted posts about characters about characters going through abusive situations (incest, grooming, etc.) I personally can't logically wrap my head around that.

You seem to be a person who can hold both these positions at once, somewhat, and I respect a lot of your opinions. I would like to ask what you think of all this, exactly?

And I am asking this in good faith! (saying this bc I know users can send accusatory asks with no other purpose than to indict the person they're addressing, lol) Nor do you have to answer me. This is something I think about a lot regarding how people discourse about it on Tumblr, and I find that I don't have a solid position on this yet.

thanks for your patience. this is a complicated subject and i hope i'm not repeating myself and am open to clarification. gonna answer this bit by bit bc there's a lot in here

so tbc, at one point i also called myself that before coming to the same realization as you, as in i found these type of online communities to often be deeply reactionary both in terms of racism/anti-feminism and in terms of how they treated children and youth oppression. not that the "other side" (calling either Pro Shippers TM or Antis TM coherent groups as a whole feels kinda meaningless tbh) was great on these either but i completely understand your disillusionment leading you to rethink your positions completely.

i'm someone who actually started ten years ago when this discourse was going on on tumblr, arguing that shipping Abusive Ships so blatantly was harmful to victims of abuse etc. then meeting lots of abuse victims who'd been actively harassed and abused including by friends for being Bad Victims who did not fit that mold also changed my mind. overall in the past few years i've kind of realized that this whole discourse, beyond the harm caused to individuals (via targeted harassments and callouts, a toxic online environment for people who already tended to be heavily isolated and marginalized irl, etc) was completely missing the forest for the trees.

the discourse was so focused on fandom and shipping and kinks as direct causes of abuse and grooming, and supposed impact or lack of impact on individuals or wider societal trends, very few people seemed to actively discuss wider causes of abuse: namely social structures such as the nuclear family, patriarchy, lack of autonomy and resources for abuse victims (especially children, who can try to run away but will be caught and given back to their abusers or put into a foster or adoption system that in itself also greatly enables abuse), the barriers for abuse/incest survivors to leave safely without financial/material consequences, the ostracization of survivors and ability of abusers to turn things around on their victims and convince their wider support network that they're the bad ones, etc. these are all structural and material issues that to me are far more dangerous than any potential shipping or not, because in the end i've noticed that there is no matter whether you're in a community that's firmly anti-porn/anti-kink or completely open to these, no community is free from abuse.

now i do think that there's a particularly nasty danger to telling a group of people, especially abuse survivors, that they would not have been groomed or abused were it not for x fanfiction because the truth is, someone who is abusing or grooming someone will use *any* material to do so. saying "i was abused bc x fanfic/ship existed at all" is taking away both from the conditions surrounding the victim and abuser (in the case of children, the lack of autonomy and adults' propensity to punish children for being abused or speaking out about it, as well as general denial to talk about sexuality at all) and from the fact that someone who grooms a child could have used fanfic, yes, just as they could use the bible, use any random book, to gain their victim's trust and normalize their behaviour. or they can *also* tell the kid they're a safe adult who is hunting predators, so look at all this nasty thing this x person online is doing, isn't it awful and gross, help me harass this person online and i'll deem you worthy of trust/love! and i've known someone who was abused specifically bc their friend told them they were evil for enjoying the fucking captive prince series, and needed to repent and make amends and grovel for their like of this book series.

but it would be just as stupid of me to claim that anyone who's anti-shipping x is an abuse enabler by default. bc again the material conditions of victims matter, especially if they're isolated irl and financially/materially dependent on someone or on a wider community who will ostracize them for speaking out or trying to leave their abuser!

That's changed again recently, the more I started disagreeing with people on kink discourse, and the more I started reading takes from other people regarding the value of certain topics being addressed in fiction + the difficulty of being able to determine what counts as "bad" depiction vs "good" depiction without shoving critically acclaimed works (like Lolita) into the former category. I started to realize that this is a position you could absolutely take without falling into a more reactionary mentality like "everything goes in fiction, which means you can't criticize what I write ever, even when it's racist", or something equivalent. There IS one point where I'm still iffy on though, and it's the subject of depicting this topics in very obviously titillating ways through fanfiction and the like. I find the argument that in these cases you won't be able to tell the difference between a depiction that "explores sensitive topics" vs one that's just written to get someone off a bit dishonest, because just opening a bunch of "dead dove" tagged stories on AO3 would tell you the opposite. I've personally clicked and read enough of such fanfiction to know that there is a glaring difference most of the time.

so here's three things:

the first is.... i don't actually.... necessarily think there's always a glaring difference. like. that actually does really depends on sensibility. i've seen lots of people who wrote very thoughtful explorations of csa and abuse, exploring their own experiences, and yet still got relentless harassment saying their work was for titillation and they, as individual writers, were personally sexualizing and violating specific readers and Sexualizing The Readers' Trauma, with absolutely no insight into the author's own experiences. the most well known example rn would be when taz muir's old fanfic came out and people called her a pedophile and relentlessly harassed her when she was a csa survivor and her fic was literally emulating lolita! so i don't agree that one can always tell when an author is "just" gleefully getting off on these things, bc i've seen more than enough evidence to the contrary that people's mileage varies about this, and that they WILL go after individual writers/artists online and assume things about their past and abuse.

the second thing is, you can want to write about abuse and csa thoughtfully AND want to make it "titillating" and sexualize it. i actually don't think that the latter excludes the former. that would be like saying that metal gear solid's critiques of the military industrial complex are completely cancelled out by kojima's obvious geeking out about military equipment being cool. it's like saying that you can't make meaningful art about physical violence and war unless it's constantly miserable and disgusted by the subject, and if it ever looks too "cool" then the intended meaning does not matter at all. and maybe to you this does take away from it, or it walks a fine line and unfortunately fails in execution! but just because the execution was failed doesn't mean that kind of art should be banned unless it passes a test audience where they all agree the Message Was Properly Delivered. it's saying that the only people who make this kind of art must already have absolutely mastered its execution, and you should never *try* lest it be taken poorly or not well executed. which would 1) leave a lot of clumsy beginner artists in the dust 2) exclude a lot of people who've been through these forms of violence because they're not expressing yourselves well enough to someone's taste

hell rn i'm writing a fic that's about the legacy of domestic and gendered violence within an abusive family, AND i'm intent on making it sexual and even arousing because my purpose in this fic is to make it uncomfortable, and to leave everyone uneasy and unhappy. i've been very worried about the execution of it! there's a strong likelihood i won't succeed in my intent! but i want to try nonetheless because no matter if i fail, i struggle to write and i want to make SOMETHING to express my feelings about this work.

which leads me into the third and most important thing, that kinda makes the first two points moot: even if someone is making something only for a "titillating" purpose and is open about never having been through abuse or csa...... i don't actually think that should mean they're not allowed to make art about it. i mentioned war previously--why are we so much more critical of sexual/horny art that could be Too Horny about the subject and not nearly as critical about works about other forms of violence? this leads into another thought of mine: that separating sexual violence from other forms of violence, considering it particularly heinous and bad and entirely different, isn't actually helpful. why is someone's portrayal of rape scrutinized far more than them being tortured? why are stories about child soldiers (which is v common in shounen as a form of power fantasy for teenagers) ok but why when there is canon writing about children who canonically who go to war and get grieviously injured or even killed, writing fic about them getting assaulted is particularly heinous and needs to be scrutinized a lot more?

this isn't to say sexual violence isn't bad on its own or Not A Big Deal. but i've been thinking about this a lot recently--how putting rape and csa on a higher pedestal of violence is actively destructive and hurtful to survivors. i am not a csa or rape survivor (though i've been through abuse), but i have friends who as children went through physical, emotional, and sexual abuse--and more than anything it was others' treatment of sexual abuse that made their ordeal much worse. treating sexual abuse survivors like they are inevitably broken or sullied, like they've "lost their innocence", talking about how it's better to die than being to be raped--downplaying the other forms of violence they faced in favour of making the sexual abuse the one defining violence they faced..... if anything it makes recovery so much worse, it's part of why communities will shun victims and deem them to be broken or sullied, and it feeds into the current idea conservatives worldwide are pushing worldwide sex is not morally neutral, but something either holy and unique, or disgusting and inherently corrupting, and children can never see anything that has been deemed sexual (even if that includes entire categories of human beings, and if it means keeping them away from sex ed)

add to that: sexual violence is common. this isn't to say it's less bad but--why do people write about sexual violence in art so much, either in forms of bodice ripper romances or Serious Explorations? because it's an ubiquitous form of violence that even if you personally haven't experienced it, you're very likely to know people who have or to have been threatened with it. it's more prevalent for marginalized people to be victims of it (trans women in particular are one of the largest groups affected by it) but i know middle class cishet white dudes who've also been through it! it pervades our societies not simply by what appears in fiction but because sexual violence, especially against children, is normalized. it's not fanfiction that normalizes this, or even big name shows or books--it's baked into the structure of the nuclear family and authority structures. it's used as a threat to beat people down, harassment and assault and casual groping and innate sexualization of people's secondary features even as kids is insanely common, even *among* kids. so like. is it a surprise that people write about it and draw it? considering how human brains get horny about the weirdest shit for innocuous reasons, is it a wonder that many people process this constant threat/presence through art, and that het women might love bodice ripper romances in which an abusive guy sexually abuses a self insert heroine *and it feels good*, and the relationship ends up working out and becomes happy and healthy? this is just..... how lots of humans process things. it's why we have kinks too! sex is morally neutral, and it's also a weird thing and brains get horny on the weirdest shit. some people can't come unless they're fucking a clown, or imagining being vored, yknow.

(this is also why i separate all of this from racism and racist writings/art, which is far more targeted and strictly enforced towards specific groups of people, even though there might be "misdirected" racism etc, and that's a much wider subject that's worth being discussed on its own but it's a different one too that i'm far less qualified to discuss)

so you mentioned propaganda earlier, and i think it's worth saying that what part of what defines propaganda (not taking the marxist sense here, simply "propaganda" as it exists in the popular imagination, so i hope my marxist followers forgive me lmao) are the forces behind it, and the reinforcement of existing beliefs and structures in a given community and/or wider society. it's part of why even Good Art about sexual violence might be seen as an endorsement of it--see how lolita is often turned into a love story, etc. and it's why game of thrones hasn't by itself started an incest crisis in society, but the misogyny and sexual violence so poorly depicted in the show are just...... very normalized as a whole. it doesn't mean that someone who enjoys GoT at all would suddenly think sexual violence is good, or if they do it's just reinforcing their existing beliefs! banning these kind of depictions would not magically decrease abuse either.

look at mormons, who reject all masturbation and all porn at all, and who have a huge csa and sexual abuse crisis within the church! that's in large part because the church is a patriarchal entity that deems all non normative sex outside of marriage to be evil, and for sexual violence within a married couple to be normal, and for two kids who make out a bit too heavily to be just as bad in terms of sexual sin as a serial child abuser. it's baked within the structure.

someone writing fanfiction does not have nearly the same amount of power or visibility as these institutions, or even the ability to reshape culture like a lot of these pop culture phenomenons (which, again, are rather reinforcing existing trends rather than starting them, and again even if they did not exist abusers would find other material to groom and abuse and isolate their victims and convince them it's ok to do so). i think it's perfectly ok to dislike these types of fic, to never want to see them at all--i wish ao3 had a more robust blacklisting function that enabled people to block and blacklist certain tags forever. but the thing is, people who write "titillating" stuff are usually themselves aware of what they're writing! i think if they're tagging something as rape/non-con or underage they are not making light of it, quite the contrary. they're recognizing the nature of what it is they are writing! and no matter the intentions behind it (whether real or projected onto by the audience) they are being honest and giving tools for people to curate their experiences. and it's frustrating that tumblr's tag system has changed so much, bc i remember when in the past people would tag expressively in order to make their posts easier to find for eager audiences AND harder to find for people who didn't want to see this kind of stuff. part of the issue here i think has to do with the centralization of Content TM which means that people who have no desire to see fictional sexual violence will still accidentally stumble upon it and be understandably unhappy about it (i hate a lot of proship arguments that people should just curate their feeds when most of current socmed is literally based on outrage bait and showing you upsetting stuff for you to Engage). i don't think it's the op's fault either though, and the idea that all of it should be far more hidden or banned from online entirely is impossible to separate from current trends saying that any sexual content should be banned lest children accidentally see it. the issue here is social media as it exists today! as it stands, ao3 has the best system while also being riddled with its own issues that are, tbh, also related to any large online platform today (the racism of staff and volunteers, the actual csam issue--not fics but embedded gifs that are often only taken long after they're reported--but again we run into the problem of moderation and who gets to be forced into these dehumanizing and traumatizing jobs).

what of people who deliberately search for this kind of content? well, my nsfw blog is full of vore and body horror sex! this is the cannibalism fetish website! so why is someone getting off on say, fictional rape or incest, so much worse than getting off on cannibalism or dismemberment, which are things that aren't really likely to affect you? it comes back to the question of kinks you mentioned tbh, why is it acceptable

you mention rape jokes, and that's interesting to me bc i have friends who are rape survivors who make rape jokes among friends--and i think there's a HUGE difference between rape jokes that are publicly made as an attempt to normalize sexual violence and even threaten people (such as a guy who is making rape jokes at his female colleague, or trying to hint nudge his other colleagues to joke about how normal it is to rape their girlfriends, right?) and rape survivors making a rape joke in private. and tbc if someone is a rape survivor in the latter case and uncomfortable/unhappy with it, they're allowed to say so and draw boundaries too! to say, please don't make that joke in front of me it triggers me! (which is different from saying, you're a potential rapist and danger.)

again i think everyone has their own boundaries on this, their own trauma, and it's why, especially in people's own private spaces or in an artistic context, assuming bad faith or that someone is a potential rapist/abuser, or that they endorse sexual violence, is more likely to do harm than good. enjoying or creating this kind of content does not signal you as a potential abuser, just like being a dom in a bdsm relationship does not, and considering how many traumatized queer and trans people develop certain kinks (especially trans women) and how people are far more likely to scrutinize their sexual proclivities as Signs Of Danger, as a rule i'm firmly against assuming the worst and jumping on someone. social media rn is made to create pile-ons and encourage seeing upsetting content and Reacting To It but participating in it is not the solution and does not materially contribute to helping abuse victims.

i think there are real discussions to be had about these online spaces, about giving abuse survivors material support and dismantling the structures that enable domestic and sexual violence in all their forms. going after specific fanfic authors or people who have a side blog where they fantasize about fucking their girlfriends and calling them their sister is not going to do any of that. it's lying to yourself, it's telling yourself you are Stopping Abuse when what you're most likely doing is stripping a marginalized person of whatever material or emotional support they have and condemning them to death. i don't think you should be forced to like or enjoy kinks or ships or whatever that are uncomfortable or even genuinely distressing and hurtful to you! just like i don't think someone who has these kinks should be bullied and harassed into publicly repenting of all they're written or all they've fantasized about and beg for strangers' forgiveness as they call them a rapist and monster. i've seen this used against so many survivors, so many trans women who were already on the verge of suicide and deeply isolated. it does absolutely no material good besides making the harassers feel powerful--and honestly? if they really need that feeling of being powerful, they should get over their feelings on domming and consider that it might be their own kink, and sublimate it into something a lot less materially harmful.

#fandom discourse #this is a really good analysis #appreciate the bit about rape/SA being put on a different more heinous level of violence #compared to like war torture etc #that's something i've been thinking about a lot too lately #it's part of the themes of vox populi too #tho i don't know yet if it'll be textual or just stay subtext #we'll see #Equeuevalent Exchange

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