if i wanted to fictionalize the story of my abuse. if i wanted to tell it properly, the way a good story should be told; tell it so that it would be believed, so it would be felt
i would have to make the reader fall in love with her, the way that i was in love with her.
i’d have to tell them about her eyes. the way that they were gold-brown, a color i didn’t know before her. the way her black hair erupted in the sun into shades of deep reds and golds.
i’d have to tell them about how she dropped things when she looked at me. how when her voice broke on the phone as she confessed to being scared, i felt my life realign to care for her. how she touched me with trembling hands and called me “beautiful”, and told me she didn’t deserve me. that she dreamt of me. how she told me she knew i could be better, knew i could be amazing.
tell them about the tingles that raced all over my skin when she cornered me in the dark tech booth and leaned into me all night, making excuses until she didn’t. how she almost kissed me in the abandoned hallways after school, and in the office she’d sneak into while I TA’d, and in the classroom after everyone had left, and how every time it happened my heart beat so hard I felt bruised.
i’d have to tell them how she finally kissed me and how she’d meant to leave after one kiss but she didn’t, bent down and kissed me again and whispered “you have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do that”, i’d have to tell them that I said, “i think i might” and pulled her back in and felt the world fade away.
and then i’d have to tell them about the second time she kissed me, when I tried to pull her in again and she pressed both hands to my throat until lights flashed in front of my eyes, until i considered that she might really kill me as she told me not to touch her.
how she changed her mind about that two days later and threatened to leave me because i wasn’t assertive enough.
and how she laid in bed with me, petting my hair and reading the sherlock holmes novels with me the day after. how we read at the exact same rate, turned pages in unison and she told me her mind fit mine like a puzzle piece.
the problem with edward cullen, with christian grey, is not that we as readers are meant to love them. that is arguably the only thing that the books get right, is how wildly charismatic, how intense, how perfect an abusive relationship can look at first.
if i wanted to really tell the story of my abuse, i’d have to make them love her like i did and hate her like i did and fear her like i did and long to protect her like i did. i’d have to make them sick with confusion, literally sick, so twisted that even bleeding on the side of the road they’re not sure what went wrong or whose fault it was.
i want them to sympathize with her, because i did, extensively, running antiseptic over the places she cut me watching my phone on the counter so i’d know if she texted me. i want them to know how someone gets to the point of worrying about the person who is hurting them even as they’re still doing it.
if i told the story of my abuse and it was not romantic, if the reader was not in love, if some part of them does not try to make excuses for her, if they don’t try to turn the pieces around in their head to find a way to have the joy without the agony – if they don’t ache with longing for the good parts, i have told the story wrong.
how can we talk about abuse if we cannot talk about why people stay? how can we deny fiction’s ability to explore every fractal: maybe in some universe i fix her. maybe in some universe she kills me. maybe in some universe i kill her. maybe i write a hundred endings to the story. see if any of them bring us peace.
Ships aren’t food, they’re not exercise, they’re not even a nonfiction book or a classic novel. A steady diet of LGBT+ ships with no age or power gap won’t make you emotionally or mentally any healthier. It won’t teach you about how actual relationships work and it won’t prevent you from getting into an unhealthy relationship.
Unhealthy ships won’t ruin you. They won’t corrupt you, they won’t destroy your understanding of actual healthy relationships or erode your morality.
Your fictional diet isn’t your actual diet. There’s no organic vegan gluten-free ship that will fix a single goddamn thing.
Relax. Enjoy yourself. Read whatever fiction fascinates you, tantalizes you, engages you. The content doesn’t matter much for your health, but the joy it brings you might.
Another realization: “disgust as morality” leads directly to “mere exposure leads to moral decay”
As you are exposed to something frequently, you become acclimatized to it. It stops eliciting disgust. This happens with everything from gore to porn.
There has been research after research showing that fictional depictions don’t lower empathy for real victims or decrease the perceived severity of the crime, but it does lower disgust reactions at fictional depictions of it.
To antis, this lack of disgust is the normalization they are fighting against, because disgust is how you know something is wrong. If you no longer feel disgust, your morality is compromised.
That’s what I mean when I say antis resemble Puritan Christian morality. Christianity has so many conflicting instructions regarding morality, and many areas where it’s flat-out vague. And yet they know exactly what is good and natural, and what is horrifying and sinful.
How? It’s disgusting.
Antis are impossible to argue with, because the logical arguments are made post hoc to defend what they already know: this disgusts me because it is wrong. The disgust is the true basis of their argument, and no reasoned argument will touch it.
“There has been research after research showing that fictional depictions don’t lower empathy for real victims or decrease the perceived severity of the crime, but it does lower disgust reactions at fictional depictions of it.”
This. This is another reason we have to fight.
Because disgust is a messy and destructive emotion, it doesn’t target perpetrators of violence – it leads to victim blaming.
Anti: I only go after smaller artists because they’re the only ones that will listen!!
Anti: what do you mean smaller artists are upset when I harass them? they’re adults they should learn not to care
translation: I’m a bully, but like any low-level pathetic bully, I only go after the easiest targets! 🙂
it’s like they’ve never actually learned anything about bullying or how it works or what it looks like because they occasionally describe a near dictionary definition of it but call it “activism” and it blows my fucking mind
That’s true, art is different than writing in terms of the immediate engagement of seeing it. And yet, in galleries/museums, I can only remember a handful of times I’ve ever seen warnings for art that could be potentially upsetting in the context we’re using. With paintings like Judith Slaying Holofernes by Artemisia Gentileschi, you round a corner, and !!! someone’s getting brutally beheaded in vividly gorey detail. However, to attempt to discuss [fanworks] vs. [museum (or gallery)-displayed artwork and published fiction], that’s a potentially long and difficult discussion, and your blog is about fanfiction specifically, so I won’t go there.
But I do think we have to drag published fiction into the discussion as that’s what the fanworks are based on. As you wrote:
My concern is always that a tag like that is going to change how people interpret my work into something I didn’t intend. Like, I’ve been asked to tag things as abuse before that I really didn’t agree WERE abuse, just regular conflict in a relationship. I can appreciate that that might be upsetting someone, and would like to give them a way to avoid it, but I don’t want to label something as abuse if it’s not, either.
I agree with you on this. As “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” so is “abuse is in the eye of any given reader,” whether or not the author intends it to be a depiction of abuse. Our fandom is based on works that contain plenty of problematic elements (including abuse) that the author most likely does not consider problematic, even when many of the fans are in agreement that they are problematic. Still, “many” is not “all,” and I choose not to trample on fans/fanficwriters/fanartists who ship A/B by tagging every depiction of
A/B
with {#abuse}, even when other fans condemn A/B as being a problematic and specifically abusive ship.
When fanartists and fanwriters take these same problematic elements from canon and extrapolate, they’re handling the same “tainted” material, whether or not they depict A/B as abusive, and therefore bear the brunt of the demands for tagging their works with {#abuse}.
So I don’t know what the answer is bc as I said above, I would not want to needlessly upset someone, but I also see it from the shipper/fanficwriter/fanartist/creator’s POV.
If we can’t agree on what should be tagged as {#abuse}, I feel like Dead Dove: Do Not Eat should apply:
I guess that writing is a little different, since it’s unlikely people are going to just glance at the work and be upset by something there. They sort of have to engage with it.
My concern is always that a tag like that is going to change how people interpret my work into something I didn’t intend. Like, I’ve been asked to tag things as abuse before that I really didn’t agree WERE abuse, just regular conflict in a relationship. I can appreciate that that might be upsetting someone, and would like to give them a way to avoid it, but I don’t want to label something as abuse if it’s not, either.
Dead Dove: Do Not Eat is a warning or tag used to indicate that a fanwork contains tropes or elements that may be deemed “problematic” without explicitly condemning the problematic aspects.
The “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat” tag would essentially be a “what it says on the tin” metatag, indicating “you see the tropes and concepts tagged here? they are going to appear in this fic. exactly as said. there will not necessarily be any subversion, authorial commentary condemning problematic aspects, or meditation on potential harm. this fic contains dead dove. if you proceed, you should expect to encounter it.”
I don’t feel that a
(published or fanfic)
writer is required to condemn abuse in the narrative, especially when, as you point out, they may perceive the abuse in question as regular conflict in a relationship. “Regular” is also up for debate, of course. As a fandom’s lifeblood is its fanworks, my feeling is to try to find some compromise between allowing the shipper/fanficwriter/fanartist/creators to create the fanworks they want to create, and for that to be done in a way that offers the most protection possible for people who might be upset by those fanworks.
Anyone have that quote from Lin Manuel Miranda (I think?) about exploring things you’d never want to do in real life through fiction, and exploring the worst parts of your psyche?
oh god I’m done I’m fucking. I’m done I’m sick and I’m exhausted and I’m done
Nobody here supports real life pedophilia and abuse.
Antis support bullying creators for depicting it in fiction in ways they don’t approve of. They harbor bullies because they would have no power otherwise.
What are you – I assume an anti – missing in your life that you need so badly to feel righteous about the fiction you consume? Why do you need to feel you have power over people? Antis openly admit that they go after smaller creators because they know that smaller creators will “listen” to them – except that what they’re doing is intimidation and bullying, so what they really mean is that smaller creators are afraid of them.
And you know what? It worked. It fucking worked. Small creators are terrified. Multiple artists have been driven into depression and suicide attempts by harassment that came from antis. Creators who never hurt anyone had their careers ruined over false accusations of pedophilia over a cartoon drawing. Someone got fed needles. Three artists that I know of at conventions have had their merch and displays damaged by people calling them pedophiles or abuse apologists or whatthefuckever because of the completely safe for work art they were displaying.
You’re bullies. You’re fucking bullies and you need to feel powerful so you gang up on fandom creators, who are almost all already marginalized young people, so that you can feel like you’re doing something. But you’re not. You’re fucking not. You can tear down all the queer artists you want, it won’t make a single goddamn bit of difference. YOU ARE NOT HELPING ANYONE.
You’re not. Helping. Anyone.
But you did it, I guess. Artists are scared. People are scared. Small, queer creators are more scared to release content now than they were 5 years ago, because their own community will almost certainly tear them apart like wild dogs.
I don’t have a well-articulated way of putting this yet but so much anti rhetoric strikes me as deeeeeeply sexphobic?
Like….. sexual attraction isn’t inherently predatory. Arousal is a largely involuntary process with no moral implications. Getting aroused by weird, benign, even horrifying things is a normal part of being human, and if it’s not distressing to you or causing you to act in antisocial ways then it’s not even a little bit an issue.
The idea that being aroused by another human is inherently objectifying of that human is some straight-up 18th century Kant philosophy. It was predicated on a lot of ideas we now know aren’t really true, and are deeply sexist besides. And they’re still just as wrong and sexist now as they were then? Sexual arousal isn’t a prequel to violence, attraction isn’t objectification, can we please all just in general stop being so afraid of other people’s and our own sexual feelings and start figuring out how to be accepting and positive about them in a way that benefits everyone
I-want-my-IWTV 