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As a preface I'd like to say that in a way I agree with this post insofar as obviously there is an important difference between fictional and 'real' pedophilia (and likewise a difference between fantasizing and acting on any fantasy, obviously), but once again, I'm frustrated by how quickly and how thickly people jump to drawing the line between fantasy & reality, as if it's always some 12 foot wall of steel and not a fluttering curtain at times.

There's a line between 'fiction/fantasy cannot influence or become reality' and 'fiction/fantasy naturally will and does consistently influence and become reality' where the actual truth lies, and it's a source of continuous frustration to me that people are so stubbornly binary-thinking about this. :/ I guess it doesn't make a good rallying cry to say 'well, sometimes the right fantasy will affect the right person in such a way that they could catalyze it to become reality, but most times it (probably) won't, but either way it would have happened sooner or later with another form of that fantasy, so you can't really stop it'. :> A good example of this last point is how exposure to kink in fandom has led me in particular to become a lot more laid-back and accepting of my own kinkiness levels in real life. I don't really go out and 'do it', but... neither am I opposed to some of the things slash porn has brought home to me. :P In general, I wouldn't say I write porn I consider... well, non-hot, you know? Heh.

I mean duh, yeah, fiction != reality, the Easter bunny isn't real and the sky is blue, but on another level, what kind of paucity of imagination does this imply in people? This is empirical materialism at its most droll. Meh. :/ Even more frustrating when spoken by writers themselves. The opposite end of the spectrum is of course the faithful fanatic extremists, the ones who think that thoughts are dangerous and the heretics must be BURNED before they, you know, COME FOR US ALL. *eyeroll*


People fear disruptive beliefs and 'dangerous' speech for a reason, no matter how much one goes on about 'fantasy' and 'human rights'-- and that reason is that ideas are fucking powerful. Ideas can move the world, and they may not be real to start with-- I mean, you can make up some stupid fantastical story about overlord Xenu and the Body Thetans that's full of pure grade-A crack, and 50-some years later, Tom Cruise will go on TV loudly proclaiming how he's Seen the Light and You Should Too-- and that, that sort of crazy is as real as it gets. All too real, actually, as in I wish it'd go away and take all the other crazy cults with it. Yeah, right.

Likewise, people go on and go about free speech for even the most loathsome & dangerous concepts for a reason-- and that reason is that once you start repressing and censoring, these ideas actually gain power as they go underground and strengthen through increased opposition. People who're given a real fight rather than dealt with rationally & peacefully tend to fight harder. People are contrary bastards that way. This is why terrorists wet themselves with glee at every bit of mass panic and hatred they can stir up, right? Right, because that's what they need to grow and to prove their point.

The thing is, the painful truth is, that we cannot avoid the dangers of existence, we can't really protect ourselves and we can only sort of protect our kids. We can do our best, and that's all anyone can do, but a lot of times we'll be fucked over anyway and there's nothing to be done about that because 90% of the time the 'solution' is worse than the problem. And I'm not trying to be nihilist, either, I'm just trying to say that the 'solution' is accepting the world as it is-- trying to help without trying to 'fix it', because basically you can't fix it when 'it' is reality or human nature.
    You can deal with it, you can try to go around it or improve it or treat its effects, but you can't... change its basic properties. Therefore you'd have to accept that our greatest freedoms carry within them-- are the flipside of-- the greatest dangers, and that fantasy is indeed dangerous, though not half so much as reality, and there's no such thing-- no such thing-- as a harmless thought. It's only when you fully realize that that it becomes truly meaningful to say that there's also no thought, fantasy or pure desire that should be forbidden.

So basically you end up with a lot of stuff about 'lesser evils' and a lot of people telling themselves that it's safer to allow the dangerous types like pedophiles their imaginary pleasures because after all, the imagination is a powerful thing, and it can, in fact, often be near as good as the real thing. It can stem the urge. It can heal. It can create an outlet. It can defuse the ticking bomb. In short, it's the furthest thing from safe and it has a deeply real effect on the person doing the imagining, but even with all that, it's better than the alternative. And pedophilia is actually a straw man in any discussion about fantasy vs. reality in some ways, because nearly everyone has a very clear knee-jerk reaction against it, right? I know I do; I pretty much hate pedophilia like I hate nothing else human. It's easy to feel separate from it and to say 'I'm nothing like that' 'cause clearly, clearly, you don't want to hurt children.
    Of course, inevitably this leads to murkier waters like 'so obviously I don't want to kill anyone' and 'obviously I don't want kinky sex', etc, where the truth is that whether or not we like murder mysteries, a lot of their potential draw comes from the fact that we can, as human beings, empathize with the instinct to kill if we're honest with ourselves. Most people-- even me-- just need the right incentive for most awful or dark or dangerous things, really. We just need the right push, and that truth is where dark fiction and dark fantasies of all stripes draw their deeply welling power in the first place.

Date: 2007-06-03 02:28 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] yourpoison.livejournal.com
Hehe yeah I'm a bit embarrassed about the Myers-Briggs thing but on the other hand, I don't mean it as an excuse, just a way of explaining/classifying personalities. And I agree that there's definitely an intersection between the social & the individual... I was just saying I was focusing more on the individual as the lens rather than the other way around.

Well yes, I do go on tangents and such :D Social evils as examples of disruptive beliefs... I didn't mean to immediately transfer it to the arena of social justice in the applied criminal sense, I guess. I mean, even Scientology-- I don't think it's wrong in the sense that it's criminal or even harmful to others, exactly; it was meant as an example of obvious fantasy being taken seriously, though there are many such examples. It's not that the belief does it through existing alone, but that's the binary set-up I was trying to challenge-- it's not one or the other for me, but rather a matrix of interconnected points. Beliefs and desires and all things illogical and irrational influence without determining or guaranteeing anything, influence most at the 'right time and the right person' (as I said in that second paragraph), yes, but still.

Well, see, that's exactly it-- I know this through my own experience, because I'm sensitive to people's beliefs, fantasies, desires and personalities-- perhaps even moreso than their actions (because I'm always looking for the 'real reason' someone does something, I won't necessary have a 'normal' reaction if someone 'seems' to betray me, or yells at me, or whatever). It's because of that I bring up the Myers-Briggs thing-- it's a shorthand method for explaining a basic difference in that regard, once you understand it.

I mean.....
Life is socially-focused materialism.
You can see how not everyone would agree, right? ...:)) And that's a philosophical difference, not a question of right/wrong that you could prove so easily as something truly empirical like 'the sky is blue', either.

You know, in order to understand people's actions, my point is that you'd need to understand their motivations, no? Taking that statement of yours, I can better understand where you're coming from, for instance, in terms of why you do or believe X. With me, I think it'd be a lot easier to understand the stuff -I- may do or believe if you don't project that same philosophy onto my own ego, and realize that I believe something like 'Life is an individually-focused search for enlightenment and growth as well as a process of communication with others'. This is subjective, but it's what motivates me. People are funny in that the 'objective physical truth' doesn't always apply to their behavior the way it does to the behavior of chairs, for instance :>

Perhaps I have a semi-unique perspective here in that I often go days and weeks without contact with other people (unless calling for pizza delivery counts), and I'm pretty certain I exist & also retain my personality :> Sure, most people are unaware of it (and I think most don't really know who I am even if I do interact with them simply 'cause my experience of myself and my appearance in social interactions are way different 'cause I'm just... shy and suuuper-quiet, if nothing else, whereas really I'm the last thing from someone who has nothing to say or is meek/submissive). By saying I'm introverted and 'Feeling', I'm saying that what hurts me tends to be my own ideas of other people's feelings, because I'm just solipsistic like that :> If you judged me only through my effect on others and you also didn't know me online, you may in fact not notice I exist (most people don't), but, y'know, I exist right :D

Date: 2007-06-03 02:42 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] notrafficlights.livejournal.com
You can see how not everyone would agree, right?

Having an opinion isn't the same as having a valid opinion.

Perhaps I have a semi-unique perspective here in that I often go days and weeks without contact with other people

That's not "unique", that's "pathological".

Date: 2007-06-03 06:02 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] yourpoison.livejournal.com
Hahah, true, I wasn't saying it was at my most healthy times that I was most solitary, necessarily, but I get an out since I often do that when I'm in the midst of furiously writing, reading, painting/designing, etc. I mean, it's not out of sheer sociophobia, really (...these days). I'd say at those times I feel most myself and most alive. I mean, even at the best of times I don't have that many friends to talk to (not least 'cause most of my friends live elsewhere or... do other things with people who are not me, though I seem most likely to have depressed friends for some reason).

Well, but when you're talking about something like a philosophy of the meaning of life, there's a wider range of valid opinions than say, the scope of valid opinions about whether or not George W Bush is a good president or whether cats and lions have evolved from the same common ancestor :> I'm not proposing anything as questionable as the existence of little green men or claiming Jesus will save your soul-- it's just an interpretation of the facts that values certain things differently. Like if there's an equation where 2(x + y) = 2x / 2y, the structure is valid with several different values for x & y. In this case, I only claimed it was valid within the structure of providing motivation for the behavior of one person as opposed to another-- or, I suppose, I was saying that effectively, if someone disagreed then on some level it doesn't matter if it's 'true' or not because their behavior and actions would be different accordingly.

...Well, I don't know if that makes sense, but anyway :>

Date: 2007-06-03 06:12 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] notrafficlights.livejournal.com
Well, but when you're talking about something like a philosophy of the meaning of life

We're not talking about the meaning, we're talking about the method.

Date: 2007-06-03 06:25 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] yourpoison.livejournal.com
It gets fuzzy though, doesn't it? (Well, now is when you could say in my head everything gets fuzzy, and I suppose that wouldn't be wrong, but.) There are layers to these things, layers of motivations & causes that put results in context, that make exceptions for most common methods.

Using the empirical/materialist methods, while you can describe the end result of irrational/impossible to prove processes, you can't really track them or make them a part of the story, and therefore data would get lost and understanding suffers. Which is to say, it is not the whole story anymore than the transcript of a play (action, dialogue, perhaps a narrator) is the play. Er? ^^;

Also, um, focusing on the method to the exclusion of context/subtext and such, that in itself confers meaning :>

Date: 2007-06-03 06:42 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] notrafficlights.livejournal.com
you can't really track them or make them a part of the story

Yes you can. Even scientific research has to list processes, failed hypothesis, errors and false-positive data. ;)

Date: 2007-06-03 06:54 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] yourpoison.livejournal.com
Heh, I was going by your description (so far), not necessarily my idea of the 'scientific method'. Man, I love the scientific method :> But then there are hard and soft sciences, sociology & psychology & anthropology, biochemistry, neurology & biology all trying to explain how people act. That's what I meant about talking about different things-- it's just like different disciplines with different fields of validity. Although honestly I'm not sure what I'm talking about anymore ^^;;;

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