the rats in the steel walls.
Jun. 1st, 2007 11:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
reenkaAs 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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2007-06-05 10:01 pm (UTC)Not always, no. But I know people who have been hurt by incest and pedophilia and sexual assault and even if I didn't, I think it's something we have to take seriously, because statistics and true stories alone tell us there isn't always a twelve foot wall.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-06 01:56 am (UTC)When most people say 'it's something we have to take seriously', I guess they mean you have to write it in a certain way-- like, you have to write it 'realistically' (with 'correct' consequences and so on), and I don't believe that; kink is valid too. I guess to me, 'seriously' is an internal process that merely means continued self-awareness, something that prevents self-righteousness and casual dismissals. Something like a process of paying attention-- rather than taking the form of policing others or demanding change, maybe it's something more difficult for some people, ones who aren't naturally honest with themselves or given to self-reflection. Apparently, you know, there are people who resist certain kinds of introspection even in therapy-- don't want to talk (or, you'd imagine, think) about their own feelings & deeper motivations. I'd have thought those people wouldn't be writers, but-- I guess it's possible. Maybe the person is good at fantasizing and observing the outside, mimicking the inner without being truly aware.
I do think that those statistics don't take the sort of person it is into account, and that's important in this context; your everyday sexual fantasy isn't the same creature as a fantasy in the context of erotica writing. I mean, they're related, but it's still different in terms of motivation and effect to some extent. Also, we don't know the role imagination plays in the lives of your everyday common garden-variety sex-offender; my guess is that there's a wide enough variety, but the majority of people in general (sex offenders or not) aren't very imaginative, so I assume they don't reflect on their desires one way or the other but rather act on them mindlessly, not considering the real effects (especially in circumstantial cases, which are probably in the majority of instances-- ie, not premeditated). Most people (I assume and observe), as in, most 'normal' non-especially-creative people, don't seem to have much of a conscious, active imagination; I'm not sure what precise effect that has-- I just think they don't think about their dreams/feelings that much if they don't have to, so a lot of it's repressed and unconscious.
So what does it mean, as a creative self-aware person, to let your unconscious out to play? Obviously, since people who write erotica or fiction of any sort are in a minority, and sex offenders are also (thankfully) a minority of the population, there aren't going to be many people who're both writers and sex offenders. And so on some level I can see where the indignation comes from-- something about the way writers are, the way we're more comfortable with our darker/deeper levels of imagination, we think of it as harmless 'cause obviously the only person it ever seems to hurt is ourselves (and it's more like a burden in the outside world, rather than some sort of weapon). I think it's much more dangers to not explore it, not write or think about it, in terms of having it get away from conscious control. And yet at the same time I just instinctively feel the thin, worn places where the walls between desire nd impulse to action are worn thin; the thing that's keeping me from action is really my innate nature rather than some safety of fantasy remaining in check by its nature, I guess.