The view from inside
In this post, 
researchgrrrl wrote about her experiences as a rape survivor, and how it informs her belief that writing rapefic about real people is wrong. I admire the courage it must have taken for her to write that post, and to make it public, and I am in no way denying that she is entitled to express her opinion. However, I have to disagree with her comment that:
I feel that we have a responsibility as humans first and fans second to not use the imagined violence and victimization of real people as the basis for any sort of erotica or romance.
To me, the implication is that there are some things that it's unacceptable to think about, and that thought and action carry the same moral and ethical weight.
I don't believe that.
I'm sure there are people who don't fantasize about things they would never do, but I'm certainly not one of them. I do it constantly in small ways, like when I'm on the phone with a client and I zone out while imagining being able to say, "Please to be getting over your clueless tenured entitlement-whore self, moron," and get away with it. I used to fantasize about going into my high school and blowing away the group of boys who were making my life hell--fortunately, this was pre-Columbine; now, just expressing the thought could get you in trouble.
Certainly, there are things that I wish people wouldn't think, especially in an erotic context. I have a kink for sleazy gay porn, which means I spend a fair amount of time at nifty.org. At a rough guess, at least half of the stories in the "Authoritarian" section of the archive involve characters who are children or young teenagers. About 2/3 of the stories in that section range from mildly to incredibly racist. Since I find both racism and child abuse to be appalling, I've learned to be very quick on the back button when on Nifty. If I met some of the authors of those fics, I'd be tempted to either smack them real, real hard--that violent streak again--or call the police. But as long as all they're doing is writing, then I'm simply going to exercise my right to not read their work, and hope that at some point, they'll get a clue.
A couple of years ago, someone I knew in the LJ HP fandom decided that she could no longer have me friended because I was on Fandom Wank. I found out about this because she made a public post in which she noted her disappointment (to be fair, she didn't mention my name), and wrote about how she'd killed off the Sim of me that she'd created. It was pretty creepy, given that I didn't think we knew each other well enough to be making Sims of each other. But I didn't and don't think that meant she intended violence, any more than I did when I made a Sim of my manager in my old job, stuck her in the pool, and took away the ladders. Laughing while I watched the Sim drown may not have been nice, but it didn't mean that I was going to try to kill her. It did mean that for one day, I was able to release my frustration in a way that didn't actually harm her, didn't harm myself (banging your head into walls hurts), and didn't get me fired. In a similar (no pun intended) vein, if the person on LJ who made and killed the Sim of me found that it was cathartic, well...more power to her; even if I felt it was creepy.
I expect that at least someone is about to hit reply and point out thatresearchgrrrl never advocated censorship, and that she was just expressing her opinion. And I would agree. But just as she does, I have the right to express my opinion, which is that stating that people have a responsibility not to fantasize about certain things implies that there are things that not only shouldn't be written about, but that shouldn't even be thought. And for me, that's never acceptable. The inside of my head isn't always a nice place, and I acknowledge that. But it's my place, and no one else has the right to tell me what is allowed to happen there--which means that I don't get to set those rules for anyone else.
researchgrrrl wrote about her experiences as a rape survivor, and how it informs her belief that writing rapefic about real people is wrong. I admire the courage it must have taken for her to write that post, and to make it public, and I am in no way denying that she is entitled to express her opinion. However, I have to disagree with her comment that:I feel that we have a responsibility as humans first and fans second to not use the imagined violence and victimization of real people as the basis for any sort of erotica or romance.
To me, the implication is that there are some things that it's unacceptable to think about, and that thought and action carry the same moral and ethical weight.
I don't believe that.
I'm sure there are people who don't fantasize about things they would never do, but I'm certainly not one of them. I do it constantly in small ways, like when I'm on the phone with a client and I zone out while imagining being able to say, "Please to be getting over your clueless tenured entitlement-whore self, moron," and get away with it. I used to fantasize about going into my high school and blowing away the group of boys who were making my life hell--fortunately, this was pre-Columbine; now, just expressing the thought could get you in trouble.
Certainly, there are things that I wish people wouldn't think, especially in an erotic context. I have a kink for sleazy gay porn, which means I spend a fair amount of time at nifty.org. At a rough guess, at least half of the stories in the "Authoritarian" section of the archive involve characters who are children or young teenagers. About 2/3 of the stories in that section range from mildly to incredibly racist. Since I find both racism and child abuse to be appalling, I've learned to be very quick on the back button when on Nifty. If I met some of the authors of those fics, I'd be tempted to either smack them real, real hard--that violent streak again--or call the police. But as long as all they're doing is writing, then I'm simply going to exercise my right to not read their work, and hope that at some point, they'll get a clue.
A couple of years ago, someone I knew in the LJ HP fandom decided that she could no longer have me friended because I was on Fandom Wank. I found out about this because she made a public post in which she noted her disappointment (to be fair, she didn't mention my name), and wrote about how she'd killed off the Sim of me that she'd created. It was pretty creepy, given that I didn't think we knew each other well enough to be making Sims of each other. But I didn't and don't think that meant she intended violence, any more than I did when I made a Sim of my manager in my old job, stuck her in the pool, and took away the ladders. Laughing while I watched the Sim drown may not have been nice, but it didn't mean that I was going to try to kill her. It did mean that for one day, I was able to release my frustration in a way that didn't actually harm her, didn't harm myself (banging your head into walls hurts), and didn't get me fired. In a similar (no pun intended) vein, if the person on LJ who made and killed the Sim of me found that it was cathartic, well...more power to her; even if I felt it was creepy.
I expect that at least someone is about to hit reply and point out that
researchgrrrl never advocated censorship, and that she was just expressing her opinion. And I would agree. But just as she does, I have the right to express my opinion, which is that stating that people have a responsibility not to fantasize about certain things implies that there are things that not only shouldn't be written about, but that shouldn't even be thought. And for me, that's never acceptable. The inside of my head isn't always a nice place, and I acknowledge that. But it's my place, and no one else has the right to tell me what is allowed to happen there--which means that I don't get to set those rules for anyone else.