So I was incredibly wary of inputting on this topic, because I think it’s a very important, but very tense and nuanced subject. However, given I was tagged, I was a bit worried that my silence would read as blanket agreement if I didn’t say anything, and this is an important topic close to my heart.
First off; romance is not the same as abuse, I think we can all agree on that.
Second; I think you both make some great points (for example, I very much agree that the solution is not to avoid creating this kind of content and that its crucial to consider one’s own critical thinking, that what is considered toxic can be hugely varied, but also I believe that crowned-avery is correct that infantilising the reader does not fix the problem, that there will always be ‘bad readers’ and that it’s tiring to always hear ‘think of children’ rhetoric in the discussion of any contentious elements of fiction.) This post is not intended as a take-down or even especially a criticism, just I guess a counterpoint and furthering of discussion - because it is an important discussion to have.
I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, so I’m going to start with ‘think of the children’, on top of the points that crowned-avery has already made.
Fiction and ‘Think of the children’
I understand and appreciate where the original post is coming from, because the messages that we perpetuate are important, as is kinds of representation we show or do not show, and while I don’t believe in infantilising younger readers as if life is sugar-sweet and peachy until you magically turn 18, I can acknowledge that developmentally younger people may be at a more vulnerable stage and ultimately it is important to teach and have conversations early where possible.
However, I also strongly believe that it is not necessarily the job of fiction to be anyone’s moral or relationship guide.
Fiction is there to let people explore and express emotions, actions, ethical dilemmas and parts of themselves that often they wouldn’t in real life. It is a hugely important outlet, especially for the taboo. I know I wrote plenty of toxically co-dependent stuff when I was a teenager, and had I been doing that under the current social pressure to be ideologically flawless, I would probably have quit writing then and there. I can easily see a hypothetical situation these days where young content creators write something ‘problematic’ and the outcry against them doing that will be far more traumatic and troubling to their development than whatever they wrote in the first place.
For me, for example, I was sixteen and figuring out as someone ace, who didn’t know they were ace, what intimacy in a relationship without sex would or could be. And combining that with my love for hero/villain dynamics. I could not have told you that was why I was so drawn to it at the time, or make all the points about why I did that then as I can now. I was a teenager. My emotions were higher intensity, so all scenes, much like in Twilight, were also of a higher intensity. This is not to say ‘accept all writing without nuance’, but rather to question the current obsession with ideologically pure content as the end all of fiction, and to challenge the idea that it is only adult content creators putting out this content when we say ‘think of the children’. When we criticise harmful fiction under the ‘think of the children’ concept, children and young adults can pick up on that, and then look at their own stuff in a deeply unnuanced and critical light which doesn’t actually help them understand the content or their own emotions about it. What they may do, instead, is pick up ‘this is wrong’ and ‘I shouldn’t talk about this’ because it is wrong and bad and therefore I am wrong and bad. This is sort of parallel to ‘don’t write fiction that romanticises abuse’, but I believe part of the larger issue. Most people who write ‘problematic content’ aren’t doing it because they are inherently problematic people who think that’s what relationships should be like in real life. But a lot of the current ideology around talking about ‘romanticising abuse in fiction’ doesn’t draw this nuance.
You make the point in the replies, Crewe, that “This [the post] is just encouraging readers to think about what they are reading critically”, which I wholeheartedly agree is important and I’m really glad you said it, but the original post does put the onus on content creators to make sure that they portray the relationships and dynamics they depict in a healthy way. Which is a lot. And also to some extent perpetuates an expectation that content creators magically know what is healthy more than anyone else, and positions them to be torn down if they don’t. And if, they don’t, in its most slippery slope version leads to ‘well, if you don’t know, don’t try and write’.
The guidance for what is a healthy relationship, be it romantic or otherwise, should in an ideal world be coming from parents, people around you, schools having robust sex education lessons, and easy access to resources that actually engage properly with consent and relationships in a more nuanced, less heteronormative and even potentially less vanilla way. Obviously, still in an age-appropriate way for whenever you are having this conversation, but still. Again, people don’t magically personality shift at 18.
These resources and conversations being in place, and not being themselves toxic, is its own issue because school sex ed can be terrible and heteronormative and overly simplistic and not everyone is lucky enough to have family that do support healthy relationship dynamics. But that is a different issue to replacing real life information and educational material with fiction, and expecting them to do the same job.
It may be one thing if you are writing an explicitly young adult or children’s book, in which case the creator is implicitly agreeing to write within the generally understood rules of the genre, and accepting a responsibility (along with the publishing team working with them, which is a support network not there for a lot of online writers who are just posting alone) to write content that is appropriate.
But a lot of the content on tumblr for example (and certainly my content) isn’t written for an explicitly young adult audience. I am an adult. Young adults may be interacting with my work, and certainly I don’t go out of my way to be a terrible role model, but ultimately I am an adult writing for adults. Enforcing the rule of ‘always think of younger readers’ implies:
a) that all online content should be accessible and appropriate for a younger audience, when in actual fact it’s not and that will and never should be the case
b) that it is the responsibility of the content creator to monitor who is reading their work, and what message the reader is taking away (except we can’t possibly know that, because we’re not mind readers, and frankly people will read whatever they read into a piece of work based on their socialisation, views and upbringing, and there is such a thing as a ‘bad reader. See, how people react to Nabakov’s Lolita).
I will get back to point b later.
Finally, on the topic of ‘think of the children’, there is, to me, something deeply uncomfortable about using children or young adults as the key rhetoric in enforcing a moral view or moral rules. It harks back to a cultural history of censorship, wherein anything that isn’t liked by the general public is flagged under ‘think of the children’ as a way of erasing or controlling it.
For example, this was the case with the Hayes code and gay rights, which was a set of film industry guidelines which made it clear that being gay is not child friendly and should not therefore be encouraged on screen. There is still tension in LGBTQ circles surrounding, for example, the question on whether or not pride should be child friendly versus the issues surrounding the infantilisation or sanitisation of queer identity, which I think highlights the impact this kind of argument can have.
To be clear, this is not to suggest that the condemnation of being LGBTQ is the same as condemning the portrayal of abusive relationships in a romantic light, but I do think it is notable that in this case they both stem from the same place of ‘think of the children’. Because, at the end of the day, when you cite children it (whether you are doing it consciously or not) positions anyone who disagrees you as somehow being against the safeguarding of children and young adults, when normally they are different issues.
A further note on critical thinking
I’m coming briefly back to point b now.
Flagging any troublesome content with explicit warnings, to my mind, actually does the opposite of teaching critical thinking skills. It instead creates a scenario where people are taught ‘this is bad’ without necessarily being given the room to explore or understand why it’s bad. It sets up an expectation that any abusive or harmful behaviour in life will be clearly marked out, when it’s not. Keeping to fiction only simply to limit the scope of this post, I could see that creating a knock on effect where anything not flagged is there automatically assumed to be good and right, whether that’s true or not.
This is not to suggest that there’s no place for, for example, trigger warnings or flagging content, only that I think the issue is more complicated than that. A flag says that something is in a piece of work, it doesn’t necessarily tell you anything about how well the writing around that topic is handled, or whether it is romanticised or not.
Conflict and the structure of writing
I also think it is important to note that the kind of content that tends to be dragged into the whole ‘this is toxic’ discussion, with perhaps the exception of Twilight which was marketed as a romance with all of the expectations of the genre, is often not marketed as a romance. And this isn’t always acknowledged.
For example, crowned-avery raises the point of whump content, and I would raise ‘heroes x villains’ as another example, because on tumblr that is often the community targeted by these kinds of accusations of toxicity. Sometimes the content may deal with an enemies to lovers dynamics, but often it is not explicitly a romance and is not necessarily looking to be romantic when the characters behave in a manipulative way, or there is an intense power imbalance that would be would worth questioning outside of fiction. I mention this, because to go back to critical thinking and reader responsibility, some people will read sexual tension into everything regardless of how a story is written. Because our society often reads sexual tension in all tension, regardless, which isn’t a fiction problem it’s a society problem.
However, more importantly, perhaps, fiction relies on conflict in a way that real life relationships often don’t. You have to have conflict in most fiction because that’s how you get a plot. There is conflict in real life, but it is often not on the same level. In real life, most people will never get romantically entangled with the handsome mafia boss that comes into their pancake bar, or whatever.
Similarly, in real life, people will never be in a situation where they are a seventeen year old girl dating a super-powered vampire. It’s fantasy.
This isn’t to say because it is fantasy that it is exempt from criticism, but I also think to a certain extent the criticism of any less than perfect dynamic in fiction adds to the conflation of ‘real life should be like fiction’, because we are increasingly demanding that fiction play out exactly like an exciting version of real life, which to me as a writer feels...off, though I can’t quite put my finger on it.
Sorry for the really long post. I did say I had a lot of thoughts! And thank you both for your discussions on this topic so far.
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