hi pia! you thoughts on this? principles(.)tumblr(.)com/post/175274570907/people-have-said-this-before-but-just-to
Okay I’m gonna quote that crap so that people can see what’s going on:
if you agree that positive representation (for example, well written, humanized gay characters) can normalize and help gay teenagers, then you inherently have to also accept that negative representation (for example, accepted and sympathetic pedophile characters) can normalize pedophilia to people. this is the same vein of the same critical thought. you can’t claim that representation matters if you also believe that someone writing ‘non con’ adult / child porn is fine since its fictional.
Oh that is some lovely reductive bullshit isn’t it? It sounds very catchy, but it is very reductive and doing the whole false equivalency thing. And we know it’s a false equivalency because the research and studies literally don’t bear out what they’re saying. Very catchy if you’re an anti I suppose (especially that whole positive/negative thing, see that lovely binary between pure and sinful happening? You may not recognise it for the Fundamentalist argument it is, but…it is very Fundamentalist, as old as the church really), but again, it’s designed to shut down conversation and discussion and not promote conversation and discussion. And that’s a big problem when it comes to fiction.
Like, fiction will, by its very nature, be problematic. All fiction. ALL fiction. Even the best fiction that helped someone and normalises say: queer teens, fat bodies, disability etc. will, in some way, be problematic. Even the greatest feminist work of fiction in the world, right now, no matter what it is, is not without its problematic elements.
The answer isn’t to eliminate all fiction ever, just because fiction can be problematic or have problematic elements. Just because it can do things like: normalise heteronormativity, or express taboos in ways that seem like it’s normalising that taboo.
It’s also way more complex than: ‘people writing underage stories about 15/40 yos normalises pedophilia.’ We know it doesn’t. Like, there has never been a single good study that has demonstrated or supported this. (Please see: Moral Combat? Why the War on Violent Video Games is Wrong by Patrick Markey and Christopher Ferguson - which also covers fiction, comics and other media too). Scientists with a lot of government and church money to try and prove this stuff is monstrous have never been able to accurately prove that: violence in video games causes violence in real life, representations of sexual violence in fiction causes sexual violence in real life, and so on. There’s just no ‘correlation equals causality’ happening.
Fiction influences us. Of course it does. But we get to be discerning re: how it influences us. We have brains, and are not just mindless fiction receptacles. That’s media studies 101, that’s the first thing you learn. That’s why companies who pay for advertising don’t always get rich, because as much as they wish it were true - humans are not mindless fiction receptacles. That’s why we get to actually talk and have discussions about things that are problematic in media to understand why we like them, what’s going on there, and what might be being expressed:
For example, rape fantasy among women is extremely common in misogynistic societies. That is obviously reflective of a greater societal issue, but on an individual level it’s often an expression of ways to get healthier control in an unhealthy, uncontrolled society. A lot of women enjoy rape fantasy because they get to control the fantasy. They get to express sexual control and also get to experience guilt-free sex, if someone ‘forces’ them in a fantasy, then they don’t have to associate any religious or societal shame in a society that represses and shames them simply for having the bodies they have.
That is obviously something we learned from talking about it, researching it and discussing it. We didn’t learn that by shaming women so profoundly and saying things like: ‘look you have to admit that if you care about women’s rights and read rape fics at the same time…there’s something going on there, you don’t get it both ways.’ Like, actually, you do? That’s kind of…how society works? It’s not a coincidence that the most oppressed people in society are most likely to write the most taboo content. Like, how does anyone think that is a coincidence? That say, on AO3, the majority of the people are non-male and non-straight, and need those taboos more than y’know…a very wholesome episode of whatever primetime TV show is being very acceptable by mainstream standards right now (idk, I don’t watch primetime TV anymore, lol).
If it was so simple was ‘I read a gay fic that made me feel better about being gay’ and ‘I read a fic about underage tropes and now I’m in jail for pedophilia,’ then like, maybe. But we KNOW it doesn’t work like that. To be accurate in their comparison, what this person would need to say, is something like this:
‘These fics have gay representation and it normalised gay people and therefore straight people and straight children will become gay and that’s why it’s bad.’
Like I’m sorry, but that is not how queer fic is working. It’s absolutely not how underage, incest and rape fic is working either. That is like, the kind of disgusting rhetoric we saw from queer hate groups and Fundamentalist Christian groups. And it is scaremongering. The post acts like they’re engaging critically with the concept, but they’re not.
Of course representation is important, but that doesn’t mean it’s free from being problematic. Look at Will & Grace! That show did immense and world-changing things for queer representation, it showed the first on-air kiss between two men on primetime TV - it was also viciously: lesbophobic, transphobic, fatphobic and gender essentialist, and also - at times - deeply misogynistic. And ironically, laughably, fics with rape / noncon / incest can be great for representation! Lol. It’s not like, ‘here is the first and here is the second and never the twain shall meet.’
But you have to think in that super rigid binary if you’re an anti, because one has to be good, and one has to be evil. The words are right there in their post for you to see exactly how much of a fixed binary they need in the world - positive representation, negative representation, and no acknowledgement that all representation is problematic anyway.
Let’s also talk about normalisation, because it doesn’t always do the things antis think it does. Normalisation can mean good things for representation. But it can also help maintain cultural taboos. When we normalise the discussion of STIs, that doesn’t mean we’re more likely to go out and get STIs. It actually means we’re more likely to protect ourselves against STIs and have more informed sex.
The act of writing underage and having to tag that with a huge bold warning on AO3 actually helps constantly and consciously/unconsciously maintain the distinction that this is a huge societal No No on par with graphic depictions of violence and rape/non-con. (And the people writing underage don’t want that warning to go away, they understand why that needs to exist). Just by the virtue of that tag existing, we maintain the cultural taboo and understanding that this is not an okay thing to accept in real life, and we don’t positively associate with real life pedophilia. If anything, you are more likely to find folks who have been sexually assaulted, abused as children, people who are trying to heal, people who are trying to understand what happened to them, and folks who very clearly understand the difference between fiction and reality.
Normalisation is not a simple term. It’s a sociological/anthropological/psychological term with a lot of varied approaches that doesn’t just mean ‘seeing this all the time makes this thing okay.’ We know it’s not that simple. We know that sex education doesn’t make us more likely to go out there and get pregnant or get STIs - even though that’s what Fundamentalists, Christian right wing groups (and probably antis in about ten years) would want you to think. It actually makes you hugely, radically less likely to go and do both of those things. It is when sex education isn’t normalised that you get a massive problem.
Representation is complex. It’s obviously complex. It would be lovely to reduce it to a nice simple paragraph of ‘if you’re on this side you’re virtuous and if you’re on this side you’re a sinful person normalising pedophilia.’ But the research, academia, the studies, the real life lived experience of people just doesn’t bear that out. It’s so much more complex than that. And as we see with the prevalence of rape fantasy in women in misogynistic societies, something likely very psychologically complex is going on in the case of people attracted to things like underage / incest / noncon and other societally agreed upon taboos.
If you want to read further about this subject in an engaged way (because even my response isn’t as long as I wanted it to be, because you could be here for years talking about this stuff, and people are spending years researching this stuff), I highly suggest you also look into:
Transcending Taboos: A Moral and Psychological Examination of Cyberspace by Garry Young and Monica Whitty and;
Sex, Literature and Censorship by Jonathan Dollimore
as well as the book recommended above.
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