i have thought a lot about censorship and what is “appropriate”. not a lot of people know this, but lolita was written to show what we allow on our bookshelves: there being no swear words in it meant it was free from censorship. a book about child molestation was allowed because it didn’t explicitly use the word “fuck”. he wrote it to show we don’t really care about protecting children, and it ended up being seen as a romance.
someone once told me – actually, many people have – that lgbt content isn’t appropriate for children. any content. not just kissing. i’m drowned in questions: “won’t the parents have to explain it?” “kids shouldn’t be thinking about sex at this age, or do you think differently?” “what will the kids think?”
at six i saw disney movies. people kiss and get married. i didn’t ask “what does that mean.” i didn’t ask “are those people going to have sex?” i didn’t ask anything, because i was six, and no six year old thinks twice about these things. nobody ever “explained” being straight to me, it was a fact, and it existed, and i was fine with that. why would being gay require a thesis, i wonder.
someone once told me that the one of the reasons people hate lgbt individuals is because they can’t see us as anything but sexual. we’re not people, so much as sinners. that they don’t see love, they see sex. just sex. it’s perversion, not a matter of the heart. only of the body.
i think i was in my early twenties before i saw someone like me.
how old were you, though, before you saw violence? before you saw sexual assault on tv? i think something like that is only pg-13, and if it’s implied, they can get away with anything. i remember watching things and learning about blood, but knowing sex – sex was what was really wrong. sex was always rated r. sex was always kind of a bad word. i was told a lot that i wasn’t ready.
i had a dream last night that i made a site where people could ask any question they wanted about sex and get answered by a professional. it was shut down in moments because 15 year olds wanted to know if it should hurt, if “double-bagging” was a real thing, if this, if that. we shudder. don’t let the children know about that!
but at thirteen i had seen enough violence it no longer struck me. i couldn’t say “fuck” but i knew that if you break your femur, you can bleed out internally in under half an hour. in school i wasn’t allowed to write about loving girls because what would the administration think – but i could write about wanting to kill myself and people would say how lovely, how blistering.
i have thought a lot about censorship. sometimes people on this site try it with me: don’t write this, don’t be so nasty. some of it is intrinsic. we know as people with a uterus not to complain about “that time of the month”, we know better than to talk about sexual assault (how shameful), we know that talking about a vagina is somehow scandalous. i can say “dick” and nobody questions me. some people only refer to the bottom half of me by “pussy”. they won’t wrap a mouth around “vagina” like it’s poison to them. even discussing this, that the language halts, that there’s an intrinsic desire to say “girls” instead of “women” – feels naughty, illicit. not for children.
the other day someone suggested i make my blog 18+. i said, okay, it deals a lot with depression and other problems that might be for a mature audience. oh no, they said, that’s not it, i think that’s helpful. i said, okay. so what is it then. well, you’re gay. you write about loving women. and i said, i don’t write about sex often and they said. it’s not about the sex. but wlw isn’t for a general audience. teenagers aren’t ready.
oh.
lolita is recommended for high school and up. i think about that a lot. i know girls who love it, who say it speaks to them on a deep level. it’s beautiful prose, after all. that was the whole point of the novel. something that looked like a rose but was intrinsically awful. i think about how if i was a model they’d want me to look young, thin, prepubescent. how my body would be sold and how through the mall i walk by images of barely-clothed women while mothers cannot breastfeed in public without fear of retribution.
i think about how i can write a novel about violence and it will be pg-13 but if my characters say “fuck” twice it’s inappropriate. i said fuck three times so far in this post, which makes it only appropriate for adults.
i think about that, and how my identity is something that people suggest lines up with a swear word. that people shouldn’t talk about it. that it’s a vulgarity. bad for children, harsh, confusing.
fuck. i love women. which one makes this only for those over eighteen.
This is such a powerful post. Read it fully, and spread it around.
Not sure how true the bit about the reasons behind Lolita are. I’ve never read it as it squicks me. However, someone else noticed the type of website op mentions exists and I wanted to make sure the link was included with the post:
Employer: so tell me, why do you want this job?
Me: I must survive capitalism
As a library worker, there’s something I want to say to you.
You do not have to apologize for the books you choose to read.
At all. To anyone. You owe nobody any explanations; you need no excuse or “good reason” to be reading the book.
You do not have to be ashamed for wanting to read “bad” books. You wanna read Twilight? We got Twilight. Need a banal, cookie-cutter-plot mystery or thriller? Those are always fun. Our regulars check them out by the towering stack. Ask Betty for recommendations; she’s read them all. 50 Shades of Oh Fucking No? We’ve got it, we even got it in large print. Have fun. Check out the rest of our porn too. Oh, and the sex manuals are a MUST if you want to “experiment” yourself. Don’t be afraid to ask; they’re here for a reason.
Want to read a book written by a huge asshole everyone hates and agree was a monster? Yeah, we have those. No, we don’t think you’re an asshole for wanting to know what was actually written in there, or judging things for yourself.
You are not too old for Diary of a Wimpy Kid, The Babysitter’s Club, or Captain Underpants. You are not too young for Sherlock Holmes. There’s nothing wrong with a boy reading The Princess Academy or Sweet Valley High. There’s nothing wrong with a girl being into The Hardy Boys or Artemis Fowl instead.
You do not have to pull the shame face and offer me an excuse when you check out your books. I don’t care if I got so angry at that book I threw it against a wall when I read it: you have the right to read it, and enjoy it if it’s enjoyable for you. THAT’S WHY THE LIBRARY HAS IT IN THE FIRST PLACE. If we only stocked pure, unproblematic literature everyone approved of, by authors of unquestionable virtue, we wouldn’t have any books at all. Or music. Or movies. It would be utterly fucking boring. And it certainly wouldn’t be a library.
It always get me when people talk about magical girl shows going dark and gritty as though it’s some sort of daring subversion of the genre, like the first season of Sailor Moon didn’t end with a total party kill.
Ethical Consumption of Woobie Villains Under Late Stage Capitalism
*cracks open the cellar door and crawls out of the shadows*
Hi, I want to talk about a very delicate, complex and startlingly revolutionary topic today.
Is it ethically permissible to like villains and write fic about them crying pretty and getting fucked? Hmmm. Hard to say. Doing so might make you a problematic person. Wow, this really is the great moral question of our times, isn’t it?
(It’s not, actually.)
So yeah, of course it’s ethically permissible to like villains, and the fact that there is discourse in both fandom and mainstream media crit reminding us constantly that: “Something You Might Have Missed In The Newest Disney Franchise Movie: The Bad Guys Are Bad And The Good Guys Are Good, A Startlingly Revolutionary And Feminist Narrative!” is deeply discouraging to me as a writer, as a consumer of media, as a human being with the ability to observe, absorb and synthesize information.
It seems like there is far more focus right now on looking directly at what characters say and do as a method to extract substance from a text without asking what it means that they say and do those things, and what the author is trying to accomplish or make you think by making the characters say and do those things.
That is to say, people are looking at what the text “”“says”“”, not what is says.
This is probably a natural result of what I’m gonna flippantly refer to as the “YA-ification” of mainstream media, that is: the rise of dominant nerd culture and “identity” being exploited by capitalism in concert with massive campaigns of media conglomeration creating a situation in which popular media is becoming increasingly homogenized and “safe”.
But I don’t really want to talk about that directly. I want to talk about why I think specifically Villain Discourse™ is a prime symptom of this and why I think it’s a good example to show the problem with viewing pop culture through this kind of lens.
So, like, when “Media Consumption = Identity” hits fandom, it gains another dimension, which is the link of media consumption to personal morality. We’ve seen a profane marriage between these two laterally related concepts over the last few yeas that has broken down into smaller and smaller battlefields until it’s no longer just about what shows you watch, it’s about what characters you like in the shows. Good pure fans like “Hero Character”, bad impure fans like “Villain Character”.
Captain America is “good”. He’s a “cinnamon roll”, a “non-toxic male”, a “golden retriever”, a “soft pure hero”, a “feminist friendly hero”. Loki is bad and greasy and a Villain and Silly Fangirls Need To Understand He’s Bad. Every time a male hero doesn’t, idk, explicitly call his female co-star misogynistic slurs, fandom and nerd media fall over themselves to act like it’s the most Important Story Ever Told and it’s an incredibly pressing issue to make sure everyone understands that the people who oppose the hero are Not Good, because the fans out there drawing fanart of the bad guy must not have gotten the message!
My problem here is that this kind of criticism is explicitly buying into the moral and political framework of a story, rather than viewing the story through your *own* moral framework and synthesizing it in a meaningful way. It limits analysis to playing by the rules that these $300 million blockbusters want you to play by.
For example, the idea that Captain America as presented in the MCU (or any character in big, colourful PG rated popcorn flick for that matter) is a new, revolutionary, un-problematic kind of hero is how we saw so many people unblinkingly and uncritically swallow ‘The Winter Soldier’ as some politically rebellious masterstroke of leftist defiance when it was actually a very careful, very safe, very neoliberal script that took tepid aim at something everyone agrees is bad (the Patriot Act) without offering any substantial commentary or praxis and while *still* stroking off American exceptionalism and perpetuating the inherently reactionary message of superhero vigilantism.
That’s my take at least. So why should I accept that people who like Steve Rogers are “better” and “more moral” than people who like [hot villain of the week], when I think that the entire thematic foundation of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is suspect and against my personal politics?
I’m not saying ‘The Winter Soldier’ is bad and you’re bad for liking it, I’m saying that I think the conversation we had about it as a culture was exactly the conversation Disney wanted us to have about it. The idea that these are “important” statements, that these black & white, a-thematic stories told in broad strokes across multi-million dollar canvasses are meaningful moral constructs is what Disney and similar companies want you to think. Literally NO ONE needs to be *told* who the Good Guys are and who the Bad Guys are in a PG rated mainstream franchise.
You can, and should, glean real life context and messages from even simplistic narratives, but that kind of analysis needs to be applied outside the Good Guy/Bad Guy paradigm of the text itself. Yeah, sure, there’s something to be said about Kylo Ren’s arc in light of how young men are being radicalized by extremist movements targeting their loneliness and emotional instability, but that interpretation existing doesnt mean that people who like him better than the heroes are stupid. They aren’t being tricked or duped, they aren’t morally suspect and they aren’t committing an act of irresponsible text misinterpretation on the level of, say, not realizing that Humbert Humbert is a monster.
Not all fiction is a morality tale, and not all fiction SHOULD be a morality tale and not all people should be obligated to react to morality tales the way the morality tale wants to be reacted to 100% of the time. Treating
morality tales as these earth-shattering, profound commentaries that must be obeyed absolutely and drawing lines regarding personal integrity based on whether people like Good Space Wizards or Evil Space Wizards is creating a critical atmosphere in which the “good” being presented to us isn’t being questioned at all.
And that, imo, is way, waaaay more alarming than people on the internet writing ship fics about Kylo Ren’s big wibbly lips.
You can’t be Vanatru and be a TERF.
Freyr doesn’t like it when you disrespect his priests.
Excluding trans people is not being true to the Vanir.
^This.
The Fifth Element totally predicted the rise of vloggers and social media stars.
Yet another installment in humans being fuckin weird compared to aliens: humans give blood, organs, and tissue to each other, because our race is built around being able to function under as much stress as possible.
So of course, what do we do when another human will die without something we could live without?
We go to our local hospital and undergo trauma to provide them with it, for no compensation.Sure you might need to eat and drink more, take antibiotics or anti rejection drugs, but hey!
B’ril over there had to wait until HIS race figured out stem cells and lab grown organs, because ALL their organs are vital, and losing a pint of fluid flat out kills them or sends them into shock.
“You… you lost… your toxin filters?”
“Well, we’ve got a few things that do that, but yeah, like… four of them?”
“….Four?”
“Well, counting tonsils.”
“You are… How are you alive, again?”
“You make it sound so weird. I still have two kidneys- One’s synthetic, the other was donated.”
“…….donated?”
“Yeah, my girlfriend was compatible.”
“Donated.”
“….Yeah? Like, we had the same blood type and everything, and she volunteered. What, you guys don’t do that? What do you do when someone needs a liver, or something?”
“We… clone one.”
“Okay, sure, but what did you do before cloning? You didn’t just like, give someone a piece?”
“….. we died? Wait, what do you mean, ‘give someone a piece’?”
“Well, our livers can grow back. You can give someone a piece of yours, and they can grow their own. You guys don’t do that?”
“,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,………..no.”
Oh, you get to make it weirder. You would have THREE kidneys. They usually leave the old ones in.
“I have three kidneys but only one of them works.”
“Oh, so like your planet’s branches of government?”
“Not at all. I said one of them works.”
drag ‘em
Artisan Scribbles 