strikethorughing back
My response to the strikethrough is not unmixed.
[ETA: Un-locked, but I'm not interested in wide linkage.]
[ETA: re-flocked. Just not comfortable with it out there.]
[ETA: Un-locked again. This is getting stupid.]
As some of you who know me are already aware, I was abused by an authority figure as a child. It went on for at least four years, and he made damn sure I liked it, and that I wanted to come back.
I once gave what I thought was the ultimate summary of my response to adult-child sex, even in fiction, and particularly in HP:
In an entry from a year ago I wrote:
In response to my comment, "I have a strong desire to punch anyone who squeals in glee over a story about a teacher seducing an 11 year old," marksykins wrote You wanting to punch someone you don't know over them liking something fictional baffles me... And I summarized for her what that squee means to me:"Oh, neat! Sexual initiation of an adolescent boy by an authority figure, setting him up for an adulthood of promiscuity, self-loathing, and overcompensating arrogance. That is so hot!"
And now, I retire the hobby horse. Whenever I want to make the same damn point, I'll just reference this entry.
I guess the hobby horse wanted one last strut around the ring. The source of the "promiscuity, self-loathing, and overcompensating arrogance" reference was not just my experience, but scholarly literature. Therapists find common behavior patterns in people abused as children, and as uncommon as I like to think I am, I fit the common mold.
In the past, I've asked people to please be sensitive to the issue that for kids in the same position I was in, finding something that normalizes it, perhaps paints it as positive, may not be a Good Thing. I managed to get myself out of the situation, but it took years, and if a voice other than the abuser's had been telling me that it was okay, then I might not have put a stop to it. In Slashdot's story on the LiveJournal deletions, someone noted the flip side, more looking at it from the potential abuser's PoV in a comment excerpted below: Internet is a great place if you're looking to confirm your "normality". Between a few billion people, there's almost always someone that's just as oddball as yourself. So if you start out looking to confirm that lots of people have incestrous fantasies, you'll find it. And while there, you'll find sutble hints that people have real-world experiences. And if you want to believe it, you'll "find" that lots of people do it and so could you.
I understand bone-deep the difference between fantasy and reality, and that people can get off on the idea of things they'd never do, or that they use fictional depictions of abusive situations to explore human psychology, or to purge their own demons. True pedophiles act wherever they can, and a real kid at hand is worth a dozen in the pixels. The point here is that I don't believe Harry Potter fanfic inherently empowers abusers, or disempowers the victims. I don't believe it should be banned or censored. But I wish, like on a star or a coin in the fountain, that the writers would post it in 18+ forums.
Because if back then, when on at least a weekly basis from the age of ten I had sex with in authority figure, if back then I'd found some of the stories I've seen in HP fandom that painted the child as the seducer, the relationship as positive? I might not have extracted myself.
To the outside world, fandom can look pretty whacked out. Your average person thinks it's weird to write stories about characters from TV shows to begin with, but to add them having sex, or introducing homosexual relationships, adds to the whack factor. Fantasy football leagues look just as weird to me, but I've had flashes in these last five months in my year of no fanfic writing of just how whacked fandom looks like from the outside.
I looked at comic writer Warren Ellis's response to this, and found an automagically generated link to kalichan's response to his post and to the whole strikethrough, which you should read if you've been thinking about this. The creator of Transmetropolitan's Spider Jerusalem (a Hunter Thompson like character in the future) made fun of fandom in the following way (quoted many places): The outcome, therefore, has been pure comedy, with comments that read very much like “I love spending all day reading about forced underage incestuous sex with squirrel fisting on top, but of course I’m not interested in that in real life -- that’d make me a pervert!”... Elsewhere Ellis says, Personally? I have an eleven year old daughter. I’m with Warriors For Innocence on this.
I wonder whether he lets his daughter read his work, because if she did, and she thought her father was Spider Jerusalem, down to the toilet bomb? He'd be the first to say that what he writes isn't what he is. And if it is what he is, Spider Jerusalem would laugh at the whacked out fans, find cutting and original ways to say, "Get a life," and then defend their right to write whatever the hell they want while reminding them that they don't own LiveJournal's servers, and the company can do whatever the fuck it wants with its own disk space.
So, as I said at the beginning of this, my response to the strikethrough is not unmixed.
[ETA: Un-locked, but I'm not interested in wide linkage.]
[ETA: re-flocked. Just not comfortable with it out there.]
[ETA: Un-locked again. This is getting stupid.]
As some of you who know me are already aware, I was abused by an authority figure as a child. It went on for at least four years, and he made damn sure I liked it, and that I wanted to come back.
I once gave what I thought was the ultimate summary of my response to adult-child sex, even in fiction, and particularly in HP:
In an entry from a year ago I wrote:
In response to my comment, "I have a strong desire to punch anyone who squeals in glee over a story about a teacher seducing an 11 year old," marksykins wrote You wanting to punch someone you don't know over them liking something fictional baffles me... And I summarized for her what that squee means to me:"Oh, neat! Sexual initiation of an adolescent boy by an authority figure, setting him up for an adulthood of promiscuity, self-loathing, and overcompensating arrogance. That is so hot!"
And now, I retire the hobby horse. Whenever I want to make the same damn point, I'll just reference this entry.
I guess the hobby horse wanted one last strut around the ring. The source of the "promiscuity, self-loathing, and overcompensating arrogance" reference was not just my experience, but scholarly literature. Therapists find common behavior patterns in people abused as children, and as uncommon as I like to think I am, I fit the common mold.
In the past, I've asked people to please be sensitive to the issue that for kids in the same position I was in, finding something that normalizes it, perhaps paints it as positive, may not be a Good Thing. I managed to get myself out of the situation, but it took years, and if a voice other than the abuser's had been telling me that it was okay, then I might not have put a stop to it. In Slashdot's story on the LiveJournal deletions, someone noted the flip side, more looking at it from the potential abuser's PoV in a comment excerpted below: Internet is a great place if you're looking to confirm your "normality". Between a few billion people, there's almost always someone that's just as oddball as yourself. So if you start out looking to confirm that lots of people have incestrous fantasies, you'll find it. And while there, you'll find sutble hints that people have real-world experiences. And if you want to believe it, you'll "find" that lots of people do it and so could you.
I understand bone-deep the difference between fantasy and reality, and that people can get off on the idea of things they'd never do, or that they use fictional depictions of abusive situations to explore human psychology, or to purge their own demons. True pedophiles act wherever they can, and a real kid at hand is worth a dozen in the pixels. The point here is that I don't believe Harry Potter fanfic inherently empowers abusers, or disempowers the victims. I don't believe it should be banned or censored. But I wish, like on a star or a coin in the fountain, that the writers would post it in 18+ forums.
Because if back then, when on at least a weekly basis from the age of ten I had sex with in authority figure, if back then I'd found some of the stories I've seen in HP fandom that painted the child as the seducer, the relationship as positive? I might not have extracted myself.
To the outside world, fandom can look pretty whacked out. Your average person thinks it's weird to write stories about characters from TV shows to begin with, but to add them having sex, or introducing homosexual relationships, adds to the whack factor. Fantasy football leagues look just as weird to me, but I've had flashes in these last five months in my year of no fanfic writing of just how whacked fandom looks like from the outside.
I looked at comic writer Warren Ellis's response to this, and found an automagically generated link to kalichan's response to his post and to the whole strikethrough, which you should read if you've been thinking about this. The creator of Transmetropolitan's Spider Jerusalem (a Hunter Thompson like character in the future) made fun of fandom in the following way (quoted many places): The outcome, therefore, has been pure comedy, with comments that read very much like “I love spending all day reading about forced underage incestuous sex with squirrel fisting on top, but of course I’m not interested in that in real life -- that’d make me a pervert!”... Elsewhere Ellis says, Personally? I have an eleven year old daughter. I’m with Warriors For Innocence on this.
I wonder whether he lets his daughter read his work, because if she did, and she thought her father was Spider Jerusalem, down to the toilet bomb? He'd be the first to say that what he writes isn't what he is. And if it is what he is, Spider Jerusalem would laugh at the whacked out fans, find cutting and original ways to say, "Get a life," and then defend their right to write whatever the hell they want while reminding them that they don't own LiveJournal's servers, and the company can do whatever the fuck it wants with its own disk space.
So, as I said at the beginning of this, my response to the strikethrough is not unmixed.