all things are not equal

cephiedvariable:

Okay one more thought about the whole “anti” culture & fanfic purity crusade thing before I go back to focusing on more positive things.

SO the difference between the porn produced in female-dominated fandom and the porn produced by the mainstream porn industry for the consumption of cis hetero men (ie: why m/m slash is not the same as lesbian porn) is an issue of objectification vs. identification. In mainstream heterosexual porn, the focus is on the woman as consumable object for the sexual gratification of the consumer. The women are often dehumanized, degraded in order to be an empty receptacle for the desires of the person watching the porn. In fandom porn, the focus is on self-identification with one or both characters in a pairing. There is a great deal of empathy and humanization in the story – you’re meant to care about the characters who are fucking, and to relate to at least one of them. I’m obviously not going to excuse the latent homophobia that sometimes rears it’s head in the predominantly straight parts of slash fandom, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s still not comparable to mainstream lesbian porn because it comes from a very different place (investment in and love of the characters vs. dehumanized objectification), serves a different function
and, oh, also THE PRODUCTION OF IT DOESN’T FEATURE OR HARM REAL LIFE PEOPLE WHO ARE REAL AND EXIST.

As much as I’m getting into tricky territory here, I honestly think this distinction applies to dub/non-con fic as well because, unlike mainstream/gonzo porn that is blatantly designed to look like rape (while claiming to be technically consensual), fic of this nature is 99% of the time dependent on the reader having empathy for the victim, identifying with the victim. The argument that the current fandom purity movement is probably (at least subconsciously) fueled by misogyny is not trying to claim that women should have a “get out of jail” free card on their behaviour, it’s a call to examine the fact that fandom is a space primarily composed of people – women and LGBT people – who are the most common the victims of sexual violence. Women and queer people live in a different social paradigm when it comes to this kind of stuff than cis heterosexual men do and fandom is one of the few places where you can see people’s internalized thoughts and feelings on that truly unshackled. Which isn’t to say that the kind of people who flock to fandom cannot be abusers – they absolutely can be; what I’m saying is that people who live with the threat or reality of sexual violence and the normalization of that by mainstream media as an inexorable element of their lives are probably going to be drawn to the exploration of sexual violence in fiction for completely different reasons than the kind of people who watch brutal gonzo pornography.

The current discourse in fandom is not an attempt at starting a conversation about this. It might be good for a lot of people to be able to have a conversation about this in a public forum. The current discourse in fandom is a concentrated campaign of shutting the entire thing down. It’s a shaming movement that uses the abominable tactic of telling women and young queer people that they’re just as bad as their abusers, that they are in fact complicit in their own abuse and responsible for the abuse of others because of something they might have written or read about fictional people who do not exist. Additionally, it’s a patronizing attitude that assumes that while someone like George R. R. Martin or Brian Fueller can write about rape and incest and cannibalism and abuse all day with the understanding that it’s an exploration of transgressive topics for the sake of making a literary or deconstructive point and that people can watch these things understanding that it is only fiction, the moment this sort of stuff gets taken out of the mainstream and put into the hands of young women, all of a sudden the line between “depiction” and “endorsement” is completely erased and all us people in fandom are completely incapable of a) writing something that isn’t some sort of personal manifesto on what we think is correct behaviour b) understanding the difference between fiction and reality, text and intent. As I said in a previous post about this: if the only place you care about punching in these purity crusades is down or sideways, I question the sincerity of your convictions.