When we’re talking about fandom purity culture and the fan police, there’s an issue I think fandom needs to deeply grapple with. Obviously, I wish the people doing the grappling, digging into the research and finding complex answers, were the same people who think it’s cool to call people sexual predators for writing short adults having sex with tall adults. But just as obviously, those people are absolutely unequipped to do it.
So I’ll say it: Anti culture imagines art to work very differently than it actually does, and has defined many things as harmful when they are not actually. I actually agree, personally, that authors have a responsibility not to glorify or encourage child sexual abuse or domestic violence, and I would support reasonable methods aimed at discouraging the creation of artworks that do that.
However, in the first place, their proposed methods are ineffective and harmful, but that is outside the scope of this post. In the second place, the artwork that they think “encourages” those harmful things quite frequently doesn’t, actually.
1. Art and fiction is a very ineffective way to influence people’s behaviour. As an artist, I’d like to think the things I write are Changing Peoples’ Lives–but even at its greatest, I have to admit that the science says my reach is rather more limited. Like, to boil down everything I’ve read from the field of Media Psychology research, media, art, and fiction:
influence people’s emotions, observably;
Influence their attitudes about things, to some degree, but not in ways you’d always expect
Influences their behaviour, very little.
For example, I think we can all agree that many video games glorify and encourage violence: They’re specifically designed to make you pretend to injure and kill people and think it’s a really fun cool acceptable way to pass the time. But the research, after decades of desperately trying to prove that video games cause violence, shows that people who play video games are only a tiny bit more violent than those who do not.
The causes of behaviour, or misbehaviour, are much deeper than what somebody reads or watches or plays.
(Does anyone want to dig into media psychology more? I found an entire book chapter online!)
2. How art and fiction affect people varies A LOT from person to person.
Pretty much all fan police crusades are based on the assumption that artwork can be objectively assessed. Work A glorifies abuse; Work B does not. Then, if Work A glorifies abuse, and somebody likes it, they must support abuse.
It’s said all the time. “This is just objectively disgusting.”
I… look. I’m going to try to spare you guys just how tedious and jargon-filled the field of “Perception in Art” is. I’ll try to say this another way.
In psychology, we have this thing called the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). It’s a set of drawings of real people in ambiguous situations, for example, an old woman looking out a window with her back turned to a young man holding a hat. People are shown a card, and then asked to tell a story about what they think is going on in that picture.
Two things you need to know about the TAT:
1. It’s a projective test, which means the answers people give say way more about them–their upbringing, experience, emotional state, and perspective on the world–than the objective reality of the card. It relies on the fact that people will interpret works of art a million different ways.
2. People’s responses to the TAT were so unpredictably different, and it was so difficult to interpret what the hell their response said about them, that it’s not even considered a valid test anymore, because the field of psychology has collectively thrown up its hands and decided that even people highly trained in interpreting human emotions were incapable of figuring out why the fuck people respond to art in different ways. (It’s still used sometimes, but more because it’s a fabulous conversation starter than for its diagnostic validity.)
If someone ran an experiment asking people to read certain fics about a subject and say whether or not that story “romanticized” or “glorified” that thing, I will bet you this year’s entire tax return that the variation in responses would be HUGE. There would be people absolutely sure it did, and some people absolutely sure it didn’t. And what’s more, those groups would both have a fair number of people with direct, personal experience of the thing it depicted.
Right now, in fandom, the perception of a work that’s accepted as “true” tends to be the person who shouts accusations loudest and is scariest to argue with. These people will often leverage social justice axioms about believing marginalized people to mean that they are the marginalized person who should be listened to, pay no attention to all the people who share their marginalization and disagree with them behind the curtain. That, or they cast anyone who disagrees with them in the worst light, by accusing them of “defending” the bad thing–the bad thing those people are usually trying to argue they don’t think the work actually promotes.
There’s a big discussion to be had, about what makes someone capable or qualified to judge a work of art–whether some interpretations of art are equally or more valid than others–about whose opinion should be listened to–about what should happen if they’re right.
But the first thing we need to do is stop accepting that just because one perception of a work of art is that it “glorifies” or “romanticizes” a thing, that is the actual objective unarguable truth about it.
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