too tired to write a proper coherent essay about this so here are some things iâve been thinking about in relation to this:
1) this is not the first time weâve been having this conversation in this particular form and i can trace the discourse about public morality and responsibility and the poor impressionable hysterical wimmens whose sensibilities are now excited and senses inflamed by consuming this lurid, pornographic literature all the way back to the discourse surrounding the advent of the novel as a form of writing. yes, those dry books by walter scott once inspired the same pearl clutching as an adult writing teens in romantic & sexual relationships (for some reason, always the fic writers, never the pro adult published authors who get targeted by this ire) do today. people are being neither revolutionary or thought-provoking when they revive this strain of discourse again. cis straight white men have been doing this to us for centuries.Â
2) this same discourse was repeated with the rise of the gothic romance which, okay, walpole may have kickstarted it, but eventually it became a genre for women and by women. iâll say a lot of the themes and concerns of the gothic romance are repeated in darkfic today, so its worth looking back at what was said to those women - what is still being said about this genre, without ever interrogating why someone might choose to write the stories in this form without reflecting on the authorsâ inferred personal morality and inherent âunfeministâ inferiority - and how, ultimately, it did nothing to actually change the pervasive social structure of the time but did plenty to remind us that women are inherently silly and stupid and full of unruly and awful desires.
3) the âall depictions must be pure and edifyingâ is a peculiarly Victorian strain of thought and is one of the reasons why, for the longest time, childrenâs lit was this bizarre genre in which children were saintly and suffered beautifully without complaint and were in the end rewarded for their adherence to christian virtues - while the naughty children obviously were frowned upon and went on to be inherently defective and awful till they became the criminals they were destined to be. thank god there were writers who decided to write a form of childrenâs stories that were ârealisticâ in that they were not moralistic handbooks designed to browbeat children into submission to the perfect Victorian ideal OR ELSE, but instead for children to read, relax and have fun and probably develop some ability to think critically for themselves and recognize when children in the stories were acting like asses without necessarily having it punished on-screen.Â
the idea that depiction = endorsement, which is so inherent to the negative discussions of darkfic, noncon, dubcon and even fucking unhealthy relationships (why would i want to write about it, you say? you donât understand? for that, see #4) is frankly ridiculous and i have no qualms calling it neo-victorian because it is, quite literally, about the aesthetics of morality - performative morality, instructional morality, predicated entirely on individual action and personal responsibility - rather than an actual discussion of ethics, of what it means to live in an inherently âsickâ society (a patriarchal society, a society in which we are hurt one way or the other either by people, by our social milieu, by our culture and by our media) and what actual structural social change would look like. it ainât healing or helping people, itâs just concerned with making sure we present ourselves properly OR ELSE (or else you are literal trash, you are the worst, you are not only an apologist, but you feed rape culture, you are a pedophile, you are the very thing that hurt you in the first place.)
4) PERSONAL TIME. when i was twelve i wrote my first short story and it was about a girl who was angry, lonely and hurting - so she destroyed everything. quite literally burnt it down. this was not good, did not glorify god and also worried my mother, so instead of sitting me down and asking me why i wrote this story this way, what was i trying to say, my mother rewrote that story for me. quite literally. in fact that whole story was jossed and what we wrote was a thinly plagiarized version of the story fly away home. why? because it was uplifting and hopeful.Â
this is what i mean by performative morality. antis donât seem to care about the actual whys and wherefores of any given fic so much as its existence, so much as the fact that it stridently exists on its own terms and is there, is glaringly messy and awful and not at all part of any of the âgoodâ narratives we tell ourselves about marginalized folk. this is the soul exposed (kind of) and presented for all to read. amazing! some people like thinking about the questions these awful things present. some people donât. thatâs, i think a far position to maintain.Â
what is awful is this demand that only ideologically pure and innocent stories get written and yet again, weâre forced to remember that these horrible bits of ourselves, the demons weâve been struggling to exorcise and the parts of us weâve been trying to excise, need to be hidden. this is not revolutionary or helpful. we canât talk about being vulnerable and open and radical love as healing process, healing as a social process, if weâre going to insist we only do this the stiff upper lip way and keep all those horrid horrid things out of sight, smile and wave boys everythingâs all right. the story you find personally offensive might be the story which clarifies something for someone else - and might even give them someone to reach out to.Â
5) to resume the problem of depiction = endorsement - i resent the idea that somehow teens are going to be so naive that they canât be critical of what they read and therefore, that things canât be written that arenât 100% pure. its actually really fucking patronizing to assume that their mental faculties are so underdeveloped that they canât draw the line between a fantasy, or the exploration of a taboo subject in an artistic medium & what can be endorsed and explored irl. chances are the average teen is going to be exposed to far more worse stuff by just studying lit in their schools - shakespeare, for example, really doesnât demur or shy away from serious adult themes, and i think at some point everyone learns yeatsâ poem about leda and the swan which is well, a rape story in essence - and anyone who has the remotest interest in mythology will have had to grapple with the complex morality of the greeks. give the average fourteen year old credit; most of âem come into work of fiction with the implicit assumption âdo not try this in real lifeâ. most of âem will also walk away with a great deal more awareness of what a socially ill world looks like than if they hadnât read it (i know i understood what the patriarchy looks like much more by reading plays like Ion and Medea when i was 14 than if iâd gone âoh ion is a problematic story best not read itâ. it is problematic. thatâs how i learnt to be leery of male characters and male writers and patriarchal societies.)Â
6) iâm much more worried about books that present themselves as good and non-problematic romances than i am darkfic or fic in general, which iâve generally observed is usually rigorously tagged for and covered with the appropriate disclaimers (and somehow, like one of the commenters mentions, its always these labelled fics that attract attention rather than the ones which are labelled as something else and have their own problems - which again, performative morality; its easier to go after a visible target than a non-obvious and insidious one).Â
in fact iâd much rather have critical discussions about what is âromanticizationâ and what constitutes rape culture in fiction - why is something âbadâ, in what ways does a text fail to convey what the author was trying to say and why - so that we can think critically about its tropes and forms and presentations, than these ongoing blanket statements that âx person is romanticizing abuse because they wrote a particular pairing/trope/whateverâ. did you read the fic? did you understand what they were doing with it? did you actually engage with the work at all? do people really park their brains so much while reading they canât delineate the difference between fiction and reality? teenagers read a lot more heavy stuff in school as part of their literary curriculum, i promise you - and incidentally, its this same argument thatâs led to the banning of books like Brave New World in some curricula, because of their ânegativeâ themes. ironic, because i canât think of a book that teaches criticality and awareness than Brave New World.Â
7) i mention it earlier but its worth reiterating again: darkfic is almost always tagged. this means there are trigger warnings all over this shit. thereâs something going spectacularly wrong if even the sight of a trigger warning is enough to set people off, or is supposedly creating an atmosphere of hurt or an unsafe space. there are tools and technology to keep this shit out of your sight. if someone ainât tagging, ask them to tag - if they refuse, unfollow, walk away from them (in fact give them a wide wide berth in general imho). but like, what is the point of a fucking witch hunt because of the existence of these tags? unless, of course, what weâre aiming for is to purge this heresy so we can only do rightthink and rightthought all the time, even in a society that is more or less hell-bent on fucking us up right from birth?Â
8) way too many fanwriter friends have privately confessed to me that a) the current atmosphere makes them literally terrified of writing anything that explores anything dark or vaguely problematic because theyâre afraid someone is going to misread exploration for endorsement (and lbr, it only takes that one match for the smear campaign to get going) and b) that they are actually afraid to talk to other fannish friends about the things they want to explore because they have no idea how those friends are going to react and whether or not they will end up being the Next Big Wank and callout. this isnât healthy. this isnât a healthy state for a community to be in at all. fannish creators can only control responses to their works so far - the original definition of death of the author declares that the reader fills in a lot of the gaps with their own social milieu and their own ideas. you literally cannot be expected to create a work that everyone will understand 100% because surprise! no one comes from the same background or the same worldview and no one responds to a work in exactly the same way, in exactly the way the author intended.
like, we have got to abandon this idea that thereâs something like ideologically pure and perfect sex because there isnât or the fact of wanting to write about bad or problematic sex being enjoyable being bad because it isnât. humans are weird. brains are weird. fantasies are weird. none of this necessarily makes people bad, least of all when they know theyâre never going to act on it. Â
look, its not healthy at all for us to have been pushed to the point to have designated friends who will âgetâ this shit and not write up a callout post for us, or who will not bring this up if ever the friendship dissolves or a grudge is formed for whatever reason - and friends who are ânot safe but enjoyableâ. and iâll go one further and say: iâm actually really fucking tired of doing the whole performative âi know i am garbage but consider thisâ bullshit, because i would like to launch straight to âhere is some porn, enjoyâ or conversely, âhere is some pain, enjoyâ. it is psychologically taxing and its infuriating because fandom is meant to be a form of relaxation, in which we bond over the things we love. anon hate and callout posts and doxxing are not revolutionary praxis and at least two of those have highly dubious origins in the SJ sphere (thatâs another discussion to be had).
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