More Thoughts

[alixtii]

"femlash" : "slash" :: "microwave oven" : "oven"

*

Some people are having "the authorial responsibility discussion." Some people are having it intelligently, some foolishly, some civilized, some wankfully--such is the way of the world.

Long-time readers will remember me struggling with these very questions myself when I asked "Do texts speak with a moral voice?"

But the question can't be--or at least shouldn't be--about what is inherently objectionable. The issue is context. Who is reading? Who is being harmed? The last question requires a healthy dose of both theory--to understand how thoughts can lead to words can lead to deeds--and empiricism, to see how they are actually doing it. The same text in different contexts can serve radically different--often diametrically opposite--functions. Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel by socialist Eric Blair, has been reappropriated by the neo-conservatives. Hell, the New Testament has been basically reappropriated by evangelicals and conservatives. WTF?

It's not what is being written, in and of itself, which is at issue; it's what is being written in the context of how, and by whom, it is being read. (And who's writing, both individually and as a community.) What may be perfectly fine in the feminist utopia may be problematic in the here-now, and vice versa.

What other texts--and by texts I include practices, customs, behaviors--does the text in question connect with or resist? Sexual deviants, good and bad, do not have a broad network of structures already in place in our culture to facilitate their predation; sexists, racists, and heterosexists do. (Where rapists fall could be arguable--but again, noncon in a mainstream comic book is not going to have the same sociological effect as in a fanfic. It's just not. The values of the interpretative community are different, the readers are different, it just has a completely different function, and any quick and easy comparison between the two is absurd.) A story about incest is not going to function in the same way as a story about racism.

(Which is not to say that I don't come down firmly on the side of laissez-faire when writing what we want, when representing our fantasies. We have to work out our issues within the iconography which we have at hand, at that means at times writing things which may be sexist, racist, or heterosexist. But writing what we want is not the same as refusing to be critical of them after we've written them--the response to problematic speech is never supression, and always more speech.)

If you don't believe that patriarchal structures and systemic sexism (racism, heterosexism, etc.) are embedded in our society, then I'm sure that we feminists come off looking like self-righteous, wanton hypocrites, wanting a ridiculous double standard.

But then you come off looking willfully blind, so I suppose we're even.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/peasant_/]

If you don't believe that patriarchal structures and systemic sexism (racism, heterosexism, etc.) are embedded in our society, then I'm sure that we feminists come off looking like self-righteous, wanton hypocrites, wanting a ridiculous double standard.

But then you come off looking wilfully blind, so I suppose we're even.

Absolutely spot on. I recently got into a discussion that was rapidly turning into an argument with a feminist, and I eventually abandoned it for just the reasons you give - she was coming across as all the things you list (and also, perhaps most importantly to me - as wishing to impose her own standards on the rest of us) and I was finding it increasingly hard to hide my dislike for the personality that was revealing in her, and it became increasingly obvious that she was considering me as foolishly naive, and lacking in compassion to boot, and she was finding it just as hard to hide her dislike for what she was seeing in me.

I think that ultimately, where you stand on something like feminism comes down to a very fundamental matter of how you see the world and what your personal experience has taught you about how to interpret what you see - and those are matters so complex, so involved with our upbringings and hence unchangeable, that probably never the twain shall meet.

But oddly enough, people with two radically different views on the origins of the issue can still reach the same opinion by coming from opposite directions, because as it happens the feminist and I were both agreeing on something.

Such is the way of people :o)

[http://users.livejournal.com/peasant_/]

Er incidentally, I think I pretty much agree with your main point about morality only being relevant in context - nicely put.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

I totally agree with everything you say here.

[inalasahl]

That link to "Do texts speak with a moral voice?" is broken.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Whenever I try to link to a tag, I never seem to get it right. Grrrr.

Thank you!

[thelana.livejournal.com]

Whenever I have my feminism moral attack, it's usually all personal and never about teaching others. It just disturbs me when somebody female says that male characters are just more interesting and that female characters could just never be that interesting. Because I always think, as a woman, how can you believe that and not go crazy? It's not about not helping the evil patriarchy or educating other women into being good little feminists.

If I as a woman honestly believed that as a woman I could never be as interesting or cool or good as a man, why not just shoot myself since I can obviously never live up to the big standards? Do you really go through life thinking your are flawed because you were born a woman since only men have interesting stories? I love men, I'm attracted to them, I like reading about them. But I cringe every time somebody says women just couldn't be possible be interesting. Not for feministic reasons, because as a women, that kind of world would just be too depressing. Sounds too much like saying "Hey, women, your life might as well be useless because none of your stories will ever be worth telling because you just aren't interesting;".

I believe that men and women are equal as human beings. And that therefore that both have the potential to be interesting.

...And I believe I have hopelessly veered off topic here.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

...yes, perhaps you have. :)

There's a difference between "have the potential to be interesting" and "are interesting to me," of course. As a het male, it happens to be the case that I find reading about men not to be interesting. Not just in my pr0n--I just in general find it easier to identify with female characters and prefer reading about them. I'm just not that interesting about reading stories only about men.

But yes, that's a whole lot different than saying that men (or women) can never be interesting, to anybody.

I'm not equipped to say what women can or can't believe without going crazy, though.

[thelana.livejournal.com]

I've always been rather fascinated with how men write women and vice versa. It seems quite logical that we like thinking about the opposite sex and wondering what they are thinking. Not to mention the potential that we can see something, as an outsider, about the other side that they wouldn't have noticed on their own. Especially in movies I can think of a bunch that rather glorify women and/or bemoan their plight that were written by men.

Of course the other side to this is people complaining that the writing isn't too realistic, both when women write men and when men write women. Or that there are at least certain mistakes or shortcomings in description that happen a lot (blabla, the often cited Madonna/whore thing).

I think the certain female identity crisis is that there usually is more male written media out there and it's easier to see and emulate it. And while males do write powerful and popular women (Joss Whendon/Buffy comes to mind, JJ Abrahms/Felicity&Sydney), male writers also write a lot of male centered things (I'm thinking about the whole Dawson's Creek section of "growing up" stories).

Maybe it would be an interesting thing to study, females created by male writers, males created by male writers, females created by female writers and males created by female writers (JRK Rowling and Harry Potter comes to mind; seems at least to me that boys have no trouble identifying with him or liking him even though he is written by a woman).

I'm not equipped to say what women can or can't believe without going crazy, though.

I guess it boils down to the whole "women supposedly ore critical on other women than men" thing. Sometimes it just comes off as pretty self-hating.

[rez-lo.livejournal.com]

But writing what we want is not the same as refusing to be critical of them after we've written them--

Just, thank you. In fanfiction, it is hardly ever the content per se that makes me uncomfortable. It's the claims made by the community about the content, which are very often triumphalist or at least flat-sided, not fully explored. If we're going to theorize, surely we owe it to ourselves and each other to be inclusive about the work our storytelling does, both good and bad.

Thank you again for this elegant and incisive summing-up.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

If we're going to theorize, surely we owe it to ourselves and each other to be inclusive about the work our storytelling does, both good and bad.

I can't disagree.

Thank you for the compliments!

[alias_sqbr]

This is a very interesting post, but I'm tired, so will just say that I think the link you meant to post was
http://alixtii.livejournal.com/tag/moral+voices
(You forgot the "s") There's some more interesting ideas there, hate for other people to miss them :)

Here from metafandom, btw.

[vinnie-tesla.livejournal.com]

If you want to see a low point in the discussion, have a look at my deeply unsuccessful attempt to pose some relevant questions here (http://community.livejournal.com/writing_sex/62414.html).