non-disabled h/c writers' priorities are always going to be different from disabled non-h/c writers' priorities
There are also disabled fans who read and write h/c, though, and I think it's important not to lose sight of that. Not because it makes h/c magically always okay because we have the disabled fen seal of approval, but because h/c writers aren't just writing for an able-bodied audience. We can't say "this is about our kink; it's not for you," because sometimes it is.
You're talking about the wider ethics of kink here as opposed to the specific circumstances of the hc_bingo challenge, but to bring it back to the challenge -- there are a couple people on my flist who eagerly wanted to participate in it but then didn't sign up because the content or wording of various prompts made them uncomfortable. So they weren't objecting to the kink itself, but to the specifics of the way the challenge was set up. I've only seen a few people actually object to existance of a h/c kink in general.
There are also disabled fans who read and write h/c, though, and I think it's important not to lose sight of that. Not because it makes h/c magically always okay because we have the disabled fen seal of approval, but because h/c writers aren't just writing for an able-bodied audience. We can't say "this is about our kink; it's not for you," because sometimes it is.
*nod* Which is why I dropped that in in the next line, and I didn't spend too much time on it because that wasn't the part of the discussion I was raising points against. What disabled h/c fans think of the whole thing is a whole other aspect of the debate, as you said, and one that I've seen a lot of intelligent writing on.
I was mostly responding to the fact that there have been some posts that seem to be pretty upset, offended, squicked, horrified, "hey, no way", about the fact that something like a disability of theirs is someone's kink. It seems demeaning and trivialising to them, because it feels like they're being reduced to a subset of themselves, and a subset
( ... )
And as this debate has apparently bled over even into Slacktivist, one of my regular haunts:
It's a lot like that fanfic where the author sent her protagonists to the killing fields of Cambodia so that they would have an exciting background as they fuck- the fact that you care more about seeing two hot guys screw than about genocide says something about you as a person, and pointing that out isn't meanspirited or unfair or an illegitimate extrapolation from your writing choices.
This is something of a different-if-related issue to h/c and disability specifically, but that implication, that it says something about you to inherently think this way, is something that I want to unpack
( ... )
(Which is also not to say that my hurt is the be-all and end-all, or more important than the hurt of other groups of people, or something. Nor do I expect anyone to feel particularly emotionally motivated over the fact that it exists. It's more just an explanation of "why care about this nitpicky detail?"
I think it's partly that I'm incapable of looking at a ship with a small hole in the hull and not going "but there's a hole in the hull", even if the people involved have decided to prioritise hauling water out and going full steam ahead to stopping and fixing the hole, because it'll ultimately get them where they need to go faster. It slows down the process of getting to an end goal, and I should probably feel bad for being nitpicky because of that. But I'm very much "what about the hole?" It's my mental structure and probably makes me unfit to participate in debates about progressive fandom ever, because the majority of the participants can get to whether they're going better without me, but I do because... hole.)
Everybody can be the target of a kink. You can never know that as we speak that there isn't somebody wanking off to you. Potentially somebody really gross and disturbing.
Yep. I'm sure people have, in the past. I'm fairly sure they were people I didn't like. It's skeevy-sounding, but I can do nothing about it and try not to think about it.
It's a compounded issue when society at large is already objectifying you, because a kink then stops being a politically and socially neutral thing to express. That's the trickiness of this whole issue, I think. There's no way to express or not express that isn't going to place a compromise on someone, and a compromise in some fairly crucial areas. The issue isn't really, as such, solvable. (But I think it is reducible, by warnings and thoughtful research and carefully wording things.)
It's one of the oddities of kink that it produces media on a subject X that might be virtually unreadable/unconsumable to actual members of X. Yeah. And I think that's because a lot of kink... is very objectifying
( ... )
And to be fair, every once in a while it produces something that is actually good and consumable. Like let's say Bound. Or male writers who actually write or create cool female characters. It can happen, unfortunately, the overwhelming majority is likely gonna be bad. Because the irony is that the target audience is different, the target audience is generally the author him/herself and people of a similar degree of cluelessness (or below).
And that's why I think hubhubs like this can be good just to remind people that there *is* another audience out there. The author might not want or be able to do anything about it, but it's sometimes good to remember that the world doesn't begin and end with oneself.
There are also disabled fans who read and write h/c, though, and I think it's important not to lose sight of that.
This reminds me of a story I heard about a badly-written, unrealistic rapefic that someone I knew read, and was about to mock as ignorant/insensitive-- and then they discovered that it was written by a person who was actually a rape victim. Which... changes one's perspective a bit to realise.
That anecdote is all secondhand, but it makes me wonder: is that person's way of dealing with it to write it as they envisioned it, ratcheted up ridiculous degrees, with impossible bits that felt possible written in? Were they coping via fic? Or do they, too, just get off on the same thing that many non-rape-victims do? You can never know what someone's going to be into based on what's happened in their lives. And you can never define for someone else how they should feel about their own life's traumas.
There are also disabled fans who read and write h/c, though, and I think it's important not to lose sight of that. Not because it makes h/c magically always okay because we have the disabled fen seal of approval, but because h/c writers aren't just writing for an able-bodied audience. We can't say "this is about our kink; it's not for you," because sometimes it is.
You're talking about the wider ethics of kink here as opposed to the specific circumstances of the hc_bingo challenge, but to bring it back to the challenge -- there are a couple people on my flist who eagerly wanted to participate in it but then didn't sign up because the content or wording of various prompts made them uncomfortable. So they weren't objecting to the kink itself, but to the specifics of the way the challenge was set up. I've only seen a few people actually object to existance of a h/c kink in general.
edited to add: Though, the general ( ... )
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*nod* Which is why I dropped that in in the next line, and I didn't spend too much time on it because that wasn't the part of the discussion I was raising points against. What disabled h/c fans think of the whole thing is a whole other aspect of the debate, as you said, and one that I've seen a lot of intelligent writing on.
I was mostly responding to the fact that there have been some posts that seem to be pretty upset, offended, squicked, horrified, "hey, no way", about the fact that something like a disability of theirs is someone's kink. It seems demeaning and trivialising to them, because it feels like they're being reduced to a subset of themselves, and a subset ( ... )
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It's a lot like that fanfic where the author sent her protagonists to the killing fields of Cambodia so that they would have an exciting background as they fuck- the fact that you care more about seeing two hot guys screw than about genocide says something about you as a person, and pointing that out isn't meanspirited or unfair or an illegitimate extrapolation from your writing choices.
This is something of a different-if-related issue to h/c and disability specifically, but that implication, that it says something about you to inherently think this way, is something that I want to unpack ( ... )
Reply
I think it's partly that I'm incapable of looking at a ship with a small hole in the hull and not going "but there's a hole in the hull", even if the people involved have decided to prioritise hauling water out and going full steam ahead to stopping and fixing the hole, because it'll ultimately get them where they need to go faster. It slows down the process of getting to an end goal, and I should probably feel bad for being nitpicky because of that. But I'm very much "what about the hole?" It's my mental structure and probably makes me unfit to participate in debates about progressive fandom ever, because the majority of the participants can get to whether they're going better without me, but I do because... hole.)
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Yep. I'm sure people have, in the past. I'm fairly sure they were people I didn't like. It's skeevy-sounding, but I can do nothing about it and try not to think about it.
It's a compounded issue when society at large is already objectifying you, because a kink then stops being a politically and socially neutral thing to express. That's the trickiness of this whole issue, I think. There's no way to express or not express that isn't going to place a compromise on someone, and a compromise in some fairly crucial areas. The issue isn't really, as such, solvable. (But I think it is reducible, by warnings and thoughtful research and carefully wording things.)
It's one of the oddities of kink that it produces media on a subject X that might be virtually unreadable/unconsumable to actual members of X. Yeah. And I think that's because a lot of kink... is very objectifying ( ... )
Reply
And that's why I think hubhubs like this can be good just to remind people that there *is* another audience out there. The author might not want or be able to do anything about it, but it's sometimes good to remember that the world doesn't begin and end with oneself.
Reply
This reminds me of a story I heard about a badly-written, unrealistic rapefic that someone I knew read, and was about to mock as ignorant/insensitive-- and then they discovered that it was written by a person who was actually a rape victim. Which... changes one's perspective a bit to realise.
That anecdote is all secondhand, but it makes me wonder: is that person's way of dealing with it to write it as they envisioned it, ratcheted up ridiculous degrees, with impossible bits that felt possible written in? Were they coping via fic? Or do they, too, just get off on the same thing that many non-rape-victims do? You can never know what someone's going to be into based on what's happened in their lives. And you can never define for someone else how they should feel about their own life's traumas.
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