Rock and a Hard Place
Dear Fandom, I am Asian.
Such a strange thing to say, isn't it? How odd it is that the first, most crucial, bit of information I feel I need to convey to people with whom I have been amicably escaping for years into the pleasures of slash fanfiction, but who don't even know my real name, my gender, my sexual orientation, my favorite food... is my race.
A couple years ago, Lost in Translation came out and I spent a lot of time making people feel guilty for loving it. They loved it. They related to it. They found it pretty and thought-provoking. I found it offensive and objectifying, and was outraged (or "disappointed") in all the white folk who couldn't see that. Suddenly, in the last week, I have come to feel vaguely ashamed about that.
Fandom, like all the entertainment media we come together to worship, is a lot about escape. Only with fandom, we're escaping together. We're sharing. And, yes, a lot of us are sharing porn.
Some people find that offensive. Some people found that offensive enough to make it very difficult for certain fanartists to stick around here. That crushed a lot of joy, because it wasn't like taking a piece of entertainment and restricting access to it by rating it NC-17, it was taking a piece of entertainment and condemning it, and it's creators, as being wrong and disgusting and criminal.
Is it? Some people might find Snarry to be all of those things. Some people, victims of pedophilia or some sort of sexual abuse, might find it personally so. And heaven forbid some enthusiastic shipper decide to educate said person on why that situation is so right and hot and sexy and juicy and fun. Said person is probably-and justifiably-not going to enjoy consuming that product.
I often don't enjoy consuming entertainment which utilizes issues having intimately painful resonance for myself without the same delicate perspective. There's Lost in Translation and the classic novel Shogun at one end of the spectrum, and traumatic sexual violation at the other. Let's face it: there is a hell of a lot of rape (or "non con") fic out there, enough so that I accidentally encounter it on a greater scale than "chan" (though there are more warning labels put on the latter, because we have all agreed as a society that it has greater potential to be totally offensive to a whistle-blower). There is enough that I've gone from feeling sick after stumbling upon one to actually making it through couple. And I'm glad I did, because some were well written and had worthy content to offer.
I suppose rape is safer (than other, less universal issues) because we all generally assume that your average LiveJournal fandom peer is a female, and if nothing else we share the experience of being the "weaker sex" in a patriarchal society and maybe at one point felt scared of some guy following us down the street or violated when Joey from math class tried to cop a feel. ...That's great, actually. I'm going to allow Jane to tackle that subject because it exists and really I'd rather she not have to be subjected to the act in order to write about it. Hell, I'm going to allow John to write about it, too.
After all the bad-feeling caused by 6Apart's witch hunt, I was exhausted. I saw us banding together, but it was so full of anger and righteousness (which I felt, too!) and fear, that it didn't feel rewarding or good. It felt like work. As a minority (and, yes, that is a huge part of who I am and how I identify), who has been shocked or disappointed or out-right incensed by racial ignorance in the media and the people around me, I appreciate people taking steps away from that. But I honestly don't think making Rules on how to write "the other," not daring to write anything beyond one's personal experience, and most certainly ganging together for a witch hunt, is the way to solve any of our problems. If anything, it only makes the walls between us more impenetrable (which really should be impossible, considering how quickly this pot has been melting).
I didn't want to involve myself, and tend to avoid these "fandom wank" sort of things, but then someone on my flist posted for input on whether or not she should remove or f-lock a fanfic to prevent it from offending anyone in this heated climate.
And I realized: I have been a coward. I realized that it's my fault that fandom isn't quite as wonderful and free as it used to be. These days, when I look around for new fic, I encounter scores of restricted-access or deleted files. A lot of old favorites are gone, sometimes authors and entire archives disappear. This is, for a large part, because we are afraid.
We're already afraid of 6Apart and the government and the judgment of our coworkers and even discovery by our own family members. Let's not be afraid of each other. Because things are tough enough already, and fandom is an escape.
Such a strange thing to say, isn't it? How odd it is that the first, most crucial, bit of information I feel I need to convey to people with whom I have been amicably escaping for years into the pleasures of slash fanfiction, but who don't even know my real name, my gender, my sexual orientation, my favorite food... is my race.
A couple years ago, Lost in Translation came out and I spent a lot of time making people feel guilty for loving it. They loved it. They related to it. They found it pretty and thought-provoking. I found it offensive and objectifying, and was outraged (or "disappointed") in all the white folk who couldn't see that. Suddenly, in the last week, I have come to feel vaguely ashamed about that.
Fandom, like all the entertainment media we come together to worship, is a lot about escape. Only with fandom, we're escaping together. We're sharing. And, yes, a lot of us are sharing porn.
Some people find that offensive. Some people found that offensive enough to make it very difficult for certain fanartists to stick around here. That crushed a lot of joy, because it wasn't like taking a piece of entertainment and restricting access to it by rating it NC-17, it was taking a piece of entertainment and condemning it, and it's creators, as being wrong and disgusting and criminal.
Is it? Some people might find Snarry to be all of those things. Some people, victims of pedophilia or some sort of sexual abuse, might find it personally so. And heaven forbid some enthusiastic shipper decide to educate said person on why that situation is so right and hot and sexy and juicy and fun. Said person is probably-and justifiably-not going to enjoy consuming that product.
I often don't enjoy consuming entertainment which utilizes issues having intimately painful resonance for myself without the same delicate perspective. There's Lost in Translation and the classic novel Shogun at one end of the spectrum, and traumatic sexual violation at the other. Let's face it: there is a hell of a lot of rape (or "non con") fic out there, enough so that I accidentally encounter it on a greater scale than "chan" (though there are more warning labels put on the latter, because we have all agreed as a society that it has greater potential to be totally offensive to a whistle-blower). There is enough that I've gone from feeling sick after stumbling upon one to actually making it through couple. And I'm glad I did, because some were well written and had worthy content to offer.
I suppose rape is safer (than other, less universal issues) because we all generally assume that your average LiveJournal fandom peer is a female, and if nothing else we share the experience of being the "weaker sex" in a patriarchal society and maybe at one point felt scared of some guy following us down the street or violated when Joey from math class tried to cop a feel. ...That's great, actually. I'm going to allow Jane to tackle that subject because it exists and really I'd rather she not have to be subjected to the act in order to write about it. Hell, I'm going to allow John to write about it, too.
After all the bad-feeling caused by 6Apart's witch hunt, I was exhausted. I saw us banding together, but it was so full of anger and righteousness (which I felt, too!) and fear, that it didn't feel rewarding or good. It felt like work. As a minority (and, yes, that is a huge part of who I am and how I identify), who has been shocked or disappointed or out-right incensed by racial ignorance in the media and the people around me, I appreciate people taking steps away from that. But I honestly don't think making Rules on how to write "the other," not daring to write anything beyond one's personal experience, and most certainly ganging together for a witch hunt, is the way to solve any of our problems. If anything, it only makes the walls between us more impenetrable (which really should be impossible, considering how quickly this pot has been melting).
I didn't want to involve myself, and tend to avoid these "fandom wank" sort of things, but then someone on my flist posted for input on whether or not she should remove or f-lock a fanfic to prevent it from offending anyone in this heated climate.
And I realized: I have been a coward. I realized that it's my fault that fandom isn't quite as wonderful and free as it used to be. These days, when I look around for new fic, I encounter scores of restricted-access or deleted files. A lot of old favorites are gone, sometimes authors and entire archives disappear. This is, for a large part, because we are afraid.
We're already afraid of 6Apart and the government and the judgment of our coworkers and even discovery by our own family members. Let's not be afraid of each other. Because things are tough enough already, and fandom is an escape.