De gustibus disclosure is not obligatory
Spotted on Twitter: someone alleging - can this even be true? I see various iterations of the idea that "if you wouldn't discuss your taste in pornography with your grandma/your boss/a stranger then what you're into is wrong." This is some bullshit.
Come ON. People judge other people about tastes much less high-risk than what they wank to and they are in no obligation to disclose them to anyone, particularly bosses, strangers, or their grandmother who may think they ought to be doing something more useful than whatever it is anyway.
Women getting smirked at in public for reading romances, in the days before e-readers meant they did not have the disclosing covers available for all to see. And indeed the whole cultural dissing of women's fiction, going back to the birth of the novel.
I had people at the tills in bookshops (general type bookshops, not the specialist ones) sometimes look at me weird and make comments when I was buying sff in the days of those gaudy covers.
People are judgey and like to jump on people for what they like, even an it harm none and gives them entirely innocent pleasure.
(An unwritten Clorinda episode: Lord D- fulminates about the pernicious and unGodly effect of Gothick novels, why, he happened to pick one up by chance just lately by A Lady Anonyma, and surely it could not really have been writ by a woman, let alone a lady... He is astonished to see these things in circulating libraries of quite the highest respectability, and will endeavour to bring the Vice Society to Do Something. The effect on the minds of the young must be extreme deleterious. How degraded must be the authors of such stuff -
Clorinda: *wafts fan, smiles enigmatickally*.
Lady D-: is glad she has discreetly concealed her novel collection under the covers of collected sermons of forgotten divines, at the suggestion of her sister Mrs Lucas.) This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2960494.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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