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alarajrogers · 2 days ago

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Writers Tell You What They Believe, Not Who They Are

I’ve been percolating this post in my head for a while.

I want to talk about the Neil Gaiman situation. How there are, apparently, people out there who are trying to declare that there’s evidence in his writing for what he turned out to be, who blame the fans who were taken advantage of or who still find the writing beautiful no matter what the man is. Those people are wrong. They point at previous examples of writers who showed their true colors like JK Rowling, but this is not that situation.

I’m going to contrast this to Rowling, and to Orson Scott Card, another writer many of us (particularly us older ones) loved before he turned out to be a shit. In fact, I’ll start with him.

But first, I’ll tell you: Writers do not tell you who they are. They tell you what they believe. Sometimes those match. Sometimes they do not.

I was a huge fan of Orson Scott Card, and read everything he wrote once upon a time, so I know he wrote kindly and sympathetically about gay men and boys. He didn’t give any of them love or a happy ending, but most Card characters don’t get love or a happy ending, so this was not notable. Thus it surprised many of us when he came out swinging against gay marriage, and some people viewed him as a hypocrite.

He wasn't.

Card’s work repeats a theme over and over: older men have to hurt children and young people, raise them harshly, crush their dreams, in order to save them, or the nation, or the world. Over and over again. It’s relevant that Card was abused by his father as a child, so we can certainly see how tempting this paradigm would be for him. These older men suffer, because they sympathize with the young ones. But it has to be done, for the sake of everyone.

Around the time he was campaigning against gay marriage, Card said, in a forum post that unfortunately appears to have been lost forever, that we can’t have gay marriage because men would naturally want to marry men. Men just understand better and are naturally simpatico with other men, and presumably the same is true for women. So if we had same-sex marriage, all the men would marry other men, and human reproduction would stop, and the species would die out.

Leaving aside what this implies about Card himself and what he was obviously not letting himself realize about himself, this means his opposition to same-sex marriage is exactly what he told us, in his books, over and over, that he would have to do, when he became an older man. Older men hurt young people to force them to conform to what society needs. If men being allowed to marry men could destroy the human race, of course it’s his job as an older man to prevent it, no matter how sympathetic he might be to gay people’s desire to love each other. They have to suck it up and endure heterosexual marriage, like he has to, and like he assumes most married men have to, or humanity dies.

He's wrong, and his belief is honestly kind of repulsive because it means he assumes every man who says he loves his wife is kinda lying, or at least, made himself believe it. But he’s not a hypocrite. He told us what he believes, and it matches what he does.

Now, JK Rowling. I was an adult when Harry Potter came out, so I was never a huge fan of Rowling. I’d already read better fantasy, for children, by female authors, from England… Seriously, Rowling is kind of mid when compared to other fantasy writers for kids. But Harry Potter was pretty cool. I liked the fact that she presented us with an obvious villain, an absolute asshole, a cruel teacher who bullies the kids, plainly in league with the main villain… and then made him turn out to be a hero. Someone who, the whole time, was sacrificing himself to keep everyone, including Harry himself, safe. And who was, nonetheless, still an asshole. I liked that. “You don’t have to be a good person to do the right thing.” Sounded to me like a good message.

Rowling’s beliefs seemed pretty bog-standard white suburban liberal. Of course diversity is important, that’s why there are token members of several races. Fascism is bad, of course. The circumstances of your birth don’t matter nearly as much as what you make of your life. Child abuse is bad.

But there was stuff that people who were not raised as white suburban liberals kept pointing out. Like… Rowling doesn’t think it’s important to do enough research to have a real Chinese name for her one Chinese character. It’s not going to be a problem that Irish, Scottish and Welsh children – all oppressed by England once upon a time and in many cases still oppressed – are going to school in Scotland with English children; the only conflicts will be between houses. Slavery is of course bad, but have you considered that maybe some slaves want to be slaves and you should probably leave them to it? If a woman is sufficiently evil, it might be a good idea to arrange for her to be raped by centaurs. Women who look mannish are figures of fun and probably bad people. Fat people are bad. We do not at any point need to think about the question of, in general, what would wizards from oppressed Muggle families do if brought into the wizarding world and trained, because, well, that’s not worth thinking about.

Also, while Rowling might not consciously be an anti-Semite, she did come up with one of the most vicious collections of anti-Semitic tropes and applied them to her goblins, who are money-obsessed, bankers, have pointed noses and ears, and are not treated kindly by the narrative as non-human magical creatures the way Hagrid himself and any of his pets are.

Also, she gave us “Dumbledore is gay” in Word of God, but couldn’t be bothered to put it into the book that is heavily about Dumbledore’s past, which goes into detail about his close friendship with a fascist who despised the Muggle-born, where establishing that he loved Grindenwald would have made the whole relationship make more sense and make Dumbledore more sympathetic.

So… she ended up becoming a TERF. And this felt like a betrayal to those of us who saw in her beliefs the same liberal ideals we held. Except… she was never intersectional. She never told us she cared about minority humans. Her bad guys were fascists because they wanted to dominate the Muggles – a group that includes all of us, actually – and to purge “half-bloods” and Muggle-born, which, again, all of us are Muggle-born and we would be if we suddenly got that owl from Hogwarts. It’s real easy to hate fascists who want to put the boot on your neck specifically. She got a little bit into fantastic racism with the prejudices against Hagrid, but other races – like the goblins! – were just treated badly because that’s the way it is, and Harry never thinks to push back against obvious injustices unless they affect him and his friends.

She was always a bit skeeved out by “women who look like men”, and then the TERFs radicalized her and told her that trans women are a dire threat to cis women and that trans men are sad little girls who’ve been brainwashed to give up their womanhood, and she believed them because none of this contradicted anything she told us she believed. She very clearly told us in the books that she really didn’t care about anyone who wasn’t a white British human, and she has next to no consciousness of how the Irish, Scottish and Welsh actually perceive the British, and while the Weasleys are poor because they have way too many kids on a government worker’s salary, they have no class consciousness that stands in opposition to Harry’s, or anyone else’s. Rowling just doesn’t empathize with people who aren’t like her. So it wasn’t hard to get her to hate people who never did anything to her, because they were different enough that she could be convinced they were dangerous.

Neil Gaiman is not like that.

Like most good writers, Gaiman told us what he believed. And I think he was sincere in those beliefs. Even after he himself became a monster, I think he believed what he believed because those themes show up consistently in all his work, from the Sandman to his more recent works. And I’m going to point out the relevant ones, that seem to have an impact on this discussion.

We make our own hell with our guilt. Lucifer said so in A Season of Mists, despite it contradicting DC continuity and some stuff Gaiman himself did, such as Nala being condemned to hell by Morpheus. It is still consistent in most of his depictions of Hell. The angel Remiel is corrupted by being forced to punish sinners, but it’s the sinners’ own guilt that demands punishment, not a directive from God.

Desire is capricious and dangerous. Desire wants to destroy Dream for reasons we are never given. Alone of the Endless, Desire is never shown in a positive light. (Despair is, in places. Desire, never.)

Predators deserve to die or suffer a fate worse than death.

This is important to note. A lot of Gaiman’s villains don’t really suffer much of anything; their ability to do harm is removed, that’s it. Such as John Dee, who murders an entire diner full of innocent people. But predators and people who betray people who look up to them and trust them… they suffer.

In Sandman, Richard Madoc, a writer who can’t come up with ideas, catapults to fame when he takes the Muse Calliope as a sex slave, imprisoning her, dominating her, and repeatedly raping her. Morpheus punishes him by driving him mad, with a torrent of so many ideas he cannot express them all, and he ends up destroying his own fingers trying to write the ideas down on the wall in blood. This is a particularly horrifying fate for a writer, and a particularly horrifying fate for a writer to imagine.

Prince Franz Drago of Bohemia, in A Study In Emerald, is an eldritch abomination, as are all the royalty of Europe in this particular AU. He is brutally murdered by two of the most beloved characters in the canon of English-language literature. One of the two explains how Drago was lured to his death, in a way that the character (and the author) intend to justify the murder: he was promised a virgin girl, raised in a convent, who had never seen a man. The sight of Drago would have pitched her into “a perfect madness”, which Drago would have feasted on while raping her. For being the kind of entity who would want to do this, and probably has done it before, Drago was eviscerated. We are intended to sympathize with the murderers.

There are other examples, of people looking up to someone they respected, only to discover that person was lying, or betrayed them. These people are killed, or their plans are ruined. I’m not going to list every instance of that here. But this is a thing Gaiman believes, a theme that appears multiple times.

Gaiman also believes that we make our own hell. It wasn’t until I watched the Lucifer series, and had some experience with people who do awful things, many of whom have managed to twist things around in their head so they are the victims, that I thought: if you know what you’re doing is evil, why are you doing it? Many of the people I know who do terrible things simply don’t recognize that what they’re doing is bad. Like Rowling and Card, both of whom think they’re doing the right thing. They’re not going to punish themselves in Gaiman’s Hell. Maybe someone who murdered in a fit of rage, but not someone who thought of themselves as the victim, or as someone entitled to do what they did… which seems to be a lot of bad people.

And Gaiman believes that Desire is the cruelest of the Endless, and has nothing positive to say about them.

Gaiman told us what he believed, and we were calmed, and pleased, because we believed those things too. Trans women are women. All people deserve dignity. There is no one we have the right to look down on, and everyone has their own reasons for doing things, even evil people. Demonstrate empathy for all. This sounds like the beliefs of someone who is very, very safe. Like… a year ago I would have put Neil Gaiman on a list of “Least Likely To Have Problematic Skeletons In The Closet” creators, which just tells you, I pay too much attention to what writers believe when I think about what they do.

Because people don’t always do what they believe.

Sometimes they know what they’re doing is wrong. Sometimes it goes against everything they believe. And they feel hellish amounts of guilt for it. But they still choose to keep doing it. Maybe telling themselves they’re slaves to their own desire, that they cannot stop themselves. Maybe telling themselves it’s okay, fooling themselves that people they overpower with force of personality could have said no if they hadn’t wanted to. Gaiman at one point admitted to impostor syndrome. To not being able to quite grasp how successful he was, how people looked up to him. Maybe he was able to fool himself into thinking that if you pressure someone who looks up to you, who you have economic power over, into having sex, you’re not raping them because if they’d really fought back they could have stopped you. (Never mind that you had too much power over them and they were lulled by your public persona, sure you were safe, until you weren’t.)

Trust me, I am not here to praise Neil Gaiman, but to bury him. (And unlike Marc Antony in Shakespeare’s play, I sincerely mean that.) The fact that he knows better, that he believes people who are doing what he’s doing should die or suffer fates worse than death, that his writing strongly implies that he feels intense guilt over it… but he does it anyway.

Anybody got that gif of Chidi Anagoyne from The Good Place saying “But that’s worse. You get how that’s worse, right?”

No one could have read Gaiman’s work and thought, this is a sex predator into domination and rape. Because Gaiman has consistently condemned people who do that, in his writing. And his writing is all we knew about the man.

You know how you read some fanfic authors, and you can see their personal fetishes glaring out at you? You can’t do that with Neil Gaiman. He’s a better writer than that, and he’s good at hiding the things that turn him on, because he’s felt guilty about them from the beginning. He’s told us what he believes, not what he thinks is sexy.

He knows what he did is wrong. He feels guilt over it, or he did when he was writing Sandman and having fantasies, maybe. He knew it was wrong when he did it. And he did it anyway.

The only hint we could possibly have ever taken was that Gaiman thinks the people who do terrible things know it, and feel guilt over it, and demand to be punished for it when they get to Hell. When we see a world around us of people who feel no guilt whatsoever for the terrible things they do, maybe we should have questioned?... but it could have been the naivete of a young writer (young-ish, at least…) who genuinely wanted to believe the people who do terrible things feel guilt for it. I know I wanted to believe that, and I was horrified at how not true it turned out to be.

I hope he burns in the hell of guilt he’s made for himself. Because he told us what he believed, and we all believed it too. We forgot that a person can do things they believe are wrong.

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alarajrogers · 2 days ago

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Gen X started getting on the internet in our 20's; by the time we were 40 all of us were interacting with it one way or another. Some of us don't know jack, sure, but some of us are the tech support that helps out Millennials when they can't figure it out.

We were in our 20s and 30s in the early 00's when All Your Base, I Can Haz Cheezburger?, Longcat is Long, Ievan Polka played over an anime girl swinging a leek, and many other ancient memes were popularized. We're the ones who created those. Millennials were kids and I think we all know Boomers did not significantly contribute to Internet culture unless they were engineers.

It’s funny because it’s true

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alarajrogers · 2 days ago

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What keeps getting me about the water argument...

Look, water is neither created nor destroyed on this planet, not unless someone's doing hydrolysis or burning a hydrogen fuel cell. Water-based cooling systems either reuse the exact same water, or the water evaporates into the air and comes back down as rain somewhere.

I will agree that if you are on the West Coast, in the Southwest where it's pretty desert-y, the chances that the evaporating water will come down somewhere useful to humans is low enough that you should be using closed water systems. (On the East Coast it doesn't fucking matter because we have more water than we know what to do with. There are never water shortages on the East Coast. Also there is no desert.) But pretty much anywhere else in the US, either there is already so much water that it doesn't matter, or the water has nowhere to go except to rain on the desert or the prairie. Water that evaporates from a data center in Colorado on the eastern side of the Rockies will not go west. If it does, it will rain on the Rockies, which will then drain back down to Colorado, or somewhere else along the Rockies.

You cannot use up all the water on a planet 3/4ths water. What you can do is allow too much of it to escape to the ocean, where it is not drinkable by humans. But in places where clouds sweep in from the ocean and rain on the land, as long as the amount of water lost to the ocean is less than the amount it comes from the ocean and rains on the land, you cannot use up the water. So are there places that need to carefully regulate their water management to avoid water going out to sea and never coming back? Yeah, the southwest side of the Rockies. I don't know the weather patterns in the Gulf, so, maybe Texas has this issue too? But landlocked states and states east of the Rockies, this is not an issue. The water will evaporate and travel as a cloud to somewhere else that is also land, and rain there.

If you're not talking about the US, then yeah, I recommend you don't run data centers in the Sahara Desert, but most places on this planet where humans live are places where it rains enough that realistically, you cannot use up enough water to be a problem. And this will never be a problem if you used closed water systems, particularly if you used closed water systems that employ salt water. (which, since salt water freezes at a lower temperature than regular water, might be good for a cooling system that has to deal with fucktons of heat!)

Look. AI and all other things the Internet does uses up energy, and if you're not getting it from green sources, then yes. It's finite and it leaves dirty residue that is harmful to humans. Bitch about that if you have to. The sooner the whole Internet is on green energy, the better. And AI and everything else the Internet does relies on highly poisonous and often very rare metals that are used in making computers, and that's an issue that's going to get more and more important over time because Earth has a finite supply of those metals.

But water? You are bitching about water? The stuff that we drink and then it circulates through our veins and then we piss it out and it goes to the ocean and then clouds bring it back and rain it on us? That stuff? Are you imagining that we are pouring the Hoover Dam over a data center and it is disintegrating the water molecules, rendering them down not into oxygen and hydrogen but total non-existence, like maybe some random quarks floating around? Did you think using water to cool computers poisoned the water, or something? Pro tip: Don't pour water directly over computer parts where it can touch the heavy metals, because if you do, your computer will stop working. And then the water might get contaminated. But first it will break your computer.

On Earth, almost nothing we do with water ever actually destroys it. If we live in a place where it rarely rains, conserving the water that we need to live is important. So it should be illegal to have water bottling plants anywhere near desert or prairie areas. You wanna bottle the Great Lakes, feel free, but do not ship Montana water out to me on the East Coast where I can walk outside my house practically once a week and see water falling from the sky, just so I can enjoy it being refrigerated for me. Shipping water from low-water regions to high-water regions ought to be illegal. But when we talk about water cooling systems... that's not what's happening. The water either evaporates locally, or it doesn't go anywhere at all, or it gets dumped in a body of water. All of which are usually pretty unproblematic fates for water.

I think almost all of the environmental case against AI is factually incorrect fear mongering, or "misinformation"

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alarajrogers · 3 days ago

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Because so many people helped with my cat, I will signal boost this. I can't afford to help out myself, I am still unemployed.

hi yall I'd really hate to ask for help, but my puppy has a large bump/possible cyst on her chest and we unfortunately do not have enough funds to cover a vet visit so anything would help if you wanted to pitch in. Kofi link here

I want to make sure she is ok, especially after the dog attack she was in...

her name is kia btw 💜

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alarajrogers · 3 days ago

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#This was super cool!#Not really sure what was going on with the “leaving out young adolescent females”#but the recommended plan in response to it was 100% accurate

Sacrificing virgin girls to dragons.

This is a big enough part of socially known "dragon lore" that I assumed a society where dragons are real and are known to "kidnap humans" (ie, someone saw they have humans "imprisoned" in their lairs) would have this cultural belief. And since the dragons do take the girls, believing that the humans have abandoned the poor things and they need to be rescued and cared for, the practice persists.

Writeober 2020 #21: Dragon

How to Care For Your Pet Human

Congratulations! You’ve made the decision to adopt a human. Humans are excellent pets – intelligent, loyal, longer-lived than most other pet animals, and hypoallergenic, producing far less dander than the average mammal or bird. But they can be a challenging pet to care for as well. Here’s what you need to know to keep your human healthy and happy!

Committing To A Human

Like any pet, a human wants a forever home it can stay in for its entire life. Unlike most pets, a human can live for close to a century, if well cared for. It’s a big commitment! Make sure you’re ready for it.

Humans are incredibly intelligent, and if you do not provide sufficient enrichment, they will find it… one way or another. Everyone’s heard a story about a dragon who left their human alone in their lair, only to find the human gone after they returned. There are very few predators that are dangerous to a human, so if you don’t smell that another dragon has invaded your lair, and your human is missing… they found a way to escape whatever enclosure you had them in, and they may never return. Don’t let this happen to your human!

Humans are also incredibly social. If you’re not willing to take on more than one human, you must find a petsitter when you nap. The isolation of being alone while you’re asleep for a year or two may kill your human – and, of course, humans need food and fresh water every day, so you’ll need to make arrangements for them to be fed while you’re sleeping. We also recommend strongly that if you cannot care for more than one human, you frequently bring your human for play dates to a friend with a human, or a human rescue center.

Most breeders and rescue centers will be able to tell you if your human has the trait of “introversion.” Such humans are valuable and may cost significantly more, because introversion allows a human to be left alone for much, much longer than the average human. An introverted human can get all of their social interaction from you, as long as you provide enrichment for them to entertain themselves. You’ll still need a pet sitter when you sleep, but you don’t have to take them on frequent play dates. Other humans without the trait will be stressed by the lack of human companionship even if you interact with them frequently. We strongly recommend that in general, if your human is not introverted, they will be happiest with a human companion or two. Because they’re low-allergenic and they’re (for the most part) very clean animals, and because they enjoy socially sharing food, most dragons find that it’s easier to care for multiple humans than it is for just one!

Keep reading

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alarajrogers · 3 days ago

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They're so close to getting it. So, so close.

People's gender doesn't determine what they like. What they are exposed to, what their friends like, what their parents encourage them in, determines what they like. And all of those things are influenced by the gender the people around them think they are.

Someone who grew up exposed to computers and encouraged to find them fun and rewarded for tinkering with them may develop a lifelong love of computers, hardware, building, making. Discovering that they are in fact a woman will not change this. (I am referencing a real person I know, my brother's childhood best friend.) Loving motorcycles because you were taught about motorcycles and something about them really caught you won't change if you find that you are a woman. Meanwhile someone who was taught to knit and found a love for it won't change their opinion when they discover they're a man. Because it's all bullshit.

None of these things are gendered. In Russia and Iran, science and computing are normal professions for women. Neither is exactly a bastion of feminism. The Maasai traditionally believed that beautiful makeup was for men to decorate themselves with, to make themselves look more fierce and attract women. The Iroquois thought that it was the role of women to be in charge, and men should counsel them but only women should get a vote. NONE of this is gendered.

So yeah. Trans women love the same things cis men love, because they grew up surrounded by people who thought they were cis boys, who showed them stuff that our culture says "this is for men", and sometimes, those things caught their attention and they loved them. Trans men often love things cis women love, for the same reason. Also, some cis girls get exposed to this shit and love it, but society doesn't encourage that, so the numbers are a lot lower. And cis boys are actively taught, no, don't love that thing, it's for girls. A lot of trans women don't get a chance to explore makeup or pretty clothes until they've already figured out they're trans, but they were taught all about sports or computers or war games (or niche porn) when they were younger and everyone thought they were boys/men.

If there was a specific group of cis girls who were resistant to cultural messages about "you shouldn't enjoy that thing, it's for boys", and they had sympathetic families who exposed them to the kinds of things "boys" like, such as STEM, gaming, strategy, so on...

...you'd have autistic girls being much more likely to be GNC and into "boy" pursuits than allistic girls are.

Huh. Funny how that works out, isn't it.

men are biologically wired to enjoy paradox games

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alarajrogers · 4 days ago

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I'm an atheist, but I kinda half believe this. Except that, not being Jewish, I don't need to stick to one God, so in my view there is a committee. Overworked, over budget, over deadline, and with varying quality levels of their work. So evolution is driven by backward compatibility, and the stars and planets were probably done by someone who is very precise, and life gets worked on by fuzzier Gods, and one of them is super into beetles. The human eye is a masterwork of engineering and also so fucked up that we can see our own optic nerve sometimes. Bipedal humans have so many problems due to our bipedalism it's a miracle we work at all -- but bipedalism solved so many problems and enabled us to be near-unique in the animal kingdom. Bees are fucking amazing. Whoever came up with the wasp life cycle or Cordyceps doesn't have a lot of compassion.

I'm an atheist but also, I feel like G-d being a writer would resolve basically every atheist objection to the idea of god, from the actual philosophical arguments against the concept (the omnipotence paradox, the problem of evil, et c.), to the really specific yet also surface-level Bible nitpicks

"How was there a day-night cycle before there was a sun?" actually, when you're worldbuilding it can actually be a good idea to figure out things like your planet's rotation and orbit, or the atmospheric composition and the main surface liquid, and only then deal with the cosmic neighborhood so you can make sure you have a star that works well with all that (i mean, assuming you're worldbuilding the whole planet, there's nuances to this stuff)

This is not an actual view that I hold nor an actual interpretation of Genesis that I subscribe to but I do think it's philosophically satisfying and also kinda funny

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alarajrogers · 5 days ago

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"Stop normalizing pedophilia" isn't even right. Because we don't. Pedophilia is pretty much reviled everywhere, and so when people say not to normalize it, they are usually attacking something that has nothing to do with pedophilia. Such as women shaving their pubes, women who are very short being seen as desirable by men of normal height, or age gaps between adults.

Meanwhile actual eleven-year-olds who were gang raped were described by the entire town they lived in and the New York Times article that reported on it as "fast", "sexually active", "running around with guys", and so forth, while the literally 20 or so men who gang raped her were described as good men who were having their life ruined by this bitch. (She didn't even come forward. One of them recorded it and the recording got out of their little criminal circle and to someone who recognized it as a record of a child's rape and brought it to the police.)

What we actually need to do is stop normalizing rape. Or rather, stop abnormalizing it, in the sense that if we think of rapists as slavering psycho monsters who jump out of the bushes, we lose track of the fact that the vast majority of rapists are dudes with friends, whose families love them, many of whom actually have girlfriends that they don't rape. When a man who rapes an 11 year old is a good guy who made a mistake, and the 11 year old is a slut for "consenting" to sex with men (11 year olds can't consent, assholes), this isn't because we think pedophilia is fine. It's because we don't think it's pedophilia if we think the child should be treated as an adult. Happens a lot with children of color. Also, girls who have hit premature puberty and developed breasts and other secondary sexual characteristics too young.

It's more important to recognize: people you think are good men can commit rape, rape is terrible no matter who it's committed against, and all sex with children too young to consent is rape. Connect the dots. We hate pedophiles, but young men who raped an 11 year old were just going along with the crowd, innocent guys who made a mistake? There's a huge disconnect there.

Racism plays a really big part in it. Black children are more likely to be oversexualized and treated as adults long before they are adults. Misogyny is also part of it. If it's okay to pressure an adult woman into sex she doesn't want because there's a power dynamic in your favor, and we perceive a teenage (or preteen!) girl to be "an adult", then it's okay for adult men to pressure that girl too, because she didn't say no. Also, slut-shaming: treating women as if they've committed a crime because they had consensual sex also results in treating victims of rape as if they're the real criminals here.

There's no one easy answer here. We have plenty of safeguards against pedophilia. But they fall down in many actual cases of pedophilia because pedophilia is a term for "people we are disgusted by". If that's a charming, charismatic man, he's not a pedophile no matter how many teens he rapes, and if that's a person who has only ever had consensual sex but that consensual sex is weird and we don't like it, that's a pedophile. The term's come to be useless. (It also confuses pedophiles, people who are attracted to children, probably not by choice, with child molesters, who may be turned on by rape and don't really care the age of the person they do it to, and they do it to children because it's easier. This means that non-offending pedophiles who stay away from children and don't commit any crimes are lumped in with rapists who prey on children because children are easy to overpower.)

Fundamentally, we need to remember:

Children should have human rights and the right to say "no" to adults, to give them better ability to resist being assaulted (and also, happier lives in general)

But this still doesn't mean it's okay to have sex with them if they "consented", because the power dynamic is too large

That doesn't mean a relationship between a 19 year old and a 40 year old is necessarily nonconsensual

But it does sure mean that you should be asking the 40 year old what the hell they're thinking, because it looks pretty bad, and if you're a friend of the 19 year old, talk to them to make sure this is genuinely consensual

And in general, we should believe rape victims, at least to the same extent we believe people who say "that guy stole my bicycle" -- innocent until proven guilty, but that applies to the crime of lying to cops, also, so you kind of have to provisionally assume that they could well be telling the truth while not pre-judging the accused. There are in fact a lot of stranger rape cases where the accused is innocent and the victim was really raped, but is mis-recognizing the accused, and there's an actual rapist out there going free.

If you say "kill all pedophiles", you'll likely face zero opposition. And that's because pedophiles are so universally hated in our society that no one wants to associate with them at all, or even be perceived as associating with them.

But if you ask a bunch of women what age they were when they started being sexually harassed by grown men, you'll be shocked at how young they were. Even if you prepare yourself by saying "I bet they were very young, like in their preteens", many of them were even younger. And it often happens in situations where others easily witness it.

But how is that possible? In a society that has so much bloodlust for pedophiles, how is it possible for so many women to have multiple experiences being sexually harassed by pedophiles?

It's because "pedophile" is nothing more than a dogwhistle. "Pedophile" means "person I don't like". Those who say "kill all pedophiles" are actually saying "kill all people I don't like". That's why people who say "kill all pedophiles" jump through so many hoops in order to label oppressed people or those who defend oppressed people as pedophiles.

Instead of saying "kill all pedophiles", if you said "stop normalizing pedophilia", many people who were on board with killing will be angrily opposing that. And that's because they don't actually want to stop pedophilia. They only want to use pedophilia as a weapon against anyone they don't like. If pedophilia didn't exist, they wouldn't be able to weaponize it, so they want to make sure it continues to exist.

Also, if you replaced "pedophiles" with a pattern that pedophiles have (for example, "kill all people who want their partners to obey them" or "kill all people who take advantage of power imbalances"), many people will get defensive and see that as a terroristic threat. And that's because they realize that you're targeting them instead of just "those other people".

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alarajrogers · 5 days ago

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Ceaseless watcher you have got to check this out

Ceaseless watcher turn your gaze upon this fuckin thing

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alarajrogers · 5 days ago

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The real world effect is never caused by one piece of media.

Good representation is overall more powerful than bad representation. That is, you get a lot of bang for your buck by putting a black woman on the bridge of the Enterprise, and you don't hurt much by having Spock question whether a woman who was attacked by Evil Kirk might have really enjoyed it, because Spock's comment reflects an existing cultural belief that is not being challenged, and Uhura on the bridge is challenging cultural beliefs.

Nobody produces media that challenges cultural beliefs in a bad way. Because people in general don't respond well to that. If you create a piece of media that says that it's a good thing for white people to indiscriminately murder non-white people, most white people will be really uncomfortable with that and dislike that media. (There are white supremacist Christian pieces of media that work like this. Mostly no one watches them unless they already agree with the extreme ideology of the people who made it.)

So what we see in real life is: representation that does not make an argument against a mainstream cultural belief, and representation that does, and usually that argument is a positive one (ie, "people who don't get shown being heroes a lot should get to be heroes too"). Having a white male villain doesn't make an argument against the cultural belief that white men get to be heroes, because the actual cultural belief is that white men are important to the story.

Therefore, one piece of media that doesn't challenge the status quo is never going to be harmful. The harm is done by there being so many of them. And you're not going to get anywhere by yelling at people that they're being bad by not making a perfect piece of fiction. You get a lot farther praising people for doing it right than complaining they did it wrong.

Despite it being arguably the biggest discursive lightning rod of the last ten years, I feel like I still don't understand the causal mechanism of "bigoted portrayals in fiction lead to people being more bigoted in real life." I feel like it's taken as so obviously true that the idea of a 'causal mechanism' doesn't register with people.

I'll put the question to anyone reading this: have you ever known someone who watched/read/played something that's an internet punching bag for having retrograde portrayals of some group, and become more bigoted against that group as a result? To the extent that you think there's a provable cause-effect connection?

Because I think it never happens. Like, statistically, never. No one actually has stories like that. Compare that to "my friend joined a far-right group because they offered a sense of community and belonging" or "My uncle used to hate black people but then his daughter married a black guy and he got better rather than disown her". Things that actually effect real peoples' lives will blow any positive or negative effect from fiction out of the water. You at least occasionally hear people share stories like that.

Anyone who wants to reduce (or, uh, increase) bigotry should pour 100% of their energy into real-world positive-interaction-creation, and 0% into yelling at people who have Bad Media Tastes, the same way people who fear death should worry about car crashes more than being attacked and eaten by wolves. And I think on some level, everyone knows that, when you frame it this way.

I maybe have more to say here but I'll stop and wait for some feedback.

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