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ark-of-eden · 7 years ago

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Thoughts on the Function of Art?

(R:) I didn't want to append this to that big thread about censorship, questionable story content, and authorial intent because I am a Small Person who just consumes things and I was pretty sure that I can't actually add anything useful to the discussion. But I'm still stuck on it a little, so here is a thing that I'm putting behind a readmore in case everyone is fucking tired of the whole censorship debate.

tl;dr: Riss is old and grew up in an environment that was not exactly info-rich when it came to controversial issues. Riss is clumsily attempting to tape this and that together for some reason, possibly just to get it out of the brain. (This ultimately turned into a long fucking story about my early life that doesn't really go anywhere. It's just a long fucking story.)(**ALERT: This includes discussions of stereotypes, slurs, and fetishization.)

People in that thread pointed out the weird over-reliance on interrogating an author about what exactly they meant by writing certain content and that authorial intent should be a yardstick for whether certain content is edifying (and deserving of existence) or not. Other people wisely pointed out that every consumer will inevitably interpret every creation through the lens of their own experience and come up with a different take on what the piece is "saying" about whatever it depicts.

Back when I was very young, there was no way to directly contact any sort of creator. Novels had small text somewhere that mentioned how to send snailmail to the author C/O the publishing company, but naturally there could be no expectation that an author would ever actually write you back. Direct contact with creators was usually in the context of them being guests at a con or signing or gallery showing, which was sort of like seeing a band play live. Every other exposure to them was one-way or indirect, through their work or news articles or possibly from hearing a radio interview or watching a TV program about them, if they were important enough. This was pre-widespread-Internet, so nobody had blogs; some big-name people had fanclubs that mailed out regular newsletters, but the vast majority of creators had nothing but their content in circulation.

I guess that the point of saying all of that is just to illustrate that the present-day situation in which creators have public social media accounts that one can just drop into and toss opinions and questions about intent at them is...kind of a luxury, in my experience? For writers of "classics," there might be printed articles or essays in which they went on about their intent or process, but for creators who weren't popular while they were alive, historians have to go mining for diaries or letters to even get an idea of what sort of person they were, much less what they meant when they wrote that one scene from that one novel that was Kind Of Problematic.

And that was a tangent leading around to a perspective about creative work in general that I heard very early on and took to heart when it came to consuming media. I read somewhere that the point of creating something was to produce a response or emotion in the consumer. Any response. The creation was meant to be a catalyst for newness or change in the viewer, even if the response was something like anger, fear, or disgust. The worst possible response to a creation was dull indifference, because it had failed to do anything at all to the consumer.

I saw supporting evidence for this perspective in a lot of media. Bands built up weird, elaborate Aesthetics purely to draw attention to their songs, not because they were demonstrating some deeply-held belief system. (I've lost track of how many CDs I saw from bands who made dark music about cruelty, despair, and the emptiness of the universe and yet, in tiny liner-note text, poured out flowery squee about how they thanked the loving Lord God and Jesus Christ for blessing them with their musical careers.) Artists who talked to other artists about their craft admitted that they often made the art they did just because they wanted to make it for no special reason, but they fabricated deep-sounding bullshit to attach to it so that collectors would buy the thing just for the story that went with it.

A piece that kept getting talked about over and over back then was Piss Christ, which was literally a large glass jar full of urine that had a crucifix floating in it. Large sections of society were fucking outraged that this thing even existed, that galleries dared to let it darken their doorways, that the artist was even depraved enough to think up such a thing. I don't recall what the artist herself (I think it was a she) said about why she made it, but what was clear to me was that she had succeeded at the goal of art like an absolute champion. Nobody could look at that piece without having some kind of intense response, and whole groups of educated people were compelled to spill out their opinions and argue about it. Piss Christ was Successful Art, the thing that every piece of art wished that it could be. It didn't matter that most of the responses were negative. Apart from making it, the artist did nothing to encourage all the discussions prompted by the art's existence. People used it as a springboard for debates about What Is Art Really, the empty veneration of religious iconography, public obscenity, and all sorts of other things, entirely on their own.

Granted, there were clear downsides to not having instant access to people's creative narratives and backgrounds, or to the greater community of consumers. There were panels discussing themes in modern writing at cons and sometimes a nearby book club where people could rec things and talk about good and bad aspects to whatever they were reading, but if you weren't in a position to have either of those things? There wasn't a lot to do but chat with any reader buddies you might have or actually trust marketing. This book is a NYT Bestseller and has its own special display in Borders? Well, must be a well-written book with quality content, or else it wouldn't have that kind of backing, right? (I was such a trusting little idiot back then, seriously.) So this was when all those toxic norms of casual misogyny, racism, and queer villainization went unchallenged in a lot of places and was just The Way Things Are.

My family moved around to many parts of the US while I was young and I swear I never heard people anywhere bothering to have a discussion about the trend of weak female characters or how POC cultures kept getting reduced to exotic window dressing. There was a sense that those kinds of intellectual topics were the sort of thing that academics did in far-off Academic Country, where they only read classic literature and went over word-by-word symbolism with ever finer combs. I'm no quality literature historian, but I imagine that those kinds of thematic conversations probably got louder as widescale communication got easier, such that a person could throw out into the aether, "Is it just me, or is the only time when cultural elements from Asian, Middle Eastern, Native American, or African civilizations turn up in mainstream lit is when they need 'exotic savage foreigners'?" and people would be able to chorus back, "OMFG THANK YOU I thought I was the only one bothered by that!!" (I mean, advancements in communication helped every minority find other people like themselves, which is why the Internet is part of real life and a genuinely precious resource to isolated odd folk who are forced to live in places that are hostile to them. You no longer have to live your entire life being the only lonely freak instance of your kind in the entire universe.)

So I recognize the shitty situation of having mainstream marketers telling people which stories were good and which story elements were admirable without also having access to Discourse that would challenge those norms. I remember just accepting that girls would hardly ever be able to be heroes the way boys could be, and that people from far-away cultures were always primitive and backward but in fascinating ways. Nothing in my daily life countered anything that I read. Discussions that I found online much later in life caused me to rethink the trends in everything that I'd read as a kid and see it all with fresh eyes so that I could realign my opinions. It's vital to have discourse and challenge happening alongside creation so that we don't have generations of people absorbing shitty norms that are supported by fiction and not realizing that there are even alternative ways of seeing things.

But there's still that issue, in my mind, of a good creation being one that creates ripples far outside of itself by prompting any kind of response in the consumer. Which is, I guess, why it seems fine to me that Problematic things exist and that people encounter them even if they come away hating those things. The encounter with that thing can make a person think about their own perceptions and experiences, and it can prompt conversations about was learned from that encounter - the why of the result and what it means. Obviously, the same can be done with media that makes a person happy or comforted, and that ends up in Discourse because people end up comparing their experiences and questioning whether the people who are happy/comforted are correct to feel that way about the media.

(Bonus Tangent: it's never possible to be incorrectly upset/offended, only incorrectly happy, strangely. Because telling people that they are not allowed to be upset about something is controlling and aggressive, but telling people that they're wrong to enjoy something is...I'm not finding any positive result. It's shaming, which is a response used to exert social control over others. Talking about whether or not casting shame on total strangers leads to the desired result is something that even I don't want to take the space to talk about. I'm one of those who considers emotion to be out of a person's control. Emotion precedes action. What's important, IMO, is what action a person takes regardless of what emotions they might have, because it's possible to choose actions. Telling a person that they're not allowed to feel a certain way is an attack based on something that a person can't actually control. Whenever I see antis saying things like "no one should ever enjoy this content," I wonder how people are supposed to casually shut off their enjoyment. Can the antis shut off their outrage with a flip of a switch, since it's just an emotion too? Attempting to reprogram a person's emotional or motivational palette leads to things like conversion therapy, which has a high rate of failure/relapse and tends to traumatize people into other mental deformities. That's why it's far more useful to focus on responses to emotion instead of emotion itself. People with uncontrollable emotional responses - such as phobias or fetishes, say - can learn adaptive actions faster than they can unlearn emotional responses.)

This was a hugely roundabout way of saying that I really think that bad media or problematic media are still important. They can prompt discussion and introspection, as mentioned, but, IME, even a shitty representation of a concept can put cracks in a person's worldview and make it possible for them to be open to better ideas in the same vein later on.

For instance, I had that strict mainstream heteronormative upbringing. The only thing I knew about queer people for a huge part of my life was that they needed to be pitied because they were going to hell, and the closest thing to a trans person that I knew about was that Crying Game trap drag queen concept where the sinister man in a dress seduced honest straight men with borrowed feminine wiles. (I literally did not know that transgender people were actually real until after I was 20, which is one reason why I am such a massive late trans bloomer.) I also had that strict gender role upbringing in which there were certain things that a person must and must not do in order to be "proper."

Back when I first got on the Internet and started interacting with fandoms, genderswap fics were popular in my circle. Often, it was basically the same plot as the source material, but you'd switch everybody to the opposite binary gender and then, based on the assumption that men and women think and do things in slightly different ways, the plot would usually derail from canon because the genderswapped characters wouldn't do the same things that they canonically did. It was just one of many common fanfic thought exercises.

Looking back, reading genderswap fics was something that started eroding the strict worldview that I'd inherited. The "men and women just naturally do things differently" was enough in line with traditional gender roles that it passed by my defenses, but the swapped cast of just about everything ended up with lots of strong, heroic women and the occasional male sidekick. Further, writers tended to use the "women are more socially/emotionally intelligent than men" stereotype to correct shitty things that male characters did in canon because, if they were women, they'd be too smart and perceptive to do whatever stupid thing they did and everything would have happened differently. Nowadays, there's formal discussion about the lack of strong female characters in mainstream fiction, but in fandom, female writers just fixed the problem directly with genderswap so all the interesting, powerful people could be women and the guys could be useless arm candy for once. It was a way of reclaiming importance and power when canon media didn't give women much else to work with.

(I became aware while ago that Discourse is informing people that genderswap fics are hugely offensive to trans people. Now, I've described my crappy upbringing, but as a trans person, I don't understand this at all. I get that the "opposite gender" swap upholds the gender binary, but the issue is offense against trans people, not against genderqueer or nonbinary people. I seriously don't get why I should be offended? Is it because the genderswap doesn't include actual RL transgender experiences, as if the entire cast were realistically transitioning as a plot element? Genderswap is not acceptable unless it specifically includes things like "this is the story of how Cloud Strife got her testicles removed and enjoyed growing breast buds thanks to HRT"?? Maybe I'm an idiot, but those are two distinctly different story concepts and both have merit. o_o)

Later on, I became aware of people who were preoccupied with stories and fantasies of fantastical gender transformation, usually male to female. Some stereotypical male character would get injected with an alien serum or zapped by a fairy's wand or something and he would immediately metamorphose into a woman. There was often a disturbingly rapey element to these stories, like the boy wouldn't want to be transformed and was horrified while he was changing, but after he settled into the woman-shape or had sex as a woman after changing, he realized that he loved it and felt so much better that way. The stories were mostly just short repeats of this exact same situation, written by different authors with slightly different details, and this group never seemed to get tired of them.

Eventually, I learned that most of the people in the core of this group identified as trans women, but they lived in circumstances where they weren't permitted any female expression or had lost hope of ever transitioning. They fixated on transformation fic as a way to soothe the pain of living. Looking back, the noncon/dubcon themes that kept appearing in the fics made sense as a way of indirectly satisfying the powerful social forces that were demanding masculinity of them. The male characters were trying hard to stay male, fighting back against the transformation; they were clearly performing all the do not want signals expected of men threatened with feminization. They fought the good fight, but the enemy overpowered them! Womanhood was forced upon them! It was totally unexpected that they enjoyed being a girl after all, but because their maleness had been aggressively destroyed, they were free to stop performing resistance and love themselves.

But you can find fetish material like this in a lot of places, without any context as to the intent of the creator. (And I'd argue that it counts as a fetish if you crave it as necessary somehow, regardless of whether or not you're jacking/jilling to it.) Some people would write the same kind of stories for forced feminization as a type of humiliation. Among furries, transformation fetish material seems to add an extra angle of growing into new power and strength by a change into some larger, more magnificent creature in addition to changes involving sexual characteristics.

Further into the fantasy fetish scene is smut involving dickgirls/cuntboys. Those terms are inherently objectifying and fetishizing; the focus is entirely on the genitals and how a person has the "wrong" ones for their body. Understandably, this is where trans people get turned into dehumanized kink fuel, and real life "tranny chasers" exist who try to weasel into relationships with trans people just to have an embodiment of their fetish.

Artists seem to be slowly getting better with at least giving a nod to real trans people when tagging this sort of art, but (likely to get the most search hits) usually it's just "transwoman/man" alongside "dickgirl/cuntboy." And the art, at least, is clearly designed as fap fuel, so it's not like changing the label makes the content more respectful to the real humans it resembles.

Fetish art with that sort of name shouldn't be uplifting or encouraging because it makes trans people into objects, I know. But I enjoy it when I see it not because it gets me hot in itself, but because I feel heartened when I see sexy art of, essentially, trans people who have not had any genital surgery. I'm fortunate in that I don't have the worst soul-crushing dysphoria surrounding my (still XX factory standard) genitals, but I know a lot of trans people get seriously torn up about theirs and worry that they'll never be truly attractive to others because their genitals are "wrong." While it's possible to find humiliation art online of people with all kinds of body configurations, I tend not to (YMMV again) find much that seems to be specifically shaming or hating on characters who have trans genitals specifically because they are wrong/ugly/queer/etc. They're just participating in enthusiastic hot sex like all the other characters. Sometimes they're literally just standing around looking sexy, like any other badly-posed pinup. But when they're in the mix of whatever smut they're depicted in, they're objects of desire with their own sexual power, unashamed and equal to the others, and the other characters find them attractive and are clearly really excited to be doing whatever they're doing with that hot trans character.

And this response is very problematic, I know, because smut of trans characters that's designed to satisfy fetishes actually does lead to cis stalkers who want trans partners as living sex toys. And art of pre/non-op trans people being sexually liberated and desirable might end up being nearly indistinguishable from most of the fetish art I've seen, apart from lacking the objectifying dickgirl/cuntboy label. I hate seeing those terms in art tags, but the art itself makes me happy. Not even aroused, just happy to see characters who are essentially pre/non-op trans people being desired and enjoying themselves. When you've lived your life believing that you're ugly and unlovable, seeing people similar to yourself in those kinds of situations is a Band-Aid on an old, deep wound. I wish someone would look at me that way. I wish someone wanted to touch me that way. And even if you can't have that for yourself, you can at least look at art where similar people can, and even if those trans people are imaginary six-breasted purple foxtaurs, you can still feel like at least there are trans people somewhere in the galaxy who are free and happy and desirable. It's the same as those trans girls who spent years telling each other the same MTF transformation story over and over and over even though it was pure fantasy. They needed periodic inoculations of that fiction to keep themselves afloat when they believed that they could never have the reality.

That's why, to return to my earlier point and to the points that the people in that big thread probably said better than I have, I don't want bad media to go away. Even gross White Man Story For White Menfolk fiction can at least prompt discussion and response and might have little bits in it that made someone out there think of something in a way that they haven't before. Even depictions of minorities that are pretty clearly designed to be shallow fetish fuel might be a lifeline to some isolated person to whom that shitty depiction is the most positive representation of their identity that they've ever seen. You'd hope that they'd quickly be able to find better ones, but beggars can't be choosers, and if that shitty depiction hadn't existed then they might never have had the chance or the knowledge that different views were possible. You just can't know what people see and think when they consume a particular piece of media. They bring so much of their own context into the experience.

That's why I wish people would focus on action instead of on vague, catastrophizing speculations about intent or potential or who has a "right" to create or consume certain things. There are at least a couple of stories floating around about female fic writers who regularly wrote m/m smut, but who, IRL, opposed same-sex marriage and disowned their queer relatives. IMO, that's how you can tell who is making objectifying content - by whether they treat actual, living representations of minorities/fetishes like frivolous entertainment. I would bet that those IRL-anti-queer fic writers wrote things that were indistinguishable from the general mass of fanfic, which was why other fandom people were shocked to discover their IRL actions. People create things for all sorts of different reasons, not because ther creations are a clear window into their innermost motivations. You just can't know what's in a person's head, no matter what sort of things they create.

And I've literally spent hours writing this and sort of vaguely editing it paragraph by paragraph, so I'm going to post this now and release myself from childhood memory hell. Ultimately, that reblogged thread still said all of this better, but I just had a compulsion to LET ME SING YOU THE SONG OF MY PEOPLE FOR TEN FUCKING PAGES. :P

And oh hey, I was so caught up in time-warping back to the 80's and early 90's that I forgot that Wikipedia existed, so here's their page on Piss Christ. Turns out the artist was male. Says it was only a photo?? Lies!! I distinctly remember seeing the goddamn gross jar of pee!! Because human memory is a reliable, unalterable record!! (Okay, I've clearly gone on too long here. I apologize to the whole internet in advance.)

#fetishization #queer #early life experiences #slurs #queer fetishization #fandom politics #not even sure what to tag this as so just sort of be generally cautious

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