Because philosophers are all about making distinctions, I’d like to talk about a distinction that a lot of people on this hellsite seem to have trouble with: the distinction between the events depicted in a work of art and the work’s stance toward those events. (I’m saying “the work’s stance” and not “the artist’s stance” because those can come apart for a variety of reasons. The artist’s failure to effectively convey their personal stance in the work due to incompetence is the most common one, but the work can also become skewed away from the artist’s intentions through censorship, or the artist might experiment with a perspective different from their own… Anyway, the important thing is the implied stance of the postulated author of the work, who is not identical with the real-world creator, but is the hypothetical agent who could have intended all of the features of the work.)

I should hope it would be obvious that depicting events of a certain type is not equivalent to endorsing them. A simple example: both The Birth of a Nation and 12 Years a Slave depict violence by white people against Black people, but the first portrays it as just and necessary, while the second portrays it as cruel and unjust. Gone with the Wind portrays the defeat of the Confederacy as the tragic loss of a beautiful way of life, while Lincoln portrays it as a just and hard-won triumph for humanity. Different war movies can convey different attitudes toward the violence of war. Films like Rambo (presumably; I’ve never seen it) and Inglourious Basterds revel in it; films like Saving Private Ryan and Dunkirk may portray it in great detail, but in a way that aims to sadden and disgust rather than thrill the viewer, to emphasize the horror and waste of war rather than the excitement and heroism.

With sexism and sexual violence, the typical way of depicting it without condemning it is not to acknowledge it as such. If jokes about nagging wives, vapid blondes, women being bad drivers, etc. are presented without comment or challenge as invitations for the audience’s laughter, the work is sexist. But the work can also portray those things in a way that condemns them, either by having a character explicitly criticize another’s sexism, or by dwelling on the discomfort of women who are subjected to these stereotypes. The work can acknowledge the stereotypes while challenging them, as does Legally Blonde, which shows just how intelligent and resourceful the supposedly stereotypical “vapid blonde” can be. [I’m putting the rest under a cut because this is getting really long.]

In the case of sexual violence, the problem is usually that things which are in fact sexual harassment or assault are interpreted as something else. Stalking is often portrayed as romantic when we see it from the male stalker’s POV, and when the woman who is the object of his affections is shown “aww-ing” over the man’s devotion and grand gestures and eventually being swayed to return his love. It’s supposed to be sexy when a man overcomes a woman’s resistance and hesitation; when we see her give in to his persistence, it’s not with resignation or reluctance, but with the force of irresistible passion, or with a kind of relief at being “allowed” to indulge desires she had all along because she made the requisite (token) effort to resist. Sure, that kind of thing probably happens sometimes, but media tropes reinforce the idea that when a woman is saying no, she’s usually just “playing hard to get,” and with a little more persistence she’ll be wholeheartedly won over. If works of fiction really focused on the woman’s face and body language, or even her inner monologue, when she gives in to a man badgering her for sex, if they showed how often it’s due to exhaustion or fear of violence, they would be showing the same event (broadly speaking) but with a different interpretation, and thus a different stance toward the predator/prey model of heterosexual courtship. It would be shown as distressing and dangerous rather than natural and sexy.

I’ve noticed that the preferred approach in progressive/social justice circles recently (of which I should probably count myself a member, no matter how often they annoy me) is to avoid portraying Problematic things at all. The concern sometimes seems to be that the portrayal will end up being exploitative, regardless of the official stance of the work toward the events depicted. And there’s certainly a basis for that concern. Depictions of violence against women, especially sexual violence, are often staged in a way that’s erotic or titillating, even if the work explicitly condemns the act; so men are allowed to be turned on by the sight of women in pain and distress even as they reassure themselves that they’re on her side, they hate the man who’s doing that to her, and they would try to protect her if they were in the position of the (usually male) protagonist. Sexual violence is also often used as a narrative device in trite, lazy ways that trivialize the experience of the victim. A woman is raped and/or killed to start a male protagonist on his quest for revenge; sexual and/or domestic violence is placed into the background of a female character in order to provide her with some generic angst/darkness without really exploring how it has affected her. Women are almost never shown recovering from the experience of sexual violence and reclaiming their lives: it tends to define them as plot or characterization devices in a man’s story, or become the entire basis for their characterization if the woman is a protagonist.

There have been so many bad ways of using violence against women that progressives start to think there’s no good way to depict it. Why do we need to depict it, anyway? they wonder. There are so many stories without it that haven’t been told, and surely all the stories involving it have been done to death. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to violence against people of color, especially Black people. It’s become so common that audiences are almost inured to it; it often serves a symbolic function rather than really engaging with the experience of the sufferer; it often plays into White Savior narratives in the same way that violence against women plays into White Knight narratives (different use of “White” there). Especially in fantasy and science fiction, I’ve been seeing a desire for utopian settings rather than either historically based or dystopian ones. Instead of explicitly portraying problems similar to the ones we have in this world, they say, we should imagine worlds in which those problems have been solved. Even in narratives set in the past, people want utopianism—hence all the rejoicing that in Wonder Woman, no one ever underestimated or disrespected Diana because she was a woman.

Combine (1) the more sophisticated understanding that it’s very difficult and uncommon to portray certain kinds of Problematic phenomena in ways that fully recognize their seriousness and center the experience of the injured party with (2) the social justice Left’s drift toward utopianism and (3) a big dose of bad K-12 education that doesn’t teach people how to read sensitively, and you get the idea, apparently rampant on Tumblr, that there simply is no distinction between depicting an event and endorsing it.

OK, so, how does this apply to fanworks that depict, say, rape, dub-con, sex between an adult and someone significantly underage, or abusive relationships? If such fanworks are tagged properly—which they usually are, or antis wouldn’t even be able to find them in order to try to hound their creators off the internet—it can’t be argued that the creators don’t recognize what they’re depicting as Problematic in the same way as sexist works or “romantic” works that normalize the predator/prey model. (And since in the case of fanworks, the tags are effectively presented as part of the work, you can draw the same conclusions about the work’s stance as about the writer’s.) Both writers and readers pretty much always know that what they’re writing/reading about is rape, statutory rape, and/or abuse, and it would be pretty fucking weird if someone tagged it that way without knowing that those things are bad and assuming that the reader is going to know that too. The real problem (for antis who aren’t complete idiots) is that these things usually are presented in a way that’s intended to titillate. Let’s face it, most of what we use fanfiction for is masturbation material. So if the writers and readers know it’s bad, why are they getting off on depictions of things that they condemn in real life, and why is that OK?

My only answer is that human sexuality is weird. Yes, women (and some men and non-binary people) have rape fantasies in which they are the victim; no, of course they do not actually want to be raped, and do not think they would really enjoy it if they were. Yes, people find relationships of unequal power to be erotic; teachers often get into (potentially) exploitative relationships with their students not always because the students feel like they can’t refuse, but sometimes because the student is turned on by the teacher’s position of greater experience, knowledge, and power. I know; I had a massive crush on a professor in his 40s when I was a 20-year-old college student. I know how bad that would have been if it had gone anywhere (which it wouldn’t have, because he’s an incredibly moral person); I even would have thought less of him if he had gone for it. But sometimes we still want to indulge those fantasies in a controlled setting where the real dangers of the power imbalance don’t apply.

One of the ways people can do that is BDSM, power exchange, and roleplaying. “Safe, sane, and consensual” is the watchword of the community: there are all kinds of safeguards, and participants communicate and negotiate extensively before starting so that everyone knows exactly what they’re getting into. A lot of the stuff that people do in the BDSM context would be really horrible and messed-up if it were done in a different context, but it makes all the difference that it’s controlled and consensual. But not everyone can or wants to act out the admittedly messed-up scenarios that turn them on, and that’s what fanfiction is for. I’ve talked to a number of straight or bi women who have said they write M/M slash not only because they like imagining two hot guys together, but also because it allows them to write smut involving violence or unhealthy power dynamics where they can project themselves onto the character in the vulnerable position without the extra baggage of imagining a woman being abused or exploited by a man. The gender switch allows them a little more distance, which provides an added measure of safety in addition to the distance of fiction. But the fact that they feel like they have to do that is a really good indication that they know it’s bad in real life, and they wouldn’t find it sexy in real life. Hell, if I found a man who was willing to act out rape scenarios with me, I would have serious enough doubts about him that I probably wouldn’t want to get involved with him anymore; I can’t even read about BDSM with a male dom and a female sub without getting turned off by the evocation of the all-too-real problem of male violence against women.

Final question: why is this better than male audiences getting turned on by titillating depictions of sexual violence in works that officially condemn it? A couple of reasons. (1) There’s a real-world power imbalance between cis men and everybody else. Most of the people who read and write fanfiction are not cis men, whereas the concern about mainstream media depictions of sexual violence is that the demographic who are the most likely perpetrators of sexual violence are allowed to get pleasure from seeing the pain and fear of the victim, which is one of the reasons why people perpetrate sexual violence. Maybe it’s just because no one would admit to identifying with the perpetrator, but based on my (admittedly limited) sampling, most of the people who enjoy “Problematic” fanfiction identify with the victim in the fictional scenario. (2) We all know what we’re doing. Reading and writing fanfiction is very much like entering a BDSM scene, where the tags are the prior negotiation, clicking on the link is consent, and the back button is the reader’s safeword. There is seldom that much control and signposting in mainstream media.

Jesus Christ, apparently I can’t answer a question without writing a fucking essay. @illwynd, @incredifishface, anything to add…?