Id-policing

I was witness, last night, to a spectacularly incendiary blow up, courtesy of the Social Justice Warriors. 

Social Justice is a movement that in theory I agree: pointing out privilege and biases in mass media, hoping to make the invisible visible and give the silenced a voice.  I agree with all of these things. 

I can't, however, agree with the methods I see them employ in fandom circles: bullying, namecalling, shaming. 

Let's just use last night's blow up as an example. One person posted that she felt bad for being judged for liking a certain trope in fanfiction (noncon) and a particular, dysfunctional relationship.  (There's been a lot of hostile back and forth about Megatron and Starscream in TF Prime).  I'll talk about that in a moment. 

Her housemate (so you can imagine the full awkward of this, right?)  posted about ten minutes later, the title of her post being 'BULLSHIT'.  That set the tone for the content that followed, which basically said that anyone who liked that trope was supporting rape culture and were, and I quote ' ignorant idiots who never learned to, refuse to, or can't think critically about things'. 

On an interpersonal note, calling someone an 'ignorant idiot' does not exactly open doors and minds for critical discussion. Honestly, if someone called me an ignorant idiot, I would not be willing to engage in debate, civil or not, with said person, because it's clear that THEY are not open for debate and I have no great love for futility.  When you call someone a name like that, it means you are closed against them, have already judged them.

Now, my stance is, and has always been, that yes, there are some tropes I find disturbing, distasteful or that I cannot read.  And I wish I lived in a world where they weren't the go-to tropes of narratology.  But I don't.  This is the world I live in, these are the tropes that surround us.  We see rape sexualized, glamorized and sold to us as sexy everywhere.  Yet this movement, I suppose knowing that it can't target the real promoters of these tropes, so it goes after the young, the vulnerable, the weak, those beginning writers, beginning fan creators, and making them feel shamed.

I want to go a little deeper here than my usual 'shaming hurts and is not okay'.  Let's consider the operation of shame psychologically.  Shaming is someone taking the Superego voice to tell you that your Id is bad. 

The id is a cellar of desires, that sort of defy morality.  Some of the id's impulses are good: without the id, we could not feel pleasure, we could not enjoy the guilty thrill of playing hooky, or the pleasure of a massage. The Pleasure Principle is rooted in the id. 

The id's desires get created in the culture that the person is raised in.  Thus, in Imperial China, there was the Golden Lotus fetish for women with bound feet.  Their ids eroticized the mutilated feet.  Ours does not.  (Honestly, I find those pictures horrific).  Our ids have been shaped in a world with a host of conflicted and contradictory messages (just one example: women are supposed to dress to be 'attractive'  and 'sexy'  and enjoy the art of self-adornment as a pleasure, but if they get harassed or assaulted, well, obviously, 'they were asking for it'.)  That means that the images the id throws up to us are often, well...complex. 

And  noncon, rape, well, wow, that's a loaded gun.  Notice how often rape is invoked in mass media about female characters--in the movie Dredd, both female characters were associated with rape--Ma had been raped and cut, Anderson was subject to an on-screen rape fantasy. The Sword and Sorceress collections I loved as a teen were rife with 'rape and revenge' stories--all written by women, of course!  Did the 'revenge' redeem the rape scene? Or was it a way to have the cake and eat it too--write an eroticized rape scene and then erase the complications through the revenge?  (The complication not being the issue of consent, but rather the issue of the eroticization, and the weight of the aftermath on sexuality--the revenge was magically going to 'heal' her psychological drama). 

Because, I'll point out, that in our culture, heck, I'd say in any culture I can think of, power is 'sexy'. Power is eroticized, and the power/powerless relationship has a certain fascination, as extremes of power spectra we find ourselves inhabiting every day.  Those women writing those rape-and-revenge fantasies knew it: they were, in our day of secondwave feminism, powerless, and writing the stories, however tropey, was some sort of fantasy of power.  The late 70s early 80s were filled with science fiction by women that explored female only or female on top worlds--fantasies of power, yes?

There's a lot of talk about whether or not writing or reading noncon supports or promotes 'rape culture'.  I've wondered this myself, honestly, with the prevalence of the rape is love trope, which is predicated on male lust being simply uncontrollable and thus the sexual violation becomes narratively 'justified' and in fact 'acceptable'. (I find the idea that sexual desire would drive anyone to violate another's integrity to be repugnant, but then again, countries embracing Sharia Law do not agree with me--to them a woman should wear a burqa because the males are literally that incapable of controlling their desire just as much as it is about controlling women--it's a deft 'control by wanting to protect you' move that we'd recognize as manipulative in the microcosm.)

Oh, oops, digression.  The thing is, our id throws up dark things at times.  It's often the things we fear the most that draw the strongest response: serial killers, death, the undead/inhuman/no longer human, powerlessness.  Vampires have been eroticizing nonconsensual powerless sex since Polidori brought them into British literature.  Fiction has always provided a safe place to get those things out on the page, to wrestle with them, like St George and his dragon. 

Or rather like Spenser's Redcrosse Knight and the dragon that vomits books. 

The issue is, that shaming is an attempt to control someone's id.  You only need to look at the Victorian era, or the Catholic sex scandals to realize that shaming and guilting the id....kind of backfires?  Making someone feel bad because they enjoy fantasies of powerlessness or power does not change their fantasies.  In fact, it fuels them, because the id's desires grow in the dark. 

So, of course, what if we do think that these fantasies are unhealthy, and they promote a culture that normalizes and validates a culture where people are made to feel unsafe and vulnerable at every moment? I'd start with, well, not making the person who has those fantasies feel unsafe and vulnerable by attacking them, but that's, I hope, common sense.  Beyond that, I'd ask them about the fantasy, what it means to them, what it is to them, WHY they like it, and what appeals to them. Ask.  ASK.  Give them credit for having a brain. If they've never thought of it before, you might just start them thinking.  But if they have, their answers--gasp--might make you think that their liking for the trope is quite different than you think.