Seebs, you word good. Can you help me articulate the difference between fiction affecting reality (re: rape culture, beauty standards, “normal”) and fiction clearly separated from reality (re: ships you don’t like, escapism, portrayals of bad things)? There’s definitely middle ground between, say, 50 Shades being awful for its terrible portrayal of BDSM and romanticized abuse and 50 Shades being perfectly fine because adults can understand fiction vs. reality. I just don’t know how to say it.

curlicuecal:

the-real-seebs:

I see where you got off on the wrong foot. The question is not “when does fiction affect reality” but “how does fiction affect reality”. Fiction always has effects. But if you want to show that a given kind of fiction has bad effects, you have to actually show that the bad effects exist, and are not completely irrelevant compared to the positive effects. And even then, it’s not clear that this would be a basis for doing anything but, say, writing something you like better.

The problem comes from the unconsidered assumption that fiction’s sole effect on reality is to make people think that the things depicted are good. That’s actually not an especially common outcome, especially with things that are tagged for what they contain. (Indeed, those have precisely the opposite effect; I know a lot more people who realized they were being abused because they saw fictional depictions depict the behavior as being bad than people who became convinced that it was okay.

This post finally clicked something into place I’ve been pondering about:

I don’t think 50 Shades of Grey romanticizes abuse at all.  Or rather, I think the popularity of 50 Shades of Grey reveals an existing cultural mindset that is blind to a particular way a situation could be abusive.  The abuse was already romanticized.  The book is a symptom, not a cause.  

This is part of why I don’t have any particular problem with the book existing.  The problem wouldn’t go away if we somehow vanished the book from all shelves everywhere.  That’s a red herring.

But the popularity of the book does motivate me to discuss the problematic material and pick it apart in detail.  It does motivate me to advocate hard for more education on topics like consent and healthy negotiation, because apparently there are a whole ton of people out there getting bad information, and hello we have highlighted a need.  

And I guarantee that discussions going on around this book have helped people identify bad shit going on in their own lives.  If nothing else, by revealing an apparently prolific blindspot, it helped us figure out where discussions needed to be had.  It woulda been hella nice if some of those discussions and awareness could have come from the author (proper tagging, anyone?), but they are happening, in places they were not happening before.

Could the book plant dangerous seeds in the uninformed?  Hell yes.  But the fact that there are people who are uninformed about what healthy relationships and consent look like is not a problem that can be solved by controlling what types of fiction people are allowed to write and read.  Because if we as a society are relying on a person’s chance encounters with various popular media to provide a minimally adequate sex education we have already failed. 

Like wow.