How "dark" is an erotic story allowed to be for fun?

[Bramblethorn]

Can authors foresee how their work might influence readers? This is a topic we've debated here several times before, and every time it descends into equivocation.

Can we foresee exactly how every single reader will be influenced by something we write? Obviously not. Nobody could have foreseen that "Helter Skelter" would influence Charles Manson to murder, and if the song had never been written, it seems unlikely that Manson would've just lived out his days peacefully.

Can we foresee in a general sense the kinds of reactions our stories are likely to provoke among many readers? Well, given the amount of ink spilled in this forum about writing technique and how to get readers to feel certain ways about our stories, it sure feels like a lot of people here believe the answer is "yes", at least when it wouldn't have uncomfortable implications.

Every time we debate this question, I see people point out that the answer to the "exactly/every single reader" version of the question is "obviously no" - which, fair enough - and then talk as if this meant nothing was foreseeable. This is, at best, bad logic.

I'm not saying everybody in this discussion is doing this, but I certainly see some people doing it; decide for yourselves whether your posts fit the pattern I'm describing. If it's not about you, it's not about you.

If you're an author who is happy to talk about ways that authors can make readers relate to their characters, or make readers get aroused by a sex scene, or make them visualise a location, but as soon as questions of responsibility come round you find yourself pivoting to "it's absolutely impossible for an author to foresee how their words might affect somebody", maybe sit a while with that contrast.

Me, I've heard from some readers that things in my stories influenced them to be better to their fellow humans or to themselves. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy to believe that in these cases I've made the world a slightly better place. But if I want to believe that, I also have to believe that I have the potential to do harm.

 

[MillieDynamite]

I don't think we are responsible for other people's actions based on reading something we wrote. I anticipate that people will react emotionally to some of my writing. However, I cannot anticipate they would emulate any of the character's actions. If a Deputy or Assistant District Attorney reads Vengence is Mine and decides that what the DDA did in that story is an excellent way to deal with some criminals (you know, killing them), that's on them, not me. Was Agatha Christies's story, the ABC Murders, the inspiration for serial killers? If so, is she guilty of something? If someone copies the plot of a murder mystery to off their spouse, is that the writer's fault?

 

[pink_silk_glove]

If you're an author who is happy to talk about ways that authors can make readers relate to their characters, or make readers get aroused by a sex scene, or make them visualise a location, but as soon as questions of responsibility come round you find yourself pivoting to "it's absolutely impossible for an author to foresee how their words might affect somebody", maybe sit a while with that contrast.

Obviously you mean me.

Here's a true story. My great grandfather by most accounts was a cruel man or at least had a streak of cruelty. My grandfather was a kind and gentle man. One of the things that influenced my grandfather and how he treated the animals on the farm was witnessing the cruelty of his father beating the disobedient animals. It influenced him to choose not to be cruel to the animals himself and through all of his life with his own farm he always made a point to be humane to the animals. My grandfather also suffered abuse form time to time from his father, and certainly favored his younger children over my grandfather and his sister. Now we all hear that abusers tend to raise abusers, but my grandfather made it a point to not be an abusive father himself and to never play favorites, directly because of the abuse that he had endured and the favoritism that he had witnessed.

So whether my stories portray positivity or negativity, even if I intend to project those dark emotions, Ultimately I have zero control over how someone sees my art and how they wish to act if they do wish to act upon it. Perception is choice. If you believe that the artist has any responsibility in this matter then from a legal standpoint, one would be a fool to make Saving Private Ryan or The Godfather or Taxi Driver.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Me, I've heard from some readers that things in my stories influenced them to be better to their fellow humans or to themselves. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy to believe that in these cases I've made the world a slightly better place. But if I want to believe that, I also have to believe that I have the potential to do harm.

I'm with you on this. Whenever these threads come around, folk are quite happy to lap up the positive vibes, thinking, yeah, it's pretty cool that people are getting off on my stories, that's the power of words, right there. Yay, orgasm! That's my "safe haven" principle, and yep, it's a buzz, hearing those good things.

But when the content goes darker (and let's face it, for some writers it does), those same folk are quick to rush out the, "But it's only fantasy, and we should all be allowed to write transgressive material. and readers can always tell the difference, and anyway, where's the evidence?" defence, and run away quickly from their content. Keep in mind, though, the arguments are mostly hypothetical, positions of academic principle, because the proponents aren't in fact writing anything I wouldn't let my mother read, and we've got a pretty good gatekeeper in Laurel.

I'm inclined to think that you can't have it both ways, to celebrate the power of words on the one hand and deny the power of words on the other.

 

[Bramblethorn]

Obviously you mean me.

It would be unwise to assume that I've read any specific post in this thread other than the first; I saw how it started, and I've heard this song often enough to know how it goes. I skimmed a little way, saw a few posts along the lines I described, and I've probably missed others along similar lines. You are welcome to gauge for yourself whether your posts here fit the pattern I've described.

Here's a true story. My great grandfather by most accounts was a cruel man or at least had a streak of cruelty. My grandfather was a kind and gentle man. One of the things that influenced my grandfather and how he treated the animals on the farm was witnessing the cruelty of his father beating the disobedient animals. It influenced him to choose not to be cruel to the animals himself and through all of his life with his own farm he always made a point to be humane to the animals. My grandfather also suffered abuse form time to time from his father, and certainly favored his younger children over my grandfather and his sister. Now we all hear that abusers tend to raise abusers, but my grandfather made it a point to not be an abusive father himself and to never play favorites, directly because of the abuse that he had endured and the favoritism that he had witnessed.

So whether my stories portray positivity or negativity, even if I intend to project those dark emotions, Ultimately I have zero control over how someone sees my art and how they wish to act if they do wish to act upon it. Perception is choice. If you believe that the artist has any responsibility in this matter then from a legal standpoint, one would be a fool to make Saving Private Ryan or The Godfather or Taxi Driver.

FWIW, it's not my position that portraying people doing bad things necessarily encourages readers to do bad things. That's a very misguided notion, and if I believed such a thing several of my stories here would never have been written. As your example illustrates, witnessing/experiencing abusive behaviour can just as easily prompt an opposing reaction as emulation.

What I do believe is that when it's presented in fiction (or indeed non-fiction), how it's handled can influence the reader. I can write a story about a father who beats his child and sees that child learn to be obedient and hard-working, growing up to be a successful businessman; I could also write a story about a child who's beaten by his father and sometimes still wakes up from nightmares of his father forty years later, and has to fight the instinct to treat his own child and his employees the way his father treated him. Those two stories are unlikely to provoke the same reaction from readers, even if the facts they present are consistent.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

It would be unwise to assume that I've read any specific post in this thread other than the first; I saw how it started, and I've heard this song often enough to know how it goes. I skimmed a little way, saw a few posts along the lines I described, and I've probably missed others along similar lines. You are welcome to gauge for yourself whether your posts here fit the pattern I've described.

Well let's just take a look at that.

Every time we debate this question, I see people point out that the answer to the "exactly/every single reader" version of the question is "obviously no" - which, fair enough - and then talk as if this meant nothing was foreseeable. This is, at best, bad logic.

I guess that the fact that your quote is a direct correlation to mine here is just a mere coincidence and I'm just arrogant for assuming.

Agree. Everything is a Rorschach test. One cannot control how another interprets their work. Give two people an inkblot, one sees fluffy clouds and sunshine, the other sees dismembered body parts and blood. Art is no different.

Bottom line: an artist cannot be held responsible for the reactions to his work, as he may be able to influence his audience but ultimately has zero control over them.

But then this is quite curious.

I'm not saying everybody in this discussion is doing this, but I certainly see some people doing it; decide for yourselves whether your posts fit the pattern I'm describing. If it's not about you, it's not about you.

You certainly see people in this thread doing it, yet you only read the OP and skimmed. Hrmm. All right, I'll take you at your word that this is just mere coincidence.

Back to the topic.

What I do believe is that when it's presented in fiction (or indeed non-fiction), how it's handled can influence the reader. I can write a story about a father who beats his child and sees that child learn to be obedient and hard-working, growing up to be a successful businessman; I could also write a story about a child who's beaten by his father and sometimes still wakes up from nightmares of his father forty years later, and has to fight the instinct to treat his own child and his employees the way his father treated him. Those two stories are unlikely to provoke the same reaction from readers, even if the facts they present are consistent.

But neither of those example stories promotes child abuse. The promotion of child abuse is purely in the eye of the beholder. We can play back reels of old Nazi propaganda films from the 30s for everyone here and I doubt that anyone will adopt Nazi principles. We would need an audience of a thousand people before a handful actually started thinking that they were good ideas to adopt in their lives, and it would not be because of the movies themselves, it would come from what is already in their hearts that the films may have uncovered, but by the same token in the hearts of everyone else the films would uncover very different things, starting with sympathy and empathy and a whole range of other ideas and emotions. The art has no control over the reactions and the decisions, it merely does the uncovering.

 

[WeShallUnclench]

The art has no control over the reactions and the decisions, it merely does the uncovering.

That is an interesting take, but if we argue art only uncovers, then that suggests art never actually creates anything within people?

Would you really look at all the art you have consumed over your life, and say none of it added anything new to you? Just made you learn things about yourself that were "already there"?
And even if that's the case, doesn't that "discovery" in itself represent something new, something different?
Potentially, something worse?

I also feel we have moved away a bit from the "control" argument. I don't really see anyone arguing here that you can hijack your reader's brains for specific purposes (edit: as in, make sure they do something with a high degree of certitude).

I see the extreme end of the argument more like this: "If we have lit a fire, we cannot just walk away, throw our hands up and say, we have no control over what it will burn."

 

[WeShallUnclench]

My own current understanding of all this, for all it's worth, is this:

You know 'Dungeon Meshi'? It's a cartoon about a group of adventurers going into a dungeon full of monsters.
The twist of the story, however, is that they decide to eat the monsters to survive.
Not just eat them, but cook them, turn them into ridiculously fancy meals.

The explicit point of the tale is to say, you have a right to exist. To take up space. To hurt, even kill other living things not just for your survival, but for your pleasure. Because you have a right, perhaps even a duty to exist and thrive in this world. To be a part of it.
(It's a bit ironic, given how the author herself doesn't eat meat.)

In regards to the topic, what I am getting from this is that you can weigh the perceived "risks" of what you write against how much pleasure and fulfillment you feel it's gonna give yourself and others. Not everything needs to be moral. Indeed, if we try to squeeze everything into a morally coherent framework, we'll arguably end up more miserable, because the world is more than just one thing, must be approached in more than one way.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I guess that the fact that your quote is a direct correlation to mine here is just a mere coincidence and I'm just arrogant for assuming.

If you look through this discussion, and past AH discussions on the same topic, you may find other people's posts which also look an awful lot like what I'm describing.

You certainly see people in this thread doing it, yet you only read the OP and skimmed.

No, "only read the OP" is not what I wrote there. You've misread that.

But neither of those example stories promotes child abuse. The promotion of child abuse is purely in the eye of the beholder.

Is that true, though?

If I write a story where a father abuses his child, and if I show that as having positive effects (the child learns to be well-behaved and hard working, and "succeeds" in life) without in any way acknowledging the harm done, seems likely to me that some folk might come away with the impression that I believe that kind of abuse is acceptable and beneficial.

Authors invent dragons and spaceships and a lot of other obviously-fictional things, but even in fantasy most authors aim for some level of believability in how they present human nature - and it's not exactly a secret that authors with a RL ideology to promote often wrap it in fiction, whether it's Swift or Lewis or Rand.

It's particularly an issue when the concept being presented is otherwise unfamiliar to readers. If you write a story where the sky is green, readers need only to look out their window to know that this isn't what the sky usually looks like. But when it comes to things that many readers don't have personal familiarity with, sometimes fiction is the only reference point they have.

I grew up undiagnosed autistic at a time when most people's understanding of autism (including mine) was largely limited to Rain Man, a film in which a non-autistic man plays an "autistic" character written by two non-autistic guys based on two other non-autistic guys. I can tell you for a fact that a lot of people, me included, got some very misguided ideas about autism from that movie and those misguided ideas had real-world consequences.

We can play back reels of old Nazi propaganda films from the 30s for everyone here and I doubt that anyone will adopt Nazi principles.

Of course not. We have the benefit of ninety years of hindsight and extensive historical records to show us where those principles led (and can still lead) and we've grown up in cultures where "Nazi" was a synonym for evil. Just about everybody here has already formed some pretty firm opinions about the NSDAP. Further, film-making has changed hugely in that time, in a way that often blunts the impact of old works.

But in the 1930s when those films were made? Leni Riefenstahl and the folk who paid her bills sure as fuck believed they had the power to persuade audiences in a specific direction.

We would need an audience of a thousand people before a handful actually started thinking that they were good ideas to adopt in their lives,

My first story here has almost a hundred thousand views. By the standards of this site, that's not huge. But it's enough for a hundred handfuls.

I take it seriously when even one commenter says one of my stories helped them understand something in their own life. If I'm doing that, I probably need to take it just as seriously if my stories are pulling them away from understanding.

and it would not be because of the movies themselves, it would come from what is already in their hearts that the films may have uncovered, but by the same token in the hearts of everyone else the films would uncover very different things, starting with sympathy and empathy and a whole range of other ideas and emotions. The art has no control over the reactions and the decisions, it merely does the uncovering.

And yet we spend so much time here discussing artistic techniques intended to prompt some specific reaction in our readers. Are all those discussions in vain? Do authors really have no capacity to influence their readers' state of mind in some intended direction? Are the readers who tell us "you changed the way I think about X" just lying to us?

 

[MillieDynamite]

I have gained a fan from a site where I no longer post but left up the stories. He said, "I like your darker, twisted tales of rape. You've inspired me to write my own."

I'm not certain how much of a compliment that is. I'm tempted to go read one of his, but he hasn't yet published one.

 

[TheRedChamber]

I wrote the following on a thread earlier in the year and I think it fits here.

Art is complicated.

One of the most affecting moments in my life was seeing the great guitarist Peter Green play in the late 1990s when I was still a teenager. He had suffered a mental breakdown in the 1970s due to taking LSD and even 25 years later the effects were still clear. He was frail beyond his years and, in all honesty, his playing was emotional but not as sharp as it had been. The use of hard drugs in the 60s and 70s and beyond destroyed the lives of many of the great rock talents as well as other ordinary people. I have never used hard drugs and do not support their legalization.

For all that, 'White Rabbit' by Jefferson Airplane is my favourite ever song.

Society and art often exist in a feedback loop. Jefferson Airplane wrote songs about drugs because drugs were part of their lives and the community they lived in, but also the fact that they and others wrote songs about drugs undoubtedly made them more acceptable and wide-spread (outside of the communes in Haitt-Ashbury for example). Similarly, the punks were (rightly) angry at life and the government in 70s Britain, but by making their anger known they made other people angry as well. Gangster Rappers sing about guns because guns are a necessary part of their life, but also, in doing so, convince others that they need a gun.

And a lot of the music is still great even if you don't happen to agree with the implied or explicit message it carries.

Plato thought that it was a bad idea to have any characters in a play do something bad because someone might see that play and copy the bad act. Since it was impossible to write an effective drama where the characters only act properly, he decided that the best thing to do was to ban all drama.

I'd argue that most stories are founded, for good or bad, on some kind of ethical principle. At a base level, we want to see good triumph against evil. Even in those stories where evil wins, we're usually able and encouraged to look at them and decide why evil won in that case (The Joker wouldn't have become the Joker if mental healthcare support was better in America)

Occasionally you encounter a story whose ethical principles are so far from your own that it completely destroys all sense of drama or enjoyment. This happened to me recently when I watched the Wagner opera Lohengrin - a story whose moral seems to be that women should never question their husband's secrets because the husbands are always pure and virtuous (and pulled across lakes by white swans). Wonderful music but you spend the whole time going 'what? really? no!"

To complete the thought, if I were a member of Jefferson Airplane, and knowing what I know now, would I still argue for releasing the song. In so far as I find it hard to believe that someone somewhere had their first acid trip to the song, much as it would break my heart, the answer would have to be 'no'. That said, I think the number of media where the answer is so clear cut are relatively few.