Should authors avoid writing about a subject because a minority might emulate it?

[Stella_Omega]

"fetish" has a pretty specific meaning-- it's a fixation on a sexual side-dish, so to speak, that can be strong enough to displace the sexuality component entirely. Like latex fetishists who don't care if anyone wears the rubber nurse's dress, only that it exists...

"Kink" is anything that you prefer sexually that doesn't fit in with the norm. I have a kink for getting spanked-- hardly rates as a kink at all, anymore, but once upon a time it did...

WAAAY TOO MUCH INFO!!!!!!!!!

Speak for your own damn self, buddy.

Am I screwed up from my early porn experiences?

I was screwed up way before that, all on my own bat. From the very first, porn interested me in direct proportion to how close it was to the fantasies I already had-- which is why I write my own these days...

 

[Verdad]

There are a few issue here, I think. One is, implicitly, whether there's such thing as too much information. I do not believe that. I'm pretty big on free speech, availability of information, and such like. At the same time, information is influence, and I like to see it critically approached.

For instance, were people doing 'BDSM' before there was such thing as BDSM? Absolutely. So what changed? Well, on the up side, one might say people got the assurance that others are doing it too, and they got a lot of practical info about how to do certain practices safely. These are surely good things. However, at the same time, we've got normative influence ("am I doing it right?"); commercialization ("you can't be doing it right without our line of products"); coercive power ("of course you want to be spanked, all the cool people do"); and a general expansion of social into the private sphere. I'm almost tempted to say, "It takes a village to fuck."

Pure mentioned the confessional mentality, so I'm also tempted to mention an xkcd sketch in which the characters decide to go out and live a little. While going about it, all they can think of is, "Man, this is going to make such a great Facebook entry!"

A similar feedback loop surely affects sexual experience. The manner of recounting it adjusts itself to public feedback so as to yield maximal approval ("you're so hot!"), and then gradually, the experiences themselves seek to comply. The paradoxical result is that there's, arguably, less freedom. The freedom to explore is supplanted by a freedom to choose from a structured menu. The chorus is present in every sphere of life, promptly dishing out approval or disapproval.

I couldn't be further from a nostalgic, so I hope no one reads me as one. I just like to examine these things for more than an unqualified good. The battle for free expression strikes me as a bit last century. The current task seems to me more about learning to preserve one's individuality while enjoying the fruits.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

From a utilitarian point of view it definitely takes longer to figure shit out when you do the math by pencil rather than calculator or get the answers from the back of the book.

On the other-hand, how in Hell did Charles & Caroline hide their boinking in a small cabin? Think about it. You spend 6 months crossing America in a wagon loaded with kids and groceries and furniture; were you celebate the whole time?

 

[Epmd607]

From a utilitarian point of view it definitely takes longer to figure shit out when you do the math by pencil rather than calculator or get the answers from the back of the book.

On the other-hand, how in Hell did Charles & Caroline hide their boinking in a small cabin? Think about it. You spend 6 months crossing America in a wagon loaded with kids and groceries and furniture; were you celebate the whole time?

Parents don't have sex, sexy girls don't go to the bathroom. Caulk the wagon and float it across the river, don't wait for the ferry.

 

[xssve]

From a utilitarian point of view it definitely takes longer to figure shit out when you do the math by pencil rather than calculator or get the answers from the back of the book.

On the other-hand, how in Hell did Charles & Caroline hide their boinking in a small cabin? Think about it. You spend 6 months crossing America in a wagon loaded with kids and groceries and furniture; were you celebate the whole time?

Celibate.

Nobody would have thought it was unusual back then - the Pigs were doing it in the pen, the Chickens were doing it in the yard, the Horses were doing it in the stable, the Cows were doing it in the pasture, the cats and dogs were doing it pretty much everywhere - all assuming they weren't all actually doing it inside the house - if you wanted to learn the facts of life you just opened your eyes and looked, not like it is now.

In the basement.

In the dark.

For purposes of procreation only.

Welcome to the Monkey house.

 

[James G 5]

My .02:

I am a writer, not a therapist. I have no guilt or shame or second thoughts about what I write or how it affects the reader. I love hatemail as much as I love fanmail.

Then again, my full-time job is basically in porn, and twisted, kinky, fetish-porn at that. Do I worry that someone is going to watch my video work, see me bound, gagged, tortured and sexually used and go out and try it with his next girlfriend or her next boyfriend? Nope, because if they were watching it in the first place, they were already thinking about it, and it was already hardwired into their personality.

Basically, people act on their natures, not on on their influences. I grew up in the white-trash, Bible-thumping, God made Adama and Eve not Adam and Steve part of Florida- and I came out as a articulate, educated, bisexual, kinky, polyamorous fetish model and performer who writes porn on the side. Had nothing to do with my environment- there was nothing LIKE that in my environment- I went seeking for the things that made me tick- and I found them. The same is true of anyone else- those who want it badly enough will find it.

That was very heterosexist of you, don't you think?

 

[FallingToFly]

That was very heterosexist of you, don't you think?

James, hush.

You know as well as I do that I'm about as open as the door gets.

You're POTSTIRRING again!

 

[James G 5]

James, hush.

You know as well as I do that I'm about as open as the door gets.

You're POTSTIRRING again!

ME? NEVAR!

 

[xssve]

There are a few issue here, I think. One is, implicitly, whether there's such thing as too much information. I do not believe that. I'm pretty big on free speech, availability of information, and such like. At the same time, information is influence, and I like to see it critically approached.

For instance, were people doing 'BDSM' before there was such thing as BDSM? Absolutely. So what changed? Well, on the up side, one might say people got the assurance that others are doing it too, and they got a lot of practical info about how to do certain practices safely. These are surely good things. However, at the same time, we've got normative influence ("am I doing it right?"); commercialization ("you can't be doing it right without our line of products"); coercive power ("of course you want to be spanked, all the cool people do"); and a general expansion of social into the private sphere. I'm almost tempted to say, "It takes a village to fuck."

Pure mentioned the confessional mentality, so I'm also tempted to mention an xkcd sketch in which the characters decide to go out and live a little. While going about it, all they can think of is, "Man, this is going to make such a great Facebook entry!"

A similar feedback loop surely affects sexual experience. The manner of recounting it adjusts itself to public feedback so as to yield maximal approval ("you're so hot!"), and then gradually, the experiences themselves seek to comply. The paradoxical result is that there's, arguably, less freedom. The freedom to explore is supplanted by a freedom to choose from a structured menu. The chorus is present in every sphere of life, promptly dishing out approval or disapproval.

I couldn't be further from a nostalgic, so I hope no one reads me as one. I just like to examine these things for more than an unqualified good. The battle for free expression strikes me as a bit last century. The current task seems to me more about learning to preserve one's individuality while enjoying the fruits.

Nothing has really changed here except the influences, the menu existed before any widespread influence of porn, it was just much narrower menu - i.e., straight vaginal sex, exclusively utilizing the missionary position, in Western morality - that isn't so much a choice as a stricture, and the consequences for deviating from it could be, and still are, in some instances, severe.

Truely, the involvement of the village has been historically difficult to avoid, social status often hinges on acceptance/enforcement of the norms - look how many conservative family values activists have made their reputations as defenders of the faith, who turn out to bigger freaks than the freaks they rail against.

All that wild stuff is either the province of unsophisticated hicks or those wealthy enough to not have to worry about what anybody thinks.

There is no perfect, one either envision Utopian perfection as monolithic and controlled, alá Walden II, where all influences are determined by committee according to some ideal, or natures way of constant experimentation, random mutation, cause and effect, and natural selection.

I'm placing my bets on nature, the only reason any species becomes extinct is overspecialization, and I've mentioned it before in other threads, there is, in nature, a constant tension between conformity and diversity - a group of organisms has to conform enough to adapt to their environment as a species, but if they adapt too well to too narrow a niche, they're at risk of being stressed or going extinct if the conditions in that niche change.

I think that in many respects, porn represents a return to a more primitive range of options -hard to say what might have happened in Europe without the discovery of new continents to accept the population overflow, but I suspect it would be much what we're seeing now anyway.

And, rather than a Malthusian observation, I think a lot of the stressors at that time were largely the result of perceived Malthusian stressors rather than actual ones - England did not experience a sudden growth in poverty, malnutrition, and criminal activity until they began closing the commons.

There are generally social-economic solutions to Malthusian stressors, as well as technological ones, but since power and status are so entwined with social economics, social-economic policies typically generate and exacerbate these stressors rather than resolve them, precisely because they tend to reflect a very narrow and relatively specialized range of adaptive behaviors.

Resolutions tend to come well after a crisis point has been reached and the old conformity has been unarguably demonstrated to be inadequate.

It's a hell of a way for a supposedly reasoning species to operate, the underlying mechanism is basically mindless, episodic mutation and selection - the mistake I think Utopians make, is that they imagine Utopia can be attained by narrowing options, which in going against the pattern of diversification and selection, usually ends in Dystopia due to exaggerated and abstract mechanisms of selection: Social Darwinism, Theocracy, autocratic regimes and philosophies in general, which invariably lead to overspecialization.

Without a metaframe of reference, criticism in this area is almost necessarily subjective w/respect to some particular range of specialization.

In this case, if I follow your arguments, your concerns have to do with the tension between social mimicry (conformity) and innovation (creativity), you maintaining that widespread availability of porn is distorting and repressing a more fundamental exploratory approach via social mimicry.

That is the particular facet of the metaframe were discussing here, what has not been fully defined is just how susceptible culture at large is to such influences, and what sort of results we might predict from it - there are always natural limits to any abstract social behavior for one thing, physical limits, if nothing else, re: Pure's empirical data on semen quantities, i.e., some things don't change.

At least on observer has noted that the more choices people have, the more they act like each other, in some sense, conformity is a defense against alienation, which might be one place to start defining just exactly what constitutes the rational parameters.

 

[xssve]

This discussion has ranged pretty far Hugo, but you did hit it on the head in your OP, the real issue remains the indirect, normative effect of media, and it's role in a socially evolving species, us.

It's going to be hard to find raw data on this, it hasn't morphed into a Free Will vs. Biological Determinism debate yet, but if we go by historical examples, I'd say there always going to be a little bit of both involved.

In this case, we can substitute the existence of conceptually abstract ideals for free will, rape fantasies in this instance, social conformity to that abstract construct for biological determinism, i.e., fashionable conformity.

There's the frame, the conflict/tension lies between the commonality of the rape fantasy among women, and the propensity to commit the actual thing among men - tempered by the fact that practically nobody with a rational bone in their body will argue that they are even remotely the same thing.

Is there any middle here, would seem to be the question.

I happen to think that our more or less instinctual propensity to avoid violence is deeply embedded, it required immense expenditures of effort on the part of Christianity to enforce an organized rape culture, but there is also circumstantial evidence of what one might call natural occurrences of less organized rape cultures, to which in some sense, Judeo-Christian rape culture is a reaction formation.

And, not that I'm saying that rape is the motivating factor behind Judeo-Christian morality, but it does play a significant normative role.

Personally, I wouldn't worry too much about it - I think the difference between porn and storytelling is the presence of conflict - porn is gratuitous by nature, and I'm guessing a would be rapist would find the presence of conflict in a story confusing, and ignore it anyway.

Hope that helps.

Selected quotes.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The arguments against publishing a work about a taboo subject can be put into three categories:

1) It is harmful to someone who seeks to view it
2) It is harmful to someone who views it without seeking to
3) It is harmful to someone who does not view it, indirectly through someone who does

Personally, I dismiss arguments 1 and 2. As for 1, an artistic work can only change someone in a way they voluntarily choose. While I will admit that people can voluntarily choose things that are harmful to them, I don't think it's common to voluntarily choose things that are very harmful. Some harm can be done, but it's minor and rare, so it's negligible. 2 is applicable in some contexts. We have laws as to what can appear on billboards, because people not seeking to view the billboards are exposed to them. However, for several reasons, people who find my story on Literotica are probably seeking at least something similar.

In summary, it does not bother me that there are people who find rape so distasteful that they don't even want to read about it. They don't have to read my story.

Argument 3 is hard to prove, yet also hard to refute, because indirect influences are hard to observe. What I am concerned about is the possibility that someone might be influenced by my story to commit a sex act with a non-consensual partner, i.e. rape. I am not too concerned if someone who reads my story is inspired to role-play the events or something similar with a person who agrees freely to participate. Certainly the percentage of readers who might commit rapes is small.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Anyway, that was probably too long. Any advice? In particular facts might be helpful, such as sociological studies. It's difficult to choose the right study to draw conclusions from, though. Some seem somewhat applicable, but not perfectly. For example, they deal with the effects of pornography on violence, but not specifically pornography with violent content, or they deal with the effects on minors, who should not be reading Literotica. Absent facts, any plausible reasoning would be good to hear. Or if you can say nothing about whether I should rewrite my story, you could give advice about how to do it without ruining it.

 

[xssve]

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/5/5/

 

[Verdad]

In this case, if I follow your arguments, your concerns have to do with the tension between social mimicry (conformity) and innovation (creativity), you maintaining that widespread availability of porn is distorting and repressing a more fundamental exploratory approach via social mimicry.

That is one of my lines of thought, yes. I've got a couple and some models to fit them in (e.g. Marcuse) but I really don't feel like it now. It's lotsa blather and I've got to be in a full dystopic mood to do it justice.

As far as the OP goes, no, I don't think writers should limit themselves for that reason, or pretty much any reason, though there's, of course, no guarantee of publishing. If I were offering pseudo advice and gnomic utterances, I'd sooner leave it at "don't worry about others emulating your writing—rather worry whether your writing emulates that of everyone else."