Authorial Endorsement -- what do you think?

[MelissaBaby]

I feel like this is related, and relevant to the issue.

I recently got into a back and forth on twitter with a Lit author who, to the best of my knowledge, does not post on the forums.

The subject was the nature of "villains" and how to write them. It was his position that bad people are just plain evil and should be written as such. I responded that I had know many people who committed terrible acts, but that they never seemed to think of themselves as being the bad guy. To write villains or any characters who commit reprehensible acts properly, an author should try to understand them, and what motivated them.

His response was to tell me that I was, obviously, an evil person myself, and that no one who was not could, or would, try to understand why bad people do what they do.

I thought about this exchange as I read this thread. This guy thought that any authorial attempt to understand or explain the behavior of "evil" characters indicated evil intent on the part of the author themselves.

I just figured I'd toss that into the mix as food for thought.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

Okay... what I get from this is the Twinky defense from years ago.

People who do bad stuff will never take responsibility for what they did. They will blame it on whatever or whoever is the latest thing to blame for their wrong doing.

Every prisoner in prison is innocent even after the jury found them guilty of all charges. Now in some cases that might be true, but in most it's bullshit.

A story I write will not make someone, no matter how well I write it, make bad decisions. If it does, then that person was already on the way to being a loon. I am not an orator of great power. I'm an old man who for the most part writes porn. I do write some Sci-Fi... well a lot of Sci-Fi. Yet I don't believe I'm sending any kind of message. I'm just telling a story with good values(sci-fi). The porn, I'm telling a story where the camera get to go in the bedroom with the couple or threesome or moresome.

 

[Jamie_and_Lisa]

I feel like this is related, and relevant to the issue.

I recently got into a back and forth on twitter with a Lit author who, to the best of my knowledge, does not post on the forums.

The subject was the nature of "villains" and how to write them. It was his position that bad people are just plain evil and should be written as such. I responded that I had know many people who committed terrible acts, but that they never seemed to think of themselves as being the bad guy. To write villains or any characters who commit reprehensible acts properly, an author should try to understand them, and what motivated them.

His response was to tell me that I was, obviously, an evil person myself, and that no one who was not could, or would, try to understand why bad people do what they do.

I thought about this exchange as I read this thread. This guy thought that any authorial attempt to understand or explain the behavior of "evil" characters indicated evil intent on the part of the author themselves.

I just figured I'd toss that into the mix as food for thought.

Picture the worst villain imaginable, let's say Hitler for the sake of discussion, if he were alone how much evil could he do? If we could look at people and bad ones looked like Sneidley Whiplash and good ones looked like Nell and Dudley how hard would it be to decide who to trust? Pretty simplistic. Like star- bellied sneetches are good and those with none are bad (or vice versa). Life isn't a cartoon strip.

In the opinion of many, including us, there is far more evil done by those who do not believe that they are doing anything wrong. On one end of the spectrum is an SS officer who "just followed orders." There are those who looked the other way or didn't get involved. There are also those who have caused massive harm while they purported to help. Some actually believe that they are helping "fix" a problem they don't understand to begin with. (These people tend to get government jobs.)

Years ago Italian author Umberto Uno penned a satire of a superhero comic 'My Brother Superman', which took place in a zero-sum world. Every "super" action resulted in a real consequence. Scooping up water to douse a fire caused a guy to break his neck jumping into a suddenly empty swimming pool and the like.

Real life isn't ever quite that simple. The world is filled with overly simplistic people who in the words of Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson want to "take thier comic books and super crooks, (and) make all of thier heroes real, elect Superman for President, and have Robin save the day." (Thick as a Brick - 1972)

 

[SimonDoom]

No rule Literotica makes impinges at all on your "freedom" to "write something". They might decide they don't want to host it on their site, but as a privately-owned, privately-run website they're simply exercising their own freedom to choose what they do and don't want to do with the servers and bandwidth they're paying for. None of us ever had the right to a platform here. You still retain the freedom to write it, and to find some other publisher or to self-publish.

This kind of rhetoric only makes sense in the context of regulations set by a government, or perhaps a major tech monopoly.

I'm also not convinced that Literotica can accurately be described as "a decent and civilized society"...

I've been mulling this over a bit, and I think you're right that my previous statement didn't quite characterize the issue correctly. In the context of a privately owned forum like this one, the issue isn't freedom v. nonfreedom. It's a question of tolerance. What I'm saying is that the presumption should lie in favor of tolerance.

By tolerance I mean an attitude of "I may dislike what you write, but I think you should be able to write it in this forum because tolerance is a positive good. Allowing views that some, or perhaps even most, dislike is a positive good for a society, or for a forum like this one."

I think an attitude of tolerance extends beyond merely agreeing with the proposition "the Site shouldn't ban your story just because I dislike it." It means, as well, that although it's perfectly fair to critique a story on the ground of its subject matter, the critic should take some care with trying to shame the author or trying to convince the author to choose not to publish the story on the ground that it's objectionable or irresponsible.

My concern with the theory of authorial endorsement, apart from my skepticism about whether the assumptions underlying it have any validity, is that it may conflict with this value of tolerance, which I think is a positive good for a writing community like this one.

As far as Literotica's decency is concerned, I think this is one of the more civilized and interesting social media forums I've ever been involved in. Disagreement here, while sometimes testy, is, on the whole, more civil and polite than in most other forums I've seen, and it's much more intelligent and informed. Much of the Internet more closely resembles the General Board or Politics Board, which I see as useless swamps.

 

[MelissaBaby]

Picture the worst villain imaginable, let's say Hitler for the sake of discussion, if he were alone how much evil could he do? If we could look at people and bad ones looked like Sneidley Whiplash and good ones looked like Nell and Dudley how hard would it be to decide who to trust? Pretty simplistic. Like star- bellied sneetches are good and those with none are bad (or vice versa). Life isn't a cartoon strip.

In the opinion of many, including us, there is far more evil done by those who do not believe that they are doing anything wrong. On one end of the spectrum is an SS officer who "just followed orders." There are those who looked the other way or didn't get involved. There are also those who have caused massive harm while they purported to help. Some actually believe that they are helping "fix" a problem they don't understand to begin with. (These people tend to get government jobs.)

Years ago Italian author Umberto Uno penned a satire of a superhero comic 'My Brother Superman', which took place in a zero-sum world. Every "super" action resulted in a real consequence. Scooping up water to douse a fire caused a guy to break his neck jumping into a suddenly empty swimming pool and the like.

Real life isn't ever quite that simple. The world is filled with overly simplistic people who in the words of Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson want to "take thier comic books and super crooks, (and) make all of thier heroes real, elect Superman for President, and have Robin save the day." (Thick as a Brick - 1972)

I think it's much more common for people to do things that they intrinsically know to be wrong because they see it as justified by the unfairness of life, or offset by some balancing good which usually will just coincidentally also be in their self interest.

 

[8letters]

I feel like the article missed the boat, making a mountain out of a molehill while missing the elephant in the room.

I think readers understand that it's a story. There's good guys and bad guys and stuff happens. To take "Star Wars", I don't think it advocates for blowing up planets. You can argue that it advocates for "the solution to evil is a good guy with a gun", but again, it's a story.

I think there's a far larger, more subtle problem than authorial endorsement. Stories create a reality, and particularly when it's not a reality the reader has experience with, the reader will accept the reality as true when it isn't. The problem is made much worse when that false reality is regularly shared through a variety of stories.

Going back to "Star Wars", it's reality is that the universe is male-dominated and white-only. The only roles for woman are housewife and entertainer (who will presumably get married some day and become a housewife). Leia is the only woman to break out of those role for women, but it's not because of anything she did; it's because she's a princess. If you're a six year old boy watching "Star Wars" a lot, you're going to believe that's the future.

In Young Adult fiction, teens don't have sex. Kissing is as far as things go. And that creates "reality" for many teens today. You can't even read on this porn site stories of kids under eighteen having sex. The rate of students have sexual intercourse has really dropped - between 1991-2015, the proportion of students who ever had sexual intercourse decreased from 54% to 41% despite wider access to contraceptives. As someone who thinks the positives of teenagers experimenting sexually in their high school years far outweighs the negatives, I'm saddened by this.

On the other hand, young men are getting the message that threesomes are awesome. One US study found that 82% of male and 31% of female respondents to an online survey of heterosexual 18-24-year-olds said they were interested in having a threesome. That creates a problem in that many US males think it's natural to have a threesome and their girlfriends aren't interested.

At Literotica, I think it's pointless to say certain kinks are bad because readers self-select which kinks they are exposed to. I write incest stories. Readers who read incest stories are looking for fantasies that turn them on, not accurate portrayals of incest. It's not like the Hallmark channel has realistic stories of modern day romances.

I think authors owe their audience their best effort at capturing reality. But I think they need to focus their efforts on those things where there is a lot of misinformation. An example from the article would be that an author shouldn't use torture as a way of extracting information as torture is only effective at getting people to tell you what you want to hear. With porn, there are host of nonsensical tropes that get repeated over and over again.

 

[Jamie_and_Lisa]

... which usually will just coincidentally also be in their self interest.

Funny how that works isn't it?

 

[capnjs]

I feel like this is related, and relevant to the issue.

I recently got into a back and forth on twitter with a Lit author who, to the best of my knowledge, does not post on the forums.

The subject was the nature of "villains" and how to write them. It was his position that bad people are just plain evil and should be written as such. I responded that I had know many people who committed terrible acts, but that they never seemed to think of themselves as being the bad guy. To write villains or any characters who commit reprehensible acts properly, an author should try to understand them, and what motivated them.

His response was to tell me that I was, obviously, an evil person myself, and that no one who was not could, or would, try to understand why bad people do what they do.

I thought about this exchange as I read this thread. This guy thought that any authorial attempt to understand or explain the behavior of "evil" characters indicated evil intent on the part of the author themselves.

I just figured I'd toss that into the mix as food for thought.

That guy. haha So self righteous. Such a one-dimensional view of the world.

I actually watched a movie called Random Acts of Violence earlier today that sort of tackles this issue (through a genre film lense). It was rather non-committal in its conclusion, which is fine given the kind of movie it is.

For me, art is so subjective that it is difficult to really nail a piece of art down in order to hold it - or rather its creator - accountable for whoever is "inspired" to act based on the content. I see Taxi Driver brought up a lot. Taxi Driver is a very complex film that is often misinterpreted. It is, at its most simple, a depiction of the psychology of a bigoted, potential mass murderer who quite literally gets away with murder because he happens to kill the "right" people. The public makes the mistake of putting a dangerous psychotic back out on the streets, because they approve of his use of violence. When Travis glares into the rearview, Scorsese purposely sped up the footage and played the score backwords to suggest that Travis is still "on the edge", as he phrases it. He's still a racist. He still feels that women owe him affection. He still feels a need to "do something".

The reason I talk about this film extensively is to say that I think Schrader and Scorsese did a really good job of telling a story from the perspective of a misogynistic, bigot without justifying or vindicating him. I think the film does a fantastic job of illustrating his lapses of logic and delusional thinking. It also doesn't paint the people around him as antagonists. It doesn't paint him as justified. There are a lot of movies that fail in theses areas and are irresponsible in their messaging.

So, that leads to the question of whether or not those artists who ARE irresponsible should be blamed. In my view? No. And that goes back to something Melissa put out there earlier "Pointing a finger at an author because you fear their work might inspire bad behavior is to allow the worst readers to set the standard for judgment."

 

[Bramblethorn]

I might be late to the party here, but I finally had a chance to go read that blog posting.

And... the first thing it reminded me of was “CAP Alert.” You don’t know CAP Alert? Rational Wiki article on the Child Care Action Project. (Anyone who recalls me bringing up Jandek on another thread, this one’s another... um, product of Texas...)

CAP Alert is run by a fundamentalist Christian dude in Texas who since the mid-1990s has been doing movie reviews based on ‘biblical principles.’ Basically, there is no ‘art’ where CAP Alert is concerned, he takes everything utterly literally. But read the Rational Wiki article. It’s fair. Go read the actual movie reviews. They’re... anyway. They’re there. And long before I’d made it to the end of the blog posting my memories of CAP Alert had been dredged up in full color. The statements there just put me in the same space that “you’d better assume readers will take every word literally.” Just like the CAP Alert dude says of movies.

I'm familiar with CAP Alert. This is an odd comparison to draw.

CAP makes it clear that their reports (which they don't consider to be "reviews") penalise depiction of "sin" no matter what the context. Their position is that movies are entertainment, that "demonstrating sin" has no place in entertainment, and that regardless of context, even when the film is doing its utmost to warn against sin, depicting how to sin is still inherently corrupting. In their words:

And all those "moral" movies that try to show our kids that a sinful behavior is morally wrong are teaching our kids how to be morally wrong in spite of any "good messages" or "wholesome morals." It is not posible to watch sin demonstrated by live actors (and to some extent, by animated characters) without being shown how to sin; without learning it.

The "authorial endorsement" essay, OTOH, spends a lot of time talking about context, and nowhere does it adopt the premise that depicting evil actions is automatically bad - only that the context can make it so.

It would be nice if y'all could refrain from this whole "what, I'm endorsing every bad deed that happens in my story" straw-man.

 

[Bramblethorn]

I certainly was. But I am cognizant there there are other people who might read it and think, "Wow. She really liked fucking on cocaine, maybe I ought to check that out." The question is whether or not I have a moral responsibility for their decision.

Up north, we have warning signs like these: https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-extreme-danger-saltwater-crocodiles-27989303.html

Some people ignore those signs and go stand in the water anyway. Most times they get lucky, but once in a while somebody gets killed. It's sad, but I'm pretty comfortable viewing those as self-inflicted. Somebody who ignores that kind of warning probably has some serious issues with judgement and risk that are likely to lead them to grief sooner or later, in one form or another.

Having read "My Fall And Rise", I'm comfortable saying that anybody who comes away from that story eager to take up drugs is pretty much in the "standing hip-deep in crocodile-infested waters" class, and you're not responsible for people ignoring those warnings. I would expect it'd deter as many readers as it encouraged.

But supposing you had exaggerated the fun parts of the experience, downplayed the bad, and so given your readers a dishonest impression that makes the package deal sound better than it was, that would be problematic and you might bear some responsibility for the consequences.

I get what you are saying, Manson and Hinckley are outliers. But I don't see how the same principles don't apply, whether the influenced behavior is shooting a president or committing a micro aggression in the office place. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't consider the potential consequences of what you write, but that it is one consideration among many, and not necessarily the most important.

I think we're generally in agreement here. There are a lot of grey areas and difficult judgement calls involved, but the fact that there's not a bright line at the boundary between "okay" and "not okay" doesn't mean no distinction exists.

By the way, I think there is a world of difference between Manson and Hinckley. There is nothing in the Beatles repertoire that could possibly have been construed by a sane person as it was by Manson. Taxi Driver is much more problematic.

Yeah, there are really three categories here:
- Material that would not foreseeably influence anybody to do Bad Things.
- Material that would not foreseeably influence sane people to do Bad Things, but where one can foresee the possibility that an insane person might be influenced that way. (cf. "stochastic terrorism", where this is done deliberately as a deniable way of inciting violence, and ducking the question of what exactly counts as "sane".)
- Material that might foreseeably influence sane people to do Bad Things.

Having listened to a lot of Beatles in my time, I'm comfortable putting Helter Skelter in the first category. I haven't seen Taxi Driver but from what I know of it, I'm prepared to accept that it might fit in the second category.

That's an important category to consider, because even one violent lunatic can do a huge amount of damage. But my reading of the essay is that it's at least equally concerned with the last of those categories. So much of the evil in the world is done by sane people, often even well-meaning people, who have absorbed a drip-feed of toxic ideas and then acted on them.

If you want a woman, and she doesn't want you, persist until she changes her mind - maybe with a big public proposal in front of friends and family! And there's nothing more romantic than elaborate deceptions.

The hero always gets the girl in the end. If you didn't get the girl, well... that never happens.

Cops bending the rules in order to put bad guys away? Always morally justifiable. Never ends up in corruption and abuse.

If somebody hurts you, revenge is the only way to fix it, the crueller the better.

Those people always hated us, always will. There's no reasoning with them and no point in trying to understand why.

IMHO, fiction can play a big part in forming those attitudes, and authorial endorsement is important there.

I don't think the author of the blog post, or anyone here, is calling for writers to refrain from writing stories that contain violence or other objectionable conduct. The issue is whether or not you present it in a manner that conveys your approval of it. If that is your intention, you are well within your rights, and others are within theirs in voicing there objections to it, but that's not the point.

I may not have expressed myself clearly in this thread. I agree with the premise of the article, although I think some of their examples are poorly chosen.

...

So, there was an inherent conflict in my intentions that can not be resolved within the story itself. I can't do all the work for the reader. They have to bring a willingness to absorb and understand what the story is saying. I bear the responsibility of writing a story that conveys my intentions to the best of my ability, as I feel responsible for putting out my best work in all the other aspects of storytelling.

I don't think of readers as passive observers. They are active participants in the process. They depict the characters in their own imaginations, they "see" the action in ways that are subtly different from the author, they draw their own conclusions about what it all means.

So, while I agree with the concept of authorial intent, I recognize its limitations.

Yep, agreed here. It certainly shouldn't be taken as "if you follow this advice, nobody will ever come away from your work with bad ideas", only as a way of reducing that risk.

 

[SyleusSnow]

Soooo... late to this thread, but I'll chime in with a few half-baked ramblings anyway:

The misogyny in porn, including here on Lit, always revolted me (e.g. the BTB crowd in Loving Wives). When I started writing my own filthy smut, I purposely tried to "support a clear message": Hey, guys--women are people. Don't be a pig.

Even the one non-consent story I wrote was about miscommunication and gradually being overcome by passion. The message in my crappy stories is overt, but even good writers can't help exposing their world views and who they are, though it's often subconscious.

SimonDoom asks whether a Lit author should be mindful of how a story might be interpreted. Absolutely... to make a better story. But should they self-censor? Artists must be free to explore all aspects of society freely, even (hell, especially) distasteful ones. Even work that seems created only to shock leads to valuable discussion (Maplethorpe, Serrano's "Piss Christ")

Exploring a topic isn't necessarily promoting it, and writers are explorers. Vonnegut famously compared artists (science fiction writers, specifically) to a canary in the coal mine, alerting society to what might happen before it's too late. Orwell's 1984 was a warning about authoritarianism, not the blueprint certain political parties seem to think it is.

Is incest/taboo the most popular category on Lit because most readers want relations with their relations? I wonder. Personally, I enjoy the I/T stories because the best ones show a hesitant, thoughtful growing together and giving into passion. I mentally edit out the brother/sister mother/son or whatever relationship and the story turns into a sweet romance. Never once has an I/T story made be want to boink my sisters/cousins/mother

(Still, there are a few I/T stories where the taboo is discovered, followed by societal mayhem and regret. A few stories are like that in non-consent too. I'm grateful for them.)

Say a reader finds an incest story so similar to their own life they picture themselves as the main character. This requires some germ of attraction already in their real life. They get their rocks off to the fantasy. Does the reader think "wow... that was great," then go off to molest their sister? Or did the fantasy defuse their lust, maybe leave them feeling guilty, and lead them to mull it over in real terms, leading to the realization it could never/must never happen in real life?

Same for underage and other taboo topics. Pearl-clutchers claim works like Lolita promotes and justifies certain behavior, just like they claim video games lead to mass shootings, Fight Club caused toxic masculinity and so on. Hinckely blamed Taxi Driver for shooting Reagan. Yet a bunch of studies have shown having access to such fantasies reduce the chance a person acts them out in real life.

 

[AlinaX]

Yet a bunch of studies have shown having access to such fantasies reduce the chance a person acts them out in real life.

I guess a lot of this boils down to whether the behaviour is being normalised. Incest is interesting because the eroticism comes from its taboo nature. Readers don't want it to be normalised. In Loving Wives, OTOH, some readers clearly want revenge/torture porn to be normalised.

I like to normalise gender diversity, which I guess counts as authorial endorsement. I like to write non-consensual themes, but I have no wish to normalise non-consensual sex.

 

[SimonDoom]

Yeah, there are really three categories here:
- Material that would not foreseeably influence anybody to do Bad Things.
- Material that would not foreseeably influence sane people to do Bad Things, but where one can foresee the possibility that an insane person might be influenced that way. (cf. "stochastic terrorism", where this is done deliberately as a deniable way of inciting violence, and ducking the question of what exactly counts as "sane".)
- Material that might foreseeably influence sane people to do Bad Things.

.

Isn't it very difficult to predict with any degree of confidence what the foreseeable influence of a Literotica story would be? I'm not sure how anyone could predict anything from any story with any confidence.

I take a pretty free-wheeling "do what you want" attitude on this subject, but I wouldn't say it's completely unlimited. I would be uncomfortable, for example, writing an erotic story on the subject of auto-erotic asphyxiation, which provided a step by step explanation of the process and presented it as fun and safe. I could imagine somebody, somewhere, using my story as an instruction manual, and I would not be comfortable with that. I'd feel the same way about publishing a book that explained in great detail how to build weapons of mass destruction.

But about a great many other subjects, I'm much less sure. A story that indulged a woman's rape fantasy and ended well could be read by somebody, somewhere, as an incitement to rape someone. But is it endorsement? I think context matters. There's an implicit understanding at this Site, I believe, that these stories are, to a great degree, about fantasy. They are not how-to guides (except perhaps in the how to or essay sections). They are not political tracts. They are not expository. They're stories that transport readers to a fantasy world for a little while so they can get off. I think that affects the kind of responsibility one has and whether it's really plausible to say that one is "endorsing" bad behavior or beliefs expressed in one's story.

In the linked article, the author suggests that one way to avoid the problem of authorial endorsement of bad behavior is to make sure that people in the story who engage in it don't get away with it. But that's problematic, because the story may in part have the (perfectly legitimate if debatable) message that sometimes people get away with bad behavior. An good example of that is Woody Allen's movie Crimes and Misdemeanors, in which a man who has had an affair with a woman hires the mob to kill her when she becomes a threat to his marriage. He gets away with it and in the end everything turns out great for him. Allen obviously isn't endorsing the view that this is a good thing. He's endorsing his extremely bleak view of life: that this is the way life is. Good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people and there's no explaining it. That's a bleak but perfectly acceptable artistic message. As a result of this movie, did anyone hire a killer to get rid of someone else? Possibly, but I don't think we'll ever know or have any clue about the probability involved.

I just don't know what basis there is to have any confidence that we know the foreseeable consequences of Literotica stories.

 

[Omenainen]

I don't think of this so much in relation to the main theme of the story, but sort of collateral damage issue. I think most authors think about their main theme and their opinion of it, or how they want to portray it, and pay attention.

Let's say that in the process of writing a story about neighborhood swingers' club the author manages to have all the female characters be stay-at-home trophy wives, and have all sexual situations be initiated and controlled by the males; are they now intentionally or unintentionally endorsing the view that a woman's place in the world is to be a sexy home appliance? If it's not essential to the story, why make it be that way, if that's not what they're endorsing? There is also progression, like for some story something might make sense, but if the same attitude is imbued in every story an author has written, I can't help but interpret that that is where they're coming from, fiction or no fiction. That's what I'm taking away from this discussion, to focus on what goes on at the edges of my stories, so I'll at least acknowledge what it is.

 

[Jamie_and_Lisa]

It seems like you don't really get the right picture here. Even in the AH, there are plenty of posts about breaking the taboo on incest and making it acceptable.

Incest is an overly broad topic. It's can be a dollar store kitchen knife in the hands of Freddy Kreuger or a JA Henckels in the hands of Emeril Lagasse. The first, like any human relationship, can be an abuse of power. The second, a mutual decision to explore or embark on a consanguinamorous journey, can be the most beautiful thing in life. The pathway to something we think is universal, a human desire for complete acceptance, understanding, and love.

Makes me wonder about endorsement when participating on those threads. And whether it is right or wrong not to react...

IOurHO Love and hate are not opposite ends of a straight line. (And Einstein would argue there are no straight lines anyway.) But, they are the extreme emotional ends of a loop. People are interested in what they find fascinating because they are strongly attracted to it or strongly repulsed by it. They mostly ignore the middle.

 

[AlinaX]

It seems like you don't really get the right picture here. Even in the AH, there are plenty of posts about breaking the taboo on incest and making it acceptable. Makes me wonder about endorsement when participating on those threads. And whether it is it right or wrong not to react...

Yes... but even when it's, "I've been fucking my dad since I was a girl in a totally consensual and non-abusive way," it's within a broader context where this would be regarded as seriously disturbed and dysfunctional.

Normalisation and authorial endorsement would probably go along the lines of, "Derek Soames was one of that growing community of loving fathers who eschewed society's archaic strictures on incest. 'The love between father and daughter,' he would often opine, 'is the purest of all affections, and surely the happiest day in any good man's life is the day his matchless daughter - whose chastity he has guarded as surely as Launcelot, that noblest of knights, guarded Guinevere - finally comes of age.'"

 

[Jamie_and_Lisa]

Yes... but even when it's, "I've been fucking my dad since I was a girl in a totally consensual and non-abusive way," it's within a broader context where this would be regarded as seriously disturbed and dysfunctional.

Really? Genesis 19:
לא וַתֹּאמֶר הַבְּכִירָה אֶל-הַצְּעִירָה, אָבִינוּ זָקֵן; וְאִישׁ אֵין בָּאָרֶץ לָבוֹא עָלֵינוּ, כְּדֶרֶךְ כָּל-הָאָרֶץ.
31 And the first-born said unto the younger: 'Our father is old, and there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us after the manner of all the earth.
לב לְכָה נַשְׁקֶה אֶת-אָבִינוּ יַיִן, וְנִשְׁכְּבָה עִמּוֹ; וּנְחַיֶּה מֵאָבִינוּ, זָרַע.
32 Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father.'
לג וַתַּשְׁקֶיןָ אֶת-אֲבִיהֶן יַיִן, בַּלַּיְלָה הוּא; וַתָּבֹא הַבְּכִירָה וַתִּשְׁכַּב אֶת-אָבִיהָ, וְלֹא-יָדַע בְּשִׁכְבָהּ וּבְקוּמָהּ.
33 And they made their father drink wine that night. And the first-born went in, and lay with her father; and he knew not when she lay down, nor when she arose.

לו וַתַּהֲרֶיןָ שְׁתֵּי בְנוֹת-לוֹט, מֵאֲבִיהֶן.
36 Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father.
לז וַתֵּלֶד הַבְּכִירָה בֵּן, וַתִּקְרָא שְׁמוֹ מוֹאָב: הוּא אֲבִי-מוֹאָב, עַד-הַיּוֹם.
37 And the first-born bore a son, and called his name Moab--the same is the father of the Moabites unto this day.
לח וְהַצְּעִירָה גַם-הִוא יָלְדָה בֵּן, וַתִּקְרָא שְׁמוֹ בֶּן-עַמִּי: הוּא אֲבִי בְנֵי-עַמּוֹן, עַד-הַיּוֹם.
38 And the younger, she also bore a son, and called his name Ben-ammi--the same is the father of the children of Ammon unto this day.

Moab מוֹאָב means “from my father”

Ben-Ammi בֶּן-עַמִּי means "of my people"

They were neither ashamed of what they did nor punished for what they did.

Obviously because it wasn't wrong.

 

[KeithD]

We all know how consistent the Old Testament is. It's interesting what one can do with a tent peg as well that is sanctioned--and a whole land of people.

 

[AlinaX]

Really? ... Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father.' And they made their father drink wine that night. And the first-born went in, and lay with her father; and he knew not when she lay down, nor when she arose.

You're trying to prove that incest is okay by quoting an incident of non-consensual incest?

 

[Jamie_and_Lisa]

We all know how consistent the Old Testament is. It's interesting what one can do with a tent peg as well that is sanctioned--and a whole land of people.

A young man who was almost not quite old enough to join LitE left central Texas as part of the 36th Infantry Division to fight Hitler. Being a descendant of German Pietists who settled the Hill Country - Pietists believed that each individual human being should seek a personal understanding of everything rather than simply accept what they were told - he was shaken by what he saw at places like the Dachau Concentration Camp that his unit helped liberate. When he returned to Texas he went to the seminary and became a Brethern minister.

(The Brethren ordained women (1910) and uncloseted homosexuals (1932). In what we see as ill-considered moves they later merged with the Evangelicals (1952) -- who were Holiness Methodists -- before both merged with the mainstream Methodists (1968) moving to the political right each time. Where we grew up the laity deserted them, most became Pentecostals. When mom was a kid they were taught that it was a duty to care for our “other” -- other was not gender-specific or explicitly binary. That included the gift of sex when our “other” needed some. Not when it was convenient or when we felt like it.)

He was our pastor and Eva, Lillian, and Claire’s father, his BA was in Textural Criticism. We met Eva when we were kindergarteners and she was a first-grader. He taught us to parse a text, to see what was there, what wasn’t there, and how to use inconsistencies to see where a text had been changed. (Our teachers with two exceptions didn’t like us.) We hung out at the parsonage and read smut together. (Once we were all 18 of course -- this is LitE.) In modern terms, the Bible is full of dominance, submission, murder, mayhem, rape, pillaging, and our favorites…

Polygamy -- we played ‘Laban’s house’ as pre-sexual kids, two or three dads and five to eight moms living together. Consanguinamory -- Incest -- Adam and Eve, 20 generations of brothers marrying and procreating with sisters, Noah’s three sons, Abraham and his sister Sarah who sent their son and grandsons to marry their first- cousins… And we are back at Laban’s house only as 18-year-olds. Eva had been ordained by the Pentecostals because the Methodists required penises of divinity students in 1969.

Don’t get us wrong -- we love penises, Paul and George have wonderful ones that they are more than happy to share -- but Eva could preach or make love to her sisters in Christ without one. Scripture, as originally written, isn’t anti-sex -- it’s pro-responsibility. The unit of measure is the colony, not the ant. To regulate a thing is to accept its existence and normalize it. There are eight forms of Biblical Marriage -- guess which one isn’t in there, one man one woman where she gets to choose -- homosexuality, masturbation, oral sex, and anal sex are not prohibited. Polygamy and consanguinamory are viewed with great favor, not scorn.

Not just in the Bible. We grew up on a goat farm. Back then Texas A&M University distributed research to ranchers such as this by Dr. Anthony M. Ludovici "The evidence from the practice of experienced breeders conclusively points to the best results being obtained from the closest inbreeding...

"Just as natural selection eliminates individuals which are the outcome of two polluted streams becoming confluent in consanguineous unions, so the wise breeder, imitating Nature's way, carefully weeds out unhappy specimens. If morbid or lethal factors still exist in the stock's germ-plasm, and they happen to come together from both sides in the mating of close relatives, then instead of a confluence of rivers of pure water, a confluence of impure streams occurs, which results in a stream doubly contaminated.

"It is remarkable that owing to the ethico-theological superstition against inbreeding and incest, bad and ignorant breeders have, until recently, always ascribed to close inbreeding per se, and not to the pollution of the continent streams..." We got a free visit to the provost’s office for bringing a copy of that University study to a High School biology class. But since we never had to go back so it was pretty much win-win.

The preface to the original King James Version of the English mistranslation of the Latin Vulgate states that it was changed by the political elite to correct errors. (Well, errors in the opinion of the King who commissioned the mistranslation because the popular Geneva Bible didn’t recognize “the divine right of kings.”) In our opinion UNC Prof. Bart D. Ehrman’s ‘Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why’ (ISBN 978-0-06-073817-4) is an excellent “beginners book” on this subject.

 

[KeithD]

Umm, OK. I read some of that. Yes, Bart writes great stuff. He's an agnostic now, by the way. Other than that I'm not sure what the hell you thought you were talking down to me about. (I once was the editor of one of the United Methodists' national magazines and have coauthored a Bible study myself.) If you aren't feeling pretentious, you probably should be.

 

[Jamie_and_Lisa]

You're trying to prove that incest is okay by quoting an incident of non-consensual incest?

What we actually said was that it wasn't considered to be scripturally wrong or ethically bad in the original context of Judaism or Christianity. Mom's church was German Pietist, we were expected to literally "give" our bodies to our "other." Other was not defined in gender-specific or binary terms and the church ordained women from 1910 and uncloseted homosexuals from 1932.

Individual consent is a very modern concept. There are eight forms of marriage that are Biblically regulated and therefore acceptable -- one man one woman and she chooses is not one of them -- in ancient times the survival of the colony, not the ant was what mattered. Men having sex with men and women having sex with women wasn't a problem -- practice is a good thing -- so long as the social structure is maintained and children are produced and raised in the way of the clan.

PS: The name Palith (Lots eldest daughter) means to "deliver a people."

The name Hodesh (the younger daughter) means "a new beginning."

And we are officially squawking 7500... (Hijack transponder code.)

Now we don't think that the state should be using scripture to make laws any more than we think that the speed limit on Post Road should be 35 mph. But if it is, then be honest about it don't ticket us for driving 33 mph.

Re: Biblical references to Brother-Sister Marriages and resultant offspring a longer but not exhaustive list...

Cain+Awan-->Enoch
Cain+Nod-->Rash
Cain+Balbira-->Azael
Enoch+Azael-->Irad
Seth+Aclima-->Anok
Seth+Azura-->Enos
Seth+Azura-->Noam
Enos+Noam-->Kenan
Enos+Noam-->Mulalelath
Kenan+Mulalelath-->Mehalalel
Kenan+Mulalelath-->Dinah
Mehalalel+Dinah-->Jared
Mehalalel+Dinah-->Baraleg
Jared+Baraleg-->Enoch
Jared+Baraleg-->Edna
Enoch+Edna-->Methuselah
Enoch+Edna-->Emzara
Methuselah+Emzara-->Lamech
Methuselah+Emzara-->Balenos
Lamech+Balenos-->Noah

Noah, Seth's great great great great great grandson, broke with "tradition," and married a distant cousin, Naamah who was Cain's great great great great granddaughter. (Yes, without counting Adam and Eve having seven children, we just cited 20 examples and we are "only" at the flood.)

Inescapable conclusion: polygamy and consanguinamory are not "Biblically immoral."

 

[Jamie_and_Lisa]

Umm, OK. I read some of that. Yes, Bart writes great stuff. He's an agnostic now, by the way. Other than that I'm not sure what the hell you thought you were talking down to me about. (I once was the editor of one of the United Methodists' national magazines and have coauthored a Bible study myself.) If you aren't feeling pretentious, you probably should be.

We are genuinely sorry if you felt like we were talking down to you. That wasn't our intent. Although our post was in response to your post it was meant for a wide audience...

Oops, we just figured out where we were being pretentious...

Any honest person is an Agnostic, none of us "knows." Atheism is as much of a belief system as any other. We aren't anti-Methodist, and we understand the social justice forces of the 1960s and the desire to pool influence that led to many of the (in our opinion ill-fated) decisions that were made in all three church bodies mentioned.

 

[KeithD]

Were you two on the sauce tonight? That barrage was truly bizarre. I left the church last year, just as your referenced Bart Ehrman has done, for just about the same reason as you pointed to in your "stuff" dump--the Old Testament is so full of patriarchal, contradictory, blood thirsty, and obsolete crap--like the Moab story you nonsensically dumped here--that clinging to it is obsoleting the rational (so not the Evangelical) Christian churches in the twenty-first century.

 

[Jamie_and_Lisa]

Were you two on the sauce tonight?

Yes, but not to the point that it made us any weirder than we already are. We are Anders als die Andern (to borrow the title of Richard Oswalds 1919 film) in more ways than one. A little dinner a little drink a little sex on the beach a little bizarre posting of our brain droppings (to borrow from Mr. Carlin)

That barrage was truly bizarre.

We have been told that we are pretty bizarre. We see everything as being connected to everything else. Of course, we live in a pretty bizarre world. We hit 65 a few years ago and decided to leave the US to avoid mandatory retirement. As legal residents elsewhere we can legally work in the US because of a reciprocal treaty, but couldn't if we were still US residents. Lisa was once charged by one federal agency for stealing an airplane that a different federal agency said she owned, and a third federal agency is currently pissed at us for providing a state court with a video of an agent employed by a fourth federal agency (who two years later hasn't been fired) soliciting a bribe to commit a felony on our behalf. (Perhaps we shouldn't come back.) As weird as we are, sometimes we are the only sane people in the room.

your "stuff" dump--

We don't think the government should be legislating morality. For starters, they are unfamiliar with both the term and concept. Sadly so are many churches. AlinaX opined that Incest was popular because it was taboo, and those who enjoyed reading about it don't want it normalized. ReubenR opined that a lot of people at AH wanted it normalized. We opined that the word is loaded, that like other words not normally used as pejoratives like marriage, there are abusive ones and sweet tender ones. We know a lot about the latter. AlinaX countered that even consensual situations were considered by outsiders to be dysfunctional. We know a lot about that too. We countered with the story of Palith and Hodesh as a historical view of an oft assailed behavior that was not considered disturbed.

I left the church last year

Yes, the last one to leave needs to turn out the lights. Eva and Lillian are two of our lovers, Claire is married to Lisa's brother Ethan (they're into this really weird monogamy thing, we try not to judge, it seems to work for them) when we were young their father taught that God was love and we were all just a little bit different because we were all made in a reflection of an aspect of the divine, and he could cite his sources. Eva is an ordained minister and we attended a conference together where people who couldn't read the Bible in English, let alone the original as she can, gave the Walt Disney comic strip version and argued that people like us were responsible for the decline of the church, society, the word, why they can't get their microwave oven to stop flashing 12:00 over and over.

the Old Testament is so full of patriarchal, contradictory, bloodthirsty, and obsolete crap--like the Moab story you nonsensically dumped here-

Just our opinion, IF IT IS READ IN THE ORIGINAL OR A LITERAL TRANSLATION it makes sense as a historical record of a people written by many individuals over many years. Note, we didn't say "it's a blueprint on how to live in 2020." There are 617 "rules" or rather "suggestions" given. Logically they cannot all be taken literally as normally translated.

-that clinging to it is obsoleting the rational (so not the Evangelical) Christian churches in the twenty-first century.

When we were kids, Evangelical was simply a synonym for Lutheran it didn't have the connotations that it does today, churches weren't political and they were relevant. (Hmmm was that a coincidence?)