can you deal with incest in fanfic?
Jan. 12th, 2004 08:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
percivalIf you are a mature adult, yes, possibly. But if you are a child or a teenager? Will you know that it is not a good idea to have sexual relationships with your sibling? Or will repeated exposure to the idea and fantasising about the idea somehow start to make incest acceptable to you after a while?
Just a Buddhist thought:
In Buddhism, we try to be compassionate and loving in our hearts. That means that we neither dwell upon violence nor enjoy it. One of the key insights in Buddhist spirituality is that who you are and how you act is closely related to what you think. As a consequence, we need to work on our mind, our thinking. We need to make sure that our thoughts are compassionate, loving, free of clinging desire.
So, from a Buddhist perspective, actively seeking out incest fics because you get a thrill out of the dark, forbidden relationship is clearly wrong because you are indulging a desire to see people harm each other. You invite these fantasies into your mind and nourish them.
How would a Buddhist regard people who read incest fic? Well, non-judgmentally, with compassion and understanding. If they decide they need to pollute their minds, they will have a reason for doing it.
For the record, I myself continuosly pollute my mind with thoughts of anger, self hate, sarcasm, hate of others, petty jealousy. But seeing that I want to be a good Buddhist, I will need to work on that. Sigh. Revelling in anger can be such fun sometimes, just as revelling in fantasies of incest or rape can be fun for people who read those fics. But ultimately, it's nae good for you, says Uncle Gautama. And Uncle Gautama is usually not far off the mark, if you know what I mean.
Just a Buddhist thought:
In Buddhism, we try to be compassionate and loving in our hearts. That means that we neither dwell upon violence nor enjoy it. One of the key insights in Buddhist spirituality is that who you are and how you act is closely related to what you think. As a consequence, we need to work on our mind, our thinking. We need to make sure that our thoughts are compassionate, loving, free of clinging desire.
So, from a Buddhist perspective, actively seeking out incest fics because you get a thrill out of the dark, forbidden relationship is clearly wrong because you are indulging a desire to see people harm each other. You invite these fantasies into your mind and nourish them.
How would a Buddhist regard people who read incest fic? Well, non-judgmentally, with compassion and understanding. If they decide they need to pollute their minds, they will have a reason for doing it.
For the record, I myself continuosly pollute my mind with thoughts of anger, self hate, sarcasm, hate of others, petty jealousy. But seeing that I want to be a good Buddhist, I will need to work on that. Sigh. Revelling in anger can be such fun sometimes, just as revelling in fantasies of incest or rape can be fun for people who read those fics. But ultimately, it's nae good for you, says Uncle Gautama. And Uncle Gautama is usually not far off the mark, if you know what I mean.
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no subject
Date: 2004-01-13 08:50 pm (UTC)I'm disturbed that you're so interested in the inside of my head, but writing the fic was a very interesting experience. I was writing about issues of consent in as many situations as I could come up with, problematizing as much as I could.
From what I can tell, people participating in this conversation may not understand why anyone would do that. I think there's something to be said about working through these things, both in private and in a public forum. I certainly learned a lot. The conversations that emerged were interesting and enlightening; some people felt that the incest victim I was portraying was in fact 'a slut' because of her situation. If people honestly have the capacity to think that way about girls caught in these kinds of vicious circumstances, I think it's something we really should explore, by your own moral standpoint. What if this stuff makes people more sensitive, rather than less?
How did it make me feel, writing incest? I really have no idea, I was more fixated on how my characters would be feeling than how it was making me feel. Challenged, I guess. It's difficult to write emotionally-charged situations. It felt more like a manifesto than anything else.
Hope that helps.
no subject
Date: 2004-01-15 01:11 pm (UTC)And these issues need to be explored, because no matter how "enlightened" or "holy" a person is, s/he will still feel all of the negative emotions that everybody is subject to. Now, (and this is my spiritual tradition coming through again, so bear with me ...), I think that it is much better to acklowledge a negative emotion and to explore it with compassion than to push it away and smack yourself for even THINKING about such things.
Well written incest really can make people more sensitive. I came away from Lolita thoroughly disgusted by Humbert Humbert, and marvelling at the way people can justify their own behaviour.