can you deal with incest in fanfic?

[percival]

If 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.

Comments

[swampfaye.livejournal.com]

I don't think your post was judgemental - as in "YOU PEOPLE WHO WRITE INCEST FAN FIC ARE SICK" - that would be what *I* would say - yes, but you didn't say it, you proposed some thought on the subject. If someone is offended, too bad (I'll beat them up for you)

Incest is never "harmless" - like child pornography or abuse, it has real life consequences. THe problem with most fan fic is that it never produces consequences. Homosexual relationships never end in AIDS, Heterosexual relationships never end in pregnancy or divorce, incest never ends with bruised egos and psyche's, and adult/child relationships never end in damaged and confused children. It's unreal. That's why it remains fan fic.

And may I remind fan fic writers... Romance is not Passion and Lust is not Romance.

[iczer6.livejournal.com]

[THe problem with most fan fic is that it never produces consequences.]

Nor should it. God forbid someone reads a story that's Deep and Meaningful.

Not everything in the universe needs to be taken seriously. If someone wants to write a FredxGeorge smutfest and NOT turn into in a 30 chapter angstfest they're allowed.

Did you miss the rant above that one of the appeals of fiction is that we can explore things that are dangerous or harmful without dealing with real life consequences?

Here are some salad tongs, pull that pole out of your ass and then we can talk.

[swampfaye.livejournal.com]

Are you really SO afraid of addressing the issue that you have to insult me and be derrogatory? The issue is that fan fic of this sort (and might I remind you that all fan fic is infringing on copyright of intellectual property) has no value OTHER than entertaining twisted fantasies which are Illegal and immoral and frankly destructive in real life. Is that really the arguement you want to make?

Well...

[nabiki-gmyw.livejournal.com]

There are several issues here that are getting lumped together when they are actually seperate issues. I'm going to split them apart for clarity. For example:

Fanfic Incest and Morality: Well, humanity is full of dark sides to begin with. Even if these fantasies are evil and immoral, in the end are just fantasies. Can someone actually take them seriously? Yes, if they were mentally ill to begin with.

Every respectable middle-aged man has a dark side lurking in the back of his mind. Better on the net than in RL, that's what I say. We all have our own personal demons, our sick little fantasies, its what makes us human. Better to let it out in fanfic/art than release it on other human beings.

Remember that, try as we might, the dark side of the force will always be there. Better to integrate it into the self and conquer it than hiding it and pretending its not there. Denial will just be harmful in the long-run.

Incest and Censorship: And anyway, if people want to read/write those fantasies, its not anybody's duty to 'save' them. It's a personal choice, really. And like the already-mentioned Sartre said, we have to assume the consequences of our choices.

A fic writer that writes about incest/murder/whatever is always aware that they'll be consequences. They may not be obvious, or even important, or the writer will simply be willing to pay the costs anyway.

Literary merit of incest: As for the literary merit of such endeavours, well, that's a different animal. The famous book Lolita is about a weird relationship of an adult and a girl is regarded as a masterpiece even if it does have a controversial subject matter. I guess what I'm trying to say that good morality doesn't equal crappy writings (even though most slashfics try seem to prove otherwise.)

Add to that that some people honestly don't care about literary merit to begin with and what do we have? Lots of fighting and simplification on what is actually a very delicate and complicated issue. It's not as simple as black and white, not when its in the name of art. It deserves serious thought and patience, both which are not abundant in the real world nor the net.

Re: Well...

[swampfaye.livejournal.com]

The problem *is* that it doesn't stay on the net. Otherwise child porn would be perfectly acceptable and slash porn would be "mainstream". Child porn is illegal because it is almost ALWAYS acted upon. There are some fantasies you simply should not entertain. There are very destructive things and it does us no good to expose ourselves to them and say it does no harm.

That's not the reason.

[alara-r.livejournal.com]

Child porn is illegal because it is created by raping or exploiting children.

There *was*, at one point, a law in the US stating that even if kiddie porn was created without using any real children, it was still illegal. However, the purpose of this wasn't actually "omg, what if some guy looks at anime where there's a girl who's supposed to be 12 even though she has giant boobs and decides to rape a real 12-year-old?" It was to cover the defense of photomanipulations; in today's day and age, it might be impossible to tell if a picture really depicts the sexual abuse of a child or if it was photomanipulated to look like that, and they didn't want to run the risk that the exploitation of real children would be defended by lying and claiming it was a photomanip. I believe the Supreme Court has since struck down this provision, anyway, as it was too broad (it could have applied to cartoon drawings, where obviously no real children were involved, or even written fiction.)

There is *no* pornography that is "almost always acted upon." What we can say is that a child molester will almost always remain a child molester, but we *cannot* say, at this time, that a consumer of child pornography will become a child molester. Thinking thoughts is not wrong. Committing evil acts is. Child porn is illegal and rape porn is not because an actress can freely consent to be photographed in a sexual act where she is pretending to be raped, but a child involved in a sexual act *is* being raped, no matter what, and it is very difficult to create the realistic appearance of child rape without actually raping a child. By making it totally illegal to *own* child porn, they seek to undercut the market, make people fear buying it, and therefore make it less profitable to rape children and photograph it.

That being said, I think it would be very, very dangerous for a person who has sexual thoughts about children to indulge them with kiddie porn, because it *could* lead to desensitization and willingness to commit the crime of child molestation. I think that usually, fantasizing about something is all right because it provides an outlet and because there's often some legal, non-harmful way you can fulfill your fantasies (for instance, men who fantasize about committing rape *could* hook up with women who have rape fantasies for some consensual roleplaying.) But short of happening to find a 19-year-old lover who looks 12 there is *no* legal or non-harmful way to satisfy fantasies of molesting children. Adults just don't look like children and actual children can never participate in sex acts with adults without it causing them great harm. So chanfic does, in fact, rather trouble me (and anime where girls in sailor suits are sexually molested *really* bothers me).

But I think that, while incestfic squicks the hell out of *me*, there's nothing inherently wrong with writing it (particularly of the twincest variety, where the identical ages means it's unlikely to involve exploitation or rape the way older sib/younger sib usually would). Incest, for one thing, is something that most normal humans are genetically programmed against; you *can't* persuade a normal person that it's okay to have sex with their brother, because they think about it and go "EUUUWWW!" Brothers are not sexual beings to most normal people. Hell, *my* brother is a guy I can recognize intellectually as incredibly hot, who'd be exactly my type if he weren't my brother, and the thought of even seeing him naked grosses me out. :-)

Re: That's not the reason.

[swampfaye.livejournal.com]

Child molestors consume porn. That is almost always how they are traced and caught. Police are having a hard time stopping kiddie porn because parents are so willing to put their kids in skimpy outfits in front of photographers without checking their references. there was a recent sweep by the FBI that found over 50% of "child photographers" found on the internet were convicted of "sexual offenses with a minor".

At least you are a thinking poster though and don't just "reply" without thinking

[carmarthen.livejournal.com]

Complete stranger here, but:

1) Heterosexual people get AIDS, too. Quite frequently.

2) And may I remind fan fic writers... Romance is not Passion and Lust is not Romance.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that, but not everyone is interested only in Romance, and people's definitions of romance/lust/passion/love and the borders between them tend to vary a lot from person to person.

3) Of course, I tend to hide in my happy little corner of fandom where people are aware of what they're writing and take it reasonably seriously. But I don't think 'not taking things seriously' is strictly a problem of fanfiction -- there's an awful lot of professional fiction and pornography out there that glorifies rape, murder, incest, and so on. Most people are fully capable of distinguishing fantasy and reality.

(For the record, fiction glorifying incest disturbs me, as does fiction glorifying violence, destruction of the environment, or stalking -- but I also think it's ridiculous to think that teenagers, or even older children, would decide that incest is great from reading fiction. Fiction can influence people, but I don't think it's nearly that dramatic most of the time.)

[swampfaye.livejournal.com]

Companies spend MILLIONS of dollars on 30 seconds of "words" because they know they can influence you in that amount of time. How many more seconds are some people spending on these very destructive words? Will it influence them?

[carmarthen.livejournal.com]

Most advertising is largely visual, not verbal, and there's a big difference between an ad carefully designed to sell a product, service, or idea and a book or story intended to tell a story. Most fiction isn't polemical in the same way ads are.

Is reading romance novels going to make teenagers have sex? Does reading horror novels turn people into serial killers? Words require thought to understand, and on the whole I'm a lot more inclined to worry about the repetitive violence on TV and in the movies, the way sex and violence are so often linked in the media, and the consistently unhealthy portrayals of love and sex in the media, than a few fanfiction stories on the internet.

(And on the subject of incest, or anything else controversial, really -- the reason incest is a taboo is not simply because parents tell their kids it's Wrong -- I'm pretty sure my parents never bothered, but the idea of having sex with one of my siblings is still pretty repellent. The majority of people have a mental barrier against incest in real life simply because of the difference between family relationships and other relationships. I seriously doubt reading fiction that portrays incest as okay is going to go against that sort of programming. Reading about characters you like having sex or a romantic relationship is vastly different from suddenly finding your's obnoxious sister, the one who threw you in the swimming pool when you were six, attractive. Ultimately -- if adults are going to be unduly influenced by what they read, that's their problem. If children are unable to think critically (and I have read books which contained reasonably explicit sex since I was quite young -- I had one conversation with my mom about how sex isn't usually like it is in books, and that was that. Not only am I not a crackwhore, I'm still a virgin), then it's the parents' responsibility to monitor their reading/movie-watching/TV-watching/etc. Even when authors have icky issues, it is not their responsibility to not write; it is the reader's responsibility to be aware of what they're reading, or to choose not to read it.)

[swampfaye.livejournal.com]

I just find it facinating that people think it will have no influence on them 0 of course it will. Comanies would not spend MILLIONS of dollars on it if it didn't - VIsiual may impact you sooner, but words still mean things. Otherwise, am/fm radio would have long ago shriveled up and died.

[carmarthen.livejournal.com]

Again, there's still a vast difference between an ad designed to brainwash and a piece of fiction designed to tell a story, and I still think the visual is much more influential in the case of advertising.

And I think I can say fairly confidently that the vast majority of ads actively repell me, and I don't generally buy things I see in ads.

Anyway, my point still stands: it is perfectly possible to be a critical reader/viewer and analyze what you see and read rather than blindly following it. People do that all the time; it's the people who don't think about what they see who are affected by advertising.

I find it fascinating that you essentially ignored everything I wrote, which was argued and supported, and replied with three sentences which didn't answer my argument and merely reiterated yours, but on the other hand I'm beginning to regret attempting to debate here anyway, since we seem to come from polar opposite views on who responsibility belongs to.

[swampfaye.livejournal.com]

Anything, however unlikely, is still possible

[perceval.livejournal.com]

Thank you for arguing calmly with somebody who indeed comes from a completely opposite point of view to yours. Now let me jump one step up and reply to some of the earlier posts.

[perceval.livejournal.com]

There's something else going on here that you need to factor in as well: people's gullibility, their tendency to believe in what authorities tell them, and their tendency to want to fit in with their peers.

All outside influences, be they books, media, or other people, can contribute to shaping a person's world view - depending on how that person processes these influences.

So, while it's wrong to say that romance novels make somebody want to have sex, they might nourish ideals of romantic love and fantastic sex which do not correspond to what can be found in real life.

But the "fault" there - if there is any fault at all! - is not with the novel, it is with the reader, who is inclined to confuse the novel with reality.

Likewise, with an incest fic, it depends very much on how it is read, with what intent it is read, and whether it is read in order to reinforce self-harm or other-harm tendencies that are already there.

Does that make sense to you?

(sorry for taking so long to respond: see my next post in my LJ re: being quite busy at the moment)

[carmarthen.livejournal.com]

But the "fault" there - if there is any fault at all! - is not with the novel, it is with the reader, who is inclined to confuse the novel with reality.

Exactly what I was attempting to say. Thus I think it's far more effective to try training people to think critically than to try to sanitize the world. The former's unlikely, but the latter's impossible.

[perceval.livejournal.com]

Well, I'd agree with carmarthen here in that influencing people is not as simple as it may seem. True, the media do have a role to play, but there's also church, your peers and friends, your parents, and your education.

Whether an ad reaches its goal depends quite a lot on the personality of the viewer and reader, and his/her susceptibility to the messages.

You seem to be able to withstand media onslaughts pretty well, and that's a good thing! I'm sure there are many more people like you out there.

[budclare.livejournal.com]

"Incest is never "harmless" - like child pornography or abuse, it has real life consequences."

Technically, that's not true. It's generally assumed that any incest that occurs took place and/or started during childhood, but it's theoretically possible that an incestuous relationship could take place between adults. In that case, it'd still be squicky, but it wouldn't be the same issue as incest involving one or more minors. And even then, the squick-factor would be due to our society's views of incest, not due to any inherent wrongness. (But I do agree with your point about consequences. I'm just being picky. ;)

(How the hell did I end up in a discussion about incest? Sheesh.)

[swampfaye.livejournal.com]

I don't think you know people who have suffered from incest. It is a violation of trust. It usually involves molestation. There is a VERY GOOD reason it is socially unacceptable. Talk to any psychologist who has had to council someone suffering from incest - it's not pretty and it leaves scars. See... this is the problem - we make incest "mainstream" so it starts to lose it's "inherent wrongness" and it destroys peoples lives when they find themselves involved in it. Can you see how someone could enter into this kind of relationship saying "this is okay, I read about it online" (just look at the arguements here FOR "incest is not that bad") or are you just denying that words have any influence over people at all?

[budclare.livejournal.com]

"I don't think you know people who have suffered from incest."

No, I don't, because I've lived my whole life under a rock. (I'd chide you for your bad logic, except that I sometimes say stupid things like that too. Go figure.)

"It is a violation of trust. It usually involves molestation."

Usually. That was exactly my point, which you would have known if you had bothered to actually read what I wrote. Yes, incest is horrible. I never said that it wasn't. I'm saying that it's theoretically possible for incestous relationships to exist that do not follow the patterns that we are familiar with. Hell, two people could have sex without knowing that they're family. It's technically incest whether they know about it or not. All I'm saying is that odds are that there are a very, very tiny percentage of instances of incest that are not as bad as the rest.

"Talk to any psychologist who has had to council someone suffering from incest - it's not pretty and it leaves scars."
Talk to any anthropologist and they'll tell you that there have been, on ocassion, groups where incest (in the form of marriage between siblings) was acceptable or even the norm. While I'll agree that this is hardly a good idea, growing up in a society like that would produce a worldview that is totally different from our own, and therefore the psychological issues would not be the same as they are for us.

"we make incest "mainstream" so it starts to lose it's "inherent wrongness" and it destroys peoples lives when they find themselves involved in it."

Prove it. Prove to me that people commit incest after reading fanfic who would not have done so anyway. Because in my world, you're either crazy (and/or ridiculously impressionable) or you're not, and nothing you read is going to change that.

"Can you see how someone could enter into this kind of relationship saying "this is okay, I read about it online" (just look at the arguements here FOR "incest is not that bad") or are you just denying that words have any influence over people at all?"

I'm denying that most people are as easily influenced as you seem to believe. Incest happens because life sucks, not because someone writes about it.

[swampfaye.livejournal.com]

Incest happens more often because we say "it's not really that bad." It doesn't happen as often in countries where it has a severe penalty. SO yes, soften the blow - you increase the behavior.

[budclare.livejournal.com]

"Incest happens more often because we say "it's not really that bad.""

Who says that?

"It doesn't happen as often in countries where it has a severe penalty."

Were you hoping for capital punishment?

[swampfaye.livejournal.com]

Capitol punishment for incest does not bother me but I will defer to people who deal with this issue on regular basis (law enforcement and psychologists).

[perceval.livejournal.com]

I agree with most of what you are saying. You can extend the anthropology argument easily to history, fwiw.

Because in my world, you're either crazy (and/or ridiculously impressionable) or you're not, and nothing you read is going to change that.

What do you mean by that? I actually see this more as a continuum, starting at normal sibling relationships, then going via feelings for a sibling / attraction to a sibling to full blown incest. Or going via the need to assert superiority over a sibling, and the need to express one's own sexuality, to incest. Either way, it's a continuum. If you're unsure about what the healthy boundaries of a sibling relationship are, a subculture where incest is feted could push you in the direction of incest. Likewise, a subculture where incest is taboo might push you towards more healthy behaviour.

Note the "might": there are too many other variables in this game to make this relationship deterministic.

(Thank you for having a relatively rational debate with a friend of mine who does not share your opinion, btw.)

[budclare.livejournal.com]

I agree, but reading fanfic could only really be an issue in borderline cases. Most people are so far from commiting incest (due to the "Ew" factor, as others have mentioned) that no amount of reading will change that. In the cases where fanfic could potentially have a negative effect...there had to have been a problem to begin with. Maybe fanfic could provide the final straw, but it can't create the problem in the first place, not without a lot of help. In those cases, even if you remove one possible trigger from the equation...there's always going to be another possible trigger waiting to take its place. You can only do so much to protect people from the world, and if you try too hard to shelter people, you just end up doing more harm than good.

I do find it a little odd that so many people write incest fics, but I'm certainly not going to tell them not to just because there's a remote possibility that it might, along with a variety of other factors, cause someone harm. There's plenty of real blame to go around when something as bad as incest happens. There's no need to start assigning imaginary blame as well.