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: 2004-01-14 12:07 pm (UTC)Well...
Date: 2004-01-14 05:14 pm (UTC)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...
Date: 2004-01-14 07:43 pm (UTC)That's not the reason.
Date: 2004-01-16 05:23 am (UTC)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.
Date: 2004-01-16 07:46 am (UTC)At least you are a thinking poster though and don't just "reply" without thinking