Rob checks his privilege
So apparently writing N/C impregnation with overtones of cheating and sharp power differentials is something Rob does now? Discussions with a couple of other writers have nudged me towards thinking a little bit about our role as creative individuals. Or, rather, our non-role.
Over the years, I’ve written a few harder-edged, noncon pieces. I didn’t really intend them to be arousing, and it was initially surprising to me when people found them that way. The moral lesson to be taken from “Catholic schoolgirl rape” is a bit ambiguous, even when they are asking for it. For awhile I was a little conflicted, and then I decided that I should stick with it, because it turns me on. And then another writer I know felt compelled to tell me that they write nonconsensual pieces because they also think it’s hot, and then feel guilty for doing so. They feel, “as a feminist,” that it’s inappropriate.
And then I decided that this was silly. It’s silly for anyone to be apologetic about their fetishes, which are private things anyway; it’s particularly silly for furries to do so. So that was data point one for this essay.
Data point two is that by all accounts the video game Grand Theft Auto is a blast and a half.
Let’s extrapolate some things from this.
Firstly, that rape can be super hot. Secondly, that murdering people is a lot of fun. And thirdly, that I didn’t feel the need to condescend to you by saying “in fiction! In fiction! Not in real life,” because I presume that most of us are reasonably well-versed on the difference between the two.
Now. Somebody probably ought to be saying right about now: “but I don’t think that either of those things are cool, even in fiction.” Or maybe you think one is fun but not the other; hey. I’m not going to judge. Indeed, I think we realize that people have different tastes. We realize this every time that we need to find a place to go out to lunch. “How are you feeling about Thai food?” “Eh, I don’t know. I don’t really like Thai food.” “How about that Mexican place?”
Fortunately, the Internet allows us to associate only with people who share our particular tastes. And, it permits us to assume a greater weight to them beyond that accorded by our own opinion.
“How are you feeling about Thai food?” “I find Thai food problematic.”
Although actually I sort of mean:
This is a neat party trick. You might ordinarily feel guilty about telling someone what to do (“don’t eat pad thai”), since it’s based on your own personal opinion (“I don’t like pad thai”) and the synthesis of those two (“we shouldn’t eat pad thai because I don’t like pad thai”) comes off as weirdly demanding. But… it shouldn’t, right? Everything is based on compromise of opinion.
We could have a conversation like this:
You: “As a writer of erotica, I think that noncon impregnation is super hot.”
Me: “Yeah, to be honest, I don’t like N/C scenarios and they make me uncomfortable, even in fiction.”
But here’s the catch with that. If we’re friends, you might be a decent person and say “Fair enough, I won’t keep sharing these with you.” If we’re really good friends, you might even say “Why is that? Maybe I should think about how I’m presenting this.” But if we’re acquaintances, or don’t really know each other at all, there’s literally sweet fuck all keeping you from saying: “That’s cool. I don’t care.”
That’s how opinions work. I like all of you a lot, and some of you a great deal more than that even, but to be honest your opinions on the best kind of coarse salt to cook with, or the best RL Stine book, or the cutest variety of guinea pig, don’t really matter to me at all. They don’t keep me up at night. And even if we are discussing guinea pigs, your preference for Coronets is very unlikely to sway me away from abbys.
Anyway this is true no matter how sharply we escalate. I can even declare that noncon impregnation is patently offensive to me and it’s still a perfectly valid response on your part to point out that this is my opinion, not relevant to you, and you don’t care.
The way to do an end run around that is to make it not my opinion anymore. And the easiest way to do that is for me to find some global context to situate my opinion in. Now we can start to talk about “tropes,” and we can use words like “culture of [x]” and “heteronormative” and “male gaze.” I know this! How do I know this? Because Rob, unlike most of the people who have picked up these words from Twitter hashtags, majored in the social sciences :3 And it was de rigueur then to couch everything as though it was not an opinion, but an academic movement.
“Problematic” is a great example of this. Before its co-option, “problematic” had an established meaning — that is, something that was related to an inquiry or problem. Something that, because it was related to inquiry, was doubtful or uncertain. “The degree to which we can identify a historical Jesus is problematic,” or “resolving general relativity and quantum mechanics is problematic.”
In the more postmodern of social sciences, though, “problematic” is now a code phrase. It means, “describing a thing or event that is at odds with the doxa of prevailing schools of cultural studies.” Therefore a lot less of “dividing by zero is problematic,” and a lot more: “the president having a pick-up game with no LGBT referee is problematic” or “the Army naming its helicopters after Native Americans is problematic.”
In this sense it is a form of dog-whistling: you hear problematic and assume that something is “a problem”; suitably primed cultural studies majors hear problematic and know that it means: Karl Marx would not approve.
“Problematic” has sort of lost its way. In its most legitimate sense — I don’t want to throw all my fellow Cultural Anth majors under bus — it means, “I think that this topic warrants investigation through a set of particular paradigms and I believe that there is more to the subject than meets the eye, which would be revealed if we were to unpack it a little more.” This is not what it means on Twitter. On Twitter it means something more like:
- “I feel that there is an injustice represented that I cannot quite articulate,” or more often
- “I don’t like this topic, but I can’t just say I don’t like that because who would care?” or
- “This topic makes me feel ooky, and one of the precepts of modern life is that being uncomfortable is ipso facto a reason for something not to exist,” or quite frequently
- “I am a discontented person whose personality is predicated on being opposed to something, anything, and the lack of queer characters in the new Civilization V DLC pack is the field on which I choose to fight my quixotic battle against the forces of injustice today”
Now, when you say “noncon impregnation is super hot” and I say “that position is problematic,” I have raised the stakes a bit. We’re no longer talking about a difference of opinions, like which fast-food hamburger is best or where REM finally went off the rails. Now you have an opinion and I have the greater context of modern society behind me. Now if you say “I don’t care” you’re positioning yourself as refuting a fact, just like the anti-vaccine crowd or global-warming deniers.
We could have a discussion about what “problematic” means, but I will always win because the battle is on my terms. This is because “problematic” is really my phrasing for “I have performed a Discrete Issue Transform on this subject, and now it is about Bigger Things than You and I.”
The Discrete Issue Transform is one of the most valuable tools at my disposal. It’s a fast, efficient way of converting a signal from the Reality domain to the Social Justice domain. You can perform a DIT with any arbitrary content! For example, let’s say I’ve stumbled across the website chicpapoose.com, which sells those hands-free baby slings. It appears to be an etsy-style shop, with an Amazon storefront and a link to their endorsements along the bottom. People has endorsed them. If you stay there long enough, you see a few laughing infants.
Something about the word “papoose” throws me off, though. Isn’t that an Indian word? And how come all of these babies are white? And how come you don’t see any men wearing the sling? By giving a surface-level, cursory scan of this website, I am able to determine that the big issue here is appropriation. Who gets to use the word “papoose”? Only the people who invented it! And indeed, my Discrete Issue Transform shows a big peak at “appropriation,” with sharp resonant peaks at “Indian affairs” and “Stuff white people like,” which is a catch-all term for things that people who drive Subarus and listen to Terry Gross do that rub me the wrong way.
There are of course a few other “isms” in play. It’s a product that’s being sold, so it pings my capitalism radar, because selling things renders them inauthentic and situates them in the age-old power struggle between the Haves and the Have-Nots. And the lack of men is really… well. It’s problematic, isn’t it? And now we’re ready to go:
Judicious use of Issue Transforms allow you to see the real story behind all sorts of things, from people wearing clothes you don’t like to people reading books you don’t like to people eating food you don’t like to people living in neighborhoods you don’t like.
But that’s only part of the story. Because one of the key narratives in identity politics like this is agency, and what we have a choice over, and the empowerment that comes from those choices. In the sort of space promoted by, say, Tumblr, we’re all supposed to be more or less equal. The person who’s really into EMD F-7 locomotives and insists that they be referred to with the pronouns “train/trains/trainself” is entirely within trains right to do so if train wants. In point of fact, I have zero problem with that, because gender is silly and experimentation is fun.
But! Suppose you like shooting brown people in the face in Call of Duty and watching fetish pornography. And suppose I don’t like that. It’s still, unfortunately, none of my business: it’s your right to have your own interests, just like it’s my right to have my own interests. This is just another restatement of the basic problem from earlier, only now instead of talking about opinions, we’re talking about what we are each empowered to do. There’s some cognitive dissonance in play, because I want to think I’m open-minded, but I also don’t want you to keep playing Call of Duty. What to do? This leaves me bored and recreational-outrageless! I need to find another solution.
That solution is to decide that it isn’t your right. In fact, it’s neither yours, nor a right! Checkmate, atheists >:[
It’s not a right because rights exist between equals, and we’re not equals. For various reasons, you as a member of the dominant culture are accorded certain privileges. And of course, privilege is a very real thing, and sometimes it’s inextricable from who we are — we don’t have a choice in it. Every American citizen gets to vote, for instance, and every Syrian does not. Straight guys don’t get asked probing questions about their sexual proclivities by well-meaning doctors. Women don’t get the cops called on them if they hang out in a playground too long. And even the poorest white dude, who is disempowered in a lot of ways, is still unlikely to get stop-and-frisked by the police, and if he is, he’s a lot less likely to wind up dead.
You have probably noticed that privilege is contextual. Which is true. But fundamentally, if we’re not on a level playing field, we don’t have equal rights. Hold on a tick as to why this is important, while I cover why it’s also not the “your” in “your right.”
It’s not yours because, while you think you actually enjoy fetish smut, you’re really just channeling the insidious whispers of the Kyriarchy, which is what the Patriarchy evolved into when somebody forgot to press “B.” Loosely defined it is the analysis of the world as seen through power dynamics, which is sort of the dirty little secret of this game. Modern social advocacy is notionally about equality and, for what it’s worth, I believe that many advocates are seeking equality.
But academic Marxism is bound up in the idea that power imbalance is everywhere. It’s fundamentally zero-sum: for someone to win, someone else has to lose. That means that everyone is oppressing someone else in some fashion at some time. You’re exerting power over the barista at Starbucks. Politicians are exerting power over you. Policeman have power over civilians. Whites have power over blacks. Men have power over women. The bourgeoisie has power over the proletariat. And you can’t see Kyriarchy, but it’s everywhere.
Looking for who is dominating and who is being subjugated is the goal. And being in a position of “privilege” delegitimizes all your opinions. After all, you only have them because you’re allowed to have them by dint of your role as an Appropriating, Sexist, Heteronormative, Cisgendered Caucasian. Which, perversely, results in anyone who buys into this narrative engaging in a race to the bottom of who is most underprivileged.
That means that every interaction is clouded by the intersections of who is using their privilege as leverage and every interaction is some microcosm of a vast, terrifying whole. It’s not sufficient that you like bondage. You only do because it’s symbolic of the power that all men have over all women, and it only exists because women are oppressed, and your liking it contributes to their oppression. How? Because you’re playing into the Dominant Patriarchal Narrative, that’s how.
And it’s not sufficient that you just enjoy playing first person shooters. First person shooters exist because something about Masculinity and they’re situated in the Middle-East because of something about Eurocentrism. And if you deny that, you’re just “choosing to ignore” the truth that’s all around you. If this sounds like conspiracy theory, well… that’s because it, and Kyriarchy as a mode of thought — particularly in the extremely silly form it takes on social media — is a conspiracy theory.
Anybody who disagrees is in on it. Or is blinded by their privilege. Or is apathetic, an apathy empowered by said privilege. Or, or, or.
What’s my point?
My point is that there is a fundamental issue with this entire thing, and it’s this: it doesn’t matter whether I think there’s something wrong with you enjoying Grand Theft Auto. It doesn’t even matter if you do only like shooting folks in GTA5 because you’re Cis Scum. It’s absurd to think that you’re buttressing the patriarchy by getting off on noncon erotica, but even if you are, that doesn’t matter either.
Because, whatever the reason, you still like it. I’m not going to change you liking it, and arguing that there’s some great crime involved in not caring who Ubisoft puts in their next game solves nothing except making you defensive. As you should be, because I’m being a prat. No matter how much of a froth I work myself into. And what’s the point of that outrage? What’s the point of being so bloody angry all the time? Attempting to police what people like is a fool’s errand indulged only by the recreationally irate.
What I’d like to see is what I started out with, and that’s some honesty.
That comes from both sides. There is a lot of personal preference that drives who winds up as the protagonist of the next Assassin’s Creed, and a lot of personal preference into whether you find feral rape erotic or not. That’s it. It’s not problematic that there’s cub stuff on Inkbunny, or interracial porn on RedTube, it’s just something you don’t like. At some point, that stopped being good enough — it stopped being good enough to have opinions, and suddenly it was important to have crusades. Not everything can be unpacked, and not everything needs to be. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
The flipside is that we need to be able to have a discussion about not liking things without assuming that the end goal is censorship. It’s cool that people want to see more non-white non-male non-straight leads in AAA video games. That would be fun! And we need to understand that bitching about “social justice warriors” is like bitching about “the gay agenda” or “the war on Christmas.” These aren’t real things. They’re constructs created to make it easier for us to dismiss opinions we don’t like by pretending that the person holding them has some weird ulterior motive. Because for some reason if it’s wrong to say “I don’t like that thing,” it’s just as wrong to say “Well, I do.”
But you ought to be able to get to this point and say that you don’t like this essay.
And I ought to be able to say: It’s my opinion; take it or leave it. And read, and play, and watch, and get off to what you damned well like already without making a production out of it or assuming everyone has to share your opinion.
And then I can go back to writing, because that makes me happy.
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WHY DOES THIS POST HAVE SUCH FEW NOTES?? Its absolutely brilliant, and I think it skillfully articulates some very good,...
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