On Making Your Own, #4: Culture Change
Here are two poisonous but common myths in the culture I live in:
(1) People who like erotic representations are really a bunch of pathetic losers masturbating in their mother’s basements, and
(2) Only a tiny number of people are actually kinky, even in their minds.
And these myths serve those who want to beat down others who are not like them sexually, or, more insidiously, others who are like them sexually but unwilling to live lives as hypocrites. We all know that there are too many such people: busybodies and bigots. Why someone should want to behave in such a vile way to one’s fellow human beings is a a mystery to me, but we are confronted with the brute fact of their existence, and the brutal fact that they can do immense harm.
But in a larger cultural context that at least formally honors human liberty and equality (thank you, Enlightenment!), the proposition that you should be allowed to beat down other people for no other reason than that their sexuality pisses you off is not going to sell. “Because my religion tells me I must” might get marginally more traction, but not much more. In a religiously pluralist society, claims like that understandably make people nervous. But what you can sell is the claim that somehow you’re doing people a favor by suppressing their revealed sexual preferences.
And how do you do that? By advancing the claim that their sexuality is somehow inauthentic. By claiming that other people are helpless, passive vessels into which bad wine been poured. They’re brainwashed. They have false consciousness. They’ve gotten bad lessons from the media/the patriarchy/corporate capitalism/Satan. They’re addicted. If only we took Pete Pajama’s porn away from him he’d get out of his mama’s basement and fine a real girlfriend for a change. They’re sick. They need therapy. We know they’re sick because there are millions of us and only a few of them so if they disagree with our consensus reality, we know they must be wrong, right?
You know the litany.
The point here is that if you’re a creator you are presenting to yourself to the world as no longer passive. Being able to create involves being inherently active: you select your materials, you choose, you shape. You have no choice but to reach into yourself and engage with the world. In the place of the passive loser, you put a Promethean self.
And of course, you can no longer be represented as lonely, because your very act of creation is likely to involve creative partners, and you are reaching out to the world, making friends and making fans. Making art of any kind is a social act, because it involves an audience.
And not only are you reaching out, you are encouraging others. Lots of people have interesting ideas and intriguing fantasies but are intimidated about expressing them. If you create, you encourage others on the margin, who will encourage others and others.
If we do our jobs right, in the end there will be millions of us creators, linked to each other by billions of strands of friendship, influence, and affinity. And that’s a lot harder for bigots to beat down that a lonely, disconnected individual.
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People are beaten down for not sharing other peoples’ reality in general ways, not just those involving sex, although the demand for sexual consensus does seem to be particularly exaggerated in a lot of societies. People beat themselves up about it, too.
But even in the bohemian section of town, there is can be great pressure to conform, so I wouldn’t say the anti-establishment is free of this. The wildest artists also have their prejudices.
While I commend your attempting to stand up for the underdog, no one is made of pure, nonjudgmental acceptance and there of plenty of people who are fighting for non-judgmental acceptance who aren’t very non-judgmentally accepting themselves.
I feel the real enemy is within.
I like your passionate plea for creating. I’ve experienced the effects you describe many times. For example, in fiction writing and reading communities. In discussions it comes across frequently how people get pleasantly surprised when they find out that they are by no means the only persons who make up and are fascinated by stories about their particular kinks.
At present, for women who create porn they enjoy, there is the additional hurdle of finding a favourable environment that doesn’t turn them off. Note that there is a difference between kinks and other porn content as individual turnoffs — that’s what story codes and warnings are for — and an environment that is a turn-off. One factor for sharing is finding or creating an environment where people will actually have conversations about the creations, rather than twisting it into being about the female creators turned into sex objects.
Favourable environments have been built for example by people of any gender who write fanfiction, draw fanart, and make fanvids. An important premise there, besides shared fandoms, is the shared understanding that the fictional creations are the objects of desire. One example of such a favourable environment: Kink Bingo.
For people like me, who are not very interested in most popcultural fandoms and want to give feedback to creators of original works, the niches ‘Original characters’ + ‘Conversation focus on the creations’ + ‘Kinks I’m into’ + ‘No commercial sex-related advertisements that happen to turn me off sexually’ are even harder to discover. I’m happy when I do discover them.
The stories in the Original Slave Fiction community, for example, are usually (though not exclusively) about enslaved men. A very important factor of the community’s attractiveness is that this is a space where female writers (though not exclusively female) can feel comfortable expressing their own interests. On many kink-related sites, that premise is not necessarily a given.
Also, hot Prometheus!
I just had an interesting showdown about this. Because with the mainstreaming of the trappings of BDSM, I’m encountering it a lot more. It’s the ‘my kink is fine but yours is sick’ attitude. Or ‘my fantasy is normal but yours is twisted’.
In response to a recent post I wrote on women who have rape fantasies, a fellow smut writer wrote: I have no problem with people who like adult baby play, but I just can’t support RAPE.
It seems she can distinguish between ‘adult baby play’ and pedophilia, but can’t extend the same courtesy of distinguishing women who have masturbatory non-con fantasies from a person who actually condones the crime of rape.
I understand it is hard to not be squicked by something that doesn’t turn you on. And there are things that definitely squick me too. But ultimately, I think you have to have respect for people’s imaginations and have an expectation that most people are sane and consensual and do understand the very big difference between fantasy and reality.
And those who can’t will find any excuse laying around to behave badly anyway.
That why, after many years, I finally started shooting nudes and glamour shots. But even after doing this for a while, I finally feel I’m getting somewhere and figuring out what I really like. It’s been a journey!