on anti culture & how narrative influences reality
So look.
A common point of discourse from anti-shippers is the fact that narrative influences reality, and therefore - they claim - depictions of harmful acts will have a normalizing effect on how real people perceive those acts outside of fiction. The problem with this claim is that, while there is evidence for the idea that narrative can indeed influence reality, it’s a gross distortion of fact to say that it does so in the specific way they mean.
Read on below the cut:
When we talk about the potentially harmful effects of fiction on the real world, the evidence we have relates pretty much exclusively to the portrayal of marginalised people: namely, how inaccurate portrayals or a lack of visibility negatively impacts members of marginalised groups while at the same time perpetuating misinformation about and a lack of empathy for those groups among other people. For instance, if children of colour grow up never seeing themselves fully depicted in children’s books or TV shows, that has a negative impact on their self-esteem and can lead to feelings of shame, invisibility and ugliness, particularly for non-white girls who learn, via the omission or background-relegation of characters and models who look like them, that “beautiful” means “white”.
As such, the solution is to promote diversity in kids’ entertainment and literature: creating more diverse stories, working to ensure that those narratives are available to those who need them most, and pushing to get rid of racial bias in the relevant industries themselves, which includes dismantling toxic cultures, challenging inaccurate, racist “industry truths” about Black people not buying books or white kids not wanting to watch shows with non-white protagonists, and – of course – making it possible for more diverse creators to enter and thrive in those industries at all levels in the first place. This last point is especially important, as part of the reason racism (among other toxic biases) makes it into so many stories in the first place is the lack of marginalized voices present during the editing/writing/planning stage – or, when such voices are present, their comparative powerlessness. It does no good having a lone Black writer in the room to point out, ‘Hey, that trope we’re using is racist,’ if they’ve got no-one to back them up and lack the seniority to be listened to.
As for the spread of misinformation – well. To take a specific example, if white audiences overwhelmingly encounter Black characters as racist stereotypes – welfare queens, gangbangers, drug dealers, thieves – then, consciously or not, we start to view those depictions as true. The human lizard brain uses pattern recognition for survival purposes: if we’re used to seeing a certain type of person depicted as threatening, in the absence of an equal number of positive depictions to balance things out, then it doesn’t matter how liberal an education we’ve received – the lizard brain will see such a person IRL and wonder threat?, because it’s trying to keep us safe. The lizard brain doesn’t know it’s been given false data to work with, which is why it’s the job of our conscious minds to correct the lizard brain: to tell it “no, that’s racist, false alarm” instead of assuming we’re experiencing objective intuition in a social vacuum. This is why so many Nice White Ladies who support diversity initiatives in their jobs still clutch their purses when they see a Black man walk past them in the street: they’ve grown up with the idea of Black men as violent predators thanks to countless shows and movies, but haven’t learned to challenge their lizard brain or acknowledge it for what it is. (And also, some of them are just straight-up racist.)
The point being, narratives cause harm through collective pressure, which is influenced in turn by the existence or absence of related social narratives. It’s not one story about the beautiful white princess that teaches Black girls to think of themselves as ugly, but a slew of such stories corroborating the absence of Black models from fashion magazines, the demonizing of natural Black hairstyles in schools and workplaces, the presence of colourism and multiple other factors. And when narratives spread misinformation, they do so by amplifying biased assumptions that already exist, feeding on ignorance to slip, unchallenged, into the collective psyche.
It’s comparatively rare for a single, popular narrative to have a specific impact on the real world, but again, when this happens, it doesn’t do so in isolation. To take an example unrelated to human diversity, consider the Jaws effect, wherein the success of the movie Jaws led to widespread shark culls and fear of sharks – something that shark conservationists are still having to push back against. Yes, the film Jaws was popular enough to service as a catalyst for widespread discussion about and action against sharks, but crucially, the fear of sharks already existed. The film didn’t manufacture a fear out of whole cloth: it amplified and popularized a fear that already existed.
How, then, does all this relate to the anti claim that, if fanfiction exploring dark themes like incest and pedophilia is allowed to exist, it will cause those things to be normalized?
Well, let’s see. Socially, incest and pedophilia (to take the two most commonly cited examples) are already taboo concepts. There is no existent social culture that lionises or excuses either one, which means that there’s no prevailing bias or imperative towards either action that fanfiction could amplify on a collective level. It’s also relevant that fanfiction itself – though globally popular – exists as a series of overlapping niches: in order to locate a particular type of fanfic, a reader must first choose a fandom, find a website that hosts or links to it, and then search within the existing content there to find what they’re looking for. As such, even if you take darkfics as a collective entity and ignore the disparate fandoms, types and quantities in which they’re written, such works are still not being popularized in the public mainstream, which means that nobody is being exposed to them in an ambient, casual, ongoing way, the way we experience, for instance, constant depictions of thin, conventionally attractive, predominantly white people in countless ads, films and TV shows. So while an individual reader might be upset by a particular fanfic, it’s equivalent to an individual child being scared of dinosaurs after watching Jurassic Park – the problem is a mismatch of audience and content, not a sign that the content should never have existed.
All this being so, it makes no sense to claim that the existence of a comparatively small number of darkfics have the power to create a culture of acceptance or normalization around things like incest or pedophilia. It simply doesn’t track with what we know of how narrative influences realty. And thanks to the successive waves of moral panic about rock music being evil, Dungeons & Dragons promoting Satanism and video games turning teen boys violent that characterized the 70s, 80s and 90s, we have quite a lot of evidence to the contrary, showing that, actually, certain types of “morally dangerous” content do not cause an uptick in morally bad behaviour, even when the content in question is far more popular and ubiquitous than darkfic. Rather, what we’ve learned is that, where toxic or antisocial cultures do develop around a particular hobby or environment – like, say, rape culture in frat houses or virulent misogyny in certain online gaming forums – it happens because people who already have the salient biases in common unite to make an environment that caters to those biases while violently excluding outsiders. In other words, the pre-existence of misogyny leads to the creation of misogynistic environments: misogynists might choose to rally around spaces or content that they believe supports their biases, but the content itself does not create the culture from the ground up.
There’s one more crucial angle from which to address the concept of darkfic: the pornographic. Because brains are plastic, it’s possible to train ourselves to crave or want a particular thing: the more we reward ourselves with pleasure for indulging in a specific fantasy, the more ingrained the fantasy becomes. However, humans are, by and large, intensely visual creatures: we’re much more likely to train ourselves through visual stimuli than the written word, and even then, our higher cognitive faculties allow us to distinguish between fantasy and reality. This is why, to return to the concept of video games, we can happily slaughter hundreds of enemies in a simulated context, getting a full endorphin and adrenaline rush from our actions, without ever wanting to kill people in the real world.
But even then, if we oversaturate ourselves with a particular concept, it also easily loses its appeal – hence the concept of ‘escalation’ in sexual fantasies. Having exhausted a particular fantasy, we might move on to another, and then another, until our end point is so far removed from where we began that our very first fantasies have become novel again. This is extremely common, and nothing to be ashamed of – and again, because our brains are able to distinguish between fantasy and reality, what we think about while masturbating doesn’t have to bear any relationship to what we want with a partner. The two are distinct, and written erotica often plays into this: something we might find unsettling or extreme if acted out visually is fine when indulged within our own imagination, where every detail is under our unique control. Absolute control as a prerequisite for exploring a particular fantasy, in fact, is exactly how we know it as distinct from a real-world desire: if we couldn’t control it the same way we could a daydream, then in many instances, we wouldn’t want it at all – and that’s okay.
Using your imagination, whether for erotic purposes or not, is a valid end in and of itself. An individual no more has to justify their interest in a particular sexual fantasy by rooting it in their real-world wants than a fantasy reader has to justify a love of magic stories by linking them to the laws of physics. It’s part of what makes us human.
The porn industry, by contrast, is rife with problems – not because sex, sex work or sexual fantasies are bad, but because the global porn industry, especially where catering to straight men, is overwhelmingly run by awful, exploitative people. When we talk about visual stimuli training brains to want a particular thing in a sexual context, we mean things like porn videos where actual, real people are hurt or degraded as par for the course, but where the hurt enacted against them is depicted as universal and pleasurable, rather than something specific and negotiated. By design, mainstream porn culture blurs the lines between consent and coercion, not because it wants its audience to think about such distinctions, but precisely because it doesn’t: the exploitation of real, vulnerable people is cheap, and those making money from it want to acclimate their viewers to what that looks like. A video advertised as a rape fantasy might be a scene acted out by willing participants, or it might contain an actual, literal rape. A porn actress might love her job and feel empowered by it; another might hate it, but lack other options, and you, the viewer, cannot always tell which is which. The problem here is not the actress who loves her job, nor is it the actress who would rather do anything else; it isn’t even necessarily the viewer (or at least, not their sexual appetite); and it certainly isn’t the existence of sex work as a concept. The problem is a rapacious, uncaring, deeply misogynistic and too-often unregulated industry, combined with a culture that disdains sex work under any circumstances while failing to protect either willing professionals or vulnerable newcomers from being exploited by it.
In other words: while the porn industry didn’t create misogyny, rape, abuse of the vulnerable or any of its other sins, it all too happily amplifies those existing biases for profit, such that it actively encourages its audience not to think about the nature of their fantasies or the potential cost of having them enacted.
Darkfic, by comparison, is a wholly different creature, not least because no actual, real people are harmed in its creation. By its very nature, the tagging system employed in fanfic is designed to ensure the safe navigation – and, crucially, labelling – of sexual fantasies. If a fic is tagged for rape, for instance, then you, the reader, know that the writer knows what rape is, and is choosing to explore it in whatever way regardless – and if that’s not to your taste, then you can avoid it, and no harm is done. There are plenty of ways that rape culture is normalized in society, but the unifying thing about them is their ambiguity about what constitutes rape and whether it’s really a serious crime, the idea being that if a victim is attacked, then they must’ve done something to deserve it, and if so, then their assailant can be forgiven. Victims are blamed and said to have wanted it, girls are cautioned against going out late and wearing short skirts, boys are excused for snapping bras in school – rape culture is fundamentally antithetical to anything which claims, outright and clearly, ‘this act is rape,’ because creating ambiguity about impulses, needs and wants is the whole point. That being so, the idea that fanfic, by virtue of explicitly tagging the presence of rape, is somehow contributing to rape culture, is nonsensical – tagging for rape doesn’t normalize or excuse it, but rather encourages recognition of what rape is, without caveat or excuse.
This has all gotten rather longer than I intended, but the point is this: while fiction can certainly influence reality, it doesn’t do so in the way antis claim. Darkfic isn’t a social threat, but forming toxic cliques that encourage the harassment, abuse and doxxing of real people on the basis of fictional content? That’s an issue.
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