Sometime reasonable wins...

[maygra]

If you have not tripped over heatherly's essay elsewhere, I encourage you to read it.

You know, if that's the sort of thing you like to read.

I say this in full admission of fact that I disagree, or rather, approach differently a couple of points in the second half of her essay -- primarily from a ideological and practical POV as opposed to disagreeing with her en toto of a writer's responsibility. I'm pretty sure I'll have additional thoughts on that in a bit, if I can get my thoughts organized in such a way as to present them as less contention than perspective.

Comments

[maygra.livejournal.com]

RE: The SGA Race discussion (which I admittedly, only caught the edge of) plays differently for one reason and one reason only: it didn't come from outside.

The thing is, I'm not saying people don't have the right to form moral judgments on people because of what they write. I think a good many of those judgments are either specious or outright stupid, but people can certainly make them. Those disagreements came down to "hey this is behavior I think might be construed as being racists and maybe you should look at what you're doing" and yes, people got angry and said some pretty vicious things on both sides, lines were drawn, flists were realigned, pros and cons were hashed and rehashed.

And true, you might, if you wrote a racist story, find the reaction so uncomfortable that you left. But this I'm sure that if I got TOSsed for a story that was overtly racist or sexist, there'd be few people wanting to leave Livejournal because of it, or go to the media to protest the injustice. is, iMO, a strawman argument, because as far as I know, no one threatened anyone with an abuse complaint for racism, no one tried or even threated to have journals shut down for promoting racism via fictional works. There is a a big difference, to me at least, between telling someone they might be showing an unconscious racial bias in a work or even concluding that a particular fan is a racist and accusing someone of actively promoting pedophilia in a fictional work or accusing someone of being a pedophiliac and threatening to report them to LJ or other "authorative" agencies if they don't stop writing what they are writing.

I think people are having a hard time separating content from context. I don't think any one asked or would expect you to defend specific fans or stories that have content you might dislike or find absolutely abhorrent. What people were asking (and yes expecting) no matter how badly phrased was the idea that merely writing something -- no matter how horrible or offensive to you or any other individual -- does not automatically make the writer a horrible person. It does not, in fact, convey any authorative weight at all about that person's actual moral or ethical stance on the existence or real life repercussions of child abuse or pedophilia.

(continued next post)